The quick rise and fall of Mahmoud Abbas
By Hasan Abu Nimah, Electronic Intifada 9/10/2003
The resignation of the first Palestinian prime minister should surprise no one. The whole scheme was no more than an artificial arrangement intended to serve far more hidden, dangerous purposes than those sanctimoniously declared. It was artificial because Mahmoud Abbas was neither the choice of the Palestinian people nor that of the Palestinian Authority president. Instead, Abbas was imposed by the Americans and the Israelis to implement a plan, the elements of which were harmful to the cause of peace, harmful to Palestinian interests, and contradictory to any of the patrons' claims of introducing democracy and reform to the Palestinian institutions.
Under intense American and Arab pressure, even threats, the Palestinian leadership succumbed and offered a tepid welcome. But with the exception of the tiny and opportunistic minority who stood to make petty personal gains, most Palestinians were neither happy nor convinced. They were more cautious and fearful of the outcome of another alarming attempt to circumvent their rights.
No master plan
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz 9/10/2003
In one of the villages beside Qalqilyah and close to the Green Line, in which the threatening separation fence has already gobbled up chunks of land from most of the inhabitants and destroyed their water reservoirs, A. and his family are planning to move to Nablus. After all, what is the point in staying in a closed village, when all you have is a bit of land for growing mint in the yard?
The separation fence, along with the Qalandiyah and Bethlehem roadblocks, leaves tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Jerusalem area trapped between the fence and the centers of their lives (whether in Jerusalem or the West Bank), with no access to normal education, medical clinics, work, family. How many of them are already thinking of a solution similar to A.'s?
In many West Bank villages people are giving up cultivating a good share of their land at the edges of their property due to harassment by Israelis who have settled the area, both before and after September 2000.
Sometimes it is a fence and a security road built around various settlements long before September 2000. The fence included hundreds of fruit trees, the livelihoods of dozens of families. By definition that cultivated land, that fenced-in land, is lost. Now that has become the fate of the lands trapped between the Green Line and the separation fence. Since before September 2000 and to this day, West Bank viallagers have been served with court orders for the destruction of their homes or the uprooting of their orchards. They had encroached on state lands, said the civil administration.
You can't make a deal with the dead
By Kevin Toolis, The Guardian 9/10/2003
For a walking dead man, Hamas leader Ismail Abu Shanab was unimpressed by the assassins who would one day come for him. "I am not afraid," he said as we sat drinking tea in his Gaza City home. "If the Israelis want to kill me, they will. We live in war, but the Palestinians are tough enough to confront the huge power facing them. We are not afraid to die." In terms of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, Shanab was a pragmatist, credited with having helped to broker the seven-week Palestinian ceasefire. His conversation was peppered with hints that Hamas' rejectionism towards the state of Israel was tradable for withdrawal to the 1967 borders.
Shanab met his predicted end under a hail of Israeli rocket fire two weeks ago in Gaza City. His death was the 138th "targeted killing" of Palestinian militants by the Israeli military since 2000. Since Shanab's immolation, Israel has stepped up the killing game against Hamas, culminating in the failed strike against the paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, last weekend. The total is now around 150 and rising.
But then so is the overall casualty count: 2,600 Palestinians and 840 Israelis. Hamas appears undeterred by the attrition campaign against its leadership. The materials for suicide vest bombs come cheap, around £30, and there is an endless army of Palestinian volunteers to wear them. In classic counter-insurgency warfare terms, the Israeli level of casualties, one in four, remains unsustainably high.
Has France Lost Its Balance?
By Randa Takieddine, Al-Hayat 9/10/2003
The unanimous European decision to enlist Hamas' political wing on the European list of "terrorist organizations" and freeze its assets is most regrettable. The huge U.S. efforts exerted on countries such as France have succeeded, despite the traditional balance brought by the Gaullist policy regarding the Arab cause.
It is most unfortunate that the European Union was unanimous in taking this decision to penalize Hamas, even while Israel has been violating the Israeli-European partnership agreement for years, without any European procedure taken to punish it. Israel has been selling on European markets its agricultural foods, produced in the illegal settlements built on Palestinian territory, even though it doesn't have the right to sell them as Israeli products.
At the initiative of France, Europe has often threatened to penalize Israel, but it never did, despite the fact that the partnership agreement includes a clause binding Israel to commit to the Oslo Accords and respect the international laws, including ceasing settlement building and dismantling illegal settlements. Despite this and the fact that Israel is pursuing its settlement policy and violating international laws, Europe currently imports 70% of Israel's agriculture production, tax-free.
Crisis Of Our Liberalism Sharper Than That Of Westernization
By Wahid Abdulmajid, Al-Hayat 9/8/2003
Khaled Haroub has a great capacity of surprising his readers when he discusses an issue of his choice, based on hypotheses he formulated, and then turns into given facts without proving any of them.
In his article published in Al-Hayat on August 30, he tried to discuss the contemporary problems of Arab liberalism. There are many and complicated problems, just like with all the other Arab political thoughts, especially Arab Marxism and pan-Arabism. If Arab political Islam found a platform in the present reality, it is not because its ideological foundation is better, but because it exploits the confusion between it and the Islamic doctrine....
....After Arab ruling regimes invented the accusation of imported ideas in order to undermine the Left specifically, some Islamists and nationalist intellectuals adopted a classification originally based on this accusation, dividing ideas into two main categories: one inherited or original category (political Islam and pan-Arabism) and the other, which is imported (liberalism and Marxism).
This classification is wrong, or at least debatable, because to consider ideas as importable goods means that all the ideas are originally from the West. Moreover, the foreign element in the Arab nationalist ideology is much greater than in any other Arab ideology. Marxism is based on a principle existing in our legacy and that is justice. Another element in liberalism that exists in our tradition is freedom. However, pan-Arabism is entirely built on a Western ideology that does not exist in our tradition: the national state.
Double-Dealing by the Rich
Editorial, Arab News 9/10/2003
The rich First World rejoices in the achievements of capitalism and the successes of the free market economy. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the high priests of this apparently fundamental philosophy, spend much time and ink producing detailed reports criticizing emerging economies for their state aid, lack of transparency and free trade.
Much of this is baloney. The dominant economies of North America, Europe and Asia are all of them riddled with subsidies, both hidden and overt, which give their own producers support and protection from damage in the free markets. Their reasons may be good, but they cannot then criticize struggling Third World countries for trying to redress the balance by instituting their own protective fixes. An attempt to end this double standard is likely to be a key issue at the latest round of World Trade Organization talks which start today in Cancun, Mexico. Third World countries struggling to get on their feet economically are suffering serious losses because of First World trade barriers built out of subsidies, especially for agricultural production. Research just published in Washington calculates that the world’s poorer countries lose a staggering $24 billion a year because of protectionist subsidies in the world’s rich nations. In terms of the opportunity cost to countries whose entire national product may be less than a billion a year, this money represents the difference between continued abject economic failure and modest success.
Is the Neocon Agenda for Pax Americana Losing Steam?
By Jim Lobe, Dissident Voice 9/9/2003
President George W. Bush's speech to the nation last night was notable in many ways, most critically for marking what appears to be a weakening of the steep unilateralist trajectory on which neoconservative and right-wing hawks set U.S. foreign policy two years ago. Who would have thought it would lose momentum so quickly after Washington's stunning military victory in Iraq in early April and plummet back to earth?
Now, just a week before the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration appears to have decided that Washington really cannot run Iraq, let alone the entire Middle East, by itself and must rely on others--even the much-despised United Nations--to help out.
Whether the UN will agree to do so--and on what conditions--remains to be determined, but, for the first time in two years, it appears that the administration's more multilaterally inclined, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, may actually be moving into the driver's seat. While the battle for control is far from over, the signs of what is being euphemistically called a "policy adjustment'' have already emerged....
....The Washington Post reported September 4th that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard B. Myers, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace, effectively circumvented the Pentagon's civilian leadership in lobbying in support of Powell's efforts to turn to the Security Council for a new resolution. The result was that when Powell presented the idea to Bush earlier this week, he was able to speak for the uniformed military, as well as the State Department, effectively undermining Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Fragments of Rafah
By Laura Gordon, Electronic Intifada 9/9/2003
21 August 2003 -- And outside, they are shouting again, men's voices fighting to stay afloat like it was an ocean they were drowning in. Down the street in Al-Awda Square, Hamas has been demonstrating since 8 pm between Christmas lights in bright colors and loudspeakers. Further down, the shooting from the tower dominiates the night, louder than angry men, louder than demonstrators. Earlier tonight, an ambulance's urgent wail, me holding my breath praying. Death is so close now you can smell it. Already it has come like a rain storm beginning in Hebron, like the time I watched rain come towards me from across a lake and ran toward the forest and my feet were not faster than the rain.
In the West Bank, tanks close in, six dead in a day. In Gaza, five missiles from an F-16 assassinate Ismael Abu Shanab, a non-militant spokesperson for Hamas; kill his two bodyguards, and injure 20 bystanders, 5 seriously. F-16s paint the sky everyday, blue and white like clouds. But so far in Rafah, a military tower is shooting in the air, bullets have remained abstract in their threat, have not collided today with flesh, but still I see death everywhere, in the faces of my friends and of strangers in the streets. Shouting upstairs as the images paint TV.
29 August 2003 -- In my haste to leave the Internet cafe, I forgot to mention in my last letter that just as we were leaving the hospital, one 17-year-old was dying in the ICU from the injuries he had received from the missile in Jabaliya Camp the day before, and crowds of people were flowing into the waiting room like rivers, falling all over each other and you could hear the sounds of hearts breaking.
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