Empty gestures
By Gideon Levy, Palestine Monitor, May 17, 2003
It is forbidden to stand, to smoke, to speak, to read a newspaper, to look to the side. They sit like this for an hour, and hour and a half, with their legs amid the garbage. Several male conscripts and one female soldier stand over them, rifles poised, with their armored truck parked on the side. "Mamnu'a"- "That's forbidden!" soldier H. growls at someone who tries to violate orders by lighting a cigarette. H. is armed and protected from head to toe. His round glasses peek out from under a helmet that's too big for him and covers his boyish face. His armored vest rests heavily on his scrawny body. At the dusty checkpoint near the town of Beit Anoun on the outskirts of Hebron, about 50 Palestinian men sit at the soldiers' feet on the filthy pavement and wait. It's not hard to guess what kinds of feelings are building up inside them and what kind of hatred they must feel, sitting there in the trash like animals waiting for their masters' orders. It's harder to guess what is going through the minds of the soldiers who are standing over them, making sure they do not move or speak or smoke. This happened last Sunday, when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was shuttling between Jerusalem and Jericho. Israel Radio announced that the "closure has been lifted in the territories" and the lead headline in the International Herald Tribune said: "Israel Lifts Limits on West Bank Travel." At the checkpoint on the edge of Hebron, a group of residents who hadn't heard the news was sitting in the dirt. All they had wanted to do was to pass on foot - there is no other way - from their town to Hebron across the road, or back.....Essentially, a "transfer" is taking place here, in plain sight. About 2,000 stores, market stalls and businesses have closed and been abandoned here, and hundreds of families have left their homes, according to the estimate of B'Tselem researcher Musa Abu Hashash. He is the one who exposed the case of the killing of Amran Abu Hamdiya in Hebron by Border Police officers, who are currently being tried. His organization is currently preparing a special report about the transfer occurring here. The residents apparently can't take it anymore. Only the poor remain, waiting for donations.

Moving toward permanent control of the territories
By Danny Rubinstein, MIFTAH, May 20, 2003
Based on what has been happening lately in the West Bank and Gaza, it's apparent that one must get used to the idea that the Israeli regime in the territories, in its current form, is becoming permanent. The elements are familiar: The Israel Defense Forces have taken the place of the Palestinian security services, which the army obliterated in the West Bank and partially destroyed in Gaza. Palestinian cities, towns, and villages are under various forms of siege ("closure" in the official terminology), with severe limitations on freedom of movement for the residents, and the Palestinian Authority's institutions and services are barely able to function. Last year's Operation Defensive Shield practically destroyed the sovereign existence of Area A, which had been under full Palestinian control in the West Bank. In recent months, Gaza's Area A has been going through a similar process of elimination. From several perspectives, the worse things have become for the Palestinian residents of the territories, the better things have become for the settlers. Though settlers are targets for unceasing Palestinian attacks, and settlers have left some places, the overall framework of Jewish settlement in the West Bank continues to develop apace. The civilian and security infrastructures for the settlements have been greatly strengthened. There is nearly complete Israeli control on the roads in Judea and Samaria. The electricity and water systems, as well as various other services used by the settlers have become nearly completely independent of the Palestinian infrastructure. All the planning bodies in the territory are under settler control. The Defense Ministry's civil administration, which in the past handled all matters in the territories, has become an instrument to extend Israeli control over about half the West Bank.

Let's hear it for Belgium
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, May 20, 2003
An attempt to try Tommy Franks for war crimes in a Belgian court has outraged the US -- Belgium is becoming an interesting country. In the course of a week, it has managed to upset both liberal opinion in Europe - by granting the far-right Vlaams Blok 18 parliamentary seats - and illiberal opinion in the US. On Wednesday, a human rights lawyer filed a case with the federal prosecutors whose purpose is to arraign Thomas Franks, the commander of the American troops in Iraq, for crimes against humanity. This may be the only judicial means, anywhere on earth, of holding the US government to account for its actions. The case has been filed in Belgium, on behalf of 17 Iraqis and two Jordanians, because Belgium has a law permitting foreigners to be tried for war crimes, irrespective of where they were committed. The suit has little chance of success, for the law was hastily amended by the government at the beginning of this month. But the fact that the plaintiffs had no choice but to seek redress in Belgium speaks volumes about the realities of Tony Blair's vision for a world order led by the US, built on democracy and justice. Franks appears to have a case to answer. The charges fall into four categories: the use of cluster bombs; the killing of civilians by other means; attacks on the infrastructure essential for public health; and the failure to prevent the looting of hospitals. There is plenty of supporting evidence. US forces dropped around 1,500 cluster bombs from the air and fired an unknown quantity from artillery pieces. British troops fired 2,100. Each contained several hundred bomblets, which fragment into shrapnel. Between 200 and 400 Iraqi civilians were killed by them during the war. Others, mostly children, continue to killed by those bomblets which failed to explode when they hit the ground. The effects of their deployment in residential areas were both predictable and predicted. This suggests that their use there breached protocol II to the Geneva conventions, which prohibits "violence to the life, health and physical or mental well-being" of non-combatants.

The American ideology
By Samir Amin, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 15 -21 May 2003
The US may claim to be a democracy, but its religious rhetoric betrays totalitarian ambitions -- Encouraged by their recent successes, the extreme right now has a tight hold on the reins of power in Washington. The choice on offer is clear: either accept US hegemony, along with the super-strength "liberalism" it promotes, and which means little more than an exclusive obsession with making money -- or reject both. In the first case, we will be giving Washington a free hand to "redesign" the world in the image of Texas. Only by choosing the second option may we be able to do something to help rebuild a world that is essentially pluralist, democratic and peaceful. -- Today, the United States is governed by a junta of war criminals who took power through a kind of coup. That coup may have been preceded by (dubious) elections: but we should never forget that Hitler was also an elected politician. In this analogy, 9/11 fulfils the function of the "burning of the Reichstag", allowing the junta to grant its police force powers similar to those of the Gestapo. They have their own Mein Kampf -- the National Security Strategy --, their own mass associations -- the patriot organisations -- and their own preachers. It is vital that we have the courage to tell these truths, and stop masking them behind phrases such as "our American friends" that have by now become quite meaningless. Political culture is the long-term product of history. As such, it is obviously specific to each country. American political culture is clearly different from that which has emerged from the history of the European continent: it has been shaped by the establishment of New England by extremist Protestant sects, the genocide of the continent's indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the emergence of communities segregated by ethnicity as a result of successive waves of migration throughout the 19th century. Modernity, secularism and democracy are not the result of an evolution in religious beliefs, or even a revolution; on the contrary, it is faith which has had to adjust to meet the requirements of these new forces. This adjustment was not unique to Protestantism; it had the same impact on the Catholic world, though in a different way. A new religious spirit was born, liberated from all dogma. In this sense, it was not the Reformation that provided the pre-condition for capitalist development, even though Weber's thesis has been widely accepted in the Protestant societies of Europe, which were flattered by the importance it gave them. Nor did the Reformation represent the most radical possible break with Europe's ideological past and its "feudal" system, including earlier interpretations of Christianity; on the contrary, the Reformation was simply the most confused and most primitive form of such a rupture.

The long and winding roadmap
By Nevine Khalil and Soha Abdelaty,
It will take more than diplomatic handshakes to convince Cairo that the roadmap will lead to peace any time soon. -- On his first tour of the region in over a year, US Secretary of State Colin Powell had a lot on his plate. It was not just the Iraqi conundrum which topped his agenda; one of the main priorities was to ensure the roadmap actually leads somewhere. Stopping in Cairo on Monday, Powell met with President Hosni Mubarak, Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher and Chief of Intelligence Omar Suleiman, but skipped meetings with Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and European Union envoy Javier Solana. Powell briefed the Egyptian side about his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in Jericho the day before, as well as his meetings in Syria early last week (see interview, p.5). The Egyptians were "encouraged" by US commitment to the roadmap -- which Powell said is the same as the one drafted last December -- although they remained sceptical about the viability of the plan if Israel is not more forthcoming. "I'm not optimistic, but I hope I'm wrong," said Maher after the talks. But Powell believes that "we need to seize this moment of opportunity." The US plan for the region is packed with change and challenges; there's the rebuilding of Iraq, installing a new regime in Baghdad, clinching a peace accord between the Palestinians and Israelis, improving security and stability in the region, as well as a proposed Free Trade Zone (FTZ) between the US and the Middle East. The immediate task at hand -- making progress on the roadmap -- is certain to be an uphill struggle. Powell believes that immediate implementation is essential, although care should be taken on what issues to tackle first. "It is important that we [do] not deal with the most difficult issues such as right of return and the status of Jerusalem, but start moving now on those earlier steps," he told a joint press conference with Maher on Monday. Powell believes that without making progress on issues of security and improving the lives of the Palestinians, "we will never reach the point where we can deal with these more difficult issues."

Palestinian-Israeli Talks and Reality
By MIFTAH, May 18, 2003 
Clearly, no one expected a breakthrough following Saturday night’s highest level of Palestinian-Israeli talks for more than two and a half years. Palestinian Prime Minster Abu Mazen and his counterpart Ariel Sharon seemed to convey a relatively similar message to each other: we are holding tight to our respective positions, at all cost. Abu Mazen is determined to secure Israel’s unconditional acceptance of the ‘roadmap’ before taking any steps to suppress Palestinian armed resistance, and Sharon seems bent on keeping his occupation forces in every Palestinian city, town, and village, with no signs of halting illegal settlement construction and expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, as Israel continues to unleash its horrific military assaults against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, undermining any chances for real peace, another Palestinian attack against Israeli civilians in Jerusalem overshadowed the talks, attracting more scepticism to an already ill-fated process. The Palestinian people remain captive to Israel’s brutality and overwhelming military offensives, and ordinary Israelis continue to pay the price of Sharon’s short-sighted policies of militarism and expansionism, which are driving most ordinary Palestinians to desperate measures.

Rite of return to a Palestinian home
By George E. Bisharat, San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003
On Wednesday, the 55th anniversary of the Palestinian "Nakba" (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem. It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir -- author of the famous quip that "the Palestinian people did not exist" -- when she was Israel's foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, "Papa" to all of us. I went to visit our home for the first time in 1977. Although he was a Christian, Papa named the home "Villa Harun ar-Rashid," in honor of the Muslim Abbasid Caliph renowned for his eloquence, passion for learning, and generosity. Painted tiles with this name were inset above the second floor balcony and over a side entrance.   EXPLOITS IN THE ORCHARD:  When Papa first built the home in what became known as the Talbiyya quarter of Jerusalem, few other residences existed nearby. As I grew up, my father regaled me with tales of his boyhood exploits in the surrounding fields and orchards. Two of my uncles were born while the family lived there; one uncle succumbed to pneumonia in Villa Harun ar-Rashid. The young boys went to school up the road at the Catholic-run Terra Sancta College. My uncle Emile told me of a wager he made with his younger brother, George (for whom I am named), that he could not stand on a swing on the front porch and swing with no hands - - with predictable, but fortunately mild, consequences. The wall enclosing the front yard was a fledgling design effort by my father's twin, Victor, later a successful architect in the United States, whose buildings helped galvanize the urban renewal of Stamford, Conn. My grandparents eventually suffered a reversal of fortunes, and in the early thirties, leased the house to officers of the British Royal Air Force, expecting to return in better times. Frescoes on the interior walls were plastered over to accommodate the tastes of the British officers. My family moved a short distance away to a more modest house on the Bethlehem road. Little did anyone appreciate at the time that the move signified the family's final departure from Villa Harun ar-Rashid. A sense of foreboding gripped many Palestinians in the years leading up to the wars in the region. Under the gathering clouds of unrest, my father and uncles came to the United States to attend college, while Papa shifted his business activities to Cairo. Thus, the family was outside of Palestine on May 14, 1948, when Israel declared independence and war with the Arab states commenced. Our fortunes were better than most of 750,000 other Palestinians who were driven out or fled their homes in terror during the fighting.

Living outside of history
By Yuli Tamir, Haaretz, May 21, 2003
On their return from a visit to South Africa, some two weeks ago, members of the Israeli-Palestinian delegation asked themselves a number of questions: How is that South Africa extricated itself from the cycle of hostilities, while we are still there? How did former South African president F.W. de Klerk, with whom the delegation met, go from being the leader of an extreme nationalist party, which was openly affiliated with the notions of Spanish fascism and Nazism, to being a leader who believes in the establishment of a civil and equal state? How did the negotiations manage to create a new political reality that is allowing South Africa to begin, albeit significantly late, to deal with its real problems - poverty, disease and ignorance? The story of South Africa is the story of a country that tried to exist outside of history and found out that history had the upper hand. In 1948, the year the National Party took power, Burma, Sri Lanka and South Africa rid themselves of the yoke of British colonialism. The world after World War II began to demand self-rule for nations that colonialism had oppressed. The Boers in South Africa did not see themselves as a colonial offshoot, but rather as emissaries of God who had been sent to spread Christianity in the Promised Land. "The holy mission," which was, in fact, an attempt to take control of a country rich in natural resources and disinherit its original inhabitants, tried to rest not only on messianic principles, but also on international ones. It was not by chance that de Klerk relied on Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, which served as the basis for international recognition of the principle of national self-determination.....The story of South Africa is, to a certain degree, our story. The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. The likeness stems from the way in which Israel is trying to swim against the historic tide and freeze time, while attempting to use global fears to delay the end. Just as South Africa held on to the anti-communist fear, so Israel is resting today on the fear for Islamic terror. Just as in the case of South Africa, so too in the case of Israel is there a basis for the fear, and therefore delaying the inevitable is possible; but the price is huge. South Africa returned to the family of nations and began to rehabilitate itself decades late, and hence the rehabilitation is slow and costly. In Israel's case, the price could turn out to be even higher.

The road ahead is clear, but will George W. Bush take it?
By Ahmed Bouzid, MIFTAH, May 21, 2003
Here is what we know: we know that almost three-fourths of Israelis want the full evacuation of the settlements NOW. We know that two-thirds of Israeli settlers are willing to leave their settlements if adequately compensated. We know that Palestinians can stop violence against Israel -- they have done it before, under Barak for instance, when a whole year went by and not a single Israeli was killed in an attack. And we know that when a strong Palestinian Authority is in place, while the prospect for an end to the conflict is within sight, Palestinians turn away from violence.[1] We know that Palestinians and Israelis can build bridges -- they have built them before, and they want to build them again. We know that they can reach a compromise: in Taba, in January 2001, just a few days before the elections that were to make Ariel Sharon Prime Minister, the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating delegations issued a joint statement in which they said in part, “the two sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections.”[2] We know that the Arab countries are tired of their war with Israel and that they are willing to establish full and normal relations with the Jewish state. Last year, when they met in Beirut, they issued a statement that said that once a just and mutually acceptable settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis is reached, the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region,” and that they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”[3]

Walk This Way
By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 21, 2003
Call me a civil liberties prude, but I don't want John Poindexter tracking my body part contours. Or my silhouette pixels, for that matter. Not since Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks has a government devoted so much money and study to watching our steps. Admiral Poindexter, who supervised the strutting Oliver North during the Iran-contra machinations, is now supervising the Pentagon's attempt to create an Orwellian "virtual, centralized grand database," which could put a spyglass on Americans' every move, from literally the way Americans move to their virtual moves, scanning shopping, e-mail, bank deposits, vacations, medical prescriptions, academic grades and trips to the vet. (Sometimes pets are the first to go in biological warfare.) One of the technologies the Pentagon is working on, as The A.P.'s Michael Sniffen reported, is a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk for use in a new antiterrorist surveillance system. "Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people," he wrote. The Pentagon, which wants to be able to identify people at 500 feet, has also enlisted the help of Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers there in biometrics are developing a video recognition method of gait analysis, which could be used by embassy security officers to check out shadowy figures. Researchers, who are just beginning to test their method with campus cameras, say it has a laboratory success rate of 90 percent for identifying people far away by observing their walk — and not just people who walk as distinctly as Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe or Hannibal Lecter.

A self-confident Hamas
By Amira Hass, Haaretz, May 21, 2003
This time it will be difficult for Hamas to rebuff the regular charges of the Palestinian Authority leadership that Hamas operations are meant to directly attack the official Palestinian leadership. The attacks during the Oslo years, until 2000, said official Palestinian spokesmen, were sometimes timed to coincide with expectations of a redeployment of IDF forces in the West Bank or at the height of negotiations over various articles of the interim agreements. In the past two years, the attacks took place when there were various mediation efforts. The Park Hotel bombing on Passover eve in 2002 was timed to coincide with the Arab League summit in Beirut, called to discuss the Saudi Arabian peace initiative. Hamas has always rejected those charges. It's just a coincidence, they say. It's a long, complicated procedure to plan, organize, and execute a suicide bombing, so the deliberate timing of an attack is impossible. But this time, the dispatch of three Hebronites on their missions the night of the first meeting between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan with Ariel Sharon and then the day afterward speaks for itself. The geographic choices for the attacks also can strengthen the claim they were meant to embarrass Abbas and Dahlan no less than they were meant to kill Israelis and win prestige points among Palestinians in the ongoing duel between them and the Israeli security services.

Sharon has the power
By Gideon Samet, Haaretz, May 21, 2003
There's a growing measure of despair among all the players in this blood-dripping drama. It's among the Palestinians, who began doing what Washington and Jerusalem demanded, but never received anything in return from Israel. On our side, murderous terror plays into the hands of irresponsible politics, providing an excuse to justify rejectionism, making Israelis despair. Bush's Washington, which has never shown any burning desire to manage an agreement, deals with it at arm's length, pretty much fed up. Sharon's canceled trip to George Bush symbolizes the key role the prime minister gives to terror threats, pushing to the sidelines any form of diplomatic effort. Gradually, through a lengthy process of brainwashing, the fatalistic Israeli majority is getting used to thinking there's nothing that can be done. And that's not true. The assumption that nothing can be done was not invented by the current government. The real momentum for that national thesis came from Ehud Barak. He came back from talks with the Palestinians and sparked the beginning of a despairing atmosphere with the sweeping argument - problematic in its reasoning - that the other side wouldn't take, even when offered nearly everything. Since then, the path of non-dialogue and the massive use of military power has not helped. The Qassam rocket launches at Sderot are a despairing testimony to this: Even the repeated incursions into Gaza have not halted the cheeky threat against an Israeli township. When the IDF's efficacy is measured by its results, the ongoing killing effectively means a retreat in its defensive and deterrent capabilities. If that is what happens after two years of eroding the terrorist organizations in the territories, then there is, indeed, reason for despair.