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Mid East Realities
MID-EAST REALITIES - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 20 October 2003: They control the huge ghetto through checkpoints, electrified fences, and guard-post watch-towers with search lights. All entry and exit is in their hands. Their military occupation commanders wield power based on military law, brutal repression, and ruthless killing. They are using the most advanced high-tech weapons of war -- including battle tanks and helicopter gunships -- against refugee camps. Gaza ghetto has become in fact the world's largest concentration camp. And a historic extended pogrom is now underway; this one perpetrated by the survivors of the Holocaust now enshrined with power in the guise of the Jewish State of Israel. And Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamed is right to raise one of the central usually unspoken issues - for the Jews of the world are now, with few but noteable exceptions, complicitous in excusing, perpetrating, and rationalizing this brutal ongoing pogrom; as is the world's only superpower, the United States where they wield unrivaled influence.

posted by LoZo 4:09 PM

 

One State or Two? A False Dilemma
(Do you favor a one-state solution or a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict? Personally, I favor both. . . . The one-state solution calls for a single state made up of Israel plus the occupied territories. Since the state is conceived as democratic, it would very likely involve a Palestinian majority. Sometimes there is talk of giving Jews in this state certain protections; always there is talk of acknowledging a Palestinian right of return. The proposal is said to be the only just solution, and the only one which can eventually produce a happy, prosperous, beautiful Palestine. . . . The two-state solution has several variants, some of them justly infamous. Mine is very simple: Israel gets out of every square inch of the occupied territories, and the Palestinians acquire complete, unqualified sovereignty over every square inch of the West Bank and Gaza. In return, the Israelis get the one thing they need--defensible borders. Anything else can be negotiated later. . . . No doubt Israel would also want Palestinian guarantees to end terrorism, but why? Guarantees are mere words. If Israel wants real security, it must end the oppression of the Palestinians and permit the formation of a genuinely independent Palestinian state--a state its rulers and virtually its entire population would want to preserve. Since cross-border attacks would certainly provoke an Israeli invasion, a truly sovereign Palestine and its supporters would not allow such attacks. Palestinians would not want their newly independent country to be destroyed. . . . The solutions debate is further confused by a failure to distinguish two considerations: (i) what is morally right given that everyone, including Israel, behaves morally; (ii) what is morally right given how the Israelis can reasonably be predicted to behave. The first consideration gives priority to a single-state solution; the second to a two-state solution. I agree that the single-state solution is ideally preferable, but I get annoyed when it is used to play a game of moralizing one-upmanship whose object is to see who can give the greatest lip-service to Palestinian rights. . . . The Zionists did not come simply as refugees or immigrants or settlers. They didn't simply seek, as immigrants often do, some land. They wanted more than a 'homeland' in the sense that, say, Bavaria is the homeland of the Bavarians. They intended to create a Jewish state, a state in which Jews retained sovereignty. This implies that Jews alone have the final say on everything, including who lives and dies, within a certain geographical area. That the Zionist state was conceived to be 'democratic' ignores its essential requirement--a perpetual Jewish majority to preserve, in the facts on the ground if not in law, Jewish political supremacy throughout its territory. This means that the other inhabitants of the area must either submit or leave. Since no one contends that the Palestinians had done any harm to the Jews before the Zionist influx, it can only be regarded as an exercise in usurpation. . . . So the Palestinians may well have a right to a single state, perhaps even to a state in which they are de facto sovereign. But there's a catch. Lots of people have lots of rights to lots of things. But these rights do not translate easily into strategies. They must be balanced against other rights as well as other moral and practical considerations. . . . When the survival of the Palestinians is given priority over their territorial claims, certain facts loom large in the one-state-two-states controversy. A one-state solution does not just mean 'abandoning apartheid', as some claim. It means abandoning the core of Zionism, abolishing the sovereignty of Jews over Israel. Israel, the country, might still exist, but the Zionist project would vanish off the face of the earth. Given that Israeli governments won't agree even to stop settlement activity--an attempt to extend the boundaries of Jewish sovereignty--how and when, exactly, are they expected to abandon that sovereignty altogether? How and when, exactly, is someone going to force them to do so? . . . The idea of a single, secular, inclusive state may be attractive, but so is the idea of a world in which everyone is good, all the time. The one-state ideal is politically and even morally irrelevant because it isn't feasible at this point. . . . Does this mean the single-state solution should be dismissed out of hand? No; it simply means that solution is a very long-term project, depending on basic shifts in the Middle East balance of power as well as, one hopes, an eventual softening of Israeli attitudes. Meanwhile, the Palestinians face destruction. . . . But in fact there is no long-term conflict between the survival of the Palestinians and the project of a single state: both require, without a doubt, a prior two-state solution. . . . If the Palestinians are to live, if they are to have a platform from which to demand a single state, if they are to acquire the power to make their demands heard, it can only be from the relative sanctuary of their own country. They haven't the slightest chance of obtaining this sanctuary except in the West Bank and Gaza. So the one-state solution absolutely requires a two-state solution. If ever there was a false dilemma, it is any claim that the two alternatives are mutually exclusive.

posted by LoZo 8:42 PM

 

Robert Fisk: Israel's attack is a lethal step towards war in Middle East

(Robert Fisk, The Independent, 06 October 2003)
Israel received the Green Light. It came from what is called the Syria Accountability Act, moving through the United States Congress with the help of Israel's supporters, that will impose sanctions on Damascus for its supposed enthusiasm for "terrorism" and occupation of Lebanon.

Speaker after speaker in the past week has been warning that Syria is the new - or old, or non-existent - threat previously represented by Iraq: that it has weapons of mass destruction, that it has biological warheads, that it received Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction just before we began our illegal invasion of Iraq in March.

The Israeli lie about "thousands" of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has been uncloaked yet again. In reality, there hasn't been an Iranian militant in Lebanon for 20 years. But who cares? The dictatorial Syrian regime - and dictatorial it most decidedly is - has to be struck after a Jenin woman lawyer, who has probably never visited Damascus in her life, blows herself and 19 innocent Israelis up in Haifa.

And why not? If America can strike Afghanistan for the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and if America can invade Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September, why shouldn't Israel strike Syria?

Yes, Syria does support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But in Iraq is based the Mujahideen Khalq, which bombs Iran, and the Americans have not bombed them. In Jerusalem exists a government that openly threatens the life of Yasser Arafat but no one suggests action should be taken against the Israeli administration.

In Jerusalem lives a prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who was adjudicated to be "personally responsible" by Israel's own Kahane commission of enquiry for the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. But he is not going on trial for war crimes.

Of course, Syria is going to take the air strikes on the 'training base" of Islamic Jihad to the United Nations. Much good will it do Damascus. When the United States cannot bring itself to support a resolution condemning Israel's threat to murder Arafat, when it will not stop the Israelis building 600 more houses - for Jews and Jews only - on Palestinian land, air raids on Syria simply don't matter.

Perhaps Lebanon will benefit. Perhaps Lebanon can now be spared Israel's retaliation for Palestinian violence - unless, of course, Israel decides to strike a Palestinian "training base" in Lebanon.

No one asks what these "training bases" are. Do Palestinian suicide bombers really need to practice suicide bombing? Does turning a switch need that much training? Surely the death of a brother or a cousin by the Israeli army is all the practice that is needed.

But no. Yesterday, we took another little lethal step along the road to Middle East war, establishing facts on the ground, proving that it's permissible to bomb the territory of Syria in the "war against terror", which President Bush has himself declared now includes Gaza.

And the precedents are there if we need them. Back in 1983, when President Reagan thought he was fighting a "war on terror" in the Middle East, he ordered his air force to bomb the Syrian army in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, losing a pilot and allowing the Syrians to capture his co-pilot, who was only returned after a prolonged and politically embarrassing negotiation by Jesse Jackson. In an era when America is ready to threaten the invasion of Syria and Iran - part of that infamous "axis of evil" - this may seem small beer. But Syria itself has seen what has happened to America's army in Iraq, and is emboldened by its humiliation to avenge the attacks of Israel or America, whatever the cost.

If America cannot control Iraq, why should Syria fear Israel?

posted by LoZo 8:17 PM

 

World-renowned
scholar Edward Said dies

     Edward
Said, the world-renowned scholar, writer and critic has died aged
67 . . . His writings have been translated into 26 languages and
his most influential book, Orientalism (1978), was credited with
forcing Westerners to re-examine their perceptions of the Islamic
world. . . . His works cover a plethora of other subjects, from
English literature, his academic speciality, to music and culture.
His later books include "Musical Elaborations" in 1991,
and "Cultural Imperialism" in 1993. . . . Many of his
books - including The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam
(1981), After the Last Sky (1986) and Blaming the Victims (1988)
- were influenced directly by his involvement with Palestine. He
was a prominent member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for
14 years before stepping down 1991. . . . In a 1995 lecture, he
said Arafat and the Palestinian Authority "have become willing
collaborators with the (Israeli) military occupation, a sort of
Vichy government for Palestinians." . . . Salman Rushdie
once said of Said that he "reads the world as closely as he
reads books". . . . The Irish critic Seamus Deane described
him as: "That rare figure: a truly public intellectual who
has a powerful influence within the academy and also a potent public
presence. He's a very brilliant reader, of both texts and political
situations." . . . Hamid Dabashi, chairman of Columbia's
Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, said: "Over
the past three decades he was the most eloquent spokesman for the
plight of the Palestinians."

posted by LoZo 4:48 PM