Bracing for a "Catastrophe" in the Middle East
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle, October 16, 2002
Many Palestinians fear that the policy of “transfer” or forced expulsion of Palestinians may be the pinnacle of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s career. “Transfer” has been anything but a fairy-tale idea, contemplated only by extremist Israeli politicians or religious leaders. It is a concept that has been implemented many times throughout history, going back as early as the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages (418 to be exact), during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, also known as the “Palestinian Catastrophe.”

Mau-mauing the Middle East
By Michelle Goldberg, Salon, October 15, 2002
Palestinians are the latest chic cause on campus. Now American Jews are trying to brand criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic -- and even un-American: Sept. 30, 2002  |  On Sept. 18, the conservative Middle East Forum launched Campus Watch, a Web site designed to "monitor and gather information" on academics who are not sufficiently pro-Israel. There are "dossiers" on eight professors of Middle Eastern studies, six of them Arabs. Since appearing on the list, all have been deluged with hostile e-mail and one has been threatened by phone. There's also a page on Campus Watch for students to submit complaints about their teacher's pedagogical treason. The project is designed, says Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, to push ideas that are "outside the bounds of mainstream discourse" off college campuses. His message to professors of Middle East studies: "Be careful. You should behave yourself."

Native Americans and Palestinians - HTML
Native Americans and Palestinians - Acrobat (PDF) format
By Norman Finkelstein, The Link, Americans for Middle East Understanding, December - December  1999
Ardis Iron Cloud is a Lakota Indian, a teacher, and a mother of eight children. In a phone conversation she confided that when she visited Palestine she felt like — and here she paused while she found the right words — she felt, she said, like she was visiting relatives. Palestinians felt the same when they visited the First Nation Indians in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. We asked Zoughbi Zoughbi, a member of the Palestinian delegation, to describe how the exchange of visits came about and what happened when these far separated peoples met. Zoughbi is currently the director of the Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem. What both peoples have in common, of course, is history of ethnic uprooting. And because it is a history that stretches back over the past five hundred years — and may haunt us for years to come — we offer it at this time as our way of marking the millennium milestone. To review that history we asked Dr. Norman Finkelstein to write the introductory section, based on his book “The Rise & Fall of Palestine.”

Sesame sans frontieres
By Gary Younge, The Guardian, October 14, 2002
"Children in Palestine today will not appreciate, understand, absorb and react in a positive way to the goals we want to accomplish," said the Palestinian executive producer, Daoud Kuttab, whose studio in Ramallah was damaged by Israeli soldiers: Where Big Bird goes, tolerance should follow. But finding a format to suit areas of conflict is not easy: In the beginning there was Big Bird, and children saw him and said he was good. And in one of those rare moments of inter-generational concord, parents saw him and said he was good too. And so it came to pass that Ernie, Bert, Mr Snuffleupagus and the other characters of Sesame Street were welcomed into liberal homes and hearts, first in America and then around the world. Progressive parents who denied their boys access to toy guns and forbade their daughters Barbies, only to find their offspring escaping to friends' houses to play war and dress dolls, finally found a tool for ethical and educational child-rearing that worked. Unlike broccoli and piano lessons, here was one of those rare things that parents thought was good for their children and that their children actually enjoyed. Recently, however, even this simple relationship has been violated. In the past year Sesame Street has come under fire in the Middle East, been subject to intense criticism and scrutiny in the US Congress from rightwing republicans, and is struggling to make itself understood within the sectarian atmosphere of Northern Ireland.

Not in the footsteps of his predecessors
By Amir Oren, Ha'aretz, October 15, 2002 
This week, the CIA released an updated edition of the annual World Factbook, which, among other things, provides Israel with a clear reminder as to how temporary the American administration considers Israel's status in the annexed and (i.e. East Jerusalem, Golan Heights) and occupied territories. The annual publication puts Israel's population at 6,030,000, one-fifth not Jewish, and the number of Palestinians at 3.4 million, of which nearly 2.2 million live in the West Bank. Based on this equation, the gap between the Jewish population of Israel and the total number of Palestinians and Arab Israelis is a mere 200,000.

Mideast needs new mediator
By Jimmy Carter, USA Today, June 30, 2002
"With the United States aligned today with Israel and making demands that Palestinians will not accept, other world leaders — perhaps in the Arab world, Europe or the United Nations — now need to share responsibility, as in Oslo, for the progress that must come.": Recently, Emory Professor Kenneth Stein and I spread a detailed map on my office floor and examined the hundreds of strategically planted Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, each surrounded by a military force and connected by a web of guarded highways. The remaining unoccupied Palestinian lands appeared as small, isolated red splotches. Ken indicated the $350 million barrier of fences and trenches being built northeast of Jerusalem. This, he noted, may represent the ultimate desire of most Palestinians and Israelis: a permanent and impenetrable separation of the two peoples. Sadly, such isolation already exists in the policies of Israel, the Palestinians and the USA. Each lacks real support outside its own political circles. Unless other parties come forward to bridge these divides, there is little hope to offer those suffering from daily violence.

A natural turn of events
By Ghassan Khatib, BitterLemons, October 14, 2002
The Israeli reoccupation of most of the Palestinian territories, once under Palestinian Authority control according to the Oslo agreements, has created some significant questions about what comes next. Prior to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and before the peace process, Israel controlled in practice and by force almost every aspect of Palestinian life. That included control over land, borders, legislation, administration and services such as education, health, and so on. At a certain point, Israel even appointed Israeli officers to act in the position of Palestinian mayors. When the Oslo agreements were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the areas of Israeli control were scaled back. The peace agreements began a process of territorial compromise, whereby the Palestinian Authority was controlling “A Areas,” while other parts of the territories remained under Israeli control. Further negotiations were to continue this transfer of territory from Israeli to Palestinian jurisdiction.

Reform by Imprisonment
By Sam Bahour, Palestine Chronicle, October 14, 2002 
"With every Palestinian arrested by Israel, entire families are being broken up, children are building up hatred and detainees are becoming more embittered ..": While the most brutal of measures are being taken against the Palestinian population, the world is being deceived into believing that political reforms can happen in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. As the Bush Administration continues to call for regime change in the Palestinian Authority, Israel is silently pursuing a violent strategy of establishing internment camps that imprison Palestinians from all walks of life. With over 12,000 acts of detainment and over 5,000 Palestinian detainees now languishing in Israeli jails, the façade of reform unfolds in a political vacuum.

What Sharon wants
By John Chuckman. YellowTimes, October 15, 2002
(YellowTimes.org) – What was the point of the Israeli army's reducing Mr. Arafat's compound to ruins, firing shells that came within the smallest margin of error of killing him? Everyone outside the hermetically-sealed thought-environment of Israel and Washington recognizes Mr. Arafat is no more responsible for the violence of Hamas or Hizbullah than Mr. Bush is responsible for a disturbed gunman now terrorizing America's capital city.