The case of the prisoners
Editorial, Jerusalem Times, July 10, 2003
All the taboos about East Jerusalem were broken, when Palestinian cabinet ministers met with their counterparts in Jerusalem especially between Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid and his counterpart, Abdel Karim Abu Saleh and Minister of Prisoner Affairs Hashem Abdel Razeq. This meeting occurred in East Jerusalem in what is now the Israeli Ministry of Justice on Salaheddin Street, the business hub of East Jerusalem. With this the Palestinians broke their own principle to demonstrate at every turn their refusal to accept the unilateral annexation of Arab East Jerusalem. This violation of Palestinian taboos by the highest ranking Palestinian leadership, who just a few months ago called for the boycott of the municipal elections in Jerusalem, to uphold the notion that East Jerusalem was annexed against the will of the Palestinian people and the international community, was summarily dismissed to demonstrate to the Israeli side the importance of the release of  Palestinian prisoners incarcerated during the past 34 months of the Intifada. Is it then in vain that Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and his entire cabinet, at each meeting of the two sides, have tried to  drive home to Ariel Sharon and his cabinet that the release of Palestinian prisoners is an essential part of the process and that the credibility and political future of the reformists is on the line. So far the Israeli response has been inadequate. Certainly, the Palestinian leadership understands the constraints and public pressure exerted by the victims' families and Israeli public opinion in general, yet neither the intercession by PM Abbas with Sharon, nor the meetings with Lapid, Mofaz and Shalom have convinced the Israeli side that this issue, if not properly tackled and a major release of Palestinian prisoners from all the factions, especially from Hamas and Jihad, takes place, the Roadmap process would be seriously undermined and all the efforts of the Palestinian Authority will be dissipated, and the political future of the Abbas cabinet would crumble. The reconstructed Palestinian police and security services continue to consolidate their control over the northern Gaza Strip and the Bethlehem governorate. Their activities of arresting violators of the cease-fire is unpopular but necessary to demonstrate that the PA is serious about living up to its commitments to the agreement. Yet on the very day that PM Abbas and PM Sharon met in Jerusalem and announced to the world their adherence to the Roadmap. the Israeli government announced unabashedly the expropriation of 17,000 dunums in the village of Beit Iksa in the East Jerusalem district. Moreover, Israeli army officers have said to Palestinians, the future Palestinian state will be in what used to be known as Areas A and B, and that Area C, which is over sixty percent of the West Bank and a third of the Gaza Strip, will be annexed to Israel.

Middle East Surprises for America
By John V. Whitbeck, Arab News, July 10, 2003
For those formulating American foreign policy and dreaming of remaking the Middle East in their own image, the region appears to be full of surprises. The determined resistance of some Iraqis to the Western occupation of their country seems to have been genuinely unanticipated. It should not have been. If the United States were conquered and occupied by Arab armies which announced their intention to stay for years and to restructure the country’s government and economy along Islamic lines, would no Americans resist, not even “hardcore Bush loyalists” or “Republican Party remnants”? The legislative elections in Kuwait on July 5, if noticed in America, should have constituted an even more stunning surprise. Before and after the conquest of Iraq, proponents of the war evoked the vision of a virtuous “domino effect” toppling authoritarian regimes in the region and replacing them with modernizing, Western-oriented “democratic” ones. As a genuine reason for war, such a democratic mission always lacked credibility with those who actually live in the region, who recognize that, so long as America and Israel act like Siamese twins joined at the brain, any government in the Arab world which actually reflected the will of its people would be fervently anti-American. Of course, Americans do like elections — provided that they produce the “right” result. (Donald Rumsfeld has made clear that an Islamic government will not be permitted in Iraq even if most of Iraq’s people were to favor one.) However, few believe that the United States would really prefer a democratically elected government which is anti-American to an authoritarian regime which is pro-American. So, what happened in the elections in Kuwait, the most pro-American country in the Arab world, with the most reason (by far) to be pro-American? The “liberals”, who seek a more open and modern society and had hoped to make significant gains, were almost wiped out, retaining only three seats (down from eight) in the 50-seat Parliament. The remaining 47 seats went to conservatives and Islamists, including radical fundamentalists. The “domino effect” has not worked out — at least not falling in the “right” direction — next door to Iraq. What would genuinely fair elections produce in other Arab countries, whose people are far less pro-American? A quiet burial for the “democratic mission” can be anticipated. Another illusion destined to be dispelled soon is that the current “road map” for Israel/Palestine will win the United States friends and gratitude in the Arab world. While the “road map” is widely described as a “peace plan”, in Arab eyes, “peace” in Israel/Palestine requires ending the occupation, not crushing all resistance to it, while, in most of the world, true “peace” is recognized to require some measure of “justice”, a word rigorously avoided by successive American governments in connection with their successive “peace plans”.

Our gift to Iraq
By A.L. Kennedy, The Guardian, July 10, 2003
Due to the dreadfully unpatriotic behaviour of Robin Cook and the BBC, many of you are now experiencing what we might call worry. You're mumbling anxious nonsense like, "Surely, it was obvious that Iraq's new democratically poisonous water supplies, freedom-loving house-to-house searches, its sexy, western-style press censorship and friendly, illegal interrogations might not entirely please Iraqis." Why, I'll bet you're allowing phrases like "playing Russian roulette with other people's lives" and "blood-soaked, greedy, Westminster scum" to creep into otherwise respectable conversations. You may even worry that Tony Blair has misplaced his soul. But worries cause disease. So to keep us all happy and healthy, let's focus on the one real feelgood factor left in Iraq - depleted uranium. That it is left all over Iraq just shows how much we care, because DU is gorgeous stuff - gorgeous uranium-238 with a dash of gorgeous uranium-235. It's cheap, if you're subsidising nuclear power to the hilt, and frankly we have whole slag heaps of it to dump. It's almost twice as heavy as lead, so it's great for armour plating, radiation shielding, ballast in missiles and aircraft counterweights. It's splendid for shells and - better yet - it's pyrophoric. Which is to say, if you bang it into anything, it produces blasting amounts of heat. War, naturally, involves many things banging into each other. If we're not wasting our own troops by mistake, there's always enemy action to consider, plus accidents and malfunctions - it's not all shiny flightsuits and blasphemous profiteering: combat has it's dark side, too. A few of you have heard that DU is toxic and radioactive, and maybe you're fretting about that. With so many vehicles containing DU and so much DU ammunition rattling about and the possibilities of violence being fairly high, DU could be released into the environment and come into contact with people, even British people.

Temporary protection and the Palestinians
By Susan M. Akram, Daily Star, July 10, 2003
The “road map” presented by the US administration does not provide any breakthroughs on the major issues that confront Palestinians and Israelis in finding a durable and just peace. A comprehensive negotiated solution to the conflict is more remote than ever, particularly in the absence of political will among the relevant states to enforce international legal norms that can provide a just framework for a durable solution. An international regime of temporary protection provides one possibility for breaking the impasse and improving the Palestinians’ situation, while preparing for a just, durable solution. Temporary protection (TP) is widely regarded as an international legal norm that is now obligatory on states in certain circumstances with regard to their treatment of a mass influx of refugees, or persons fleeing armed conflict or civil strife. By granting temporary protection in such circumstances, states agree not to return people seeking refuge from conflict and grant them certain minimum rights pending a durable solution. In the more recent regimes of TP, the focus has been on eventual safe return unless individualized refugee claims are sustained. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner, the EU and other bodies have formalized the basic rights that states are obligated to grant under temporary protection, including nonreturn to areas of risk to life or safety, the right to freedom of movement and to obtain certain benefits for subsistence. Despite the controversy that TP has generated in Western states (on the basis that it undermines permanent protection offered by the 1951 Refugee Convention and other major rights instruments), it has special significance to the Palestinian refugee situation. For historical, legal and political reasons, Palestinian refugees and stateless individuals have been effectively denied many of the minimal legal protections available to other refugees under the Refugee Convention regime. This has had grave consequences, both for Palestinians within the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora, the latter including those within the Arab states. Although the Arab states have offered a de facto form of temporary protection to Palestinians for 55 years, actual practice has been very inconsistent, and for the most part fails to meet minimum standards guaranteed in the major human rights instruments.

Time for a Change
By MIFTAH, July 8, 2003
As the occupied Palestinians continue to unilaterally carry out steps outlined in the American brokered ‘roadmap’ to peace, Israelis have yet to recognize the Palestinian right to exist or stop their hateful incitement as demanded by the peace plan. According to Phase I of the ‘roadmap:’ “Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitment to the two-state vision of an independent, viable sovereign Palestinian state.” More importantly the ‘roadmap’ addresses the issue of incitement calling on “Palestinians and Israelis [to] resume security cooperation […] to end violence, terrorism and incitement.” The ‘roadmap’ gets even more specific, insisting that “all official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.” Nevertheless, the map of greater Israel continues to be highlighted on Israeli TV without any recognition of the Palestinian territories, which are occupied by Israel. Israel has not launched a campaign in which they educate their citizens, who are mostly immigrants, on history and international law or the Palestinian right to live in freedom on occupied Palestinian territories. As the ‘roadmap’ clearly acknowledges, without Israeli recognition of the Palestinians’ internationally accredited and long ignored rights, there will be no reconciliation process and any peace initiative will be doomed to fail. Israel is slowly turning the American ‘roadmap’ into an Israeli document, demanding the occupied to unilaterally act to secure Israeli existence and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank including east Jerusalem. The number of illegal outposts is more than it was the day Israel pledged to remove all outposts and freeze settlement activity, this has been a condition for every peace initiative proposed. Everyone knows that the settlements create an obstacle to peace and Sharon and his coalition government of settlers continue their illegal contractions.

Massive Concrete Wall Encircles Qalqiliya
By Christian Chaise, Palestine Media Center, July 10, 2003
“Qalqiliya residents nearly totally cut off from rest of West Bank by 8-meter high and 130-kilometer long wall.” -- Until a few months ago, the Shreim family could see the plains of central Israel from their living room. "Now all that we can see is this wall," laments Nabil Abdelfattah Shreim, pointing at the huge concrete structure which looms just 20 meters (yards) in front of their home. The eight-meter high wall has been built by the Israeli army to separate the 40,000 inhabitants of this West Bank town from Israeli territory. Located in the north of the West Bank, Qalqiliya is bang on the Green Line, the boundary which separates the Jewish state from the Palestinian territories. Before the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September 2000, Israelis poured into Qalqiliya every Saturday, boosting the economy of the town's residents. But the dozens of suicide bombers who have crossed the frontier to carry out their attacks on Israeli targets have persuaded Ariel Sharon's government to build a security fence along the length of the West Bank in a bid to stop infiltrations. The barrier normally takes the form of a two-tiered wire fence which runs on either side of a road and a ditch. But at Qalqiliya, it transforms itself for several kilometres (miles) into a grey concrete wall dotted at regular intervals by turrets which allow Israeli soldiers to keep a permanent eye on the town. A defense ministry spokesman said that the first section of the security fence, which will run for around 130 kilometers (85 miles) across the northwest of the West Bank, should be completed by the end of the month. The Shreims, who moved into their home two years ago, are the epitome of the Palestinian middle classes who prospered in the wake of the 1993 Oslo peace accords that raised hopes of a brighter future. Nabil, a 41-year-old car parts salesman, said that he had spent 320,000 dollars on buying and doing up his luxurious home which boasts a miniature waterfall in the garden. But one has to climb up on to the roof of the house to see over the wall to the first houses on Israeli territory.The Shreim family and their neighbours are not the only ones to suffer as a result of the wall. The route chosen by the Israeli authorities for the fence means that Qalqiliya finds itself encircled and nearly totally cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Its only link to the outside is a single Israeli army roadblock in the east of the town.

Yanoun 1948, Today
By Ben Scribner, Palestine Chronicle, July 10, 2003
I spent the last two nights in Yanoun, a tiny Palestinian village frozen in time. The village sleeps beneath starry nights on a steep hillside that overlooks a miniature valley with two fields, a line of trees, and a spring. A rough dirt road runs through the only gap in the surrounding hills. I wake to sheep and goats being herded into the fields by children. Old men sit under olive trees and invite me for tea as I pass. The year is 1948. 1948 is, of course, the year of Al Nakba, "The Catastrophe" or for Israel, the year of Israel's "independence" Like many other villages of this time, Zionist colonial outposts and settlements surround Yanoun. But while other Palestinian villages are cleared, their residents massacred and fleeing, Yanoun sits frozen in a moment of half-existence, it's houses half-empty, its villagers half-refugees. John and I, both from Boston, USA, arrived yesterday and were greeted by a villager named Yassir with tea and cigarettes. He is about forty-five, and has the taught build and leather skin of a person who works outdoors and eats little. He does not seem to mind sitting in the glaring sun, and does not glance at the settlement that stares down at us from the opposing hill. His broad, squinting smile and shy laugh eases our attempt at conversation without a common language. He tells us that seven of his grandfathers were born in Yanoun. The oldest man I have met here, Ahmad Mahmoud Subah, has lost one eye to age and the other lost to a settler. A few years ago, before the Nakba began, he was alone tending sheep on a field very nearby when he was attacked and badly beaten. Now he leans on a mat in the home of his son, his heavy head nodding downward. With his staff and arm outstretched, he insists on walking painfully up to the roof to join us for tea. At night, we hear the barks of dogs echoing through the valley. Only the settlers keep dogs, and I fear an attack, not knowing that wild dogs also roam. The valley is so still that I can hear the dogs panting as they run. Another outpost above and behind the village shines a spotlight onto the hills in front of me as I peer out the window. I do not sleep the first night. But Louis, a Canadian who has been here two weeks, and John, both sleep soundly. The next day, the mayor shows us a map he has drawn. Yanoun appears as a lonely teardrop in a sea of stolen land. At its heart its treasure: a natural spring. The settlers must bring their water in by truck. But sometimes on Saturdays they enter the Yanoun, heavily armed, and wash their dogs in the spring's water trough.

Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle, July 10, 2003
"But the long wait has abruptly ended. On July 08, 2003, Mohamed al-Khatib was killed in a car accident in Kuwait. His mother, now very old, received the news and for once abandoned her blanket outside .." -- The mother of Mohamed al-Khateb resolutely awaited the return of her son. But waiting for her was hardly a metaphoric notion. She sat on an old blanket, placed permanently in a shaded spot adjacent to her house and waited, for decades. We grew older, from childhood to manhood, and the tired old face of Mohamed’s mother always greeted us, as we walked about our tiny yet crowded refugee camp. My foolish age once made me wonder if she ever moved or took a rest, even once. Later, I realized that she simply waited for her son, never losing hope that he would return one day. Mohamed was in Kuwait. He left his refugee camp in Gaza following the 1956 war. He was still young then and Diaspora was still fresh in the minds of all refugees. There was no work in Gaza, so he choose to head to Kuwait, joining an influx of well-educated Palestinian youth that sought better lives in the Gulf states. The young man never intended to stay in Kuwait for eternity. The plan was as simple as all others, making enough money to support one’s family and return home. Mohamed returned twice or more to visit his family in the camp, once with a family of his own. But as the longing for her son and grandchildren reached an intolerable stage, Mohamed’s mother was struck with the aftermath of the 1967 war: the Israeli army occupied the Gaza Strip and the rest of the territories. The woman felt the bitterness of defeat and the cruelty of a new fate imposed on her. But there was more on her mind than the fall of her last safe heaven. Mohamed, along with tens of thousands of Palestinians who were outside of their towns, villages and refugee camps, were denied even their refugee status. They were permanently exiled.