Palestinian property is now codified, but will it be used?
By Michael R. Fischbach, Daily Star, June 24, 2003
Part 2 of a two-part series -- The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) completed in 1964 its massive program aimed to determine the scope and value of Arab land in Israel in 1948. In the process, it created 523,750 forms containing information on 458,210 parcels of Arab land, in addition to thousands of other documents. While the UNCCP issued a sanitized report detailing the scope of Arab property, it made no public mention of the land’s value, and a plan for compensating the refugees for their abandoned property has yet to emerge. After it ceased active operations, the UNCCP archived approximately 30 meters of documents behind locked doors at the UN Secretariat annals in New York, where special permission is required to view them even today. However, the UNCCP later allowed several parties to obtain copies of some these records. The Arab states began requesting copies of some of the UNCCP’s records as early as April 1953, although their requests were denied. With completion of the UNCCP Technical Program in 1964, and the Arabs’ desire to determine their own estimates of refugee property losses, the efforts to obtain the documents were renewed. In Nov. 1972, the Lebanese ambassador to the UN spoke with the US ambassador to the UN, future President George H.W. Bush, about whether the United States would support a renewed Arab request for copies of the records. The UNCCP discussed the matter with the UN’s legal counsel and decided to grant permission at long last. The UNCCP agreed to provide copies of documents to parties that had a direct interest in the refugee problem, with the provision that any party receiving such material keep the figures on land values confidential. The first Arab state to formally request and receive copies of the UNCCP material was Egypt, which asked to make copies of the material at its own expense in September 1973. Filmed copies of the records were made in June 1974. The Egyptians later received a second copy of the films in March and May 1975. In May 1974, Jordan made a similar request and received the films the following year. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) also requested copies of the films in November 1982. Duplication finally was completed in May 1984 and the copies were handed over to the PLO. Finally, another UN agency, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, requested “an inventory of Arab property in Israel and the territories occupied by Israel” in 1976. The UNCCP agreed, and provided copies of the same information it provided to the Arabs.
(Part 1: Records of Palestinian dispossession are gathering dust)

Ambient Death in Palestine
By Paul De Rooij, MIFTAH, June 24, 2003, 
Before her murder by the Israeli army, Rachel Corrie referred almost casually to the conditions at a refugee camp in Gaza as being beset by “ambient gunfire” [1]. Today the problem isn’t necessarily the gunfire, but it is the “ambient death and destruction”. In fact, Palestinian death has become so routine that it simmers at a level not meant to enter “Western” consciousness at all. It has been a long time now since we even saw the names of Palestinian victims in The New York Times or similar newspapers, but now even death as a statistic is disappearing. If anyone wonders how terrible mass crimes occurred in the past and no one intervened, then Israel’s relentless dispossession of the Palestinians provides a case study in how this happens. Some Statistics: A brief perusal of the usual newspapers reveals that most don’t mention the daily death toll in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). It is only when the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) engage in some particularly egregious act that there may be some mention, but it disappears in a matter of days. As long as the death toll remains below a magical threshold, it is not deemed important enough to bother Western readers with deaths happening elsewhere. The regularity of the death toll indicates that this is something that the IOF may be exploiting on purpose. The statistics reveal that some very sinister and criminal acts are perpetrated against the Palestinians regularly, and it is a chronic condition. The graphs below aim to give a better perspective of what is happening on the ground and what is the true nature of the occupation.

An American Vision for the Future
By Khaled Ezzelarab, Islam Online, June 25, 2003
The WEF: Shaping tomorrow by America and for America -- On Saturday June 21, 2003, a small Jordanian Dead Sea resort was the gathering place for a number of the most influential figures in the world and particularly in Middle East affairs. At noon of that day, King Abdullah II of Jordan was delivering his opening speech to an audience of more than 1,200 people representing the political and business leaders of the region and other important international players. It was the opening ceremony of the Extraordinary Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF was established in the 1970s as “an independent organization that is committed to improving the state of the world [by] embracing new challenges” to promote its core principles of economic and political development, according to its mission statement. Apart from this year’s extraordinary meeting in Jordan, the meetings of the WEF are always held in the Swiss town of Davos, with the exception of last year’s meeting, held in New York in a show of solidarity with Americans after September 11. The choice of Jordan as the place for the meeting is symbolic of the interest of the international organization and its sponsors in the region. Uniquely located between Iraq, which has just come out of a war and entered a new and still-uncertain era, and Israel and the Occupied Territories, where efforts to put an end to the ongoing war have recently been intensified, Jordan was the perfect place to host a conference titled “Visions for a Shared Future.”

The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
By Edward Said, Dissident Voice, June 24, 2003
In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family. But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, " You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."

End the fake evacuations
By Gideon Levy, The Electronic Intifada/Ha'aretz, , June 24, 2003
22 June 2003 -- The operation to evacuate the West Bank outposts undertaken by Ariel Sharon's government is a farce that is bad for the peace process. It would be better to stop this charade as soon as possible, because its damage is immeasurably greater than any good it might be doing. The only ones gaining from this absurd eviction performance is the prime minister, the right wing and the settlers. The losers are the Palestinians and mainly, the peace process. The Americans, who are full partners to this deceit, should also pull themselves together and realize that this absurdity is no good for peace. If I were a Palestinian I'd hasten to declare - no, thank you. This is neither evacuation nor a confidence-building measure; it is a deception with a heavy price. This is not the evacuation of real settlements and more importantly, not the evacuation of settlers. This is a farce in which all the actors understand the rules and are playing their role on the stage only to accumulate more power and more sympathy, rather than advance any political process. The first one to gain from this false spectacle is of course the prime minister. Half the nation is again tempted to believe that here is "a new Sharon," a "complex" and "fascinating" figure which has undergone "a historic change," an Israeli de Gaulle, the only one who could make peace.

Incarceration or Transfer: The Post-Incursion Plan
By Jeff Halper, Media Monitors Network, June 26, 2003
Like Sharon's 1982 war in Lebanon, which was also minimized as simply an "operation" (Operation Peace for the Galilee), Operation Defensive Shield had political goals far beyond that indicated by its modest "defensive" name. Under the guise of destroying the "infrastructure of terrorism," Sharon (and his willing partner Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the elected head of the Labor Party) believe they have accomplished two major goals that fundamentally alter the political situation. In Jenin they destroyed the Palestinians' ability to resist the ever-expanding Occupation. And in Ramallah they destroyed the infrastructure of Palestinian civil society, rendering the Palestinians unable to govern themselves. To be sure, terrorist "incidents" will still occur occasionally, but the Israeli army is today engaged in mopping up exercises. It enters Palestinian areas with absolute impunity, with nary a whiff of opposition from the international community. The Israeli government believes it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all. What is left is mopping up operations what we are witnessing these days in towns and cities throughout the West Bank and construction of a type of rule that leaves Israel firmly in control of Jerusalem and the West Bank (and its settlement network intact), yet relieves it of direct rule over the Territories' three million Palestinians. It is no coincidence that Israeli and American insistence on "reforms" within the Palestinian Authority begin with the security services and that Washington has "discovered" in Muhammad Dahlan a "leader" it can deal with. So, too, can the vilification campaign being waged against Arafat be interpreted as trying to get beyond him to a leader who will sign off on a mini-state that ensures Israel's continued control. In order to make this all palatable to the international community, however, Israel and the US must also offer a sop to the notion of Palestinian self-determination. The outlines of Sharon's grand scheme are already taking shape on the ground. Israel's emerging post-incursion strategy has three main components....

The Unholy Alliance In The Occupied Territories
By Avia Pasternak, Alternative Information Center, June 25, 2003
Minutes after the Ta’ayush activists arrived at the wheat field together with the Palestinian villagers, a group of settlers, lead by the Rabbi of ‘Maon’ settlement, began running down the hill towards them. The settlers shouted at the harvesters, threatening them and demanding that they leave the field. Some of them had guns. At that point the soldiers intervened. Instead of arresting the rioters, they stopped the harvest, denying the Palestinians access to their land. As is usually the case in South Hebron, they protected the violent law-breakers; the Jewish settlers. It all began several hours earlier. Saturday morning, not long after dawn, Ta’ayush activists from all over Israel left their homes in order to join the Palestinians from Twaneh, a small village located in South Hebron. We wanted to harvest a wheat field that is located near the Jewish settlement Maon. Saturday marked the end of a gory week the terrorist bombing in the center of Jerusalem, two targeted assassinations in Gaza, and a long list of innocent Palestinian and Israeli victims. Especially at a time like this, it was important for us to demonstrate our solidarity with our Palestinian friends and to protest against the endless bloodshed. With black flags on every vehicle, we drove towards Twaneh. Approximately one kilometer past the green line soldiers and the border police blocked our way with an improvised roadblock. They had been waiting for our arrival. The commander declared the place a closed military zone and told us to turn around and leave immediately. We asked him to show us the legal order stating that this was indeed a closed military zone, yet he had no such order at hand. What was worse, while the soldiers at the roadblock did not allow Ta’ayush activists to enter the region with their cars, they enabled settlers’ cars to pass. South Hebron is closed only for peace activists.