A call to violence
By Ali Abunimah, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 7 - 13 August 2003
A right-wing US lawmaker urges Israel to ignore the truce and go on killing Palestinians -- As President Bush met with Palestinian premier Mahmoud Abbas and his Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon in Washington last week, one of Bush's closest allies in Congress was in Israel. Tom DeLay, the influential leader of the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives was accorded the privilege of addressing members of the Knesset on 30 July. His speech was so extreme it prompted Labour Party lawmaker Danny Yatom to comment, "Geez, Likud is nothing compared to him." In his speech, DeLay, a representative from a suburban district near Houston, Texas, dismissed the unilateral cease-fire by Palestinian factions, which has resulted in a virtual cessation of violence against Israeli civilians and occupation forces, as nothing more than a "90-day vacation" for "terrorists" and "murderers". He urged Israel to ignore the truce and go on killing Palestinian activists. DeLay informed the Israeli lawmakers that he was an "Israeli at heart", and acknowledged that Palestinians "have been oppressed and abused", though only by their own leaders, never by Israel. DeLay's central point was that the entire burden of ending the decades-old conflict lay on the shoulders of the Palestinians. Knesset members gave DeLay a standing ovation. DeLay has spoken recently of a US-funded "Marshall plan" to aid Palestinians, but this is merely an effort to distract from the core of his message which is anti-Palestinian.

Racism reinforced
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 7 - 13 August 2003
New Israeli citizenship law targets Palestinians and empowers Israel's transfer policies. -- Morad as-Sana and his wife Abir returned home from their honeymoon in Istanbul last Saturday to the news that the Israeli parliament had passed a law two days earlier that will make their planned life together impossible. As the young couple crossed back over the land border from Jordan to Israel, they parted ways: Abir to her family in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and Morad to his apartment in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva. Neither knows when they will be able to see one another again. The enforced separation is the result of legislation rushed through the parliament last week on the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, before the Knesset's summer recess this week. Sharon made the new law -- an amendment to the Citizenship Law barring Palestinians from joining a spouse to live in Israel -- a vote of confidence in his government. The measure was approved by a wide margin last Thursday. All Palestinian applicants will now be refused residency permits and access to the naturalisation process that would lead to citizenship.Thousands more Palestinian spouses who are already living in Israel -- and their children -- face an uncertain future. They will have pending applications for citizenship frozen or refused, and unless they are allowed residency status they too will be forced to separate from a husband or wife. The law provoked almost universal condemnation as "racist" from international and local human rights groups. Btselem, an Israeli rights group, pointed out that it contravened Israel's basic laws on equality as well as the Declaration of Independence, which pledges the state to "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or ethnicity".

The premature burial of Arab culture
By Charles Paul Freund, Daily Star 8/8/2003
In his best-selling 1994 book, A Drive to Israel, the popular Egyptian playwright Ali Salem recalls a moment when Cairo’s intelligentsia anticipated its own annihilation. That moment of fear came in the wake of the Oslo Accords, which seemed to promise regional normalization. With the decline of an assumed Israeli military threat, however, came an increase in concern that Israel was poised to begin a massive cultural offensive that would undermine Arab culture. According to Salem, a prominent Egyptian academic approached novelist Naguib Mahfouz, seeking his counsel about “the dangers of the imminent Israeli cultural invasion that threatens Egypt’s heritage and culture.” When he finished, Mahfouz asked him: “Do you really think that Israel is capable of doing this to us?” The scholar responded: “Yes, that’s why I came to ask you what we should do.” “Die,” answered the novelist. “If Israel is capable of annihilating the artistic, literary and cultural heritage of Egypt and the Arab world, then we’d better all die.” Much the same sort of total intellectual destruction was predicted again in Cairo last month. This time, however, the perpetrator was an American. A scholar named Ammiel Alcalay charged in Al-Ahram Weekly that the United States, working through its military and its media, was engaged in a vast project “to obliterate the idea of all memory other than newly minted official memory, to destroy any narrative that goes beyond idolatry, beyond the superficial image captured in a sound bite or an orchestrated video clip.” This was the era of America’s “new Crusades,” according to Alcalay, a teacher in New York. To succeed in its imperial ambition, the US was demolishing all alternative “cultural space,” ejecting inconvenient narratives from the political imagination and replacing them with simple-minded stories that served its ends.

Sharonic delusion
By Ibrahim Nafie, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 7 - 13 August 2003
Sharon's tactics are tried and tested, their outcome consequently well-known -- Ariel Sharon insists that Egypt must release Azam Azam, an Israeli Druze currently serving a 15 year sentence for espionage, if it expects to continue to play a part in the peace process. The Israeli prime ministers' recent statement to this effect underscores once again how warped his thinking is on questions of peace and security. Sharon, prime minister since February 2001, champions the Israeli ultra right, which holds that recourse to force is the only way Israel can realise security and compel the Arabs to reach a political settlement. This was the segment of Israeli opinion that had also believed that an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty would neutralize Egypt as a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East conflict and the peace process. Once a treaty was concluded, they imagined, Egypt would never dare stand up against Israel's arrogance and belligerence. Of course time proved the absurdity of such illusions. Egypt has remained a bastion of support for Arab nations and peoples. Since signing the peace agreement with Israel Egypt has repeatedly asserted its regional weight through a number of practical and symbolic measures. Examples of this are to be found in the Egyptian response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in Egypt's unstinting support for Arab parties involved in the negotiating processes initiated by the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, and in Egypt's drive to link normalization through MENA mechanisms to progress in the peace process. A more dramatic instance occurred when, in March 2001, the Israeli government expressed its contempt for the Arab peace innitiative by launching a fullscale incursion into PA territories. In response Egypt ceased all contacts with Israel, with the exception of those communications that promoted the continuation of the peace process and the interests of the Palestinian cause.

The Particular Poignancy of Tisha B'Av, This Year in Jerusalem
By Brian Walt, Forward 8/8/2003
Demolishing Homes While Mourning Lost Temple? -- This Thursday, while Israelis across town marked Tisha B'Av by mourning the destruction of our Temple, as many as 45 Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Jabel Mukaber, Sur Bacher, Shuafat and Beit Hanina were facing the impending demolition of their homes.None of these families, who in recent weeks had been informed of the planned house demolitions officially or orally by the municipality of Jerusalem, have engaged in violence or in harboring terrorists.When the Israeli government demolishes the homes of suicide bombers' families, the official rationale for the order is security. In these cases, however, there is no security reason for the order.The families' only crime is violating zoning regulations. They have illegally built a room or some addition to their modest homes in order to provide adequate housing for their families.Of course, any state must have and enforce zoning regulations, but in this case the zoning violations are a direct result of a discriminatory public policy. It is virtually impossible for a Palestinian family in Jerusalem to get permission to add on to its homes. Applications by Palestinian families to build or add on to their property are routinely rejected.With the goal of limiting the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Israeli government has designated 54% of Palestinian-owned land in East Jerusalem as "open green space" and therefore not available for Palestinian construction. In addition, 35% of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem was expropriated for the building of Jewish neighborhoods. This leaves Palestinians in Jerusalem the use of only a fraction of the land that they own and almost none for additional housing. There is currently a shortage of some 25,000 housing units for Palestinians in Jerusalem.Palestinian families are caught in a "Catch 22." As their families expand, they have no legal way to provide even modest housing. The predicament they find themselves in is a direct result of Israeli land policy.

A Jewish State, Or State of Jews?
By Leonard Fein, Forward 8/8/2003
The conventional explanation for Israel's more controversial measures, including in particular the security fence now under construction and the new marriage law passed by the Knesset, is that these are responses to the ongoing conflict. (The new marriage law cancels the automatic citizenship hitherto accorded Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens.) But underlying that explanation, there is a darker and infinitely more problematic reality: Israel does not know what to do with or about the 1.2 million of its citizens, 20% of the total population, who are Arabs — or, as they increasingly choose to define themselves, Palestinian Israelis.While all the hubbub about fences and settlements and such continues, at quite a distance from the real-time radar screen, a new drive has been launched in Israel that perhaps more explicitly than ever highlights the issue — or, if you will, Israel's dilemma. The World Zionist Organization is undertaking a project to build 30 new settlements in the Negev and the Galilee — that is, within the Green Line, the pre-1967 armistice line.So wherein lies the problem? These are not controversial settlements in the West Bank or Gaza. No one questions Israel's right to build wherever it chooses to within the Green Line. Everyone knows that too much of Israel's population is concentrated in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, and that the Negev and the Galilee are relatively sparsely populated.The name of this new program reveals its problematic aspect: "The New Challenge: A Zionist Majority in the Negev and Galilee." Please understand, no test of Zionist conformity will be administered to would-be residents of the new settlements. The word "Zionist" in the title of the project is really a euphemism; the intention is a Jewish majority. But it would be at the least impolitic to say it quite that baldly, so the word "Zionist" is used as a substitute, or subterfuge.

Return of the native
By Danny Rabinowitz, Ha'aretz 8/8/2003
Israelis and Palestinians have conflicting ideas about what could happen if Palestinian refugees are granted the right of return to Israel. Israelis are convinced that such a move would set off a massive wave of Palestinian immigration and upset the demographic balance. The Palestinians, basing themselves on recent surveys of the refugee population, believe that the majority want their right of return acknowledged but do not intend to exercise it. Roughly half of those questioned, for example, said that they would only return if their former homes were still standing. Many were opposed to living under Israeli rule, and many were prepared to consider financial compensation instead.  On the face of it, these differing assessments could ruin any chance for an agreement. The paradox is that under certain conditions, recognizing the Palestinians' right of return could promote a solution in which each side feels that it has gained. Among the Palestinians, the growing realization that very few would want to go back to Israel allows for the traditional demand,calling for a universal and sweeping return, to be toned down and replaced by a limited quota. Speaking off the record, there are Palestinians who would accept a quota of 200,000 returnees - double the number that Israel said it would consider at the Taba talks in January 2001, but still demographically insignificant compared to the Israeli fear of an influx of millions. On the Israeli side, the assumption that every Palestinian who can will immediately jump at the chance to return, could pave the way for setting a higher quota, but with lower demographic risks. One such formula, certain components of which I proposed at a recent academic conference on Israel and the Palestinian refugees held in Heidelberg, is as follows: In a symbolic gesture, Israel could declare right now, prior to reaching a permanent accord, that it is prepared to grant Israeli citizenship to any Palestinian refugee born within the Green Line before 1948. There are about 200,000 people who fit that description, all of them over the age of 55, most of whom will not be having more children.

A recipe for civil war
Editorial, The Jordan Star July 3 - 9, 2003
Israel’s insistence on dismantling Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups as a prerequisite for the implementation of the roadmap peace plan can be understood within the context of the Jewish state’s desire to see Palestinians kill each other. -- JORDAN (Star) - Israel’s insistence on dismantling Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups as a prerequisite for the implementation of the roadmap peace plan can be understood within the context of the Jewish state’s desire to see Palestinians kill each other. What is not understandable is the US approach to this extremely sensitive matter. A week ago President George Bush came out with the same idea: Hamas should be dismantled if peace is to be reached in the Middle East. His call amounts to a recipe for a Palestinian civil war. Hamas can only be dismantled by vigorous force and this will lead to an internal bloody strife stripping the Palestinian leadership of its legitimacy and creating widespread chaos that aggravates an already complicated situation.The Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas is neither willing nor capable of taking such a huge disastrous step. With the Palestinian security forces reduced by persistent Israeli attacks and brutal killing to a pitiful state, Abbas has neither the power nor the will to engage in such a battle which is bound to produce grave consequences to the cause of the Palestinian people.Hamas, after all, represents a very broad sector of the Palestinians inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories and among the Palestinians living in the diaspora. A war against its ranks by the government will severely undermine the standing of Abbas among his people and set the stage for inter-Palestinian wrangling that could only yield a calamity for the entire peace process.

The Roadmap: From An Implementation Plan To A Negotiations Card
By Nayef Hawatmeh, Al-Hayat 8/8/2003
[First part of a two-part article] It is no longer possible to talk about the Roadmap without relating it to what happened in both Sharm Al-Sheikh and Aqaba, whereby the results of these summits cast doubt over the seriousness of the Bush administration in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the Palestinian-Israeli one. Instead of taking a balanced stance of integrity and neutrality, this administration once again adopted the policies it had been applying in the White House ever since it got there, hence planning to wage wars to serve Israel's interests. And to that end, the administration cooperated with the government of terrorist Sharon in exerting enormous pressures on the Arab countries, namely on the Palestinian parties, so as to carry out Sharon's 14 reservations to implement the Roadmap, which practically cancelled the main idea of the plan and turned it into a paper to negotiate one term after the other, during the course of the practical implementation, instead of a simultaneous implementation under the supervision of the international Quartet, in accordance with what the Roadmap stipulates.The U.S. administration, which is relatively siding with the Sharonian understanding of a compromise, believes that the developments that followed the Anglo-American occupation in Iraq, along with the worsening situation of official Arab regimes and its success in imposing "a new and different leadership" to the Palestinians (according to the American-Israeli allegations), are all paving the way towards imposing a compromise that would suit the rightist Israeli terms, as well as give the U.S. administration the exclusive right of supervision. In other words, it would be the American hegemony, just like during the Washington negotiations (1991-1993), leading to Oslo (1993-1999) to this day. The results of both these summits represented the beginning of a serious step back in the direction of a destructive course aimed at imposing the Israeli view of the Roadmap, hence stripping it of its content and turning it into a series of security conditions imposed on the Palestinians; on the other hand, the Israelis washed their hands clear of most of their duties listed in the Roadmap, not to mention that they presented Sharon's speech in the Aqaba summit, relating the Roadmap to the 14 terms and understandings reached with the Bush administration, which worsened even further the latter's biasness.

It Takes Two To Tango
By Jihad Al Khazen, Al-Hayat 8/8/2003
Just like tango, peace takes two to work, and Mahmoud Abbas alone cannot achieve peace as long as Ariel Sharon keeps deliberately trying to foil the peace process, with premeditation might I add, in each and every step he has been taking ever since the Roadmap was announced and Abbas became Prime Minister.Sharon could be regretting his success in ousting Arafat, as even while the President is besieged in the Muqataa, the Israeli Premier is facing a Palestinian Prime Minister who is on excellent terms with President Bush. As a result, the relation is much better than the one he himself has with Bush, knowing that the Israeli government is the party being pressured to carry out its commitments, and not Palestine.I called Abbas yesterday, as he was getting ready to visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Gulf. He told that his trip to the U.S. and his meetings there were of paramount importance, although nothing palpable was achieved; in fact, the U.S. understands the Palestinian stance and has promised to keep pressuring Israel to stop building the security wall and remove the random settlements.However, releasing the Palestinian prisoners and detainees remains on the top of the current list of demands, and the Israelis have already freed 338 detainees, half of whom are administrative detainees who were arrested on no particular charge and hence were not prosecuted. In fact, the Israeli law allows their detention for six renewable months, and Israel claims it has 763 administrative prisoners, whereas the Palestinians say they are close to 1,800.Abbas also said that the Israelis have released those who almost finished serving their sentence. Some of them still have one month to go, and others two. He added that his government will insist on releasing all the prisoners gradually and that there was a Palestinian unanimity on refusing any exception, so that all the freed persons would belong to the different Palestinian factions. However, Abbas is facing the famous Sharonist filthiness. Actually, ever since the Palestinians declared truce on June 29, Israel arrested 230 additional Palestinians.

Pro-Likud network walks through Washington’s corridors of power
By Jim Lobe, Daily Star 8/8/2003
WASHINGTON: An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly pro-Likud political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq. The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office in Feith’s domain, was staffed mainly by appointees closely identified, like Feith himself, with Likudist perspectives or with close ties to individuals who have taken pro-Likud positions in the US public debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Feith, whose Israel-based law partner has acted as a spokesman for the Israeli settlers’ movement, was an outspoken foe of the Oslo peace process throughout the 1990s. But others appointed by him to positions in OSP and NESA largely shared those views, according to a former colleague, retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowsky, who worked in the NESA office from May, 2002 through February, 2003. In an interview with The Daily Star, she said the two offices recruited personnel from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that works closely with Washington’s biggest pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC. She also said that two of the staffers in the NESA office, including its chief, Deputy Undersecretary for Policy William Luti, had previously worked as aides to the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, who is also based at AEI. OSP was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence agencies to uncover possible ties between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it to the White House.