New Opportunity for Peace Does Not Exist
By Fawaz Turki, Arab News, June 12, 2003
There was something viscerally unsettling about the image, shown on television screens the day after the Aqaba summit concluded, where the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was reduced to pleading in his speech that his people under occupation “should be able to move, go to their jobs and schools, visit their families, and conduct a normal life.” The image in question was of a bridal couple held up in a bottleneck at an Israeli checkpoint called Kalandia, with the bride, attired in her bridal gown and veil, being frisked by an Israeli woman soldier, before she and the bridegroom were allowed to go back into their vehicle and move on. Who are these people doing the frisking and what are they doing in Palestine, ruling over the political destiny of a whole nation and how this nation’s citizens live their daily lives? And isn’t it about time they got their butts out of there after more than 35 years of brutalities? The road map, at least as defined by the current Israeli government, offers the people of Palestine next to nothing. Ariel Sharon never ever used the word “settlements” in his speech at Aqaba, but spoke instead of removing “unauthorized outposts” — mostly a few trailers on hilltops — after, and only after, the Palestinian Authority cracked down on the resistance, and wiped out its cadres. And whereas the road map compels Israel to commit itself to “an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state,” the Israeli prime minister is committed instead to his vision of it, as laid out in a speech he gave last December. “This Palestinian state,” he said, “will be completely demilitarized. It will be allowed to maintain lightly armed police and interior forces to ensure civil order. Israel will continue to control all entries and exists to the Palestinian state, will command its airspace, and not allow it to form alliances with Israel’s enemies.”....

Ariel Sharon - Profile Of An Unrepentant War Criminal
By Jeffrey Steinberg, Rense.com/Executive Intelligence Review, May 16, 2002
Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, is currently facing possible war crime prosecutions for two massacres that occurred 20-years apart: the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon (click for more), and the April 2002 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) mass killings in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Sharon is, without doubt, guilty of these crimes against humanity, and others. He is also unrepentant. For him, these mass killings are merely necessary steps on the path toward his objective of a "Final Solution" to the "Palestinian problem," through the mass expulsion and/or extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Under various labels, Sharon and a rogues gallery of collaborators inside Israel, Britain, and the United States, are now moving toward the final phase of their "mass transfer" plans for the Palestinians and Arabs. EIR has "written the book" on Sharon's blood-soaked career for over 30 years. (see 1994 Profile) As a service to the current worldwide debate on his government's fascist actions, we provide this summary dossier on the Israeli mass murderer. This summary is linked to a compendium of earlier exposés of Sharon and his partners in crime.  The Sharon File: Sharon was born in Kfar Malal in 1928. At the age of 14, he joined the Haganah, and at 20, headed an infantry company in the Alexandroni Brigade during the 1948 War of Independence, during which the Israeli forces drove an estimated 300,000 Palestinians from their land, using some of the same genocidal methods against unarmed civilian populations that were used in the recent IDF invasion of the Palestinian Authority's Area A territory. In 1953, Sharon founded "Unit 101," a secret death squad within the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians. In October 1953, Sharon's "Unit 101" massacred 66 innocent civilians during a cross-border raid into the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya. Under intense machine-gun fire, local residents were driven into their homes, which were then blown up around them, killing the occupants by burying them alive in piles of rubble. The April 2002 IDF massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin was, in fact, modeled on Sharon's "Unit 101" operations at Qibya.....

"The man who wasn't there"
By John Chuckman, YellowTimes.org, June 11, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) -- I read something recently about America's Middle East initiative, the "road map," offering Bush the chance for greatness. Verbal excess like that demands a realistic discussion of the prospects. When Britain achieved a breakthrough for peace in Northern Ireland, it did not do so by telling the IRA that its representatives were terrorists, unacceptable to negotiate. It had not surrounded the houses of IRA leaders with tanks, blasting away until ruins remained. It did not forbid IRA leaders from attending church or traveling. Yet this is the way -- along with a daily toll of reprisal killings and assassinations -- Mr. Sharon prepares for peace. For many reasons, I can only be pessimistic about the "road map." Sharon's immediate instinct was to reject and belittle it. Under pressure from Washington to reverse himself, he only did so with a list of qualifiers long enough to make it a different document than the one Palestinians accepted. The fact that Mr. Sharon used, just once, the honest word "occupation," normally forbidden in the Cloud-cuckoo-land of Israeli politics, and offered to trash a couple of clumps of abandoned, beaten-up trailers where the most crazed settlers play cowboys-and-Indians with assault rifles do seem less than signs of great events to come. Consider some of the constraints around this initiative. First, it is sponsored by a President who has just launched the United States into two meaningless, destructive wars. American forces, resources, and diplomacy now face huge, complex, and long-term obligations in Afghanistan and Iraq that did not exist a short time ago. Bush has, at the same time, threatened Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and, at least in the case of North Korea, a serious conflict may well be coming. Second, this President's policies have not ended terrorism, nor do I believe they ever can, which means American concerns and resources will be stretched even further. The President's policies since 9/11 have been exactly those followed by Israel for fifty years, striking out against someone, almost anyone, wearing the right kind of headdress. Has fifty years of that solved Israel's problems? If anything, it has only created new and desperate enemies, like the hopeless young people willing to blow themselves up to strike a blow. Third, the plan is in the hands of Secretary of State Colin Powell who has proved ineffective at almost everything undertaken, a judgment from one who once admired him. More importantly, Powell's stature among Bush's intimates is so low that you suspect they have secretly uncovered he is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, the political anti-Christ of neocon America.....

New road map: One state, modeled after U.S.
By Tarif Abboushi, Houston Chronicle, June 11, 2003
Barely a week after President Bush attempted to kick-start the latest Middle East peace process with the Red Sea summit in Jordan, the bloodletting in the Holy Land has resumed with its usual vengeance. Keeping a tally of how many Israelis and Palestinians kill each other requires daily vigilance because it's a daily occurrence. The road map might more aptly have been named road kill. Bush is to be commended for taking the Middle East bull by its horns and committing to ride herd. Time will show that the map of the ranch will have to be redrawn if the bucking broncos are ever to be tamed. One of the road map's failings is that, like the Oslo peace process that preceded it to such disastrous effect, it avoids discussion of the most contentious issues -- borders, settlements, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees -- until the end-stage "final status" negotiations, so they can cause the process to unravel later rather than sooner. Another failing is in the unequal demands the road map places on the two warring parties. One example is the onus on the Palestinians to draft and adopt a constitution, while Israel is allowed to continue without one. A more logical approach is to address all the issues -- the tough ones at the head of the list -- up front, and to frame everything strictly in the context of American values of governance. There is only one solution that is consistent with American-style democracy, and it resolves all the issues to the satisfaction of all but those on both sides who preach exclusionist segregation. It involves defeating those on the Palestinian side whose avowed aim is to create an Islamic nation in all of historic Palestine, an unacceptable recipe because it means the destruction of Israel and the disenfranchisement of the Holy Land's Jews and Christians. It also involves defeating those on the Israeli side who espouse Jewish domination of the land, because that leaves the Muslims and Christians with not just the short straw, but no straw at all. The two-state solution in the Holy Land is objectionable for the same reason the international community rejected it in South Africa, where it would have meant a state for blacks alongside a white state still built on -- and practicing -- apartheid principles. Two infrastructures must be dismantled for peace in the Holy Land: the infrastructure of terror -- the targeting of innocent civilians by whichever group or government -- and the infrastructure of racism -- the state-sanctioned laws that assign rights, privileges and obligations to people based solely on their religion.....

Living "the other," fearing "the other"
By George E. Irani, The Electronic Intifada, June 6, 2003
Living in Victoria--an idyllically beautiful and peaceful spot on the Pacific--one cannot but be struck by the various types of fears that are pervading the planet today. Fears of epidemic diseases such as SARS, the West Nile Virus, the "Mad Cow" disease, AIDS, and tuberculosis, or fears of the human-created diseases such as racism, poverty, violence, injustice and terrorism. Over the past month, I have attended conferences and meetings that focused on the contemporary salience of fears--caused by both objective and imaginary factors--in Western societies, particularly North America at this historical juncture. Fear is nothing new in human affairs. It has been with us since the dawn of time. Now, however, we live in a world that is both increasingly intertwined and alarmingly disjointed. Globalization has dramatized a fundamental reality for the fortunate citizens living in the rich world: If you want to subject the rest of the planet to your models of consumption and personal freedoms, expect responses and reverberations. You must accept that ultimately, you, like the "wretched of the earth," live in the same world, with all its warts and disappointments. By no moral, legal, or cultural calculus will it ever be acceptable that some live in comfort and splendor while the majority of Earth's human denizens suffer hunger, oppression, want and despair. Yet, in the poorest and least developed societies of the non-Western post-industrial world, humans have kept a closer connection between themselves and their natural surroundings. In societies where agriculture, horticulture, and grazing still play important roles in the local economy, humans enjoy a symbiotic relationship with nature and its various creatures--vegetation and animal--that would be inconceivable to North Americans who spend most of their waking hours in air-conditioned mega-malls and high-tech office blocks. In North America, a total separation between the man-made and natural worlds has nearly been achieved, with notable exceptions in farming and seafaring communities. Urban and suburban sprawl has taken nature as a hostage--a symbol of the human mind's illusion of taming Mother Nature. For North Americans, the natural world is frightening: bugs must be killed, wild animals shot or locked up, weeds obliterated. The upshot of this attempt to control, manipulate, and commodify the natural world is seen when episodes of new or virulent diseases erupt, such as the current wave of SARS infections, which has statistically taken fewer lives in Canada than the average holiday weekend's traffic fatalities. Nontheless, Canadians and Americans express helplessness and terror before this new disease. Their vaunted technologies and carefully controlled environments have failed them, so they quickly fall prey to fears that often verge on hysteria. Such fears bleed into other fears, evoking the desire to exert additional controls locally, nationally, and internationally. We see Canadians and Americans now attempting to literally or figuratively shut out anything alien, strange, or unsual. The "other" is held in suspicion and placed under surveillance; the suspect held in quarantine.....

Playing Chess with the Angel of Destruction
By Gabriel Ash, YellowTimes.org, June 12, 2003
"'Moderate' Israeli negotiators have applied this lesson ruthlessly since Oslo, when it first became apparent that the ethnic cleansing of Greater Israel could not proceed without active Palestinian cooperation .." -- (YellowTimes.org) – When the Nazis came to Budapest in 1944, Rudolf Kastner, vice president of the local Zionist chapter, faced a decision no community leader should ever face: how to respond to an overwhelming force that seeks nothing less than one's annihilation. In Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal," the hero, facing his own mortality, invites the Angel of Death to a hopeless game of chess. Kastner, too, chose to be a player. He got into a lengthy negotiation with Himmler's subordinates over several proposed deals, including finally a deal to trade a million Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks. As a confidence building measure, the Nazis allowed him to save 600 Jews, including his friends and family. After that, the negotiators treaded water. Of the truck deal, nothing came out of it. But as long as the two sides were talking, Kastner also had to show some goodwill. He had to facilitate the organization and transport of Hungary's Jews to the death camps. The result: in return for securing the escape of altogether sixteen hundred, and the ever receding hope of saving some more, Kastner ended up helping the Nazis carry out the murder of half a million Jews. Was Kastner duped by the Nazis? Was he a corrupt monster who helped the extermination of Jews for personal gain? Was he a sucker for power, a man so enamored of his personal influence that he lost sight of what he was negotiating about? Was he tempted by the fantasy of absolute power when he was asked to decide who would live and who would die? Was he, as his right-wing accusers in Israel later claimed, an example of the slavish mentality of European Jews, accustomed to obedience and quiet, deferential lobbying of the powers that be? Or was he, as Eichmann later testified, "a fanatic Zionist," who cared more about getting a few Jews into Palestine than about keeping the millions out of the death trains? Or was he perhaps merely an ordinary, imperfect human being, who chose badly between two horrible alternatives, in circumstances that called for superhuman heroism he did not possess? These are perhaps unanswerable questions. The Devil is not generally known for the clarity of his road signs. Israel claims to have learned many things from the Holocaust. One that is often unmentioned is the art of securing the collaboration of its victims in their own destruction. "Moderate" Israeli negotiators have applied this lesson ruthlessly since Oslo, when it first became apparent that the ethnic cleansing of Greater Israel could not proceed without active Palestinian cooperation. This was the Oslo Accord in a nutshell. Arafat and his entourage were to be recognized by Israel as "brave" leaders, the way the Nazi apparatchik Adolf Eichmann recognized the virtue of Kastner as an "idealistic" Jew. In return for this flattery (plus control of a few lucrative monopolies), Arafat would help Israel corral Palestinians into ghettos and use his "security forces" to protect the advancing Israeli land grab against his people.....

Israel’s Feeding Frenzy at $3 Trillion
By William Hughes, Palestine Chronicle, June 12, 2003
"This week, I began reading the June, 2003 edition of the WRMEA magazine. An article titled “The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $ 3 Trillion” caught my eye .." -- Recently, I attended an advanced computer skills class at a local community college. I was shocked to find out that we had to meet in an overcrowded WWII-type trailer, that served as an annex to the institution’s main facility. As a result of severe legislative underfunding, this school, and many others, are pressing into service these relics of a bygone era. Meanwhile, my daily paper, the Baltimore Sun, has been filled with horror stories relating to the deepening fiscal crises affecting the nation, Baltimore City, its surrounding counties and the state of Maryland. Budget cuts and layoffs dominate the news, as the unemployment rate continues to soar. Teachers and police department personnel are also protesting over denial of promised raises. The governor of Maryland has predicted that unless Medicaid cost are reined in, they could bankrupt the state. Nationally, the U.S. debt is at a staggering $6.1 trillion and last year’s deficit alone was $158 billion and rising. On the global front, a UN agency, the International Labor Organization, reported, “Half the world lives on less than $2 a day, and of that total, a billion people survive on $1 a day.” This week, I began reading the June, 2003 edition of the WRMEA magazine. An article titled “The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $ 3 Trillion” caught my eye. Its author is the distinguished economist, Thomas R. Stauffer, who has taught at both Harvard U. and the Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Stauffer’s research is a damning indictment of the outrageously expensive U.S. relationship with Israel, since the post WWII period. The $3 trillion cost to the taxpayers, measured in 2002 dollars, “is almost four times greater than the cost of the Vietnam War, also reckoned in 2002 dollars. Even this figure underestimates the costs because certain classes of expenditure remain unquantified . . . in the interest of national security.”....