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April 11, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
From the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Juniad Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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By Alexander
Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read Whiteout and Find Out
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:
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April 11, 2002
After the Invasion
Now What?
By Jeff Halper
With the fall of the Jenin refugee camp and the
crushing of resistance in the casbah of Nablus, April 9 -- the
twelfth day of the Israel's final push to defeat the Palestinians
- marks the end of yet another stage of the Palestinian's struggle
for self-determination. April 10th, when Powell meets the Spanish
presidency of the European Union, it will become clear whether
the "political process" that must now emerge will
lead to a viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state or to
the dependent mini-state Israel has had in mind since the start
of the Oslo process in 1993.
This is an either-or situation; nothing
can "bridge" the fundamental interests separating
the two sides. The Palestinians, who already agreed on a demilitarized
and semi-sovereign state on only 22% of mandatory Palestine,
must receive a state that is territorially coherent, economically
viable, in control of its borders and natural resources, with
full access to Jerusalem and a meaningful degree of sovereignty.
Israel, which needs a Palestinian mini-state to "relieve"
it of the three million Palestinian residents of the Occupied
Territories who pose a threat to the "Jewish character"
of the state, will not agree to relinquish control or to fully
dismantle its infrastructure of settlements and "by-pass
roads." It is determined to maintain its occupation in
one form or another. Only one of these two options is possible:
either a viable Palestinian state or a dependent bantustan.
With the breaking of Palestinian resistance
on April 9th, Sharon would appear to have reasons to rejoice.
The multi-pronged strategy of his "National Unity"
government to force the Palestinians to accept a bantustan seems
to have achieved its major goals:
1. A campaign of attrition has steadily
eroded the Palestinians' ability to resist the occupation. The
demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes, massive expropriation
of fertile farmland, a permanent economic "closure"
that has imprisoned and impoverished the population, curfews
and sieges lasting months, induced emigration of thousands of
middle-class families, and the widespread use of collaborators
to undermine Palestinian society have all taken their toll.
2. Massive military actions against the
fragile Palestinian infrastructure and population centers using
the most sophisticated and powerful of US conventional weapons
-- F-16s, Apache helicopters equipped with laser-guided missiles,
tanks and artillery, culminating in the current all-out invasion
of Palestinian areas - are intended to beat the Palestinians
into submissiveness. Although seemingly in response to Palestinian
terrorist attacks and carefully cast as part of America's "War
Against Terrorism," these military actions are pro-active,
exploiting terrorist attacks to achieve political goals of continued
domination.
3. Delegitimizing Arafat, who Sharon
has called "our Bin Laden," "irrelevant,"
head of a "terror-sponsoring entity" (the Palestinian
Authority), is essential if Israel is to install (with American
help) a more "compliant' Palestinian leader who will agree
to a mini-state. Just as South Africa had to find African "leaders"
that would lend legitimacy to their bantustans, so must Israel
find a Palestinian figure willing to be "president"
of a mini-state, thereby agreeing to and legitimizing Israel's
control over most of the West Bank, "Greater" Jerusalem
and perhaps parts of Gaza.
4. Creating irreversible "facts"
on the ground. While deflecting attention to its role as a peace-seeking
"victim" of Palestinian aggressiveness, Israel never
paused for a moment in expanding settlements and constructing
its own infrastructure that would ensure its control over the
Occupied Territories even if a Palestinian mini-state were
to come into being. The vaunted Mitchell Commission's recommendations
of freezing Israel's settlements have already been rendered
irrelevant. Israel has all the land, settlements and settlers
it needs. Once it completes the construction its 480 kilometers
of highways and "by-pass" roads linking the settlements
while creating massive barriers to Palestinian movement - a
$3 billion project entirely funded by the United States - its
hold on the Occupied Territories may be irreversible.
5. Reliance on the American Congress
to protect Israel from those forces - European, Arab, international
(member states of the UN) - who would pressure it to dismantle
its occupation completely in the interests of a viable Palestinian
state. The uncritical support of Congress is Israel's trump
card; it provides it with an impenetrable shelter from outside
pressures. The US Administration may (only may) press for a
meaningful political process following Israel's suppression
of Palestinian "violence," but Congress will ensure
that it be an open-ended process of negotiations lasting years.
At best Israel strives for "interim agreements" rather
than a final status settlement, for these will preserve its
de facto control over the Occupied Territories.
Will Israel succeed? Sharon thinks so.
He believes that Europe, critical as it might be, has no independent
foreign policy apart from the US. The Arab countries have some
limited clout - the US will press Israel to make concessions
so that the Arabs will submit to an attack on Iraq - but those
concessions will stop far from a complete end to the occupation.
Both Israel and the Arab world know Congress's "red lines"
on Israel, and they fall much closer to a Palestinian mini-state
than to a viable and truly sovereign one.
Still, it is up to us, the international
civil society of NGOs, faith-based organizations, political
groups, human rights advocates and just plain world citizens,
to monitor the fateful period we are now entering. April 10th
begins our test. Having shed the naivete of Oslo, we must follow
the up-coming political process with eyes wide-open and critical.
Our goal must be to see a viable, sovereign state emerge in
all the Occupied Territories (giving the Palestinians the right
to negotiate border adjustments and other compromises they see
fit). Unlike Oslo, the political process must have a just peace
-- a viable Palestinian state and a just resolution of the refugee
issue, as well as Israel's security concerns - as its explicit
goal. And it must have a binding timetable.
In the Oslo process and during the past
year and a half of Israeli repression the international community
let the Palestinians down. It did not insist on negotiations
that would lead to Palestinian self-determination (after seven
years of negotiations the Palestinians ended up confined to
tiny, impoverished islands while Israel doubled its settler
population). And it did not provide the protection and support
available to the Palestinians through international law, according
to which the occupation was illegal, unjust and immoral in every
respect. One cannot criticize an oppressed people's resort to
armed resistance - even terrorism - when it finds itself abandoned
by the international community that offers its only source of
redress. We must not again allow occupation, repression and
violence to overwhelm the progress towards a just peace as
we have over the past decade. It is truly time to end the occupation.
Jeff Halper
is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
(ICAHD). He can be reached at icahd@zahav.net.il
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