| The Left Side - Home
About Page
Whats New in the World
News News News
Occupied Palestine
Israel
American Foreign Policy
Images of Holy War
Favorite Links
Speak Out - Guest book
|
|
|
How Arafat Failed Israeli Interests
Sharon as Bush Speechwriter
by Robert Fisk
June 26, 2002
The Independent
Put your flak jackets on, President George Bush has spoken. He wants a regime change in Palestine, just as he wants a regime change in Iraq. He reads the Israeli government press handouts and accurately quotes them to his American people.
Ariel Sharon, wants the destruction/ liquidation/ resignation of Yasser Arafat. So does Mr Bush. "Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership so a Palestinian state can be born," Bush told the fearful American people, waiting for the next apocalypse, be it on 4 July or after.
So, no Palestinian state unless Arafat goes. There were no Bush conditions for Israel. He did not secure an end to the continuing building of Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab (that is somebody else's) land. Nor did he secure a halt to continuing Israeli military "incursions" -- how I love that word "incursions".
Mr Sharon, in his highly mendacious demand for Palestinian "'transparency", has demanded Palestinian reform must be neither cosmetic nor an attempt to preserve Arafat. And what does Mr Bush say? Why, that Palestinian reform "must be more than cosmetic changes or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo".
Why, I wonder, doesn't Mr Bush let Ariel Sharon run the White House press bureau? Not only would it be more honest--we would at least be hearing the voice of Israel at first hand--but it would spare the American President the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis.
All that he offers to the Palestinians is a ghastly mockery of what the Palestinians are told to do by the Israelis.
There never has been an "interim" state, let alone a "provisional" state. These are fantasies of the Israelis and Mr Bush. White House "officials" -- we can guess who they are -- believe a Palestinian state can be "achieved" within 18 months. Let's forget international law provides for no such entity.
Let's go over again that most crucial -- and most dishonest -- part of the Bush statement.
"When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbours," he told us, "the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose border and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East." Let's see what this means: when the Palestinians have elected a leader whom the Israelis want -- a condition that could go on to the crack of doom -- the Americans will support a Palestinian state whose very existence will mean nothing unless Israel approves what that state wants to do.
In other words, the United States will be Israel's spokesman in any negotiations. A growing number of Americans know they are being suckered by their own government and their own press, that their country's foreign policy is being manipulated to give maximum support to one -- and only one -- country in the Middle East. So will "certain aspects of its sovereignty". Note these weighty words. "Certain aspects" of its sovereignty.
What, I wonder, does this mean? Do these "certain aspects" include the continuation of illegal Jewish settlement building? Or the absence of any international guarantees for this interim/provisional state? Or perhaps a get-out clause for the United States to wash its hands of the whole shebang if Israel decides to annex the entire West Bank?
Note, again, the weasel words. Palestine's borders will be "provisional ... until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East". Yet never before has an occupied people been led by so pathetic a person as Yasser Arafat. Nineteen years ago, this same Yasser Arafat swore to me -- on a hilltop above the Lebanese city of Tripoli -- that his "Palestine" would be "a democracy among the guns". His Palestine, he told me, would be unlike any other Arab state. There would be no secret policemen, no "regime", no cronyism, no corruption.
Fast forward to the spring of 1998. I am listening to a French diplomat who has returned from Gaza. He and his delegation carried a personal letter to Arafat from President Chirac. Again and again, Arafat disregarded the letter, only interested in when the new French school in Gaza will open. The diplomats understand. One of Arafat's relatives will be the headmistress of this school. Family before nation. The Chirac letter stays unopened.
Yes, as Nabil Shaath, one of the most loyal -- and most obsequious -- of Arafat's ministers, says, "a state is a state, and you cannot be provisionally pregnant and you cannot have a provisional state". It might have been wiser -- and more honest -- if he had reminded us that the CIA trained the gunmen and intelligence thugs who worked for Arafat; if he had outlined the imprisonment and torture that Arafat inflicted on his Palestinian opponents with the complicity of those who supported the "peace process".
For it is becoming ever more obvious that Arafat did not fail in his duties as Palestinian leader. He failed in his duties as Israel's -- and thus America's -- proxy colonial apparatchik in the West Bank and Gaza. The fact he is a corrupt little despot does not change this.
He was given time to prove his loyalty to the West, to America, to Israel. He was supposed to have made Israel's settlements both safe and sacred.
Now, when he can no longer control the people he was supposed to control -- remember the BBC's repeated question: "Can he control his own people?" -- his usefulness is at an end. He must go, to be replaced by our choice of leader -- forget elections -- who will be as democratic as the new Afghan "interim" government.
George Bush insulted the Palestinians and enraged the leadership of the Arab world. Who cares about the latter? Most of them were appointed by us. But I have a feeling that the Palestinians will not accept this nonsense.
Which is why they will be condemned -- as never before -- as "terrorists".
|
|
|
George W Bush: The Man is Stupid
by Joan Smith
June 17, 2002
The Independent
I have lost count of the times I have been ticked off in recent months, sometimes by quite senior politicians, for suggesting that George W Bush is a complete idiot. He is nowhere near as stupid as he seems, I have been told, a proposition that has some force solely because it is hard to imagine any world leader being afflicted with quite the degree of bovine incomprehension that the President habitually displays. On Monday, for instance, he was on cracking form, announcing in halting English you'd think he'd be fluent by now that a dangerous terrorist had been detained and "is now off the streets, where he should be".
As so often with Bush's pronouncements, what he appeared to say that terrorists should be on US streets was the opposite of what he meant. Unfair, unfair, his defenders will say: we have never claimed that our man is an accomplished public speaker. Fine, but my other reaction to the announcement I am being unusually frank here was, "You credulous git, do you believe every single thing anybody in the administration tells you?" US intelligence agencies are trying to deflect accusations that they failed to pick up warnings of last September's suicide attacks and desperately need the kind of crowing headlines "US foils al-Qa'ida 'dirty bomb' plot" that the announcement prompted.
But the administration was soon backtracking, accused of exaggerating the importance of a US citizen known as Abdullah al-Mujahir, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and changed his name in prison. The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, admitted "there was not an actual plan" to set off a radioactive device in Washington, and it now seems that al-Mujahir's research had not gone much further than surfing the internet. Nor is it clear why he was arrested while on a reconnaissance trip to the US from Pakistan on 8 May, after being under 24-hour surveillance since February, when further observation might have yielded valuable information about al-Qa'ida associates .
Meanwhile, a terrorist whose plans were at a rather more advanced stage succeeded in bombing the US consulate in Karachi on Friday, killing 11 people. None of this seems to have fazed the President, whose announcement about al-Mujahir coincided with a decision to transfer him to military custody, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having the more lurid allegations against him tested in open court. Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was not so lucky, having been foolish enough to make grand claims about al-Qa'ida operating in the disputed border territory of Kashmir without a shred of evidence. Rumsfeld's announcement during a visit to India on Wednesday collapsed under questioning from journalists in Islamabad. "I don't have evidence and the US doesn't have evidence of al-Qa'ida in Kashmir," he admitted.
That is not to say I underestimate the threat from Islamist groups whose motivation is as much their complex and ambivalent relationship with secular modernity as the genuine grievances the US's uncritical support for Israel and undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia felt by moderate opinion in Arab countries. But what I am suggesting is that the response of Mr Bush and leading figures in his administration, with the exception of his sadly marginalized Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is akin to a bunch of ham actors staging a noisy hunt for pantomime villains. Think about the search for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, whose whereabouts appear to be as great a mystery to Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft as they us.
We, however, are not supposed to know that kind of stuff. It is not your job, or mine, come to that, to have advance knowledge of terrorist outrages. But we are entitled, in a world where what the US President says may affect all our lives, to expect something better than the overblown claims and ignominious climbdowns that are the hallmark of this ignorant, inept administration. Frantic displays of patriotism, random round-ups of hundreds of foreigners and unverifiable claims about imminent terrorist attacks cannot conceal the fact that its members do not know what they are doing; any day now, I expect to hear that Switzerland, or perhaps Belgium, has been added to the axis of evil. It is not just Mr Bush, as I naively hoped, who is absolutely clueless.
|
|
|
The Palestinian Intifada: A Very American Struggle
by Sam Bahour
June 7, 2002
AL-BIREH, West Bank. The Palestinian people have no grudge against the American public. We never did. As a matter of fact, if one resists the media spin and takes a closer look at what the Palestinians have been struggling for, it will be revealed that the Palestinian intifada is a very American struggle. After all, it is a struggle for national independence, civil liberties, human rights, as well as a struggle to establish an open market in an independent economy, free to market forces and free from Israeli domination.
The Palestinians are doing what any American citizen would do: We are fighting for our rights. At times, some Palestinian individuals and organizations reach a point of equating life under Israeli occupation to death and unfortunately choose to take Israeli civilian lives along with their own. This is a sad but bitter reality of the environment that a prolonged foreign military occupation creates. No matter how many times U.S. President George W. Bush or a war criminal like Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon call upon Palestinians to condemn these acts, the reality remains that taking civilian lives is definitely not the norm in the Palestinian struggle. The history of the Palestinian struggle is rich; it is something that every American can relate to. Let me explain.
First, the Palestinians are not begging for a homeland of their own. They had a homeland in 1948 before the establishment of the State of Israel. As a matter of fact, before 1948 they were living mostly peacefully in a secular environment: Jews, Muslims and Christians. It is the establishment of the State of Israel that created the first wave of Palestinian refugees who are still suffering a daily hell, 54 years later. These Palestinian refugees, plus their offspring, are the same people that are (or were) living in the Jenin refugee camp before Israel committed its latest atrocity. In 1948, these Palestinian refugees did not immediately take up arms against Israel when they were forcefully evicted from their homes. Just the opposite.
From 1948 up until the mid-1960s, Palestinians attempted to find a peaceful resolution to their being forced from their homes by the Israeli military. Through numerous political and organizational venues, Palestinians shuttled from the United States to the United Nations to Britain and back again, demanding that justice be served. Everyone recognized the historical injustice committed against the Palestinians, but no one stood up to take action. It was only then that the Palestinians took up arms and began their military struggle. For this they paid a high price. Israel saw that the world's powers-to-be were not concerned with resolving the plight of Palestinians and proceeded with a military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem June 4, 1967 during the Six Day War. This created a second round of Palestinian refugees and, consequently, another generation of anger.
In the 1970s, the Palestinians went to the U.N. and asked again for justice to be served, peacefully and diplomatically. The U.N. took significant decisions in favor of Palestinians; however, it had neither the power nor the will to implement any of them. Palestinian living conditions continued to worsen. The Palestinians turned again to nonviolence in the beginning of the '80s, only to have the leaders of that nascent movement exiled from the West Bank. Many others -- writers, student activists, unionists, musicians and organizers -- that tried to work nonviolently to end the occupation and restore the rights of the refugees were thrown in Israeli prisons. Most of them were tortured.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and tried to crush the Palestinian movement there, where thousands of Palestinian refugees had taken refuge as they waited for the world to act. Although it supported the massacre of up to 2,500 Palestinians in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, Israel failed to destroy either the Palestinians' hopes or their struggle. Then, in 1987, the Palestinians took to the streets in what is now known as the first intifada, an action not unfamiliar to anyone who lived in the U.S. South during the 1960s. Palestinians made their voice heard, again mostly nonviolently, but the U.S. continued to turn a blind eye, while at the same time arming Israel to the teeth and pumping more foreign aid money into Israel than it provided to all of Africa.
In 1993, Palestinians entered a peace process that made unprecedented Palestinian political overtures to Israel even though the Oslo accords still maintained the system of Israeli military occupation. Palestinians recognized Israel as a state and renounced terror. During the next eight years, what the Palestinians got in return was a 70 percent increase in the number of illegal Israeli settlers living on their land and Israeli domination of their economic development. And now we are facing another Israeli military invasion and more war crimes. Many Palestinians believed that a world now in a state of U.S.-led globalization would not put up with continued Israeli intransigence. We were wrong.
I was born in Ohio and lived all of my life there before relocating to Palestine following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords. I would bet that any American put in the circumstances the Palestinian people have found themselves in would act just as we have. The American way would counsel being steadfast, fighting back, and even painfully witnessing some of their own taking their lives after losing all hope for the possibility of a secure and respectable life.
Over the years Palestine and the Palestinians have historically been every American government's worst nightmare. Why? Because U.S. administrations know something that every Palestinian also knows -- U.S. foreign policy, at least on this issue, has never reflected genuine U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East, nor has it reflected the will and principles of the American people. Thus, when the Palestinian struggle moves to the front burner, as it does periodically, U.S. presidents, officials and most congresspersons know that their most prestigious government institutions are about to be exposed to their own constituency.
What is their fear? Well, Israel decided not to waste its time with the American people so it created the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and its related political action committees to deal with Congress. In its own words, AIPAC aims to "Reinforce our commitment to Israel and support her security infrastructure by providing nearly billion in aid, while refocusing that assistance to meet Israel's changing security needs." Also, AIPAC aims to, "Recognize Israel's singular needs by granting unique early disbursal of aid -- all assistance was received 30 days after the foreign aid bill was passed."
What does all this mean to American citizens? It means an expenditure of their taxes amounting to billion a year: in total, over billion since Israel was established. Additionally, it means that a good amount of these monies went to build illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands, in flagrant disregard to U.S. objections and in blatant violation of international law. Moreover, it means that some of these monies will go to professional public relations firms that keep repeating that "all Palestinians are terrorists" until they actually believe it. And there is more. Israel offers its citizens free health care, free education and a standard of living that beats that in most U.S. cities. All this and more is made possible by U.S. taxpayers' money.
Most Americans do not recognize the similarities between the Palestinian struggle and their own principles of freedom and independence, because Israel (with Americans' taxes) makes sure that they do not hear the other side. Worse yet, the pictures of innocent Israelis killed have overwhelmed and moved Americans -- as they should -- but most have yet to ask why no cameras were allowed in the Jenin refugee camp to photograph the killing of Palestinian civilians by the State of Israel. A sad but true fact is that American society, the most developed in the world, has forced Americans to view the Palestinian struggle, and many others too, in the same manner that they purchase their toothpaste -- the side that spends more advertising dollars wins.
Colonialism always fails, and Israeli colonialism will fail, too, in the end, no matter how many U.S. armaments, U.N. vetoes and U.S. funds are made available to it. As we Palestinians struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, we urge Americans to end the Israeli occupation of the U.S. Congress. The American people deserve better leadership.
Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in the Palestinian City of Al-Bireh/Ramallah in the West Bank. He can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com
|
| |
Take Sharon to The Hague: Prosecute Israeli War Crimes at Jenin
by Francis A. Boyle
June 6,2002
The Israeli government inflicted war crimes, grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and a Crime against Humanity against the inhabitants of Jenin. The United Nations must prosecute these international crimes for the exact same reasons that it created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Both of these ad hoc international criminal tribunals were established by the United Nations Security Council with the approval of the United States government, a Permanent Member thereof with a veto power. But it has already been publicly reported that the Bush Jr. administration intervened with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to head off an investigation of Jenin as authorized by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1405 (19 April 2002).
Despite such unconscionable but continual U.S. obstructionism at the Security Council when it comes to protecting the basic human rights of the Palestinian People, the U.N. General Assembly has concurrent jurisdiction under the United Nations Charter to investigate and prosecute Israeli government officials - both civilian and military - for the international crimes that they have ordered, committed, condoned, and approved at Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine. We must pressure the member states of the U.N. General Assembly to found an International Criminal Tribunal for Palestine (ICTP) in order to prosecute Israeli war criminals, both military and civilian, including and especially Israeli political leaders such as Sharon. The U.N. General Assembly can set up this ICTP by a majority vote pursuant to its powers to establish "subsidiary organs" under U.N. Charter Article 22. This International Criminal Tribunal for Palestine should be organized by the U.N. General Assembly along the same lines as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which deals with international armed conflicts.
In this regard, back in 1993 as the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I sued the rump Yugoslavia for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. I also did the very best I could to personally implicate Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen for ordering and committing these international crimes against the Bosnians. At the time I never realistically expected that less than nine years later Milosevic himself and his henchmen would be on trial in The Hague for committing these heinous international crimes against the Bosnians.
For similar reasons, Sharon and his henchmen must also stand on trial in The Hague for perpetrating the exact same types of international crimes against the Palestinian People at Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine. It is up to us to bring Sharon and his henchmen to Justice in The Hague. Milosevic and Sharon will get along quite well with each other in The Hague because they have so much in common to talk about: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
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
|
|
|
