When Will Reality Become News Worthy?
By Kristen Ess, Palestine Chronicle 11/18/2003
Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 14 year old boy Saturday night, 15 November 2003 at 7 pm. IOF were invading the boy's village, Beit Forik, near Nablus. As is common in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers were randomly firing throughout the village. After Israeli soldiers shot and killed the 14 year old, Ahmed Halani, they ran over his body with their military jeep. A friend comments, "This is normal, the Israelis are always doing this, running over the person after they kill them. Lots of times it's with the tank, especially in Nablus and Hebron." She shrugs and finishes with, "This is the Israelis."
Israeli Occupation Forces have been heavily invaded the Jenin and Nablus areas since the beginning of the month of Ramadan. As one of dozens of recent examples, IOF killed a 38 year-old woman, Im Tiaz Sofan, while invading the Old City of Nablus on the sixth of this month. Two Israeli helicopters, several tanks and soldiers invaded the city. Israeli soldiers shot Sofan while she was standing inside her home. She bled to death within an hour because Israeli soldiers would not allow an ambulance to reach her. Across town that same day, IOF killed a young man in the Balata Refugee Camp.
On 8 November, IOF invaded Barkeen Village near Jenin and killed 16-year-old Mortaz Wasaf Mustafa Ahmoudi and injured four other people. On Sunday, IOF killed a 55-year-old man in Rafah.
There are countless examples of IOF brutality in the past three weeks, a few of them re-reported herein as a reminder of what reality is, as the Israeli and U.S. media and governments play spin doctors with this morning’s news that the Palestinian resistance killing of two Israeli soldiers is the cause of the collapse of the “peace process.”
Jerusalem to Gaza via Eretz Checkpoint
By Dr. William Deinst, International Press Center 11/18/2003
It wasn’t very hard to get from Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem, all the way to the Eretz Checkpoint on the frontier between Israel and Gaza. The trip only took a little more than one hour. All I did was hire a taxi. Getting across, and into Gaza would prove to be much more difficult.
We cruised down from the Judean hills on the main highway toward Tel Aviv, past the Western flank of Jerusalem, and past the former Arab village of Deir Yassin, where the current West Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul now stands.
In 1947, 242 of the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin were massacred by Menachem Begin and fellow members of the Stern Gang. Palestinian Arabs were murdered that day by desperate men, many who had survived atrocities themselves in Europe during the Nazi holocaust. Actions such as these led to massive flight of about 750,000 Palestinians into what became refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza.
The modern state of Israel was born the following year in May, 1948. However, some Palestinian Arabs never left the former British mandate in Palestine; some still live in what is now Israel, and the government of Israel now calls them “Israeli-Arabs”. Below Givat Shaul, we pass the Arab towns of Abu Gosh and Beit Safafa, on either side of the main highway. We leave the hills behind, and turn south off the Tel Aviv highway on the fertile plains toward Beersheva, and Ashkalon, also known by their Arab names of Beersaba’ and Askalaan. Many of the current inhabitants of Gaza have ancestral roots in these parts of Palestine, prior to “the Catastrophe” of 1948.
The paradox begins to unravel
Ha'aretz 11/19/2003
The Israeli paradox is running rampant but it is also beginning to unravel. The familiar paradox is about a majority in favor of a peace deal with the Palestinians, while a majority, somewhat weakened in the polls, favors a government and prime minister who continue to oppose such a deal. Most are for cooking up negotiations with the Palestinian Authority but there's a majority, albeit shrinking, in favor of Sharon, who continues to do everything to leave out the critical elements for the stew.
There are new elements now intruding into the menu, destabilizing it. For some months, the feeling has been expressed here - and it's only partially backed up by solid data - that something in the Israeli consciousness is shifting and strengthening the revulsion at continuing the status quo. This week, new data was added to underline this impression.
The street, in all its strata, has not been exposed in the last decade to an initiative such as the one that was deposited in every mailbox in the country. The Geneva initiative is not a perfect solution. It does not pretend to be and cannot be. It's usefulness goes far beyond the zero chance it has of being fulfilled with Sharon in power. Even before the December 1 signing in Switzerland, the largest distribution list of all received tangible proof that there is someone for serious talk in the Palestinian leadership. That fact can't be denied nor repressed, though there is automatic disgust for it on the right. On the contrary: those who want to burn the text of the initiative, like the gang in Kfar Chabad, and those decrying it so passionately belie the extent to which it touches the most sensitive nerve in the Israeli rejectionist wing. In other words, in their eyes it seems so feasible, indeed inevitable, that the contempt rises with foam on their lips.
Fanning the flames of hatred
By Roman Bronfman, Ha'aretz 11/19/2003
Another day of Jewish victims somewhere in the world, and this time in a terrible attack on synagogues in Istanbul. The number of violent incidents worldwide against anything identified with the State of Israel and the Jewish people no longer leaves any doubt that this is a real wave.
Even a quick glance at the newspapers in recent weeks indicates the worrisome change in world public opinion: Israel as a symbol - and Jews, in general - have been transformed from the helpless victims of the Nazi extermination machine into "the most dangerous country to world peace," as defined by the latest European Union Commission survey. This was a problematic survey from a structural point of view, so I shall reword the statement - Israel has become the most hated nation in the world.
How can this hatred toward us be explained, particularly in the developed European states? And why is it being expressed specifically now, and with such intensity? At first, Israel officially assumed that these were only marginal expressions of radicalization toward Israel. But when the waves of hatred spread and appeared on all the media networks around the world and penetrated every home, the new-old answer surfaced: anti-Semitism.
After all, anti-Semitism has always been the Jews' trump card because it is easy to quote some crazy figure from history and seek cover. This time, too, the anti-Semitism card has been pulled from the sleeve of explanations by the Israeli government and its most faithful spokespeople have been sent to wave it. But the time has come for the Israeli public to wake up from the fairy tale being told by its elected government.
U.S. Lacks the Honesty to Be ME Broker
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center 11/19/2003
Every one has the right to build a fence on his land to protect his family and property or even to acquire a better level of privacy. This is a personal right that allows individual the right to use their privately owned property in the way the suits them without overriding the right of their neighbors or the right of the public in general.
Yet, when you build your fence deep inside your neighbor’s yard, you are accused with an assault against their ownership rights. No matter what your excuse is, you have committed an offence that can send you behind bars. In other wards it is a criminal act.
Even more, how would it look if you move into your neighbor’s yard, destroy part of his home, uproot much of his trees, and build a fence deep inside his yard including much of his privately owned land into your own yard? Even worse, If you turn into the yard of your second neighbor and build a fence that include his entire land and home into your own property and then open a gate, hire a guard, and order him not to allow your neighbor in or out unless he obtains a passage permit from you directly.
Beirut, or the awesome difficulty of making peace
By Hazem Saghiyeh, Daily Star 11/19/2003
Rarely has an Arab League summit had such positive implications as the Beirut conclave of March 2002. However, compared to the Khartoum summit after the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which rejected recognition of Israel and reconciliation and negotiations with it, or the 1978 Baghdad summit that isolated Egypt as a reaction to the Camp David Accords, the distance covered by Arab rationality was apparent. Yet this rationality required the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy to express itself, and remained restricted to some political elites, while the masses confronted it with animosity. Such radical positions caused difficulties for the Beirut summit, as did the counter-radicalism of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the US administration of George W. Bush. On March 28, 2002, it looked like things had changed when compared to the past. Arab leaders emphasized that peace was their strategic option in settling the Middle East conflict. By reviving Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and the land-for-peace formula, sensibly included in Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s initiative, the Arab states pledged to recognize the Jewish state if it fulfilled its major and numerous obligations toward peace.
However, the conciliatory effort was not sufficient to deter Sharon, who had detained Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. When Sharon granted Arafat “permission” to leave so that he could travel to Beirut, he attached a number of humiliating conditions: the Palestinian leader would have to accept Israel’s format for a cease-fire. If he inflamed passions against Israel in Beirut, or if a suicide attack took place during his absence, the door would be closed for his return to Palestinian territory.
The Bush vision
By Henry C K Liu, Asia Times 11/20/2003
Part 2, REALPOLITIK OF DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: United States President George W Bush has built his new policy of world democratic revolution on the assumption that democracy in foreign lands would automatically welcome US imperialism in the name of capitalistic free trade. In the Middle East, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the native land of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001, or even Egypt, democracy, if allowed to be practiced as a free political process that reflects popular opinion and historical conditions, will likely be problematic to US regional and global interests, which includes its and its allies' dependence on low-cost imported oil. The US has repeatedly tried to topple democratically elected governments, the latest example being the Bush White House's efforts to engineer a coup in Venezuela.
In his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy this month, Bush paid homage to former US president Ronald Reagan and his 1980s Westminster Abbey invocations of freedom's allegedly unstoppable momentum against Soviet communism. All through the Cold War, while both camps claimed to defend freedom and their own version of democracy, such noble values were in short supply in practice not just in the Soviet bloc, but also, as Bush acknowledged, in the so-called free world.
The Reagan administration was as much surprised by the sudden implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as anyone else, notwithstanding its manipulative exploitation of dissidents and democratic opposition movements in the Soviet Union and across Central and Eastern Europe, turning them from national-liberation movements into Cold War agents to serve US geopolitical interests. Many of these dissidents, hailed as heroic freedom fighters during the Cold War, were promptly forgotten by Washington as soon as the Cold War ended. Others became terrorists against their former supporters, drawing on skills taught by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Washington's willingness to outspend Moscow on nuclear and conventional arms and to maintain strong North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) capabilities were the key factors in bankrupting the Soviet Union, not US democracy.
|
