By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Before he became the executive editor of the Jerusalem Post, one of Israel’s most influential English-language newspapers, Amotz Asa-El was a business editor and a foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Though he appears young, he has spent much of his adult life in journalism.
Long before that, he told a room full of supporters of the Jewish National Fund, he was a third grader in 1967, worrying about the war that had just begun-37 years and one week prior to his appearance at the benefit brunch at Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on June 13.
Asa-El used the occasion of the anniversary of the Six-Day War to describe what he saw as the near-destruction of the State of Israel that resulted from the occupation of territory following the quick victory in that war. He said the lightning-fast defeat of the Arab forces caused a schism. One side saw it as a confirmation of a Divine covenant and believed that the land should become a part of greater Israel. The other supported a land-for-peace arrangement with the Palestinians and, ultimately, a two-state resolution to the conflict.
Polarization between the two camps within Israeli society descended into a period of escalating violence and antipathy, culminating in the assassination of Yitchak Rabin in 1995.
More recently, in light of the second intifada and the scope of the violence emanating from the West Bank and Gaza, Asa-El said there is now an emerging consensus that, while peace will eventually come to the region “it may not be in our lifetime.”
He said that the large majority of Israelis have concluded that actions like building the separation barrier and unilateral withdrawal are the best that can be achieved until there is a change of heart among the Palestinian people and their leaders.
“I think that the Israeli media, along with much of the Israeli upper-middle class, has been humbled by the past four years’ violence, including myself,” said Asa-El. “I was an explicit and open and enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo process when it was launched.
“I think the most reflexive thing for a Jew is to embrace peace. I embrace peace, but along with so many of my colleagues, we learned, the way we see it, that we had no partner.”
While he laid the failure of the peace process directly at the feet of the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, and Yasser Arafat in particular, he also criticized Israel. He said the government marginalized Palestinian involvement in the Israeli workforce in the decades between the 1967 war and the first intifada in the late 1980s.
“The policy of opening Israel to Palestinian workers, though viewed at the time as an extremely liberal move, was done “in the worst possible social and cultural way,” he said.
“They were allowed to walk into Israel and join its labor market as washers of dishes in the restaurants, sweepers of streets in Israel’s major cities” said Asa-El. “But it was not done in a way that they would join the Israeli labor market as a professional, so an Israeli would never meet them as lawyers, as accountants, as engineers. They ended up as hewers of wood and haulers of water.” The results, he said, were “disastrous.”
“Twenty years later, all this blasted in our faces in the form of the first intifada,” Asa-El said. “They declaimed through their violence that that kind of a relationship would be indigestible This is where we Israelis began understanding the futility of occupation-occupation being, in this case, social, not geographic.”
That, in turn was the genesis of what he called the Israeli consensus, in which even Likud’s leadership concluded that “it would no longer be feasible or desirable for Israel to rule the Palestinians on a daily basis.”
JTNews also asked the editor for his list of the “most under-reported stories” in the Mid-East today.
“I would say the Algerian civil war,” he said, beginning his list of stories that had not gotten the attention they deserve in the world press. He said that war, fomented by what he referred to as “a criminal, French-led cancellation of a democratic election in 1992-the only one that ever took place in the Arab World” and won by Muslim fundamentalists-“therefore is the touchstone of the civil war that rages there until today.”
Comparing it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which, over four years. has cost between close to 5,000 lives on both sides, “over there you have well more than 100,000 Algerians being killed by fellow Arabs, and nobody cares.”
Next, Asa El noted the situation in Sudan, where “you have not 100,000, but a million. And in the Sudan you have not only Arabs killing Arabs, but white Arabs killing black Africans, you have children being captured and sold into slavery and you have genocide.
“The third incredibly undercovered story is Arab dissidents,” he said. “We know that there are Arab dissidents rotting in jail in Damascus and Cairo and other places-democracy fighters-and their story is nowhere near being celebrated the way Solzhenitsyn and Sakarov and Scharansky were in their times.
“Another incredibly undercovered story is the persecution of gays in Egypt. In Egypt it’s illegal to be gay and gays get jailed by the hundreds.”
Finally, he listed Israeli issues not related to the Palestinian conflict.
“There was a three-year-long recession in Israel, the worst ever in its history. [It] received no mention in the international media, including the business media,” he said. “Any recession for a developed economy becomes a story. Israel’s, for some reason, was not.” Asa-El said the cause of the recession was not war-related.
“A million immigrants that the former East Bloc had to offer had arrived in Israel and the supply of prospective immigrants plunged to minimum levels,” he explained. Prices in the Israeli property market dropped by 30 percent in that period.
“It was a very simple mechanism and the prices behaved so erratically that it was a great business story,” Asa-El said. “Nobody covered it because it was not war.”