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April 22, 2002
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
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
Alexander Cockburn
Austin Cultural Limits:
Willie Nelson, Film and BBQ
April 17, 2002
Norman
Finkelstein
Behind
the Carnage in Palestine
Kristen Schurr
With the Wounded
and the Homeless in Nablus
Norman
Madarasz
Undoing
Chavez:
The View from South America
Brian Wood
Combing The Ruins of Jenin
George
Monbiot
Chemical
Coup: The CIA's Attempt to Undermine the UN's Weapon Inspector
for Iraq
Robert Fisk
Fear and Learning in America
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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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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April 22, 2002
Word Games and
Body Bags
by Irit
Katriel
Only an unbelievably brutal world
can look at the remains of
what was once home for 13,000 impoverished 1948 Palestinian refugees,
scratch its head and say "we don't know what actually happened
in the Jenin refugee camp." The camp is
now described by the media as an "earthquake zone"
-- a
natural disaster of sorts. Unlike real earthquake zones, you
don't see massive search and rescue teams in this one
(Israel's rescue team, which aided in Istanbul and Kenya, is
probably busy doing something else). Only the survivors and
a handful of Red Crescent workers are there to search the
rubble for the corpses, guided by their stench. Man made
earthquakes do not, apparently, warrant real relief efforts.
On April 9th, the Israeli
daily Ha'aretz reported on its
website that "Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is very worried
about the expected international reaction as soon as the
world learns the details of the tough battle in the Jenin
refugee camp." It added that Israeli Defense Force (IDF)
officers have similar worries: "The bulldozers are simply
'shaving' the homes and causing terrible destruction. When
the world sees the pictures of what we have done there, it
will do us immense damage."
"It will do us immense
damage" is the closest that official
Israel can come to expressing shock or remorse.
The next day, the London
Guardian reported that Germany
suspended arms sales to Israel. "The reports about the
Israeli troops' conduct are shocking," said Schroeder's
minister of development aid. On the same day, the European
Parliament adopted a resolution that called for the
suspension of trade agreements between the EU and Israel.
Later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that "the
situation is so dangerous and the humanitarian and human
rights situation so appalling . . . an affront to the
conscience of mankind" that the dispatching of an
international force to the area under the auspices of the UN
"can no longer be deferred." Schroeder supported discussing
the idea, the US and Israel as usual opposed (Agence France
Press, April 12). Even the British foreign minister summoned
the Israeli ambassador and said he was "disturbed"
by
reports from Jenin (This Is London, April 13).
That was last week, when
we knew what was happening in
Jenin. But since then, the Israeli "damage control"
apparatus has changed that. Now we don't know. We need a UN "fact
finding" committee to find out why an Israeli tank and
helicopter attack on a densely populated refugee camp ended
up like an earthquake. As if Sharon was absolved merely by
the decision to appoint the "fact finding" committee,
the
criticism from foreign governments seems to have faded into
thin air.
The media, after a series
of shocking reports ("A monstrous
war crime," "The sickly sweet smell of death,"
"The camp
that became a slaughterhouse"), gradually turned more
technical, unemotional, formalistic, legislative. The mumbling
began around April 16th. The Guardian's editorial that day, titled
"The battle for truth: What really happened in Jenin camp?"
describes at length the extensive destruction and death in the
camp. It points out that "if the leaders of the 'international
community' had been more resolute Mr. Sharon would have been
no more able to mount his West Bank invasion than Hamas would
have been allowed to pursue its suicidal attacks." But then
it calls for an investigation to find out "is [Sharon] guilty,
as the Palestinians claim, of a heinous and exceptional crime?
In short, what really happened inside Jenin?"
What happened in Jenin?
Was it a heinous and exceptional
crime? Or just an ordinary one? The world needs to know. We
need to find the exact definitions for what was done, and to
identify which precise clauses of international law were
violated. Before that is done, we cannot take a stand.
The name of the game
now is "there was no massacre."
Palestinian eyewitnesses who escaped the camp reported that
people were summarily executed and their bodies disposed of
(e.g., The Guardian, April 11). Israel denies that. This is
what we should talk about now: was there a proper massacre
or not. If hundreds of people were killed in a different
manner, such as by being under curfew in their home when it
was bulldozed or bombed, that's not a massacre. And the only
question in our word game today is, "was there a massacre?"
Ha'aretz, the newspaper of choice of the "intellectual
elite" in Israel, joined the choir with its editorial of
April 19. There was no massacre, they say, because "No order
from above was given, nor was a local initiative executed,
to deliberately and systematically kill unarmed people."
An
old timer in apologetic liberalism. There wasn't an order to
systematically kill, so the corpses should not be billed to
our account.
Ha'aretz doesn't question
the operation itself. It also
doesn't question the occupation. It doesn't say what we
know, but are so easily made to forget: The 35 year long
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a crime. Israel has
no right and no justification to invade occupied towns and
destroy them, regardless of what "exactly" happened
in
Jenin. Ha'aretz also doesn't put the destruction of the camp
in the context of the statements by Israeli government
ministers who openly speak about ethnic cleansing of the
occupied territories (e.g., minister Effie Eitam: "I think
our Jewish conscience will be clean if we say [to the
Palestinians], 'you brought war and in war there are great
human tragedies,' . . . They will cross the river and go to
Jordan." AP, April 8).
It is reasonable to assume
that the UN "fact finding"
committee won't go into these issues either. This is why it
will have very little impact on the prospects of preventing
Sharon's next earthquake. In the meantime, while the
committee will "find facts" and the 13,000 second-time-refugees
of Jenin will try to survive, the man
with the smoking gun in his hand who promises only more of
the same, is given a green light to go on by an unbelievably
brutal world which is playing with words.
Irit Katriel is an Israeli activist, currently
living in Germany. This article originally appeared in Dissident
Voice, a
semi-regular newsletter dedicated to challenging the lies of
the corporate press and the privileged classes it serves. Email:
dissidentvoice@earthlink.net
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