Reading at checkpoints
By Sammy Kirreh, Jerusalem Times 9/11/2003
I have found out that the best way for a Palestinian living under Israeli military occupation to avoid stress and the boredom of waiting at checkpoints is to read. On my daily trip to Bethlehem where I teach, Israeli soldiers at Gilo junction stop the bus that forty students and I take at Damascus Gate, detaining us for nearly three-quarters of an hour and sometimes longer. As I wait I read.
Reading is a useful habit but more so at checkpoints as it distracts my mind from the humiliation of being questioned or ignored or made fun of by Israeli soldiers. Reading breaks me away from a reality that is stressful and sad, placates my anger at an unjust treatment, and helps pass the time.
I read at checkpoints because I am indifferent to the Israeli soldiers who stop me. For me reading is a form of protest, a way to say, "I don't care and I exist whether you like it or not."
The book I am reading now is M. K. Gandhi's autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I was in the middle of part three as I was waiting last Monday morning at Gilo junction to get back my identity card from an Israeli soldier. I like Gandhi's notions of ahimsa, or non-violence, and satyagraha, or passive resistance, and brahmacharya, or conduct that leads only to God, and I thought that if Palestinians put these notions to practice they will surely win their case.
A time to act
By Ze'ev Sternhell, Ha'aretz 9/12/2003
There's no reason to complain to the prime minister and the defense establishment. The present policy is exactly what Ariel Sharon, the chief of staff, the government and the leaders of the settlers think is correct and desirable. They know this policy has a price and they are willing to pay the price with eyes wide open. Their hearts are rent at the sight of the tragedy in Cafe Hillel, on the No. 2 bus in Jerusalem, or at Tzrifin, but to them those who are murdered are soldiers who fell in battle.
"The policy of liquidation is working," Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon declared to one of the mass-circulation dailies, without defining the precise criterion for success. He knew that Hamas would react to the airborne attacks that also kill innocent civilians, just as occurs in Israel.
Indeed, the people who are deciding Israel's future know that they are not eliminating terrorism but heightening it, but they believe that this is the heavy price to which we have to agree in order to destroy the Palestinians' capability to maintain national existence. In their view, the breaking of the population's resistance and the ghettoization of the territories are a sine qua non for the consolidation of Israel's future. They are not naive, they are not stupid, and they don't think that liquidating the leadership of Hamas will bring about a peaceful solution - or any other solution, for that matter - but that doesn't exactly bother them, because that's not what they're after.
10 years after Oslo, question of single state unavoidable
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 9/12/2003
In the United States, the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is viewed as a "blow" to President Bush's road map for peace.
However, the momentous crisis represented by the Abbas resignation may actually signal the end of the era in which hopes for peace were predicated on the division of the land between an Israeli and a Palestinian state.
Among Americans, conventional wisdom holds that Abbas failed because he was too weak to crack down on Hamas and because Palestinian President Yasser Arafat stood in his way.
The idea that the future of an entire region is determined by the individual fortunes of a mediocrity such as Abbas, or a compulsive failure such as Arafat, is absurd. However, along with the position that progress depends entirely on the behavior of an occupied population and not on the Israeli occupiers, this obsession with Palestinian personalities has been the bedrock of the U.S. approach to the conflict.
Despite its serious flaws, Bush's road map could have led to an end of the conflict if it had been implemented as written. But from the beginning, Washington sat on its hands as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly flouted the plan with assassinations and new settlements, despite a unilateral Palestinian cease-fire.
Analysis of the Israeli violations of the Road Map
Gush Shalom September 2003
Background: Israel has still not officially accepted the Road Map as a whole, but rather, pursuant to an Israeli cabinet vote on 25 May 2003, has accepted only the "steps" outlined in the Road Map. In addition, Israel only accepted the steps of the Road Map after unilaterally appending to the Road Map a list of 14 reservations and conditions aimed at obviating the substantive provisions of the Road Map. In other words, Israel agrees to the implementation of some of the steps outlined in the document, but not the end result of the Road Map: an end to Israel's 36-year military occupation and the creation of an independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian state.
"They have decided upon cold-blooded murder"
By Gush Shalom, Electronic Intifada 9/12/2003
"The government of Israel has tonight resolved to commit a cold-blooded murder, with the implementation deferred -- the cold blooded murder of the elected president of the Palestinians. Let there be no mistake about it. Let no one be fooled by the talk of 'deportation'. There is no intention that Arafat will survive the encounter with Sharon's soldiers. I know Sharon, I have followed his career for decades, ever since he was a young commando officer carrying out brutal cross-border raids. He has not changed in any essential, only in the amount of power held in his hands. He means to do it, he means to kill Arafat. He will watch for his chance, wait for a moment when the Americans look elsewhere - and then he will pounce."
That was the immediate response by Uri Avnery, former member of the Israeli Parliament and veteran activist of Gush Shalom (The Israeli Peace Bloc). "The cabinet ministers of the Government of Israel have tonight adopted an ominous, criminal decision, whose implementation would entail rivers of shed blood - far beyond all the horrors we have already seen in the past three years. The effects will spread far beyond the confines of this country - throughout the region and the world. The ministers who raised their hands for this infamous resolution will never be able to shirk of responsibility for what they have done".
The Hillel Cafe Bombing
By Yitzhak Frankenthal, Electronic Intifada 9/12/2003
10 September 2003 -- It is now 11:59 PM, half an hour after the suicide bombing at Hillel Cafe. Just the night before, my wife and I and two of our friends were sitting at the Cafe until around 11:40 PM. The place was packed. I can now hear the sirens of the ambulances racing through the streets of Jerusalem. I cannot get the images out of my head; images of severed arms, decapitated heads, people with nails and pieces or iron stuck in their bodies, broken tables, the cake and sandwich bar shattered into thousands of pieces.
What happened to the sweet waitress who was serving us? What happened to the young bus boy? We were sitting in the middle of the room; all those people came there for a good time and were carried out in coffins. Is the high ceiling still in place? The glass wall shattered into millions of shards, covering body parts and swimming in the blood that spilled on the floor like water.
Shema Israel, hear O Israel, we pray - but Israel is not listening. And I feel empty inside, asking myself which of my friends and neighbors were at the Cafe today? I am thinking about the people holding their coffee cups when the bomb went off, and how they were lucky if the shatters only got in their eyes and did not kill them. I think of the man biting into his sandwich not knowing that this would be his last bite ever; about the piles of human bodies flying in the air into one another; about the severed arm thrust into the young woman still seated at her table, but she feels nothing - she is either in shock or simply dead.
In Keeping Terrorists Out, Security Fences Israelis In
By Shmuel Erlich, Forward 9/11/2003
The declared aim of the security fence being constructed between Israel and the Palestinian territories in the West Bank is military: to provide better security for Israel's Jewish population, under continuous attack in the bloody and seemingly endless intifada. But there is no question that its overriding purpose is psychological: to give the Israeli population the feeling that something can be and is being done to curb and contain the bloodthirstiness of our Palestinian neighbors.
Its message, therefore, is above all intended to calm fears and provide hope. At the same time, it delivers a message to the Palestinians: If you are not strong enough, or mature enough, to take care of your own aggression, we will curb and incarcerate you all. Such a unilateral message, delivered from the position of greater power, cannot but increase counter-aggression and belligerence.
This is not a political or strategic statement, but a sad psychological fact that must not be overlooked in this century-old conflict that, as has already been said, is 90% psychological. Historically, the construction of the security fence means that nothing has changed since David Ben Gurion's acceptance of the United Nations' partition — the 1947 version of a fence — and the Arabs' refusal to accept any such fence or boundary. In history, as in human psychology, the past is always contained in the present.
The Devil and Daniel Pipes
By Salim Muwakkil, AlterNet 9/12/2003
The Bush administration's war on terrorism has done little so far but increase the ranks of potential terrorists. And while this may seem to be the regrettable result of a bumbling foreign policy, there are signs the administration is deliberately trying to antagonize the Islamic world; there seems to be method to its madness.
After a few bellicose statements about "crusades" early on, Bush's public soundbites have consistently portrayed Islam as a peaceful religion that has been "hijacked" by the forces of terrorism. But his official policies have done little to mark that distinction. The latest White House affront to Muslims is the recess appointment of Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
...The Bush administration seemingly has done all it could to offend Muslims and increase the allure of "jihadists" like Osama bin Laden, who argue that the West is inherently offensive to Islam. The military invasion of Iraq has unleashed forces of religious fervor that also feed jihadist passions. Many young Muslims now will be taught that secular ideologies are unable to protect Islamic lands from crusading imperialists.
It's good to talk
Editorial, The Guardian 9/12/2003
Even at the bloodiest times of the conflict in the Middle East a few politicians on both sides of the divide have contrived to keep discreet channels of communication open. Oddly, this has been less true of senior journalists and editors. As restrictions on travel became more severe and attitudes became polarised, so the normal exchange of journalistic information and ideas became rarer. That was the reason that 10 respected editors from Israel, Palestine and Egypt came together in London this week. A dialogue - these days impossible within their own region - took place over 48 hours in the centre of London under the joint auspices of this newspaper and the Portland Trust.
One editor laid his cards on the table early on. He had not come all this way, he announced, in order to have a bogus exercise in hand-holding and peace-making. In truth, there was little chance of that. The news organisations represented included papers of the left and right, including a monthly magazine primarily aimed at Israelis living in settlements. But in place of hand-holding there was something more valuable: two days of uninhibited, challenging and revealing dialogue over much coffee, a certain amount of drink and a prodigious number of cigarettes.
No success like failure
By Doron Rosenblum, Ha'aretz 9/12/2003
Like a huge oil spill in the ocean, the realization is spreading of the failure of the military option that was pursued for three years almost exclusively, with unprecedented operational leeway by a group of serving and retired army officers. True, opinion surveys still show that the public, in its desperation, continues to support every new force-driven option that is supplied by the army and Ariel Sharon.
However, with every new round of the escalation spiral - the terrorist attack, the retaliation, the "targeted preemption" and the bloodbaths that follow - an abiding sense of the bitter failure is beginning to slowly trickle in. "You do not come dramatically," the English poet Philip Larkin wrote in "To Failure," "It is these sunless afternoons, I find / Install you at my elbow like a bore./ You have been here some time."
Indeed, as the third anniversary (!) of the war with the Palestinians approaches, it is already difficult to repress the gravity of its interim balance sheet. The criterion is simple: as in that rolling war in Lebanon - which, not by chance, was also fomented, escalated and prosecuted by Ariel Sharon - our situation today is immeasurably worse than it was at the outset. After hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded we have regressed far back - far past square one - with Arafat still pulling the strings, terrorism "more terrible than anything we have known" still ahead of us, the fire that motivates the Palestinians' terrorism has become a forest fire, and they haven't even begun to make concessions on the "right of return." They at least received the promise of a state, whereas our situation - security, economic, moral and morale - has plummeted into the depths. What achievement can Sharon and his officers point to after three years of bloodshed, apart from something of a postponement in the American pressure to evacuate outposts and settlements (or is this actually the only goal Sharon aimed for)?
The expulsion of Arafat
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center 9/12/2003
After being treated as irrelevant for long, in less than a week, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat became the focal point of the Middle East crisis.
The Israeli assault against Arafat went non stop since he rejected “the generous Bark’s offer” in Camp David talks. Attempts to accuse, isolate, and marginalize him continued with each Israeli PM who stepped in office.
The American administration, since Clinton times, allied with Israel in holding Arafat responsible for the failure of Camp David talks and hence after linked any progress in peace talks with “Palestinian reforms” that in practice meant “steps to isolate and replace Arafat”
With the latest Israeli security cabinet decision to expel Arafat, which was described by Israeli ministers as practically meaning “to expel, arrest and trial, or kill him”, Israel stepped up the assault and forced new rules over the current crisis.
Many Israeli Generals and security officials believe that if both the expulsion and liquidation of Arafat is looked at by Palestinians as a realistic, possible to implement, option, Israel will be able to increase considerably its deterrence ability. But, even if that fails, Israeli right wing politicians believe that removing Arafat would actually mean the end of the Palestinian dream for a state.
The glittering edge of the boot
Ha'aretz 9/12/2003
The three women soldiers who detained an old Palestinian on the main street of the German Colony in West Jerusalem didn't hit him; they didn't spit at him or kick him or shove him against a wall with the butt of a rifle, but there was something in the behavior of these three girls, border policewomen in uniform, detaining an old Palestinian on a narrow stretch of a main street in Jerusalem that made me pause, look at them for a moment, go on walking, then retrace my steps. There was something I couldn't overlook and then go about my business.
What was it that drew me back there? It was something undefined and awful; an evil, whose ripples forced me to return and take a second, more focused look at what was happening: The old man, a tall Arab of about 70, wearing a traditional white keffiyeh and with an expression of disorientation and meek acceptance on his face, was standing on the narrow part of the sidewalk, his back to the stone wall of the old German cemetery, whose iron gates are always locked, and the three Border Police soldiers were leaning on the banister separating the sidewalk from the road. One of them was holding the documents the Palestinian had handed them - he came from Hebron and had no permit to be within the Green Line (1967 border) - and was talking on her mobile phone about personal matters, while the two others chatted and laughed, going on with their personal affairs.
Twilight Zone / Birth and death at the checkpoint
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz Friday Magazine 9/12/2003
Rula was in the last stages of labor. Daoud says the soldiers at the checkpoint wouldn't let them through, so his wife hid behind a concrete block and gave birth on the ground. A few minutes later, the baby girl died -- They wanted to call her Mira. All their children have names that begin with M, from Mohammed to Meida, their youngest daughter. They borrowed baby clothes from Rula's sister - their financial situation after three years of unemployment made buying new clothes out of the question - and they packed a bag to be ready for the birth. Now they are beside themselves with grief. Rula doesn't say a word and Daoud can't keep the words from pouring out.
Kafr Salem, behind the Beit Furik checkpoint east of Nablus, has been one of the most besieged locales in the West Bank over the past three years. It is rare that passage is granted to cars - even ambulances. A single dirt path leads to the village, and traffic there is usually prohibited, too. About 5,000 people live there, blockaded and beset by unemployment. An appeal to the High Court on the matter did not change the situation; the court approved the continuation of the blockade.
The Ashtiya family's house sits on the outskirts of the village. "House" may be too genteel a word; perhaps "hovel" would be more apt. The walls are not plastered, flies swarm, there is an awful stench. There is nothing in the house apart from a pile of mattresses and a small, worn-out plastic table of the kind meant for toddlers, which has been brought into the living room to serve as a table for the guests.
|
