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A
Missive to America from Jenin
By Annie Higgins, CounterPunch, January 7, 2003
Dear Fellow Citizens, Imagine your city without a police force.
Imagine that the police stations are rubble, having been bombed
out months ago. Imagine that every city in our nation is in this
situation. Would you feel secure? Would you be able to band together
as a society to keep yourselves safe from within and from without?
Imagine your roads are never repaired, ever. Imagine that when a
few civic-minded broad-shouldered citizens take up shovels to fix
the road, they are arrested and tortured and imprisoned without
charge. Imagine that when someone in your city commits a crime in
this police-less place, everyone in your city, and that means you,
is put under house arrest. Imagine further that this extends to
terrorizing people without any pretext for doing so, with a terror
action that is fatal to one of your neighbors - a doctor in an ambulance,
a teacher returning home from school, a child writing on the blackboard.
Think for a moment of a crime you have heard of in your city. Is
there a particular doctor you would like to have killed in retaliation?
A teacher you would like to have eliminated? A child you would like
to have snuffed out? Yes? Then come and support the Occupation of
Palestinian lands.
A
Letter to Bush from the Mother of a Slain Palestinian
By Mrs. Ra'ida Rafiq Abu Hasan,
CounterPunch, January 7, 2003
To the Honorable President George Bush, President of the United
States of America:
We hope that you can give us a little of your valuable time so we
may clarify for you how we are suffering from Israel's persecution
and oppression, and from the systematic terror and state terrorism
they are carrying out. We hope that you will give this letter the
attention it deserves, and take note of the complete facts herein.
Mr. President, I am a teacher at a United Nations Relief Works Agency
(UNRWA) school. I have a son named `Amid `Azmi Ratib Abu Hasan,
aged exactly nineteen years and seven months to the day at his death.
He left our house to join his friends on April 10, 2002 after the
invasion of the city of Jenin and Jenin Refugee Camp. Our house
is in the city about a mile from the Refugee Camp. We were startled
when an Apache helicopter pummeled our home for more than five minutes
with heavy machine gun fire. When the shelling stopped, it became
clear that my son and his companion had been killed, and another
child was critically wounded, as was an adult.
Blame
Yourself: American Power and Jewish Power
By Michael Neumann, CounterPunch, January 7, 2003
Sometime around the 1940s or 1950s it was cool to talk about the
capitalist power structure, and in the 1960s to speak of a white
power structure. In both cases one could say, in annoying-geezer
talk, "Now that was a power structure!" Because if you looked at
what the capitalists or the whites controlled, well heck, it was
everything! And as a measure of just how everything it was, both
the capitalist and the white power structure contained the entire
Jewish power structure. Has something changed? Have the white folks
been dethroned by the Jews? Talk of a Jewish power structure is
increasing at two levels. In the nether regions of the internet,
there's more about Jewish control of the US' Israel policy, or perhaps
of the US itself. Higher up, one hears about a Jewish lobby, or
a Jewish-Israel lobby, or, more often, about mean-spirited, unpleasant
people who control the government, and who, it is said or coyly
suggested, are Jews. There is inconclusive but considerable evidence
to support these claims. Jews loom large among the high ranks of
government policy advisers, and in influential non-governmental
policy organizations. Most media push a Zionist line; many are owned
by Jews. And there are well-documented cases of senators and congressmen
who have learned to regret, come election time, wavering in their
support for Israel. Some suggest that Jewish pressure groups had
a role in the downfall of Bush the First.
People
and Politics / War or no war, there's little time for U.S. peace
moves
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, January 7, 2003
Israeli officials could understand from the [US] ambassador that
his boss' new schedule didn't leave much room, if at all, for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If his hosts had told the ambassador
what's written in the Israeli comments on the Quartet "road map,"
his report to Washington would have taken the last bit of wind out
of any sails Bush may have set for sailing into the Middle East
conflict. -- Last Tuesday, when the U.S. headlines were full
of the winds of war and local headlines were full of faulty gas
masks and vaccinations, American Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer paid
a visit to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Kurtzer accepted an
invitation from the head of the ministry's North American desk,
Yoram Ben-Ze'ev, to brief the department on the latest developments.
The officials naturally wanted to hear if the ambassador believed
they should prepare for an American peace offensive the day after
the end of the Iraqi war. Kurtzer said U.S. President George W.
Bush is determined to disarm Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of his
weapons of mass destruction, but it is not at all certain he will
need to declare war to do so.
Jingle
to a miserable failure
By Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, January 7, 2003
As election broadcasting kicks off today, Israel is like the kid
from the old joke whose father smacks him in the face for getting
an "A" in singing. "All these `Fs' on your report card," bellows
the father, "and you're still in the mood to sing?" Over the next
20 days, Israel will be listening to jingles and slogans composed
by the finest songwriters and advertising pros. The country is collapsing
- and they'll be serenading us with promises and dishing out dirt
in rhymed couplets. Did we say collapsing? Has anyone noticed how
popular this word has become in the last few months? The governor
of the Bank of Israel is talking about it; the heads of the economy
are talking about it. It's all over the place. Some other terms
that have become part of the public lexicon in the Sharon era are
"banana republic" and "shades of Argentina." With the recent discovery
of corruption in the form of vote-buying, for cash or its equivalent
pilfered from the public purse, the 1977 rallying cry, "With the
corrupt, we're fed up!" has resurfaced as: "Racketeer, get outta
here!" The father, the son and the scent of moolah. The godfathers,
the deals, the ex-cons past and present, the buying and selling
of votes: A country in the midst of social, economic, political
and military turmoil, now suffering from moral rot for good measure
- and they're singing jingles.
Some
things just won't change 'the morning after'
By Dalia Shehori, Ha'aretz, January 7, 2003
It is doubtful whether there is any book whose publication at this
time would raise as many questions as one that examines the era
of peace. Just such a book, "The Morning After: the Era of Peace
- Not Utopia," edited by Meron Benvenisti, was recently released.
In presenting 14 research articles, the book offers what is a hardly
optimistic forecast of Israel the morning after a peace accord with
the Palestinians is signed. The book is based on the assumption
that peace will be very cold, and as a result, "the dividends of
peace" will be severely limited. Not only will the peace not bring
sweeping changes to Israel society; it will accentuate the existing
processes, some of which are negative. Benvenisti reveals a pessimistic
attitude in the book's preface, and writes that he is not even referring
to a cold peace. "Twilight is the most fitting definition for the
image of a possible peace in our region," he writes.
L'etat,
c'est moi
By Amir Oren, Ha'aretz, January 7, 2003
February 12 will mark Shaul Mofaz's "civilian birthday," when he
will leave the legal freezer that he was put into as chief of staff,
because only then, two weeks after the new Knesset is elected, will
six months have passed from his last day in military service. This
morning, 11 Supreme Court justices will hear Mofaz's petition against
the decision by the Central Election Committee and its chairman,
Justice Mishael Cheshin, that he is not eligible to run for Knesset.
Mofaz is asking the court to pay the bill for the whims of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited Mofaz into politics and in
the same breath put the former chief of staff into this fix by setting
the date for the elections on January 28, without taking into account
Mofaz's needs. The ambitions of an individual - Mofaz - are more
important in his eyes than the legislator's desire to draw a distinction
between military and political service. He is opposed to the cooling-off
period in general (100 days for junior officers and six months for
senior officers), and as his wont, shirks responsibility for his
deeds and failures, in this case, the false documentation produced
for him. On August 11, the petition claims not so innocently, Mofaz
"decided to end his retirement leave. As a result, the military
authorities set the date of his demobilization from the army, according
to IDF practice, on July 13." Who am I, the simple soldier Mofaz,
to argue with the army and its practices? Give me the money and
I'll run.
We
must answer the midnight call on Iraq
Rt. Rev Peter B Price, The Independent, January 5, 2003
"It is midnight in the moral order. There is a knock on the door
of mankind," declared Martin Luther King at the height of the struggle
among America's minority ethnic population for civil rights. It
is a strangely apt observation as we enter 2003, and the Prime Minister
has issued notably jeremiad warnings in his New Year message, with
its continued litany of despair over war with Iraq, the continuing
threat of global terrorism, and the stark realities of a stalled
peace process in the Middle East and the systemic crisis in Africa.
Throughout history, relationships between the Christian faith tradition
and governments have often been at their most vulnerable at times
of moral crisis. Vulnerability offers to all parties the possibility
of being exposed to alternative options, different responses, other
solutions. Today we live in such a time. A recent Gallup survey
in the US indicates that only 15 per cent support going to war against
Iraq, regardless of UN inspections; and a vast majority believe
that if Iraq does not disarm, the US should still seek UN approval
before invading. "The poor are off the agenda," remarked one prominent
church leader. If war erupts in the Middle East it will have a profound
effect on aid and development programmes worldwide, resulting in
additional hidden holocausts throughout Africa, the Indian sub-continent
and elsewhere.
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