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May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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May
23, 2002
Sharon's War
Plans
The Great Reformer?
by Uri Avnery
When the inhabitants of Bethlehem came out of
their homes, after the long weeks during which Israeli soldiers
shot at everything in town that moved, they discovered that
the landscape had changed. While they were imprisoned in their
homes, the army had been working day and night to separate
them from the world by a trench two meters deep and a murderous
wire fence, sharp as a razor, that could cause anyone entangled
in it to bleed to death. The town and its suburbs (Bet-Jala,
the Aida and other refugee camps) had become a big prison.
This week, members of the Palestinian
parliament tried to get to the session that dealt with "reform".
The trip to Ramallah, half an hour in ordinary times, took them
four hours, including a series of humiliations at the many army
checkpoints.
Bethlehem is a suburb if Jerusalem. Hundreds
of threads tie it to the city. All these threads are cut now.
Jerusalem is further from Bethlehem than the dark side of the
moon.
This kind of fence is being erected now
in many places around the country, cutting the Palestinian enclaves
off not only from Israel, but from each other, too. The slogan
is "separation", and that sounds good to Israeli ears.
"We are here and they are there," as the lamentable
Ehud Barak used to declare. The real situation is quite different:
"We are here and we are there." Because the separation
is not only unilateral, but also unidirectional. Palestinians
are forbidden to cross into Israel, but the settlers and soldiers
cross into Palestine.
Sharon's war against the Palestinian
people is continuing at full speed. The erection of the fences
is only one of its operations. The second one is the settlement
activity that has not stopped for a moment. Old settlements
expand, new ones spring up and all over the occupied territories
the building of bypass roads goes on, expropriating Palestinian
lands and strangling Palestinian villages.
The third operation of the war bears
the glorious title of "reform".
When Sharon declares that the reform
of the Palestinian Authority is a condition for the resumption
of the peace process, it is another device to prevent any negotiations.
It also allows Sharon to climb on the bandwagon of Bush, who
is demanding a democratic reform of the Authority (without,
of course, demanding the same from countries like Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and China.)
The slogan of reform also serves another
of Sharon's purposes: it attracts public attention, causes the
Jenin events to be forgotten and the daily incursions and killings
of the IDF in the Palestinian territories to be ignored.
But as the Great Reformer of Palestine,
Sharon is following a much more important agenda. As a general
in the army, he was famous as a commander who "reads the
battlefield", meaning that he had the ability to grasp
instinctively where the crucial spot in the enemy front is located.
For example: long before the October 1973 war, Sharon had decided
exactly were he would break through the Egyptian front and cross
the Suez canal when the time arrived.
Sharon decided long ago that the crucial
point in the Palestinian front is the leadership of Yasser Arafat.
Many believe that Sharon's efforts to eliminate the Palestinian
leader spring from a personal vendetta, after Arafat slipped
out of his hands in Beirut. But the matter is far more serious.
Sharon knows that if he succeeded in
breaking Arafat, we would be breaking the backbone of the Palestinian
people for many years to come--years in which he could finish
the job of filling the territories with settlements and annexing
them to Israel. Arafat is a strong and authoritative leader,
who holds all the strands of the Palestinian people together,
preventing a civil war between them and is the only one who
can take courageous, historic decisions.
Many different parties are now speaking
about reforming the Palestinian Authority, and each one of them
has a different agenda. For Sharon, reform means doing away
with Arafat and installing a group of Quislings (as he tried
20 years ago with the creation of the "village leagues".)
For Bush, "reform" means appointing a Palestinian
leadership that will follow his (and, indirectly, Israel's)
orders, in return for the creation of a Palestinian client-state
like Puerto Rica or Andorra (as Netanyahu once said).
Among the Palestinians themselves, some
see reform simply as a means to push their rivals out and take
their place. I suspect that some of the reform-toting Palestinians
work for the Mossad and/or the CIA. Hamas hopes that the reform
will bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and
clear the way for its own takeover. Other Palestinians are
striving honestly for the immediate establishment of practices
appropriate for an ordered state, quite ignoring the fact that
the Palestinian people is still in the middle of a fight for
its very existence, faced with the real danger of finally being
driven out of its country.
Many Palestinians want a different reform:
one that will cut out the parasitical elements, which have attached
themselves to the Palestinian authority, and prepare the Palestinian
people for the next, decisive stage of its struggle for liberation.
Not reform instead of the struggle, but reform for the struggle.
None of them intends to fulfill the dream of Sharon and Bush
to liquidate Arafat or turn him into a Palestinian facsimile
of Moshe Katzav, the figurehead President of Israel.
Uri Avnery
has closely followed the career of Sharon for four decades.
Over the years, he has written three extensive biographical
essays about him, two (1973, 1981) with his cooperation.
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