|
January
4, 2002
CG Estabrook
Anti-War
= Anti-Globalization
Jordan
Green
What's
Changed in New York
January
3, 2002
Walt Brasch
Exit
Cheney, Enter Ridge
Mokhiber
and Weissman
The
10 Worst Corporations
of 2001
Robert
Hunter Wade
America's
Empire Rules an Unbalanced World
Shahid
Alam
Is
There an Islamic Problem?
January
2, 2002
Ross Regnart
Patriot
Act Redefines the Mob as "Terrorist Associates"
John Chuckman
The
Republicans' Secret Plan X
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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 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
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
January
4, 2002
Is Israel more secure now?
By Edward Said
'The world is closing on us, pushing
us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass
through.' Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the
PLO's exit from Beirut in August 1982. 'Where shall we go after
the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last
sky'? Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians
in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the al-Aqsa
Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered
by the Israeli Army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little
ghettoes, and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting
for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying
or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours
at barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli
soldiers. As I write, two hundred Palestinians are unable to
receive kidney dialysis because for 'security reasons' the Israeli
military won't allow them to travel to medical centres. Have
any of the innumerable members of the foreign media covering
the conflict done a story about these brutalised young Israeli
conscripts trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the main
part of their military duty? I think not.
Yasir Arafat was not allowed to leave
his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of Islamic
Conference foreign ministers on 10 December in Qatar; his speech
was read by an aide. The airport fifteen miles away in Gaza and
Arafat's two ageing helicopters had been destroyed the previous
week by Israeli planes and bulldozers, with no one and no force
to check, much less prevent the daily incursions of which this
particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza airport was
the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the
only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World
War Two. Since last May Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by
the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and
villages, Guernica style, destroying property and killing civilians
and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy or
air force to protect the people); Apache attack helicopters (again
supplied by the US) have used their missiles to murder 77 Palestinian
leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group
of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority
to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval
on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet and, more generally,
that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job
of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well
as civilian. During the night of 5 December, the Israeli Army
entered the five-storey offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau
of Statistics in Ramallah, carried off the computers, as well
as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually
the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982 the
same Army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted
off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Centre,
before flattening the structure. A few days later came the massacres
of Sabra and Shatila.
The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic
Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well
they would be when, after a ten-day lull in the fighting in late
November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader
Mahmoud Abu Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation
and thus allow the Israeli Army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians.
After eight years of barren peace discussions 50 per cent of
Palestinians are unemployed and 70 per cent live on less than
2 dollars a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs
and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying
trees and orchards on Palestinian land. Although five or six
Palestinians have been killed in the last few months for every
one Israeli, the obese old warmonger has the gall to keep repeating
that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that
meted out by Bin Laden.
The crucial point in all this is that
Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it
is the longest such occupation in history, and the only one anywhere
in the world today: this is the original and continuing violence
against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been
directed. Yesterday (10 December), two children aged 3 and 13
were killed by Israeli bombs in Hebron, yet at the same time
an EU delegation was demanding that Palestinians curtail their
violence and acts of terrorism. Today five more Palestinians
were killed, all of them civilian, victims of helicopter bombings
of Gaza's refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a result of
the 11 September attacks, the word 'terrorism' is being used
to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation
and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful
killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and thirty
plus years of collective punishment is proscribed.
Every Western pundit or official who
pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how forgetting
the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism. Arafat's
great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice,
was to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorised
'peace' discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian
families and Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Cambridge. These discussions were all to do with
Israeli security: nothing was said about Palestinian security,
nothing at all, and the struggle of his people to achieve an
independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli security
to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognised international
priority which allows General Zinni and Javier Solana to preach
at the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation.
Yet Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than
the Palestinians have. Its mistake has been to imagine that by
conning Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions
and tiny concessions it would get a general Palestinian quiescence.
Every official Israeli policy thus far has made things worse,
rather than better, for Israel. Ask yourself: is Israel more
secure and more accepted now than it was ten years ago? Can its
current war of attrition be any more successful than the one
it lost in Lebanon?
The terrible and, in my opinion, stupid
suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem over the
weekend of 1 December should of course be condemned, but in order
for the condemnation to make any sense the raids must be considered
in the context of Abu Hanoud's assassination earlier in the week,
along with the killing of five children by an Israeli booby-trap
in Gaza - to say nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians
killed throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions,
the endless grinding away of Palestinian aspirations, minute
by minute, for the past 35 years. In the end desperation only
produces poor results, none worse than the green light George
W. and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he was in
Washington on 2 December (all too reminiscent of the green light
Al Haig gave in May 1982). With their support went the usual
ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and
their hapless, inept leader into world-wide aggressors who had
to 'bring to justice' their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers
were systematically destroying the Palestinian police structure
which was supposed to do the arresting.
Arafat is hemmed in on all sides, an
ironic consequence of his bottomless wish to be all things Palestinian
to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a tragically
heroic figure and a bumbling one. No Palestinian today is going
to disavow his leadership for the simple reason that despite
all his wafflings and mistakes he is being punished and humiliated
because he is a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity his
mere existence offends purists (if that's the right word) like
Sharon and his American backers. Except for the health and education
ministries, both of which have done a decent job, Arafat's Authority
has been a dismal failure. Its corruption and brutality stem
from Arafat's apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous,
way of keeping everyone dependent on his largesse: he alone controls
the budget, and he alone decides what goes on the front pages
of the five daily newspapers. He knows what's going on and has
a few people well placed to stir up a little rock-throwing in
the streets. Above all, he manipulates and sets against each
other the 12 or 14 - some say 19 or 20 - independent security
services that he created, each of which is structurally loyal
to its own leaders and to Arafat at the same time without being
able to do much more for its people than arrest them when enjoined
to do so by Arafat, Israel and the US. The 1996 elections were
designed for a term of three years, but Arafat has shilly-shallied
with the idea of calling new ones, which would almost certainly
challenge his authority and popularity in a serious way.
He has had a well-publicised entente
with Hamas since the latter's June bombings: Hamas wouldn't go
after Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone.
Sharon killed off the entente with Abu Hanoud's assassination:
Hamas retaliated and there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing
the life out of Arafat, with American support. Having destroyed
Arafat's security network, his jails and offices, and having
physically imprisoned him, Sharon made demands that he knows
can't be fulfilled (even though Arafat, with a few cards always
up his sleeve, has managed, astonishingly, to half-comply). Sharon
stupidly believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can
make a series of independent agreements with local warlords and
divide 40 per cent of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several
non-contiguous cantons whose borders the Israeli Army will control.
How this is supposed to make Israel more secure eludes me, but
not, alas, the people with the relevant power.
That leaves out three players, or groups
of players, two of whom in his racist way Sharon gives no weight
to. First, the Palestinians themselves who are far too intransigent
and politicised finally to accept anything less than unconditional
Israeli withdrawal. Israel's policies, like all such aggressions,
produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress
is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian
law provides for 60 days of rule by the speaker of the Assembly
(an unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abul Ala,
much admired by Israelis for his 'flexibility'). After that,
a succession struggle would ensue between other Arafat cronies
such as Abu Mazen and two or three of the leading (and capable)
security chiefs - notably Jibril Rajoub of the West Bank and
Mohammed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people has Arafat's stature,
or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost) popularity. Temporary
chaos is the likely result: Arafat's presence has been an organising
focus for Palestinian politics, in which millions of other Arabs
and Muslims have a very large stake.
Arafat has always tolerated, indeed supported
a plurality of organisations that he manipulates in various ways,
balancing them against each other so that no one predominates
except his Fatah. New groups are emerging, however: secular,
hard-working, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in
an independent Palestine. Over these people, the PA has no control
at all. It should be said that no one in Palestine is willing
to accede to the Israeli-US demand for an end to 'terrorism',
although it will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind
between suicidal adventurism and resistance to the occupation
so long as Israel goes on with its bombings.
The second group are the leaders in the
rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in Arafat,
despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and
more persistent than they are, and knows the hold he has on the
popular mind in their countries, where he has cultivated both
Islamists and secular nationalists. Both feel under attack even
though the secular nationalists have hardly been noticed by the
vast number of Western experts and Orientalists who take bin
Laden - rather than the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim
secular Arabs who detest what he does - to be the paradigm Muslim.
Now that Arafat is cornered, his popularity in Palestine has
shot up. But until very recently, he and Hamas were about level
in the polls (hovering between 20 and 25 per cent), with the
majority of citizens favouring neither. The same division, with
the same significant plague-on-both-your-houses majority, exists
in Arab countries where most people are put off either by the
corruption and brutality of the regimes or by the extremism of
the religious groups - most of whom are more interested in the
regulation of personal behaviour than they are in matters like
globalisation or producing electricity and jobs.
Arabs and Muslims might well turn against
their own rulers were Arafat seen to be choked to death by Israeli
violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present
landscape. His departure will only seem natural when a new collective
leadership emerges among a younger generation of Palestinians.
When and how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I'm
quite certain that it will happen.
The third player is Israel, where an
audacious Knesset member, the Palestinian Azmi Bishara, has been
stripped of his Parliamentary immunity and will soon be put on
trial for incitement to violence, because he has long stood for
the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, arguing that,
like every other state in the world, Israel should be the state
of all of its citizens not just of the Jewish people. For the
first time, a major Palestinian challenge is being mounted inside
Israel (not on the West Bank) with all eyes on the proceedings.
At the same time the Belgian Attorney General's office has confirmed
that a war crimes case against Sharon can go forward in the country's
courts. A painstaking mobilisation of secular Palestinian opinion
is underway which should slowly overtake the PA. The moral high
ground will soon be reclaimed from Israel, as the occupation
becomes the focus of attention, and as more and more Israelis
realise that it won't be possible to keep it going indefinitely.
Besides, as the US war against terrorism spreads, more unrest
is almost certain: far from closing things down, US power is
likely to stir them up in ways that may not be containable. It's
no mean irony that the renewed attention on Palestine came about
because the anti-Taliban coalition made it necessary.
|