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TAC: 'Time to do what you ask Arafat to do each week Mr. President! 'Lead, Follow, or get the hell out of the way!'
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Palestine Chronicle Weekly Newsletter
Thursday, June 13 2002 @ 10:01 PM GMT
June 14, 2002; Brought to you by PalestineChronicle.com
Editorial : \'Not Even a Tiny Condemnation,\' By Ramzy Baroud
Feature: \'Remembering September 11th, and Jenin,\' By Rifat Audeh
Commentary: “Payback Time”, By Alec Dubro
News In Brief
Not Even a Tiny Condemnation
By Ramzy Baroud, Editor-in-Chief
When was the last time the American administration condemned the murder of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army? Not once have I read or heard a clear word of condemnation of the killing of one innocent Palestinian soul. But isn’t there one Palestinian, whose life is precious enough?
Not once did President Bush feel the need to stand and to declare to the whole world that the United States government firmly and strongly condemns the death of this innocent Palestinian orphan, or that child, woman, or man at the hands of the Israeli army.
Okay, we agree; the Zionist lobby has greater influence on the US government than the interest of the American people themselves.
We understand how the mainstream media functions, at least for the most part, and how Israel finds and gets its way when it comes to making sure that the mainstream cooperate media, fully and firmly sides with the Israeli government, even if Israel is a bit at odds with the US’s own government.
We concur that Bush is himself under the Israeli spell, that he is trapped, unable to escape the tight grip or the watchful eyes of APIAC, the ADL, and all others, that the White House’s real allegiances is to those who would help it pass coming elections, not to a Palestinian child on his way to be buried.
But for heavens sake, not one out of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian victims managed to escape this vicious cycle, of being completely neglected by the US government and media?
Don’t American officials watch the same images we watch? If American satellites manage to penetrate and spy on the most detailed movements of the \'enemies of the United States\', did the satellite screen ever capture photos of Palestinian men, with their hands behind their backs, being executed; or the face of a child’s mother running like a madman behind her son’s funeral, or a whole refugee camp being bulldozed with its own people?
It’s amazing that no matter how gruesome Israel’s crimes are, the US government, in the most elaborate, fantastic way, re-arranges them, not only neglecting to condemn the Israeli action, but to blame Palestinians for it.
Even at times when Israel’s crimes wreck some foreign policy agenda the US is trying to carry out, the White House often keeps its cool. \'The US regrets the fact that Israeli army has done so and so ..\', \'President Bush believes that the Israeli action is not helpful…\', \'the US is concerned by the fact the Israeli government has decided to do this and that ..\', or any other, but never a clear word of condemnation.
And no matter how \'harsh\' the US statement maybe, it must always (and I mean always) be coupled with, \'the US understand Israel’s need to defend itself,\' and \'Palestinians must end terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians,\' even if a whole bunch of Palestinian civilians were the ones being murdered.
Palestinians continue to lose rights that one would assume should be enjoyed by any living thing. It seems as if it\'s not Palestinians who have lost their land, driven out at gunpoint, scattered in refugee camps, having no security; being massacred, threaten at all times, repeatedly starved, but they are now being denied the right of being considered, needless to say treated like civilians in times of war.
In recent weeks, as the United States’ government, officials and White House fought over the use of terminology to condemn the suicide bombings in Israel, Palestinians were killed, but without much fuss. In fact, Israel, even while mainstream media is boosting over the \'promising calm\' in the Middle East, continues to kill. But Palestinian deaths are always irrelevant, at least to the US government, for you know, wink, wink, the Israeli lobby in the US is too powerful to defy.
Pick any random day, any random period of that day, you’ll find some Palestinian blood being shed somewhere in the West Bank or Gaza.
Check out the Palestinian Human Rights Office, LAW’s (or any other human rights office in Palestine) records and you’ll find that not one day has passed without an innocent person or scores of them being covered with blood, rushed to the hospital or to the grave.
Just during the past week, as everyone including the Palestinian Authority condemned Palestinian attacks against Israelis (even attacks at Israeli occupation soldiers), everyone seemed little interested in condemned the killing and wounding of a long list of names, Palestinian names, that starts from Rafah (in the south of Gaza) all the way across numerous villages, and towns in the West Bank.
Israel might claim that it kills Palestinians with explosive belts wrapped around them, and the US government might agree. But how about the children, the orphans, the school kids with special uniforms and heavy back bags filled with coloring books; the fathers and mothers in their homes; the passengers boarding a taxi cab, going home after a long day at work, Mohammad Snoober, from Yitma, Nablus, who was on his way home on a donkey\'s back when Israeli troops shot him on the bypass road between Nablus and the Jordan Valley; Bassam, Mahdi, Fida, Mohamed, Ala, Hamdoun, Iman, Yaser, and thousands more, each with a life, dare I say, precious.
I am afraid it’s not the loss of innocent life that governs the language, nor the policy used by White House officials or President Bush himself, for if it was, then the White House record would have issued at least 2,000 statement in the last two years, each condemned the killing of one Palestinian.
But although we do understand the currents that control the foreign policy of the United States, one cannot help but fantasize that one day, one day, a Palestinian life would prove precious enough, that when it’s murdered, its murdered would be condemned, even if a tiny little condemnation. Thank God that fantasies are not too controlled by the Israeli lobby.
Remembering September 11th, and Jenin
By Rifat Audeh for Palestine Chronicle
Imagine for a second, if Sep. 11th happened again, and -God forbid- the equivalent number of people got murdered all over again. Then imagine it happening again and again, for 35 years. Hard to swallow, or even fathom something that horrific ? Well, it has been going on actually, right before us. Welcome to the life of a Palestinian in occupied Palestine.
The other day, I watched the completion of the cleanup at Ground Zero in NYC on the news. The report was that 2823 people lost their lives on that fateful day. Being of Palestinian origin, this immediately triggered my thoughts of the defenseless Palestinian population, also being unjustly murdered -by the Israeli occupation- half a world away.
Thinking solely in terms of numbers, there are only 3.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If we translate the numbers proportionally to the United States population for example, this would mean that 157, 000 Americans had been killed, and over three million wounded in the past 20 months. This is like having 55 events like September the 11th, or almost one every ten days for the past year and a half .
The purpose of these figures is not to belittle what occurred on that horrific day, but to exhibit a thought exercise, to try and understand the volume of the tragedy, the hell the Palestinians have been living through since 1967.
Add to the above the first Palestinian Intifada, in which thousands more (i.e. equivalent to hundreds of thousands) were dead or wounded, many crippled for life. Then the hundreds of homes demolished (i.e. tens of thousands of families rendered homeless), the daily humiliations, women giving birth to children dying at checkpoints, massive arrests without any charges, the systematic torture of these prisoners, illegal land confiscation, uprooting of trees representing peoples\' livelihood, and the list goes on and on. Living through this daily fear and suffering, can we even begin to understand it all ?
Again, watching the TV, I saw the last beam of the World Trade Center\'s rubble loaded onto a truck and carried away, and this triggered more thoughts. My mind raced back to the Jenin refugee camp, which was put under siege by the Israeli military for 12days and nights. For what seemed like an eternity, the men, women and children of the camp were pounded with the horrors of bombardment from Israeli gunfire, tanks and missiles. In the end, hundreds, if not thousands, were redispossessed as refugees once again, arbitrarily arrested, wounded, missing or dead under the rubble.
I remembered when the towers went down how people from all across the USA rushed to New York to remove the rubble and help in the search for survivors. In Jenin, we\'ll never know if there were any left under the debris, because they were not allowed to be saved, as the Israeli army prevented the ambulances or rescue workers into the camp. Even after the army withdrew from the camp center, it continued to block the surroundings and prevent any type of equipment from entrance to help in the rubble\'s removal. The Israeli government continued to enforce round-the-clock curfews on the civilians in neighboring towns and villages, and blocked those areas off, preventing people from coming to aid in any rescue effort. And so, as the children began to dig away with their bare little hands to find their loved ones, the surviving mothers wailed in the background, asking God why ??
I remembered all the journalists rushing from across the country to assess the damage, and report on the rescue efforts underway. I contrasted that with how reporters from across the globe were prevented to get near or see the crimes being committed in Jenin. How they couldn\'t see the wounded left to die slowly in horrible agony, because medics weren\'t allowed in to treat them, or how they died quickly when Israeli tanks ran over them and mangled their bodies. How those bodies lay rotting in the streets, and the women and terrified children who saw them, as they ran from one home to the next looking for cover and cowering with fear. How food, medicine and water was cut off from the camp, and families were forced into drinking sewage. How men were stripped and beaten, used as human shields, taken away and tortured, then left to return without ever knowing what happened to their now missing families. Then Israel succeeded in defying the world, and preventing the UN from inve! stigating these savageries.
Yet not only do the Palestinians have to endure these cruelties, but also the hypocrisy of the outside world, particularly the US media and press that vilifies them. The examples of abhorrently biased reporting are too many to list, yet here\'s a description from the NY Times on April 21 : \'As Israeli forces pursued militants, civilians continued getting in the way and dying as a result \'. !! This appalling type of narrative has become widespread in demonizing the victims, and justifying any and all Israeli criminal acts.
Just as the atrocity of that September morning should have never occurred, the continuing atrocity against the Palestinian people shouldn\'t. It is time we come together, and demand from our government and media that the Palestinian nightmare, that the ongoing Palestinian day of Sep. 11th, which has lasted for 35 years, come to an end.
Payback Time
By Alec Dubro
For the past 55 years, or to put it another way, for my entire life, Israel has asked me and other American Jews for one thing: help. I think it\'s time Israel realized that it might owe a debt to the 60 percent of Jews who choose not to live there.
That\'s right, I want help from Israel, a big favor. I\'m asking you to remove the settlements from the West Bank, Gaza and Golan. And try - as hard as you\'ve worked to build Israel\'s military power - to come to a workable peace with your neighbors.
I realize you\'re in trouble right now and it\'s a lot to ask, but then you\'ve asked a lot of us. Although it\'s hard to get accurate statistics on this, it seems the U.S. sends about $10 billion a year in public and private aid and donations each year. Over the years, that amount may have been less, but comprised a larger share of Israel\'s GDP. It\'s hard to see how we contributed less than half a trillion to Israel.
Israelis at least owe me a hearing on this. When I was young, my father worked for United Jewish Appeal and then for Bonds for Israel. We didn\'t see too much of him because his work was important. As I got older, I donated money and purchased trees for plantation. To be honest, at a certain point, I ceased to support Israel, largely out of disaffection for Israeli policies, and because Israel became wealthy. But in the last half century, the relationship has been entirely one-sided: You asked, we responded.
Now, I\'m asking. Your insistence on maintaining gated suburban communities in the West Bank and Gaza, and the conflict that flows from this policy, is endangering Jews who live throughout the world. The current spate of attacks in Europe and elsewhere is directly tied to the occupation. I don\'t need any lectures about the durability of anti-Semitism throughout the world. I\'ve been subject to it and lived with it. But until the last few years, anti-Semitism had grown increasingly marginalized in the developed world.
The fight over the West Bank has breathed new life into a moribund, although not dead, ideology.
From my perspective, Israel is holding the world\'s Jews hostage to the principle of greater Judea or greater Samaria or whatever you\'re calling it these days. So that 200,000 Jews can live in defiant comfort in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan, the rest of us see deteriorating relations with our neighbors and an increasing sense of danger.
As far as I\'m concerned, the flawed idealism of Zionism has run up against a wall. Even if I accepted the biblical premise that Jews are entitled to that piece of Levantine real estate - and I don\'t - the political reality is that you cannot find peace by pursuing your current objectives. And you threaten more than yourselves and your immediate neighbors; you are threatening those of us who contributed so heavily to your existence.
So I ask you again to have some concern for the world\'s Jews, for the supporters of Jews, and for peace in general. If you fail to relinquish your semimilitary communities, there will be only war and division. And, as you further endanger those of us outside Israel, you risk losing your base of support.
In fact, if Israel insists on maintaining the occupation, I will take action. I will demand my trees back. You owe me.
Alec Dubro is a freelance writer in Washington D.C. This article is brought to you in association with Arab news
News In Brief
Arafat Addresses New Palestinian Cabinet
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has convened a new, streamlined Palestinian cabinet - formed in response to Israeli and U.S. pressure to reform the Palestinian Authority, in away that would \'guarantee\' security for Israel. The cabinet, trimmed from 31 members to 21, met Thursday at Palestinian headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
The Youth Faction of Sweden’s Largest Party to Try Sharon
The international uproar caused by the Israeli government’s violent polices against Palestinian civilians continues. Street marches and vigils however are being replaced by legal action, mostly in European countries where courts are allowed to try individuals for war crimes committed elsewhere.
Ahmad Qoraia, Washington’s Choice to Replace Arafat
The United Stated is determined to appoint a more obedient figure as the head of the Palestinian National Authority, an international Arabic publication’s website revealed on Wednesday night. The internet site of Al-Qanat, quoting diplomatic sources in Washington, revealed that the United States is planning for replacement of the Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, with the current head of the Palestinian National Parliament, Ahmad Qoraia.
Ahmad Qoraia, Washington’s Choice to Replace Arafat
The United Stated is determined to appoint a more obedient figure as the head of the Palestinian National Authority, an international Arabic publication’s website revealed on Wednesday night. The internet site of Al-Qanat, quoting diplomatic sources in Washington, revealed that the United States is planning for replacement of the Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, with the current head of the Palestinian National Parliament, Ahmad Qoraia.
Rights Group Calls for Investigation into Killing of Palestinian Father, Wounding of His Son Thursday
A rights group said that Israeli special forces raided the home of a Palestinian family in the Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, killing a father and wounding his son. The group called for an immediate investigation into the killing, although Israel refuses to investigate the killing of Palestinians on the hands of its soldiers.
Israeli Soldier, Due to Receive Medal, Boasts About Bulldozing Palestinian Home on Top of its Residents
The Alternative Information Center translated the words of an Israeli occupation soldier, from an engineering platoon, scheduled to receive the medal of honor awarded to twelve soldiers who participated in the Jenin refugee camp massacre and the destruction of the old city of Nablus.
TAC: 'Medal's of honor' for the murdering thugs of the IDF and their brutal 'handiwork' committed at Jenin?!
TAC: Any spare medal's of Honor in the Whitehouse safe--they might run short in Israel Mr. President!
TheAZCowBoy,
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