An unacceptable helplessness
By Edward Said, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 16 - 22 January 2003
Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? Urging an Arab alternative to the wreckage that is about to engulf our world -- One opens The New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. 62,000 more soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks for 15 billion dollars in additional loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day. Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised indifference (which may conceal great over-all fear, ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the administration's war- mongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.

Letting Saddam Off the Hook
By Faleh Jabar, AlterNet, January 13, 2003
Getting rid of the Ba'th regime in Iraq has been the cause of my life for almost a quarter of a century. Precisely when the United States found in the totalitarian regime a worthy ally to stem the tide of fundamentalist Khomeini forces in 1979, the leftist movement to which I belonged discovered, belatedly, that it was in the jaws of a rapacious Leviathan. I was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party and the editor of the paper's international and Arab affairs department. I hailed the collapse of the Shah of Iran as a portent of "the end of single-party systems." This did not endear me to the Iraqi government. We got a tip I was blacklisted, and I had to leave in less than six hours! I flew to Beirut on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October 1978 to avoid the horrible fate that thousands of my colleagues had met: torture, rape, or assassination. You had either to be with the Ba'th or you were against it. For a decade or so, we lived like global underground nomads, changing countries, dialects, names, and passports, fake or otherwise. More than 200,000 Iraqis – mostly intellectuals and professionals from the left, liberal, or Kurdish nationalist currents – crossed the border. The world took no notice. Why should it? I took solace in the writings of German intellectuals who sought refuge outside beleaguered Europe under the Nazi rule. New vocabulary entered our lexicon: exile, identity, alienation, and angst. These were accentuated by a sense of weightlessness, that unbearable lightness of being. New layers of emigrants inflated our ranks to reach an estimated 3.5 million Iraqis in exile in the late 1990s – the crθme of the nation. In London, my last home base, aged liberal politicians from the monarchy socialize with middle-aged leftists or rub shoulders with young disillusioned Ba'thists who seek asylum, unified by a sense of loss and desperation.

Who is stealing the water of the West Bank and Gaza
By Anis Saleh, MIFTAH, January 16, 2003
According to Afi Eytam, the Israeli Infrastructure Minister, "the Palestinians are conducting a 'water war' by stealing water from Mekorot's pipelines and by refusing to build an efficient sewage purification system." (Arnon Regular, 23/10/2002, Ha'aretz). A statement such as this could only have been released from an Israeli government water chief, not an independent water manager. Of the West Bank and Gaza Strip's 991 million cubic metres of renewable water resources, 741 million cubic metres are under the control of Mekorot, the Israeli water company, and channelled for the sole use of Israeli settlers and citizens. In fact, "the total renewable water resource in Palestine (i.e. Gaza, the West Bank and Israel) is estimated at nearly 2,000 MCM per year. Out of this amount, Palestinians living in West Bank and Gaza Strip use only 250 MCM of water." (PHG Dec 2000) In other words, 88% of the water resources are allocated, by Israel, to six million Israelis, while only 12% are allocated to the 3.3 million besieged Palestinians. Israeli citizens consume four times as much water per capita as Palestinians, while Israeli settlers consume six times more water per capita than the Palestinians.

MLK's Legacy Continues: Hope and Action in the Midst of War
By Frida Berrigan, AlterNet, January 16, 2003
This week Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 74 years old. On his birthday, it is easy to look around the country and the world and be thoroughly depressed. The disastrous war on terrorism, the impending war against Iraq, the ballooning budget deficit and the calls to solve that with major social spending cut backs (not a decrease in military spending), increased poverty and desperation, and the fact that the WorldWatch Institute warns that the human race only has a generation (maybe two) in which to save the world. But we draw energy and hope from the fact in every corner of this country, people are embodying Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of peace and justice and working to make it a reality. Even a casual perusal of regional newspapers turns up countless articles on the peace movement. Read these headlines for a jolt of hope and energy: Los Angeles: Thousands Rally Against War in Iraq, Push Peace...Minneapolis: Demonstrators Rally to Protest Possible War with Iraq...Hundreds in San Francisco Protest INS Registration...81-Year-Old Picketer: 'The Time to Act is Now'...Sept. 11 Victims' Kin Protest in Iraq..."Human Shield" Peace Activists Mobilize for Iraq...Highway Protests: Citizens with Signs Stand Up for Peace...Pacifist Hopes Human Shield Will Halt US March to War...On the Coast of Maine a Peace Sign Shines Bright in the Night...Anti-War Organizers Welcome 'New Spirit' of Dissent... Nude Women Protest War Again; Men Also Demonstrate....... And that is just a sampling.

Marches Can Change American Politics
By Lucy G. Barber, AlterNet, January 16, 2003
A hundred years ago, when the first group of Americans organized a march on Washington, D.C., many politicians and opinion makers feared that this action would forever change the nation. And they weren't happy about the prospect. One newspaper editor called the 1894 march a symptom of "blood poisoning in the republic." In a way they were right: Marches have changed American politics over the past century. At a time when commercial media and big money dominate national politics, the act of marching on Washington is more important than ever – for individuals and the nation. In the past century, marches have become so common that today we sometimes take them for granted. This Saturday, opponents of a U.S. war against Iraq will gather on the Mall below the Capitol, as well as in San Francisco and other cities around the country. A few days later, people who deplore the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1973 to allow some abortions will march from the court building, by the Capitol and gather at the Mall.

Palestinian humor: Daily life under Israeli occupation
By Ghassan Abdallah, MIFTAH, January 12, 2003
Since the Israeli re-invasion of Palestinian cities last April-2002 has left most of the population confined to their homes, no cases of sunstroke were reported in the Occupied Territories despite the hot Middle Eastern summer. With drivers hardly ever able to reach even fourth gear thanks to checkpoints, car accidents are way down. We also save on petrol. Sharon is losing the demographic war with the Palestinians. What do you expect people locked-up in their homes to do, especially when the power is out and no TV? Outsiders think the Israeli Merkava tank is a formidable machine. But we hear that Israeli soldiers don’t like it. It has small openings so they cannot steal whole computers from Palestinian homes and offices. That is why there are so many reports of them opening up PCs and taking out only motherboards and hard disks. At the Surda checkpoint, on the road from Ramallah to Birzeit University and other villages, Israeli bulldozers are always busy digging up the asphalt and piling mounds of earth and cement blocks. Every day we find the distance to walk becomes longer. But there are positive aspects to it. The exercise it takes to go across is making us fit, we are using this chance to enjoy nature and the change of seasons, and using the opportunity to meet friends and colleagues, help the elderly and sick across, exchange the latest news and jokes, sympathizing with those arrested by Israeli soldiers and often made to sit on the ground tied up and waiting for ‘processing’, and putting our remaining energy hating the occupation even more. In spite of the terrible hardship, you still won’t find people sleeping on pavements like in New York or London. There are still a lot of family and neighborhood safety nets. So we guess we still have a long way to go before we become an advanced society.

AIC Report on Hebron Jewish Settlement Activity
Alternative Information Center, January 17, 2003
Hebron's Old City, under Israeli jurisdiction, is being taken over by violent Jewish settlers who believe in the "judaization" of the town inhabited by 520 settlers and 170,000 Palestinians. The State of Israel provides logistic support for their mission, with about 4000 troops stationed in Hebron to protect the settlers, and plans to expand and facilitate security measures for the settlers. The security of Palestinians, and the future of this devastated town, is not taken into account.  AIC Fact Sheet on the Hebron Jewish Settlement: Palestinian population of Hebron AlKhalil (estimated): 170,000 / Settler population in Kiryat Arba (settlement on eastern flank of Hebron): 6,500 / Settler population in enclave inside Old City: 520 / History. In response to an ad placed by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a handful of Jewish families celebrated Passover of 1968 in Park Hotel in downtown Hebron under the guise of tourists. When the group proclaimed its intention to stay indefinitely, minister of defense Moshe Dayan ordered their evacuation but agreed to their relocation to the nearby military base in what became Kiryat Arba. The Israeli civilian presence grew rapidly and by 1972 twenty Jewish families were squatting downtown in abandoned houses. The militant settlers draw on religious redemptionist and pioneering ideologies, and build their historical narrative on a “continuation” of the Jewish minority living in Hebron prior to the Arab anti-zionist uprising in 1936 when the Jewish presence there was terminated.

A vicious cycle of death & destruction
By Essam Al-Ghalib, Arab News, January 17, 2003
As a result of press censorship which deems certain pictures “offensive,” those who do not live in Palestine have no idea how nightmarish everyday life there is. As a journalist, I see the daily carnage by way of press releases and photos that are filtered through the Arab News office. A great deal of what I see is considered too graphic by most newspapers to print. For instance, recently I saw a picture of dead and bloodied Jamal Zabbaro, 20, whose family was hugging his bullet-pierced corpse. Most people’s perception of what is happening in Palestine is formed by what they read in newspapers and what they see on television. Headlines announcing death on both sides are now so commonplace that one is surprised when a day goes by without an atrocity being committed. For us living in other parts of the world, we take a moment to read the article, shake our heads or frown, then go on with our daily lives. We pick up our children from school, we bring them home and cook their dinner, help them with their homework and wait for our spouse to come home. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Tulkarem and Gaza City, people are living in fear that when their loved ones leave home, there is a strong possibility that they may never return, that it may be the last time they are seen alive. For hundreds, that fear has been realized.

Workers Against War
By Joann Wypijewski, CounterPunch, January 17, 2003
"Our member are split 50/50 on Bush. Fifty don't believe a word he says. Fifty think he's a liar." -- As entrails to ancient augurs, the water in toilets on upper floors of the Sears Tower presents to us signs, omens, the coded messages from which to coax the metaphors for our age. Lapping back and forth within the bowls, the water betrays the ceaseless stress and sway of America's tallest building. "The whole thing is basically just a steel skeleton. Think of the steel as a wire", my friend Marty Conlisk, a union electrician who has worked on just about every skyscraper in Chicago, suggested. "What happens when you put stress on a wire? It bends. Enough stress, over enough time, and it snaps." Outside the Tower a banner exhorts passersby, "Stand Tall America". Marty figures that "one day they're going to have to take the building down, or it's going to come down". I was in Chicago for a meeting on January 11 of about 100 union antiwar advocates or activists from across the country, gathered there to initiate a national labor organization against a war that, in its hottest phase, has yet to begin. The term "historic", used throughout the day, was not misplaced. Among the group were Staughton Lynd from Youngstown, who'd chaired the first demonstration on Washington against the Vietnam War in April of 1965; Frank Emspak from Wisconsin, who'd chaired the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam when it called the first mass days of protest in October 1965; and Jerry Tucker from St. Louis, who was present when unions formed a peace faction outside the ultra-hawkish AFL-CIO in 1971, by which time, as he notes, the Vietnamese had won the war. Something profoundly different is happening now, and while it's unclear how broad labor opposition will become, its very existence, now given national expression, represents the deepest crack in the supposed consensus for war.

Demand peace: Vote in the streets this Martin Luther King weekend
Molly Ivins, Working for Change, January 16, 2003
AUSTIN, Texas -- "Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Normally, making the case for peace over war requires the brain of a gnat. "Jaw, jaw," said Winston Churchill, "is better than war, war." There's not much historical evidence that war does anyone any good: a few rare cases of "just war" under St. Augustine's definition. Mostly war (A) kills a lot of people, causing hard feelings; (B) doesn't solve anything; (C) has hideous unintended consequences that often lead to more war. Avoid war if at all possible is the first rule of statesmanship. Conservatives are fond of pointing out that there are problems in this world that can't be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that can't be solved by dropping bombs on them. We are in such a strange position here, preparing to attack a country that has neither attacked us nor threatened to attack us. President Bush calls his new doctrine "pre-emptive war," but pre-emptive war is what Israel did in 1967, with the Egyptian army massing on its borders. They attacked first under clear threat. John Ikenberry, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that this administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high."

With eyes glued shut
By Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, January 17, 2003
"Corruption and thumbing its nose at public opinion have become a way of life for the government. Year after year, the state comptroller rakes the Likud administration over the coals. Nepotism, back-stage appointments, waste and embezzlement of public funds, immunity for crooked public officials, distribution of perks and benefits. With its politicizing and colossal appetite for appointments, the Likud has lost all shame." The passage was penned by yours truly in June 1992, shortly before the Likud was defeated at the polls. But back then, there was an alternative: the party that was voted into power. Labor was a party full of serious politicians, with a record of having ended the Lebanon War and put a stop to 100 percent inflation. Today, after 22 months of a Likud government led by Sharon that nearly sent the country over the brink, there is no one to take the reins. Labor, as a member of the unity government and hence a collaborator in this failure, thinks that now, after sitting in the opposition for two months, it can beat Sharon. What it really is, is a bunch of hot air. If things go on this way, Labor will be mentioned in textbooks of the future on the same page as the dinosaurs.