Saba’tash Revisited
By jolifanto, International Solidarity Movement 10/17/2003
The road from from Asira (and the North of the West Bank) to Nablus is closed to vehicles by earth roadblocks at both the top and bottom of the hill. Pedestrians are not ‘allowed’ to pass either, as this road is a ‘closed area’, apparently to protect the military road that crosses it. Instead, Palestinians wishing to travel from Asira to Nablus or vice versa are expected to take a long-cut around, through Sebastiya village, Shave Shomrom checkpoint and Beit Iba checkpoint. There is no particular reason why either of these should be open. Beit Iba has been shut to all bar students, teachers and a few medical cases for the past three weeks. Most Palestinians continue to attempt to sneak through Saba’tash , dodging the soldiers posted to stop them. Those captured are generally detained for 4-12 hours, before being sent back the way they came. A past entry describes the humiliation detainees face.
We regularly escort two kidney patients from Asira that need dialysis treatment in Nablus three times a week. Dialysis patients become particularly weak just before they receive their treatment, and both the woman and the older man often require donkeys. Risking detention and harrassment, they make their way through Saba’tash valley every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday morning, returning in the evening. Despite their medical papers, soldiers rarely allow them through if they are caught, and frequently keep them all day.
Jenin: A snapshot of an occupied land
By Jon Elmore, FromOccupiedPalestine.org 10/12/2003
Jenin, West Bank -- At the time, I was inclined to think that the walloping the boy got from his mother for being on the street throwing stones with the older boys was as bad as anything the IDF might have dealt him. But hours later I saw what a tank's heavy-calibre mounted machinegun will do to a young child's leg - a red gooey mass of mangled flesh bigger than a softball. I then saw what a mother looks like as she hurries with terrified panic through the hospital doors to see her son who has been shot.
The boy's walloping - with a thin black rubber hose - happened at about 9:30am, two hours into the daily routine of tanks patrolling the main street to enforce curfew. The boy was maybe six years-old, and seemed to know that he was in for it when his older brother followed his mother's barking orders to retrieve him from the street, draping his arm sternly around his little brother's shoulders.
This six year-old was part of the pack of boys that meet the tanks head on, each time they pass, with stones and juice bottles filled with fine white rock-dust. With a little water added, the bottles make a perfectly sized concrete projectile much more solid and easier to throw than a rock, and leave a white splattering on the tank's armour as a calling card.
Still, in real terms, it is little more than a symbolic show of force in the face of a 62-tonne tank that pulls down metal electric poles as if they were twigs, caves in entire storefronts and leaves the paved roads and boulevards as tangled piles of rubble.
Sharon, Bush and the race for ‘Greater Israel’
By Patrick Seale, Daily Star 10/17/2003
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his friends in Washington are in a hurry. They are racing to achieve their objectives before anyone stops them. And when they are in a hurry, they are particularly dangerous. Syria and Iran are in their sights, with further down the road Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt. Political and economic pressure, financial penalties, sanctions, intervention, regime change by military force, these are their chosen instruments for bending the Arabs to the will of Israel and its United States patron.
Sharon’s main objective is the building of a “Greater Israel” on the ruins of Palestinian nationalism. His latest instrument is the wall or separation barrier which is imprisoning the Palestinians on a fraction of their territory, cutting them off on all sides from contact with their Arab neighbors. The wall is due to be finished in eight months’ time. Sharon is determined that nothing must prevent its completion.
At the UN Security Council this week, he won a major victory when the United States vetoed a resolution, proposed by Syria, condemning the wall. Within hours, a radical Palestinian group attacked the motorcade of an American delegation in Gaza, killing three Americans and wounding a fourth. Sharon will no doubt exploit this latest incident to rally American opinion against the beleaguered Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat.
Policy of conquest
By Medhat El-Zahed, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 16 - 22 October 2003
In attempting to turn an elected president into a figurehead, then a refugee, Israel is sending a clear message to all Palestinians and Arabs. Its decision to expel Yasser Arafat, or worse, is part of a consistent policy. Since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel has been determined to turn the interim self-rule agreement into a final one. Israel has never accepted the historic compromise that Arafat hoped would come out of Oslo: a Palestinian state within the pre- 1967 lines.
From Operation Defensive Shield to the apartheid wall (carving off nearly 45 per cent of the West Bank); from the targeting of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to the threats against Arafat, Israel has one thing in mind, to force the Palestinians into accepting a final settlement that falls short of their basic needs and aspirations.
This is why Israel is not sparing moderate leaders, such as Ismail Abu Shanab of Hamas. It is targeting the very people who negotiate and work towards a political solution. It has purposely undermined the political mission of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The first Palestinian prime minister had to resign after the truce he put together failed to convince Israel to pull out from Palestinian areas, remove roadblocks, and ease the stifling blockade.
Israel wants to block all chances of negotiations, and is likely to continue to do so regardless of how reconciliatory the Palestinians may get. Israel has intentionally torpedoed Oslo, the roadmap, and any political solution involving a viable Palestinian state. The only Palestinian state Israel would approve of is one made up of discontinguous cantons with a Palestinian flag.
The danger of peace
By Nehemia Strasler, Ha'aretz 10/17/2003
The past three years have plunged Israel into a social-economic recession that is even deeper than the major recession of 1966-1967 and the slump that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Not a day goes by without announcements of factories being shut down and businesses going bankrupt. Not a day goes by without the bad news that more people have lost their jobs in industry and commerce, and this week the organizations of the self-employed filed an all-inclusive request to erase their debts. The official figures tell of a decline of 8 percent in the standard of living in the past three years, so this time, perhaps, the awakening will come from the social-economic direction. Even now, before the planned publicity campaign has begun, 39 percent of the public (according to a poll published by the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth) supports the "Geneva Accord," signed by nongovernment Israeli and Palestinian representatives.
The very fact that such an agreement was reached undercuts the central argument of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that there is no one to talk to. It turns out that the representatives of the Palestinian side received the blessing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat before embarking on the project. The composition of the delegation itself (three former cabinet ministers, several members of the Palestine Legislative Council and ranking security figures) shows that this is a distinguished group from the heart of the Palestinian establishment.
Widening the conflict?
By Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 16 - 22 October 2003
It is not yet clear whether an attack on a US convoy marks a new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, if so, the causes are political as much as ideological -- The ambush on a US "diplomatic convoy" in Gaza on Wednesday threatens to turn another page in the long war known as Israel-Palestine. The roadside bomb wrecked one car and killed three US officials while traveling into Gaza under a Palestinian Authority police escort just south of the Strip's main Eretz crossing into Israel. Among the dead were junior diplomats and CIA agents, said Israeli and Palestinian media sources.
Yasser Arafat denounced the attack as a "crime", aware that it could harden even further American attitudes toward his leadership and/or precipitate the US-administration's already "disengaged" posture toward the Israel-Palestinian conflict into an all-out flight. Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmed Qurei (better known as Abu Ala) vowed to open an investigation into those responsible for the ambush. He too needs all the American help he can get. Israel said it underscored its demand that the PA "dismantle the terrorist infrastructure" in the PA areas.
At Al-Ahram Weekly press time, no Palestinian militia had claimed the ambush. Nor is it yet certain whether America as a state was the intended target. The area where the ambush happened has seen several roadside bombs and armed attacks on Israeli army and settler convoys. What is clear is that the explosive charge was huge and was probably detonated by remote control. Nor is it any secret that US diplomats and CIA men routinely use the road to travel in and out of Gaza.
From winning card to doomsday weapon
By David Landau, Ha'aretz 10/17/2003
The peace camp - pathetic naifs that they are - actually believed that the separation fence would prove to be the ultimate weapon against those spoiling for war.
The peace camp believed that pressure brought to bear by the Israeli public, battered by terrorism, would eventually overcome the settlers' ideological opposition to any fence that would split the Land of Israel in two. Peaceniks believed that Ariel Sharon, with his fine-tuned political sensibilities, would succumb to these pressures and agree, despite his own misgivings, to the construction of a fence.
In their minds, members of the peace camp saw the longed-for fence bringing peace closer, or if not peace, at least a unilateral agreement. This was because, according to their naive logic, there were only two reasonable possibilities for the location of the fence, both desirable from their perspective: either along the Green Line, demarcating the future border, or at some line further east, with settlements east of that evacuated.
A third possibility, anchored in a different kind of logic, never occurred to them. It turns out, though, that the fence can also be built east of the Green Line without evacuating a single settlement beyond it.
US return to UNESCO
By Hassan Nafaa, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 16 - 22 October 2003
Is the US decision to return to the fold of the UNESCO simply a ploy to gain credibility for its plans for the Middle East? -- The US returned to UNESCO last week after an absence of 20 years. Some observers cited this step as proof of that the Bush administration was relaxing its opposition to a more dynamic role for the UN and its affiliate bodies in international affairs. They further link it to Washington's renewed drive for a Security Council resolution that would ostensibly give the UN a greater role to play in Iraq.
Even presuming the best of intentions, this contention is regretfully illogical and overoptimistic. It is hardly a coincidence that the decision to withdraw from UNESCO in 1983 was taken by a neo- conservative administration and that the decision to return to the humanitarian body was taken by an administration at the more extreme end of that political spectrum. If the decision to withdraw reflected, as I believe, the arrogance of American might, its return was certainly not with its tail between its legs. If the withdrawal was meant to convey the message that the US could get along perfectly well without the rest of the world, the message today is not "We're sorry for offending the international community and are now ready to hear others' advice", but rather "We hope y'all learned your lesson and are now ready to do as you're told".
The US's departure from and return to UNESCO is also the story of the rise to power of the American ultra-right in the beginning of the 1980s and its even more forceful resurgence at the beginning of the new century. Nor do I believe that it was coincidence that this shade of the political spectrum, then and now, chose UNESCO as its preferred forum for declaring its intentions.
Against the hurtling herd
By Ze'ev Sternhell, Ha'aretz 10/17/2003
The uprising by the pilots who signed the famous letter draws its strength and authority from the classic distinction between an order that is legal but illegitimate, and an order that is both legal and legitimate. Nobody questions the authority of the Israeli government to drop a one-ton bomb on a residential building, but that fact is not enough to make the act legitimate and to remove the fear that a crime was committed on behalf of the state.
Under such circumstances, a person has no choice but to go back to the founding principles of their culture. Regarding the individual as an autonomous creature, with the ability to judge the world through the force of reason and conscience, is one of the identifying marks of Western culture. This culture is built in part on the concept that there are norms of natural justice beyond human legislation. The concept of human rights is also an expression of the view that human beings have natural rights that are inherent by virtue of their humanity and nobody has the right to deny them.
By the force of those principles the secular West created democracy; it exists only in those places where individuals use their judgment as moral beings. But the same principle covers every society and every regime: Even orders given by a government elected by a perfectly formal democratic process can be criminal orders. The French in their colonies and the Americans in Vietnam provided classic examples of war crimes perpetrated by democratic governments.
Bad news from Israel: media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
By Greg Philo, Miftah 10/16/2003
If you don't understand the Middle East crisis it might be because you are watching it on TV news. This scores high on images of fighting, violence and drama but is low on explanation.
The Glasgow University Media Group interviewed twelve small audience groups (a total of eighty five people) with a cross-section of ages and backgrounds. They were asked a series of questions about the conflict and what they had understood from TV news. The same questions were then put to 300 young people (aged between 17 and 22) who filled in a questionnaire. We asked what came to their mind when they heard the words 'Israeli/Palestinian conflict' and then what was the source of whatever it was. Most (82%) listed TV news as their source and these replies showed that they had absorbed the 'main' message of the news, of conflict, violence and tragedy, but that many people had little understanding of the reasons for the conflict and its origins. Explanations were rarely given on the news and when they were, journalists often spoke obliquely, almost in a form of short-hand. For example, in a news bulletin which featured the progress of peace talks, a journalist made a series of very brief comments on the issues which underpinned the conflict...
Said's work towards artistic cooperation celebrated in music performance memorial
By Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada 10/16/2003
When I was in grade school, my aunt hosted a Japanese woman to stay with her in our suburban town as part of a cultural exchange program. The young Japanese woman visited my house and, although we were unable to have a conversation, as her English was weak and my Japanese nonexistent, we were able to sit at the piano together and play a duet. One could say that musical notation is itself a kind of language, but it is now clear to me that we did not merely share a musical conversation. Though the experience did not seem revelatory at the time, and my clunky musical ability was unremarkable, we accomplished something more significant: artistic cooperation.
However, there were no political tensions between myself and the Japanese woman, like there would be between Israeli and Arab musicians, as Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim witnessed during their West-Eastern Divan workshop. The West-Eastern Divan workshop, which gathers outstanding young musicians from Israel and Arab countries, and puts them together into one orchestra, gives an opportunity for youth to produce something together. The goal is not to save the peace process, or to have the musicians hold hands and be best friends. Instead, national identities like Lebanese, Palestinian, Russian, Israeli, and Egyptian are replaced as these musicians "suddenly became cellists and violinists playing the same piece in the same orchestra under the same conductor," as Said explains in Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, which he co-wrote with Barenboim.
|
