Let Israelis and Palestinians vote on a final settlement
By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, The Guardian 9/8/2003
The road map will fail, but there is a better way -- The current Israeli-Palestinian peace process relies on a step-by-step approach, which is destined to fail. Moreover, its goal is final status negotiations, which are unlikely to succeed.
Enough with the small steps. Years of intermittent talks between Israelis and Palestinians have produced a good notion of what a settlement acceptable to both sides must look like. The challenge is to get there before a catastrophic chain of events takes place. The weekend resignation of the Palestinian government, together with Israel's attempt to kill the top leaders of Hamas, could be the first links in that chain. It is time for a fresh approach that leaps directly to a final deal, without further negotiations, backed by a US-led international mandate and submitted for approval via popular referendums among the Israeli and Palestinian people. This is the best and most realistic way forward.
The Bush administration's road map, by contrast, is faltering - because of its own deficiencies. Like past peace plans, it is premised on the idea that incremental stages will bring Israelis and Palestinians to the point where they can negotiate the fundamental issues that separate them. The road map is somewhat clearer than previous proposals about the ultimate goal - a two-state solution - but not much. Unfortunately, the outcome is as predictable as the recipe is familiar, for an incremental peace process plays right into the hands of those who want no peace process at all.
Because the ultimate solution remains up for grabs, the protagonists pursue policies designed to shape its contours rather than promote a common enterprise. The vagueness of the goal means neither side has an incentive to live up to its obligations in a wholehearted way. Instead, such obligations - Israeli evacuation of settler outposts or Palestinian confiscation of weapons, for example - are carried out under pressure, if at all. The leadership on both sides must contend with domestic opposition, and neither is prepared to take it on at the outset of an ill-marked path. Each incremental gesture creates one more opportunity for a misstep or deliberate sabotage.
Israeli peace camp deserves help from Arabs and Americans alike
Editorial, Daily Star 9/8/2003
Readers of the International Herald Tribune received a rare treat on Saturday when the paper ran a commentary by former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg. The Labor Party MP issued a scathing analysis of the dilemma facing the Jewish state and the Sharon government’s uninspired reactions thereto as it tries to have things both ways by clinging to claims of being a democracy while simultaneously oppressing the Palestinian people. Burg’s devastating indictment of current Israeli policy was welcome evidence of what The Daily Star has noted on numerous occasions: It is foolish for Arabs and their governments to view Israel as a hostile monolith because many of its citizens and political leaders are potential partners in the search for a just and comprehensive peace.
Burg’s article was hardly written on a lark. He has a long history of advocating steps to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict and of working diligently to build mutual understanding. But he and like-minded people on both sides of the crisis cannot do it alone. For this reason, it would be nice to know how many Arab and American decision-makers were among the IHT readers fortunate enough to read the piece. It would be even better to know that they understand the opportunity it represents and are determined to take advantage of it for the sake of all concerned.
The Arabs would do well to recognize and embrace the sentiments expressed in Burg’s article by reviving the peace plan promulgated at the Beirut summit in March 2002. The fact that hostilities continue in the Occupied Territories is no excuse for inaction. On the contrary, it only adds to the moral and diplomatic responsibility of all Arab leaders to end what has become a semi-permanent crisis. And make no mistake: The motive force of any new Arab peace drive can only be enhanced if leading roles are enthusiastically adopted by key players like Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Cornered, besieged and in charge
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz 9/8/2003
In his letter of resignation as Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) cast most of the blame on the Israeli government, which is continuing its previous policy in the territories. From the Palestinian point of view, Abu Mazen's government took a series of steps in an attempt to implement the road map, while the Israelis did zero in return. The Palestinian Authority established a government in order to bring about orderly governance, Abu Mazen instituted a reform in the PA's financial system and, most importantly, his government achieved a cease-fire on the part of the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. And what did Israel give? A meaningless release of a few hundred prisoners, most of whom were due to be released soon anyway, and a minority of whom were criminal offenders whose release the Palestinians had not even requested. In addition, the Israeli administration opened a road in Gaza and took down five roadblocks in the West Bank, out of nearly 220.
However, the senior figures in the PA know that Abu Mazen also made a serious error on the domestic scene. This, of course, has to do with his relations with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. His mistake was in "asking for Arafat's support by removing himself from the position of chairman" (in the words of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian People's Party and chairman of the Non-Governmental Organizations in the territories), instead of dealing with him in a more sophisticated way. There was no chance that Arafat would agree to this. No leader helps to eliminate himself politically, and certainly not Arafat, who, during his 35 years as chairman of the Palestinian national movement, has proved to everyone that he is the master of survival.
Not anti-Semite, just anti-Zionist
By Malcolm Evans, Ha'aretz Friday Magazine 9/5/2003
I differentiate between the Jewish community at large and the doctrine of Zionism, writes New Zealand cartoonist Malcolm Evans in response to "Drawing the line" by Sara Leibovich-Dar, Haaretz Magazine, August 29. -- Someone once said that anyone who sets out to explain himself risks being misunderstood and I took that risk, because I relied on the reporter's professionalism to get the story right. So it was with a growing sense of frustration, sadness and concern that I read so many inaccuracies, distortions and falsehoods in the published piece.
The fact that my most repeated theme - my dismissal was a consequence of my refusal to accept the editor's claim that he had the right to direct my work, should have received such little emphasis, worries me.
I was not dismissed because my cartoons compared Israel's policies to Nazism, as Leibovich-Dar wrote, but rather, as I said in our interview, because one cartoon which drew an analogy with Apartheid raised the ire of some in the Jewish community here, which subsequently led to a breakdown of my relationship with my employer, culminating in my dismissal.
I am more concerned that paragraph three of the story is a terrible distortion of what I actually said. Leibovich-Dar wrote: "Evans is angry at the Jewish community and at Jews from other countries who, he says, complained ... " I didn't say that and I am not angry at them at all. I fully respect their right to complain and I fully understand how their sensitivity to any statement critical of Israel, might move them to do so. [See VTJP's Cartoons page, scroll down for samples of Malcolm Evans' work]
There's a wall in the way
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz Friday Magazine 9/5/2003
A little girl in her school uniform, her hair carefully combed, was walking to her first day of school on Monday. Walking to school? Not precisely. There's a wall in the way. Trying to squeeze between the big cement blocks of this wall besieging her home, she nearly manages to get her little body through, but not her new school bag. Backing off, she tries a different spot where people climb over instead of squeezing through. She ducks her head under the barbed wire, puts one foot across, then the book bag, jumps, lands with a thud and runs - in fear of the Border Police who could show up momentarily. Eventually she arrives at school, still in one piece.
Welcome to the first grade!
No need to travel far to see this evil. Fifteen minutes from downtown Jerusalem, you can see what cruelty for its own sake looks like: collective abuse bearing no relation to its declared purpose. The little town of Abu Dis, once was nearly the temporary capital of Palestine, with an imposing parliament building to prove it, is just a dusty village nowadays, scarred and abandoned, with a wall that bisects everything.
For over a year now, an ugly concrete wall has divided the good people from the bad there, the prisoners from the free, the blue (Israeli identity cards) from the orange (West Bank ID cards). Officially, Palestinians who live west of the wall are okay; Israel leaves them alone, they're deemed residents of Jerusalem. Those to the east of the wall are caged like animals.
The division is not absolute. Despite the absence of a gate, an evil decision in and of itself, infiltration occurs under the noses of the Border Police patrols swarming all over the village. People climb over or squeeze through. Meanwhile, they're humiliated. Bullied. Battered. Made to sweat. Covered in dust. An entire town scales the wall to get to school, to the grocery store, to work - day after day, evening after evening: old folks, young folks, women and children.
A war of bricks and mortar fire
By Yair Ettinger, Taayush/Haaretz 8/15/2003
Beside the single mothers, the Bedouin have set up a tent in Jerusalem to protest demolitions of their homes, which they see as the first stage of Sharon's transfer plan -- Far away in the peripheries, the government has been waging an uncompromising war against many hundreds of its citizens. "This is the 11th hour," warned Construction Minister Effi Eitam, referring to what he calls Israeli Arabs' "construction Jihad." Recently, on the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, officials from the government and the local authorities, equipped with bulldozers and accompanied by hundreds of policemen, have been going out to areas of predominantly Arab communities. On Monday, seven homes in Bedouin settlements in the Negev were demolished, taking the number of homes razed in the Negev to 117 since the start of 2003. This compares to 113 in the whole of 2002. Dozens more Arab-owned homes have been demolished in other areas, particularly the mixed Jewish-Arab towns of Ramle, Jaffa and Lod.
In the aftermath of October 2000, the government refrained from demolishing homes, fearing a violent backlash. In the run-up to the 2003 elections, the authorities began to demolish homes again, and now sources close to Sharon are speaking of an all-out war. "Our campaign to demolish illegal edifices is gaining momentum," they say with satisfaction. "The prime minister is following developments personally. Unfortunately, house demolition is not being carried out to the extent we would like, because of legal restrictions, so the war is currently focusing on deterrence, to try and limit the phenomenon."
It is far from clear whether the enemy in this war is being deterred. On the day the Negev homes were demolished, their occupants vowed that they would be rebuilt, and said that the groundwork had already begun. Hundreds of Bedouin promised to demonstrate, which they did, with the help of the local welfare committees and various voluntary political organizations, such as Taayush. But, unlike the past, Sharon's current campaign against illegal construction is being interpreted by leaders of the Arab public not just as a discriminatory policy, but as the first stage of a transfer plan. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee called this week for their struggle to be intensified, in light of "the start of the implementation of Sharon's colonialist plan for the Judaization of the Negev and the Galilee."
Two Steps Backward
Editorial, Arab News 9/8/2003
The two body blows administered to the Palestinians on Saturday have perhaps fatally set back the peace process. The resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has derailed the road map because the initiative’s chief sponsor, the United States, and Israel view Abbas as the only Palestinian they will deal with. And the attempted Israeli assassination of the Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, an immensely popular Palestinian figure, on the same day will lead to fierce reprisals by the resistance movement.
Israel will now take the opportunity of Abbas’ apparent departure to sever all contacts with the Palestinian Authority and therefore all obligations under the road map. As a consequence, it will continue its round-the-clock arrests and search raids in West Bank cities and villages and will continue building the wall that divides the country. Tel Aviv will continue to claim that it is unable to restrain the zealotry of Jewish settlers when in fact it has probably encouraged them to undermine the road map.
The picture is a far cry from where the parties stood in June when President George Bush got Ariel Sharon and Abbas to shake hands on the road map. It was an incredible decision on Israel’s part to try to kill Yassin, leader of the biggest Palestinian resistance movement. It was a red line the Israelis should never have crossed. But cross it they did. The result is that already some of Hamas’ members are calling for the blood of Sharon.
The resignation of Abu-Mazen is a great victory for Sharon
By Gush Shalom, Arabic Media Internet Network 9/6/2003
From the beginning, Sharon intended to topple Abu-Mazen. It was obvious that President Bush's has taken a liking to this Palestinian leader, and this endangered Sharon's exclusive status in the White House. Therefore it was Sharon's aim to bring about the political elimination of Abu-Mazen in a way calculated to put the blame on Yasser Arafat.
Thus Sharon hoped to kill two birds with one stone: safeguard his exclusive influence on Bush and prepare the way for the elimination of Arafat.
Abu-Mazen's position has become impossible. He got nothing at all from Sharon and Bush, except the release of a bunch of Palestinian criminals and an increase of the number of Palestinians workers in Israel - as required by the Israeli economy. Apart from that, not one of the "painful concessions" promised by Sharon has been delivered. On the contrary: the "targeted eliminations" have been accelerated, as well as the building of the Wall and the enlargement of the settlement.
Israeli women working to end occupation
By Gila Svirsky, Daily Star 9/8/2003
Nonviolence as a strategy has been practiced by the Israeli women’s peace movement since the founding of Women in Black in early 1988, one month after the first Palestinian intifada broke out. The Women in Black movement began as a small group of Israeli women carrying out a simple form of protest: Once a week at the same hour and in the same location a major traffic intersection in Jerusalem they donned black clothing and raised a black sign in the shape of a hand with white lettering that read: “End the occupation.”
After this modest beginning, women throughout Israel heard of the protest, and began similar vigils. In northern Israel, where many Palestinian citizens of Israel reside, the vigils had Arab and Jewish women standing side by side. From Israel, it spread to dozens of other countries. The strength of the movement is its clear and unchanging message presented in a nonviolent manner: End the occupation. The target audience is the Israeli public and leadership, the international public and leadership, and the Palestinian people. The intent is to magnify the voice of those who object to the occupation, but do not have political clout as individuals. Because of the persistence of these women and the growing number of vigils, this movement seems to have had a widespread impact.
A scandalous celebration & an "illegal demonstration"
By Adam Keller, Arabic Media Internet Network 9/5/2003
"The Road Map to Peace", which the Government of Israel officially endorsed, obliges the government to immediately dismantle all settlement extensions established after March 2001 (when Sharon came to power) and to strictly refrain from any further settlement extension whatsoever. It seems, however, that Sharon's Housing Minister Effie Eitam never heard of it.
A week ago the minister - former Brigadier-General with a highly checkered career, and presently leader of the extreme-right National Religious Party - announced his intention to attend the inauguration ceremony of a new "neighborhood" at the Israeli settlement of Kedumim, southwest of Nablus on the West Bank. The settler pirate radio jubilantly announced the occasion - the evening of August 31 - and called upon its listeners to "participate in celebrating this new extension of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel".
This forthcoming event was also noticed by the Peace Now Settlement Watch Team, and the movement immediately approached the police and military authorities with a request to hold a protest vigil during what Peace Now termed in its Ha'aretz ad "the scandalous settlement festival".
The permit for the demo was duly granted - rather to the organizers' surprise - and on the appointed afternoon two busloads of demonstrators set out from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem to rendezvous a few kilometers outside the settlement. There, however, they run into a hitch. Reneging on their previous promises, the officers on the spot refused to let the demonstrators proceed to the settlement gate, instead pointing to the top of a rugged hill: "You can stand there with your signs".
Promis
By Michael C. Ruppert, From The Wilderness September 2000
...The Promis-managed data could be anything from financial records of banking institutions to compilations of various records used to track the movement of terrorists. That made the program a natural for Israel which, according to Hamilton and many other sources, was one of the first countries to acquire the bootlegged software from Meese and Company. As voluminously described by Inslaw attorney, the late Elliot Richardson, the Israeli Mossad under the direction of Rafi Eitan, allegedly modified the software yet again and sold it throughout the Middle East. It was Eitan, the legendary Mossad captor of Adolph Eichmann, according to Hamilton, who had masqueraded as an Israeli prosecutor to enter Inslaw's DC offices years earlier and obtain a first hand demonstration of what the Promis could do.
Not too many Arab nations would trust a friendly Mossad agent selling computer programs. So the Mossad provided their modified Promis to flamboyant British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, a WWII Jewish resistance fighter who had assumed the Anglo name and British citizenship after the war. It was Maxwell, capable of travelling the world and with enormous marketing resources, who became the sales agent for Promis and then sold it to, among others, the Canadian government. Maxwell drowned mysteriously in late 1991, not long after investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was "suicided" in West Virginia. Maxwell may not have been the only one to send Promis north....
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