Thanks but no thanks
Editorial, The Guardian, January 22, 2003
The public remains off-message on Iraq -- Tony Blair says he "totally understands" why public opinion is sceptical on Iraq - but it is far from clear that he does. His role in recent months, he told a Commons committee yesterday, has been to build "the broadest possible international consensus" on disarming Saddam Hussein. The prime minister acknowledges the risk of short-term unpopularity. But he believes he can win over the doubters in the event of war. He predicts that the public will rally round if, in his final judgment, there is no other way. As has been noted here before, Mr Blair's confidence in his powers of persuasion is impressive. But on Iraq policy at least, it is not borne out by the facts. As the Guardian's ICM tracking poll shows, opposition to war in Iraq is rising, not falling. Since Mr Blair's dossier on Iraq's estimated weapons of mass destruction capability was published last September, opposition has increased by 10 points, to 47% (with 30% in support). This trend, indicative of a deeply divided nation, has accelerated of late despite unremitting US-British tub-thumping. Other polls confirm that more than 80% want, at the very least, incontrovertible evidence of an Iraqi threat and specific UN authorisation. Nor do most people appear to accept, as a cause for war, the government's linking of notional terrorist attacks here, the worldwide WMD proliferation problem, and Iraq. In other words, Mr Blair has so far failed to make the case.

War is not inevitable
By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, January 22, 2003
All an attack on Iraq will do is fan the flames of terrorism. It's time for the anti-war camp to act decisively. -- The drums of war are getting louder. A total of 35,000 British troops are now heading to the Gulf, where they will join 125,000 US forces already gearing up for action. Together it's enough to start a decent-sized city, let alone crush the rag-tag army of Saddam Hussein. A colossal amount of kit - tanks, ships and planes - is on its way to the desert, too. A Bush-Blair council of war is planned for Camp David at the end of the month. The UN weapons inspectors' deadline will have passed a few days earlier. The orchestra has tuned up; the audience is hushed - all we are waiting for is the clamour to start. In this atmosphere the chief question for the organisers of the February 15 anti-war demos around the world must be: will we be too late? Over the last few days a change has been in the air, as if the phoney war has ended and the bloody real thing is about to begin. What should opponents of the war, and doubters, do now? They might be tempted to give up, as if the argument has already been lost. That would be premature. Even if Washington (and perhaps London) has made up its mind - George Bush was drumming his fingers on the desk yesterday, saying "time is running out" - the rest of the world has not. France, from its current perch in the chair at the UN security council, is promising to lead the coalition of the unwilling. "We are mobilised, we believe war can be avoided," said French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin yesterday, launching his bid to become the George Galloway of international diplomacy. Public opinion has hardly been lost either: on the contrary, as the Guardian's own poll laid bare yesterday, outright opposition to war all but commands a majority in Britain.

War journalists should not be cosying up to the military
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 21, 2003
It looks like a rerun of the 1991 Gulf War. Already American journalists are fighting like tigers to join "the pool", to be "embedded" in the US military so that they can see the war at first hand – and, of course, be censored. Eleven years ago, they turned up at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, already kitted out with helmets, gas capes, chocolate rations and eyes that narrowed when they looked into the sun, just like General Montgomery. Half the reporters wanted to wear military costume and one young television man from the American mid-west turned up, I recall well, with a pair of camouflaged boots. Each boot was camouflaged with painted leaves. Those of us who had been in a desert -- even those who had only seen a picture of a desert – did wonder what this meant. Well, of course, it symbolised fantasy, the very quality upon which most viewers now rely when watching "live" war – or watching death "live" on TV. Thus, over the past four weeks, the massed ranks of American television networks have been pouring into Kuwait to cosy up to the US military, to seek those coveted "pool" positions, to try on their army or marine costumes and make sure that – if or when the day comes – they will have the kind of coverage that every reporter and every general wants: a few facts, good pictures and nothing dirty to make the viewers throw up on the breakfast table.

The “Transfer” of Palestinians From Their Land is a Step Towards Genocide
By Robert Jensen, Dissident Voice, January 21, 2003
One way to cover up a crime is to find a benign term that hides the violence and cruelty of the act. Such is the case with "transfer," an idea increasingly being put forward in Israel as a solution to conflict with the Palestinians. Transfer conjures up images of a worker reassigned to a new office, or a slip allowing a rider to change buses for free. But transfer of the Palestinians would be nothing less than ethnic cleansing. The main public proponents of this have been on the far right of Israeli politics, such as the Moledet Party, which refuses to recognize Palestinian rights. But in a poll earlier this year, 46 percent of Israelis supported transfer of Palestinians out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while 31 percent favored transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country. As Israeli author Tanya Reinhart argues in her new book "Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948," there has long been planning for "the second half of 1948" by some Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The phrase refers to the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, which ended with Israel controlling 78 percent of Palestine that existed under the British Mandate (compared with 56 percent under the U.N. partition plan in 1947). Now some Israelis ponder whether can they take 100 percent. A military campaign to achieve that had been unthinkable, but many now believe that under the cover of a U.S. war against Iraq, Israeli soldiers would be free to finish the job. I say "finish," because a slow ethnic cleansing is already underway, primarily through the systematic destruction of the Palestinian economy; when people cannot make a living, many will leave. A study for the U.S. Agency for International Development released in August showed that one-fifth of Palestinian children were malnourished, due to dramatically lowered Palestinian incomes and disruptions of food distribution because of the tightened Israeli occupation.

They want Mitzna to bring the nightmare to an end
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, January 22, 2003
Elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were to have been held two days ago. The date was set in the summer, at a time when the Palestinian Authority representatives were involved - under close European and American supervision - in preparations for reforms in the Palestinian Authority, of which the elections were viewed as the most important element. The rest is history: Israel had no intention of allowing the elections to be held, the United States backed Israel, the Israel Defense Forces deployed in all the Palestinian cities and the continued policy of closure made it impossible for the Palestinians to challenge the Israeli refusal and hold elections - some say not to the great sorrow of the Palestinian leadership. But the Palestinian public, so it seems, is taking a greater interest in the elections for Israel's Knesset than in its own chances of electing representatives to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). This interest is not new. Many Palestinians, not only political activists, have long been interested in and very familiar with Israeli politics, candidates, the results of surveys, internal disputes, almost as if they themselves had the right to vote for the Israeli Knesset.

You can drive along and never see an Arab
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, January 22, 2003   
Monday marked the official opening of a tunnel that greatly reduces the distance from Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem and from the Jordan Valley to the center of the country. Or, to be more precise, that reduces the distance for Jews traveling from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Now, Ma'aleh Adumim is almost touching Jerusalem, which embraces Har Homa, which abuts Gilo, and the latter two, thanks to fast roads that have already been or are now being paved, touch Efrat, which is continuously expanding along a row of hilltops, like a train to which a new car is added every month, and is gradually approaching Tekoa: The travel time is constantly decreasing. Similarly, other settlements, large and small, old and new, are being connected by a network of wide, comfortable, traffic-free roads, completely devoid of Arabs. There is no Green Line: There is no difference between a neighborhood and a settlement, between a settlement and a city, between the campaign posters along roads inside Israel that urge the public to vote for Baruch Marzel and Herut or Avigdor Lieberman and between the same posters on roads in the West Bank, between what Ehud Barak called "isolated settlements" and what he called "settlement blocs."

The Olive Harvest 2002: The battle of the Olive (part I)
By Danny Adino Ababa, Meron Rapaport and Oron Meiri, Palestine Monitor, January 22, 2003
Reporters of Yediot Ahanorot’s “7 Days” Weekend Supplement joined the settlers’ pirate olive harvest for a week and exposed contractors working on the ‘Green Line’ who are selling ancient olive trees stolen from the Palestinians for prices ranging in the tens of thousand shekels:
OLIVE LOOT -  A “7 Days” reporter responded to a wanted-ad and joined the settlers’ olive harvest as a simple laborer. Working along with him were settler teenagers who boasted about shooting at Arab homes. Settlement leaders gave the harvesters the “go ahead” sign to work in “abandoned” areas belonging to Palestinians. The security officer of one of the settlements upgraded the method and proposed harvesting the Palestinians’ olives and forcing them to buy back the harvest. A Palestinian who would refuse, would find his trees destroyed *** At the same time, along the “separation fence” line, Israeli contractors have loaded hundreds of uprooted Palestinian olive trees and smuggled them out to plant nurseries in Israel. Every such stolen tree may bring in a profit of 600 to 25,000 (!) shekels. Thus, dunum by dunum, tree by tree, canister by canister, proceeds the ugly ‘battle of the olive’. When the shooting started, I realized that this time I was in trouble. Sitting in the car with me were Yair Shalev, my new boss, Shani, the spirited soldier-girl with the M16 rifle, and two settler boys we had picked up 10 minutes earlier at Kdumim. These are not people I’d want to spend my last living moments with, not yet. I could already see the headlines: “5 settlers killed in a pirate olive harvest”, and beneath, in fine print: “Among the casualties, an undercover reporter”.

The Olive Harvest 2002: Uprooted (Part II)
By Meron Rapoprt and Oron Meiri, Palestine Monitor, January 22, 2003
Wednesday, November 13, the ‘separation fence’ line opposite kibbutz Magal. Amos, a foreman at the Ben Rahamim Brothers firm, presents his clients with the goods: an olive grove covering the hillside on the outskirts of the village Zeita. Handsome, ancient trees, at least to the layman’s eye. There’s not much time to check the merchandise. “They were shooting here this morning, from this window here”, says Amos, pointing to the outer house of the village. The clients, two reporters of Yedioth Aharonot and a press photographer, cast quick glances at the trees. They look good, no dry leaves, a sign of health. Such a large tree, over one hundred years old, might sell for 3,000, perhaps even 5,000 shekels at an Israeli nursery. We ask Amos for 100 trees. “No problem,” he says, “we have as many trees as you want”. When can we take the trees, we ask. “Whenever you want. Tell us and we’ll get them for you,” Amos answers. The deal looks good, but we don’t want to be suckers. “The CEO has said 1,000 shekels per tree. This is expensive as hell”, we say. Amos is offended: “1,000 shekel is cheap. He gave you a discount. At 3,000 shekels I can sell it just like that, in the ground. 1,000 shekels for such a beautiful tree? Cheap, cheap.” Three days later, near the same hill, we meet Ahmad Al Rafiq, a farmer from the village of Zeita. Apparently the trees Amos had so generously offered us belong to Al Rafiq. Actually, there’s not much of a hill left, nor trees. Gone. A day or two earlier the bulldozers came. Of his hundred trees, perhaps ten were left. “I asked the contractors to wait a little, to let me uproot them myself”, he says. “They wouldn’t agree, they didn’t let me near the trees. They said to me: Shut up, or we’ll send you soldiers.”

The Young And The Peaceful
By Seth Sandronsky, Common Dreams, January 20, 2003
You can see it in Juniper Manifest’s eyes. The 20-year-old from Carmichael (suburb of Sacramento) is very concerned about her country attacking Iraq. So she is going public, joining “old heads’ from the 1960s and others. Manifest is one of many young people energizing the growing anti-war movement in the U.S. “Unless I make my opinion known to my government, and to my fellow citizens, it counts for nothing,” Manifest said. “I don't want to stand idly by while people kill and are killed. I'm doing what I can for what I believe, and to prevent the truly horrendous future I fear will be the consequence of a mindless war.” Building a better future is what compels her and other anti-war activists born a generation ago. Their backgrounds are similar and diverse. For example, some have served in the armed forces abroad.

God bless America
Harold Pinter, The Guardian, January 22, 2003
In a poem written for the Guardian, the distinguished playwright Harold Pinter takes the US to task for its seemingly inexorable march towards war on Iraq  --  Here they go again / The Yanks in their armoured parade / Chanting their ballads of joy / As they gallop across the big world / Praising America's God...