An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
By Yonathan Shapira, CounterPunch 1/23/2004
Each Day the Government Becomes More Dictatorial -- I am Yonathan, one of the initiators and signatories raeli pilot’s letter. Until some weeks ago I was a pilot and active leader in a squadron of “Blackhawk” helicopters in the air force. On the eve of last Yom Kippur I was called for an interview with the commander of the air force, wherein he told me that I was dismissed and that I was not a pilot anymore in the Israeli air force and all this because I announced that I will not agree to take part in obeying illegal and immoral orders.
And now during the last few months the commander of the air force has been making the rounds of the bases and the flight crews and announcing that a large and powerful organization supports our group, and the military will find it and expose it to all. On this present festive occasion, I want to disclose to you who this large and powerful body is. It is an organization on whose knees we grew up and were educated on.
I want to read to you two of the basic values of--the Israel Defense Forces.
Human Dignity: The IDF and its soldiers are obliged to honor human dignity. Each human being should be respected, regardless of his race, creed, nationality, gender, status or his social role.
Purity of arms: The soldier will use his weapons and his might only to achieve his objective, to the degree that this is required for the purpose, and will retain his humanity even during battle. The soldier will not use his weapons and his might to hurt persons who are not fighters, or prisoners, and will do everything in his power to prevent an assault on their life, their body or their property.
Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Zionism
By Uri Avnery, CounterPunch 1/19/2004
A Practical Manual -- A Hungarian Joke: During the June 1967 war, a Hungarian meets his friend. "Why do you look so happy?" he asks. "I heard that the Israelis shot down six Soviet-made MiGs today," his friend replies.
The next day, the friend looks even more jubilant. "The Israelis downed another eight MiGs," he announces.
On the third day, the friend is crestfallen. "What happened? Didn't the Israelis down any MiGs today?" the man asks. "They did," the friend answers, "But today someone told me that the Israelis are Jews!"
This is the whole story in a nutshell.
The Anti-Semite hates the Jews because they are Jews, irrespective of their actions. Jews may be hated because they are rich and ostentatious or because they are poor and live in squalor. Because they played a major role in the Bolshevik revolution or because some of them became incredibly rich after the collapse of the Communist regime. Because they crucified Jesus or because they infected Western culture with the "Christian morality of compassion". Because they have no fatherland or because they created the State of Israel.
That is in the nature of all kinds of racism and chauvinism: One hates someone for being a Jew, Arab, woman, black, Indian, Muslim, Hindu. His or her personal attributes, actions, achievements are unimportant. If he or she belongs to the abhorred race, religion or gender, they will be hated.
Allow Palestinian elections, to break the stalemate
By Mahdi Abdul Hadi, Daily Star 1/24/2004
Palestinians, wherever or whomever they are, agree that they are today witnessing a new nakba, or catastrophe, one that is exceeded in pain, suffering and losses only by the nakba of 1948.
Since the second intifada broke out in September 2000, Israel has renewed its occupation; 3.4 million Palestinians (15 percent in refugee camps, 28.5 percent in rural areas and 56.5 percent in urban areas) have been isolated in cantons sealed off from one another by Israeli settlements, bypass roads and the powerful Israeli Army. Jerusalem has been cut off from the rest of the West Bank, with most of its national and social institutions closed down by the military. In addition, around 150,000 middle class and professional Palestinians have left the country.
Since 1996, the elected Palestinian Authority (PA) has become a replica of other Arab regimes: It is weak, corrupt and lacking any legitimate power to enforce law and order and maintain domestic security; it also lacks the capacity to resist the policies and practices of the occupying power. The duties of the PA are limited to conducting administrative activities and diplomatic contacts through a huge bureaucracy that employs more than 120,000 civil servants.
Abandoning the march on Jerusalem
By Karim Sadjadpour, Daily Star 1/24/2004
There is perhaps no government in the world more outspoken in its enmity toward Israel than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran’s ruling mullahs routinely denounce the “Zionist entity,” send millions of dollars to pro-Palestinian militant groups and provide an economic lifeline for Lebanon’s Hizbullah.
However, unlike Arab governments, which have for decades employed the “Palestinian card” to curry favor with their domestic constituencies, the Iranian regime is discovering that its glorification of the Palestinian cause is having the reverse effect domestically. Rather than applaud efforts on behalf of Palestine, Iranians are today increasingly voicing frustration at the Islamic Republic’s contempt for Israel and seeming obsession with being “more Palestinian than the Palestinians.” It is a policy, they argue, that is being carried out at the expense of Iran’s own citizens.
In the 1970s, during the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, solidarity with the Palestinian cause ran deep in Iran. Tehran’s cozy relationship with Tel Aviv was widely unpopular with Iranians, not least because Israeli Mossad agents were thought to have trained the Shah’s secret police, the Savak. Shortly after the fall of the monarchy in 1979, the keys to the former Israeli Embassy in Tehran were handed over to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the Islamic revolution would march onward until the “liberation of Jerusalem.” Unsurprisingly, this pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli attitude became a pillar of the foreign and domestic policies of the new Islamic Republic.
Remember the war; forget reconciliation
By Michael Young, Daily Star 1/24/2004
Lebanese journalist Amal Makarem is heading an effort to make her compatriots remember their civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. In a recent AFP wire report she was quoted as saying: “Thirteen years afterward, communities still live in total separation, rejecting each other, blaming each other. It is a real time bomb.”
The story explains: “Plans for a reconciliation project materialized when Makarem and a nucleus of independent lawyers, writers, journalists and sociologists launched the action in 2001 with a highly-acclaimed seminar held at the UN House here … They plan to establish an association and set up an archive center and a museum with data, objects and pictures from the civil war.” Makarem admits, “we don’t have a clear-cut situation in Lebanon; those who say they are victims were at some point torturers, and vice versa … But if at least everyone would admit his wrongdoing in public, then it is at least a first step toward reconciliation.” The effort has received backing from the European Union as “part of necessary reconciliation efforts,” says Francisco Acosta, the first secretary of the EU delegation in Lebanon.
Far be it from me to disagree with Acosta, whose Basque origins make him uniquely credible when addressing the advantages of reconciliation. Nor can one condemn Makarem’s laudable effort to initiate a Lebanese reconciliation process that she accurately observes has never been attempted. However, her larger ambition, no matter how admirable in theory, is terribly wrong-headed in fact. Worse, she implicitly pursues two aims reconciliation and reviving memories but gives the wrong one priority.
Too late for two states? Part II
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian 1/24/2004
It was Ariel Sharon's walkabout at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem that triggered the intifada, but - coming in the wake of the failure of the Camp David talks - it was in one sense a revolt against the Oslo process, which had delivered so little to Palestinians in their daily lives, while Israel forged ahead with settlement expansion and land confiscations. Since then, more than three times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis (2,648 to 842) - five times as many when it comes to children. As the former US senator George Mitchell reported in 2001, there was no plan by the Palestinian leadership to launch a "campaign of violence" - even if some tried to ride the tiger of popular anger - and the bloodshed was unleashed by Israeli troops repeatedly using live ammunition against stone-throwing demonstrators. In the first 10 days after Sharon's visit, 74 Palestinians were killed as against five Israelis. Even then, the character of the intifada as a mass popular movement against occupation continued and it was not until the early months of 2001 that the suicide attacks began.
The experience of Zakaria Zubeidi is typical. In a secure house in Jenin refugee camp, the 27-year-old local leader of the Fatah-linked al-Aqsa Brigades, recalls how he and other activists demonstrated at the main Israeli checkpoint outside the West Bank town during the first weeks of the intifada. "Almost every day, one of the demonstrators was shot dead. Eventually, we gave up throwing stones and in the same place where the Palestinians had been killed, we killed an Israeli soldier."....
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