Newsday

EDITORIAL

Israel Should Aid, Not Alienate, Palestinian Moderates

July 12, 2002

What were they thinking? It was unconscionable for hard-liners in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government to shut down the East Jerusalem office of Sari Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian moderate and peace advocate who is also president of al-Quds University. This is precisely the kind of influential Palestinian leader Israel should be cultivating and promoting, not alienating.

Nusseibeh was among the few Palestinian intellectuals who had the guts to publish a thoughtful letter recently denouncing suicide bombings as an obstacle to peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has consistently been a voice of reason and moderation, eliciting respect on both sides of the bitter conflict and abroad. He also has been the target of death threats by Palestinian militants for his views, and the Palestinian Authority has had to provide him with armed protection.

So for Israeli police to barge into his university office and cart offboxes of files and computer disks was a humiliating display of brain- dead thuggery. The justification given by Uzi Landau, the hard-line Israeli minister of public security, was paper-thin. He said Nusseibeh was operating his office in violation of the Oslo accords, even though Israel has essentially declared the accords dead and, in any case, is itself violating them with the reoccupation of Palestinian towns.

And for Landau to call Nusseibeh "a Trojan horse," undermining Israel sovereignty by operating as a civil representative of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, is absurd. Israel, under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, already accepted the principle of a divided Jerusalem, with East Jerusalem functioning as a Palestinian capital.

This page has consistently supported the right of Israel to defend itself against attack, even when it involves the temporary Israeli recapture of Palestinian lands. But the move against Nusseibeh is inexcusable. Israel should do all it can to buttress the credibility of Palestinian moderates like him, instead of marginalizing them and undermining their authority.