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May 2, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
A
Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal Diary
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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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Reviews of Gore:
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May
2, 2002
Israeli
Soldiers Resisting the Occupation
Why We Refuse to Fight
by Rami Kaplan
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip can in no way be considered democratic. It oppresses
3.5 million people, denying them their basic human rights. My
refusal to militarily participate in this occupation, on the
other hand, is most certainly a democratic act.
It exercises my right to protest, as
I strive to hold on to the values of justice and peace, and
it sends a message to my government that it cannot use me as
a tool for attaining every goal it decides upon. In doing so
I am fulfilling my obligations as a moral citizen of the world.
Every man and woman must decide where the boundaries of conscience
lie, and my conscience does not permit me to fight today in
the occupied territories.
The refusal of the 435 signatories to
the "Courage to Refuse" letter, is a refusal to fight
for continuation of the occupation, or, more precisely, for
continuation of the settlements. It is a refusal to fight in
a war of choice fueled by an extremist messianic ideology.
Make no mistake, Israel has no other
reason for remaining in the occupied territories than to preserve
the existing settlements, even when they are deep within Palestinian
centers of population. Maybe the Palestinians are not interested
in peace - one of the most commonly heard justifications for
our recent invasions - and truly want to push us into the sea.
Even then, we would be much better off defending ourselves from
the 1967 borders rather than from inside the narrow alleys of
Jenin, Ramallah and Bethlehem. This is why I think that the
occupation runs against the most basic interests of the state
of Israel, even to the extent of threatening its very existence.
As a concerned and involved citizen in
a democratic regime, I see it as my right and duty to do all
I can to save my country, the country I am willing to die for,
from this dizzy descent into violence and mayhem.
This kind of struggle is not one to wage
alone, and so when I heard that a group of reserve officers
were organizing with the intention of publishing an open letter
stating their categorical refusal to don their uniforms in the
service of the occupation, I knew I had to join them.
For me, as for the others who have signed
our letter, the decision was at once terribly difficult yet
glaringly simple.
Difficult, because I am a Zionist. I
served in the standing army for six years, and have since spent
upward of 50 days a year in the reserves, and I have always
equated love of the country with loyal service in the army.
It was difficult to break rank, to look my fellow officers and
soldiers in the eye and tell them that I would not join in their
next campaign, in the war for the settlements, a war we chose,
not one we had forced upon us.
Yet the decision was also easy. Both
as a democrat and as a patriot, I had no other choice. It took
me a long time to realize, to understand that not everything
I learned during my long years as an officer was correct. The
turning point was a tour of duty in the Gaza Strip a year ago.
My soldiers committed no atrocities, but I could see the futility
of our military presence there, and the daily injustices inherent
in it.
Today I stand firm, confident that I
am doing the right thing, hopeful that the group of soldiers
currently demonstrating their tremendous courage to refuse,
and spending long weeks in military prisons as a result, will
help bring an end to the occupation.
The occupation is destroying Israel from
within, it is destroying the Palestinians, and it is destroying
those two nations' common future.
Rami Kaplan,
aged 29, is a major in the Israeli armored corps and a leading
activist in the Courage to Refuse group.
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