An outcome too terrible to imagine
By Yigal Bronner, Ha'aretz 9/17/2003
Ours will be a brutal land of pens stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that will make South African apartheid pale. The outcome is too terrible to even imagine. -- The morning after the horrific suicide bombing at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked on the radio whether this was the right time to cut the defense budget. Netanyahu reiterated his promise that the funds earmarked for what is known as the separation fence will not be reduced and will even be pumped in faster to accelerate its construction. This will be done in order to guarantee the security of Israeli civilians. It never occurred to the radio host to ask whether the fence would, indeed, guarantee security. As in other areas, the escalating violence and heated emotions rule out any alternative views.
One of the most dramatic geo-political changes in the history of the region is taking place at record speed and without any public debate. Before it becomes too late, we must take time out to look through the veil of lies about the fence.
The first lie is in the title. The so-called separation fence promises the worn-out and worried public that the Palestinians, and all the troubles that contact with them entails, will be tucked safely behind the fence. We are on one side, they are on the other, and that's that. The alignment of the fence will, in reality, annex much of the West Bank to Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will still be living west of the fence, on the Israeli side. Thousands of settlers will be living east of it. Call it what you will - separation it ain't.
The second lie is that this fence marks a border, and that the Palestinian State that Sharon speaks of will be established east of it. This is not one fence, but at least two sets of walls. And while one of them, the western one, will steal as much Palestinian land as possible along the Green Line, the other one, the eastern one, will be annexing remote settlements. Several other obstacles, including fences and ditches, will be created between the two walls. This system will turn the populated areas of the West Bank into uncontiguous pens.
The Jews In Palestine 1938
By Mahatma Gandhi, Palestinian Diary 11/24/2000
Several letters have been received by me asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question. My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews. But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.
Want peace? Make Arafat relevant
By Geoffrey Aronson, Daily Star 9/16/2003
There is a precedent in recent Palestinian history that not only illuminates the current crisis of representation at the upper echelons of Palestinian politics, a crisis that one disheartened Palestinian described as a “political kindergarten,” but which also points the way to its resolution.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the United States began a rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, but continued to shun its leader, Yasser Arafat. The then-government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was prepared to attend the Madrid conference of October 1991, but conditioned its participation on the incorporation of “non-PLO” Palestinians into a joint delegation with Jordanian representatives. The negotiations that followed in Washington adhered to this formula. Arafat accommodated the American and Israeli demands. He blessed the creation of a delegation of Palestinians from inside the Occupied Territories to negotiate with Israel. Both then-President George Bush and Shamir thought that they had won a great diplomatic victory, one that presaged the substantive policy achievement of removing the PLO and Arafat from the evolving diplomatic equation.
To their dismay the Palestinian delegation, ably led by physician Haidar Abdul Shafi, proved to be a recalcitrant and demanding antagonist. Dutifully following instructions by Arafat, Abdul Shafi, assisted by Hanan Ashrawi and others, insisted upon terms that neither Shamir nor his successor Yitzhak Rabin would contemplate. The Palestinian negotiating position advanced during this period was safely within the broad Palestinian consensus, and was, thus, a prescription for stalemate. The Washington delegation, composed of individuals appointed but not empowered by Arafat, was not destined to engage in creative diplomacy or make the kind of concessions demanded by Israel and the US.
Dialectics of Terror
By M. Shahid Alam, Dissident Voice 9/14/2003
“If you kill one person, it is murder. If you kill a hundred thousand, it is foreign policy.” - Anonymous --
I doubt if I have come across a more pithy statement exposing the hypocrisy of America’s war against terrorism; but this is what I read, well before September 11, 2001, on a car-sticker in the commuter parking lot in Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA.
States are founded on a monopoly over violence, which has nearly always included the right to kill. In fact, that is the very essence of the state. States seek to enforce this monopoly by amassing instruments of violence; but that is scarcely enough. They also use religion, ideology and laws to deligitimize and root out violence stemming from non-state agents.
This monopoly over violence creates its own problem. Unchallenged, the state can turn the instruments of violence against its own population. This leads to state tyranny. The state can also wage wars to enrich one or more sectional interests. This defines the dual challenge before all organized societies: restraining state tyranny and limiting its war-making powers.
Often, there has existed a tradeoff between tyranny and wars. Arguably, such a tradeoff was at work during the period of European expansion since the sixteenth century, when Europeans slowly secured political rights even as they engaged in growing, even genocidal, violence, especially against non-Europeans. As Western states gradually conceded rights to their own populations, they intensified the murder and enslavement of Americans and Africans, founding white colonies on lands stolen from them. Few Westerners were troubled by this inverse connection: this was the essence of racism.
Ten Years Later: The World Is Upside Down
By James J. Zogby, Arab News 9/17/2003
I know I have said it before but the times bear repeating it, sometimes it feels like we’ve all become Alice, the character in the Lewis Carroll classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Events these days are so bizarre, it’s as if we have fallen into that story’s “rabbit hole” and ended up in “Wonderland” where everything is upside down.
Ten years after we gathered on the White House lawn to witness the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace accord and the Arafat-Rabin handshake, Rabin has been murdered by an Israeli assassin and Arafat is in his compound threatened with expulsion or death.
Ten years ago, while the majority of Israelis and Palestinians celebrated the promise of peace, they were joined by Arab-Americans and American Jews who shared the same hope. Extremists, on all sides, however, were resolved to bring the process down and, it appears, they are close to accomplishing their goal.
The decade of “peace” has brought disaster to the Palestinians: Israeli settlements have doubled and Israeli roads and other construction projects (including the insidious “wall”) have carved the territories into prison-like reservations seething with despair and anger. The occupation’s brutality and repression have come to define the Palestinian’s daily life, as has their poverty. Palestinians are poorer and less employed today than they were before Oslo. This “peace process” has given peace a bad name. It has, instead, sucked the very hope and life out of those who pinned their hope to it. And all of this was true even before the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000.
And yet in the bizarre upside-down political discourse of the United States the brutal provocateur Sharon is “a man of peace” and Arafat, the head of a dismembered and dispossessed people and a dismantled authority is “an obstacle to peace”. Israel continues to receive compassion, as victims of terror, while Palestinian suffering is largely ignored and almost never condemned.
Preparing For A Post-Road Map Struggle Against Apartheid
By Jeff Halper, Arabic Media Internet Network 9/15/2003
Everyone pooh-poohs the road map. From State Department and other "quartet" officials through the office of Ariel Sharon to international activists and the average person on the streets of Palestine and Israel, one would be hard-pressed to find a single believer in the "road map." From the start it has been dismissed as another failed initiative, joining a long line from Mitchell and Tenet to Gunnar Jarring and the Roger's Plan. But is it? In my view the road map possesses a significance that has been lost even on its adherents.
If The Road Map Fails: Permanent Apartheid
Looked at from the ground up, from the perspective of Israel's completion of its three-decade campaign to create irreversible "facts on the ground," the road map represents the last gasp of the two-state solution. This is the crunch. As anyone who has spent even a few hours in the Occupied Territories readily understands, Israel has entered in the last phase of fully and finally incorporating the West Bank into Israeli proper, of transforming a temporary occupation into a permanent state of apartheid. Sharon's implementation of Jabotinsky's doctrine of the "Iron Wall" establishing such massive "facts on the ground" that the Palestinians will despair of ever having a viable state of their own has reached its critical mass. The Israeli settlement blocs are so extensive, their incorporation into Israel proper by a massive system of highways and "by-pass roads" so complete and the Separation Wall physically confining the Palestinians to tiny cantons so advanced as to render any genuine two-state solution impossible and ridiculous. Given the unwillingness of the international community to force Israel's withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and in particular the American Congress's refusal to countenance any meaningful pressure on Israel, we may say that Israel is on the brink of emerging as the world's next apartheid state. Only the road map, the last dying breath of the two-state solution, stands between the hope of Palestinian self-determination in their own viable and truly sovereign (if tiny) state and the de facto creation of one state controlled by Israel. Rather than merely another failed initiative on the way to yet others, we must view the road map as a watershed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its final failure will alter fundamentally the entire nature of struggle for a just and sustainable solution to the Palestinian issue.
Palestinians trapped by Israeli military occupation need international protection
By Lev Grinberg, Arabic Media Internet Network 9/16/2003
The crucial problem is not security, but the uneven power relations between Israelis and Palestinians, and the ascendance of the military society over the civil society. -- The deadline for the first stage of the Road Map (RM) was May 2003, it has expired three moths ago. The Hudna (cease fire) was declared unilaterally by the Palestinians for three moths, but it didn’t last even for two months. During that period the Israeli Government continued the confiscation of Lands, demolition of Palestinian houses, building new houses in the settlements and the eight meters high wall of hate, violating the principles of the first stage of the RM. The new Palestinian Government didn’t even have the opportunity to prove if it has the capacity and the political will to prevent suicide attacks. Israel continued its policy of targeted killings of Palestinian activists and political leaders, and also civilians, by inevitable ‘accidents’.
The humiliation of occupation continued, and with it the mutual hate between Israelis and Palestinians, that led to the loss of hope. In the last three years Palestinians and Israelis saw only the ugly faces of each other: Palestinians saw soldiers, settlers and helicopters. The Israelis saw suicide bombers. Almost no peace seekers in both sides were able to cross the border lines that separate Israeli citizens from the occupied Palestinians. Most people ready to cross these lines were those ready to use violence against each other.
The actions of the Israeli civil society grew in the last year significantly in different specific fields, from solidarity actions done by Taayush, the committee against House demolition, to civil rights protection like Machsom Watch and Betselem; from concrete struggles against manifestations of the occupation, like the struggle against the separation Wall in Mas’ha Camp, to the struggle against the military actions of the COs.
Arafat Locked Between Two Gangs
By Zuheir Kseibati, Al-Hayat 9/17/2003
When the Security Council warned Israel of imposing sanctions if it carries out its threat to ban President Arafat from the Palestinian territories, Israel's response was to offer another option: to execute the Palestinian President. As for the Arab League, its reaction was to hold an extraordinary session for the states' representatives! This is the difference between Israel and the Arabs, put simply: a revelry that does not recognize international laws and occupational responsibilities, that blackmails the world by making itself appear in the role of the "victim," and follows the path of the Americans after the September 11 attacks, and even teaches them the method of eradication as the last remedy… whereby all is allowed.
The U.S. advice to avoid expelling or killing Arafat remains just an advice, and not a binding request made to the ally Ariel Sharon, as long as he is engaged in the "war on terror."
What Washington fears is a burst of anger in the region, at a time when it refuses to speed up its withdrawal from Iraq, and where killing is allowed, just as it is in the Palestinian territories.
As for the Arab situation, it no longer comes as a shock or a surprise, every time the region faces an event of the importance of Israel's preparations for eliminating the "Arafat obstacle": no reaction as far as action, nor does the concerned party expect anything more than just talk, communiqués and expressions of sorrow from the compatriots.
From Barak to the Road Map
By Baruch Kimmerling , Dissident Voice 9/15/2003
About a year ago, the New York Review of Books devoted its pages to an interesting exchange on the question of who was to blame for the collapse of the Camp David peace talks between Barak and Arafat, presided over by Clinton. This was — and still is — not a purely historical issue: what happened at Camp David has a direct bearing on the present and future of Israeli–Palestinian relations. The exchange in the NYRB, however — on one side, an interview with Barak by the Israeli historian, Benny Morris; on the other, a ‘Reply to Ehud Barak’ by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha — was principally concerned, above all on the Barak–Morris side, with clearing one or other of the participants in the aborted talks of responsibility for their failure. In doing so, the debate became decontextualized, avoiding wider discussion of what really went wrong and why, and concentrating instead on the interpersonal dynamics that developed at Camp David and the psychologies of the major players.
....Prior to the Camp David talks, Barak and Clinton had agreed that every move would be coordinated in advance between the United States and Israel; and that if the summit failed, Israel would not take the blame. Clinton stood by this, as did most of his subordinates. The exception was Malley, the President’s Special Assistant for Arab–Israeli Affairs during the negotiations, who came out with his own, fairly devastating account of Barak’s strategy, and apportioned blame for the failure between all three sides. Nevertheless, with the support of both Morris and Dennis Ross, Clinton’s point-man for dealing with the Palestinians (employed today as director of a hawkish, pro-Israeli research institute), and through numerous personal articles and appearances, Barak has succeeded in convincing most of the American public of the validity of his ‘no partner’ claim.
How Turkey's goose was cooked
By Henry C K Liu, Asia Times 9/16/2003
I was invited to give a lecture on "The Global Economy in Transition" at the Seventh International Conference on Economics held on September 6-9 at the Economic Research Center of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. The conference brought together from all over the world prominent economists with diverse viewpoints and special expertise, ranging from central bankers and policy specialists to academicians and scholars. The ideological range covered neo-classical to Marxist economics, as well as apolitical macroeconomics and mathematical modeling experts.
The event also gave me occasion to review the economic situation of Turkey, a country that paid dearly for playing by the rules of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and neo-liberal market fundamentalism. The Turkish government, in its good-faith efforts to join the European Union, has managed to plunge the country's economy from the frying pan into the fire.
The financial press reported that both Turkey and Argentina, beginning in late November 2000, experienced a sudden drop in investor "confidence", whatever that is, posing the biggest challenge to the IMF and the United States since the Asian financial crisis of the 1997. Both nations were desperately seeking emergency IMF loans, the largest bailout packages since an IMF rescue of Brazil in 1998.
The hawks fall out
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times 9/16/2003
The open clash between Rumsfeld and the neo-cons over the US commitment to "nation-building" has long been simmering below the surface. -- WASHINGTON - Faced with the rising costs and complications of occupying Iraq, the hardline coalition around US President George W Bush that led the drive to war with Iraq appears to be suffering serious internal strains.
On the one hand, neo-conservatives, who were the most optimistic about postwar Iraq before the US-led invasion, are insisting that Washington cannot afford either to pull out or to surrender the slightest control over the occupation to the United Nations or anyone else.
To a rising chorus of calls by Democrats for Washington to invite the world body to take over at least political control of the transition to Iraqi rule in exchange for a commitment of money and peacekeepers, the neo-cons are urging the administration to send more US troops instead.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is dead-set against deploying yet more troops to join the 180,000 now in Iraq and Kuwait. And while he, like the neo-cons, opposes conceding any substantial political role for the UN or anyone else, his preferred option is to transfer power directly to the Iraqis as quickly as possible, even at the risk that reconstituted security forces would be insufficiently cleansed of elements of the former regime's Ba'ath Party.
Fear, beer and hummus
By Gideon Samet, Ha'aretz 9/17/2003
How can the defense minister's judgment on the budget be trusted when Shaul Mofaz was so delusional and dangerous with his recommendation to kill Arafat? What kind of trust can be given to the man above him, a prime minister who has not kept a single promise, except to invest more money in the settlements (and to bring in more foreign workers for farmers), when the cost of every new road to a picayune settlement is that of half a dozen children's day-care centers and tens of thousands of doses of medicine for the medical basket that was cut yesterday?
This government is scary not only because of its terrible mistakes. The Sharon team's decision-making process should also be sickening. It should be, but isn't. Channel Two's popularity poll picked Sharon as man of the year. None of the mistakes of this man (once told by Ben-Gurion to stop lying) shakes Israelis, who are now in their third year of seeing the mistakes, deceptions and failures mastered by him.
After being thrown out on his ear from the Prime Minister's bureau, the former chief of the Mossad said that in 15 years of working with prime ministers he has never come across such a crooked way of making decisions. The moderate Ephraim Halevy was immediately attacked by the fists of anonymous bluffers in the same bureau, who charged him with making extremist suggestions. Because the guys surrounding Sharon are endlessly dealing with spin and disinformation, from the dead negotiations with the Palestinians to the police inquiries. And they have no reason to cease if this dangerous leader is able to bask in the support of a majority of the people while he makes his calamitous decisions.
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