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April 7, 2002
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
Tzaporah
Ryter
Under
Fire: an American Student in Ramallah
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
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
Resources:
100s of Links
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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
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 7, 2002
Survival, Hope
and Forbearance
The Future of Palestine
By Edward Said
Anyone with any connection at all to Palestine
is today in a state of stunned outrage and shock. While almost
a repeat of what happened in 1982, Israel's current all-out colonial
assault on the Palestinian people (with George Bush's astoundingly
ignorant and grotesque support) is indeed worse than Sharon's
two previous mass forays in 1971 and 1982 against the Palestinian
people. The political and moral climate today is a good deal
cruder and reductive, the media's destructive role (which has
played the part almost entirely of singling out Palestinian suicide
attacks and isolating them from their context in Israel's 35-year
illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories) greater in
favouring the Israeli view of things, the US's power more unchallenged,
the war against terrorism has more completely taken over the
global agenda and, so far as the Arab environment is concerned,
there is greater incoherence and fragmentation than ever before.
Sharon's homicidal instincts have been
enhanced (if that's the right word) by all of the above, and
magnified to boot. This in effect means that he can do more damage
with more impunity than before, although he is also more deeply
undermined than before in all his efforts as well as in his entire
career by the  failure that comes with single-minded
negation and hate, which in the end nourish neither political
nor even military success. Conflicts between peoples such as
this contain more elements than can be eliminated by tanks and
air power, and a war against unarmed civilians -- no matter how
many times Sharon lumberingly and mindlessly trumpets his stupid
mantras about terror -- can never bring a really lasting political
result of the sort his dreams tells him he can have. Palestinians
will not go away. Besides, Sharon will almost certainly end up
disgraced and rejected by his people. He has no plan, except
to destroy everything about Palestine and the Palestinians. Even
in his enraged fixation on Arafat and terror, he is failing to
do much more than raise the man's prestige while essentially
drawing attention to the blind monomania of his own position.
In the end he is Israel's problem to
deal with. For us, our main consideration now is morally to do
everything in our power to make certain that despite the enormous
suffering and destruction imposed on us by a criminal war, we
must go on. When a renowned and respected retired politician
like Zbigniew Brzezinski says explicitly on national television
that Israel has been behaving like the white supremacist regime
of apartheid South Africa, one can be certain that he is not
alone in this view, and that an increasing number of Americans
and others are slowly growing not only disenchanted but also
disgusted with Israel as a hugely expensive and draining ward
of the United States, costing far too much, increasing American
isolation, and seriously damaging the country's reputation with
its allies and its citizens. The question is what, in this most
difficult of moments, can we rationally learn about the present
crisis that we need to include in our plans for the future?
What I have to say now is highly selective,
but it is the modest fruit of many years working on behalf of
the Palestinian cause as someone who is from both Arab and Western
worlds. I neither know nor can say everything, but here are some
of the handful of thoughts I can contribute at this very difficult
hour. Each of the four points that follow here is related to
the other.
1) For better or for worse, Palestine
is not just an Arab and Islamic cause, it is important to many
different, contradictory and yet intersecting worlds. To work
for Palestine is necessarily to be aware of these many dimensions
and constantly to educate oneself in them. For that we need a
highly educated, vigilant and sophisticated leadership and democratic
support for it. Above all we must, as Mandela never tired of
saying about his struggle, be aware that Palestine is one of
the great moral causes of our time. Therefore, we need to treat
it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations,
or making a career. It is a just cause which should allow Palestinians
to capture the high moral ground and keep it.
2) There are different kinds of power,
military of course being the most obvious. What has enabled Israel
to do what it has been doing to the Palestinians for the past
54 years is the result of a carefully and scientifically planned
campaign to validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue
and efface Palestinian actions. This is not just a matter of
maintaining a powerful military but of organising opinion, especially
in the United States and Western Europe, and is a power derived
from slow, methodical work where Israel's position is seen as
one to be easily identified with, whereas the Palestinians are
thought of as Israel's enemies, hence repugnant, dangerous, against
"us." Since the end of the Cold War, Europe has faded
into near-insignificance so far as the organisation of opinion,
images and thought are concerned. America (outside of Palestine
itself) is the main arena of battle. We have simply never learned
the importance of systematically organising our political work
in this country on a mass level, so that for instance the average
American will not immediately think of "terrorism"
when the word "Palestinian" is pronounced. That kind
of work quite literally protects whatever gains we might have
made through on-the-ground resistance to Israel's occupation.
What has enabled Israel to deal with
us with impunity, therefore, has been that we are unprotected
by any body of opinion that would deter Sharon from practicing
his war crimes and saying that what he has done is to fight terrorism.
Given the immense diffusionary, insistent, and repetitive power
of the images broadcast by CNN, for example, in which the phrase
"suicide bomb" is numbingly repeated a hundred times
an hour for the American consumer and tax-payer, it is the grossest
negligence not to have had a team of people like Hanan Ashrawi,
Leila Shahid, Ghassan Khatib, Afif Safie -- to mention just a
few -- sitting in Washington ready to go on CNN or any of the
other channels just to tell the Palestinian story, provide context
and understanding, give us a moral and narrative presence with
positive, rather than merely negative, value. We need a future
leadership that understands this as one of the basic lessons
of modern politics in an age of electronic communication. Not
to have understood this is part of the tragedy of today.
3) There is simply no use operating politically
and responsibly in a world dominated by one superpower without
a profound familiarity and knowledge of that superpower -- America,
its history, its institutions, its currents and counter- currents,
its politics and culture; and, above all, a perfect working knowledge
of its language. To hear our spokesmen, as well as the other
Arabs, saying the most ridiculous things about America, throwing
themselves on its mercy, cursing it in one breath, asking for
its help in another, all in miserably inadequate fractured English,
shows a state of such primitive incompetence as to make one cry.
America is not monolithic. We have friends and we have possible
friends. We can cultivate, mobilise, and use our communities
and their affiliated communities here as an integral part of
our politics of liberation, just as the South Africans did, or
as the Algerians did in France during their struggle for liberation.
Planning, discipline, coordination. We have not at all understood
the politics of non- violence. Moreover, neither have we understood
the power of trying to address Israelis directly, the way the
ANC addressed the white South Africans, as part of a politics
of inclusion and mutual respect. Coexistence is our answer to
Israeli exclusivism and belligerence. This is not conceding:
it is creating solidarity, and therefore isolating the exclusivists,
the racists, the fundamentalists.
4) The most important lesson of all for
us to understand about ourselves is manifest in the terrible
tragedies of what Israel is now doing in the occupied territories.
The fact is that we are a people and a society, and despite Israel's
ferocious attack against the PA, our society still functions.
We are a people because we have a functioning society which goes
on -- and has gone on for the past 54 years -- despite every
sort of abuse, every cruel turn of history, every misfortune
we have suffered, every tragedy we have gone through as a people.
Our greatest victory over Israel is that people like Sharon and
his kind do not have the capacity to see that, and this is why
they are doomed despite their great power and their awful, inhuman
cruelty. We have surmounted the tragedies and memories of our
past, whereas such Israelis as Sharon have not. He will go to
his grave only as an Arab-killer, and a failed politician who
brought more unrest and insecurity to his people. It must surely
be the legacy of a leader that he should leave something behind
upon which future generations will build. Sharon, Mofaz, and
all the others associated with them in this bullying, sadistic
campaign of death and carnage will have left nothing except gravestones.
Negation breeds negation.
As Palestinians, I think we can say that
we left a vision and a society that has survived every attempt
to kill it. And that is something. It is for the generation of
my children and yours, to go on from there, critically, rationally,
with hope and forbearance.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
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