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March
4, 2002
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
Terry
Diggs
Why
Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson Still Matters
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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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
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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March 4, 2002
How to Torpedo the Saudis
Thirty five years
of occupation and settlement have eroded Israel's abilty to
reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly
By Uri Avnery
If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that
the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal
relations with it, in return for Israel's recognition of the
Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of
the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into
the street, singing and dancing, as they did on November 29,
1947, when the United Nations called for the establishment of
a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.
But then disaster struck: we conquered
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likud governments
filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds
to many like a malicious anti-Semitic plot.
The leaders of Israel tell us: Don't
worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall survive Emir
Abdallah.*
This is an allusion to a famous Israeli
song.
So what will happen?
In Israel, every international initiative
designed to put an end to the conflict passes through three
stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c) liquidation.
That's how the Sharon-Peres government will deal with this one,
too. It can draw on 53 years of experience, during which both
Labor and Likud governments have succeeded in scuttling every
peace plan put forward.
(We must nor suspect, God forbid, that
the successive Israeli governments were opposed to peace. Not
at all. Every one of them wanted peace. They all longed for
peace. "Provided peace gives us the whole country, at least
up to the Jordan river, and lets us cover all of it with Jewish
settlements." Until now, all peace plans have fallen short
of that.)
PHASE A is designed to belittle the offer.
"There is nothing new there," the Political Sources
would assert. "It is offered solely for tactical purposes.
It is a political gimmick". If the offer comes from an
Arab: "He says it to the international community, but not
to his own people". I short, "It's not serious."
One proven method is to concentrate on
one word and argue that it shows the dishonesty of the whole
offer. For example, before the October 1973 war, President Anwar
Sadat of Egypt made a far-reaching peace offer. Golda Meir
rejected it out of hand. Her Arabists (there are always intellectual
whores around to do the dirty job) discovered that Sadat spoke
of "salaam" but not of "sulh, which "proves"
that he does not mean real peace. More than 2000 Israel soldiers
and tens of thousand Egyptians paid with their lives for this
word. After that, a salaam treaty was signed.
Such methods are already being applied
now to the Saudi offer. First it was said that Crown Prince
Abdullah had spoken about his initiative only with an American
journalist, but not addressed his own people. When it transpired
that it was widely published in all Saudi papers, both at home
and in London, another argument was put forward: the prince
has made his offer only because Saudis had become unpopular
in the United States after the Twin Towers outrage. (As if this
matters.) In short, Abdullah has not become a real Zionist.
This point was widely discussed in the
Israeli media. Commentators commentated , scholars showed their
scholarly prowess. But not one (not one!) of them discussed
the actual content of the offer.
PHASE B is designed to outsmart the offer.
We do not reject the offer. Of course not! We a longing for
peace! So we welcome the "positive trend" of the offer
and kick the ball out of the field.
The best method is to ask for a meeting
with the Arab leader who proposed the offer, "to clarify
the issues". That sounds logical. Americans think that,
if two people have a quarrel, they should meet and discuss the
matter, in order to end it. What can be more reasonable than
that?
But a conflict between nations does not
resemble a quarrel between two people. Every Arab peace offer
rests on a two-part premise: You give back the occupied territories,
and you get recognition and "normalization". Normalization
includes, of course, meetings of the leaders. When the Israeli
government demands a meeting with Arab leaders "to clarify
details", it actually tries to get the reward (normalization)
without delivering the goods (withdrawal from the occupied territories).
A beautiful trick, indeed. If the Arab leaders refuse to meet,
well, it only shows that their peace offer is a sham, doesn't
it?
Many peace offers have fallen into this
trap. Ben-Gurion offered to meet with Muhammad Naguib, the Egyptian
ruler after the 1952 revolution. Several Prime Ministers asked
to meet Hafez al-Assad. Only Sadat outsmarted the smart ones
and turned the tables on them. He came to Jerusalem on his
own initiative.
When the General Assembly of the United
Nations adopted resolution 242, the Israeli government did not
accept it. Only much later, when there was no way out, it accepted
it "according to the Israeli interpretation". This
concentrated on the article "the" that is missing
in the English version (which demands withdrawal from "occupied
territories" instead of from "the occupied territories"),
contrary to the French version, in which the article duly appears.
(The Soviets were caught napping, because there is no article
in the Russian language.)
The preferred method is to kill the spirit
of the offer slowly, to talk about it endlessly, to interpret
it this way and that way, to drag negotiations on and on, to
put forward condition which the other side cannot accept, until
the initiative yields in silence. That's what happened to the
Conciliation Committee in Lausanne, that is what happened to
most of the European and American peace plans.
PHASE C: If phases A and B have not worked,
the liquidation stage arrives. Nowadays it is called "targeted
prevention" or, simply, "ascertained killing"
by the army.
Against the original UN mediator, the
Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, "targeted prevention"
was applied literally: he was shot and killed. The killers were
"dissidents", but Ben-Gurion did not shed any tears.
Usually, Israeli governments use two
deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the US Congress and the American
media. William Rogers, President Nixon's secretary of state,
for example, proposed a peace plan that included the withdrawal
of Israel to the pre-1967 border, with "insubstantial
changes". Israel released its torpedoes and sunk Rogers
together with his plan. His job was taken over by the Jewish
megalomaniac, Henry Kissinger, and that was the end of peace
plans.
Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled
in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not
be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small
frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier.
A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.
But Shimon Peres and his foreign office
are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades.
Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under
the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the
chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the
occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.
Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In
Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. The national
instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of
occupation and settlement have eroded the nation's abilty to
reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly.
A great, perhaps unique opportunity may
be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands may pay for
it with their lives. They will not dance in the streets any
more.
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