Language barrier a hurdle to peace

THE Palestinians are saying one thing in English while contradicting themselves in Arabic, according to Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus.

Speaking to a small gathering hosted by Albert Dadon, founder of the Australia-Israel Leadership Forum on Tuesday, the Israel-based activist broadcast numerous media clips, which he said showed the Palestinian people are not ready for peace.

While the US Government and the Middle East Quartet (the UN, US, EU and Russia) have made recognition of the Jewish State a prerequisite for peace talks, state-sanctioned Palestinian television stations continue to ignore the Jewish State.

Marcus showed footage from a recent documentary, which speaks of the Palestinian state spreading along the Mediterranean from Gaza and Ashkelon to Haifa. He also displayed pages from schoolbooks with the Palestinian flag covering all the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

“There is a constant message to see a world in which Israel does not exist,” Marcus explained. “This is a basic problem of recognition. There is no message to perceive a world where Israel is a reality.”

Just last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the world he believes an Israeli state and a Palestinian state can live side-by-side. However, the message from Fatah-run TV is very different.

“There is no comparison to what is being said in English, it is a whole other category,” Marcus explained, saying he had addressed the issue with the US and Israeli Administrations, which are both taking it very seriously.

A second major concern, according to the Palestinian Media Watch founder, is that glorification of  violence continues in the territories.

He showed footage of a Palestinian Liberation Organisation cultural festival staged earlier this year — which he claimed had been broadcast multiple times on television — of dancers holding large guns while the music plays: “There is no force in the world that can remove the weapon from my hand”.

Marcus also read out reports from Palestinian newspapers of sporting events being named after terrorists who had killed Israeli civilians.

“There is much, much more of the glorification of Palestinian terrorists today,” he said, adding that public calls for death to the Jews or to Israel have reduced, but surreptitious glorification of terrorists has taken its place. He called this process “role modelling”.

“We’ve had summer camps named for Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide terrorist,” he said. “And in the last months, as the peace process was going on, there was a boxing tournament named for one of the planners of the Munich Olympic massacre.”

He concluded his presentation with a quote from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who last year said: “We will only work with a Palestinian Authority government that unambiguously and explicitly accepts the Quartet’s principles: a commitment to non-violence; recognition of Israel; and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the ‘road map’.”

NAOMI LEVIN