One Story Of Nonviolence
bY Mubarak Awad, Al-Hayat 8/6/2003
It is unfortunate that we Palestinians have not properly chronicled our stories and the history of the Palestinian nonviolent struggle. My own involvement in nonviolence, for example, was an intensely personal commitment based on two basic points. First, my religious belief that as a human being, I, like all others am a child of God. So, for any person to kill the spirit of God, found in every person, is not right - no matter the circumstance. Secondly, my understanding of psychology, which led me to believe that nonviolence, can be a far more effective tool in fighting the occupation than armed resistance. In 1983, I returned to Palestine as a psychologist who was interested in counseling Palestinians and soon found myself immersed in nonviolent activism.I opened the Palestinian Center for Nonviolence to bring alternative solutions to the Palestinians with an emphasis on nonviolence in the Islamic and Arabic worlds and lessons learned by Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States, and Abdulzaphar Khan in Pakistan. Quickly, I grasped the differences in our own situation. Palestinians had a different enemy. Jews around the world are at the forefront of civil, human, student and women's rights. At the same time, they had just suffered the trauma of the Holocaust, and were still paranoid with the fear of its genocidal horror. Thus, in using the methods of nonviolence in opposition to this particular enemy, it was an opportunity to use of civil resistance, and reason rather than bullet. I felt that our armed struggle, and the rhetoric of violent resistance, only reinforced their fears and paranoia, while nonviolence could possibly appeal to their humanity as they heard our love for the land and our cries for justice and humanity in the face of their evil occupation.

Update the gas masks, there's a Syrian threat
By Reuven Pedatzur, Ha'aretz 8/5/2003
Foreign Report, the British weekly newsletter, last week cited Israeli sources in reporting that "100 Syrian missiles are aimed at Israel." The missiles, said the weekly, are equipped with payloads of VX nerve gas, "which causes burns and respiratory difficulties that end in death" as the publication put it. That would appear to be an explosive and worrisome report, exposing a fundamental shift in Syrian intentions. But five years ago, on May 21, 1998, the same Foreign Report said: "Syria is aiming chemical-warhead missiles at Israel." Indeed, in 1988,then-opposition MK Yitzhak Rabin revealed that Syria had positioned ballistic missiles equipped with binary chemical warheads - twin chemical elements that when mixed create a lethal compound. Since then, dozens of reports have dealt with Syria's armada of chemical weapons missiles. The technical data on the missiles has been published, as have specifications on range and accuracy. The Syrian ballistic missile threat has long been a permanent fixture taken into account for IDF planning and there have been no significant changes in recent years. So, if there is nothing new in the information reported by Foreign Report, why did the "Israeli sources" find it necessary just now to present seemingly new, dangerous Syrian threats? Well, from the perspective of the Israeli defense establishment there is a very good reason to magnify the threat of the Syrian missiles. Sadly, the Iraqi missile threat is gone. For many years that threat was the excuse for allocating billions of dollars "to prepare" for the threat. A special new command - the Home Front - was established just for that purpose.

Vicious Gimmick
Editorial, Arab News 8/6/2003
The Israeli Parliament has just passed a law preventing Palestinians from the occupied territories and married to Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. It may come as a surprise that Palestinians would want to marry Israelis, let alone become Israeli citizens. In fact, in the last ten years, 16,000 did precisely that. But to be astonished is to forget that 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs or that Israeli Arabs are Palestinians by another name. Some see Israeli Arabs as the salvation of the Palestinians, and believe that, with their higher birth rate, they could become a majority in the future, thus ending Israel’s position as a uniquely Jewish state. But that is not what the Israelis are afraid of at the moment or why Ariel Sharon has pushed for this law. It is part and parcel of his plans to segregate Palestinians from Israelis. Designed to trick the Israeli electorate into believing, yet again, that he has a policy that will stop attacks by Palestinian militants, they include the controversial wall he is building as well as a further amendment to the citizenship law that would prevent children with mixed Palestinian-Israeli parents from automatically gaining citizenship. They are a gimmick, but a vicious one. Even by Israeli standards, the new law is a landmark in bigotry. Palestinians alone are targeted; Americans or Russians, even Indians and Pakistanis wanting to marry an Israeli — Jewish or Arab — will not be denied Israeli citizenship or residence. Only people from the occupied territories. But Arab Israelis will also be the victims. The law discriminates against them too because it effectively says that they cannot marry Palestinians. Technically, of course, they can, but since the Palestinian partner will not be able to take Israeli citizenship and will be barred from entering Israel, they cannot live together there. That is not only unjust, it is vindictive. Israeli Arabs are being told that if they want to marry someone from the occupied territories, they have to get out.

Insider fires a broadside at Rumsfeld's office
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times 8/7/2003
WASHINGTON - On most days, the Pentagon's "Early Bird", a daily compilation of news articles on defense-related issues mostly from the US and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the United States Defense Department's top leadership. But few could help notice last week that the "Bird" omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April. "What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam [Hussein] occupation [of Iraq] has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense [OSD]." Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress".

Hard-line views put Bolton in spotlight
By Jim Lobe, Daily Star 8/6/2003
Ultra-hawk regarded as neocons’ 5th column within state department - US diplomat proposed to testify that Syria’s progress on alleged weapons programs threatens regional stability -- Washington: To the North Koreans, he is “human scum” and a “bloodthirsty vampire.” To former ultra-right US Senator Jesse Helms, he is “the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.” His name is John Bolton; his title, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. And he is widely seen as the reliable fifth columnist within the State Department for the right-wing and neoconservative hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq from their perches at the Pentagon and Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office. North Korea, which last week agreed to engage in multilateral talks with its Northeast Asian neighbors and the United States on its controversial nuclear program, announced Sunday it will have nothing to do with Bolton and will not even recognize his status as a US diplomat. The highly unusual statement was reportedly provoked by a speech given by Bolton in Seoul last week excerpts of which were reprinted on the highly sympathetic editorial pages of the Asian Wall Street Journal Friday in which the undersecretary, who ranks fourth in the State Department hierarchy, described life in North Korea as a “hellish nightmare” and accused Pyongyang’s leader, Kim Jong Il,” of being a “dictator” or running a “dictatorship” or “tyranny” no less than a dozen times.

What Remains Of The Country
By Azmi Bishara, Al-Hayat 8/7/2003
For reasons that are too obvious to be explained, the vanquished political mind is divided into two main streams: challenging reality by denying its existence and considering any contact with it as an acceptance of failure on one hand, and dealing with the political reality represented in a pragmatic attitude, and based on refusing the logic of submission to power, which would only boost that power's arrogance. A number of Palestinians and Arabs have openly promoted the idea of failure, as if we were facing some sort of a conflict between armies and forces that are equally powerful; as if the struggle against the occupation did not embody a just cause; as if Israel had triumphed in this confrontation. Some Palestinians thought that by agreeing to a ceasefire, the Palestinians were admitting their defeat. Those who claim this do it with the same logic when they used to say "We triumphed" in Beirut in 1982 over Sharon. Those who claim this should not be surprised when Mofaz pretends that the fact that the Palestinians accepted the ceasefire is a result of Israel's victory and persistence in making the Palestinians understand it was in their best interest to cave in to Israeli superiority. The truth is there is no such thing as an Israeli military superiority in an occupied-occupying relationship.However, the logic of submitting to the arrogance of force is not considered as such, knowing that it is making an effort towards more achievements. In order to do that, all it has to do is change the goal, forget about people and itself and the cause that was once the source of legitimacy in dealing with politics amid people whose nation was taken away from them, whereas the remaining part of it crawls under occupation: the cause of liberation. If one would like to participate in the dialogue regarding the last steps in the details of the achievements that showed in the American admiration for some person or in the smile or laugh of the American President due to a certain incident, all one needs to do is change his orientation and adopt a different logic from that of the issue from which the legitimacy of dealing with politics under the occupation originally emerges. If one were not to do that, then he would become literally "clueless." Imagine yourself, dear reader, clueless in a party full of movements and chaos you know nothing about. This is how the Palestinian people feel.

The village of Yanoun: a microcosm of the destructiveness of Zionism
By Mick Napier, Electronic Intifada 8/6/2003
We had a great reception from the wonderful people of Yanoun, most of whose land has been confiscated for the nearby Jewish settlement of Itamar, and who endure frequent beatings and shootings from these same fanatical settlers who want to 'redeem' the rest of the land by driving out the remaining Palestinians. Yanoun shows the destructiveness of Zionism in a microcosm. Heavily-armed settlers march through the village regularly, usually on their Sabbath, intimidating and beating up villagers. Any villager who strays over invisible lines, perhaps to retrieve a stray sheep, risks a severe beating or worse. While we were there one farmer was still in hospital after being shot in the foot during the settlers' previous foray, a serious injury for a working farmer. When one of us used binoculars to observe the settlement, we were warned never to give the glasses to a Palestinian; a Palestinian looking at Itamar through glasses could provoke one of the snipers there.We drank the obligatory sweet tea under a tree while the farmers told us of their woes. All the time we were under the gaze of the settlers' watchtower on the hill, the Israeli flag of occupation flapping in the wind. During one foray, the armed settlers had urinated and washed their dogs in the village's drinking water. UN-donated generators, housed in a small shed with huge UN letters and flags for "protection", had been burned by settlers not once but three times in recent years.

Wall challenge needs more than symbolic acts
Editorial, Daily Star 8/7/2003
The separation wall Israel is building to cut off much of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Jerusalem is causing new tensions for Israelis and Palestinians. It also poses a fresh dilemma for the US, which is dealing with the matter in a manner so imprecise that it also risks being ineffective. The wall may be the test case that will reveal the extent of Washington’s seriousness or otherwise in trying to promote a fair, negotiated Palestinian-Israeli peace accord. The initial American position on the wall months ago was relative silence. Soft criticisms followed, reaching their zenith with President George Bush’s clear criticism of the wall during the Washington visit of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Days later, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the White House, the same President Bush backpedalled on the issue, expressing understanding for Israeli security measures. Now, credible reports speak of American officials making plans to cut back US loan guarantees to Israel in amounts equivalent to Israel’s expenditures on the wall. This should be taken as a positive sign of Washington’s understanding of its dual role as an impartial arbiter of the actions of Israelis and Palestinians, and also as the main supporter, protector, and financier of Israel. The Bush administration should be praised for considering tying the amount of its loan guarantees to Israel to Israel’s spending on the separation wall.