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March 23, 2002
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
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
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The New Crusade:
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
What Price Oslo?
By Edward Said
The television images on Al-Jazeera have been
burningly clear. There is a kind of Palestinian heroism in evidence
there that makes this the story of our time. An entire army,
navy, and air force supplied munificently and unconditionally
by the United States have been wreaking destruction on the 18
per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza afforded Palestinians
after ten years of negotiations with Israel and the US.
Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee
camps and civilian residences have been at the receiving end
of a merciless, criminal assault by Israeli troops huddled inside
their helicopter gun-ships, F-16's and Merkavas, and still the
poorly armed resistance fighters take on this preposterously
more powerful force undaunted and unyielding.
In the US, CNN and newspapers like The
New York Times fail, to their discredit, to ever mention that
"the violence" is uneven and that there aren't two
sides involved here, but only one state turning all its great
power against a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and dispossessed
people, bereft of arms and real leadership, with the aim of destroying
this people, "dealing them a terrible blow" as the
war criminal who leads Israel shamelessly put it.
As an index of how deranged Sharon has
become, I might quote here what he said to Ha'aretz on 5 March:
"The PA is behind the terror, it's all terror. Arafat is
behind the terror. Our pressure is aimed at ending the terror.
Don't expect Arafat to act against the terror. We have to cause
them heavy casualties and then they'll know they can't keep using
terror and win political achievements."
Besides symptomatically revealing the
workings of an obsessed mind bent on destruction and sheer, unadulterated
hatred, Sharon's words indicate the failures of reason and criticism
loosed on the world since last September. Yes, there was a terrorist
outrage, but there's more to the world than terror. There is
politics, and struggle, and history, and injustice, and resistance
and yes, state terror as well. With scarcely a peep from the
American professorate or intelligentsia, we have all succumbed
to the promiscuous misuse of language and sense, by which everything
we don't like has become terror and what we do is pure and simple
good -- fighting terror, no matter how much wealth, and lives,
and destruction is involved.
Swept away are all the Enlightenment
precepts by which we attempt to educate our students and our-fellow
citizens, replaced by a disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness
and self-righteous wrath of the kind that only the wealthy and
the powerful, it would seem, have the right to use and act upon.
No wonder then that a fourth-rate thug like Sharon feels entitled
(by emulation and derivation) to do what he does when in the
greatest democracy on earth, laws, constitutional rights, writs
of habeas corpus and reason itself are consigned to the rubbish
bin in the pursuit of terror and terrorism.
As educators and as citizens, we have
failed in our mission by allowing ourselves to be bamboozled
in this way, without so much as an organised public discussion
about a defence budget that has shot up to $400 billion while
40 million people remain without health insurance.
Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told
that love of country requires such expenditures and such destruction
because a good cause is at stake. Nonsense. What is at stake
are material interests that keep rulers in power, corporations
making profits, people in a state of manufactured consent, just
so long as they don't get up one morning and start to think about
where, in this mad technologised rush to bomb and kill, we are
going.
Israel is now waging a war against civilians,
pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way
in the US. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics,
a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer
disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony!
Yet CNN never refers to "occupied"
territories (always rather to "violence in Israel"
as if the main battlefields are the concert halls and cafes of
Tel Aviv and not in fact the ghettoes and besieged refugee camps
of Palestine that have already been surrounded by 150 illegal
Israeli settlements). For the past ten years, the great fraud
of Oslo was foisted on the world by the US, with hardly an awareness
that only 18 per cent of the West Bank were given up, and 60
per cent of Gaza. No one knows geography and it's better not
to know, since the reality on the ground is so astonishing, considering
the verbal hoopla and self-congratulation.
And that pseudo-pundit -- the insufferably
conceited Thomas Friedman -- still has the gall to say that "Arab
TV" shows one-sided pictures, as if "Arab TV"
should be showing things from Israel's point-of-view the way
CNN does, with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all word
for the ethnic cleansing that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians
in their ghettoes and camps. Has Friedman (or CNN for that matter)
ever tried to point out the difference between an attacking army
fighting a colonial war on the territory of the people it has
occupied for 35 years, and the people defending themselves against
that butchery? Of course not, for indeed why should Friedman
ever bother to say honestly that there is no Palestinian occupation,
there are no Palestinian F-16's, no Apache helicopters, no gunboats,
no Merkava tanks, in short, no Palestinian occupation of Israel.
So much for Friedman's credentials as
an honest commentator and reporter who has utterly failed, in
unadorned terms, to explain the US view or to understand the
Arab and Palestinian cause. Can he not see that he and his writings
are part of the problem, that in their maundering self-justifications
and the dishonesty in which he shows no sign of the self- criticism
he keeps hectoringly expecting of others, he actually aggravates
the ignorance and the misperceptions rather than reducing them?
Poor journalist and educator, he.
The picture you get here is that Israelis
are battling for their lives instead of for their settlements
and military bases on the occupied lands of Palestine. No maps
have been run for months in the American media. On 8 March, hitherto
the bloodiest day for Palestinians of the 16-month Intifada,
CNN's main evening news specified the death of 40 "people"
and failed even to mention the death of several Red Crescent
workers killed while their ambulances were prevented by Israeli
tanks from getting to the wounded. Just "people," and
no pictures of the hell they've been living in this the 35th
year of military occupation. Tul Karm is undergoing a siege of
sieges with 24 hour curfews, electricity and water cut-off, systematic
round-ups and the removal of 800 young men, the wanton smashing
of refugee houses, wholesale destruction of property (and I'm
not speaking of nightclubs or sports facilities but of shacks
and lean-tos that furnished twice displaced refugees with hovels
for bare subsistence) and limitless cases of sadistic cruelty
to unarmed and undefended civilians who are pushed and beaten
and left to bleed to death, women allowed to give birth to stillborn
babies while they wait needlessly at Israeli road-blocks, old
men made to strip and take off their shoes and walk barefoot
for a gum-chewing 18-year-old waving around an M-16 that my taxes
have paid for.
Bethlehem, its town center and university
destroyed, flattened at 5,000 feet by valiant Israeli bombers
swooshing in with their marvelous F-16's which I've paid for
too. Balata camp, Aida and Dheheisheh and Azza Camps, the tiny
villages of Khadr and Husam, all battered into rubble without
even a mention by the US press, whose New York editors so obviously
have no problems with it, with a few exceptions here and there.
The uncounted dead and wounded, the unburied
and unassisted, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of
lives maimed, distorted, catastrophically marked by wantonly
caused suffering, all of it ordered at a safe distance from the
action in leafy, calm West Jerusalem by men for whom the West
Bank and Gaza are distant rat holes filled with insects and rodents
that must be "subdued" and driven out, taught a lesson
in the accepted jargon of Israel's superb military.
On Tuesday, in the biggest attack of
all, Ramallah has been invaded and is being ravaged by 140 Israeli
tanks, thus completing Israel's re-conquest of the already-occupied
Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian people are paying the
heavy, heavy unconscionable price of Oslo, which after 10 years
of negotiating left them with bits of land lacking coherence
and continuity, security institutions designed to assure their
subservience to Israel, and a life that impoverished them so
that the Jewish state could thrive and prosper.
In vain during those 10 years did some
of us warn that the distance between the US-Israeli language
of peace and the appalling realities on the ground was never
bridged, never even intended to be bridged. Words and phrases
like "peace process" and "terrorism" took
hold without reference to any real referent. Land confiscations
were either overlooked or referred to as "bilateral negotiations"
that were taking place between a state consolidating its hold
on territory it wanted at all costs, and a mediocre set of uninformed
negotiators whom it took four years to acquire, much less use,
a reliable map of the land they were negotiating over.
The worst misrepresentation of all is
that in the 54 years since 1948, never has a narrative of Palestinian
heroism and suffering been allowed to emerge. We are all depicted
as violent fanatic extremists who are little more than the terrorists
that George Bush and his cabal have imposed on the consciousness
of a stunned and systematically misinformed population, aided
and uncritically abetted by an entire army of commentators and
media stars -- the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers, Brokaws,
Russerts, and their ilk. The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed
with such faithful disciples trailing happily in its ranks.
But now that the Saudi peace proposal
has become the point of discussion and of hope, it is necessary,
I think, to put it in its real, as opposed to its supposed, context.
First of all, this is the re-cycled Reagan plan of 1982, the
Fahd Plan of 1983, the Madrid plan of 1991, and so on: in other
words, it follows a series of plans many times put forward which
in the end both Israel and the US have not only refused to implement,
but have actively torpedoed.
The way I see it, the only negotiations
worth having should be on the phases of a total Israeli withdrawal
and not, as was the case with Oslo, bargaining over what pieces
of land Israel was willing very grudgingly to give up. There's
been too much Palestinian blood spilled, too much Israeli contempt
and racist violence dispensed for any serious return to Oslo-style
negotiations brokered by that most biased of honest brokers,
the United States. Everyone is aware, however, that the old Palestinian
negotiators haven't given up on their dreams and illusions, and
that meetings have been occurring throughout the raids and bombings.
But I would argue that due weight be
given to decades of Palestinian suffering and the real human
costs of Israel's destructive policies before any negotiations
accord undue status to Israeli governments that have trampled
on Palestinian rights the way they have demolished our houses
and killed our people. Any Arab-Israeli negotiations that do
not factor in history -- and for this task a team of historians,
economists, and geographers with a conscience are needed -- are
not worth having, just as Palestinians must now elect a new set
of negotiators and representatives in the hope of salvaging something
from the present calamity.
In short, in whatever meetings that now
occur between Israeli and Palestinian representatives, the gravity
of Israeli depredations against our people has to be given attention
and not simply brushed aside as so much past history. Oslo, in
effect, pardoned the occupation, excusing it for all the buildings
and lives destroyed over the first 25 years of occupation. After
so much further suffering, Israel cannot be excused and allowed
to walk away from the table with not even a rhetorical demand
that it needs to atone for what it did.
I will be told that politics is about
what is possible, not about what is desired, and that we should
be grateful to get even a small Israeli pullback. I disagree
strongly. Negotiations can only be about when the total withdrawal
will take place, not what percentage Israel is willing to concede.
A conqueror and a vandal cannot concede anything: he must simply
return what he's taken and pay for the abuses that are his responsibility
to bear, just as Saddam Hussein should and did pay for his occupation
of Kuwait.
We are still a considerable distance
from that goal, although in the meantime the extraordinary unbowed
bravery of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has in
effect politically and morally defeated Sharon, who will lose
his seat in the not too distant future. But, that in two decades
his armies can invade Arab cities at will, killing and sowing
destruction without so much as a collective Arab peep speaks
reams for the Arab world's leaders.
Lastly, what the various Arab rulers
who are so delicately silent now while Palestine is being raped
on TV think they are doing, I don't know, but I can imagine that
deep in their souls they must feel no small amount of shame and
disgrace. Powerless militarily, politically, economically and
above all morally, they have little credibility and no real standing,
except as obedient pawns on the American-Israeli chessboard.
Perhaps they feel they are playing a waiting game.
Perhaps.
But they (like Arafat and his men) haven't
learned the power of systematically disseminated information
as a way of protecting their people from the onslaughts of those
who consider all Arabs militant, extremist, terrorist fanatics.
The good news is that the time for that sort of irresponsible
and contemptible behavior is very short. Will the new generation
do any better?
It is for a whole new attitude toward
secular education to decide the answer, whether collectively
we go down again to disorganisation, corruption and mediocrity
or whether at last we can become a nation.
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