Westminster Notes (The Golan Heights)
By Sir Cyril Townsend, Daily Star 1/8/2004
All too few people now recall that 139 Arab villages flourished on the Golan Heights before the six-day war of 1967, and of those 131 were systematically destroyed by the ruthless Israeli army. -- It would be agreeable to be able to report that significant coverage was given in the British media to Israel's plans to double the number of Jewish settlers living on the Golan Heights. Not so. It was only briefly mentioned in the serious papers, and yet again one had the impression that for most newspapers Syria does not appear on the radar screen, and does not exist in the minds of their readers. While at least the outlines of the Arab-Israel dispute are known to most people in Britain - and there is a problem over the endless repetition of bad news - the fact that Israel is still occupying a large chunk of Syrian territory is not generally known in Britain.
The timing of the Israeli announcement by Yisrael Katz, an Israeli Cabinet Minister responsible for the plan, was curious. Only last month President Bashar Al Assad of Syria had suggested during an interview that his country was willing to resume discussions with Israel. This was a prudent decision by Syria, which has appeared, month by month, both more isolated and vulnerable. But Israel's announcement stamped that idea into the ground. Israel has been getting even worse publicity than usual following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's threat to "initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians". This had infuriated the Bush Administration and most member states at the United Nations. Why then select this moment at the New Year to annoy everybody even more?
The media, nuclear power, and failed peace: An interview with David Hirst
By Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada 1/9/2004
Listen to the interview or read the transcript -- "It seems to me clear that a great many Israelis, ideally, would like to see an Arab-free West Bank and Gaza. The statistics seem to show that. But of course, the question is how to implement this," David Hirst explains in this interview with EI. David Hirst worked as The Guardian's Middle East correspondent from 1967 to 2001, and authored the classic book The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, which was published in its third edition in 2003 with a new 120 page foreword. From Beirut, Hirst spoke with EI on the bias of the American media towards Israel in its coverage of the conflict, the implications of Israel's nuclear aresenal, and how Israel is more of a strategic liability than asset for the U.S.
Maureen Clare Murphy: In the book's new foreword, Mr. Hirst, you comment on the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, which found the U.S. media parroting the Barak story that Arafat rejected Israel's unprecedented generous offer. You write: "the fact that it took so long [to debunk the generous offer myth] exposed the incompetence of a Palestinian leadership which miserably neglected to tell its side of the story, but it was also an indictment of such weighty organs of news and opinion as the New York Times, which had failed to investigate the claim, or even wonder whether there might possibly be something blatantly self-serving about it."
What impact do you think the U.S. media has on efforts towards negotiations and peace when CNN and the like declare any time there is Palestinian-perpetrated violence that the peace process is on the brink of failure?
And the twins died
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz 1/8/2004
The twin girls died one after the other. The first to die was the one who was born first, at the checkpoint. Several hours later came the death of her sister, who was born a few minutes after they finally left the checkpoint, and who managed to reach the hospital alive. One lived for less than an hour, the other for less than a day. The death certificate lists their ages as one day old and zero. One died in the arms of her grandmother, the other was carried in the arms of her aunt, while their mother was lying in an ambulance, freezing, trembling, exhausted and humiliated after what she had gone through at the IDF checkpoint near her village. This past Sunday, the two bespectacled soldiers at the checkpoint at the entrance to Deir Balut direct us with unusual politeness to the path through the fields that leads to the village. The asphalt road to the village is regularly closed off with cement blocks and barbed wire, despite the fact that there is a manned checkpoint at the other end. Why is travel forbidden on the main road, and allowed only on the rocky path? Only in order to subject the 4,000 residents of this attractive village to further mistreatment, and to pacify the settlers in the area, residents of Paduel, Alei Zahav and Beit Aryeh, who whiz past on the well-paved Jewish roads.
Jerusalem's rejectionists
Editorial, Ha'aretz 1/9/2004
As though in spite of himself, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz admitted on Wednesday that there was no choice but "to examine" the signals emanating from Syria about the renewal of negotiations with Israel. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is apparently even less willing than Mofaz to display receptiveness to the possible new winds from Damascus. The Israeli nation could not "cope" with two peace processes simultaneously, the prime minister asserted on Wednesday, as though engaging in peace were some sort of edict or punishment. And the deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, stated in an interview yesterday, that peace with Syria didn't have a high place on the national order of priorities. The recoil of these three key policy makers from seriously discussing and intelligently responding to a possible change that is taking place on the Syrian front is flagrantly unimaginative in the light of a more receptive reaction by others in the government. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has for some time urged a positive response, at the rhetorical level at least, to the Syrian feelers. The evaluation of the heads of the army, and especially the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash, is that the new tone coming out of Damascus attests to substantive and meaningful changes in the political approach there following the American victory in Iraq and the security developments throughout the entire region in its wake.
Syria And Turkey Defy The United States
By Patrick Seale, Al-Hayat 1/9/2004
This week's visit to Turkey by Syria's young leader, President Bashar Al Assad, is of considerable geo-strategic significance. It has taken place in close coordination with Syria's ally Iran, whose foreign minister, Kamal Kharazzi, was in Damascus on the eve of the visit, while Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul is expected in Tehran on Saturday.
The three countries are intent on sending a firm message to the United States about its policy in Iraq. They are telling Washington that Iraq must remain a unitary state and that they will strongly oppose any attempt to break it up into three mini-states, Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite, as several influential American commentators have recently been recommending. Above all, they are warning the U.S. not to encourage the Kurds to seek permanent autonomy, let alone independence.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud Al Faisal, has also said this week that the dismemberment of Iraq would be a threat to his country's security.
This is the first time that the major states bordering Iraq have publicly joined forces to check what they see as a dangerous American temptation, strongly supported by Israel, to seek to weaken Iraq permanently by rebuilding it on a federal basis, without a strong center -- thereby dealing a blow to the entire Arab system.
Approximately 75 percent of Palestinians live below poverty line
By Muhammad Kuraizam, Jerusalem Times 1/8/2004
Many Palestinians are currently wondering if they are destined to live in poverty for the rest of their lives. The answer may be ‘yes’. Throughout Palestine’s history, every occupier has tried to weaken the Palestinians morally and financially and make them reliant on its economy. The question now, however, is the one of whether occupation alone is responsible for poverty in Palestine. Some believe there are other factors, such as meager natural assets, incompetent management, and the spread of corruption. This report will examine the causes and solutions of poverty in Palestine.
Statistics: A report produced by the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation in 1998 and published in 2003 revealed the following:
1. In 1998, poverty reached 23 percent in the Palestinian territories.
2. More than 28 percent of the families in Gaza and 16 percent of families in the West Bank live below the poverty line.
3. Two of every three poor families in Gaza are considered extremely poor (i.e., unable to afford basic needs). In the West Bank, half the poor families fall into the same category.
4. The highest percentage of poverty is found in refugee camps.
5. The south is poorer than the north.
6. A poor family in Gaza is poorer than a poor family in the West Bank.
7. Poverty is higher among families headed by women.
8. Poverty increases with the increase in the size of the family.
9. Poverty is highest among unskilled workers.
10. Poverty decreases as education increases.
11. Older people are more prone to poverty.
There is also a relationship between the increase of unemployment and the spread of poverty. Unemployment currently registers at 75 percent.
[If unable to access this page, go to: http://www.jerusalem-times.net - then enter or paste this address: http://www.jerusalem-times.net/article/news/details/detail.asp?id=4604 - Ed.]
A fine piece of work
By Rogel Alpher, Ha'aretz 1/8/2004
I am part of the first year that was born into the occupation, in 1967. I did my basic training in 1985, before the first intifada, at Dotan camp near Jenin in the West Bank. It was an abridged basic training, with most of the new recruits not being part of the creme de la creme of the army's IQ tests. Our group was comprised of what's known derisively as jobnikim - non-combat soldiers with cushy jobs - cooks, drivers, intelligence soldiers. Still, many of them very much enjoyed holding the M-16 rifle they were issued. They held it even before they fired their first shot. Before they knew how to use it. What they especially enjoyed was the feeling it gave them on the bus trip via Baka al-Garbiyeh. They opened the windows, aimed the weapon at passersby on the streets, and shot at them. Not that the rifles were loaded. But the soldiers made noises of "boom boom" and "tu-tu-tu-tu-tu," and were deeply satisfied at the hurt looks on their targets' faces. They promised to come back soon and empty whole magazines into the Israeli Arab village. They doubled over with laughter and patted one another on the shoulder.
The commanding officers, reservists aged twenty and a bit, who had recently completed combat service, smiled in understanding. Yeah. Terrific. That's the right attitude. A few of us cringed with shame. We knew there was no one to talk to or what to talk about. These are the rotten products of an occupying society, which educates its sons to nationalist and racist lordship that is taken for granted. Nevertheless, I was marked. My mute restraint brought punishment in its wake. The night before the end of basic training, my duffel bag was stolen and its contents scattered across the grounds of the base. I collected my stuff, item after item, to the open delight of the great patriots, who with astonishing ease had become brutes in their soul. They left no room for doubt. They would have shot me, too.
Refugee Issue Is Right at the Core of the Palestine Conflict
By Karma Nabulsi, Palestine Chronicle 1/9/2004
LONDON - This year is the 250th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s legendary Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality. In its dedicatory epistle to the Republic of Geneva, Rousseau, citizen of that virtuous city, described the democratic vision he claimed was inspired by it: “I should have wished to be born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have had only one and the same interest, so that all the motions of the machine might only tend to the common happiness; since this is impossible unless the people and the sovereign are the same person, it follows that I should have wished to have been born under a democratic government.”
The Palestinian people desire such an equal happiness as did Rousseau for the citizens of Geneva. Last month, the Swiss government invited dozens of international luminaries and VIPs to this same Geneva, in order to celebrate a peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians. The plan calls for a two-state solution, the sharing of Jerusalem, the dismantling of some settlements and the keeping of some others and, most fundamentally, for Palestinian refugees (the Palestinians being largely a refugee population with more than five million refugees) effectively to give up the right of return to their original homes and properties inside Israel as the necessary “painful compromise” for peace.
All those guests — Jimmy Carter, Lord Carrington, Hans-Dietrich Genscher — are citizens of countries imbued with the very institutions whose creation are due, in no little measure, to Rousseau’s seminal texts. The Geneva accord has been universally welcomed as a moment of great hope; a serious response at last to Sharon and his bleak enterprise.
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