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July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
Resources:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
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The
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July
3, 2002
Obituary for
the Oslo Accords
R.I.P. Sept.
13, 1993 - Sept. 28, 2000
by Francis A. Boyle
Oslo is dead. Generals Barak and Sharon deliberately
killed off Oslo on 28 September 2000 when they knowingly instigated
the Al Aqsa Intifada by desecrating the Haram-Al-Sharif. When
Barak could not compel President Arafat into permanently accepting
the Oslo Agreement as the "final solution" for the
Palestinian People at the Camp David II negotiations in July,
he and Sharon decided to revert to inflicting raw, naked, brutal
force that would culminate in the planned reimposition of Israel's
outright military occupation upon the West Bank. All of the subsequent
violence between Israelis and Palestinians is directly attributable
to this malicious decision undertaken jointly by Barak ("Labor")
and Sharon ("Likhud") with the full acquiescence of
the United States government (under both Clinton and Bush Jr.)
every step of the way.
The Israeli/American destruction of Oslo
was only a matter of time. There was never any good faith on
the part of the Israeli government and the United States government
when it came to negotiating a just Middle East peace settlement
with the  Palestinians going all the way
back to the preparatory work for the convocation of the 1991
Madrid Conference by the Bush Sr. administration. American bi-partisanship
at work directed against Palestine and the Palestinians.
When the Israeli government finally tendered
a proposal for an interim peace agreement to the Palestinian
Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations in Washington
D.C. in 1992, the Palestinian Delegation rejected it because
it constituted nothing more than an apartheid Bantustan for the
Palestinian People. Akin to the legal chicanery that the Afrikaners
had unsuccessfully attempted to impose upon the Black People
in the Republic of South Africa. Or the "Indian reservations"
that the United States has so far successfully imposed upon its
Indigenous Peoples. Not surprisingly, the United States government
fully supported Israel in its attempt to impose this apartheid
Bantustan upon Palestine and the Palestinians.
Nevertheless, the Palestinian Liberation
Organization applied enormous political pressure upon the Palestinian
Delegation and in particular its Head, Dr. Haider Abdul Shaffi,
to accept the Israeli Bantustan proposal right then and there
in Washington, D.C. This he adamantly refused to do. But it then
became incumbent upon Dr. Abdul Shaffi to produce an anti-Bantustan
model that would (1) protect and promote the Palestinian right
to their own independent and viable nation state; (2) be negotiable
in good faith with Israel; and (3) convince the PLO leadership
in Tunis that these twin objectives could be accomplished. It
was my great honor and pleasure that Dr. Abdul Shaffi and the
Palestinian Delegation turned to me at this critical time in
their Nation's history in order to devise this Palestinian alternative
to the Israeli Bantustan proposal.
This I did by means of oral briefings
and later a formal Memorandum of Law dated 1 December 1992 that
was addressed to the Palestinian Delegates to the Middle East
Peace Negotiations as well as to the top political leadership
of the PLO then headquartered in Tunis. This lengthy Memorandum
was translated into Arabic for review, consideration, and approval
by the PLO Executive Committee, which serves as the Provisional
Government of the State of Palestine, whose President was at
the time and still is Yasser Arafat. My Palestinian anti-Bantustan
model was approved by the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle
East Peace Negotiations as well as by the PLO leadership in Tunis.
In other words, there was an officially approved Palestinian
alternative to Oslo. So there did indeed exist a "choice."
Because of its historical significance,
the Board of Editors of the distinguished Arab Studies Quarterly
decided to publish this Memorandum in full in their Volume 22,
No. 3, Summer 2000 Issue, together with a brief editorial Note.
While going through this Memorandum, the reader should understand
that the Israeli proposal severely criticized therein would later
become the Oslo Agreement. In other words, this 1 December 1992
Memorandum provided the PLO leadership with a detailed roadmap
of precisely what was wrong with Oslo, what would be the negative
consequences of Oslo, and why Oslo would inevitably fail. Indeed,
this 1 December 1992 Memorandum repeatedly predicted the failure
of the Israeli proposal that would later become the Oslo Agreement,
which was signed by President Arafat at the White House on 13
September 1993.
All of this analysis was well-known to
President Arafat, Dr. Abdul Shaffi, the Palestinian Delegation
to the Middle East Peace Negotiations, and the PLO Executive
Committee well before 13 September 1993. It was for this reason
that Dr. Abdul Shaffi and several of the Palestinian Delegates
refused as a matter of principle to attend the 13 September 1993
White House signing ceremony. They knew Oslo was a Bantustan
and thus wanted nothing at all to do with it. Hence, contrary
to some news media accounts and academic speculation, President
Arafat knew exactly what he was signing on 13 September 1993.
He had been fully informed and properly advised. But he signed
on to the Oslo Bantustan anyway.
In our conversations before Oslo was
signed and afterwards, the greatest fear and concern shared by
Dr. Abdul-Shaffi and me was that Oslo would set off a Palestinian
civil war. This would not have bothered the Israelis and the
Americans one bit. But to his great credit, so far President
Arafat has refused to ignite a Palestinian civil war in the name
of enforcing the Oslo Bantustan.
Precisely because President Arafat would
not do their dirty work for them, the Israelis and the Americans
then turned upon him. Both the Israelis and the Americans have
decided to jettison President Arafat in preference to installing
some Palestinian quisling willing to become the "chief"
of a Palestinian Bantustan where he would employ its "reservation
police force" in order to suppress the Al Aqsa Intifada.
I doubt very seriously that the Israelis and the Americans will
succeed at imposing their nefarious objectives upon Palestine
and the Palestinians without violent resistance. What the ultimate
consequences might be I cannot predict at this time. But the
longer the United States government enables Israel to torment
Palestine and the Palestinians, the progressively less likely
a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement becomes.
In this regard, having served as Legal
Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace
Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, and in a similar capacity to
the Syrian Delegation to the Middle East Negotiations during
their First Round held in Washington, D.C. during 1991, I can
state unequivocally that if there had been good faith on the
part of the governments of Israel and the United States back
in 1991, there could have been negotiated a comprehensive Middle
East peace settlement between Israel, on the one hand, and Palestine,
Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, respectively, on the other, no later
than by the end of 1993. The conclusion is inexorable that the
governments of Israel and the United States were never seriously
interested in obtaining a comprehensive and just Middle East
peace settlement in the first place. Rather, Israel's perpetration
and prolongation of its "low intensity conflict" against
Palestine and the Palestinians as well as against Lebanon, the
Lebanese, and Palestinian refugees involuntarily living in Lebanon
suit the interests of the interpenetrated security-military-industrial-complexes
that really control the governments of the United States and
Israel.
Of course, from the Palestinian perspective,
there is nothing "low intensity" about their just struggle
for national survival against the Israeli-American juggernaut.
And there are signs that Sharon would like to unleash a major
new war against Lebanon and Syria just as he did in 1982 when
as Israel's "Minister of Defense" - truly Orwellian!
- he got the proverbial "green light" from the Reagan
administration to do so. Right now the "governments"
of the United States and Israel are plotting to launch catastrophic
aggression against Iraq, giving Sharon cover to initiate yet
another round of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians by
driving their West Bank inhabitants into Jordan. This incredibly
volatile situation could readily degenerate into another regional
war for the entire Middle East along the lines of 1948/1967/1973.
Francis A. Boyle,
Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations
of World Order, Duke University Press, and The
Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Clarity Press. He
can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU
Today's
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Robert Jensen
Lynne
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Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
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