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Israel to expand settlement despite peace plan, Palestinian prisoners riot

(Mark Lavie, Canadian Press, July 31, 2003)
Israel announced Thursday it would build new housing in a Gaza Strip settlement, angering Palestinians and raising questions about implementation of the "road map" plan, after Israel's prime minister returned from a White House summit and top officials from the two sides had inconclusive talks about the next peace moves. . . . Israel published tenders for 22 new housing units in the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza, Neve Dekalim, angering Palestinians and leading to charges that the move counters road-map requirements. . . . About 2,400 Israelis live in Neve Dekalim, which anchors a bloc of settlements near the Gaza coast. . . . Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, criticized the tender. "This is a very dangerous step taken by the Israeli government," he said. . . . the peace plan states: "Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report," an international study from May 2001. That report says Israel "should freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." . . . Palestinians demand that all the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza be removed as part of the creation of a Palestinian state. The road map leads through three stages to a Palestinian state in 2005. But beyond the freeze and removal of unauthorized Israeli outposts, it leaves the fate of the settlements for final-status negotiations. . . . On Thursday, tempers boiled over at a prison in the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. About 400 Palestinian inmates rioted, the prison service said. Five prisoners were slightly injured. Israeli media said the prisoners were trying to prevent Israeli wardens from inspecting their cells. . . . In the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, Palestinians and Israeli supporters demonstrated at the site of the security barrier that Israel is building along the West Bank line. Qalqiliya is on the line and is also next to a new north-south highway just inside Israel. To protect the road from snipers, Israel built a high, concrete barrier. . . . Other fences cut the town off on three sides, leaving only one entry-exit point to the rest of the West Bank. . . . "The wall is in complete contradiction of our interests. We are living inside of a prison," Qalqiliya Mayor Marouf Zahran said during Thursday's demonstration. "We have no freedom of movement."

posted by LoZo 12:34 PM

 

Israel's latest insult: New Law for Israeli-Palestinian Couples
(Gavin Rabinowitz, Associated Press, July 31, 2003)
Israel's parliament passed a measure Thursday that would force Palestinians who marry Israelis to live separate lives or move out of Israel. The government said the law was necessary to prevent terror attacks, but critics called it racist. . . . The law, to be in effect for one year, would prevent Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who marry Israeli Arabs from obtaining residency permits in Israel. . . . Israeli Arabs were outraged. "We see this law as the implementation of the 'transfer' policy by the state of Israel," said Jafar Savah from Mossawa . . . Local and international human rights groups have condemned the law as racist. . . . "This is a racist law that decides who can live here according to racist criteria," said Yael Stein from the Israeli rights group B'tselem. . . . Two New York-based rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, sent letters to the parliament protesting the law and urging lawmakers not to pass it.

posted by LoZo 10:09 AM

 

The Meaning of Rachel Corrie Of Dignity and Solidarity
(Edward Said, ZNet, June 26, 2003)
An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family. . . . But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. . . . What shines through all the letters she wrote home and which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the roadmap and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the US and Israel. . . . It is no wonder, then, with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticizing the US government and being called "anti-American" for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists . . . In Palestine alone there are over a 1000 NGO's and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't worked at all, and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs, but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organized protest, here and everywhere. . . . This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it was an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of it citizens and bring it something called "democracy," especially at a time when the school system, the health system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression. Why was the collective Arab voice NOT raised against the US's flagrantly illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self-solidarity. . . . Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.

posted by LoZo 12:11 PM

 

In the Beginning, There Was Terror

[Comment: A very revealing essay, based on Sharett�s diaries, on how Israel manipulates events, and even creates them, to fan turmoil in the Arab states and promote its expansionist plans. A superb read, shouldn't be missed. Click the link above for the full story.]
(Ronald Bleier, The Link, July-August 2003)
Much of the history of terrorism in today�s Middle East has been thrust down the Orwellian memory hole due to the highly effective campaign over the past 50 years to suppress information prejudicial to Israel. . . . Blowing up a bus, a train, a ship, a caf�, or a hotel; assassinating a diplomat or a peace negotiator; killing hostages, sending letter bombs; massacring defenseless villagers � this is terrorism, as we know it. In the modern Middle East it began with the Zionists who founded the Jewish state. . . . Israel�s original sin is Zionism, the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine. At the root of the problem is Zionism�s exclusivist structure whereby only Jews are treated as first-class citizens. . . . Zionists expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and never allowed them or their descendants to return. In addition, Israeli forces destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and perpetrated about three dozen massacres. In 1967, the Israelis forced another 350,000 Palestinians to flee the West Bank and Gaza as well as 147,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. Since 1967 Israel has placed the entire Palestinian population of the Territories under military occupation. . . . One of the most notorious acts of Israeli terrorism occurred during the 1948 war when Jewish forces assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a U.N. appointed mediator. . . . One of the most notorious examples of Jewish/Zionist terrorism in the post-war period 1945-1948, was the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946. . . . The King David Hotel was brought down by means of 50 kilos of explosives, placed beside supporting pillars in the hotel�s �La Regence� restaurant. . . . The official death toll was 91 dead: 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews, and five others. . . . Moshe Sharett�s r�sum� included being head of the Jewish Agency�s political department (1933-1948), Israel�s first foreign minister (1948�1956), and its second prime minister (1954-1955). Following his death, his son edited his personal diary which covered the period from October 1953 to November 1957. The diary was published in 1979 in Hebrew only. . . . the earliest days of the state, Israel cynically and with cold calculation used its military power under the banner of security in order to dominate the region. . . . Rokach concludes from Sharett�s journal that the Israeli political establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. She writes that Israel deliberately attempted to drive the Arab states into confrontations and wars in order to dominate the Middle East. Such ambitions could not be achieved on the basis of the earlier Jewish moral superiority doctrine and thus �inevitably presupposed the use of large scale, open violence.� According to Rokach, �Terrorism and revenge were now to be glorified as the new moral�and even sacred values of Israeli society.� . . . An instance of Sharett�s documentation of Israeli �retaliation� is the notorious Kibya affair. . . . Ariel Sharon�s Unit 101 killed 60 people in the Jordanian border village of Kibya. Sharett heard reports that: thirty houses have been demolished in one village. This reprisal is unprecedented in its dimensions and in the offensive power used. . . . In addition to the Israeli retaliation policy against the Arabs, Rokach devotes a chapter to a possible Israeli �false flag� or �black propaganda� operations whereby its own Jewish citizens were deliberately sacrificed. In her chapter entitled �Sacred Terrorism� Rokach details an incident from March 1954 in the course of which attackers killed ten passengers on a bus from Eilat to Beersheva at the Ma�aleh Ha�akrabim crossroads. Four passengers survived. To this day the circumstances of the attack are shrouded in mystery. Who were the attackers? Rokach wrote that the Israeli cover story was �too strange� for outsiders to believe . . . Today with Ariel Sharon as prime minister, the same dynamic of Israeli use of terror for political gain repeats itself shamelessly. As Rachel Corrie, the American volunteer recently crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer, said in a letter home to her parents: �Sharon�s assassination-during-peace negotiations/land grab strategy, is working very well now to create settlements all over [and is] slowly but surely eliminating any meaningful possibility for Palestinian self-determination.� . . . One of the most historically significant �false flag� schemes documented by Sharett is the infamous Lavon Affair which is one of the few such operations that the Israeli government was forced to acknowledge. In July 1954, about 10 Egyptian Jews under the command of Israeli agents planted bombs in British and American properties and Egyptian public buildings in Cairo and Alexandria. The spy ring was caught and broken up on July 27, when one of its members was caught after a bomb exploded in his pocket in Alexandria. . . . Today, a standard, even routine method of sacrificing Israelis on the altar of politics is the Israeli tactic of provoking Palestinian attacks by assassinating high profile activists. . . . Israel�s strategic plan to dissolve the Arab states by breaking them down into smaller sectarian units was laid out openly in an 1982 essay by Oded Yinon, an Israeli strategist. Oded pointed to the �real civil war� taking place nowadays between the Sunni majority and the ruling Shi�ite Alawi minority in Syria. . . . It�s clear that the recent U.S. war against Iraq has advanced a key aim of the most grandiose Israeli dreams for regional hegemony. From the point of view of Israeli goals, the U.S. has begun to implement what Israel Shahak, the late Israeli author and government critic, called �the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime�for the Middle East. [The plan] is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states. (Emphasis in original.) Shahak also noted �the strong connection with the Neo-Conservative thought in the USA.� . . . The neoconservatives (or neocons), typically Republican zealots close to Israel�s Likud party, are getting a great deal of media attention nowadays because they have been installed in key positions in George W. Bush�s government and they seem for the most part to be the voice of the administration . . . The twin ascendancy of the right-wing regimes of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Ronald Reagan led to the brutal 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that claimed an estimated 17,000 to 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian lives, the great majority of whom were civilians. . . . Israel�s two-week bombing campaign against Lebanon in July 1981, a prelude to the 1982 war, is an extreme case of Israeli terrorism. The episode is also an instructive example of the divergence between U.S. and Israeli policy goals in Lebanon. The U.S. was interested in a stable Lebanon in order to pacify its Arab allies, and to beat back the Soviet challenge in the region. In direct opposition to American policy objectives, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon were determined to destabilize Lebanon and create a puppet, Christian-led government. . . . Prime Minister Sharon has used his political skills to unite the Israeli public behind dramatic restrictions on the ability of the Palestinians to pursue civil life. Despite the current incarnation of the �peace process,� inaptly named the �road map,� never have the Palestinians been so threatened by Israeli policies. Through a combination of intimidation and effective use of the Israeli lobby in the U.S. and the complete subservience of Congress, Ariel Sharon, for example, has not been called to account for the March 2003 bulldozer murder of Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen, who was one of three international peace activists killed or seriously wounded by the Israeli army within a month�s time. . . . Palestinians cannot get to schools, businesses, or pursue normal economic life. They must face checkpoints without end, �targeted assassinations,� tanks, sharpshooters, F-16s and Apache helicopters in their population centers. A �security wall� currently being erected in the West Bank is gobbling up thousands of acres of Palestinian olive groves, farms, factories, and is affecting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a hundred villages or communities located in between the wall and Israel�s 1967 borders or nearby. 45 All this while the world focuses on the �Road Map� which many observers view as little more than a distraction and a public relations ploy. . . . Prospects for peace seem slim and growing slimmer. One indicator of the difficulties that lie ahead is National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice�s comment in Tel Aviv in mid-May 2003. Ms. Rice said that the �security of Israel is the key to the security of the world.� As one close observer of right wing influence on U.S. policy put it, this goes far beyond even the �neocon claim that the security interests of the U.S. and Israel are identical.�

posted by LoZo 9:29 AM