Analysis / A one-way street  
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, May 27, 2003
Israel's reservations on the road map plan that were attached to the government's decision turn the document from a diplomatic initiative into an Israeli diktat of a Palestinian surrender agreement. In one fell swoop the reservations do away with long months of negotiations during which the Quartet, and then the U.S., rejected most of them. The authors of the document apparently assumed that President George Bush was only asking for the formal approval of the Sharon government to the road map, and to hell with the implementation. In the document, not the slightest effort at moderating the reservations is made, nor is an effort made to hide the intention of neutering the road map. This is like thumbing one's nose at the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the UN. Not surprising, the Palestinians flared up yesterday when they heard the reservations. The reservations confirm the Palestinian claim that Sharon cabinet approval of the road map is akin to throwing a ball onto the court. In fact, Sharon sent Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) a transparent balloon that any analyst will find easy to deflate. For many months Israel insisted the road map must follow the principle of advancement in line, and not in parallel. At the same time, Israel insisted that the first issue in line be Israel's security demands from Palestinians - preferably as difficult to attain as possible. In order for any advance to take place, Abu Mazen and Muhammad Dahlan must succeed where the strongest army in the Middle East has failed in more than 30 months. According to the reservations, Ariel Sharon is expecting that the Palestinians to carry out an act akin to the Altalena - the arms ship brought offshore by the Etzel in 1948 and sunk by Hagana guns.

End of all aid work in Palestine?
By Ann Kristin Brunborg and Gudrun Bertinussen, The Electronic Intifada, May 27, 2003
Less than 24 hours after the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, left Israel, Israel closed all the borders with Gaza and refused entry to UN employees and international aid workers - this after the Israeli government had promised to lift restrictions on the Palestinian population as an expression of good will. If this situation is not resolved quickly, the international aid community in the occupied areas could be forced to halt their operations in the Gaza Strip. Medicine du Monde France has already wound up its entire programme whilst other large, heavyweight aid agencies and organisations may well have to halt their projects for an indefinite period. The whole business began with Israel requiring all foreigners crossing the border to Gaza to sign papers stating that the Israeli army no longer were to be held responsible if they shot and killed international aid workers, journalists or others. If we were staying near illegal Jewish settlements, militarily closed zones or in areas with military activity, we would be arrested and deported from Israel. There are very few refugee camps or areas in the Gaza Strip that would not be covered by this definition. All international organisations refused to sign this document. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli army informed us that all access to our workplaces in Gaza was stopped. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Since January this year, international workers in American and European organisations have been denied work permits by Israel. We are refused entry to the country. We are interrogated and deported. Papers are confiscated, PCs seized and, if you are unlucky, your offices and aid warehouses demolished or bombed. We have frequently been refused entry to the occupied areas since the massive military actions on the West Bank in April and May last year. Organisations use a great deal of unnecessary time in gaining access to projects or writing complaints to the Israeli authorities about their unsuccessful attempts to carry out their work in an effective way, according to the Association of International Aid Agencies (AIDA) in Jerusalem, which has about 80 large, medium and small international member organisations. The feeling of powerlessness and despair in the aid milieu is now overwhelming. Israel is barely interested in making arrangements for, or allowing, our work or in having any form of international presence in the occupied areas. In addition, there is nothing to indicate that the situation will improve in the near future, despite the new diplomatic initiative, the so-called "road map for peace" which has now been put forward.

Palestinians Cast Doubt on Sharon’s Peace Commitment
By Chris McGreal, ArabNews/The Guardian, May 27, 2003
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 27 May 2003 — The days of choreographed diplomacy that culminated in Sunday’s vote by Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet to accept the US-led “road map” to end the Middle East conflict have failed to persuade the Palestinians that President George Bush is committed to his own plan for peace. The Palestinians are privately more certain than ever that Sharon is not committed to the plan, but that the only person who can force his hand is Bush. In the loosely worded deal hammered out in Washington at the end of last week, the White House promised to “address” Israeli objections to the road map, and Sharon delivered his Cabinet’s lukewarm “acceptance” of the process without any commitment to its goal of a viable, independent Palestinian state. It looks to the Palestinians more like an escape route than a breakthrough. Bush has been under pressure from Tony Blair and Us Secretary of State Colin Powell to stick to the commitment he made in Belfast when he pledged to put as much effort into resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the British prime minister had into finding peace in Northern Ireland. Sharon, who could hardly snub the president of the country that keeps the Israeli economy and military afloat, has sought to buy time. But neither he nor Bush has yet convinced the Palestinians they are serious about making the road map work.

The Emerging Shiite Powerhouse
By William O. Beeman, AlterNet/Pacific News Service, May 21, 2003
The war in Iraq has produced an unintended consequence – a formidable Shiite Muslim geographical bloc that will dominate politics in the Middle East for many years. This development is also creating political and spiritual leaders of unparalleled international influence. It is easy to see the Shiite lineup. Iran and Iraq have Shiite majorities, and so does Bahrain. In Lebanon, Shiites are a significant plurality. In Syria, although they are a minority, they are the dominant power in government. They are the majority in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and have a significant presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The United States is used to thinking of the world in terms of individual nation-states. But the Shiites are a transnational force. The United States unwittingly supplied the key linkage for this bloc. By destroying the secular government of Saddam Hussein, it brought that country's Shiite majority to the fore, revealing a solid line of Shiite majority nations from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. This force is magnified because devout Shiite followers have a primary loyalty to spiritual leaders rather than secular officials, and that leadership is supremely well equipped to secure the loyalty of its followers. Shiite leaders are organized, well funded, and set up to provide charitable aid, health care and social welfare – a social safety net notably absent in the U.S. occupation so far. The task of keeping tabs on Shiism is made somewhat easier for Washington since the city of Najaf is rapidly becoming the Vatican of the Shiite world and lies in the heart of the American occupation. Najaf is where Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, is buried. Ali's descendants are revered by Shiites as the only legitimate spiritual leaders of Islam.

Next stop Tehran?
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, May 27, 2003
With Iraq beaten, the US is now playing the same dangerous WMD game with Iran -- Imagine for a moment that you are a senior official in Iran's foreign ministry. It's hot outside on the dusty, congested streets of Tehran. But inside the ministry, despite the air-conditioning, it's getting stickier all the time. You have a big problem, a problem that Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, admits is "huge and serious". The problem is the Bush administration and, specifically, its insistence that Iran is running "an alarming clandestine nuclear weapons programme". You fear that this, coupled with daily US claims that Iran is aiding al-Qaida, is leading in only one direction. US news reports reaching your desk indicate that the Pentagon is now advocating "regime change" in Iran. Reading dispatches from Geneva, you note that the US abruptly walked out of low-level talks there last week, the only bilateral forum for two countries lacking formal diplomatic relations. You worry that bridge-building by Iran's UN ambassador is getting nowhere. You understand that while Britain and the EU are telling Washington that engagement, not confrontation, is the way forward, the reality, as Iraq showed, is that if George Bush decides to do it his way, there is little the Europeans or indeed Russia can ultimately do to stop him. What is certain is that at almost all points of the compass, the unmatchable US military machine besieges Iran's borders. The Pentagon is sponsoring the Iraq-based Mojahedin e-Khalq, a group long dedicated to insurrection in the Islamic republic that the state department describes as terrorists. And you are fully aware that Israel is warning Washington that unless something changes soon, Iran may acquire the bomb within two years. As the temperature in the office rises, as flies buzz around the desk like F-16s in a dogfight and as beads of sweat form on furrowed brow, it seems only one conclusion is possible. The question with which you endlessly pestered your foreign missions before and during the invasion of Iraq - "who's next?" - appears now to have but one answer. It's us. So what would you do? This imaginary official may be wrong, of course. Without some new terrorist enormity in the US "homeland", surely Bush is not so reckless as to start another all-out war as America's election year approaches? Washington's war of words could amount to nothing more than that. Maybe the US foolishly believes it is somehow helping reformist factions in the Majlis (parliament), the media and student bodies. Maybe destabilisation and intimidation is the name of the game and the al-Qaida claims are a pretext, as in Iraq. Perhaps the US does not itself know what it wants to do; a White House strategy meeting is due today. But who knows? Tehran's dilemma is real: Washington's intentions are dangerously uncertain.

Washington's rare Byrd
By Matthew Engel, The Guardian, May 27, 2003
The more we learn, the more the Iraq war seems to be a war without heroes, even in the debased tabloid-newspaper usage of the word. The funny thing is that a hero really has emerged on the other side of the argument. And a very improbable one he is. Last week, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, Robert C Byrd, again got up and delivered a passionate denunciation of Bush's adventure: "The run-up to our invasion of Iraq featured the president and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ-laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post-traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger." The speech was, I believe, heard by a similar-sized audience to the others: about two people in the chamber and three watching on C-Span. Yet these things have legs. Byrd's main anti-war oration in February was reprinted across the world, in these pages among others. The cadences are often beautiful. The logic has gone unrefuted and, since Bush has now had his way and unhorsed Saddam, is forever irrefutable. Who is this man? Why isn't he running for president instead of the mealy-mouthed Democratic front-runners, Kerry and Edwards? Well, there are one or two conventional objections to this idea. Byrd is 85, and has Parkinson's. And his reputation, achieved over a mere 51 years in Washington - the last 45 in the Senate - has always been for four of the most objectionable senatorial vices: (a) windbaggery; (b) constitutional and procedural pedantry; (c) an ego the size of a much larger state than West Virginia and (d) absolute unprecedented brilliance at the Senate's most noxious vice of all, securing those federal hand-outs for constituents collectively known as "pork". I was recently musing, possibly on a flight from Reagan National airport in Washington to Bush airport in Houston just how crass it is to name things after living politicians. In West Virginia, there are at least 32 federal projects named after Byrd, including four stretches of road, two interchanges, two courthouses, a bridge and a dam. In the state capitol rotunda, there is a double-life-sized statue of him. On his website, he is described as "the West Virginian of the 20th century". No wonder he was against overthrowing Saddam, you might think; they have much in common.

US adds power to India's Israeli links
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, May 27, 2003
WASHINGTON - Immediately after the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal featured an article arguing that Israel, India and Turkey were Washington's only "allies for the long haul" in the coming war against terrorism. While an increasingly democratic Turkey turned out to be a major disappointment (from the Washington point of view), three-way ties between Israel, India and the United States are growing fast, spurred by precisely the same forces in Washington who championed the invasion of Iraq. That trend reached new heights when US officials confirmed last week that Washington has given the go-ahead for Israel to sell its advanced Phalcon airborne reconnaissance system to India in a deal worth some US$1 billion. The same officials said that the administration of President George W Bush is also on the verge of approving the more-expensive sale of Israel's Arrow anti-missile system, which was developed jointly with the US. Such a system could go far in neutralizing threats posed by Pakistani missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Both moves highlight the burgeoning alliance between the two most potent non-Islamic militaries in the Middle East and South Asia, a trend that has the enthusiastic support of Bush administration hawks, particularly in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office. That alliance will again be spotlighted with next month's scheduled visit to India by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. While Israel sees India as a comrade in the fight against Islamic militants, the US has a somewhat broader agenda to pursue with New Delhi, particularly its possible role as a counter-balance to China, which US hawks see as Washington's strategic competitor in Asia. "India is the most overlooked of our potential allies in a strategy to contain China," according to Lloyd Richardson of the Hudson Institute, a think tank very close to the administration. With India determined to build a naval force capable of projecting power into the South China Sea, says Conn Hallinan, an analyst at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Washington has especially courted India's navy, most recently with the Malabar IV joint exercises involving thousands of sailors and pilots from both countries. Not coincidentally, some of the biggest boosters of US-Indian military ties both in and outside the Bush administration are also prominent neo-conservatives with close ties to Israel's ruling Likud Party.

Trouble in the Hinterlands
By Steve Perry, Babelogue, May 26, 2003
Lugar, Bush, and the permanent war in its first throes of crisis -- Now we begin to see what synergy is all about. There's bad news for the Bush administration from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel. Late last week Richard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly scolded the Bushmen and warned them that their victory in Iraq was "at risk." But Lugar pulled what might have been his most effective punch when he rather delicately pointed out that continued failure in Iraq would create "an incubator for terrorist cells and activity." The incubator Lugar alludes to is more like a factory, and it has been pumping out product since the invasion of Afghanistan. You have only to look to the waves of foreign volunteers who streamed into Iraq to wage jihad against the Americans at the outset of the war--more than 10,000, according to the European press. And events since then have no doubt galvanized countless more. Lugar is promising an investigation of the Bush administration's planning for post-war Iraq. We'll see. Lugar is one of the few people in the entire government who could singlehandedly do serious damage to Bush next year, but only at the cost of making himself a lifelong pariah in Republican circles. He's really not the type. Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, an expert in all things Hoosier, says this of him: "Privately Lugar is said to have thought that Bush bungled diplomacy and that the war on Iraq was unnecessary and detracted from the hunt for al-Qaeda. He is often at odds with the neo-cons camped in the Bush inner sanctum and has a particular hatred of Rumsfeld. Lugar has bit his tongue for the last two years, but now that the Iraq war is over and his former staffer Mitch Daniels has left the administration to run for governor in Indiana, Lugar feels freer to speak out openly. But he's a fixer, not a revolutionary. He'll be the public voice of Colin Powell's agenda." As I've written before, I believe the US entered Iraq with the sole intention of staying as long as possible and insinuating itself as deeply as possible in the fabric of the economy and of such government as exists there. So in that sense the Bushmen's current predicament cannot be altogether a surprise to them. But even if this was their "plan," there's no question that they did a wretched job of thinking through the contingencies. There is no sense in which it's in the administration's interest to have this level of anarchy in Baghdad, and yet they are only now awakening to the fact that it's probably not a good idea to occupy the city with combat troops. A larger force will be required in any case, and meanwhile Britain has been quietly and steadily withdrawing troops from the occupation force.

Laying Bare the Primordial Roots of the Middle East Crisis
By Neil Berry, Arab News, May 27, 2003
LONDON, 26 May 2003 — Much has been made of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state. Much has been made too of the promise he allegedly wrung from George Bush: That — in return for British support in the war against Iraq — the United States would do its utmost to make the Palestinian state a reality. No doubt the British prime minister is genuinely concerned to push for a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet one may wonder just how even-handed Blair’s approach to that conflict really is. No more than Bush himself has Blair taken conspicuous steps to consult Arab opinion. When he came to power in 1997, he appointed as his adviser on the Middle East the wealthy businessman Lord Levy — a British Jew about whose intimate ties with Israel there has never been any secret. What has stopped him from recruiting a counterbalancing Arab adviser on the region’s affairs? The fact is that exponents of the Palestinian point of view are kept at arms length by the political establishments of both London and Washington. It is hard to imagine Blair or Bush extending the hand of friendship to so forthright an advocate of the Palestinian cause as the US-based academic and political intellectual Edward Said — let alone exposing themselves to the influence of such an individual. Admittedly, none of this has stopped Said from becoming renowned for his incisive contributions to the debate on the Middle East — even if his status remains that of a somewhat suspect, if not positively subversive, figure. Indeed, Tony Blair would almost certainly be loath to be seen in Said’s company for fear of sending out what, in present-day mediaspeak, is known as the “wrong signal.” Not that Britain’s philistine, big business-fixated leader is often seen in the company of writers and intellectuals of any description.

Property Rights and the “Right of Return”
By Richard M. Ebeling, Future of Freedom Foundation, May 26, 2003
If a settlement is reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians, justice would suggest that all legitimate property should be returned to its rightful owners and that residence by those owners on their property should be once again permitted. Indeed, one of the points made over the last 10 years concerning the wars in the former Yugoslavia has been that “ethnic cleansing” has driven people from their land and homes and that they should be allowed to return — even if the conquering group has now redistributed the property to members of their own national or ethnic group. Why? Because it is stolen property and the new occupants are in possession of ill-gotten gains. -- The Israeli government has been taking the position that any hope for a permanent peace settlement with the Palestinians must be preceded by a number of preconditions. One of the leading preconditions is that the Palestinian authority reject any claim for a “right of return.” What this refers to is the fact that, during the 1948 war for Israeli independence against the surrounding Arab countries, thousands of Palestinian Arab families left those parts of Palestine controlled or occupied by Israeli military forces. Some of these families left because they found themselves in the line of fire. Others left out of fear of living under Israeli rule. And still others left because of appeals by surrounding Arab governments to clear out of the way of their advancing armies. The joint attempt by the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to militarily crush the new state of Israel failed. And the thousands of Palestinian Arab families then found themselves exiled in refugee camps in the surrounding Arab countries. Many of them and their offspring have now been living in the camps for 55 years. During this time, they became pawns of the Arab countries that were their hosts. For the most part, they were prevented from accepting the reality of the situation and going on with their lives by integrating themselves into the host countries. Instead, the host governments wanted them to remain in the camps — with the bill for their food, housing, and care paid for primarily through international organizations, including the United Nations. The Arab governments could point to the poor and primitive conditions in which the Palestinians lived as a propaganda tool against the Israelis on the stage of world opinion. The Israelis are adamant against any “right of return” by Palestinian refugees or their descendants. A large influx of refugee Palestinian Arabs, they argue, would threaten the demographics that now makes Israel a “Jewish state.” The Palestinians and their descendants who find themselves in this situation will have to accept living either in their host countries or in what would eventually become a Palestinian political entity on the West Bank. What has not been raised in almost any of the debates of a “right of return” has been the issue of legitimate property-right titles. The real property and personal property that the Palestinian refugees left behind were owned by them. The land, buildings, and related assets were, in many cases, the legal property of those families for generations. War and the fear of battle drove them into the neighboring Arab countries that were viewed as taking them out of the harm’s way of combat.

US media should not play into the hands of Israeli tactics
By Palestine Media Watch, May 26, 2003
PMWATCH - May 26, 2003 -- The blaring headlines on Sunday, May 25, 2003, were all about how Israel had "finally accepted" the Quartet-proposed road map for the creation of a Palestinian state in 2005 and the end of hostilities between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states. But anyone who has followed this conflict from any distance and possesses a minimum sense of history can only view the latest declarations from the Israeli government as nothing more than a stalling tactic necessary given the circumstances. First is the basic fact that Israel has fought, every step of the way, the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state, has pursued the relentless infiltration of Palestinian land by illegal settlements, and since the second Intifada started in September 2002, has consistently frustrated attempts at calming the situation down and getting back to real negotiations. Second is the basic fact that Ariel Sharon has never wavered in declaring that he sees the Palestinian territories as part of "the Land of Israel" and is willing at best to tolerate a token "state" in no more than 40% of the West Bank and Gaza. And third: the last time an American President leaned "hard" on an Israeli prime minister -- George Bush the father on Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir -- we saw a reluctant Israel first drag its feet to the negotiating table, and then pretend for a whole decade that it was willing to make peace, while at the same time frantically doing everything to delay any real progress towards the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state. Indeed, during the so-called peace process between 1993 and 2000, a period during which Israel was supposed to withdraw from Palestinian land, the size of the settler population in the Occupied Territories -- Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem -- doubled! And when at last the US tried to force the final settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the proposed Palestinian state was nothing close to an entity upon which a politically sovereign and economically viable state could be built. Since then, Israel under both Labor's Ehud Barak and Likud's Ariel Sharon, has done all it can to create roadblocks against any return to the negotiating table -- i.e., assassinating Hamas officials, closing down whole towns, shooting at children for violating curfews, demanding that there must be seven days of uninterrupted "calm" before even talking to the Palestinians, building more settlements, demolishing houses, uprooting trees, destoying the infrastructure of civilian Palestinian institutions, refusing to consider international monitors to act as buffers between the Palestinians and the occupying military forces, etc.

Through a Glass Darkly: An Interpretation of Bush's Character
By John Chuckman, Palestine Chronicle, May 27, 2003
"Bush's recent stunt of flying to the deck of an aircraft carrier in order to make a televised speech might well have been copied directly from Hitler's flight to the gigantic Nuremberg rally .." -- While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush's upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush's character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographer's interpretation of Hitler. Ian Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler puts great emphasis on his being a driving high-stakes gambler - with innate, animal-cunning about human psychology, few gifts of statesmanship or strategy, and little systematic learning - attributing most of his success and all of his failure to his compulsive quality. When, for example, Bush waged his ferocious post-election pursuit of legitimacy through threats and court actions, finally securing appointment to office by America's Supreme Court, it resembled the way Hitler, never actually elected, worked ferociously behind the scenes and on the streets at a time of great political instability to secure appointment as Chancellor by President von Hindenburg. Several observers have commented that Bush's recent stunt of flying to the deck of an aircraft carrier in order to make a televised speech might well have been copied directly from Hitler's flight to the gigantic Nuremberg rally, his plane dramatically circling in descent towards a million people gathered in barbarian tribute, his purpose being to make a filmed speech. Whether Bush's crowd consciously followed the script set down by Hitler nearly seventy years ago matters less than that the thinking is so similar, with the manipul ation of dramatic, militaristic props for propaganda being identical.