From refuge for Jews to danger for Jews
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz 11/3/2003
The official reaction from Jerusalem to the public opinion poll showing that some 59 percent of people from 15 European Union countries believe Israel is the greatest danger to world peace was to be expected. Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs Natan Sharansky attacked the Europeans for "blaming the Jews for the world's troubles," and said the findings show that anti-Semitism hides behind political criticism of Israel. According to Sharansky and his colleagues in the government, one must be a European racist to find anything wrong with the behavior of a little Jewish state, under attack from terrorism, surrounded by enemies, as it defends its citizenry.
The professionals in the Foreign Ministry, following with mounting anxiety the rising trends in anti-Semitism, propose a more complex diagnosis. According to the professionals, 95 percent of the anti-Semitic incidents last year in Europe were by Muslim immigrants. Most of the incidents were meant as protest against the inequities of the Israeli occupation of the territories. The officials point to a direct connection between the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism to the frequency of the pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian children. The images of settlers putting up outposts in the heart of Palestinian territory emphasizes to the non-Jews the Jewish identity of the occupiers.
The decision to open a broad front against the outgoing Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, was not a conditioned reflex of politicians who turn every enemy's shadow into an enemy. This time it was the professionals who rang the warning bells and proposed an all-out campaign against the relatively new anti-Semitic genie let loose in Asia.
If this is justice, I'm a banana!
By Nick Pretzlik, Electronic Intifada 11/2/2003
The family last saw Asma Abdel-Razzaq Salih, a 25-year-old mother of two, at the beginning of February this year. It was 1:00 a.m. when the Israeli soldiers arrived at the house, and dawn was breaking as they took her away.
In the West Bank and Gaza incarceration of Palestinians is a regular occurrence; it happens all the time. But at least, it is customary for due process to be followed. Charges are eventually laid and court proceedings ensue, or, alternatively, no charges are brought and Administrative Detention is confirmed in their place. Administrative Detention is the process whereby a person can be held in prison, on the basis of undisclosed and untested evidence, for as long as the authorities wish.
In Asma's case there are two unusual -- and disturbing -- elements. First, Asma is one of only seventy Palestinian women prisoners being held by Israel for Intifada-related reasons -- all of them are held at Ramleh jail in Israel. Secondly, and more importantly, she hasn't done anything wrong. The authorities accuse her of ...nothing. No charges have ever been laid.
Effectively, Asma has been kidnapped and held hostage for the past nine months in the harshest of circumstances because the Israeli army has been looking for her husband and could not find him. They still cannot find him. Asma is being kept in prison simply as bait -- like the chicken in a sack used cruelly to draw a fox out into the open.
Building to destroy: The 'separation' wall and the future of Palestine
By Anwar Darkazally, Electronic Intifada 11/3/2003
The Road Map is in tatters, and not by accident. It is business as usual for the most right wing government in Israel’s history. Business is building, and building is booming.
For many months now, before and after the launch of the Road Map, land has been confiscated and homes and agricultural land levelled for the construction of the “separation” wall along the north of the West Bank. People are being separated from their land and each other, greenhouses and crops have been destroyed and towns and villages are being encircled by the wall as it snakes through the West Bank annexing land to Israel. In areas outside the major enclaves that are being created, individual Palestinian villages and towns will be enclosed. Concentrations of Palestinians of 3,000 up to 25,000 are being crowded together behind razor wire and electric fences.
Thirty six years ago the settlements were a “temporary” measure according to the military orders that stated that the massive land confiscations for the construction of the settlements were absolutely necessary for “security” reasons. These “security” reasons have seen the construction of 123 settlements over the years since Israel occupied the Palestinian territories and 380,000 Israeli settlers now live on Palestinian land. If the wall is for security, then why is it not being built on the Green Line?
Shades of optimism in a grim reality
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz 11/3/2003
The compact emergency government formed by Ahmed Qureia ends its official term tomorrow. It was appointed as a temporary government for a month, and did not need to win a vote of confidence in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the Palestinian Authority's parliament. Qureia agreed to accept the job to form a new government and he intends to make a broad, normal government that will get a vote of confidence in the PLC. The first step in that direction was taken on Saturday, when the Fatah block in the PLC chose Rafiq al-Natsha as the Fatah candidate for speaker, to replace Qureia, who must resign as speaker if he is going to serve as prime minister.
The Palestinian efforts at forming a new government are accompanied by a slightly optimistic atmosphere. Voices from Israel and the U.S. are indicating readiness to give Qureia a chance. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon speaks of a meeting in the near future with the new Palestinian prime minister and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz announced renewal of contacts with senior Palestinian officials. Qureia is preparing for meetings with representatives of all the Palestinian factions, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of Hamas, and there are even reports about a new hudna.
The Meaning of Closure
By Kate - IWPS, International Middle East Media Center 11/3/2003
When missiles are flying in Gaza, killing dozens each day, a small word like “closure” can seem benign. Particularly to those of us who are used to being able to go where we like, buy what we need, work when we are supposed to and come home when we are done, go to the doctor if we have to, and, and, and … as Palestinians say.
Maybe we even think that a day when we were forbidden to do any of those things would give us an excuse to stay home and rest, like a snow day. And if it is one day or two, sometimes that is true.
On Tuesday night, October 7, our friend and neighbor, Abu Rabia, came to tell us that he had just been informed of a new order to take effect the next day.
He is the DCL, or District Coordinating Liaison, for the Salfit District, so he gets this information first, directly from the Israeli authorities. The order was that no Palestinian would be allowed on Israeli roads, otherwise known as settler roads, by foot or in a car.
Any car found on the road would be confiscated, anyone walking on the road could be arrested, and most significantly for the people in our area, no one would be allowed to pick olives, inside or outside the villages.
THE PERMIT MAZE: Palestinians need permits to move, to live, for everything
By BADIL Resource Center, Badil 11/3/2003
There is only one thing straightforward about the maze of permit regulations for Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza. Despite the Oslo accords and other interim agreements, all applications for identity documents end up being approved or rejected by some Israeli authority.
The maze of permits regularly becomes more tangled. In addition to permits they need even to live in their own homes let alone travel a few kilometers to work or see family, the Israeli authorities have introduced a new model.
The new permit is for people caught between the “security fence” and the West Bank-Israel border, an area being called the “seam zone”. More than 12,000 Palestinians, so far, are in this trap and more may follow as the “fence” snakes its way around and through towns. Palestinians living within these areas are required to obtain permits to enter the area and live there. Conditions for leaving will be determined by the Israeli authorities.
Another group of people living east of the “fence” need permits to enter or leave the area to work on land in the “seam zone” they own and have farmed for generations.
This is only the tip of the iceberg says BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. While freedom of movement may be restricted under international law for security reasons, it has become the norm for Palestinians’ movements to be continuously restricted limiting access to work, medical care, education and even food supplies and water.
Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...
By Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald (Scotland) 11/2/2003
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? -- THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”
Wonderful Jean Ziegler
By Silvia Cattori, Alternative Information Center/Indymedia-Calgary 11/2/2003
Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, payed an official visit to Palestine in July 2003. This the first time a UN Rapporteur was allowed to investigate the situation in the occupied territories.
Jean Ziegler submitted his report in early August to the High Commission for Human Rights, as well as to the two parties concerned, and is due to present it to the General Assembly in New York in the autumn. Tel Aviv understands all too well the threat posed by this report and is doing all it can to undermine Ziegler’s findings: it has already complained to the UN that the High Commission made the report public before Israel had the chance to officially acknowledge it.
The report states that the hunger and malnutrition present since the beginning of the occupation are directly linked to Israel’s punitive and apartheid-style policy, and are in no way induced by natural causes. The report shows with extreme precision how Israel has attempted to cow Palestinians in the territories it occupies through combined military might and a deliberate “starvation policy”.
“About 60-percent of Palestinians are now living in acute poverty … and are now completely dependent on food aid; less than one in two households has access to one meal a day.” You cannot fail to understand the despair of a parent who has no means to feed his family.
Child poverty in the Jewish state: How did it happen?
Daily Star 11/3/2003
Israel’s National Insurance Institute has just completed its annual study on poverty, and the results are startling. The report finds that almost one-third of Israeli children are growing up poor and that the number of under-privileged families has risen by 31,000 in the past year alone. According to the authors of the study, the Jewish state “is on the way to becoming the country with the highest poverty rate in the Western world.”
Some will reflexively blame this alarming information on the intifada and note that in both relative and absolute terms, the suffering of Palestinian children is even worse. Such arguments are at least partly correct, but they are also entirely irrelevant. The pertinent issue is how the world’s most prolific recipient of foreign aid (approximately $500 a year for every man, woman and child) has managed to get itself in such a bind. And it is not just Israeli citizens who deserve answers: American taxpayers also have a right to know what has happened to the tens of billions of dollars their government has lavished on the Jewish state.
So where is the money that might have kept more Israeli children from going hungry? Much of it has been used on subsidies to ensure that more Israeli children live in colonies on occupied Arab land. Where are the funds that might have provided better schools and more equitable access thereto? They are locked up in a grotesque wall ostensibly designed to protect Jews but actually situated to oppress Arabs....
The Cancer Cells
By Uri Avnery, Arabic Media Internet Network 11/1/2003
In the Six-Day War, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were murdered while storming the Sinai desert, the West Bank and the Golan heights .
In the Yom-Kippur War, more than 2000 Israeli soldiers were murdered in the defense of the conquered territories.
In the 18 year long Lebanon War, more than a thousand Israeli soldiers were murdered while conquering and occupying South Lebanon .
They would have been surprised to learn that they were “murdered”. Perhaps they would have been insulted. After all, they were not helpless Jews in the ghetto who were killed during a pogrom by drunken Cossacks. They fell as soldiers in war.
Now we are back in the ghetto. Again we are poor, fearful Jews. Even when we are in uniform. Even when we are armed to the teeth. Even when we have tanks, airplanes, missiles and the nuclear option. Alas, we are murdered.
The application of the verb “murder” to combat soldiers who fall in action is a semantic novelty of the present intifada in the Sharon era. It was very conspicuous last week, in the wake of two military incidents.
In the Palestinian village of Ein Yabroud , three soldiers were ambushed and killed. Their job was to safeguard the road to the nearby settlement Ofra, north of Ramallah. They were patrolling the main street of the village on foot, following their regular route. On the way back, three Palestinian fighters lay in wait for them, killing three and wounding one. The attackers got away.
A classic guerilla engagement. Not terrorism. Not an attack on civilians. The action of guerilla fighters against armed soldiers in an occupied area. If it had involved German soldiers in France or French soldiers in Algeria , nobody would have dreamed of saying that they were “murdered”. But on our television, military correspondents talked of the three being “murdered” by “terrorists”.
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