Wanted: A US intifada against impunity at home and abroad
By Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Intifada 10/27/2003
Is it still possible to separate the "foreign" from the "domestic?" The United States is about to embark on a presidential campaign season that may be one of the most important in decades. Candidates will make countless speeches in halls large and small across America expounding on their visions for foreign and domestic policies. But the two are harder and harder to separate, whether one is talking about events, markets, policies, or sentiments. We are living at a time when the global and the local, the national and the international, intersect dramatically, sometimes delightfully, sometimes terrifyingly. If nothing else, the events of 9/11 should have taught us that.
Of the many possible lessons that could have been learned from those searing events two years ago, the Bush administration has only considered -- and quite ably marketed -- a very few, all of them packaged under the general rubric of the "Global War on Terror," which, with the Patriot Act, increased surveillance of Arab and Muslim Americans, and all sorts of "total information awareness schemes," begins here at home as much as it does in Kabul or Baghdad.
The Bush administration is very comfortable with the word "global" -- as long as it is used in the context of the "global projection of U.S. military might" or the "expansion of global markets," on terms, of course, that benefit the U.S. much more than its economic trading partners. But the Bush administration is not at all comfortable with the concept, let alone the practice, of global justice. This administration is actively hostile to the progressive evolution of international criminal prosecution. Indeed, a Human Rights Watch staff member referred to the Bush Administration's actions against various emerging institutions of international law as "America's global jihad against international justice" last summer. (1)
Words Leave My Heart Dry
By Laura G, International Solidarity Movement 10/16/2003
Collection of Journal Reports - September 23, 2003: The last time I saw Om Omar, she had aged visibly. The light normally present humming almost imperceptibly lighting her face - visible evidence of her proximity to divinity - had dimmed somewhat, making her wrinkles and her tired knees seem, for the first time, indicative of age. I hadn’t seen her for some weeks. I was looking for her because I wanted to take her picture. Without needing to search she came out on her own (within five minutes, anyone you are looking for will be informed by the neighbors), slowly climbing the uneven earth between tall piles - the remains of demolished homes. I’ve watched this street be slowly transformed from a vibrant neighborhood to a desert landscape, broken concrete mountains and sand.
I walked towards her to spare her knees and she embraced in the same joyful way she used to do when I was coming to stay with her in her house, when she had a house. And so it goes, every minute I spend with Om Omar I am living only halfway in the present time and place while the rest of me drifts with her to sunset greetings next to the orange tree in her front yard. In the presence of the moments, the tree is still bearing enough fruit for the morning sun and not crushed under the broken floors of the home.
Whom to Believe?
By Uri Avnery, Palestine Chronicle 10/27/2003
“Whom do you believe?” asked General Ya’akov Amidror on TV with subdued anger, “the army spokesman or Hamas?”
General (reserves) Amidror is the highest religious officer in our army. In the past he has raised several public storms with some utterances denigrating secular Israelis, saying that they are not real Jews. He has a sharp mind, much above the average in the army command, and his intellect is fully employed in serving his extremist views – both the extremist religious and the extremist nationalist ones.
His question was intended to be rhetorical. After all, the answer is self-evident: on one side there is the IDF, “the most moral and most humane army in the world”, as it calls itself, and on the other side there is a bunch of crazy murderers, so what’s the problem?
But, according to Amidror himself, the reverse is happening. The world believes Hamas and does not believe the IDF spokesman. The Israeli public believes Hamas. Even cabinet ministers and Knesset members believe Hamas and do not believe the army spokesman.
The crisis of confidence was revealed in all its harshness by a series of events last week in the Gaza Strip.
Between a rock and a hard place
By Adam Keller, Palestine Media Center 10/27/2003
The landscape seemed highly picturesque: the olive trees dotting the rolling hills, the strewn rocks, the placidly grazing donkey. Such a sharp contrast with the congested superhighways and high-rise office towers of metropolitan Tel-Aviv, a short drive away - a short drive, that is, to those privileged to pass the various barriers and roadblocks. But we had not come as tourists, and the apparently tranquil countryside was the inside of a besieged enclave, around which a noose is being drawn ever tighter.
It was to help these besieged people that a mobilizartion effort had been mounted in the past week by the Olive Harvest Coalition. Already before arriving at our destination on this Saturday, Oct. 25, we had a good close look at The Fence - a line drawn across the landscape in the past year, cutting arbitrarily across the fields and the lives of those who live hereabouts. For some time our cavalcade - seven buses and some private cars - moved parallel to this implacable barrier, then we moved back from it, along ever-worsening roads and tracks.
Soon came the moment to alight and divide into groups of about twenty, each guided by Palestinian farmers. Then quite a long way by foot, partly along goat tracks full of thorns and brambles, under a blazing sun which would have better fitted a day in mid-August rather then late October. Finally we arrived, panting. Mufid, our guide, pointed to the trees to the left: "These are ours, my father planted many of them". Then to the buildings on the next hill: "That is the settlement of Sal'it. The army is always getting nervous when we try to come here. With you, it should be more easy." But now, even the settlement takes second place in his worries in comparison to The Fence. "My village, Ras, is on the other side, and most of our fields and olives were left on this side. We have to ask for permits to cross the gate. I got a one-month permit. My wife, who did a large part of the harvest last year and in all the years before, did not get one. Why? The soldiers just told me "That's the way it is". Half of our village got no permit."
Get out of Gaza
Editorial, Ha'aretz 10/27/2003
The terrorist attack early on Friday morning at Netzarim, which ended in the deaths of three soldiers, two of them women, and the wounding of two others, makes tangible the absurdity of Israel continuing to hold on to the Gaza Strip. It would be an error to examine the incident merely in the light of an operational mishap or mistaken considerations by the commanders and to try to learn lessons from it regarding the local deployment of the Israel Defense Forces. This is a national failure and all Israeli governments since 1967 are party to it, as is the society of this country, which gave them backing.
The Gaza Strip was a tract of land that was left in Egyptian hands after the War of Independence. It fell into Israeli hands after the Six-Day War, together with its hundreds of thousands of residents, most of them Palestinian refugees. The Gaza Strip had no sentimental value in the Israeli national ethos, as did the West Bank; nevertheless, the governments headed by the Labor Party and, later, those of the Likud, were foolish enough to covet it and establish settlements upon it, and in this way to create a commitment to it. This was an untenable settlement enterprise that cost a fortune, was in no way useful to the country's development, caused grievous suffering to the Palestinian population, placed a heavy security burden on the IDF and presented Israel as a state that inflicts injustice.
The basic facts have indeed led to an unfortunate result: 1.3 million Palestinians who mostly live in extremely deprived conditions scuffle with 7,000 Israelis who generally live in spacious settlements, over the control of an area of 340 square kilometers, amid constant mutual bloodshed....
Palestinians need protection from failed yet continuing assaults
E ditorial, Daily Star 10/27/2003
The recent pace and nature of Israeli assaults on Palestinian lands and property in the Gaza Strip, in particular, again raise two important questions that should challenge the international community: how many international agreements and legal principles does Israel have to break before it is held accountable to the same moral and legal standards that other countries are asked to meet? And how much more suffering and death must the Palestinians experience before the international community steps in with some form of decisive protection measures?
The latest example of combined military and moral violence by Israel was its blowing up of three apartment towers in Gaza on Sunday, leaving over 150 Palestinian families homeless, and damaging many other homes for kilometers around.
The Israeli government announced that this destruction aimed to deter Palestinians from allowing their infrastructure to be used for terrorism a quick attestation to the increasingly obvious fact that neither Israeli explosions nor intellectual thought processes operate with any credible effectiveness.
Is America copying Israel's mistakes?
By William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune 10/25/2003
PARIS The power of the weak lies in a people's acceptance of suffering. The weakness of the strong is that a disproportionate use of force against the weak eventually corrupts their own society.
The recent air attacks against the Palestinians in Gaza, using helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter aircraft and producing the inevitable "collateral damage," have actually been a demonstration of Israeli weakness.
The attacks led nowhere that the majority of Israel's society wants to go. The daily newspaper Maariv described the message they delivered: "Israel has gone mad."
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claims to see blinding light at the end of the tunnel. A "victory" over the terrorist infrastructure is only weeks away, and Israel is about to be liberated from fear. He says the new Geneva draft peace settlement, developed by former official Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, is mere political plotting by disloyal Israelis, "encouraging terrorism."
Yet few, even in the military command, can believe that aerial bombing will stop Palestinian suicide bombings. The latest, in Haifa on Oct. 9, which served as justification for the new Israeli offensive, killed 21. It was committed by a 27-year-old student lawyer with no known connection to Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility. Her brother and cousin had recently been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Sharon has always publicly professed two convictions: First is that Israel must expand into the occupied territories. He sponsored the colonization movement after the 1967 war, and on Thursday his government confirmed a decision to build 300 new West Bank housing units, despite its "road map" commitment to halt colonization.
The Demographics of American Jews
By Lenni Brenner, CounterPunch 10/24/2003
"My People are American. My Time is Today." -- A friend once got a bit of a reputation by pointing out that "you don't need the weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing." But you do need a demographer to know which way the Jews are going.
Some readers will recall the journalistic hockey brawl in the NY Times over the National Jewish Population Survey 2000/2001, partially released in October 2002. Now the full survey is out, but the sticks are still flying, and the penalty box is full.
J. J. Goldberg, editor of Forward, the leading 'Jewish community' weekly, contributed an op-ed to the 9/17 Times, denouncing "flawed figures." James Tisch, chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, replied in the 9/22 issue, defending their numbers against "critics" who "try in vain to ascribe to us ulterior motives."
If gentile readers were confused about the furor, they will be comforted in knowing that most Jews likewise don't grasp the underlying issues. But valid stats are crucial to a scientific understanding of the evolution of American Jewry. And with the US military all over the Middle East, and Palestine/Israel certain to be a priority concern in the forthcoming presidential election, universal misunderstanding of the status of Jewry in modern America can have fatal consequences for Palestinians, Israelis and Americans.
The IDF's chorus of incitement
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz 10/26/2003
Who told the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi (Farkash) to declare, "Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers"? Is the head of army intelligence now also to be in charge of setting Israel's moral priorities? And what prompted the commander of the Ground Forces, Major General Yiftah Ron-Tal, to decide that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has to be liquidated? It's not hard to guess what would happen if Mohammed Dahlan, the former security chief of the Palestinian Authority, were to call for the assassination of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - or, for that matter, what the consequences would be if Major General Ron-Tal were to urge Israel to launch negotiations with Arafat: His days on the General Staff would be numbered.
In the past few months, the top military brass have been able to say just about whatever they like, as long as what they say is consistent with the positions taken by the prime minister and the defense minister. Knowing what their masters think, these generals dare to make - in a manner that is unprecedented in terms of the norms that used to exist in Israel - extreme declarations, and always in the same vein. The previous head of Southern Command, Doron Almog, stated that the Palestinian Authority has not given up its "phase strategy" aimed at destroying Israel; in January 2003, Amos Gilad, serving as the government's coordinator of activities in the territories, stated that there will never be peace with Arafat; and the commander of the Air Force, Major General Dan Halutz, said Ganim and Kadim - two West Bank settlements - "are our home."
Security Council reform: Where are the Arabs?
By David Malone, Daily Star 10/25/2003
Recent discussion about UN reform has focused on Security Council composition and the veto. What would such reform mean for the Arab world?
When world leaders assembled at the UN last month, the legitimacy and effectiveness of the organization, particularly that of a Security Council undermined by disagreements over Iraq, was much on their minds. Calls for a “UN of democracies,” which would potentially disenfranchise most of the Arab countries, have been heard from some in Washington, bizarrely ignoring that the key disagreements over Iraq were between the major Western democracies not between Washington and undemocratic states (many of which lined up on the US within the political coalition it cobbled together to front its Iraq venture).
The Council today has 15 members, with five having been granted permanent status in 1945 and endowed with vetoes: China, France, the USSR (later replaced by the Russian Federation), the United Kingdom and the United States. The remaining members are elected for two-year terms by the entire UN membership. By tradition, the Arab world has occupied one non-permanent seat within the Council drawn from either Africa’s quota or Asia’s.
Here's Lucy, caving in, taking flight
By Alan Ramsey, Sydney Morning Herald 10/25/2003
Dr Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi is a woman, a professor of English, an international human rights activist, and a politician. A year ago she was chosen, unanimously, to receive the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize. The Premier, Bob Carr, will present Ashrawi with her award at State Parliament in 12 days. The first four recipients of the annual prize were honoured at functions in the Great Hall of Sydney University. They included South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999), East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao (2000) and Australia's Sir William Deane (2001). However, for Ashrawi, the Great Hall is out of bounds.
This is not because Ashrawi is either a woman, an academic or a political activist. It is because she is a Palestinian. That is enough to ensure a virulent campaign of distortion and ridicule by Jewish critics to brutalise her image and try to have Carr renege on Ashrawi's presentation and the award taken from her. So far Carr has refused to buckle. Not so Sydney University.
Earlier this year the university's chancellor, Justice Kim Santow of the NSW Supreme Court, made it known to Professor Stuart Rees, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, and to Kathryn Greiner, the foundation's chairwoman at the time, that the Great Hall would be closed to Ashrawi. Rees and an academic colleague, Ken McNabb, took the matter to Sydney's vice-chancellor, Gavin Brown. In what was called a "difficult and shameful" meeting, Brown confirmed the decision. The campaign now is about maximum political pressure for other corporate and civic sponsors to abandon Ashrawi and intimidate Carr.
Eyewitness in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
By Robert Fisk, Veternas for Common Sense 10/26/2003
Robert Fisk reports on a near-epidemic of indiscipline, suicides and loose talk. -- Baghdad, Iraq (The Independent) - I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home down the road - "Dreamland", the Americans call it - but this was not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them - and rightly so.
Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe - indeed have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the equation), are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war on terror". Special forces soldiers are now being told by their officers that the "war on terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket - unless they can be described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or "deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.
Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. Ordinary Iraqis - many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein - are attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. And Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles and - no doubt - fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect, are indeed themselves the "terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops - his first line of defence - would be very angry indeed.
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