CounterPunch's
Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Order Now / Available in April
Today's
Stories
April 3 / 5, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Anti-Depressants
a Problem? We're Shocked
Jeffrey St. Clair
How Neil Bush Succeeded in Business
Without Really Trying
April 2, 2004
Dave Lindorff
Barbaric
Relativism: the Press and Fallujah
Kurt Nimmo
Wherever
Bush Goes, Osama is Bound to Follow
Emma Miller
The
Role of the West in the Rwandan Genocide
Dr. Susan Block
Same
Sex Marriages: Just Say "No" to Prohibition
Norman Solomon
Media Strategy Memo for George & Dick
Sacha Guney
The Meaning of the Elections in Turkey
Christopher Brauchli
The
Disturbing Case of Cpt. Yee
Website of the Day
Mercenaries, Inc.
April 1, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Dying in Vain in Iraq
Harry Browne
No Smoke, Plenty of Fire: Ireland's Pubs Go Smokefree
Chris Floyd
Towel Boy: Bush Hits Workers with Chemical Weapons
Nicole Colson
Inside America's Concentration Camp: Tortured at Guantanamo
Charles Arthur
Haiti's Army Cracks Down on Workers
Laura Flanders
Elaine
Chao: a First Daughter for the First Son
March 31, 2004
M. Junaid Alam
Israel:
Suicide Nation?
John L. Hess
Condi
Under Oath: But What About the NYTs Reporters?
Fernando Suarez del Solar
A Year
Since My Son's Death in Iraq
Sofia Perez
Spain's
U-Turn on Iraq is Real Democracy in Action
David Vest
Stick 'Em Up: Put Cheney and Bush Under Oath
Tanya Reinhart
As in Tiannamen Square: Justice and the Yassin Assassination
Mike Whitney
Time to Dump the Pledge
Donald Kaul
Martha Stewart's Lesson: Never Talk to the FBI
Milt Bearden
Mired in the Tracks of Alexander the Great
Marjorie Cohn
The Illegal
Coup in Haiti: How the Kidnapping of Aristide Violated US and
International Law
Website of the Day
New Pentagon Papers Dropped at DC Starbucks
March 30, 2004
William S. Lind
An Occurrence
in Pakistan: the Battle That Wasn't
Ron Jacobs
Assassinations, Hate Mail &
Justice
Mickey Z.
Tommy Boy Friedman Does "Imagine"
Neve Gordon
Strategic Motives of the Yassin Assassination
Mark Scaramella
The Founding Scam: Insider Trading is the American Way
John Chuckman
The Countessa of Empire: Condi
Rice's Idea of Democracy
Greg Moses
Live from Pasadena: Silhouettes of New Order
Rai O'Brien
What Kind of Democracy to Expect if the Opposition Takes Power
in Venezuela
Bill Christison
The
9/11 Commission: Dangerous Harbinger for the Future
Website of the Day
Ghost Town: Riding Through Chernobyl
March 29, 2004
John Maxwell
Crisis
in the Caribbean: a Miasma Foretold
J. Michael Springmann
Email
Spying & Attorney Client Privilege
Robert Fisk / Severin
Carrell
Coalition
of the Mercenaries
The Black Commentator
Haiti's Troika of Terror
Doug Giebel
Candide in the Wilderness:
How Bush Policy Was Made
David Krieger
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Bargain
Mike Whitney
Rejecting the Language of Terrorism
Richard Oxman
The Pitts: a 9/11 Burrow of an American
Family
Kim Scipes
The AFL-CIO in Venezuela: Deja Vu All Over Again
Michael Donnelly
End Game for Northwest Forests
Norman Solomon
The Media Politics of 9/11
Kathy Kelly
Last Lines Before Vanishing
Website of the Day
Swans: Can Money Buy Everything?
March 27 / 28, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Dave Lindorff
Spineless of US Journalists
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Say a Little Prayer
March 26, 2004
Christopher Brauchli
There's
a Chill Over the Country
Robert Fisk
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Ordeal
of Mordechai Vanunu
Joe DeRaymond
Democracy in El Salvador? Think Again
Mike Whitney
Lessons on Apartheid from Ariel Sharon
Mickey Z.
Somalia and Iraq: Looking Back and Ahead
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
CounterPunch Photo Wire
Cheney's Close Shave?
John Breneman
Bush's Comic Bomb
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
April 3 / 5, 2004
Welcome to Their Nightmare
Orwell
and Kafka in Israel/Palestine
By LAWRENCE DAVIDSON
In the last two years I have made three trips
to Israel and Occupied Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
Each trip represents a journey into an approximation of the literary
nightmares of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. To a certain extent
we are all subject to the Orwellian version of these nightmares.
It was Orwell's conviction that "political language is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful." Here
in the United States we ought to recognize the truth of this
maxim for we have once again been drawn into deadly foreign adventures
based on lies and exaggeration. However, in Israel the influence
of "political language" has reached a unique level
of intensity. Increasingly, many Israelis live in a "closed
information environment" wherein an insidious Orwellian
"newspeak" (a language of propaganda aimed at creating
ideologically determined boundaries for thought), shapes thinking
and perception relative to the Palestinians. This is just not
true of ! your average citizen manipulated by mendacious politicians
and a censured press. In Israel, as in Orwell's novel 1984, society's
leaders are as shaped by the prevailing "political language"
as those they rule. Thus, descriptions of Palestinians by Israeli
leaders range from "there are no such thing as Palestinians"
(Prime Minister Golda Maier, June 15, 1969), to "beasts
walking on two legs" (Prime Minister Menahim Begin, June
25, 1982), to "drugged cockroaches in a bottle" (Raphael
Eitan, Chief of Staff, April 14, 1983), to "people who do
not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong
to a different galaxy (Israeli President Moshe Katsav, May 10,
2001). For a man like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, "peace"
for Israel comes through dominating and controlling "the
enemies of humanity" (January 5, 2004). Oppression and war
making becomes peace making in the land of Zion.
With the Palestinians, on the other hand,
the use of language is much more descriptive of their reality.
Just about every Palestinian has been negatively impacted by
the Israeli occupation, and thus no propaganda can hide the truth
from them. Any politician, of whatever nationality, who tries
to tell the Palestinians that the Israelis have their best interests
at heart and are in "Judea and Samaria" to raise Arab
standards of living, introduce progress, and otherwise help the
Palestinians into the modern world (all claims made by Zionists
in the last 50 years) would be laughed at and thoroughly despised.
Thus, deceptive language that substitutes for reality, is not
what defines the world of those in Occupied Palestine. Instead,
the particular nightmare of the Palestinians is best described
in the pages of Franz Kafka. In Kafka's world the prevailing
theme is uncertainty and unpredictability. There are no set rules
for behavior and the orders given by authorities se! em arbitrary
and even contradictory. You do not know what the laws are. The
"authorities" in Kafka's work sit in their fortresses
and periodically intrude upon the lives of the confused and apparently
helpless protagonists.
This Kafkaesque situation describes life
in Occupied Palestine. Israeli authorities suddenly intrude themselves
into the lives of the Palestinian population, and do so in an
unpredictable and arbitrary manner. They also destroy in an arbitrary
manner. Israel's message to the Palestinians reflects one of
Kafka's more depressing maxim's, "why build knowing destruction
is inevitable?" A Palestinian might be safe one moment and
in danger the next. You cannot predict if you will make it to
work, the grocer, or school, or for that matter back again. As
a result many Palestinians could identify with Kafka's character
Joseph K in the novel The Trial who, "without having done
anything wrong was arrested one fine morning."
ISRAEL
Israel has entered into an Orwellian
world of inbred perceptions and unanalyzed assumptions. These
appear to make sense from inside Israeli society (and the Zionist
community worldwide as well), but from the outside seem to be
out of touch with reality. The inside "reality" is
dominated by the obsessive concept of fortress Israelthat
is Israel against the world. This mental paradigm, which ascribes
all criticism of Israeli behavior to eternal anti-Semitism, is
assimilated from childhood, taught to you by your family and
your teachers at school. It is a belief commonly shared, and
thus reinforced, by your neighbors, your coworkers, the newspapers,
television and radio, and those with whom you do your military
service (some of the army induction ceremonies are held at site
of the 73 CE mass suicide of Jewish Zealots at Masada). It is
a constant part of your consciousness and defines patriotic thought.
Nonetheless, the belief in fortress Israel
is fraught with Orwellian contradictions. Here are some of the
things this paradigm teaches (as against what reality looks like
from outside of Israel and the Zionist perspective): the Palestinian
Arabs are eternal enemies and want to push the Jews into the
sea (even though it is the Palestinians who are being slowly
but surely pushed into bantustans behind a ghetto like "separation"
wall). Given half a chance the Palestinians can accomplish this
new holocaust with the help of allied Arab hordes (even though
Israel is among the strongest military powers on the globe, is
allied to the world's only superpower, and has never lost a war).
The Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel proper, are
ersatz Nazis (even though, for hundreds of years before the rise
of Zionism, they lived peacefully with their Jewish neighbors
and only turned hostile when the Zionists started appropriating
Palestine ! under the protection of British imperialism). Arafat
is the devil incarnate and also as Prime Minister Sharon likes
to put it, "the greatest obstacle to peace" (even though,
since 1988, he has tried repeatedly to make peace with the Jewish
state. All these efforts have been replaced in the Israeli collective
memory by Arafat's refusal to accept the treaty offered at Camp
David II. Israeli rejection of all previous Palestinian efforts
at peace have been forgotten). Israel is just a little place
with "fragile" borders (which since 1947 have repeatedly
expanded just as David Ben Gurion, speaking at the time of the
founding of Israel, predicted they would). Only war can bring
Israel peace (Which characterizes the thinking and policies of
the present Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, a man who is
generally recognized outside of Israel and the U.S. to be a war
criminal.)1
These beliefs approach the strength of
a religious doctrine in Israel. They also restrict the range
of thought, and narrow the possibilities for action for many
Israelis and other Zionists. Most have also shown an inability
to critically examine Israel's behavior and how it has evolved
from this siege mentality. They have held fast to a selective
use of history in order to support the fortress Israel paradigm
and its corollaries. As a consequence of this closed mindedness,
those who, for a variety of reasons, do break free of the nationally
sanctified blinkers and publically contradict accepted doctrine
are seen as heretics or traitors and risk social isolation and
the ruination of their careers, and sometimes worse. One can
see this clearly in the case of tenured Israeli professors who
publically oppose the occupation. Academics like Ilan Pappe of
Haifa University, are periodically harassed by their university
administration by being brought up on disciplinary charges fo!
r alleged seditious activity. They are denied promotion. Their
graduate students have found it hard to get jobs, so now few
will work with such professors. Untenured professors are reluctant
to take a public stand against government policies because they
are more vulnerable and could lose their positions. And finally,
Jews outside of Israel who publically criticize the Israeli government
and the Zionist ideology are accused of being "self-hating
Jews." Nonetheless, so horrid is Israeli behavior toward
the Palestinians that the number of such Jews, best exemplified
by the "refuseniks" is slowly increasing both in Israel
and abroad.
Behind the wall of fortress Israel, most
Israeli Jews are scared and depressed. Popular feelings are affected
by a constant concern for personal and family safety. Israelis
tend to look over their your shoulders and worry about riding
the bus or going to a restaurant. Britain's Daily Telegraph (
September 30, 2003) has reported on the poll conducted by the
Israeli hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth. The report concludes that
"Israelis are in a state of open despair about their country's
future." 73% of Israelis do not think that their children
will have a better future. Under these conditions one can ask
why the Israelis simply do not negotiate a just peace with the
Palestinians? Give them their state on the 22% of Palestine on
the other side of the 1967 border (the Green Line). This is an
offer the vast majority of Palestinians will readily accept.
Also, such a move would very likely make an ally of a Palestinian
government which, predictably, would go to great lengths to con!
trol anyone whose actions would threaten to bring the IDF back
across the border. Just such a scenario was described to this
author as the basis for peace by Yasir Arafat in June of 2003.
This is also the arrangement Israel has with the Jordanians who
control their border with Israel quite effectively. And, in a
quiet way, the same arrangement prevails with the Syrians and
the Egyptians.
Yet the Israelis insist that allowing
the Palestinians a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza
Strip is impossible and mortally dangerous as well. How do they
know? The Orwellian political language that dominates their "closed
information environment" tells them so. Remember, such an
environment binds one to internal references only. These references
become inbred and self-serving so that one's major sources of
information function like sycophants telling one only what supports
and rationalizes one's actions. Information that undermines or
contradicts a priori points of view remain unseen, unheard, or
are magically reinterpreted to fit the set parameters in one's
mind.
This closed information environment has
led most Israeli (and diaspora) Jews to believe that :
1) It is the Palestinians do not want
peace.
The Israelis make two claims for this
assertion. First they point out that the Palestinians have a
long history of attacks against Israelis. The second point is
that Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's supposed "generous offer"
at Camp David II in 2000.
The Israelis reject the Palestinian claim
that the intifadas (the word means to "shake off")
are episodes of resistence against Israel's aggression and occupation.
They point out that Palestinian attacks pre-date 1967 and the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This was the position taken
in December of 2002 by Major General Isaac Ben-Israel at a Tel
Aviv University discussion in which the author participated.
Because there was violence prior to the occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, there must be violence if Israel withdraws
from the territories. It should be noted, however, most of the
cross border incidents, particularly in the ten years following
1948, involved Palestinians who were simply seeking to return
to their homes. According to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim
hundreds of these unarmed Palestinians were shot down by the
Israelis. Statistically the number of Palestinian armed attacks
on Israel before 1967 was low and relatively infrequent, and
reflec! ted the slow Palestinian recovery from the shock of the
Nakba (or 1948 catastrophe). The Jewish Virtual Library (a Zionist
source) lists only 27 Israeli fatalities as a result of Palestinian
attacks between 1958 and 1966. In the same period Israeli retaliatory
raids into Jordanian and Egyptian territory killed many hundreds
of people. Nonetheless, from the Israeli point of view, these
pre-1967 attacks were not a response to anything the Zionists
did, but rather the expression of an undying a priori desire
to destroy the Jewish state. Unfortunately, this line of thinking
requires a negation of the history of Zionist goals and behavior,
and an assumption that past Palestinian behavior will continue
indefinitely into the future.
Israelis and other Zionists simply take
it for granted that, from 1917 onward, the history of the occupation
of Israel proper (that is the 78% of Palestine that is Israel
behind the Green Line) was benign and any Zionist military action
associated with it was purely defensive. In reality, as any number
of Israeli historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim,
etc.) have shown, large Jewish immigration under the protection
of British imperialism initiated the displacement of Palestinians.
Palestinian resentment of and reaction to this process was natural
and led to resistence that began as early in the 1920s. In truth
all Zionist history in Palestine is the history of occupation
which has been and is offensive rather than defensive in nature.
However, today the situation is not the
same as it was in the 1920s or in 1948. In 1988 the PLO recognized
the state of Israel within its 1967 borders. This constituted
a supreme compromise in that by this recognition they voluntarily
forfeited 78% of their historic homeland and restricted their
claims to the remaining 22% that make up the West Bank, including
East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. It is the refusal of Israel to
seriously respond to this recognition and the sacrifice it represents,
and cease its occupation of Palestine beyond the Green Line,
that has led to a new level of violent resistence on the part
of the Palestinians.
Of course the Israelis do not believe
they have failed to respond. They believe that in the year 2000,
at Camp David II, Ehud Barak put forth a "generous offer."
This belief has taken on mythic proportions not only in Israel
but throughout the world's Jewish communities and in the United
States as well. It now stands as an excellent example of political
language restricting the range of thought and thus resulting
in mass self-deception within a closed information environment.
According to the Zionist story, this "generous" offer
gave the Palestinians the Gaza Strip and almost the entire West
Bank. Instead of accepting this deal the Palestinians, under
the leadership of Yasir Arafat, rejected it and launched the
on going and deadly Second Intifada (2000 to the present).
2) Arafat is the one who is responsible
for this rejection and the subsequent violence.
While Israelis believe they are willing
to make peace through "historic compromises," there
is, in their view, no "partner" on the Palestinian
side to negotiate with. Yasir Arafat, a man who is shut up in
two buildings in Ramallah, amidst acres of rubble, his communications
monitored and his travel restricted, is responsible for on-going
terror and, according to the Israeli novelist and political pundit
Eyal Megged, "employs tactics that remind us of Hitler."
Essentially what one has here is an alternate
history which, is accepted by the majority in Israel and also
by the present U.S. government. In the Summer of 2002 National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice stated on national television
that "Arafat is somebody who...failed to lead when he had
a chance....Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel,
gave him a terrific opportunity to lead. And what did he get
in return? Arafat started the second Intifada instead and rejected
that offered hand of friendship." Unfortunately, both the
Israelis and Ms Rice are wrong about their facts. The "generous
offer" has been disproved by both American and Israeli experts.
For instance, among others, Robert Malley, President Clinton's
advisor on Israeli-Arab affairs who was at Camp David II; Ron
Pundak, Director of the Peres Center for Peace; Professor Jeff
Halper (Ben Gurion University); Uri Avnery, head of Gush Shalom,
Israel's foremost peace organization; and finally Ehud Bara!
k himself has twice (in the New York Times of May 24, 2001 and
in the Israeli hebrew newspaper Yedi'ot Ahronoth of August 29,
2003) denied that his offer was anywhere near "generous."
What did Barak really offer? According
to the above reports his offer gave the Palestinians a little
over 80% of the West Bank carved into nearly discontinuous cantons.
The Israeli government would have controlled all the Palestinian
borders (none of which would touch on another Arab state), it
would have controlled the air space above the Palestinian territory,
most of the major aquifers, retained sovereignty over East Jerusalem,
maintained almost all Israeli settlements and access roads, controlled
immigration into the Palestinian "state," and retained
the Jordan Valley through an indefinite "long term lease."
This is an offer that no Israeli would ever accept. However,
most Israelis and Americans do not know these details and believe
instead in the myth of generosity.
Unfortunately, what is true is not as
important as what one thinks is true. Believing that the Palestinians
rejected a generous peace at Camp David II, and opted instead
for the violence of the Second Intifada, the Israelis now look
to other ways to achieve security. How this is to be done is
dictated by their Orwellian weltanschauung. Thus:
1. You insist on Palestinian elimination
of militancy while systematically destroying the Palestinian
Authority's police capabilities. The Israeli army attacks Palestinian
police in uniform on sight and most police facilities have been
destroyed. Simultaneously the Israeli government demands that
what is left of the Palestinian Authority direct whatever security
forces they still have to the job of "fighting terrorism"
which are code words for defending Israeli borders and settlers.
Given the position of the Palestinians as an oppressed people
facing illegal colonization, this is amounts to a demand for
the Palestinian authority to take it upon itself to eliminate
Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. Within this scenario
Palestinian resistence to land confiscations, home demolitions,
and settlement activities become offensive actions, and the invasion
of towns and villages by Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships
becomes defensive action.
2. You build a "Security Wall"
to separate yourself from the bulk of the Palestinians. However,
you do not do this along the 1967 Green Line which most of the
world recognizes as the defacto border between Israel and Palestine.
Rather you build this barrier deep inside of the Palestinian
West Bank. Its construction thus facilitates ongoing land confiscations.
You build it so as to confine the Palestinians into a series
of walled off areas of concentration. De facto, this transforms
the "security wall" into a "ghetto wall."
Those West Bank Palestinians who find themselves on the Israeli
side of the wall are to eventually be transferred into the Palestinian
ghettos. This will produce future peace and security for Israelis
in the same way that prisons prevent crime.
3. And you enforce a harsh collective
punishment on the Palestinians, entailing draconian curfews,
roadblocks and checkpoints, "security" sweeps leading
to mass arrests, house demolitions, denial of access to medical
facilities, mass shut down of education, and the "legal"
use of torture, etc. until they "come to their senses"
and negotiate peace on "acceptable terms." This tactic
at once brutalizes the Palestinians and Israelis as well. As
the Israelis visit violence and destruction on their Palestinian
victims, there own levels of domestic violencespouse abuse,
child abuse, violence in the schools, road rage, and violent
crime--have gone up.
Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Hebrew
University and a member of Checkpoint Watch, attributes this
downward spiral of Israeli society and culture to the fact that
"a military discourse has taken over in Israel." Within
the context of this militarized society who can best achieve
peace and security? It continues to be the case that a majority
of Israelis believe it is Ariel Sharon (a general who made his
reputation based upon his personal brutality) and his right-wing
coalition. This seems to be so not despite the fact that these
politicians are ideologically committed to retaining the West
Bank and Gaza Strip (and also the Golan Heights), but because
they are determined to continue the occupation.
This would seem, from an outside perspective,
to be yet another Orwellian proposition-- that is, the road to
peace lay through demanding the right of permanent occupation.
Yet this notion does not appear to be contradictory to most Israelis.
Among the reasons for this is that Zionist perceptions of reality
deny the true nature and consequences for the Palestinians of
37 years of colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Indeed,
for a long time the Israelis refused to even entertain the word
occupation for what they were doing. As the Israeli writer David
Grossman explained in an interview with Bill Moyers in March
of 2002, "there was a whole machinery of fabricating names
to the situation, there was a whole narrative that in a way used
words not to describe reality but rather to camouflage it, to
protect us the Israelis from the harshness of what we are doing."
This is what the Israel Lawyer Leah Tsemel calls the "laundering
of language." In Hebrew "occupation! " became
"release" or "salvation," while "colonizing"
became "peaceful settlement" and "killing"
became "targeting." Orwell would have recognize this
use of "political language" without much trouble.
Another Zionist trick of the mind is
to assign the blame for any negative consequences arising out
the occupation to the Palestinians themselves. For instance in
an August 2002 editorial in the Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem
Post, the common assertion was made that "...the Palestinians'
current malaise is no one's fault but their own, considering
that they started and are continuing the war that is exacting
from them such a hefty price." That the "war"
is actually resistence against colonial occupation is lost on
the Jerusalem Post editors.
In Israeli eyes the occupation is a warranted
defensive action driven by a pervasive national fear and suspicion
of Palestinians as terrorists. It should be noted that to most
Israelis, and Americans too, the terrorist is the essential Palestinian.
Each Palestinian whether man, woman, or child is just a body
potentially encased in dynamite. The Israelis point to Occupied
Palestine as the place from which suicide bombers come and thus
they feel they must "control" these lands. That the
occupation and its accompanying colonizing policy are in fact
the sources of suicide bombings and overall Palestinian violence
is simply not accepted by most Israelis. Instead, they ascribe
these actions to Muslim religious fanaticism. This came out clearly
in a January 2002 interview by the author and others with Ben
El Eliazar, the former Israeli Defense Minister. Ben El Eliazar
described how he would go and interrogate prisoners suspected
of being! failed suicide bombers. "If you interrogate them
long enough you can see the religious fanaticism surface."
His interrogations may well result in self-deception. Push long
enough and hard enough and you can get a prisoner to tell you
anything, particularly what they soon realize you want to hear.
There are other ways in which the Israelis
manage to promote the occupation, arguably the source of their
insecurity , as a source of security. Here is how the Likud leader
and member of the Knesset, Yuval Steinwitz conceptualized the
situation to the author in December 2002: the occupation is necessary
because it alone can give Israel, "this little land with
impossible borders" defensive depth. According to Steinwitz
Israel is a "great regional power" that is at the same
time "fragile" enough to be destroyed by the Palestinian
terrorists allied to the Egyptians. This is a variation on the
notion that the Israel is in perpetual danger of being "kicked
into the sea." One can locate the origins of this fear in
the Holocaust and understand how deep rooted it is, but it nonetheless
defies reality. There is no military intelligence service outside
of Israel who believes this myth. No military engagement (including
those in 1947-1948) has ever come close to suggesting this scen!
ario was or is possible. Yet the myth is pervasive in Israel
and among the Jewish diaspora community as well. So, acting on
what you believe is real (not, in this case, what is in fact
real) you justify colonial occupation, the brutal destruction
of Palestinian society, and the slow by sure ethnic cleansing
of Occupied Palestine of its non-Jewish population (all of which
is overtly offensive and brutally aggressive in nature) in the
name of needing "defensive depth."
The Israelis and their supporters have
other rationalizations for occupation. There is the biblically
based claim that "Judea and Samaria" are "covenant
lands," that is lands given to the Jews by God. This, of
course, is a matter of faith and not provable fact. Many people
take the bible, where this covenant is to be found, as the word
of God. However, this too is faith and not provable fact. Nonetheless,
such faith put forth as fact allows some Israelis to see the
indigenous population as "strangers in the land" and
Jewish folks from Brooklyn as rightful inhabitants. This leads
to more tricks of the mind. For instance, Carolyn Glick, the
Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Post told this author and others
that the removal of the West Bank colonies would constitute the
"ethnic cleansing of Judea and Samaria."
Whether it is for imagined military reasons
(which entails a denial that occupation is the source of their
insecurity), or faith based religious reasons (which entails
exoneration from responsibility for brutal actions because they
are doing the work of God), the majority of Israelis have come
to the conclusion that there is no alternative to a hard line,
right wing government which can only conceptualize a peace treaty
that ghettoizes, economically emasculates, and subordinates any
eventual Palestinian political entity. And even then most Israelis
do not believe such a treaty will lead to real peace, not because
it fails to satisfy Palestinian needs, but because the Palestinians
are all anti-Semites who will forever want to destroy all of
Israel.
PALESTINE
Palestine is a land of deep despair,
growing poverty, and pervasive insecurity. In a slow but sure
fashion the Israelis are reducing the Palestinians to an impoverished
cheap labor pool within ghetto-like areas of concentration. Here
is how they are doing it:
1. The ancestral lands of the Palestinians
are being confiscated: 78% of Palestine was taken in 1948. According
to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics the over 1 million Israeli
Palestinians who now live in Israel proper (behind the Green
Line) make up 20% of the country's population (and 40% of Israel's
population growth rate) are confined to 3% of the land. And,
this 3% is subject to continuing periodic and unpredictable confiscations.
Israel's Palestinian communities are not allowed to geographically
expand. In 1967 the Israelis took over the remaining 22% of Palestine
(now designated the Occupied Territories) and immediately began
a colonization program that is illegal under international law.
To date they have confiscated some 40% of this remaining 22%
of Palestine and now operate over 200 colonies which hold nearly
400,000 illegal residents. They are continuing to expand these
"settlements" through the continuous confiscation of
land in Occupied Palestine (that is! beyond the Green Line).
This means that the Palestinians, both within and without of
Israel proper, are being relentlessly ghettoized into smaller
and smaller areas.
2. Besides the land, the people in Occupied
Palestine are experiencing the destruction of their property
on a daily basis. According to B'Tsalem, Israel's own civil rights
organization, hundreds of thousands of olive and other fruit
trees have been and continue to be destroyed; hundreds of water
wells have been sealed (90% of all the water resources of Occupied
Palestine is now reserved for exclusive use by the occupier);
according to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions about
11,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967; the
population is subjected to periodic indiscriminate artillery
shelling and automatic weapons fire; American made jet planes
and helicopters discharge high explosive missiles and bombs in
crowded civilian areas. Some of these bombs and missiles are
made of depleted uranium infused metals. All of this is illegal
under international law as promulgated in the Hague Conventions
of 1907 and 1987, and the 4th Geneva Conventio! n.
3. Palestinians have seen their rights
of free movement, free association, access to education, access
to medical care, ability to transport and market goods (most
of which rights are guaranteed by the Declaration of Universal
Human Rights adopted by the United Nations after World War II)
severely restricted by the creation of some 480 checkpoints and
roadblocks. Most of these are not placed between Israel and Palestinian
towns and villages, but rather between Palestinian locales. These
checkpoints, the purpose of which seems to be harassment rather
than security, attack the most basic personal rights. The most
tragic example of this is the resulting collapse of the Palestinian
medical system. According to Human Rights Watch, Israeli soldiers
purposely harass and sometimes target for injury or death Palestinian
doctors and medical personnel. Checkpoints prevent ambulances
from getting to hospitals or the residences of ill people and
they prevent pregnant women about to gi! ve birth from going
to hospitals. The soldiers at the checkpoints do not prevent
these things all the time, but rather they do so in an unpredictable,
random fashion that heightens the sense of uncertainty and vulnerability
of the Palestinian population. I asked Ben Eliazar, the former
Defense Minister, about this practice in the January of 2002
interview mentioned above. He asserted that the Palestinians
use ambulances to transport weapons and "wanted criminals."
When I pointed out to him that there was a qualitative difference
between stopping an ambulance and searching it for weapons or
wanted individuals and stopping an ambulance until the patient
inside it died, he became sullen and said that he did not need
any help from me when it came to security. Since their tactics
have left the Israelis continuously insecure, this is a questionable
claim. At the very least the Israelis need help in maintaining
a basic level of humanity. As a result of the policies just described
! the rate of death from curable diseases is on the rise among
West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians, and vaccination and preventive
medicine is almost non-existent.
In addition to the checkpoints, draconian
curfews which keep the entire populations of cities and towns
under forced house arrest for weeks on end contribute to the
breakdown of medical care, education, and employment (According
to United Nations Relief and Works Agency reports unemployment
in the Occupied Territories now stands over 65% and more than
half the population lives in poverty).
It bears repeating that much of this
harassment and destruction occurs in a random and arbitrary fashion.
One does not know if one can get through a checkpoint to go to
school or work. If one gets through, one does not know if one
can return home again through the same checkpoint. One does not
know when the curfews will come. One can be arrested anytime
for any reason. It is a Kafkaesque world wherein one cannot predict
the consequences of one's daily behavior.
Under these circumstances, 90% of Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories see no hope in their future without
international intervention. Yet intervention is consistently
blocked by the United States which vetoes any UN resolution that
seeks the creation of such a policy. It is because they are not
"balanced" says the U.S. State Department, but this
is ridiculous in the face of Israel's brutal behavior. The U.S.
uses its veto to protect Israel because Zionist interest groups
have such powerful influence with the American government and
political parties. In any case, the Israeli government is adamantly
against such intervention and would resist it by force. As a
consequence there is no choice for the Palestinians but to continue
their resistence to Israeli occupation, for to concede defeat
would mean to acquiesce in the death of Palestinian society and
culture.
When it comes to resistence, it is historically
the case that the violence of the oppressed usually rises to
the level of the violence of the oppressor. That is what has
happened in Palestine. The Israeli occupation constitutes 37
years of institutionalized terror which has just about destroyed
the economic, social, and political lives of all Palestinians
under Israeli rule. Civil society and its infrastructure are
nearly gone. Civilian deaths due to direct military action and
indirect consequences of Israeli colonial policies now (November
2003) stands at just over 2700 people (compared to about 800
Israelis). Palestinian civilian injuries due to Israeli action
stand at over 47,000. Resistance is all that remains.
This brings us to the issue of suicide
bombings. The context for understanding this tactic is the occupation
itself. The consequences of the occupation do not discriminate
between men and women, adults and children. Confiscations impact
them all, home demolitions displace them all, curfews confine
them all, Israeli violence targets them all. This is the truth.
The author has seem much of this with his own eyes. Americans
and many Israelis may not believe it, but their disbelief does
not change the Palestinian reality. That reality produces deep
despair, feelings of humiliation and unavoidable hatred. It is
from this context that the bombers come. Their tactic is the
reverse coin of Israel's own practices and not the product of
some innate religious fanaticism.
It is this despair and rage, and not
religious fanaticism, that also leads to popular support for
Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are supported so widely not because
they are Islamic fundamentalists, but because, in an atmosphere
of despair, they serve the needs of the rapidly growing numbers
of poor and they resist the Israelis. Give the Palestinians back
their hope of a just settlement by moving concretely toward the
satisfaction of their basic demands, and the support for Hamas
and Islamic Jihad will diminish. This is not mere conjecture.
Right after the Oslo Accords were signed, and despite their serious
flaws, there was much hope for peace among the Palestinians.
As a consequence support for groups like Hamas fell to under
10% of the population in the West Bank and Gaza. By the middle
of 2003, in an atmosphere of near hopelessness that still prevails,
polls taken by the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research
indicated that support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad s! tood at
58%.
ANY HOPE?
It is important to realize that most
ordinary people on both sides say they want many of the same
things: normal lives, security for themselves and their families,
acceptance by the other side. And while the majority of Israelis,
and a number of Palestinians cannot get past perceptual barriers
dominated by fear, suspicion, and anxiety there are factors that
can, at least in theory, result in movement toward real peace
if given a chance to come to the fore.
1. The vast majority of Palestinians
know (even if the Israelis do not) that they cannot destroy the
Israeli state.
2. Most Palestinians in the Occupied
Palestine are willing to negotiate compromise solutions to all
issues (including the controversial issue of the "right
of return") except their right to a viable state occupying
roughly the 22% of Palestine beyond Israel's 1967 borders. For
the Palestinians, this is the sine qua non of a just peace. This
is not a new stance on the part of the Palestinians or their
leaders. Here is a list of peace initiatives that the Palestinians
have welcomed (and various Israeli governments have rejected):
The Rogers Plan (1969); The Scranton Mission on behalf of President
Nixon (1970); Sadat's land for peace mutual recognition proposal
(1971); Carter's call for a Geneva international conference (1977);
Saudi King Fahd's peace offer (1981); The Reagan Plan (1982);
The Shultz Plan (1988); The Baker Plan (1989); A continuation
of the Taba negotiations (2001); The Saudi Peace proposal on
behalf of the Arab League (2002); The unofficial Geneva peace
init! iative of November/December 2003. And, of course, in 1993
Arafat signed the Oslo Accords which unraveled after Yitzhak
Rabin's assassination (November 1995) and the subsequent return
to power of the Likud party
To the extent that the Israelis block
the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian leaders
and intellectuals put forth the idea of a one state solution.
That is, the acceptance of one state from "the sea to the
river" with the struggle then directed toward bringing about
equal rights for all citizens. This would of necessity negate
the idea of a "Jewish state." I do not believe this
is the preference of most Palestinians but it may be made inevitable
by the short sighted policies of the Zionist movement.
3. The recent Geneva Initiative (November/December
2003) is at least a sign that Israelis and Palestinians can work
together to come to a settlement. It certainly is not the end
game for it fails to give adequate attention to the fate of millions
of Palestinian refugees who have rights under international law.
If this initiative is to be seriously pursued negotiators need,
at the very least, to improve the water rights package, and add
onto the initiative an Israeli acceptance of responsibility for
the Palestinian refugee problem plus a pledge of compensation.
It is to be noted that the Geneva initiative has been endorsed
by Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. It has, however,
been attacked by the Sharon government as a traitorous act.
4. On the Israeli side there are a growing
number of influential military men (such as Amram Mitzna and
Ami Aylon), who have credibility with the Israeli public, and
understand that continuing the occupation will not bring security
and normality, but rather a continuing brutalization of Israeli
society. There is also a very small, but growing, number of resisters
both within and without the army who refuse to cooperate with
the Israeli government's occupation policies.
The problem is that while those who are
ready to take risks for peace appear to be a majority on the
Palestinian side, they are as yet a minority on the Israeli side.
In the end what we have is a horrible process of physical and
emotional destruction that can only be overcome by a psychological
leapand that mostly among Israelis. They must come to a
realization that the occupation is the source of Israeli insecurity
and only by giving it up can there be security and normality.
If you will, only through peace with the Palestinians, can Israel
be a safe haven for Jews. Whether the Israelis can achieve this
level of awareness while in the grips of an historically rooted,
paralyzing fear and anxiety (played upon by a Likud government
and right-wing factions which are determined to stay in "Judea
and Samaria" forever) remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it
is their occupation. It is they who have brought to life the
nightmare worlds of Orwell and Kafka. If things are to change,
it is they who must wake up.
Lawrence Davidson is a Professor of History at West Chester University
in Pennsylvania. He can be reached at: ldavidson1945@msn.com.
This essay originally appeared in Logos.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Say a Little Prayer
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|