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May 1, 2002
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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The New Crusade:
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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May
Day, 2002
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
by Baruch Kimmerling
Was or was not a massacre in Jenin is only a semantic
question. What is more important that the Jenin battle and the
brutal Israeli intrusion to the Palestinian territories just
made more clear the character of this conflict.
Ariel Sharon is a talented, experienced
statesman. He does not merely possess a talent for reading topographical
maps, but one for reading political landscapes as well. He may
not speak openly, very often, but he is always active; and his
activities reflect a great intelligence, one that has been honed
by both success and failure. Having learned from the personal
disaster of having led Israel into a war of choice in 1982, he
has carefully avoided repeating this mistake twenty years later.
Patiently, with great care, he is methodically
building circles of hatred and abysmal exasperation amongst both
Arabs and Jews. He knows how to exploit the weaknesses of a man
and his passion for honor and, apparently, for power. In this
way, he has neutralized the Labor Party, while silencing any
semblance of a true public discourse.
His comparing Arafat to Bin Laden, a
few months ago, seemed a mistake; but yet again, in retrospect,
he has proven successful at "getting inside the American
mind" and the Bush Administration, and has integrated his
own objectives into the American world war against terrorism.
Perhaps the height of his success, up until now has been the
recruitment of all the  Palestinian factions (Fatah
and its various branches, Hamas, Islamic Jihad) to cooperate
within his grand program of 2001-2. Only the majority countries
that met last week in the Beirut Summit and proposed full peace
with Israel for the first time in history are slowly refusing
to cooperate with Sharon and his cronies. But there is no doubt
that he will sway them in the near future.
Sharon is a man with a vision, a man
who desires a grand place in Israeli history books, not as the
hero of Sabbra and Shatila, nor even as the Israeli De Gaulle.
Sharon wants to enter the heroes pantheon, continuing a lineage
that includes Joshua Bin-Nun, conqueror of Canaan, King David,
builder of the Israeli Empire, and David Ben-Gurion, founder
of the modern Israeli state, expander of its borders, and the
man who uprooted most of the Arab population from within them
during the 1948 war. Ariel Sharon, who grew up and grew out of
the historical Mapai party's gardens, desires to finalize the
job Ben-Gurion began -- not merely by way of the rhetoric of
Revisionist Zionists, which speak of acts that go unfulfilled,
but rather through the creation of the irreversible actions presently
underway. Anyone claiming that Sharon has neither a clear policy
nor a master plan is mistaken and mislead. Sharon has taken upon
himself to complete the task Ben-Gurion began -- and no price
is too high.
And now, as our fears have come true,
exemplified no less by the horror of the battle over Jenin than
by the prompt answer of a suicide bomber, two ethno-national
units, so interwoven that they cannot be untangled, have passed
through a process of dizzying regression into fanatic tribalism.
The sounds of beating war drums can be heard throughout the land,
calling both the hawkish tribes to gather around the campfire,
to put on their war paint, and to go out into one last battle,
until the final annihilation of the other hated and demonic tribe.
All rational thought has been clouded by the intoxicating scent
of a primordial war of vengeance. No longer is there a left and
a right: "we" are all Jews. No longer is there Fatah
or Hamas or the Popular Front: "we" are all Arabs,
Palestinians, and Muslims, a collective of martyrs at all costs.
Indeed, we and the world of 2002 are
different from that of 1948. It is quite possible that what was
done in 1948, and yet again, today, is rightly called "ethnic
cleansing," and was vital for the existence of a Jewish
state. Perhaps, after many years, when a true reconciliation
comes between Jews and Arabs, it will be forgotten and forgiven,
as other peoples (including the Jewish people) have learned to
forget and forgive. But what is being carried out now, and will
be carried out in the days and weeks to come, will come to be
categorized among war crimes, unforgettable and unforgivable,
neither by our partners in this land, nor by the world, and principally
not by ourselves and our generations to come. As this war appears
more and more successful, from the Israeli point of view, its
tainted fruits will eradicate the legitimacy of the existence
of the state of Israel, and thus, in turn, also will diminish
our, the Israelis', power to survive in the long run. And no
one of us can say, "I didn't know, I didn't hear,"
because the writing is on the wall.
Baruch Kimmerling is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Among his recent books are The
Invention and Decline of Israelieness (University of
California Press) and with Joel S. Migdal Palestinians:
The Making of a People (The Free Press and Harvard University
Press). This article originally appeared on Dissident
Voice.
Dissident Voice: dissidentvoice@earthlink.net
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