A virtual Palestinian state
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 26 June - 2 July 2003
Announcing the creation of a Palestinian state alone will not be enough to end the conflict  --  There has been a great deal of talk in recent days of getting the protagonists in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to agree on a truce, even though they remain deeply divided over the shape of a final settlement. It is a formula reminiscent of the one used during the Cold War to keep another intractable conflict from boiling over into open warfare. Known as peaceful coexistence, it was in fact a sort of truce that kept the intense ideological, political and military rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States just short of military conflict. The underlying logic was that two incompatible political systems, communism and capitalism, could exist simultaneously and that war between them was not inevitable. Can the same logic apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that is, can war between Israel and many of the Palestinian factions be avoided even if Sharon remains in office for quite some time to come, as is likely to be the case? Peaceful coexistence is a formula which allows two states to live in peace despite their intractable differences, even when, as in the case of the two superpowers during the Cold War, there is no prospect of overcoming these differences. But although there could be no settlement of the fundamental conflict between communism and capitalism, that did not mean that all aspects of the conflict were equally recalcitrant. For example, while the two superpowers refused to yield one inch on those aspects of the conflict which could be characterised as constants, they were more flexible when it came to the variables. A case in point was the arms race, which threatened them both with mutual annihilation. This particular variable came to overshadow the constants, and led to the need to find a way out of the fix. And so was born the era of peaceful coexistence between the superpowers. Can something be envisaged in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that is, can considerations related to transient phenomena come to outweigh those stemming from the permanent features of the conflict? If so, which of the parties is more likely to benefit from a shift in the variables/constants equation?

How Christian is Zionism?
By Leslie C. Allen and Glen Stassen, Sojourners Magazine, July-August 2003
What the Bible says about "Israel" and the things that make for peace. -- "Lord," the disciples asked the risen Jesus, "is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" His answer was: "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority." —Acts 1:6-7  The question was a reasonable one for disciples who had earlier heard Jesus imply future glory for the city of Jerusalem when the times of Gentile political domination were past (Luke 21:24). Here in Acts such standard hopes of Jewish end-times theology (or "eschatology") that included political sovereignty were not denied but apparently deferred. For now the concern to which the disciples were directed was a worldwide evangelistic mission radiating out from Jerusalem, instead of a focus on political rule in Jerusalem. Fast forward to the late 19th century. When nonreligious Jews sought to create a secular Jewish state, many Orthodox Jews objected that the Zionists were jumping the gun. The Zionists were "flying in the face of heaven," they said, and they should wait until the Messiah came to take the people of Israel back to their ancestral land. The Orthodox Jewish stance has a remarkable affinity to Jesus' answer to the disciples, because both depend on traditional Jewish eschatology, which says it is the Messiah who will restore Israel to the land where justice and peace may be enjoyed. In Acts 1, Jesus, as the Messiah, is personally to restore the kingdom to Israel, and the timing is to be God's. The context suggests that when Jesus returns from heaven it will be his role to carry out this Messianic task: "This same Jesus, who has been taken up from you to heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). Jewish eschatology looked for the establishment of the house of David in Jerusalem over an independent state. In the Old Testament, the concept of the land plays a prominent role. But the New Testament mostly tells a different story. By persistent appeal to Psalm 110:1, the New Testament claims that the rule of the risen, ascended Messiah is for now established in heaven rather than on earth. This emphasis and a focus on redeeming the Gentiles moved the early church away from a land-related agenda. The New Testament tends to reinterpret the land as the whole earth or as heaven. The Plymouth Brethren, a group that began in mid-19th-century England, proposed a novel understanding of the "rapture" in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. There Paul regards the Second Coming as a time when Jesus, coming back to earth through the air, was to encounter Christians, both living and resurrected, who would be caught up to meet him. In the Brethren's new understanding, the purpose of this meeting was to take the church up to heaven, rather than seeing here the welcome given by a church that escorted its lord back to earth, as in the wedding parable in Matthew 25:6. Only if Jesus returns to earth, the Brethren believed, can he reign in Jerusalem, the very place where he was rejected.

Book Review: Islam Under Siege, by Akbar S Ahmed
By Ahmad Faruqui, Asia Times, June 28, 2003
The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are being squeezed between two equally strong forces. On the one hand are the forces of the West that want to modernize them, if need be through regime change. On the other hand are the forces of Osama bin Laden who want to de-Westernize them, if need be by wrapping their women in dark flowing robes. The pain is being shared equally by the two-thirds of the Muslim population that lives in Muslim countries, and who are often governed by tyrants that suppress all independent scholarship and dissent and the one-third that lives in non-Muslim countries, where even some of the longest standing democracies are rapidly regressing toward tyrannical control over their Muslim minorities. Critics of Islam in the West have begun to argue that the Koran asks Muslims to follow it blindly and resort to fanaticism. Yet in the words of linguist and translator Thomas Cleary, "Islam does not demand unreasoned belief. Rather, it invites intelligent faith, growing from observation, reflection and contemplation, beginning with nature and what is all around us. Accordingly, antagonism between religion and science such as that familiar to Westerners is foreign to Islam." It is a fact of history that Islamic civilization eventually nursed Europe out of the Dark Ages, laying the foundation for the Renaissance. It is unfortunate that Islam, which means "submission to the will of God", and whose followers greet each other with the expression, "Peace be on you", stands accused in the West of fomenting violence due to the acts of a few extremists who are acting contrary to the teachings of their faith. A few months ago, I interviewed a learned Islamic theologian about these issues, Dr Khalid Siddiqi. He teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at several colleges in the San Francisco Bay area and directs the Islamic Education and Information Center. With degrees from Dar-ul-Uloom Nadwa in India, al-Azhar University in Cairo and a doctorate from the University of London, Dr Siddiqi is in a unique position to judge the compatibility of terrorism with Islamic precepts. He said, "Violence against innocent civilians had no place in the life of Prophet Mohammed, and it should have no place in the life of his followers today."

The Israelization of American Policy 
By Marwan Bishara, CommonDreams/International Herald Tribune, June 27, 2003
For the past few months I have watched with bewilderment as America has adopted Israel's mistaken strategy in the Middle East. Will America take as long as Israel to realize that starting a war is nothing like finishing it, and that military occupation does not bring about peace or security? Two pictures in the International Herald Tribune on the same day, June 16, spoke volumes. One showed an Israeli soldier in Hebron pointing his automatic rifle at civilians with their hands in the air, and another of an American soldier doing exactly the same thing in Falluja, Iraq. If there were no captions, you couldn't tell one photograph from the other. America, like Israel, is getting increasingly bogged down by an open-ended military occupation, as attacks on its troops continue almost daily in Iraq. The situation has been aggravated by America's break-up of state institutions such as the army, rendering millions of Iraqis unemployed. Powerful but vulnerable, America and Israel seem to bring out the worst in each other. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington has internalized Israel's claustrophobic view of a world full of hatred and terrorism. Its post-Cold War optimism has given way to vengeful pessimism. President George W. Bush is walking down Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's path as he uses the dramatic events of the past two years to whip up a new theological patriotism to strengthen his governing base and confront those - mostly Muslims - who "hate us for what we are." Neither Israel nor America is bothering to ask why the Palestinians and Muslims of the Middle East are carrying out suicide attacks, something not previously seen in Islam or Palestine for the last 14 centuries. Have Israeli military occupation and American military domination transformed Middle East killing fields into fertile ground for hatred and conflict that has taken on a religious fervor? Instead of extracting the source of tension, Washington has added another occupation to the Israeli occupation. Like pyromaniac firemen, U.S. officials are implementing Sharon's war philosophy of putting out fire with fire.

Confronting Impunity for War Crimes: The Choice before Belgium -- and All of Us
By Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Intifada, June 27, 2003
Before us is a choice. Behind us are searing landscapes of impunity: Beirut, 1982; Manhattan, 2001; Netanya and Jenin, 2002. Scenes of mass death and measureless destruction in which the cries of the bereaved and odors of death erase local particularities, reminding us of humanity's infinite capacity for cruelty and violence. But human beings are also capable of creating a worldwide landscape of social and political justice. The foundations of this alternative landscape are not hidden, unattainable, or imaginary, but clearly encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international human rights law, and International Humanitarian Law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention adopted after World War II to halt grave violations of civilians' rights. Last year's establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) brings us another step closer to realizing landscapes of hope, despite the alarming US decision to withdraw from this important attempt at ensuring global justice. Methods for holding war criminals accountable have multiplied in the last decade, particularly after Spain requested the extradition of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet from the UK in 1998. Since then, the impunity of other infamous human rights violators -- Hissein Habre of Chad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein -- has been challenged or proposed to be challenged in national judicial venues, particularly in Belgium, a country unique in the world for having offered up its courts for the investigation and prosecution of atrocities committed elsewhere. In 1993, the Belgian legislature formally incorporated the principle of universal jurisdiction for war crimes and crimes against humanity into its national criminal code, expanding this law further in 1999 to cover the crime of genocide. These laws enabled Belgian courts to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide regardless of where the crimes were committed or the nationalities of the victims and perpetrators. Since the ICC lacks retroactive jurisdiction over war crimes committed prior to July 1, 2002, and will never be able to hear or handle all the cases that might be sent to it, the Belgian courts could provide a much-needed venue for addressing impunity for war crimes that have festered for decades, poisoning hearts and minds and fueling new rounds of vengeance and suffering.

Challenging the Closures in Nablus
By Ben Scribner and John Petrovato, Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, June 25, 2003
"Sometimes I feel like we are the hospice for a dying society."  -- We are writing to you from the ISM apartment in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus.  The apartment is upstairs from a martyr's home, now slated for demolition.  There are 11 internationals here, and they were surprised to see us arriving since Nablus had been sealed off through the day.  We managed to enter through a small checkpoint where we claimed to be child psychologists visiting the hospital. Our first evening we sat in on the ISM group's planning meeting for the next day's activities.  It was decided that we would attempt to join Palestinians in a village just outside Nablus to remove one of several roadblocks.  The catch was that there is a checkpoint on our side of the roadblock.  One of the Palestinian coordinators had information that the checkpoint is sometimes open just before dawn, so we decided to wake up at 4am and march from Balata, through Askar refugee camp and out to the roadblock. After a few hours "sleep" (due to the stifling heat and constant movement of tanks and jeeps through the camp) we headed out (see photo 1).  It was still  completely dark.  Some of us had concerns about moving in the dark, even with  reflective vests, as the military might still be active and we could also be mistaken for soldiers by the Palestinian resistance.  Also, we could hear military drones flying above, a possible indication that the army was still in the area. Luckily, we encountered no military vehicles, and in fact were offered tea by the lone passing motorist who pulled over to see who the hell were these yellow-vested people.  After passing Askar camp, the landscape changed from semi-urban to a wasteland of random objects, burned out vehicles, and most bizarre, the remnants of a partly built amusement park, including a ferris wheel and an actual passenger jet mounted on stilts (see photo 2).  It seemed strange to see something like this, obviously built in a more hopeful time.

The Kfar Darom obstacle
Editorial, Haaretz, June 27, 2003
Although the road map does not demand it at this stage, Israel's welfare demands the evacuation of Kfar Darom in a unilateral move that the government is now free to carry out.  -- The U.S. National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is slated to arrive tomorrow for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. This is the third high-level visit to the region by an American official - following that of President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell - in less than four weeks. Ostensibly, this is encouraging evidence of the great attention the administration is devoting to settling the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. In fact, however, this is a disturbing sign of the fragility of the Aqaba process. Based on declarations by Bush and administration spokesmen, it emerges that Washington does not have much faith in the intention of terror organizations to refrain from attacks. They are supposed to observe a cease-fire, as a first stage, and thereafter Hamas and the other organizations will be required to give up their arms so they will not be able to revert to their evil ways when they decide to put an end to the agreement. Contacts among the organizations themselves and with the government of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) are being conducted in parallel to sporadic talks between the premier's representatives, headed by the PA minister in charge of security, Mohammed Dahlan, and Israeli military officials. In these talks, the Palestinians have been presenting various demands, which, if accepted, will make things difficult, but not impossible, for the Israel Defense Forces. After eliminating various obstacles from the path, the disagreement is now focused on the fate of the long, major road in the Gaza Strip labeled the Tancher route on IDF maps. Dahlan is demanding uninterrupted and unimpeded Palestinian traffic along this road. Israel is afraid that such traffic, which would run contrary to the military conception of separation and the prevention of friction between the populations, will tempt hostile elements to attack Jewish settlements adjacent to the road. The group at risk includes the settlement of Netzarim, which is somewhat distant from the road, but the main problem is the settlement of Kfar Darom.

East Jerusalem Legal System More Dangerous Than Army
By Chris Sands, Palestine Chronicle, June 27, 2003
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PC) - In East Jerusalem, Israel’s legal system is more dangerous than its army. Here you will not see tanks constantly patrolling the streets or gun emplacements watching over everyone, but life for the sizeable Palestinian community is still hard. The reasons for this, many people believe, are a series of laws that cover everything from housing to taxation. Ziad Al-Hammouri, director general of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER), said: “The problems in East Jerusalem are different to the Occupied Territories. Here you have problems that are visible and invisible.” The Palestinians of Jerusalem are officially regarded as Israeli residents, unlike those who live in the West Bank or Gaza. This means they escape restrictions now choking the Occupied Territories and it gives them access to a variety of social welfare benefits they would not enjoy elsewhere. But their unique status does not stop them suffering, according to Mr Al-Hammouri. As director general of the JCSER, he helps those people “subjected to discriminatory policies” get the legal assistance and representation they increasingly need. Palestinians make up over 50 per cent of East Jerusalem’s population but now live in an estimated seven per cent of the area. This is largely because huge swathes of land have been confiscated by the Israelis. However, the high cost of building permits also causes difficulties, as most Palestinians cannot afford them. People subsequently build homes illegally, which almost inevitably leads to them being demolished by Israeli forces. These problems mean many residents leave for the suburbs in an often futile attempt to escape trouble.

Violence in Israel Alters Local Man’s Life
By Susan Broili, Palestine Media Center/The Herald-Sun, June 28, 2003
As he lay badly wounded for two months in an Israeli hospital, Brian Avery dreamed of coming back home to Chapel Hill. "The biggest thing I was looking forward to was having some privacy and some peace and quiet," Avery recalled. The 25-year-old Avery, a 1996 graduate of Chapel Hill High School, was shot in the face April 5 in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Members of Avery's Palestinian-backed International Solidarity Movement to Protect Palestinian People said an Israeli armored personnel carrier fired the shot that hit him. The Israeli government, in a statement issued to The Chapel Hill Herald, said the soldiers in question did not shoot the self-described peace activist. Since he returned home June 7, Avery has found some of the peace and quiet he longed for. He spends time reading, taking walks and allowing the lush beauty of his hometown to help him heal. "There's so many trees and flowers," he said. Avery already has undergone three surgeries to rebuild his face. It will take at least four more to restore his features. He almost made it home physically unscathed from his time in the dangerous West Bank region, where he also acted as a human shield. After almost four months of volunteering for the ISM, Avery had planned to leave the day before he was shot. But his taxi to the airport could not pick him up because of an around-the-clock curfew imposed April 3 by Israel Defense Forces, said his father, Robert Avery. His speech muffled by his closed and injured jaw, Brian Avery spoke recently of the events that left him with pulverized facial bones and teeth, an injured eye and a road map of scars.

Road Map to Grand Apartheid?
By Gershom Gorenberg, Middle East Information Center, June 27, 2003
Jerusalem -- The best way to understand just how Ariel Sharon plans to crumple and fold the road map to Israeli-Palestinian peace is to get out on the roads of the West Bank. Drive east from Jerusalem. Pass the stone-faced apartment buildings of Ma'aleh Adumim, a suburb of 25,000 that is the largest single Israeli settlement in the territories. Before Jericho, turn left onto a two-lane strip of asphalt that rises and plunges, in a tangle of stomach-wrenching switchbacks, through the desolate hills of the Judean Desert. To the side of the road is the settlement of Alon, a cluster of stone houses and mobile homes where several hundred Israelis live. Keep going north. A sign points to Ein Prat -- an "outpost" where a single family of settlers lives in a house built in the time of British rule. A short distance beyond is another outpost. The place is called Ma'aleh Hagit -- a handful of mobile homes, a water tank, a power line that loops around the hilltop to feed the perimeter lights. An army jeep stands by a plastic swing set and slide; a pair of soldiers stand guard over the three or four families that populate the place -- though under Israel's own laws, the settlers' presence is apparently illegal, outside the bounds of any government-approved settlement. Up the road is the outpost of Mitzpeh Danny, home to another few families. Turn west, toward the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Al-Birah, and you reach Migron, a year-and-a-half-old Israeli outpost that began with a guard watching over a cell-phone antenna. Now mobile homes cover a hilltop. On the ridge beyond, you can see the red-tiled roofs that are the mark of older settlements. I've watched settlements grow for years. Yet the sheer physical spread of the settlers' presence on the ridges of the West Bank today is still stunning. Not only have established Israeli communities grown but clumps of mobile homes now mark hilltop after hilltop between them. According to the Peace Now movement's Settlement Watch monitoring project, since 1996 more than 100 outposts have been established -- tiny settlements, created on the cheap in apparent defiance of government policy. But the defiance is only apparent. Ariel Sharon gave a major push to the outpost effort in 1998, when, as foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's government, he publicly urged settlers to "grab more hills, expand the territory." "Everything that's grabbed, will be in our hands," he explained, and the rest of the West Bank would end up in Palestinian hands. About two-thirds of the outposts have been established since March 2001, when Sharon became prime minister -- though the official guidelines of the government formed then, and of the new one formed this year, state that there will be no new settlements.