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Today's
Stories
September 24,
2004
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
"Finally
It Broke My Heart": Random Impressions from Palestine
September 23,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Are They Still Holding "Mrs. Anthrax?"
Christopher Brauchli
Ashcroft's "Distressing Lack of Care": Hamdi and the
Phony War on Terrorism
Derek Seidman
Fighting for a Union at Starbucks: an Interview with Daniel Gross
Michael Neumann
Three
Years and Counting? How Time Flies
September 22,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Zarqawi's
War: the Mysterious Sadist from Jordan
Neve Gordon
The
Wall, the Court and Sharon
Joshua Frank
History Repeating: New York, 1832 and Now
Ron Jacobs
Stormy Seas on the Citizen Ship
Jack Random
Defending Dan? Rather Not
Tarif Abboushi
Kerry's Final Straw: Confessions of a Despairing Voter
Mickey Z
Stupid White Guy Quiz
John L. Hess
Faking the Difference: a Serious Debate?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: The House Rules
September 21,
2004
Gary Leupp
"We
Are Not Secure": Kerry's "Unwavering Commitment"
to Securing a Middle East Realm
Robert Jensen
Large
Dams in India: Temples or Burial Grounds?
Elaine Cassel
Fourth Circuit to Moussouai: Ask Your Questions; Prepare to Die
Stanley Heller
Reagan and the Killing Fields of Lebanon
Adam Federman
America Will Disappoint the World, Again
David Whitehouse
What's Behind the Horror in Darfur?
M. Junaid Alam
How to Avoid Becoming an Anti-American
Paul Craig
Roberts
Attention
Deficit America
Website of the Day
True American War Heroes: the Iraq Refuseniks
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 20,
2004
Cockburn /
Buncombe
Get
Fallujah
David Price
Relying
on Phonies: What If The Problem with Phone Polls is That They
Are Phone Polls
Dave Lindorff
How
Dems Fight: Tigers Against Nader, Pussycats Against Bush
Harry Browne
Pre-Nup at Leeds: Talked Out, But Does IRA Give Up?
Mark Wesibrot
Bush's
Ownership Society: No Taxes for Owners, Only Workers
Karyn Strickler
The Keys to the White House v. the Shrum Curse?
Uri Avnery
The Temple Mount Bombers
September 18
/ 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
Conn Hallinan
Ashcroft and Indonesia
Lori Smith
Health Care in America: And Then I Got Sick...
Dave Zirin
Hold the Booyah!: SportsCenter Out of the Middle East
John L. Hess
Rather Will Take the Heat, As Bush's War Deteriorates
Brian J. Foley
W is for Wimp: So Why do Manly Men Love Him?
Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman and Osama bin Laden: Odd Juxtapositions
Poets' Basement
Vest, Landau & Albert
Website of the Weekend
Eye on the NYTs
Septemeber
17, 2004
Ray McGovern
Gossing
Over the Record
Patrick Cockburn
The New Iraqi Economy: Baghdad's Thriving Kidnapping Industry
Lee Sustar
The State of Working America: an Autopsy of the American Dream
Mike Whitney
John Kerry: 195 Lbs. of Political Helium, Not an Ounce of Sincerity
Victor Kattan
Black September
Ray Hanania
Israel's Demographics
Greg Bates
Nader's Victories: a Mid-Campaign Assessment
Website of
the Day
The Road to Hell
September 16,
2004
Landau / Hassen
Meet
the New Villain: Syria
Joanne Mariner
Inside
Darfur: a Photo Essay
Patrick Cockburn
US
Offers Conflicting Accounts of Baghdad Bloodbath
Greg Moses
Four Million Children Might Be News
Joshua Frank
Nader in the Battleground States
Christopher Brauchli
The Bush Drug Lottery Flops
David Himmelstein
Folke Bernadotte: a Rosh Hashonah Remembrance
Website of the Day
The Abu Ghraib Index
September 15,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Hell
on Haifa Street
Ron Jacobs
Oppose War, Not Just Bush
David Lindorff
Blanking Out Dissent
Joanne Mariner
Talking About Darfur: Is Genocide Just a Word?
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
An Open Letter to Madonna: Please Don't Support Israeli Apartheid
Dave Zirin
Is the NFL Ready for Us?
Yigal Bronner
"They
Are Building Walls Around Us"
September 14,
2004
Gary Leupp
The
Problem of Chechnya
Jennifer van
Bergen
What's
Wrong with Torture?
Stan Goff
Wake Up and Smell the Jungle Rot
Patrick Cockburn
The
Punishment of Fallujah: US Precision Strickes...on Ambulances
Anis Memon
Nader
in Michigan
Michael Donnelly
The Nuance Comes Off: Former Naderites Beg for Kerry Votes
Werther
Zell Miller: the Peckerwood Pericles
Website of
the Day
Osama Bin Forgotten?
September 13,
2004
Gabriel Kolko
Elections,
Alliances and the American Empire
Phillip Cryan
How Do You Say "Death Squad?": Language in Colombia's
War
Patrick Cockburn
One of Baghdad's Bloodiest Days: "I'm a Journalist! I'm
Dying! I'm Dying"
Noah Leavitt
The War on Civil Liberties
Robert Jensen
Highjacking Catastrophe: Bush, the Neo-Cons and 9/11
Mike Whitney
Alan Greenspan: Fed-Master to the Wealthy
John Chuckman
Stop Talking About the "Election"
Mike Burke
Kerry/Edwards Website Censors Discussion of Israel/Palestine
Issues
CounterPunch
Wire
The Quotations of David Cobb: "I Don't Care How Many Votes
I Get"
Website of the Day
Keep It In Your Pants: the Bush Plan to Combat Teen Promiscuity
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
Fred Gardner
Yet Another Prozac Scandal
Saul Landau
When Our Assassins Go Free
Jennifer Van Bergen
How to Beat Bush: a Simple Strategy for the Average American
Roger Burbach
/ Jim Tarbell
The Real Dead Enders: Iraq and the Crisis of Empire
Christopher Reed
9/11 in an Historical Context: a Minor Event When Compared to
Worldwide War Casualties
Francisc Catalin
An ABC of American Interventions
Carl Estabrook
Big Science and Government Terror
Bernard Chazelle
Anti-Americanism: a Clinical Study
Sharon Smith
Third Party Blues
Dave Lindorff
Perhaps This Time We're the Silent Majority
Mike Whitney
Fallujah: an Iraqi Beslan?
Frederick B.
Hudson
Their Sons Perished in the Flames, But Not Their Faith
Mickey Z.
Round Up the Usual Suspects: a Look Back at 9/11
Ron Jacobs
Redneck Music for the New Century
Greg Moses
Soap Opera Moments in Texas School Funding Trial
Benjamin Dangl
/ Andrew Kennis
An Interview with Leslie Cagan
Poets Basement
Del Papa, Albert, Gelman
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
September 24, 2004
"Finally
It Broke My Heart"
Random
Impressions from Palestine
By
KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former
CIA Analysts
A few weeks spent in Palestine is always
an assault on the senses, on the emotions. And after three trips
to the West Bank in the past eighteen months, it is impossible
not to draw some conclusions. For most Americans, the eleventh
commandment of the politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
is Thou Shalt Not Reach Conclusions, for conclusions that
Israel wants the land of Palestine without the people; that the
Israeli settlements, the roads accessible only to Israelis, the
land confiscations, the house demolitions, the destruction of
agricultural land add up to an act of ethnocide against the Palestinian
people; that Israel's occupation and Israel's land greed are
the root of the conflict and the root cause of terrorism
are too pointed for most people, too embarrassingly descriptive
of an ugly reality impossible to ignore.
Without conclusions, American
friends of Israel can live comfortably in denial, believing that
although the occupation may be misguided, ultimately Israel is
good and innocent, it is only protecting its security, the whole
conflict is the Palestinians' fault. But when you are in Palestine,
when you see hundred-year-old olive groves bulldozed to make
way for the wall, when you see entire city blocks bulldozed and
cleared of homes where thousands once lived, when you actually
watch a home being demolished, when you see huge Israeli colonies
and small outposts on every hilltop, when you see markets closed
because the wall has separated commerce from its customers, when
you see destruction all around, denial is no longer possible.
You must conclude that there is a deliberate scheme here. You
must acknowledge the unthinkable, that Israel has been built
from the beginning on the ruins of another nation, that Israel
has all but destroyed another people in order to have a Jewish-majority
state, that Israel is not moral as its friends claim, not a light
unto the nations.
"You
Are the Proof that Palestinians Are Not Alone"
What is perhaps most surprising
is to encounter so many people, Israelis as well as internationals,
who agree with these conclusions and who speak openly and almost
casually about their distaste for Zionism and the flaws inherent
in the system it has generated. For the second year running,
at a work camp sponsored by the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICAHD) to rebuild a recently demolished Palestinian
home in the village of Anata, just outside East Jerusalem, we
encountered more people than we knew existed, from more organizations
than we knew existed, working to oppose the occupation and help
Palestinians oppose Israel's expansionism. These are people
who put their own personal safety at risk and their own personal
comfort aside in order to help Palestinians rebuild, protect
Palestinians from Israeli settlers and soldiers, bring the Palestinian
message to the world, stand in solidarity with Palestinians in
distress. ICAHD itself, founded and led by Jeff Halper, is both
an activist and an education organization, with a small core
staff of Israeli and Palestinian experts, starting with Halper
himself, who know every road in the West Bank, every settlement,
the details of every Israeli expansion plan, every mile of the
separation wall.
In addition, there are countless
other volunteer organizations, including, among others, the International
Solidarity Movement; Christian Peacemaker Teams; Ecumenical Accompaniers
(who accompany Palestinians traveling in areas with a heavy Israeli
settler presence). Some people return year after year, during
vacation time or school breaks; one Quaker woman was there this
year for her ninth summer. Israeli peace groups, including non-Zionist
groups uncomfortable with Israel's Jewish exclusivism and prepared
to live in a Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians enjoy equal
rights, are numerous. International volunteers also work with
Palestinian medical and social relief organizations. During
the two weeks of the work camp, we hauled cinderblocks and carried
mortar with volunteers from France, England, Israel, Palestine,
Canada, Australia, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, South
Africa, and the United States many of whom worked on other
projects before and after the work camp. A group from Japan
working with children in Gaza joined our camp for a day of hard
toiling. These Japanese workers were true Stakhanovites.
Being with these individuals
and these groups gives one a great sense of the possibilities,
a sense that with this many people dedicated to achieving justice
for the Palestinians, the struggle cannot possibly be lost.
But a return home brings one back to the stark reality that very
few Americans and, for all intents and purposes, no politicians
of any political stripe care a whit. The stark reality
is that neither John Kerry nor George Bush gives a damn how many
Palestinians die while they laud Ariel Sharon's efforts to "guarantee
security for Israel," or how many Palestinian lives and
livelihoods are ruined when homes are confiscated or demolished,
agricultural land and greenhouses bulldozed, water wells destroyed
to make room for the wall that Kerry and Bush alike regard as
a marvelous innovation in Israeli peacemaking. The stark reality
is that over 90 percent of our congressional representatives
vote with numbing regularity to endorse the deliberate strangulation
of the Palestinian people.
How ignorant they all are,
these politicians who are supposed to represent us, about the
realities of life under the dominion of Israel. How ignorant
they all are of the facts: that Israel daily destroys or steals
homes and land from Palestinians because Jews want these properties,
that more miles of the impenetrable, permanent concrete barrier
wall are built every day on Palestinian land, that Israel killed
385 Palestinians, 40 of them children under the age of 15, during
the five and a half months in which Israelis recently enjoyed
a respite from suicide bombings. Kill ratios of 385 to 29
more than two Palestinians killed every day versus one Israeli
killed every week are good for Israel, and what is good
for Israel is good for U.S. politicians as well. This is also
good for the media, which gets a rest from hard reporting on
human conflict. Americans have not heard anything from the mainstream
media about almost 400 newly dead Palestinians.
Since we were in Palestine
last year, new miles of the wall and new Israeli-only roads have
been built. New destructions of markets and homesteads have
occurred. But little of this makes it into the mainstream press.
For two weeks in August, ISM activists led a non-violent march
along the length of the wall, from Jenin in the northern West
Bank to Jerusalem every day scores of protesters simply
walking along the wall but few would know this from watching
TV news in the U.S. or reading the New York Times.
How cavalierly they all
the politicians and the media and the friends of Israel
forget about the Palestinians as human beings with basic human
rights like the rest of mankind; how cavalierly they write off
the Palestinians as unworthy of those rights guaranteed to us
Americans and of course to Israelis: the rights to life, liberty,
property, the pursuit of happiness, security against foreign
occupiers. How cavalierly they ignore common human decency.
Like that proverbial tree falling in the forest, we international
volunteers and peace groups must wonder if anyone hears us.
We take heart, however, from
one fact in particular: Palestinians hear us, and that after
all is what it's all about. Palestinians know that ISM volunteers
stay with families whose homes are demolished in illegal Israeli
acts of collective punishment, giving them strength and some
little bit of hope. Palestinians know that groups of internationals
will help them with the olive harvest next month, in areas where
the wall has blocked Palestinian owners from reaching their own
orchards. Palestinians know that Christian groups will protect
children on their way to school from the harassment of angry,
racist Israeli colonists. Palestinians know that ICAHD volunteers
will rebuild a home here and there in an act of defiance against
the occupation and of solidarity with Palestinians. Palestinians
know that not all Americans are like their government, or even
like most of their opposition presidential candidates. Salim
Shawamreh, whose house we rebuilt last year under ICAHD's auspices
and who is now an ICAHD board member, spoke at the ceremony marking
the completion of this year's house. Palestinians often think
that no one anywhere in the world knows or cares about their
plight, he said, but addressing the international volunteers
"You are the proof that Palestinians are not alone."
"The
Price People Should Pay to Be Free"
The wall is "the biggest
crime against humanity in the last fifty years," he says.
Juliano Mer Khamis, director of the recently released motion
picture Arna's Children, spoke to the work camp after
an evening showing of his powerful movie. He is himself a powerful
presence handsome, forceful, angry on behalf of the Palestinians.
Mer Khamis is the son of the Arna of the movie's title, a Jewish
Israeli woman born and raised in the Galilee, and a Palestinian
father from the same region of Israel. The parents were communists,
never Zionists, and Arna spent much of her life working on behalf
of Palestinian liberation. For many years, only the family's
Jewish identity rubbed off on the son; like many children of
mixed marriages, Mer Khamis initially identified aggressively
with the power and superiority represented by his Jewishness,
even joining the elite paratroops to prove his loyalty to the
Jewish state. Until, that is, one day when, while on duty at
a checkpoint between Palestinian and Jewish areas inside Israel,
he encountered a carload of his own extended Palestinian family
and was ordered by a superior officer to harass and humiliate
them. After he refused the order, slugged the officer, and served
eighteen months in a military brig, his thinking, his politics,
and the center of his self-identity changed.
Mer Khamis worked with his
mother on the youth theater project that is the subject of Arna's
Children. The movie is the story of Arna's efforts in 1994
to organize a theater group for young Palestinians in the Jenin
refugee camp. Although girls were also involved, the movie concentrates
on half a dozen Palestinian boys in their mid-teens. This was
a period, just after the signing of the Oslo peace agreement,
of considerable optimism in both Israel and Palestine, and the
movie shows happy young people totally engaged in their amateur
theater work. Ten years later, the hope and hilarity of young
people working together have been extinguished. Arna herself
is dead of cancer, and all but one of the Palestinian teenagers
is dead, either the targets of Israeli assassination, or killed
fighting Israeli forces during Israel's siege of Jenin in April
2002, or in two cases in suicide attacks inside Israel. Seeing
the human face of these young kids turned militant leaves the
audience drained.
Asked during a discussion after
the movie if he supports suicide bombings, Mer Khamis never says
yes or no but answers with a long description of the Palestinian
situation. Palestine, he points out, is a unique guerrilla situation:
there are no jungles and no mountains in which to hide in order
to attack and ambush the Israelis. "All they have is their
suicide attacks." He notes that "the intifada with
stones," the first intifada in the late 1980s, "where
they die in front of the camera and the world sympathizes,"
turned into an armed intifada when Israel responded to stones
with Kalashnikovs, which occurred on the first day of the second
intifada in September 2000. Israel has pushed the Palestinians
farther and farther, Mer Khamis says, provoking greater militancy
with each step, so that it could justify its actions before the
world. Suicide attacks are the Palestinians' last steps, justifying
any oppressive measures in Israel's eyes. These include assassinations
and, the worst, the separation wall.
An Israeli official summoned
Mer Khamis for a meeting after the movie was released, thinking
it could be used for pro-Israeli propaganda because it shows
an Israeli woman helping the Palestinians. But Mer Khamis countered
that rather than paternalistically "helping" Palestinians,
in fact Arna "strengthened these boys to fight for their
rights." She turned her back on Zionism and was fighting
against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. The boys are now
almost all dead, and Mer Khamis says that in Jenin today you
simply don't see the age group between 18 and 29, but he says
this is the price people should pay to be free. He quoted one
of the boys as saying that he would rather die on his feet than
live on his knees. This is the only way to be free, Mer Khamis
affirms. (Undoubtedly, neither Mer Khamis nor the teenagers
of Jenin have ever heard of Patrick Henry or any of those other
revolutionary heroes whose memorable pronouncements on freedom
we Americans purport to live by for ourselves, at any rate.)
Over the long term, Mer Khamis
is optimistic for the Palestinians, but he believes the fighting
will go on for years more. Conflicts can be solved only when
they reach a peak, he says, and Ariel Sharon's role is to bring
this one near its peak. But it will get worse before it gets
better. The first intifada trained the leadership of the second
intifada, including the teenagers of Arna's theater group; youngsters
today, some of them pictured singing a militant song at the end
of the movie, are being trained for leadership of the third intifada,
sometime in the future. Optimism comes at a heavy price.
An interesting aside: One of
the teenagers is shown in the movie saying that he had initially
been suspicious of Mer Khamis because he is a Jew, until he clearly
demonstrated his sympathy for the Palestinians. Asked after
the movie why the Palestinians focused on his Jewishness when
he is actually as much Palestinian as Jewish, Mer Khamis observed
that, for Palestinians, Israel is not a culture but an apparatus
of oppression, and they think of "Jews" as soldiers.
They are not anti-Semitic in the way many in the West are; they
don't hate Jews, only Jews seen to be oppressors, and this is
the only face of Judaism that most Palestinians see.
The Inevitable
Consequences of Zionism
On off days at the work camp,
ICAHD staff took the group on political tours of Palestinian
and Bedouin areas inside Israel. The tours proved to be a dramatic
illustration of the discrimination and racism inherent in a system
designed specifically to maintain a Jewish majority a system
based on the superiority of Jews over anyone else. Palestinians,
including Bedouin, living inside Israel are citizens of the state.
They can vote in Israeli elections; Bedouin, although not other
Palestinians, serve in the Israeli military. As a matter of
law and of the institutional arrangements inherent in Israel's
status as a Jewish-majority state, however, Palestinians and
Bedouin, because they are non-Jews, do not receive anything like
equal rights or services from the state.
Not only do they face the kind
of de facto discrimination that blacks have faced in the U.S.
their schools are inadequate, their municipal services
are inadequate, they face job discrimination, their towns often
sit next to toxic waste dumps and other environmentally hazardous
sites but because Israel is explicitly a Jewish state,
Palestinians are unable by law to enjoy the benefits of
the state provided to Jews or in any way to live in the state
as Jews do. The state owns 94 percent of Israel's land and holds
it in trust specifically for the Jewish people, meaning that
Palestinians cannot buy land even land they once owned
before Israel was created and they were dispossessed. They usually
cannot even rent state land. They are not permitted, by law,
to move into Jewish cities or the Jewish neighborhoods of mixed
cities. Despite a high birth rate and growing population, Palestinian
towns and cities cannot expand their municipal limits. Many
Palestinian and Bedouin towns are not recognized at all by the
state, meaning they receive no services whatsoever from the government,
including electricity and water, and are subject to demolition
whenever they build residences, mosques, schools, or municipal
buildings. As a matter of government policy, the state rings
Palestinian towns with Jewish towns in order to limit Palestinian
growth. In some mixed cities, the authorities are actually building
walls to shield Jews from having to see or deal in any way with
their Palestinian fellow citizens.
Most significantly, as a matter
of law and because Israel defines itself as the state of Jews
everywhere rather than a state of its citizens, no Palestinian,
even those who once lived on the land before 1948, may immigrate
to the Jewish state. The only way Israel was able to establish
itself in the first place as a state with a stable Jewish majority
was by dispossessing and expelling most of those Palestinians
who lived on the land before 1948; it maintains its Jewish majority
by barring these natives and their descendants from returning.
We were able to witness some
of the effects of this racism on a trip to several Bedouin towns
in the Negev where, because the towns are unrecognized and no
schools are provided, children must walk miles in the desert
heat to reach schools in recognized villages; where nuclear and
chemical wastes from Dimona and other neighboring plants seep
into the ground, contaminating the water and the earth; where
demolition orders are pending on virtually every building; where
Bedouin who loyally served the state in the military receive
none of the benefits for which Jewish veterans are eligible;
where Jewish towns are being deliberately planted to prevent
Bedouin expansion.
We also visited the Palestinian
city of Baqa in north central Israel, where the separation wall
has split a thriving town that lay astride the 1967 border, half
inside Israel, half in the northwestern West Bank. (Baqa was
one city in 1948 but was split in two by the 1949 armistice line,
the western half remaining inside Israel, where its residents
became Israeli citizens, and the eastern half coming under Jordanian
rule in the West Bank. Western and eastern sections were reunited
physically, although not legally, when Israel captured the West
Bank in 1967, and the city again essentially functioned as one
until the wall irrevocably split it.) In August 2003, in order
to make way for the wall, Israeli tanks and bulldozers destroyed
a market area that straddled the border. Described as the most
vigorous open-air market in the West Bank and used by Jewish
Israelis as well as Palestinians from both Israel and Palestine,
the once-bustling market area is now dead on both sides of the
border; almost 150 market stalls and several private homes were
demolished, and what shops and stalls remain intact have closed
for lack of business.
The massive 25-foot-high concrete
wall bisects the principal east-west commercial road and separates
families, divides commercial ventures, and separates people from
service providers. A system of permits now allows only slightly
more than 100 named individuals, out of a city of thousands,
to pass from one side to the other through a single gate in the
wall, operated by Israeli soldiers. Our group left its mark,
out of sight of the Israeli soldiers, by writing protest messages
on the wall in a variety of languages, but this was small satisfaction
against the realization of the destruction of lives represented
by the wall, and against the sobering knowledge that Israel treats
its own citizens in this way only when they are not Jews.
We witnessed a similarly discriminatory
situation in the twin cities of Lod and Ramle, well inside Israel,
near Tel Aviv. Once entirely Palestinian towns, both were almost
totally emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants in July 1948,
thanks to a forcible expulsion led by a future Israeli prime
minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Those Palestinians who escaped expulsion
and their descendants now make up 25-30 percent of each city's
population, living for the most part in the slum sections of
cities otherwise populated by Israel's poorest Jewish immigrants.
These are the poor suburbs of Tel Aviv, and Lod is the location
of Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport.
As elsewhere in Israel, Palestinians
in Lod and Ramle are unable to expand their neighborhoods. We
drove through one residential section where Israeli authorities
had placed huge boulders to prevent Palestinians from building.
Walls not as high as the separation wall in the West Bank
but just as solidly concrete are being built in both cities
to separate Jewish from Palestinian neighborhoods. Several Palestinian
(but no Jewish) homes have been demolished to accommodate the
wall. Our guide, a sympathetic Israeli doing a doctorate in
urban planning with particular emphasis on how Israel institutionalizes
its racist policies, pointed out one spot in Ramle where Palestinian
boys regularly scale the wall to play soccer and basketball in
a field on the other side very near a Jewish residential neighborhood.
The Jews are outraged that Palestinian kids can enter their
neighborhood, and a Ramle city official whom our guide interviewed
for his dissertation confessed that he felt he had abdicated
his municipal duties by failing to keep the Palestinian boys
out of the Jewish side. In Lod, the Israeli military and police
have actually established a checkpoint in one spot between Jewish
and Palestinian sections at which cars are stopped and questioned.
Our bus was stopped and, although we were allowed to pass into
the Palestinian section, a police jeep followed the bus, lights
flashing, until we drove out of the city limits. Israelis are
obviously uncomfortable when outsiders witness the state's racism.
All of these official, state-mandated
discriminatory measures against the non-Jewish population are
the inevitable consequences of establishing a state on the basis
of Jewish exclusivity and Jewish-majority rule. For Israelis,
the more they can keep Palestinians out of sight and out of mind,
the better. Invisible is good from the Jewish perspective; gone
altogether would be far better, but this is something the Israelis
have not yet been able to achieve. They're working on it.
To cap this picture of the
impact Zionism has had on Palestine's native population, the
group also walked through what little remains of a Palestinian
town in the Galilee that Israeli forces erased from the landscape
in 1948. Saffuriya, about five miles north of Nazareth, was
a farming community of over 4,000 people with a history going
back to Hellenistic times. Archeological excavations have revealed
the remains of a Roman amphitheater; the ruins of a sixth-century
Christian church are still evident; Muslims conquered the town
in the seventh century; Crusaders built a castle there, which
was later captured by Saladin; an Ottoman ruler built a fortress,
still prominent today, on the town's highest point in the eighteenth
century. Israeli forces attacked the town in July 1948, and
most residents fled north to Lebanon. A small number remained
or reinfiltrated, but according to Israeli historian Benny Morris
no friend of the Palestinians but an honest historian
Jewish authorities wanted Saffuriya's approximately 7,000 acres
of cultivable land for new Israeli villages and also feared that,
if left alone, the town would return to its prewar population.
As a result, in early 1949 the authorities trucked the remaining
Palestinian inhabitants to other villages, distributed the land
to three Israeli farming villages, and demolished Saffuriya's
700-plus homes.
Our group was led by a young
man, the grandson of Saffuriya residents who now lives in Nazareth,
through tall weeds and past huge prickly pear cactus something
every Palestinian recognizes as the certain indication of an
abandoned Palestinian village to stand on the long-abandoned
site of Saffuriya. We stood in the old cemetery, looking up
at the hillside that had once constituted the built-up area of
the town. The young guide stood in front of the hill and showed
us a large wall calendar with a picture of the same location
dating from the 1930s. The picture shows a sizable town, houses
spilling down the hillside, agricultural lands below, and the
square Ottoman fortress at the top of the hill. Today the fortress
is still there, but no houses remain; the hillside has been densely
planted with tall pines by the Jewish National Fund. Americans
are familiar with the Jewish campaigns of past decades to raise
donations for tree-planting in Israel, supposedly an effort to
help Israelis "make the desert bloom." Here we saw
evidence of the human tragedy that enabled the planting of many
of those trees. Clearly, in an Israeli context, trees are better
than Palestinians. Another of the consequences of Zionism.
The Logic
of the Occupation
Trying to visit the small Christian
Palestinian town of Zababdeh in the northern West Bank one Sunday
morning after the work camp was finished, we encountered the
arbitrariness of Israel's domination close up. Invited to visit
a Palestinian Melkite Catholic priest who is the friend of some
American friends of ours, we left Jerusalem at 9:00 in the morning
in a car driven by a Palestinian friend, Ahmad, who has a Jerusalem
ID card, as well as yellow Israeli license plates, and speaks
Hebrew and English, in addition to Arabic. For Palestinians,
in this most surreal of environments, the origin of one's ID
card and the color of one's license plates are critical to getting
along in life. Possessing a Jerusalem ID card is the only way
a Palestinian can enter the city without a special, hard-to-obtain
permit. Having yellow license plates, as opposed to the green
and white plates of the West Bank, is the only way a Palestinian
can drive through most checkpoints or drive on the many limited-access
roads built for Israeli settlers.
We drive from Jerusalem down
to the Jordan Valley and north along a route paralleling the
Jordan River. Although considerably longer, Ahmad calculates
that this is an easier route than straight north through the
West Bank because we can avoid the notorious Huwwara checkpoint
near Nablus, where Israeli soldiers get off on extremely harsh
treatment of Palestinians. After about an hour, we turn left,
heading back into the heart of the West Bank toward the Hamra
checkpoint. After this, we will have a clear, checkpoint-free
road to Zababdeh. It is very quiet here, only a few cars waiting
to get through the checkpoint in each direction. By mid-morning,
it is beginning to get hot, and the Israeli soldiers are already
bored and irritated. When our car approaches the checkpoint
and stops, the soldiers begin to harass Ahmad, who has gotten
out of the car. Put out your cigarette, turn off the engine,
give us your ID card, why are you here? Ahmad is friendly but
not obsequious. He puts out his cigarette but demands to know
why this is necessary. Because sometimes Palestinians throw
cigarettes at us, the soldier says inanely.
Ahmad explains our purpose.
Zababdeh is a Christian village, the priest is a Christian,
there are no terrorists there, we are Americans. No luck. The
soldiers say that no one with a Jerusalem ID and no foreigner
may enter the West Bank. Obviously, we have been in the West
Bank all along, but this logic seems not to matter. We all plead
our case, we in English with the one soldier who speaks English
(and is obviously originally an American), Ahmad in Hebrew with
the checkpoint CO. No luck. They say we can call the district
headquarters and put in an appeal, but this could take hours.
They wave us off to wait at the side of the road. We would
leave, but they have kept Ahmad's ID card and refuse to return
it. This is worse than taking his clothes or confiscating his
car. As we wait, Ahmad steams. "They each have a role,"
he says. "This one is to deal with the foreigners; that
one is to get permissions [from higher authority]; that one is
to give shit. Each one has his job. He feels he is the God
of everybody." Periodically, each of us tries to talk to
one soldier or another, no longer pleading for passage but simply
for the return of Ahmad's ID card, but always to no avail. Finally,
after an hour and a quarter, the American-Israeli soldier comes
to the car and tells us that we two Americans can "enter"
that is, walk through the checkpoint and pick up a taxi
on the other side but Ahmad cannot.
When we make it clear that
we will not abandon Ahmad, they finally return his ID, and we
leave, retracing our steps down to the Jordan Valley. We head
farther north and again turn left toward the heart of the West
Bank, trying another checkpoint. By now, it is noon, and the
temperature outside is 104 enough to create some sympathy
even for Israeli soldiers. One soldier, outside a guard tower
overlooking the checkpoint, is so bored he is sound asleep, head
tilted back in his chair. The soldier in charge here is nicer,
at least not out to humiliate Ahmad, and he does not take Ahmad's
ID when he goes to his guardpost to call someone about how to
handle us. Again we wait for an hour, held captive by the "nice"
soldier's repeated tantalizing assurances that he is trying to
get authorization for us to pass. Again, however, after an hour
we are turned away.
This time the story is that
Ahmad can enter, but we cannot because we are foreigners. In
Israeli thinking, this is apparently not a contradiction. It
is the logic of the occupation. We return to Jerusalem almost
six hours after leaving. Were Israel not controlling Palestinian
lives in the West Bank, we could have spent this six hours driving
directly north to Zababdeh, visiting with our friend the priest
for three hours, and returning directly to Jerusalem. We call
the priest when we return to Jerusalem. "This is what we
go through all the time," he tells us. "Please tell
this story when you go home."
Encountering
Americans
Somewhat to our surprise, we
have encountered American aid workers, contractors working for
USAID, at our East Jerusalem hotel both this year and last.
They have all been on contract from private companies building
wells and rebuilding roads for Palestinians. The irony of this
is inescapable. Last year, speaking to one of these Americans,
a supervisor whose subordinates were working on roads in Ramallah,
we commented on the irony, wondering at a US government that
was financing Israel's destruction of roads all over the West
Bank as its tanks rampaged through cities and countryside, and
was then financing the reconstruction of the same roads. The
same applies to wells, which Israeli tanks and bulldozers regularly
destroy and contaminate. Oh, this contractor said, harrumphing
a bit uncomfortably, we don't get into politics; it would make
life and work too difficult if we took sides in the conflict.
Indeed. Difficult too if they were to challenge the illogic
of their US paymasters. This year we made the same point to
another contractor whose team was working on wells, but his response
was belligerent: nobody has ever destroyed his wells, he insisted,
entirely missing the point that he is the one who is repairing
Israeli damage. His contract, he declared self-importantly,
is worth $7 million. Gee, this might buy the wing of one of
the many F-16s the U.S. donates to Israel every year.
Later, at the airport in Amman,
Jordan, as we prepared to fly home, we encountered four young
Americans at the departure gate, all dressed in desert fatigues
without insignia, all muscular and thick-necked, all obviously
enjoying their loud conversation about the numbers of RPG rounds
their installation had taken on this or that night. They were
clearly coming from Iraq, heading for a home leave; they did
not have the demeanor of troops on their way home for good.
As they continued their conversation, largely for the benefit
of those of us around them, Jordanians and Americans, who were
not so privileged to live in the macho world of Baghdad, a young
woman in civilian dress arrived at the gate and, in the same
boisterous manner, struck up a deliberately easy-to-overhear
conversation. What did they do in Baghdad, she wondered? Personal
bodyguards for Ambassador John Negroponte. Were they working
for Blackwater (the now notorious company that has sent hundreds
of so-called "contractors" i.e., armed mercenaries
to Iraq to do guard duty at prisons and at military installations)?
Yes. It soon came out in the conversation that she too had
been in Baghdad a few months earlier, working in some kind of
legal capacity inside the Green Zone. They all fell to comparing
their living arrangements they seemed to inhabit sections
of the Green Zone with names like Paradise Hills, or perhaps
it was Paradise Gardens and their own experiences dodging
mortar rounds and RPG fire. One of the young men, asked "how
it is these days," lamented that it was bad, now that the
idealism has gone.
We had to wonder, when was
that, that there was any idealism? But we didn't ask. We cringed
at the knowledge that Americans like this transit Amman all the
time, en route to and from Iraq, leaving behind an impression
of Americans that grows worse by the day. And Americans wonder
why Arabs cannot abide us anymore.
Sad Days
Our good-bye to the Middle
East last year had a bit of romance to it. After we had left
Palestine across the Allenby Bridge to Jordan in August 2003,
we spent the evening before our flight home from Amman with some
Palestinian-Jordanian friends who own a home and orchard in the
hills north of Amman. Arriving in the late afternoon, we talked
for a while and then went out to the orchard to pick figs. Eating
figs right off the tree in this beautiful setting was like being
transported to the hills of Tuscany, far away from the tragedy
of Palestine and the turmoil of Middle East politics. We could
look across the Jordan River and down at the entire West Bank.
As night fell, the lights of Jerusalem and the West Bank began
to blink on. Our Palestinian friends pointed out the lights
of Nablus opposite us, those of Jenin farther north. Jerusalem
was a huge display of lights far to the south. What are these
near lights just across the river, we asked, knowing there was
no sizable Palestinian town in this area. That's an Israeli
settlement, our hosts said, and the group fell silent.
Leaving was sadder this year.
The memory of the wall, the visual evidence from all over Palestine
of Israel's cruel destruction in the name of making life comfortable
for Jews, and the memory of Israel's racist treatment of its
non-Jewish citizens were still vividly with us as we left Palestine
and a few days later left Jordan. The wall in particular haunted
and still haunts us. Supporters of Israel are fond of saying
with considerable sarcasm that the wall is only an inconvenience
to Palestinians and, they claim, only a temporary one at
that while those Jews murdered and maimed by Palestinian
terrorism are permanently murdered and maimed. But there is
something special about the in-your-face brutality of the wall.
It destroys permanently, it ruins lives and does so permanently,
it is a permanent blight on the landscape (even if it is eventually
torn down, the olive groves and agricultural land that it destroys
will not grow back soon), it is a permanent blight in people's
lives. Several Palestinians who protested the wall in peaceful
demonstrations have been permanently shot to death by Israeli
soldiers. The wall's massive physical size and the casual
disregard for Palestinian lives of those who defend its construction
leave those who have stood in its shadow, dwarfed by its
monstrous presence, dumbfounded, at a loss for words to describe
it. But the feeling of immense sadness is palpable.
Just yesterday a woman from
France who had been part of the work camp wrote us that she had
been thinking about the destruction and desolation in Palestine,
comparing it to the beautiful landscapes near her home in the
French Alps; she said that "finally it broke my heart."
Palestine tends to have that effect on you.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA.
He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director
of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is
a contributor to Imperial
Crusades, CounterPunch's new history of the wars on Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Kathleen Christison, a former CIA political analyst, is
the author of Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy
and Wound
of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story. They can
be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org.
They can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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