Source: Page 293 of White Noise Keywords: "walked," "porch," "separates," "injury"

From: ACJ <news@acj.org> Subject: [ADC Updates] ACJ Palestine/Israel News -- August 12, 2002 Date: 12 Aug 2002 Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive

Compiler Note: In today's news, the recurring theme in a number of articles revolves around how the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has hardened attitudes on both sides, preventing each from relating to the other's suffering. The LA Times reports on a survey of Palestinain public opinion indicating a hardening of opinion. An article out of the UK in the Guardian by award-winning jounalist Suzanne Goldberg reports on how each side feels like only they are the victims. Australia's Sydney Morning Herald provides one more example of the humiliation and violence suffered by Palestinins at the hundreds of Israeli checkpoints all over the Occupied Territories. In an example of the indiscriminate shooting of civilians associated with these checkpoints, AP reports on the shooting at a taxi carrying an Israeli journalist and his cameraman. R. Dajani. ------------------------------------------------------ Palestinian Poll Results 'Alarming' By Tracy Wlikinson Los Angeles Times August 12, 2002 The Mideast Threat That's Hard to Define By Youssef M. Ibrahim Washington Post, Opinion August 11, 2002 Soldier Opens Fire on Israeli Journalist in Taxi   Associated Press August 12, 2002 Angry Israelis Pressing Sharon To Do More To Prevent Attacks By Matthew Guttman The FORWARD August 9-16 Issue Looksee Lawyer Failed to see Soldiers' Brutality By Jonathan Steele Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) August 12, 2002 Low-Intensity Ceasefires The Economist (UK) August 12, 2002 'It's Gone Beyond Hostility' By Suzanne Goldenberg The Guardian (UK) August 12, 2002 Mid-East Economic Woes Deepen By Caroline Hawley BBC (UK) August 12, 2002 Palestinian Malnutrition Bodes Ill for the Future By Catherine Cook Haaretz, Opinion (Israel) August 12, 2002 If Truce Gauntlet is Thrown, will PM Pick it Up? By Bradley Burston Ha'aretz (Israel) August 12, 2002 Palestinian Factions Discuss Plan to Limit Terror Attacks By Ellis Shuman Israel Insider (Israel) August 12, 2002 The Other Anti-Semitism By Omayma Abdel-Latif Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt) August 9-16 Issue Extremists Share Mideast Violence Blame By Ray Hanania Jordan Times, Opinion (Jordan) August 12, 2002 ------------------------------------------------------- Palestinian Poll Results 'Alarming' By Tracy Wlikinson Los Angeles Times August 12, 2002 A new survey of Palestinian public opinion due to be released today shows a further hardening of attitudes and a rise in support for an Islamic political system over a democratic one. The poll by Birzeit University, the Palestinians' oldest institution of higher learning, suggests that a majority would vote for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat if he ran for reelection. But the most important criteria for a president, Palestinians said in the poll, are the ability to "confront Israel" and remain committed to "Islamic values." Nader Said, the Birzeit sociologist who conducted the survey, said the results are troubling for anyone who wants to build a democratic, pluralistic Palestinian state. He said the last 23 months of violence and extremism have erased any gains made before the outbreak of the current intifada, or uprising, and have radicalized the society. Deepening poverty and the failings of the Palestinian Authority have helped push people toward Islamic militancy, he said. "There has been a major shift in Palestinian political culture that has negative social implications," Said said. "It's extremely alarming from my perspective." Among the causes for concern, he said, is the large majority of 18-to 22-year-olds who said they would not vote for a woman for president. Overall, 54% of the respondents said they would be willing to vote for a woman. In choosing a political system, 42% favored a democratic, pluralistic one, and 42% wanted one-party Islamic rule. Birzeit's Development Studies Program conducts such surveys regularly but had not previously posed this question. From other polling done in the late 1990s, however, Said estimated that support for democracy has dropped about 20 percentage points. It is not clear whether such views are permanent. Though support for radical Islamic organizations such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad has increased, some of the extremism may be exaggerated as a way of defying what Palestinians perceive to be U.S.-and Israeli-imposed ideas, Said said. To conduct the poll, researchers hiked over back roads and through ditches to reach many of the targeted 75 towns and villages, most of them cut off by Israeli army restrictions. The survey reflects widespread skepticism about presidential, legislative and local elections called by Arafat, and about announced measures aimed at reforming the Palestinian Authority's security services and financial system. Neither elections nor reform were seen as likely to improve Palestinians' lives. In a piece of bad news for U.S. policymakers, similar skepticism was expressed about the U.S. role in the region. Ninety-one percent said Washington is demanding reform of Palestinian institutions merely for its own political interests, with only a fraction believing that the reforms are designed to benefit the Palestinian people. Support for resuming political negotiations with the Israelis also has declined. "Two long years of extreme hopelessness and violence is going to have an impact, especially on young people who see that this intifada is not empowering them," Said said. On Sunday, scattered violence continued. The Israeli army said troops killed a Palestinian gunman who was attacking a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli was wounded by gunfire in that encounter. In the northern West Bank city of Jenin, two Israeli soldiers were wounded in a gun battle with Palestinians, the army said. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said the army opened fire on him and his photographer earlier Sunday as they were riding in a marked Israeli taxi into the West Bank city of Tulkarm. They had obtained explicit army approval to enter the town and had checked in with the soldiers on duty as they approached, Levy said. But as they drove slowly toward a second army position, the soldiers opened fire and continued to shoot, he said. Fortunately, Levy said, the car was bulletproof and no one was hurt. Also in the taxi was an investigator from Israeli Physicians for Human Rights. Levy, who writes for the liberal newspaper Haaretz, specializes in articles about the suffering of Palestinians and was traveling to Tulkarm to look into the killing last week of a Palestinian teenager. The army said Sunday evening that the shooting was a mistake and apologized. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer called Levy to express his regret, Israeli radio reported. The Mideast Threat That's Hard to Define By Youssef M. Ibrahim Washington Post, Opinion August 11, 2002 There are people inside the American defense establishment -- the most powerful, technologically sophisticated military in the history of mankind -- who believe that the greatest threat they face today may come from followers of an early 18th century religious extremist who called for a renewal of Islamic spirit, moral cleansing and the stripping away of all innovations to Islam since the seventh century. Those disciples are known as Wahabis. Their namesake would have vanished into obscurity but for an act of political savvy that assured his followers influence over what has become one of the world's wealthiest, most pivotal regions. In 1745, the religious leader Mohammad Ibn Abdul Wahab forged an alliance with Mohammad Ibn Saud, the principal tribal leader of a large portion of the Arabian peninsula. Ibn Abdul Wahab wanted to propagate his brand of Islamic orthodoxy. Ibn Saud wanted to unite tribes and secure political command, becoming the founder of the Al Saud dynasty that still rules what is now known as Saudi Arabia. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, perpetrated by people who mostly came from Saudi Arabia, "Wahabism" has entered the vocabulary of American policy makers almost as synonymous with death, destruction and terror. Moreover, Wahabi teachings and influence in Riyadh have colored our image of Saudi Arabia, threatening to move it from the category of a friend helping to stabilize oil prices and the region to one of a foe alien to our values and bent on hurting us. Less obvious, however, is that the Sept. 11 attacks also have strained ties between the "Wahabis" and Arab governments. The alliance between the House of Saud -- wealthy, cosmopolitan, and increasingly Western in tastes and habits -- and the proponents of an austere form of Islam based on a literal interpretation of the Koran is becoming harder to sustain. An increasing number of newspaper commentators, regional leaders and Saudi officials are daring to speak up against the backwards "Wahabi" vision of society. And Persian Gulf governments are taking a tougher line against extremists once thought to be useful, or at least relatively harmless. Instead of representing growing Wahabi power, the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath in Afghanistan may signal the peak of Wahabi influence, and a turning point in Arab attitudes toward such extremists. These nuances are important for the United States as it wages its war against terror and tries to decide, to paraphrase the president, who is with us and who is against us. The Bush administration must better distinguish between Islam and the real enemy -- radical extremists within Islam. Otherwise we risk a collision with 1.2 billion Muslims around the word who do not appreciate being demonized -- as Saudi officials felt they were the other day by a report leaked to this newspaper -- just because they disagree with our policies in the Middle East or our plans to invade Iraq. It is true that the links between Saudi rulers and Wahabi followers have been real and durable. The pact of mutual convenience made more than 250 years ago continues. The Saudi minister of religion is always a member of the Al Sheikh family, descendents of Ibn Abdul Wahab. Moreover links between Ibn Abdul Wahab and the house of Saud have been sealed with multiple marriages. The Wahabis' sway over mosques has ebbed and flowed, but they possess their own notorious religious police and have extended their reach via networks of schools throughout the Muslim world. It is difficult to pinpoint the boundaries of Wahabism. It is not a religion or an offshoot of Islam. Its followers are not a tribe or ethnic group, and they prefer to identify themselves as muwahiddun, which means "the unifiers." As Abdallah Al Obeid, the former dean of the Islamic University of Medina and member of the Saudi Consultative Council, explains, Wahabism is a political trend within Islam that has been adopted for power-sharing purposes. "It has no special practices, nor special rites, and no special interpretation of religion that differ from the main body of Sunni Islam," he says. It is, however, extremely austere and rigid. It tolerates little dialogue and less interpretation. It frowns on idolatry, tombstones or the veneration of statues and artworks. Wahabis forbid smoking, shaving of beards, abusive language, rosaries and many rights for women. They expect their followers to pray five time a day and they regard all those who don't practice their form of Islam, including other Muslims, as heathens and enemies. Their prominence is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the 1950s, Cairo, infused with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalism, was the intellectual center of the Arab world. But the massive Israeli victory over Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War dealt a blow to Nasser's prestige. Islamic religious leaders stepped into that ideological vacuum. When the big oil money of the 1970s started flooding the Persian Gulf region, the balance in religious matters shifted away from the progressive Levantine version of Islam that existed in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria, to the Wahabis' rigid tendencies. As millions of Egyptian, Moroccan, Pakistani and other guest workers poured into Saudi Arabia, they returned home with both money and a new religion. Egypt started to tip over. Anwar Sadat, who had struck his own alliance with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood to fight the remnants of Nasserism, was killed by it. Later there were at least five attempts by Islamic extremists against the life of his successor, Hosni Mubarak. The war against the Soviets in Afghanistan gave radical Islam a chance to deploy its military prowess. Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt profited, fattening their ranks with new recruits and coffers with new contributions. At that time, the American government considered the Saudis' links with these groups useful. With the encouragement of the Carter and Reagan administrations, the Saudis funded the jihad against the Soviets jointly with the CIA, while Egypt gave the mujaheddin arms from its arsenal and Pakistan provided land and training grounds. Ironically, the money that brought Wahabis power throughout the Arab world and financed networks of fundamentalist schools from Sudan to northern Pakistan, has also widened the gap between Wahabis and Arab societies. Increasingly, the Wahabi outlook is detested by the Saudi ruling elite, the growing middle class and the vast powerful business community in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month at a conference on Islam in Amman, Jordan's Crown Prince Hamzeh urged educational reforms to "prepare our students . . . to integrate into the modern world" and "set them free from their isolated mentality." The attack on the United States by al Qaeda may spell the beginning of the end of this brand of radical Islamic extremism, as people in the region deal with the harm Wahabi disciple Osama bin Laden has done to the reputation and welfare of Muslims around the world. The entire Saudi religious establishment is under pressure from both the royal family and the Saudi public. For the first time, artists, politicians and pundits are openly criticizing the clergy in Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia and throughout the world of Islam. The historic alliance between the Sauds and Wahabis may be coming apart -- unless we in the United States intervene with unreasonable demands for instant reforms couched in barely disguised racial slurs. Instant anything in Saudi Arabia or the conservative world of Islam is impossible. The simple-speak propagated by the Bush White House, has mixed mainstream Islam with Wahabism into a confusing mish-mash. The two are different. True, Arab governments coddled the fundamentalists. But so did we. The United States gave a green card to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in recognition for his service in rounding volunteers in Egypt to fight the Soviets. He ended up with a life sentence for conspiring to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and the World Trade Center. I would argue that just as the 1967 war spelled the end of Nasserism, the Sept. 11 attack will mark the beginning of the end of radical extremist Islam in all its varieties. The money from Islamic charities is drying up. After Sept. 11, the "swamps" that provided recruits are drying up, too, so much so that two Islamic groups in Egypt, Jihad and al Gamaa al-Islamiya, have formally announced they are abandoning the armed struggle. In Saudi Arabia, half the population of 18 million sees Wahabism as oppressive. The same goes for people in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait. That does not automatically translate into loving the United States. The bin Laden attacks have given us an opening, though. Millions of Muslims who belong to the secular middle and business classes and the ruling elites also detest Muslim fundamentalists. But they equally detest our Middle East policy. It is time to bond with them on fighting fundamentalism without demanding that they subscribe to every one of our policies. Our friends there, the secularists, need to be offered a way to bond with us instead of being presented with simplistic choices of black and white. Youssef M. Ibrahim is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Soldier Opens Fire on Israeli Journalist in Taxi   Associated Press August 12, 2002 An Israeli soldier in the West Bank opened fire on a taxi carrying a prominent Israeli journalist who said Monday the shots were fired without warning. The army said the soldier and an officer would be tried.   The incident occurred Sunday morning in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, as the taxi, which had Israeli license plates, approached an army post. Shots hit the bulletproof windshield of the armored taxi. Gideon Levy, a correspondent for the daily Haaretz newspaper, a Haaretz photographer and a representative from the organization Physicians for Human Rights were in the vehicle. They were not injured. Levy, who writes weekly stories about the lives of ordinary Palestinians, said the incident was not unusual. ''What happened ... happens every day in the occupied territories,'' Levy said. ''The only difference was this time it was an Israeli Jew and a journalist.'' A number of Palestinians have been killed and wounded in roadblock shootings in nearly two years of fighting. The army has denied Palestinian allegations that soldiers are quick to fire at what they consider suspicious vehicles without justification. Levy said the group's visit to Tulkarem, which is under tight curfew, had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli army. The taxi waited for two hours at a roadblock while soldiers confirmed that it was allowed to continue. When the taxi entered the town, it traveled freely until it met an armored personnel carrier, Levy said. Officers ordered the taxi to drive to a nearby army post. Driving slowly, the taxi approached the post when suddenly a soldier stationed at a lookout post opened fire, Levy said. ''There was no warning ... just shooting to kill,'' Levy said According to a report in Haaretz the soldier who fired the shots testified that he first fired a warning shot over the taxi, then shot at the wheels and only then at the hood. The military said in a statement that a preliminary investigation concluded that there had been a lack of coordination between various positions in the area and that the soldier who had fired the shots erred. The army apologized for the incident and said the soldier and the officer would be put on trial. ''(Lack of coordination) is one of the problems. But the main problem is the easy hand on the gun,'' Levy said. Angry Israelis Pressing Sharon To Do More To Prevent Attacks By Matthew Guttman The FORWARD August 9-16 Issue Reeling from a seemingly endless wave of terrorist attacks  including six attacks in one 24-hour period this week that left 13 Israelis dead Israelis are growing increasingly impatient with their government's inability to stem the bloodshed. "There is neither peace nor security, and there are no diplomatic goals," said Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the rightist Israel Beiteinu- National Union party and onetime ally of Prime Minister Sharon. "Sharon is merely fighting for his position in the polls. He should take Peres and go with him hand in hand to a nice nursing home, the sooner the better." The latest spate of attacks comes less than a week after Israel's state comptroller, Eliezer Goldberg, released a scathing report accusing the government and the defense establishment of dragging their feet in implementing a plan to prevent terrorist infiltrations across the so- called seam-line separating Israel proper from the West Bank. "The government has not allocated the necessary resources to carry out all the elements of the [seam line] plan, while implementation of all the elements was a condition for its overall success," charged the report, written in March and released last week. Indeed, Israelis were stunned this week to learn that the central aspect of the plan, a much-touted fence begun two months ago and expected to stretch about 65 miles along the northern West Bank, is now only about 120-feet long. A poll published in the Friday issue of the Israeli daily Ma'ariv shows that Sharon's approval rating has dropped to just 52%, his lowest showing in months. Sharon has fallen to dead-even with his Likud rival, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in public preference for prime minister. The poll shows the public impatient for action against terrorists and dismissive of moderation. Fully 61% said they supported last month's bombing raid against a Hamas leader in Gaza, in which 17 Palestinians, including 12 children, were killed; only 26% said they opposed it. Asked how they believed the raid would affect future terrorist attacks, 44% said it would probably increase the likelihood of attacks while just 22% said it would decrease attacks. Responding to such sentiments, the government has steadily increased military pressure on the Palestinians in recent weeks, while preparing a variety of alternative plans aimed at deterring would-be terrorists. Most new plans involve harsh punitive measures, which have in turn aroused a series of objections from the state attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein. In rapid succession, the army and various government ministries in recent weeks have proposed deporting relatives of terrorists from the West Bank to Gaza, demolishing their homes and, most recently, revoking the citizenship of suspected Israeli-Arab collaborators. Both the deportations and the home demolitions have been cleared for implementation, following heated public debates. The proposed citizenship revocation, mooted this week by Interior Minister Eli Yishai, leader of the Orthodox Shas party, has aroused the fury of civil libertarians and sparked a debate between Sharon, who backed it, and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who opposed it. Critics say the revocations would violate international treaties to which Israel is signatory, but Rubinstein this week approved revocations for three Israeli Arabs suspected of aiding Hamas or Hezbollah. Palestinians, meanwhile, appear to have found antidotes almost as quickly as Israel has been able to propose deterrents. Defense officials note that Palestinian terrorist groups have ceased their practice of publishing the names of suicide bombers, in order to hinder Israeli plans to punish surviving relatives. And as Israelis learned in last week's bombing on the Hebrew University campus, which killed seven, including five Americans, the Palestinians now are even moving away from using suicide bombers. "Nobody, nothing and no group or party, can stop the suicide bombings" said Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank city of Nablus. "We've gotten to the point where few Palestinians care whether or not it helps the national cause or not." Security experts ranging from the head of the Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, to the head of the National Security Council, Uzi Dayan, continue to argue that the best way of protecting the vast majority of Israelis that do not live in the territories is a fence, which they say would effectively seal terrorists in the West Bank. The seam-line fence, slated to be operational by April-May 2003, will cost a little less than $200 million, say Defense Ministry sources. It represents just one of a half-dozen government-approved but unimplemented plans meant to thwart the infiltration of terrorists into Israel along the porous seam line. But "the government has not allocated the necessary resources to carry out all the elements of the [seam line] plan, while implementation of all the elements was a condition for its overall success," charged the state comptroller's report. Though compiled before the government approved in mid-April construction of the security fence  a series of obstacles including a fence, patrol roads, ditches and electronic monitoring systems   Goldberg, the state comptroller, said last week that the report's findings still stand. Critics on the left charge that the delay is deliberate. "Either the government is dragging its limbs for political reasons, or it is so helpless that it does not have the barest capabilities to do the job," opposition leader Yossi Sarid of the left-wing Meretz party told the Forward. "Either one is frightening." Working actively behind the scenes to block the fence is the settler movement, which considers it the first step in the creation of a de facto border between Israel and the Palestinians. "Even if the government does not intend it to be a political fence, it could ultimately be viewed as such," said Ezra Rosenfeld, spokesman for the Yesha Council of settlements. Rosenfeld also believes the fence is impractical. "It takes 15,000 soldiers to make the 50-odd-kilometer-long Gaza fence effective," he said. "Imagine the manpower necessary to make a West Bank fence effective." However, according to Defense Ministry sources, both Ben-Eliezer and Ministry director-general Amos Yaron remain dedicated to the project. Defense Ministry sources claim construction is on schedule and that hundreds of thousands of tons of earth have been moved to facilitate about 10 kilometers of fencing  only five kilometers of which are to go up in the Jenin area in the coming two months. In addition, the number of contractors working on the project will be increased from three to 10 starting Sunday, a fact which will accelerate construction. According to the state comptroller's report, one of the greatest impediments of the security plan was the Finance Ministry's refusal to provide the funds for the project and its insistence that the government bodies, mainly the Defense Ministry, pay for their share of the project out of their own budgets. Defense Ministry officials warn that the fence's $200 million price tag could cripple Israel's defense budget, already limping because of cuts in the 2003 state budget. A Defense Ministry spokeswoman, Rachel Nidek-Ashkenazi, refused to speculate on the outcome should the added funding be withheld. "I can only say" she added gravely, "that we believe this project is too cardinal, too important, not to be funded." The Forward is a Jewish weekly, published in New York. Looksee Lawyer Failed to see Soldiers' Brutality By Jonathan Steele Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) August 12, 2002 An unusual exercise in fact-finding backfired when the Israeli Attorney- General, Elyakim Rubinstein, was revealed to have been close at hand when soldiers beat a Palestinian child and two Palestinian men at the main Israeli checkpoint outside Ramallah last week. Mr Rubinstein spent five days at the checkpoint doing volunteer service as a reservist. Although other officers knew he was there, his presence was publicised only after he finished. Newspapers carried quotes saying he wanted to get a proper look at how Palestinians were treated rather than turning up for a few minutes as a VIP. "Aside from feeling a need to do his share, he also values the opportunity to become more acquainted with the distress of the Palestinian population at checkpoints", a caption in one newspaper explained. It now turns out that while he was there soldiers arrested and beat a Palestinian boy and two men so hard that a judge ordered them to be released. The newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday that Judge Michal Agmon wrote in her decision: "The sight was shocking. The backs of two of them were bloody and bruised, and the back of one of them was still bleeding. "There is no explanation for what happened to them between their arrest at 11am and 7pm when they were brought to the police station." She reprimanded the police for not investigating what the soldiers had done and for not calling a doctor at the detention centre to examine the beaten boy. Mr Rubinstein admitted to Yedioth Ahronoth that he had seen the three detainees sitting by the checkpoint at noon last Wednesday. He asked the unit commander to give them water and let them sit in the shade, he said. He also telephoned the Jerusalem police to come and fetch them. He thought their handcuffs were too tight and asked for them to be loosened. But Mr Rubinstein said he did not notice that any of them were bruised. The incident is now under investigation. Elsewhere on the West Bank, an armed Palestinian infiltrated the Jewish settlement of Mehora at the weekend, then killed a woman and wounded her husband before Israeli soldiers shot him dead. Near the Gaza Strip on Sunday soldiers killed a gunman who wounded an Israeli repairing a security fence at Dugit. Both men were members of militant group Hamas. Yesterday Ghasal Israhat, a Palestinian militant wanted by Israel, was killed by Israeli troops during a raid on al-Yamoun, near Jenin, his family said. An Israeli soldier in Tulkarem fired on a taxi carrying a prominent Israeli journalist. No one was injured. The army said the soldier and an officer would be tried, AP reported. Low-Intensity Ceasefires The Economist (UK) August 12, 2002 BY RECENT standards, it was quiet weekend. But Palestinian guerrillas killed a 31-year-old Israeli woman from a settlement in the Jordan Valley and the Israeli army shot dead three Palestinians, two of them militants, one a 55-year-old municipal worker in Nablus, killed at an army checkpoint, after the army had given him permission to work during its curfew on the city. It expressed sorrow for the death. Away from the killings, there were at least some moves afoot to reduce them. In Gaza, representatives from all the Palestinian factions met to try and agree on a policy for the two-year intifada, or uprising, and discuss, again, the fraught issue of suicide attacks inside Israel. The talks mark a renewal of the ceasefire initiative that was to have been declared by Yasser Arafats Fatah movement prior to Israels assassination of the Hamas military leader, Salah Shehada, and killing of 14 other Palestinians in Gaza City on July 22nd. No policy has yet been agreed but the goal, say Fatah sources, is threefold. First, to declare unequivocally that the aims of the Palestinians national struggle are an end to Israels occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a just solution for the Palestinian refugees. Second, to agree on the weapons and battlefield for Palestinian resistance, with Fatahs younger political leadership now clearly opposed to all attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel and perhaps also the occupied territories. Finally, to establish a temporary national government that will ensure the participation of all the factions in the Palestinian presidential, parliamentary and local elections tentatively scheduled for next year. Following the assassination of Mr Shehada, Hamas resumed its bombings inside Israel, ruling out any ceasefire not reciprocated by the Zionist enemy. Still, Hamas people are participating in the Gaza talks and for the same reason as Fatah: self-preservation. All of the factionsincluding Fatahs military wing, the al-Aqsa Brigadeshave come down against the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its preliminary acceptance of the Gaza first plan proposed last week by Israels defence minister, Binyamin Ben- Eliezer, and approved by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister. Under the plan, Israel will relax its military and economic siege on Gaza. In return the PA police will take against action against the militiasabove all, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Brigades. The plan foundered on what the Palestinians said was Israels reneging on a commitment to withdraw also from Bethlehem, one of the seven West Bank Palestinian cities under full military occupation. At a fractious cabinet meeting on Aug 11th, Mr Sharon maintained that the PA had only agreed to the Gaza first proposal as a way of mollifying the Americans. It was a ruse on their part. Mr Ben-Eliezer explained that it made sense to begin in Gaza because the Palestinian security apparatus there was still largely intact, whereas on the West Bank it had suffered extensively from Israeli attacks. The term Gaza first, comes from the early years after the Oslo peace agreements of 1994, and duly triggered a nasty exchange between Shimon Peres, the foreign minister, and several rightist ministers over whether Oslo was alive or dead and whether it had been a good thing or a disaster. The plan, however, has not been buried yet, and further PA-Israel meetings are planned this week to revive it. It is also very much tied to CIA plans to reform the PAs security forces with the assistance of the Egyptian, Jordanian and European intelligence services. Over the weekend, Mr Arafats new security advisor, Mohammad Dahlan, was in Amman and Cairo and the new interior minister, Abdel Razek Yahyia, was in Washington, DC, to discuss both Gaza First and PA reform. Mr Arafat gave his blessings to all meetings, partly to assert his authority and thwart what he saw as American attempts to transform him into an honorary president like the Afghani president, Hamid Karzai. But there are other reasons why the Palestinian leader is delegating authority for his security forces, admits one PA minister. The struggle between Arafat and Hamas is essentially over Palestinian public opinion. In the absence of a political alternative, he knows the Palestinian public is with Hamas on the issue of armed resistance and suicide attacks. This is why he now needs outside help in dealing with Hamas. Mr Sharon also has his eyes on public opinion. His consistently strong public support63% percent in a weekend poll said he was doing a good job as prime minister, though only 36% thought he could defeat terror or bring peacerests to a large degree on his ability to preserve the unity, however spurious, of the perennially-popular unity government. Despite his hardliners raucous reservations, Mr Sharon has involved himself in the renewed dialogue with the Palestinians. On August 11th, he sent his top aide, Dov Weisglass, together with other officials, to hold talks with Salem Fayad, the new Palestinian finance minister. Mr Fayad had earlier spurned the strings that Israel tried to attach to its modest first repayment of Palestinian tax revenue that it has withheld since the start of the intifada. Mr Weisglass reportedly was able to placate Mr Fayad and the repayment of an initial $40m dollars (of a total of some $450m) is going ahead. But Mr Sharons deft balancing act between cabinet moderates and extremists may be running out of energy. As the trade unions brought workers out on a three-hour nationwide strike on August 12th, to protest against rising prices and spreading unemployment, the prime ministers aides warned that he would dissolve the Knesset and call early elections if the Labour and Shas parties, his main coalition partners, persist in opposing an austerity budget he has recently tabled. The test will come in October, when the Knesset comes back from its long summer recess. Mr Sharon has often said he would like to go the full term, until November 2003. But an early electionJanuary would be the earliest the law allowscould catch his Likud rival, Binyamin Netanyahu, flat-footed. It would also catch Labour still licking the wounds after a new party leadership battle, scheduled for November. This week, a new contender has entered the lists: Amram Mitzna, mayor of Haifa, and a former general, who believes he can breathe new life into the flagging and dispirited party of peace. 'It's Gone Beyond Hostility' By Suzanne Goldenberg The Guardian (UK) August 12, 2002 There was gunfire on the day I moved out - a crack or two, followed by a burst of automatic fire and silence before the familiar wail of the ambulances made it horribly clear that this wasn't fireworks or a car engine -backfiring. The fatal shooting - a Palestinian gunman shot dead a security guard from the telephone company before being killed himself along with a Palestinian bystander - was just around the corner at the Damascus Gate of the walled city, and sounded very loud from our front porch. The packers, strangers to Jerusalem from the relatively sleepy northern town of Atlit, were shaken. When they had walked through the door, less than three hours before, the television was showing scenes of carnage from a suicide bombing of a bus in the Galilee. Another attack? They turned on a radio to hear the latest score of death, but almost immediately resumed packing. The moment was a last reminder of the intimacy of the violence of the past 22 months. Most Israelis - even if they and their loved ones have never been close to a Palestinian suicide attack - can identify at least with the location: their bus route, their cafe, their falafel stand. So can Palestinians, of course, with Israeli tanks thundering up and down the streets of their cities and towns in the West Bank. Children rattle off the calibres of the various weaponry they hear and see deployed around - and far too often at them - by the Israeli army. Almost every single Palestinian I have met here can count someone within their immediate family either dead or injured by Israeli soldiers. Some poor unfortunates have been shot twice, in their own homes. All have their own stories of lesser injury: the casual brutality with which Israeli soldiers restrict normal movement at checkpoints, the mix of fury and boredom after 50 days of living by Israel's clock, under near constant curfew. But despite the proximity with which they live and die, Israelis and Palestinians, in the main, are interested in knowing only their strand of the story. And while it would seem abundantly clear to the outside world that Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have brought only disaster, Israelis and Palestinians appear not to be suffering from doubts, but from certainties. Increasingly, Israelis are resistant to hearing or seeing anything that challenges their version of events, a nationally adopted cant that basically says: "We are the victims, they are terrorists and the whole world is against us." Palestinians, naturally, see themselves as universal victims as well. The competition for victimhood reached its apogee a few days after September 11, when Palestinians and Israelis held candelight memorials with astoundingly similar placards: "We know how you feel, we are victims of terrorism too." The sanctification of victimhood has gone further since then. Liberal Israeli commentators talk about the rise of McCarthyism. At the same time as supporters of Israel rage against the sacking of two Israeli academics from the editorial boards of obscure journals of translation in Manchester, lecturers at Israeli universities face disciplinary measures - sometimes at the instigation of their colleagues - for expressing support for the country's tiny movement of conscientious objectors in the classroom. Peace activists - and they exist only on the margins of Israel's far left nowadays - are also threatened with legal proceedings for encouraging the investigation of Israeli soldiers for war crimes. The limits of Israel's democracy are as circumscribed as they have ever been, says Jeff Halper, an American peace activist who immigrated here in 1973. "It's gone beyond hostility. You are simply dismissed. People don't listen to you. They have no idea what in the hell you are talking about. It is so clear to people that we are the good guys, and they are terrorists that just want to kill us." Such certainties do not exist any more in western countries. Since the Vietnam war, Americans have gazed on their military with a large dose of scepticism. Nobody seriously believes the army is always right. But despite two years of atrocity and siege, and growing criticism in Europe and even in America of Ariel Sharon's pursuit of a military solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, Israelis continue to see themselves as part of an ideal. Many believe that their country operates on a higher ethical standard than most. Phone-in callers to radio chatshows regularly congratulate themselves - with no apparent irony - on living in the best country in the world before going on to bewail the mess the Palestinians - not their own leaders - have got them into. Israeli politicians and generals are fond of describing their army as the most "moral" force in the world and its citizens generally believe them. And so none of the Israelis I spoke to were as struck as I was at the photographs that have begun appearing in Israeli newspapers since the army reoccupied the West Bank in June. The first searing image appeared at the beginning of July: a grinning Israeli soldier looming over two Palestinian captives, kneeling in their underpants before a cache of seized weapons. Their hands were bound behind their backs, and they were blindfolded. Once fearsome Palestinian terrorists turned into human trophies of war. The photographs reminded me of the pictures taken by British souvenir hunters more than 150 years ago, after the crushing of a rebellion by Indian soldiers against the East India Company in a whirlwind of massacres and sieges in 1858. Once fearsome opponents turned into human trophies of war. Since arriving in Jerusalem in February 2000, seven months before the eruption of the Palestinian uprising, I have lost count of the times I have heard Israelis describe Palestinians as animals, savage beasts intent on inflicting terror. Only Israelis rarely use the word Palestinian - their neighbours are much more commonly described as Arabs, part of that collection of more than 20 countries most have never seen. "Only an animal could do something like this," said a young woman at the illegal Jewish settlement of Emmanuel the day after Palestinian militants killed nine people in an ambush. "Not even animals kill just for the fun of it, like they do." Waves of suicide bombings by Palestinian militants have done much to feed that impression, enabling Israelis to deny the Palestinian humanity. So has the footage from the West Bank and Gaza shown on Israeli television: the beaming children waving their hands in the air for the cameras in celebration of a suicide attack, the ritual of martyrs' funerals, with masked men bristling with weaponry firing guns in the air as a final send-off. In recent weeks, a few Palestinian intellectuals have spoken out against the cult of bombers, recognising that suicide attacks are destroying their own society from within - and its image from without - at the same time as they are rendering it near impossible for activists inside Israel to mobilise greater publics in support of peace. But even these petitions and advertisements against suicide bombings are not voiced in moral terms. And they have not explicitly condemned suicide bombings - it would be seen as too confrontational - but cocooned their criticism in the phrase "attacks against civilians in Israel". A few days after one such petition was published in Israeli newspapers, one of the signers, a university lecturer, told a friend in Ramallah: In her heart of hearts, she still felt that the Israelis had not absorbed their full share of suffering yet. Halper and others argue that the mutual blindness between Israelis and Palestinians is far older than the current intifada. "The problem is that Zionism never recognised that there exists a Palestinian people; in other words, a people with a distinct identity, with a distinct character, with a history of their own, with legitimate claims to the country," he says. "I look at the intifada like a prison revolt, and the attitude of the Israelis is, 'what right do these inmates have in our country to resist our rules?' One thing that is hard to explain is this tremendous rage at the Palestinians in which you dehumanise them, in which you can just do anything to them with utter disgregard to them as human beings. That rage comes because these are people that don't accept our exclusive claims to the country and therefore we have to eliminate them." It is, of course, also true that many, many Palestinians are unwilling to admit the humanity of Israelis. The other week, I watched the funeral of 15 Palestinians - including nine children and three women - who were killed when Israel dropped a one-tonne bomb on one of the most crowded neighbourhoods of Gaza City to assassinate the man who was arguably one of its most dangerous enemies - the founder and military commander of Hamas. Tens of thousands of Palestinians coursed down Gaza's main street, furious and vengeful. Munira Shurab, a middle-class housewife, watched them pass from her balcony. "The hate in my heart now is too big to describe to you. I never thought I was capable of hating so much but, day after day, the anger increases," she says. I have watched a similar transformation among other acquaintances in the West Bank and Gaza: a trained Hebrew teacher, who studied in Israel, who now feels incapable of maintaining former contacts with Israeli peace activists; peace educators who now find it impossible to ring their fellow teachers in Israel - though they find themselves wondering after a bombing or a shooting if their colleagues are alive. Such sentiments cut across class and geography. The Shurabs are an ambitious family. Munira's eldest son, Amjad, has just completed the first year of a law degree. He says he wants to be a lawyer because Palestinians desperately need due process, a state based on the rule of law. He also believes that suicide bombings are perfectly defensible. Many Palestinians have tried this argument on me. Israelis have F-16s, Apache helicopters and tanks, they say, all we have are our human bombs. A corollary goes something like this: even if Palestinian militants open fire on Jewish settlement blocs, the range of the weapons is so poor they generally miss or inflict little damage, so why does that count as violence? At the heart of these arguments is the belief of many that in this nasty war for a state, the Palestinians can afford no distinction between civilian and soldier. "There are no civilians in Israel. All the Israelis are military, all of them," says Amjad Shurab. "They are all military and they all have weapons and guns, and the moment they are called up they are going to be using their weapons against me." No women, no children, no ordinary people just struggling to survive an intolerable situation. Only massed ranks of soldiers, not quite human. It's a reasoning I have encountered dozens of times among Palestinians. Though Palestinians make a point of tracking political events in Israel - knowing that they contain the key to their future - their interest has been blunted over the past few months. There is no difference, they say now, between Ariel Sharon, or any other Israeli leader. None can be trusted to negotiate a just peace; at heart, all are the same. It is a kind of thinking that has overwhelmed Israeli society. Where racist remarks were once confined to a close circle of friends - whose views were known and presumably similar - the old inhibitions have slipped away. The slow winding down of a Friday afternoon into the Jewish Sabbath is a rarefied time in Jerusalem, a few hours when the city permits itself to relax. Government offices are shut. Shops and banks close early. Errands done, people while away the afternoon in cafes, as did we last week. They were playing Edith Piaf and conversations started easily in Hebrew, English, Russian and French - for once not on "the situation" but movies, living in America, bad driving habits. Then the man at the end of the table chimed in: "Erasure," he said, inspired by talk of an Arnold Shwarzenegger movie. "That's what Israel needs to do." There was a moment's embarrassed silence. We were strangers after all. But he persisted. "Imagine if you could erase them all, starting from Jerusalem, Tulkaram and Ramallah." Mid-East Economic Woes Deepen By Caroline Hawley BBC (UK) August 12, 2002 Public services in Israel have been hit by a three-hour strike by workers demanding an increase in wages in line with inflation. The action comes as the Israeli economy is in crisis after almost two years of conflict with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, a senior United Nations official is starting a mission to assess the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories. For three hours flights in and out of Israel were suspended as government services shut down on Monday. Radio and television broadcasts were interrupted and health workers only dealt with emergencies. Israel's main union says 1.5 million workers took part in the action, which it described as a warning strike - with threats of more to come. The union wants salaries to match soaring inflation as the Israeli economy reels from the effects of the past 22 months of conflict. The government says it cannot afford to pay the workers more with increased defence spending, rising unemployment and plummeting investment. It is determined to pass a new austerity budget that would cut social welfare spending at a time when ordinary Israelis are already feeling the pinch; few can remember it being this bad. And on the Palestinian side, it is worse. Checkpoints and curfews imposed by the Israeli army have brought all normal economic life to a halt. Aid workers are now talking of a humanitarian crisis, with families forced to cut back on what they eat. A newly appointed UN humanitarian envoy, Catherine Bertini, is now beginning a mission to assess just how serious the problem is, and to determine how the United Nations should respond. Palestinian Malnutrition Bodes Ill for the Future By Catherine Cook Haaretz, Opinion (Israel) August 12, 2002 A recently released US Aid funded nutritional assessment indicates that acute and chronic malnutrition rates of Palestinian children under 5 have reached emergency levels. Some 22.5 percent of children suffer moderate or severe acute or chronic malnutrition, and one fifth suffer moderate or severe anemia. The study, designed by Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, surveyed nutrition levels, availability of food in the market and household consumption, and found that the factors affecting the dangerous rise in malnutrition directly relates to Israeli imposed movement restrictions and the dismal economic situation in the occupied territories. Major food shortages were caused primarily by Israeli imposed road closures, checkpoints, and curfews, while the economic situation and subsequent loss in purchasing power was the main factor inhibiting people's ability to buy food. Fifty-six percent of surveyed families indicated that they had been forced to decrease the amount of food consumed for more than one day in the previous two week period. Of those, two-thirds cited lack of money and one-third cited Israeli imposed curfews and closures as the reason. The study found that 36.6 percent of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza Strip lack the purchasing power to consistently feed their families. The number of families affected was highest in Gaza City, where 41.3 percent of families reported selling assets to buy food. This is how collective punishment works - Israel implements restrictions on freedom of movement, Palestinians lose their jobs inside Israel or can no longer reach their places of work in the occupied territories, and their level of income decreases. As of December 2001, unemployment had reached 35 percent in the occupied territories according to the World Bank. Figures released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) in April indicate that in the first two months of the year 2002, more than two-thirds of Palestinian households were living below the poverty line, set at US $340 a month (less than $1.90 a day). PCBS also reports that more than half of Palestinian households have lost more than 50 percent of their income since September 2000. How does this affect children? The US AID study tells us the answer - Palestinian wholesalers and retailers are facing difficulty getting food into the market, particularly fresh meat and dairy products, such as powdered milk and infant formula. Once they do, many families are either unable to reach the store, due to Israeli imposed restrictions on freedom of movement or they cannot afford to buy adequate food, both in terms of quality and quantity. The lack of purchasing power has forced Palestinians to buy less of more expensive high protein foods, such as fish, beef, and chicken. Lack of protein is one of the direct causes of malnutrition and anemia. This situation is not the result of a natural disaster or a lack of natural resources, it is a result of Israeli government sanctioned policies implemented by an occupying power against civilians, a government which is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, totaling some five billion annually. These policies are an integral part of the 35 year long Israeli occupation. What the nutritional assessment illustrates clearly is that the Israeli occupation is more than a soldier with a gun - it is a system of control that impacts every aspect of the lives of three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 53 percent of whom are children. Israeli actions are having a similarly devastating impact on other areas related to children's well being. The reality for Palestinian children is that they live in an environment where they suffer collective and concurrent violations of their rights at all times. Israeli occupation policies simultaneously prevent Palestinian children from receiving adequate nutrition, interrupt the educational process, deprive children of homes, parents and siblings, lead to the death, injury, and arrest of thousands of Palestinian children, and imprison hundreds of thousands of children in their homes for days on end, under the policy of curfew. The cumulative psychological effects of the last two years on Palestinian children have been immense and will take many years of intensive, serious work to treat. These factors not only impact the child's daily life, they constitute a major obstacle to the child's healthy development, and, thus, rob the child of prospects for a decent future. The Israeli government repeatedly asserts that it is not targeting the Palestinian civilian population, but you cannot implement policies such as these without bringing a society to its knees. You certainly cannot do it for two years and claim that the results are unintentional. And the international community cannot continue to turn a blind eye. On August 5, the UN General Assembly passed yet another watered-down resolution calling for an end to the violence on both sides. However, another resolution is not what is called for, but rather concrete action on the part of the international community to intervene to end the Israeli occupation is needed. The US AID study pointed out in its conclusion that "today's acute malnutrition will be tomorrow's chronic malnutrition unless a variety of interventions - economic, political and health related - take place." The international community would be well advised to open its eyes and take this a step further - Palestinian children today make up 53 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. What will the situation look like in 10 - 20 years when this generation of children reach adulthood? Catherine Cook is International Advocacy Coordinator for Defense for Children International - Palestine Section, a child rights NGO based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. If Truce Gauntlet is Thrown, will PM Pick it Up? By Bradley Burston Ha'aretz (Israel) August 12, 2002 The militant Islamic Hamas and Yasser Arafat's Fatah may be close to curbing their deadly strikes against civilians in Israel, but with signs of early elections in the Jewish state and a hawkish image to burnish, will - or can - Ariel Sharon rise to the diplomatic challenge of a calming trend? As Sharon dangled the possibility of early elections - as soon as January, nearly a year in advance of the scheduled ballot - the lockstep degeneration of Israeli-Palestinian violence entered a possible new phase this week, as Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Organization's central Fatah faction and 11 other Palestinian groups weighed a draft document that could spell a cessation of terror attacks in Israeli cities. Keen to shore up his credentials as a tough leader amid polls showing a slide in his popular support, rightist Likud leader Sharon has dismissed as a "trick" the recent peace feelers, including a plan for a trial IDF withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as a prelude to possible further pull-outs conditioned on a drop in Palestinian attacks. But Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of the center-left Labor Party held out hope that Hamas and Fatah might find common ground in reversing what he called a slide in the furtherance of the cause of eventual Palestinian statehood. After years of terror attacks, "The Palestinians are losing across a very broad front, they are on the threshold of de- legitimization by the United States, the gravest of matters." If Hamas consents to such an understanding, "I believe we are speaking of a total halt to attacks on civilians within the State of Israel," said Arab MK and former senior Arafat advisor Ahmed Tibi. He said the powerful Islamic organization could give its answer in a matter of days. The draft document coincided with an unprcedented paroxysm of internal criticism within Arafat's Palestinian Authority. In recent days, ranking Palestinian officials have begun speaking out against the institution of the Authority itself. West Bank and Gaza natives like Fatah lawmaker Fares Kadura have proposed dismantling the PA altogether, arguing that Arafat's current leadership lineup - which led the PLO from the Palestinian diaspora until signing peace deals with Israel in 1993-4 - placed self- perpetuation over the plight of their hard-hit constituents. The calls for breaking up the PA came from quarters as high-profile as Hanan Ashrawi, long a prominent spokeswoman for the Authority. Asked when Hamas might signal its agreement to the document, Tibi told Army Radio: "They are closer than they have ever been in the past." He said that Hamas had helped word the document, "and I believe it is a matter of days until they will give their answer regarding the substance." The draft document includes a clause endorsing Palestinian independence within the 1967 borders, an apparent departure for Hamas, which does not recognize Israel and is explicitly dedicated to an Islamic Palestine encompassing the borders of present-day Israel as well as the territories. A senior Hamas official indicated that Hamas would reserve the right to continue to argue for a Palestinian state on all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Nonetheless, Tibi said, "The fact that Hamas is meeting in a kind of modus vivendi with the Fatah organization over establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders, is an important point. Tibi added that the agreement constituted "important progress" despite the implication that attacks would continue in the West Bank and Gaza. Alluding to previous cease-fire discussions that ended when Hamas military chief Salah Shehadeh was killed in an July IAF bombing that killed 11 children and a number of adult civilians, Tibi said he hoped that until Hamas was ready to sign the current accord "no F-16 airplane will kill any Palestinian leader." Tibi said the assassination "cut off a historic move." Having a hardline image of its own to maintain, even if hardline Hamas decides to join the effort to quell attacks, it may well refrain from any public acknowledgement of having done so, says Ha'aretz Arab Affairs Editor Danny Rubinstein. "There is very wide Palestinian public support for terror attacks within Israel, and Hamas, which enjoys the massive backing of the majority of the public, will not want to commit itself." In order to avoid the appearance of having capitulated to Israel, '"Perhaps Hamas will stop the attacks in practice, but it is almost 100 percent sure that it will make no official announcement to that effect." The continuing Palestinian loss of faith in the peace process was reflected in a public opinion poll conducted by the West Bank's Bir Zeit University and quoted by Israel Radio on Monday showed that support for peace talks with Israel had sharply declined over the last six months - from 70 to 55 percent. Hopes for a diplomatic solution have also dimmed markedly on the Israeli side. However, a prime minister with a peace plan could still marshal broad public support behind a diplomatic offensive, argues Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Samet. "A majority in Israel still exists for re-opening negotiations with the Palestinians. Also, once a leader here stands behind such an initiative, all of a sudden it can garner support from a number of sources, among them the frustration of the Israeli public and the fact that Israelis basically want to live in peace, just as, basically, Palestinians want to live in peace." Samet said that the Sharon-led military offensives had significantly weakened the Palestinian leadership. "If one of the outcomes is that Fatah as well as Hamas are ready to negotiate, that could constitute an achievement, providing - and this is a big caveat - that Sharon did this with the sincere intention of using this momentum in order to enter negotiations." But Samet says no evidence has yet been seen to suggest that Sharon would bend to pick up a truce gauntlet, were it to be thrown. "The last time around, when was serious news that such talks were going on and more were underway, he bombed Shehadeh," Samet notes. "I am among those who believe that the timing of the attack on Shehadeh - which had been called off eight times previously - had to do with news of an impending agreement over a cessation of terror strikes. "Another leader might have used the opportunity either sincerely to sit down and discuss an opening, or to call their bluff. He didn't do either." Moreover, as the Israeli political climate heats up and elections loom, "Sharon believes that this is not a good time - if there is such a thing - to make a move that might lead to wider negotiations, which could eventually necessitate far-reaching concessions on Israel's part. He doesn't want to step into the electoral arena with what he thinks many would see as selling out, as a blot, a stain on his record. The failure to initiate diplomacy or to take advantage of a string of opportunities, when relative calm appeared to meet his own stringent conditions for a return to a peace process, "has been, and unfortunately, is going to continue to be, Sharon's major fault as a leader." In any case, cautioned Peres, traditionally the indefatigable champion of diplomatic lost causes, a halt to attacks within Israel could backfire on the Palestinian groups, if it were accompanied by continuing assaults in the West Bank and Gaza. "This would be a mistake of the first magnitude, because Israel would then transfer all of its priorities to the setters and the settlements," which Palestinian militants view as their arch- enemies. "We would not have any alternative but to invest there, to entrench there, to deploy more soldiers there." Palestinian Factions Discuss Plan to Limit Terror Attacks By Ellis Shuman Israel Insider (Israel) August 12, 2002 Various Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been holding intensive meetings in the last few days discussing proposals presented by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement that would limit "resistance efforts" in a partial cease- fire. The document under discussion would call for actions to be focused against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "I believe we are speaking of a total halt to terror attacks within the state of Israel," MK Ahmad Tibi (Ta-al) told Army Radio today. Tibi said Hamas was "closer than they have ever been in the past" to signing such a cease-fire plan, and expected the organization to give an answer "within days" to the Fatah proposal. "The fact that Hamas is meeting in a kind of modus vivendi with the Fatah organization over establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders, is an important point," Tibi said. He said that despite its implication that terror attacks would continue in the West Bank and Gaza, the proposed document constituted "important progress." Alluding to Israel's air strike on July 23, which killed Hamas militant leader Salah Shehada and 14 other Palestinians, and which reportedly cut short previous cease-fire discussions, Tibi said he hoped that until Hamas was ready to sign the current accord, "no F-16 airplane will kill any Palestinian leader." He said Shehade's assassination "cut off a historic move." In an interview on Radio Monte Carlo, Ismail Hania, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, said that the document being discussed would declare that the Palestinian struggle would be concentrated within the areas Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War; namely the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Ha'aretz reported. Hania confirmed that Hamas was partaking in the discussions, but had not yet given its final approval to the proposal. Israeli Channel Two television reported Sunday that Hamas representatives were absent from the discussions being held in Gaza yesterday. Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin refrained from endorsing the cease-fire efforts, and said, "We will continue to defend ourselves; this doesn't count as terror." Palestinian sources connected to the Supreme Intifada Monitoring Committee - an umbrella group of all Palestinian political organizations - said that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would eventually agree to the document, as soon as they had received approval from their political leadership overseas, ynet reported. According to the sources, both organizations want to refrain from harming the Palestinian public, and to limit damage to the Palestinian cause in international public opinion. The Gaza talks came as Palestinian officials completed their meetings in Washington with high-level American officials. "The talks were very positive," Arafat told reporters, referring to the meetings between Interior Minister Abdel Razek al-Yehiye and CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam quoted Yehiye as saying that the talks were "constructive, serious, and fruitful" without elaborating. But senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that the Washington talks had not achieved a breakthrough in PA-U.S. relations. Meanwhile, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) criticized Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for "marginalizing" the council. Council members declared Arafat's new cabinet "illegal" because it was never presented to the PLC for approval. PLC members Kadura Fares and Hanan Ashrawi called for the dismantlement of the entire Palestinian Authority. The Other Anti-Semitism By Omayma Abdel-Latif Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt) August 9-16 Issue  "May the holy name visit retribution on the Arabs' heads, cause their seeds to be lost and annihilate them, cause them to be vanquished and cause them to be cast from the world. It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must give them missiles, with relish. Annihilate them, the evil ones." Those words were spoken by the leader of Israel's Shas Party, Rabbi Ouvadia Ben Yousef. Such a striking case of overtly racist comments comes to mind in the lead up to a lawsuit charging that an Egyptian newspaper was guilty of "perverse racism" in its coverage of Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Tomorrow, a Paris court will look into a case initiated against Ibrahim Nafie, editor-in-chief of Cairo's Al-Ahram newspaper, chairman of the board of the daily's mother organisation (which also publishes Al-Ahram Weekly) and chairman of the press syndicate. The case was launched by the Paris-based Jewish group, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. Nafie is charged with inciting hatred against Jews by publishing an article entitled "A Jewish pie from Arab blood" on 10 October 2001 by journalist Adel Hamouda. The French Jewish group deemed the article anti-Semitic. Nafie's summons by the French court has drawn angry responses from across the Arab world and this week witnessed a show of support from the Press Syndicate, the Bar Association and human rights organisations who vowed "to stand by him [Nafie] so as not to be intimidated by such attempts to silence criticism of Israel". Observers told Al-Ahram Weekly that the case was "politically motivated" since it comes at a time when both the Arabs and Israelis are engaged in a war of words and imagery to win international support for their position with respect to the Palestinian Intifada. This competition over public opinion is particularly strong in Europe, which the International League Against Racism and Anti- Semitism claims is sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight. That the Arab press, in general, and the Egyptian press, in particular, is anti- Semitic is almost an article of faith for the Jewish lobby in Europe and the United States. Portrayal of the Arab media as replete with anti-Jewish rhetoric and racist incitement has been part of the Israeli campaign to defame Arab journalism in the West. Emad Gad, editor-in-chief of Mokhtarat Israelia [Israeli Selections] -- a monthly journal published by the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies -- and an expert on Israeli affairs, said the case against Nafie was merely a continuation of Israel's relentless efforts to win sympathy by invoking the charge of anti-Semitism. "They [the Israelis] exploit historic events that have resonance for Europeans. They think that by accusing the Arabs of anti-Semitism, they will undermine criticism against Israel in Europe and create sympathy for their side," he said. Gad's argument seems to hold water within a European context, since previous attempts to silence critics of Israeli policies have borne fruit. A Western journalist told the Weekly, "Many journalists back down from criticising Israel because to do so would put their careers in jeopardy." In explaining the reason behind pro-Israeli groups' constant accusations of anti-Semitism against their critics, Britain's Channel Four correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, herself a Jew, wrote in the London- based New Statesman magazine on 13 May 2002, "The moment Europe's Jews say the threat [of anti-Semitism in Europe] has diminished or disappeared, Israelis fear the reason for their state is undermined. They need anti- Semitism." "Israeli politicians," added Hilsum, "want that collective guilt to define European attitudes to the Middle East today. But pretending Europe has not changed in 60 years does not give Israel licence to do what it likes in the Palestinian territories it occupies." The case of the French Jewish group serves as an example of how Israel uses anti-Semitism as part of a strategy to ensure its survival. One observer said that the case initiated against Nafie in France could be interpreted within the context of the Israeli government's campaign that targets France's Jewish community, estimated at 600,000, making it the third largest community outside Israel after Russia and the US. Spokesmen for the Israeli government have made repeated calls for France's Jews to emigrate. In February, Sharon himself said Israel was preparing for an exodus of French Jews due to "a dangerous wave of anti- Semitism". On 10 April, the Israeli government said the emigration of France's entire Jewish community had become a "necessity" and announced the setting up of an inter-ministerial committee on the issue. Following Jean-Marie Le Pen's success in the first round of France's presidential elections, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Elie Yisha, who heads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, called on French Jews to emigrate to Israel, insisting that the "Jews of Europe, and the Jews of France, in particular, cannot remain indifferent in the face of growing anti- Semitic attacks, which the French authorities seem unable to stop". But in the view of some Western journalists, and a few Arab critics, the Arab press does play into the hands of Zionist groups since they sometimes permit the use of a discourse cluttered with indiscriminate slurs against Jews that range from marked insensitivity to crude racism. Such a discourse amounts to what one British journalist of Jewish background described as "European Christian anti-Semitism which fills the pages of Arab newspapers". In response to this claim, Egyptian journalists who spoke to the Weekly referred to "the context" into which this so-called anti- Semitic language emerged in the Arab press. "It did not happen in a vacuum," said Gad. "Since the Intifada, both the Arabs and the Israelis have been engaged in this 'tit for tat' war of words which has sometimes slipped into racist remarks on the Arab side," Gad said. He pointed out what he described as "the conspicuous absence" of any reference in the Western media of what he called "the other anti-Semitism" that is taking place in Israel against the Arabs --  both Muslims and Christians. "The ubiquity of Israeli incitement against Arabs and Muslims is barely commented upon in the Western press," Gad told the Weekly. "It is always underplayed -- if it is mentioned at all. One can rightly claim that they [the Israelis] also resort to incitement but this is hardly mentioned in the Western press," said Gad, who pointed to a thick file of newspaper clippings and statements by Israeli politicians and writings by rabbis that he says are full of extremely racist and anti-Arab rhetoric. According to Salaheddin Hafez, the secretary- general of the Arab Journalists Federation, Nafie's case sets a precedent that will throw the door open for similar cases to be initiated by Zionist organisations. In a pre-emptive move, an Egyptian journalist lodged a complaint this week with the Paris- based Reporters Without Borders Organisation (RSF), urging it to look into what he described as the relentless attempts by Jewish groups based in Europe to silence any criticism directed against Israel in the Arab press by accusing it of being anti- Semitic. In response to the complaint which spoke of the intimidation that Arab journalists are subjected to by pro-Israeli groups, Virigine Locussol, who is in charge of the Egyptian affairs section of the RSF, said "it is a very big problem in France, too." Locussol mentioned the case of the French Journalist Daniel Merme of Radio France International who was also accused of anti-Semitism because "he aired a programme from Gaza in which Palestinians talked about the situation under the Israeli occupation," Locussol told the Weekly by telephone. The RSF itself came under attack when the organisation included the Israeli Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz (during the period November 2001 until July 2002 on its list of "predators", or the enemies of journalists, which is posted on its Web site. RSF removed Mofaz from the list when he retired, but added Ariel Sharon. "When we were in Gaza a few months ago, we were denied press accreditation. So if you criticise the Israeli army, you are dubbed anti-Semitic," Locussol said. Locussol and others criticise the Arab press for exaggeration. "It is a pity that sometimes they publish articles which exaggerate. I would tell them, you don't need to exaggerate. The facts are already horrible." But Locussol had a warning for the Israelis, too. "If any of the critics of Israel are dubbed as anti-Semitic, it is something terrible for the memory of the Jewish people who died because of anti- Semitism. They render this term banal and use it to put pressure on others," Locussol added. Extremists Share Mideast Violence Blame By Ray Hanania Jordan Times, Opinion (Jordan) August 12, 2002   IT IS easy to get caught up in the escalating cycle of Middle East violence. But placing all the blame on one side is wrong and feeds the violence. Though I am Palestinian-American, I don't blame one side. I blame both. I also blame President George W. Bush. Two weeks ago, there was an Israeli terrorist attack that killed innocent civilians including many children. The attack was premised on killing a man the Israelis allege (but never proved) is responsible for numerous bombings. Last week, it was a Hamas terrorist attack at a university in occupied Jerusalem. Both sides term their attacks retaliation. It is easy for Palestinians and Israelis to stand across from each other and point fingers. But the real solution is to acknowledge that the majority of Palestinians and Israelis are victims of extremists on both sides, who use violence to block peace. It is a simple analysis, an alternative to the commonly held belief that many Americans have as a result of a heavily pro-Israel media spin. The conflict is not between Palestinians and Israelis. It is between those who support peace through compromise and those who don't. The real dividing line separates extremists from moderates. On one side are the Palestinian and Israeli extremists using terrorism to prevent peace. Their goal is to block an accord that would require concessions. That is the purpose of the violence that has taken place on both sides in the past two years. Extremist Israelis don't want to surrender land they occupied in 1967. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a fundamentalist extremist who also seeks to destroy his long-time foe, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Extremist Palestinians don't want to surrender what they insist is their right to lands occupied in 1948, and they also want to undermine Arafat's government, the only Palestinian authority that has ever publicly recognised Israel's right to exist in the context of land-for- peace compromise. In the middle are the majority who are willing to compromise but are held hostage by the growing fanaticism around them. Others are responsible, too. President Bush blames Arafat, but he says nothing about Israel's use of violence. In this one-sided approach, Bush panders to pro-Israeli extremism. His refusal to meet with Arafat fans the flames of violence by reinforcing the belief, of Palestinian extremists, that their violence is achieving their goal of blocking peace. Bush's approach is different from that of his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who torpedoed the Middle East peace process by striving not for a just and lasting peace, but for one that would put a shine on his legacy. Bush lacks the experience to lead effective foreign policy. His most significant change in policy was to walk away from the process at a time when the process needed leadership, only to return in the wave of emotional hysteria that followed the unrelated terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. It was Bush who gave Sharon the green light to launch an unjustified military assault against the civilian Palestinian population already burdened by years of a brutal military occupation. The United States has the right to dictate terms and order both sides to sit down to negotiations. After all, American taxpayers underwrite billions in dollars, primarily to the Israelis and, to some extent, to the Palestinians. When an Israeli government uses terrorism as a pretext to acquire more Palestinian land and destroy a long-time foe, and when Hamas killers use terrorism to undermine compromises, we all suffer. The conflict destabilises the world and exposes Americans to violence. It takes real courage for Palestinians, Jews and Americans to stand up together and call for an end to the conflict. -------------------------------------- The ACJ is a coalition of major Arab-American organizations dedicated to promoting a solution to Jerusalem which accommodates the deep attachments of people of the three monotheistic religions to the city, and the political aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis. American Committee on Jerusalem 4201 Connecticut Avenue, Suite 302 Washington, DC 20008 Phone (202)237-0215 Fax (202)244-3196 To unsubscribe, follow this link: <http://www.acj.org/postlister/confirm.php?liste=List&abonner=0&eposta...> ================================= American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee 4201 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20008, U.S.A. Tel: (202) 244-2990, Fax: (202) 244-3196 E-mail: adc@adc.org Web   : http://www.adc.org To unsubscribe from Updates@adc.org: http://adc.org/mailman/listinfo/updates_adc.org

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