Can anyone be an honest broker of ‘information’ in a war of hate waged with lies?

Last week, sitting in a special session, the Supreme Court en banc chose six nominees out of 19 aspirants for the two vacant seats in that chamber.

Tomorrow, the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) will name four other nominees to complete the short-list of ten finalists for the two vacancies. It gives you a hint of the characters of the first candidates selected by the High Court that there’s widespread expectation (hope?) in Bench and bar that the JBC’s four nominees will be better than certain nominees of the Supreme Court.

On another level, the names of the five appointees to the five vacant seats in the Court of Appeals are already known – well, practically known – in the legal community. Four of the five appointees for Associate Justice in the appellate court are career Regional Trial Court judges who each has served for more than ten years in the judiciary. The remaining one is a brilliant Department of Justice official – a lady. The choices, those in the know say, are very good, with not one of them tainted by scandal or any rumor of corruption.

Why then does Malacañang not yet release their names? The mystifying delay is raising all sorts of speculation, such as the prospect of certain appointees being elbowed out of the list at the zero hour and replaced with desperate aspirants who happen to be backed up by powerful padrinos. The delay has caused so much anxiety on the part of the deserving appointees that one of them had to be rushed to the Makati Medical Center the other day because the tension and "mental torture" imposed on him by the mysterious reluctance of the Palace to announce its choices were apparently too much to bear.

Under the Constitution, of course, Malacañang has 90 days from the date nominations are submitted to formalize the filling of vacant positions in the judiciary. Those 90 days are almost up. But why wait for the last minute to release those appointment papers?

* * *

Surfing the cable news networks yesterday afternoon, I chanced on CNN’s Larry King interviewing "live" from Jerusalem, one of the most famous faces on television – veteran Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) anchorman and news commentator Dan Rather.

Rather – for the first time since I’ve been seeing him on TV off and on over the past two decades – looked tired. Not just tired, actually, but discouraged, and plumb exhausted. Even the weather reflected Rather’s gloom: In a land of almost perpetual sunshine or starry skies, it was a dreary and rainy night in Jerusalem.

The CBS titan of the broadcast industry had covered many wars, and had just come from Afghanistan. But it was in Israel and Palestine that, it seems, he came upon the most frustrating conflict of his career. For, as he told Larry King, in response to one of the latter’s questions, he could not see where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was going. When Larry asked him whether he saw any light at the end of the tunnel, or some way by which the escalation of violence and the current impasse could be resolved, Rather replied that, normally, he’d always been an optimist, but this time he didn’t see any prospect of "peace" at all.

Rather admitted it was difficult to cover and analyze this "war". He said, more or less (I dredge this up from faulty memory), that he had striven to be a fair and impartial journalist all his life, "to be an honest broker of information" from all sides, even in struggles "like this one which is being waged with propaganda and not just bullets", but, this time, the future was almost impossible to call.

That’s the tragedy. There seems to be no way out.

* * *

There was a time, I believe, when there was a glimmer of hope. This was when one of Israel’s most redoubtable soldiers, who had been Chief of Staff in June 1967 when Israel won one of its most decisive victories – the Six-Day War – became Prime Minister with the victory in June 1992 of the Labor Party. General Yitzhak Rabin, who had been an architect of the Iron Wall against Arab attack, was the unlikeliest candidate to become a peacemaker. But this he became when the Oslo Accord was signed, and he took the former Palestinian "terrorist" Yasser Arafat’s hand in that historic handshake on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.

The impact of the Oslo "compromise" was phenomenal. To the relentless TV camera eye, it was clear that Rabin had taken Arafat’s proffered hand reluctantly, but once he grasped it, he had grasped it firmly. The Oslo deal had represented a mutual recognition of each other’s right to self-determination, an understanding that the differences outstanding between them would be settled by "peaceful means", and the further concession that the momentum would be towards the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Although this was not stated openly, this was the clear implication.

As Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, pointed out in his candid book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2000) . . . "the basic premise underlying the Declaration of Principles was that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had to be effected gradually. The most difficult issues, such as the rights of the Palestinian refugees, the future of the Jewish settlements, borders, and Jerusalem, were left to the last stage of the process, to the negotiations on the permanent status of the territories. Gradual progress was intended to enable the two communities to overcome their fears and suspicions and to learn to live peacefully alongside one another. Normalization between Israel and the Palestinians was also expected to pave the way to normalization between Israel and the Arab states."

The results of that accord were amazing; it’s almost impossible to recall these tormented days. Within a year, Rabin had inked a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan. By 1996, Israel had established diplomatic relations with 16 Arab states!

On the night of November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin never appeared more confident of his role as a "peace warrior". More than 100,000 cheering Israelis had turned up to hear him speak at Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square. Rabin joined the chorus of thousands in belting out the Song of Peace.

The lyrics were portentous. They went: "Let the sun rise, light up the morning. It will not return those whose candle has been blown out. Nor will it return those buried in the dust with bitter tears. Sing out. Sing the song of peace."

In his speech, Rabin had called on his people to turn away from violence. He asserted that " . . . it is violence which undermines the foundations of Israeli democracy. We have to denounce it, we have to spit it out, we have to isolate it . . ."

As Rabin walked to his car at the conclusion of that triumphant rally, three shots rang out. A 27-year-old Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, a law student at Bar-Ilan University (no pun intended), had infiltrated Rabin’s lax security cordon and fired away with his 9 mm Beretta. Two of the dum-dum bullets lodged fatally in the Prime Minister’s back. He died later in the hospital.

I’ve always suspected that Amir was a Shin Bet agent, which is why his credentials had brought him so close to his target. Whatever the method, the foul deed was done.

That was the death of the peace process. This is why Arafat, whatever his own perfidy, keeps on reminding his listeners of his "partner" and "comrade" Rabin in the signing of a "Peace of the Brave."

* * *

Today, there is no peace. The brave and cowardly alike are dying. For after Rabin and his short-term successor, the wise but politically inept Shimon Peres, came the "destroyer", Binyamin Netanyahu.

On May 31, 1996, the 73-year old Prime Minister Peres lost disastrously to the brawler of the Likud Party, the 46-year old Netanyahu.

The US-educated Netanyahu had been elected by a margin of less than one percent – would you believe? That was the tiny margin, it proved to be, between peace and renewed "war" with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu had licked Peres by only 30,000 votes.) While his Likud Party had won only 32 seats in the 120-member Knesset (parliament), "Bibi" Netanyahu managed to forge a coalition, then set out to dismantle the Oslo agreement.

On February 19, 1997, Netanyahu launched a program to build a Jewish settlement of 6,500 houses and apartments for 30,000 Israelis at Har Homa, in "Arab" East Jerusalem. That was the opening salvo. In the years that followed, his Revisionist Zionist program’s weapon was the bulldozer, which cleared tracts of land in East Jerusalem, then the West Bank, for new Jewish communities. The Palestinians were horrified, then affronted. The Intifada or violent resistance resumed.

After Netanyahu came Ehud Barak, a former IDF chief of staff. Barak probably meant well, but he was unable to stop the momentum of the radical Zionists in establishing more "settlements" on disputed land. When Barak’s government went shaky, and the troubles intensified, a hawkish former General and Minister of Defense (whom the Palestinians called "The Butcher of Beirut") was swept into power on the platform that he would provide security for Israel.

With Ariel Sharon assuming the Prime Ministership more than 18 months ago, we all know the rest. The suicide-bombers, instead of being cowed by an all-out Israeli "IDF" military offensive, have kept on coming with increasing frequency. The other day, a car loaded with explosives was stopped by an Israeli checkpoint at the "border" between East Jerusalem and Central Jerusalem. The suicide-bomber at the wheel, whether by accident or design, blew his vehicle up. He died instantly. The policeman who had stopped him died – later. And so it goes on. Open-ended.

NEWSWEEK Magazine (April 1 issue) asks the question on its cover: "Can Israel Survive?" That’s what it has come down to: survival.

Netanyahu, surprisingly, is offering himself today as an alternative to Sharon! Salamabit. This is a choice between Dracula's legendary monster Frankenstein and the Werewolf of London to play the role of Horatius at the Bridge – while Godzilla batters at the Gate.

I grieve for the dead and those fated to die on both sides. What’s most poignant, however, is the "peace" that had been so narrowly missed.