Nightlife in Jerusalem
By Neve Gordon, CounterPunch 8/2/2003
"They Arrested 19 Men and We Don't Know Where They Took Them!" -- The meal had been lovely, and I was preparing to pay the bill when my cell phone rang. Even though it was just a few minutes before midnight, the Jerusalem restaurant was bustling and I had to walk outside to hear what the caller was saying."They arrested Jammal, Yusef and seventeen other men!" the woman on the other end exclaimed. "We don't know where they took them But Irit, Ezra, Tamara and Amiel are on their way to the military checkpoint."Together with Farid and Mounther, I left the restaurant. We drove towards checkpoint 300, the one between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.On the way Mounther noted that the time and day of the operation had been carefully chosen. The hour was late and it would be difficult to find a lawyer who could file an urgent appeal; moreover, the Israeli weekend newspapers were already at the printers - by Sunday the incident would no longer be news.This was the third time that Israeli Border Police had entered Nuemann, a small Palestinian village located on the southern hilly terrain of Jerusalem. This village, together with 27 others, had been annexed to the municipality immediately following the 1967 war. Yet, unlike most of the inhabitants of the other villages, who were subsequently registered by the Israeli civil administration as Israeli residents (as opposed to citizens), the inhabitants of Nuemann were given West Bank identity cards. Thus, the Nuemann residents and their houses belong to different legal and administrative systems: the houses and land are part of the Jerusalem municipal system, while the inhabitants are residents of the West Bank and therefore subjected to Israeli military rule.

Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
By Mickey Z., CounterPunch 8/4/2003
As July turned into August, the thoughts of repressed white men turn to...marriage? In Israel (a.k.a. the Holy Land), the Knesset hurriedly passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis from obtaining Israeli citizenship or residency. (FYI: Anyone else who marries an Israeli remains entitled to Israeli citizenship.) As reported by Justin Huggler of the Guardian, "Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip will either have to move to the occupied territories, or live apart from their husband or wife. Their children will be affected too: from the age of 12 they will be denied citizenship or residency and forced to move out of Israel."The ostensible reason for this racist legislation is this: The Israeli Arab community, already 20% of the population, is growing faster than the Jewish population...and, over the past 10 years, more than 100,000 Palestinians have become Israeli citizens through marriage (mostly to Israeli Arabs).Of course, those in favor of the law cloaked their bigotry in the garb of anti-terrorism. "We are in a state of war--not with the English, or the Americans, or the Dutch, or the Slovaks--we are at war with our neighbors, the Palestinians," Gideon Sa'ar, of the Likud Party, said before the vote. "It's a tragic reality.""This law comes to address a security issue," said Gideon Ezra, a cabinet minister. "Since September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks, between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs."By "significant," Ezra apparently means the 20 (out of 100,000) Israeli Arabs who allegedly have been involved in "suicide bombings or other militant attacks."

The myths of Camp David
By Ghassan Khatib, Daily Star 8/4/2003
Three years after the Camp David summit ­ that infamous “lost opportunity” ­ it is useful to examine whether the alternative approaches attempted after the summit’s failure were productive for either party to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was inevitable that allowing this very first and highly visible final-status negotiations summit to crash and burn would bring us to the only alternative to peaceful negotiations ­ violent confrontation. Today, both parties are paying the price. For Palestinians, Israel, after it failed to convince the Palestinian leadership to accept final status agreements at Camp David, decided to try other means of “convincing” it of the kind of solution Israel wanted. Starting with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and since, Israel has used all manners of pressure against Palestinians, including violence and collective punishment. There is no other explanation for the Barak government’s precedent-setting act of allowing Ariel Sharon to enter Al-Haram al-Sharif for a public relations stunt. When Palestinians demonstrated, Israel responded with a blizzard of force, killing an average of 10 Palestinians a day for the first 10 days of what was later to be called the intifada, despite almost no Israeli casualties. This barrage was accompanied by the rapid propagation of several myths crafted by Israel about Camp David. One of these was that Israel made an “unprecedented and generous offer” to end the occupation of 90-95 percent of the Occupied Territories, an offer the Palestinians refused to accept.In fact, there was no documented Israeli offer at Camp David. There were American attempts to establish positions, but these were not Israeli positions and they were not generous. Even these suggestions did not present a serious strategy for handling the Jerusalem component of the conflict. After Camp David, there was an opportunity to build on what the summit had started ­ US President Bill Clinton introduced a peace proposal that was refused by neither Palestinians nor Israelis. There is no truth to the allegation that Palestinians rejected the dream that they had always struggled for.

The designated monitor should start monitoring
Editorial, Daily Star 8/4/2003
The progress and regression in implementing the “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are looking remarkably familiar. Similar recent attempts to stop the mutual warfare and violence, and prod a negotiated peace accord, included the Mitchell and Tenet plans and other well-intentioned proposals. None have worked to date, and we may be witnessing one big reason why: the absence of a decisive third party mediator, monitor, arbiter, and whistle-blower.The “Quartet,” comprised of the US, UN, EU, and Russia, was touted as the sponsor and guarantor of the road map, but the Quartet is nowhere to be seen. We are concerned about the implication, mainly that the United States, once again, is the only possible third party that can influence the flow of the negotiations. Like a thunderstorm, this is a reality that we must deal with pragmatically, rather than judge morally. ...One of its specific aims was to provide a monitoring mechanism, in the form of an external party that would examine events on the ground, and say to the world whether the Israelis or the Palestinians ­ or both ­ were or were not implementing the provisions of the road map. It is possible that the United States’ multiple senior officials involved in the process are doing this quietly, and behind the scenes. That probably defeats the purpose of such a role, which aims to put public pressure on both sides to implement the road map. Or they are not doing it at all, leaving the parties to revert to the patterns that have repeatedly caused previous failures: each side seeks revenge and retaliation for the violence of the other, and each side also refuses to move according to the road map scenario because it claims the other side is not living up to its obligations.

The War on Truth
By John Pilger, Dissident Voice 8/4/2003
In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked, and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling headstones and unchanging historical truth. Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here, in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: "Our armies do not come...as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British, who gassed and bombed those they called "miscreants". It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle East never recovered. Every day now, in the United States, the all-pervasive media tell Americans that their bloodletting in Iraq is well under way, although the true scale of the attacks is almost certainly concealed. Soon, more soldiers will have been killed since the "liberation" than during the invasion. Sustaining the myth of "mission" is becoming difficult, as in Vietnam. This is not to doubt the real achievement of the invaders' propaganda, which was the suppression of the truth that most Iraqis opposed both the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland. One reason the BBC's Andrew Gilligan angered Downing Street was that he reported that, for many Iraqis, the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the fallen dictatorship. This is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook his head and lectured me on the "precision" of American weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science in the service of America's unique divinity. It was like interviewing a priest. Only American "boys" and "girls" suffer, and at the hands of "Ba'athist remnants", a self-deluding term in the spirit of General Maude's "miscreants". The media echo this, barely gesturing at the truth of a popular resistance and publishing galleries of GI amputees, who are described with a maudlin, down-home chauvinism which celebrates the victimhood of the invader while casting the vicious imperialism that they served as benign. At the State Department, the under-secretary for international security, John Bolton, suggested to me that, for questioning the fundamentalism of American policy, I was surely a heretic, "a Communist Party member", as he put it.

No such thing as a free hudna
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz 8/4/2003
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are working hard to try to persuade the citizens of Israel, including the unemployed and the single mothers, that the road back to economic security unavoidably includes a rough transition period. Without going into the shortcomings of the government's economic program, it is nevertheless possible to say that this is one of the rare cases in which the decision-makers have taken short-term risks for the sake of a shot at an improved quality of life in the long term. But the sense of responsibility, the wisdom and the courage suddenly disappear when it comes to life itself - to the physical security of those same citizens.  Ten weeks after the cabinet approved the road map and five weeks into the cease-fire, the choice facing the political echelon is between a major threat to personal security in the long term and a certain degree of security risk in the short term - between a fragile, temporary quiet that will last a few weeks and the chance of a permanent arrangement that will last many years. The government has preferred the assessments that the Palestinians will extend the hudna (temporary truce) to the warnings that if the cease-fire is not fueled by tangible improvements in the Palestinians' daily lives and hopes for an end to the occupation, the fire will flare up again to previously unknown heights. Saeb Erekat, a member of the Palestinian parliament, warned members of the "peace coalition" over the weekend that if there is no improvement in the civilian population's situation, the armed militias will gain control of the street.

Open wound at the Muqata
Bt Danny Rubenstein, Ha'aretz 8/4/2003
The Palestinian leadership and Palestinian public, are, for the moment, prepared to bear the national humiliation of the "leader and symbol" who is under house arrest. But it should not be thought that this can go on for a long time. Arafat imprisoned in Ramallah is an open wound in the Palestinian political and social fabric that will lead to more and more problems. -- Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is fed up with the siege. Last week it was easily perceivable from the broadcasts of the Arab television channels and the pictures on the front pages of the Palestinian newspapers just how fed up he is. Everyone had seen how his Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) met with U.S. President George W. Bush, photographs were published with King Muhammad VI of Morocco and with King Abdullah of Jordan (last Thursday) - whereas Arafat had to make do with pictures of himself with the new British consul in Jerusalem, with children from a summer camp and with the mayor of Bethlehem, Hanna Nasr. It is not a question of pictures, or even a matter of public standing - but rather a real issue for a leader who is humiliated and having his nose rubbed in the dust. It is difficult to evaluate the diplomatic and political implicationsof this. It is well known: For years, Arafat was accustomed to being in the center of all Palestinian activity, to travel around the world - and all of a sudden, he really has nothing to do. Abu Mazen is sensitive to this. Dozens of VIPs and delegations coming to Israel and the territories ask to meet with him, and the answer they receive is: first go see Arafat. Some of them agree and some refuse. Abu Mazen also does not forget, every few days, to declare that Arafat is the one and only leader, and that the siege on him must be lifted. But the more time passes, the more this sounds like lip service.

Security Fence Goes Further Than Apartheid
By Munir Chafic, Al-Hayat 8/4/2003
A number of Palestinian intellectuals insist on drawing a comparison between the apartheid (racial discrimination) system that prevailed in South Africa and the Jewish Zionist entity in Palestine. In fact, they view the security fence, which the Jewish state is building to separate the West Bank from the territories it seeks to claim, and by expanding Jerusalem and the settlements, as embodying the apartheid system. Like a snake, this fence has started winding around a number of settlements, as well as Palestinian towns and villages, separating what settlements it can to join them to its state, while isolating several Palestinian cities and villages from each other, by seizing thousands of acres of arable land in view of also adding them at a later stage. The official reason given for this wall is to ensure "security" against attacks inside Israel, including inside settlements. But this is only one of the major reasons why this wall is being built. Other reasons include taking hold of the Western water basin that lies just below the villages it separated. The water motive, in the Israeli strategy, is just as important as stealing land and evicting the Palestinian inhabitants. This has always been a key element in Israel's strategy and tactical military operations, including the colonies in the past and the settlements today.This is why Israel's apartheid-like racial discrimination does not constitute the core element of the Zionist strategy. The Zionist racism is not restricted to apartheid as in segregation; instead, it involves stripping the Palestinians from their land and evicting them outside the country, if possible. It is a discrimination of stealing land with all that lies under and above it, including built cities and villages once all the original residents have been evicted, as it happened in 1948/49 in accordance with the strategy of the Jewish agency and the Haganah. Consequently, the comparison between the apartheid system in South Africa and Namibia releases the Zionist discrimination from its most horrifying aspects. But the latter is qualitatively different from apartheid in the realm of discrimination itself. Nothing is worse than Zionist racism except the racism of the White Americans, who stole the land and evicted the inhabitants, whereas Zionist racism contributed to stealing the land and confiscating towns and properties, but differed in that it resorted to forced eviction instead of mass extermination - naturally accompanied by a limited number of massacres (compared to the American case), and aimed at "racial" cleansing through deportation, instead of extermination.

The many voices of US foreign policy
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times 8/5/2003
WASHINGTON - If foreign leaders and diplomats appear increasingly confused about where United States foreign policy is being made, they are not alone. From Qalqiya on the West Bank to Karbala in Iraq to North Korea, contending forces within both the administration of President George W Bush and his Republican Party are duking it out for control, and the White House seems more and more unable to impose discipline. While the neo-conservatives and right-wing hawks in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who led the drive to war in Iraq, have been put on the defensive as the costs in blood and treasure of the post-war occupation mount, they have by no means retreated from the battle. And while Secretary of State Colin Powell has worked quietly to extend his power, particularly over the Israeli-Palestinian roadmap and dialogue with Pyongyang, right-wing elements in Congress appear determined to thwart him, even if the Pentagon's voice on the two issues has been somewhat diminished. To succeed, Powell needs a strong ally within the White House, and, as noted by the Financial Times last week, the newly perceived weakness of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her staff is making it very difficult for the secretary to gain traction there.Instead, Powell is relying increasingly on his friends in Congress, particularly Democrats and moderate Republicans - such as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, and Senator Chuck Hagel - to both press his positions and to keep the Pentagon on its heels, a task they performed admirably in a remarkably confrontational hearing on Iraq that featured a defensive, if defiant, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

The Right Of Return And The Recent Challenge
By Omar Kilani, Al-Hayat 8/4/2003
Every time the armed conflict between Palestinians and Israelis tones down and shifts to a political conflict aimed at reaching a settlement or peace, whether based on an agreement, a protocol or a Roadmap as is currently the case, the issue of right of return of the Palestinian refugees surfaces as if it were the heart of the political conflict. The Israelis are calling for canceling or disclaiming this right, while the Palestinians are clinging to it because it is sacred, and cannot be subject to cancellation or modification, and is vital for a fair settlement and sustainable peace.The current truce between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was hardly achieved, as a first step to start implementing the Roadmap, that Israelis from various spectrums of the society opened the battle to cancel and disclaim the right of return. This requires all Palestinians - the Authority, the factions, the forces and the civil organizations - to mobilize to insist on their adherence to this right and the impossibility of canceling or disclaiming it, regardless of the causes and results. The Israeli Knesset ratified a law that bans the implementation of the right of return. Sharon told the U.S. Secretary of State that he will only approve the Roadmap if the Palestinians give up this right. The Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Silvan Shalom, ordered the Israeli diplomatic corps to stop using the term "right of return," even if they are calling to cancel it and use instead the term "wish to return." The Israeli minister's legal advisor issued a legal opinion claiming that the right of return means nothing in international law, whether to the Palestinians or to any other people. He advised the Israeli diplomacy to maintain that there is a need to find a solution to the refugees' problem, instead of saying the Palestinians should give up their right of return, because such right means nothing in international law!

The "Wanted"
By Abdulwahab Badrakhan, Al-Hayat 8/4/2003
A number of Palestinian officials are speaking of the "wanted" from Israel, as if they were a problem or a burden or as if they were guilty and accused. Probably with the U.S. intervention, they also became "wanted" for the Americans, in solidarity with the Israelis. The recent development in this regard is that the "new" Palestinian Authority is trying to find a solution; but acts as if their being "wanted" by the Israelis compels it to view them as "wanted" as well. The Palestinian Authority is treating its citizens in accordance to lists drawn by an Israeli security mob, and not according to strict Palestinian responsibilities. An even worse excuse, which the Authority is using, is that prison is a safer place for them as long as Israel is chasing them, and as long as it can arrest or assassinate them.So why the truce, and what is its logic, if there is no reference party to penalize this chase and prevent the assassination? What does it mean to stop the Intifada if Israel has a recognized right to punish whomever it wishes to, by death or prison? If it really enjoys this right, someone must have approved it, thereby approving the criteria for imprisoning the hostages-prisoners, and even asking for more. But what does it mean to have "wanted" people, if Israel put the whole Palestinian people in one large prison, so that all the citizens, men, women and children became "wanted"? And what else could it mean that by wanting a citizen, the superiors are wanted as well; and can the Israelis consider President Arafat anything else than "wanted"? Tomorrow, if Sharon presents his plan for a final settlement and tries to impose it on Mahmoud Abbas and meets a refusal, what would prevent the Likudnik war criminal from saying that Israel is no longer capable of dealing with Mahmoud Abbas and his government, regardless of whether the Intifada is still ongoing?