Staying alive
By Ahdaf Souei, The Guardian, March 13, 2003
Once there was a thriving Arab women's movement. Right now, survival is our political act -- In Baghdad on any given day you might come across her. I will not tell you her name - but she is tall and slim with brushed silver hair. She dresses in black with black trainers and thick black socks. Her husband, now dead, was an Iraqi ambassador long ago. Now she sets out from her home every morning and walks. She walks though the streets looking and listening and asking questions. Her project is to memorise what is happening to the people and the daily life of her country. She's 88 and doesn't have much time. None of us have much time. Have you ever seen a patched book? Here it is: SJ's slim volume The Poet. SJ has a PhD in Arabic literature from Baghdad university. The ancient piece of machinery coaxed into printing her book either dries up or floods. On pages where the damage is too bad SJ writes out the missing words by hand on a piece of paper and glues it in place. "War gives birth," she writes, "and mothers do the bringing up." She sells The Poet at 125 dinars a copy, hoping eventually to pay back the 3,000 dinars it's cost to produce. Three thousand dinars equals $1.50. Do you see these women represented in the western media? Arab women are generally portrayed as victimised, subservient. They sit next to silent, wide-eyed children in Iraqi hospitals, they stumble among the ruins of their homes in Jenin. Many in the west seem to think they need to be dragged out from under their veils and scolded into standing up for themselves. But as we all try to block, to temper, to survive the coming horror, it is crucial for sympathisers in the west to understand the truth. The women's movement started in Egypt, Palestine and Syria in the 1880s. By the 1960s women in many Arab countries had the vote, equal pay for equal work and maternity and childcare legislation that is still a dream in the west. Massive women's organisations worked to improve women's education and healthcare. Women (and men) campaigned for reforms in the personal laws and notched up several successes. But now all this is on hold. I'm asked what Arab women are doing in these critical times. They are doing what they have to do: toughing it out, spreading themselves thin, doing their work, making ends meet, trying to protect their children and support their men, turning to their friends, their sisters and their mothers for solidarity and laughs. There was a quieter, more equable time when women's political action was born of choice, of a desire to change the world. Now, simply trying to hold on to our world is a political action.

The map must show a way home
By Ghada Karmi, The Guardian, June 6, 2003
The Middle East plan will fail unless it allows the right of return -- In 1969, Israel's prime minister Golda Meir astonished the world with this: "It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them," she said. "They did not exist." Such a statement would be unimaginable today, thanks mainly to a tireless Palestinian struggle for recognition and legitimacy. Today's Middle East road map would seem to be an important landmark in this struggle. It establishes some significant benchmarks: it explicitly acknowledges the need for Palestinian statehood and underlines the role of territory as fundamental to a settlement of the conflict. It is hard to believe that in the 1960s, the very word "Palestine" had slipped out of the lexicon. Growing up in England, I remember people thinking I meant "Pakistan" when I said where I was born. The 1948 exodus, tragic though it was, created a new category - "Arab refugees" - but no one remembered where they came from. It took the PLO's establishment in 1964, an armed campaign against Israel and several terrorist attacks in the 1970s to force the Palestine question on to the international agenda. Political manoeuvring thereafter, led by the much disparaged Yasser Arafat, kept it there. The eruption of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in the 1987 intifada forced Israel to negotiate the Oslo Accords with the PLO. Failed though these were, they helped establish the structures of Palestinian statehood and make it broadly acceptable. The second intifada that started in 2000 has been instrumental in forcing the instigation of the current peace plan. The question is whether the road map as proposed will lead to an adequate, fair and final settlement that addresses the Palestinian's predicament. On the face of it, the plan looks like an improvement on the Oslo Accords and subsequent proposals. It has a shorter and tighter timeframe - Palestinian statehood by 2005 - through a series of concurrent rather than consecutive stages, each side having to complete its tasks independently. This time, progress will not be left to Israel to monitor; senior US officials will be closely involved. However, the road map's flaws are obvious. Like its predecessors, it is ambiguous and vague on crucial detail. We do not know what and how much territory will form the Palestinian state, nor what its sovereignty will mean. Israel has already put forward 14 reservations to the plan, the most serious of which requires the Palestinians to relinquish their right of return ahead of any agreement. If this condition is allowed to pass, then this proposal, like the previous ones, is already a dead letter.

The road taken
By Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 5 -11 June 2003
After three years George Bush has thrown his weight behind the roadmap. Where will it end? -- Whether the conclusion is "a just and comprehensive peace" or simply "another lull between Intifadas" George Bush's presence at the Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba summits marks a new page in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if only in terms of the cast. The two meetings were as much about the Arabs realising the US president's condition of creating a "new and different Palestinian leadership" in the person of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas as about inaugurating the "roadmap for peace" under Bush's "personal" stewardship. By being invited to sit at the same table as the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Abbas has again placed the Palestinian Authority on the right side of the new regional order born of US conquest of Iraq. Out in the cold are Syria and Lebanon and the elected Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Despite protests from the four Arab leaders Washington insisted Syria and Lebanon be neither invited to Sharm El-Sheikh nor their conflict with Israel be included in the roadmap due to their alleged "support for terrorism", most recently during the Iraq invasion. As for Arafat, he no longer exists. "It is impossible to achieve peace with Chairman Arafat," Bush told Egypt's Nile Television channel last week. But the greater prize was Abbas' meeting with Bush in Aqaba on Wednesday. For the Palestinian leadership (including, ironically, Arafat) this consecrates the longed for return of active US diplomacy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after two years of indifference during which the governments of Ariel Sharon reconquered the West Bank and destroyed the PA as a functioning government. The hope now is that "re-engagement" will translate into pressure on Israel to withdraw from West Bank Palestinian cities and freeze settlement construction, two conditions essential if the PA is to evolve from a nominal entity to a viable Palestinian state.

Democracy's oasis -- a mirage
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 5 -11 June 2003
Israeli war crimes go unpunished as human rights reports blast Israeli practices. -- Israel's image as a democratic state took a further heavy battering last week as two separate reports were issued, the first by Amnesty International into Israeli military policies in the occupied territories, and the second by a United Nations watchdog monitoring Israel's commitment to human rights. Both reports follow on the heels of a survey last month by the Israeli Democracy Institute, an academic think-tank in Jerusalem, that ranked Israel close to bottom of 32 countries in terms of the value its politicians and citizens put on democratic participation. The results showed a particularly weak identification by the Jewish majority with the values of pluralism, with 53 per cent believing Arabs should be denied equal rights and slightly more, 57 per cent, wanting Arabs transferred out of the country. Only 77 per cent of respondents thought democracy was the best system of governance. Amnesty's findings were familiar to those who have followed the events of the past two and half years in the West Bank and Gaza. It documented a catalogue of human rights violations against the Palestinians: the extensive destruction of homes and farming land, the lethal shelling and bombing of residential areas in response to mortar fire from militants, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by the army, extra-judicial assassinations that have killed bystanders, the eradication of most economic life through a system of curfews and internal closures, and the torture and mistreatment of thousands of suspects, including children. It also pointed out that the army command rarely investigates or punishes soldiers accused of reckless or intentional firing at non-combatant.

Trapped by Their Own Lies
By David Lindorff, CounterPunch, June 6, 2003
Cracks in the Consensus? -- It's too early to predict how far things will go, but it does appear that the Bush political juggernaut, much like the army's tanks and armored personnel carriers in Iraq, has begun to show signs of breaking down from overuse. The big issue at the moment is the administration's blatant lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--the justification for the American/British war of aggression against Iraq. The obvious fact that, after all, Iraq did not have such weapons any more by the time of the invasion is leading for mounting calls, both in the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament, for an investigation of the run-up to war, and into how intelligence information was manipulated or manufactured. Perhaps even more important, the American media, which for over half a year played lapdog to Bush and his warhawks, is starting to report more critically about the issue for the first time. On May 26, media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post published an article airing a set of vitriolic emails between New York Times Iraq bureau chief John Burns and one of the paper's in-house cheerleader for pre-emptive war, reporter Judith Miller, whose thinly sourced stories repeatedly and breathlessly touted discoveries of WMD sites only to have each discovery subsequently debunked. Those emails make it clear, Kurtz writes, that Miller's only real source for these stories was Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted swindler being promoted as a potential Iraqi leader by Bush's warhawks in the Pentagon. Citing New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, Kurtz suggests that Chalabi was a key source of WMD "evidence" for the infamously biased "intelligence unit" known as the Cabal set up in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last fall, when he found he couldn't get what he wanted from the CIA. Kurtz goes on to say, "Chalabi may have been feeding the (New York) Times and other news organizations the same disputed information." Even the Philadelphia Inquirer, which in the run-up to the war was taking a moderately pro-war stance in both its reporting and its editorials, has become more openly critical. On June 1, the paper published a news story by Inquirer Washington bureau reporter John Walcott headlined, "Doubt on war felt at top levels." In it, Walcott says that the war, which Bush's top advisers have hoped would be "the centerpiece of Bush's reelection campaign," was becoming "a political, diplomatic and military mess." He goes on to report that, "A growing number of critics in Congress and some within the administration" are now saying that "much of the administration's public rationale for the war, and much of its planning for the war and its aftermath, appears to have been based on fabricated or exaggerated intelligence that was fed to civilian officials in the Pentagon by Iraqi exiles."

Thirty-six years of silence
By Gordon Murray, The Electronic Intifada, June 6, 2003
An open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien -- The occupation of Palestine has festered for thirty-six years too long. Despite Canada's official position that Israel must withdraw from all the land it occupied in 1967, the Canadian government has done nothing as Israel illegally installed entire cities on the territory it stole by force. Now, under the guise of security, the Israeli government is building a multi-billion dollar prison wall that will effectively annex up to 40 per cent of the West Bank, yet Canada remains silent. Despite Israel's official policies in the occupied territories that are flagrant violations of the 4th Geneva convention -- including house demolitions, collective punishment, interfering with medical services, and extra-judicial assassinations -- Canada does not protest. As a result of this deafening silence, the Israeli occupying army has become emboldened in its illegal actions. I was in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for one month this spring and witnessed first hand the Israeli military's increasing brutality and contempt for international law. I observed soldiers kidnap and beat on-duty medical personnel and use them as human shields. I was shocked by the constant humiliation, degradation and unlawful treatment of Palestinian civilians -- including pregnant women, infants, medical patients and the elderly -- at checkpoints and during house "searches." I saw water systems, refrigerators, and family portraits that had been maliciously destroyed and riddled with bullets. Because Israeli soldiers now believe they can act with impunity, they have started killing, maiming, arresting and illegally deporting journalists, aid workers and international human rights monitors on a weekly basis. Israel forces all foreigners entering the Gaza Strip to sign away their fundamental rights to life and liberty. And still Canada says nothing. I was in Palestine when the armoured bulldozer crushed Rachel Corrie and her dream of a better world. After I returned to Canada, my friend and colleague Brian Avery was shot in the face with a heavy machine gun. I felt the outrage and pain etched in Alice's face as she cradled Tom Hurndall, his head shattered by an Israeli sniper's bullet. Last week, the house of a Palestinian family who took me into their home and hearts was destroyed by the Israeli army, leaving them destitute and hopeless.

Beirut librarian makes plea for Iraqi heritage
By Jim Quilty, Daily Star, June 7, 2003
International cooperation urgently needed to save libraries, archives, museums from further devastation -- The liquidation of Iraq’s Baathist state was a showcase of neo-liberal doctrine. The streamlined Anglo-American force was efficient in its application of overwhelming force, scrupulous in securing Iraq’s economic assets and has been laissez-faire in fulfilling its responsibilities as an occupying power. The lawlessness of Iraq’s streets and the rampant looting of its libraries, archives, museums, and archaeological sites have, in fact, become a symbol of occupation neglect. Critics of the US-led occupation point out that the security of human life and the immense cultural heritage of Iraq have been so grievously compromised as to violate the Geneva Conventions ­ conventions which Washington had strenuously invoked weeks earlier when images of some of its captured troops appeared on Al-Jazeera. The US-led administration’s attitude toward its responsibilities might originally have been dismissed as the aggressive ineptitude of “laissez-faire occupation.” More recently, though, it has come to look more monopolist. When UNESCO recently sent a delegation to Iraq to assess the damage done to its cultural institutions, for instance, US troops refused to admit one member of the delegation, an inspector-general of France’s Bibliotheque National. Presumably the accredited inspector was shut out because she is French. As he relates this anecdote, Wolf-Dieter Lemke, the head librarian of Beirut’s German Orient Institute, looks first bewildered then angry. Lemke espouses a more common-sense view of international dialogue with Iraq. If the perilous state of Iraq’s libraries, archives and museums is to be remedied quickly it will require the combined efforts of Iraqi and international expertise. In his view, the Americans’ insistence upon excluding non-US experts from the assessment and rehabilitation of these cultural institutions is not only arrogant, it wholly contradicts the interests of Iraqis. Along with the Universite Saint Joseph’s Bibliotheque Orientale, Lemke’s institution co-hosted the annual conference of The European Association of Middle Eastern Librarians (MELCOM) in late May. Though MELCOM’s members have an intense interest in this region, it has tended to be an explicitly apolitical one ­ no surprise given their area of expertise. The present situation in Iraq changed that.

Violence, settlements and peace
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada/Chicago Tribune, June 6, 2003
President Bush's summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in Aqaba, Jordan, ended this week on an upbeat note. But Sharon's announcement that Israel will dismantle "unauthorized" settler outposts as its contribution to implementing Phase 1 of the "road map," and his failure to announce a construction freeze in other settlements, is a sign that the initiative will quickly run aground unless Bush forcefully upholds his peace plan. The "road map" requires Israel to stop all settlement construction immediately, and remove all new settlements built since March 2001. Israel's Peace Now movement puts the number of such new settlements at 60, dozens more than the handful of outposts that Sharon considers to be "unauthorized" by his government. Sharon's failure to commit to the terms of Phase 1 of the road map contrasts with Abbas' clear renunciation of "terrorism and violence against Israelis wherever they may be." The day before the Aqaba meeting, Bush declared that, "Israel must make sure there is a continuous territory that the Palestinians can call home," and consequently "must deal with the settlements." Such statements are simply too vague to persuade Israel's hard-line leaders to do more. After Bush's statement in Sharm el-Sheikh, Ha'aretz quoted Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ruling out evacuating even "tens of thousands" of the hundreds of thousands of settlers, and claming, "this is unrealistic, and I don't think the Americans are thinking of this." On the ground, Israel is moving ahead with plans to build massive new settlements, despite its nominal acceptance of the road map. Using Israel's name for the occupied territories, Sharon's housing minister, Effie Eitam, declared on June 2 that, "Praise the Lord, there is large natural growth in Judea and Samaria--just this year alone there has been a 5.5 percent increase in settlers." Making clear that "natural growth" includes moving new settlers in from Israel, Eitam promised, "we will build for them, and provide them roads and infrastructure." And, just before the Aqaba summit, Israeli municipal authorities announced they are moving ahead with plans to build a new Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, to be called "Kidmat Tziyon" (meaning "the progress of Zion"). The plan calls for 230 Jewish-only housing units on 25 acres overlooking the future home of the Palestinian parliament.

If This is the Road, I'd Rather Be Lost
By Amelia Peltz, CounterPunch, June 7, 2003
Where is the Hope? Where is the Justice? -- It could be argued that that the average male has a very difficult time admitting when they get lost. Only as a last-ditch effort to save face will they stop and ask for directions. If only they had checked the map, their destination could have been reached in half the time. So it was with great pomp and fanfare from the US Administration (with the backup of the Quartet ­ the EU, the UN, the US, and Russia), and a tremendous amount of wary scepticism from the people of the Palestine and Israel, that President Bush presented his so-called "Road Map" for Middle East peace. The plan that is supposed to guide those gone astray in reaching the elusive goal of peace. In this world of sexist politics dominated by men, and my own delight in finding ironic metaphors for analyzing the political rhetoric in comparison with the reality of our daily lives, I found it somewhat amusing that this gang of acronyms, all headed by some of the most arrogant men in power, were calling their grandiose plan a "Road Map". A slight attempt at humility in the wake of a history of evil deeds in this region? Hardly. Perhaps the need for a catchy title to cover up the fact that this plan is not based on anything that resembles social, political or economic justice? Definitely. Despite the tremendous uncertainty over the viability of such a plan, combined with the knowledge that there is not an ounce of justice contained in its pages, many Palestinians still held onto a shred of hope that, perhaps, life will become a little easier now. Maybe we won't have a real state, human rights, the right of return for refugees, or a seat at the United Nations, but maybe we will have the opportunity to work and put bread on the table. A Road Map. Maps can be dangerous things when they are not drawn well. One slip of the hand can inadvertently erase an entire city, draw a river where one does not exist, or fail to properly illustrate the sharp curve going around a mountain pass. This "Road Map" for Middle East peace has been drawn with such a careless hand that one could hardly imaging getting anywhere useful by following its guidance. Based upon the same pitfalls as the Oslo Agreement, the "Road Map" makes no mention of the most critical issues that need to be addressed such as Jerusalem, the dismantling of all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the control over water resources, and acknowledging the right of return for Palestinian refugees. One of the starting points on this map was to be an "easing of restrictions on Palestinians in order to improve the humanitarian conditions." From my own experience and eyewitness on this issue alone, I can say without hesitation that so many wrong turns have been taken that it seems almost impossible to imagine that we can find our way out.

US raid on Palestinian embassy in Baghdad ordered by Israeli Finance Minister, Netanyahu
By Jean Shaoul, Al-Jazeerah Info/Palestine Media Center, June 7, 2003
....There is every indication that this attack was mounted at Israel’s insistence. An article on Israel’s finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s website by Joseph Farah states: “As I report in the latest edition of G2 Bulletin, there is plenty of substantial evidence to suggest the Palestinian embassy in Iraq knows plenty about where Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were hidden. “Sources said the site’s diplomatic immunity kept the documents beyond the reach of UN arms inspectors for years and may still present a hurdle for US-led forces. The documents relate to the purchase of raw materials required for Iraq’s manufacture and deployment of weapons of mass destruction. The PA embassy is situated in Yasser Arafat’s private residence in Baghdad, a heavily guarded palatial structure well inside a compound. “One of the Iraqi opposition groups’ American sympathisers, who worked with them in London from 1991 to 1994 and resumed activity on their behalf in Washington, said that the hidden documents refer to Iraq’s chemical weapons, VX nerve gas, “and possibly nuclear arms.” --- US troops raided and ransacked the Palestinian embassy in Baghdad at the end of May. They arrested 11 members of its staff, including its top diplomat, and nothing has been heard of the Palestinians since then. The raid is an act of political gangsterism carried out by US armed forces that have occupied Iraq on the basis of an illegal war. It was instigated at the direct request of Israel’s finance secretary and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. An AP report cites Mohammad Abdul Wahab, a member of staff at the embassy, as saying, “They even took all our water bottles and food cans. They behaved like common thieves.” According to Wahab, on May 28 dozens of US troops escorted by several armoured vehicles entered the embassy. After the guards opened the gate, they were immediately arrested and handcuffed by the soldiers who burst into the building and held up officials, drivers and gardeners, including Charge d’Affaires Najah Abdul Rahman who was running the legation in the ambassador’s absence. Wahab said that they were taken to a US base in the centre of the city and are still in custody. The soldiers kicked and smashed their way in—many of the doors in the building had the marks of combat boots—and used shotguns to blast open office doors, although they were all either unlocked or had keys in them. Filing cabinets were ransacked and their contents removed.

A State for All Its Citizens—One Palestinian’s Dream of Peace
By Samah Jabr, Palestine Media Center/Jerusalem Journal, June 7, 2003
For the past two years, I have longed to be able to spend a Sunday in New York’s Central Park. I remember it as a place where people of every color, race and creed enjoy the blossom of pink spring flowers. The park’s wonderful configuration of elm trees provided shade for a diversity of people: Chinese giving backrubs; Africans selling their crafts on the sidewalks; a gorgeous black model in a flimsy dress sitting next to a young white man; an Eastern-looking scholar with a long beard and a short cloak leaning on the grass and enjoying his privacy; young boys with kippas playing competitively on their skateboards; sporty women in every possible outfit and hairstyle, looking after little kids, jogging or walking their dogs along the green grass. It is a diversity in which I revel. South Africa, too, is a rainbow nation. After the defeat of constitutional prejudice and the barriers of apartheid, South Africa is on the right path for peace. Freedom was the first step—now the battle for advancement, and against crime and disease goes on. I yearn for these places precisely because, just as the walls have come down in South Africa, they are being raised in my homeland. The most infamous of these is the huge wall being established on the illusory Green Line separating Israeli-inhabited areas from Palestinians and their homes. Those of us who live here know that walls do not reduce violence or stop Israeli tanks or Palestinian bombers. They do, however, separate those of us who are willing to meet each other. Walls emphasize stereotypes and deepen the sectarian hatred and animosity on both sides. Walls are being built here to shatter into pieces our dream of peace. You may be surprised to know that I am speaking here not of a physical structure, but of the “two-state solution.” These days my ears are full of the region’s cries of war that grow ever louder with time. But the “peace” that the world and the Israeli left wish upon us is based on walls: a two-state proposal that is misleadingly or mistakenly being called a “solution.”

Just Children
By Gideon Levy, Palestine Media Center/Haaretz, June 7, 2003
The expressions on their faces say it all - gloomy stares without a trace of a smile. These children obviously know hardship and suffering. They sit on the filthy couch in the middle of an unfinished room in the Jenin refugee camp, and tell their story. They haven't seen their father in nearly a year. And it's been almost six months since they last saw their mother. In all that time, since she was arrested, they haven't even heard her voice. It's hard to believe. The state, which jailed the mother without a trial, won't even allow her to phone her children. Not a single phone call to see how the five children who were left alone without a father and mother are getting along. Is this justice, compassion, humanity? No - it's because of "regulations" and "security considerations." The children's older brother Abed is also in prison. Their father Jamal is accused of belonging to Hamas. Their mother, Asma, who is ill with cancer, is in administrative detention - imprisoned without an indictment or a trial. And Abed, who followed in his father's footsteps, was recently sentenced to 87 months in prison. The family's home partially burned down during the Israel Defense Forces incursion into the camp in April, 2002. Asem, 16, and Imad, 15, the two big brothers, are thrown together with 11-year-old Hamzi and seven-year-old Sajida in the ruined house. The two little ones still smile shyly once in a while, but even this smile is terribly sad. The ponytail-holder in Sajida's hair is the only reminder that this is just a little girl. They may be the children of Hamas, but they are still children. This is the Abu-al-Haija family. Has anyone thought to look in on how they're doing? The IDF Spokesman, on the eldest son's sentence: "In his arguments, the defendant's lawyer mentioned the fact of the father's imprisonment and the mother's illness." The Prison Service: "The security prisoner is not permitted phone calls due to a regulation that applies to all security prisoners in Israel." The chirping of the birds in two cages in the corner of the room gives the house a semblance of calm. The walls of the house were damaged by an explosion when it was hit by a rocket during the IDF incursion last spring into Jenin. A year later, local residents gathered to fix it up and some construction workers from the camp are busy plastering over the sooty walls. A couch and table are the only pieces of furniture, and scraps of the workers' food are strewn about. During the incursion, the soldiers looked for the father, Jamal Abu al-Haija. They didn't find him, but took his 18-year-old son instead. Four months later, in August, the father was captured as well. The IDF says that the father was the Hamas spokesman in the Jenin area. A few months later, the mother, Asma, was also arrested and sent to administrative detention in Neve Tirza prison. No one knows why.