Violent invasions, extrajudicial killings, and suicide bombings
By Mika Minio-Paluello, Electronic Intifada 1/25/2004
The Israeli invasion and siege of Nablus city ended two weeks ago now (Wed Jan 7), with a return to the nightly machine gun fire from the mountains, daily mini-incursions, and deadly proddings by jeeps and the occasional tank.
As families attempted to return to their daily routine, the residue of the invasion was visible everywhere: new shaheed "martyr") posters on the walls, freshly-laid pavements torn up by tanktracks and an atmosphere of fear based on the belief that the soldiers would return any day. Despite invading first Balata Camp and then Nablus city, placing 180,000 people under curfew and ransacking hundreds of homes, Israeli forces failed to catch any of the men they claimed to be searching for.
With the invasion competing with the horrific Iranian earthquake, aircrashes, Sharon's speeches and the Christmas holiday, media coverage was minimal, in Israeli, international, Arab and even Palestinian media, adding to the Nablus perception of abandonment by the world.
Conniving Uni-Power
Editorial, Miftah 1/24/2004
According to Israeli sources, the United States, in spite of their “public” condemnation of the continued construction of the ‘colonization wall,’ is lobbying against the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decision to look into the legality of the “Apartheid Wall” scheduled to start on the February 27th, 2004, and is being constructed by Israel on occupied land against international community’s will.
US National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, told Dov Weisglass, head of Sharon’s office, that Washington will support Israel in challenging the Court’s legitimacy in hearing the case against the Wall and have sent letters to their “allies” worldwide urging them to take similar action. Washington will stand by Sharon’s government to shield and prevent Israel’s occupation policies from being put on trial, regardless of whether such action is fair or just or even serves the interest of peace and humanity.
Rice did intimate to Weisglass Washington’s disappointment in Sharon’s behavior, maintaining that he had ignored repeated letters, urging him to move forward and ease restrictions crippling Palestinian society, in order to create a momentum for peace talks to resume. Nevertheless, Sharon has received yet another invitation to Washington, whereby he intends to present Bush with his “unilateral steps,” designed to ignore all laws and agreements while guaranteeing instability in the region for years to come.
How Internationals Help Palestine Cause
By Richard H. Curtiss, Arab News 1/26/2004
WASHINGTON, 26 January 2004 — Tom Hurndall, 22, died in a hospital in England on Jan. 18. He was mortally wounded in April 2003 while volunteering in the West Bank as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the pro-Palestinian peace group that serves as buffers between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.
Hurndall’s American colleague in the ISM, Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, WA was killed on March 16, 2003. She was trying to stop an Israeli Defense Forces Caterpillar tractor from demolishing the home of a Palestinian. Eyewitnesses vary on the details, but everyone agrees that the bulldozer driver refused to stop destroying the building. The Israeli operator later said he did not know that Corrie was standing in the way when he moved forward. Photographs taken of her murder make that story hard to believe.
On May 2, 2003 a third Westerner was killed in Rafah. He was British cameraman James Miller. A colleague from the Associated Press Television News (APTN) who was nearby recorded all of the circumstances of his death on film. Miller had completed filming in Rafah and wanted to depart. But he wanted to be sure that the Israeli military unit nearby would not shoot at him and his crew.
Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short
By George Bisharat, Common Dreams/Los Angeles Times 1/26/2004
It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another — and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft.
Today, many assume that to achieve Middle East peace, we Palestinians must surrender our right to return to our homes and homeland. Millions of Palestinians — with memories and photographs of our stolen properties, keys to our front doors, and an abiding sense of injustice — are expected to swallow our losses in order to facilitate a "two-state solution."
But it's not that simple. Although Israel has claimed that Palestinians willingly abandoned Palestine after being urged to leave in radio broadcasts by Arab leaders, a review of broadcast transcripts by Irish diplomat Erskine Childers in 1961 revealed that Palestinians were exhorted by Arab leaders to stay, not leave their homes. In fact, Yigal Allon, commander of Palmach, the elite Zionist troops, and later Israeli foreign minister, launched a whispering campaign to terrorize Palestinians into flight.
PA has no reason to celebrate
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz 1/26/2004
Some Palestinians were happy on Saturday, on hearing the news that Israel and Hezbollah had signed the prisoner-exchange agreement. "The release of 400 Palestinian prisoners is a day of celebration for 400 families in the West Bank and Gaza," said, for example, Palestinian cabinet member Qadoura Fares, who has been dealing with the prisoner issue for years. Fares and his colleagues are well aware of the fact that there are no big names among the prisoners slated for release. Israel refused in principle to release detainees defined as having "blood on their hands," despite the fact that, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, this is a definition lacking in legal or moral foundation - after all, in keeping with such a definition, those who did the planning and sent the murderers to their missions can be released.
Insofar as is known, neither does the list of Palestinians slated for release include well-known detainees such as Palestinian Legislative Council members Hussam Khader of Nablus or Marwan Barghouti, who is often named as a candidate to succeed Yasser Arafat. In Ramallah, there's a Popular Committee that is working very hard to secure Barghouti's release; and on Saturday, shortly before the news of the deal with Hezbollah was released, the members of the committee warned the Israeli authorities against harming the man, who is being held in solitary confinement.
Palestine and the Antiwar Movement
By Lee Sustar, Palestine Media Center/Socialist Worker 1/26/2004
SHOULD THE antiwar movement take up the question of Palestine? Or, to put the question another way, can the movement oppose one element of U.S. domination of the Middle East, the occupation of Iraq, while ignoring the other--the increasingly savage Israeli occupation of Palestine that’s funded, armed and politically supported by Washington?
Founded by mainly European Jewish settlers, known as Zionists, in British-controlled Palestine in 1948, Israel was based on the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians through killing and terror, including massacres of entire villages. Jews, who owned 6 percent of the land in 1947, established their state on land that was 94 percent owned, farmed and used by Palestinians.
Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose research has uncovered a series of Israeli massacres in 1948, recently declared that "from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians."
The Zionists, who justified their demand for a Jewish state by pointing to the horrors of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, created Israel through the oppression of another people. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel seized more territory, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have lived under Israeli military occupation ever since. Some 2,200 settlers gained control of 40 percent of the land in Gaza; in the West Bank, 55 percent of the land and 70 percent of the water was seized for Jewish settlers.
The New American Century
By Arundhati Roy, Miftah 1/26/2004
In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.
Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.
In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook....
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