Wagnerian tactics
By Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 6 - 12 November 2003
On 20 October, Gaza came under 13 hours of aerial bombardment which left 14 Palestinians dead and over 100 wounded. Israel is acting as if Gaza were a military fortress. If we are to believe Israeli officials, things will only get worse. The attack on Gaza took place on the same day Sharon was delivering the government's statement to the Knesset. In a gruesome kind of symmetry, the sound of bombardment was Sharon's own "special effects". Bombs put his words into action.
Sharon's recipe for dealing with the Palestinians is simple: if force does not work, use more force. Sharon has asked the Israelis to be patient in this difficult time of waiting. He refers to this time with the exact same wording (tekufat hehmetna) the Israelis used for the period preceding the 1967 war. These were the months in which the Israeli public lived in what is usually portrayed as painful anticipation, waiting to see who would start the war first. Israel had just provoked Egypt and Syria, to get them into a war that Israel willed and planned. The two countries fell into the trap soon enough, with a flurry of rhetoric and ill-preparation. Israel was given the justification it needed for the most spectacular preemptive strike in the second half of the 20th century. Sharon is using this "difficult period of waiting" to make a certain point. I don't know how purposeful this is, and I am not sure how many have caught on to its historical resonance. But I am willing to bet that Sharon's use of words was more intentional than incidental, for it accurately underlines the current political mood.
Chasing illusions?
Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 11/7/2003
Until Arab governments wake up and act, only the Israeli right is gaining ground -- After lengthy secret negotiations in Geneva, a group of prominent Israeli and Palestinian figures met in Amman to put their initials to a summary of what has become known as the Swiss agreement. Subsequent news reports indicated that the signing ceremony for the complete text would take place on 4 November, in order to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the assassination of Rabin.
One is immediately struck by the remarkable difference between the two delegations that took part in these negotiations. The Israelis included former Minister of Justice under Rabin, Yossi Beilin, former Labour Party leader General Amran Mitzna, former Chief of Israeli Intelligence David Kimchi and a number of other political and intellectual figures with leftist leanings. The only individual who could be said to be near to Israel's ruling coalition was Najama Ronin, a Likud member who, to my knowledge, has never occupied an influential position within the party. The Palestinian delegation included Minister of Information Yasser Abed Rabbo, along with a number of other prominent Palestinian figures, most of whom are members of Fatah, the backbone of the PLO and PA. In other words, the Israeli negotiators represented the Israeli opposition (and only a segment of the opposition at that), while the Palestinian delegation consisted of current officials, some with close ties to Arafat, and could thus be characterised as semi-official.
....The Palestinians taking part in the negotiations were especially keen to demonstrate their willingness to be accommodating. The Israelis taking part in the negotiations were just as keen to prove that they could obtain more from the Palestinians through political means than Sharon could with his guns and Apaches. From the outset, therefore, they were in a position to blackmail their Palestinian counterparts into yielding more and more concessions.
Time is on whose side?
By Michael Shaik, Electronic Intifada 11/7/2003
Recently, Palestinian farmers living in proximity to Israel's Separation Wall received an order signed by Major General Moshe Kaplinski, commander of Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, declaring that their lands lying between the barrier and the border with Israel had been classified as "a closed military zone". Henceforth, the order stated, only Israeli citizens and Jews from other countries would have unrestricted access to these lands. Palestinians who wished to enter or continue living in these areas would have to apply for special permits.
According to a report prepared by the World Bank, the order will directly affect 95,000 Palestinians living within the "closed military zone" and another 20,000 living to the east of the wall whom the wall has separated from their livelihoods and relatives. The report goes on to note that the wall crosses agricultural roads, cuts off residents from their water supply, from their schools, businesses, public services and farms.
The specifically racial criteria used to decide who has access to the occupied lands west of the wall have led human rights activists to describe the 650 km long steel and concrete barrier as an "Apartheid Wall" and note that the enclaves created by its construction compare unfavourably with the ghettoes created for Europe's Jews and the Bantustans created for South Africa's blacks during the Apartheid era.
The lights of Netzarim
By Emmanuel Sivan, Ha'aretz 11/7/2003
In early 1980, a helicopter hovered above the Gaza Strip settlement of Netzarim. In it were the military governor of the Strip and the agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon. The governor told the minister, his former commander in the paratroops, what was bothering him.
I'm supposed to defend a concentration camp, Netzarim, which is inside another concentration camp, the Nuseirat refugee camp. And that's an almost impossible mission.
What's the point, the governor wanted to know. Sharon replied without hesitation: "I want the Arabs to see Jewish lights every night 500 meters from them."
That's the whole doctrine. It has nothing to do with "upholding the commandment to settle the Land of Israel, or even with strategic considerations of the kind that a few Israel Defense Forces commanders are trying to tell us about following the recent terrorist attack at Netzarim in which three soldiers were killed (i.e. control of Gaza port, the settlement's location at a vital junction, etc.).
No, the point is for them "to see Jewish lights" - in other words, to assert ownership, to dramatize who's in control.
Why Vicki Knafo gives bouquets to Netanyahu
Ha'aretz 11/7/2003
"It's a fragmented, disintegrating society, like the United States. Israel does not have, and never had a tradition of a labor culture and broad solidarity of workers based on a common ideology of social change and a just distribution of the public wealth." -- On the eve of municipal elections last month, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the southern development town of Mitzpeh Ramon. A local resident - obviously an ardent supporter - presented him with a floral wreath. Her name was Vicki Knafo.
Anyone who heard Knafo hurling fire and brimstone at the government in general and at Netanyahu's obtuseness in particular, as she camped out for the summer in her her Jerusalem protest tent across from the treasury, would have found her floral gesture to him difficult to swallow.
Yet in those few seconds, in which the smiling images of Knafo and Netanyahu flickered across the nation's television screens, contained the entire explanation for the terrible distortion that is eroding Israeli politics.
Any basic political logic would suggest that Knafo should have been leading a vigorous opposition movement in Mitzpeh Ramon against a government that is oppressing the poor as no other government before it has done.
Instead, she is supporting the right and, to the delight of all those who despise trades unions, she is also laying into the Histadrut labor federation. She identifies the left with the educated, sated upper middle classes that vote for Meretz and the Labor Party.
Shelters from the storm
By Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 6 - 12 November 2003
Israel and the Palestinian factions are awaiting the formation of the next Palestinian government -- each for their own reasons. -- Tuesday midnight was supposed to have been the expiry date for the "emergency" government decreed by Yasser Arafat one month ago following a suicide bombing in Haifa, and the real fear Ariel Sharon would invoke it to "remove" the Palestinian leader once and for all. The emergency has apparently passed, but the appointed eight-man cabinet remains in a caretaker role until the Palestinian Authority parliament convenes for a confidence vote in a full 21-minister government "next week", insists Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa).
Much seemingly rests on the government's establishment. Qurei wants his premiership endorsed by president and parliament alike to steel him in discussions with the Palestinian factions for a new "mutual" Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire. Sharon needs a new Palestinian interlocutor to give an illusion of "progress" when in fact there can be none.
The snag restraining all is the same that gnawed away at the government of Qurei's predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). According to PA officials all of the ministries in the new cabinet have been agreed between prime minister and president except for Interior, mandated under the long-expired roadmap to "consolidate" the PA's police into a fighting force able to take on and disarm the Palestinian militias.
‘Democracy’ alone won’t save Saudi Arabia from extremism
Editorial, Daily Star 11/7/2003
Saudi Arabia’s interior minister has challenged conventional wisdom by arguing that the kingdom’s terrorism problem does not stem from a lack of democracy. Prince Nayef’s comments might indicate a dangerous level of denial, but they could also demonstrate a deeper understanding of the challenges facing Saudi Arabia than any of the so-called “experts” would like to admit. It is not the absence of a particular system that has put the Saudis in their current dilemma. Instead, the culprit has been the breakdown of a model that formerly was sufficient.
Nayef’s father, King Abdel-Aziz, is famous for having warned: “Do not mix commerce with governance.” This simple rule has been ignored for far too long, with members of the royal family now accustomed to abusing their privileges in order to enhance their holdings and/or ruin their competition. Apart from the economic damage wrought by such practices, there is also the matter of the caustic effect they have on national unity.
The private sector has also been squeezed by the massive growth of the oil industry. The state’s control over energy assets and the proceeds therefrom has simultaneously hobbled the development of a healthy middle class and robbed the business community of the influence it once enjoyed by dint of its being a prime source of capital.
The side I see: Thoughts during the olive harvest
By Flo Razowsky, Electronic Intifada 11/7/2003
I've come to this world as an outsider, as one actually born to the occupiers, as one to fight, one to learn and carry the truth home. It has been over six months now since I set foot on this much disputed land for the second time in my life. This land that I, my allies, and those I have come to support, call Palestine.
And that is where the conflict begins, the verbal attacks, the insults on my intelligence, the regurgitation of a brainwashing that I myself was raised under. I have seen though, am seeing, the truth that escaped my brainwashed upbringing. The part of the story that missed me because I was too busy being told about all the Arab terrorists and the importance of protecting the security of Israel, the place I was taught to strive for, my supposed homeland.
I have spent six months living across the line from the side that I should be on, according to my birth. Six months of waking almost every morning inside a cage, surrounded by the walls, fences and gates of those from that other side. These days, there is no way in or out save through a gate in this fence, controlled by soldiers from the other side. Even access to the rest of the West Bank is controlled.
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