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May 9, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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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
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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May
9, 2002
Israel's Best Interest
By Omar Barghouti
There is something peculiar about how the world,
the UN included, has been dealing lately with Israel's uncontested
repression of human rights and violations of international law.
The main most common concern raised in this respect is "Israel's
best interest." If something is good for Israel, then the
world should push for its implementation, if not, then no need.
The United States' threats of using its veto in the UN Security
Council and its relentless other efforts in torpedoing the UN's
now thwarted attempt to send fact-finders to Jenin can be understood
in light of its role as Israel's real defensive shield; but the
complicity of the UN chief and the European Union can hardly
be explained, except if seen in the context of promoting what's
"best for Israel."
After it audaciously refused to comply
with UN Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal
from recently occupied Palestinian territories, the Israeli government
outdid itself when it arrogantly announced that unless "its
conditions are satisfactorily met" by the UN, it would not
allow the team's entry, Kofi Annan tried to "convince"
the Israeli prime minister relax those conditions. Bolstered
by the boundless support from the US Congress, and, to a slightly
lesser extent, from the Bush Administration, Sharon conducted
his negotiations with the UN from a position of strength, which
allowed him to deal with Kofi Annan with a little more respect
than he usually gives to Arafat. Strikingly, he even applied
to the UN the same logic of dictates and evolving conditions
often used with the pathetically disadvantaged Palestinian "negotiators."
Despite all that, Annan bent over backwards in accommodating
several of the unusual Israeli terms. "The UN," a report
in the Guardian stated, "has already bowed to Israel's demand
that the identity of soldiers who testify should remain secret,
and that they will not have their evidence used against them."
Furthermore, the very composition of the team was also modified
to meet some Israeli "legitimate concerns."
Even after all this unprecedented tolerance
exhibited by the UN, the Israeli communications minister, Reuven
Rivlin, chastised the Jenin initiative saying, "This awful
United Nations committee is out to get us, and is likely to smear
Israel and to force us to do things which Israel is not prepared
even to hear about, such as interrogating soldiers and officers
who took part in the fighting." Singing the same tune, the
more "dovish" Shimon Peres insisted on Israel's "right"
to decide who would testify, and superciliously declared, "Israel
won't sit in the place of the accused. Israel will sit in the
place of the accuser. This is an attempt to place baseless blame,
almost a blood libel, on Israel."
To calm Israel's "understandable"
fears, Annan still argued that it was "best" for Israel
to "put behind us" all the rumours, and to dispel "the
long shadow which has been cast over Jenin," for otherwise
it "will be with us for a while." Annan's preoccupation
with the "shadow" rather than the reality the hard
evidence collected meticulously by human rights organizations,
including the latest damning report by Human Rights Watch implied
that the accusations leveled against Israel were grossly exaggerated
or simply illusionary. Consequently, he helped defuse some of
the world fury over Israel. Assuading Israel's "PR crisis"
therefore became the prevalent, and oft repeated, justification
for the investigation, and not the fact that there was compelling
evidence of horrific war crimes committed by Israel, whereby
real people were killed, or injured and left to die without medical
attention, real houses were demolished on top of their inhabitants
and real humans were used as shields by the merciless Israeli
soldiers. It wasn't in "Israel's best interest" then
to focus on those real but marginal details.
Conforming to the same shameless theme,
the European Union sheepishly deplored "the fact that...the
[UN] team is unable to go to the region and begin its mission."
They could not have invented a longer and safer detour! Even
Israel's nemesis on the team, the former president of the International
Committee of the Red Cross, Cornelio Sommaruga, "regretted"
the cancellation of the mission only because it could have made
"a contribution to a certain detente in the region."
He also "felt" that Israel had "nothing to hide."
Apparently, the condemning reports issued by the Red Cross on
Jenin had not raised his interest.
Adding insult to injury, the UN's special
representative in the region, Terje Larson, in the aftermath
of Israel's "Defensive Shield" and his own falling
out of favour in Israeli eyes for mildly describing the devastation
he witnessed in Jenin, flew to Beirut to impress upon the Lebanese
government the absolute sanctity of the UN-designated "blue
line," loyally emulating the previous visit by the US Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, days before that. The fact that Israel
had just crossed all the "red lines" were lost on the
seasoned European diplomat. He also joined the chorus trying
to convince Israel to accept the fact-finding mission, because
it was "good for Israel."
Iraq, in comparison, has been suffering
for more than eleven years of utterly inhumane sanctions due
to its alleged non conformance to certain aspects of UN resolutions.
Hardly anyone at the UN bothered to ask where the Iraqis' "best
interest" lied.
In Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, among other
places where international organizations conducted investigations
into war crimes, what was "good" for those countries
was emphatically decided as it ought to be by international bodies,
independently of the wishes, the desires, or the "legitimate
concerns" of the respective governments. After all, when
someone, or some political entity, is accused of committing war
crimes or crimes against humanity, their preferences, not to
mention their conditions, as to how the investigations should
be conducted, should hardly be taken into consideration, for
the obvious reason that they have an inherent conflict of interest
that prevents them from being sufficiently transparent or forthright.
It would be unfair, though, to put all
the blame for this hypocrisy on the shoulders of the UN and the
Europeans, since Arab leaders, including the Palestinian chairman,
have made a habit of justifying their political ideas based on
the "Israel's-best-interest" logic. Mr. Arafat's strongest
argument against the Israeli siege of his headquarters was: how
can I fight terror when you've confined me and destroyed most
of my security tools? Several Arab leaders have presented to
the US similar arguments about the need to strengthen Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority, since that was "the only
assurance for Israel's security." Indeed, most Palestinian
and Arab leaders have strived in recent years to sell the idea
of a Palestinian state as the "best security guarantee"
for Israel. Manifestly, their argument was quite persuasive for
Mr. Bush, as well as several Israeli leaders, who have turned
into strong advocates even nagging ones, in the former case of
a Palestinian "state." Hence the creatively novel adjective,
"viable," came about to describe a necessary requirement
of such a state, for if it were to die, so would Israel's security
and along with it Israel's "best interest."
What then would have satisfied Israel's
best interest in the Jenin ordeal, from Israel's own perspective,
and not how all the "concerned" others perceive it?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the following confession in Ha'aretz
(April 27, 2002): "One [Israeli] official recalled this
week that back when the UN committee was formed to evaluate compliance
with the Grapes of Wrath understandings, Israeli-American coordination
was so close that the investigation's main conclusions were agreed
upon ahead of time."
Omar Barghouti
is a Palestinian doctoral student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
He is now residing in Ramallah. He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com
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