How Zionists Created a Failed State
By Fawaz Turki, Arab News 10/9/2003
A reasonable surmise now — even without considering last weekend’s violence — is that in Palestine we have reached not only the end of the road map, but the end of the road. Israelis and Palestinians soldier on. The former manned their checkpoints, shot their missiles, continued building their infamous wall — miles beyond their property line — inside the occupied territories, and found time to bomb a target deep inside Syria, threatening to turn the three-year old Palestinian uprising into a larger regional conflict. And the latter sent a Palestinian civilian to kill Israeli civilians in a crowded restaurant in Haifa.
Both, in their own way, were leaving their calling cards.
Yet, there is no symmetry here. Israel is a merciless occupying power, pitted against a people gasping for breath, no longer sure what life is about and whether there is any supreme worth in living it.
At first blush, one is tempted to wonder, as a case in point, why Hamadi Jaradat, a young law school graduate, who had her whole life ahead of her, would choose to become a suicide bomber. But what kind of life are we talking about when you have to go through any of the hundreds of checkpoints, manned by foreign troops, to get anywhere — in your own homeland?
Ariel Sharon's escalation fronts
By Roman Bronfman, Ha'aretz 10/9/2003
The events that took place in the country before Yom Kippur this year were so dramatic that they have the power to change both the Israeli reality and that of the entire Middle East. The many documentaries on the television channels and supplements in the weekend newspapers devoted to the Yom Kippur War apparently aroused nostalgia in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; and now, Israel under his leadership is once again facing a very dangerous escalation in the relations with our neighbors.
Over 20 years ago, when he was the defense minister in the government of then prime minister Menachem Begin, Sharon deceived the prime minister and took Israel into the quagmire of Lebanon. Now, he is once again deceiving the entire Israeli public. His latest moves are unequivocal: After displaying total ineffectualness in the war against terror, Sharon is warmongering, and leading the country into an even deeper security abyss.
During his entire term, Sharon, with the backing of the U.S. administration, has been preoccupied with attempts to evade the implementation of his declared policy. Instead of tending to the root of the problem of Israeli existence - Palestinian terror - by ending the Israeli occupation, creating effective channels for rapprochement with the Palestinian leadership, or at least completing the construction of the separation fence, Sharon is now turning to extreme and irresponsible steps.
An Israeli Arab Looks to South Africa And Dares to Dream of Peace
By Celean Jacobson, AllAfrica.com 10/5/2003
I HAVE a photograph of Khaled Agbaria standing on the edge of his hometown of Um-el-Fahm, less than 50m from the Green Line, that uneasy border that separates Israel from Palestinian territory.
One of his arms points to the dusty town of Jenin, the other back towards the sea in the distance. His stance shows the dilemma facing Arab Israelis, who are caught in the middle of the conflict that is tearing this tiny patch of land apart.
While the world marks the third anniversary of the Palestinian uprising this week, the plight of these people is overlooked.
After the state of Israel was created in 1948, thousands of Arab families fled the area as war broke out. Only a handful managed to hold on to their land, and they became Israeli citizens. Making up about 20% of Israel's 6.5 million population, they pay taxes, vote and have a few members in the Knesset.
Many families have had a link to the area for more than 500 years and there are stories of happier times when Jews and Arabs worked this holy land side by side.
Now they live in villages and towns clustered mainly in the north where municipal services are minimal. The budgets for schools are lower than in Jewish areas. These citizens do not serve in the army and so lose out on extra welfare benefits.
Theirs is the dilemma of citizens who are not at home in the land of their birth.
Neo-con fingerprints on Syria raid
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times 10/8/2003
ROME - The neo-conservatives in and around the administration of US President George W Bush may be on the defensive, but Washington's reaction to the Israeli attack on Syria on Sunday shows that they remain in the driver's seat at the White House.
The fact that Bush has himself refused to in any way criticize the Israeli attack - the first on Syria since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war - shows how far the neo-cons have succeeded in aligning US policy with the right-wing government in Israel, a key goal going back to the first Likud government of the late Menachem Begin and, more recently, since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won elections in early 2001.
It was the neo-cons who in 1982 defended Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the bloody siege of Beirut that followed. While then-president Ronald Reagan went along with the original invasion, his administration never publicly endorsed it and eventually distanced itself from the Israelis as the siege wore on.
Syria: Odd man out in a tough neighbourhood
By Iason Athanasiadis, Asia Times 10/8/2003
DAMASCUS - The capital is no longer an Assad theme park. The visitor is no longer greeted at the airport with a sign declaring "WELCOME TO ASSAD'S SYRIA". Where once 10-storey banners bearing the likeness of Hafez al-Assad draped entire buildings there are now gaudy ads for local or imported chocolate, mobile phones and other consumer products.
A European TV crew on shoot in Syria spent the better part of a day driving through Damascus last week, on the lookout for the monumental portraits of the former Syrian president that had once occupied prize positions in collections of dictator paraphernalia. Frustrated, the camera-crew ended up with paltry shots of conventional portraits hoisted up on government buildings. Businesses, cars and lampposts are no longer adorned with the cult of the raiss (president).
...One unintended side-effect of the recent Israeli and US pressure on Damascus has been to radicalize figures heretofore considered to be moderates. "After insisting that America be the main moderator in Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations, [Foreign Minister Farouq] Sharaa has given up and adopted a more hardline position," a Syrian journalist told Asia Times Online. Indeed, the urbane minister had a recent outburst during which he described the Bush administration as surpassing all others in "foolishness and proneness to violence" and accusing its hawks of wanting "the sword to remain over Syria's head".
In the lands of the Cyclopses
By Rana Kabbani, Palestine Monitor 10/7/2003
Douce Haifa, scene of the weekend's tragic carnage, is also a city long drenched in the pain of dispossession and violence
I was four when I met my first Palestinian, in a leafy neighbourhood in Damascus where I was born. Her name was Nora Cavalcanti and she had ended up in Syria, having lost everything in 1948 when Israel was created. She must have been quite lonely to have sought the company of the chubby little girl that I was, and invited me to lunch by myself. I climbed the shabby stone staircase that took me up to her fourth-floor flat and found her waiting in a room full of books in English, and others in a language she told me was German, which she had studied in her native city of Haifa. For pudding, she gave me biscuits in the shape of brown stars. "These are what I used to bake in Palestine for Christmas," she said, as she put two on my plate.
I recognised neither the word "Palestine" nor the word "Christmas", concepts I had not yet come across in the noisy Syrian Muslim household where I belonged across the street. "I had a lovely garden there," she continued, wistfully, "and beautiful furniture from my mother. And linen, real linen, not like this awful thing," she said, pulling at the plain tablecloth which I had sloppily managed to stain.
Jewish schools in Beirut once served purposes of integration
By Mazen Wehbe, Daily Star 10/9/2003
But their effects on Arab Jews was noted and denounced by Zionists -- The year is 1870. The building no longer exists, but was located somewhere in the bourgeois and aristocratic neighborhood of 19th century Achrafieh.
Antoun Shehayber, lawyer and businessman, was addressing the director of the Jewish School of Beirut: “Yes, director, it is impossible for us to forget what suffering you have endured for our sakes and what efforts and zeal you have shown for our moral upbringing and education. First of all, in order to plant in us the spirit of the noble religion of Judaism you brought us an energetic rabbi. Secondly, you implanted in us the grammar of the Arabic language of our homeland, and how much expense and effort you have borne to bring professor Bekhor Leon for French. We want to assure your excellency, director, that we the Syrian Arabs are grateful for your favors. Although we are Arab in appearance, and our costume is Syrian, we still strive to attain the highest degree of science and progress. Friends, who have nominated me to undertake this noble task, raise your voices with me in calling out: Long live the Syrian, Arab and Jewish director from Sidon, Zaki Effendi Kuhin.”
Sadly, this speech survived but the school didn’t. It was shut down in 1904, probably because of lack of funds. Even though other institutions succeeded the school, and used a similar “Levantinesque” approach to Jewish education, its contribution to Beirut society was unique. In today’s world, the adjectives Syrian, Arab and Jewish would probably be met with disbelief if they were used to describe a rabbi who headed a Jewish school in Beirut.
The Palestine Solidarity Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle in America
By Shemon Salam, Middle East Peace 10/7/2003
With last week's solidarity rally for Benton Harbor fading into memory, more analysis of it is critical to understanding larger problems that are plaguing people of color, Arabs, and Muslims today. Many Arab and Muslim students did not attend the rally, seeing it as a fight for civil rights and equating the struggle with black people. While many black students, on the other hand, saw it as a protest for Palestine, and equated the fight with Arabs and Muslims.
The lack of solidarity between the groups shot both peoples in the proverbial foot that day. The cynical mumblings of "this is not my fight, it is their cause" shortchanged both peoples so that neither have been able to accomplish their respective goals. Black people have been struggling for an equal footing in this country on the basis of social and economic justice for over 300 years, and Arabs and Muslims have been in the movement for Palestinian independence since 1948.
With both groups of people seeing each other as antagonists, they have left little room for discourse on what commonalities their respective struggles have. In the last thirty years both sides in the United States have seen their movements as mutually exclusive, when in reality the cause for civil rights in the United States and the freedom for Palestine are intertwined.
Arab Free Trade Zone is noteworthy but slow
By Khatoun Haidar, Daily Star 10/9/2003
Around seven years have passed since the inception of the Arab Free Trade Zone in 1996. Yet the numbers are not encouraging.
The implementation of the Arab Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) began on March 1998. Through a process of agreed annual tariff reductions, the free trade zone is anticipated for 2008. The number of signatory countries increased to 17 Arab countries, 90 percent of inter-Arab trade is conducted between AFTA countries, and the participants agreed on a tariff reduction of 80 percent as early as 2004.
But inter-Arab trade is still stuck at 8 percent of total trade in spite of tariff reductions of 60 percent since 1997 throughout the AFTA zone. The biggest economies of the region fare even lower: 5 percent for Saudi Arabia and 3 percent for Morocco. Furthermore, the trends are not encouraging. In Egypt, the inter-Arab trade volume in 1999 was 5.8 percent of the total volume of international trade transactions; in 2002 it still hovered around 6.5 percent. In Kuwait it was 8 percent in 1998, and decreased to 6 percent in 2001. The direct reason for the failure of AFTA to boost inter-Arab trade appears to be related to a flawed implementation mechanism, and national political considerations.
A binational Israel-Palestine
By Helena Cobban, Christian Science Monitor 10/9/2003
NEW YORK – We can ask, "Who killed the road map for peace between Israelis and Palestinians?" Or we can start thinking through the implications of the fact that it is dead. Either way, the Palestinian bombing Saturday that killed 19 people in Haifa, Israel, followed by the Israeli bombing of a site in Syria, indicates that the road map - which the Bush administration and its allies have pursued throughout the past year - cannot now be salvaged.
The road map's declared goal was the establishment of a Palestinian state of undefined powers and uncertain borders alongside Israel, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
Israel's ruling Likud Party never liked that idea, and it hedged its very qualified "acceptance" of the road map with a list of 14 formal reservations.
The Palestinian leadership - including Yasser Arafat, who was voted president of Palestine in a US-sponsored election in 1996, and two successive Palestinian prime ministers - expressed unqualified acceptance of the road map.
All that is now history. The road map, which never had much real momentum, is dead.
Its death marks not just the latest in a long series of debacles in Washington's attempts at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
It could also mark the end of the long-pursued concept of a two-state solution. For if a two-state solution were to provide the stability and security that both peoples so desperately crave, the resulting Palestinian state would have to be just as viable as the Israeli state with whose fate it would always be so closely entwined.
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