Scarred psyche
Editorial, Arab News, January 2, 2003
It was always a boast of the Israelis that they were an isolated island of democracy surrounded by a dangerous ocean of reactionary Arab states. For the well-meaning, but ill-informed, American voter, whose country’s treasury has been the wellspring of Israel’s financial survival, Israel’s democratic credentials reinforced the sentiment that it deserved his support. How will it seem now that Israel’s Election Commission has seen it fit to ban two Arab deputies from standing for re-election, because it does not agree with their political views on the plight of their fellow Palestinians? The decision to bar Azmi Bishara and his Balad party from contesting his seat in the Jan. 28 elections comes a day after it disqualified another Israel Arab MP, Ahmad Tibi. The charge against them is the catch-all "seeking the destruction" of the Jewish state. It is an accusation that doesn’t need to be proved in Sharon’s Israel. If it is an Arab, accusation is proof.

Waiting also carries a price
By Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, January 2, 2003
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his associates in the political-security leadership promise that the American offensive against Iraq will solve Israel's problems. Hostile regimes in the region will collapse, Yasser Arafat will be replaced by a more palatable leadership and dollars from the United States will end the economic crisis. If we wait for the "day after," Sharon believes, we will awaken to a new reality, one in which the Arabs fear Israel's American-backed power. Waiting, however, comes with a price. The lengthy preparations for the war on Iraq suggest that even the world's superpower finds it hard to chew gum and talk at the same time. And there are no vacuums in the international arena: With America engaged by Saddam Hussein, others are exploiting circumstances in order to create new strategic facts. Thus the balance of power in the region is likely to change for the worse before we get to the "day after."

Needed: A commission of inquiry
By Yitzchak Zamir, Ha'aretz, January 2, 2003 
What is so bad about the present system, whereby the central committee chooses and ranks the party's candidates for a Knesset seat? In essence, what is bad about it is that the present system invites corrupt manipulations that distort the principles of democracy and cause great damage to the country. To be specific, the main drawbacks of the system are..

The futile diplomacy of buying time
By Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, January 2, 2003
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, has finally, and as expected, decided to postpone legislative and presidential elections, originally scheduled for January 2003, under pressure from Israel, the United States and the usual chorus that rallies behind such delaying tactics. The Palestinians had, however, been warning that the continued Israeli occupation and its paralyzing impact on all aspects of life would have made carrying out elections all but impossible in the first place. They were right about that; the occupation makes elections impossible not only due to the cruel and repressive nature of the Israeli military dictatorship that rules over the Palestinians. But Israel also intends not to allow the Palestinians to overcome any of the demands and hurdles that have been placed before them -- such as political reform and unilaterally ending violence while Israel continues its massive attacks on civilians and leadership alike -- ostensibly the preconditions for resuming a useful dialogue.

Letter from Qalqiliya
By Michael Jansen, Palestine Monitor, December 26, 2002
We were lucky. It took us only an hour to reach Qalqiliya. There was just one lenient checkpoint on the road. At the sole remaining entrance to the town we parked our four-wheel drive vehicle on the side of the road by dozens of lorries and cars and walked up to the armed Israeli soldiers sitting behind a barricade of cement blocks. While one examined our passports, the other inserted cartridges in the magazine of his M-16, waving the barrel in my face. “We have an appointment with the mayor,” we said. “OK,” said the soldier, returning our documents. As we walked to the other side, my companion remarked: “We were lucky. Sometimes it can take an hour an a half, sometimes more. It depends on the mood of the soldiers on duty.” We engaged a driver who had shown her round on an earlier visit and began the tour of the wall. He took us to the latest construction site, north of the town, driving down a narrow alley between ramshackle orchard fencing to a huge expanse of rich, red bulldozed earth. The taxi bucked over the rough ground, skirting a massive heap of olive branches and a Palestinian couple loading this detritus of devastation in the back of their truck. Last week this place boasted a stand of century-old olive trees which provided a livelihood for their owners, now anyone can come here to collect firewood.

Senator Lieberman: Your Peace is Our Demise
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle, January 2, 2003
SEATTLE (PalestineChronicle.com) - US Senator and likely Presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman is touring the Middle East. His visit will most likely be described as a success. And why not? Lieberman conversed with Ariel Sharon and top Israeli leaders. He vowed time and again to stand by Israel in its “war on terrorism”, and its right to “self-defense.” He managed to completely ignore the elected Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, meeting instead with Saeb Erekat, the former head of the Palestinian negotiation team. When asked about who was to blame for a bloody two years of occupation and bloodshed, he uttered, the “blame goes on the terrorists,” the Palestinians of course. With that said, Lieberman managed to squeeze in a few statements about the need for peace, and Palestinian reforms, and a Palestinian crackdown on terrorism, and Palestinian willingness to negotiation and a new Palestinian leadership, etc. To be fair, Lieberman did briefly address the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. But of course, it was not Israel who received the blame for the growing humanitarian catastrophe, but the “terrorists.”

Nuremberg Precedents Ignored by Israeli Court
By William Hughes, Palestine Chronicle, January 2, 2003 
(PalestineChronicle.com) - On Dec. 30, 2002, the Israeli Supreme Court, in Jerusalem, ruled that Army reservists, who have refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, for “reasons of conscience,” cannot be exempted from military duty. Earlier this year, more than 70 Israeli army reservists, including at least two dozen officers, stated they would no longer serve in the West Bank and Gaza because of the brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. “We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line, [the border between Israel and the West Bank established after the Six-Day War] for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people,” (01/31/02, www.wsws.org).

Fighting for our Minds
By Rahul Mahajan, Palestine Chronicle, January 2, 2003   
As the Bush war machine attempts to plant the flag of imperium wherever its over-sized jackboot takes it, Americans must fight to reclaim that most precious ground, ceded to the forces of the right after long wars of attrition: our minds. No less than the collective fate of humanity hangs in the balance. The struggle is as easy or as hard as we make it. It’s hard because in a sense, we start already defeated; in the absence of an affirmative campaign to reclaim our minds, we think the master’s thoughts: he rules us as a colonial power. In the absence of a concerted, irreverently irredentist campaign to reclaim the territory that is rightfully ours, we are slaves in our own houses and our slavery removes the most fundamental check on the colonizer’s desire to find new worlds to conquer (with the attendant toll of human degradation, suffering, and death.) But its easy too because the moment we start the battle, the moment we acknowledge the simple fact that our minds have been colonized, the colonizer’s modes and methods, its purpose, its theology become ever so clear.

After life of resistance, he died sane
By Colman McCarthy, National Catholic Reporter, December 27, 2002
With Irish wit flavored with irony, Philip Berrigan liked to say that he was “a Catholic trying to become a Christian.” His cancer death in Baltimore Dec. 6 ended a life rooted in early-century Christianity when defiance of state violence, sharing communal wealth and risk-taking pacifism were the unwritten articles of faith. It was before dogmas, doctrines and the rot of the just war theory took hold and church leaders sidled close to Roman emperors. Beginning in the mid-1960s, when he went beyond ordinary antiwar protests by destroying draft records, Berrigan persisted through the end of the 1990s to disturb the false peace of the national security state. Believing, as did Martin Luther King Jr. that “war is our government’s number one business,” Berrigan went into business for himself: the resistance business.