The heart breaks
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz 1/22/2004
Na'im Araj awakens every day at 4 A.M., leaves quietly by the glass door in the living room that leads directly to the cemetery, and goes to his son's grave, just to be with him. After sunrise, his brother comes and takes him, for his own sake, away from there. "Mohammed, Mohammed," he hears him saying. But even when they've left the cemetery, glimpses of the dead boy are everywhere. The crowded camp cemetery is visible from the window of the house. There in the middle of a row of headstones, where olive and myrtle branches cover the freshly turned earth, is Mohammed's grave. The father need but look out the window to see it. An advantage of sorts that goes with living in the last house in a refugee camp, across from the cemetery. Mohammed Araj was six and a half, and carefully protected by his father; even on the day he died, he hadn't been to school, lest something bad happen to him. His father permitted him to go only as far as the front steps, and Mohammed did as his father told him. But it wasn't enough: The soldier emerged from the alley between their house and the cemetery at the edge of Balata camp, and shot him once, straight to the heart.
Mohammed was eating a sandwich. Eyewitnesses say the street was quiet. The sandwich fell down and was covered with blood. Mohammed somehow got indoors and cried for his mother, then collapsed in her arms. Afterward, says the family, the soldiers barred entry to two ambulances rushing to save the child. The boy's brother, carrying the bleeding Mohammed, ran, panicked, a few hundred meters and flagged a passing car. At the hospital, they could only pronounce him dead. For four days, the IDF prevented the family from burying their son, because of a closure.
A Tyrant is Taking Root Here
Palestine Chronicle/Ha'aretz 1/23/2004
The separation fence folly is turning into one of the worst scandals in which an Israeli government has become entangled. And it's not because of the political motive: Sharon has engaged yet worse maneuvers to undermine prospects for an agreement, and to perpetuate Israel's destructive nonaction. The fence/wall is such an egregious scandal because of the heedless manner in which a decision was reached to build it. There was never a substantive discussion about it; nor were its negative global implications forecasted. After every last word is said about Sharon's actions and mistakes, the fence and its outrageous manner of construction will remain as a stark symbol of the brawny methods, and reckless disregard of results, of one-man rule.
Reminiscent of other episodes in his past, the fence affair illustrates Sharon's undeniable knack for managing a totally wrong-headed maneuver with what appears to be deft, efficient aplomb. Constructing hundreds of kilometers of fence and spending sums that could be allocated elsewhere to cover almost all the state's budget holes, Sharon has led the government and all its experts toward a boondoggle that will now have to be changed from top to bottom.
How did it come to pass that nobody in the government's policy-making circles stood up to correct the mistake? What does the construction of the concrete and barbed wire monster say about the way decisions are reached in the Sharon government? It says that Sharon's destructive industriousness does not today, and has not in the past, confronted anybody who is willing to question it.
Putting Israel's weapons above the law
By Hasan Abu Nimah, Electronic Intifada 1/22/2004
Talk of ridding the Middle East of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) has been heard for years, but no efforts have been made to bring this closer. Whenever Arab states raised the issue, for example at the United Nations, instantly doubt would be cast on their motives, and their efforts would be perceived as a veiled attempt to point fingers at Israel, which is known to have huge arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The UN has lacked credibility whenever it raised the issue, because of the careful avoidance of mentioning Israel in any serious way. The 1991 Security Council Resolution 687, which ended the first Iraq war, clearly called for all countries to work to rid the region, not just Iraq, of WMD. Yet, all the focus has been on Iraq, even though, it was clear as early as 1994, despite propaganda to the contrary, that it had been already effectively disarmed.
Iraq's recklessness has provided a convenient cover for the UN and its powerful states to hide their timidness when it comes to confronting Israel and its American sponsor. But the unwillingness to confront Israel has also meant that it has been too embarrassing to target other countries' WMDs on a purely subjective and selective basis. Hence, stalemate.
'One Man, One Vote: And Then What Will We Do?'
By Anne Gwynne, Palestine Chronicle 1/23/2004
To the British Guardian, in response to Jonathan Spyer's article (14/01/04)
In an article entitled "Israel's Demographic Time Bomb" by Jonathan Spyer, formerly Adviser to the Government of Ariel Sharon, The Guardian (14/01/04) ran this heading, 'Jews risk becoming a minority in their own land'
The Guardian is one of the two most widely respected English-language newspapers in the world today. That such an article should appear, unchallenged, in Comment and Analysis (p16) was, to say the least, a surprise. An article written by an adviser to a government headed by a war criminal.
What does it tell the reader? That Likud has always rejected any territorial compromise in the remaining tiny part of historical Palestine. You bet it has. Any day one or more of the 50,000 IOF soldiers manning the 850 road blocks in a country half the size of Wales will tell you the truth. 'This is Israel' they say 'and Jordan is Israel too, and so is Lebanon and part of Iraq, Egypt and Syria - it's ours and we will take it'. 'It is on our flag, which [they say] is the Nile and the Euphrates [top and bottom] bordering all the land between which is Israel'. With this end in mind it is unsurprising that Likud considers this remaining tiny piece of historical Palestine strategically crucial!
The One-State Solution: Palestine-Israel
By Virginia Tilley, SFIndyMedia 1/22/2004
The one-state solution is the only one that the international community can responsibly now entertain. -- "There are different kinds of minorities. The notion of an Egyptian state for the Egyptians, a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality. What we require is a rethinking of the present in terms of coexistence and porous borders." - Edward Said, 1999
For some years, most people sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations - or simply alert to their durability and the political dangers they pose - have assumed that a stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would require the formation of a Palestinian state in the (dwindling) areas not yet annexed by Israel, in what is left of British Mandate territory. This old staple of the Palestinian national movement was even belatedly approved by Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush. The Palestinian Authority itself was set up by the Oslo process as a pre-statal entity, intended to establish by stages an independent Palestinian cabinet and parliament, as a prelude to sovereignty over (a disarmed, landlocked, dependent) Palestine. Most recently, a courageous coalition of Israeli and Palestinian professionals has tried to imbue the two-state solution with new energy by formulating a detailed agreement - the so-called Geneva Accords. All these efforts have referred, vaguely or specifically, to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements, without which a Palestinian state would make no territorial sense.
Yet at some point in the past decade, this foundational precept became an obfuscating fiction. As many people privately acknowledge, and as Tony Judt has now proposed in the New York Review of Books, the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed, its death obscured (as was perhaps intended) by daily spectacle: the hoopla of a useless 'road map', the cycles of Israeli gunship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal internal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions and death counts - all the visible expressions of a conflict which has always been over control of land.
The man who knows too much
By Sara Leibovich-Dar, Ha'aretz 1/22/2004
[David Spector provided the videotapes broadcast by Israel's Channel 2, 1/12/2004, which implicated Sharon's sons in the 'Greek Island' bribery scandal.] David Spector and Ariel Sharon first met in 1999, when Spector helped Sharon defeat Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem and Sharon's great rival in the race for the leadership of the Likud Party. Morale at Sharon's headquarters was rock-bottom. Sharon's aides were concerned that Olmert would get thousands of Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews), his political allies in Jerusalem, to register for the Likud and vote for him. Spector, highly experienced in giving strategic and tactical advice, was perceived by the Sharon team as the right man in the right place. Spector's chief advocate and the person responsible for the fateful match was attorney Dov Weisglass, then Sharon's lawyer and personal friend and today his bureau chief. Weisglass knew Spector from their work together in the service of the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth in a wiretapping affair. Weisglass represented Haim Rosenberg, the paper's administrative director. Since 1993, Spector had provided the paper with information protection against its longtime rival, Ma'ariv, and its publisher, Ofer Nimrodi.
"Weisglass was very impressed with my work," Spector says, "both in the area of security advice and by my expertise in the legal and editorial sphere. He worked with me constantly, so much so that he consulted me on legal matters. He really admired me. Anyone who brought my name up heard only superlatives from him."
Go, for God’s sake
By Dan Margalit, Maariv 1/23/2004
"The Prime Minster is leading a regime that makes George Orwell’s 1984 seem like an oasis of democracy and good government. Cromwell’s famous words “You have been here too long for any good you may have done, in the name of God go” are as apt now regarding our PM as they were to the long parliament."
Ariel Sharon hardly denies it already. He cynically says “calm down, I won’t resign”. He does not defend himself with “believe me” but rather with “I don’t care about you” instead. It’s clear that with all the good will in the world, there is nothing left to hold on to and believe in him with. How can we? When David Appel told him, in the words of the indictment, that his son Gilad would make a lot of money with him, and he did not comprehend that the tens of thousands of dollars a month and the 2.5 NIS were bribes?
When he dinned twice with the Greeks at Appel’s house , was it out of recognition for Nikos Kazantzakis? For Zobra the Greek? For Marina Mercuri? For Appleton?
Did Arik not understand the problems involved with having Norman Shkolnik, a businessman involved in a different scandal, present at a meeting with foreign ministry officials, not once but twice?
US Jews and foreign policy
By William Fisher, Middle East Times 1/23/2004
There’s an old Jewish saying about what happens when you get three rabbis in a room. You get four opinions… at least.
This truism is a useful guide to the complex way in which the interests of American Jews is reflected – if at all – in US foreign policy.
At a time when the degree of US commitment to the Middle East is increasingly seen as determining what chance – if any – there is of peace in the region, every nuance of US foreign policy is under scrutiny. And one aspect of that policy – albeit a much smaller portion than is often believed – reflects the beliefs of American Jews.
But the most interesting point is that current US foreign policy reflects the views of only a small proportion of American Jews. That is, like any other group, American Jews are far from homogenous.
What the world – and American Jews themselves – doesn’t know about the six million Jewish Diaspora in the US has helped contribute to many missed opportunities for problem solving in the Middle East.
Time to remember
By Ghada Karmi, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 22 - 28 January 2004
Whatever the discursive niceties it is important to realise that Israel is Zionist, and that Zionism displaces and kills -- For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism is about two recently published pieces will make salutary reading. The first is an interview with the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, published in the Israeli daily Haaretz on 4 January. The second is an article by Morris in the 14 January edition of The Guardian. In both Morris explains, with breathtaking candour, what the Zionist project has entailed. Few Zionists outside the ranks of the extreme right have been prepared to be so brutally honest. Morris not only claims a leftist position but, more significantly, was the first to expose the circumstances of Israel's creation. Using Israel state archives for his groundbreaking 1987 book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, he was hailed as a courageous revisionist historian.
Though he balked at confronting the full implications of his discoveries and still refuses to recognise the deliberate Zionist transfer policy that aimed to drive Palestinians from their homeland long before the 1948-9 War, his work suggested to many that, knowing the facts, he was bound to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. In the last few years, however, he has been expressing ever more hard-line views, as if he regretted the pioneering research that helped expose the savage reality of Israel's establishment. This shift seems to have culminated in his most recent utterances about the nature of Zionism. Unpalatable as these are, we must thank him for saying so bluntly what all Zionists, however liberal, really think but cannot say.
Moral decay and Benny Morris
By Ali Abunimah, Daily Star 1/23/2004
When does the banishment of an entire people become morally justified? That such a question can even be posed in today’s Israel is dismal testament to the transformation of Zionism into what it claims to abhor. In two recent, extraordinary documents a commentary in London’s The Guardian and an interview with Haaretz Israeli historian Benny Morris prepared the ground for Israel to justify any atrocity, no matter how much it transgresses human rights, law and decency.
In a Jan. 9 interview with Ari Shavit of Haaretz, Morris went further than he ever did in describing the 1948 exodus of Palestinians as the result of deliberate “transfer” by the Zionist militias. Far from being horrified, however, Morris said: “There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.” He admitted that a “Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads … (and) the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”
Accepting this “necessity” stands on the belief that the Zionists had an absolute, unquestionable right to establish by any means necessary a Jewish state in Palestine, notwithstanding that the land was already inhabited.
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