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INSIGHT

Anniversary of the Intifada

Aired September 18, 2004 - 23:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: An empty anniversary. The Palestinian uprising marks its fourth year. An enormous opportunity has been lost, leaving violence, anger and exhaustion.
Hello and welcome.

There are a lot of ways you can count this day on the calendar for Palestinians and Israelis. There is only one that they agree on: that it has been four years since the violence began on September 28, 2000.

The Reuter News Agency counts more than 3,000 Palestinians killed and nearly 1,000 Israelis, but both sides put their own casualties higher, and though both sides see the last four years as a very dark time, they obviously disagree on who is to blame.

On our program today, the anniversary of the intifada. We have two reports, but before we get to them, a quick word on something we'll be telling you more about later. One of our colleagues, CNN producer Riad Ali, was kidnapped in Gaza Monday and has now been released. We'll tell you what we've been able to learn about that coming up in a few moments, but first, the last four years as seen by Israelis and Palestinians. We begin with CNN's Ben Wedeman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Plastic coated steel (UNINTELLIGIBLE), stones, tear gas. Israeli troops and Palestinian villagers reenact a familiar scene in the West Bank village of Boudros (ph). The villagers are trying to stop construction of Israel's so-called security barrier, but a stone's throw away work on the barrier continues apace.

(on camera): Beginning the fifth year of their uprising, Palestinians have gained very little and lost a lot. In the last four years of violence, more than 3,300 Palestinians have been killed. According to Israeli human rights groups, over 3,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed. The Palestinian economy is in shambles and hope for peace has all but vanished.

(voice-over): In her shop in Bethlehem, Angelica Jaciman (ph) passes the time doing needlepoint, waiting for the rare tourist to wander into Manger Square.

ANGELICA JACIMAN (ph), SHOPKEEPER: We have very little (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

WEDEMAN: Her only sale today, a postcard for 35-cents.

South of Nablus, Palestinians wait for hours for Israeli troops to open a checkpoint. Israeli officials insist such measures are intended to stop suicide bombers, which means that for everyone else the simple act of getting from point A to point B is an endurance test.

Biomedical engineer Sayed Fukan (ph) works in Ramallah and is trying to go home for the weekend to see his wife and children in Nablus. Sayed (ph) tells me the intifada has been a waste.

SAYED FUKAN (ph), BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER: Four years and we have the same situation.

WEDEMAN: Mustafa Barguti (ph), an advocate of peaceful protests, says the Palestinians should never have taken up arms.

MUSTAFA BARGUTI (ph), PEACE ADVOCATE: The militarization did something wrong. It created the impression as if Palestinians are a military state. In truth, it is not.

WEDEMAN: Nearby, Palestinians file through the turnstile at another Israel checkpoint, with plenty of regrets and little to show for four years of struggle.

Ben Wedeman, CNN, Kalandia (ph), on the West Bank.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: On the Israeli side, after so much suffering a glimpse of things getting a little closer to normal.

Guy Raz has that side of the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUY RAZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Empty streets, the absence of city life, suicides taking a physical and phycological toll on Israelis. But that was then. This is now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think there is a feeling that perhaps the worst is over. Life is back to the streets. It's back to the cafes. It's back to the shopping malls.

RAZ: Even at Jerusalem's Caf‚ Hilel (ph). A year ago a suicide bomber tore this place apart.

Lauren Trugar's (ph) father was killed at Caf‚ Hilel (ph). A year on, she started going out again. Her favorite club, Al-Oman (ph), once deserted, is now packed.

LAUREN TRUGAR (ph), CLUB-GOER (through translator): The atmosphere is different. The last few months have been good. There were no major attacks.

RAZ (on camera): Israelis believe it's because of this, the wall that separates them from Palestinians. Now the government here points out that this barrier has reduced attacks inside Israel by some 90 percent. But at what price?

(Voice-over): International protests and court rulings condemning the wall have left Israel more isolated diplomatically and incursions into the occupied territories and Palestinian civilian casualties haven't improved Israel's global image either.

But political analyst Ari Shavit (ph) believes international pressure has brought about an unintended result as well.

ARI SHAVIT (ph), POLITICAL ANALYST: The political conclusion of the Israeli majority is let's give up as much occupation as possible.

RAZ: An unlikely advocate of this view is hard-line leader Ariel Sharon. By next year, Sharon hopes to evacuate Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza. Israelis believe is oft-described ruthless crackdown on Palestinian militants has worked.

The beaches are full. Tourists are trickling back. Four years on, Israel believes it's recovering.

Guy Raz, CNN, Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: We take a break and when we come back, looking back from both sides.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MANN (voice-over): Four years ago Ariel Sharon, accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police, visited Jerusalem's Temple Mount. They entered the compound of the Al Aqsa Mosque, an area sacred to Judaism and Islam though rarely visited by Jews.

Within hours, Palestinian rioters began to face off against the security forces. It was the start of what is now known as the second or Al Aqsa Intifada. An independent commission headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell said Sharon should have been able to foresee the trouble, though he was not the direct cause of it.

ARIEL SHARON, ISRAELI PRIME MIN.: I came here with a message of peace. I believe that we can live together with the Palestinians.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MANN: Welcome back.

The violence that began that day never ended, and as we've seen, both Israelis and Palestinians have been changed by it.

We asked both an Israeli and a Palestinian to reflect on what their people had been through. First Tom Sagat (ph), a historian and journalist at the Israeli daily "Ha'aretz."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM SAGAT (ph), "HA'ARETZ": I think the level of brutalization which has risen so much. You know, today when you go out to a restaurant or you want to take a bus, you want to send your daughter to ballet school, you think twice because you are afraid. Israelis are frightened. Israelis are angry. Israelis are resentful. And I think that Israelis are more brutal, the whole Israeli society is more cruel than it was four years ago.

We today tolerate violations of human rights which four years ago we would not. There was a time when every house Israeli army demolishes in the occupied territories would make headlines. Today, we demolish hundreds of Palestinian homes and nobody cares.

MANN: Has the way that Israeli thinks about the Palestinians changed entirely, do you think?

SAGAT (ph): Yes, I think the way we think of Palestinians has changed. For one thing, I think that hating the Palestinians has become legitimate, and that I think is something terrorism does to free societies everywhere. You use your ability and your willingness to think rationally. This is the major danger of terrorism to a democratic society.

So hating the Palestinians and hurting the Palestinians have become legitimate. Revenge has become legitimate.

On the other hand, a certain level of realism has turned in. I think more and more Israelis realize today that we really can't win, and so you have the Sharon disengagement plan, which most Israelis support.

We have lost nothing in Gaza, so let's get out of it. That's what most Israelis say today. And that is, I think, a direct result of the intifada.

MANN: The Palestinian prime minister reflecting on the intifada said today that this was an opportunity for both sides to rethink the kinds of things they have been doing over the last four years. Now, letting the Palestinians speak for themselves, should Israel be rethinking anything?

SAGAT (ph): Oh, absolutely. I am not as optimistic as the Palestinian prime minister.

I think that as long as Arafat rules the Palestinians and as long as Sharon rules Israel, you can't really expect a major change. I think we really need different leadership in this country. Perhaps it is not for me to say, but perhaps we also need different leadership in Washington, because as long as these men determine the situation, I don't see that anything can really change.

MANN: So if you were to look four years down the road, four years into the future, what do you see?

SAGAT (ph): I'm afraid I see more of the same, but I really wouldn't like to say that, because if you had asked me four years ago, I wouldn't say that.

Four years ago, I belonged to those Israelis who were very optimistic, and today I belong to those Israelis who are very disappointed and angry and worried and afraid. So this is a region where one really shouldn't predict anything.

MANN: There was a time when Israelis, optimistic Israelis, hoped that Palestinians and Israelis could find a way to live together. The is a different kind of optimism in Israel now that Palestinians will find a way to live apart from the Israelis, because of the physical barrier that will separate the two sides.

Ultimately, do you think, is that going to be any kind of solution?

SAGAT (ph): I belong to those Israelis who believed in the wall, the so-called fence. It's really a wall. It's a very ugly, big, concrete structure. I don't believe in it so much anymore because I think that the whole management of the wall is wrong. It causes much more hardship to the Palestinians than it should and it does not really protect us in the way it should.

So in a way, I think that the wall is one of many, many missed opportunities.

MANN: So do you see any way out of this?

SAGAT (ph): Yes. I think that we need a leadership that can manage the conflict in a more rational way. It is all about management. It's not really about solving the conflict. It's about managing the conflict. And I think that is a very modest requirement, and I think it can be done, but I really think that people who are 75 years old have a whole life of conflict behind them are not the right people to manage the conflict for a better future.

MANN: Tom Sagat (ph), thank you so much for this.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Joining us now for a different position is Sari Nusaba (ph), formerly the Palestinian Authority representative in Jerusalem, now leader of the People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

Thanks so much for being with us.

I'm sure you have some thoughts you'd like to add to what Tom Sagat (ph) just said, but let me ask you first of all, in your own right, about how you reflect back on the last four years of the intifada.

SARI NUSABA (ph), PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY: Well, I think it's been a catastrophe, a tragedy for both Israelis and Palestinians. Certainly for the Palestinians it's been a tragedy in the sense that our situation has deteriorated in many ways, more ways than can be enumerated or defined.

You know, at the level of our lives, the life of the people, employment, safety, security, the level of being able to establish or continue to try and establish a homeland for ourselves, independence for ourselves, a lot has been destroyed over the last four years during this tragic confrontation between ourselves and the Israelis.

MANN: Tom Sagat (ph) was very clear in blaming the leadership on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. Is it that simple? Who do you blame?

NUSABA (ph): No. I think -- I wish matters were that simple. I think neither can we attribute the cause solely to the leadership on either side. Nor can we also expect help solely from the leadership on both sides. I think the situation is far more difficult.

I suspect that the outbreak of violence four years ago was not necessarily planned by either side and I believe that certainly, although we call it on the Palestinian side and the Israelis and the international media calls it an intifada, thereby giving it a kind of Palestinian shake and form, I believe personally that this is not really an intifada in the sense that we had one 10, 15 years ago, in the sense of being a nonviolent peoples' engagement in a well-defined resistance or well-defined effort to try to achieve very clear goals. It's been very chaotic, and it's actually focused basically on the efforts of only a few people, people that are armed that certainly do not represent or do not in fact -- they are not the population.

The population at large certainly was affected by what was happening, but it was involved at the receiving end, unlike the previous intifada, where the entire population was engaged positively in order to achieve a very clear and workable end, and did so in strategically well-defined phases and steps.

MANN: So what do the Palestinians do now? The Palestinian prime minister, and I mentioned this earlier, said today that the Palestinians and the Israelis both have to rethink their actions over the last four years. What has to be done on the Palestinian side?

NUSABA (ph): I believe -- first of all, I think the reference to the Israelis and the Palestinians is very important, because this is not a situation in my opinion where you can isolate the Israeli situation or the Israeli case from that of the Palestinians or vice versa. One cannot address and solve the problems that the Israelis have outside of looking also at the Palestinian situation or the other way around.

We're in it together. Somehow the Israelis and the Palestinians either continue to sink together in this horrible quagmire continuously with no end in view, or we help each other to try and pull ourselves out of the mess we have entangled ourselves into.

Now, I don't believe that you should look at the leadership only for solutions. Certainly I don't believe we should look to the international community, to international leaders for assistance. It would be great if the international community could in fact do something. It would be even greater if our leaderships back home would be able to do something.

But I think it requires a more active involvement, in my opinion, on the part of the ordinary people themselves, the Israel people and the Palestinian people. We heard what Tom Sagat (ph) was saying, basically reflecting on the one hand the attitude of fear, frustration, but at the same time commitment to seek a negotiate solution that would provide the Palestinians with the respect and the dignity we need, the freedom we need.

And I think we find many Israelis like this, but also many Palestinians, and I think these Israelis and Palestinians, who in my opinion represent the majority of people on both sides, should themselves stand up and express their opinions very openly, very clearly, and impose on the leaderships their will to have normal life, a normal life based on very clear principles: ending the occupation, allowing the Palestinians to live in peace and security in their own state and allowing the Israelis also to have a future.

The only people that can do this, in my opinion, are the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves, and we shouldn't wait for something to come or happen from outside.

MANN: On that note, Sari Nusaba (ph), of the People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy, thank you so much for this.

NUSABA (ph): Thank you.

MANN: We take a break. When we come back we're going to change gears a little bit. What was behind the abduction of one of our colleagues, a CNN journalist in Gaza.

Stay with us for that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MANN (voice-over): Abductions have become routine in Iraq, but in the Palestinian territories they are rare, so when gunmen seized a CNN producer in Gaza Monday, it caused quite a stir and set off a frantic effort to find him.

Riad Ali was released unharmed a few hours ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I am pleased to hear that all of the groups in Gaza have come out against this kidnapping, and we can only hope that it is a one-off and that it will never happen again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MANN: Welcome back.

The abduction of Riad Ali happened on a busy Gaza street, right in front of two other CNN colleagues. One of them, our Ben Wedeman, joins us now from Jerusalem with an update -- Ben.

WEDEMAN: Yes, Jonathan, we've just ended one of the most difficult 24-hour periods in my life.

It was just late last -- or rather early yesterday evening, in Gaza, when we were driving down the street and a car pulled out in front of us. An armed gunman got out and basically they dragged Riad out of our vehicle, into theirs, and they drove away. And for many hours after that, we spent all our time, basically all night and much of today, working the phones, trying to find out who might be holding Riad, what they wanted.

We never received any claim of responsibility, never any list of demands, but we did begin to hear indications about midday in Gaza that his release was coming, that the Palestinian security services had finally made contact and were working for his release.

And at about 6:30 this evening, we finally saw him. He had a press conference outside the Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza where he expressed appreciation for all of those who helped win his release.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RIAD ALI, CNN PRODUCER/KIDNAP VICTIM: All I would like to say is to thank all of those people who were involved in my release. I would like to thank President Arafat, the Palestinian prime minister, many Israeli Arab figures. Of course, CNN. CNN had made a lot of efforts to ensure my release. I would like to thank all of these people.

The only thing that I am waiting for now is to see my family, to see my kids, to see my wife. They are waiting for me up in the north, in my village. So thanks, all of you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WEDEMAN: And, of course, we did receive a tape from his captors shortly before Riad's release in which Riad said on tape that the people holding him were members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. That's a faction affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

But it is still not clear if that was actually the identity of the captors, and in fact there are many questions about this abduction that have still not been adequately answered. So we'll be trying to follow-up and finding some of those answers in the days ahead -- Jonathan.

MANN: Ben, he looks like he is OK, but the key question, it seems to me, is why him? Is it clear why he was singled out for kidnapping?

WEDEMAN: No, it's not. I mean, he was -- when these armed men approached the vehicle, they specifically said which one of you is Riad. So they were looking for him.

Now, in this tape that his captors released, Riad goes on for quite a while, talking about the status of the Druse, which are an Arabic speaking minority that lives in Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Here is Israel, they've traditionally cooperated with the Jewish state. And he called upon his fellow members of the Druse community to stop cooperating with the Israeli state, to stop serving in the Israeli army.

But this was a statement made under duress and it is not really clear whether this was the reason why they abducted him or not. Still a lot of questions, Jonathan, and I certainly haven't head adequate answers.

MANN: Ben Wedeman, thanks very much.

After four years of tragedy, that one mystery brings us to an end of our program for this night.

I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.

END

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