My brother's fight for democracy
By Marwan Bishara, The Guardian, December 31, 2002
Peace requires both equality in Israel and an end to occupation -- Since Israel's attorney-general recommended that the Arab-Israeli MP Azmi Bishara and his party be banned from running in the forthcoming elections, death threats against him have multiplied. It's natural that I should worry - he is my brother. But why should the world at large care? The reason is that Azmi's vision of an Israel based on universal democratic values - including an end to inequality and the occupation of the Palestinian territories - is indispensable to solving the Middle East conflict. Today, this vision is threatened politically and physically. Azmi has warned against Ariel Sharon's drive to war and supported popular resistance to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, his parliamentary immunity was lifted last year and he was put on trial for "supporting terrorism". Polls show that Azmi is now the most popular leader among the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

From Trent Lott to Ariel Sharon: Wherever Segregationists Are Found
By Tarif Abboushi, CounterPunch, December 30, 2002
Trent Lott's recent and now-infamous faux pas precipitated an avalanche of media editorials, mostly calling on him to resign his post as U.S. senate majority leader. Lott's statement that the country would have been better off if U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat candidacy in the 1948 presidential race had succeeded was deemed evidence of his failure to shed deep-rooted racist sentiments. His attitude was widely described as intolerable. In the immediate aftermath of Lott's gaffe, questions swirled about whether he had said what he meant or meant what he said. Those questions were quickly swept aside and replaced by near-unanimous editorial assertions that all manifestations of racism are to be condemned. But when editors of American newspapers correctly posit, as some have, that discrimination, bigotry and intolerance deserve to be condemned wherever they are found, it is fair to question whether they really mean what they say.

Iraq Belongs on the Back Burner
By Warren M. Christopher, December 31, 2002
North Korea's startling revival of its nuclear program, coupled with the unrelenting threat of international terrorism, presents compelling reasons for President Bush to step back from his fixation on attacking Iraq and to reassess his administration's priorities. North Korea's reopening of its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon puts it within six months of being able to produce sufficient weapons-grade material to generate several nuclear bombs. Contrast this with Iraq. Not only is North Korea much further along than Iraq in building nuclear weapons but, by virtue of its longer-range missiles, it has a greater delivery capability. Every option for dealing with this situation — including the administration's "structured containment" — is fraught with danger and potentially disastrous consequences. Having participated in the discussions leading up to the now-violated 1994 agreed framework with North Korea, I am convinced that this crisis requires sustained attention from top government officials, including the president. It's important to remember that devising a solution for the North Korean crisis will require sustained diplomatic efforts with China, South Korea and other countries of the region. All this will take time, energy and attention.

"Nadav's" Putsch
By Uri Avnery, Media Monitors Network, December 30, 2002
The coming elections will be decided – and perhaps have already been decided - by an anonymous person, whose nom-de-guerre is “Nadav”. “Nadav” calls himself an “expert” in the service of the General Security Service (known by its Hebrew acronym Shabak or Shin-Beth). According to him, his official title is “chief of the research department in the field of Israeli Arabs”. If “Nadav” were the commander of an armored brigade and instigated a military coup-d’etat, like a South-American general of old, the results of his action would not be much different. Of course, his bosses did not send their tanks to the Knesset, neither did they arrest leftist leaders and drop them from helicopters into the sea. Of course not. They are much more humane. They only use paper. The “Nadav’s” paper is an “expert opinion” submitted to the Central Election Committee by the Attorney General. In it, the man in quotation marks – the quotation marks appear in the document itself - states that the Balad party aims to destroy the State of Israel, to aid and abet the enemies of the state, to incite the Arab citizens to rebellion, and more of the same. On the basis of this expert opinion, the committee intends to disqualify Balad and its leader, Azmi Bishara, together with some other Arab MKs, from taking part in the elections.

Danger ahead
By Avi Temkin, Globes, December 31, 2002 
Israel can’t afford another year like 2002 --  The fact that the Israeli economy had its worst year since 1953 has long since become a clichι. This constitutes unhappy proof of the plight the economy has reached in the past two years. A summary of 2001-2002 shows a cumulative 7% drop in per capita GDP. Judging by the current trends, the decline will reach a cumulative 10% by the end of 2003. In other words, there is no point in asking whether or when the economic crisis will come. It’s already here, and it’s taking its toll. The background to Governor of the Bank of Israel David Klein’s remarks last week on the danger of further economic contraction can be seen in the Central Bureau of Statistics figures, which illustrate the whole picture. Business sector output has fallen by almost 6.5% in the past two years, industrial output was down 12% in the same period, imports 15%, and exports 17%.

People and Politics: Too close a shave for justice
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, December 31, 2002
They are having a difficult time trying to decide at the B'Tselem offices whether to laugh or scream. Someone proposed that Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon grant lieutenant's bars to the head of B'Tselem's field work team in Hebron, Mussa Abu Hashash, so the cooperation he gets from "the relevant IDF authorities," isn't the usual "get out of here before I throw you in the calaboose."  --- A petition by a new group calling itself the "Forum of Holocaust survivors and descendants to halt the deterioration of Israeli humanism" is cautiously maneuvering between the murder of the yeshiva students in Otniel and Holocaust denial in the Arab world, between the horrors of the occupation and the stories of abuse of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers.

Fences that obscure reality
Editorial, Ha'aretz, December 31, 2002 
After more than two years of lethal terror attacks that have exacted a terrible price on both sides of the Green Line, change can be discerned in the settlers' orientation. Eliezer Hisdai, the Yesha Council of Settlements security chief, told Ha'aretz on Sunday that a clear majority of settlements in the territories want to erect electronic fences. Only 10 out of 150 settlements still refuse to surround their areas with some sort of fence, despite the frequent murderous terror attacks in the territories; these 10 insist on putting the lives of their residents at risk in the name of ideology.

Year of the pundits
By Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, December 31, 2002
Ministers, generals and senior functionaries whose job it is to run the country all treat their failures as if they had nothing to do with them. They are not leaders, navigating Israel's course. They are merely political analysts. In fact, the year 2002, which ends tonight at midnight, could be summed up as the Year of the Pundit. --- When the Trade Bank collapsed and its clients lost all their money, the governor of the Bank of Israel, David Klein, appeared on a radio talk show. One of the victims called up and asked: "How do things like this happen?" Klein didn't beat around the bush. "You should have put your money in a big bank," he said. Now David Klein has made it clear that even big banks are not exactly safe. Even the biggies could go under, he told an audience of industrialists and businessmen, repeating this remark in an interview with Ma'ariv. And it's not because the supervisor of banks has done anything wrong; it's because government policy stinks.

War on Iraq: A Return to Classical Imperialism
By Kareem M. Kamel, Islam Online, December 28, 2002
Despite Iraq’s acceptance of full and unfettered access for UN inspectors and its submission of a detailed, 12,000-page report on its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the world continues to follow with anticipation the unfolding drama between Iraq and the United States in the political and diplomatic arenas. In the meantime, the US military buildup in the Middle East continues to intensify, as US warmongering reaches epic proportions. The confrontation with Iraq since Desert Storm falls into the analytical category of coercion: the use of threatening force to induce an adversary to behave differently than it otherwise would.2 The current political discourse in Washington has focused almost exclusively on the use of military force, with scant attention given to non-military means.

Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future
By Ran HaCohen, Palestine Chronicle, December 31, 2002
There is a puzzling paradox about Holocaust denial: those who deny it are precisely the ones who would have supported it. I couldn’t help thinking of this paradox when I heard that American university professors have recently been accused of anti-Semitism (!) for signing a document warning against Israeli intentions to drive out masses of Palestinians, possibly during a American attack on Iraq. It seems that those likely to support such a crime are precisely the ones who so vehemently deny that Israel might be contemplating it. In Israel itself, however, the idea of "transfer" – the common euphemism for ethnic cleansing or mass deportation – is discussed openly. Several political parties support it; one of them is in Sharon’s cabinet. They may speak of "voluntary transfer", but Minister Benny Elon has been quite explicit about what they mean by "voluntary": It’s like a man who refuses to give his wife a divorce, he said. According to Jewish law, the defiant husband can be jailed and slashed until he – "voluntarily" – complies. (If you wonder why Israel is turning Palestinian life into hell, this – not the futile "war on terrorism" – is the answer.)