THE GAZA CONCENTRATION CAMP
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THE GAZA CONCENTRATION CAMP

April 27, 2001

MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/26: Over the years the Israelis have essentially turned The Gaza Strip from a Ghetto to a kind of Concentration Camp. In this small area today live more than 1 million Palestinians, a large number of whom have never been able to leave and reenter. Today the Gaza Strip is fully surrounded by an electrified fence with all entrances and exits controlled by the Israelis military. Call it an Israeli created Warsaw Ghetto, if you will, complete with a kind of kapo internal "VIP" police force today known as the "Palestinian Authority". Tragically, it is through the use of this "Palestinian Authority" imagery in fact that the Israelis have been able to further implement their approach to the Palestinians of which Gaza is in a sense the model -- the creation of isolated and surrounded concentration camps pocketing the landscape; the "autonomous Population Centers" supposedly "agreed" to at Oslo by the very Palestinian negotiators who today are the "VIPs".

FACES OF GAZA

by Charmaine Seitz

DUSTY, POOR and crowded, the Gaza Strip is not an easy place to live. But in recent weeks, a new hardship has set in. Indiscriminate Israeli shooting, the razing of entire neighborhoods and a slash-and-burn blighting of wide swaths of landscape are making life unbearable. The only thing growing here is a new Israeli matrix of control.

Hungry to live

"We were sleeping in our houses," remembers Sara Abu Khreik, 43. "At around 11:30, the Israelis started shooting at us with the tanks and machine guns and their big shells. At around 12, we found the tanks and bulldozers coming at us and they started to demolish the home on top of us. At that moment, we grabbed the children. We had about 30 seconds. The planes were flying overhead and from every direction the guns were working on us. We left without our scarves, without any covering. It came as a surprise, just like that."

In the rubble lie the intimate pieces of a previous life. A cracked cassette tape. The torn poster of a beautiful singer named Latifa once decorated a young man's wall. The color green surprises me. It is a modest flower garden, perennials now flattened into the sandy earth.

I found Sara in her tent, sitting alone. But as she began to talk about the night Israeli tanks and bulldozers invaded Khan Younis Refugee Camp, others gathered. They are all eager to speak.

Sara, for one, remembers when Israel first occupied Gaza in 1967. "They came with tanks and they were holding the Palestinian flag. I was about 10 years old. But even then, they did not do what they are doing now. They occupied us, but they didn't demolish our homes, they were not shooting at our children or killing our men. Then we stayed in our homes. This is a war against a civilian population. They are firing on a people who have no tanks or missiles. What is a rock against a tank?"

Israel said it invaded this area under Palestinian Authority control to destroy a sand hill built by Palestinians, along with these homes. Palestinian shooters were using the hill for cover. The residents, here, however, say the barrier was meant to protect children from the frequent gunfire.

"In the night, the kids have nightmares of shooting. In the day, they have nightmares of shooting. When you sit and listen to what the children are talking about, they are saying to each other, 'Today they shelled; today they shot guns; today they demolished; today they bulldozed.' How much are our people supposed to endure?" Sara asks.

The walls of the nearby buildings are pocked with bullet holes and gaping shell wounds. One man holds up a pair of pants that were hanging on his wall when he fled. They are now pierced with holes.

The residents say that before the mass demolition, Israeli undercover operatives sometimes entered the camp. When they were fired on by Palestinians, the tanks in the nearby Israeli military encampment hit the residential area with heavy artillery. Now some 500 people have lost their homes.

"We were all living in five rooms," Sara says of her family of 14 young ones. "We had a television, a washer, a refrigerator. There were wedding photos on the wall and photos of the children, and one of a verse from the Koran."

The Palestinian Authority donated Sara's family an apartment of two rooms that she says is just too small. "The thing that I miss most is just being in my own house with my kids."

Her neighbor, Ahmad Hasan Lauwish, 31, enters the tent. His voice loud, his hands erratic, he is still dazed by what happened that night.

"I was inside my house, sleeping. From 11:30 to 3:45, I was in the house. People said they were demolishing, but I thought, the Israelis are not going to destroy it. I didn't believe that the government would do it. I didn't believe it at all.

"Then the light from the bulldozer woke me up. It was like the sun and I woke up swearing and the bulldozer came bearing down on me. I started to yell, 'Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.' I went in the other room to try to grab a box, but I couldn't. I tried to go in the kitchen to grab something, but I couldn't. Finally, I went to the door again, but the tank was right there. There was dust and fog and they started to shoot at me."

All he managed to save were his wife and his child - he wasn't even wearing a shirt on his back, he says. "Since that day, I have been sick. Everything is gone. You tell [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to bring his tanks, his bulldozers, his planes, his missiles. We are not moving."

I wonder out loud how they are living. "We are not hungry for food," says Sara, although there is no sign of food or drink anywhere. "We are hungry for humans to stand with us for our rights and for freedom. We are hungry to live."

Laying waste

It is impossible to adequately describe the effects of Israeli troop movements in the Gaza Strip. The few years of economic growth under the Palestinian Authority had reaped new architecture, paved roads and streets lined with flowering trees.

Now, however, the Gaza Strip from its center to its northern and southern tips has been ravaged by Israeli bulldozers, the building of new military compounds and a series of demolitions and bombardments decimating entire neighborhoods and creating a new Israeli network for reasserting the Israeli occupation.

Since the start of the Intifada, the Israeli military has been in complete control of the main road separating Gaza City from Khan Younis, Rafah and all points south. At Kfar Darom settlement, two Israeli cement block outposts about one kilometer apart stop and start Palestinian traffic, ostensibly to allow passage for Israeli settlers and army vehicles. As far as the eye can see, the land has been razed clean and military hardware sprouts in its place.

Cars queue before these checkposts, waiting for a gesture from the hands sticking out of a skinny slot. The Israeli soldiers directing traffic are nearly invisible behind the high barricades.

When our taxi reaches the second Israeli post on the way to Khan Younis, the driver is unsure if the hands waved him on. He waits, then inches forward. Guns are trained on us from the right. On the left at a newly built army facility, a mounted machine gun turns towards us in the wind.

He stops, then nervously asks us if he should keep going. He drifts a few more inches. In front of us a long line of cars waits to run the gauntlet, their drivers looking on.

"Move it," the soldier screams through the megaphone. Relieved, the taxi driver revs ahead. Human-sized cement blocks line the dusty road until we reach the sandbagged Palestinian security camp on the other side.

Coming the other way, the cars stretch for miles. Some drivers have fallen asleep, their heads slouched and sweating over the steering wheel. Young men stand outside the cars, lounging in the heat as if at a Sunday car wash. Eyes watch us pass in envy, tired and wan.

On April 18, Israel drew international criticism when it invaded three areas of the Gaza Strip under Palestinian control, moving tens of tanks into thin swathes separating Palestinian population centers. While the army did not stay - hours later, the tanks were in retreat - it left vast devastation in its wake. The incursion that permeated the boundaries agreed upon in peace accords drew a swift American response. But the damage that the army continues to wreak in entry-and-exit operations has not drawn similar condemnation.

In only one example, in between Deir Al Balah and Gaza City, Israeli bulldozers have razed a 30-meter wide strip of land from the edge of the Gaza Strip down to the sea. Trees, houses, anything in the way has been reduced to a dusty path for re-invasion at a later date.

The Israeli army says that its bulldozing of the landscape is meant to destroy cover for Palestinian shooters or those that have fired mortars at Israeli towns. But the visual impact of this newly carved wasteland seems also meant to destroy the Palestinian spirit at its roots - through the land.

Israeli "rules of engagement"

Salah-Al-Din Gate in Rafah is right on the Egyptian-Gaza border. At the end of a long dusty street, the Palestinian- Israeli flashpoint looks like the set of an old western. Men sit sipping tea before empty storefronts. The street's unprotected center is empty. At its end, are two lines of sandbags and three uniformed Palestinian security men. In the distance, I can hear the persistent cannon of an Israeli tank.

Three men sit on a stoop. Their clothes are worn and one of them has teeth the color of brown apples. They are also eager to talk to me, an unexpected distraction. A woman passes, carrying a bag of rice on her head. At their prodding, I ask her if she has heard the news that a bomb has exploded in Tel Aviv, killing one Israeli. What does she think?

"I was happy," Huda Kesar, 28, tells me, "because it happened to the Israelis. We have nothing else left."

Two days after Khan Younis was destroyed, the Israeli army began to shell Rafah, targeting the nearby offices of Palestinian military intelligence. Then the tanks and bulldozers moved in to raze 17 houses and 40 stores in an area under Palestinian Authority control. One hundred and sixty-eight Palestinians, refugees and long-time Rafah landowners, were made homeless in the operation.

"The Jews, they are the problem," says one man who will not give his name for fear of losing any chance of work in Israel. "They don't want us to live. They don't want to live with us. They want to take the land and take the ocean, but they don't want us. We are human. Here you see respectable people, people like them. They have to speak to their government and say they don't want problems with us." He has not worked in seven months.

Khalil Abdul Al, 20, steps forward. He is a slight young man with freckles and a firm voice. His uncle was the Islamic Jihad activist killed by two Israeli helicopter missiles last week.

"In our opinion," he tells me. "We do not start the firing. Right now you might hear gunfire from them, without any provocation. We have to defend ourselves." There are no guns in view here, but the people assure me that they each have personal weapons for the nights when they are necessary.

To see the areas that have been leveled, we must walk up close to the sandbags. The three security officers are tall, their mustaches trimmed and their clothes pressed. They sit with their guns on plastic chairs. But they do not want to talk. Aren't they frightened? I ask. The man in charge smiles kindly at my entourage. "If we are afraid, what will they do?"

Inside the camp, we follow the gutters of raw sewage past children playing in the dirt. Finally, we reach a house only half destroyed in the recent attack. From the door, I can see a wooden chest of drawers sagging in the bedroom. The kitchen has been sliced open by a bulldozer. Only one internal wall remains standing and behind it is the Israeli military camp.

"Go look," the woman says. I refuse. Yesterday in Rafah, a journalist from Abu Dhabi satellite channel was shot in the leg by Israeli soldiers while waving her notebook over her head. The boys agree, saying, "They might shoot."

"No, come," the woman says firmly. "This is my house."

She steps out in front of the wall in direct view of the Israeli base. Gently, she takes my arm and pulls me toward her. How then, can I tell her no? I see the Israeli position no more than 20 meters away, then quickly step back behind the wall.

"We are not afraid of their shelling, we are not afraid of their tanks, we are not afraid of Sharon and we were not afraid of Menachem Begin," says Ihsan Abu Fakhour, 55. She is adamant. "This is our land. Whatever Sharon does, we are not afraid. The important thing is that we will not leave. That's it."

Twelve tents sit on the other side of the camp where most of the houses were demolished. These people here have not been given Palestinian Authority homes. Like Khan Younis, the buildings still standing are pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. And again, in the sea of rubble lie the scattered remains of these people's lives.

As we walk back on to the main street, I see two boys walking tightrope over the sandbag barriers. They are not throwing rocks, only twirling on their toes and showing off. Passing under them, I and several others duck below the heights of the sandbags to cross the street. Suddenly, through the air cracks a rifle. The bullet whistles just over our heads. - Published by Palestine Report, April 25.


April 2001


Magazine



ARAB-AMERICANS - PATHETIC STATE OF AFFAIRS
(April 30, 2001)
Regular readers of MER won't be all that surprised; though many others will be, especially those who misguidedly and in many cases sincerely give their money, support, and most of all their hopes to these pathetic groups.

THE DARK SIDE OF ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE Day
(April 30, 2001)
Leave it to the Arab Americans to screw things up all the time. As the iconoclastic Israel writer Israel Shamir said as he prematurely departed American shores a few days ago: "With such Palestinian activists, who needs the Israeli lobby?"

ABDULLAH AND THE CIA - LONG HISTORICAL CONSPIRACY AGAINST PALESTINIANS
(April 30, 2001)
The Israelis and the Americans are busy using the Mubarak Regime in Egypt and the Hashemite Regime in Jordan in an increasingly desperate attempt to quash Intifada II and create still more years for the Israelis to consolidate and make permanent their grip on the Palestinians.

WAR MACHINES ON THE MARCH - MER FLASHBACK
(April 29, 2001)
Before the Second Intifada began, before last year's aborted Camp David fiasco, before this year's sweeping victory of Ariel Sharon and the attempt to then position Ehud Barak as Defense Minister, MER was already writing about what was to come while most of the media was sidetracked with and seduced by "the peace process."

THE "APARTHEID PEACE" REMAINS THE GAME BEING PLAYED
(April 28, 2001)
They -- the same personalities representing the same countries that created this "Apartheid Peace" and its resultant intensified uprising against it -- are at it again.

THE SLAUGHTER IN ALGERIA
(April 28, 2001)
This book contains shocking testimony about what is happening inside a country where, according to reliable estimates, more than 150,000 of its citizens have been slaughtered during the past decade.

THE ARAB AMERICAN and JEWISH AMERICAN SCENES
(April 27, 2001)
You gotta love all these scams that so many so tragically so often fall for -- especially the confused and naive Arab Americans.

THE GAZA CONCENTRATION CAMP
(April 27, 2001)
Over the years the Israelis have essentially turned The Gaza Strip from a Ghetto to a kind of Concentration Camp. In this small area today live more than 1 million Palestinians, a large number of whom have never been able to leave and reenter.

ARAFAT'S ESCAPE PLAN - MER FLASHBACK
(April 26, 2001)
More than $100 million dollars in a secret bank account set up by the Israelis and designed to make it possible for Arafat and friends to flee a coup and set up a "government in exile"?

SHA'ATH and PERES DESERVE EACH OTHER -- BUT HOW TRAGIC FOR THE PALESTINIANS
(April 26, 2001)
Sharon is sending Peres to Cairo, and Sha'ath visiting Sweden says there is a "crack in the wall of darkensss."

BERKELEY STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD
(April 25, 2001)
With the total failure of the Arab American organizations at the national level, and of course provoked now by an Intifada II that is half a year old and the election of Ariel Sharon as PM in Israel, the grassroots are finally stirring a little, students in the lead as at other times in history.

CASINO FIRST!
(April 25, 2001)
In the old days of Intifada I Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres were busy pursuing their "Gaza First" strategy. It was never presented, but always designed, as a kind of trap for the Palestinians; and it was continually rejected by the Palestinian negotiating team that went to Madrid and then Washington, headed by Dr. Haider Abdul-Shafi.

Washington Scene: THE TRAGIC STATE OF ARAB AMERICAN AFFAIRS
(April 25, 2001)
Three things this week underscored the pathetically tragic state of affairs for the Arab American community which remains, well, politically retarded and as a result miserably weak...not to mention oh so co-opted and manipulated.

ISRAEL & TURKEY - MAJOR MILITARY ALLIANCE
(April 25, 2001)
While the misnomered "peace process" continues to dominate the news, arms continue to flood into the Middle East region and possible war preparations are underway.

SHIMON PERES - NOW HOLOCAUST DENIER!
(April 23, 2001)
For the past few years we have mentioned the great importance of the new military axis in the Middle East that adds Turkey's size and power to the U.S.-Israeli alliance that dominates and controls the region.

ARAFAT'S TRAVEL NOW RESTRICTED - MAYBE ON PURPOSE?
(April 23, 2001)
The front-page Washington Post article over the weekend about what the Israelis are up to helps reveal what the new General in charge of the Israeli Army, Ariel Sharon, is attempting to accomplish.

BLOODY SUNDAY AS SIX BOMBS ROCK ISRAEL, GAZA
(April 22, 2001)
Two explosions hit Israel over the space of several hours, and four bombs were detonated in Gaza City which is under Palestinian control.

TERROR IN TEL AVIV TODAY AS US PREPARES FOR BIOLOGICAL ATTACK
(April 22, 2001)
Like so many things in life, terror is a two-edged sword. No doubt the Israelis will use today's bomb blast in Tel Aviv to still further clamp down on and try to choke the Palestinians into submission.

ISRAEL'S ETHNIC CLEANSING SECRETS
(April 21, 2001)
Israel's prime minister-elect, in the throes of forming a new government, is known to be a militant nationalist. Ariel Sharon's view of history is that the Zionists unequivocally have justice on their side in the conflict over what is known to Jews as the Land of Israel and to Palestinians as Palestine.

HISTORIC JEWISH STATEMENT SUPPORTING PALESTINIAN INTIFADA
(April 21, 2001)
Two months after the first Palestinian Intifada began in December 1987, a group of professionals, all American Jews including many professors and lawyers, joined together to publish as a full page ad in THE NATION Magazine of 13 February 1988 this historic statement: "Time To Dissociate From Israel"

ARAB AMERICANS STILL TERRIBLY WEAK
(April 20, 2001)
Three things this week underscored the pathetically tragic state of affairs for the Arab American community which remains, well, politically retarded and as a result miserably weak...not to mention oh so co-opted and manipulated.

FROM THE FRONT
(April 19, 2001)
Attempts by Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, to crush Palestinian violence by adopting still harsher military tactics came to nought last night, after guerrillas in the Gaza Strip fired more mortars into Israel, and one of the worst battles for months erupted on the edge of Bethlehem.

MUBARAK - MORE FRIGHTENED THAN ANGRY OR CREDIBLE
(April 19, 2001)
They use to call him the "laughing cow". Anwar Sadat made him Vice-President thinking he'd never really have to worry much about him. And he himself has never made anyone Vice-President fearing any and everyone.

QANA MASSACRE - 5TH ANNIVERSARY
(April 18, 2001)
It was only four years ago; but already it has been mostly forgotten -- the terrible Qana Massacre in southern Lebanon, and the atrocious cover-up by Israel, the U.S. and the U.N. that followed.

QANA REMEMBERED
(April 18, 2001)
It was five years ago today that hundreds of civilians under U.N. protection in southern Lebanon were brutally killed or maimed by the Israeli Army. With Shimon Peres then Prime Minister after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israelis desperately tried to cover it all up and pretend it was just a mistake of war.

LATEST NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
(April 17, 2001)
With a heavy rocket barrage, Israel seized nearly a square mile of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, retaking Palestinian-controlled territory for the first time since 1994 in retaliation for a mortar attack on a small Israeli desert town.

ROBERT FISK SPEAKS UP OH SO THOUGHTFULLY AND COURAGEOUSLY
(April 17, 2001)
The famous American Jewish iconoclastic journalist Izzy Stone (I.F.Stone) once told me over a long dinner in my apartment that the role of real and serious journalists in our day and age needed to be "to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted."

ISRAEL STRIKES STILL HARDER, IMPOTENT ARAB "CLIENT REGIMES" COWER
(April 17, 2001)
We shouldn't be surprised what the Israelis are doing. Ehud Barak may have hesitated, but after all in the end both he and Shimon Peres publicly gave their endorsements to Ariel Sharon and Sharon has been warning and threatening to do just such things for a very long time.

HASHEMITES CONTINUE TO COLLABORATE
(April 16, 2001)
Today the Jordanian Foreign Minister goes to Israel even as Israeli bombs kill Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians and the whole region is being humbled and shaken by the Israeli Generals, accused war criminal Ariel Sharon now in charge.

CIA BUGS ARAFAT AND ALL P.A. LEADERSHIP
(April 14, 2001)
Arafat has been paid a very great amount of money for the deals he signed in Washington, Cairo, Sharm, Hebron, et. al. He, his family (the Tawils), and top cronies like Nabil Shaath, Abu Mazen, et. al., now have hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts as a result.

EPILOGUE TO A DECADE - A SERIOUS ISRAELI ANALYSIS
(April 14, 2001)
From what would usually be called the far far left in Israel and whose voice is rarely heard these days beyond their own circles -- but which we would term the serious, sophisticated, highly committed and principled Israeli intelligentsia -- there is a magazine published every other month called "Challenge".

EASTER IN THE "HOLY LAND"
(April 13, 2001)
Two thousand years ago on the ancient streets of Jerusalem it was the Roman army in control, the Jewish people under occupation, and Jesus, a heretical Jewish rabbi, heading to his crucifixation as a result of "official" Jewish and Roman cooperation.

DEATH MY REMOTE CONTROL AS HIT SQUADES RETURN
(April 13, 2001)
Israel's strategy has always been to overwhelm and suffocate the Palestinians. At various times different tactics have been used ranging from diplomacy to brutality, from talk of "Statehood" to the imposition of neo-Apartheid.

ISRAELI ARMY ON THE RAMPAGE
(April 12, 2001)
A seven-year-old Palestinian girl was shot in the face by an Israeli rubber bullet while at school in the West Bank village of al-Khader when clashes broke out nearby, medical sources said.

IT'S WAR, MURDER, ASSASSINATIONS AND BEATINGS
(April 12, 2001)
With Robert Fisk, based out of Beirut and the longest serving Western journalist in the region, and Phil Reeves among the Palestinians and the Israelis, The Independent is usually heads above the English rest in both its coverage and analysis.

ISRAELIS ATTACK EVEN MORE BOLDLY
(April 11, 2001)
The Israelis won't be returning to "Zone A"; why should they? After all one of the major goals of the Madrid-Oslo "Peace Process" was to get the Palestinians into isolated and controlled "autonomous population centers" and let them fend for themselves.

ISRAEL BEGINS MINI INVASION STRATEGY
(April 11, 2001)
The Israelis have changed Generals, and the new master General Ariel Sharon is doing things his way. But then nearly everyone else among the Israeli elite has lined up right behind him.

ABDULLAH - KING OF JORDAN, AGENT OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS
(April 11, 2001)
Abdullah II, ruler of Jordan, once called TransJordan, once called the East Bank of Palestine, is once again in Washington. The pattern is all too familiar.

ISRAELIS START USING GROUND TO GROUND MISSILES TO ATTACK PALESTINIANS
(April 10, 2001)
Starting yesterday, and for the first time in the occupied territories against the Palestinians, the Israelies have begun to use surface to surface missiles. In doing so the Israelis are once again throwing down the gauntlet to the entire Arab and Muslim world.

RACISM, MILITARISM, NEO-NAZISM IN THE "JEWISH STATE"
(April 10, 2001)
Racism, militarism, and a peculiar form of Israeli neo-Nazism thrives in today "Jewish State". Harsh conclusions, true; but buttressed by considerable evidence, both factual and ideological.

"VOICE OF AMERICA" EXPANDING TOWARDS CRUCIAL MIDDLE EAST
(April 9, 2001)
Just a few years ago, after the original Camp David agreement in 1978, the joke around Cairo was that the "Voice of America" was really all those loud muffler-broken U.S-supplied buses helping choke, or unchoke depending on your perspective, Cairo's teeming streets.

BARAK AND SHARON PLAN NEXT WAR
(April 9, 2001)
Long before anyone even thought Ariel Sharon might become Israeli Prime Minister... Long before anyone even thought Shimon Peres would serve as Sharon's Foreign Minister... While the "Peace Process" and plans for "Camp David II" were riding high... MER was writing about the coming war being planned by Generals Barak and Sharon in tandem.

DEIR YASSIN REMEMBERED AND "THE QUILT"
(April 8, 2001)
"It's so unfair... After 50 years the Israelis have nuclear weapons, the Mossad, Hollywood, a kosher White House, and their own Assistant Secretary of State; while the Arabs have corruption, secret-police, pathetic Arab- American organizations, Arafat, and the 50th anniversary quilt!"

THE PATHETIC ARAFAT - GIVER AND BEGGAR
(April 8, 2001)
This guy Arafat, and those who advise him, are truly getting ore pathetic all the time. We now learn that while his people suffer even worse than before as a result of what he and his cronies have done, and not done, Arafat has been busy giving expensive jewelry gifts to the former American President, First Lady, and Secretary of State (and no doubt there is a larger list!).

PASSOVER IN THE TIME OF THE INTIFADA
(April 8, 2001)
"I have been invited to a neighbor's Seder this year, and in my fantasy I have thought that I would rather sit on a box at home by myself in the dark with my face to the wall for the length of time the Seder lasts, out of a mixture of shame and protest against Israel's denial of freedom to her Palestinian neighbors."

THE LAST PASSOVER
(April 7, 2001)
"Is this the last Passover that I will celebrate? My heart is not in the celebration this year. And it can never be again until freedom for Jews is also freedom for Palestinians."

THE NEXT EXPULSION OF THE PALESTINIANS?
(April 7, 2001)
The effect of the four-month-old al-Aqsa intifada has been to radicalize and polarize all sides and thus the current situation poses a great danger to the Palestinian people.

ISRAELIS AND U.S. CONGRESS POUND PALESTINIANS
(April 6, 2001)
What is happening now is the result of all the past years of ineptitude, corruption, stupidities, and mistakes by the the various Arab "client regimes", Yasser Arafat's included of course, as well as from the various "client organizations" allied with them, especially in the US.

ISRAELIS BUILD, AMERICANS DECEIVE, ARABS WINK AND HIDE
(April 6, 2001)
This little game has gone on quite literally for decades now. The Israelis twist and turn, delay and obfuscate, but all the while push forward. The Americans say one thing and do another, and when the going gets hot they provide a little criticism of Israel for the Arab media but reserve the important things that really matter for ongoing and escalating cooperation with the Israelis.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 4
(April 5, 2001)
This time they are going to march down a largely weekend deserted street in New York City, after gathering at a closed Israeli Consulate, to listen to a group of largely unknown speakers familiar only to themselves, with no strategy other than to gather among themselves to listen to themselves and to be able to say for themselves that they are doing something important...

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AGAINST TOP THREE ARAFAT PEOPLE?
(April 5, 2001)
Believing the official Israelis is all but impossible at this point; so one has to do the best one can to put together the pieces in ways that make sense. What happened yesterday was probably not an actual assassination attempt -- if that's what the Israelis wanted to do to these three they have the capabilities to do so and not to miss.

THE JORDANIAN POLICE STATE
(April 4, 2001)
About five days before the convening of the Arab Summit in Amman, dozens of masked security men armed to the teeth, along with officers of the Intelligence service (mukhabarat), stormed the house of Siajj Said Daraghmeh near Jabri on the Gardens Street in Amman.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 3
(April 4, 2001)
Saturday a few thousand Arab Americans are planning to make it to Washington "demanding" the "Right of Return" for Palestinian refugees. What should one think about this?

"RIGHT OF RETURN" CONF A "DISASTER" - PART 2
(April 3, 2001)
The region itself has corrupt and incompetent "client regimes", now including that of Yasser Arafat. And that explains a great deal why such an important and rich part of the world with over 200 million people is so regularly humbled and bleeding.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 1
(April 3, 2001)
This year the selected slogan for Arab Americans is "the Right of Return". A couple of years ago at the time of the 50th anniversary of the 1948 war -- the "nakba", the "disaster" -- the slogan was "the Quilt".

"INVASION" PREPARATIONS AS MUBARAK COMES COLLECTING
(April 2, 2001)
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has come to Washington once again. His visits have become customary to in a sense collect his allowance and meet with his new American keepers, which are in fact really the old Bush crowd he is very familiar with.

PERES 'MORE AGGRESSIVE' THAN SHARON
(April 2, 2001)
"Peres is more aggressive than I am, (said Sharon). "Peres responded (to the Cabinet), "Yes, he had to restrain me this time."

PLOT TO KILL ARAFAT'S TOP PEOPLE
(April 1, 2001)
Yesterday the Senior U.S. Senator from New York, Chuck Shumer, went before the Washington cameras to denounce Yasser Arafat as a "terrorist" and demand he comply with U.S./Israeli dictate or else.

ANOTHER ARAB SUMMIT COMES AND GOES
(April 1, 2001)
If the demonstrators going to the Palestinian Rally in New York next weekend had any guts, and any smarts, after they gather at the Israeli Consulate they would move on and conduct their serious shouting where the Arab Ambassadors and the Arab League hang their sorry hats.




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