Bearing Witness in the Promised Land
By Rob Lipton, Middle East Peace 9/4/2003
[from the just published book, Live From Palestine: International and Palestinian Direct Action Against the Israeli Occupation] -- A significant proportion of the international volunteers joining Palestinians in resistance to occupation are Jewish. Jewish American Rob Lipton was in Bethlehem with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) when the city was invaded in March 2002, and continues to speak out and organize against the occupation.
I’m the “man bites dog” story: I’m an American Jew who thinks that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a crime against humanity.
Why do I need to say I am an American Jew as a qualification? What is being done to the Palestinians is wrong; any person with eyes in their head can see this simple fact. For me to say, “it’s really bad and I’m Jewish” shouldn’t matter. I did not have to be Jewish to march in September 2002 to the besieged Muqata’a, where I witnessed hundreds of Palestinians spontaneously demonstrating in central Ramallah. My eyes were not somehow more acute in Nablus as a result of my being Jewish; any eyes could see Baha Al-baheishe’s death as a cold-blooded murder committed by an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) sniper, any ears could hear the anguish in his mother’s cries. All people should call this for what it is: an occupation that is killing us all.
In Amira Hass’s book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, witnesses people standing by and watching as the trains went to the death camps. I am motivated by this legacy to “not stand by.” I don’t want the prosecution of this occupation to be in my name.
I have been called misguided, a traitor, and self-hating, and these soft words are from family and supposed friends. None of these people have been to Palestine. They have not witnessed the humiliation of checkpoints or seen tanks roaming the streets of densely populated cities....
Playing With Fire
By Jihad Al Khazen, Al-Hayat 9/4/2003
Yasser Arafat and Jibril Rajoub have formed a team versus Mahmoud Abbas and Mohamad Dahlan.
Had it been a volleyball game on the beach between two teams, it would have been easy. But these two teams are dealing, and I wouldn't want to say playing, with the Palestinian cause, and the suffering and bloodshed that led the Palestinians to this rock bottom.
Personally, I hold Arafat alone responsible for this confrontation, and believe that Abbas, Dahlan and Rajoub are innocent. Arafat was the one who objected to appointing Abbas as Prime Minister, not to mention that he set obstacles to this process and is still trying to destroy it without suggesting any other alternative, but himself; he also refuses to admit that he is not welcome in the current equation.
Arafat appointed Jibril Rajoub to be his National Security Advisor, although he is aware of the old but ongoing disagreement between the latter and Mohamad Dahlan. Moreover, this appointment is strange because Arafat himself "attacked" Jibril Rajoub by evicting him from the position of head of preventive security in the West Bank when he thought he was competing with him over the Authority. Now that the competition involves both Abbas and Dahlan, he brought Rajoub back to a leadership position, hoping he would stand in their way.
This is not politics, it's playing with fire, while the Palestinian cause is being shattered by Ariel Sharon's gang, with U.S. support.
Sharon is saved from the threat of peace
By Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz 9/4/2003
It used to be said about Yitzhak Shamir that he wanted to wake up in the morning and see newspaper headlines saying, "The threat of peace has been lifted." All the signs now point to Ariel Sharon approaching the accomplishment that the former Likud premier dreamt of. The "window of opportunity" for renewing the peace process, opened after the war in Iraq, has been slammed shut. The efforts for a political deal have once again given way to the routine of managing the conflict, with Israel controlling the territories, and all the settlements in place.
U.S. President George Bush has returned to the White House from his Texas vacation a much weakened leader, struggling to save his job. The lightning victory in Iraq has turned into the mud of occupation, regime chaos and mass terror attacks. The 2004 election campaign, which up until recently looked like a stroll to a second term, now looks like a battle for political survival. Internal polls taken by the Republicans show Bush could lose to the Democratic Party's candidate.
While trying to avoid the fate of his father, a single-term president, Bush has to fight and win on two fronts. On the foreign policy front, he has to show achievements in Iraq and even Afghanistan, to justify his "global war on terror." Domestically, he has to keep his power base. Both political parties in the United States have already decided that their strategies will be to preserve their traditional voter base instead of trying to court floating voters.
Palestinian Mistakes Provide Israel with the Ammunition to Win
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center 9/4/2003
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government, and in particular his right wing defense minister Shaul Mofaz, seized the opportunity of the latest Jerusalem bus bombing to establish an unprecedented policy of deterrence.
Even when one acknowledges that the continued Israeli policy of assassinations and military operations conducted deep inside Palestinian areas were the elements that forced an end to the one sided truce, Hamas’ fatal mistake did provide the needed cover for the new Israeli deterrence policy, a policy that can push the long standing red lines even further and will relinquish any level of immunity political figures and public leaders have enjoyed so far.
Mofaz did not truly reflect his feelings when he said that he regretted not expelling Arafat in the past, but to my understanding his promise to expel him, no later than end of the year, has more strategic meanings than a threat from the side of an angry General.
One can read three main elements of the new Israeli policy of military and political deterrence; firstly, the fact that expelling or liquidating Arafat became a realistic option that Israel can commit to without serious international uproar. Linking this option with any future Palestinian retaliation could establish a strong deterrence level, especially within the current internal Palestinian crisis. Presumably, Palestinian resistance groups will think twice before retaliating if they feel that their move might have such a drastic consequence.
Ehud Barak: Israel’s worst and dimmest
By Michael Young, Daily Star 9/4/2003
Was there ever a shoddier product enveloped in the package of certified excellence than former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak? Before taking office Barak was shown off in various poses of refinement, notably playing sonatas on the piano, and we were assured that a sharper mind couldn’t be found. Yet survey his record, and a very different moral emerges: Never did Israel place such an incorrigible mediocrity in a position of similar authority.
This comes to mind after reading that an Israeli commission of inquiry, known as the Or Commission, recently found that Barak and his public security minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, misread Arab anger in October 2000, when riot police killed 13 Arab-Israelis protesting in solidarity with the intifada. In testimony to the panel, Barak said: “When these events erupted, they erupted with an intensity and force and energies and motives that were not expected by us, and according to my assessment, could not have been expected.”
Barak shouldn’t fret. The findings of the 1983 Kahan Commission, which investigated the massacres at the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, ultimately failed to prevent the ascent of Ariel Sharon to the post of prime minister. Indeed, the Or Commission did not block Barak’s possible return as prime minister, though it did recommend that Ben-Ami, a somewhat contested poster boy for the Israeli peace camp, not be offered again the public security portfolio.
No avoiding the commission recommendations
Editorial, Ha'aretz 9/4/2003
Police Commissioner Shlomo Aharonishki's instructions to national police headquarters officials to look into legal ways to avoid fulfilling Or Commission recommendations to investigate police responsibility for the deaths of Israeli Arabs in the October 2000 riots was extremely unreasonable.
The commissioner wants to find a legal mechanism similar to the one that prevented the investigation and prosecution of the senior Shin Bet officials involved in the "Bus 300 affair." The late president Chaim Herzog handed down the clemency in an effort to put an end to what he called the "brouhaha around the affair" and to avoid what he referred to "further grave damage to the Shin Bet."
The pardons handed down in that affair were eventually approved by the High Court in a two to one majority opinion of then-court president Justice Meir Shamgar and his deputy Justice Miriam Ben-Porat against the current court president Justice Aharon Barak. The decision was considered by many a blow to the basic principle of equality before the law. The emphasis in Justice Barak's opinion at the time - that granting a pardon before an investigation and indictment is a contravention of the "constitutional structure" of the state of Israel, since the president is not meant to use the power of the pardon before the final verdict of the courts - is considered the prevailing view in Israeli law for many. It is very possible that the High Court would not approve such a pardon if it were given nowadays.
The Paradox of Interventionism
By Fawaz Turki, Arab News 9/4/2003
It was a classic cloak-and dagger operation, but Kermit Roosevelt, CIA operative in Iran, neither wore a cloak nor carried a dagger when he brought down the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Tehran 50 years ago, in October 1953.
Operation Ajax, as the plot was known, was no mere CIA-engineered coup in a backwater Central American country. It was an event that reshaped the entire Middle East — indeed the world — enabling the Shah to return from exile to the Peacock Throne and impose a tyranny on his people that sparked the 1979 revolution, a revolution that to this day continues to inspire activists throughout the Muslim world.
Stephen Kinzer, a veteran New York Times correspondent, drawing on both academic research and on new material from long secret CIA documents leaked to his paper in 2000, has just published “All the Shah’s Men,” an engrossing account of Operation Ajax, complete with saboteurs, secret agents and bought-off newspapers, bribes, staged riots and suitcases full of cash, and of midnight meetings between a terrified Shah — who fled his country at the first sign of trouble — and a determined Roosevelt.
But beyond being a suspenseful narrative of CIA skullduggery, Kinzer’s book is a tragic tale of the head-on encounter between a Cold-War obsessed US and Iran’s political, cultural and religious heritage, of which Mossadegh was the product, and about which Washington was clueless.
A Deadly Franchise
By Naomi Klein, AlterNet 9/3/2003
The Marriott hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's security minister, explained the implications of the day's attack: "Those who criticise about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human rights issue."
In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying Bush's so-called War on Terror (WOT). Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism – real and exaggerated – has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
Many have argued that the War on Terror is the US government's thinly veiled excuse for constructing a classic empire, in the model of Rome or Britain. Two years into the crusade, it's clear this is a mistake: the Bush gang doesn't have the stick-to-it-ness to successfully occupy one country, let alone a dozen. Bush and the gang do, however, have the hustle of good marketers, and they know how to contract out. What Bush has created in the WOT is less a "doctrine" for world domination than an easy-to-assemble toolkit for any mini-empire looking to get rid of the opposition and expand its power.
....The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was the first to adopt Bush's franchise, parroting the White House's pledges to "pull up these wild plants by the root, smash their infrastructure" as he sent bulldozers into the occupied territories to uproot olive trees and tanks to raze civilian homes. It soon included human rights observers who were bearing witness to the attacks, as well as aid workers and journalists.
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