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16 July 2005        Free

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News, Views, & Analysis Governments, Lobbies, & the
Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know


ISRAEL and SHARON'S LATEST AND GREATEST DECEPTION


MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 16 July:    There are very few print magazines that deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a serious and sophisticated way.   One of these is a bi-monthly English magazine called Challenge; and this editorial from the current issue is of particular interest and importance at this particular time.    All the more so with the Israelis so outrageously trying to cajole and extort still further billions from the U.S. -- a financial swindle on top of what really rises to the level of a major historical and political scam.  It is indeed always challenging to really understand the actual, rather than the public relations, policies of Israel; and of the U.S. as well.  More and more in fact.

editorial:

Phony Trauma

Roni Ben Efrat

ISRAEL IS SET to evacuate its settlements from the Gaza Strip in mid-August. Until recently, the right-wing opponents of disengagement were making inroads. According to a survey by Yediot Aharonot, the proportion of the plans supporters had declined from 64% in February to 53% in early June. Three weeks later the trend reversed. Support shot back to 62%.

What happened was this: A cabal of young Kahanists had descended on Gaza from illegal West Bank outposts, setting up in an abandoned hotel, which they dubbed the Song of the Sea.EThey sat undisturbed for a month, writing obscene graffiti about Muhammad to provoke the nearby Arabs. They were determined, they said, to stay in Gaza until the cancellation of disengagement or death. Pundits trembled at the prospect of civil war.

The turning point came on a day when other opponents of disengagement blocked the countrys highways. The Kahanists had a brawl with the Arabs they had managed to provoke. At zero range they stoned Eon camera a young Palestinian who had already been knocked unconscious. The public backed away in revulsion. Feeling new wind in his sails, PM Ariel Sharon took action the next morning: the army surrounded the Song of the Sea.E/FONT>

The rest was anticlimax. Finding no support from their settler colleagues, the Kahanists turned in their weapons. Then elite army units entered the hotel and carried them to buses. No Masada. The threat of civil war evaporated. De-gunned, the settlers turned to sheep.

On the following day (July 1), in Yediot Aharonot, Gideon Maron and Oded Shalom wrote: The right-wing extremists who barricaded themselves in Gush Katif could have been reined in a month ago. The army knew this but turned a blind eye, acting only yesterday, after blood was spilled.E/FONT>

The month-long wait served to build up the drama, which Sharon needs. In order to serve his long-range policy aim, disengagement must take on mythic proportions. The greater the resistance against it, the more impossible it will seem to follow it with any Act II. Thats why he doesnt do what Charles De Gaulle did with the French settlers in Algeria, fixing a date to pull out the army and saying that any settler who wants to remain in Gaza may apply to the Palestinian Authority. Rather, he needs the brouhaha as a doorstop: This far we shall go, no farther. We cant. Look how traumatic it is! Even this much has torn us apart!E

The financial aspect reinforces our suspicion. Dan Ben David, a lecturer on Public Economics at Tel Aviv University, has written that the purely civilian costs of the disengagement plan amount to 5.5 billion shekels, or an average of $611,000 per family. The 7000 Gaza settlers are 3% of the total settler population (not including occupied Jerusalem). At sums like this, how could the State afford additional traumas? Never.


SHARON'S present deeds are designed to improve his chances in the next round of elections. With 1.5 million fewer Palestinians under Israels responsibility, and as the only Israeli leader capable of evacuating settlers, he can offer his candidacy for the Nobel Prize. At the same time he can posture as the champion of the right wing, the man who saved the important West Bank settlements from the threat of dismantlement.

But there is also a new round of fighting at the door. The political situation is clearer now Eand worse for the Palestinians Ethan during the Oslo years. Then they signed an agreement that was open-ended, assuring them nothing. The accord was full of holes that each side could fill as it wished. Israel could claim that it had not yielded on the issues of settlements, Jerusalem or the right of return. The Palestinians could claim the opposite. It took each seven years to understand where the other side stood. Even now the Oslo agreement is obscure enough to inspire the most varied interpretations. The Disengagement Plan, on the contrary, leaves no room for doubt: Sharon repeatedly brandishes the promise he got from US President G. W. Bush: that the major settlement blocs are off the agenda. Thus he advances toward his real program: to separate Gaza from the West Bank.  

The left-wing parties in the Knesset drift, meanwhile, toward oblivion. This applies both to Meretz-Yahad, which gives Sharon a parliamentary umbrella from outside his government, and also to Labor, which is inside. Professor Shlomo Ben Ami, who was part of the Israeli team at Camp David in July 2000, criticizes the Disengagement Plan as a patchwork leading nowhere: Its backers dont see it as a component in a broader plan for a political arrangement that will bring Israel to permanent recognized borders. In the final analysis, two senior politicians in Israel today, Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, are partners in the concept that Israel does not need to advance toward a permanent arrangement and an end to the conflict.E(Haaretz June 30.)

Laborites like to boast that Sharon is implementing their platform, but that is at best an illusion, at worst sheer fraud. Labor is merely preparing its seats in the next government, which it hopes Sharon will assemble Eand not Binyamin Netanyahu. It has backed away from the challenge of building an alternative to the Likud.   


THE OBSESSIVE preoccupation with the misery of the settler-evacuees, and with the difficulties faced by Sharon, conceals what is happening in the background. After seven months as PA President, Abu Mazen has reached the end of his rope. He never quite understood that disengagement curtails his days. After Israel has left Gaza, it wont need him anymore. Many, it is true, still wag their fingers at him, complaining that he ought to collect the weapons of Hamas, but this is a smoke screen. Since the start of the second Intifada, Israel has known that it must not place its security in the hands of a Palestinian authority. Where the border between Gaza and Egypt is concerned, for instance, it wants Egypt to police it, not the PA, and it is now engaged in the final stages of a deal.

The army waits eagerly for the first Kassam rocket that will fall after disengagement. It will then demonstrate that by getting rid of the settlements, it has improved its military position. It will be able to invade the Strip by land, sea and air without having first to take account of a vulnerable Jewish population there.  

It is not just Israel, however, that will undermine Abu Mazen. Hamas has rejected his call to join his government. Thus it expressed its annoyance with him for delaying the parliamentary elections. Hamas understands why Abu Mazen wants it inside: so that he can avoid the moment of truth at the polling booth. Hamas also knows where its power resides. It is waiting for disengagement so that it can pluck the fruits by taking command of the Strip. There is a whiff of historical dialectic in this: Sharon, it would seem, is improving the position of Hamas!   

The proponents of disengagement are wrong. The US is wrong in telling Abu Mazen to refrain from making conditions and simply allow Israel to leave. Abu Mazen is wrong to sit on his hands while Israel secures the tools it needs to continue ruling the West Bank. And finally, Sharon and his supporters are wrong. Their Disengagement Plan contains the seed of the third Intifada. The Palestinian people will not accept the new reality imposed by Israel: the imprisonment of millions, without means of livelihood, behind a fictive border of separation enhanced by actual fences and walls. The flames of the third Intifada will overcome all fences and walls. 
Challenge # 92,  July - August 2005  


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July 2005


Magazine






It's The Damn Policies Stupid!
(July 20, 2005)
Long-time MER readers will not find all this a total surprise. We've been 'preaching' for some time that what is happening today can in fact be traced back to what has happened ever since the end of World War I in the Middle East, to Western policies ever since the carve-up of the old Ottoman Empire. It was then, at the so-called 'Paris Peace Conference', that the Turkish Muslim Empire of old was ended by force of arms and the Arab peoples tricked once again by those who professed 'self-determination' (the 'freedom' slogan of that era) but were in fact determined to deny the Arabs their independence and any semblance of democracy.

American Terror and the Coming War With Iran
(July 19, 2005)
"In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran -- despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster."

George Bush's Twisted and Perverted World
(July 18, 2005)
So much for real democracy. Even in the supposed 'bastion of freedom', the United States of America, we are all now closer than ever to living in what has to be considered a complicated modern day police-states using pre-fascist techniques. That is what omni-present 'survelliance', unchecked Gulags, 'Patriot Acts', Supreme Court 'stop the vote counting' decisions, torture techniques, legalized 'censorship', CIA covert and black ops, and continual press manipulation are really all about.

A BIG WARNING - Too Little Too Late Too Bad
(July 18, 2005)
Unfortunately, tragically, those who oppose what the Israelis are doing are not only very weak, they are badly organized and led -- miserably and probably fatally in fact. This 'Warning' Statement 'to raise the alarm' published over the weekend by three Israelis is an example -- correct in the warnings and conclusions, badly written, even more badly presented, and without any serious strategy other than a kind of pathetic assertion to sign another petition that has no chance of any kind of having any impact...only further misleading people as to what is really involved and what the situation really requires.


(July 18, 2005)



(July 18, 2005)


Greg Szymanski Articles - 9/11 Conspiracy
(July 18, 2005)


Witchhunt against Ward Churchill
(July 17, 2005)


ISRAEL and SHARON'S LATEST AND GREATEST DECEPTION
(July 16, 2005)
There are very few print magazines that deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a serious and sophisticated way. One of these is a bi-monthly English magazine called Challenge; and this editorial from the current issue is of particular interest and importance at this particular time. All the more so with the Israelis so outrageously trying to cajole and extort still further billions from the U.S. -- a financial swindle on top of what really rises to the level of a major historical and political scam. It is indeed always challenging to really understand the actual, rather than the public relations, policies of Israel; and of the U.S. as well. More and more in fact.

Arafat's 'Stealth Assassination' Confirmed
(July 13, 2005)
Last November, long before any other credible expert news and analysis media, and even as the Israeli/U.S.-chosen Palestinian leaders were strenuously denying it, MER repeatedly published articles detailing the "STEALTH ASSASSINATION" of Yasser Arafat.

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(July 12, 2005)
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Washington Firestorm over Rove, Court - Calculating Next 'New World Order' Strikes
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(July 11, 2005)
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POPE FANS FLAMES OF CHRISTIAN - MUSLIM WAR
(July 10, 2005)
Add to these acts and statements of the Pope of Rome, certainly the most visible and powerful symbol of Christianity, the ever-increasing Evangelical 'Born Again' nature of American society these days on top of George W. Bush's public assertion of 'Crusade' both in word and deed, and you have a formula for escalating religious-inspired warfare for a long time to come. Things are now escalating further out of control into a real 'Clash of Civilizations'; though this certainly did not have to be.

The Apartheid Wall - A Year After the Historic ICJ ruling
(July 9, 2005)
Meanwhile the Israelis have continued racing ahead not only with 'The Wall' but also with their grand design to further build and consolidate the great majority of settlements they plan to keep and expand, while feinting 'withdrawal' from the small few they have always planned to give up as far too costly, isolated, and 'dispensable'. It is all a receipe for much further conflict, bloodshed, and turmoil in the years ahead; just as it is this Jews Vs Arabs conflict in the 'Holy Land' which in the past has so poisoned the region and indeed now the world.

Britain had been warned says Robert Fisk
(July 8, 2005)
"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours."

The Most Cowardly War in History
(July 8, 2005)
"The assault on Iraq is an assault on all of us: on our dignity, our intelligence, and our future."

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"Egyptian society is boiling. We have seen this only one or two times in the past 80 years,"

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"Finally, I am beginning to understand, as I see so many parallels right here. I look forward to more valuable insights coming from your publication."

White House Threatened?
(July 6, 2005)
Is it really conceivable that in 2005 a legal investigation about who in government leaked the name of a secret CIA operative to the media could unravel the Bush Administration? There are so many differences from what happened to President Nixon in his second term. But even so legal proceedings have a kind of insolation from normal politics, none other than top Bush Adviser Karl Rove is being fingered as the man who did it, and supoenas are said to have now been issued for White House and Air Force One records involving Rove.

Front Nixon to Bush - 'Where Is The Press Now?' Asks Actor Robert Redford
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Judith Miller and Karl Rove
(July 4, 2005)
"Miller...has a formidable track record of egregious violations of journalistic standards and best practices, and a habit of sending the public off on what turn out to be wild goose chases. Relying on a small circle of highly interested parties (often anonymous "sources"), she became the leading journalistic purveyor of the fallacy that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that he was tied to Al-Qaeda."

Iraq Quagmire Indeed! 42% support Impeaching Bush
(July 3, 2005)
"...more than two-in-five (42%) voters say that, if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment. While half (50%) of respondents do not hold this view, supporters of impeachment outweigh opponents in some parts of the country."

Karl Rove Fireworks Looming
(July 2, 2005)
It's been rumored for some time; but now that the long investigation is going to definitely and legally 'out' Karl Rove as 'the source' -- in this case according to federal statute an illegal act knowingly revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent -- what is fast approaching is some fierce political and legal fireworks immediately after the 4th of July fireworks.

Recent MER Articles
(July 1, 2005)


From Germany To America
(July 1, 2005)
"What no one seemed to notice...was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider.... What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security."




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