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THE "PEACE PROCESS" FRAUD AND CONSPIRACY

August 20, 2001

"Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people's misery?" Prof. Edward Said

"The 'Peace Process' was from the start a conspiracy and a fraud" Prof.Tanya Reinhart

"You (Palestinians) shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave." Prof. Noam Chomsky quoting General Moshe Dayan

MID-EAST REALITIES © - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/20/2001: Professors Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Tanya Reinhart -- Jewish American, Palestinian American, and Israeli -- all have explained this month why the "Peace Process" was a fraud, a deception, a conspiracy, from the start. Four years ago, long before it became popular to do so, MERTV produced a special program -- "Peace Process Real or Phony?" -- which can now be watched at http://www.MiddleEast.Org/mertv/116. And eight years ago, during the White House ceremony with Rabin and Arafat, MER's publisher, Mark Bruzonsky, pointed out even then the basic flaws and contradictions in the "Peace Process" while providing the live television commentary for Canadian National CTV -- which can now be watched at http://www.MiddleEast.Org/mabtv.ht

COMMENTARY; NEOCOLONIAL INVITATION TO A TRIBAL WAR
By Noam Chomsky

"What we feared has come true," Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in Israel's leading newspaper. Jews and Palestinians are "regressing to superstitious tribalism.... War appears an unavoidable fate," an "evil colonial" war. This prospect is likely if the U.S. grants tacit authorization, with grim consequences that may reverberate far beyond.

There is, of course, no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" regressing to tribalism. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation since 1967. The conqueror is a major armed power, acting with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps.

The cruelty of the occupation has been sharply condemned by international and Israeli human rights groups for many years. The purpose of the terror, economic strangulation and daily humiliation is not obscure. It was articulated in the early years of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, who advised his Labor Party associates to tell the Palestinians that "you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave."

The Oslo "peace process" changed the modalities, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, a dove in the U.S.-Israeli spectrum, wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neocolonialist basis." The intent was to impose on the Palestinians "almost total dependence on Israel" in a "colonial situation" that was to be "permanent." He soon became the architect of the latest Barak government proposals, virtually identical to Bill Clinton's final plan.

These proposals were highly praised in U.S. commentary; the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat were blamed for their failure and the subsequent violence.

That presentation "was a fraud perpetrated on Israeli ... and international ... public opinion," Kimmerling writes accurately. He continues that, a look at a map suffices to show that the Clinton-Barak plans "presented to the Palestinians impossible terms." Crucially, Israel retained "two settlement blocs that in effect cut the West Bank into pieces." The Palestinian enclaves also are effectively separated from the center of Palestinian life in Jerusalem; the Gaza Strip remains isolated, its population virtually imprisoned.

Israeli settlement in the territories doubled during the years of the "peace process," increasing under Barak, who bequeathed the new government of Ariel Sharon "a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the transition took place early this year: "The highest number of housing starts in the territories" since the time when Sharon supervised settlements in 1992, before Oslo. The facts on the ground are the living reality for the desperate population.

The nature of permanent neo-colonial dependency was underscored by Israel's High Court of Justice in November 1999 when it rejected yet another Palestinian petition opposing further expansion of the [Jewish] city of Maale Adumim established to the east of Jerusalem, virtually partitioning the West Bank.

The court suggested that "some good for the residents of neighboring [Palestinian villages] might spring from the economic and cultural development" of the all-Jewish city. While they try to survive without water to drink or fields to cultivate, the people whose lands have been taken can enjoy the sight of the ample housing, green lawns, swimming pools and other amenities of the heavily subsidized Israeli settlements.

Immediately after World War II, the Geneva Conventions were adopted to bar repetition of Nazi crimes, including transfer of population to occupied territories or actions that harm civilians. As a so-called high contracting party, the U.S. is obligated "to ensure respect" for the conventions.

With Israel alone opposed, the United Nations has repeatedly declared the conventions applicable to the occupied territories; the U.S. abstains from these votes, unwilling to take a public stand in violation of fundamental principles of international law, which require it to act to prevent settlement and expropriation, attacks on civilians with U.S.-supplied helicopters, collective punishment and all other repressive measures used by the occupying forces. Washington has continued to provide the means to implement these practices, refusing even to allow observers who might reduce violence and protect the victims.

For 25 years, there has been a near-unanimous international consensus on the terms of political settlement: a full peace treaty with establishment of a Palestinian state after Israeli withdrawal, an outcome that enjoys wide support even within Israel. It has been blocked by Washington ever since its veto of a Security Council resolution to that effect in 1976.

It is far from an ideal solution. But the likely current alternatives are far more ugly. (Los Angeles Times, 13 August 13 2001)

OCCUPATION IS THE ATROCITY
by Professor Edward Said

In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid since 1967, the terrible human cost of Thursday's Jerusalem restaurant bombing and Monday's Haifa disaster settles quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hasn't done enough to control his terrorists; suicidal Islamic extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on "us" and our strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred; Israel must defend its security. A thoughtful individual might add: these people have been fighting tiresomely for thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped; there has been too much suffering on both sides, although the way Palestinians send their children into battle is another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. And so, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified and undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the Palestine Authority's police buildings plus several others, and then sends out its propagandists to say that it has sent a message to Arafat to curb his terrorists. In the meantime, he and his coterie are begging for American protection, doubtless forgetting that Israel is the one with US protection and that all he will get, for the 6,000th time, is an injunction to stop the violence.

The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the propaganda war, and America is where it's about to put several more million dollars into a public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Yitzhak Pearlman, and Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 34-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints that detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted; 2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.

Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities) and 15,000 wounded (a dozen times more than on the other side). Regular Israeli army assassinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14 Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using helicopter gunships and missiles; they were thus "prevented" from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings -- part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news programmes, even though -- for reasons that I simply cannot understand -- Arafat is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and fill it with dreadful, murderous armed settlers who, defended by the army, wreak havoc on Palestinian orchards, schoolchildren and homes; it is, as the American researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to make life impossible so that the Palestinians will leave, or give up somehow, or do something crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967, leaders have been jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students prevented from studying, universities closed (in the mid-'80s Palestinian universities on the West Bank were closed for four years). No Palestinian farmer or business can export to any Arab country directly; their products must pass through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was simply re-packaged, only 18 per cent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of Arafat, whose mandate seems to have been only to police and tax his people for Israel's sake. After eight fruitless immiserating years of the Oslo negotiations masterminded by an American team of former Israeli lobby staffers like Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation packaged more efficiently, the phrase "peace process" given a consecrated halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more Palestinian suffering to go on than before. Including a "Judaised" East Jerusalem, with Orient House occupied and its contents looted or carted off (there are invaluable records, land deeds, maps, that in a repetition of what it did when it stole PLO archives from Beirut in 1982, Israel has simply stolen), Israel has implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land. To call them vigilantes and hoodlums is not an exaggeration.

It is worth recalling that a couple of weeks after Ariel Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem's Haram Al-Sharif on 28 September, with 1,000 soldiers and guards supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for this action by a unanimous Security Council resolution. Then, as even the merest child could have predicted, the anti-colonial rebellion broke out, with eight killed Palestinians its first victims. Sharon was swept to power essentially to "subdue" the Palestinians, teach them a lesson, get rid of them. His record as an Arab-killer goes back 30 years, before the Sabra and Shatila massacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to negotiate with him and come perhaps to a cozy arrangement with him so as to safeguard the very Authority that Sharon is systematically dismantling, destroying, razing to the ground.

But he isn't a fool either. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege more, taking more land, making a habit of more and deeper incursions into Palestinian towns like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly assassinating Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable, redefining the terms of his government's actions, that it once made "generous concessions" while "defending" itself, that it "prevents" terrorism, that it "secures" areas, that it "re-establishes" control, and so on. Meanwhile he and his minions attack and dehumanise Arafat, even saying that he is the "arch-terrorist" (although he literally can't move without Israeli permission), and that "we" have no war with the Palestinian people. What a boon for that people! With such "restraint," why should a massive invasion, carefully bruited about to terrorise the Palestinians even more sadistically, be necessary? Israel knows that it can retake their buildings at will (witness the wholesale theft of Jerusalem's Orient House, plus nine other buildings, offices, libraries, archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but eliminated the Palestinians as a people.

This is the real story of Israel's pretended "victimisation," constructed with such premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has been sundered from reality. Pity not the inept Arab governments who can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the wounds in their flesh and the emaciated bodies of their children, some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only way out for them.

And Israel, stuck in a futureless campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As James Cousins, the Irish poet and critic, said in 1925, the coloniser is in the grip of "false and selfish pre- occupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull[ed] from the path of open rectitude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech, and action, in the artificial defense of a false position." All colonisers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until at last, as Israel turned tail from its 22 year occupation of Lebanon, they exit the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was supposed to fulfil Jewish aspirations, why did it require so many new victims from another people who had nothing to do with Jewish exile and persecution in the first place?

With Arafat and Company in command, there is no hope. What is the man doing, grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous places, pleading without dignity or even intelligence for imaginary observers, Arab aid, international support, instead of staying with his people, trying to aid them with medical supplies, morale- boosting measures and real leadership? What we need is a unified leadership of people who are on the ground, who are actually doing the resisting, who are really with and of their people, not the fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who want their business deals preserved and their VIP passes renewed, and who have lost all trace of decency or credibility. A united leadership that takes positions and plans mass actions designed not to return to Oslo (can you believe the folly of that idea?) but to press on with resistance and liberation, instead of confusing people with talk of negotiations and the stupid Mitchell Plan.

Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people's misery? All the polls show that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be possible. We need a united leadership to make decisions, not simply to grovel before the Pope and the moronic George W Bush, even as the Israelis are killing his heroic people with impunity. A leader must lead the resistance, reflect the realities on the ground, respond to his people's needs, plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and difficulties that everyone experiences. The struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation is where every Palestinian worth anything now stands: Oslo cannot be restored or re-packaged as Arafat and Company might desire. It's over for them and the sooner they pack and get out, the better for everyone.


August 2001


Magazine






IDEOLOGICAL CEASE-FIRE OR SELL-OUT AT DURBAN?
(August 31, 2001)
It's not likely this is the end of it, but indications are that the Arafat crowd -- as of the moment still in the pay of the U.S., Israel, and the despicable Arab "client regimes" -- has found a way to back away from the badly needed ideological confrontation, with the help of non other than that slimmy man for all seasons who never misses an opportunity to interject himself Jesse Jackson.

ASHRAWI SPEECH IN DURBAN
(August 31, 2001)
Hanan Ashrawi is no real hero, and she's made some terrible hard-to-forgive political mistakes in the "peace process" years in her search for the limelight and VIP status.

DURBAN AND ROBINSON AND ANNAN
(August 31, 2001)
A pamphlet distributed at the United Nations anti-racism conference in South Africa equating the Star of David with a swastika has prompted the UN human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, to declare at an official dinner: "I am a Jew".

"GO BACK IMMEDIATLEY OR WE ARE GOING TO SHOOT" - MARY ROBINSON COMES OUT JEWISH
(August 30, 2001)
Talk about humiliation. When the U.N.'s top human rights official was in occupied Palestine last year her car was shot at by Israeli settlers -- the Israeli army doing nothing to stop them. Now we learn that the very same Mary Robinson is herself Jewish and has been using her position to head off the urgently needed world censorship of Israel for its racist and apartheid-like policies.

HABASH AND CARLOS HAVE THEIR SAY
(August 30, 2001)
Aging guerrilla leader Carlos the Jackal called from his French jail cell Wednesday for worldwide attacks on Israel and the United States in support of the Palestinian uprising.

A LAND WITHOUT HOPE
(August 29, 2001)
Gaza is the largest prison in the world. Most of its one million plus inhabitants, in a sense inmates, have never been let out. Whether the term be "ghetto" or "concentration camp" or just "prison", the historical parallels are all too damning.

THE U.S. MAKES IT ALL POSSIBLE
(August 29, 2001)
What we should all be thinking when the U.S. State Department spokesman gets in front of the cameras is -- "You've Got To Be Kidding!" Instead, the American government with its super sophisticated PR apparatus dishes it out. The gullible, or should we say complicitous, corporate media then broadcasts it -- not just CNN, also the rest of the networks along with PBS followed up by the big daily newspapers and newsweeklies --all lemming-like.

TIME TO SUSPEND ISRAEL FROM U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY
(August 28, 2001)
The American President and Vice-President both are giving public expressions of support to the Israelis; while the American CIA, military and Congress make Israeli policies possible with a continual flow of money, guns, and information.

"INVITING HELL TO BREAK LO0SE" - PFLP LEADER ASSASSINATED TODAY
(August 27, 2001)
The Israelis are clearly planning to totally crush the Palestinians -- Minister Uzi Landau is publicly saying as much -- probably thinking they can buy themselves still more years to consolidate their grip on the occupied territories and probably scheming for the opportunity to push as many Palestinians as they can across the Jordan and into a Hashemite Kingdom that will eventually, sooner or later, implode into a Palestinian State.

A MOST COURAGEOUS AND DEDICATED ISRAELI JOURNALIST
(August 26, 2001)
If we had an award for Middle East Journalist of the year, the Israeli writer Amira Hass would be very high on that list. A few years ago, long before it became politically correct to term Israeli policies "apartheid like", especially in Jewish and American circles, Amira Hass was doing just that in her writing and speaking.

ISRAEL WINNING PROPAGANDA WAR - MASSIVELY
(August 26, 2001)
The terribly weak, confused, and co-opted Arab regimes, Arafat's included, are miserably losing the "propaganda war". Sure, the Israelis have suffered in some quarters in some ways; but nothing compared to the Palestinians.

THE LATEST FROM GAZA GHETTO
(August 25, 2001)
About 400 fanatical "settlers" have forced their way into homes in the middle of Hebron, a city of 120,000 Arabs. About 6000 fanatical "settlers" contnue to occupy about 35% of the Gaza Strip, amidst more than 1 million Palestinians.

ISRAEL'S IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
(August 25, 2001)
If you want to understand what the Israelis are doing, and why, you have to understand the ideological underpinnings of what is called "Revisionist Zionism". This article was published many years ago in The Washington Post by Mark Bruzonsky, today the Publisher of MER.

JUST IMAGINE, A MILLION + INJURED IN A YEAR
(August 24, 2001)
If adjusted for differing population sizes, these would be the dead and casualties figures if a foreign military power occupied the United States and did to Americans what Israel, with U.S. money and arms, is doing to the Palestinians. And that's just in the past year or so.

WITH ARAFAT AND COMPANY IN COMMAND, THERE IS NO HOPE.
(August 24, 2001)
As usual there is no serious introspection and self-criticism here. Arab and Palestinian Americans have failed miserably over a very long period of time to even establish viable organizations and publications. Moreover they have no lobbying and professional presence even worth discussion in the crucial capital of Washington, DC, even today.

SUICIDE BOMBERS - MADE BY ISRAEL AND THE USA
(August 23, 2001)
It didn't begin this way. A few generations ago Arabs and Jews lived together in the same neighborhoods of the once Holy Land. In the 40's the famous Arab mayor of Haifa Hassan Shukri's only son married a Jewish woman.

ISRAELIS "DEBATE" BOTH "SEPARATION" AND "DEPARTURE"
(August 23, 2001)
Two rather insightful articles follow about how confused and insecure many Israelis have become, even though this often comes across to others as heightened arrogance and self-centeredness. In the first from Ha'aretz some Israelis are hedging their bets and wondering just what the future holds. There is a deep down awareness, not quite conscious for many, that what they are doing to the Palestinians could possibly in the future backfire in an orgy of hatred and recriminations far beyond today's situation.

KILLING AND DESTROYING - THE ISRAELI WAY
(August 21, 2001)
Even as the U.N. Security Council gathered to demonstrate once again how badly it has been neutered and cast aside when it comes to the Middle East, the Israelis are further unleashing their basic policy of killing, destroying, repressing. General Barak, the previous PM, is busy taking credit for having "exposed" the Palestinians and "fathered" the concept of "unilateral separation" (i.e., apartheid forever).

UN NOW AND THEN
(August 20, 2001)
Today's United Nations is pretty much an "appendage of the (U.S.) State Department". And that's not our phrase, it's one used by a senior U.N. official not that long ago in one of those quiet unpublicized off-the-record Washington discussions.

THE "PEACE PROCESS" FRAUD AND CONSPIRACY
(August 20, 2001)
Professors Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Tanya Reinhart -- Jewish American, Palestinian American, and Israeli -- all have explained this month why the "Peace Process" was a fraud, a deception, a conspiracy, from the start.

PLEADING FOR PEACE; ANALYSIS IS WAR
(August 18, 2001)
Everything stops for tea in Britain, or so they say. So when Angie Zelter and her fellow foreign protesters found their way from Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem to Jerusalem blocked by Israeli soldiers and police on Saturday, Zelter ever so politely ventured a few words of advice.

A SUICIDE BOMBER'S WORLD
(August 18, 2001)
In a sense, a very important sense, the "Suicide Bombers" now so much in the news should have stamped on them "Made in Israel, Encouraged by USA". There were few if any "Suicide Bombers" just a few years ago. The phenomena first arose out of Israel's destructive invasion of Lebanon in and before 1982, then the occupation of about 10% of that country which only ended last year.

DATELINE WASHINGTON: ONE ARAB DISASTER AFTER ANOTHER
(August 17, 2001)
Months ago now the relatively new group of Muslim "client organizations" headquartered in Washington repeatedly promised at one press conference after another a wave of civil disobedience throughout the U.S. in view of what Israel and the U.S. are doing to the Palestinians.

ANTI-US/ISRAEL DEMOS IN SOUTH AFRICA
(August 17, 2001)
The pathetically weak and terribly mislead Arab and Muslim groups in the US aren't doing any protesting worth mentioning about this or anything else; but thousands of South Africans are doing the work for everyone...and "internationals" are on the way.

WHY WE HAVE ALL BECOME SUICIDE BOMBERS, DR EYAD SARRAJ-MER FLASHBACK
(August 16, 2001)
A few weeks ago I said that the struggle of Palestinians today is how not to become a bomb and that the amazing thing is not the occurrence of the suicide bombing, rather the rarity of them.

HAVE WE A PREDICTION HERE? YASS?
(August 16, 2001)
Beneath that thick Israeli arrogance, many Israelis are really far more confused, and far more fearful, than they are going to admit. Theirs' is a complicated psychology especially as the scars of the Holocaust remain deeply buried and only occasionally visible.

DEATH IN BETHLEHELM, MADE IN AMERICA
(August 15, 2001)
While the Israeli Army surrounds Bethlehem and many of the "autonomous Palestinian population centers" created through the Apartheid-style "peace process", it is American weapons and money that make the brutal military occupation possible.

ISREALI STORM TROOPERS BEAT, SHOOT, TORTURE, KILL
(August 14, 2001)
How ironic that the Jewish Israelis are acting like modern-day storm troopers, perpetrating ongoing Crystal Nachts, their victims akin to dark images from the Warsaw Ghetto of yesteryear...and so many "Good Israelis", so sadly reminiscent of the "Good Germans" of their own terrible past when they themselves were powerless victims, are cheering with mindless hatred

USED "PEACE PLAN" FOR SALE CHEAP - CAVEATE EMPTOR!
(August 14, 2001)
Gee..isn't this interesting. With the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel -- i.e. Zionism -- about to be challenged by much of the world in Durban; and with the "peace process" itself about to be finally condemned as a "new form of apartheid" -- just as so many of the independent experts have been saying for years now -- the Israelis are embarking on a major international public relations campaign whose top dogs are none other than soft barkers Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, chief architects and salesmen of the very same.

SALAMI ESCALATION
(August 14, 2001)
The Israelis are preparing everyone psychologically for more. Rather than everything at once, Sharon's tactics are a war version of "triangulation" which has become so famous in American political infighting. In this way he gets to be called "restrained" by many, creates the climate of confusion and anticipation that he wishes, uses Peres and Eliezer to confuse world opinion and even some of the more gullible Arab "leaders", and craftily prepares for that day when the tanks will roll in and roll over...and not just leave after a few hours of death and destruction.

NOW RUSSIANS PREDICT MID-EAST WAR SOON
(August 13, 2001)
The Israelis have been trying for years now to "reconfigure" the Middle East to their further advantage. That's really what the war for Lebanon that erupted most fiercely in 1982 was all about; and its what the various responses to the Intifada have always been about as well -- most especially the disengenous "peace process" which has now worse than collapsed.

A PEOPLE CRUSHED, DISPOSSESSED, TORTURED...
(August 13, 2001)
"His was not an act of 'mindless terror', the words Israeli spokesmen use. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, tortured and killed in terrible numbers." Fisk on the 'Suicide Bomber'

ON TO DURBAN...WITHOUT THEM - PART II
(August 12, 2001)
Well we weren't expecting United Nations officials to heed our advice about Durban and get on with things, with or without the constantly threatening and vetoing Americans (see Part 1 published yesterday). In recent years some of their colleagues at the very highest levels of today's U.N. have in fact resigned in moral disgust -- and even said so in public.

EGYPT MIGHT MOVE ARMY INTO SINAI?
(August 12, 2001)
It's not likely to happen -- Egypt's Third Army moving into Sinai for the first time since 1973 -- but it could. And in the Middle East there are historical precedents that this is sometimes the way big wars start with an initial bombardment of threats, bluffs, feints, and then the confusion takes on a life of its own.

SYMBOL OF PALESTINE CAPTURED AND RAPED
(August 11, 2001)
"Israeli riot police on horseback yesterday charged into protesters sitting outside Orient House, the barricaded mansion that serves as an unofficial Palestinian capital, reopening the battle for Jerusalem. The occupation of Orient House, headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Jerusalem, by the Israeli army is one of the biggest acts of aggrandisement since the intifada began 11 months ago."

ON TO DURBAN...WITHOUT THEM
(August 10, 2001)
Conclusion first: Let the Americans and the Israelis stay home. So be it. There's been enough blackmail and bribery and vetoing for such a very long time now. The Americans and the Israelis have been two against the whole world so many times when it comes to the international community of nations. It was just a few years ago that the U.S. single-handedly black-balled Boutros Ghali and sent him packing.

SHARON OF ISRAEL - DANGEROUSLY CUNNING
(August 10, 2001)
Ariel Sharon has a terrible history of brutality and murder, and indeed by the usual definitions these days he is at the very least indictable as a war criminal. Even so, especially now in his new role as Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon is an extraordinarily crafty and sophisticated strategist as well as tactician.

ISRAEL FLAG FLIES OVER ORIENT HOUSE
(August 10, 2001)
They never ever let Yasser Arafat come to Jerusalem. And Arafat missed his moment on the day of Feisal Husseini's burial earlier this summer when he could have, and should have, called their bluff. Now the Israelis, commanded by General Sharon, have done what they have been planning to do for some time, using the excuse of yesterday's terror bombing on Jaffa Road -- they have closed Orient House, the very symbol of things Palestinian in East Jerusalem, as well as many other organizations associated with the PA.

ORIENT HOUSE CLOSED - STRATEGIC BLOW AGAINST PALESTINIANS LIKELY
(August 9, 2001)
NEWSFLASH -- 8/09/2001, 9:30pm -- For first time Israel has closed down Orient House in Jerusalem along with nine other offices associated with the Palestinian Authority

USS LIBERTY - ABANDONED AT SEA AND AT HOME BECAUSE?
(August 9, 2001)
Tonight at 8pm (ET) on the History Channel part of the story about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967 is going to be told. But from preliminary indications, just part, and not necessarily the most important historical parts which really involve top secret intrigue at the highest levels of the CIA, NSA, and White House complete with super secrets of state the Americans continue to want to keep out of sight out of mind.

THE REAL USS LIBERTY STORY
(August 9, 2001)
The real questions -- and answers -- have been avoided for a very long time by the American Government, and in this case also by the "free and independent" American media. And from the preliminary indications, tonight's History Channel documentary about the USS Liberty doesn't actually answer the key questions (as it could) nor even deal with the key subject of the crucial role of the CIA (as it should).

THE CRUCIAL ISRAELI-TURKISH-US MILITARY ALLIANCE,THE ARABS ARE SURROUNDED
(September 9, 2001)
It was just a few years ago that in all likelihood the Mossad and CIA helped the Turk's capture Kurdish Leader Abdullah Ocalan after first pushing him out of exile in Syria, the Moscow, then Greece, and then grabbing him in Nairobi. It was three years ago last month that MER first published an article about the great importance of the new military alliance that has developed between Israel and Turkey -- "New U.S./Turkey/Israel Alliance Circumvents and Bottles Up The Arabs." And it was two years ago that the prolific and courageous British journalist, Robert Fisk, first gave us some of the details behind the new strategic military relation Turkey actually courted with Israel.

WITH THE HELP OF U.S. ARMS MANUFACTURERS, THE CIA, CONGRESS, AND THE PENTAGON
(August 8, 2001)
The Israelis are controlling, repressing, dispossessing, and assassinating the Palestinians not on their own. They are doing so with the constant and considerable help of American arms manufacturers, the CIA, and of course the U.S. Congress (which of course is supposed to represent the will of the American people) which constantly appropriates billions yearly for Israel and sanctions (or the threat thereof) against Israel's foes

HIZBULLAH ON A ROLL
(August 7, 2001)
Israeli security forces have completely shut down access in and out of five large Palestinian towns following the killing of a pregnant Jewish settler, Israeli public radio said Monday, quoting security officials. The army sealed off the West Banks towns of Nablus, Tulkarem, Jericho, Ramallah and Qalqilya, the radio said, adding that it had partially closed the towns of Hebron, Bethlehem and Jenin.

WILL THE REAL YOSSI BEILIN PLEASE STAND UP
(August 4, 2001)
Like in the movie LION OF THE DESERT, those who profess sympathy and understanding can often cause the most harm. The well-meaning Lieutenant Colonel who befriends Omar Muhktar, lures him into deceptive "peace negotiations" in the desert, and then salutes him as his own involvement leads to Muhktar's being hanged from the gallows, is an illustrative symbol from the past.

SHARONS PUBLIC RELATIONS WAR
(August 7, 2001)
One thing about countries that have democratic features and most especially a professional and independent press -- sometimes insightful even amazing little tidbits result either from leaks or investigations. Like today's story about how Ariel Sharon himself is also the Commanding General in Israel's public relations war, shaking up and countermanding his troops in this arena as well.

ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS WAR IN 2002
(August 6, 2001)
Israeli sources said military intelligence has drafted a report that warns of the increasing likelihood of regional war in 2002. The report said the war could be sparked by either an Israeli offensive against the Palestinian Authority or an escalation in tension along Israel's border with Lebanon

TARGET EVERYONE EVERYWHERE
(August 5, 2001)
It has not happened yet, but it is now the direction things are heading. Soon the Palestinians may start responding to Israel's increasingly brutal military occupation, unprecedented anywhere else in the world of our day, by targeting Israeli political leaders and maybe Zionist leaders outside of Israel.

EGYPT IN THE ERA OF THIEVES
(August 5, 2001)
The Egypt of Hosni Mubarak and associates has terribly betrayed itself. It is a regime of sadistic torture and omnipresent corruption. It is a country of gross repression and escalating fear. And to a certain extent all this is at least in part the legacy of the Camp David agreement Egypt was tricked and bribed into signing two decades ago, and for which Anwar Sadat was assassinated by his own soldiers on military parade.

IRAEL ENFLAMES PALESTINIANS- HATRED WILL LAST LONG INTO THE FUTURE
(August 5, 2001)
In the past week the Israelis have substantially escalated the conflict with the Palestinians and risked enflaming not only the Palestinians but Arabs and Muslims around the world. Now senior Palestinian political leaders are being targeted.

ASSASSINATION POLICY EXPANDED- EXPECT A NEW LEVEL OF CLANDESTINE WARFARE
(August 4, 2001)
In a sense it would be like the going after the associates of Jerry Adams and his Sein Fein colleagues in Northern Ireland. It was a policy followed to a lesser extent by the White South African government when it tortured and murdered persons associated with the ANC, almost in fact secretly poisoning Nelson Mandela in his prison cell

"SECRET PLAN" TO SEND OBSERVERS TO ISRAEL
(August 3, 2001)
The very idea that the Americans and the Brits, after their long history of treachery and deception in the Middle East, are now going to do something other than continue on in that tradition is rather ludicrous. All the current talk at the moment -- especially from the Europeans and the usually gullible "peace" and "human rights" NGOs -- about helping the Palestinians by sending them "observers" is indeed a fitting CIA response to the predicament the American government finds itself in at the moment.

ISRAEL THREAT TO INVADE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES IS REAL
(August 3, 2001)
The Palestinians and their allies and supporters are extremely ill-prepared for what is happening. Israeli military might remains overwhelming, and political support remains amazingly strong, especially in view of today's situation with Ariel Sharon Prime Minister, the "peace process" undergoing slow and tortuous cremation, and Israel attacking Palestinians in the occupied territories with tanks and gunships heretofore reserved for real warfare between armies.

11 YEARS, 1.5+ MILLION DEAD, SEETHING HATRED EVERYWHERE
(August 2, 2001)
Eleven long bloody years. In the years just before the Gulf War there was the destruction of Lebanon, the terrible bloodletting of the U.S.-instigated Iran-Iraq orgy, the Kissinger-legacy of the Kurdish sell-out.




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