AN AFFRONT TO CIVILISATION
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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


Magazine



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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