Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld covers Washington, D.C.

The violence in the Middle East-terrorist bombings by Palestinian militants followed by military assaults by the government of Israel-will come to an end only when a political settlement is achieved, one which permits both Israelis and Palestinians to live in dignity and security.

It is becoming increasingly clear, even to many Israelis, that it is not possible to both occupy the West Bank with Jewish settlements and expect Palestinians to quietly acquiesce in this expropriation of their land. Previous Israeli governments, beginning with the Oslo agreements of 1993, agreed to limit and begin to remove such settlements. In fact, since 1993, the numbers of settlers have doubled and Israel’s current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has expressed hi intention to maintain such settlements, and even increase them.

The respected Israeli author Amos Elon points out that,

Israel has been unable to resolve the painful paradox of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. The reasons for this continuing paradox are political: the attempt of one people to rule another against its wish. These reasons will not go away. . . . Among Israelis there was only very rarely a shadow of guilt over the fact that their astounding material, social and international success had come at the price of rendering millions of Palestinians homeless. If it were not for European anti-Semitism, Israel would probably not have come into being. The Palestinians were not responsible for the collapse of civilization in Europe under the Nazis but in the end they were punished for it. . . .

Israelis say that at Camp David, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians “the moon,” and that the Palestinians were still not satisfied. Israel, in this view, went the extra mile and has suffered growing terror and assault in return.

This assessment, however, avoids the real complexities involved. While Barak did break Israeli taboos against any discussion of dividing Jerusalem, and did sketch out an offer that was considered overly generous by many Israelis, it was nevertheless an approach that the Palestinians did not believe would leave them with a viable state.

Robert Malley, who was President Clinton’s special assistant at Camp David, wrote (together with Hussein Agha, a Palestinian who teaches at Saint Anthony’s College, Oxford) in The New York Times Review of Books that Ehud Barak saw the interim approach established at Oslo as finished and wanted only

...a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation. . . . Barak discarded a number of interim steps, even those to which Israel was formally committed by various agreements-including a third partial deployment of troops from the West Bank, the transfer of Palestinian control of three villages abutting Jerusalem and the release of Palestinians imprisoned for acts committed before the Oslo Agreement.

“In addition,” Malley pointed out, “Israel continued its expansion of West Bank settlements, which proceeded at a rapid pace.”

There has been a increase of over 50 percent in the number of housing units as well as settlers since the Oslo agreement of September 1993. There are altogether 145 official settlements and another fifty “unofficial” ones. There are altogether 145 official settlements and another 50 “unofficial” ones. The length of the roads built for the settlements, used only by the settlers, increased by 160 kilometers between 1997 and 1999. Professor Avishai Margalit of the Hebrew University points out:

That the settlements are illegal under international law is not in doubt to any of the 142 members of the UN except for Israel. Nor is it in doubt to most legal experts, for who Israel is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) which says: “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” . . . It remains clear that the purpose of Article 49 is to prevent permanent colonization of occupied territories, which is undoubtedly the purpose of the settlements.

The Barak offer, Malley argues,

. . . was never necessary for the viable, contiguous Palestinian state. Under the Barak plan, the West bank would have been divided into three cantons. Each would have been completely surrounded by Israel, while the Gaza Strip, many miles away, would have been a fourth.

“Seen from Gaza and the West Bank,” writes Malley,

Oslo’s legacy reads like a litany of promises deferred or unfulfilled. Six years after the agreement, there are more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement and worse economic conditions. Powerful Palestinian constituencies-the intellectuals, security-establishment, media, business community . . . whose support was vital for any peace effort were disillusioned . . . doubtful of Israel’s willingness to implement signed agreements.

Amira Haas, the correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in the Palestinian territories, and author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza, reports that,

There is no way to understand the current Palestinian uprising without examining the moral, economic and social reality that the Israeli settlement policy has created in the last thirty-four years. Since the 1967 war, Israeli governments-both Labor and Likud-have built settlements all over the occupied West Bank and the small Gaza Strip, in the midst of Arab-Palestinian communities that are centuries old. . . . The construction and development of these outposts have essentially allowed Israel to create the infrastructure of one state, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

Haas points out that,

While Israelis can at any time move to the West Bank or Gaza, Palestinians are not allowed to live legally in an Israeli city or settlement, even if this settlement is built upon their family land. . . . Alongside the flourishing, green and ever-expanding Israeli Jewish outposts-well maintained by Israeli policies and laws-is a Palestinian society subject to the rule of military orders and restrictions, its dense communities squeezed into small areas, served by miserably maintained roads and an insufficient water supply system. . . . The Palestinian self-rule enclaves are encircled by vast Israeli-controlled areas and cannot develop without Israeli permits for activities like building water pipelines and new schools, upgrading a road to building a gas station.

In the past year, radical Palestinians who have no interest in any kind of peace settlement with Israel but who wish, instead, to remove Israel from the region entirely, have gained strength as moderates view the situation as increasingly hopeless. Saleh Abdel Jawad, professor of political science at Bir Zeit University, described the situation this way,

It’s a system that suffocates you slowly, slowly. It paralyzes your life, daily. And the people arrive to the point of explosion, and they cannot explode, and then one of the suicide bombers explodes instead of them.

Those who are critical of Yasser Arafat’s role, and his apparent lack of effective leadership, declares The Economist,

. . . are right in pointing out that the protection of Israel’s security is an obligation that Mr. Arafat has accepted. Whey they do not add is that Mr. Sharon’s policy of assassination Palestinian militants, invading Palestinian towns and blowing up police stations has bade the obligation unfulfillable. If Mr. Arafat now gave orders for the wholesale arreat of the people who Israel names as culpable, he would not be obeyed. Given Hamas’ growing popularity with an embittered Palestinian population, he has difficulty in getting his Fatah security men to arrest Hamas leaders, let alone to arrest their fellow in Fatah. His people, under bombardment, are balking at the occupied being asked to provide security for the occupier.

What many forget is that in the 1980s, it was Ariel Sharon who fostered the birth of Mamas as a counterweight to Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization. According to Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor,

In December 1992, the late Yitzhak Rabin gave Hamas another inadvertent boost when he tried to banish more than 400 Islamists-including members of Hamas’ smaller (but equally deadly) twin, Islamic Jihad-to Lebanon after a series of ruthless attacks. Beirut refused to accept the, and the men were left to camp out for months in a “no-man’s land” on the Lebanese border where they underwent training by Hezbollah, particularly in the weapon that had played such a prominent part in driving the Israeli military out of the rest of Lebanon in 1983-85: the suicide bomb. In April 1994, Hamas launched its first wave of suicide bombers with the objective of wrecking the Oslo accords.

Early in December, when the Bush administration sent retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni to the Middle East to attempt to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, which opposes any such talk, launched a series of suicide bombings. The result was renewed pressure on a weakened Yasser Arafat to act against Palestinian militants just as Israel launched retaliatory raids against the Palestinian Authority itself. Hamas, it seems, succeeded in its goal of derailing the process, a process for which Ariel Sharon also has little sympathy.

Now, many are calling for the removal of Arafat, a course that may be filled with as many unanticipated consequences as Israel’s initial support for Hamas. The Economist points out,

A Palestinian leader who has lost control may sound expendable. But his departure is unlikely to open the way for a regime that is both in control and prepared to cooperate with any workable formula for peace. Mr. Arafat has plainly failed to please everyone. But if he is harried b the Israelis into oblivion, his successors, at great cost to the region, may have an agenda that has no interest in, and no chance of, pleasing anyone.

Sadly, there is not the kind of leadership among Israelis or Palestinians to bring the more than fifty -year conflict to a fair and equitable resolution. When Camp David failed, Arafat walked away, rather than making counter-proposals that might have been productive. Israelis then elected Ariel Sharon, a long time enemy of the peace process and an advocate of increasing Israeli settlements and control of the occupied territories.

Polls indicate that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want peace. Only a political solution can produce that peace. It may take an even stronger U.S. role in the region to develop the conditions and incentives which neither Palestinians nor Israelis can create. The only alternative is endless violence, which will benefit no one.

Giving Parents a Choice: The Best Prescription for Our Failing Public Schools

That our public schools have been declining for many years is no longer a subject of debate. The evidence is clear-and overwhelming.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Education issued the results of American high school seniors in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), a worldwide competition among twenty-one nations.

“U.S. twelfth graders performed below the international average and among the lowest of the twenty-one TIMSS countries on the assessment of mathematical general knowledge,” they reported. The American students scored nineteenth out of twenty-one nations.

The national Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tested students in American history. Two out of three seventeen-year-olds, most ready to go to college, did not know the meaning of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Less than half of 16,000 high school seniors tested recognized Patrick Henry’s declaration, “Give me liberty or give me death!”

In an NAEP geography test, on a black outline map, high school seniors were asked to mark (1) Pyrenees Mountains, (2) Japanese Archipelago, (3) Mediterranean Sea, and (4) Persian Gulf. Seventy-seven per cent of the seventeen-year-olds could not locate even three out of the four.

Several months ago, test results from the NAEP were released which show that more than eighty per cent of high school seniors lack profiency in science. The performance of twelfth graders was worse than four years before. If our graduates know less about science than their predecessors four years ago, then our hopes for a strong twenty-first century workforce are dimming just when we need them to improve most.

For many years, the declining public schools have had a captive audience: thos who did not have the resources to withdraw their children and place them in higher-performing private and parochial schools. Locked into inferior schools, in particular, were minorities in the nation’s inner cities.

Finally, real choices are beginning to emerge, bringing much-needed competition to education. Professor Paul Peterson of Harvard points out that,

Historically, most school boards in the U.S. assigned students to schools by drawing boundaries that established specific attendance areas. Where one lived determined the school one attended. Families had relatively little choice in the matter. The situation has changed substantially in recent years. Today, a wide variety of school choice mechanisms are available to parents and students-vouchers, magnet schools, charter schools, inter-district choice programs, home-schooling, tax credits and tax-deductions for private tuition and . . . school choice through residential selection. . . . Approximately sixty-three per cent of American families with school-age children are making a choice when sending their child to school.

School vouch programs have, with public and private funds, been established in many cities and states. In just 10 years, the number of students involved has climbed from zero to more than 60,000. During the 1999-2000 school year, nearly 50,000 students were participating in sixty-eight privately funded voucher programs and another 12,000 in 3 publicly funded ones.

The three publicly funded voucher programs are in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and the state of Florida. In Cleveland, students began matriculating in private schools in the fall of 1996: by the fall of 1999 the number of participating students had reached nearly 4,000. In 1999 students received a scholarship of up to $2,250, substantially less than the amount spent per student by Cleveland public schools. The Milwaukee program, established in 1990, originally allowed students to attend only schools without a religious affiliation, and only a few hundred students participated in the program in its first year. In the 1998-99 school year, the program was expanded to include religious schools, and in 2000 the number of participating students had increased to approximately 12,000, with participating students receiving a scholarship of up to nearly $5,000. A small number of students became eligible for participation in the Florida program for the first time in the fall of 1999 when the legislature said that students attending “failing” schools could apply for vouchers of up to $3,389.

Most parents who take part are happy with the results. A study by three academics-Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute, William Howell of Stanford and Paul Peterson of Harvard-showed that sixty-six per cent of voucher parents were “very satisfied” with the academic quality of their new schools, compared with less than thirty percent of public school parents.

A study by Kim Metcalf of Indiana University found that voucher students showed a small but statistically significant improvement in their achievement scores in language and science. Another study found that voucher students were in more racially integrated schools than they would have been in their district public school.

Late in June, the Supreme Court will rule on the of voucher programs which provide assistance to religious schools.

Proponents argue persuasively that voucher programs are similar to programs which give veterans financial aid for education. The G.I. Bill gave funds to individual veterans, who were then free to use those funds at the educational institution of their choice, whether religious and secular. Under current voucher programs, families are similarly given funds to use as they choose. Beyond this, public funds already go to faith-based schools to pay for textbooks, school buses and special education.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules,it is clear that choice in education is of particular benefit to minorities. “Urban black America favors school vouchers,” writes Professor Michael Leo Owens of Emory University,

...but its leaders don’t. Vouchers transfer authority over the use of a portion of government education funds from bureaucrats to parents. . . . Why do I and other African Americans support vouchers over the advice of black politicians? At the most basic level, we are desperate for a decent education for our children. And people in my generation and those younger doubt the ability of black government leaders to influence public education policies in ways that would benefit our children. Our support for vouchers is essentially a critique of politicians’ ineffectiveness.

A 1999 survey by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research group, found that sixty-eight per cent of blacks favor vouchers. A similar poll by the Joint Center of Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, showed that the percentage of blacks supporting school vouchers rose to sixty percent in 1999 from forty-eight percent in 1996.

Professor Owens declares that whatever their shortcomings, vouchers

...offer the only hope available to may poor students trapped in the nations’ worst schools. For a limited number of children, they may make a crucial difference. That possibility is enough for black parents to take a chance.

A two-year study of students I three cities by researches at Harvard, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin, found that black students who switched to private schools from public schools on scholarships that were similar to vouchers performed significantly higher on standardized math and reading tests than similar students who remained in public schools. The average performance of black students who switched to private school was six percentile points higher than that of students who stayed in public schools. The study followed students in voucher programs in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Dayton, Ohio.

The case before the Supreme Court, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, concerns the question of whether the state-funded Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program subsidizes religion.

No one questions the fact the Cleveland’s public schools have failed. Just nine percent of high schoolers passed all four sections of Ohio’s ninth grade proficiency tests. Overall, the district flunked all twenty-six of the state’s standards.

Only one in three students makes it to graduation. The voucher program was created to give low-income children a way out. This year 4,457 students in kindergarten through eight grade received up to $2,250 in assistance-about a third of what the city spends per public-school pupil. “It’s a bargain for the state,” say Ohio Assistant Attorney General Judith French.

The point at issue is the fact that religious schools enroll 99.4 per cent of the students. Ohio officials argue that the vouchers are fully constitutional and compare them to using federally funded Pell grants at religious universities. Opponents of the voucher program, needless to say, include the National Education Association that seeks to protect the jobs of teachers in failing schools.

Even if the Court rejects Cleveland’s program, this will hardly reverse the tide in behalf of school choice. George Pieler, director of the Institute for Policy Innovation’s Center for Educational Freedom, argues that,

For school choice . . . the only way is upward and onward. The Supreme Court can give the movement a great boost, or shape its tactics a bit, but even the Supreme Court can’t stop an idea whose time has come. Even for those schoolchildren in Cleveland, there still is great hope even if the Supreme Court declines to do the right thing. If the Supreme Court should be obtuse enough to strike down Ohio’s law, other doors will surely open in Cleveland. Parents who have tasted greater freedom of choice will not give up so easily. Private philanthropy, for one, can be critical-when Milwaukee faced a similar judicial impasse, the Bradley Foundation stepped up to fund scholarships for students already enrolled in private schools with vouchers. The Supreme Court will give the school choice movement an unparalleled chance to galvanize the public in favor of greater educational freedom. That chance must be seized, win or lose.

We would like to thank the following readers for their generous contributions towards the publication of this journal: John M. Baker, Dirk A. Ballendorf, Nancy M. Bannick, Frank Barrera, Dean A. Benjamin, Charles Benscheidt, Bedford H. Berrey, James L. Blilie, Walter I. C. Brent, James M. Broz, William L. Burns, Frances G. Campbell, Thomas J. Ciotola, William D. Collingwood, Robert M. DeLisser, John B. Edge, Nicholas Falco, Edwin J. Feulner, Etha Fox, Robert Gates, Robert C. Gerken, Thad A. Goodwyn, Alene D. Haines, Paul J. Hauser, Bernhard Heersink, Arthur Hills, John A. Howard, Patrick R. Huntley, Art Ivey, Burleigh Jacobs, Michael Kaye, Robert E. Kelly, Frank G. Kenski, A. R. Kircher, Mary S. Kohler, Eric Linhof, Joy J. Lobeck, Gregor MacDonald, Thomas D. Macstocker, Daniel Maher, Lloyd W. Martinson, Anna C. Marx, Thomas J. McGreevy, Ben McMillian, Mrs. Robert McQuade, Aubrey A. Melton, W. C. Metcalf, David P. Mitchel, Thomas L. Mitchel, James, D. Moenssen, Michael E. Moore, Dwight D. Murphey, Grover E. Murray, Bernard L. Poppert, Paul R. Rangel, Jeanne I Reisler, Mark and Beth Richter, Willard Rogerson, George M. Sayre, William Schummrick, Al Shane, Charles B. Stevenson, Clifford W. Stone, Dennis J. Sullivan, Lovic P. Thomas, Paul B. Thompson, Johanna Visser, Richard B. Wenger, Thomas L. Wentling, George M. Wheatley, Robert C. Whitten, Edward Wilson, Eric Wilson.