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AN AFFRONT TO CIVILISATION
May 13, 2001
"AN AFFRONT TO CIVILISATION"
Without international pressure on Israel,
the shameful humiliation of Palestinians
will continue
By Ian Gilmour
[The Observer, UK - 13 May 2001]:
I was on my way to Khan Yunis, a desperately poor
Palestinian refugee town in the Gaza Strip, when we
learned it was under heavy bombardment. Please, urged
my Palestinian guides, could I postpone my visit to
the next day? Although I thought it unlikely I would
suffer the same fate as the four-month-old baby,
blown to pieces that morning by the Israeli army, I
agreed.
The next day, seeing houses that had, without any
warning, been bulldozed in the middle of the night by
the Israeli army and then talking to their former
inhabitants, now huddled in tents, was a haunting
experience.
And Khan Yunis is not untypical. A ruthless colonial
war is being waged throughout the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank, the territories occupied by Israel since
1967. I also happened to be in Beit Jalla the previous
day, when the Israelis reoccupied and demolished a
section of this Christian suburb of Bethlehem. The
Israeli army of occupation has the overwhelming
superiority of a nineteenth-century imperial power.
'We have got the Maxim Gun,' sang Hilaire Belloc, 'and
they have not.' The modern equivalent of the Maxim gun
for mowing down 'the natives' is the American-made
Apache helicopter and a plethora of other hi-tech
weaponry.
And since, as Yasser Arafat perhaps wistfully told me,
the Palestinians 'don't have helicopter gunships,
tanks or gunboats', General Mofaz, the Israeli
commander, is able not only to destroy buildings and
kill Palestinian fighters and unarmed civilians in any
quantities he wants, but also to impose collective
punishments and to make life intolerable for the
entire population.
In addition, on the pretext of security, Mofaz is
laying waste some of the best Palestinian soil. I saw
acres and acres of uprooted olive and fruit trees,
some of them in places where there could be no
possible security excuse. Israelis used to boast that
they had made the desert bloom; now they can boast
they have turned previously blooming Palestinian land
into a desert.
But why, it may be asked, are 'the natives' restive?
And is it not their own fault, for were they not
offered a very 'generous' deal at Camp David last
autumn? To take the second question first, the claim
that Mr Barak made a generous offer at Camp David has
become the reigning orthodoxy. But it is a myth. The
alleged generosity involved derisory terms on
Jerusalem and would have kept most of Israel's major
illegal settlements in place, turning the areas
assigned to the Palestinians into a series of
mini-Bantustans, and making the resulting Palestinian
state unviable.
For instance, this 'state' would have been deprived of
almost any water, as all the West Bank aquifers were
to be annexed by Israel. Had Nelson Mandela accepted
such an offer from apartheid South Africa, he would
have been reviled as a traitor. And if Yasser Arafat
had accepted the Camp David offer, he would have been
similarly execrated.
Not only did the Palestinians, partly through their
own negligence, suffer a public-relations disaster at
Camp David, they helped to unify Israel behind a
hardline policy by the way they talked, understandably
but unwisely, about the right of return for the
refugees whom Israel expelled in 1948. Their return
would effectively mean the abolition of the state of
Israel. Yet an Israeli admission that they were
ill-treated and entitled to compensation is perfectly
feasible and long overdue.
The answer to the first question is that the natives
are restive because they are fed up with 34 years of
brutal occupation. They want the right of
self-determination and they now realise that they have
been double-crossed. Israel's pre-1967 frontiers
already give her 78 per cent of Palestinian territory,
which seems quite a lot. The Oslo agreement was meant
to establish an irreversible process whereby Israel
exchanged the Palestinian land she had occupied since
1967 for peace. Instead, Israel has done the opposite.
Because of what the former Israeli Minister, Shulamit
Aloni, has called Israel's 'unrestrained greed', it
has, since Oslo, doubled the number of illegal settlers.
Ariel Sharon continually denounces Palestinian
'terrorism' and 'violence', forgetting, no doubt, that
his own record of terrorism and violence is, as the
police used to say, as long as your arm. To take just
its high points. In 1953, he and his subordinates
bravely massacred 69 Jordanian villagers, including 46
women and children. In 1982, he engineered the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon and killed hundreds of civilians
by his bombing of Beirut.
Finally, there were the massacres of Sabra and
Shatila, for which an Israeli commission found Sharon
'remiss in his duties'. The Cabinet voted to remove
him from his ministry by a vote of 16 to one
(himself). Since then, Sharon has consistently
favoured the violent option and always tried to block
any progress towards peace.
Of course, there has been terrorism on the other side.
All Palestinian violence within Israel proper is
terrorism and the Hamas suicide bombings are
atrocities. Furthermore, not only are they suicidal
for the actual bombers, they are suicidal for the
Palestinian cause. Very understandably, they unite
Israelis against Palestinians. Many Israelis take a
different attitude to Palestinian violence in the
occupied territories. They have little love for the
settlers, and they recognise that most (though not
all) Palestinian violence in the territories is not
'terrorism' but justified resistance to armed
occupation. All the same, a non-violent intifada would
have been far better for the cause, but Barak's lethal
reaction to unarmed demonstrators in its first three
days made that impossible.
Israel's illegal settlements on the West Bank are bad
enough, but the ones in the Gaza Strip are an affront
to civilisation. The Israeli army and some 1,000
settlers occupy some 40 per cent of the Strip and take
about the same percentage of the water, thus leaving
only 60 per cent for no fewer than 1,100,000
Palestinians. I very much doubt if there is, even in
the murkiest annals of nineteenth-century colonialism,
a remotely comparable instance of imperial arrogance
and contemptuous regard for the rights of subject people.
No wonder many decent Israelis want to end this
intolerable situation. The former Minister, Haim
Ramon, recently said that as soon as there is a
ceasefire, Israel and all the settlers should leave
the Strip. That is, indeed, the only respectable
solution.
The settlements are the nub of the matter, as the
US-appointed commission, chaired by George Mitchell,
made clear last week. Without a complete halt to
settlement expansion, there will be no end to the
violence now, and without the removal of most of them
there will be no peace in the future. As senior
Israeli politicians privately admit, pressure from the
US and Europe is the only way to stop Sharon creating
unlimited havoc and doing irrevocable damage to
whatever chances of peace still exist. |
May 2001
FEISAL HUSSEINI - DEAD AT 60 IN KUWAIT (May 31, 2001) Feisal Husseini will be buried tomorrow in Jerusalem with great circumstance.
However whatever else he was, and many think he was a good and committed man, he
was a fairly simple man and he certainly was not a great man.
SHARON SHOULD SURRENDER TO HISTORY (May 25, 2001)
Like many nation states born out
of war, Israel must re-evaluate
its past in order to move forward,
argues Mark Mazower*
THE GAZA GHETTO/PRISON (May 25, 2001) The "Gaza Strip" is a huge ghetto; created of course by the Israelis. In a sense it is also the largest prison in the world as the great majority of those who reside in Gaza are unable to leave and return through any of the handful of Israeli army checkposts which control who comes and goes.
APARTHEID ISRAEL (May 24, 2001) "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our
enemies -- not just in ability but in morality, culture,
sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our
neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance
of a few hundred meters away, there are people
who do not belong to our continent, to our
world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."
WATER WARS (May 24, 2001) In the end its not really the "settlements" that will determine which civilization will prosper in the once Holy Land now so fought over by the descendants of Abraham. Control and use of WATER is even more at the heart of the conflict between the two competing societies.
CONTINUE THE INTIFADA (May 23, 2001) It's a terrible deal for the Palestinians actually -- they expected to give up their very justifiable struggle against the occupier in exchange for another promise to "freeze settlements". Gee...it was just last year that Yasser Arafat was proclaiming ad infinitum that no matter what there would be a Palestinian State by the end of the year!
WHAT THE "MITCHELL COMMISSION REPORT" REALLY SAYS (May 23, 2001) "Here's your lifeline Yasser, Nabil, Jabril, and all you Palestinian VIPs -- and you better grab it because it may be the last one you get".
THE MITCHELL COMMISSION REPORT -- A LONG SORDID HISTORY (May 22, 2001) The big fix is on of course with the "Mitchell Commission Report". Other madmen desperately scampering from one TV studio to the next are "Ambassador" Dennis Ross, now back at the Israeli/Jewish lobby from whence he came, and of course Senator Mitchell, himself retired from the most pro-Israeli political body on the planet ...
ARAFAT AND THE WORLD FORCED TO DANCE TO SHARON'S WAR TUNES (May 21, 2001) The Israelis are pushing their lies, schemes, deceptions, and brutality more than ever these days. It's all designed of course to demoralize and confuse the Palestinians, to twist and torture them into submission.
BREAKING NEWS - RAJOUB HIT (May 20, 2001) Jibril Rajoub is a favorite of the CIA, the headquarters of which he has personally visited numerous times in recent years on his visits to Washington. His force is the main one trained by the CIA in order to keep the Arafat Regime in power ...
TRUE MARTYRDOM (May 20, 2001) Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash -- 21 and now departed -- never knew anything other than Israel's brutal military occupation. He never knew anything other than Arab "client regimes" and the Arafat "Authority". He never knew anything other than a savage Israeli army, fueled by an increasingly racist ideology, armed and financed by America.
ISRAEL - APARTHEID IN THE MIDDLE EAST (May 20, 2001) A little trip back in history's lane will result in all kinds of close connections between Israel and South Africa in the days of Apartheid. And during that trip one will discover that Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin were at the top of the list of those promoting those relations.
THE ARAB AMERICANS and their "CLIENT ORGANIZATIONS" (May 19, 2001) There are many desperate and depressed people out there these days, especially among Palestinians, their friends, and the Jewish left that is mortified to awaken to find itself with Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister, the hoped for salvation of the Oslo "Peace Process" destroyed, and one of their false prophets, Shimon Peres, at Sharon's side.
SUICIDE BOMB, ISRAELI AIR STRIKES CAUSE NEW CARNAGE (May 18, 2001) A suicide bombing followed by
retaliatory Israeli air strikes killed 16 people and injured 200 on Friday
in one of the bloodiest days since a Palestinian uprising erupted nearly
eight months ago.
ISRAEL'S ARMY - A NEW, PERHAPS DANGERSOUS, FREEDOM (May 18, 2001) TRIGGER-HAPPY troops set loose? Questions about the
response of Israeli soldiers facing Palestinian demonstrators
are being asked, and not just by Palestinians. But suspicions
about individual behaviour are less relevant than the clear fact
that the army, given its head by Ariel Sharon, has made a
deliberate decision ...
SEVEN KILLED, OVER 50 INJURED IN SUICIDE BOMB ATTACK (May 18, 2001) A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the Hasharon
shopping mall in the center of the coastal town of Netanya at around 11.30
A.M on Friday morning. Seven people were killed in the blast, one of them
most likely the bomber himself.
ISRAELI ARMY ON THE RAMPAGE (May 17, 2001) The Israelis are more and more specifically targeting children, journalists, and Palestinians at all levels. The goal is to create such fear, such intimidation, such apprehension, that ...
MORE BLOOD AND MEMORIES FLOW ON "DISASTER DAY" (May 16, 2001) Yesterday was the 53rd anniversary of what the Israelis believe was the start of their independence and the Palestinians believe was the start of their ongoing and tortuous "disaster", the "nakba".
"SCHOLARS, INTELLECTUALS, EXPERTS BETRAY THEIR VOCATIONS..." - MER FLASHBACK (May 15, 2001) The recent orgy of 'activism' surrounding the new "Har Homa" settlement has given 'peace groups' and various Arab Americans groups something to do again.
THERE WERE WARNINGS THEN, THERE ARE WARNINGS NOW (May 15, 2001) It's 53 years now since Palestine was fractured, a Jewish State was born, the Palestinian refugee crisis created. There were warnings from both Arab and Jewish leaders what would result if a "Jewish State" were declared when the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948.
NO JUNITY, NO ALLIES, NO FUTURE (May 14, 2001) Let's get right to the bottom line here first. Those American Jews, and whoever else for that matter have been looking to what is called "JUNITY" (that's "Jewish Unity For a Just Peace" so they say) ...
AN AFFRONT TO CIVILISATION (May 13, 2001) I was on my way to Khan Yunis, a desperately poor
Palestinian refugee town in the Gaza Strip, when we
learned it was under heavy bombardment. Please, urged
my Palestinian guides, could I postpone my visit to
the next day?
IN MEMORY OF PROF. CHARLES BLACK (May 12, 2001) "Against hugh odds...they decline to submit, and instead go out
on the streets and pick up stones. They are beaten without let
or mercy. They are imprisoned under obscene conditions, after
kangaroo trials, or no trials at all.
THREATENING WRITERS AND MORE ASSASSINATIONS (May 12, 2001) Of course what the Israelis are doing in so many areas to many classes of people is dastardly and deserves widespread condemnation. The first article details what the Israelis are doing to Palestinian writers who are citizens of Israel; the second to Palestinian activists who are struggling against Israel's occupation.
HASHEMITE COLLUSION AND REPRESSION (May 11, 2001) The Hashemite Regime of King Abdullah the Second is running more and more scared; and for good reason. After all, the collusion of this regime with the Israelis, going way back to the beginning of the conflict...
MAHMOUD DARWISH ON 53RD NAKBA ANNIVERSARY (May 11, 2001) Next Tuesday, 15 May, is the 53rd Anniversary of what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the "Disaster", and what the Israelis call their Independence. In a very unusual move some 250 Arab Professors and Intellectuals have issued a call for their own countries to finally join in a serious way the Palestinian struggle.
FROM HERZL TO SHARON - STEALTH DISPOSSESSION (May 10, 2001) "The removal of Arabs bodily from Palestine is part of the Zionist
plan to 'spirit the penniless population across the frontier' by
denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation
and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly
and circumspectly."
THE POLITICAL PROSTITUTION OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IN PALESTINE (May 10, 2001) We're talking here about political prostitution; for it too is an age-old profession and it too leads to many other vices.
THE POPE GOES VISITING (May 9, 2001) With the creation of a "Jewish State" in the Holy Land, in a sense a new era began twisting the modern-day concept of nationality back to one of ethnic and religious identification.
FROM HELL WITH LOVE (May 8, 2001) Ironically, in the early years of this ignoble "Peace Process", Dr. Sarraj himself -- a dignified psychiatrist and recipient of the Physician for Human Rights Award -- was arrested three times, tortured, and threatened with death...not by the Israelis but by the forces of the Arafat "Palestinian Authority".
ISRAELIS SEE THROUGH GLOSS OF LIFE AMID ORANGE GROVES (May 7, 2001) When the real estate sharks of California
began to coax Americans to Los Angeles early in the last century, they stuck
oranges on the trees to make the desert more alluring. The oranges are real
enough in the groves on the hills around Jerusalem, but the hard selling is
just the same.
WE ARE ACCUSED OF TERRORISM (May 7, 2001) The incomparable Nizar Qabbani was buried in Damascus earlier this week. "We Are Accused Of Terrorism" was one of his last poems first published a year ago; key excerpts from that poem follow.
GUNNING DOWN ISRAEL SHAMIR - Part II (May 4, 2001) Previously we outlined how the regimes-sponsored Arab American establishment, using the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) to try to control everyone as usual...
SHARON'S RISE TO THE PINNACLE OF POWER - HELPED BY THE ARABS THEMSELVES (May 3, 2001) Ariel Sharon's becoming Prime Minister of Israel didn't happen overnight. He pursued the job for a very long time and whatever one thinks of his person and policies he carried out a masterful political coup.
GUNNING DOWN ISRAEL SHAMIR (May 3, 2001) The worst thing that happened to the people of the Middle East in recent history was the imposition on them by the Western powers of the "Client Regimes" -- those who read MER regularly know what we are talking about...
ARAB REGIMES COWER AND BEG; ISRAELIS CONTINUE TO KILL AND DESTROY (May 2, 2001) Shimon Peres runs around the world, especially to the gullible American media, and especially to CNN and PBS, with soothing rhetorical jibberish while his Generals further demolish Palestinian homes making fools of those who believed in the "Oslo Peace Process" and its associated "agreements".
FORMER SHIN BET HEAD TALKS SOME SENSE IN PUBLIC....BUT WHY? (May 2, 2001) Motives are of course a very important aspect of life and politics...as is timing. And when it comes to someone who has been head of the Shin Bet, like Ami Ayalon, and who is saying these things now, at this particular crucial and sensitive time, there are good reasons to have many suspicions, and many questions, and many doubts.
EXTINGUISHING THE INTIFADA (May 2, 2001) A major effort is underway to somehow smother and snuff out the Intifada, one way or another. Those heading up the effort, in order of importance, are:
ARAFAT'S FIRST INTERVIEW SINCE THE INTIFADA BEGAN (May 1, 2001) Yasser Arafat often describes his struggle as a "long march" to the
"spires and minarets" of Jerusalem, capital of his Palestinian
state-to-be.
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