here The tanks roll into Bethlehem, and the Middle East erupts By Phil Reeves in Bethlehem 09 March 2002 Dr Ahmed Soubeih knew that setting foot into the silent, sun-lit street outside his hospital yesterday was highly dangerous. The Israeli army had already slaughtered more than 30 Palestinians across the occupied territories in the past 12 hours, making it the bloodiest day of the intifada. There were snipers with high-powered rifles hidden in a building not far from his front door, part of an Israeli force that swept into Bethlehem and its surrounding Arab villages before dawn. His neighbourhood was under an Israeli-imposed curfew, as was much of the urban sprawl around Bethlehem, reoccupied by Israel again even though the land was placed under Palestinian rule by the Oslo peace accords. A 1,000lb bomb dropped by an F-16 jet had flattened a local government office during a terrifying night of attacks. Helicopters had been spraying streets with fire from their heavy-calibre machine guns, picking off several of the naive and ragged youths unlucky enough to be in Yasser Arafat's farcical national security forces. An Israeli spy drone circled overhead. Tanks were near by, and had been shunting Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances off the streets, brazenly contemptuous of the protection afforded to rescue workers under the Geneva Conventions. And with Israeli troops inside or stationed around two nearby refugee camps, Aida and Deheisheh it was clear that fighting could explode at any second. So Dr Soubeih took particular care before setting off in his BMW to drive through the empty streets of Bethlehem's suburbs to a neighbouring Palestinian hospital to collect food and medicine for his patients. "He called the Israeli army and asked them if he could go," said his nephew, Ra'ed Isbaih. "They took details of his car, told him to wear a white shirt and no jacket, and to drive slowly." Dr Soubeih set off at around noon. According to Mr Isbaih, a sniper fired in his direction. So he called the Israeli military again and was reassured that this time it would be safe to drive. A few minutes later, a volley of bullets from a heavy machine-gun mounted on an Israeli Merkava tank removed his face. In one brutal moment, his six children lost a father; his patients lost a doctor, who by local repute, was caring and compassionate; and the Palestinians lost another medical worker, the fourth to be killed by the Israelis since Monday. Dr Soubeih, 36, director and founder of the 20-bed Yamama Hospital in al-Khadr, had been on his way to the larger al-Hussain hospital, on the edge of Bethlehem. "He was a very decent person, and a very hard worker," said Dr Peter Qumri, director of the al-Hussain Hospital, looking red-eyed after a sleepless night caring for the wounded after Israel's latest invasion, which killed eight people. "I spoke to him only yesterday for two hours about preparing for the emergency and getting medical supplies." After initially saying they had no knowledge of the incident, the Israel armed forces last night said they "regretted" the death. Perhaps they were having trouble keeping track. By last night they had killed at least 38 Palestinians, including two children, a young woman and a general, in the worst day of the 17-month intifada. In Bethlehem there was no hint Dr Soubieh had any connection with the "terrorists" Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, has vowed to root out. If this is Mr Sharon's strategy as opposed to deliberately fanning Palestinian violence to a level that will allow him eventually to eradicate their claim to nationhood then it is not working. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army in the past week and hundreds more have been injured. This has not stopped the flow of suicide missions. Last night, the Israeli security forces said they intercepted another suicide bomber trying to penetrate north Jerusalem the third in two days. Had any of them succeeded, the Israeli death toll in the past week of 36 would have been much higher. Six Israelis were killed yesterday, including five teenagers shot by a gunman in a Jewish settlement. And it did not stop 19-year-old Mohammed Farhat from cutting through a wire fence surrounding the Jewish settlement of Atzmona in the Gaza Strip, and opening fire on a hall full of Israeli teenagers. By the time he was shot dead by Israeli security forces he had emptied his Kalashnikov and lobbed in hand grenades, killing five 18-year-olds and injuring 20 more. That attack, late on Thursday, was followed by still more horror. At least 16 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza village of Kouza as the Israeli army lashed out. The victims included Major-General Ahmed Mefraj, one of the senior Palestinian security officials with whom Israel used to co-operate. Israel has raised the temperature by storming into refugee camps including Tulkarm, where Israeli troops were facing off scores of gunmen last night. It is doubtful whether the arrival of Anthony Zinni, the US Marines general sent by America to end this nightmare, will make any difference.
here Robert Fisk: Bush is doing nothing to stop Israel's immoral civil war 09 March 2002 Three score and five in a day? That was the regular casualty figure during the Lebanese civil war, the average cull of lives in another conflict in which America called for "restraint'', another war in which Israel could blast down apartment blocks with impunity while pursuing its war against "terror''. We still forget what happened then. In June of 1982, Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners were executed by the Israelis and secretly buried in Sidon; Israeli jets bombed Palestinian hospitals. Yes, a PLO anti-aircraft gun was positioned on the roof of a hospital in Sidon but the Israelis went ahead and destroyed the hospital anyway – and all the patients inside it. The Palestinians murdered prisoners – let's not have any romanticism here – and the Palestinians tortured and executed Arabs who were working as Israeli collaborators. But 41 in a day was a Lebanese day. So what we have now in the occupied territories and Israel is also a civil war; a Muslim-Jewish war, a shameful, revolting struggle that mirrors, more and more, the Algerian war of independence of 1954-62. There, too, guerrilla destruction turned into assassination, murder into reprisal slaughter, and massacre into mass killing. Only last Christmas, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, told the French President, Jacques Chirac, that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria'', the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay''. And there you have it. Israel, in Mr Sharon's own words, is fighting a colonial war. Not the "war against terror'', which he tries to mimic in miniature with the United States, but a war to colonise Arab land with colonies for Jews and Jews only, as the colonised (the "terrorists'', of course) rise up against them. But why should the Israelis worry? The United States will do nothing to stop them. The American press made much of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's criticism of Mr Sharon. But read what Mr Powell actually said: he asked whether Sharon's military policy – of killing more Palestinians – would work. One of his spokesmen, speaking two days ago, announced that "we had to make clear to him [Sharon] there is simply no evidence that approach will succeed''. Mr Powell and his minions were not attacking Mr Sharon because the Israeli policy was immoral. It was the military ineffectiveness of killing Palestinians, not the abuse of human rights that this embodies, to which the Americans took objection. Yes, of course, the Palestinians have crimes to answer for. Who decided that Israeli civilians should pay the price for the war against occupation, as Hanan Ashrawi has bravely asked? Who gave them the right to slaughter Israeli kids in pizza parlours? But Israel is America's ally and President Bush is doing nothing to end this monstrous war.
here Israel descends into chaos · 40 Palestinians killed · Five young Israelis shot dead · Sharon vows escalation Israel descends into chaos · 40 Palestinians killed · Five young Israelis shot dead · Sharon vows escalation Suzanne Goldenberg in Atzmona settlement, Gaza Strip Saturday March 9, 2002 The Guardian Israel's military offensive, aimed at pounding the Palestinians until they beg for surrender, produced the bloodiest day of the 18-month uprising yesterday, killing 40 Palestinians in an onslaught on the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military assaults - on the Tulkaram refugee camp and biblical Bethlehem in the West Bank and on the Gaza village of Khuza - were launched hours after President George Bush announced that he was sending an envoy to the region again to try to impose a ceasefire. Last night Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, suggested he may be prepared to drop his insistence that there should be seven days of peace before ceasefire talks could begin. "Negotiations to stop the shooting will be held under fire," he said. However, Israel state television yesterday quoted defence officials as saying that the army wanted to make the most of a strategy of beating the Palestinians into submission before the arrival of the US envoy, the retired marine corps commander General Anthony Zinni. Yesterday's escalation of violence followed a deadly rampage by a Palestinian militant through a military academy in the Jewish settlement of Atzmona in the Gaza Strip, in which five teenage officer cadets were killed and 24 injured by bullets and grenades. Their deaths, after a week in which Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen staged attacks on Israel at an hourly rate, led to a withering Israeli assault. Minutes after the raid on Atzmona, attack helicopters buzzed over the nearby village of Khuza, as tanks and ground forces poured into the area, killing 20 Palestinians including a senior local commander of the Palestinian police and an ambulance driver. In the northern Gaza Strip, four Palestinian policemen were killed when their station was attacked by navy gunboats. The broader thinking behind Israel's military escalation was unveiled this week by Mr Sharon, who said Israel must kill ever larger numbers of Palestinians until they submit. With his popularity on the decline, Mr Sharon offered the clearest statement of his policy towards the Palestinians for months. "They must be beaten. We have to cause them heavy casualties, and then they will know they cannot keep using terror and win political achievements," he said. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed since then. At least 15 bled to death because Israelis blocked ambulances from reaching the wounded, or fired at the vehicles, said Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian emergency services. Five Palestinian medical personnel have been killed in the past 36 hours, he added. Yesterday's onslaught spread to the West Bank towns of Tulkaram and Bethlehem. In Tulkaram, Israeli forces thundered into a refugee camp before dawn, trapping dozens of gunmen inside the warren of cinderblock houses along with 12,000 civilians. At least six Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed in the camp on a day of gun battles. Among the dead was a 10-year-old boy in Tulkaram proper, cut down in front of his home by a helicopter gunship. Another boy, 6, was killed in the West Bank town of Jenin. Israel said it entered the refugee camp to hunt down Palestinian militants. Tulkaram is a stronghold of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a military offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation that has carried out the bulk of attacks against Israel in recent weeks. The soldiers ordered all males between the ages of 14 and 40 to gather at a club in the centre of the camp, and began house-to-house searches. By nightfall, Israel Radio reported that 10 Palestinian fighters had given themselves up to the soldiers. However, local Palestinians said only policemen and a director of a refugee organisation had surrendered. Most militants, who face decades in jail if arrested, had escaped, or were determined to fight to the death. A similar mission was launched in the Bethlehem area. Tanks and ground forces entered the suburb of Beit Jala and parts of two refugee camps. Five Palestinians were killed, including the director of a local hospital, who was hit by a tank shell while trying to reach the wounded, and a woman who died when a tank shell landed on her home. Israeli helicopter gunships fired three missiles last night at Palestinian security targets near Hebron and a fourth at an electricity supply building that plunged the West Bank city into darkness, witnesses said. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The fury of Israel's military actions yesterday was fuelled by the gravity of the overnight commando-style raid on the military academy of Atzmona. The Hamas militant launched his lone commando operation just before midnight on Thursday, slipping through two perimeter fences before bursting into a cluster of Nissan huts used as dormitories. "He got in one of the buildings and started shooting and throwing grenades, and carried on to the study hall where there were a lot of pupils," said Yona Emmanuel, a resident of Atzmona, which mixes pre-army training with religious study. During the 15-minute rampage, the militant hurled a grenade into a trailer, incinerating a student in his bunk, and sprayed gunfire into the study hall, before being shot dead by a soldier. The attacker was identified as Mohammed Farhat, from Gaza City. At 19, he was a year older than his victims.
here 'Israelis want more violence and the other side wants more violence' Tactic of attrition against Palestinians suggests worse is yet to come Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor Saturday March 9, 2002 The Guardian Even after a day like yesterday that saw the biggest Israeli assault yet on the Palestinians, there was little sign of either side being chastened. The mood among the Israelis and Palestinians appears to be overwhelmingly in favour of violence. A source in the Israeli administration, reflecting on the options available in the coming months to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was pessimistic yesterday: "Israeli public opinion wants Israel to use more violence. And the other side wants more violence from their own people. They want more suicide attacks." Although another Israeli official yesterday expressed hope that the death toll might prove to be a turning point, the dominant view is that worse is yet to come. Mr Sharon, a former soldier, has opted to try to hammer the Palestinians into negotiation. He said this week he "intends to hit the Palestinians hard" and yesterday the Israeli army did just that: assaults throughout Gaza and the West Bank produced the highest death toll since the Palestinian uprising began 18 months ago. Instead of a cycle of violence in which the one side reacts to incidents by the other, the Israeli army is engaged in a rolling programme against the Palestinians. The Israeli prime minister's tactics are to fight a war of attrition, hoping to grind down Palestinian resistance and then enter negotiation with a weakened Palestinian leadership. He has said publicly that he supports the idea of a Palestinian state but European foreign ministers who have discussed this with him say that the Palestinian state he has in mind is a Bantustan, the artificial homelands created by the apartheid government in South Africa. He has rejected the two main alternatives. Right-wingers in his cabinet are pushing for him to remove the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and re-occupy the West Bank and Gaza. The right has even called for the forced removal of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli army is opposed to reoccupation. Israeli soldiers stationed in Nablus or Ramallah or Gaza City would be permanent targets, symbols of occupation. The other main alternative, pushed by sections of the Labour party, which is also in his coalition government, is for the withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, setting up a Palestinian state and entering quickly into negotiations. The Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who is also the most prominent Labour member, is pressing Mr Sharon to accept a plan roughly along these lines. The Palestinian state could be in existence within 12 weeks under his plan. Mr Sharon, keen to keep Mr Peres in the coalition, has not dismissed it outright, complaining only that the timetable is too quick. Successor Even if Labour was to leave the coalition, Mr Sharon has enough support left to continue in government. Only if the right was also to desert him would he face a vote of confidence in the Israeli parliament. If more than half the 120-member Israeli parliament voted against him, it would trigger an election. If Mr Sharon was to fall - and there is little sign of a vote of confidence, a leadership challenge or an early general election - he would almost certainly be replaced by the former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, whose rhetoric is to the right of Mr Sharon. Mr Netanyahu has been vocal in support of re-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and toppling Mr Arafat. Mr Peres, who signed the Oslo accords with Mr Arafat a decade ago, argues that the Palestinian leader is the only one who could sell a deal to his people. Mr Sharon is indifferent to this argument. According to those around him, he believes that he can deal just as readily with the next generation of Palestinian leaders. The only person outside Israel that Mr Sharon will listen to is the US president, George Bush. Mr Bush has sent his special Middle East envoy, General Anthony Zinni, who is scheduled to arrive in the region early next week. There is speculation that he may try to persuade Mr Sharon to drop his demand that there be a cessation of Palestinian violence for at least seven days before he will regard the peace process as underway. The US is now believed to favour an immediate start to the peace process. But Mr Bush is not about to play the part of honest broker that he hinted at in the aftermath of September 11. He will remain Mr Sharon's best friend. In spite of several visits by Mr Sharon to the White House, he has still to invite Mr Arafat. The Saudi peace plan also now looks doomed, as too much an expression of hope and too short on detail. A year ago, Meir Shalev, a columnist on the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth and a maverick leftwinger, said that there will be at least a few more years of bloodletting and only then will there be a genuine desire on both sides to enter real negotiations. That assessment seems even more accurate after yesterday's carnage.
Boy, don't you realize that the Idependent and the Guardian are very annoying to most Americans. In recent years they are used to only having the news come in two flavors conservative corporate media and conservative corporate media lite. Recently with the advent of right wing talk radio we also get some exposure to the very conservative corporate media flavor. When it comes to Israel it tends to all blend to one flavo, with the permissible range of opinion roughly between Sharon and Bush. This concentration has unfortunately happened as most cities and town have become one newspaper towns and we are reduced to about 5 corportate media groups owning virtually all the media. The electonic media is becoming owned by a few corporations also. Who Controls the Media? Table of Media Ownership The funny thing is that the right wing talk show crowd thinks the media is too liberal.
Myth that Arafat turned down a generous offer by Barak Viewpoint -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Myth of Israel’s ‘generous offer’ damages truth, peace By MIRIAM WARD The myth of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” and “Israel’s painful concessions” in the summer of 2000, and the consequent portrayal of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a “truculent rejectionist” in the mainstream media needs to be examined. Although an American (Robert Malley) and an Israeli (Ron Pundak), diplomats intimately involved in the Camp David negotiations, went public some 12 months after Camp David with more nuanced versions of what really happened, the “generous offer” continues to be damaging to truth and ultimately to peace. Taken out of context, the question “Didn’t Barak offer 95 percent of the occupied territories to Arafat at Camp David?” is exploited to the fullest and enters the mythology of Israeli propaganda. Repeated enough, people believe it. So just what was the offer made by Mr. Barak in July 2000? According to Malley and Pundak, both Barak and Arafat made serious tactical errors based on misperceptions of the other. Neither side exhibited sensitivity to the others’ concerns or suffering. Barak wanted to bypass interim agreements and present Arafat with an “all-or-nothing” proposal, with no fallback options. He presented nothing in writing; proposals were stated verbally. Conclusions of what proposals might be were drawn from maps. Israel would not return to its 1967 borders. Barak’s offer would have left the main Israeli settlements and their Jewish-only bypass roads intact. Palestinian villages would continue to be “islands” isolated from each other, “Bantustans” completely surrounded by Israeli military who could and do blockade entire villages from travel. Except for three villages, Barak excluded the 28 Palestinian villages Israel illegally annexed to Jerusalem. Israel would accept no responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem. To his credit, Barak broke long-held taboos in discussing Jerusalem and the refugees. Arafat was reluctant to go into the talks without reasonable assurance of success. President Clinton promised Arafat that if the talks failed, Arafat would not be blamed. Yet, when the talks failed, Clinton placed most of the blame on Arafat and contributed to the misleading, simplistic propaganda of the “generous offer” by Barak, which was then picked up by and carried on in the mainstream media. Given the history of broken promises and increased land confiscation and accelerated settlement expansion under Barak, Arafat didn’t trust these verbal promises. He wanted proof of Israel’s seriousness in implementing the agreements previously made (and negated by Netanyahu), and feared that in accepting an “all-or-nothing” final status proposal, the entire basis of international legitimacy would be undermined. In the 1993 Oslo Agreement, by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians already gave up 78 percent of their land and accepted the formula “land for peace” within the context of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories. This meant Palestinians were willing to settle for 22 percent of originally mandated Palestine. To put it bluntly: You take $100 from me and later offer to repay $22. I cut my losses and give up $78. Still later you want more of my remaining $22. In short, Arafat felt Palestinians had made real concessions in settling for the territories occupied since the 1967 war. Sheer ineptness and internal squabbling among Palestinian negotiators confounded the Palestinian presentations. Even without the valuable insights of Malley and Pundak, a cursory look at a map of the settlements and their bypass roads amidst Palestinian cities and towns strikingly reveals the impossibility of a viable sovereign Palestinian state. Sovereignty presupposes contiguous territory. How many of us would agree to travel 40 miles from one town to another when the actual distance between them is only five miles? Jeff Halper, a professor at Ben Gurion University, calls it a “matrix of controls” a system of “facts on the ground,” settlements, military checkpoints, permits for travel, permits for building, closure political control over every aspect of Palestinian life. Israeli military decide if and when one can go to work, to market, to school, to the doctor or hospital, to church/mosque, or to visit relatives, leave one’s home or one’s village. Control means when and how much water will be allowed Palestinians. In a sense, control is as important as territory. A member of the Israeli peace group Gush-Shalom says, “Prisoners may occupy 95 percent of prison space, but it is the other 5 percent that determines who is in control.” Palestinians feel helpless and hopeless against the whole apartheid system of control, control backed by F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships and tanks. There is no way Arafat or the Palestinian people could have or should have accepted Barak’s offer. Palestinians are not asking Israel for concessions, but compliance with international law not to give up, but to give back land. Sister of Mercy Miriam Ward is a founding member of Pax Christi Burlington, Vt. National Catholic Reporter, March 1, 2002
Last night I was coming home and I turned on 950 and I heard the "Savage Nation"...It was disgusting.
here The Bush administration also reprimanded Israel Friday for carrying out the deadly attacks. Demanding an immediate halt, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said "above all, civilians should not be targeted." In his comments, Boucher referred to reports of an Israeli vigilante group carrying out an attack on the West Bank and reported attacks on ambulances. "We strongly oppose the Israeli policy of targeted killing that has led to the death of many innocent civilians," the spokesman said. "It's important for the Israelis to think hard about their policies, think through the consequences of things like going into heavily populated areas with heavy military force. Because those consequences can be tragic," Boucher said.
There needs to be an Islamic Crusade. I mean the euro'd did it once for "christanity" so it should be ok for Arabs! Down with Sharon, the butcher of the middle east! Sharon and Saddamy should marry cause they're both gay!
Glynch, I'm living here in London so I probably read more of the Guardian and Independent (cover to cover) than you do. And yes it is annoying to most Americans to see the same tired journalists retreading their old Marxist pieces and calling them 21st century tires. It so silly to assume that Americans somehow 'don't know what's going on.' Most Americans don't believe the Israelis would be striking out if there weren't attacks coming from Palestinians. Most Americans don't believe that Palestinians are doing anything but encouraging more violence. They are supporting the organizations that are attacking Israel, and they are paying the price for the escalating violence. If they treated the extremists like outcasts, the Israelis would not be able to continue to attack them without more harsh sanctions from the outside world. Nor would they have a motive to continue to attack them. As you've pointed out in many of your .org and .peace site pieces, many Israelis are cool with the Palestinians getting some land. They elected Sharon because they felt the Palestinians were retrenching in their push for the whole enchilada, including the dismantling of Israel itself. There is nothing in any of the pieces, including those in the Guardian or the Independent that would change that view.
I don't see how Americans can possibly have a clear view of what's going on in Palestine. I watch CNN all the time, and read so many of these online newspapers. It's all opinion and negative stuff towards Palestine. Do you guys get Al-Jazeera TV in the States? That's the same thing as CNN, but biased in favour of Arabs.
