The way we live now
By Abdel-Moneim Said, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, August 15 - 21
There are two ways to evaluate today's situation in the Middle East, firstly by looking at the immediate present and secondly by estimating long-term prospects should the present situation continue. The immediate present can be described as a conflict in which the parties involved have failed to come to grips with the realities of history and with their respective capabilities. A state-of-nature style conflict has been allowed to take its course, with both Palestinians and Israelis deciding to rely on force in achieving their national objectives. The Israeli side has decided that the use of massive military force will allow it to continue its occupation of Palestinian territories, while the Palestinian side has opted for the use of suicide bombing, seeing this as the means of ending the Israeli occupation.

J'accuse
By Haim Bresheeth, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, August 15 - 21
The occupiers and torturers of a whole nation have argued themselves into the position of victims: A new paradigm seems to have been recently established, and like so many of the new paradigms it arrived from the United States. It is no longer feasible to criticise and attack in the press and media the murderous and short-sighted policies and actions of the current Israeli regime without immediately facing the accusation of anti- Semitism. And who in his right mind would like to face this charge, however unjustified? Jews writing in this vein, trying to open a clear distance between themselves and the barbarities enacted in their name, get a reduced sentence: they are only accused of self-hatred! And that is when what they might feel hate towards is never themselves or their deeds, but the deeds of those who take it upon themselves to speak for all Jews elsewhere, dead or alive, and to use this multitude of disparate people as an automatic backup for any atrocity they may commit.

Some lives are cheaper than others 
By Gideon Levy, Alternative Information Center, August 18th, 2002 
Which is preferable - "pressure cooker" or "neighbor procedure"? Is it better to detonate a building with the occupants inside - a practice known in the Israel Defense Forces as "pressure cooker" - or to send one of the local neighbors to defend the soldiers bodily, the "neighbor procedure" in IDF argot. In the moral deterioration of the IDF in the territories, which has been greatly accelerated in the past few weeks, the choices that are made by the army's commanding officers are often described as an alternative between two controversial actions, in which the non-use of one automatically validates the other, and both of them together are automatically justified within the framework of the war on terrorism in which just about everything now goes.

Power preacher
By Gerda Mansour, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, August 15 - 21
US President George W Bush's 24 June speech setting out his administration's Middle East policy appeared to some as positive and balanced. However, linguistic analysis reveals an altogether different meaning: The long-awaited speech by US President George W Bush on his new Middle East policy was delivered on 24 June, and, because so much seemed to depend on it, analysts have since pored over it to distil its message to the Arab world. While official statements in the Middle East described it as positive and balanced, many political commentators described it as plain disastrous.

The Men From JINSA and CSP
By Jason Vest , The Nation, September 2, 2002
Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days duringthe Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.