Children in Bethlehem under siege
By Rifat Odeh Kassis, Electronic Intifada 12/23/2003
When his alarm clock goes off every day at 6am, Saif, my 11-year-old son, barely moves his body out of his bed. His mother and I must go to extraordinary lengths to get him up and ready to go to school. This was never the case before.
Saif studies in the Lutheran Church School in Beit Sahour, which is also known as the “Shepherds Field” according to the Bible. Located east of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour is the last Christian majority town in Palestine and used to enjoy the reputation of having the smallest percentage of immigration. This is also not the case any more.
Long before the second Intifada began, Saif and the other children in our area noticed that their lives were changing when the Abu Ghnaim Mountain, historically owned by Palestinians from Bethlehem and Beit Sahour, was confiscated to build a Jewish colony on its green land.
Located less than one kilometer from our cooperative housing project, the Abu Ghnaim mountain is home to many Christian holy sites including St. Theodore’s Well, the 5th and 6th century Byzantine monastery and church of Bir Oadisum which marks the place where St. Mary dismounted before giving birth to Jesus.
The geographical location of the mountain gave it such importance that, in 1967, Israel decided to annex it to the Jerusalem Municipal boundaries and, despite its historical and religious importance, built the Har Homa colony. This colony now contains about 6,500 housing units in high-rise buildings with standard infrastructure such as roads, schools, and shops in addition to hotels, a tourist village, and industrial zones to accommodate thirty to forty thousands Jewish settlers.
This Israeli decision, which was made before the second Intifada started, has had fatal consequences to Christians and Muslims living in the area. It turned our peaceful neighborhood into a war zone and plays a major role in limiting the ability of people in Beit Sahour to expand forcing them to immigrate outside their country.
Sharon’s Wall a Threat to All Religious Groups
By Christopher Bollyn, AmericanFreePress.com December 2003
‘Annexation by appropriation’ ruins world’s holiest cities for everyone -- The Israeli “separation barrier” is the culmination of Ariel Sharon’s long-planned settlement scheme to appropriate vast amounts of Palestinian land and water resources and impoverish the non-Jewish population to the point of expulsion.
Bethlehem this Christmas, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, under “closure” of the harsh Israeli military occupation, has become a Christian ghetto–separated from its hinterland and Jerusalem. Bethlehem has become an open-air prison, like the Gaza Strip, surrounded by an Israeli-built electrified wall–an atrocity paid for by the U.S. taxpayers and supported by the U.S. government.
The tall and ugly electrified wall being built around the town of Bethlehem and its famous Church of the Nativity is but a small part of the more than 400-mile-long fortified wall designed to separate the population of the Holy Land into two ghettoes–one Israeli, the other Palestinian. The meek protests of the Bush administration do nothing to hide the fact that the Israeli barrier is being built with funds and political cover provided by the U.S. government.
Depicted by the mass media as a self-defense measure required to foil Palestinian terror attacks, the wall is actually the beginning of the final phase of a long-planned appropriation of Palestinian land and water resources begun decades ago by the current Israeli prime minister.
A Plan Born Dead
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center 12/22/2003
Sharon, as he presented his “disengagment plan” trigered fears among both Palestinians and settlers. Settlers, wo stand on the fore front of the Greater Land of Israel camp, Likud hardliners, and relgous parties are seemingly preparing a counter attack to balance what they describe as “the international pressure on the prime minister." With the expectations that the publicly stated position of Sharon would introduce a significant public opinion shift in support of evacuating settlers, even by force, settlers and Likud hardliners are reverting to the old tactic of threatening with disobedience and warning of a civil war.
The first move came from the side of Likud MKs, who will meet Monday at the Knesset to chart a detailed course of action designed to put a stop to unilateral steps involving the evacuation of settlements. Leading the group are MKs Gilad Erdan, Ehud Yatom, Yehiel Hazan, and Yuli Edelstein.
The group may put pressure on Sharon and Likud ministers supporting his policies by breaking with party discipline on votes, as a means of showing their displeasure at what they perceive as a break with party principles."
Now Maher knows how angry the Palestinians are
Editorial, Daily Star 12/23/2003
The harsh treatment accorded Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher in Jerusalem on Monday should be interpreted as a warning. The people who assaulted Maher and his entourage may have been extremists, and their behavior was entirely inappropriate, but the anger they expressed is one that permeates Palestinian society. At all levels and in every town, village and refugee camp of the Occupied Territories, Palestinians are increasingly resentful of their fellow Arabs: They feel abandoned in their hour of need, a perception that carries no small amount of truth.
It goes without saying that attacking the foreign minister of a friendly country is wrong, and that doing it when he is engaged in an attempt to further the peace process is doubly so. This is not to mention the counterproductive effect involved: Physically endangering someone whom one accuses of betrayal is hardly a surefire method of positively influencing their behavior. The individuals who threw shoes at Maher, however, were not thinking along such lines: All they know is that they and their families face an exceedingly uncertain future and that their erstwhile allies have done almost nothing to help.
Maher is a savvy diplomat with more than enough experience to appreciate the factors that contributed to Monday’s ugly incident. If he is to make the best of the situation, though, he has to get beyond understanding. Whether or not anyone intended to send a message by treating the Egyptian foreign minister so roughly, it is the Egyptian president and other Arab heads of state who need to hear and clearly comprehend what is being said. Then they need to act, creatively and meaningfully, by impressing on the Israelis and their American benefactors that the peace process cannot indefinitely lay dormant: At some point it will die, and when that happens there will be no more talk of a temporary cease-fire, let alone discussion of a comprehensive agreement.
Bush has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international terrorists
By David Hirst, The Guardian 12/23/2003
This was the year the Middle East became the undisputed, tumultuous centre of global politics. When, at dawn on March 20 the US and its British ally went to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they were intervening in the region on such a scale that Arabs everywhere compared the invasion, in its potential geopolitical significance, to that seminal upheaval of the last century: the collapse of the Ottoman empire. That led to the arbitrary carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European colonial powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine, to the Israeli settler-state.
In Arab eyes, it was a final mortal blow to the so-called "Arab system" through which the component parts of the greater Arab "nation" collectively strove to protect the territorial integrity and basic security of the whole. To the disgust and shame of the Arab peoples, it was not merely incapable of preventing the conquest and occupation of what, properly governed, would have been one of the most powerful and prosperous Arab lands, it was largely complicit in it.
It simply stood and watched as the world's only superpower embarked on its hugely ambitious, neo-colonial enterprise: to make Iraq the fulcrum for reshaping the entire region and, with regime change and "democratisation", cure it of those sicknesses - political and social oppression, religious extremism, corruption, tribalism and economic stagnation - that had turned it into the main threat to the existing world order. It did not formally envisage a full-scale redrawing of state frontiers, but it looked as though by an inexorable momentum that might come to pass.
It was seen as a second Palestine, not so much because it was a foreign conquest of another Arab country, but because, via the Bush administration's neo-conservative hawks, it was at least as much Israeli in inspiration and purpose as it was American....
Who can say 'yes' to the Geneva Accord?
By Maher Mughrabi, Electronic Intifada 12/22/2003
What the Middle East needs, we are told, is democracy. Even George Bush seems convinced that after "60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East", democracy is an idea whose time has come.
The problem is that, having rode in on the back of a tank, democracy does not seem to have much time to discuss things with us. America's man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, knows that his masters would like to wind up their occupation of Iraq before presidential election time. So he hatched a plan for "indirect elections" and partial consultation in a "town hall" format so that an Iraqi government could be agreed upon post-haste.
This week that plan hit an obstacle in the form of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who said that the only acceptable government was one directly elected by all the Iraqi people. That certainly sounds very democratic. But the Americans complain it will take too much time. Whose clock are we on, one wonders?
Sistani's aides explained the delay in his objections being voiced by saying that the American plan had been "misrepresented by whoever saw him" and that until recently the ayatollah did not have an Arabic version of it.
Those of us who have, in recent weeks, been asked for our stance on the Geneva Accord can sympathise with his predicament. A thousand accounts of the accord have preceded it from every point in the political spectrum, not to mention the elaborate sound-and-light show in Geneva itself, with a cast including Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa and even Richard Dreyfuss.
We have learnt to be wary of stage-managed productions, from Clinton, Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 to Bush, Sharon and Abu Mazen in Aqaba in 2003. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians are being killed and maimed every day. Time is of the essence. But time should not be used to dictate terms, as it was by an anxious Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David three years ago.
The Geneva Accord and the Right of Return as seen from Al-Baqa'a Refugee Camp
By Stefan Christoff, Electronic Intifada 12/22/2003
Amman, Jordan -- Al-Baqa'a is Jordan's largest Palestinian refugee camp, located on the outskirts of Amman and home to more than 100,000 refugees. In the heart of one of Jordan's many desert valleys, at night, Al-Baqa'a is a beautiful array of lights sparkling below the wealthy hilltops of Amman. But, when visiting Al-Baqa'a during the day, it emerges as an impoverished Palestinian community of countless markets and shops lining small crowded streets of makeshift homes.
The Palestinian refugees who make up Al-Baqa'a are from throughout the 1948 lands of Palestine, displaced by force from their homes during both the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. The residents of Al-Baqa's are just one manifestation of the millions of Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the world.
Al-Baqa'a was established during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fleeing deeper into Jordan. Many of the refugees at Al-Baqa'a fled from the town of Karameh in the Jordan Valley, just a one-hour walk from the Israeli border.
Karameh is famous for a 1968 battle when over 15 000 Israeli infantry, supported by tank units and helicopters, marched over the Allenby Bridge. At the time, Karameh was the political and military headquarters of the Palestinian al-Fatah movement. At the Battle of Karameh, the technologically-advanced, better-equipped and larger Israeli army was forced to retreat, leaving Karameh to the Palestinians. The Battle of Karameh represented the Palestinians greatest military victory up to that time, and sent a surge of optimism through the Palestinian community, as well as helping establish the Palestinian claim to being a genuine national liberation movement.
Iraq's Phantom 'Insurgents'
By Robert Fisk, Palestine Chronicle 12/22/2003
Schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America's famous "insurgents". In Samarra for which read Fantasyville he was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city.
It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered Issam's back, speeding on through an outer wall. His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital yesterday in a serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the Samarra emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages.
The Americans claimed to have killed 54 "insurgents" after a series of guerrilla ambushes in the city last month, and the only dead to be found in the mortuaries were nine civilians, including an Iranian pilgrim to the great golden-cupolaed Shia shrine that looms over Samarra. Four days ago, they boasted of a further 11 "insurgents", but the only dead man who could be found was a vegetable seller. At the Samarra hospital, doctors also have the name of a taxi driver called Amer Baghdadi, shot dead by the Americans on Wednesday night.
...The American military still talk about their battle against "terrorism" in Samarra, a story that might be more convincing if their troops were not accompanied in the city by hooded men in plain clothes carrying Kalashnikov rifles. The 4th Infantry Division claim these are members of the "Iraqi Civil Defence Corps" who are now also appearing in hoods in the centre of Baghdad but there is no way of knowing.
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