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April 3, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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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
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 3, 2002
Israeli Invasion Brings
No Peace to Bethlehem
By Robert Fisk
in Bethlehem
The Independent
If this is a war on terror, Jesus wasn't born
in Bethlehem. The first to die was an 80-year-old Palestinian
man, whose body never made it to the morgue. Then a woman and
her son were critically wounded by Israeli gunfire.
A cloud of black smoke swirled up in
the Tempest winds from the other side of Manger Square. A burning
Israeli armoured vehicle, they said, although - running for
our lives as bullets crackled around us just below the Church
of the Redeemer - there was no way of knowing. The air was alive
with the sound of shells and rifle fire, the rain guttering
in waves across the Israeli tanks which ground between the
Ottoman stone houses, smashing into cars and tearing down shop
hoardings.
Yes, the little town of Bethlehem lay
still, its dark streets deserted save for the Israelis, but
there was no everlasting light, no deep and dreamless sleep.
As we huddled in our frightened little room with Norma Hazboun,
a professor of social sciences at Bethlehem University, the
sight of a Merkava tank crashing towards Qutaa Street, just
600 metres from the place of Christ's birth, was the symbol
of the hopes and fears of all the years.
Oslo, "peace" and "mutual
respect" had brought us to this. A Closed Military Area
had been declared once more by the Israelis. Jesus, one assumes,
also had to deal with the Roman version of closed military areas,
but he had God on his side. Yesterday, the people of Bethlehem
had no one.
They waited for some statement from the
Pope, from the Vatican, from the European Union. And what they
got was an invasion of armour. We watched them all morning,
the Merkavas and APCs stealing their way through the ancient
streets searching for the "savages" of "terror"
Ariel Sharon has told us about. And all the while, on the television
set by the window of our Bethlehem room, we watched Palestine
collapse around us. The Palestinian intelligence offices had
been attacked in Ramallah. The Palestinians said hundreds of
women and children were packed inside the besieged and shelled
building as well as men. Then shells started falling on Dheisheh
camp. We knew that already. Dheisheh was so close that the windows
vibrated.
The Bethlehem television station was
still operating from a few hundred yards away - the Israelis
hadn't got there yet - and there was Sharon on the screen. He
was offering to let the Europeans fly Yasser Arafat out of Ramallah,
providing he never returned to the land he calls Palestine.
Back in 1982, Sharon made the same deal with Arafat; back then
it was exile from Beirut with the help of the Americans. Not
this time. Offer refused.
More shooting now from outside our windows.
A tank came down the road, its barrel clipping the green awning
of a shop and then swaying upwards to point directly at our
window. We decamped to the stairwell. Had they seen us watching
them? We stood on the cold, damp stairs then peeked around our
window. Two Israeli soldiers were running past the house. A
second tank shuddered up the street and swivelled its turret
to the south.
We knew all about these tanks: their
maximum speed, the voice of their massive engines. One raced
across an intersection while we stood, in blue and black flak
jackets marked with 'TV' in huge taped letters, arms spread
out like ducks to show we carried no weapons. Each time we found
a smaller street, another Israeli tracked vehicle would drive
past it.
By the time we were close to Manger Square,
we had tanks in front of us, APCs and another tank behind. That's
when the shooting began, the crack-crack of bullets fired from
a few yards away. The Israelis? If it was coming from Palestinians,
they were suicidally close. We ran across the road, down a narrow
passage. It was then that Professor Hazboun unlocked her iron
front door to us.
How snug we felt beside her gas fire,
how trapped in her little home. How powerless to move. The TV
became a monitor of Palestine's disintegration. The newsreader
stumbled on his words. Iran and Iraq might stop oil exports
to force the Americans to demand an Israeli withdrawal. Arafat's
intelligence headquarters in Ramallah were on fire. An Israeli
soldier was dead in an APC on the other side of Manger Square,
hit by two Palestinian rockets. About 700 prisoners were bound
and blindfolded in Ramallah. Colin Powell, the American Secretary
of State, was insisting Arafat was "recognised" as
the Palestinian leader, and that this recognition would remain
whether he was in Europe or anywhere else.
The smoke still rose behind Manger Square.
The tank up the street backed towards the pavement and collided
with the side of a house. The television newscaster, unshaven,
exhausted and dressed in a leather jacket, read a statement
from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, one of Sharon's most lethal
enemies. These are the wicked, cruel suicide bombers who have
stricken Israel. "We will stand as Abu Amar (Yasser Arafat)
said: For victory of martyrdom, as the enemy knows." Outside,
beside a cluster of lemon trees, two armoured carriers pulled
up, their Israeli crews desperately trying to pump fuel from
one vehicle to the other before Palestinian snipers picked them
off. The bullets snapped around them within seconds and the
two frightened soldiers threw themselves off the roofs to the
shelter of a shop.
Then the mobile phone rang. An English
voice, a lady from Wateringbury in Kent. My home was once in
the next village of East Farleigh. But Liz Yates was not in
Kent. She was only two miles away, in the Aida refugee camp
with nine other westerners, two each from France and Sweden
and five from the United States. They were refusing to leave.
The voice had that sharpness born of intense tiredness and fear.
"We want to help the 4,000 Palestinian refugees here.
Everyone here believes the Israelis will come in and we've promised
to stay here when they do. It will be some kind of protection.
We are asking our consulates to pressure the Israelis into withdrawing."
Some hope. Only a day earlier, an Israeli
soldier opened fire on a group of unarmed western protesters
near Bethlehem , wounding five of them in front of the BBC's
own cameras before trying to shoot television reporter Orla
Guerin as well. We were thinking about that when the bullets
flew around us on the road in central Bethlehem. We thought
about it again when we crept out of the house in the late afternoon.
I had another call before we said goodbye
to Professor Hazboun, from an American woman working with a
Palestinian human rights group in Gaza. She could no longer
reach the Rafah refugee camp, she said. She was copying the
group's computer files in case the Israelis took the originals
as they had in Ramallah. "Everyone thinks they are coming."
Yes, they thought that at Aida camp as well. The Israelis are
coming. But do the suicide bombers care?
We walked like robots back down those
dangerous streets. It had been like this when the Israelis,
having humiliated Arafat, invaded West Beirut in 1982. Sharon
was in control then too. The Israelis were engaged, he told
us then, in a "war on terror". Civilians died in their
thousands. And then came the massacre of Palestinians by Israeli
allies at Sabra and Chatila. So when, I asked myself as we made
our way back to Jerusalem, will the massacre start here?
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