Q-C representatives poles apart

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By Thomas Geyer/ QUAD-CITY TIMES | Saturday, March 30, 2002 | No comments posted

John Dabeet of Muscatine, Iowa, has slept little since Thursday night.

The Palestinian native has been worrying about members of his family in Ramallah since the Israeli military surrounded the compound of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in response to a suicide bombing Wednesday in Netanya, Israel, that left 21 people dead and scores more injured.

"Water and electricity in Ramallah have been cut off," Dabeet said Friday night. "The only contact I have with them is by phone. I keep hoping they will not disconnect the phone lines."

Rabbi Henry Karp of Temple Emanuel in Davenport recently returned from a two-week trip to Israel.

While there, he and his wife demanded that their 21-year-old daughter, Shira, a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, return to the United States. She did so this week.

"There is no place in Jerusalem that one can consider safe," Karp said. "Our daughter didn't want to come home. It was difficult to pull parental rank and override her desires in this matter. But under the circumstances that exist in Israel, we could not live with the consequences if something should happen to her."

Dabeet, a U.S. citizen and a Christian, is the president of Americans and Palestinians for Peace, or AMPAL. He is employed as a professor of economics and statistics at Muscatine Community College, has worked with the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations and has spoken and traveled widely, urging all who will listen that the Middle East peace process must move forward.

Karp is well-traveled and well-known in the Jewish community. He, too, has forcefully decried the continuous cycle of violence and waste in the Middle East.

But as to how peace might come about, the two men are poles apart.

"I'm optimistic that, sooner or later, we will have peace there. We just don't know when," Dabeet said. "I don't see a real peace happening soon with a war criminal like (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon in power.

"Sharon doesn't want peace," he said. "It's that simple. His history is one massacre after another against the Palestinian people. He's a war criminal."

Dabeet said he is sure there are Israelis who want a just and lasting peace. "They need support. They need to gain power," he added.

Israel and the United States blame Arafat for the actions of the Islamic militant group Hamas, he said.

"Arafat can't control anyone when, every day, Sharon is making him weaker and weaker and weaker by destroying his police forces.

"We (AMPAL) strongly condemn any act of violence," Dabeet said. "Human life is just too precious. Sharon needs to wake up and see that, over the past 18 months, he has brought nothing but destruction to both Palestine and Israel."

Karp, though, said, "I am thoroughly convinced that the Palestinians do not want peace. We have this mythology that the terrorists are beyond the control of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Those organizations are part of his administration. They do his bidding."

It is clear, he said, that the Palestinians want nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

"Every peace effort that has been made has been undermined by this destructive terrorism," Karp added.

A major part of the problem, he said, is there is no one among the Palestinians crying out for peace as there is in Israel.

"There's no voice saying, �Stop shooting and start talking,' " Karp said. "I have to assume that there are Palestinians who are as deeply pained as the Israelis by the violence."

Why then, he added, are they not demanding their leaders seek peace?

"Until there are Palestinians who have the courage to stand up for peace, who are willing to step up to the plate and make that desire for peace known and be as insistent as Israel, then there will be no resolution to this situation," he said.

Thomas Geyer can be contacted at (563) 383-2328 or tgeyer@qctimes.com.