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January
14, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
Enron's
Accountants:
When In Doubt, Shred It
January
13, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
Why
We Kill People
January
12, 2002
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Forbidden
Truths
January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
January
6, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Students
Put the Heat on Foreign Sweatshops
Tariq
Ali
Battleground
Kashmir
January
5, 2002
Mark Schneider
Kifah:
The Movie Star
Israel Killed
Edward
Said
Is
Israel More Secure Now?
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
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
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Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
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Cockburn
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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
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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:
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January
14, 2002
Emerging Alternatives in Palestine
By Edward Said
Since it began 15 months ago the Palestinian Intifada
has had little to show for itself politically, despite the remarkable
fortitude of a militarily occupied, unarmed, poorly led, and
still dispossessed people that has defied the pitiless ravages
of Israel's war machine. In the United States, the government
and, with a handful of exceptions, the "independent"
media have echoed each other in harping on Palestinian violence
and terror, with no attention at all paid to the 35-year Israeli
military occupation, the longest in modern history: as a result,
American official condemnations of Yasser Arafat's Authority
after 11 September as harbouring and even sponsoring terrorism
have coldly reinforced the Sharon government's preposterous claim
that Israel is the victim, the Palestinians the aggressors in
the four-decade war that the Israeli army has waged against civilians,
property and institutions without mercy or discrimination.
The result today is that the Palestinians
are locked up in 220 ghettos controlled by the army; American-supplied
Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, and F-16s mow down people,
houses, olive groves and fields on a daily basis; schools and
universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are
totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed
and tens of thousands injured; Israel's assassinations of Palestinian
leaders continue; unemployment and poverty stand at about 50
per cent -- and all this while General Anthony Zinni drones on
about Palestinian "violence" to the wretched Arafat,
who can't even leave hi s office in Ramallah because he is imprisoned
there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security forces
scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices
and barracks.
To make matters worse, the Palestinian
Islamists have played into Israel's relentless propaganda mills
and its ever-ready military by occasional bursts of wantonly
barbaric suicide bombings that finally forced Arafat in mid-December
to turn his crippled security forces against Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, arresting militants, closing offices, occasionally firing
at and killing demonstrators. Every demand that Sharon makes,
Arafat hastens to fulfil, even as Sharon makes still another
one, provokes an incident, or simply says -- with US backing
-- that he is unsatisfied, and that Arafat remains an "irrelevant"
terrorist (whom he sadistically forbade from attending Christmas
services in Bethlehem) whose main purpose in life is to kill
Jews.
To this logic-defying congeries of brutal
assaults on the Palestinians, on the man who for better or worse
is their leader, and on their already humiliated national existence,
Arafat's baffling response has been to keep asking for a return
to negotiations, as if Sharon's transparent campaign against
even the possibility of negotiations wasn't actually happening,
and as if the whole idea of the Oslo peace process hadn't already
evaporated. What surprises me is that, except for a small number
of Israelis (most recently David Grossman), no one comes out
and says openly that Palestinians are being persecuted by Israel
as its natives.
A closer look at the Palestinian reality
tells a somewhat more encouraging story. Recent polls have shown
that between them, Arafat and his Islamist opponents (who refer
to themselves unjustly as "the resistance") get somewhere
between 40 and 45 per cent popular approval. This means that
a silent majority of Palestinians is neither for the Authority's
misplaced trust in Oslo (or for its lawless regime of corruption
and repression) nor for Hamas's violence. Ever the resourceful
tactician, Arafat has countered by delegating Dr Sari Nusseibeh,
a Jerusalem notable, president of Al-Quds University, and Fatah
stalwart, to make trial balloon speeches suggesting that if Israel
were to be just a little nicer, the Palestinians might give up
their right of return. In addition, a slew of Palestinian personalities
close to the Authority (or, more accurately, whose activities
have never been independent of the Authority) have signed statements
and gone on tour with Israeli peace activists who are either
out of power or otherwise seem ineffective as well as discredited.
These dispiriting exercises are supposed to show the world that
Palestinians are willing to make peace at any price, even to
accommodate the military occupation. Arafat is still undefeated
so far as his relentless eagerness to stay in power is concerned.
Yet at some distance from all this, a
new secular nationalist current is slowly emerging. It's too
soon to call this a party or a bloc, but it is now a visible
group with true independence and popular status. It counts Dr
Haidar Abdel-Shafi and Dr Mustafa Barghouthi (not to be confused
with his distant relative, Tanzim activist Marwan Barghouthi)
among its ranks, along with Ibrahim Dakkak, Ziad Abu Amr, Ahmad
Harb, Ali Jarbawi, Fouad Moghrabi, Legislative Council members
Rawiya Al-Shawa and Kamal Shirafi, writers Hassan Khadr and Mahmoud
Darwish, Raja Shehadeh, Rima Tarazi, Ghassan Al-Khatib, Nassir
Aruri, Eliya Zureik and myself. In mid-December, a collective
statement was issued that was well-covered in the Arab and European
media (it went unmentioned in the US) calling for Palestinian
unity and resistance and the unconditional end of Israeli military
occupation, while keeping deliberately silent about returning
to Oslo. We believe that negotiating an improvement in the occupation
is tantamount to prolonging it. Peace can only come after the
occupation ends. The declaration's boldest sections focus on
the need to improve the internal Palestinian situation, above
all to strengthen democracy; "rectify" the decision-making
process (which is totally controlled by Arafat and his men);
assert the need to restore the law's sovereignty and an independent
judiciary; prevent the further misuse of public funds; and consolidate
the functions of public institutions so as to give every citizen
confidence in those that are expressly designed for public service.
The final and most decisive demand calls for new parliamentary
elections.
However else this declaration may have
been read, the fact that so many prominent independents with,
for the most part, functioning health, educational, professional
and labour organisations as their base have said these things
was lost neither on other Palestinians (who saw it as the most
trenchant critique yet of the Arafat regime) nor on the Israeli
military. In addition, just as the Authority jumped to obey Sharon
and Bush by rounding up the usual Islamist suspects, a non- violent
International Solidarity Movement was launched by Dr Barghouthi
that comprised about 550 European observers (several of them
European parliament members) who flew in at their own expense.
With them was a well-disciplined band of young Palestinians who,
while disrupting Israeli troop and settler movement along with
the Europeans, prevented rock-throwing or firing from the Palestinian
side. This effectively froze out the Authority and the Islamists,
and set the agenda for making Israel's occupation itself the
focus of attention. All this occurred while the US was vetoing
a Security Council resolution mandating an international group
of unarmed observers to interpose themselves between the Israeli
army and defenceless Palestinian civilians.
The first result of this was that on
3 January, after Barghouthi held a press conference with about
20 Europeans in East Jerusalem, the Israelis arrested, detained
and interrogated him twice, breaking his knee with rifle butts
and injuring his head, on the pretext that he was disturbing
the peace and had illegally entered Jerusalem (even though he
was born in it and has a medical permit to enter it). None of
this of course has deterred him or his supporters from continuing
the non-violent struggle, which, I think, is certain to take
control of the already too militarised Intifada, centre it nationally
on ending occupation and settlements, and steer Palestinians
toward statehood and peace. Israel has more to fear from someone
like Barghouthi, who is a self-possessed, rational and respected
Palestinian, than from the bearded Islamic radicals that Sharon
loves to misrepresent as Israel's quintessential terrorist threat.
All they do is to arrest him, which is typical of Sharon's bankrupt
policy.
So where is the Israeli and American
left that is quick to condemn "violence" while saying
not a word about the disgraceful and criminal occupation itself?
I would seriously suggest that they should join brave activists
like Jeff Halper and Louisa Morgantini at the barricades (literal
and figurative), stand side by side with this major new secular
Palestinian initiative, and start protesting the Israeli military
methods that are directly subsidised by tax-payers and their
dearly bought silence. Having for a year wrung their collective
hands and complained about the absence of a Palestinian peace
movement (since when does a militarily occupied people have responsibility
for a peace movement?), the alleged peaceniks who can actually
influence Israel's military have a clear political duty to organise
against the occupation right now, unconditionally and without
unseemly demands on the already laden Palestinians.
Some of them have. Several hundred Israeli
reservists have refused military duty in the occupied territories,
and a whole spectrum of journalists, activists, academics and
writers (including Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, David Grossman, Ilan
Pappe, Dani Rabinowitz, and Uri Avnery) have kept up a steady
attack on the criminal futility of Sharon's campaign against
the Palestinian people. Ideally, there should be a similar chorus
in the United States where, except for a tiny number of Jewish
voices making public their outrage at Israel's military occupation,
there is far too much complicity and drum-beating. The Israeli
lobby has been temporarily successful in identifying the war
against Bin Laden with Sharon's single-minded, collective assault
on Arafat and his people. Unfortunately, the Arab American community
is both too small and beleaguered as it tries to fend off the
ever-expanding Ashcroft dragnet, racial profiling and curtailment
of civil liberties here.
Most urgently needed, therefore, is coordination
between the various secular groups who support Palestinians,
a people against whose mere presence, geographical dispersion
(even more than Israeli depredations) is the major obstacle.
To end the occupation and all that has gone with it is a clear
enough imperative. Now let us do it. And Arab intellectuals needn't
feel shy about actually joining in.
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