Return to Transcripts main page
Live From...
Jerusalem: New Violence, New Moves Toward Peace
Aired February 26, 2002 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MIKE HANNA, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF: I'm Mike Hanna in Jerusalem. Old divisions continue to deepen, but new developments offer a glimmer of hope to those striving to achieve a peace, tonight, in LIVE FROM JERUSALEM.
ANNOUNCER: A new burst of violence and a new move toward peace.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We look at this initiative as a very important initiative, potentially a very serious development in the region.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Will a new bid for peace erase decades of pain for Israelis?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It doesn't end. It's just like a nightmare.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: And Palestinians.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LUCY (ph): Everybody is -- play with us like a ball in the ground and nobody care about the Palestinian people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, for decades, two old enemies, now, still at odds over the path to peace. Are the obstacles too great? We'll pay a visit to a security checkpoint, a symbol of the wide divide between both sides.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COL. OLIVIER RAFOWICZ, IDF SPOKESMAN: What can we do, to wait to be attacked or to be bombed or to try to do everything to prevent the next attack? (END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: LIVE FROM JERUSALEM, Mike Hanna.
HANNA: Good evening. A chink, a very slight chink of light in the gloom that's enveloped the region, within the last few hours, the renewal of cease-fire talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA (voice-over): Security chiefs from the two sides talking about how to lessen the conflict on the ground. And while violence continues to play in several parts of the region, an idea has been floated in the Arab world aimed at finding a more long-term solution. In a new statement interview, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia suggested that the Arab world could grant recognition to a state of Israel that had withdrawn its forces from the land it occupied in the 1967 war.
ADEL AL-JUBEIR, ADVISER TO SAUDI CROWN PRINCE: Here's an idea that's very simple. It essentially says, withdraw from the territories, including Jerusalem in exchange for normalization.
HANNA: A suggestion that's evoked great interest in Washington.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president praised the Crown Prince's ideas regarding the full Arab-Israeli normalization once a comprehensive peace agreement can be achieved. The president also conveyed the United States' desire to continue to work closely with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the pursuit of Middle East peace.
HANNA: And after a meeting with Ariel Sharon, a European Union representative said the Israeli prime minister expressed interest in the concept as well.
JAVIER SOLANA, EU FOREIGN POLICY CHIEF: He come to the interesting idea. He would like to know more about the content. He would be ready to meet anybody from Saudi Arabia, formally, informally, publicly, districtly, whatever.
HANNA: Solana says he's amended his travel plans and is going to Saudi Arabia for an urgent meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA: But despite these developments, the anger, the hatred, the despair in the region is no less intense as Jonathan Mann found when he went for a drive.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JONATHAN MANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On a quiet day, no one really talks about the checkpoints, they just grumble. The Palestinians who stand and wait, the soldiers who stand watch, trying to distinguish between ordinary travelers and trouble. MAZEM IDEKADEK, PALESTINIAN ACCOUNTANT: I don't know. If someone wants to bomb, he will not carry a bomb across this border. I don't think he carries the bomb across the border. He knows that they going to stop him and they going to check him. So he won't go...
(GUN FIRE)
MANN: That was a warning shot fired into the air, one of several we heard in our visit to the Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. In between the rocks, a hard place, one of dozens, perhaps a 100 checkpoints dotted around the country. No one was hurt or particularly surprised to hear guns at Kalandia, but one week ago, the Israeli Army lost six men in a checkpoint attack, its worst surprise in more than a year and a half. The group that claimed responsibility, the al-Laxa (ph) Martyrs Brigades called it a salvo in a war against the checkpoints. It may not be a war, but it does seem to be getting worse and the victims aren't only soldiers.
Two pregnant Palestinian women were shot and wounded by nervous Israeli soldiers at checkpoints this week. And as if to remind doubters of Israeli fears, an Israeli woman was shot by Palestinians as she approached a checkpoint and then delivered her own child. Ten Israelis were shot in East Jerusalem Monday night. That wasn't at a checkpoint, but Israelis will tell you that that is why the checkpoints are there.
RAFOWICZ: When we have everything, terrorists threat. When we don't get all the intruders that we could receive, but we know that we have to prevent the next attack by a source of bombers coming from some village, form Somalia, from Jerjer (ph) into Jerusalem, into Tel Aviv. What can we do, to wait to be attacked or to be bombed or to try to do everything in order to prevent the next attack?
MANN: Colonel Rafowicz is an Army spokesman. The soldiers who man the checkpoints won't talk on camera, but even with their guns and bunkers, it's no secret that they feel like obvious exposed targets.
(on-camera): A reserve officer who commanded the troops here was so concerned about security that he stayed away from duty in protest and he's now spending a month behind bars. The officer who's in control right now told us to be careful while we do our work here. His men, he explained, are nervous.
(voice-over): It wasn't supposed to be this way. Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister one year ago, promising a tough new approach that would bring peace and security, but he won't be Yasser Arafat and he won't offer Palestinians much hope. Instead, Palestinian militants have responded with even more violence than under Sharon's predecessor. A ship full of weapons was intercepted in the Red Sea. An Israeli tank considered state of the art and unstoppable, was blown up in an ambush. The Israeli government has confined Arafat to Ramallah and is now considering a new wider kind of confinement, buffer zones to keep Palestinians out.
Saudi Arabia's Prince Abdullah has put forward a peace plan of his own -- Israel withdraws to pre-1967 borders in return for recognition from the entire Arab world.
AL-JUBIER: One message is to the Israeli people saying you can't have peace, there's a price. The message to the peace camp saying, don't lose hope, there is hope for peace. The message to the U.S. saying, if you re-engage in the Middle East, you will find friends and allies who will work with you to try to bring about a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East. That's really what the message here is.
MANN: Jonathan Mann, CNN, at the Kalandia checkpoint.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA: Tonight marks a beginning of the Jewish festival of Pirum and the end of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha, but celebrations are muted amidst the ongoing violence as divisions between people who all call this land home continue to deepen. Jerrold Kessel reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Concrete blocks, piled up earth, and Israeli blockades Palestinians must cross to visit their families during this Muslim festival.
LUCY (ph): There is no taste for this feast.
KESSEL: Lucy (ph) and her husband with their 18-month-old must clear one blockade after another to spend the holiday with family.
LUCY (ph): Everybody is play with us like the ball in the ground and nobody cares about the Palestinian people, nobody, just talk about us like chess. They play chess with us.
KESSEL: Down the West Bank road outside a supermarket in a Jewish settlement, a suspected car bomb where just a few days before a Palestinian suicide bomber was thwarted at the same supermarket. After the street is cleared, an embarrassed settler comes to claim his illegally parked car, but the worries don't go away.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It doesn't end. It's just like a nightmare. It's just terror. It's just waiting to happen.
KESSEL: Through the outskirts of the settlement, a Palestinian shepherd drives his flock towards his home village, but the sun is starting to set even on this kind of intermingling between Palestinians and Israelis.
No hope heralded with this dawn at another settlement. The early morning prayers, a regular ritual as these Israeli settlers struggle with how to deal with the escalating violence, wariness about a new idea on how to cope with Palestinian terror, what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls security buffer zones that are being designed to keep Palestinians out of Israel.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seems like the kind of answer just like when we used to drive through Ramallah to get to our house. So when they threw stones instead of trying to solve the problem, they made a street that went around. They made a street that went around, they started shooting on that street. So they think about another way to get around it instead of really solving the real problem.
KESSEL: Avi (ph) heads off to work down this bypass road built to protect him and other settlers as they drive through the West Bank.
(on-camera): For now, both Israelis and Palestinians have other concerns about what's happening on the ground in the West Bank, like what's happening right here, now on this so-called bypass road.
(voice-over): These Israeli soldiers told us they were in high alert mode because of a warning of an imminent attack. Palestinian cars are backed up while settlers cars pass through.
Separation now an Israeli buzzword. For Palestinians separation means an immediate hazard, their inability to get through to work, to study, even simply to meet outside their own towns.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fifty-five kilometers. I am driving three hours.
KESSEL: For Israelis the idea of separation is now in fashion after the hammering they've taken from Palestinian attackers.
In this incident, east of Jerusalem, a policeman was killed, as he stopped a suicide bomber trying to get through to the city. At the policeman's funeral, the mayor of his village mourns him and is sad at the prospects of new burials.
"There's talk," he says, "of the need for a fence between us and the Palestinian people. What there must be is not a barrier but a fence of peace."
Among Israelis, the idea of separation is not new. The old maxim, good fences make good neighbors. This fence was built to keep Palestinians from throwing rocks at Israeli settlers.
(on-camera): Now, for both Palestinians and Israelis, the idea of separation is seen to be the need for good fences to be built against bad neighbors.
(voice-over): These Palestinians were caught at a checkpoint trying to sneak to jobs inside Israel. Men like these virtually the only Palestinians who try to cross into Israel these days apart from the bombers.
This small Israeli border community has built its own wall to separate it from the neighboring West Bank Palestinian town, an unofficial barrier that could eventually become part of a very real border. No one knows what Prime Minister Sharon's proposed military buffers will eventually look like, but even some close to the prime minister hope the buffer zones could become eventually a genuine border.
Palestinians just struggling with the current barriers and checkpoints say ideas about fresh kinds of obstacles are simply designed to stifle them further. What's needed, they say, is a real separation, the end of Israeli occupation.
(on-camera): If there's any agreement on both sides of the divide here, it's agreement that separation may simply be an alternative way of coping with the conflict, not a solution to the conflict.
(voice-over): Unless each side is able to reach across the barriers of fear to begin understanding the pain on the other side.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think everything will change because the government and people from Israel, they want this change. They don't like to feel -- you see their life is miserable like Palestinians. They don't feel safe. You see, their children, they cannot move safe. They are like us.
KESSEL: A rare voice says each side continues to hunker down in its own pain and mental separation.
Jerrold Kessel, CNN, on the West Bank.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA: Ariel Sharon has been known to say that he's tried to kill Yasser Arafat on 13 occasions. Arafat's response -- well, so far, he's failed.
Coming up, bitter enemies of the past involved in a new standoff in the present.
ANNOUNCER: Next, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, old enemies still at odds over prospects for peace.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ARIEL SHARON, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAELI: Arafat, at the present time, is an obstacle to peace.
YASSER ARAFAT, PRESIDENT OF PALESTINIAN NATIONAL AUTHORITY: We are committed completely to the peace of Israel and the peace process.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: And later, caught in the crossfire, two pregnant women, one Israeli, one Palestinian.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TAMARA LIFSHITZ-FISH, ISRAELI MOTHER (through translator): I understood that I had a bullet in my stomach and I saw my father dead on the spot.
MAYSOUN AL HAYEK, PALESTINIAN MOTHER (through translator): I got out of the car and all the windows were smashed. I looked at my husband and saw that he was unconscious.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Both saw death and then gave new life.
LIVE FROM JERUSALEM is back in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ANNOUNCER: Ariel Sharon was a general in the Israeli Army. He served as Israel's defense minister and foreign minister. Sharon was elected Israel's prime minister in February of last year.
Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1969. He was elected president of the Palestinian National Authority in 1996.
HANNA: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, two leaders who have been tasked by their people to find ways of resolving the conflict, two leaders whose mutual animosity spans decades. Sharon will not even speak to Arafat on the phone and this is how the Israeli prime minister describes the Palestinian leader.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SHARON: Arafat, at the present time, is an obstacle to peace. He adopted this strategy of terror. He formed this coalition of terror. With him, I don't think we can reach anything.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNA: Yasser Arafat's conflict with Ariel Sharon is just one of his problems. An old warrior who's been champion and savior to many Palestinians now faces what could be the toughest and most dangerous challenge of his life not only from Israelis but the Palestinian people as well. CNN's senior international correspondent Walt Rodgers reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WALTER RODGERS, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): Publicly, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat behaves like he is at the top of his game in a duel to the finish with his ancient rival, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Conventional wisdom holds Arafat thrives on challenges like the current crisis.
HANAN ASHRAWI, PALESTINIAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER: The more you challenge him, the more he rises to the occasion and particularly with Sharon because Arafat knows him and Arafat feels that he's been face- to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball with Sharon and he's defeated him.
ROGERS: Palestinian children are out with their stones again, others have taken up guns. And the Palestinian public has temporarily put aside its discontent with Arafat's leadership to rally behind him after the Israelis tried to demonize and demarginalize him.
DR. MISTAFA BARHOUTI, PALESTINIAN ANALYST: Mr. Sharon is trying to personalize the Palestinian issue, thinking that this way he can legitimize the whole Palestinian cause.
ROGERS: When the Israelis locked down Arafat in his headquarters in Ramallah, there was a spike in public support, but even Arafat's closest aides suggest the Israelis may have cornered him.
JIBRIL RAJOUB, WEST BANK SECURITY CHIEF: I think that this is the worst time that Mr. Arafat and the whole Palestinian cause is facing.
ROGERS: Arafat continues to behave with characteristic bravado, claiming victory over Prime Minister Sharon. But Arafat's failure to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is failure to deliver on the peace process and his failure to provide good clean government provokes increased Palestinian criticism.
KHALIL SHIKAKI, PALESTINIAN ANALYST: When his back is to the wall, Arafat stands to become defiant, stubborn and defiant. His definition of victory is I will not give them what they want.
ROGERS: It is not playing that well among all Palestinians. The radical Islamists behind the suicide bombings, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, now poll higher than Arafat's Fateh faction. Twenty-six point one percent for Fateh in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, another 26.6 percent for the Islamic radicals espousing violence. These Islamists reject negotiations believing Israel can be thrown out of the Palestinian territories the same way Hezbollah forced an Israeli retreat from Lebanon.
Many believe Arafat is so weakened he dares not confront the Islamist radicals. And Palestinians warn the Israelis, their policy of demonizing Arafat is akin to Israel shooting itself in the foot.
ASHRAWI: Actually, Arafat was the best chance and is still their best chance at achieving peace. The people after him will not necessarily be more conciliatory or more subservient to the Israelis. They probably will be more hard line, tougher people.
ROGERS: Arafat's dilemma now is that he must balance so many conflicting interests he has difficulty articulating a strategy of his own.
SHIKAKI: That's Arafat. He survives. He does not deliver the deal, but he manages to survive.
ROGERS: In the meantime, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Houdini, thinks he can escape from this trap as he has in the past with international help.
ARRAF: Not to forget that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) conference had a start because it was President Bush's proposal. And I hope and I am sure that President Bush, the son, will complete it.
ROGERS (on-camera): Yasser Arafat's survival also depends on his skill in creating a situation where Palestinians have no alternative to him except chaos and more violence.
Walter Rodgers, CNN, Ramallah on the West Bank.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA: Coming up, even amidst the carnage and the violence and the death, there is new life. LIVE FROM JERUSALEM returns in a few minutes.
ANNOUNCER: For more on the struggle for peace in the Mideast, including a timeline and a virtual tour of the region, head to our in- depth report at CNN.com. For AOL users, the keyword is CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNA: Deaths and violence continue, some killed by chance, others intentionally targeted in terror attacks, but a strange twist in this tragic litany, two women within hours of each other, wounded in gun attacks, two women losing people close to them, two women, who in the wake of the trauma gave birth to babies.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA (voice-over): In the West Bank city of Nablus, a funeral of 22-year-old Muhammad al Fahak. He was shot and killed by Israeli forces who said he refused to stop when challenged at a checkpoint. His father also traveling in the car was wounded, as was his pregnant wife, Maysoun, whom the two men were rushing to hospital.
In the Jewish settlement of Kafar Exion (ph), another funeral, that of 65-year-old Israeli Abraham Fish (ph). He was shot dead by a Palestinian gunman while driving along a road in the West Bank, also killed was his neighbor, Ahran Goruf (ph) and seriously wounded was his 33-year-old daughter, Tamara, who was nine months pregnant. The five-year-old daughter escaped uninjured. Tamara Lifshitz was rushed to a hospital where her baby was delivered by c-section.
LIFSHITZ-FISH (through translator): I understood that I had a bullet in my stomach and I saw my father dead on the spot. I asked my daughter if she was OK. I checked her and she was OK and then I told her, grandpa is dead. I was afraid they would come and finish us off.
HANNA: And in a hospital in Nablus, Maysoun Al Hayek is handed her newborn.
AL HAYEK (through translator): I got out of the car and all the windows were smashed. I looked at my husband and saw that he was unconscious and the same with my father-in-law. I started screaming, "There is a baby. There is a baby."
HANNA: The news that a new Palestinian mother lost her husband greeted with sorrow by the Israeli who had lost her father.
LIFSHITZ-FISH (through translator): It is terrible, but what I want to say is the Israeli soldiers did it by mistake. Here, they never made a mistake. They waited to kill us.
HANNA: At her father's funeral, an atmosphere of sadness and defiance.
AMOS FRIED, MOXDIM SETTLEMENT, WEST BANK: In this universe and I don't wish bad for any Arab. And on a personal level, I know Arabs and I work with Arabs and I have nothing against them. On a national level, they have to understand there's a war here and one nation is going to win and that nation will be Israel.
HANNA: Defiance, too, at the funeral of Muhammad Al Hayek who is declared a martyr of the Palestinian cause.
"This is our land and we will stay in it," chants the crowd. "Oh, martyr, be calm, we will continue the struggle."
Back at the hospital, Maysoun is asked what she will name her baby girl.
AL HAYEK (through translator): I don't want to know. I want to know what happened to Hamad.
HANNA: But later, she decides the baby will be named Feeda (ph), Arabic for sacrifice. Tamara says she's thinking of naming her new baby after her dead father.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNA: People die, children are born, a normal cycle of life and death, but in this region, there are so many unnatural deaths and life is not normal. And amidst this conflict, people are eager to grasp at any straw, at any idea, that offers any hope of a solution to this interminable conflict. All eyes now on the latest plan, an idea floated by Saudi Arabia, hoping that this could be the beginning of an end to this interminable violence.
I'm Mike Hanna. That's all from LIVE FROM JERUSALEM. Coming up for our domestic viewers, "THE POINT." For international viewers, it's "Q&A." Good night.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
