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April 3, 2002
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
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
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
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
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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
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 3, 2002
An American Jew Talks About His
Shame
By Bernard Weiner
As an American, as an American Jew, and as a longtime
supporter of Palestinian rights, I am ashamed.
Where Presidents Carter & Clinton
made serious attempts to help broker a peace in the Middle East,
I'm ashamed to tell all the Israeli and Palestinian families
who have lost loved ones in the past many months that the current
resident in the White House chose to do next to nothing and
thus is partially responsible for the rising crescendo of violence.
Bush has no shame.
Where previous prime ministers of Israel
have been at least interested in the idea of peace, the current
PM, from the the very moment of his election -- well before
the unleashing of the suicide bombers -- has exhibited nothing
but a desire to behave like a cruel general of an occupying
army, crushing all beneath his path, smashing any momentum
toward peace, reveling in the humiliation and suffering he can
arrange. Sharon has no shame.
Where the elected leader of the Palestinian
Authority once earned the world's acclaim by promising peace
with his Israeli neighbors, in his frustration he has turned
to partnership with terrorist groups to utilize indiscriminate
suicide-bombers as his final weapon against his people's oppressors.
Arafat has no shame.
At Clinton's urging, the previous Israeli
PM, Barak, daringly offered a reasonable peace treaty to the
Palestinians (it didn't contain all the Palestinians wanted,
but enough to get the peace process heading toward finality),
but Arafat, thinking that by other means he could get something
closer to what he wanted, turned it down. (We're reminded yet
again of Abba Eban's famous observation about the Palestinians
never missing an opportunity for missing an opportunity; now
the Palestinians are joined in this wrong-headedness by their
Israeli enemies.)
Barak then was voted out of office for
offering too much, and the old, bloody, war-criminal Sharon
was brought in. A man with no vision other than a limited military
one: to try to stomp the Palestinians into submission. Bush
in the White House, a man with no vision beyond expanding his
"war on terrorism" to other countries, decided to
keep hands off the Palestinian issue, other than to say the
U.S. supported a "Palestinian state," but with no
earthly idea how to get from here to there. And then there's
Arafat, a man with no vision other than going head to head with
his old nemesis, Sharon, to force the Israelis to end the occupation
by blowing up innocent civilians in Israeli marketplaces, pizza
restaurants and public buses.
In short, three "world leaders"
who operate on violence as the one and only option for solving
what are essentially political problems, necessitating compromise.
No wonder the Middle East is a powderkeg. Both sides are stuck
in the horror-groove, content to run the historical blame loop
of "you-started-it-first."
OK, we know what the disease is, how
do we cure it, or at least figure out how to slow it down? How
can we stop the current epidemic of killing from infecting more,
from bringing in Arab countries and Western countries choosing
sides and starting a regional conflagration -- or even worse?
My own feeling is terribly pessimistic
at this point. The parties are perilously close to the point
of no return.
But there may be one more chance. If
the US, as the only world superpower, were to work with the
U.N. and/or organize a global coalition for Mideast peace, and
help arrange a way for both sides to back down -- perhaps with
buffering peace monitors in-between the warring parties -- maybe,
just maybe, there might be reason for some sliver of hope.
But it's clear that Bush & his hawkish
advisors have no new ideas on this matter, no desire to come
up with any (which would have to include altering US policy
in the region to lower the level of tensions), and instead continue
their meaningless sending of envoys to the area to arrange...what?
another piece of paper signed, another set of promises made.
The result is that the violence ratchets
up another notch, because both sides know that America is not
seriously engaged and therefore there are no unbearable penalties
for acting irresponsibly. Thus, Arafat can send more suicide
bombers, Sharon can re-occupy the territories, and Nero is
content to laze on his Texas ranch, in denial about the world
about to explode in the Middle East. (Maybe when an oil stoppage
is mounted by Arab countries and the lines grow long at the
gas pumps in Anytown, <U.S.A>., Bush may suddenly see
a necessity for becoming engaged in the Middle East.)
There's no guarantee that deep and serious
US engagement right now would send both sides moving, however
slowly and vaguely, back toward an eventual peace treaty. But
if the US continues to do the little or the nothing that passes
for American Mideast policy these days, the Bush administration
is going to have a lot of blood on its hands as the Israeli/Palestinian
war grows into white-hot intensity, dragging other countries
into it.
OK, you may say, suppose that a ceasefire
is arrangeable and both sides are ready to meet. How can Jews
and Arabs ever sit down at the same table and talk peace after
the past decade of mass slaughter, the ceaseless humiliation
of occupation, suicide bombings of innocent civilians, etc.?
How could Arafat ever agree to sit across a table from Sharon,
and vice versa, let alone sign a treaty document with him?
One way might be to lower everyone's
expectations. The object is not to get the enemies to trust
each other, or like each other, or to revise their opinion that
they're dealing with anything other than bloodthirsty zealots.
(If peace is ever achieved, those attitudinal changes might
come later, as byproducts of a few years of peace, and in mutually-beneficial
water and other practical treaties.)
The object here is to get each side to
say to the other: "We're here, we're not going away, you're
here, you're not going away; we wish you would disappear, or
that we could make you disappear, but we realize realistically
that it's not going to happen. Military slaughter simply doesn't
get either of us to where we want to be, no matter how many
tanks are employed, no matter how many suicide bombers blow
themselves up. Each of us wants security, and to raise our
children and grandchildren in peace. So, what can we do to bring
that security and peace about?
"We can't forget our respective
historical claims and what we've done to each other, but how
can we move into realistic talks about what we can do TODAY
to make the situation better? What compromises might you have
to make, what compromises might we have to make, to begin to
bring us to that point?"
If both sides can come to a public realization
-- as they almost did a decade ago -- that the other side is
here to stay and their just demands and historical claims must
be taken into account, and that military slaughter does not
lead to what they want, then they can move on to the political,
necessary-compromises stage, involving withdrawal from the settlements,
formal recognition of Israel, reining in their Jew- or Arab-hating
extremists, sharing Jerusalem, etc.
Is this THE solution? Probably not. But
it's a starting point, and the U.S. simply must take the lead
in making sure something like these ideas begins to alter the
agenda and discussion in the Middle East. To do nothing serious,
to simply let tanks and suicide-diplomacy rule the day -- which
is what Bush's non-engagement policy amounts to -- is to condone
utter madness.
Bernard Weiner,
the San Francisco Chronicle's theater critic for nearly two
decades, has taught government and international relations at
Western Washington University and San Diego State University.
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