Tears in the shape of knives
By Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz, May 5, 2003
It is difficult to describe a more gloomy reception for Mahmoud Abbas' government and the road map than what took place as it was confirmed and in the days that followed. With the approval of the Palestinian government, the Israel Defense Forces operations and assassinations continued and there was the terror attack on the Tel Aviv seaside promenade, followed by the IDF operation in Sijia in Gaza. Three Israelis were killed in the terror attack and 20 Palestinians were killed in the army operations. The Israeli media is usually restrained when it comes to pictures of terror victims. The Arab and Palestinian media run more horrific photographs. Last Thursday, Al-Hayyat al-Jedida, the Palestinian newspaper whose workers are, in effect, officials of the Palestinian Authority, published a front-page picture of the smashed skull of the Palestinian baby shot to death in Sijia. And much space was given to the death of Rami Hadar Sa'ad, a 27-year-old engineer and one of the commanders of the military wing of Hamas, who was also killed in that operation. Sa'ad's wife is the young, well-known cartoonist known as Ummiya Joha; her cartoons are published far beyond the Palestinian territories. She is from a refugee family from the village of al-Muharka, which was near Be'er Sheva. She studied mathematics and worked as a teacher for a while. At the start of the intifada, she began drawing her political cartoons for the Palestinian press and there's nobody in the territories who doesn't know her work. Lately, she has been adding a small key to her signature on the drawings, a symbol of the Palestinian "vision of return." Her cartoon did not appear the day after her husband was killed. Instead, in the usual place on the last page, was a picture of her shaheed husband Rami, lying on a bier, weapon in hand. Underneath it was the caption: "Our comrade Ummiya Joha's cartoon does not appear today - this is her husband, the Shaheed Rami, who has written in blood what no other means could express." One of her most recent cartoons showed a tearing Palestinian eye, and the tears were in the shape of knives. Palestinian mourning is now dominated by feelings of revenge, and it was the subject on everyone's lips at the huge funeral for the 13 dead of Sijia. Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the Hamas leaders, said: "We will not put down our arms and will not surrender. We prefer death to the prisons of the occupiers."

Interview: Gretta Duisenberg, An Activist in the Trenches
By Paul de Rooij, Palestine Chronicle, May 5,  2003
Gretta Duisenberg: "Our action led to us receiving many letters from Dutch people, many written by the older generation, who were ashamed about their previous ebullient pro-Israeli stance. Many found that they hadn’t dared utter criticism before, but now 'if Gretta dared, then I dare too.' .." -- Symbols are important. Israeli soldiers react like a bull in front of a red cloth when they see the Palestinian colors. This same reaction was elicited from Dutch Jews when a Palestinian flag was hung from the balcony of Gretta Duisenberg’s house last year. The hysterical response to this symbolic gesture didn’t send Mrs. Duisenberg cowering, but instead it strengthened her resolve to speak out against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. She helped set up the activist group, Stop the Occupation, which aims to educate the Dutch public about the nature of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and to change Dutch policy in the region. In January 2003 she visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories eliciting the by now predictable response from right-wing groups in the Netherlands. Paul de Rooij: How did you become involved in the campaign to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine? Gretta Duisenberg: In April 2002 there was a large demonstration in Amsterdam against Israeli actions against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. At that time, I was in Germany (where I live part of the year) and I saw the announcement of the demonstration. I ordered a Palestinian flag via the web and went to Amsterdam to participate in the demonstration. On the way I met two students from Jenin whose parents were experiencing terrible things. At the time of the demonstration, the events in Jenin had just ended, but the Israeli army siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was continuing. It was all very emotional. When I went home I thought: this is not enough, I must do more. Because I had to travel, I placed the Palestinian flag in the veranda of my studio. When I returned from my trip, it turned out that the flag had caused much commotion among my - Jewish - neighbors. Crazily enough, this incident made it into the press.

With the Wall, the Settlers will Have all the Olives
Gush Shalom, May 3, 2003
"It is the Wall which has brought us here, three busloads of activists from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, as over the past three weeks it has brought an increasing number of Israelis .." -- On Saturday May 3, at the approaches to the village of Mes'ha in the Qalqilia District of the West Bank. What had been two and a half years ago a bustling highway is now completely blocked off by two piles of earth, at a distance of some fifty meters from each other, making it impossible to get by car in or out of the town - as is the situation at the entrance of virtually every Palestinian community in the West Bank, from tiny hamlets to the big cities. The official reason is that if the movement of all Palestinians is hampered, the movement of suicide bombers will also be hampered. The unofficial reason is the assumption that disrupting the Palestinians' daily life would bring them to their knees. Neither reasoning seems to be working out - and still the siege continues, and the earthen barriers have already been there long enough to sprout a lot of vegetation. In today's Yediot Aharonot, Condolizza Rice is quoted as demanding "Israel restore the Palestinians' freedom of movement"; Mes'ha inhabitants do not seem to wait with bated breath. The blockage of the entrance is anyway old news, a terribly heavy burden on daily life but with which they had to learn to live for more than two years already and to which they find some small practical ameliorations. Nowadays, Mes'ha is faced with a more immediate and existential threat -the wall which Sharon is in the process of building, and which turns out to cut very big slices out of the West Bank; Mes'ha will be separated from98% of its agricultural lands. The Separation Barrier as it is officially called, the Apartheid Wall which is the common name hereabouts, or just The Wall - has become the most important fact of life for these thousands of villagers. It is the Wall which has brought us here, three busloads of activists from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, as over the past three weeks it has brought an increasing number of Israelis, internationals and Palestinians from other places to an ongoing protest encampment in the place where this village's lands are being stolen. The earthen barriers make it impossible for our buses to get anywhere near the place. It would be a considerable walk. Making a virtue of necessity, it had been decided to make this walk into a demonstrative procession.

Nothing Personal / To protect and trust  
By Thomas O'Dwyer, Haaretz, May 5, 2003
"The problem, according to Shimon Peres, is not the light. The problem is the tunnel," begins a new paper issued by the Middle East Policy Initiative Forum, a British think tank, which proposes handing over the West Bank and Gaza, not to Yasser Arafat but to a temporary, international protectorate. It is a serious proposal that has been in development for almost a year, and during this time, a number of other groups and individuals - including former U.S. ambassador Martin Indyk, Canadian policy makers, the left-wing establishment in Israel - have begun to think about a new trusteeship as a way to both end the occupation and meet Israel's security concerns. The London group's proposal, authored by international relations specialist Dr. Tony Klug, alongside Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, cites recent precedents from Namibia to East Timor and Kosovo. This paper contends that Peres was right about the light, but wrong about the tunnel. Its proposal is based on three main themes - "the situation is extremely grave and set to get worse; the situation has never been so close to a resolution; and the parties cannot solve the problems themselves, and have no exit route." The introduction to the paper is titled is "A road map without a vehicle" and it argues that the Quartet road map, soon to be published, falls within the tradition and wishful thinking of previous dead plans that depended on incremental "confidence-building" steps, backed up by little more than outside exhortation. "While it is unlikely that local political leaders, left to themselves, will ever be able to agree terms, decisive outside intervention is a different matter, and holds the key to a solution," the paper says. It proposes a multinational force to replace Israeli occupation troops for just enough time for the Palestinians to get on with nation building. "If the road map is not to avoid the same ignominious fate as its predecessors, it should be amended to incorporate an International Protectorate as a vehicle and enforcement mechanism," the paper says. "Failing this, the protectorate idea should be further developed and held in reserve against the future collapse of the road map. Meanwhile, even as world attention is diverted elsewhere, a groundswell in support of an International Protectorate may be built up - both in preparation for later participation by the U.S. and other powers, and as a means of influencing global policy in this direction." This obviously is not destined to be another dry academic paper that gathers dust behind various foreign office cabinets.

Despair: the terrorist's best recruiting officer
By Gilles Kepel, The Independent, May 4, 2003
The 'road map' for peace cannot succeed without respect for Palestinian claims -- While the governments of the United States, Europe and Russia, together with the UN, have put the Middle East "road map" for peace back on the table, watchers of Arab satellite television see quite a different picture. Day in day out, two juxtaposed stories unfold on al-Jazeera or Abu Dhabi television. On the one hand, there are images of suicide attacks in Palestine, followed by scenes of Israeli repression, and of the burial of "martyrs" watched by angry crowds of bearded youths and close shots of veiled female mourners. And on the other, images of Iraqi hostility towards American troops, scenes of armed retaliation and, again, burials where turbaned sheikhs chant defiant slogans against America, and followers praise Allah the Almighty, as well as close shots of spilled blood on the streets. These distressing images are a far cry from the virtuous circle the Americans wanted to implement in the Middle East as a result of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (or OIF – preferred to "Operation Iraqi Liberation", which bore the somewhat embarrassing acronym OIL). The toppling of a brutal tyrant in Iraq was meant to engineer gradual prosperity and democracy in the whole region, and facilitate the re-floating of the sunken Israeli-Palestinian peace of the 1990s via the process known as the "road map". This would involve a restoration of Palestinian democracy mixed with Israeli territorial concessions, and would lead to mutual recognition of the two states, while appeasing political and religious tensions between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Cheap oil would flow securely to consumer markets of the West and Asia, while petro-dollars, Arab workforce and Israeli know-how would combine to shape a new and strong economic region.

Who's afraid of the Road Map?
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, May 5, 2003
Even before its publication, Israel's supporters in the United States launched a vigorous campaign to sabotage the U.S.-sponsored 'Road Map' for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Nearly 400 members of the U.S. House and Senate signed letters circulated by the pro-Israeli lobby opposing the plan. Influential neoconservatives aligned with the Pentagon have attacked the Road Map and the State Department for promoting it. The pro-Israel lobby has always been vigilant against any U.S. policy that could thwart Israel's long-term expansionist plans in the occupied Palestinian territories. But rhetoric against the Road Map -- which is endorsed by the current president -- is the sharpest since the first President Bush delayed U.S. loan guarantees to Israel in 1991. Israel's supporters are in full panic by even the appearance of minimal fairness and reciprocity contained in the plan. Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli analyst, claimed in The Los Angeles Times that the Road Map is sloppy and biased because it does not insist that Palestinians eradicate all resistance to the occupation prior to any Israeli measures. "The credibility of the Road Map, " Halevi argues, requires the Palestinian Authority to "uproot the terrorist infrastructure" as a first step, "before Israel can be asked for a reciprocal gesture" such as freezing settlements (April 28). Halevi is infuriated that the Road Map contains a timetable and contends that, "it will take years, not months, to test the transformation of Palestinian society." In other words, Halevi demands an open-ended process in which Israel is allowed to continue its killing, destruction and colonization for years, while the only tangible feature of the 'peace process' in the meantime would be complete Palestinian capitulation to the occupation.

Ariel Sharon's Plan B
By Jackson Diehl, Washington Post, May 5, 2003
Ariel Sharon, Israel's man of action, has much to gain simply by doing nothing over the next few weeks -- and he knows it. He knows that unless the new Palestinian prime minister, Abu Mazen, is able to convincingly break the connection between the Palestinian Authority and violence and shut down some of the terrorist cells in the West Bank and Gaza, neither Israelis nor the Bush administration will expect the latest Middle East process to move forward, despite what the official "road map" says. He also knows that without continual, concrete, concerted help from Israel, Abu Mazen's already slim chances of overcoming the obstructionism of Yasser Arafat and the extremism of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will shrink to none. So if Sharon wants to put the brakes on any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, he need only insist -- as he has -- that any steps by Israel be preceded by "100 percent effort" from Abu Mazen. He need only protest -- as he has -- that before the road map can be implemented, Israel must first discuss the 14 objections to it his government recently raised with the White House and circulated to its friends on Capitol Hill. He need only continue -- as he has -- Israeli assassinations and raids against Palestinian militants, thereby inflaming the extremists and making Abu Mazen's security forces appear to be Israel's deputy sheriffs. The new Palestinian prime minister is weak enough as it is; he has no chance against such Israeli stalling. Why might Sharon wish for Abu Mazen's failure? Because a successful Arab-Israeli peace process, completed on the three-year timetable of the "road map," would almost certainly produce a settlement on terms that Sharon considers unacceptable. Israel would have to give up all but perhaps 5 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plus the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and relocate tens of thousands of Jewish settlers. Those conditions were accepted by the Clinton administration, the last Israeli government and the overwhelming majority of Israelis; but Sharon sees them as suicide. His central political goal has been to dramatically shift the international consensus on how much land and sovereignty a Palestinian state should have, so that Israel retains, for example, most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. He knows that moving the goalposts could take years, maybe even decades -- which is why he has always said his goal is a "long-term interim agreement" with the Palestinians.

The Israeli War on the Palestinian Cabinet
By the political editor, State Information Service (SIS), IPC, May 5, 2003
As the Palestinian cabinet assumed the swear in ceremony in front of President Yasser Arafat, and the entire world declared, in different degrees, its long-awaited optimism that revealed the horizon for Israelis and Palestinians. Only 48 hours have passed on the declaration of the government in front of the legislative council, which clearly stated that the Palestinians would abide by the legitimacy, that there's only one law, and that illegitimate weapons will disappear. As all of these fast-moving events, weaving hopes that Palestinians and Israelis depend on, in order to cease the killing and frantic destruction, the Israeli army had started an operation, least to be named a public execution of the "Roadmap" along with all the Palestinian, Arab and international efforts, which exerted their pressure to achieve the long-awaited peace. We will stop and ask: is this continuous Israeli war, with all their weapons, on Al-Sheja'eya neighborhood, only a coincidence? And does it have an explanation for all this madness and barbaric killing that doesn't exclude even babies? Nothing can justify all this killing and destruction, not even the attack on a night club in Tel Aviv. If the terrorists in the Israeli leadership think that they are retaliating to a terrorist attack, they're opening a door nobody can close, carrying a response to every response that nobody can stop. As such, in all of this Israeli state violence and terrorism, we conclude to the following: First: Obviously there's a wager between the Israeli prime minister and the hawks of the Israeli army that the Palestinians are absurd, and that their primary ethics is rejection –all or nothing! Based on that, as soon as it became clear that the Palestinians showed superior perception in dealing with the surrounding developments, shock prevailed Sharon and his government.