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Recent Stories
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz--Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
25, 2003
An Interview
with Hanan Ashrawi
Palestinians:
Long-term Hopefulness Still Dominates
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Ramallah.
Hanan
Ahsrawi tells us bluntly that the principal aim of Israeli Prime Minister
Sharon and his right-wing, Zionist fundamentalist government is to make
sure that no Palestinian state ever exists as a viable entity. Their
goal, she says, “is not just dismantling the infrastructure, the
structures of Palestinian statehood, but dismantling an identity: not
just preventing formation of a viable Palestinian state but eliminating
a nation and a people.” Ashrawi is a Palestinian legislator and
former spokesperson for the Palestinian negotiating delegation who is
known widely in the United States as an articulate, plain-talking, down-to-earth
spokesperson for her people, easily able to relate to American audiences
and speak to Americans in their own political dialect.
Ashrawi describes
Israel as having returned to a strain of fundamentalist Zionism, reminiscent
of 1948, that denies Palestinian identity altogether. It is attempting
actually to deconstruct the Palestinian presence, to render it docile
and compliant. Anyone who tries to assert himself, to stand up for Palestinian
rights, is put down; no resistance is permitted. Israel, Ashrawi asserts,
“is sending the message to the Palestinians that you are totally
at our mercy, we’ve robbed you of any independence, you’re
broken. Sharon has tried this before, and he’ll keep trying.”
The message that
Ashrawi sees is clear wherever you go in the occupied West Bank. When
we flew from Amman to Tel Aviv a week ago, the small commuter airliner
flew at just 8,000 feet on a bright, cloudless day, giving us a striking
bird’s-eye view of Israel’s massive encroachment on this
Palestinian territory. An Israeli settlement or outpost stands on virtually
every hilltop, commanding the terrain around it, cutting off one Palestinian
town from another. There are over 200 of these Israeli settlements in
a territory of about 2,000 square miles, a huge insertion of a Jewish/Israeli
presence and identity into a Palestinian landscape.
Established settlements
are easily identifiable by their uniformity: rows of ticky-tacky looking
much like a new American suburban development, with identical shapes,
identical red tiled rooftops, identical rows of tall trees taking up
precious ground water that is denied to Palestinians. The new outposts,
about 30 or 40 of them seized by wildcatters, but with government sanction,
in the two years since Sharon came to office, are also readily recognizable
by the open cut in the hilltops on which they sit, where trees have
been cleared away and trailers or “caravans,” as they are
called here, have been brought in as temporary housing. A vast network
of limited-access highways (“settler roads,” the Palestinians
call them) on which only those with yellow Israeli license plates may
drive, connect these settlements to each other, further scarring the
landscape, destroying Palestinian olive groves and agricultural land,
further isolating Palestinian towns from each other What else could
be the intent of this gigantic expropriation of another people’s
land except the denial and dismantling of Palestinian identity that
Ashrawi describes?
Turning to U.S.
policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli situation, Ashrawi expresses dismay
that, at present and for the foreseeable future, the narrative in the
United States is “purely Israeli,” to a degree that she
says is scary. For the first time ever, “we have a U.S. administration
that adopts wholesale the Israeli version.” Ideologically, Ashrawi
says, the Bush administration and the Sharon government are “not
just tightly knit, there’s a real overlap” in the way they
think and the way they determine policies. The U.S. speaks entirely
according to an Israeli script and does so for the first time at the
decision-making level. This is no longer just a matter of Christian
fundamentalists allying with Zionist fundamentalists in think tanks
and advisory bodies outside the administration, she notes, but “it’s
in the Defense Department, in the White House. It’s an ideology
that’s lethal.” The situation is made far more difficult,
furthermore, because “the media is accepting a packaged message,”
she says. “I have never seen such a monolithic approach to this
conflict. It’s unprecedented in scope and magnitude.”
Yet Ashrawi can
still see reason to hope. Asked if she shares the dismal vision of Israeli
peace activist Jeff Halper, who has written in scathing articles about
Israel’s physical and political absorption of the occupied territories
into Israel that he sees little remaining hope of ever establishing
an independent, viable Palestinian state, Ashrawi asserts that she is
not willing to say it’s too late. “If there is a will, the
settlements can be removed.” She acknowledges that it’s
hard right now to count on any movement in this direction, but she is
emphatic that the Palestinians will not succumb to Sharon’s attempt
to break them.
Asked where the
breaking point comes, she says she sees a greater likelihood of acts
of desperation by Palestinians than of surrender or flight out of Palestine.
Palestinians tend to regard the current difficulties as another historical
phase that will pass. Demography is in the Palestinians’ favor,
she says, but her hope for the future rests on more than just demography.
“There’s a social cohesion and an identification with the
land that are very important. Originally we’re all peasants who
are completely bound to the land. The source of our self-value is tied
to land.”
So the Palestinians
are determined to stay, Ashrawi notes. After their experience in 1948,
when over 700,000 fled what became the state of Israel in the belief
that they would be able to return when the fighting stopped, Palestinians
cannot now be fooled into leaving “temporarily.” The majority,
she asserts with a large smile, “are staying because they know
the price of leaving.”
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti,
who directs a medical relief organization in the West Bank and Gaza,
shares Ashrawi’s somber assessment of the present situation and
also her long-term sense of hope. Barghouti’s most immediate concern
is preparing for a possible total curfew imposed by Israel in the midst
of the Iraq war, which would prevent Palestinians, already barred by
checkpoints from seeking care at hospitals, from reaching any medical
help at all. But Barghouti has also been involved in politics and heads
what he and a few others are calling the Palestinian National Initiative,
which puts itself forward as a third choice between the ineffective
Palestinian government and the radical Hamas. “You cannot have
true democracy and reform,” Barghouti believes, “without
elections.” He and his organization are working to bring forth
a new generation of Palestinian leaders not captive of either the Fatah/Palestinian
Authority leadership or Hamas.
Barghouti’s
principal fear at the moment is that under cover of the war in Iraq
Israel will kill more Palestinian civilians on the pretext that they
are terrorists and the international community will largely ignore the
killing. In the last three weeks alone, as many as 90 Palestinians have
been killed. He sees the killing of American peace activist Rachel Corrie
last week as an indication that Israel feels it can act as it pleases
while the world looks elsewhere and also as a deliberate effort to intimidate
the young internationals who worked with Corrie to try to protect Palestinians
against Israeli depredations. Barghouti also fears that Israel will
attempt a large-scale “internal transfer” of Palestinians
under the cover of the war. This could involve forcibly moving Palestinians
out of villages near Israeli settlements, in order to create buffer
zones around the settlements, or expelling Palestinians living along
the route of the “separation wall” that Israel is building
inside the West Bank. Construction of the wall, now underway in the
northern sector of the border area between the West Bank and Israel,
has thus far resulted in the expropriation of large tracts of Palestinian
agricultural land, the separation of Palestinian towns from their farmlands,
and the destruction of numerous wells that supply water to Palestinian
towns and villages. Current planning by Israel’s defense establishment,
as described today in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, envisions
a vast increase in the amount of land to be incorporated into Israel
behind the fence, in order, as the paper reports, “to get as many
Jews and as few Palestinians as possible into the western [Israeli]
side.” (Readers of CounterPunch.org will recall a searing article
describing this appalling wall by Anne Gwynne on March 15. The article,
“Anger and Tears at Israel’s Wall of Apartheid,” is
a powerful cri de coeur.)
Despite his dire
forecasts for the immediate future, Barghouti sees no alternative for
the Palestinians but continued struggle for an independent state in
the West Bank and Gaza.
Although some Palestinians
and some Israeli peace activists have begun to advocate a one-state
solution in which Palestinians press for citizenship in a single Israeli
state established throughout all of Palestine, Barghouti believes Palestinians
cannot give up on the two-state formula because it remains the only
solution the international community will accept and because it is the
only way for Palestinians to achieve real self-determination. He sees
three reasons to be hopeful for the future: Palestinians are gaining
more international support, more Americans have begun to recognize what
is happening in Palestine and object to unquestioning U.S. support for
Israel and, perhaps most important, the Palestinians themselves are
undeterred in the struggle against Israel’s occupation.
“There are
good, resilient people on the ground here,” he says, who will
not give up. “We are like South Africa in the 1970s,” which
gives him great hope.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency
for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence
Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on
certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and
Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office
of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.
Kathleen
Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since
then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She
is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
The Christison's
can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's Features
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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