ISRAEL - FACTS AND PROPAGANDA

From: Mazin Qumsiyeh <qumsi001@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 19:08:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject:  Israel targets civilians: evidence

Israeli forces target civilians for political purposes (the classic definition of terrorism). Here are several lines of proof from independent sources.

Physicians for Human Rights USA investigated the high number of Palestinian deaths and injuries in the first months of the Intifada, concluded that: "the pattern of injuries seen in many victims did not reflect IDF [Israel Defense Forces] use of firearms in life-threatening situations but rather indicated targeting solely for the purpose of wounding or killing." http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/update_commentary.html

In an interview with Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass, an Israeli sniper described the commands he receives from his superiors: "Twelve and up, you're allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us," he said. "So," responded the reporter "according to the IDF, [the appropriate minimum age group at which to shoot] is 12?" the soldier replied, "According to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don't know if this is what the IDF says to the media."

Yediot Aharonot (Hebrew Edition, 11/17/00) quoted Tal Etlinger, a "border guard" trained to quell demonstrations as stating that riots at Um Al Fahm (where scores of unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel were shot and many killed by snipers) were much less violent than Jewish riots (such as in Tiberias) which were "much worse..but we handle Jewish riots differently..[t]o a demonstration like this we know in advance to come without weapons.. These are the orders from above, and we use only gas."

Human Rights Watch issued a report May 3, 2002 on Israeli atrocities in Jenin stating in part: "[Palestinian] civilians [in Jenin] were killed willfully or unlawfully [by the Israeli military]. . . . [which] used Palestinian civilians as ‘human shields’ and used indiscriminate and excessive force. . . . The abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases appear to be war crimes. . ." (http://hrw.org/press/2002/05/jenin0503.htm)

Amnesty International issued a report 23 October 2001 stating that it is "gravely concerned at recent reports of random shelling and shootings by the Israeli Defense Force in Palestinian residential areas, among them Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarm, Bethlehem and Beit Jala, which has left at least 25 Palestinians killed, among them several children, and scores of others injured, in retaliation for the killing of the Israeli Minister of Tourism, Rehavam Zeevi on 17 October."

Jenin Death Video Implicates army: BBC obtains video showing shelling children running away: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_2102000/2102081.stm (copy and add all link intact if broken)

In an article in the Washington Post, Keith Richburg reported (November 30, 2000; Page A01): "Iyad was shot because he ran too fast. Nshat was shot because he missed his ride. Ronny was shot for throwing a stone. And Abdel Kareem was shot where his two friends died. Iyad, Nshat, Ronny and Abdel Kareem had never met before. But these four young Palestinians now see one another daily, as patients at the Abu Raya Rehabilitation Center."

B'Tselem, the Israeli Human Rights group, reported in October 2001 that "the IDF continues to employ a policy of 'an easy trigger-finger' and demonstrates a disregard for human life." In one Press Release (12 March 2002) B'Tselem stated: "In every city and refugee camp that they have entered, IDF soldiers have repeated the same pattern: indiscriminate firing and the killing of innocent civilians, intentional harm to water, electricity and telephone infrastructure, taking over civilian houses, extensive damage to civilian property, shooting at ambulances and prevention of medical care to the injured." (http://www.btselem.org/ )

Hamas history tied to Israel
By
Richard Sale
UPI Terrorism Correspondent
United Press International
June 18, 2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=18062002-051845-8272r

In the wake of a suicide bomb attack Tuesday on a crowded Jerusalem city bus that killed 19 people and wounded at least 70 more, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, took credit for the blast.

Israeli officials called it the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately vowed to fight "Palestinian terror" and summoned his cabinet to decide on a military response to the organization that Sharon had once described as "the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face."

Active in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism.

But Sharon left something out.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were "weak and dormant" until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da'wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

"Social influence grew into political influence," first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran.

What took Israeli leaders by surprise was the way the Islamic movements began to surge after the Iranian revolution, after armed resistance to Israel sprang up in southern Lebanon vis--vis the Hezbollah, backed by Iran, these sources said.

"Nothing provides the energy for imitation as much as success," commented one administration expert.

A further factor of Hamas' growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the '80s, leaving the Islamic organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories "as the court of last resort," he said.

When the intifada began, Israeli leadership was surprised when Islamic groups began to surge in membership and strength. Hamas immediately grew in numbers and violence. The group had always embraced the doctrine of armed struggle, but the doctrine had not been practiced and Islamic groups had not been subjected to suppression the way groups like Fatah had been, according to U.S. government officials.

But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain in strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation.

Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: "To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."

In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who "were dangerous hard-liners," the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

"Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with," he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

"The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy," said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, "the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism."

"The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer."

"They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it," he said.

Aid to Hamas may have looked clever, "but it was hardly designed to help smooth the waters," he said. "An operation like that gives weight to President George Bush's remark about there being a crisis in education."

Cordesman said that a similar attempt by Egyptian intelligence to fund Egypt's fundamentalists had also come to grief because of "misreading of the complexities."

An Israeli defense official was asked if Israel had given aid to Hamas said, "I am not able to answer that question. I was in Lebanon commanding a unit at the time, besides it is not my field of interest."

Asked to confirm a report by U.S. officials that Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the military governor of Gaza, had told U.S. officials he had helped fund "Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists," the official said he could confirm only that he believed Segev had served back in 1986.

The Israeli Embassy press office referred UPI to its Web site when asked to comment.

Ethnic Cleansing And The Establishment Of Israel
by
John Pilger
The New Statesman
June 19, 2002

Behind the turbulent news from Israel, a struggle for historical truth has passed almost unnoticed outside academic circles; yet its wider significance is epic. In May 1948, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by the advancing Jewish militia in the coastal village of Tantura, south of Haifa. According to the recorded testimony of 40 witnesses, both Arab and Jewish, half the civilians were shot in a "rampage". The rest were marched to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children. They were taken to a wall near the mosque where they were shot in the back of the head.

The "cleansing" of Tantura (a term used at the time) was a well-kept secret. When they were interviewed four years ago, several Palestinian witnesses said they feared for their lives if they spoke out. One survivor, who as a child witnessed the murder of his entire family in Tantura, said to the interviewer: "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble . . ."

Trouble indeed. The researcher, a student called Teddy Katz, has had his masters degree annulled by Haifa University, even though he was awarded a top grade by the Middle Eastern department. When his research was revealed in the Israeli press, Jewish veterans of the attack on Tantura sued him for libel, and several Jewish witnesses recanted.
Katz had breached the taboo of the ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel and which the Palestinians mourn as Nakba - the catastrophe.

Without waiting for the case to come to court, the university struck Katz's name from its honour roll. Whispered to be a traitor, and under pressure from his family and friends, Katz, a devout Zionist who lived on a kibbutz, apologised. Twelve hours later, he retracted his apology.

Professor Ilan Pappe is one of the few to have read all the transcripts of more than 60 hours of Katz's taping of eyewitness evidence. "They include," he wrote, "horrific descriptions of executions, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture." He describes Katz's thesis "as a solid and convincing piece of work whose essential validity is in no way marred by its shortcomings". The shortcomings, he says, come down to four minor mistakes. But the importance of the Katz research is its illumination of Israel's history in terms of "the expulsion, direct and indirect, of some 750,000 Palestinians, the systematic destruction of more than 400 villages and scores of urban neighbourhoods, as well as the perpetration of some 40 massacres of unarmed Palestinians."

Although other prominent scholars supported Katz, a silence and hostility familiar to those who break academic and political ranks in Israel descended on the case. Since the election of Ariel Sharon last year, this hostility is such that not even national heroes are forgiven. Last month, Yaffa Yarkoni, "Israel's Vera Lynn", whose emotional, wistful songs have celebrated Zionist triumphalism from 1948 to the present day, lost her huge popularity overnight when she remarked that Israeli soldiers ought not to be writing numbers on the arms of Palestinians. "Isn't that what the Germans did?" she asked. One newspaper headline called her an "enemy of the people"; an editor said she "has joined the new anti-Semites in Europe".

In challenging the Zionist version of Israel's past, Ilan Pappe is one of Israel's "new historians", a distinguished and courageous critic. He has likened the Israeli state to apartheid South Africa, with its Palestinian "bantustans" and plethora of humiliating controls which now restrict the movement of people within their own communities. He says that Sharon's goal is to begin the mass expulsion of Palestinians across the Jordan; only a pretext is required. According to one poll, 44 per cent of Israelis support this latest "cleansing", known as "transfer", another euphemism from the past. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, wrote, "We have accomplished our settlement by transfer of the [Palestinian] population."

Not quite. The notion of a "final transfer" is supported by a number of cabinet members in the ruling Likud government, by leading Labour Party members and professors and media commentators. "Very few now dare to condemn it," says Pappe. "A circle has been closed. When Israel took over almost 80 per cent of Palestine in 1948, it did so through settlement and ethnic cleansing. The country has a prime minister who enjoys wide public support and who wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 per cent."

Now it might be Professor Pappe's turn to be expelled from Haifa University. In an open letter circulated two weeks ago, he writes that the dean of the humanities department has demanded his expulsion for criticising the university over the Katz case. This runs deeper; Pappe has been a consistent opponent of Israel's illegal military occupation of Palestine. He describes the university "court" that threatens to punish him as a "McCarthyite charade". He has called upon "universities worldwide to debate a boycott of Israeli institutions, given their contempt for basic principles of academic freedom and dispassionate research". He says that only international shaming, free of the intimidation that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, will break the silence about "horrific deeds in 1948, and so prevent their repetition".

Others in Israel, as courageous as Ilan Pappe, are also under pressure, both crude and insidious. In Ha'eretz, Israel's equivalent of the Guardian, two outstanding journalists, Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, have consistently reported the unpopular truth about Israel's occupation of the remaining 22 per cent of the Palestine it conquered in 1967. They live daily with threats and hate mail. Upholding the bravest traditions of Jewish humanity, they need international solidarity.

Israel's war of words gets dirty
By
Phil Reeves in Jerusalem
14 April 2002
THE INDEPENDENT
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=284812

Joel is a reserve captain in the Israeli army. He has a warm handshake and a line in rapid-fire patter that betrays his New York upbringing. He introduces himself as a "military source", but it swiftly emerges that he is a headline machine, churning out slurs.

Joel is in the front line of a multi-million dollar propaganda drive by the Israeli government to try to prevent an international backlash over its military invasion into Palestinian-run parts of the occupied West Bank. They face their toughest challenge yet: limiting the damage to Israel over the atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians.

In a newly opened Israeli government media centre in Jerusalem, Joel was looking for journalists to make his pitch.

We cut straight to the question of Jenin. "Believe me, we would love to let you guys into Jenin, but unlike the Palestinian terrorists, we respect the dignity of the dead," he said. "They want to gather up the bodies and show them off to the international media as evidence of a massacre ­ that is typical of the sort of PR tricks they play." The press was also not being allowed into Jenin because of the "abundance of terrorists" looking for "Western targets". The Israeli army has frequently shot at journalists, injuring more than 40 and killing one. Suddenly, it was concerned for our safety.

A journalist himself, Joel seems to know all about "PR tricks". Asked why the Israeli army is refusing to allow ambulances from the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter the camp and evacuate the wounded, he urged The Independent on Sunday to investigate. "You are on to a good story there. Go to the Red Cross and find out if they are using drivers from Sweden, or Palestinians."

The propaganda war between the Israelis and Palestinians has always been a dirty business, but now it has sunk to new depths. Israel's media centre issued a statement boasting of "countless examples" of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. This will be staggering news to the Red Cross and Red Crescent, who have been barred from entry, shot at and repeatedly humiliated, all in violation of the Geneva Convention.

As ever, Israel has more money, resources and skills to apply to its spin than the Palestinians. It has recruited the ex-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to appear on foreign television to explain why Israel believes blasting Palestinian towns is an effective tool against terrorism.

FAIR-L: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism
MEDIA ADVISORY: Euphemisms for Israeli Settlements Confuse Coverage
June 26, 2002

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported last month (5/31/02) that at the behest of a Likud party minister, the Israel Broadcasting Authority has banned its editorial departments from using the terms "settlers" or "settlements" on radio and TV. According to Ha'aretz, "it is not clear if the editors will obey the order," which was seen as an attempt by the new IBA director to curry favor with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. What does seem clear is that settlements-- housing built on land illegally seized by Israel after the 1967 war-- are such a contentious issue within Israel that the Israeli government would like to stop reporters from even saying the word.

Nonetheless, the opinion pages of an Israeli paper like Ha'aretz often show a franker debate over Israel's aggressive settlement policy than one can generally find in mainstream U.S. media. Direct government interference doesn't seem to have been necessary to convince some major U.S. news outlets to avoid honest investigation of settlements, and sometimes even to avoid the word itself.

The "neighborhood" of Gilo

This may be partly due to campaigns by pressure groups within the U.S. Take the case of Gilo, an Israeli settlement that some pro-settler groups have used as a focal point for their campaigns to eliminate the term "settlements" in favor of "neighborhoods." In September 2001, CNN changed its policy on how to characterize Gilo: "We refer to Gilo as 'a Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967.' We don't refer to it as a settlement," said the order from CNN headquarters. CNN denies that its decision was a concession to outside pressure, but according to veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk (London Independent, 9/3/01), sources within the network said that the switch followed "months of internal debate in CNN, which has been constantly criticized by CNN Watch, honestreporting.com and other pro-Israeli pressure groups."

CNN is far from the only outlet that has trouble identifying Gilo. Media critic Ali Abunimah pointed out in a June 20 letter to NPR that the network's coverage of the recent suicide bombings which killed 26 Israelis incorrectly asserted that the attacks took place in "Jerusalem." In fact, they occurred in the settlements of Gilo and French Hill, both of which are outside of Jerusalem's traditional city limits, on land illegally annexed by Israel. Abunimah explained that "while absolutely nothing can justify such attacks... geographical accuracy in reporting remains supremely important," especially given the emotional intensity of the subject.

A close reading of some of the New York Times' recent coverage of settlements illustrates the politics that may be at work in such cases. In a May 29 article about Palestinian attacks on Israelis, Times correspondent John Kifner reported the Israeli army's efforts to erect fortified barriers between Bethlehem and Gilo, which Kifner described as "a nearby East Jerusalem neighborhood, where a sprawling Jewish area has been built on land seized after the war of 1967." The sentence would have been a lot easier to parse if Kifner had called Gilo what it is: an Israeli settlement.

As Kifner indicated, Gilo is built on land seized by Israel after the 1967 war. What the Times left unsaid, however, is that this seizure is illegal under international law. Gilo, like other Israeli settlements on "seized" land, was built in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 446, which states that Israeli settlements built on land occupied since 1967 "have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace." Resolution 446 also calls on Israel to observe the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Since 446 was passed in 1979, the U.N. has issued other resolutions "deploring" Israel's failure to comply with it.

Again, Gilo's status as an illegal settlement does not justify the Palestinian killings of civilians there, but it is central to understanding why Gilo is such a hot spot. For news outlets to report on Gilo simply as a Jerusalem neighborhood under attack, without explaining its legal status, is a gross distortion-- especially since the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which has claimed so many thousands of lives, is at bottom about who should control the land. Settlements have been a central point of contention throughout.

According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, the settler population in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) increased almost 100 percent between 1993 and 2000, and there are now 380,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements (including East Jerusalem). In a May 13 report, "Land Grab," B'Tselem argues that this illegal growth is a result of Israel's policy of de facto annexing Palestinian land through a variety of mechanisms, including economic incentives for settlers so large that in the year 2000, "settlement regional councils received grants averaging 165 percent more than their counterparts in Israel." B'Tselem found that while "the built-up areas of the settlements" constitute only 1.7 percent of the West Bank, the settlements' broad municipal boundaries and their regional councils mean that in fact, settlements control a full 41.9 percent of West Bank land.

Struggles and shrieks

The New York Times certainly isn't the only or worst offender in terms of inaccurate coverage of settlements, but some of its recent articles are instructive in how poor attention to detail on settlements can muddy the waters in an outlet's coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a whole. Kifner's May 30 Times article about 6 Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians does consistently use the term "settlement" where appropriate. But the article's lead seems crafted to give the impression that the legality of settlements is simply a matter of perpective. Kifner described one of the people killed as "a 17-year-old yeshiva student in what he believed to be the land of Israel who was killed by a Palestinian gunman who believed the land was his." The question of legality is not clarified elsewhere. The sympathy shown throughout the article for the Israeli victims and their loved ones is perfectly appropriate. What's less appropriate, however, is Kifner's failure to contextualize the complicated and deadly issue of settlements in a framework of international law.

Kifner repeated this "he says, she says" approach in a June 4 article. He described the construction of an Israeli multi-million dollar luxury development on Palestinian land as something that would be "a neighborhood to Jews, a settlement to Arabs." Explaining the enormous growth in the settler population since the 1993 Oslo accords, Kifner noted that settlements have "generated Palestinian anger and frustration." Again, this gives the impression that there's no arbiter in the controversy, only the emotional claims of competing ethnic groups.

The sources cited in the Times article give additional insight into how U.S. cultural affinities may be influencing the slant of American reporting on settlements. Canvassing local perspectives on the luxury development, Kifner spoke with both Jews and Palestinians. Or rather, he spoke with those that he shared a language with.

Jerusalem's mayor is quoted explaining that the new construction is a sign of the positive influence of "diligent private entrepreneurs that know how to make economic considerations," and one of the developers "proudly" extolled the amenities of the "neighborhood" being built. In a striking contrast, the Arabs quoted by Kifner are presented as simply shrieking garbled objections-- because they didn't speak English:

"The Arabs down the slope were less sanguine. In a grocery store, the anger was palpable. 'This land, my father, my cousin,' said the owner, Mohammed Abedat, struggling in limited English. 'Turkey here, Britannia here, Israel no.'

"An old woman, dressed in a traditional embroidered garment, shrieked at a passing bulldozer."

It seems that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, a lot can get lost in translation.

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On June 1, 2002 I sent in three obituary noitces to the San Francisco Chronicle:

1) Palestinians Kamla Abu-Sa'id, 42, and her daughter, Amna Abu-Sa'id, 13, of the El Bureij refugee camps, were killed May 26, 2002 by Israeli troops, while working on a farm in the Gaza Strip.

2) Palestinian Ahmed Abu Seer, 7, was killed in his home in the Askar refugee camp, Nablus, May 18, 2002, by Israeli soldiers who riddled his home with bullets. Ahmed died of fatal shrapnel wounds to his heart and lung. Ahmed was a second-grader at Al-Sidaak elementary school in Nablus.

3) Palestinian Fatima Ibrahim Zakarna, 30, and her two children, Bassem, 4, and Suhair, 3, were killed May 6, 2002 by Israeli soldiers while picking grape leaves in a field in the Kabatiya village. They leave behind Mohammed Yussef Zukarneh, husband and father.

I was called immediately by Wilma, who told me that the SF Chronicle could not place these obituaries without a death certificate. Instead she said I could place them in memoriam "in memory of" and that no death certificate would be needed.

On June 2, 2002 I sent three seperate "in memoriams": In loving memory of Kamla Abu-Sa'id, 42, and her daughter, Amna Abu-Sa'id, 13, both Palestinians from the El Bureij refugee camps. Kamla and her daughter were killed May 26, 2002 by Israeli troops, while working on a farm in the Gaza Strip. --SFAACP, San Francisco, Arab-American Christians for Peace

In loving memory of Ahmed Abu Seer, 7, a Palestinian child, he was killed in his home in the Askar refugee camp, Nablus, May 18, 2002, by Israeli soldiers who riddled his home with bullets. Ahmed died of fatal shrapnel wounds to his heart and lung. Ahmed was a second-grader at Al-Sidaak elementary school in Nablus, he will be missed by all who knew him. --SFAACP, San Francisco, Arab-American Christians for Peace In loving memory of Fatima Ibrahim Zakarna, 30, and her two children, Bassem, 4, and Suhair, 3 all Palestinian. Mother and children were killed May 6, 2002 by Israeli soldiers while picking grape leaves in a field in the Kabatiya village. They leave behind Mohammed Yussef Zukarneh, husband and father and Yasmine, daughter and sister age 6. --SFAACP, San Francisco, Arab-American Christians for Peace

I was called, again, immediately by Wilma who told me that the SF Chronicle would not be able to place them in memoriams either. Wilma stated that:

1) SF Chronicle needed to make sure that no subscribers would be offended by these. Apparently some San Francisco Chronicle readers might be offended to read that innocent civilians were killed.

2) Wilma told me that she needed to make sure that the "in memoriams" were not "politically incorrect." What she means is that it might be "politically incorrect" by the Israeli killing machine.

3) Wilma told me that there were no guidelines dictating what an "in memoriam" should look like. That the fee was $6.44 per line and that they could be any length. Yet, she told me that the in memoriams I sent "didn't seem right."

4) Wilma asked for "proof" of the dead for in memoriams, even though she told me on the phone on June 1st that no death certificates were needed for in memoriams.

5) Wilma told me that her supervisor would call me back on Monday June 3rd, and no one has called me. I have left various numbers. They are probably scrambling around trying to formulate some policy on how to legally exclude us for taking out obits and in memoriams for Palestinians massacred by Israel.

They asked for proof of death, I submitted the following links to them:
Proof of death for Ahmed Abu Seer, age 7:
Proof of death for Kamla Abu-Sa'id, 42, and her daughter, Amna Abu-Sa'id, 13:
Yahoo! News - Israeli Fire Kills 2 Farm Workers
Proof of death for Fatima Ibrahim Zakarna, 30, and her two children,
Bassem, 4, and Suhair, 3:
Israel News : Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Israel says tank crew fired shots in error

What a shame that Arab-Americans in San Francisco cannot even properly grieve for their dead, dead which include 7 year old boys becuase it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some of their readers, this is discrimination in its ugliest manifestations.

Please write and call the Chronicle and tell them that you are appalled by their blatant discrimination which allows preposterous Jewish organizations operating under the guise of being "media organizations--CAMERA) to take out advertisements that are riddled with lies, meanwhile preventing others from taking out obituary notices and in memoriams which state no lies in them.

Thanks for your help,
Seham Fare
SF-AACP

CNN chief accuses Israel of terror

Oliver Burkeman in New York and Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
Tuesday June 18, 2002
The Guardian

Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN, accuses Israel today of engaging in "terrorism" against the Palestinians, in comments that threaten to lead to a further decline in the news network's already poor relations with the Jewish state.
"Aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other?" says Turner, who is vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner, which owns CNN, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

"The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis ... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism."

His remarks were last night condemned by Ariel Sharon's government, which called them "stupid". Andrea Levin, director of the American pro-Israeli media watchdog Camera, said the comments were a "reprehensible" attempt to "blur the line between perpetrator and victim".

In his first British interview since the September 11 attacks, Mr Turner - who broke philanthropic records in 1997 when he donated $1bn to the UN - argues that poverty and desperation are the root cause of Palestinian suicide bombings.

But Daniel Seaman, a spokesman for the Israeli government, said: "My only advice to Ted Turner is if people assume you are stupid, it is just best to keep your mouth shut rather than open your mouth and confirm everyone in that view."  Mr Turner also admits that he was wrong to call the September 11 hijackers "brave" in a speech in Rhode Island that sparked outrage. "I made an unfortunate choice of words," he says, adding that his ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team meant the word was never far from his mind. "Look, I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word ... I mean, I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it."

Mr Turner is moved to tears at one point in the interview by the "depressing" combination of conflicts like that in the Middle East and the state of the environment, which he says demands massive global attention - "or, you know ... it's goodbye".
A senior minister in Yasser Arafat's cabinet told the Guardian he welcomed Mr Turner's comments. Many Palestinians complain just as bitterly of a pro-Israeli bias in CNN's coverage - mocking it as the "Zionist News Network" - as Israel complains of a pro-Palestinian one.

"I feel it reflects a more consistent approach," said Ghassan Khatib, Mr Arafat's newly appointed labour minister and until recently director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, a Palestinian media monitoring unit.  "One of the problems in trying to reduce the violence has been the focus of so much international attention on Israeli rather than Palestinian civilian deaths, although four times as many Palestinians have been killed."

CNN has been a punchbag for both sides. A widespread perception of bias among some Israelis and US supporters of Israel has prompted several boycotts by pressure groups, urging viewers to switch to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel. But three months ago, in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Mr Arafat slammed down the phone after accusing her of anti-Palestinian bias. "You are covering with these questions the terrorist activities of the Israeli occupation and the Israeli crimes," he said. "Be quiet. Be fair. Thank you, bye-bye."

This will be the week when we see who runs the US-Israeli alliance
by
Robert Fisk

'Since US soldiers are blindfolding and gagging Muslim prisoners, why should Mr Sharon worry?'

The Independent, UK 08 April 2002

So what's the surprise? Suddenly Israel doesn't want to take our advice. Ex-general Ariel Sharon prefers to go on wrecking the Palestinian Authority, tearing up the Oslo agreement in the name of his Holy War on terror. Why should he worry about the scandalous number of civilian casualties among the Palestinians? After all, didn't America wreak its own revenge – killing thousands of innocent civilians in one of the poorest countries on Earth – after the crimes against humanity of 11 September? I must admit, though, to a grim satisfaction when I heard President George Bush's puzzled, uncomprehending response to Mr Sharon's refusal to withdraw his army from the West Bank.

The Israeli Prime Minister is, after all, the man who sent his army into Lebanon in 1982 to "root out Palestinian terror'' – note the identical rhetoric, as well as the same cast of characters – and whose "elite'' Israeli forces killed up to 17,500 people, almost all civilians. Mr Sharon is the man who then sent Israel's vicious Phalangist allies into the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, after which they massacred 1,700 Palestinian civilians. For this he was held "personally responsible'' by Israel's own commission of inquiry. Evidence now emerging in Beirut suggests that most of the slaughtered refugees were actually killed in the two weeks following the original massacre – after the survivors had been handed back to the Phalange by Israel's own soldiers.

So why should Mr Sharon stop now? If Mr Bush wants to rein in his reckless ally, why doesn't he ask Mr Sharon a few questions? Why doesn't he ask what has happened to the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who have disappeared into Israel's hands over the past two weeks? What happened, for example, to the five men, blindfolded and trussed up like chickens whom I discovered in the Jewish settlement of Psagot? What happened to the masses of young men I saw being taken in a bus with its windows wired over, a bus that made its way around Jerusalem and headed west on the Tel Aviv highway. How many of these young men are now being tortured either in interrogation centres or in the Russian Compound, the main torture compound in West Jerusalem?

But since Mr Bush's soldiers are experts in blindfolding and gagging Muslim prisoners – and putting them in front of drumhead military courts – why should Mr Sharon worry? For month after month, as Mr Sharon tore up the Oslo agreement, put the building of Jewish colonies on Arab land into overdrive and sent out his death squads to murder Palestinians, the Bush administration – fearful of offending the Israelis – allowed him to do what he wanted. In response to the wicked Palestinian suicide bombings, Bush expressed outrage. In response to Israel's aggression, he called for restraint – and then did nothing.

Again, what's the surprise? For months the American media has refused to tell its viewers and readers what is going on in the occupied territories. Its newspapers have indulged the insanity of writers who have been encouraging Mr Sharon into ever-more-savage acts. What are we supposed to make – for example, of a recent article in The New York Times by William Safire, referring – as usual – to Jewish civilians murdered by Palestinians but to Arab civilians "caught in the crossfire'', "crossfire" being the nearest many journalists will dare to go in saying that the culprits were Israeli.

Safire plays the old game of talking about the occupied territories as "disputed'' rather than occupied, a grotesque distortion of the truth upon which the State Department insisted in a policy paper sent out by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. But Safire adds a new threat to journalists who might wish to tell the truth: "These are disputed territories'' he writes, "to call them 'occupied' reveals a prejudice against Israel's right to what were supposed to be 'secure and defensible' borders.'' You can see the way the argument is going. If we have a 'prejudice' against Israel's rights, it's only a short step to call us anti-Semitic. But what is one to make of this nonsense? Am I supposed to pretend that the soldiers who blocked my car and pointed their guns at me in the West Bank last week were Swiss? Am I to believe that the rabble of soldiers shouting at Palestinian women desperate to leave Ramallah were Burmese?

Safire regularly takes phone calls from Mr Sharon (and then insists on telling us of Mr Sharon's latest fantasies), but my old chum Tom Friedman in his ever-more-Messianic column in The New York Times, has almost gone one better. "Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay,'' he announced last week. What, in God's name, is an American journalist doing when he urges Mr Sharon to go to war? Friedman was with me in the Sabra and Chatila camps. Has he forgotten what we saw? Last week, however, Friedman was also amiably advising the Palestinians to turn to non-violent resistance à la Gandhi.

For Friedman, "a non-violent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago...'' Needless to say, when Westerners, including two Britons, protested peacefully in Bethlehem – and were wounded by an Israeli soldier who shot at them, Friedman was silent.

The reason why the Palestinians turned to suicide bombing, according to Friedman, was not despair over the occupation – occupation which, of course, Safire tells us we mustn't refer to – but because "the Palestinians are so blinded by narcissistic rage'' that they have lost sight of the sacredness of human life.

And so it goes on. Having bestialised the Palestinians over so many years, why should we be surprised when a society eventually produces the very monsters we always claim to see in them? Even Mr Bush's speech last week in which he dispatched Mr Powell on his "urgent'' mission of peace – allowing him a lazy seven days to reach Israel, reserved its venom for the Palestinians. And yet, after all that, he fails to see why Mr Sharon might choose to keep his army in the field.

So this week will be a crucial one in the American-Israeli relationship, a real test of the Bush presidency. We shall find out who – the US or Israel – runs America's policy in the Middle East. It would be nice to think that it was the former. But I'm not sure.

From: "Yosef Grodzinsky" <yosef1@post.tau.ac.il>
Propaganda
18 May 2002 

SHAVU’OT IN JENIN: WHO YOU SHOULD BELIEVE
It is Shavu’ot now – the Jewish Holiday of Harvest – and our forces are back in Jenin city and refugee camp. Their harvest includes 30 arrested Palestinians from the General Security Service’s "wanted list", 2 killed adults "terrorists shot while trying to escape", and one 15 year old boy.

Israel is constantly attacking the territories, though with less media attention than in April. The script is the same: Armored troop carriers surround a town, while tanks and bulldozers, escorted by foot soldiers, turn up in its center, beginning their home-to-home searches. They are after those on the wanted list. They search, sometimes kill (as they did a 15 year old boy today), sometimes destroy (as they did several structures in Jenin today). News briefs regarding actions in West Bank cities, villages and towns have become a matter of daily routine now. Reporting on them is curt, clear, decisive. 2 killed (while trying to escape arrest, of course), 30 arrested; 1 child killed (the local commander duly apologized to the family), 10 arrested, an ammo "factory" found. No one, neither here nor in the U.S. questions the validity of these reports, of the wanted list, or the justification of the actions. Israel has the right to be secure, and this is the cost if its security needs. Being awarded with a GSS "wanted" status (mevukash in Hebrew or matlub in Arabic), is on a par with being handed down a verdict. A mevukash may be arrested or killed at will. Thousands have thus been arrested recently, hundreds killed. I have never seen a query by an American diplomat, or by anyone from the mainstream press, regarding the validity of the wanted list, or the fact that it completely annuls the concept of due process. "Anti-democratic" is a term reserved to Arafat, whose "intransigence" back in the news ("he is being vague again about the elections", announced Israel TV’s anchor merrily tonight); the Israelis, with their celebrated GSS, are the force of democracy and freedom, hence immune to any questioning.

Still, some cracks do surface on occasion, soon to be fixed: Today’s NYT runs a story of a new State Department report, that has found "no conclusive evidence" that Yasir Arafat or other senior Palestinian leaders planned or approved specific terrorist attacks on Israel in the six months that ended in December. This assertion, the reporter notes, is "sharply at odds with recent Israeli claims". Israel has indeed argued that documents captured in the recent operation prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Arafat gave direct orders, and made direct payments, to terrorist acts. Yet, as veteran commentator B. Michael, who has followed this affair closely, noted almost a month ago, such evidence is not at hand. I have translated his excellent article, Excavations in the Spokesman’s Site (Yedi’ot Aharonot, April 26) as it reached the same conclusions as State. Importantly, he made no use of secret documents, but merely monitored the IDF website.

"It seems that in order to justify the effort to shatter, above all, the PA and its institutions, the need arose to aggrandize its terrorist image, to make one big mishmash or PA-IslamicJihad-Hammas-Tanzim-Fatah, and create a picture of an octopus of terrorism of the PA, and Arafat as its centerpiece. The IDF spokesman was also recruited to this mission, and he harnessed his website for it…If you surf superficially over the full pages, it seems a well-constructed site, faithfully serving its master’s voice. Excavate deeper, and you will make a fascinating discovery: The whole site is constructed as if the IDF spokesman was convinced that no one would bother to read the documents themselves, and that all would only read its learned interpretation, presumably based on the "captured documents". Yet, if you surrender to your natural suspiciousness, and insist on reading the full documents, you will find a very different picture. Actually, not just different, but truly opposite. Here is a handful, a tiny bit, of the stunning gap between text and interpretation.

We begin with some negligible pieces of trivia:

1. How much explosive material did the IDF discover in the territories it conquered?

If you look at the bombastic declaration, you get the impression that huge quantities are at issue. If you listen to the Minister of Defense you think that hundreds of tons were found. More modest officers and journalists sufficed themselves with tens of tons. Yet if you bother to look at the document in which the spokesman provides updated details, you will discover that throughout the operation, 30 kilos were found. Thirty. Kilos. Like a bag and a half of potatoes. Is somebody talking nonsense here? The spokesman? The Minister? The media?

2. How many fighters of Fatah (and whatever other types) were there in Tul-Karem and Jenin?

If you demand no more than learned commentary, you will learn from the lines and from between them that at issue are cities swarming with multitudes of Fatah and Tanzim murderers. If you bother to read the [captured] intelligence reports of the PA you will be astonished to discover that the number of weapon holders of Fatah in Tul-Karem and the refugee camp is 15-20… If your read further, you will learn that half of them refuse to operate, the rest are not under anyone’s control, and even between those, there are parasites who only sport arms and make trouble. I didn’t say that, it’s the PA’s intelligence. Another document reveals that throughout the Jenin region, there were 63 Al-Aqsa people.

3. Were Tanzim terrorist acts funded by the PA?

According to the commentary, yes; by the documents, NO. The funding documents are nothing but a collection of complaints about the stingy PA that provides no resources to Tanzim fighters, expressions of jealousy of the wealthy Jihad and Hammas, stories about poor terrorists forced to purchase weapons by selling their’ wives’ jewelery (no need to burst into tears of pity at this point), and hidden threats that a continued monetary drought would make PA personnel defect to Jihad and Hammas. The documents show that they got nothing from the PA.

4. Did Arafat approve of the transfer of funds to suicide bombers?

If you only taste regurgitated texts, you are welcome to conclude that he did. If you read the documents, you will find no sign of it. All the documents in which Arafat approves sad payments to PLO and Tanzim personnel (in themselves as surprising as a discover that a head of a political party approves payments to its members) come from dates that are months earlier than Tanzim’s first suicide bombing. Not one document shows what is claimed, and it is clear that if one was available, the IDF spokesman would have publicized it widely.

5. Was there cooperation between the PA, Jihad and Hammas?

If you surf on the site’s waves, you are left with no doubt: cooperation was full; if you dive into the depth of the documents, you discover the absolute opposite. These are clearly reports of PA planted spies, who report to their superiors about the snitches who have infiltrated into their ranks, about collaborators with Hammas and Jihad who disturb the PA intelligence, and on Jihad people who pretend to be PA. If you read all the documents, you are left without the slightest doubt about the nature of the relationship between the PA, Jihad and Hammas: These are bitter rivals, sometimes even real enemies. The use of such documents to prove cooperation between the PA and Hammas is on a par with waving an IDF document that exposes a soldier who sold a weapon for a Hammasnik, and argue that the IDF cooperates with Hammas. The "Tul-Karem" document, revealed Akiva Eldar in Ha’aretz, contained a translation error which distorted the meaning of a sentence so that it fit the desired message better. Two days after this discovery, a "corrected" version of the document was loaded up. The error remained, yet the whole document underwent chopping, pruning, cutting and reshaping that wouldn’t embarrass a beginning clerk in a Soviet encyclopedia, and all that without even mentioning that the document is by no means complete, but rather, an edited, refurbished one. I could bring more examples and quotes, yet space is limited and the choices are hard. This is not to mean that Fatah and Tanzim are Zionist charities, just to wonder about the IDF spokesman who let himself take part in such a transparent web of propaganda, whose sole goal is to create a false picture that the grinding of the PA was a security necessity, not just a political whim. The past 18 months have not added much to the credibility of the IDF; this site adds little dignity to it."

I urge you to visit the IDF website (www.idf.il). You will be amazed, I believe (you can find there, for example, a report of today’s activities in Jenin, where the sole listed casualty is a lightly wounded IDF soldier; the 15 year old Palestinian boy who was killed is not mentioned, although his death was noted in all mass media).

The IDF is undergoing an important change. A new Chief of Staff – Brig. Gen. Moshe (Boogy) Ya’alon – will take over in July. The pending retirement of the current Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, has led him to exert pressure on Sharon to move into Gaza now. He wants to get credit for it, as a good beginning of a future political career. Judging by the new Hcief’s behavior, Ya’alon is no dove either. He is currently visiting Washington to get himself acquainted to the administration‘s higher echelon. Today’s New York Times cites him as a "senior military official" who clearly articulated that an invasion into Gaza is just a matter of time; that Colin Powel erred by letting Arafat off the hook, and that a visit by George Tenet to the Middle East is pointless. His aggressive tone not only indicates that the Israelis are not worried about American pressure; it leaves little room for optimism regarding the future.

Best,
Yosef Grodzinsky
Department of Psychology
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv 69978, ISRAEL
yosef1@post.tau.ac.il
http://freud.tau.ac.il/~yosef1

Letter to Bill Thompson, peace activist (undated)

Dear Bill,

Today's announcement from Israel that it will block any visits by UN teams to Jenin Refugee Camp comes as no surprise to any of us who have been in the region recently.

Having just returned yesterday from a two week visit to Palestine as part of a CPT emergency delegation, I am more convinced than ever that Sharon has no interest in reaching any peaceful solution to the problems in the area.

Everywhere we went we were stopped by soldiers, tanks and guns. We were told if we tried to take photographs our cameras would be smashed. Everywhere we saw wanton destruction and signs of complete disregard for lives and property of Palestinians living in their own territory. Settlers threw rocks at Palestinians and International Aid workers. In Bethlehem all our efforts to deliver food to people confined to the Church of the Nativity met with armed soldiers, one of whom said we were 'pathetic.' Bullets by the thousand lay in the streets, tear gas canisters were everywhere. Cars, buildings and religious statues destroyed by tanks.

In Nablus it was even more clear that there was deliberate intent to destroy property and take lives, to continue Sharon's master plan to eliminate as many Palestinians as possible and to remove all hope from survivors that they can ultimately survive the US and Israeli Occupation Force machines. What we found were bewildered civilians, asking why the world has abandoned them to Israeli aggression, why they are allowed no recourse against soldiers who attack them with Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter planes, with rockets and bombs; who mow down their houses with tanks, soldiers who steal their money, throw their rice on the ground; use them as human shields. We talked with some of the wounded at Rafidia Hospital, boys and old men, women andchildren, many of them close to death after being left lying in streets and demolished buildings for days while IDF shot at ambulances and aid workers who tried to offer medical treatment. At the hospital morgue we saw bodies of children as young as six. We saw ambulances and school buses flattened by tanks, mosques and churches demolished. We saw mass graves in Nablus and Ramallah. We saw Christian schools that had been attacked and damaged by soldiers smashing classrooms and school equipment.

In Hebron young children dressed each morning for school, then fearfully walked up to tanks and soldiers to ask if they would be allowed to continue. Settlement children waited to throw rocks at these brave little students who were never allowed to retaliate. Today I read that several schools in Hebron have been occupied by soldiers. My heart breaks as I recall the kindness we received from these gentle people, the smiles and the thanks that greeted us, the words of hope they expressed that we might let the world know of their suffering and despair.

Sadly,
Mary Hughes-Thompson
Los Angeles, California

Ambassadors of ill will
By Gideon Levy

Ha'aretz / April 28, 2002
http://news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=156636&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

No one in Israel has ever heard of Anna Danielsson, Yvonne Fredriksson, Lars Jerdoen or Margareta Sjoedberg. But last week, in their country of Sweden, there was hardly a television program that did not tell the story of the four -- two of whom are physicians -- and how they were rudely locked up and then deported in disgrace from Israel without even being permitted to contact the Swedish consulate.

The four, who belong to the Palestinian Solidarity Association in Sweden, came to Israel with the intention of proffering medical aid. No harm of any kind would have befallen Israel if the authorities had allowed them to do just that. A Japanese physician, Toshi Insushima, who arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport with a similar purpose, documented his expulsion in a letter he sent to his colleagues in the Physicians for Human Rights group: "I am sorry I did not succeed in entering Israel; I wanted to help you. I will not try again." A group of physicians from the School of Public Health at the University of Brussels encountered a similar fate here. And a delegation from Doctors of the World, which has been in Israel for some time, would also have been thrown out were it not for intervention at a senior level.

As though the brutal images being broadcast around the world from the occupied territories were not enough, these acts of expulsion are adding more fuel to the flames of criticism of Israeli policy. The order issued by Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) to prevent the entry into Israel of anyone suspected of being a supporter of the Palestinians is being carried out in full and to the letter; and it is creating a growing number of ambassadors of ill will.

With the thought police at the airport, even the few who still turn up are compelled to convince the officials of the Interior Ministry that they are lovers of Zion and answer an embarrassing volley of questions. So the interior minister, who represents a party known for its enlightened approach and its openness to the world, becomes a destructive factor in Israel's foreign relations. Now Israel is not only demolishing houses in Jenin with the occupants inside, it is also throwing out guests who don't agree with its policies. This is not the behavior one expects from an open country that takes pride in being a democracy. The amazing thing is that no one here seems to care what impression we create, otherwise it is difficult to understand the expulsion policy.

The ability to shape Israel's image as an enlightened and open state is an asset that is no less important than the arrest of another dozen wanted individuals. Israel's current image as a country that is closing itself off to the world and is lashing out at its critics while throwing out its guests is harmful to its own interests. The only benefit is that we get to return to that familiar and beloved niche called: "The whole world is against us."

In recent years, Europe has been speaking in a new language, which Israel is unwilling to accept. Human rights have become of paramount value in the political culture of Europe, and upholding those rights has become a central goal of foreign policy. As far as Israel is concerned, however, human rights are still perceived primarily as an obstacle to security policies. The new world is not ready to accept this, just as it was not ready to accept it in the Balkans.

Israel, for its part, reacts aggressively. Terje Roed-Larsen, a friend to Israel and the Palestinians who devoted 10 years to establishing peace between the two sides, immediately becomes an enemy of the people only because he made a few justified critical remarks in Jenin about Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid (he never said there had been a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp). The United Nations commission of inquiry into the Jenin case is instantly vilified as hostile to Israel solely because its members are experts on human rights. The director of the Government Press Office, Danny Seaman, an official who is responsible for Israel's image, sullies the head of the important international organization, Reporters Without Borders, only because it dared to criticize Israel's attitude toward media correspondents; and human rights activists who come to Israel are promptly kicked out. Anyone who does not accept the uniform voice coming out of Israel is declared an enemy.

From this point of view, singer Yaffa Yarkoni, Yossi Beilin, Terje Roed-Larsen and the Swedish physicians are all in the same boat. Internally and externally, Israel is now talking in one voice, which is threatening and frightening: All critics - out!

TWO WORLD RECORDS
by
BILL THOMPSON PhD
5th May 2002

The UN Jenin fact-finding mission was created by UN Security Council Resolution 1405 (sponsored by the United States), which passed unanimously on April 20. As you know, Israel has announced that it will not allow the mission to investigate its actions in Jenin. Apparently as a quid-pro-quo for the release of President Arafat, the US has now agreed to protect Israel from any resolution calling for enforcement of 1405. This will put the US in the historically unique position of vetoing a resolution which calls for enforcement of a resolution which it had previously sponsored (is this convoluted enough for you?).

This may set the world record for hyper-hypocrisy, and goes a long way toward explaining why the US is mistrusted and hated by large segments of the world community.

The second world record, this time for hyper-chutzpah, goes to the Israeli government, particularly Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shimon Peres. Mr. Peres was actually the individual who encouraged Mr. Annan to appoint the commission, but later became the mouthpiece through which Israel made impossible implementation demands, to wit (according to the NY Times): "Israeli officials have raised at least a half-dozen conditions, including that the mission also investigate Palestinian terrorism, that Israel control submission of documents and testimony to the commission, that it have the power to review and comment on Palestinian testimony, that soldiers and officials be guaranteed immunity from any future prosecution, and that the team not reach any "observations" or "conclusions."

One can only imagine the Israeli response had Nazi war criminals made similar demands.

Remember The Palestinians
by
Charley Reese
May 3, 2002

Knowing how much Americans are worried about the loss of innocent life in Palestine, I thought I'd summarize the number of Palestinians killed in the past 17 months.

This number does not include all those killed in Israel's most recent military invasion of the West Bank. They are still finding bodies in the rubble. This number represents only those killed through March 9, 2002.

The toll of Palestinian children 15 and younger is 151. That's a lot of Little League teams. Many of these children were shot through the head by Israeli snipers who, 200 yards away in armored vests and helmets, apparently feared a rock thrown by a 12-year-old that landed many yards short. I can easily imagine killing people. After all, I was in the Army. I cannot imagine lining up a child's head in the scope of my rifle and squeezing the trigger.

Another 138 Palestinians ages 16 to 18 also have been killed by the Israelis. The total number of Palestinians killed during this period is 1,286, of whom 83.8 percent were civilians. The rest, 208, were members of the Palestinian police and security forces, which might be one reason Yasser Arafat has had some trouble controlling terrorists.

The bulk of these innocent men, women and children were killed by the Israeli Defense Force, some by Jewish settlers in the occupied territories and the rest by ordinary Israelis. Apparently, it is open season on Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said 419 Israelis have been killed during the same time period, although he is counting the soldiers killed in the recent invasion, and I am not counting those Palestinians, since a definitive number is not known. Sharon is known inside Israel as a man whose word is not to be trusted (I read a column in an Israeli newspaper about Sharon's lying). Nevertheless, let us take his figure, 419, and you can plainly see that the Israelis have killed three times as many Palestinians. The Palestinians, I'm sure, would appreciate it if a few Americans would acknowledge that their lives are just as precious as those of the Israelis. The Palestinians have given up on the U.S. government. It has shown itself to be about as sympathetic to their loss of life as Sharon.

But I have a question: If Israel has killed three times as many Palestinians, the bulk of them unarmed civilians and the rest police officers with pistols and rifles, how can it be that Israel is fighting "for its survival"? The prime minister says it is. A lot of cheap American politicians are saying it is. What I want to know is how a few despairing teen-agers with homemade bombs can threaten the survival of a nation that has the strongest military force in the Middle East.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation in a recent story, Israel has the following assets: 134,000 army troops, 32,000 air force, 7,000 navy and 8,000 border police. The reserves are 400,000 for the army, 20,000 for the air force and 5,000 for the navy. In addition, Israel has 440 combat aircraft, 3,900 main battle tanks, 130 helicopters, 9,600 artillery tubes and 100 or more nuclear bombs.

Since the Palestinians have no army, no air force, no navy, no aircraft, no tanks, no helicopters and no nukes, one has to wonder indeed how these defenceless civilians can threaten Israel's existence. Gosh, you don't suppose Israeli and American politicians are lying, do you? Perish the thought.

I guess the Israeli army snipers must have been ordered to shoot all those children, for Palestinian children must be the toughest kids in the universe. I never heard of any other group of children able to frighten a whole nation like that.

That's funny, too, because all of the pictures I've seen of Palestinian children - dead, dying, bleeding or paralyzed - show kids who look like American children their age.

Check out www.palestinemonitor.org for a different view of the world.

A call for US to be fair to Palestinians
By
Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Staff
Boston Globe
9/21/2001

IN REACTING to the attack on the United States, Ehud Sprinzak, a widely quoted Israeli terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said, ''Many of us feel vindicated by this.'' He said the pictures ''are better than a thousand ambassadors trying to explain how dangerous Islamic terror is.'' Sprinzak said, ''From the perspective of Jews, it is the most important public relations act ever committed in our favor.''

That was a smug and brazen display of self-assuredness. Sprinzak assumes that the attacks will allow Israel to become the most innocent lamb in the
Middle East.

As the United States shakes down the Islamic world for Osama bin Laden, Israel's army hopes it will be spared a shakeup of its relationship with us.

Contrary to Sprinzak's hope that the attack would play in Israel's ''favor,'' it should inspire in the United States a new sense of fairness. If terrorism out of the Middle East is to stop, America must stop fueling the spiral of violence with its lopsided support of Israel. America has to stop turning a blind eye to Israel's use of American weapons to kill Palestinians.

Much have been made of the Palestinians who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center. Photos of rock-throwing Palestinians are a staple in
American newspapers. In American households, names like ''Arafat,'' ''Hamas,'' and ''bin Laden'' are much more reflexively connected to Middle East violence than ''Lockheed Martin,'' ''Boeing,'' and ''Pratt and Whitney.''

It is tragic whenever a Palestinian mob or bomber kills Jews. But if Americans really want to understand why Americans might have been targeted
for catastrophe in New York and Washington, we can no longer ignore the fact that we are helping the Israeli police and! military to outkill
Palestinians by more than a 3-to-1 margin.

In the last year of clashes, the Associated Press has counted 632 Palestinian and 174 Israeli deaths.

Americans can no longer ignore why Israel is winning the body count in their conflict. Since World War II, and despite some ups and downs in our relationship, Israel has been the largest total recipient of American aid, between $81 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service,
and $92 billion, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a think tank founded by former American foreign service officers.

The beginning of large-scale sales to Israel began with the selling of Hawk missiles by President John F. Kennedy. Today, Israel has 320 American-made F-16 fighter planes, more than any other nation in the world except for the United States. Israel has ordered 100 more, which will be delivered through 2009.

While Palestinian children are criminalized for throwing rocks, Israel has not been seriously criticized for using its 50 American-made Apache helicopters (with orders for 29 more) to attack Palestinians with laser-guided missiles. According to Newsweek last month, US-made helicopters have been involved in nine of 29 assassination attempts by Israel.

''We spend a lot of money buying arms in the United States,'' Shlomo Dror, an Israeli defense spokesman, told Newsweek. ''I'm sure US companies would
not want that to change.''

The United States sells plenty of arms to friendly Arab nations, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, but by all accounts,Israel gets the most lethal equipment with the best targeting electronics.

Though on paper it appears that Egypt is close to Israel in US aid, the quality of the aid is so different that retired US Army Colonel Norvell B.De Atkine told The Wall Street Journal a year ago, ''from a military point of view, the gap between Israeli and Arab military might has widened profoundly over the last 15 years.''

The gap in carnage has widened so profoundly that it is no surprise that the Arab world is angry not only at Israel, but at us for letting Israel behave too often as if it is a law unto itself.

The United States never said much back in the 1980s when Israel sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa and not much now when Israel has bulldozed and impounded Palestinians into parched lands no different than Soweto. While 1,300 Israelis have been injured in clashes, at least 10 times
more Palestinians, more than 14,000, have been injured by the more potent Israeli police and military.

Until that imbalance is confronted, America is chasing only symptoms, not solutions. No one no longer doubts how dangerous Islamist terrorism is. We might not have had to experience it so horribly here at home, if we had long ago condemned Israeli terrorism, conducted with weapons made here at  home.

Before There Was Terrorism – FULL ARTICLE
By
Kathleen Christison
Counterpunch
May 2, 2002

Editors' Note: Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the University of California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story, was published in March 2002. She and her husband Bill, (a former senior CIA analyst whose dissections of the war on terror are featured on this website) live in the Southwest. The following is a talk she gave in New Mexico on May 2 under the auspices of Santa Fe Community Action Network, the Santa Fe Green Party, and Tikkun.

We hear a lot about "moral clarity" and "moral equivalence" these days-the idea being that, if you have true "moral clarity," you can recognize a terrorist when you see him, and you know with clarity that there is no "moral equivalence" between Palestinians, who are terrorists, and Israel, which is a moral, democratic state fighting for its existence and using moral means to do so. At a time when the United States is officially engaged in a war on terrorism, which is officially defined as war against evil and evil-doers, moral arguments have a great deal of resonance. It's thus easy to place the Palestinians among the "evil ones," within the "axis
of evil," and thereby almost automatically to place Israel in the category of innocent victim. We Americans have already grown up with a strong image of Israel as a heroic little nation fighting against hate-filled Arabs, so the argument today that there is "no-moral-equivalence" between Israel and the Palestinians-or indeed between Israel and any Arabs-fits right in with the stereotypes and preconceived notions that we already have in our heads.

The perceptions that come out of these stereotypes-the perceptions that come out of the "no-moral-equivalence" argument and the effort to lump Palestinians in with the terrorists and other black hats around the world, while Israel is placed on a pedestal next to "us," the good people-these perceptions have a huge impact on the policy we pursue in the United States toward every aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These perceptions make it impossible for the United States to play a meaningful role in resolving the conflict; they make it impossible for us to act as a neutral mediator or honest broker. In the end, they render us unable to approach the conflict from a position of equity. The only possible way for a mediator to resolve a conflict is to take the concerns of both parties to the conflict into account equally, but when one side is viewed as morally repugnant and the other as morally unassailable, there is no possibility of equitable treatment.

This difference in perceptions of the essential morality-the "worthiness"-of those on each side is and has always been fundamental to how policy is made in this country. Marc Ellis, a Jewish-American political scholar and professor at Baylor University, recently put it this way: speaking of progressives in Israel and in the American Jewish community who always used to be open to the Palestinian perspective but distanced themselves from the Palestinians after the peace process collapsed, he says that the underlying assumption of virtually all of these progressives, when push comes to shove, is that Palestinians are not quite equal to Israelis. "Any political empowerment of Palestinians must be limited and monitored by Israel," he said-because, ultimately, "Palestinian history and destiny are secondary to Jewish history and destiny."

This has always been, and remains, the fundamental assumption, and the fundamental inequity, of all U.S. administrations and of all U.S. peacemaking efforts. And ultimately, these perceptions and the misguided policy that has resulted from them have caused the perpetuation of the conflict-the decades-long perpetuation of a conflict that could have been resolved years ago.

This notion that Jewish "history and destiny" are superior to Palestinian "history and destiny" has basically always governed popular thinking, media commentary, and in the end the making of policy in the United States. We understand Israeli fears; we feel Israeli fears. But we generally don't feel, or even care about, Palestinian fears. We have no conception of what it means for a Palestinian to have his land confiscated, his olive grove bulldozed, his underground water sucked up, so that Israel can build a
settlement for Jews only or a security road on which only Israelis are allowed to drive. Gideon Levy, an Israeli commentator for the newspaper Haaretz, who knows the Palestinians well and remains open to Palestinian concerns and the Palestinian perspective, recently quoted Palestinian militia leader Marwan Barghouti as having asked him five years ago, "When will you [Israelis] finally understand that nothing frightens the Palestinians the way settlements do?"

Israeli settlements have been expanding inexorably across the occupied territories, including, and indeed particularly, during the peace process, and what this settlement expansion meant was the gradual diminution of the area where a free and independent Palestinian state could ever be established-the gradual destruction of the nascent Palestinian state. But most Americans have no conception that this has been occurring or of the fears that this process aroused in the Palestinians. And I include among those who didn't focus on or really care what was happening to the Palestinians President Bill Clinton and his advisers, who oversaw the
so-called peace process for seven years but failed to notice the steady expansion and consolidation of Israel's control over the very territories supposed to be relinquished to Palestinian control.

As Americans, we are, of course, vitally concerned to guarantee Israel's security and existence; we actively fear, and we talk all the time about, the danger that Israel will be destroyed. It's been one of the pillars of our Middle East policy since 1948 to guarantee Israel's existence. But we don't care at all about guaranteeing Palestinian existence, and even more significantly, we don't care, or even seem to notice, that Ariel Sharon is actively attempting to destroy the Palestinian nation. If you doubt this, let me quote Avi Shlaim, an Israeli historian at Oxford University who wrote recently that one of the hallmarks of Sharon's career has been "savage brutality" toward Arab civilians and that "his real agenda is to subvert what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into the ground, and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood." If you doubt that, listen to what Sharon himself has written in his autobiography. Although he was raised, he said, to believe that Arabs and Jews could live side by side, his parents believed and taught him that "without question" only Jews had rights over the land. "When the land belongs to you physicallythat is when you have power, not just physical power but spiritual power." Everything Sharon has ever done in his career, and in his year as prime minister, has clearly been directed at guaranteeing this continued Israeli physical and spiritual control of all the land of Palestine. You can perhaps dismiss Sharon as an extreme example of this notion of the superiority of Jewish claims to all the land of Palestine, but his viewpoint increasingly represents the thinking and the actions of Israel as a nation-his popularity is very high at the moment in Israel-and in fact his policy is only a more blatant and brutal version of the policy pursued by every Israeli government since the occupation began in 1967. What possible reason, other than ensuring continued Israeli physical and political domination over the occupied territories, could there have been for the steady increase under both left-wing and right-wing governments of settlement building, road building, land confiscation, expulsion of Palestinians, segmentation of Palestinian population areas, etcetera, etcetera? What possible reason, other than an intention to keep the occupied territories, could there be for the fact that it has always been hard to find a map in Israel that does not place the West Bank inside Israel? (This was true even during the late 1990s, at the height of the peace process, when the modalities for Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories
were supposed to be the principal topic of discussion.) What possible reason, other than a deep-seated reluctance to cede dominion over the occupied territories, could there have been for the constant delays in implementation of the Oslo accords that marked the entire seven years of the Oslo peace process? Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has wryly labeled Ehud Barak's penchant for backing off whenever he came near to consummating an agreement, either with the Palestinians or with Syria, "politicus interruptus."

Yes, Ehud Barak did during the Camp David negotiations in July 2000 offer to permit the Palestinians to have a state, but the state he offered could not have been viable or sovereign or truly independent. I'll explain this more fully a little later, but for now suffice it to say that this so-called state would actually have been a colony, over which Israel would have maintained full physical and political domination. This has been Israel's intent since the beginning of the occupation 35 years ago. Let me get back to this question of comparative morality. The major issue that we hear about constantly at the moment is terrorism-Palestinian terrorism. Of course there is no excuse whatsoever for terrorism-no excuse for any action by any individual or group or state that knowingly kills innocent civilians. Nor is there any excuse for Israeli actions that deliberately kill innocent civilians-and there is voluminous evidence, including testimony from Israeli soldiers themselves, that Israelis do deliberately shoot Palestinian children and adult civilians, deliberately bomb and shell civilian residential areas, deliberately fire on ambulances and relief workers.

Palestinian terrorism is not the essence of the conflict. Terrorism is a tactic-an ugly tactic, but it is only a tactic. The tendency of Americans is always to start the clock over again with the last big event-not to look behind that last event at what provoked it or at what actually lies at the root of the problem. What we've all concentrated on in the last few months have been the hideous images of Palestinian suicide bombings-horrific acts that have killed innocent people at religious ceremonies, out shopping, riding buses, eating in restaurants.

But both Israel and the U.S. act as though nothing went before this terrorism, as though it is mindless and unreasoned, based on nothing but blind hatred of Jews. This perception has allowed us to excuse Israel's siege of the civilian population of the West Bank and destruction of the entire infrastructure of Palestinian government and society as merely legitimate retaliation; it has blinded us to the moral quality of Israel's acts; it has allowed us unquestioningly to accept Israel's definition of all Palestinian violence, even legitimate resistance to the occupation, as terrorism (President Bush recently brushed aside a British interviewer's question about precisely this difference with a dismissive, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think"); and it has blinded us to everything that went before: to the 35 years in which Israel has occupied Palestinian territories and ruled over the Palestinian population. Terrorism is a symptom of the problem; it is not the real problem. Before there was terrorism, there was the occupation. Before there was terrorism, there were settlements. Israel has established over 250 settlements throughout the occupied territories and populated them with over 400,000 Israeli settlers. The number of settlers almost doubled in the seven years of the peace process between the 1993 signing of the Oslo agreement and July 2000 when the peace process collapsed at Camp David, and Sharon has added 34 new settlements during his year in office. Before there was terrorism, there were the roads. Israel has established a 300-mile road network throughout the West Bank connecting the settlements. These are high-security roads three football fields wide with their surrounding security perimeters, and they are accessible only to Israelis. They separate Palestinian population areas from each other and from their agricultural land; in fact, before the current warfare, they segmented the areas of semi-autonomous Palestinian control into 227 separate, non-contiguous patches of land.

Before there was terrorism, there was land confiscation. Something approaching 60% of the land area of the West Bank has been confiscated for settlements, for this extensive road network, and for military bases. Before there was terrorism, there were olive groves and other agricultural land bulldozed to build roads and security areas for Israelis. Olives are a staple of the Palestinian economy. Before there was terrorism, there were checkpoints, Israeli-manned checkpoints through which Palestinians had to pass to move from one town to another and through which every item needed to run a city-food, medicines, manufacturing supplies, mail, ambulances-had to pass.

Before Jenin, the refugee camp that Israel destroyed last month in the name of rooting out terrorism, there was the occupation. Before Israel destroyed the entire infrastructure of Palestinian civil society last month-rampaging through Palestinian civil ministries for education and health and agriculture, destroying computers and hard disks and the entire written record of Palestinian society, ransacking Palestinian businesses and banks, blasting their way into and occupying and looting Palestinian residences, bulldozing whole housing blocks, destroying land registry maps and census records, as if to erase all trace of Palestinian existence-before all this, there was the occupation.

The occupation has always, from the beginning, been intended to exert permanent control over the Palestinian people in order to provide security for Israelis. Now, is this immoral, is this singular concern for Jewish security at the expense of Palestinian security and Palestinian rights immoral? Israeli commentator Gideon Levy wrote recently, in describing several instances in which Israel refused entry to or expelled representatives of international human rights organizations, that "as far as Israel is concerned--human rights are still perceived primarily as an obstacle to security policies." Is it immoral that Israeli security should take precedence over human rights for Palestinians? I think so, although many would debate me on that. Without question, however, whether the occupation is moral or immoral, it is illegal under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the conduct of states occupying foreign territory, was written and adopted in 1949 for the most moral of reasons: specifically to prevent the kind of horrors committed against Jews during the Holocaust. Both Israel and the U.S. are signatories to the Geneva Convention, but Israel ignores its provisions with respect to the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the U.S. goes along with this. The rest of the international community does recognize the applicability of the convention to these territories.

The Geneva Convention prohibits the following: It prohibits the settlement of the occupier's population in the occupied territory; that is, it should prohibit settling Jews in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It prohibits the occupier from appropriating the property of the local inhabitants; that is, it should prohibit Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land for settlements and roads, as well as its destruction of Palestinian agricultural land. It prohibits the occupier from taking any action that makes its temporary presence permanent and from asserting any claims to sovereignty; that is, it should prohibit Israel from permanent settlement-building and from any effort to annex those settlements to Israel-in fact, the convention actually prohibits any peace agreement that
would legitimize any Israeli territorial claim in the occupied territories. It prohibits the occupier from deporting the inhabitants of the occupied territory; that is, it should prohibit Israel from expelling any Palestinian from the West Bank, Gaza, or East Jerusalem-deportations Israel has carried out in the hundreds and thousands over the years. It prohibits collective punishment; that is, it should prohibit Israel from demolishing the homes of the families of suspected terrorists, from shelling entire neighborhoods in response to the actions of one or a few Palestinian gunmen, from retaliating economically against the entire Palestinian population following a terrorist attack. It prohibits the occupier from appropriating the natural resources of the occupied territory; that is, it should prohibit Israel from using the underground water resources of the West Bank and Gaza-water that Israel allocates to Israeli settlers at a rate at least five times as great as is allocated to Palestinians. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has estimated that Israeli settlers consume 348 liters per day, while Palestinians are permitted only 70 liters per day. The World Health Organization standard is 100 liters per day.

Much of the public discourse and policy today has come down to whether at Camp David Israel actually offered the Palestinians a generous deal that would have gotten Israel out of the occupied territories and given the Palestinians a state. There is a widespread impression-a misapprehension-in this country, fostered dishonestly by Israel and the U.S. media and U.S. policymakers, that Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat a state on a silver platter but that Arafat refused this generous offer and started the uprising instead. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. What Barak proposed would have left the Palestinians not with a state, but with a series of disconnected enclaves-three in the West Bank, plus Gaza, plus several disconnected neighborhoods in East Jerusalem-each of which would have been surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory. This would not have been a viable or defensible state. It is not a state that Israel itself would ever have accepted, and the Palestinians could not possibly have accepted it either.

Let me return to this issue of comparative morality before I finish. In late March, responding to the Seder massacre-a suicide bombing that killed 27 Israelis gathered for a Passover meal-President Bush said that "justice and cruelty have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them." He had used this same phrase in his speech to Congress after September 11. In the context of his constant pressure on the Palestinians but not Israel to end violence, this statement indicates that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush believes justice lies entirely with Israel, cruelty with the Palestinians, and that God is therefore on Israel's side. Interestingly enough, Elie Wiesel wrote in his novella Dawn that God is a terrorist. Dawn is Wiesel's story, said to be at least partially autobiographical, about a young man who fights against British control of Palestine in the 1940s by joining the Irgun, Israel's pre-state terrorist organization led by Menachem Begin. Wiesel calls the organization a terrorist organization, without embarrassment, throughout the novella, and about midway through, by way of justifying his hero's actions, he declares that "God is a member of the Resistance movement, a terrorist."

George Bush and his supporters have made much of the notion that he is acting against terrorism with what he calls "moral clarity." Elie Wiesel is hailed as a man of surpassing "moral clarity." But one man's moral clarity, it's clear from these two views, is another man's moral obfuscation. This is the kind of trouble, the kind of inconsistency, you get into when you try to define morality, and when you claim to base your foreign policy on God. Whose morality are we dealing with, and whose God, and whose definition of terrorism?

I've been asked to give you my vision of a peace settlement. George Bush and I both have a vision of peace; he has described his vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, and that's my vision too. Where we differ is that I don't think Bush has a vision of how to get there. Most serious analysts believe that Bush came to his vision not out of any interest in forging a peace agreement, but in order, as Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations recently put it, to "make nice" with Saudi Arabia. Bush first enunciated his "vision" last fall, immediately after the Saudi crown prince had expressed his anger over U.S. support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and Bush has reiterated the vision whenever-but only whenever-the Saudis have expressed enough concern about the Palestinians to make the Bush team worry that their "war on terror" might be impeded.

In fact, Bush's policies and actions preclude any possibility that his vision can ever come to fruition. His support for Ariel Sharon, his grant of carte blanche to Sharon's actions in the occupied territories, his declaration that Sharon is a "man of peace," precisely at the moment when he is actively attempting to destroy the Palestinian people and nation, all indicate that Bush not only has no plan for achieving Palestinian statehood, but doesn't care whether there ever is a Palestinian state, or indeed whether the alestinian people survive. Several senior policymakers in Bush's administration, in fact, particularly in the Defense Department, advocate never permitting a Palestinian state.

Any real peace agreement that is just and fair to both sides and that is stable and guaranteed to last must be based on a mediation approach that treats both sides more or less equitably. That does not mean they have to get an equal amount of territory in a peace agreement. Far from it, in fact: in any peace agreement Israel will always be guaranteed at least the 78% of Palestine that lies inside its 1967 borders, while the Palestinians will never get-and do not expect to get-more than the remaining 22%. But equity does mean that if you are the United States trying to mediate a just and stable peace, you must take the two sides' concerns into account equally. It means that, if you are concerned to guarantee Israel's security, you must equally guarantee Palestinian security. It means that if you are concerned to assure that Israel remains a viable, defensible state, you must equally assure that the Palestinian state is viable and defensible. It means that you must start from the premise that neither people is inherently more moral than the other. It means that a dead Israeli child is no more innocent than a dead Palestinian child. The death of an innocent Israeli is no more tragic, no more outrageous, no more an obstacle to peace than the death of an innocent Palestinian. This is what equity means.

(Let me say as an aside that equity does not mean the policy absurdity we have just gotten ourselves into, of giving Israel the weapons-and the green light-with which to destroy Palestinian cities and then giving Palestinians a little bit of aid with which to rebuild them.)

Most fundamentally, an equitable approach to forging a peace agreement means that you must honestly examine what lies at the root of the conflict. What lies at the root of the conflict is the occupation-Israel's 35-year-long occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The root of the problem is not the right of return, it is not Israel's right to exist, it is not the fear in which Israelis live. It is the occupation and what this means for Palestine's right to exist and for the fear in which Palestinians live.

Ariel Sharon and George Bush, along with most Israelis and most Americans, seem to believe that the root of the problem is Yasir Arafat, that he is the principal impediment to peace and that, if only he were somehow removed from the scene, everything would move forward easily. In fact, however, let's imagine a situation in which there is no Yasir Arafat. Let's even imagine a situation in which there is no suicide bombing. Without Arafat, without suicide bombing, there would still be the occupation, and there would therefore still be resistance to the occupation, and the United States would still be confronted with the need to mediate a solution. But, unfortunately, even without Arafat, Israel would still be building settlements, building roads, confiscating Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian homes, impeding Palestinian movement with checkpoints. Palestinians would still be angry and frustrated at having their opportunity for freedom and independence totally blocked, and they would still be using small arms, a few home-made mortars, and stones-the only military force available to them-to attack Israeli soldiers. Such attacks would be legitimate under international law because armed resistance to foreign occupation is considered legitimate, and Israeli soldiers are foreign occupiers in Palestinian land.

So, essentially, even without Arafat, we would be right where we are today. You can rant and rave all you want about Arafat. I rant and rave myself about how awful Arafat is. But eliminating him will not solve the problem. Only eliminating the occupation will solve the problem. That's a real vision of peace.

Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 19:28:26 -0700
From: Jim Ennes <Jim@E... >
Subject: Congresswoman McKinney is in trouble
 
Dear Friends and shipmates:
 
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia is in trouble. She distinguished herself recently, unlike her less daring colleagues, by speaking out on behalf of the USS Liberty. She made the following statement on June 6, 2002.


"Mr. Speaker, I speak to commemorate and recognize the tragic attack that took place against the U.S.S. Liberty on June 8, 1967. Although thirty-five years have come and gone since this historic event, the survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty are still struggling with the fact that their story has never been heard.

"While there has never been an official investigation into this event, we have learned from survivor accounts that for over 75 minutes the Israeli Defense Forces attacked the U.S.S. Liberty, killing 34 American soldiers and wounding an additional 172. With over 85% of the crew either dead or wounded, they somehow managed to keep the ship afloat after being hit by over 1000 rounds of rocket, cannon, machine gun, napalm hits, and even a direct hit from a torpedo.

"This unprovoked attack took place in international waters, and by a trusted ally. The only explanation given to the survivors and their families as to why this attack took place was that it was an accident and that their ship was not identified as being American, regardless of the fact that our flag was proudly flown throughout the attack. Unfortunately, that explanation is not good enough for those whose lives have been impacted by this attack, and it should not be good enough for the American people. Let's not wait another thirty-five years before we provide the survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty an official investigation into why this attack took place and allow them to tell their story. We owe them more than a debt of gratitude for their sacrifice; we owe them the truth."


Now, as so often happens, Israeli supporters are seeking to punish Ms. McKinney by contributing heavily to her opponent in the August primary election, hoping to unseat her.

That is usually what happens to any elected person who dares to act contrary to the wishes of the Israeli lobby. Israel contributes to their opponent and they are soon out of office. That is why so few elected Members of Congress lack the courage to speak out on our behalf or for American interests over those of Israel.
 
Ms. McKinney is a notable exception.
 
She knew the risks but she spoke out anyway.
 
We cannot let her be punished for helping us.
 
Please consider sending a check contribution to
 
McKinney for Congress Post Office Box 371125 Decatur, GA 30037
 
Or phone (404) 243-5574 for more information.
 
Contributions of more than $200 must by law include the donor's name, address, employer's name and employer's address.
 
For more information, visit

Congresswoman McKinney's web site at http://www.cynthia2002.com
 
The Council for the National Interest at <http://www.cnionline.org/http://www.cnionline.org/
 
The USS Liberty at http://www.ussliberty.com
 

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