MIRANSHAH, Pakistan, July 18--Pro-Taliban insurgents ambushed a Pakistani military convoy near the Afghan border on Wednesday, sparking a gun-battle that left at least 17 soldiers and some rebels dead, the army said.
The fighting in the North Waziristan tribal region moved the government one step closer to an all-out war with insurgents in the area, who abandoned a 10-month-old peace treaty with the government on Sunday.
In Wednesday's attack, insurgents fired rockets at the convoy and then opened fire with automatic weapons near the village of Lwara Mundi, chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad Said.
The spokesman said seventeen soldiers were killed and 14 others were injured.
"Some miscreants were also killed in the exchange of fire," Arshad said, adding that security had been stepped up in the region.
The mountainous area where the ambush took place is near where Pakistani forces earlier this year erected the first 35-kilometer stretch of a controversial anti-Taliban fence along the border with Afghanistan.
The attack happened hours after a roadside bomb blast in North Waziristan injured six civilians and a soldier.
Separately a landmine exploded overnight outside the Miranshah home of politician Mohammad Ajmal Khan, who served as federal sports minister in the 1990s, destroying his front gate but causing no casualties, officials said.
A day earlier, a suicide blast in North Waziristan killed three soldiers and a civilian, while another attack in the capital Islamabad killed at least 15 people.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Can't Find Osama? Attack Iran Instead
by Philip Giraldi
The July 17 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "On the Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland" [.pdf] warns that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of U.S. ally Pakistan, that it has resumed training of cadres intending to carry out "high impact plots" against the United States, and that the terrorist threat for the next three years continues worldwide and is even growing in places like North Africa and Britain. As always there is a bland euphemism to define the emerging situation, in this case that the United States will be experiencing a "heightened threat environment." And to make sure that the conflation of terrorism with Iraq is not lost on the reader, the "central front" in Iraq makes an appearance among the report's "Key Findings."
The July 17 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "On the Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland" [.pdf] warns that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of U.S. ally Pakistan, that it has resumed training of cadres intending to carry out "high impact plots" against the United States, and that the terrorist threat for the next three years continues worldwide and is even growing in places like North Africa and Britain. As always there is a bland euphemism to define the emerging situation, in this case that the United States will be experiencing a "heightened threat environment." And to make sure that the conflation of terrorism with Iraq is not lost on the reader, the "central front" in Iraq makes an appearance among the report's "Key Findings."
In a tour-de-force of misinformation disguised as fact, the report states, erroneously, that al-Qaeda in Iraq represents the principal threat for an attack on the U.S. homeland "because it has expressed a desire to attack us here." The "attack us here" theme has been around for several years, and it has lately been reinforced by the White House's incessant linkage of Iraq to al-Qaeda, culminating in a July 10 speech in Cleveland in which President Bush named the terrorist organization 30 times during comments that were ostensibly on the war in Iraq. Anyone who follows terrorism even in a pedestrian fashion might politely suggest that the administration's position on the terrorism problem is nonsense. The main threat to the U.S. comes from the real original unadulterated al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Iraq, though a magnet and training ground for terrorist aspirants, is neither interested in nor capable of exporting its own particular brand of anarchy to America's shores.
Given the prominence of Iraq, the NIE is clearly more a political document than an objective assessment. It goes on to state that the U.S. has been on the offensive against terrorism, that it has "built new institutions" and "developed new tools." It is "constantly evaluating the threat" in hundreds if not thousands of meetings in Washington. Lots of meetings. Lots of reviews. Lots of worker bees working. The irrepressible Karen Hughes at State Department has summoned her Myrmidons, "countering al-Qaeda's violent message," challenging terrorists to cyber duels over the Internet. It's Star Wars all over again. "We remain vigilant." It's all there in the NIE.
But one might be forgiven for thinking, perhaps, that all is not well, that the terrorism problem is somehow worse now than it was in 2001. Such reflection, which would be appropriate for anyone who truly cares about the United States and its people, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the past six years of misdirection and mismanagement have made the world a much more dangerous place. In that light, one might conclude that the NIE is more a chronicle of failure than success, an admission that the White House and Congress have, in fact, been unable to protect the American people. It might also be observed that one doesn't get as much bang for the buck as used to be the case. The expenditure of half a trillion dollars in a "global war on terrorism" (GWOT) that has led to the deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, intelligence officers, and law enforcement personnel against no more than a couple of thousand terrorists concentrated in one of the world's most backward regions has not radically shifted the playing field in America's favor. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda carried out 9/11. Osama has been hanging around in Pakistan since late 2001, and he is still there, training new terrorists and planning.
And, if something is wrong in the GWOT, as usual no one is to blame, as-finger pointing would reflect badly on the political leadership. Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the administration's failure to finish off a cornered Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora Mountains in December 2001, received his Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. He now sits on the boards of the Bank of America and Outback Steakhouse, and it is assumed that he will soon be named president of Oklahoma State University. Ex-CIA Director George Tenet, who claims he warned Condoleezza Rice about an impending terrorist attack but, inexplicably, failed to tell the president, just received a $4 million book advance. Paul Wolfowitz, whose lack of judgment guaranteed that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would not succeed, is now comfortably back at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute after his failure at the World Bank.
The blundering of the past six years in which America's friends overseas have been turned into enemies by arrogance and bullying, in which Washington's standing among nations has plummeted, has not resulted in any serious change of course. No one is responsible. The neoconservative architects of the Pentagon assault on Iraq that has turned that country into a failed state and a magnet for terrorism have left for greener pastures, but not a one has admitted to error or been publicly admonished. Several, including Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council's Elliot Abrams, are still in positions of power, advocating a new war as part of a larger conflict that will go on indefinitely, everywhere.
And it's always convenient to blame it on the bad guys. Per the NIE, terrorism is not a problem because America's politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits stacked a hundred high in every office lining the Potomac have failed to understand the nature of the threat. It is rather because the terrorists have "evolved" and "adapted," hardly playing fair.
The NIE is not pleasant reading, even though it tries to make the essentially political point that everything possible is being done to protect "the Homeland." What it really is arguing is that everything that is being done should continue to be done, and more. That means more of the bloated bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security and the world's mightiest military budget. Another White House tactical response to the very real terrorist threat, which it doesn't want anyone to think about too much, is, predictably, to look for a diversion in the form of someone else to kick. With Iraq and Afghanistan in shambles, there just happen to be a couple of neighbors who can be credibly accused of "interference" with the U.S. military's civilizing mission. In the intelligence business it is sometimes necessary to use "disinformation" to establish a false factual basis or to create a straw man that can be used to divert attention from an unpleasant reality. If it is too hard to catch Osama bin Laden, it might be more convenient to talk about Iran instead. As Syria and Iran have both long been in the crosshair of the neoconservatives because of those countries' antipathy to Israel, it is reassuring to know that they have not been forgotten by the White House. It is possibly no coincidence that there has been a significant increase in the anti-Iran rhetoric emanating from both the Bush administration and Congress over the past few weeks, mostly seeking to establish a casus belli by contending that Iran is masterminding lethal attacks directed against U.S. troops in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan. A tidy little war against Iran would be a useful diversion that would make everyone forget about the NIE and the inability to do anything about Osama bin Laden.
Japan okays yen transactions with Iran
A Japanese official says his country will use yen in half of its future crude transactions with Iran as requested by the Islamic Republic.
Head of Japan's Petroleum Association, Fumiaki Watari, noted substituting yen with dollar for half of Japan's transactions is feasible.
Watari who also chairs Nippon Oil Corp. pointed out that the Japanese refining companies are presently working to change the currency unit for their transactions, Shana reported.
Iran has called on the Japanese oil contractors to change the unit of currency in transactions to yen from dollar as a way to counterbalance the US sanctions against the country.
Nippon will also change currency of its transactions into yen. Nippon will be the first Japanese oil company to convert the currency to yen. The new decision will take effect as of October.
Watari reiterated that Iran crude is important for Japan and the Japanese company will study replacing dollar with yen.
Iran is the third largest supplier of Japan's crude after Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Head of Japan's Petroleum Association, Fumiaki Watari, noted substituting yen with dollar for half of Japan's transactions is feasible.
Watari who also chairs Nippon Oil Corp. pointed out that the Japanese refining companies are presently working to change the currency unit for their transactions, Shana reported.
Iran has called on the Japanese oil contractors to change the unit of currency in transactions to yen from dollar as a way to counterbalance the US sanctions against the country.
Nippon will also change currency of its transactions into yen. Nippon will be the first Japanese oil company to convert the currency to yen. The new decision will take effect as of October.
Watari reiterated that Iran crude is important for Japan and the Japanese company will study replacing dollar with yen.
Iran is the third largest supplier of Japan's crude after Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Joel Bainerman: ‘One State Solution‘ is Best
By Joel Bainerman
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
While the One State Solution (OSS) to solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is typically rejected outright as being a demographic threat to Israel- this approach could very well be the only viable path to solving the conflict.
The typical assumption is that if Israel annexed the approximately 1.5 million West Bank Arabs and granted them full Israeli citizenship- within a generation there would be more Arabs than Jews in Israel and thus Israel would lose its Jewish majority in the Knesset.
This conclusion is simplistic. In addition, Israel is not a Jewish state- it is a secular, democratic state with an overwhelming Jewish population. As Israeli Arabs have enjoyed the benefits of Israeli citizenship- so too can the 1.5 million West Bank Arabs.
This group of Palestinians could enjoy all the benefits of full Israeli citizenship- and yet still express their political will via a local, West Bank parliamentary legislature with elected representatives responsible for various aspects of West Bank society. Eventually, after consecutive years of political stability and economic prosperity- institutions of political autonomy would evolve.
Why the OSS is Good for the Palestinians
The first benefit the Palestinians will enjoy from an OSS is that they will no longer be under military rule. The moment the Israeli government grants them full Israeli citizenship- the state of military occupation effectively ends. The ‘security fence’ and all military checkpoints can be dismantled. The entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be one geographical, political entity with no need for internal security fences or borders of any type. One state, one economy, two peoples.
Most importantly, the West Bankers would be able to pursue their full economic rights in the Israeli national economy. That means a right to work in any job- anywhere in Israel- and the right to own assets and property in Israel. In addition- as full Israeli citizens, they would have the right to bring civil legal action against the Israeli government for what they may claim was the theft of their land or other property.
As full citizens of the state of Israel the West Bankers would also receive a complete upgrade of their social, economic, educational, industrial, health and public infrastructure- at a cost that will be borne by the Israeli taxpayer. As part of the plan, Israel would take it upon itself to build permanent housing for the approximately 175,000 Palestinian refugees who currently reside in refugee camps in the West Bank.
Upon receiving Israeli citizenship the West Bankers would go from being a stateless people under military occupation- to citizens of a country that has the strongest and most dynamic economy in the region. Their living standards will rise as fast as the Israeli Arabs did in the 60s and 70s.
Why the OSS is Good for Israel
The OSS is an excellent option for Israel.
Once the military rule is disbanded- Israel could no longer be criticized for depriving the Palestinians of their rights. If these new Israeli citizens do engage in anti-Israel activities they will be charged with treason and tried by Israel's civilian judicial system- just like any Israeli citizen who engages in actions harmful against the state.
The entire network of military prisons can be converted to civilian prisons administered by the Israeli Prison Authority. Over time, Palestinian policeman whose allegiance is to the State of Israel, would take over the responsibility of safeguarding the public order in the West Bank- along with their counterparts in the Israeli police.
As one political entity, there would be no reason to dismantle Jewish settlements at an estimated cost of tens of billions of dollars. In the eyes of the law- the West Bankers would enjoy the same rights as the Jewish residents of the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. No longer would the Arabs who live near the settlements view them as their enemy but as their neighbors and fellow citizens.
The West Bankers are more valuable to Israel's long term interest productive workers and active consumers in the national economy- rather than remaining poor under Israeli military occupation. Israel's national economy would grow by more than 2 million consumers and workers in addition to the future economic growth that would come from the new wealth and higher living standards that the West Bankers will experience. As the West Bank economy is already nearly completely integrated into the Israeli economy, by enriching the Palestinians- the Israeli economy will reap huge economic gains. Just like the Israeli economy reaped enormous benefits after 1967 as did the West Bank economy- it will this time as well. Just as the 1.5 million Russians who came to Israel in the early 1990s created a much bigger domestic market- so too will the additional of 1.5 million new paying consumers.
The OSS is Win-Win for Both Sides
The fact is that neither side has an alternative other than to turn to embrace each other. Separating the two peoples behind borders, fences and checkpoints is not a long-term solution for Israel- and certainly has no upside for the West Bank Arabs. Israel has a responsibility to its citizens to search for ways to rid itself of the harmful effects of the military occupation over the West Bankers. That solution must include a path that leads to living standards and a more prosperous future for the West Bankers.
While the OSS solution does not include an "independent Palestinian state" as things stand today- it is unlikely that such a political entity would ever arise- and even if it did- it would be unstable and poor. The options before the West Bankers are higher living standards and regional stability with a confederation with Israel- and the right to rule over their own affairs- or- essentially, more of the same. The choice for the Palestinians is between military occupation, political instability and economic stagnation- or a future of double digit growth rates.
The "One State Solution" will create one political state and one national economy for both peoples.
Joel Bainerman has been writing on Middle East affairs since 1982. His published archive can be viewed on his web site at www.joelbainerman.com He can be reached at isratech@netvision.net.il.
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
While the One State Solution (OSS) to solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is typically rejected outright as being a demographic threat to Israel- this approach could very well be the only viable path to solving the conflict.
The typical assumption is that if Israel annexed the approximately 1.5 million West Bank Arabs and granted them full Israeli citizenship- within a generation there would be more Arabs than Jews in Israel and thus Israel would lose its Jewish majority in the Knesset.
This conclusion is simplistic. In addition, Israel is not a Jewish state- it is a secular, democratic state with an overwhelming Jewish population. As Israeli Arabs have enjoyed the benefits of Israeli citizenship- so too can the 1.5 million West Bank Arabs.
This group of Palestinians could enjoy all the benefits of full Israeli citizenship- and yet still express their political will via a local, West Bank parliamentary legislature with elected representatives responsible for various aspects of West Bank society. Eventually, after consecutive years of political stability and economic prosperity- institutions of political autonomy would evolve.
Why the OSS is Good for the Palestinians
The first benefit the Palestinians will enjoy from an OSS is that they will no longer be under military rule. The moment the Israeli government grants them full Israeli citizenship- the state of military occupation effectively ends. The ‘security fence’ and all military checkpoints can be dismantled. The entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be one geographical, political entity with no need for internal security fences or borders of any type. One state, one economy, two peoples.
Most importantly, the West Bankers would be able to pursue their full economic rights in the Israeli national economy. That means a right to work in any job- anywhere in Israel- and the right to own assets and property in Israel. In addition- as full Israeli citizens, they would have the right to bring civil legal action against the Israeli government for what they may claim was the theft of their land or other property.
As full citizens of the state of Israel the West Bankers would also receive a complete upgrade of their social, economic, educational, industrial, health and public infrastructure- at a cost that will be borne by the Israeli taxpayer. As part of the plan, Israel would take it upon itself to build permanent housing for the approximately 175,000 Palestinian refugees who currently reside in refugee camps in the West Bank.
Upon receiving Israeli citizenship the West Bankers would go from being a stateless people under military occupation- to citizens of a country that has the strongest and most dynamic economy in the region. Their living standards will rise as fast as the Israeli Arabs did in the 60s and 70s.
Why the OSS is Good for Israel
The OSS is an excellent option for Israel.
Once the military rule is disbanded- Israel could no longer be criticized for depriving the Palestinians of their rights. If these new Israeli citizens do engage in anti-Israel activities they will be charged with treason and tried by Israel's civilian judicial system- just like any Israeli citizen who engages in actions harmful against the state.
The entire network of military prisons can be converted to civilian prisons administered by the Israeli Prison Authority. Over time, Palestinian policeman whose allegiance is to the State of Israel, would take over the responsibility of safeguarding the public order in the West Bank- along with their counterparts in the Israeli police.
As one political entity, there would be no reason to dismantle Jewish settlements at an estimated cost of tens of billions of dollars. In the eyes of the law- the West Bankers would enjoy the same rights as the Jewish residents of the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. No longer would the Arabs who live near the settlements view them as their enemy but as their neighbors and fellow citizens.
The West Bankers are more valuable to Israel's long term interest productive workers and active consumers in the national economy- rather than remaining poor under Israeli military occupation. Israel's national economy would grow by more than 2 million consumers and workers in addition to the future economic growth that would come from the new wealth and higher living standards that the West Bankers will experience. As the West Bank economy is already nearly completely integrated into the Israeli economy, by enriching the Palestinians- the Israeli economy will reap huge economic gains. Just like the Israeli economy reaped enormous benefits after 1967 as did the West Bank economy- it will this time as well. Just as the 1.5 million Russians who came to Israel in the early 1990s created a much bigger domestic market- so too will the additional of 1.5 million new paying consumers.
The OSS is Win-Win for Both Sides
The fact is that neither side has an alternative other than to turn to embrace each other. Separating the two peoples behind borders, fences and checkpoints is not a long-term solution for Israel- and certainly has no upside for the West Bank Arabs. Israel has a responsibility to its citizens to search for ways to rid itself of the harmful effects of the military occupation over the West Bankers. That solution must include a path that leads to living standards and a more prosperous future for the West Bankers.
While the OSS solution does not include an "independent Palestinian state" as things stand today- it is unlikely that such a political entity would ever arise- and even if it did- it would be unstable and poor. The options before the West Bankers are higher living standards and regional stability with a confederation with Israel- and the right to rule over their own affairs- or- essentially, more of the same. The choice for the Palestinians is between military occupation, political instability and economic stagnation- or a future of double digit growth rates.
The "One State Solution" will create one political state and one national economy for both peoples.
Joel Bainerman has been writing on Middle East affairs since 1982. His published archive can be viewed on his web site at www.joelbainerman.com He can be reached at isratech@netvision.net.il.
Monday, July 16, 2007
A Stupid War
by Uri Avnery
A DETECTIVE trying to solve a crime always asks "cui bono?" (who would profit?) When we try to solve the crime called the Second Lebanon War, this question must head the list.
The day before yesterday, a full year after the war, the Israeli media devoted most of their time to the retrospective analysis of the war. Hour after hour of television time, page after page of print.
When the war broke out, all the media rooted for Olmert. Except for a few lone voices, the media performed like a group of prancing cheerleaders at an American football game. The anti-war demonstrations were hidden away. No wonder, therefore, that this week, too, the anti-war protest was completely ignored, and all the criticism in the media came from the right.
Dozens of penetrating questions: Why was the decision taken in haste? Why wasn't the army ready? Why wasn't the rear prepared for war? But one issue was not considered: why was there a war at all?
QUESTION NO. 1: Who stood to profit?
In order to understand why the war broke out, the question is not who profited from it in practice. The decisive question is: who would have profited from the enterprise if it had succeeded as planned?
The one who stood to gain the most was the President of the United States. George Bush was already stuck in the Iraqi quagmire. He desperately needed a success in the Middle East.
The Israeli army was to break Hizbullah, a supposed proxy of the Axis of Evil, and allow the pro-American client government of Fouad Siniora to take control of all of Lebanon. Since nobody doubted the huge superiority of the Israeli army over a small band of guerillas, that was to happen within days.
This scenario included a second chapter: the victorious Israeli army was to provoke the Syrian army, and after a short war, the regime of Bashar al-Assad should have collapsed. The Axis of Evil would have been smashed, American public opinion would have been convinced that the "vision" of President Bush had been realized, "Democracy" in the Middle East would have been triumphantly on the march, the Iraq fiasco would have become irrelevant.
The second one to profit would have been Ehud Olmert. The Prime Minister, who by sheer accident had taken over from Ariel Sharon, and who until then had been a bit player, would have been recognized as an outstanding leader, statesman and strategist. Even the trade union hack, whom Olmert had put in charge of the military establishment, would have cashed in.
According to this scenario, the threat to the North of Israel would have been eliminated, the arsenal of rockets would have been destroyed, Hizbullah would have been wiped off the map, an alliance would have been formed between Jerusalem and America's clients in Beirut. And if Syria, too, had collapsed, an ideal situation would have been achieved. The entire threat to the North of Israel, which had worried the Israeli military strategists for decades - the crescent of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - would have been neutralized. Olmert would have entered history as the man who had eliminated from the Bible the verse of Jeremiah (1, 14) "Out of the North an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land."
The indirect profiteers would have been the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and perhaps also Saudi Arabia. The Palestinians would have been left even more isolated in their fight than before.
Who pushed whom into the war? Did Bush push Olmert, or did Olmert push Bush? Years may pass before we shall know for sure - and it's really not so important.
QUESTION NO. 2: Who has profited in practice?
To everybody's amazement, the Israeli army failed in its task. Hizbullah was not broken, but stood its ground against a military machine that is rated the fifth strongest in the world. The longest war in the annals of Israel since 1949 ended in a draw. So who profited?
Not Israel. True, the Air Force destroyed a large part of Hizbullah's arsenal of long-range rockets, but the short-range rockets created havoc in the Israeli rear and revealed to the whole Arab world how exposed Israel is to this kind of weapon.
The two captured Israeli soldiers - who had provided the mendacious justification for the war - were not freed. True, an international force has been inserted as a buffer between Israel and Hizbullah, and that was then presented as a huge achievement. But before the war, the Israeli military adamantly opposed the installing of just such a force. The army feared the loss of its freedom of action against Hizbullah. Now the UN force defends Hizbullah against the Israeli army as much as it defends Israel against Hizbullah.
The United States, too, did not profit. According to reports leaked from Washington, the failure of the Israeli army infuriated Bush. He turned his wrath on Olmert. The Israeli military disappointed him. In the course of the war, Bush, with the generous (and loathsome) help of several governments, including Germany, had again and again prevented a cease-fire from coming into force, in order to give Israel a little more time to fulfill the task. It did not help.
Hizbullah also did not gain. True, its steadfast stand against the Israeli army is viewed by many as an act of heroism that restores the dignity of the entire Arab world. Hizbullah's losses are in the process of being made good. But Hassan Nasrallah, who radiates an extraordinary integrity, found it necessary to admit in public that he would not have carried out the initial incursion into Israeli territory if he had known what would follow. He apologized to the Lebanese public for giving Israel the pretext for the war that caused them so much death and destruction.
Hizbullah is first and foremost a part of the Lebanese scene. The main aim of Nasrallah is to ensure for Hizbullah - and himself - a dominant position in the political system of his country. His alliances with Syria and Iran are a consequence of this objective. The Shiite conspiracy and the terrorist Axis of Evil exist only in the fertile imagination of George W.
The war has not weakened the position of Hizbullah in Lebanon. That was underlined this week when the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, invited Hizbullah to take part in an all-Lebanese conference in Paris. But it seems that the war did not strengthen Hizbullah either.
Has Iran gained? After the United States did it a favor and destroyed Iraq, which has served for centuries as a roadblock between Iran and the Arab Middle East, it now has a foothold both in Iraq and Lebanon. But this has its drawbacks, too: the situation is pushing its potential enemies, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, into preventive actions.
The conclusion: nobody has gained from this war, from all this death and destruction. By the latest count: in the 34 days of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 39 civilians were killed, and so were 1200 Lebanese civilians and fighters. 2250 Israelis and 4400 Lebanese were injured. 300 thousand Israelis and 1 million Lebanese fled their homes, 200 thousand Lebanese have not yet returned.
QUESTION NO. 3: Has Israel drawn any conclusions?
For a year now, everybody here has been busy with "drawing conclusions". From the Winograd Commission of Inquiry to the last reporter on TV. E-v-e-r-y-o-n-e.
But this is make-believe. As a result of the conspiracy of silence concerning the basic questions of the war, it is quite impossible to deal with the roots of the problem.
Everybody is dealing, of course, with the rehabilitation of the army. Thank God, everything has changed. Instead of the winged Chief of Staff we now have a commander covered with dust, Gabi Ashkenazi. Every day on TV, we see the brigades training, soldiers crawling among thorns and tanks going through their paces. So the next time (and everybody takes it as self-evident that there will be a next time) the Israeli army will be ready.
Nobody points out the absurdity of this spectacle. The army was not ready for the last war, so it is training now with great determination - for the last war. The conclusions have been drawn from the lack of preparedness for the campaign that was, so everything is now ready for the campaign that was.
If there is anything that can be assumed with certainty about the next war, if there be one, it is that it will not be a repeat of the last. Rockets will play a much bigger role, and will travel much longer distances. The weapons will be more sophisticated. The battlefield will be different.
Much has been said about the inability of the elected government to stand up to the army command in discussion about life and death, starting a war and conducting the campaign. People take comfort in the fact that we now have an "experienced" minister of defense, Ehud Barak, a former army Chief of Staff, prime minister and defense minister. But the change of personalities does not necessarily bring about a change in the balance of powers: in the future, too, a bunch of politicians who happen to be members of the government will not dare to contradict the authoritative and determined view of the military leadership, which always, but always, produces a "professional" intelligence report to support it.
This phenomenon has accompanied Israel since its foundation. A strong leader, like David Ben-Gurion and perhaps Ariel Sharon, can - perhaps, perhaps - somewhat offset this imbalance. But the imbalance remains.
That is now finding its expression in the endless talk about "the next war", "war this summer", "a miscalculation that may bring about a war with Syria", "the inevitable attack on Iran's nuclear installations", and so on. It is the army that determines the public discourse. And as the former Chief Rabbi of France lamented this week in Jerusalem: "Peace has become a dirty word in Israel".
Almost every war is stupid. The last war was more stupid than most. The next war, if there be one, will be even stupider.
A DETECTIVE trying to solve a crime always asks "cui bono?" (who would profit?) When we try to solve the crime called the Second Lebanon War, this question must head the list.
The day before yesterday, a full year after the war, the Israeli media devoted most of their time to the retrospective analysis of the war. Hour after hour of television time, page after page of print.
When the war broke out, all the media rooted for Olmert. Except for a few lone voices, the media performed like a group of prancing cheerleaders at an American football game. The anti-war demonstrations were hidden away. No wonder, therefore, that this week, too, the anti-war protest was completely ignored, and all the criticism in the media came from the right.
Dozens of penetrating questions: Why was the decision taken in haste? Why wasn't the army ready? Why wasn't the rear prepared for war? But one issue was not considered: why was there a war at all?
QUESTION NO. 1: Who stood to profit?
In order to understand why the war broke out, the question is not who profited from it in practice. The decisive question is: who would have profited from the enterprise if it had succeeded as planned?
The one who stood to gain the most was the President of the United States. George Bush was already stuck in the Iraqi quagmire. He desperately needed a success in the Middle East.
The Israeli army was to break Hizbullah, a supposed proxy of the Axis of Evil, and allow the pro-American client government of Fouad Siniora to take control of all of Lebanon. Since nobody doubted the huge superiority of the Israeli army over a small band of guerillas, that was to happen within days.
This scenario included a second chapter: the victorious Israeli army was to provoke the Syrian army, and after a short war, the regime of Bashar al-Assad should have collapsed. The Axis of Evil would have been smashed, American public opinion would have been convinced that the "vision" of President Bush had been realized, "Democracy" in the Middle East would have been triumphantly on the march, the Iraq fiasco would have become irrelevant.
The second one to profit would have been Ehud Olmert. The Prime Minister, who by sheer accident had taken over from Ariel Sharon, and who until then had been a bit player, would have been recognized as an outstanding leader, statesman and strategist. Even the trade union hack, whom Olmert had put in charge of the military establishment, would have cashed in.
According to this scenario, the threat to the North of Israel would have been eliminated, the arsenal of rockets would have been destroyed, Hizbullah would have been wiped off the map, an alliance would have been formed between Jerusalem and America's clients in Beirut. And if Syria, too, had collapsed, an ideal situation would have been achieved. The entire threat to the North of Israel, which had worried the Israeli military strategists for decades - the crescent of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - would have been neutralized. Olmert would have entered history as the man who had eliminated from the Bible the verse of Jeremiah (1, 14) "Out of the North an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land."
The indirect profiteers would have been the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and perhaps also Saudi Arabia. The Palestinians would have been left even more isolated in their fight than before.
Who pushed whom into the war? Did Bush push Olmert, or did Olmert push Bush? Years may pass before we shall know for sure - and it's really not so important.
QUESTION NO. 2: Who has profited in practice?
To everybody's amazement, the Israeli army failed in its task. Hizbullah was not broken, but stood its ground against a military machine that is rated the fifth strongest in the world. The longest war in the annals of Israel since 1949 ended in a draw. So who profited?
Not Israel. True, the Air Force destroyed a large part of Hizbullah's arsenal of long-range rockets, but the short-range rockets created havoc in the Israeli rear and revealed to the whole Arab world how exposed Israel is to this kind of weapon.
The two captured Israeli soldiers - who had provided the mendacious justification for the war - were not freed. True, an international force has been inserted as a buffer between Israel and Hizbullah, and that was then presented as a huge achievement. But before the war, the Israeli military adamantly opposed the installing of just such a force. The army feared the loss of its freedom of action against Hizbullah. Now the UN force defends Hizbullah against the Israeli army as much as it defends Israel against Hizbullah.
The United States, too, did not profit. According to reports leaked from Washington, the failure of the Israeli army infuriated Bush. He turned his wrath on Olmert. The Israeli military disappointed him. In the course of the war, Bush, with the generous (and loathsome) help of several governments, including Germany, had again and again prevented a cease-fire from coming into force, in order to give Israel a little more time to fulfill the task. It did not help.
Hizbullah also did not gain. True, its steadfast stand against the Israeli army is viewed by many as an act of heroism that restores the dignity of the entire Arab world. Hizbullah's losses are in the process of being made good. But Hassan Nasrallah, who radiates an extraordinary integrity, found it necessary to admit in public that he would not have carried out the initial incursion into Israeli territory if he had known what would follow. He apologized to the Lebanese public for giving Israel the pretext for the war that caused them so much death and destruction.
Hizbullah is first and foremost a part of the Lebanese scene. The main aim of Nasrallah is to ensure for Hizbullah - and himself - a dominant position in the political system of his country. His alliances with Syria and Iran are a consequence of this objective. The Shiite conspiracy and the terrorist Axis of Evil exist only in the fertile imagination of George W.
The war has not weakened the position of Hizbullah in Lebanon. That was underlined this week when the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, invited Hizbullah to take part in an all-Lebanese conference in Paris. But it seems that the war did not strengthen Hizbullah either.
Has Iran gained? After the United States did it a favor and destroyed Iraq, which has served for centuries as a roadblock between Iran and the Arab Middle East, it now has a foothold both in Iraq and Lebanon. But this has its drawbacks, too: the situation is pushing its potential enemies, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, into preventive actions.
The conclusion: nobody has gained from this war, from all this death and destruction. By the latest count: in the 34 days of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 39 civilians were killed, and so were 1200 Lebanese civilians and fighters. 2250 Israelis and 4400 Lebanese were injured. 300 thousand Israelis and 1 million Lebanese fled their homes, 200 thousand Lebanese have not yet returned.
QUESTION NO. 3: Has Israel drawn any conclusions?
For a year now, everybody here has been busy with "drawing conclusions". From the Winograd Commission of Inquiry to the last reporter on TV. E-v-e-r-y-o-n-e.
But this is make-believe. As a result of the conspiracy of silence concerning the basic questions of the war, it is quite impossible to deal with the roots of the problem.
Everybody is dealing, of course, with the rehabilitation of the army. Thank God, everything has changed. Instead of the winged Chief of Staff we now have a commander covered with dust, Gabi Ashkenazi. Every day on TV, we see the brigades training, soldiers crawling among thorns and tanks going through their paces. So the next time (and everybody takes it as self-evident that there will be a next time) the Israeli army will be ready.
Nobody points out the absurdity of this spectacle. The army was not ready for the last war, so it is training now with great determination - for the last war. The conclusions have been drawn from the lack of preparedness for the campaign that was, so everything is now ready for the campaign that was.
If there is anything that can be assumed with certainty about the next war, if there be one, it is that it will not be a repeat of the last. Rockets will play a much bigger role, and will travel much longer distances. The weapons will be more sophisticated. The battlefield will be different.
Much has been said about the inability of the elected government to stand up to the army command in discussion about life and death, starting a war and conducting the campaign. People take comfort in the fact that we now have an "experienced" minister of defense, Ehud Barak, a former army Chief of Staff, prime minister and defense minister. But the change of personalities does not necessarily bring about a change in the balance of powers: in the future, too, a bunch of politicians who happen to be members of the government will not dare to contradict the authoritative and determined view of the military leadership, which always, but always, produces a "professional" intelligence report to support it.
This phenomenon has accompanied Israel since its foundation. A strong leader, like David Ben-Gurion and perhaps Ariel Sharon, can - perhaps, perhaps - somewhat offset this imbalance. But the imbalance remains.
That is now finding its expression in the endless talk about "the next war", "war this summer", "a miscalculation that may bring about a war with Syria", "the inevitable attack on Iran's nuclear installations", and so on. It is the army that determines the public discourse. And as the former Chief Rabbi of France lamented this week in Jerusalem: "Peace has become a dirty word in Israel".
Almost every war is stupid. The last war was more stupid than most. The next war, if there be one, will be even stupider.
Wiping Whom Off the Map?
In occupied Palestine Israel differentiates between Christian and Muslim Palestinians, between Fatah and Hamas, between West Bank and Gaza Strip, and between citizens of one town and the other.
Since the establishment of their terrorist state on usurped Palestinian land Israelis keep regurgitating their phobic mantra “Arabs want to wipe Israel off the map” in order to draw international sympathy, and to cover up their war crimes throughout the Arab World. To build their divinely racist “God’s promised Jewish only” state from Nile to Euphrates Israeli government is conducting the policy of graduated wiping Palestinians off their own existence. Israel had, so far, successfully wiped Palestine off the map. Palestine had become to be known as occupied territories, disputed territories, and finally West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestine, a name used for the last three thousand years, to describe the land between Mediterranean shores west to Jordan River east, and from Lebanon north to Egypt south, can no longer be found on any modern map. PALESTINE HAS BEEN WIPED OFF THE MAP!!!
Israel was established and built on Zionism, a colonialist expansionist political movement based on religiously elitist ideology (God’s chosen people), and a complete denial of the other. Its ultimate goal is to build a super power state, which they hope would eventually exceed the US in controlling the globe, within the heart of the Arab World to control their resource-rich region. Its first step was to establish Israel in place of Palestine and to win (force) its international legitimacy through imperial power (unfortunately might is still right in our age). Thus Palestinians became the primary target of Zionist terror and occupation to evacuate the land, since an independent viable Palestinian state would negate the essence of Israel’s right to exist on occupied land, and would put an end to the Zionist’s expansionist dreams. The birth of the Zionist entity is based not only on wiping Palestine off the map, but also wiping all Palestinians, their history and their culture off existence. Zionist Israel, thus, had adopted a graduated genocidal policy against Palestinians in specific and against Arabs in general.
Zionists perceived seeds of conflict among Arabs due to the variety of their culture, ethnicity, and religious backgrounds. To build their divinely racist Jewish-only Greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates through the division of Arabs, Zionist Israel developed its own expansionist geopolitical policy inspired from and akin to the German Nazi geopolitical policy of 1890 to 1933 of dividing Europe into smaller states to be swallowed up by strong Germany. Where Nazi Germans prescribed to a biological elitist ideology of the superior pure Arian blood (the Superman), Zionist Israelis prescribed to a divine elitist ideology of the superior pure Jewish blood (God’s chosen people).
In occupied Palestine Israel differentiates between Christian and Muslim Palestinians, between Fatah and Hamas, between West Bank and Gaza Strip, and between citizens of one town and the other. Within the neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) Israel is inciting conflict and hatred between the citizens of those countries and Palestinian refugees, between Christians and Muslims, between Shiites and Sunni Muslims, between Kurds and Arabs, and between different political parties.
On the Palestinian front Israeli government had adopted a three-dimensional graduated genocidal policy. First comes uprooting Palestinians from their land and towns and transferring them to neighboring countries. Second is perpetrating massacres and ethnic cleansing through military incursions, shelling, and air raids against Palestinian communities to coerce the rest of them to immigrate. Third is the distortion and destruction of all physical, cultural, and historical evidence tying Palestinians to the land. Palestinian villages have been completely demolished (wiped off existence), Palestinian culture was hijacked and many had been claimed to be Jewish, and history was distorted to reflect Palestinians as invader terrorist Muslim tribes from the Saudi Desert that never had any right in God’s Promised Land. Israel has sought to negate, falsify, demonize and wipe off every aspect of Palestinian life to a point where ex Israeli PM Golda Meier stated in 1969: “There is no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.”
The policy of wiping Palestine off the map and wiping Palestinians off existence had been adopted early since the founding of Zionism. Here follows quotes of only few of noted Zionist leaders. Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism, had written in his diaries in 1898, “The Palestinians would be spirited across the border.” Israel Zangwill, a British Zionist Jew, is known for his slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” describing Zionist dream of Israeli state in Palestine. This slogan, though, was invented by a Zionist British Member of Parliament Lord Shaftsbury, who in 1853 wrote to Foreign Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation in need of a nation without a country… the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews”.
Chaim Weitzman, the first president of Israel, saw no room for Palestinians in Palestine. In his autobiography, “Trial and Error”, he wrote “Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English.”
In chapter four of his book, “Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem”, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote about Yousef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department, a man noted for his strong Zionist convictions. Weitz wrote in his diary on December 20th 1940: “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (Palestinians and Jews) … the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries … Not one village must be left, nor one Bedouin tribe.” In 1948 Weitz was given the task of creating the “Transfer Committee”, which supervised the destruction of evacuated Arab villages, and repopulating others with recent Jewish immigrants in order to make any return of Palestinian refugees to their villages impossible.
Many Palestinian villages, which survived destruction during 1948 war, were later erased (wiped off) after the war. Records of the Association of Archeological Survey, housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, show that a plan to wipe off Palestinian villages was implemented jointly by the Israeli Lands Administration and the Jewish National Fund in 1965, and was carried on for several years. The plan intended to wipe off all traces of Palestinian villages in order to destroy any hope for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
The Israeli Association of Archaeological Survey was established in 1964 to issue permits for the destruction of Palestinian villages. By 1967 this association had approved the wiping off of about 100 villages inside 1948-occupied Palestine (Israel). After 1967 the Association turned its attention to destroy Palestinian villages in West Bank and Golan heights. On December 2006 Roni Bar-On, Israeli Interior Minister declared his ministry’s approval on a plan to demolish more than 42,000 homes of Palestinian Bedouins in Negev Desert. This plan will wipe off 45 Palestinian villages housing more than 86,000 Palestinian Bedouins, who in 1958 were evacuated out of their land and confined to a piece of land in the desert known as the Triangle. Although paying taxes to Israeli government like any other town, these 45 villages were not recognized by the Israeli government, and received no civil services at all.
The destruction of Palestinian history and culture, and the wiping off Palestinian names of towns and replacing them with Jewish names was accelerated to a point where Moshe Dyan, a previous Israeli Defense Minister, bragged about it in a lecture he gave at the Technion University in Haifa in March 19th 1969. He stated: “we came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is no single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not here either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gv’at in the place of Jibta, Kibbutz Sared in the place of Huneifis, and Yehushua in the place of Tel al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Haaratz, April 4th, 1969).
The policy of wiping off Palestinian names and replacing them with Jewish names was adopted by first Israeli PM David Ben Gurion since the establishment of Israel in 1948 when he established a special committee from historians, geographers, geologists and Torah experts, whose task was to wipe off the Canaanite and Palestinian Arabic names and substitute them with Jewish names. So Tel Rabi’ became Tel Aviv, Al-Quds became Urushalaim, Um Rashrash became Eilat, Shu’fat became Nevi Yachob, Beit Jala became Gilo, Za’tara became Tabbuch, Beisan became Beit Shean, Qualandia became Atarot, Beit Mahseer became Beit Me’er, Artof became Hartuv, and so on.
Israeli government came up with a set of despotic laws to justify its robbery of Palestinian property. For example the “Expulsion of Invaders” amendment to land laws was designed to allow Israel to expel Palestinians from their land under the excuse that Palestinians are invaders. Palestinian refugees, who tried to return to their land, are considered invaders by Israel. The law of “Abandoned Properties” is designed to make it “legal” for Israeli government to seize any land belongs to absent (evacuated, transferred) owners. This law “legalized” the general confiscation of almost 450 Palestinian villages and associated farm land that were later either wiped off or Judaised. According to a report drawn up in 1952 Israel had succeeded in expropriating all Palestinian quarters in mixed towns, 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7800 Palestinian shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and most importantly 300 thousand hectares of land (see Simha Flapan’s “The Birth of Israel; Myths and Realities” p. 107)
Israel is intent on destroying all Palestinian and Islamic cultural city landmarks. Religious places and buildings, especially Muslim mosques, were claimed as Jewish, destroyed, neglected to collapse, and turned into museums, art galleries, whore houses, clubs, senior citizens shelters, and stables for farm animals. Muslim Palestinians were not allowed to renovate or build new mosques. Renovation and strengthening the bases of Al-Aqsa mosque was hindered by Jerusalem municipality. Building permits were withheld, and building materials were not allowed to pass through old gates to the mosque. The ancient Islamic Council building and its adjacent Islamic “Ma’man Allah” cemetery in West Jerusalem are important historic and cultural Palestinian landmarks. The Israeli government is destroying the internals of the Islamic Council building to build western-style apartments, and digging up the cemetery to build a Jewish Museum of Tolerance on its place. What hypocrisy!!!
Israel had always rejected, obstructed, or violated all peace treaties with Arabs since 1948 for fear of establishing permanent borders and repatriating Palestinian refugees, as explained explicitly by their first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in his “The War Diary 1948/9”. For Zionists peace means the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes (a demographic threat to the pure exclusive Jewish state), and specifying permanent borders putting an end to Zionist expansionist dreams. In December 1948 the UN established a Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) with representatives from US, France and Turkey to mediate between Arabs and Israel. Peace negotiation held in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 26th 1948. Israel was forced to attend negotiation after US threatened to prevent Israel’s admission to the UN. In the negotiation Arabs offered Israel peace and recognition providing Israel implements UN resolution 194 of returning Palestinian refugees to their homes. Israel rejected the offer.
Oslo Agreement was forced on Israel by Bush, the father, to appease Arab Gulf states, which joined his first Gulf War against Iraq, knowing very well that Israelis will eventually circumvent the Agreement somehow, and they did.
Benjamin Netanyahu, in June 1996, gave his famous three “NO”s to peace process: no withdrawal, no Palestinian State, and no refugee’s return. Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s senior adviser and one of the initiator of Sharon’s disengagement plan, stated “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.” (Ha’aretz, October 6th 2004)
Israel has also rejected the generous peace offer of March 2003 by the Arab League, which promised recognition, putting an end to all resistance, and full diplomatic relations with ALL Arab states. This offer would have fulfilled Israelis’ dreams and aspirations for the peace they claim to always have called for. Yet Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, at the time, responded by driving his tanks into all major Palestinian cities. Israel also rejected all Syrian peace offers, and violated all agreements with the Palestinian Authority.
Zionist Israeli settlers are worse than their government in their terrorist genocidal attacks against Palestinians. Zionist settlers have their own underground terrorist militias allegedly formed to protect their settlements. Given implicit permission by their government, and under the protection of the Israeli army, terrorist militias routinely attack Palestinian farmers, burn their crops, cut and uproot their trees, burn their shacks, poison their water wells, shoot and poison their farm animals, terrorize and assault members of International Solidarity Movement, who travel to Palestine to protect farmers in their fields and students on their way to schools. Some of these extremist militias (Shlomo Dvir, Yarden Morag and Ofer Gamliel) planted car bombs near Palestinian high schools in Jerusalem’s suburbs in April 2002. Others (Chahr Zliger, Naom Federman, and undisclosed other terrorists) arrested in September 2003, planned to bomb many Islamic mosques, including al-Aqsa mosque, across West Bank at the same day.
The extremist settlers encourage such terrorist acts against Palestinians and consider them religious duty. This could be seen in the way the settlers of Keryat Arba’ had sanctified the terrorist Baruch Goldstein by building a shrine for him and calling him a saint. Goldstein had shot 29 Muslim prayers in the back and injured 129 others while praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in February 1994.
Settlers’ terror increased up to a point where, in April 27, 2005, Amnesty International (AI) urged the Israeli occupation authorities to launch immediate probes into the Jewish settlers' poisoning of Palestinian agrarian fields. The Israeli government ignored such a request.
Despite all the media cover up, and the Zionist propaganda, the international community, on the civic level, understands and sympathizes with the Palestinian just cause. Many civil walks and protests demanding justice for Palestinians take place in major cities all over the world. People from all over the world join International Solidarity Movement to travel to Palestine to protect Palestinians from Israeli terror, and to protest Israeli imprisoning wall designed to choke Palestinian towns. Polls, especially in Europe, had shown that Israel is considered the most dangerous threat to world peace even before Iran.
Unfortunately the blackmail of World Zionist Organization and the pressure of the pro-Zionist neoconservative American administration and that of AIPAC made criticizing Israel a “political suicide” as described by previous American President Jimmy Carter. World leaders and politicians had ignored the plight of Palestinian people. They had ignored the illegal establishment of the terrorist state of Israel on usurped Palestine, ignored Israeli massacres against Palestinian civilians, the destruction of their villages, and the expulsion of almost 750 thousand Palestinian out of their homes, ignored the right of return for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and the implementation of UN resolution 194 of 1948 demanding their return to their land, ignored the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli terrorist occupation for the last 60 years, denied the Palestinians’ right of self-defense and resisting occupation, as guaranteed by UN charters, and called this right terrorism, ignored Israeli terrorism, on the other hand, and called it self-defense, ignored and turned against the UN democratic principles when they rejected the Palestinian government that was elected by the most democratic election as witnessed and testified by UN and international well known monitors, and imposed financial and economic siege to starve Palestinians for their democratic process.
As the international political community, alas including some Arab leaders, had shown sympathy for the capture, as a war prisoner, of the Israeli soldier (Shalit), who was sent to Gaza Strip to shell and destroy the homes of Palestinian civilians and to kill their women and children, and expressed their understanding of the Israeli terrorist war against Lebanon (July 2006) in response to the capture of two Israeli soldiers sent across Lebanese borders to incite anticipated trouble, this international “civilized” community expressed no sympathy towards the 12 thousand Palestinian civilians, including women and children, rotting in miserable Israeli jails after being snatched out of their families in the middle of the night from their homes, nor did they express any understanding for the Palestinian attacks against Israeli settlers, who usurped Palestinian land.
The international community knows that Israel is perpetrating ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, yet none of its governments is doing anything about it or objecting it, giving Israel the wrong message that it is OK to kill Palestinians. That is why wiping Palestinians off existence is still going on until today. Palestinians have long joined native Australians and Native American Indians in the category of “endangered species”. Today it is Palestinians; tomorrow it is the rest of Arab nations.
Since the establishment of their terrorist state on usurped Palestinian land Israelis keep regurgitating their phobic mantra “Arabs want to wipe Israel off the map” in order to draw international sympathy, and to cover up their war crimes throughout the Arab World. To build their divinely racist “God’s promised Jewish only” state from Nile to Euphrates Israeli government is conducting the policy of graduated wiping Palestinians off their own existence. Israel had, so far, successfully wiped Palestine off the map. Palestine had become to be known as occupied territories, disputed territories, and finally West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestine, a name used for the last three thousand years, to describe the land between Mediterranean shores west to Jordan River east, and from Lebanon north to Egypt south, can no longer be found on any modern map. PALESTINE HAS BEEN WIPED OFF THE MAP!!!
Israel was established and built on Zionism, a colonialist expansionist political movement based on religiously elitist ideology (God’s chosen people), and a complete denial of the other. Its ultimate goal is to build a super power state, which they hope would eventually exceed the US in controlling the globe, within the heart of the Arab World to control their resource-rich region. Its first step was to establish Israel in place of Palestine and to win (force) its international legitimacy through imperial power (unfortunately might is still right in our age). Thus Palestinians became the primary target of Zionist terror and occupation to evacuate the land, since an independent viable Palestinian state would negate the essence of Israel’s right to exist on occupied land, and would put an end to the Zionist’s expansionist dreams. The birth of the Zionist entity is based not only on wiping Palestine off the map, but also wiping all Palestinians, their history and their culture off existence. Zionist Israel, thus, had adopted a graduated genocidal policy against Palestinians in specific and against Arabs in general.
Zionists perceived seeds of conflict among Arabs due to the variety of their culture, ethnicity, and religious backgrounds. To build their divinely racist Jewish-only Greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates through the division of Arabs, Zionist Israel developed its own expansionist geopolitical policy inspired from and akin to the German Nazi geopolitical policy of 1890 to 1933 of dividing Europe into smaller states to be swallowed up by strong Germany. Where Nazi Germans prescribed to a biological elitist ideology of the superior pure Arian blood (the Superman), Zionist Israelis prescribed to a divine elitist ideology of the superior pure Jewish blood (God’s chosen people).
In occupied Palestine Israel differentiates between Christian and Muslim Palestinians, between Fatah and Hamas, between West Bank and Gaza Strip, and between citizens of one town and the other. Within the neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) Israel is inciting conflict and hatred between the citizens of those countries and Palestinian refugees, between Christians and Muslims, between Shiites and Sunni Muslims, between Kurds and Arabs, and between different political parties.
On the Palestinian front Israeli government had adopted a three-dimensional graduated genocidal policy. First comes uprooting Palestinians from their land and towns and transferring them to neighboring countries. Second is perpetrating massacres and ethnic cleansing through military incursions, shelling, and air raids against Palestinian communities to coerce the rest of them to immigrate. Third is the distortion and destruction of all physical, cultural, and historical evidence tying Palestinians to the land. Palestinian villages have been completely demolished (wiped off existence), Palestinian culture was hijacked and many had been claimed to be Jewish, and history was distorted to reflect Palestinians as invader terrorist Muslim tribes from the Saudi Desert that never had any right in God’s Promised Land. Israel has sought to negate, falsify, demonize and wipe off every aspect of Palestinian life to a point where ex Israeli PM Golda Meier stated in 1969: “There is no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.”
The policy of wiping Palestine off the map and wiping Palestinians off existence had been adopted early since the founding of Zionism. Here follows quotes of only few of noted Zionist leaders. Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism, had written in his diaries in 1898, “The Palestinians would be spirited across the border.” Israel Zangwill, a British Zionist Jew, is known for his slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” describing Zionist dream of Israeli state in Palestine. This slogan, though, was invented by a Zionist British Member of Parliament Lord Shaftsbury, who in 1853 wrote to Foreign Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation in need of a nation without a country… the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews”.
Chaim Weitzman, the first president of Israel, saw no room for Palestinians in Palestine. In his autobiography, “Trial and Error”, he wrote “Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English.”
In chapter four of his book, “Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem”, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote about Yousef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department, a man noted for his strong Zionist convictions. Weitz wrote in his diary on December 20th 1940: “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (Palestinians and Jews) … the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries … Not one village must be left, nor one Bedouin tribe.” In 1948 Weitz was given the task of creating the “Transfer Committee”, which supervised the destruction of evacuated Arab villages, and repopulating others with recent Jewish immigrants in order to make any return of Palestinian refugees to their villages impossible.
Many Palestinian villages, which survived destruction during 1948 war, were later erased (wiped off) after the war. Records of the Association of Archeological Survey, housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, show that a plan to wipe off Palestinian villages was implemented jointly by the Israeli Lands Administration and the Jewish National Fund in 1965, and was carried on for several years. The plan intended to wipe off all traces of Palestinian villages in order to destroy any hope for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
The Israeli Association of Archaeological Survey was established in 1964 to issue permits for the destruction of Palestinian villages. By 1967 this association had approved the wiping off of about 100 villages inside 1948-occupied Palestine (Israel). After 1967 the Association turned its attention to destroy Palestinian villages in West Bank and Golan heights. On December 2006 Roni Bar-On, Israeli Interior Minister declared his ministry’s approval on a plan to demolish more than 42,000 homes of Palestinian Bedouins in Negev Desert. This plan will wipe off 45 Palestinian villages housing more than 86,000 Palestinian Bedouins, who in 1958 were evacuated out of their land and confined to a piece of land in the desert known as the Triangle. Although paying taxes to Israeli government like any other town, these 45 villages were not recognized by the Israeli government, and received no civil services at all.
The destruction of Palestinian history and culture, and the wiping off Palestinian names of towns and replacing them with Jewish names was accelerated to a point where Moshe Dyan, a previous Israeli Defense Minister, bragged about it in a lecture he gave at the Technion University in Haifa in March 19th 1969. He stated: “we came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is no single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not here either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gv’at in the place of Jibta, Kibbutz Sared in the place of Huneifis, and Yehushua in the place of Tel al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Haaratz, April 4th, 1969).
The policy of wiping off Palestinian names and replacing them with Jewish names was adopted by first Israeli PM David Ben Gurion since the establishment of Israel in 1948 when he established a special committee from historians, geographers, geologists and Torah experts, whose task was to wipe off the Canaanite and Palestinian Arabic names and substitute them with Jewish names. So Tel Rabi’ became Tel Aviv, Al-Quds became Urushalaim, Um Rashrash became Eilat, Shu’fat became Nevi Yachob, Beit Jala became Gilo, Za’tara became Tabbuch, Beisan became Beit Shean, Qualandia became Atarot, Beit Mahseer became Beit Me’er, Artof became Hartuv, and so on.
Israeli government came up with a set of despotic laws to justify its robbery of Palestinian property. For example the “Expulsion of Invaders” amendment to land laws was designed to allow Israel to expel Palestinians from their land under the excuse that Palestinians are invaders. Palestinian refugees, who tried to return to their land, are considered invaders by Israel. The law of “Abandoned Properties” is designed to make it “legal” for Israeli government to seize any land belongs to absent (evacuated, transferred) owners. This law “legalized” the general confiscation of almost 450 Palestinian villages and associated farm land that were later either wiped off or Judaised. According to a report drawn up in 1952 Israel had succeeded in expropriating all Palestinian quarters in mixed towns, 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7800 Palestinian shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and most importantly 300 thousand hectares of land (see Simha Flapan’s “The Birth of Israel; Myths and Realities” p. 107)
Israel is intent on destroying all Palestinian and Islamic cultural city landmarks. Religious places and buildings, especially Muslim mosques, were claimed as Jewish, destroyed, neglected to collapse, and turned into museums, art galleries, whore houses, clubs, senior citizens shelters, and stables for farm animals. Muslim Palestinians were not allowed to renovate or build new mosques. Renovation and strengthening the bases of Al-Aqsa mosque was hindered by Jerusalem municipality. Building permits were withheld, and building materials were not allowed to pass through old gates to the mosque. The ancient Islamic Council building and its adjacent Islamic “Ma’man Allah” cemetery in West Jerusalem are important historic and cultural Palestinian landmarks. The Israeli government is destroying the internals of the Islamic Council building to build western-style apartments, and digging up the cemetery to build a Jewish Museum of Tolerance on its place. What hypocrisy!!!
Israel had always rejected, obstructed, or violated all peace treaties with Arabs since 1948 for fear of establishing permanent borders and repatriating Palestinian refugees, as explained explicitly by their first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in his “The War Diary 1948/9”. For Zionists peace means the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes (a demographic threat to the pure exclusive Jewish state), and specifying permanent borders putting an end to Zionist expansionist dreams. In December 1948 the UN established a Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) with representatives from US, France and Turkey to mediate between Arabs and Israel. Peace negotiation held in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 26th 1948. Israel was forced to attend negotiation after US threatened to prevent Israel’s admission to the UN. In the negotiation Arabs offered Israel peace and recognition providing Israel implements UN resolution 194 of returning Palestinian refugees to their homes. Israel rejected the offer.
Oslo Agreement was forced on Israel by Bush, the father, to appease Arab Gulf states, which joined his first Gulf War against Iraq, knowing very well that Israelis will eventually circumvent the Agreement somehow, and they did.
Benjamin Netanyahu, in June 1996, gave his famous three “NO”s to peace process: no withdrawal, no Palestinian State, and no refugee’s return. Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s senior adviser and one of the initiator of Sharon’s disengagement plan, stated “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.” (Ha’aretz, October 6th 2004)
Israel has also rejected the generous peace offer of March 2003 by the Arab League, which promised recognition, putting an end to all resistance, and full diplomatic relations with ALL Arab states. This offer would have fulfilled Israelis’ dreams and aspirations for the peace they claim to always have called for. Yet Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, at the time, responded by driving his tanks into all major Palestinian cities. Israel also rejected all Syrian peace offers, and violated all agreements with the Palestinian Authority.
Zionist Israeli settlers are worse than their government in their terrorist genocidal attacks against Palestinians. Zionist settlers have their own underground terrorist militias allegedly formed to protect their settlements. Given implicit permission by their government, and under the protection of the Israeli army, terrorist militias routinely attack Palestinian farmers, burn their crops, cut and uproot their trees, burn their shacks, poison their water wells, shoot and poison their farm animals, terrorize and assault members of International Solidarity Movement, who travel to Palestine to protect farmers in their fields and students on their way to schools. Some of these extremist militias (Shlomo Dvir, Yarden Morag and Ofer Gamliel) planted car bombs near Palestinian high schools in Jerusalem’s suburbs in April 2002. Others (Chahr Zliger, Naom Federman, and undisclosed other terrorists) arrested in September 2003, planned to bomb many Islamic mosques, including al-Aqsa mosque, across West Bank at the same day.
The extremist settlers encourage such terrorist acts against Palestinians and consider them religious duty. This could be seen in the way the settlers of Keryat Arba’ had sanctified the terrorist Baruch Goldstein by building a shrine for him and calling him a saint. Goldstein had shot 29 Muslim prayers in the back and injured 129 others while praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in February 1994.
Settlers’ terror increased up to a point where, in April 27, 2005, Amnesty International (AI) urged the Israeli occupation authorities to launch immediate probes into the Jewish settlers' poisoning of Palestinian agrarian fields. The Israeli government ignored such a request.
Despite all the media cover up, and the Zionist propaganda, the international community, on the civic level, understands and sympathizes with the Palestinian just cause. Many civil walks and protests demanding justice for Palestinians take place in major cities all over the world. People from all over the world join International Solidarity Movement to travel to Palestine to protect Palestinians from Israeli terror, and to protest Israeli imprisoning wall designed to choke Palestinian towns. Polls, especially in Europe, had shown that Israel is considered the most dangerous threat to world peace even before Iran.
Unfortunately the blackmail of World Zionist Organization and the pressure of the pro-Zionist neoconservative American administration and that of AIPAC made criticizing Israel a “political suicide” as described by previous American President Jimmy Carter. World leaders and politicians had ignored the plight of Palestinian people. They had ignored the illegal establishment of the terrorist state of Israel on usurped Palestine, ignored Israeli massacres against Palestinian civilians, the destruction of their villages, and the expulsion of almost 750 thousand Palestinian out of their homes, ignored the right of return for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and the implementation of UN resolution 194 of 1948 demanding their return to their land, ignored the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli terrorist occupation for the last 60 years, denied the Palestinians’ right of self-defense and resisting occupation, as guaranteed by UN charters, and called this right terrorism, ignored Israeli terrorism, on the other hand, and called it self-defense, ignored and turned against the UN democratic principles when they rejected the Palestinian government that was elected by the most democratic election as witnessed and testified by UN and international well known monitors, and imposed financial and economic siege to starve Palestinians for their democratic process.
As the international political community, alas including some Arab leaders, had shown sympathy for the capture, as a war prisoner, of the Israeli soldier (Shalit), who was sent to Gaza Strip to shell and destroy the homes of Palestinian civilians and to kill their women and children, and expressed their understanding of the Israeli terrorist war against Lebanon (July 2006) in response to the capture of two Israeli soldiers sent across Lebanese borders to incite anticipated trouble, this international “civilized” community expressed no sympathy towards the 12 thousand Palestinian civilians, including women and children, rotting in miserable Israeli jails after being snatched out of their families in the middle of the night from their homes, nor did they express any understanding for the Palestinian attacks against Israeli settlers, who usurped Palestinian land.
The international community knows that Israel is perpetrating ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, yet none of its governments is doing anything about it or objecting it, giving Israel the wrong message that it is OK to kill Palestinians. That is why wiping Palestinians off existence is still going on until today. Palestinians have long joined native Australians and Native American Indians in the category of “endangered species”. Today it is Palestinians; tomorrow it is the rest of Arab nations.
US Imperial Senate unanimously passes a traitorous resolution
One of the most absurd accusations against Iran has been that Tehran is secretly arming (and even possibly training) the anti-Imperial resistance forces in Iraq. Why is this an utterly absurd accusation? Because as Robert Dreyfuss explains it in his many excellent articles (see here, here and here) the USA and Iran are supporting the same side in this war: the Maliki government. They are also the only ones to support it, by the way. Even the Shias of Muqtada al-Sadr Mehdi Army are opposing a government which everybody in Iraq sees as a strange, but no less real, US/Iranian "Vichy" regime.
This is not the first time that the Empire is fighting on the side of so-called "Muslim fundamentalists". For example, while it is well known that Al-Qaeda was largely a US and Saudi creation during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Brendan O'Neill has documented the fact that Al-Qaeda as a fighting force was really brought together in Bosnia, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Likewise, the Al-Qaeda "franchise" in Lebanon, Fatah al-Islam, is also currently supported by the Empire (see here, here, here and here). However, what is interesting in the case of Iraq, is that the US appears to be supporting the pro-Iranian Shias against all the other parties to the conflict (the Redirection of the US policy in the Middle-East notwithstanding). The fact is that Iran and the USA appear to be objective allies in the war in Iraq. The question is: why is that?
There are three main reasons for this seemingly outlandish arrangement:
1. The Neocons did have hopes that the US force would be greeted as liberators by the oppressed Shia of Iraq. To a certain extend, they were, indeed, cautiously welcomed by the Shias, not out of a deep sence of love for anything American, but simply because the US occupation removed Saddam and his Baathist thugs from power.
2. The Neocons did have to put up at least a facade of democracy in Iraq and denying the reigns of power to the Shia majority would have been politically too dangerous.
3. Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani did not request, but demand free direct elections from the US occupation regime which had to cave in to this demand or face an immediate and overwhelming insurrection by the Shia majority.
So in the case of Iraq, the Empire really had no other option that to put the Shias in power. The most powerful, best organized, best armed and best trained Shia clearly were those who had spend many years in exile in Iran being trained and financed by the Iranians to overthrow Saddam and take power. The Empire did try to avoid this situation, but was typically helpless and the most pro-Iranian forces have since been in control in Iraq.
While all other parties to the war deeply resent the "Persians" as these pro-Iranian Iraqi Arabs are often called, the Sunni Resistance (including the Al-Qaeda Wahabis) in particular hates them and regularly fights against them (there are also tensions between the pro-Iranian Shias and the nationalists of Al-Sadr, but these have not been nearly as bloody as the conflict with the Sunnis and the more secular former Baathists). In fact, many believe that a US withdrawal would precipitate a loss of power by the current regime. It is thus quite clear that the Iranians need the US occupation forces to remain in Iraq and fight against the enemies of the pro-Iranian regime in power.
All that talk about Iranian IED and Hezbollah fighters in Basra are, at best, unsubstantiated exaggerations and, most probably, complete fabrications of the US propaganda machine to find a Neocon-compatible scapegoat and blame Iran for everything which went wrong in the "new Middle-East" dreamed-up by the Neocons, from the defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq to the crisis in Gaza.
Frankly, I did not expect anything better from the Neocon's propaganda. What is amazing and truly frightening, is that the Imperial Senate has unanimously passed a resolution blaming Iran for the death of US soldiers in Iraq. Yes, unanimously.
After passing a resolution supporting the Israeli war crimes in Lebanon, the House also adopted a Neocon-sponsored resolution demanding that Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad be condemned by the UN for "inciting genocide" . Only Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich voted against this text. Dennis Kucinich was even blocked from putting a correct translation of the words of Ahmadinejad in the official record even though the translation used in the media was based on a mistranslation. And now it is the Imperial Senate which adopts a self-evidently idiotic resolution unanimously, blaming Iran for US casualties in Iraq.
There is no doubt in my mind that all these resolutions serve only one single purpose: to establish a legal basis (at least in terms of US law) for a "defensive" war against Iran. The Empire fully understands that the UN will never allow an aggression against Iran and that nobody, besides Israel, wants another extremely dangerous war in the Middle-East. Having lost any hope for making such a war legal in terms of international law, the Neocons are now falling back on the next best option: attempting make such a war legal in terms of US law (thus making it impossible in the future for US lawmakers to oppose it).
There is no doubt that the Empire is suffering from a severe case of "political multiple personality disorder": American soldiers are dying every day to protect Iran's allies in Iraq, while other American soldiers are preparing to initiate an aggression against the patron of the very regime which American soldiers are protecting with their lives today.
If any good at all can come from such absurd and needless tragedies, it hopefully will be that it will finally open the currently firmly shut eyes of the American public to the reality that the Neocons regime in Washington does not care in the least about the USA or about Americans. This is not even an issue of "dual loyalty" any more: this is clearly high treason at the service of a foreign power: Israel.
How many more Americans will have to needlessly die before this Neocon occupation government and the Soviet-style Nomenklatura which supports it will be given the boot and before its leaders sent to rot in jail for treason?
This is not the first time that the Empire is fighting on the side of so-called "Muslim fundamentalists". For example, while it is well known that Al-Qaeda was largely a US and Saudi creation during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Brendan O'Neill has documented the fact that Al-Qaeda as a fighting force was really brought together in Bosnia, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Likewise, the Al-Qaeda "franchise" in Lebanon, Fatah al-Islam, is also currently supported by the Empire (see here, here, here and here). However, what is interesting in the case of Iraq, is that the US appears to be supporting the pro-Iranian Shias against all the other parties to the conflict (the Redirection of the US policy in the Middle-East notwithstanding). The fact is that Iran and the USA appear to be objective allies in the war in Iraq. The question is: why is that?
There are three main reasons for this seemingly outlandish arrangement:
1. The Neocons did have hopes that the US force would be greeted as liberators by the oppressed Shia of Iraq. To a certain extend, they were, indeed, cautiously welcomed by the Shias, not out of a deep sence of love for anything American, but simply because the US occupation removed Saddam and his Baathist thugs from power.
2. The Neocons did have to put up at least a facade of democracy in Iraq and denying the reigns of power to the Shia majority would have been politically too dangerous.
3. Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani did not request, but demand free direct elections from the US occupation regime which had to cave in to this demand or face an immediate and overwhelming insurrection by the Shia majority.
So in the case of Iraq, the Empire really had no other option that to put the Shias in power. The most powerful, best organized, best armed and best trained Shia clearly were those who had spend many years in exile in Iran being trained and financed by the Iranians to overthrow Saddam and take power. The Empire did try to avoid this situation, but was typically helpless and the most pro-Iranian forces have since been in control in Iraq.
While all other parties to the war deeply resent the "Persians" as these pro-Iranian Iraqi Arabs are often called, the Sunni Resistance (including the Al-Qaeda Wahabis) in particular hates them and regularly fights against them (there are also tensions between the pro-Iranian Shias and the nationalists of Al-Sadr, but these have not been nearly as bloody as the conflict with the Sunnis and the more secular former Baathists). In fact, many believe that a US withdrawal would precipitate a loss of power by the current regime. It is thus quite clear that the Iranians need the US occupation forces to remain in Iraq and fight against the enemies of the pro-Iranian regime in power.
All that talk about Iranian IED and Hezbollah fighters in Basra are, at best, unsubstantiated exaggerations and, most probably, complete fabrications of the US propaganda machine to find a Neocon-compatible scapegoat and blame Iran for everything which went wrong in the "new Middle-East" dreamed-up by the Neocons, from the defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq to the crisis in Gaza.
Frankly, I did not expect anything better from the Neocon's propaganda. What is amazing and truly frightening, is that the Imperial Senate has unanimously passed a resolution blaming Iran for the death of US soldiers in Iraq. Yes, unanimously.
After passing a resolution supporting the Israeli war crimes in Lebanon, the House also adopted a Neocon-sponsored resolution demanding that Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad be condemned by the UN for "inciting genocide" . Only Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich voted against this text. Dennis Kucinich was even blocked from putting a correct translation of the words of Ahmadinejad in the official record even though the translation used in the media was based on a mistranslation. And now it is the Imperial Senate which adopts a self-evidently idiotic resolution unanimously, blaming Iran for US casualties in Iraq.
There is no doubt in my mind that all these resolutions serve only one single purpose: to establish a legal basis (at least in terms of US law) for a "defensive" war against Iran. The Empire fully understands that the UN will never allow an aggression against Iran and that nobody, besides Israel, wants another extremely dangerous war in the Middle-East. Having lost any hope for making such a war legal in terms of international law, the Neocons are now falling back on the next best option: attempting make such a war legal in terms of US law (thus making it impossible in the future for US lawmakers to oppose it).
There is no doubt that the Empire is suffering from a severe case of "political multiple personality disorder": American soldiers are dying every day to protect Iran's allies in Iraq, while other American soldiers are preparing to initiate an aggression against the patron of the very regime which American soldiers are protecting with their lives today.
If any good at all can come from such absurd and needless tragedies, it hopefully will be that it will finally open the currently firmly shut eyes of the American public to the reality that the Neocons regime in Washington does not care in the least about the USA or about Americans. This is not even an issue of "dual loyalty" any more: this is clearly high treason at the service of a foreign power: Israel.
How many more Americans will have to needlessly die before this Neocon occupation government and the Soviet-style Nomenklatura which supports it will be given the boot and before its leaders sent to rot in jail for treason?
The Saker interviews Jonathan Cook from Nazareth
Today I am publishing the second interview in my new series "Saker interviews" (which began with the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery) with a Q&A email exchange with Jonathan Cook, a British journalist who lives in occupied Palestine and who recently wrote a book, entitled 'Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State', which was published by Pluto Press in Britain in April and in the United States in July 2006 (click here for more info on the book). Jonathan, a freelance journalist whose articles have been published in The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch and many other media, is the only western reporter who chose to live amongst Palestinians and who covers the Palestinian struggle without being tied to the agenda and allegiances of the Western corporate media (for more information on Jonathan's amazing work, check out his excellent website).
Jonathan has just returned from the "Israel-Palestine: One Country, One State" conference organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on the future of Palestine (which adopted a resolution-appeal whose text can be found here). Upon his return Jonathan kindly took some time off his schedule to thoroughly answer my questions for which I am greatly in his debt.
-------
First, I would like to turn to the conference which you just attended. What was its purpose, its importance, and what impact do you expect it to have?
I have no authority to speak for the group and so what I have to say should be read only as my personal impressions of the proceedings. In the coming weeks, I believe, we will issue something along the lines of a declaration of principles that will give the group a collective voice for the first time.
In early July, some 16 academics, journalists and activists met at a place called El Escorial, just outside Madrid, to think about ways to raise the profile of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis. None of us is naïve about how likely we are to get a fair hearing for such a proposition at the moment. Israel, the US and the most of the international community have too much at stake to abandon paying lip service to the official solution: two states for two people. But nonetheless, we are all aware that someone has to point out that the cadaver of the two-state solution has long been cold, and that trying to breathe life into it is only wasting valuable time, time in which Palestinians are being killed and systematically cleansed from what little is left of their homeland.
The importance of the meeting, to the best of my knowledge, is that it was the first time, in modern times at least, that Israeli Jews and Palestinians have met in a public forum to discuss ways to share the land of historic Palestine. They were exploring together a new landscape of political possibilities, which was an exciting moment to witness. The timing was important too. It is clear that decades of US and Israeli machinations, and the failure of Palestinians to see anything tangible emerge after their long wait for a state, have started to undermine Palestinian unity. The fighting in Gaza is a clear indication of the loss of political direction among the leadership. The Palestinians need a new vision to replace the compromised and corrupted one offered by Fatah, and the limited and limiting one offered by Hamas. The argument for a single secular democratic state may offer Palestinians just such a unifying vision of their future, and in the longer term may persuade a growing number of Israelis that this is where their own future in the region lies too.
None of this is going to happen overnight, and the El Escorial meeting is intended as only the first of many to expand our understanding of the issues and widen our base of support. Like all movements, it will need time to articulate the core concerns in ways that will appeal to a larger audience. The hope must be that Palestinians will soon see that one state offers them a way out of the political dead-end into which they have been led by the international community, and that activists too will understand that it offers a just solution. In time, hopefully, more forward-thinking Israelis will see that one state is the only way to secure a fair and peaceful solution for both peoples. Then it becomes a matter of integrating the one-state debate into a larger campaign, possibly of boycotts and sanctions, to bring pressure on Israel.
What was the mood of the conference participants? What did they foresee as the likely future developments in Palestine?
I think the word would be sober -- though excited too to be moving the debate forward. We all appreciated the huge task ahead of us and the urgency with which progress needs to be made for the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis.
We were not there to make collective predictions about developments in Palestine beyond our own personal diagnoses. What was more significant, I think, was a recognition from the group that the main hurdle to finding a workable solution is Israel’s continuing definition of itself as a Jewish state. This fact is overlooked or misunderstood in most discussions of the conflict. Observers tend to assume Israel’s Jewishness is a good thing that needs to be protected. That’s a very strange approach not seen in the treatment of other recent ethnic states: can one imagine Germany being encouraged to foster an Aryan view of itself, or South Africa an Afrikaner one? And similarly can one imagine an Aryan Germany or a white South Africa being treated as a reasonable or fair negotiating partner for those it was seeking to exploit or eradicate? That, in essence, is the problem faced by the Palestinians.
The first thing to do in seeking a just solution is to factor in Israel’s bad faith in the negotiating process, a bad faith that derives from its need to protect its ethnic basis. That means in any possible division of the land promoted by Israel, whether negotiated or more likely imposed unilaterally, the chief criterion will be demographic: how to keep a maximum number of Jews inside the Jewish state, and keep a maximum number of non-Jews excluded. In theory at least that could entail a meaningful division of the land into two states (even if not a fair division for the Palestinians), but in practice that won’t happen for two reasons that are related to Israel’s need to protect its Jewishness.
First, in any division of the land, Israel will be faced with the very serious problem of what to do with the fifth of its population who are Palestinian, a community that is growing much faster than the Jewish one. Palestinians inside Israel have a very deprived form of Israeli citizenship (as opposed to those in the occupied territories who, of course, have no citizenship), but more significantly they lack a meaningful nationality in Israel. It is a little known fact that Israeli nationality -- which, unusually, Israel has separated from the idea of Israeli citizenship -- does not exist in a legal sense. Instead Israelis are classified according to more than 130 different nationalities, including “Jew” and “Arab”. This makes sense when one understands that Israel considers itself the state of the Jews, not Israelis. The only nationality that counts in Israel is Jewish nationality. In this way, all Jews wherever they live -- even non-citizens outside Israel -- are Israeli nationals by default because they are considered Jewish nationals, whereas Palestinian citizens lack meaningful nationality because they are not Jewish nationals.
These strange legal sleights of hand may seem abstract but they have very real consequences. They currently sanction state-sponsored racism but , in a two-state solution, they would pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. When the West encourages Israel in its ethnic project, it effectively gives its blessing to the dark side of the Jewish state.
And second, in any negotiation over dividing the land a powerful ethnic state confronts a weak Palestinian national liberation movement across the table. Israel holds all the cards but one: the morality of its cause. And for this reason alone it must act in bad faith.
Let us imagine a scenario in which Israel genuinely agreed to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. The result would be that a legitimate kind of state (a Palestinian one where nationality is based on citizenship and territory) would be living alongside an illegitimate kind of state (a Jewish one where nationality is extra-territorial and based on ethnic belonging). In Palestine, all those living inside the borders would be entitled to become citizens and nationals. In theory at least, those Jews who are currently settlers living in the occupied territories could become Palestinian nationals (if they wanted to), as could Jews who married or marry someone who is a Palestinian national. Depending on the terms of Palestine’s immigration policy, you or I could seek to immigrate there and after a period of time apply for Palestinian nationality. In other words, independent of the question of how well it is run, Palestine would be like most other states.
None of this would be true of Israel under a two-state solution, as long as it remained a Jewish state. It would continue seeking ways to exclude its non-Jewish citizens from inclusion in the state, it would continue playing legal tricks to make Israeli nationality indistinguishable from Jewish nationality, and it would bar all non-Jews from immigrating. It would also be opposed to its nationals intermarrying with non-Jews, as it is now, and on these grounds alone it would not want relations between its own people and those in a neighbouring Palestine.
In other words, in a peaceful solution in which a real Palestine was established alongside Israel as a Jewish state, it would quickly become clear that a Jewish state is not a normal or legitimate kind of state. Peace would shatter the myth of Israeli normalcy and democracy. Which is a good reason in itself why Israel has no interest in peace, or in developing a viable Palestinian state. In fact, it has every incentive to sabotage the secular Palestinian national movement and encourage Islamic extremism, as it has long been doing. If Palestine becomes an Islamic ghetto-state, it will mirror some of the “abnormalities” of the Jewish state. There can be no change in Israel’s position until its ethnic project is ended, and the only way to bring that about it is to campaign AGAINST Israel as a Jewish state and FOR a new single secular political entity that embraces Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens. In other words, the question of what to do about creating a Palestinian state is inextricably bound up with what to do about ending the Jewish state. There cannot be a Palestinian state as long as there is an ethnic Jewish state desiring the same territory.
Turning to Palestine now, could you describe the situation in the West Bank? What is the influence of Hamas and Fatah there? How much support is there, in your opinion, for Abbas?
In a word, disastrous. Israel has spent decades trying to engineer the outcome we are now seeing in the occupied territories, which should give us a sense of how dire these latest developments are. As I have already mentioned, Israel has always wanted to achieve two goals in the occupied territories: to encourage divisions within the Palestinian national movement to weaken it; and to encourage the rise of Islamic extremism so that the conflict can be recharacterised from what it is -- a colonial conflict in which the native people, the Palestinians, are fighting for the return of their land -- to a manifestation of a wider “clash of civilisations” in which Israel is on the side of civilisation and the Palestinians / Muslims on the side of barbarism.
Among many ordinary Palestinians, there is a quite sophisticated understanding of how things have gone wrong. Most are fully aware that the Fatah leadership essentially became coopted by Israel during the Oslo process, and that it has now abandoned the task of resistance to occupation. It is trying instead to negotiate over whatever scraps Israel and the US are willing to offer. Which explains the large swing in support for Hamas at the last election, in both Gaza and the West Bank. The international community has been surprised by Hamas’ tenacity since the economic blockade was imposed, but that is partly a reflection of how firm its support has remained among Palestinians. Many understand that resistance is more important than ever, and that Hamas is still a party of resistance and that Fatah no longer is.
The trap for Hamas is that its only available route to domestic legitimacy was through elections to lead the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is a creation of the Oslo process, and was designed to instrumentalise the Palestinian leadership’s collaboration with Israel and the US. The PA is the institutionalisation under the Oslo process of the Palestinian leadership’s new status as Israel’s security contractor. So when Palestinians voted for Hamas to lead the resistance, ironically they also placed it at the head of an institution, the PA, designed to impede its ability to resist. This is not only a contradiction for Hamas but for the Palestinian public who elected it. The immediate question facing both Hamas and its supporters is whether it can continue to live with the tension of both being a resistance movement and claiming its right to lead the PA. That issue has been settled by force in Gaza, but it is yet to play out fully in the West Bank.
Abbas is damaged goods in the view of many Palestinians, but he can benefit from several specific advantages he has in the West Bank:
1. He continues to have more support there than Gaza because things are still far easier in the West Bank than in Gaza. Some Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly those in the cities, may be persuaded that the Fatah route of collaboration is better for them -- at least in the short term. The full horrors of Gaza’s imprisonment have yet to be felt in cities like Ramallah, and some West Bankers may believe that the need for all-out resistance can be postponed a little longer. In addition, some West Bankers, again particularly in some of the cities, are concerned about the overtly Islamic programme of Hamas
2. The much larger area of the West Bank is harder to unify under a single Palestinian resistance. Compared to the single ghetto of Gaza, the West Bank is being turned into half a dozen ghettoes. Fatah’s grassroots support is more developed than Hamas’ in the West Bank and it has more privileges to organise across the length of the territory because of its proven willingness to collaborate with Israel. Remember, it is mostly Hamas MPs who are being arrested by Israel, not Fatah’s.
3. Israel will assist Abbas in any way it can to prevent Hamas taking over the West Bank as well as Gaza. That would unify the resistance under Hamas both ideologically and geographically, an outcome that cannot be allowed. An amnesty has been announced for Fatah militants, so that they can be coopted along with Abbas and so Israeli hit squads can concentrate on killing Hamas militants; official Fatah security forces will be trained and armed to take on Hamas; and exiled militias like the Bard Brigade may be allowed into the West Bank. In addition, Israel will make Abbas’ collaboration look productive, with prisoner releases and so on.
4. Life will be made hell in Gaza to warn West Bankers not to follow the same path.
How effective these policies will be in winning over West Bankers will not be clear for some time.
What have you observed is going on in the Israeli public opinion? Putting aside the settlers and their supporters, why is it that the Israeli public is not demanding a change in policies? Don't they see that the "beat the Arabs - they only understand force" theory has totally discredited itself?
The question assumes that there is room for a plurality of opinions in Israel, a marketplace of ideas in which the most plausible triumph. But that is not how public opinion works in Israel. As in other highly ideological societies, Israelis are educated to regard only a narrow range of views as acceptable. Also, as in other ethnic states, Israeli Jews are raised to believe both that they are a chosen people (even if for many of them that is interpreted in a secular sense) and that non-Jews will always want their destruction. There are examples of other ethnic groups thinking in these kinds of self-absorbed and destructive ways in modern times: the Japanese, the Germans, and the Afrikaners. But possibly uniquely, the ethnic chauvinism dominant in Israel and ideas of eternal Jewish victimhood are given sanction and encouraged by many other nations, particularly in the West’s obsession with exposing anti-Semitism at the expense of all other forms of racism and in its collaboration with Israel in placing it at the epicentre of a clash of civilisations.
In this claustrophobic ideological atmosphere, Israelis are not ready to listen to a counter-reality, to anything that shakes the foundations of their worldview or their sense of entitlement. Israeli politicians are well-used to fostering and exploiting such prejudices.
In addition, as in other societies, fear sells. Just as Americans are presented with the image of the black mugger, the black rapist and the black killer to keep mostly white politicians in power and the gun lobby rich, so Israelis are presented with the image of the genocidal Arab, filled with loathing of Jews, to secure the profits of the huge local defence industry and the mutually beneficial ties with American Jewry. It is difficult to see how Israelis can be dragged out of this world of illusion.
To what degree can Israeli actions be explained by Judaism and its teachings? Is racism towards the Arabs a determining factor here or not? Who are the forces behind Olmert and his government? Are the Haredim really influencing them?
I am not sure how comfortable I am with the idea that there is something inherent in Judaism that explains the development of modern Israel. I know that some dissident Israeli intellectuals claim that ideas of separation and chosenness in Judaism are at the root of Israeli policy -- a way of reinventing ghetto living for the industrialised era. But I prefer to seek explanations of Israeli political dogmas in the ethnic, rather than the religious, qualities of the Jewish state. In fact, I would argue that Israel is behaving in a fairly typical fashion for an ethnic state. Nazi Germany had its obsession with the “Volk” and “Lebensraum”, and the Afrikaners developed the idea of the Bantustan to deal with the demographic threat of the Other. Israel’s racism, its land thefts and its disengagements and wall-building can all be explained in these terms.
What do Israelis think about the US neocons, do they see them as true friends of Israel or not?
In a way, the neocons are driven by a very Israeli vision of the future. They apply Israel’s regional security paradigm to the global stage. Thus they seek world domination for the US, just as Israel’s strategists seek regional domination. Both have a casual disdain for the Arab and Muslim “mentality”, believing that it is essentially irrational and different from the enlightened Western mind. Both believe in “endless war”. And both believe that by creating chaos and instability around them they can manipulate and control their enemies. Given these similarities of thought, it may not be surprising that Israelis generally approve of neocon policy, and that neocons are by and large besotted with Israel. Certainly Israelis were enthusiastic about attacking Iraq, and have been keen to see the US repeat that disastrous policy with Iran. I have written extensively about the links between Israel and the neocons in my forthcoming book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations”.
Lebanon: many in the region say that the war last summer was only a first round, and that this war will resume in the near future. Do you agree? If yes, what do you think the Israelis could reasonably hope to achieve by resuming this war? Do they seriously hope to "disarm Hezbollah"?
Almost certainly there will be another war. Israel has no interest in regional peace, which would damage its interests, so it must wage war. The problem is that peace would bring Israel simple anonymity: it would be just another small state in the Middle East, but without the oil of the Persian Gulf. Why would the US continue paying Israel billions of dollars in aid each year if Israel were a state at peace?
As long as there is war, or impending war, Israel is sitting pretty. It fulfils its primary function on behalf of the US, which is to keep the region’s other states nervous and unsure of what is coming next. This is a traditional policy of divide and rule: Israel decides who will be punished with attack, who will be isolated, who will be rewarded with a peace agreement and US munificence. Israel can also protect the US from the fallout when it attacks neighbouring states in line with larger US strategic goals. Those millions of cluster bombs dropped on south Lebanon, for example, were American-made and supplied, but the outrage is largely directed at Israel, not the US.
There are other benefits too. War is great for Israel’s massive defence industry. As Naomi Klein recently noted, business has been booming during the intifada as Israel develops new technologies for urban warfare, for crowd control and for imprisoning civilian populations. That is only possible as long as Israel is able to use the occupied territories as a giant open-air laboratory for performing human experiments. Were there peace, that laboratory would no longer exist and, with it, the Israeli defence industry’s profits would shrivel.
Those are the wider reasons why war is always pending for Israel. But there are three more specific reasons why Israel needs to wage another war against Lebanon and probably Syria too. The first is that the White House needed Hizbullah defanged, and Syria at the very least intimidated, before it could contemplate an attack on Iran. Israel’s failure last summer has left both Tel Aviv and Washington at a loss for how to move forward to achieve their goals. The second is a fear widely felt in Israel that in failing to crush Hizbullah the Israeli army has lost what is called here its “deterrence” value: that is, the Arabs have realised it is not invincible. Israelis are afraid that groups like Hamas and states like Syria will learn from this episode that the Israeli army can be beaten. And third, there is a widely expressed sense in Israel that, if the country’s army does not destroy Hizbullah, the US may one day start asking what value it is getting from subsidising one of the most powerful armies in the world if it cannot take on a militia of a few thousands part-time recruits. For all these reasons, Israel needs another chance to prove itself against either Hizbullah or Syria.
In your experience, what does the Jewish "street" say about a possible war between the US and Iran? Is a US attack on Iran seen as a real possibility and what do you expect the Palestinian response to such a situation would be?
The Israeli Jewish response is fairly predictable. Opinion polls show Israelis are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about a US attack on Iran, as they were about the invasion of Iraq. They are evenly split on the wisdom of Israel going it alone to attack Iran. That may in part reflect a sense of vulnerability after the humiliation in Lebanon last summer and in part a fear of breaking with their US patron. In addition, I think Israelis may fear that the moment for an attack on Iran has passed. Certainly there is lot of grumbling and tantrums from Israel’s rightwing pundits about Bush abandoning Israel by failing to strike Tehran, and Olmert is sounding ever more conciliatory. But it is always unwise to make firm predictions in this part of the world. Current Israeli indecision regarding Iran may be a sign of the army’s need to buy time as it rethinks its strategy following its failures in Lebanon. Certainly, as I’ve already argued, Israel is keen for more war in the future, and an attack on Lebanon or Syria always has the threat that it will expand to include other countries, particularly Iran.
By the Palestinian response, I take it that you mean the leadership. I think that makes the improbable assumption in the current circumstances that some kind of decipherable and unified Palestinian response is possible. Iran is a player, even if still a minor one, in the occupied territories. Iran, it can be reasonably assumed, is trying to finance and assist Hamas (just as it has done with Hizbullah) despite the sectarian differences between the two. Hamas needs all the help it can get to avert the combined opposition of Israel, the US and the Fatah leadership to its rule, so an alliance is a necessary move on its part. It has also been influenced by Hizbullah’s successes against Israel and will be learning the lessons, as are many other groups in the Middle East. One is the use of rockets to weaken Israeli resolve. Given the hostilities between Hamas and Fatah, one can probably guess that whatever is good for Hamas (a strong Iran) is bad for the Fatah leadership around Abbas.
Much is made of Hezbollah's popularity in Palestine. How popular are Iran and Khamenei or Hezbollah and Nasrallah in Palestine?
This is usually presented in the West in simplistic terms of Palestinians cheering on terrorists. That makes sense to many Westerners because they have been presented by the Western media and politicians with an image of Iran and Hizbullah as terrorists who yearn for Israel’s destruction. That view is not really credible outside the West because it simply does not fit the facts. If Hizbullah is a terrorist group, it is a very strange one: even the US Congress has struggled to identify the terrorist acts it is supposedly responsible for. Even the few terrorist acts that may have been committed by Hizbullah, though there is a lack of proof, date back nearly two decades.
Hizbullah was established as a Shia resistance movement to oust Israel from its illegal occupation of Lebanon, not to destroy it. That task it carried out with single-minded determination. Since then it has created a network of concealed bases across south Lebanon, built up a basic armoury with the help of Iran, and developed its own intelligence service that has penetrated Israel’s military secrets while largely preventing Israel from penetrating its own military structures -- all in the justified belief that Israel wants to meddle in Lebanon in ways that damage that country’s security and its interests and that Israel must therefore be repelled.
All of these achievements are reason enough why Hizbullah has earnt the enmity of Zionists everywhere. It is also why the powerful Israel lobby has been able to fashion the image of Hizbullah portrayed in the West. (Though it should be noted that senior US officials have quietly expressed their admiration of Nasrallah, including the former US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who called him “the smartest guy in the Middle East”.) Palestinians, like most Arabs in the Middle East, do not read the Western media, so they have no reason to buy into these fictions. They understand that Nasrallah has proved himself a master tactician and strategist, both political and military, who has used his few thousand fighters to repeatedly humiliate the Israeli army, one of the most powerful in the world and one backed by the US. That is an achievement that has earnt him great respect among Palestinians, and which some of them hope to emulate in their own resistance to Israeli occupation.
But it runs even deeper than that, I think. It is particularly obvious among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who faced Hizbullah’s rocket attacks just like Israeli Jews -- in fact, they were killed in greater numbers proportionally by those attacks than Jewish citizens because their towns were not protected with bomb shelters and they were not given proper warnings of attacks. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Christians, hold Nasrallah in almost unparalleled regard, despite their suffering at his hands. This is not some preverse form of masochism. They appreciate the clear distinctions he draws in his speeches between Israelis and Jews (not all Israelis are Jews, after all) and between Jews and Zionists (not all Jews are Zionists). He and his group, Hizbullah, are opposed to Zionism because they believe a self-declared ethnic state is a menace to itself, to the Palestinians and to its neighbours for many of the reasons I have given above. Palestinian citizens appreciate that he shares, even at a distance, their understanding of Israel’s ethnic nature and its bad faith, something that many Arab leaders -- often including the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories -- have failed to grasp. If someone has proved that the Arab world does not have to be permanently mired in fear of Israel, and manipulated by its divide and rule policies, it is Nasrallah. He gives Palestinians, and other Arabs, back some of their self-respect.
Feelings among Palestinians towards Iran, I suspect, are a little more complex. Certainly no one here believes the myths being spoonfed to Westerners about Iran planning to “wipe Israel off the map” (I am afraid I cannot bring myself to explain yet again the translation error that has been so readily abused by Israel, but there are plenty of Farsi experts who have done so and their articles can be easily found on the internet). Again, it is easy to mischaracterise Iran in the West as a terror state when the media acts as little more than a propaganda tool for the US and Israeli governments, and then misrepresent Palestinian support for Iran as support for terrorism. But nonetheless, feelings towards Iran are a little more mixed. Where Nasrallah appears devout and spiritual, the Iranian clerics seem purist and pious. Where Nasrallah is popular, Iran’s secular leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely populist. And whereas Hizbullah’s Shia are drawn from the Arab world, Iran’s Shia are Persian. But of course, Iran is the benefactor: Nasrallah’s talents are only on display because of Iranian money and support, so for Palestinians there is some reflected glory. And Hamas, of course, is equally in need of a patron in Iran, if it is to follow Hizbullah’s lead.
Jonathan has just returned from the "Israel-Palestine: One Country, One State" conference organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on the future of Palestine (which adopted a resolution-appeal whose text can be found here). Upon his return Jonathan kindly took some time off his schedule to thoroughly answer my questions for which I am greatly in his debt.
-------
First, I would like to turn to the conference which you just attended. What was its purpose, its importance, and what impact do you expect it to have?
I have no authority to speak for the group and so what I have to say should be read only as my personal impressions of the proceedings. In the coming weeks, I believe, we will issue something along the lines of a declaration of principles that will give the group a collective voice for the first time.
In early July, some 16 academics, journalists and activists met at a place called El Escorial, just outside Madrid, to think about ways to raise the profile of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis. None of us is naïve about how likely we are to get a fair hearing for such a proposition at the moment. Israel, the US and the most of the international community have too much at stake to abandon paying lip service to the official solution: two states for two people. But nonetheless, we are all aware that someone has to point out that the cadaver of the two-state solution has long been cold, and that trying to breathe life into it is only wasting valuable time, time in which Palestinians are being killed and systematically cleansed from what little is left of their homeland.
The importance of the meeting, to the best of my knowledge, is that it was the first time, in modern times at least, that Israeli Jews and Palestinians have met in a public forum to discuss ways to share the land of historic Palestine. They were exploring together a new landscape of political possibilities, which was an exciting moment to witness. The timing was important too. It is clear that decades of US and Israeli machinations, and the failure of Palestinians to see anything tangible emerge after their long wait for a state, have started to undermine Palestinian unity. The fighting in Gaza is a clear indication of the loss of political direction among the leadership. The Palestinians need a new vision to replace the compromised and corrupted one offered by Fatah, and the limited and limiting one offered by Hamas. The argument for a single secular democratic state may offer Palestinians just such a unifying vision of their future, and in the longer term may persuade a growing number of Israelis that this is where their own future in the region lies too.
None of this is going to happen overnight, and the El Escorial meeting is intended as only the first of many to expand our understanding of the issues and widen our base of support. Like all movements, it will need time to articulate the core concerns in ways that will appeal to a larger audience. The hope must be that Palestinians will soon see that one state offers them a way out of the political dead-end into which they have been led by the international community, and that activists too will understand that it offers a just solution. In time, hopefully, more forward-thinking Israelis will see that one state is the only way to secure a fair and peaceful solution for both peoples. Then it becomes a matter of integrating the one-state debate into a larger campaign, possibly of boycotts and sanctions, to bring pressure on Israel.
What was the mood of the conference participants? What did they foresee as the likely future developments in Palestine?
I think the word would be sober -- though excited too to be moving the debate forward. We all appreciated the huge task ahead of us and the urgency with which progress needs to be made for the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis.
We were not there to make collective predictions about developments in Palestine beyond our own personal diagnoses. What was more significant, I think, was a recognition from the group that the main hurdle to finding a workable solution is Israel’s continuing definition of itself as a Jewish state. This fact is overlooked or misunderstood in most discussions of the conflict. Observers tend to assume Israel’s Jewishness is a good thing that needs to be protected. That’s a very strange approach not seen in the treatment of other recent ethnic states: can one imagine Germany being encouraged to foster an Aryan view of itself, or South Africa an Afrikaner one? And similarly can one imagine an Aryan Germany or a white South Africa being treated as a reasonable or fair negotiating partner for those it was seeking to exploit or eradicate? That, in essence, is the problem faced by the Palestinians.
The first thing to do in seeking a just solution is to factor in Israel’s bad faith in the negotiating process, a bad faith that derives from its need to protect its ethnic basis. That means in any possible division of the land promoted by Israel, whether negotiated or more likely imposed unilaterally, the chief criterion will be demographic: how to keep a maximum number of Jews inside the Jewish state, and keep a maximum number of non-Jews excluded. In theory at least that could entail a meaningful division of the land into two states (even if not a fair division for the Palestinians), but in practice that won’t happen for two reasons that are related to Israel’s need to protect its Jewishness.
First, in any division of the land, Israel will be faced with the very serious problem of what to do with the fifth of its population who are Palestinian, a community that is growing much faster than the Jewish one. Palestinians inside Israel have a very deprived form of Israeli citizenship (as opposed to those in the occupied territories who, of course, have no citizenship), but more significantly they lack a meaningful nationality in Israel. It is a little known fact that Israeli nationality -- which, unusually, Israel has separated from the idea of Israeli citizenship -- does not exist in a legal sense. Instead Israelis are classified according to more than 130 different nationalities, including “Jew” and “Arab”. This makes sense when one understands that Israel considers itself the state of the Jews, not Israelis. The only nationality that counts in Israel is Jewish nationality. In this way, all Jews wherever they live -- even non-citizens outside Israel -- are Israeli nationals by default because they are considered Jewish nationals, whereas Palestinian citizens lack meaningful nationality because they are not Jewish nationals.
These strange legal sleights of hand may seem abstract but they have very real consequences. They currently sanction state-sponsored racism but , in a two-state solution, they would pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. When the West encourages Israel in its ethnic project, it effectively gives its blessing to the dark side of the Jewish state.
And second, in any negotiation over dividing the land a powerful ethnic state confronts a weak Palestinian national liberation movement across the table. Israel holds all the cards but one: the morality of its cause. And for this reason alone it must act in bad faith.
Let us imagine a scenario in which Israel genuinely agreed to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. The result would be that a legitimate kind of state (a Palestinian one where nationality is based on citizenship and territory) would be living alongside an illegitimate kind of state (a Jewish one where nationality is extra-territorial and based on ethnic belonging). In Palestine, all those living inside the borders would be entitled to become citizens and nationals. In theory at least, those Jews who are currently settlers living in the occupied territories could become Palestinian nationals (if they wanted to), as could Jews who married or marry someone who is a Palestinian national. Depending on the terms of Palestine’s immigration policy, you or I could seek to immigrate there and after a period of time apply for Palestinian nationality. In other words, independent of the question of how well it is run, Palestine would be like most other states.
None of this would be true of Israel under a two-state solution, as long as it remained a Jewish state. It would continue seeking ways to exclude its non-Jewish citizens from inclusion in the state, it would continue playing legal tricks to make Israeli nationality indistinguishable from Jewish nationality, and it would bar all non-Jews from immigrating. It would also be opposed to its nationals intermarrying with non-Jews, as it is now, and on these grounds alone it would not want relations between its own people and those in a neighbouring Palestine.
In other words, in a peaceful solution in which a real Palestine was established alongside Israel as a Jewish state, it would quickly become clear that a Jewish state is not a normal or legitimate kind of state. Peace would shatter the myth of Israeli normalcy and democracy. Which is a good reason in itself why Israel has no interest in peace, or in developing a viable Palestinian state. In fact, it has every incentive to sabotage the secular Palestinian national movement and encourage Islamic extremism, as it has long been doing. If Palestine becomes an Islamic ghetto-state, it will mirror some of the “abnormalities” of the Jewish state. There can be no change in Israel’s position until its ethnic project is ended, and the only way to bring that about it is to campaign AGAINST Israel as a Jewish state and FOR a new single secular political entity that embraces Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens. In other words, the question of what to do about creating a Palestinian state is inextricably bound up with what to do about ending the Jewish state. There cannot be a Palestinian state as long as there is an ethnic Jewish state desiring the same territory.
Turning to Palestine now, could you describe the situation in the West Bank? What is the influence of Hamas and Fatah there? How much support is there, in your opinion, for Abbas?
In a word, disastrous. Israel has spent decades trying to engineer the outcome we are now seeing in the occupied territories, which should give us a sense of how dire these latest developments are. As I have already mentioned, Israel has always wanted to achieve two goals in the occupied territories: to encourage divisions within the Palestinian national movement to weaken it; and to encourage the rise of Islamic extremism so that the conflict can be recharacterised from what it is -- a colonial conflict in which the native people, the Palestinians, are fighting for the return of their land -- to a manifestation of a wider “clash of civilisations” in which Israel is on the side of civilisation and the Palestinians / Muslims on the side of barbarism.
Among many ordinary Palestinians, there is a quite sophisticated understanding of how things have gone wrong. Most are fully aware that the Fatah leadership essentially became coopted by Israel during the Oslo process, and that it has now abandoned the task of resistance to occupation. It is trying instead to negotiate over whatever scraps Israel and the US are willing to offer. Which explains the large swing in support for Hamas at the last election, in both Gaza and the West Bank. The international community has been surprised by Hamas’ tenacity since the economic blockade was imposed, but that is partly a reflection of how firm its support has remained among Palestinians. Many understand that resistance is more important than ever, and that Hamas is still a party of resistance and that Fatah no longer is.
The trap for Hamas is that its only available route to domestic legitimacy was through elections to lead the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is a creation of the Oslo process, and was designed to instrumentalise the Palestinian leadership’s collaboration with Israel and the US. The PA is the institutionalisation under the Oslo process of the Palestinian leadership’s new status as Israel’s security contractor. So when Palestinians voted for Hamas to lead the resistance, ironically they also placed it at the head of an institution, the PA, designed to impede its ability to resist. This is not only a contradiction for Hamas but for the Palestinian public who elected it. The immediate question facing both Hamas and its supporters is whether it can continue to live with the tension of both being a resistance movement and claiming its right to lead the PA. That issue has been settled by force in Gaza, but it is yet to play out fully in the West Bank.
Abbas is damaged goods in the view of many Palestinians, but he can benefit from several specific advantages he has in the West Bank:
1. He continues to have more support there than Gaza because things are still far easier in the West Bank than in Gaza. Some Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly those in the cities, may be persuaded that the Fatah route of collaboration is better for them -- at least in the short term. The full horrors of Gaza’s imprisonment have yet to be felt in cities like Ramallah, and some West Bankers may believe that the need for all-out resistance can be postponed a little longer. In addition, some West Bankers, again particularly in some of the cities, are concerned about the overtly Islamic programme of Hamas
2. The much larger area of the West Bank is harder to unify under a single Palestinian resistance. Compared to the single ghetto of Gaza, the West Bank is being turned into half a dozen ghettoes. Fatah’s grassroots support is more developed than Hamas’ in the West Bank and it has more privileges to organise across the length of the territory because of its proven willingness to collaborate with Israel. Remember, it is mostly Hamas MPs who are being arrested by Israel, not Fatah’s.
3. Israel will assist Abbas in any way it can to prevent Hamas taking over the West Bank as well as Gaza. That would unify the resistance under Hamas both ideologically and geographically, an outcome that cannot be allowed. An amnesty has been announced for Fatah militants, so that they can be coopted along with Abbas and so Israeli hit squads can concentrate on killing Hamas militants; official Fatah security forces will be trained and armed to take on Hamas; and exiled militias like the Bard Brigade may be allowed into the West Bank. In addition, Israel will make Abbas’ collaboration look productive, with prisoner releases and so on.
4. Life will be made hell in Gaza to warn West Bankers not to follow the same path.
How effective these policies will be in winning over West Bankers will not be clear for some time.
What have you observed is going on in the Israeli public opinion? Putting aside the settlers and their supporters, why is it that the Israeli public is not demanding a change in policies? Don't they see that the "beat the Arabs - they only understand force" theory has totally discredited itself?
The question assumes that there is room for a plurality of opinions in Israel, a marketplace of ideas in which the most plausible triumph. But that is not how public opinion works in Israel. As in other highly ideological societies, Israelis are educated to regard only a narrow range of views as acceptable. Also, as in other ethnic states, Israeli Jews are raised to believe both that they are a chosen people (even if for many of them that is interpreted in a secular sense) and that non-Jews will always want their destruction. There are examples of other ethnic groups thinking in these kinds of self-absorbed and destructive ways in modern times: the Japanese, the Germans, and the Afrikaners. But possibly uniquely, the ethnic chauvinism dominant in Israel and ideas of eternal Jewish victimhood are given sanction and encouraged by many other nations, particularly in the West’s obsession with exposing anti-Semitism at the expense of all other forms of racism and in its collaboration with Israel in placing it at the epicentre of a clash of civilisations.
In this claustrophobic ideological atmosphere, Israelis are not ready to listen to a counter-reality, to anything that shakes the foundations of their worldview or their sense of entitlement. Israeli politicians are well-used to fostering and exploiting such prejudices.
In addition, as in other societies, fear sells. Just as Americans are presented with the image of the black mugger, the black rapist and the black killer to keep mostly white politicians in power and the gun lobby rich, so Israelis are presented with the image of the genocidal Arab, filled with loathing of Jews, to secure the profits of the huge local defence industry and the mutually beneficial ties with American Jewry. It is difficult to see how Israelis can be dragged out of this world of illusion.
To what degree can Israeli actions be explained by Judaism and its teachings? Is racism towards the Arabs a determining factor here or not? Who are the forces behind Olmert and his government? Are the Haredim really influencing them?
I am not sure how comfortable I am with the idea that there is something inherent in Judaism that explains the development of modern Israel. I know that some dissident Israeli intellectuals claim that ideas of separation and chosenness in Judaism are at the root of Israeli policy -- a way of reinventing ghetto living for the industrialised era. But I prefer to seek explanations of Israeli political dogmas in the ethnic, rather than the religious, qualities of the Jewish state. In fact, I would argue that Israel is behaving in a fairly typical fashion for an ethnic state. Nazi Germany had its obsession with the “Volk” and “Lebensraum”, and the Afrikaners developed the idea of the Bantustan to deal with the demographic threat of the Other. Israel’s racism, its land thefts and its disengagements and wall-building can all be explained in these terms.
What do Israelis think about the US neocons, do they see them as true friends of Israel or not?
In a way, the neocons are driven by a very Israeli vision of the future. They apply Israel’s regional security paradigm to the global stage. Thus they seek world domination for the US, just as Israel’s strategists seek regional domination. Both have a casual disdain for the Arab and Muslim “mentality”, believing that it is essentially irrational and different from the enlightened Western mind. Both believe in “endless war”. And both believe that by creating chaos and instability around them they can manipulate and control their enemies. Given these similarities of thought, it may not be surprising that Israelis generally approve of neocon policy, and that neocons are by and large besotted with Israel. Certainly Israelis were enthusiastic about attacking Iraq, and have been keen to see the US repeat that disastrous policy with Iran. I have written extensively about the links between Israel and the neocons in my forthcoming book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations”.
Lebanon: many in the region say that the war last summer was only a first round, and that this war will resume in the near future. Do you agree? If yes, what do you think the Israelis could reasonably hope to achieve by resuming this war? Do they seriously hope to "disarm Hezbollah"?
Almost certainly there will be another war. Israel has no interest in regional peace, which would damage its interests, so it must wage war. The problem is that peace would bring Israel simple anonymity: it would be just another small state in the Middle East, but without the oil of the Persian Gulf. Why would the US continue paying Israel billions of dollars in aid each year if Israel were a state at peace?
As long as there is war, or impending war, Israel is sitting pretty. It fulfils its primary function on behalf of the US, which is to keep the region’s other states nervous and unsure of what is coming next. This is a traditional policy of divide and rule: Israel decides who will be punished with attack, who will be isolated, who will be rewarded with a peace agreement and US munificence. Israel can also protect the US from the fallout when it attacks neighbouring states in line with larger US strategic goals. Those millions of cluster bombs dropped on south Lebanon, for example, were American-made and supplied, but the outrage is largely directed at Israel, not the US.
There are other benefits too. War is great for Israel’s massive defence industry. As Naomi Klein recently noted, business has been booming during the intifada as Israel develops new technologies for urban warfare, for crowd control and for imprisoning civilian populations. That is only possible as long as Israel is able to use the occupied territories as a giant open-air laboratory for performing human experiments. Were there peace, that laboratory would no longer exist and, with it, the Israeli defence industry’s profits would shrivel.
Those are the wider reasons why war is always pending for Israel. But there are three more specific reasons why Israel needs to wage another war against Lebanon and probably Syria too. The first is that the White House needed Hizbullah defanged, and Syria at the very least intimidated, before it could contemplate an attack on Iran. Israel’s failure last summer has left both Tel Aviv and Washington at a loss for how to move forward to achieve their goals. The second is a fear widely felt in Israel that in failing to crush Hizbullah the Israeli army has lost what is called here its “deterrence” value: that is, the Arabs have realised it is not invincible. Israelis are afraid that groups like Hamas and states like Syria will learn from this episode that the Israeli army can be beaten. And third, there is a widely expressed sense in Israel that, if the country’s army does not destroy Hizbullah, the US may one day start asking what value it is getting from subsidising one of the most powerful armies in the world if it cannot take on a militia of a few thousands part-time recruits. For all these reasons, Israel needs another chance to prove itself against either Hizbullah or Syria.
In your experience, what does the Jewish "street" say about a possible war between the US and Iran? Is a US attack on Iran seen as a real possibility and what do you expect the Palestinian response to such a situation would be?
The Israeli Jewish response is fairly predictable. Opinion polls show Israelis are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about a US attack on Iran, as they were about the invasion of Iraq. They are evenly split on the wisdom of Israel going it alone to attack Iran. That may in part reflect a sense of vulnerability after the humiliation in Lebanon last summer and in part a fear of breaking with their US patron. In addition, I think Israelis may fear that the moment for an attack on Iran has passed. Certainly there is lot of grumbling and tantrums from Israel’s rightwing pundits about Bush abandoning Israel by failing to strike Tehran, and Olmert is sounding ever more conciliatory. But it is always unwise to make firm predictions in this part of the world. Current Israeli indecision regarding Iran may be a sign of the army’s need to buy time as it rethinks its strategy following its failures in Lebanon. Certainly, as I’ve already argued, Israel is keen for more war in the future, and an attack on Lebanon or Syria always has the threat that it will expand to include other countries, particularly Iran.
By the Palestinian response, I take it that you mean the leadership. I think that makes the improbable assumption in the current circumstances that some kind of decipherable and unified Palestinian response is possible. Iran is a player, even if still a minor one, in the occupied territories. Iran, it can be reasonably assumed, is trying to finance and assist Hamas (just as it has done with Hizbullah) despite the sectarian differences between the two. Hamas needs all the help it can get to avert the combined opposition of Israel, the US and the Fatah leadership to its rule, so an alliance is a necessary move on its part. It has also been influenced by Hizbullah’s successes against Israel and will be learning the lessons, as are many other groups in the Middle East. One is the use of rockets to weaken Israeli resolve. Given the hostilities between Hamas and Fatah, one can probably guess that whatever is good for Hamas (a strong Iran) is bad for the Fatah leadership around Abbas.
Much is made of Hezbollah's popularity in Palestine. How popular are Iran and Khamenei or Hezbollah and Nasrallah in Palestine?
This is usually presented in the West in simplistic terms of Palestinians cheering on terrorists. That makes sense to many Westerners because they have been presented by the Western media and politicians with an image of Iran and Hizbullah as terrorists who yearn for Israel’s destruction. That view is not really credible outside the West because it simply does not fit the facts. If Hizbullah is a terrorist group, it is a very strange one: even the US Congress has struggled to identify the terrorist acts it is supposedly responsible for. Even the few terrorist acts that may have been committed by Hizbullah, though there is a lack of proof, date back nearly two decades.
Hizbullah was established as a Shia resistance movement to oust Israel from its illegal occupation of Lebanon, not to destroy it. That task it carried out with single-minded determination. Since then it has created a network of concealed bases across south Lebanon, built up a basic armoury with the help of Iran, and developed its own intelligence service that has penetrated Israel’s military secrets while largely preventing Israel from penetrating its own military structures -- all in the justified belief that Israel wants to meddle in Lebanon in ways that damage that country’s security and its interests and that Israel must therefore be repelled.
All of these achievements are reason enough why Hizbullah has earnt the enmity of Zionists everywhere. It is also why the powerful Israel lobby has been able to fashion the image of Hizbullah portrayed in the West. (Though it should be noted that senior US officials have quietly expressed their admiration of Nasrallah, including the former US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who called him “the smartest guy in the Middle East”.) Palestinians, like most Arabs in the Middle East, do not read the Western media, so they have no reason to buy into these fictions. They understand that Nasrallah has proved himself a master tactician and strategist, both political and military, who has used his few thousand fighters to repeatedly humiliate the Israeli army, one of the most powerful in the world and one backed by the US. That is an achievement that has earnt him great respect among Palestinians, and which some of them hope to emulate in their own resistance to Israeli occupation.
But it runs even deeper than that, I think. It is particularly obvious among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who faced Hizbullah’s rocket attacks just like Israeli Jews -- in fact, they were killed in greater numbers proportionally by those attacks than Jewish citizens because their towns were not protected with bomb shelters and they were not given proper warnings of attacks. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Christians, hold Nasrallah in almost unparalleled regard, despite their suffering at his hands. This is not some preverse form of masochism. They appreciate the clear distinctions he draws in his speeches between Israelis and Jews (not all Israelis are Jews, after all) and between Jews and Zionists (not all Jews are Zionists). He and his group, Hizbullah, are opposed to Zionism because they believe a self-declared ethnic state is a menace to itself, to the Palestinians and to its neighbours for many of the reasons I have given above. Palestinian citizens appreciate that he shares, even at a distance, their understanding of Israel’s ethnic nature and its bad faith, something that many Arab leaders -- often including the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories -- have failed to grasp. If someone has proved that the Arab world does not have to be permanently mired in fear of Israel, and manipulated by its divide and rule policies, it is Nasrallah. He gives Palestinians, and other Arabs, back some of their self-respect.
Feelings among Palestinians towards Iran, I suspect, are a little more complex. Certainly no one here believes the myths being spoonfed to Westerners about Iran planning to “wipe Israel off the map” (I am afraid I cannot bring myself to explain yet again the translation error that has been so readily abused by Israel, but there are plenty of Farsi experts who have done so and their articles can be easily found on the internet). Again, it is easy to mischaracterise Iran in the West as a terror state when the media acts as little more than a propaganda tool for the US and Israeli governments, and then misrepresent Palestinian support for Iran as support for terrorism. But nonetheless, feelings towards Iran are a little more mixed. Where Nasrallah appears devout and spiritual, the Iranian clerics seem purist and pious. Where Nasrallah is popular, Iran’s secular leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely populist. And whereas Hizbullah’s Shia are drawn from the Arab world, Iran’s Shia are Persian. But of course, Iran is the benefactor: Nasrallah’s talents are only on display because of Iranian money and support, so for Palestinians there is some reflected glory. And Hamas, of course, is equally in need of a patron in Iran, if it is to follow Hizbullah’s lead.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Al-Qaeda Escapes U.S. Assault
Inter Press Service
By Ahmed Ali*
By Ahmed Ali*
BAQUBA, Jul 14 (IPS) - Air strikes have destroyed civilian homes rather than al-Qaeda targets under the U.S. military operation in Baquba, residents say.
But signs have emerged of an al-Qaeda presence here earlier, and some residents speak of relief that al-Qaeda has been driven out of the city by U.S. forces.
Located 50km northeast of Baghdad, the volatile capital city of Diyala province is home to roughly 325,000 people. The region that has been home to fruit orchards and rural farming has been hard hit by the military conflict.
On Jun. 19 tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were deployed in Operation Arrowhead Ripper to attack militants in Baquba. The ongoing operation is one of the largest ever thus far in the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
Diyala province is inhabited by a mix of Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds. The province has been openly hostile towards occupation forces, and attacks against U.S. forces have been commonplace since early in the occupation.
According to the U.S. Department of Defence, Diyala province is the fifth deadliest of Iraq's 18 provinces for U.S. troops, with at least 186 killed there thus far.
After several weeks of the siege in Baquba, people were allowed in recent days to go to work. Witnesses spoke to IPS about fierce attacks by helicopters, and shelling of houses by U.S. tanks.
"The U.S. military bombed houses that were completely uninhabited," Kadhim Rajab, a 39-year-old city official told IPS. "Al-Qaeda had left the city before the operation even began because they knew what was coming even before we did."
But residents did speak of an al-Qaeda presence earlier. "U.S. troops bombed a number of houses that were actually used by al-Qaeda," Ibrahim Hameed, a 43-year-old secondary school teacher told IPS. "But there was no resistance at all, we heard no shooting."
Ismail Aboud, a 51-year-old physician, said the U.S. military had deliberately avoided armed clashes with militants. "It seems that the forces allowed the terrorists to leave the battlefield in order to avoid direct military clashes," he said.
Abu Mohammed, a 54-year-old grocer, said U.S. troops were now moving unarmed in the streets. "The troops appear absolutely sure that there is no resistance to face."
Salma Waleed, manager of a primary school in the city told IPS that after 12 days of shelling by the U.S. military, some electricity and water supply has been restored intermittently.
Waleed said U.S. soldiers had been handing out water and MREs (meals ready to eat). "Now, we can move very freely in the streets since there is no random shooting or kidnapping."
Professor Salim Abdulla, from the local university told IPS that U.S. soldiers claimed to have found a room in a house where prisoners were tortured, and also found barrels of chlorine. In recent months chlorine bombs have been used to blow up cars.
But Abdulla added, "What is disastrous is that before the members of al-Qaeda ran away from Qatoon (district of Baquba), they killed prisoners who had been kidnapped for getting money from their families as ransom."
Others spoke to IPS of the damaging effects of the U.S. military cordon around the city that was denying basic needs like medical care, food, water and security.
An expatriate programme manager for an international organisation, who did not wish to be named, told IPS that "the military operations are still continuing and the roads are still closed. One of my sources said that on Friday in Qatoon quarter a house was bombed and an entire family was killed. Only a baby survived."
The manager told IPS that tens of thousands have fled the Qatoon area. "Because of the closure (of roads and parts of the city) in Baquba the price of food has increased dramatically," she said. "Earlier 50 kg of flour cost 11 dollars. Now it is 40 dollars."
Only bicycles and animal-drawn carts are being allowed to bring basic supplies such as vegetables and fuel into the city, she said.
"Recently Iraqi police and ambulances have started removing the bodies," Mahdi Ameen Azawi, a 47-year-old retired Iraqi military officer who lives in Qatoon told IPS.
"This quarter remained under siege up to now," he added. "People suffered from the absence of electricity, water and food."
(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq's Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
