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April 23, 2002
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
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
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Built on Lies
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April 24, 2002
Revisiting Israel
The Broken Home
By Nir Rosen
Over a year ago, I revisited Israel after a three-year
absence. As my El Al plane landed in Tel Aviv, the intercom played
an Israeli folk song of my childhood, "Its so good that
you've come home." Despite my cynicism, the child in me
wanted to cry. I stifled the nascent tears, which I rejected
as a vestigial remnant of the nationalist propaganda they had
inculcated me with in the summer camps of my coastal village.
Just like every other time I came, I was entering a maelstrom,
new and unique, yet a mere variation on the same theme of bloody
nationalism, paranoid identity and violent religion that defined
Israel.
This time it was a literal reiteration
of my childhood, when the original intifada (Palestinian uprising
that started in 1987) forced us Israelis to confront the fact
there was a population of oppressed Arabs whose aspirations we
were denying and whose land we were occupying. A new intifada
had erupted last year due to Palestinian frustrations with Israeli
arrogance and their own leadership's failures. The only feeling
I recollect from the original intifada is a sudden fear of every
Arab I saw, for perhaps he would stab me, or overturn my bus
into a ditch. Now I was returning as a man, having swallowed
years ago from the painful chalice of truth and realized that
my whole conception of good guy and bad guy, of victim and victimizer,
was backwards, and I belonged to the onerous Goliath asphyxiating
the Palestinian David. I was also returning with the knowledge
that whereas once I had dreamed of joining Israel's elite special
forces, now, even if I wanted to I could not. An Israeli foreign
service officer had informed me of a file possessed by the Israeli
government identifying me as pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist and
an "enemy of the state." Not bad for a 23-year-old.
My first morning in Israel I was awakened
by the high-pitched voice of my grandmother shouting to other
family members: "We will never give up the Temple Mount!
It is the heart of hearts of world Judaism!" The Temple
Mount is called the Haram-al-Sharif by Muslims. It is in East
Jerusalem and both sides wanted it. I groaned to my grandmother
my hope that they give back the Western Wall too, and pulled
the pillow over my head. The day I arrived, Prime Minister Ehud
Barak had indicated his acquiescence to a Clinton plan for Jerusalem's
partition. I had arrived at a time when the country was engaged
in a violent debate over whether a bunch of rocks were more sacred
than human life.
My aunt drove me to the bus station to
go to Jerusalem. She lived in a Tel Aviv suburb and described
how idyllic it was. Indeed, I agreed with her. Green hills, peace,
silence, playgrounds, flower gardens, you wouldn't know that
a brutal war was being waged against the indigenous population
half an hour away. On the way we heard on the radio of a terrorist
bombing on a bus. Three explosions, six wounded, one of them
critical. "The shopping malls were all empty when the intifada
started," she told me, "we were all afraid to go to
crowded public places. You never know where they will strike.
At least in a war you know where the fighting is, what the targets
are. You can do something. All we can do is be afraid."
Everybody in Israel spoke with resigned
dread about the next "attack," meaning terrorist bombing.
They all expected it. Although the malls and streets were full,
everybody was worried about attacks -- they were taken for granted.
Indeed, there were attacks nearly every day I was there, and
my mother insisted that I call her all the time. People expected
to die any time they went to public places. Still, Israel has
enough chemical and nuclear weapons, not to mention conventional
ones, to blow up the world, and it has one of the most powerful
militaries in the world. It should get over its pretensions of
being the besieged victim. Israel is now more often the victimizer
than the victim.
As I waited at the bus stop, the paranoia
of living in Israel finally got to me. I wondered if any of the
cars driving by was a suicide car that rams into crowded bus
stops. I looked at the two orthodox Jews standing next to me
and wondered if they were terrorists disguised as Jews (it's
happened before). They were smoking cigarettes, I thought that
was suspicious. When I got on the bus I looked at everybody on
it to make sure that they did not look like terrorists. I figured
the back of the bus was the safest place because it was the emptiest
and afforded me the best view.
At one point the bus stopped and a young
guy with a machine gun examined the baggage compartment and then
went on the bus and looked for suspicious objects. This is routine.
A young soldier sat next to me. He couldn't have been more than
twenty. He was armed with a long M16 machine gun and a shorter
cell phone on his belt so his mother could be in constant contact
with him. His hair was slicked back and carefully spiked with
gel. He wore designer sunglasses. He was a kid. I thought it
was absurd to give children power over life and death. What experience
and judgment could he have acquired that would allow him to properly
decide when to shoot? I used to admire those soldiers, with the
red berets of elite units. Now for the first time I was older
than they were and I saw what little skinny kids they are, so
young.
When the bus entered Jerusalem, I saw
many posters supporting Ariel Sharon, the right wing leader expected
to win the elections next month, with slogans such as "only
Sharon can bring peace." Well, I suppose even Slobodan Milosevic
claimed he was bringing peace. Sharon had been the architect
of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the slaughter that followed.
An Israeli judicial inquiry had subsequently held him partly
responsible for a horrible massacre of civilians and recommended
that he be fired from his position as minister of defense. Street
signs in Jerusalem are in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Somebody
had carefully erased all the Arabic from nearly every sign I
saw using black spray paint. They had actually taken the time
to do so to every sign. It was a clear statement that Arabs were
not welcome. I saw graffiti like "Arabs out!" and "Kahana
was right!" Rabbi Meir Kahana was a right wing leader who
advocated the expulsion of Israel's Arab population and imposition
of Nuremberg type laws. He was killed ten years ago. I saw some
posters commemorating the anniversary of his death and mourning
him.
I got off at the main bus station and
transferred to a local bus. It was crowded. I nervously looked
at the other passengers to see if they looked like terrorists.
How suddenly the pressure of Israeli life had gotten to me. A
man was looking at me suspiciously. I wondered why. Did I look
suspicious to him?
I walked through Jerusalem's Old City.
The markets were empty. Tourists weren't coming because of the
violence. The Palestinian shopkeepers stood idly until I approached,
whereupon they excitedly displayed their tourist trinkets and
T-shirts. It seemed ironic to me that they were selling pro-Israeli
shirts, with slogans such as "America don't worry, Israel
is right behind you!" and even Israeli military slogans.
I asked one Palestinian salesman how he could sell such items.
"This is fucking shit!" he gestured at the shirt, "but
we need money!"
I stopped by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Christians believe that Christ's body had been placed there when
he was taken off the cross. Faithful Christians could be seen
in the dim light, kissing stone, pictures and nearly everything
else. I walked up to the entrance for the Al Aksa mosque, from
where Muslims believe Muhammad rose to the sky. Israeli soldiers
barred me from entering. It was closed to tourists. This was
the Temple Mount for devout Jews. Here, they believe the Jewish
Temple had stood. And would one day stand. Finally, I made my
way to the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest sight. It was allegedly
the last remaining wall of the ancient Jewish Temple. Hundreds
of Orthodox Jews clad in black swayed by the wall. The wall did
not seem that big or impressive. Large worn out yellow stones
with a few brown bushes growing out of the cracks.
It seemed odd to me, to invest rocks
with sacred qualities. Even if there was a god, would his presence
be in a rock? Could a wall ever be holy? Wasn't it the idea that
was supposed to be holy? How can you kiss an inanimate object
in reverence? An icon, a wall, a rock? How can you kill or die
for a rock? If there were a god would he want you to? I, who
reject religion as absurd and backwards, can at least differentiate
between holding ideas as sacred, and being truly religious, by
acting in accordance with ideas through a genuine belief, and
merely going through the acts, the formalities, the rules. Cross
now, bow now, kiss this, say that. It's like military marching
drills, a way of achieving conformity and unthinking obedience.
I woke up one morning to hear of another
attack. A Jewish settler's car had been ambushed in the Occupied
Territories. It turned out that the Palestinian who shot at the
car had killed none other than Benjamin Kahana, the son of the
slain Meir Kahana, who had continued his father's crusade. Also
killed were his wife, and his children were all injured. On the
radio I heard one of Kahana's friends on the radio: "An
Arab is an Arab. They all want us out of here. They have to get
out. There will be terrorist attacks as long as there are Arabs
here..." My aunt quipped, "or as long as there are
Jews here!" The interviewer asked, "should they [the
Arabs] be expelled or exterminated?" The man responded,
"One way or another they have to get out." And would
there be any revenge attacks? "We Jews don't believe in
turning the other cheek and we don't believe in whining about
our misery for profit. We believe in revenge." And would
the acts of vengeance be directed against the perpetrators or
against any and all Arabs? "An Arab is an Arab. They are
all the same and all want the same thing. It doesn't matter."
I sat on the train from Tel Aviv to Israel's
northernmost towns to visit a cousin. A pretty female soldier
in khaki fatigues kept on making eye contact with me and then
darting her glance away when I looked back. An elderly couple
sat across from me. They were complaining to each other about
the dead and the victims in the ubiquitous attacks. I looked
out the window. Tel Aviv was beginning to look like Manhattan,
with skyscrapers glistening beneath Mediterranean skies. Everywhere
there were wide highways being built. An uncle bragged to me
as he drove over one in his town, "this is the longest bridge
in Israel!" Israel's burgeoning technology and software
industries can be seen along the roads. My mother looked out
the window and commented on how ironic life in Israel was, referring
to the war it was conducting while people in Tel Aviv pretended
life was normal, living in happy oblivion. I looked at a forty-story
statement of Israeli power, squinting as the sun shown off its
windows and thought that there was no foundation for all this.
Israel and the Palestinians cannot be
reconciled. My father always spoke about the coming blood bath
that would make Israel look like Bosnia and I am now inclined
to agree with him when before I dismissed him as a sardonic veteran
of three wars. "The Palestinians want justice and the Israelis
want a compromise," he told me. And never the twain shall
meet. My father sighed, "It was a mistake for us to come
here to begin with. Zionism was a colonialist idea. The Palestinians
were the American Indians. It was not an empty land. The blood
will soon be up to our knees." I looked out the window and
wondered if all this could be erased. I had been to Bosnia before,
and I had seen the rotting carcass of a country.
In Tel Aviv, I took my 9-year-old brother
to National Square. It had been renamed Rabin Square after Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated there five years ago.
In the open square stood 315 life size white cardboard silhouettes
of human figures. Organized by peace activists, this exhibit
had been intended to demonstrate to the apathetic Tel Aviv residents
who lived a safe distance from the war, just how many people
were dying. A sign by the tent that served as the activists'
headquarters explained that each silhouette represented a person
killed during the latest intifada. I went into the tent to take
some flyers. A bellicose religious Jew entered and asked us if
we believed in God. I told him to get the Hell out. By the time
I left Israel there were fifty new silhouettes in the square.
Soon after the exhibit was taken away. The organizer confessed
that the nation did not care about peace.
My last morning in Israel I read the
paper by the window, overlooking my grandmother's vast orchard.
I could smell the ocean breeze. Birds were singing, the sun was
bright in a cloudless sky. I was at peace. As usual, the television
was on. Pundits were shouting at each other in the brazenly rude
way they always do on Israeli television. The headline in my
newspaper was "Powderkeg!"
I wrote those words more than a year
ago. The powder keg has exploded and my father's predictions
of a bloodbath have come true. There would now be at least 1,500
silhouettes in that Tel Aviv square, but like the man said, nobody
cares. To my dismay, my parents, and all moderate Israelis have
been radicalized. Now I find an unbridgeable rift widening between
myself and my family, over which we communicate only by screaming.
We no longer understand each other and I feel as though I live
in a different world from all the liberal, sensitive and intelligent
Israelis who were in my family.
They remind me of Serbs I have known,
whose epistemology was dominated by propaganda and denial. They
have the same defensive sense of persecution, the excessive and
preposterous protestations of victimhood that cannot mask the
guilt that they deny. The Serbs deny the rape of Sarajevo, the
slaughter of Srebrenica and the destruction of Vukovar, and the
Israelis deny the original sin of their foundation, the expulsions,
humiliations and massacres of the Palestinians for over fifty
years. The Serbs call themselves the "heavenly people"
and the Jews anointed themselves the "chosen people."
The Israeli "Defense" Forces have "Purity of Arms,"
they are the most moral army in the world, killing only in self-defense.
How do you begin to answer such "big lies"?
Trapped in their Palestinian Masada,
besieged by the Israeli Romans, some Palestinians give their
lives meaning only through an act of murderous nihilism. To blame
this on the pathetic, authoritarian and corrupt Arafat is foolish
and disingenuous. Arafat has control over nothing. The Israelis
have deliberately targeted his police forces, his jails, his
entire government, and effectively wiped out the Palestinian
Authority, only to punish the Palestinian leaders for not controlling
the terrorists in their ranks. This intifada was as much a rebellion
against Arafat's rule as it was against the Israelis. His popularity
with the Palestinians was only restored when Israel made a hero
out of him by imprisoning him.
The Palestinians are not above reproach.
No conflict is black and white, good versus evil. If the Israelis
were ever to withdraw from the occupied territories, the Palestinians,
as well as the rest of the Arab world would have to begin a process
of introspection and cease placing all the blame for their poverty,
ignorance, lack of achievement and lack of freedom on external
factors. But how can the Palestinians engage in any sort of intellectual
process while they are being starved and slaughtered?
I asked a Palestinian friend of mine
to respond to an article from USA Today that portrayed all Palestinians
as supporters of suicide bombers and quoted a father's words
of pride over his son's suicide mission. I asked him if the father
could really mean it? My friend, whose father is a prominent
Palestinian politician under siege in Ramallah, responded, "Personally
for me it's different. You are still searching for an answer,
an argument. You have to, as the liberal you are. You see, for
me it is this article and its racist mentality that drove the
suicide bomber. There is a direct relationship between the damage
caused by this fascist journalist and the blood of the next Israeli
to die in a suicide bombing. I unfortunately am beyond arguments,
because no argument will work. If we Palestinians are to succeed
in achieving our rights, it is only by being more barbaric than
our enemy, on a consistent, i.e. daily, weekly basis. It is sad,
and by all means you can and should disagree. The worst thing
is that a whole country has lied to itself and believes this
crap, they are not willing for one second to dwell on the reasons
and the feelings that led to this horrible act. When it comes
to Jewish feelings, from the holocaust on, they spare no argument.
This is massive racism that they will not acknowledge. At least
in South Africa they legitimized their racism. No the father
doesn't mean it, the father is so shocked deep down to his core,
that the pain he tried to hide from his child was even bigger
in his son. He is not proud of killing young girls, no, he is
proud that his son had the courage to end his miserable, painful
life, by at least striking at (what appears to be the cause)
the Israelis, instead of continuing to live in pain and humiliation."
It was the Racak massacre of several
dozen men of fighting age by the Serbs that provoked the NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia. Now, before the whole world, Israeli buries
Palestinians in mass graves, stores their corpses in refrigerator
trucks, bulldozes over their bodies, places hundreds and possibly
thousands of them in concentration camps where they are tortured
and makes all of the occupied territories one giant Sarajevo.
And nobody does anything!
I heard Condoleeza Rice on Meet the Press
yesterday, prattling about Ehud Barak's "generous"
offer that Arafat refused. This myth must be destroyed. It is
not generous to do justice, it is not generous to stop denying
people freedom, it is not generous to end a 34-year military
occupation. Moreover, the offer denied any possibility of a viable
state, since it gave all control over air, sea, borders and resources
to the Israelis and it divided the Palestinian areas into hundreds
of segments, cut off from one another, obviating any possibility
of a Palestinian state that could function economically or politically.
This and other myths must be combated.
The Israelis are now engaged in "hasbara," which literally
means explanation, but actually means propaganda. They have the
handsome and eloquent Benjamin Netanyahu speaking on their behalf.
The Palestinians have only buffoons arguing for them. I see the
propaganda effects on my parents, who tell me that "they"
(the Palestinians) do not want peace, they all support the suicide
bombers, Arabs only understand force, if "we" withdraw
they will see it as weakness and continue their attacks, they
want to throw us all into the sea, and so on. And they point
to the other Arabs and remind me that their regimes are all brutal
and corrupt, and that they never cared for their Palestinian
brethren. It is this "we" and "them" mentality
that precludes objectivity. My parents, like Israelis, and Serbs
before them, fear the collective guilt, fear the admission that
their soldiers have committed crimes against humanity, so they
divert every argument to the Arab crimes. There are Arab crimes,
and they should be addressed, but they do not diminish the severity
of the Israeli crimes. A crime is a crime.
Does Israel really want to place itself
in the category of countries like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia
or Iraq, where the concepts of human rights or freedom are not
even given lip service by the regimes, or does it seek to belong
to the community of enlightened nations that exist to secure
the rights of their citizens? At least Israel has the political
and intellectual infrastructure to belong to the second category,
if it ever remedies the racism in its culture and the horrible
contradiction of its continuous occupation of an entire nation.
And because it is a democracy, Israel deserves particular reproach,
because its citizens are accountable for the actions of their
leaders.
The sanctions that cripple Iraq and starve
its people do nothing to the dictator whom they did not choose
and cannot remove. Israelis on the other hand chose the war criminal
that leads them, voted for the bloody policies of their government,
and half of them support the "transfer" (the Israeli
euphemism for ethnic cleansing) of Palestinians from the occupied
territories. So I find myself in the unique and painful position
of calling for international sanctions against Israel and wondering
if a punitive bombing of Tel Aviv, the city I love, until it
complies with international law, might be a good (albeit quixotic)
idea.
"No," my father says, "we
are not part of Europe. We are in the Middle East, in the Arab
world, and we should not pretend that we are different, we have
to be more brutal than they are or they will never respect us."
Is this a solution?
A Palestinian friend of mine expressed
consternation at the deliberations over a solution. To both of
us, it seemed so simple. "Just get out of the occupied territories,"
he said. What of my father's fear that the attacks would not
cease with an Israeli withdrawal?
My friend was cautious and uncertain.
Resentment is growing among the Palestinians, if Israel does
not withdraw soon, the hate and thirst for revenge might preclude
any possibility of reconciliation and peace.
Nir Rosen,
25, is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.
This article originally appeared in Dissident Voice,
a semi-regular newsletter dedicated to challenging the lies of
the corporate press and the privileged classes it serves. Email:
<dissidentvoice@earthlink.net>
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