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April 15, 2002
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
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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
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April 15, 2002
An Open Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't
Break Them"
by Breyten Breytenbach
Sir,
You don't know me. There's no reason
why you should and little cause for you to listen to what somebody
like myself may have to say. Should it interest you, I'm a writer
born in South Africa, now living and working abroad. As a writer,
I'm deeply apprised of the need to keep words uncluttered of
any urge to rouse easy emotions. This is what facile comparisons
do - they nullify the understanding of complexity by a rush of
outrage, heating the throat and staining the adversary with vicarious
condemnation. Apartheid was not nazism, though to say so was
a striking slogan. And the policies now perpetrated by Israeli
forces on the Palestinian people should not be equated with apartheid.
Each one of these processes and systems is evil enough to merit
a thorough description of its own historical singularity.
And yet, it is all only too familiar.
The underlying assumptions informing your actions are racist.
As was the case with the South African regime, the methods by
which you hope to subjugate the enemy consist of force and bloodshed
and humiliation. Cynically you think you can get away with this
as long as you play up to the supposed vital interests of the
United States. I don't think you really care a fig for America's
interests. Your doppelganger, Netanyahu, employs this crude propaganda
more openly. But you too, by echoing the American president,
who describes every "other" as a terrorist, have shown
that you take the rest of the world for fools. Surely, not all
of us agree that the highest good in the world is America's greed
for cheap oil, and that we are hence expected to adhere to the
inviolability of corrupt regimes in the region.
It is blatantly averred, again and again,
that any criticism of Israel's policies is an expression of anti-semitism.
With that assertion the argument is supposed to be closed. Of
course, I reject this attempt at censorship by thus disqualifying
the grounds for debate. No amount of suffering - be it of the
Tutsis, Kurds, Armenians, Vietnamese, Bosnians or Palestinians
- can confer immunity from criticism. No reference to some ostensibly
sacrosanct Greater Israel can camouflage the fact that your settlements
are armed colonies built on land shamelessly stolen from the
Palestinians, festering there as shards in their flesh, or snipers'
nests, intended to thwart and annul any possibility of Palestinian
statehood. There can be no way to peace through the annihilation
of the other, just as there is no paradise for the "martyr".
Why should we look the other way when
it is Israel committing crimes? A viable state cannot be built
on the expulsion of another people who have as much claim to
that territory as you have. In the long run, your immoral and
short-sighted policies will furthermore weaken Israel's legitimacy
as a state. As provocateur, cold-blooded and cruel, you stand
out among your peers. In your dogged attempts to subvert previous
agreements and scupper the possibility of peace - except for
the peace of the graveyard and of exile, premised on the "total
transfer" or disappearance of the Palestinian entity - you
are bringing turmoil to the region. It remains to be seen whether
the growling of your principals in Washington will inflect your
campaign of calculated terror and wanton destruction - or whether
it is but a smokescreen behind which to better align the "free
world's" war on "terrorism" - and for the domination
of resources and a global control of markets, cheap oil and "democracy".
I recently visited the occupied territories
for the first time. And yes, I'm afraid they can reasonably be
described as resembling Bantustans - reminiscent of the ghettoes
and controlled camps of misery one knew in South Africa. The
few days I spent there left me with strong but conflicting impressions.
How inextricably linked your peoples are. The stones everywhere.
The topography of names familiar from the Bible. The beautiful
light. The attempts to make the place look like Switzerland by
planting out-of-place conifers. The inhospitality of the land,
except for lush coastal plains. How abysmally sad the villages
are. The green lights in the mosques and all the unfinished habitations.
The ugliness of the architecture. The inanity of your occupation
- all those lit-up detour roads built for the exclusive use of
settlers and Israeli citizens. The surly pettiness of your controls
at checkpoints, having little to do with security and everything
with the primitive urge to humiliate, harass and drive to insane
rage an occupied population.
The extreme youth of your soldiers. The
ruthlessness with which you destroy the Palestinian economy.
The ancient revenge: bulldozing houses, destroying olive groves.
The Berlin walls around your settlements in Gaza (and behind
them university extensions, research institutes, American-linked
hotels, golf courses), and then the rubble of destroyed Palestinian
quarters looking now like Ground Zero.
The ebullience of the intellectuals and
artists under siege in Ramallah - arguing, laughing at their
own plight. How they all say : "We don't want to be heroes,
we don't want to be victims, we just want to lead normal lives".
Their wry despair. The visit to Yasser Arafat, a holed fox, his
waxed yellow hands clinging to the empty cliches of "a peace
of the brave" and "the conscience of the international
community". And a human rights lawyer claiming : "We
are grateful to Sharon for two things: he united all the Palestinian
factions and he took away every option except to resist".
Later on, the same haunted man, chain-smoking and with the sweat
of death already on him, remarked bitterly that repression has
penetrated the skin of the people, and that now they have nothing
else to defend themselves with except their skins. Hence the
human bombs.
You have not broken the spirit of the
Palestinian people. They are now more resolute than ever to build
a state. They saw the renewed onslaught coming, they knew you
were but playing footsie with General Zinni. They also know that,
since you have now made them stronger, you must strike harder
and deeper, because you are caught in a conundrum of your own
making. Like Bush in his crusade against the infidel and the
disobedient, you have to accelerate your distension of international
public ethics. They know that nothing they can do will appease
you, short of turning turtle. They fear you will have to compound
this crime against humanity which you are committing at present,
that you may indeed break their hopes for a secular, modern and
democratic state responsible to its population, and bring forth
the devil among them. They also know that this will profoundly
divide and weaken Israel.
But you don't care, do you?
This is the pity and the horror.
Breyten Breytenbach was recently part of an International Parliament
of Writers' delegation to the occupied Palestinian territories
. Breyten Breytenbach was born in 1939 in Bonnievale in the Le
Cap province of South Africa. He is a painter, and writes poetry
and novels in Afrikaans. He was an indignant opponent of the
racial policy of his country and totally rejected the concept
of apartheid, as seen in Gangrene, written in 1969. He was imprisoned
between 1975 and 1982, and related his experience in poems (A
Season in Paradise, written in jail from 1977-1980), in short-stories
and in novels (Mouroir: Mirror Notes of a Novel, 1983; End Papers,
1985; Memory of Snow and of Dust, 1987). After living in exile
in France for a period he returned to South Africa and published
Return
to Paradise: An African Journal in 1992.
(C) International Parliament of Writers
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