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Against Israeli Apartheid
by Desmond Tutu & Ian Urbina
The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure--in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.
Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies' stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. Students played an especially important role by compelling universities to change their portfolios. Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.
Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than forty US campuses are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.
These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the occupied territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the antiapartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience.
To criticize the occupation is not to overlook Israel's unique strengths, just as protesting the Vietnam War did not imply ignoring the distinct freedoms and humanitarian accomplishments of the United States. In a region where repressive governments and unjust policies are the norm, Israel is certainly more democratic than its neighbors. This does not make dismantling the settlements any less a priority. Divestment from apartheid South Africa was certainly no less justified because there was repression elsewhere on the African continent. Aggression is no more palatable in the hands of a democratic power. Territorial ambition is equally illegal whether it occurs in slow motion, as with the Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, or in blitzkrieg fashion, as with the Iraqi tanks in Kuwait. The United States has a distinct responsibility to intervene in atrocities committed by its client states, and since Israel is the single largest recipient of US arms and foreign aid, an end to the occupation should be a top concern of all Americans.
Almost instinctively, the Jewish people have always been on the side of the voiceless. In their history, there is painful memory of massive roundups, house demolitions and collective punishment. In their scripture, there is acute empathy for the disfranchised. The occupation represents a dangerous and selective amnesia of the persecution from which these traditions were born.
Not everyone has forgotten, including some within the military. The growing Israeli refusenik movement evokes the small anticonscription drive that helped turn the tide in apartheid South Africa. Several hundred decorated Israeli officers have refused to perform military service in the occupied territories. Those not already in prison have taken their message on the road to US synagogues and campuses, rightly arguing that Israel needs security, but that it will never have it as an occupying power. More than thirty-five new settlements have been constructed in the past year. Each one is a step away from the safety deserved by the Israelis, and two steps away from the justice owed to the Palestinians.
If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.
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Bush is Irrelevant and Must Go
by Ira Chernus
In a major policy shift, I have decided that George W. Bush is irrelevant and must be replaced as leader of the United States. Every week, an American somewhere murders, rapes, or brutalizes a foreigner. I hold the president personally responsible for every such attack.
With American citizens continuing to kill and attack people in other nations, Bush is clearly irrelevant to the worlds search for peace. I am ceasing all contacts with him, immediately. And I am calling upon the people of the United States to elect new and more effective leadership, right away.
My critics will say that the president can not keep track of every U.S. citizen everywhere in the world, and when Americans attack foreigners, he denounces the attacks. But what is Bush doing to stop the violence? I want to see deeds, not words. He is the leader of the country. He is responsible for all its policies, all its actions, by all its people, everywhere. He is sworn to uphold the Constitution, which calls for law and order to prevail. If he can not fulfill his duties, then he is irrelevant.
Bush has also made himself irrelevant by denying basic democratic and constitutional rights to his own people. He came to power in an election that appeared to be free and fair. But even his own Justice Department now admits that many voters in Florida were illegally disenfranchised. Since last September 11, he has suspended numerous civil liberties that used to be considered basic to a democracy, using his parliament as a rubber stamp to give his measures an appearance of legitimacy.
If Bush expects me to consider resuming contacts with him, he must first show himself capable of running a genuinely democratic government. If he can not (which seems likely, given his long history of ignoring individual rights), then it is time for him to go.
This column is the opening shot in my major public relations campaign. I plan to get the news media to repeat, over and over again, that Bush is responsible for every act of violence by an American overseas, that he is now irrelevant, and that the U.S. must choose a new leader. If the media say it enough, people will begin to believe it. Eventually they will take it for granted. Then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people assume that a leader is irrelevant, that leader does in fact become irrelevant.
I learned this lesson from the government of Israel. Last fall, the New York Times reported that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and his advisors had decided to undermine Palestinian leader Yasser Arafats authority. Their plan was to blame Arafat for every act of violence committed by any Palestinian against any Jew and to declare Arafat an ineffective leader, thus irrelevant to the peace process.
The plan has succeeded admirably, with plenty of help from the U.S. government and news media. Arafats supposed irrelevance is now widely accepted in the U.S. as a fact, even though he remains the only Palestinian leader capable of making peace with the Israelis. So lets take a page from Israels playbook. Lets blame Bush for everything that goes wrong, anywhere, and demand that he leave office.
All joking aside, no leader can control the actions of all people in his nation. It is always counterproductive to treat a nations leader as irrelevant. And no nation has the right to tell another nation whom it can or cannot choose as its leader.
But there is something to be said for treating a leaders policies as irrelevant, when they are counterproductive to humane goals and values. Many courageous Palestinians have long treated Arafats security forces and censorship as irrelevant, as they have gone about the daily business of preparing for a truly democratic Palestinian state.
Here in the U.S., we should treat outrageous Bush administration policies as irrelevant and continue our efforts to build a democratic, just, and humane society. The Bush administration's Middle East policy is certainly outrageous. It is based on the presumed U.S. right to tell the Palestinians that they may no longer have the leader they choose, if Bush and Sharon dont like that leader. It is not Arafat, but the Bush Middle East policy, that should be treated as irrelevant.
When another National Review writer suggested that destroying Mecca might cause permanent outrage among one billion Muslims, Lowry rejoined, This is a tough one, and I dont know quite what to think. Mecca seems extreme, of course, but then again, few people would die and it would send a signal.
The National Review was briefly in the news last fall when one of its contributing editors, Ann Coulter, pronounced herself in favor of new version of the medieval Crusades. In response to Arab terrorism, she wrote in National Review Online, We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. When the magazine issued a public apology because of the embarrassment the incident caused the Bush administration in its Mideast diplomacy Coulter objected and was dropped as a contributor.
In considering this public debate about how many millions to incinerate in the Middle East, one must remember that Lowry and his colleagues have the closest political and personal ties to the Republican Party, the Bush administration, and the Pentagon brass. At last months Conservative Political Action Conference, where National Review was a major sponsor, the speakers included National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson.
Casual discussion of mass murder is perfectly acceptable in political discourse in these circles, and at the highest levels of the American state. But so cowardly and cowed is the American press that not one reporter at Bushs March 13 press conference dared ask him what he thought about the homicidal ravings of his close political allies.
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Bush is Walking Into a Trap
by Robert Fisk
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated , it becomes ever clearer to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.
Mr bin Laden every day his culpability becomes more apparent has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships most of them supported by the West the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.
The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechnya the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humor to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army like the Russian forces in Chechnya becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.
But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah the "center of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon drove the Israelis out of Lebanon.
In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War without end.
And while Mr Bush and perhaps Mr Blair prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilization''."America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America in many cases, educated at US universities.
I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein another of our grotesque inventions must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism using Israel's own definition of that much misused word in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper certainly no American newspaper will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Center Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint".
No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honor in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.
America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in of all places Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly.
It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beirut by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel for less than two months.
The same type of missile this time an AGM 114-C made in Georgia was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel."
I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife one of the women killed that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now.
Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and of course potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him.
No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.
No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians by fighting the Israelis will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden.
I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush perhaps we, too are now walking into it.
© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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Some Israelis question the offensive - Critics say attacks did little to deter Palestinian uprising
By Lee Hockstader
THE WASHINGTON POST
JERUSALEM, March 15 - As Israeli tanks pulled back early today to the edges of most of the Palestinian towns they had reoccupied over the past two weeks, they left a trail of smashed cars, damaged houses, broken water mains, downed power lines and deep animosity.
Nobody in the Shin Bet [Israels domestic security service] thinks these operations will stop terrorism .Its impossible to end this wave of terrorism without a political process.
A SENIOR ISRAELI SECURITY OFFICIAL
ISRAELS CAMPAIGN against refugee camps and adjacent cities, the widest-ranging offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the territories were captured in 1967, was launched with the declared objective of destroying the terrorist infrastructure that Israeli officials say takes refuge there. But some influential Israelis have questioned whether the goal was reached.
Top Israeli officials said Operation Vital Security did succeed in arresting several thousand Palestinian boys and men, seizing scores of weapons and destroying suspected weapons workshops. At the same time, some of the same officials acknowledged, the operation did little to impair the Palestinians ability to say nothing of their will to carry out further attacks.
The defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, was reported to have agreed that Israels three-day occupation of the main West Bank city, Ramallah, was essentially for show, according to Nahum Barnea, a columnist in the countrys best-selling newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth. And in the midst of the offensive, in which 20,000 troops and scores of tanks and armored vehicles were deployed in and around Palestinian towns and refugee camps, a senior security official gave essentially the same assessment.
Nobody in the Shin Bet [Israels domestic security service] thinks these operations will stop terrorism, the official said. Its impossible to end this wave of terrorism without a political process.
Today, practically before the dust of the departing Israeli tanks had settled, Palestinians exchanged fire with Israeli troops throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And Israelis braced themselves for another Saturday night, after two in a row in which Palestinian suicide bombers struck civilian targets in Jerusalem, killing 21 people.
WHAT IS ACCOMPLISHED?
As the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Anthony C. Zinni, held meetings today in his third peace mission here in the past four months, both sides grappled with what was and was not accomplished by Israels campaign.
Some senior army officers, who had predicted and pushed for tougher military operations against the Palestinians for months, said they were pleased with the results. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the army chief of staff, on several occasions noted the high Palestinian casualty count in his assessment of the Israeli assaults, portraying them as a success. He and other officers said the attacks on refugee camps were intended largely to demoralize Palestinians by showing them that Israeli tanks can enter even the toughest Arab neighborhoods such as the al-Amari refugee camp south of Ramallah, where Yasser Arafats own security forces fear to tread.
The Israeli raids, said the officers, spelled the end of the refugee camps impunity. They suggested that Palestinian gunmen based in the camps now know Israel means business. Their remarks also carried an implicit threat that Arafats eight-year-old Palestinian Authority could be dismantled and destroyed unless it drops its support for the armed uprising against Israels occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israeli offensive also chalked up what some army officers said were tangible gains. Troops discovered more than a dozen rockets in the West Bank. They also destroyed about two dozen metal workshops and lathes, where Palestinians are thought to have manufactured tubes used for rockets and mortars.
SEVERAL THOUSAND TAKEN PRISONER
Moreover, in a half-dozen towns and refugee camps, Israeli forces took several thousand Palestinian boys and men as prisoners. An indeterminate number, perhaps several dozen, may have been gunmen who resisted the Israeli forces when they moved into Palestinian areas, then surrendered.
People say, But you didnt arrest the senior wanted men, Col. Yair Golan, the army commander involved in the attack on the al-Amari camp, told Yedioth Aharonoth. Its true. We arrested second-level people. But if not for the operation we would not have caught them. We found a lab for forging documents. We've built an intelligence infrastructure.
But against those ostensible gains, Israel and its leadership have paid a high price in domestic and international political support, without, some officials acknowledge, effecting permanent change in the situation.
Nothing is cleaned up, said the senior security source when asked about the results of Israels nearly two-week reoccupation of Tulkarm and two adjacent refugee camps in the northern West Bank. If we wanted to clean up, we'd have to stay in Tulkarm.
Against that background, the Israeli public appears disenchanted with its leaders. Approval ratings for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose public support ran high during his first 10 to 11 months in office, have plummeted. In the latest survey, published today in the Maariv newspaper, 35 percent of respondents said they are pleased with Sharons performance, down from 60 percent last fall.
Even more remarkably for a 74-year-old former general known all his life as a hawk on security issues, just 30 percent said they were satisfied with Sharons performance on security. Two-thirds of those polled said they thought Sharon was doing poorly in that area.
So deep were questions about the Israeli offensive that in the midst of it, Haaretz, Israels most respected newspaper, declared in an editorial that the country was being governed by unbalanced people.
As for the Palestinians, deeply embittered even before the Israeli attacks began, they are if anything more resentful now. Hey, Jews, you cowards, read the graffiti in Gazas Jabalya refugee camp after an Israeli raid there killed 18 Palestinians. We swear we'll answer your aggression. Just you wait.
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