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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories May 19, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts The Politics and Economics of Outsourcing   May 18, 2005 Jean Bricmont Vive La France? Laura Carlsen Bush's Posada Carriles Quandry: an Anti-Cuba Terrorist is Still a Terrorist Mike Whitney The Secret Raids of Alberto Gonzales: 10,000 Swept Up Joshua Frank Flushing the Koran: Why Newsweek Got It Right George Galloway Thusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman (and Christopher Hitchens) Manuel Garcia, Jr. Writing Tickets for American War Crimes Dwight D. Eisenhower How the GOP will Destroy Itself Dave Lindorff The Plot to Make the PATRIOT Act Even Worse May 17, 2005 Mickey Z. GIs Behaving Badly Petuuche Gilbert The People of Acoma Still Fight to be Free Paul Craig Roberts Lies That Kill: Why Isn't Bush in the Dock? Ramzy Baroud The New Palestinian Uprising Robert Jensen / Pat Youngblood Pinning the Blame on Newsweek Stan Cox Poisoning Patancheru: the Severe Side Effects of India's Drug Industry Dave Zirin American Anthem: Ozzie Guillen and Fining for Freedom Diana Barahona Reporters Without Borders Unmasked Website of the Day Revolutionary Flower Pot Society May 16, 2005 Michael Gillespie The Family Released a Statement: Death Notices for the Warrior Theocracy Jason Leopold BP Stains the Arctic Jesse Muldoon How Many Schools Left Behind? Norman Solomon Media and the War: "The Bombs in Iraq Explode at Home" Robert Cray Twenty Patrick Cockburn Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land Website of the Day Bolton's Divorce Papers: She Took It All Away, Including Most of the Furniture May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Join the 14 Per Cent Club! Saul Landau Lessons from Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires as Well as People Gary Leupp Whither Yale? Towards the Imperial University JoAnn Wypijewski The Glory that is Lockhart, Texas Ben Tripp The Wayward Airplane: a Cautionary Tale Brian J. Foley Was Jesus Gay? Tom Barry Bolton the Eavesdropper Mitchell Verter Barbarous Oaxaca: Indigenous Rights Groups Meet the "Law of the Club" Mike Ferner War on COs: Army Files Additional Charges Against Kevin Benderman Dan Smith Perceiving Darfur Mark Scaramella Death with Pitfalls Don Fitz Mommy, Is This a Finger in My Rice Puffs?: Splicing Human DNA into the Food Chain Diane Farsetta PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco: the Senate's "Fake News" Hearings Michael Dickinson Soldier Crawling: Military Conscription in Turkey Ron Jacobs The Jackson State Murders Fred Gardner "Hydroponics? 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Lind Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty Jack Random The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush Gary Leupp Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg     May 11, 2005 Patrick Cockburn The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle Kevin Zeese The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day Christopher Brauchli Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan Zalman Amit The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University Robert Shull Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws Mike Whitney God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School Norman Solomon Political Bluster and the Filibuster     May 10, 2005 Richard Drayton The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check Dave Zirin Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP Jackie Corr The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall Dave Lindorff Silence of the Scams: Economists on China Michael Donnelly From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory Reza Fiyouzat Nomadic Abstracts Scott Parkin Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton Stephen Babcock The Burden of Knowing Better Alan Farago Florida, Water and Lobbyists Michael Neumann Naomi's Courage Website of the Day One Nation Under Plagiarism     May 9, 2005 Louis Proyect Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher Robert Fisk "Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two Kevin Zeese Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman Joshua Frank Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage Sasha Kramer A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons Andrew Wimmer Create and Resist Jeffrey Webber Back to the Streets in Bolivia? Jeffrey St. Clair Straight to Bechtel   May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Who Beat Hitler? Gary Leupp Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism Saul Landau Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups Joe DeRaymond Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega Daniela Ponce Seeing Chile in Nepal Heather Williams Hollywood Does Enron Gregory Elich Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice Anis Memon To Cuba and Back John Chuckman The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism" Mike Whitney Hard Right Rage Against the Truth Ron Jacobs Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On Colin Kalmbacher Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont. Lance Selfa Uprising in Mexico City Fred Gardner "Getting High is a Little Like Cuba" Ben Tripp Letters on Wittgenstein Mickey Z. The Mother of All Days Richard Joseph Those Patriotic Magnets Dr. Susan Block Come As You Are: Masturbation 101 Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert   May 6, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood Erin Yoshioka Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison? Sam Husseini Talking with Syrians Dave Lindorff Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters Kevin Zeese Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty Joshua Frank An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War Dan Bacher Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid P. Sainath India's Bloody Water Wars   May 5, 2005 Carles Mutaner Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?" Carl G. Estabrook Is There Any Hope for the Pope? Farrah Hassen The US's Syrian Obsession Kevin Zeese "Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta Michael Leonardi May Day with an American Soldier in Rome Bennett Ramberg The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You Ray McGovern The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit Norman Solomon Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran Nicole Colson The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights Brian Concannon, Jr. Clearing the Fences in Haiti     May 4, 2005 Colin Kalmbacher Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested John Walsh Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War Greg Moses Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation" Ali Khan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart Chris Floyd Ring Them Bells Linda S. Heard D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics Dave Zirin The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle William S. Lind Fool's Paradise Gary Leupp Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution Website of the Day Kent State, May 4, 1970   May 3, 2005 Dave Lindorff Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice Brian Cloughley Halliburton's War Loot Ira Kurzban Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers Seth Sandronsky Towards Debtors' Prisons? Gilad Atzmon The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More Michael Donnelly Branding Eco Collapse Alex Sanchez Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush? Peter Linebaugh Magna Carta and May Day   May 2, 2005 Ron Jacobs Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement Stan Goff The Case of Hasan Akbar Karyn Strickler Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics Joshua Frank Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly Kevin Zeese Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam Vicente Navarro Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician       April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility" Gabriel Kolko Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later Jennifer Loewenstein The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood Lee Sustar City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago Saul Landau The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power T.W. Croft The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy Nikolas Kozloff Fox News v. Hugo Chavez William Blum Never-Ending Double Standards Dave Lindorff Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly Joshua Frank The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls Doug Giebel Saving Jane Fonda Steven Erlanger A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Fred Gardner Washington State Doctor Harassed Mike Whitney Another Mad Bush Press Conference Kurt Nimmo Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine Joe DeRaymond A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania Michael Dickinson Flags Mickey Z. May Day at Yankee Stadium Justin Taylor The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy Poets Basement Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Save Barbados's Cowpastor                                             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.     Subscribe Online

May 19, 2005 From Ghettos to Frontiers What Will Happen After Israel's Withdrawl from Gaza By NEVE GORDON Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel by James Ron, University of California Press. In what direction are Israeli-Palestinian relations heading? Will the imminent withdrawal from the Gaza Strip lead the two parties closer to a peace agreement? Or will the fighting between the two peoples reemerge with a vengeance once Jewish settlements have been dismantled and Israeli troops redeployed? In order to gain insight into what lies ahead, it is important first to analyze the use of violence in the region, asking ourselves why the employment of force was less lethal in certain areas than in others. This is precisely the question James Ron asks in his daring and groundbreaking book Frontiers and Ghettos. Ron's basic and straightforward insight is that state violence is dramatically shaped by the institutional setting in which it takes place. A sociology professor at McGill University, Ron holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Human Rights. He analyzes Serbian behavior in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sandzak and Vojvodina, and Israeli behavior in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon, employing two spatial metaphors -- frontiers and ghettos. One reads that the crucial difference between frontiers and ghettos is the extent to which states control these arenas -- legally and bureaucratically -- and feel a moral and political sense of responsibility for their fate. QUOTE "States enjoy an unrivaled level of control over the ghetto's borders and territory, suppressing challenges to their monopoly and force. Although this grants states some distinct advantages, it also implies important responsibilities. Ghetto residents are despised members of society, but both local and international rules stipulate that the state bears substantial responsibility for their welfare. Frontiers, by contrast, are perched on the edge of core states and are not fully incorporated into their zone of control. States do not dominate frontiers as they do ghettos, and they are not bound by the same legal and moral obligations. In times of crisis and uncertainty, frontiers more easily become sites of ethnic cleansing." In others words, ghettos are densely institutionalized by the core state, since they are within its legal sphere of influence, and serve as repositories for unwanted and marginalized populations. Frontiers, on the other hand, are distinguished from the core state by clear boundaries, and are only thinly institutionalized arenas. The different institutional settings determine the kind of violence employed. Whereas ghettos are characterized by ethnic policing, mass incarceration and ongoing harassment, frontiers are more prone to brutal and lawless violence. State violence, Ron claims, is organized very differently at the core, within the bureaucratic-legal zone of power, than it is in regions which are not incorporated into the core state's institutional apparatus. In the section that deals with Israel, Ron's research concentrates on the first Intifada (December 1987 to 1993). His goal is to explain "why Israel engaged in ethnic policing rather than ethnic cleansing during the Palestinian uprising, despite the potential for more despotic measures." It is within this context that he distinguishes between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which he characterizes as a ghetto, and Lebanon, which he considers to be Israel's frontier. Ron begins, however, by reminding his readers that in 1948 "Jewish troops participated in the often forced removal of some 750,000 Palestinians over international borders in a campaign that today would be termed ethnic cleansing." He goes on to show that Israel has employed much more lethal methods on its frontier -- Lebanon -- than it has in the Occupied Territories. In the fifteen-day operation dubbed Grapes of Wrath (1996) the Israeli air-force carried out 600 sorties, the military fired 25,000 artillery shells, killed 154 civilians, and displaced 400,000 Lebanese. Three years earlier, in Operation Accountability, Israel killed 120 civilians and displaced 300,000 more. Ron traces these operations to the 1970s, showing how the more recent military campaigns are no different from operations Israel carried out in June 1974 and May 1975. He also discusses the Litani operation of 1978, as well as the Lebanon war and its aftermath, highlighting some of the similarities to the Serbian experience in Sand ak, particularly Israel's use of the Phalange militias and the South Lebanese Army. Ron concludes this section by noting that Lebanon has always been external to "Israel's formal zone of responsibility, separated by a sovereign border from the norms and laws of Israeli state and society. As Israeli rights group B'tselem noted, the Israeli public debate almost completely ignored the suffering and injustice inflicted on Lebanese civilians,' suggesting that unlike the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, Lebanese civilians were not part of the collective Israeli consciousness.'" Put differently, if Israel had employed the same methods in the Occupied Territories as the ones used in Lebanon, it would have been "tearing at the fabric of its own state." Whereas the Israeli military in Lebanon was distant and ferocious, striking with great intensity but making little effort to penetrate and manage Lebanese society, Ron shows that in the West Bank and Gaza Israel created a system of control, which was devised to monitor and circumscribe each and every aspect of Palestinian life. Shortly after the 1967 War Israel realized that it could not properly control the Occupied Territories if it did not seal its boundaries from external infiltrations of fedayeen (Palestinian guerrilla fighters). Simultaneously, it rapidly worked to suppress internal resistance, and began rationalizing its mechanisms of control by installing a complex bureaucratic-legal apparatus within the regions it occupied. It also incorporated Palestinian laborers into the Israeli workforce. Ron illustrates how the military government monitored Palestinian society, surveying the precise number of "licensed carpenters, printing presses, fire trucks and water wells." There were even detailed inventories of Palestinian workshops for cement, furniture, cigarettes, soap, metals, olive products and sweets. "Nothing was too small to count, and no object was too minor to register. Perhaps most significant was the state's registration of the Palestinian population itself and its creation of detailed document-verification procedures." The crucial point is that by inscribing Palestinian lives into Israel's bureaucratic registries, they became objects of state responsibility. The "ghettoization" of the West Bank and Gaza functioned, in other words, as a mechanism of restraint, limiting Israel's options with respect to the employment of violence. As we will see momentarily, the more recent process whereby the Sharon government has been turning the Occupied Territories into a frontier entails a qualitative change in the kind of violence Israel uses. Here, though, it is important to underscore that the regulations Israel set up in the territories served as the nuts and bolts of a controlling system until the Oslo process. And while Israel used harsh and painful violence, its actions were subordinate to the "rule of law" and therefore constrained. As Frontiers and Ghettos underscores, the Israeli security forces employed "police style" methods in their attempt to quell the first uprising, incarcerating tens of thousands of Palestinians while subjecting thousands of them to torture; Israel refrained, however, from employing the kinds of methods it used in Lebanon. Ron's theoretical model accordingly helps explain why, despite Israel's overwhelming firepower and the constant confrontations between demonstrators and the military during the first Intifada, "soldiers killed only 204 Palestinians between December 9, 1987, and November 15, 1988, the most intense phase of the uprising." While Ron's argument is persuasive, it is crucial to keep in mind that the institutional apparatus which constrains the use of violence, is, in and of itself, a form of violence. Ron fails to emphasize this dimension in his book, thus eliding an important aspect of Israel's occupation. This form of violence may not be as lethal, but its effects are often no less devastating. In the West Bank and Gaza, for example, one of the consequences of the bureaucratic-legal system that Israel introduced has been the complete fragmentation of Palestinian society. Social fragmentation may, at first, appear to be less brutal than artillery, but in many respects its long-term ramifications are more destructive to the fabric of Palestinian society. Frontiers and Ghettos is important not only because it helps us understand the past, but also because it provides us with tools to analyze the political processes that are currently unfolding in the region. One of these processes is the ongoing trend of transforming the West Bank and Gaza from ghettos into frontiers. This change began immediately after Oslo, when Israel started curtailing its institutional apparatus in these regions. In 1994, the Palestinian Authority willingly took on the role of managing the daily lives of the inhabitants in the Occupied Territories. Within a matter of months, the civil institutions needed to administer populations in modern societies -- inter alia education, health and welfare -- were passed from Israel to the hands of the fledgling authority, which was also given some limited form of sovereignty. Israel, however, maintained control over security matters (at least in areas B and C which comprise 80 percent of the territory). The borders separating Israel proper (pre-1967 borders) from the West Bank and Gaza became much clearer, so much so that access to the Strip was denied to all Israelis except for soldiers and settlers. Even Knesset members can no longer enter Gaza. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian laborers who had been incorporated into Israel's workforce, and were therefore part of the daily scenery inside Israel, disappeared as their right of entry into Israel was revoked. The limited -- and albeit very hierarchical -- integration of the two societies unraveled, disintegrated, and a sharp bifurcation swiftly emerged. Changes in the Gaza Strip occurred earlier than in the West Bank and have been more dramatic, particularly following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw from the area. According to B'tselem, the level of violence has increased dramatically. In the first ten months after the official decision to dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the Strip, Israeli forces killed 563 Palestinians in Gaza, while during the previous ten months period 264 were killed. But even before Sharon's decision to pull out of Gaza, Israel's repertoires of violence were modified and in no way compare to those used during the years preceding the Al-Aqsa Intifada. If in the thirteen year period between December 1987 and September 2000, 1359 Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli security forces, in the four and a half years that followed over 3,100 have been killed. To be sure, the fact that in this Intifada the Palestinians have been using firearms and suicide bombers has had an impact on the level of violence, but forms of Palestinian resistance only partially explain Israel's violence. Moreover, in June 2004, Ha'aretz journalist Akiva Eldar revealed that the top Israeli security echelons were interested in "fanning the flames" during the Intifada's first weeks. He cites Amos Malka, who was the military general in charge of intelligence at the time, as saying that during the first month, when the uprising was still mostly characterized by non-violent popular protests, the military fired 1.3 million bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. The idea was to intensify the levels of violence, thinking that this would lead to military victory. Israel now regularly uses F-16 jets, apache helicopters and tanks to bomb Palestinian cities, a form of violence that was hardly -- if ever -- utilized in the West Bank and Gaza in the past. Extra-judicial executions have become common practice as have massive demolitions of houses. In the Gaza Strip alone Israel has destroyed 2,548 houses since the beginning of the second Intifada, leaving over 24,000 people homeless. The southern Lebanese peasants could, at least, flee northwards, a non-existent option for the inhabitant of Gaza. Frontiers and Ghettos also suggests that alongside the transformation of the means of violence one should expect to see a corresponding change in Israel's sense of moral responsibility towards the occupied population. And indeed, it is no longer the case that Israeli liberals underscore their country's ethical obligations toward their occupied neighbors, as they did when these regions were ghettos. In many ways the Palestinians have become Lebanese. Israel is now less interested in penetrating and managing the lives of the Palestinians and is more willing to employ brutal violence to quell any resistance. Insofar as this is the case, it is likely that at least in the near future the violence in the West Bank and Gaza will only become more ferocious. Neve Gordon, who teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, is a visiting scholar in the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com