Articles - Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel

'It's gone beyond hostility'
After two and a half years in Jerusalem, the Guardian's award-winning Middle East correspondent is moving to a new post in Washington. Here she looks back on the desperate violence she has witnessed during the intifada and reflects on how both Palestinians and Israelis have been brutalised by the experience
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, August 12, 2002
There was gunfire on the day I moved out - a crack or two, followed by a burst of automatic fire and silence before the familiar wail of the ambulances made it horribly clear that this wasn't fireworks or a car engine -backfiring. The fatal shooting - a Palestinian gunman shot dead a security guard from the telephone company before being killed himself along with a Palestinian bystander - was just around the corner at the Damascus Gate of the walled city, and sounded very loud from our front porch. The packers, strangers to Jerusalem from the relatively sleepy northern town of Atlit, were shaken. When they had walked through the door, less than three hours before, the television was showing scenes of carnage from a suicide bombing of a bus in the Galilee. Another attack? They turned on a radio to hear the latest score of death, but almost immediately resumed packing.

Israel's Siege of the Church of the Nativity - View From Inside
Interview of author/activist Larry Hales by Mark Schneider, Palestine Chronicle, August 11, 2002
Q. The Israeli government and some western media have maintained that over 100 Palestinian gunmen and terrorists took over the Church of Nativity, taking all the clergy inside as hostages. According to them the Israeli Occupation Army was trying to liberate the clergy and apprehend the Palestinians inside. What do you say to this?

The Lebanon Syndrome is Hastening Sharon's Defeat
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle, August 11, 2002
Ariel Sharon crowned his victorious election campaign against former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak based on a promise to crush the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in less than100 days. Nearly 18 months later, Sharon announced that Israel’s “struggle” will be long. Sharon made the new revelation on August 09, 2002 in a speech at the graduation ceremony of Israel’s “National Defense College” in Tel Aviv. The bottom line of Sharon’s speech was summed up in a few words by his spokesman, Ra’anan Gissin: the speech was an attempt “to shore up the troops and to say we are in for a long struggle.” But there is more to Sharon’s words than the emotionally manipulative clarification of Gissin.

A Phone Call from Hell
by Uri Avnery, Media Monitors Network, August 12, 2002
There is a direct telephone connection between heaven and hell. I can prove it. The idea crossed my mind last Sunday, when I was climbing to a snow-covered peak in the alpine region of Italy, where I was the guest at a political conference. The sun was shining, the temperature hovered around zero centigrade, around me was a breathtaking landscape of white peaks. Far away below, calm cowherds led their animals to their green pasture. Heaven on earth.

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