Dr. Mitchell G. Bard said when he was in Israel in August he didn’t walk into the civil war that the media had been portraying.
Bard, author and leading authority on U.S.-Middle East policy, gave a lecture on campus Tuesday evening to more than 70 people about the facts and myths surrounding the dissonance between Palestine and Israel. His most recent book, “1001 Facts Everyone Should Know About Israel,” came out last week.
There was no civil war, he said, referring to the disengagement of Gaza as a triumph in democracy. He said he saw the results of democratically elected leaders in Israel making the decision to disengage from the Gaza Strip, a decision that was supported by the majority of the population. He spoke about what the next step might be to bring peace between the two countries.
Now that Israel no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, there is nothing stopping the Palestinians from moving in and creating a state in that area where they could control their own affairs and institute democratic policies, but “all they’ve been able to produce is chaos,” Bard said.
The level of corruption in the Palestinian government has been a problem, Bard said, especially in the last 10 years. The International Monetary Fund discovered that out of the $5.5 billion in foreign aid given to Palestine, Yasser Arafat stole $1 billion, Bard said.
Palestinians can no longer work in Israel because Israel no longer allows them in the country because of concerns about possible terrorist attacks, he said.
Bard continued by saying that women don’t have rights in Palestine like they do in Israel, and citizens don’t have the same freedoms of speech or assembly.
According to a number of polls taken in Palestine, when asked what country Palestinians admire most, they answer “Israel,” Bard said.
“And what can they do?” he asked.
Bard said one option is to destroy Israel, and some Palestinians have made it no secret that that is their goal, but they have recognized that they can’t accomplish it. They have tried to get other Arab leaders to do it for them, but they refuse, he said.
Another option is to do nothing, he said. If Palestinians wait instead of compromising and settling “for a crummy piece of land that the Israelis want to offer them in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” they will get “the whole thing,” Bard said.
From Israel’s perspective, he said, Palestine is made up of radical Islamic groups that want to destroy Israel.
The Jewish Student Union in conjunction with Oregon Hillel brought Bard to University as the first part of a series of events focused on ending the conflict plaguing the Middle East. JSU Director Jonathan Rosenberg said his union is honoring Israel’s former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the month of November. The Nobel Peace Prize winner was assassinated 10 years ago this Friday by a right-wing Israeli.
“We don’t want to focus on who’s right and who’s wrong,” Rosenberg said. “We want to bring peace to the Middle East.”

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