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Palestine Diaries

courtesy The Electronic Intifada

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Human Rights

courtesy The Electronic Intifada

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The Main Thing Is to Satisfy Caesar
By Uri Avnery, Arab News 2003-07-21
TEL AVIV, 21 July 2003 — George Caesar, the imperator of the new Rome, likes Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). He has invited him to the White House and showers him with compliments. As in ancient Rome, the likes and dislikes of the emperor shape the policy of the empire. All the ministers, eunuchs, officials, proconsuls and local rulers act accordingly, while mouthing words of flattery and praising the wisdom of Caesar, irrespective of whether he is really wise, like Julius Caesar, stupid like Tiberius or downright mad, like Caligula. Caesar is Caesar. George Bush is a simple man. His mental world, like a Western, contains good guys and bad guys. His impressions are personal and come “from the gut”. They have nothing to do with logic or political analysis. Arafat made Bush angry, he is a bad guy. Abu Mazen is a good guy, mainly because he is not Arafat. Like King Herod, who lived in Jerusalem but whose ears picked up the slightest murmur in Rome, Ariel Sharon listens to every whisper in Washington. In order to influence Bush, he always has to know exactly which way the wind is blowing. If Bush likes Abu Mazen, so Sharon, too, likes Abu Mazen. More than that, he lays out a blue-and-white carpet for him to walk on. He invites him to his Jerusalem office, exchanges smiles and handshakes over the emblem of the State of Israel, publicly orders his people to strengthen Abu Mazen in every possible way, watching over him like a good father over a promising son. But with friends like this, one has no need of enemies. I would advise Abu Mazen not to turn his back when Sharon is around. Definitely not.

Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs
By Edward Said, CounterPunch 2003-07-21
The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing. For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed -- mistakenly -- that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked. At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors. Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn't prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.

Anti-Semitism in Israel
By Ron Csillag, Toronto Star 2003-07-19
Noah Efron grew up in the United States a cosseted Jew. He was innocent of anti-Semitism; had never experienced a single insult or slur. He was denied nothing because of his religion. To him, anti-Semitism was "a grand abstraction, like communism." All that changed when he moved to another country. In his new home, Jews were depicted in the crudest of stereotypes that had never found public expression in the U.S. In newspapers, magazines, on TV shows and posters, among politicians, youth and the intelligentsia, Jews were portrayed as vampires, leeches and apes, sometimes with hooked noses, warts and stooped backs. They were accused of controlling the government like a puppeteer. They were presented as lecherous, money-grubbing parasites and clannish, corrupt fifth-columnists. The ugly imagery was chillingly reminiscent of Nazi-era depictions of Jews. It's what got Julius Streicher, founder of the Third Reich newspaper Der Stuermer, hanged at Nuremberg. What was most disturbing was that this was happening, of all places, in Israel, a land Efron effusively says "cascades in miracles." "My first encounter with anti-Semitism was in Israel, and the anti-Semites were my people, my heroes, the people I'd moved halfway around the world to join. After many years, I had finally seen the face of anti-Semitism, and it looked surprisingly like my own," writes Efron in Real Jews: Secular vs. Ultra-Orthodox And The Struggle For Jewish Identity In Israel (Basic, 2003), a disturbing work that shows the land of milk and honey tearing itself apart over the very essence of what it means to be a Jew. Many simply refer to it as Israel's "other war."

The end of the two-state solution?
By Ahmad Samih Khalidi, The Guardian 2003-07-18
The 'separation fence' will begin a new era of Palestinian struggle -- As Tony Blair entertained Ariel Sharon at No 10 earlier this week, it is possible to imagine that beyond the polite small talk, Blair was trying to convey his concern about the need to maintain momentum for the truce that finally launched the Middle East road map. It is likely Blair urged Sharon to support the reformist Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas; Sharon would have assented, but claimed that further progress was entirely contingent on the Palestinians performance on security. For the moment at least, these appear to be the issues. The Palestinians need a substantial prisoner release and visible changes on the ground, and the Israelis want to make sure that the Palestinians deliver on security as promised. And, for the moment, it is not entirely unlikely that both sides will get some (but not all) of what they need - enough to keep the process afloat for the next few months such that the prospects of further progress remain alive. But even if this momentum can be sustained, it will soon roll up against some very hard facts on the ground. The geo-political map of Palestine is being transformed and with it the possibility of a resolution based on the idea at the heart of the current process: partition between "the state of Palestine and the state of Israel living side by side in peace", according to President Bush's "vision". While the international community has long believed the national claims of both sides can only be reconciled through some Solomonic division of land, at different stages each side has been ambivalent (to say the least) towards the idea that their aspirations have to be scaled down to a limited territorial base. After decades of rejectionism the Palestinian mainstream adopted partition in 1988, and the notion of a Palestinian state in the lands occupied in 1967 (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza) now forms the bedrock of Palestinian national aspirations.

Israel, We Bless Thee
Arab News 2003-07-21
Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it, and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads "I will bless those who bless thee." I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us. For extorting from me and my fellow Americans $16,000,000,000.00 a year for the last 4 decades, we bless thee. For taking our most sophisticated weapons technology and stealing it for yourself without paying the American patent holders, we bless thee. For taking that high-tech military technology and selling it to our enemies, such as the Russians and Chinese, thus further endangering us, we bless thee. For using that weaponry in a sustained attack against a United States ship, the USS Liberty, in an attempt to sink her, thus preventing US servicemen from revealing to the rest of the world information concerning the war crimes they witnessed you commit against Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Desert during the Six Day War, we bless thee. For killing 35 and wounding 170 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, we bless thee. For bribing the United States government into covering it up, preventing any justice from being done for the benefit of the families of the lost sailors - as well as the American People, we bless thee.

Bush's Racial Politics At Home and Abroad
By Cynthia McKinney, CounterPunch 2003-07-20
Time for a New Declaration of Independence -- There has not been an Administration in recent memory that has stood for so little of what we hold to be self-evident American truths. Our Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our Republic, declares that there are certain unalienable rights and that it is the responsibility of government to protect, preserve, and promote these rights. However, in the words of its signers, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce [a people to life] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Today, our young men and women are in harm's way, facing what we are told to be up to 25 attacks per day. Already, nearly as many have died in George W. Bush's war as were killed in his father's. The young men and women who are now parked in the desert sands of Iraq, appear to have been subjected to deceit by the Bush Administration. One of the first Executive Orders signed by our President after declaring the War on Terrorism was to deny our young service men and women their much needed and deserved high deployment overtime pay. As our young troops and their families deal with the hardships of deployment for years on end, they won't get the overtime pay that they were promised and counted on getting. In addition to that, we still have over 160,000 veterans from the George Bush's Daddy's Gulf War who have not been adequately treated for their ailments and toxic exposures when they were sent to fight in 1991. And moreover, as a result of several complaints and lawsuits filed against the government by our veterans of the First Gulf War, health screenings were supposed to be given to each and every soldier currently being sent to Iraq. This time to avoid the excuse that the health conditions were pre-existent. These health screenings were put in place by law to protect our soldiers in the theatre of battle.

The Hatred That Grows in an Occupied Land
By Johann Hari, Arab News/The Independent 2003-07-21
LONDON, 21 July 2003 — All my life, the images of the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have flickered on television screens in the corner of my living room, mostly unwatched and unnoticed. Like most people, I guess, I can’t remember a time when I honestly felt shocked by them, even when they showed some nameless, bullet-pierced child. They have always seemed, I’m ashamed to say, a bit like the weather forecast: predictable, dull, a cue to zap to another channel. So when this week, for the first time, I visited the occupied territories — no, to hell with the angry e-mailers, Palestine — I didn’t expect to feel like I had been kicked in the stomach by the Israeli Defense Force. Even though I had piously written in defense of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and against the settlers, I had long ago turned the Palestinian people in my mind into faceless lumps of suffering putty, an amorphous, bleeding blob on which to confer occasional pity. So as I was driven toward the huge, snaking queue of battered cars that waits tetchily in front of the Qalandia roadblock, the first thing I noticed — stupid, I know — was how familiar they looked. There is an old lady being pushed in a wheelchair past our car along a bumpy dust-track. The Israeli soldiers leave the sick waiting for so long at the checkpoints in hot ambulances that have no air conditioning that the doctors have no choice but to simply carry, push or drag them to the nearest medical center. She looks, it strikes me suddenly, quite a lot like my granny.

Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement
By Pankaj Mehta, CounterPunch 2003-07-17
Rutgers University will be hosting the Third National Student Conference on the Palestinian Solidarity Movement October 10-12 in New Brunswick, NJ. While the University has recognized the conference as an example of student free speech and freedom of political association, the conference, and its local sponsor, New Jersey Solidarity -- Activists for the Liberation of Palestine (NJS), are under attack from various media outlets and state politicians. New Jersey Solidarity is a grassroots organization dedicated to resistance and action in support of the Palestinian struggle for justice, national liberation, human rights and self-determination. The attacks are not confined to merely trying to stop the conference but, instead, seek to criminalize New Jersey Solidarity and by extension, the Palestinian solidarity movement as a whole. The goal of the attackers is to equate the Palestinian liberation struggle with terrorism and label those who support the struggle as terrorist sympathizers with all the consequences it entails under the Patriot Act. New Jersey's Governor Jim McGreevey is in the forefront in this regard. The governor's spokesman, Micah Rasmussen, said the governor finds the group "abhorrent" and has been gathering information to determine whether or not they have a history of violence. As if this was not enough, he went on to state that the group did not turn up on lists of suspected terrorist organizations. (Saturday July 12 Press of Atlantic City). The implications of the last statement are clear: any group that supports the Palestinian liberation struggle should be considered a "terrorist" organization.

The Rigged Trade Game
New York Times 2003-07-20
Put simply, the Philippines got taken. A charter member of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the former American colony dutifully embraced globalization's free-market gospel over the last decade, opening its economy to foreign trade and investment. Despite widespread worries about their ability to compete, Filipinos bought the theory that their farmers' lack of good transportation and high technology would be balanced out by their cheap labor. The government predicted that access to world markets would create a net gain of a half-million farming jobs a year, and improve the country's trade balance. It didn't happen. Small-scale farmers across the Philippine archipelago have discovered that their competitors in places like the United States or Europe do not simply have better seeds, fertilizers and equipment. Their products are also often protected by high tariffs, or underwritten by massive farm subsidies that make them artificially cheap. No matter how small a wage Filipino workers are willing to accept, they cannot compete with agribusinesses afloat on billions of dollars in government welfare. "Farmers in the United States get help every step of the way," says Rudivico Mamac, a very typical, and very poor, Filipino sharecropper, whose 12-year-old son is embarrassed that his family cannot afford to buy him a ballpoint pen or notebooks for school. The same sad story repeats itself around the globe, as poor countries trying to pull themselves into the world market come up against the richest nations' insistence on stacking the deck for their own farmers. President Bush deserves credit for traveling to Africa and trying to focus attention on that continent's plight. But meanwhile, struggling African cotton farmers are forced to compete with products from affluent American agribusinesses whose rock-bottom prices are made possible by as much as $3 billion in annual subsidies. Sugar producers in Africa are stymied by the European Union's insistence on subsidizing beet sugar production as part of a wasteful farming-welfare program that gobbles up half its budget.

"He risked all for others": Tom Hurndall's mother remembers her son
By Emily Sheffield, Electronic Intifada 2003-07-21
On Friday 11 April, my eldest son, a photojournalist, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier. He was trying to protect two young girls in the Israelis' line of fire in Gaza. He is 21 and now lies in a coma, with severe brain damage. We know he is not expected to recover and our family are endeavouring to come to terms with this. Recently, we were able to fly him home from Israel and he is now in The Royal Free in Hampstead, in a room overlooking London, filled with photographs of his life. Two large sheets covered in wonderful written messages from friends hang on the walls. I was at work when I first heard Tom had been seriously wounded. I'm head of learning support at the Argyle primary school in Camden. My daughter, Sophie, phoned: a news reporter had called her to ask if she had been told about her brother. We hadn't appreciated that Tom had gone down to Rafah in the Gaza Strip that week - we thought he was in a refugee camp in Jordan. I went into shock. The first thing I did was to call Tom's father, Anthony, a lawyer, who was in Russia on business. We decided he would fly to Israel the next day with Billy, our second son, as Tom had been airlifted to Seroka hospital in Be'er Sheva.