JENIN GRAFFITI ADOPTS POLITE SLOGANS IN ENGLISH FOR VIP VISITORS

Jenin graffiti artists adopt English for benefit of VIP visitors
By Hamza Hendawi
The Associated Press
April 29, 2002

For the benefit of foreign visitors and U.N. investigators, much of the fresh graffiti in this Palestinian refugee camp is in English these days, not Arabic; and it's uncharacteristically placid, almost polite.

Battered by a fierce battle between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops, the Jenin refugee camp – a bastion of militancy – has gone to great lengths to project an image of moderation for its visitors, and in preparation for a visit by a U.N. team mandated to probe Israel's military operations in the camp.

Israel on Sunday decided not to allow the team to come to the region, repeating its objections to the team's composition and charging that its findings would certainly blame Israel. The Israelis said consultations with the world body would continue over the makeup of the team and the scope of its inquiry.

The team was to look into claims that hundreds of Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed during the April 3-11 battle either in heavy shelling or buried alive when giant bulldozers moved in to bring down homes suspected of sheltering gunmen.

Israel, which lost 23 men in the battle, says several dozen Palestinians died, mostly gunmen. So far, nearly 50 Palestinian bodies have been recovered, according to the Jenin hospital.

The battle was fought as part of an Israeli military campaign launched March 29 to hunt militants in the West Bank following a series of particularly lethal suicide bombings.

The Palestinians are making sure that whoever visits the Jenin refugee camp – those who have already been include members of the European Parliament, U.S. church leaders, Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan and Bianca Jagger, ex-wife of pop music legend Mick Jagger – reads the right slogans and sees the right stuff.

"We love Palestine" and "Palestine is for the Palestinians" read two of the new English-language slogans on the walls of the Jenin camp – very different from the venomous and warlike graffiti that has for years threatened "rivers of blood" or "opening the gates of hell" on the walls of every Palestinian town, village and refugee camp.

An old graffito declaring that "Osama bin Laden is a hero" has been painted over. Bin Laden is thought by the United States to be the architect of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, events that sent a few dozen Palestinians publicly celebrating on the day much to the dismay of many, including Yasser Arafat's administration.

In the huge mound of debris and rubble that was the heart of the Jenin camp, several families spend their days just sitting at the spot where their homes once stood. Huge Palestinian flags together with those of different Palestinian factions and militias are hoisted over buildings of which parts are still standing.

Israeli military sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the Palestinians have taken measures to "prepare" the Jenin camp for the arrival of the U.N. team.

The preparations, they say, include instructions to residents who had lost their homes to spend the day where their houses once stood and to halt any reconstruction of damaged houses so the U.N. team can see the extent of the destruction. Palestinian gunmen left in the camp, they said, have been instructed not to engage in any military activity for the duration of the U.N. team's visit.

Palestinian Jenin lawmaker Jamal al-Shati denied that Palestinian authorities were trying to "flirt" with the U.N. team or important visitors, arguing that the fresh slogans and the camp residents spending their days on the mounds of debris were spontaneous and emotional acts of a people in distress.

 

"THIS WAS A MASSACRE OF THE JEWS, NOT OF US"

Claims of massacre go unsupported by Palestinian fighters
By Charles A. Radin and Dan Ephron
The Boston Globe
April 29, 2002

Palestinian Authority allegations that a large-scale massacre of civilians was committed by Israeli troops during their invasion of the refugee camp here appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes until the final hours of the fighting.

In interviews yesterday with teenage fighters, a leader of Islamic Jihad, an elderly man whose home was at the center of the fighting, and other Palestinian residents, all of whom were in the camp during the battle, none reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed. All said they were allowed to surrender or evacuate when they were ready to do so, though some reported being mistreated while in Israeli detention.

Palestinian Authority leaders have asserted that more than 500 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the camp and that many of the dead were buried by Israeli forces in mass graves. Investigators for Amnesty International said that Israel failed to provide safe passage from the camp to noncombatants.

The Palestinian allegations led to the creation of a UN fact-finding team for Jenin, but Israel yesterday barred the team from arriving amid allegations of an anti-Israel bias.

Israel says that those Palestinians killed in the Jenin battle were almost all fighters, that none were buried in mass graves, and that ample chance was given to fighters to surrender and for civilians to leave. It initially estimated the death toll at 100 to 200, and has since revised that toll downward to 50.

Meanwhile, a British military adviser to Amnesty, Reserve Major David Holley, was quoted yesterday by Reuters news service as dismissing the Palestinian allegations of a massacre and predicting that no evidence would be found to substantiate them.

Jamal al-Shati, who was appointed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to document events at the camp, said last night that 52 deaths have been documented, including those of three women and five children under 14. He asserts that the Israelis secretly removed bodies from the battleground.

Munir Arsam, 15, a member of Islamic Jihad, said that during the siege, which began April 3 and ended around April 11, he did scouting work for older militants, threw homemade pipe bombs, and helped with ambushes of Israeli troops. He said he was one of 50 boys, divided into groups of 10 by militant leaders, who were assigned these tasks.

In contrast with allegations by some Palestinians and Amnesty investigators, Arsam said women and children were able to evacuate the camp before the climactic battle began. Even at the height of the struggle, fighters were able to put down their weapons and surrender, he said, though he also said, as did the Amnesty investigators, that those who surrendered were beaten and otherwise mistreated while in detention.

Arsam said he knew of five fighters in houses bulldozed by the Israelis, at least two of whom were wounded and screaming for help when the bulldozers came. "The men in the tanks and bulldozers could not hear them," he said.

He said he saw Sheik Ri'ad Abu Abd, 57, of Tulkarem, one of the Palestinian heroes of the battle, wounded with a bullet in the leg near the end of the fighting, and asked him if he wanted to surrender.

"He said 'No, I want to die, I want to fight and die,' and a while later that house was bulldozed," Arsam said. On the last day of the battle, with no ammunition left, Arsam buried the weapon he had acquired during the fighting and surrendered.

"They destroyed all the houses in Hawashin," he said, describing a now-demolished neighborhood in the camp. "I was in the last house, and they called out, 'Surrender or we will fire at you.' There were only two of us, so we left, and they destroyed the house." He said the Israeli soldiers held him for four days, frequently beating and kicking him to make him confess to membership in Hamas or Islamic Jihad, then released him.

Asked if he felt any massacre had occurred, Arsam said: "We killed them and they killed us, but we were victorious."

Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, 14, another Islamic Jihad grenade-thrower, said he was one of a group of 11 adults and seven young men who surrendered upon Israeli demand. He said they were confined in a courtyard near the camp to which the Israeli troops brought dozens of other men and women.

"They told all the small kids to just leave, and they let all the women go after they checked their bags," said Sa'adi, who has braces and was wearing a baseball cap. "None of them were kept for questioning."

"Of course the Palestinians won" this battle, he said, because "they did not shake our morale. This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us."

Prompted by bystanders, he revised his statement. "I think there was a massacre here – maybe 100 people," he said.

Khalid Mohammed Taleb, 70, lay on a concrete slab from his ruined house, shaded by a makeshift plastic awning, watching with a blank expression as people clambered over the rubble yesterday and buried mines and grenades occasionally exploded.

"I come every day," he said. "I lived here 50 years."

Taleb and his extended family of 11 people stayed in the camp rather than evacuating because "we thought it would be like the first invasion, they would make an incursion and leave. I used to say I wouldn't leave even if they buried me in this house, but I saw the bulldozers killing people and I left."

That was around midnight, on the day before the battle ended.

Taleb said he raised a white flag and walked at the front of a group of 20 people – his own family and those of two neighbors. The destruction of his house and the surrounding buildings occurred after the civilians left, he said, when only fighters remained.

He said several times that no civilians were killed, but after repeated questioning from reporters and bystanders, he said: "Well, maybe one or two. It was a big battle." Was it a massacre? "Perhaps," he said. "Both sides lost."

An Islamic Jihad leader, who insisted on anonymity, said he was wounded as the battle drew to a close, and crawled 300 yards to where other fighters were gathered.

"There were 35 of us, and they were bringing down houses on us, so we surrendered," he said. Israeli soldiers "threw me on the garbage near the hospital at noon" on the last day of the battle, "and I remained there until 1 a.m." The Israelis did not attempt to confine or question him, and he returned to the camp Saturday, he said.

All the fighters said that the Israelis failed to wipe out the militant leadership in the camp, which long has been known as an Islamic Jihad stronghold.

"Of course we are reorganizing," said the Islamic Jihad leader, who walked with a cane and was thronged by comrades near the wreckage. "I don't know what is the plan, what is the strategy, but people are full of hatred."

Arsam, the 15-year-old fighter, said leaders of Islamic Jihad and other factions were taking new groups of youngsters to a hill near Jenin every day for military training, teaching them to fire automatic weapons and to make bombs.

A spokesman for the Israeli army asserted, meanwhile, that Palestinians were moving bodies of people not killed in the Jenin fighting into graveyards around the camp "to score points with the UN committee due to arrive to investigate the happenings in the Jenin refugee camp." The military said this charge was based on information received from Israeli intelligence agencies, and refused to elaborate.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/29/2002.

 

"THERE IS NO JUSTICE TO BE HAD IN THE U.N. FOR THE JEWISH STATE"

"The U.N. Won't Investigate the Real Tragedy"
By Yossi Klein Halevi
The Los Angeles Times
April 28, 2002

The United Nations commission formed to investigate the nonexistent Israeli "massacre" in the West Bank town of Jenin could have been a means for some desperately needed truth-telling about the Middle East conflict.

Instead, given its mandate to focus on Israel's self-defense rather than on the Palestinian terrorism that provoked it, the commission will only confirm that there is no justice to be had in the U.N. for the Jewish state.

The commission won't be investigating how the Palestinian Authority, established and lavishly funded by the international community, abused its sponsors' trust by turning Jenin and other West Bank towns into centers for suicide bomb factories. The commission won't be investigating how Palestinian terrorists used civilian neighborhoods as shields for their death work and Red Crescent ambulances to transport explosives belts into Israeli cities.

The commission won't be investigating the verifiable massacres that have happened here in Israel's cafes and wedding halls, on its street corners and buses.

The commission won't be investigating the role played by Yasser Arafat's official apparatus – his police and militias and intelligence services – in planning, funding and recruiting for the suicide killer operations.

The commission won't be investigating how the internationally recognized leadership of the Palestinian people nurtured a culture of suicide among its young – for example, Arafat's televised plea to God to grant him the martyrdom of the suicide bomber who killed 28 Israelis in the Passover massacre, or his wife's public lament that she had no son to offer as a suicide killer.

The commission won't be investigating the cultural infrastructure that made terror possible – the Palestinian textbooks that exclude Israel from the map of the Middle East, the Palestinian media that proclaim that the Holocaust never happened, the Palestinian mosques where preachers invoke God's blessing for those who kill civilians.

The commission won't be investigating how donor nations, especially those of the European Union, allowed the Palestinian Authority to sustain a terrorist war for the last 19 months, lavishing funds on a corrupt regime that devotes its budget to building bomb factories rather than hospitals and schools.

The commission won't be investigating the Arab world's culpability in creating the Palestinian refugee crisis by rejecting the U.N.'s own partition plan in 1947 and then maintaining the Middle East conflict by rejecting President Clinton's peace plan that would have created a Palestinian state on almost all the territories and part of Jerusalem.

The commission won't be investigating why much of the world's media rushed to proclaim a massacre in Jenin without evidence, and then appeared disappointed not to find mass graves beneath Jenin's rubble.

Neither will the commission be investigating itself to expose how the U.N. has been hijacked by a coalition of international dictatorships that have singled out Israel, which struggles to maintain democratic norms under permanent siege, as the world body's symbol of evil.

It won't be investigating how a country such as Syria, whose government routinely imprisons opponents and has sponsored the mass murder of its own citizens, is given a seat on the Security Council, to say nothing of its seat on the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission.

And it won't be investigating the U.N.'s neglect of desperate human rights issues such as the occupation of Tibet and of Lebanon and the mass murder and enslavement of black Sudanese.

Those are all issues that have been obscured by the U.N.'s obsessive focus on Palestinian statelessness, which the Palestinians refused to end through negotiation and compromise.

The commission won't be investigating the real tragedy: how the U.N. squandered the dream of a united humanity animated by justice – a dream first offered by the prophets of ancient Israel – and instead joined the unholy coalition of Islamic fundamentalists, far-left moralizers and far-right neofascists in again targeting the Jewish people.

 

THE FINDINGS ARE KNOWN IN ADVANCE

The findings are known in advance
By Ze'ev Segal
Ha'aretz
April 29, 2002

The commission investigating the events of the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps determined that the massacre was carried out by the Phalangists and that the State of Israel thus did not bear direct responsibility for it.

In a note to the summary of their report, published in February 1983, the members of the Kahan commission said they were not deluding themselves into thinking that "the results of this inquiry would convince or satisfy those with prejudiced views and a selective conscience."

About a year ago, the Belgian court hearing the case against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other senior Israeli officials was presented with a whole set of testimonies, which appeared to be well-coordinated and orchestrated, about atrocities allegedly committed by Israeli soldiers in the camps.

A similar set of testimonies could also be the daily bread of the fact-finding committee appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to look into the events in the Jenin refugee camp. Palestinian sources, who are still making waves in international broadcasts, continue to claim there was a massacre in Jenin. This is the picture that will be presented to the fact-finding team by Palestinian witnesses, who will presumably speak with a single voice.

There is reason for concern that Israeli testimony will not lead the committee – which is commissioned to report its findings to the UN secretary-general and Security Council – to an unequivocal conclusion that there was never was any massacre. A complete rejection of the massacre claim would entail a pointed refutation of the testimony of the Palestinian side, something the committee would seek to avoid given its political nature.

The fact-finding committee is comprised of people of political and humanitarian background, without legal expertise in the objective and professional reviewing of facts. The committee does not include any experts with military background in fighting terror, and the general characteristics of the committee are far from that of the commission of inquiry that is customary in Israel. This type of committee does not even raise an expectation that its investigation would be impartial.

Israeli government officials assume that the recordings, photographs and transcripts of prisoner interrogations pointing to the truth would be relevant only to a fact-finding committee of a legal nature. The UN committee is not like this. At best it may conclude – in a "note" attached to the findings or in some other way – that it is impossible to determine with certainty that there was a massacre in Jenin. This conclusion would come together with the predictable findings that Israel used "excessive force" and "prevented humanitarian aid." This type of conclusion was actually already sounded by Terje Larsen, according to which "Israel prevented aid organizations and international assistance from entering for seven days."

This type of statement, without addressing the overall context, is enough to open the gates to war crimes tribunals and other investigations, and serve as the basis for anti-Israel decisions in UN institutions. The UN secretary general did not rule out the possibility of putting soldiers on trial for war crimes, though UN sources said those testifying would be promised immunity.

The need to vigorously oppose sending soldiers before the UN panel is not because we have something to hide. The widespread assumption is that we have nothing to hide. The IDF could have submitted its material and personnel for a review before a neutral and objective committee, but not to a committee representing the the Security Council, in which Israel does not get a fair hearing.

The promise of immunity for IDF soldiers from international criminal prosecution is a bluff. Immunity inherently exists only on the assumption that those implicated under questioning will not travel abroad. Otherwise, they will not have immunity and the findings of the committee will haunt them wherever they go. A government decision to subject them to questioning would be inconsistent with the state's obligation to protect the dignity and freedom of its soldiers, as also expressed in the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom.

It is accepted in law that a state can renege on a promise in the face of a clear "public interest." Israel does not need to stand by its initial agreement to the formation of a UN committee in light of its composition and character, which does not promise an honest and unbiased inquiry.

Israel cannot agree to cooperate with a committee that would discuss the actions in Jenin according to political considerations without addressing the overall picture of Jenin as "the capital of suicide bombers" and the whole series of horrific attacks that led to the IDF action. Israel could submit to the committee – if its relationship with the United States so required – recordings and aerial photos of the Jenin operation, and documents about Jenin's role in terror and about the chain of terror attacks in Israel and the territories.

However, the government should not, under any condition, expose IDF soldiers to an international inquiry whose findings are actually known in advance.

TRANSCRIPT: DENNIS ROSS ON FOX NEWS

Transcript: Dennis Ross, Former U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East
FOX News Sunday
April 21, 2002.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50863,00.html

BRIT HUME, HOST: Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has worked to achieve Middle East peace throughout President Clinton's final days in office. In the months following Clinton's failed peace summit at Camp David, U.S. negotiators continued behind-the-scenes peace talks with the Palestinians and Israelis up until January 2001, and that followed Clinton's presentation of ideas at the end of December 2000.

Dennis Ross joins us now with more details on all that, and Fred Barnes joins the questioning.

So, Dennis, talk to us a little bit, if you can – I might note that we're proud to able to say that you're a Fox News contributing analyst.

DENNIS ROSS, FMR. U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE MIDDLE EAST: Thank you.

HUME: Talk to us about the sequence of events. The Camp David talks, there was an offer. That was rejected. Talks continued. You come now to December, and the president has a new set of ideas. What unfolded?

ROSS: Let me give you the sequence, because I think it puts all this in perspective.

Number one, at Camp David we did not put a comprehensive set of ideas on the table. We put ideas on the table that would have affected the borders and would have affected Jerusalem.

Arafat could not accept any of that. In fact, during the 15 days there, he never himself raised a single idea. His negotiators did, to be fair to them, but he didn't. The only new idea he raised at Camp David was that the temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus.

HUME: This is the temple where Ariel Sharon paid a visit, which was used as a kind of a pre-text for the beginning of the new intifada, correct?

ROSS: This is the core of the Jewish faith.

HUME: Right.

ROSS: So he was denying the core of the Jewish faith there. After the summit, he immediately came back to us and he said, "We need to have another summit," to which we said, "We just shot our wad. We got a no from you. You're prepared actually do a deal before we go back to something like that."

He agreed to set up a private channel between his people and the Israelis, which I joined at the end of August. And there were serious discussions that went on, and we were poised to present our ideas the end of September, which is when the intifada erupted. He knew we were poised to present the ideas. His own people were telling him they looked good. And we asked him to intervene to ensure there wouldn't be violence after the Sharon visit, the day after. He said he would. He didn't lift a finger.

Now, eventually we were able to get back to a point where private channels between the two sides led each of them to again ask us to present the ideas. This was in early December. We brought the negotiators here.

HUME: Now, this was a request to the Clinton administration...

ROSS: Yes.

HUME: ... to formulate a plan. Both sides wanted this?

ROSS: Absolutely.

HUME: All right.

ROSS: Both sides asked us to present these ideas.

HUME: All right. And they were?

ROSS: The ideas were presented on December 23 by the president, and they basically said the following: On borders, there would be about a 5 percent annexation in the West Bank for the Israelis and a 2 percent swap. So there would be a net 97 percent of the territory that would go to the Palestinians.

On Jerusalem, the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would become the capitol of the Palestinian state.

On the issue of refugees, there would be a right of return for the refugees to their own state, not to Israel, but there would also be a fund of $30 billion internationally that would be put together for either compensation or to cover repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation costs.

And when it came to security, there would be a international presence, in place of the Israelis, in the Jordan Valley.

These were ideas that were comprehensive, unprecedented, stretched very far, represented a culmination of an effort in our best judgment as to what each side could accept after thousands of hours of debate, discussion with each side.

BARNES: Now, Palestinian officials say to this day that Arafat said yes.

ROSS: Arafat came to the White House on January 2. Met with the president, and I was there in the Oval Office. He said yes, and then he added reservations that basically meant he rejected every single one of the things he was supposed to give.

HUME: What was he supposed to give?

ROSS: He supposed to give, on Jerusalem, the idea that there would be for the Israelis sovereignty over the Western Wall, which would cover the areas that are of religious significance to Israel. He rejected that.

HUME: He rejected their being able to have that?

ROSS: He rejected that.

He rejected the idea on the refugees. He said we need a whole new formula, as if what we had presented was non-existent.

He rejected the basic ideas on security. He wouldn't even countenance the idea that the Israelis would be able to operate in Palestinian airspace.

You know when you fly into Israel today you go to Ben Gurion. You fly in over the West Bank because you can't – there's no space through otherwise. He rejected that.

So every single one of the ideas that was asked of him he rejected.

HUME: Now, let's take a look at the map. Now, this is what – how the Israelis had created a map based on the president's ideas. And...

ROSS: Right.

HUME: ... what can we – that situation shows that the territory at least is contiguous. What about Gaza on that map?

ROSS: The Israelis would have gotten completely out of Gaza. And what you see also in this line, they show an area of temporary Israeli control along the border.

HUME: Right.

ROSS: Now, that was an Israeli desire. That was not what we presented. But we presented something that did point out that it would take six years before the Israelis would be totally out of the Jordan Valley.

So that map there that you see, which shows a very narrow green space along the border, would become part of the orange. So the Palestinians would have in the West Bank an area that was contiguous. Those who say there were cantons, completely untrue. It was contiguous.

HUME: Cantons being ghettos, in effect...

ROSS: Right.

HUME: ... that would be cut off from other parts of the Palestinian state.

ROSS: Completely untrue.

And to connect Gaza with the West Bank, there would have been an elevated highway, an elevated railroad, to ensure that there would be not just safe passage for the Palestinians, but free passage.

BARNES: I have two other questions. One, the Palestinians point out that this was never put on paper, this offer. Why not?

ROSS: We presented this to them so that they could record it. When the president presented it, he went over it at dictation speed. He then left the cabinet room. I stayed behind. I sat with them to be sure, and checked to be sure that every single word.

The reason we did it this way was to be sure they had it and they could record it. But we told the Palestinians and Israelis, if you cannot accept these ideas, this is the culmination of the effort, we withdraw them. We did not want to formalize it. We wanted them to understand we meant what we said. You don't accept it, it's not for negotiation, this is the end of it, we withdraw it.

So that's why they have it themselves recorded. And to this day, the Palestinians have not presented to their own people what was available.

BARNES: In other words, Arafat might use it as a basis for further negotiations so he'd get more?

ROSS: Well, exactly.

HUME: Which is what, in fact, he tried to do, according to your account.

ROSS: We treated it as not only a culmination. We wanted to be sure it couldn't be a floor for negotiations.

HUME: Right.

ROSS: It couldn't be a ceiling. It was the roof.

HUME: This was a final offer?

ROSS: Exactly. Exactly right.

HUME: This was the solution.

BARNES: Was Arafat alone in rejecting it? I mean, what about his negotiators?

ROSS: It's very clear to me that his negotiators understood this was the best they were ever going to get. They wanted him to accept it. He was not prepared to accept it.

HUME: Now, it is often said that this whole sequence of talks here sort of fell apart or ended or broke down or whatever because of the intervention of the Israeli elections. What about that?

ROSS: The real issue you have to understand was not the Israeli elections. It was the end of the Clinton administration. The reason we would come with what was a culminating offer was because we were out of time.

They asked us to present the ideas, both sides. We were governed by the fact that the Clinton administration was going to end, and both sides said we understand this is the point of decision.

HUME: What, in your view, was the reason that Arafat, in effect, said no?

ROSS: Because fundamentally I do not believe he can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict.

Arafat's whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause. Everything he has done as leader of the Palestinians is to always leave his options open, never close a door. He was being asked here, you've got to close the door. For him to end the conflict is to end himself.

HUME: Might it not also have been true, though, Dennis, that, because the intifada had already begun – so you had the Camp David offer rejected, the violence begins anew, a new offer from the Clinton administration comes along, the Israelis agree to it, Barak agrees to it...

ROSS: Yes.

HUME: ... might he not have concluded that the violence was working?

ROSS: It is possible he concluded that. It is possible he thought he could do and get more with the violence. There's no doubt in my mind that he thought the violence would create pressure on the Israelis and on us and maybe the rest of the world.

And I think there's one other factor. You have to understand that Barak was able to reposition Israel internationally. Israel was seen as having demonstrated unmistakably it wanted peace, and the reason it wasn't available, achievable was because Arafat wouldn't accept it.

Arafat needed to re-establish the Palestinians as a victim, and unfortunately they are a victim, and we see it now in a terrible way.

HUME: Dennis Ross, thank you so much.

 

MYTHS OF THE INTFADA

Myths of the Intifada
Yasser Arafat has propagated three myths about the deals he turned down. Now Dennis Ross has set the record straight.
By Fred Barnes
The Weekly Standard
April 25, 2002

Palestinian and other apologists for Yasser Arafat have propagated three myths about his failure to reach peace with Israel. And only now--two years after Israeli Palestinian peace talks collapsed because of Arafat's intransigence – is the truth becoming known. This is mostly thanks to Dennis Ross, the Middle East negotiator for both the first Bush administration and President Clinton.

The first myth is that the final deal offered to Arafat would have created a new Palestinian state fragmented into four "cantons" on the West Bank, each surrounded by Israeli territory, none connected to Gaza. It was understandably unacceptable to the Palestinians. The second is that Arafat actually accepted a later, more generous peace settlement, only to have it nullified by the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister in February 2001. And the third is that this final offer, an official United States proposal made by Clinton, was never put on paper, making it a matter not to be taken seriously, then or now. (Yes, the myths conflict. Arafat is said to have turned down one final deal but accepted another, later, final offer.)

Myth number one has an element of truth. Indeed, the terms of the peace settlement offered by then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in July 2000 involved four separate clusters of territory on the West Bank and no land link to Gaza. Arafat said no and didn't make a counteroffer. Instead, in September, he started a violent new intifada, or insurrection, against Israel. But the myth, persistently voiced by such Arafat sympathizers as James Zogby of the Arab American Institute and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is that this was the final peace proposal. It wasn't.

Following the Camp David summit, Arafat asked for another meeting, according to Ross, and was told he would need to be prepared to accept a deal before a new summit would be set up. So Arafat "agreed to set up a private channel between his people and the Israelis," Ross told Brit Hume on "Fox News Sunday" on April 21. Arafat knew the United States was "poised to present our ideas" when he ordered a new intifada. The United States asked Arafat to prevent violence from erupting after Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and he said he would. "He didn't lift a finger," Ross said.

In December 2000, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were brought to Washington. And on December 23, President Clinton presented a new plan to them. The Palestinians would get 97 percent of the West Bank, Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem would become the capital of the new Palestinian state, refugees would be allowed to return to Palestine but not Israel, and a $30 billion fund would be established to compensate refugees. This was the final offer: The cantons were gone and a land link to Gaza was included.

And that leads into myth two, that Arafat accepted the fresh and far more generous proposal. True, he said yes when he met with Clinton on January 2, 2001, in the Oval Office. "Then he added reservations that basically meant he rejected every single one of the things he was supposed to give," Ross said. He rejected the idea Israelis would have sovereignty over the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other religious sites. He rejected the scheme for refugees and what Ross called "the basic ideas on security... So every single one of the ideas that was asked of him, he rejected." How can Ross be so sure of that? He was in the room with Clinton and Arafat when it happened.

As for myth three, Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi and others have dismissed the U.S. offer, which the Israelis under Barak were willing to accept, as so inconsequential it wasn't even written down and publicly announced. But by late 2000, Ross said, Americans had learned Arafat's negotiating style. Any formal offer would be taken as the floor for further negotiations requiring more Israeli concessions. But with the Clinton administration soon to leave office, there wasn't time to allow Arafat to prolong talks. "We wanted them to understand we meant what we said," Ross said. "You don't accept it, it's not for negotiation, this is the end of it, we withdraw it... It couldn't be the floor for negotiations. It was the roof." So for Arafat, it was take it or leave it. He left it, and soon the negotiating environment changed with the election of Sharon and George W. Bush.

In truth, the offer was written down when it was initially presented by Clinton in December. "He went over it at dictation speed," Ross said. After Clinton left the meeting, Ross stayed behind to make certain the Palestinian negotiators had gotten "every single word." They had. A footnote: Ross insists the Palestinian negotiators were ready to accept the offer. They "understood this was the best they were ever going to get. They wanted [Arafat] to accept it." He refused. Why? Ross believes Arafat simply doesn't want to end the conflict with Israel. His career is governed by struggle and leaving his options open. "For him to end the conflict is to end himself," Ross said.

What's important about the history of peace talks in the Middle East is what it tells us about Arafat. The inescapable conclusion is that he will never reach a settlement with Israelis leading to two countries, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace. The Israelis? An honest recounting of the Clinton-led peace talks shows they were willing, though hardly eager, to make substantial concessions to reach a settlement. Had Arafat gone along, Ross believes Barak could have sold the deal to the Israeli people, even as Palestinian terrorism continued and Sharon's election victory loomed. Maybe so, but that was a moment in time that, because of Arafat, has now passed away.

(Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard)

FULL ARTICLES

"FANTASY LAND IS FUN, BUT WE'VE ENCOURAGED THE ARABS IN THEIR PERCULIAR DEMENTIAS FOR TOO LONG"

It's time to snap out of Arab fantasy land
By Mark Steyn
The National Post (Canada)
April 18, 2002

So what do you think of this Israeli "massacre" at the Jenin refugee camp?

"All British officials tend to become pro-Arab, or, perhaps, more accurately anti-Jew," wrote Sir John Hope-Simpson in the 1920s wrapping up a stint in the British Mandate of Palestine. "Personally, I can quite well understand this trait. The helplessness of the fellah appeals to the British official. The offensive assertion of the Jewish immigrant is, on the other hand, repellent." Progressive humanitarianism, as much as old-school colonialism, prefers its clientele "helpless," and, despite Iranian weaponry and Iraqi money and the human sacrifice of its schoolchildren, the Palestinians have been masters at selling their "helplessness" to the West.

Odd, isn't it? The Americans are routinely accused of being (in Pat Buchanan's phrase) Israel's amen corner. But Washington is at least prepared to offer the odd, qualified criticism of Sharon. The rest of the world, by contrast, is happy to parrot Yasser's talking points without modifying a single semi-colon. In the last month, I've found as many Jew-haters on the Continent as in the Middle East, but the difference is that the Arabs are fierce in their hatred, no matter how contorted their arguments, while the Europeans are lazy, off-hand Jew-haters – they don't need arguments, they're happy to let the Arabs supply the script. Thus, the extraordinary resolution this week by the UN Human Rights Commission which accuses Israel of many and varied human rights violations, makes no mention of suicide bombers, and endorses the movement for a Palestinian state by "all available means, including armed struggle" – i.e., terrorism. The resolution could have been drafted by the Arab League or the PLO. Forty of the 53 nations on the Commission approved it, including six EU members: Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Only five countries could summon the will to vote against: Britain, Canada, Germany, the Czech Republic and Guatemala. (The U.S. is not a member of the HRC, having been kicked off by a coalition of Euro-Arab schemers.)

This is only the most extreme example of how the less sense the Arabs make the more the debate is framed in their terms. For all the tedious bleating of the Euroninnies, what Israel is doing is perfectly legal. Even if you sincerely believe that "Chairman" Arafat is entirely blameless when it comes to the suicide bombers, when a neighbouring jurisdiction is the base for hostile incursions, a sovereign state has the right of hot pursuit. Britain has certainly availed herself of this internationally recognized principle: In the 19th century, when the Fenians launched raids on Canada from upstate New York, the British thought nothing of infringing American sovereignty to hit back – and Washington accepted they were entitled to do so. But the rights every other sovereign state takes for granted are denied to Israel. "The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem ... But everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab ... Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world." Thus, the massive population displacements in Europe at the end of the Second World War are forever, but those in Palestine a mere three years later must be corrected and reversed. On the Continent, losing wars comes with a territorial price: The Germans aren't going to be back in Danzig any time soon. But, in the Middle East, no matter how often the Arabs attack Israel and lose, their claims to their lost territory manage to be both inviolable but endlessly transferable.

So even the so-called "two-state solution" subscribes to an Arafatist view of the situation. Creating yet another fetid Arab dictatorship in the West Bank would be, technically, a "three-state solution" and, indeed, a second Palestinian state, Jordan, whose population has always been majority Palestinian. It was created in the original "two-state settlement" 80 years ago, when the British partitioned their new Mandate of Palestine, carving off the western three-quarters into a territory called "Transjordan" and keeping the surviving eastern quarter under the name "Palestine." They did this for two reasons: First, they needed to stop one of the Hashemite boys, Abdullah, from marching on Syria and the best they could come up with was to halt him in Amman and suggest he serve as interim governor; but secondly, Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, thought the fairest way to fulfill Britain's pledges to both Arabs and Jews during the Great War was by confining Zionists to a Jewish National Home west of the Jordan and creating a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan. The only thing he got wrong was the names: If instead of inventing the designation "Transjordan," he'd just called the eastern territory "Palestine" and the west "Israel" (or "Judah"), the Arafatist claim would be a much tougher sell.

The Zionists have been trading "land for peace" ever since the Great War, and the result is they've got hardly any land and less peace than ever before. As early as 1921, Chaim Weizmann wrote to Churchill protesting the ever shrinking borders of the potential Jewish homeland. To the north, Britain had surrendered traditionally Palestinian land to France in fixing the Mandate's border with Lebanon and Syria and, by giving the eastern three-quarters to Abdullah, had removed the rich fields of Gilead, Moab and Edom. The 1947 UN Partition took more land – a partition of the previous partition – but the Zionists accepted it. In 1993, Oslo was the biggest gamble yet, the creation of a mini-fiefdom for their bloodiest enemy. The "Palestinian Authority" was an unlikely bet for a state but, from Arafat's point of view, it would make an ideal launch-point from which to kill Jews in the very heart of their tiny sliver of territory.

Other than that, what's the point? I'm sure the Middle East can always use another squalid corrupt dictatorship, but at the very least it ought to be a viable squalid corrupt dictatorship. An Arafatist squat on the West Bank and Gaza would be insufficient. If Israel is, to the French, a "shitty little country," this would be littler and shittier. Therefore, Arafat would seek to augment it with territory from either west or east, Israel or Jordan. The likelihood is that he'd be able to destabilize Jordan far more quickly than he could destroy Israel. If it's a choice between an Arafat sewer straddling the Jordan River or the Hashemites, I know which I'd prefer.

Israel should take what it needs of the West Bank for a buffer, round up every terrorist it can, and announce that the Jordanians are welcome to what's left. If King Abdullah doesn't want it and chooses to call in the UN blue helmets in perpetuity, so be it. But the last eight years should have taught Israel that it cannot live within its 1967 borders next to a thug statelet whose sole purpose is to liquidate it. The Arabs have succeeded in luring the West into their bizarro alternative universe, where land lost by a foolish king is mysteriously transformed into the personal property of a terrorist organization, where the "armed struggle" of wired schoolgirls is UN-approved, and where the "right to exist" is something to be negotiated. Fantasy land is fun, but we've encouraged the Arabs in their peculiar dementias for too long. It's time to get real.

 

"JENIN CAMP LOOKS LIKE THE SCENE OF A CRIME…"

The battle for the truth
What really happened in Jenin camp?
Leader
The Guardian
April 17, 2002

Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime. Its concrete rubble and tortured metal evokes another horror half a world away in New York, smaller in scale but every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made. Jenin smells like a crime. The stench of decaying flesh, of dead bodies left to rot or buried unabsolved under collapsed buildings greets those aid workers and reporters who manage to gain access. What cruel deficit of pity denies those who died the benefit of departing grace? Jenin feels like a crime. No sentient person can sift this evidence of broken lives and homes; witness the dry-eyed children, their minds shocked and twisted beyond words; look upon the detritus of a frugal, refugee existence – tin plates in a kitchen sink, cheap bathroom tiles, abandoned sleeping mats – turned into ownerless rubbish by bullets, bulldozers and rockets; and not demand an urgent reckoning. Jenin already has that aura of infamy that attaches to a crime of especial notoriety. The story of Jenin, as yet still half-told, is set to live on in memory and myth, as nightmare and as heroic apocalypse, gaining a separate existence and significance in the history of the Palestinian struggle. As the leading peace campaigner, Uri Avnery, points out, Jenin, like the Jews' Massada, could be the stuff of legend upon which dreams are built, informing, defining (and perhaps warping) the consciousness of the emerging Palestinian nation state.

Such myth-making and nation-building hardly formed a part of Ariel Sharon's plan when he sent his soldiers into Jenin. But nor is it entirely proper to portray the camp battles, in which still unknown numbers of people were killed or wounded, as victories for either side, moral or otherwise. Both are losers; and if the leaders of the "international community" had been more resolute Mr Sharon would have been no more able to mount his West Bank invasion than Hamas would have been allowed to pursue its suicidal attacks. Yet while Mr Sharon's talent for wanton destruction has once again proved deeply counter-productive, is he also guilty, as the Palestinians claim, of a heinous and exceptional crime? In short, what really happened inside Jenin?

The world needs to know. To that end, Jenin must be treated like a crime scene, investigated without delay, before the evidence disappears or is destroyed. The UN human rights commission has ordered an inquiry led by Mary Robinson. Israel and the Palestinians should cooperate fully – and even if they cannot agree a general ceasefire, in Jenin at least the truce must hold. The EU's aid commissioner says Israel breached the 1949 Geneva convention by blocking the delivery of humanitarian assistance in Jenin. Israel must ensure that all restrictions on aid agency and media access are lifted forthwith. These and other aspects of its behaviour in Jenin in respect of civilian rights, treatment of prisoners and the disposal of bodies must also be investigated – as should Israeli claims that Palestinian gunmen used civilians as human shields.

The world needs to know what really happened in Jenin if only to be better equipped to stop it happening again. Both Israelis and Palestinians need to know, because more disinformation, more denial and lies, and yet more tragic myth-making only feed the hatred and deepen the divide. Most of all perhaps, the children of Jenin need to know. The future of this land, if it still has one, lies with them. To deny them the truth would be yet another crime.

 

THERE WAS NO MASSACRE IN JENIN

There was no massacre in Jenin
Editorial
Ha'aretz
April 19, 2002

The claim that there was a "massacre" in the Jenin refugee camp has been taken up by many news media around the world, human rights groups and even among many governments. This claim, originally made during the height of the fighting in the refugee camp, reverberates with gravity, seriously damaging Israel's political campaign to justify its self defense against terror and the legitimacy of the means it is using in that campaign.

In Israel, too, suspicions were raised that there was truth to the Palestinian claims. Many feared that Jenin would be added to the black list of massacres that have shocked the world. The IDF contributed to those fears when it issued a preliminary estimate of hundreds of dead in the camp (it turned out that several score were killed, with the exact number still unknown) and by blocking journalists from entering the camp to report what was happening inside. That was an invitation to another charge, also widely reported, of an alleged cover-up.

In recent days, journalists – including Ha'aretz reporters – have visited the camp, gathering their own first-hand impressions and eyewitness testimony about the IDF's operations. Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass spent several days in the camp, and her report appears in today's pages. There is evidence of intense combat, but, with appropriate caution, it can already be said what did not happen in the Jenin refugee camp. There was no massacre. No order from above was given, nor was a local initiative executed, to deliberately and systematically kill unarmed people.

In Israel of 2002, there is practically no way to cover up atrocities. Testimony by commanders and fighters in Jenin, many of whom were civilians called up into reserves for the purpose of the operation, as well as testimony by those who observed the events through various means refute the claims of a massacre. The fighting was intense, as could be expected in built-up areas, and especially against the background of rapid Israeli successes in other areas, particularly the Nablus casbah. Armed Palestinians shot, blew up and mined houses and alleyways. The soldiers, who had difficulty progressing, used bulldozers and suffered heavy losses – 23 soldiers were killed. Under such circumstances, civilians were also harmed. That is a terrible, sorrowful fact, resulting from the nature of the fighting, and in some specific cases there should be an examination to determine whether everything necessary was done to prevent civilian casualties. But declaring the fighting in Jenin a "massacre" is a mistake on the part of the naive, and a slander by others.

Palestinian propagandists have made perverse use of legends that, in part, were invented outside Jenin. Leading these propagandists were officials of the Palestinian Authority who issued baseless charges of "executions," fanning the flames of hatred against Israel. The readiness of international elements, including the heads of the European Union, to accept the Palestinian version without question, is testimony to their character, to Israel's fragile situation and to Ariel Sharon's negative image.

 

MP ACCUSES SHARON OF 'BARBARISM'

Yesterday in Parliament
MP accuses Sharon of 'barbarism'
All sides condemn West Bank incursions
By Nicholas Watt
The Guardian
April 17, 2002

The veteran Labour MP and prominent Jewish parliamentarian, Gerald Kaufman, yesterday launched a ferocious attack on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, denouncing him as a "war criminal" who was staining the Star of David.

Speaking in a Commons debate on the Middle East crisis, in which MPs from across the house condemned Israel's incursions into the West Bank, Mr Kaufman likened Mr Sharon's tactics to the actions of Zionist terrorists in Palestine in the 1940s.

In an emotional speech, in which he described himself as a lifelong friend of Israel, the former shadow foreign secretary said: "Sharon has ordered his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestinians ... It is time to remind Sharon that the Star of David belongs to all Jews and not to his repulsive government. His actions are staining the Star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatila camp and now involved in killing Palestinians once again."

To nods of approval from MPs, Mr Kaufman condemned Palestinian suicide bombers. But he added that it was important to ask why Palestinians resort to such tactics. "We need to ask how we would feel if we had been occupied for 35 years by a foreign power which denied us the most elementary human rights and decent living conditions."

Mr Kaufman then likened the suicide bombers to the Zionist Irgun and Stern gangs, which launched a series of terrorist attacks in Palestine in the run-up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

"We need to ask what the Jews did in comparable circumstances," he said. "In 1946 the Irgun controlled by Menacham Begin blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, slaughtering 91 innocent people. In 1948 the Palestinians denounced what they described as a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin ... The difference between the Deir Yassin massacre and what happened in Jenin is that Deir Yassin was the work of terrorist groups denounced by mainstream Jewish groups. The horrors in Jenin were carried out by the official Israeli army."

A Blair loyalist, Mr Kaufman warned that Mr Sharon's conduct had made it impossible for Britain and the United States to take action against Iraq. "To do so would unite the whole Muslim world against the US, the coalition against terrorism would disintegrate, western economies could suffer a shock comparable to the oil shock of 1973."

Mr Kaufman's attack on the Israeli government were echoed across the chamber. The former Tory cabinet minister, John Gummer, said that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between the actions of the Israelis and that of the Arabs.

"Israel is a state, with the trappings of a state which claims the legitimacy of a state and the more that it rightly claims that legitimacy, the more it has to be judged by the standards of a state and the standards of democracy," he said.

Amid such a serious Middle East crisis it was irresponsible of Washington to take such a tough stance against Iraq, Mr Gummer warned. He criticised the "kind of approach that says that we judge what is in our self-interest and our self-defence and thereby can do anything we like, irrespective either of international law or the UN or indeed frankly of the evidence before us".

Ann Clwyd, the Labour backbencher who has just returned from a visit to the Jenin refugee camp with the UN, said the EU should consider economic sanctions against Israel. Apologising for her croaky voice, caused by dust from Israeli tanks, she said it was not enough for European countries to "simply bleat condemnation".

Ms Clwyd added: "They need to withdraw European ambassadors from Israel. They need to impose an arms embargo as Germany has already done, and they should consider what economic sanctions can be put in place."

 

CAN TOM PAULIN BE SERIOUS?

Can Tom Paulin be serious?
By Rod Liddle
The Guardian
April 17, 2002

There is a wonderful phrase in Arabic which I would like to share with you, if I may: "Ayoha al-motsaeb, al satheg, al-fahesh, al-makhodo'a!"

Beautifully alliterative, isn't it? Roll it around your tongue a while. Shout it at the neighbours – if you feel so disposed – and see if the dogs bark and the caravans move on.

It means "naive, deluded, self-righteous, egregious bigot". But it sounds much better in Arabic and any journalist, you might think, would be proud to write it on the page.

So it is a mystery, then, why the respectable Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram decided instead to describe Tom Paulin simply as an "intellectual". Perhaps they thought my phrase contravened the journalistic convention of neutrality – but then, "intellectual" is hardly a neutral phrase either, as it implies that Paulin is generally in the habit of – at the very least – thinking about stuff before he opens his mouth.

Paulin was interviewed by Al-Ahram about the situation in the Middle East. Among other things, he opined that the US-born Jewish settlers should be shot dead. "They are Nazis, racists," he said, adding – unnecessarily, you might argue – "I feel nothing but hatred for them."

He also pronounced that the state of Israel had no right to exist, that Tony Blair's government was "Zionist", and that the suicide bombers were an expression of "deep injustice and tragedy". However, he advised that more conventional guerrilla warfare would, tactically, stand a greater chance of success than murdering busloads of civilians – an approbation which, I'm, certain, convinced young Palestinian militants in Jenin and Hebron and Ramallah to reluctantly unbuckle their explosive belts and settle back down in front of the television.

I know that the Middle East is a crisis in which so many of us feel impotent and bereft of answers; we blunder around blindly in search of help or guidance. And I suppose, like the famous chimp at the typewriter who will, given infinity, produce by random chance, Macbeth, we, in our infinite bewilderment, will, by the same procedure, eventually end up with Paulin as our mentor or pedagogue. Maybe this is why Al-Ahram approached him.

Or perhaps I've got it all wrong and, over in Egypt, Paulin is revered as a sage and a prophet and his views frequently sought out. The only way to find out for sure was to ring Al-Ahram and ask them.

Except that, at Al-Ahram in Cairo, they'd never heard of Paulin. "Don't know him. Is he a person?" I was asked, mysteriously. They told me to ring the London office and track down the interviewer, Omayma Abdel Latif.

But they hadn't heard of Paulin in London, either. "Who's he?" they said, again. They'd heard of Omayma, though, which was promising. Omayma's based in Oxford, where she's studying at the university, they explained.

Ah, well, now we have either a coincidence or a possible answer to our conundrum. Because Paulin lectures in 19th- and 20th-century literature at Oxford University, a post from which, some have argued, he should be removed for his latest intemperate opinions.

Perhaps they met in one of those fragrant cloisters, Paulin brimming with fury, Omayma desperate for a bit of copy. Omayma hasn't returned my call just yet so we will simply have to wonder about the fortuitous meeting which resulted in so much outrage.

Anyway, I forwarded to Al-Ahram a list of names of alternative Middle East pundits should they, one day, tire of Paulin. Lee Bowyer, Dale Winton and Kelly Brook were my top three. I also offered them 800 words on why the Egyptian government are corrupt and incompetent jackanapes, but, oddly, this semi-official newspaper demurred. "We publish things when they are based upon hard facts, not just, how can I say, bad feeling." Oh yeah?

Still, the Paulin business shook me out of my Wasp-ish complacency. I'd been inclined to dismiss as paranoid repeated complaints from British Jews that there was a new mood of anti-semitism abroad: I was wrong.

Paulin will undoubtedly claim that his remarks are not anti-semitic, but merely anti-Zionist. He may even believe that himself. So might the others, generally from the left, who, when cross-examined about their opposition to what they call Zionism, reveal a dark and visceral loathing of Jews.

There is a theory, loosely based on Freud, that the left's demonisation of capitalists was simply a displaced anti-semitism; and it's true that the old communist caricatures of big businessmen were almost identical to the Nazi depiction of the "filthy Jew", with his business suit, venal expression and relentless appropriation of other people's money. But the whole thing seemed too neat, too glib a theory, to be convincing.

But I can see the displaced anti-semitism at work in the catch-all, ill-defined term "anti-Zionism". And if you doubt it look at Paulin's words – not the stuff about the rights of Palestinians, which we might all agree with – but, quite simply, in this: "hatred" and "shot dead".

 

PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Parallel universes
Most of the world sees Palestinians as the victims, but in Israel and the US events are given a different meaning
By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
April 17, 2002

Of all the stories and testimonies emerging from the ruins of Jenin, one detail, picked up by the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg, captures completely the strange tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. It does not convey the horror wrought in that West Bank town, nor the suffering of its victims. But it says everything about why this disaster is happening.

Goldenberg describes a line of graffiti, written in "neat blue ink", on a wall in the home of Aisha Salah. She is a Palestinian whose house was seized by Israeli soldiers, for use as a base of operations. Before they left, one of them took up his pen and wrote on the wall: "I don't have another land."

That was no spur of the moment doodle. That is a phrase ingrained in the Israeli, and wider Jewish, consciousness. Ein Lee Eretz Acheret is even the title of a favourite Hebrew folk song, the kind of standard that will be performed at countless Israeli Independence Day celebrations later today.

That simple, almost apologetic phrase, "I have no other land" expresses how Israelis and Jews see themselves in this conflict – as a victim nation, exiled, dispossessed and desperate for their own home – and how far apart that is from the way almost everyone else sees them. It goes to the heart of the strange truth about the current conflict: that the two sides are living in parallel universes, where the same set of facts has two entirely different meanings depending where you stand.

Palestinians are clear on what they see. They are the victims of an aggression so brutal it has shocked even them, a people who have suffered so much. In the Battle of Jenin, as Palestinian national myth will no doubt come to know it, they have seen a town shaken and upended as if by man-made earthquake: homes sliced, whole blocks flattened and reduced to rubble.

The streets are strewn with corpses, and there are more underneath the wreckage. Palestinians say bodies were piled up and taken away in trucks; that men were lined up, thinking they were under arrest, and shot; that homes were hit by helicopter gunships even as civilians cowered inside. Among the dead are the elderly and the very young, left to die, it is said, because no ambulance was allowed to get near. For Palestinians, Jenin 2002 is a tragedy on a par with Beirut 1982, when Christian Phalangists massacred hundreds in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, unhindered by the Israeli army which then ruled the city.

The Palestinians' friends around the world will draw a similar conclusion. Most of world opinion will be outraged by the images at last coming out of Jenin: the front page of every broadsheet newspaper in Britain yesterday adopted the same tone of shock and fury at the havoc Israel had wrought.

Britons and others will see an already beleaguered people taking yet another pounding from a regional superpower which has no business being there in the first place. They will see the home-made pipe bombs and booby-traps, discovered by the Israelis, and see only the meagre tools of resistance – the puny weapons of a powerless people confronting a mighty occupier.

The arrest of the key Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, will just confirm the view that Goliath is trying to choke David. The images of the small, uniformed Barghouti led off by Israeli soldiers will evoke memories of every dissident detained throughout history, jailed by the hated regime he was struggling to depose. If he is put on trial, it will be seen as a show trial – an attempt by Israel to crush a political challenge by legal means.

Yet just a few short miles away, in Israel, these same events mean something else completely. Israel is a small nation, just 6 million people, that has faced an onslaught in recent months unimaginable in any other western country: every day bringing carnage to the high street, the wedding celebration, the religious service. Just as Americans were determined to wipe out the "hornets' nest" which had sent the 19 hijackers of September 11 their way, so Israel has finally set to work rooting out the terrorists who have made Israelis' lives a daily hell. In this view, Jenin is Israel's Kandahar, dispatching nearly one in four of the suicide bombers who have deliberately murdered civilians, often targeting the young and defenceless.

There is damage, to be sure. But, say the Israelis, it's not much worse than the way parts of Afghanistan looked after the US military set to work on al-Qaida strongholds there. Some civilians were killed, but that's what happens when terrorists hide among the innocent. To support the US battle against the Taliban only to oppose Israel's own war against terrorism is to be guilty of a double standard. What would the critics have Israel do? Sit there and take it? Israel asked Yasser Arafat to clean out the terrorists and he didn't do the job – just as the Taliban never booted out al-Qaida. So, following a lead set by George Bush and Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon did what he had to do.

Those weapons stashes found in Jenin, like the armed men who shot back, killing 23 Israeli soldiers, only go to show what kind of terror academy the town had become. As for Barghouti, would anyone have raised an outcry if the Americans arrested Mullah Omar? Yet, say the Israelis, there is ample evidence linking Barghouti to the young "martyrs" who kill themselves and others: he gets the credit for wresting the suicide tactic out of the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and getting Arafat's own Fatah movement in on the action.

Judged like that, Operation Defensive Shield is messy, yes, but wholly justified. And this is not only the view of Sharon and the hardliners in his cabinet. A poll conducted last week, admittedly before the truth of Jenin came to light, found 86% Israeli support for the military campaign in the West Bank. That would include a large number of people who once identified with the peace camp and the left.

And they do not inhabit this universe alone. On Monday an estimated 100,000 people, mainly American Jews, gathered at the steps of the US Capitol to protest in favour of Israel. They note the rise in anti-semitism worldwide, see an Arab "street" inherently hostile to any Jewish state in their midst, and reflect on the suicide bombers and their choice of targets – the latest, biggest one during a Passover seder – and believe that, not for the first time, Jews are facing an existential threat. And remember, like the song says, they have no other land. So they carry placards comparing Sharon to Winston Churchill, glad that someone is fighting back.

These are the two universes, now living in parallel. In Washington, thousands gather to demand justice for the endangered people of Israel. In London, 36 hours earlier, 50,000 gather demanding justice for the endangered people of Palestine. Both sides believe they are the victim, both sides are fighting for their very lives. And, like parallel lines, they never touch.

 

"EVIDENCE OF ISRAELI CONTEMPT FOR GENEVA CONVENTION"

Analysis: Evidence of Israeli contempt for Geneva convention
By Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian
April 17, 2002

The accusation from British and Palestinian politicians that Israel has been involved in war crimes raises questions about the extent to which its military incursion into the occupied territories may have broken the terms of the Geneva convention.

Human rights workers say the definition of a war crime hinges on a cardinal principle of a body of international humanitarian law, including the Geneva convention. "The spirit and soul is to limit the effect of armed violence on those not taking part in the fighting," said Antonella Notari, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. "It is primarily the responsibility of those fighting the war to look after the wellbeing of civilians."

On that count, Israel has failed on a massive scale – and not just in Jenin. Nineteen days of curfew and siege on West Bank towns have deprived one million Palestinians of access to medical care, food and drinking water. Israeli tanks trundled over water mains, and ploughed through electricity and phone wires, depriving most neighbourhoods of basic services.

In Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Nablus, as well as Jenin, there is indisputable proof that the Israeli army denied Palestinian civilians the basic protection of medical care. Bodies rotted in homes and streets for days; the wounded bled to death because the Israeli army banned ambulances from entering the battle zones.

In Jenin, junior surgeons performed brain surgery from phone instructions given by leading practitioners in Jordan. Likewise in Ramallah several mothers were talked through the delivery of their children over mobile phones.

There are also widespread accounts from Palestinians in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin that the Israeli army regularly seized male civilians from their homes and used them as human shields. They forced the men to walk ahead of soldiers as they searched homes in camps and towns, putting them first in the line of fire from Palestinian fighters.

As well, there are scattered accounts of Palestinian civilians killed inside their homes by machine-gun fire from Israeli helicopter gunships and from tank shells in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem, generally at the start of each invasion.

Although the laws that govern war focus on the protection of civilians, they also require armies to afford some protection to combatants. "Combatants must be treated humanely and must be given a fair trial," Ms Notari said.

In Ramallah, however, captured Palestinian policemen were forced to strip to their underwear and were held in appalling conditions at a nearby Israeli army base, denied food, water and shelter for hours. A few were also shot as they were on the verge of surrender.

The Israeli roundups also made no distinction between fighter and ordinary Palestinians. In Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah and other cities, 5,000 males from their teens to their 40s were detained.

But the destruction visited on the Jenin refugee camp – and in the old city, or casbah, of Nablus where dozens of stone houses were demolished – is a far murkier affair. Although much of the devastation in Jenin and Nablus appears wanton, international law remains unclear on destruction of homes in combat zones.

The nature of the fighting in Jenin and other cities further complicates the matter. The Israeli army says it was forced to demolish civilian homes because they were occupied by Palestinian gunmen. That argument may become much hardier to sustain, though, when the full scale of the damage inflicted on Palestinian towns becomes clearer in the coming days.

However, yesterday's calls for Israel's military campaign to be classed a war crime are unlikely to be translated into any legal action.

The international war crimes tribunals now in existence were established specifically to investigate atrocities that occurred in the Balkans and in Rwanda. The UN international criminal court, which has just been ratified, does not come into force until July 1 and cannot act retrospectively.

The most likely legal avenue at the moment to investigate Israel's offensive remains the Israeli supreme court – which is not politically practical.

FULL ARTICLES

"I STAND WITH ISRAEL, I STAND WITH THE JEWS"

Oriana Fallaci on Antisemitism
Panorama (Italian magazine)
April 12, 2002

I find it shameful that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swasitka, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen et cetera, would sell their own mother to a harem.

I find it shameful that the Catholic Church should permit a bishop, one with lodgings in the Vatican no less, a saintly man who was found in Jerusalem with an arsenal of arms and explosives hidden in the secret compartments of his sacred Mercedes, to participate in that procession and plant himself in front of a microphone to thank in the name of God the suicide bombers who massacre the Jews in pizzerias and supermarkets. To call them "martyrs who go to their deaths as to a party."

I find it shameful that in France, the France of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews, profane their cemeteries. I find it shameful that the youth of Holland and Germany and Denmark flaunt the kaffiah just as Mussolini's avant garde used to flaunt the club and the fascist badge. I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-semitism. That in Sweden they asked that the Nobel Peace Prize given to Shimon Peres in 1994 be taken back and conferred on the dove with the olive branch in his mouth, that is on Arafat. I find it shameful that the distinguished members of the Committee, a Committee that (it would appear) rewards political color rather than merit, should take this request into consideration and even respond to it. In hell the Nobel Prize honors he who does not receive it.

I find it shameful (we're back in Italy) that state-run television stations contribute to the resurgent antisemitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones. I find it shameful that in their debates they host with much deference the scoundrels with turban or kaffiah who yesterday sang hymns to the slaughter at New York and today sing hymns to the slaughters at Jerusalem, at Haifa, at Netanya, at Tel Aviv. I find it shameful that the press does the same, that it is indignant because Israeli tanks surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, that it is not indignant because inside that same church two hundred Palestinian terrorists well armed with machine guns and munitions and explosives (among them are various leaders of Hamas and Al-Aqsa) are not unwelcome guests of the monks (who then accept bottles of mineral water and jars of honey from the soldiers of those tanks). I find it shameful that, in giving the number of Israelis killed since the beginning of the Second Intifada (four hundred twelve), a noted daily newspaper found it appropriate to underline in capital letters that more people are killed in their traffic accidents. (Six hundred a year).

I find it shameful that the Roman Observer, the newspaper of the Pope – a Pope who not long ago left in the Wailing Wall a letter of apology for the Jews – accuses of extermination a people who were exterminated in the millions by Christians. By Europeans. I find it shameful that this newspaper denies to the survivors of that people (survivors who still have numbers tattooed on their arms) the right to react, to defend themselves, to not be exterminated again. I find it shameful that in the name of Jesus Christ (a Jew without whom they would all be unemployed), the priests of our parishes or Social Centers or whatever they are flirt with the assassins of those in Jerusalem who cannot go to eat a pizza or buy some eggs without being blown up. I find it shameful that they are on the side of the very ones who inaugurated terrorism, killing us on airplanes, in airports, at the Olympics, and who today entertain themselves by killing western journalists. By shooting them, abducting them, cutting their throats, decapitating them. (There's someone in Italy who, since the appearance of Anger and Pride, would like to do the same to me. Citing verses of the Koran he exorts his "brothers" in the mosques and the Islamic Community to chastise me in the name of Allah. To kill me. Or rather to die with me. Since he's someone who speaks English well, I'll respond to him in English: "Fuck you.")

I find it shameful that almost all of the left, the left that twenty years ago permitted one of its union processionals to deposit a coffin (as a mafioso warning) in front of the synagogue of Rome, forgets the contribution made by the Jews to the fight against fascism. Made by Carlo and Nello Rossini, for example, by Leone Ginzburg, by Umberto Terracini, by Leo Valiani, by Emilio Sereni, by women like my friend Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti who was shot at Florence on June 12, 1944, by seventy-five of the three-hundred-thirty-five people killed at the Fosse Ardeatine, by the infinite others killed under torture or in combat or before firing squads. (The companions, the teachers, of my infancy and my youth.) I find it shameful that in part through the fault of the left--or rather, primarily through the fault of the left (think of the left that inaugurates its congresses applauding the representative of the PLO, leader in Italy of the Palestinians who want the destruction of Israel) – Jews in Italian cities are once again afraid. And in French cities and Dutch cities and Danish cities and German cities, it is the same. I find it shameful that Jews tremble at the passage of the scoundrels dressed like suicide bombers just as they trembled during Krystallnacht, the night in which Hitler gave free rein to the Hunt of the Jews. I find it shameful that in obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for them extremely advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual opportunists – or better the usual parasites – exploit the word Peace. That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than the words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism) delegated to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot's feet they incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated. Trick them, corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the yellow star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all.

I find it shameful that many Italians and many Europeans have chosen as their standard-bearer the gentleman (or so it is polite to say) Arafat. This nonentity who thanks to the money of the Saudi Royal Family plays the Mussolini ad perpetuum and in his megalomania believes he will pass into History as the George Washington of Palestine. This ungrammatical wretch who when I interviewed him was unable even to put together a complete sentence, to make articulate conversation. So that to put it all together, write it, publish it, cost me a tremendous effort and I concluded that compared to him even Ghaddafi sounds like Leonardo da Vinci. This false warrior who always goes around in uniform like Pinochet, never putting on civilian garb, and yet despite this has never participated in a battle. War is something he sends, has always sent, others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent who playing the part of Head of State caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation. No-no-I-want-Jerusalem-all-to-myself. This eternal liar who has a flash of sincerity only when (in private) he denies Israel's right to exist, and who as I say in my book contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is, so that you can never trust him. Never! With him you will always wind up systematically betrayed. This eternal terrorist who knows only how to be a terrorist (while keeping himself safe) and who during the Seventies, that is when I interviewed him, even trained the terrorists of Baader-Meinhof. With them, children ten years of age. Poor children. (Now he trains them to become suicide bombers. A hundred baby suicide bombers are in the works: a hundred!). This weathercock who keeps his wife at Paris, served and revered like a queen, and keeps his people down in the shit. He takes them out of the shit only to send them to die, to kill and to die, like the eighteen year old girls who in order to earn equality with men have to strap on explosives and disintegrate with their victims. And yet many Italians love him, yes. Just like they loved Mussolini. And many other Europeans do the same.

I find it shameful and see in all this the rise of a new fascism, a new nazism. A fascism, a nazism, that much more grim and revolting because it is conducted and nourished by those who hypocritically pose as do-gooders, progressives, communists, pacifists, Catholics or rather Christians, and who have the gall to label a warmonger anyone like me who screams the truth.

I see it, yes, and I say the following. I have never been tender with the tragic and Shakespearean figure Sharon. ("I know you've come to add another scalp to your necklace," he murmured almost with sadness when I went to interview him in 1982.) I have often had disagreements with the Israelis, ugly ones, and in the past I have defended the Palestinians a great deal. Maybe more than they deserved. But I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews. I stand just as I stood as a young girl during the time when I fought with them, and when the Anna Marias were shot. I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time. And disgusted by the antisemitism of many Italians, of many Europeans, I am ashamed of this shame that dishonors my Country and Europe. At best, it is not a community of States, but a pit of Pontius Pilates. And even if all the inhabitants of this planet were to think otherwise, I would continue to think so.

 

"WHY NO 'EUROPEAN PEACE ACTIVISTS' AT THE SEDERS OF NETANYA OR THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM?"

'Second Holocaust,' Roth's Invention, Isn't Novelistic
By Ron Rosenbaum
The New York Observer
April 14, 2002

The memory of the Holocaust is precisely what explains the one-sided anti-Israel stance of European culture.

He writes:

"...the astonishing hypocrisy of European diplomats and politicians in supporting the Palestinian "right of return" when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder..." (as pointed out by John Podhoretz in the NYPost, Apr.12/02, "Europe Loves Hate", posted previously).

The Second Holocaust. It's a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate. A reality we may have to witness. Somebody has to think about the unthinkable, about the unbearable, and the way it looks now, it's at least as likely to happen as not. One can imagine several ways it will happen: the current, terrible situation devolves from slow-motion mutual slaughter into instantaneous conflagration, nuclear, chemical or biological. Scenarios that remain regional. Scenarios that go global.

What is harder to imagine are ways in which it won't happen. A peace process? Goodwill among men? An end to suicidal fanaticism? In your dreams.

Instead we must begin to examine the variety of nightmare scenarios.

The Second Holocaust. It's a phrase first coined, as far as I know, by Philip Roth in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. It's a novel which seemed incredibly bleak back then. And yet, reexamining Mr. Roth's use of the phrase "Second Holocaust" less than a decade later, even his darkest imaginings seem optimistic now. Especially when examined by the glare of burning synagogues in France.

I was reminded of Mr. Roth's Second Holocaust scenario when I came across an excerpt from Operation Shylock on the Web site of a Canadian blogger (www.davidartemiw.com) via the all-seeing Instapundit.com.

Here's the crucial exchange between a character Roth calls the "Diasporist" and the novel's narrator:

"The meanings of the Holocaust," says the Diasporist "are for us to determine, but one thing is sure – its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East… but a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will – it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less far-fetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago."

"The resettlement in Europe of more than a million Jews … It sounds to me that you are proposing the final solution to the Jewish problem for Yasir Arafat."

"No. Arafat's final solution is the same as Hitler's: extermination. I am proposing the alternate to extermination [the return of the Jews from Israel to Europe]."

"You speak about resettling the Jews in Poland, Romania, Germany? In Slovakia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states? And you realize do you … how much hatred for Jews still exists in most of these countries?"

"Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe … there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism."

Here, it is clear, is where Roth's darkest fantasy is too optimistic. Here is where we have to examine the dynamic going on in the mind of Europe at this moment: a dynamic that suggests that Europeans, on some deep if not entirely conscious level, are willing to be complicit in the murder of the Jews again.

The novel's narrator believes that there are in Europe "powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust … a bulwark against European anti-Semitism," however virulent. It may be true in the case of some Europeans, although if so they have been very quiet about it. In fact, it seems that the memory of the Holocaust is precisely what ignites the darker currents in the European soul. The memory of the Holocaust is precisely what explains the one-sided anti-Israel stance of the European press, the European politicians, European culture. The complacency about synagogue burnings, the preference for focusing on the Israeli response to suicide bombers blowing up families at prayer, rather than on the mass murderers (as the suicide bombers should more properly be called) and those who subsidize them and throw parties for their families ….

There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture is aware that almost without exception every European nation was deeply complicit in Hitler's genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on – and yet the Nazis didn't have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered. That is why "European civilization" will always be a kind of oxymoron for anyone who looks too closely at things, beginning with the foolish and unnecessary slaughters of World War I, Holocaust-scale slaughter that paved the way for Hitler's more focused effort.

And so, at some deep level, there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of "European civilization." To blame the victim. To blame the Jews. And the more European nations can focus one-sidedly on the Israeli response to terror and not to the terror itself, the more they can portray the Jews as the real villains, as Nazis, the more salve to their collective conscience for their complicity in collective mass murder in the past. Hitler may have gone too far, and perhaps we shouldn't have been so cowardly and slavish in assisting him, but look at what the Jews are doing.

Isn't it interesting that you didn't see any "European peace activists" volunteering to "put their bodies on the line" by announcing that they would place themselves in real danger – in the Tel Aviv cafיs and pizza parlors, favorite targets of the suicide bombers. Why no "European peace activists" at the Seders of Netanya or the streets of Jerusalem? Instead, "European peace activists" do their best to protect the brave sponsors of the suicide bombers in Ramallah.

One has to put the European guilt complex not just in the context of complicity during World War II. One must also consider the malign neglect involved in the creation of the state of Israel. The begrudging grant of an indefensible sliver of desert in a sea of hostile peoples, to get the surviving Jews – reminders of European shame – off the continent, and leave the European peoples in possession of the property stolen from the Jews during the war. And that was when they didn't continue murdering Jews, the way some Poles did when some Jews were foolish enough to try to return to their stolen homes.

Someone remarked recently at the astonishing hypocrisy of European diplomats and politicians in supporting the Palestinian "right of return" when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder.

Make no mistake of it, the Palestinians are victims of history as well as the Jews. The last thing the nations of Europe wanted to do was the right thing, which would be to restore the Jews to their stolen homes, and so they acquiesced in the creation of a Jewish state and then did nothing to make it viable for either the Jews or the Palestinians, preferring to wash their hands of the destruction: let the Semites murder each other and blame the Jews, the Semites they were more familiar with hating.

And now it's so much easier for the Europeans to persecute the Jews, because they can just allow their own Arab populations to burn synagogues and beat Jews on the street for them. The way Hitler used the eager Croatians, for instance, as death-camp guards. Still, there's something particularly repulsive about the synagogue-burnings in France. I think in a way it goes a long way toward explaining why the Israeli government is acting the way it is now – with a little less restraint against those who murder their children. Yes, restraint: If Israel were to act with true ruthlessness to end the suicide bombings, they would tell the prospective bombers – who go to their deaths expecting that their families will celebrate their mass murders with a subsidized party and reap lucrative financial rewards courtesy of the Saudis and Saddam – that their families instead will share the exact same fate of the people the bombers blow up. That might put a crimp into the recruiting and the partying over dead Jewish children. But the Israelis won't do that, and that is why there's likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, still acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable.

Consider that remarkable Joel Brinkley story in the April 4 edition of The Times, in which the leaders of Hamas spoke joyfully and complacently of their great triumph in the Passover massacre and the subsequent slaughters in Jerusalem and Haifa. Two things made this interview remarkable. One was the unashamed assertion that they had no interest in any "peace process" that would produce a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side with a Jewish state. They only wanted the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with one in which "the Jews could remain living 'in an Islamic state with Islamic law.'"

That defines the reality that has been hidden by the illusion of hope placed in a "peace process." The Palestinians, along with their 300 million "Arab brothers" surrounding the five million Jews, are not interested in a "negotiated settlement."

Israelis are forever being criticized for not negotiating, for not giving away enough of their security, but they have no one to negotiate with who doesn't, in their heart of hearts, want to exterminate their state and their people as well, if necessary.

The other thing that made the Times interview such a defining document was the description of its setting. The interview with one of the four directors of the Hamas mass murderers, a Dr. Zahar, was conducted in a comfortable home in which "Dr. Zahar, a surgeon, has a table tennis set in his vast living room for his seven children."

If the Israelis were as ruthless as the Europeans take great pleasure in calling them, there would be, let's say, no ping-pong playing for the murderer of their children.

Now let's talk further about the relationship between the first Holocaust and the next. The relationship between the European response to the first one and the likely Israeli response to the one in the making.

I think it might best be summed up by that old proverb: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

The first time, when the Jewish people were threatened by someone who called for their extinction, they trusted to the "enlightenment" values of the European people, as Philip Roth's character put it.

Civilized people wouldn't let something like that happen. Pogroms, well yes, but death camps, extermination? Never. They're transporting us to camps, yes, but what could it be, labor camps at worst? The world wouldn't let such a thing happen.

Well, the world did let it happen – with extraordinary complacency, a deaf ear, a blind eye and not a little pleasure on the part of some. And it's clear from the reaction of Europe today that the world is prepared, is preparing itself, to let it happen again.

But I suspect that deep in the heart of most Israelis is the idea that this time we're not going to depend on others to prevent it from happening. We're not going to hope that the world will care that they're killing our children. This time, we won't go quietly; this time, if we go down, we'll go down fighting and take them with us and take more of them if we can, and the rest of the world be damned. Fool us twice, shame on us.

I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state. But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it – and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that sought and lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lost that war. One doesn't envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders.

But somehow the Israelis are told that they must trust the world – trust the European Union as guarantors of their safety, trust the Arab League's promises of "normal relations," trust the Saudis who subsidize suicide-bomber parties and ignore the exterminationist textbooks the Arab world tutors its children with. The Israelis must learn to make nice; the Jews must behave better with people who want to kill them. I don't think so.

As a secular Jew, I've always been more of a diasporist than a Zionist. I've supported the Jewish state, but thought that it was a necessary but not ideal solution with a pronounced dark side: The concentration of so many Jews in one place – and I use the word "concentration" advisedly – gives the world a chance to kill the Jews en masse again. And I also thought that Jews flourished best where they were no longer under the thumb of Orthodox rabbis and could bring to the whole world – indeed, the whole universe – the exegetical skills that are the glory of the people: reading the universe as the Torah, as Einstein and Spinoza did, rather than the Torah as the universe, as the Orthodox do.

But the implacable hatred of Arab fundamentalism makes no distinction between Jewish fundamentalists and Jewish secularists, just as Hitler didn't. It's not just the settlements they want to extirpate, it's the Jewish state, the Jewish people.

This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later, a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation – Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. Someone once said that while Jesus called on Christians to "turn the other cheek," it's the Jews who have been the only ones who have actually practiced that. Not this time. The unspoken corollary of the slogan "Never again" is: "And if again, not us alone."

So the time has come to think about the Second Holocaust. It's coming sooner or later; it's not "whether," but when. I hope I don't live to see it. It will be unbearable for those who do. That is, for all but the Europeans – whose consciences, as always, will be clear and untroubled.

FULL ARTICLES

FURY OVER TOM PAULIN’S “KILL JEWS” COMMENT

Fury over UK pundit’s ‘kill Jews’ comment
United Press International
April 15, 2002

An Oxford University lecturer and television pundit has triggered outrage in Britain over an Arab newspaper interview in which he allegedly said American Jews who move to Israel should be killed.

In the interview with the influential Al-Ahram publication in Egypt, Tom Paulin also was quoted as expressing support for suicide bombers, whose attacks on civilians “boost morale.”

The 53-year-old lecturer, essayist and poet, an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, makes regular appearances on British Broadcasting Corp. television’s arts programs. He could not, however, be reached Monday for comments on the Al-Ahram interview.

Jewish leaders immediately threatened to have Paulin prosecuted under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws. “We will be running it past our lawyers,” said Mike Whine, a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

What touched off the fury was Paulin’s remark in the interview that Jews who migrate from the United States to Israel “should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

The Arabic-language newspaper also quoted Paulin as saying, “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy ... I think that attacks on civilians, in fact, boost morale.”

As an example, he cited Adolf Hitler’s bombardment of Britain at the start of World War II. “Hitler bombed London into submission,” he said, “but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.”

Whine said the part of Paulin’s interview “where he is quoted as suggesting that Israel has no right to exist and he would like to kill American-Jewish immigrants to Israel is, technically at least, illegal.”

Jewish leaders said they were consulting their lawyers to see if Paulin could be prosecuted for inciting to violence. “We would like a criminal prosecution, but that is up to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.”

Scotland Yard police said they would investigate any complaints made but declined further comment on the case. Conviction under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

A BBC spokesman said Paulin was “a regular independent contributor ... on arts issues, where we always take full responsibility for comments made,” but added the “appropriateness” of his continued appearance on television would be assessed.

An Oxford spokesman told the Daily Mail newspaper the university “would be examining the text” of Paulin’s interview in Al-Ahram and that no comment would be made until then.

 

A PAULIN SENTIMENT

A Paulin sentiment
The Daily Telegraph
April 13, 2002

http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/04/13/dl1302.xml

Tom Paulin is one of the most prominent poets and critics in Britain. Thanks to his regular television appearances, his face is familiar to millions. As G M Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford, he has a prestigious platform from which to influence the young.

The same Tom Paulin has just given an interview to the leading Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. In it, Mr Paulin is quoted on Israel thus: “I never believed Israel had the right to exist at all.” On the Palestinians: “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy. I think, though, that it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare.” On the Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers: “They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

Mr Paulin is entitled to his opinions, however repulsive. He has expressed such views before, in verse and prose, and we should be the first to defend his right to free speech. However, in calling for Jewish settlers to be “shot dead”, Mr Paulin appears to have crossed the line that separates legitimate polemic from incitement to murder.

The Terrorism Act 2000, section 59, states: “A person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom.” The first such “act of terrorism” cited is murder. Moreover, “it is immaterial whether or not the person incited is in the United Kingdom at the time of the incitement”. In other words, to incite Palestinians on the West Bank to kill Jewish settlers is to break the law.

Whether Mr Paulin is in fact prosecuted is a matter for the authorities. But another question arises: does the University of Oxford wish to be seen as the madrassah of British terrorism? We are confident that Colin Lucas, the vice-chancellor of Oxford, will investigate the matter, and that Mr Paulin’s colleagues will dissociate themselves from him, just as they would if a faculty member were to incite people to murder blacks, homosexuals or anybody else. Or do Oxford dons treat Jews differently?

 

PAULIN TOLD TO APOLOGISE

Poet told to apologise for remark on Israelis
By Neil Tweedie
The Daily Telegraph
April 16, 2002

Academics at Oxford University expressed disquiet yesterday over an interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he was reported as saying that American-born Jewish settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at the university, said Mr Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College and regular panel member on the BBC2 arts programme Late Review, should apologise immediately if his comments to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly had been accurately reported.

In the interview, Mr Paulin was quoted as saying that he never believed in the right of Israel to exist, before giving his opinion on what were described as “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers.

He said: “They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

Yesterday, Mr Paulin appeared to sound the retreat from that position in a letter written to The Daily Telegraph.

He wrote: “I have been and am a lifelong opponent of anti-semitism and a consistent supporter of a Palestinian state.

“I do not support attacks on Israeli citizens under any circumstances. I am in favour of the current efforts to achieve a two-stage solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

In the letter, Mr Paulin said his views as reported in Al-Ahram, and repeated in The Daily Telegraph, had been “distorted”. But when pressed to explain how they had been distorted, he refused.

Prof Bogdanor said: “Obviously, different political views can be held on the Middle East in a liberal society, but if he said that Jewish settlers should be killed then that is inexcusable and unacceptable in any university teacher.”

 

“THE JEWISH FAITH IS NOT AN EVIL RELIGION”

The Jewish faith is not an evil religion
The Sun Says (Editorial)
The Sun
April 2002

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002170720,00.html

Two days after September 11 The Sun ran a leader headlined: Islam Is Not An Evil Religion.

As we said then, the men who attacked America seek to foster hatred. They thrive on it.

It simply cannot be the case that all Muslims hate the West and desire its destruction.

All Muslims have a right to practise their religion. British Muslims are part of the fabric of this country – not an enemy.

The media has a vital role in not demonising any faith or any racial group – history has surely taught us that great dangers follow from such primitive prejudice.

In the light of yet another suicide bomber attacking Israel on Friday, and looking at the terrifying rise of anti-Jewish feeling – anti-Semitism – around the world we would like to offer an equally important thought:

Judaism – the Jewish faith – is not an evil religion.

Imagine, for a minute, that you are Jewish. Go further. Imagine you are an Israeli – living in a country bedevilled with suicide bombers.

How would you feel as your family was threatened day after day by bombings in shops and restaurants?

Very frightened. That’s what.

But because of your Jewish faith you would feel something else, too.

You would feel alone, unloved – and hated around the world.

To be Jewish is to know what can happen when hatred comes your way.

To be Jewish is to understand that anti-Semitism can turn very quickly into something chilling.

To be Jewish is to have family ties – recent ties within one or two generations – to what happened here in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s: the Holocaust.

Nazi Germany together with far too many accomplices – some Ukrainian, some Italian, some French, ALL now in denial – set about murdering the entire Jewish population.

In all, six million died. Many non-Jews too.

This was the most systematic RACIST act in the recent history of the world.

If you were Jewish chances are you would have treasured family pictures of family members who were lost in the camps.

Think about that. Think about the effect on the psyche. Think about the pressure Israeli voters therefore put on their leaders to defend them.
After the war a guilty world allowed the Jews their own state: Israel.

There are two fundamental untruths about Israel that, far too often, go unquestioned:

They are that the Israelis will not share their land with the Palestinians and that the rise of Jewish power, wealth and influence is all down to some “plot” or “conspiracy”.

Both need to be dealt with.

Firstly the land. We will return to the accusation of “conspiracy” later.

The fact is that Israel HAS offered the Palestinians huge concessions.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, did just that in a peace deal negotiated by President Clinton – and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Sadly, Arafat turned down the offer. When the crunch came, he would not sign. In his heart of hearts, he prefers the way of terror.

As President Bush said two weeks ago Arafat’s leadership of his people has been lamentable.

He has led them into darkness; not the light.

Arafat and his allies have encouraged the suicide bombers instead of campaigning against them. Every bomber who dies worships Arafat. His allies even compensate the terrorists’ families for their loss.

The Western media loves to use the term cycle of violence. This is, indeed, what is happening.

But to use that term equates the region’s only elected democracy (Israel) with the terrorists.

The bombing of Coventry and Dresden was a cycle of violence; so was Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; so was the Occupation of Europe and the Battle of Britain.

But one side was in the right and one was in the wrong.

Fundamentally, Israel has a RIGHT to exist. Once you accept that there can be no justification for the suicide bombers.

Israel has not acted perfectly. There have been excesses – as admitted by President Bush.

But the Israelis are not the aggressors here. They HAVE offered land to their enemies. They do not WANT war.

Ariel Sharon, the ex-general who the Israelis elected as prime minister, is charged with the responsibility of defending his people.

No nation has any right to tell him he cannot do so. Not Britain. Not the United States.

We must make an effort to understand the isolated Israeli people. We must understand, like them, that it is POSSIBLE for an enemy to wish the END of your entire faith, people and nation.

This is what Hitler tried to do.

This is what the terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, ultimately wish.

They do not seek to negotiate. AT ALL.

This is not some turf war that can be settled by Eurotroops in United Nations blue berets.

This is a declared war by men of terror on a people who know the meaning of annihilation.

At the same time the Jews see a rise in anti-Semitism around the world. Especially in mainland Europe.

Consequently, Israelis are scared to death.

They have never truly trusted Britain – and with some of the people we employ in the Foreign Office why the hell should they? Now they see even America joining the bashing of Sharon.

Israeli people are reasonable people. Most of them. The media there is liberal and divided. In the United States the Jewish vote shifts to the Left not the Right.

Which brings us to the issue of “conspiracy” – the too-often stated assumption that Jews, especially in America, dominate power and “run the world”.

It is true that Jewish individuals have risen to much power and wealth in the United States.

But this has been done within a few generations; it is down to HARD WORK not a “conspiracy”.

Many of the Jews running America’s real estate, media and financial empires started out in the ghettos of New York.

Calvin Klein, to take just one example, has built one of the world’s biggest fashion brands. He was a poor Jewish boy from the Bronx.

New York is full of these incredible success stories; so is Hollywood; so is Britain – for example Amstrad’s Sir Alan Sugar, Dixons’ Sir Stanley Kalms and many others.

These people made something of themselves by themselves. There is no “plot”.

We would be wise to follow the Jewish example, not allow their success to fuel our worst prejudices.

If you were Jewish you would understand all this. Indeed, it would be written on your heart.

The rest of us would do well to try to understand the Jews.

They are not an evil people.

They are, frankly, just very scared people.

And history has shown they have good reason to be scared.

 

“WE ARE TALKING HERE OF MASSACRE, AND A COVER-UP, OF GENOCIDE”

A demo we can’t afford to ignore
By A.N. Wilson
The Evening Standard
April 2002

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/top_story.html?in_review_id=552987&in_review_text_id=519549

On Saturday, I stood in Piccadilly, and watched a march that filled the width of the street and stretched all the way from Hyde Park Corner to the Haymarket. It was a huge, peaceful demonstration by British Muslims against the behaviour of the Israeli government. It was followed by a rally in Trafalgar Square. Had these Britons been running a fun marathon or demonstrating about the rights or wrongs of killing foxes, their march would have occupied hours of TV news and many column inches of the newspapers the next day. As it was, the demo was given about 20 seconds on the TV news on Saturday night.

I have scoured the Sunday papers for a single mention of the event. Not a word is said about the fact that tens of thousands of Britons marched through London to protest about the unlawful killing not of foxes, but of hundreds of Palestinians; they were protesting against the wreckage of property, the terrorising of the old, of women and children, the poisoning of water supplies, the destruction of the Palestinian police, administrators, infrastructure.

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday reports by Bob Graham confirmed the assertions made in speeches in Trafalgar Square that we are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.

Many young Muslims in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians, educated at St George’s Jerusalem, who felt that their parents’ mild faith was not enough to fight the oppressor. For that reason, it was a pity that the demo yesterday was entirely Muslim, apart from a few Socialist Workers.

Am I very naive to have wished that some Jews could have joined us in the demo, just as horrified as any gentiles by the sheer folly of Ariel Sharon’s terror-policy? As an unbelieving Anglican, I wanted the presence on the podium of an Archbishop to protest against the disgusting behaviour of the Israeli government to my old church - including the wilful burning of several church buildings and the harassment of our cathedral in Jerusalem - and its staff when they try to visit their people in the camps in Gaza.

Some Orthodox and Catholic bishops should have been there in Trafalgar Square, too. Last week, we saw the Israeli troops destroy monuments in Nablus of ancient importance: the scene where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman at the well, and where the Israelis not long ago killed the Greek Orthodox priest, is now rubble. It is the equivalent of the Taliban destroying Buddhist sculpture but our papers don’t seem interested. Only the other day, Israeli troops started firing into the very church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Even Mandela was a terrorist

The spurious justifications for Israeli action by some newspapers is quite stomach-turning. There is said to be a war against terrorism. If “we” don’t win the war, then there will be explosions on the streets of European cities. But, hang on. What do “we” mean by terrorism? And why do terrorists do what they do?

When Nelson Mandela was arrested all those years ago, he was loading a truck with boxes labelled “Oranges”, which, in fact, contained high explosives. In numerous incidents before this, the ANC had let off bombs that killed civilians. Yet we all, rightly, regard Mandela as one of the few world leaders of true moral greatness. The state of Israel itself, whatever you think of it now, began with terrorist assassinations of British Army officers. Terrorism is the war that poor people fight against rich people because they see no other way. The more I think about the world, the less sure I am that I am an anti-terrorist. Is it always “right” to support powerful people against weak people, rich people against poor people?

Welsh roots in Hollywood

Catherine Zeta-Jones is paying her nanny, Judy Cole, £70,000 a year to bring up her son, Dylan, now resident in Los Angeles. She is determined that her boy should learn “British table manners” and not lose touch with his Welsh roots. She is going to teach young Dylan the rudiments of the Welsh language and culture. She sounds absolutely wonderful.

You might ask why, if Miss Zeta-Jones is so anxious that her boy should not lose touch with Swansea, she does not go and live in the Mumbles. There she could meet real people whose dads could remember the real Dylan – Dylan Thomas, a poet with not one word of Welsh, who lived in South Wales when not propping up bars in Soho.

In Thomas’s day, Wales was culturally thriving. Wittgenstein used to go to the Mumbles for his holidays. Kingsley Amis worked, and Martin Amis was born, in Swansea. There wasn’t so much fuss about whether you spoke the Welsh language, so Welsh and English people were happy to live there.

The insistence on Welsh language and culture had the paradoxical effect of isolating Wales from the rest of the world. Now, Wales is depopulated and if you wish to be brought up with Welsh “roots”, your safest bet is to live in Los Angeles.

Zeta-Jones is going to send her boy to a Welsh boarding school – Llandovery College, presumably. I don’t know the school but I suspect they will be very surprised if he turns up crying for laver bread and quoting from the Black Book of Carmarthen. They’ll be much more interested in finding out how many filmstars he’s met in LA.

I was never bitten by the Mo Mowlam magic. I was on an Any Questions? show with her once and, like almost every other politician I ever met, she seemed both vain and boring. Now she is making a nice little earner for herself by writing a book which tells us what we knew already – that her colleagues in the New Labour Cabinet were all vicious and nasty. “I’ve never been a knifer or a moaner,” she assures us. Oh, no, of course not. She then goes on to moan about her lot and to knife all her old friends with the manic glee of Cassius setting about Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. She has got in just in time, with the sale of her memoirs. If she’d left it another year she really would have sunk without trace as almost all politicians, thank God, do.

TOM PAULIN: "I CAN UNDERSTAND HOW SUICIDE BOMBERS FEEL"

'That weasel word'
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
April 4-10, 2002
Issue No.580

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/580/cu2.htm

As an increasing number of intellectuals speak out against the Israeli onslaught in Palestine, very few have broken the conspiracy of silence in Britain. In Oxford, Omayma Abdel-Latif meets the Irish poet Tom Paulin

We are fed this inert
This lying phrase
Like comfort food
As another little Palestinian boy
In trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
Is gunned down by the Zionist SS
Whose initials we should
– but we don't – dumb goys
Clock in that weasel word
Crossfire
– Tom Paulin, "Killed in the Crossfire," The Observer (18.02.01)

Tom Paulin does not attempt to hide his anger at what the Israelis are doing in Palestine: it is, he says, "an historical obscenity."

Paulin, currently professor of English at Hartford College, Oxford, a leading poet and, for several years now, a controversial TV pundit, is among the few British intellectuals who has dared to criticise Israel, questioning even its very existence.

"I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all," Paulin told Al-Ahram .

"Paulin has become the rare thing in contemporary British culture; 'the writer as conscience'," wrote one critic. It is a position that has led him into acrimonious public debates about his political views, particularly in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He recently took up his pen in defence of Edward Said, berating Guardian columnist Ian Buruma as a Zionist.

Paulin makes no secret of his uncompromising views on Israel. "You are either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist," he says. "Everyone who supports Israel is a Zionist."

Such Irish bluntness, as one reporter described it, has made him a constant target. His publication of the poem "Killed in the Crossfire" in the Observer newspaper almost a year ago caused an uproar within pro-Israel circles with predictable consequences: the usual accusations of anti-Semitism followed almost immediately.

Paulin is not intimidated by such tactics. "I just laugh when they do that to me. It does not worry me at all. These are the Hampstead liberal Zionists," he explains, "I have utter contempt for them. They use this card of anti- Semitism. They fill newspapers with hate letters. They are useless people."

Although he describes himself as a failed historian, Paulin maintains a habit of explaining politics only in reference to history.

"In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction."

Should the British, then, declare a historic responsibility towards the plight of the Palestinians?

"I am not very moved by historical apologies. I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either."

But why?

"Because there is a sort of amorphous, sort of darkness at the heart of things, because there is a certain kind of complacency and individualism."

Despite this bleak vision, Paulin thinks the majority of British people do support the Palestinians. The problem is, though, that there is no way of articulating this support.

"This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti-apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat," he says.

But he believes that the Palestinian cause must somehow occupy that space. "I think protest and actions have to be organised against the Israelis and their backers. There needs to be a concerted high profile campaign to raise awareness of the people in this country."

One of the responsibilities of the writer is to take a stand, argues Paulin, and any literary-political weapon he can summon to support his cause he will. Recently he resigned from the Labour party after realising that the Blair government was "a Zionist government."

"Sixty members of the Labour party went on friendly visits to Israel. Blair's special envoy to the Middle East, Lord Levy, has a son who works for the Israeli government, which means that it is linked in all kinds of ways to the Zionist government in Israel."

Israel Paulin describes as an "ahistoric state." "It is a state created by the powerful nations somewhere else. It is an artificial state."

Nor is he quiet about the balance of power between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinians, he says, need good anti-tank weapons. "They have got to meet force with force. They have to be cunning and forceful."

So how does the suicide bomber fit within this balance of power?

"I can understand how suicide bombers feel," he answers. "It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy. I think – though – that it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare. I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale. Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity."

If there is one thing Paulin clearly abhors about Israel, it is the Brooklyn – born Jewish settlers.

"They should be shot dead," he says forcefully. "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them."

 

MORE PRESSURE FOR MID EAST PEACE

More pressure for Mid East peace
The Guardian
April 6, 2002

Despite widespread international condemnation for its policy of violent repression against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, the Israeli government appears impervious to moral appeals from world leaders (Fear of wider conflict as army pushes on, April 5). The major potential source of effective criticism, the US, seems reluctant to act. However, there are ways of exerting pressure from within Europe.

Odd though it may appear, many national and European cultural and research institutions, including especially those funded from the EU and the European Science Foundation, regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts. Would it not therefore be timely if at both national and European level a moratorium was called upon any further such support unless and until Israel abides by UN resolutions and opens serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians along the lines proposed in many peace plans, including most recently that sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League.

Prof Patrick Bateson
Provost, Kings College, Cambridge

Prof Richard Dawkins
Oxford University

Prof Colin Blakemore
Oxford University

Prof Steven Rose
Open University

Dr Marina Lynch
Trinity College, Dublin

Prof Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond
Nice University

Prof Juliette Frey
Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg

Prof Nora Frontali
ISS, Rome

Prof Eva Jablonka
Tel-Aviv University

Prof Per Andersen
Oslo University

and 115 other academics

• "They would love to see me dead," says the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in one of his poems. We writers and artists believe in his right and the right of the Palestinian people to live free of the nightmare that is now unfolding at their doorstep – the nightmare of living under curfew and siege, without electricity, telephones, or the needs of daily life, cut off from the rest of the country and the world; of having their homes broken into, their sons rounded up, tagged, and hauled away; of summary executions whose purpose seems to be to incite further violence; of fear of adding yet more names to the list of the disabled and dead.

We call on all people of good conscience to protest against the onslaught on the Palestinian people, their institutions, and the fabric of their society, and to demand the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli army so that the peace process may resume. We call on the US to adopt an evenhanded approach to justice and not to blame the victim for the crimes of the oppressor.

It seems the policy of the government of Israel is to eradicate the very idea of Palestine. What they have succeeded in doing instead, is creating the grounds for vendettas for generations to come.

Harold Pinter
Benjamin Zephaniah
Ahdaf Soueif
Andy De La Tour
Susan Wooldridge
and 18 other writers and artists
Artists for Palestine

[All news briefs below from Thursday, April 11, 2002]

28TH PASSOVER BOMBING VICTIM DIES

(Israel Radio)

Anna Yacobovitch, 78, of Holon, died today of wounds suffered in the Palestinian terror attack on Passover in Netanya's Park Hotel. She is the 28th victim of the bombing.

Mrs Yacobovitch had been on life support in Hadera's Hillel Yaffe Hospital since the attack two weeks ago. Her husband, son, and son in law were also killed in the bombing.

Others injured in the bomb still remain in critical condition.

 

ALONA SPARTOVA

Alona Spartova, who was critically injured (part of her brain was destroyed) in the Palestinian terror attack on the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv on June 1, 2001. will today, at Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center in Raanana, assist Israeli Health Minister Nissim Dahan dedicate the hospital's new pediatric wing.

Alona remains in severe condition. Twenty-one Israelis died in the attack, most of them teenagers. Several of them were Alona's friends.

Details can be found at http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0k0g0

 

AT LEAST SIX PEOPLE KILLED IN BOMBING AT TUNISISAN SYNAGOGUE

(AP / Ha'aretz extracts)

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Micahel Melchior said that an explosion Thurday at the historic Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Jerba, which killed at least six people, was a deliberate anti-Semitic attack.

"The wave of recent anti-Semitic events reached its peak today with the cruel murder of tourists at the ancient synagogue of Djerba in Tunis," said Melchior.

Foreign Ministry sources told Ha'aretz, that although Tunisian authorities immediately claimed the blast was an accident, they believe that it was a terror attack. "It is not located on a main road, it is an isolated place, and to get there you have to want to get there. There is a special road leading up to the synagogue," an Israeli government official said

Four of those killed were German tourists, said Perez Trabelsi, a Jewish leader who holds an annual pilgrimage to the historic Ghriba synagogue.

Helicopters were mobilized to bring the 20 injured to Jerba's regional hospital. They suffered from burns of varying degrees of seriousness.

 

SEVERAL SERIOUSLY INJURED IN ATTACK ON PARIS JEWS

(News agencies)

A group of unidentified thugs wielding iron bars and sticks attacked a Jewish soccer team in Paris today. Several of the players reportedly sustained serious injury in the attack.

In related news, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Jr. has teamed up with a leading rabbi to protest their dismay to France's Consul-General to New York, Richard Duque, over increasing anti-Semitic attacks on French Jewry and its institutions.

Martin Luther King III, head of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of New York Boards of Rabbis, yesterday urged France to put an end to the attacks, and called on its leadership to educate its youth on the importance of multi-culturalism.

 

ANOTHER JEWISH SCHOOL BUS ATTACKED WITH STONES IN PARIS

(AP)

A school bus carrying Jewish students in Paris was bombarded with stones Wednesday, news reports said, drawing immediate condemnation from the Paris mayor and renewed pleas for religious tolerance. One school child was injured in the attack.

Synagogues and Jewish schools and cemeteries around the country have been targeted, often with firebombs, in the last two weeks. In the most serious case, a Marseille synagogue was burned to the ground on March 31.

Mayor Bertrand Delanoe issued a statement Wednesday saying he was "profoundly shocked by the intolerable aggression against a bus carrying students from a Jewish school" in the north of Paris.

 

BARAK AGREES TO HELP ISRAEL'S PR

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak last night agreed to help Ariel Sharon's government in international PR efforts. Another former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has already agreed to serve as a PR emissary of the government.

 

LEBANON STOPS DISTRIBUTION OF IHT OVER PRO-ISRAEL AD

(AP)

The Daily Star newspaper, the International Herald Tribune's publishing partner in Lebanon, withheld today's issue of the IHT because of a pro-Israel advertisement it carries.

The decision by the English-language Daily Star comes a day after Lebanese authorities said they were preparing charges against the IHT over a similar advertisement it carried last week.

The advertisement in question was printed on Page 9 and entitled "An Open Letter to the Nations of Europe." It accuses European countries of "playing a detrimental role in the face of the murder of Jews in Israel".

Under Lebanese laws, a foreign publication that distributes in Lebanon cannot publish items deemed to be propaganda for Israel, a nation with which Lebanon considers itself to be at war.

FULL ARTICLES

SCORES ARRESTED IN HOLOCAUST DAY PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTS IN U.S.

Scores arrested in Holocaust Day pro-Palestinian protests in U.S.
The Associated Press
April 10, 2002

Campus police at the University of California, Berkeley arrested 79 pro-Palestinian protesters who stormed into a classroom building after holding a rally near a Holocaust memorial day vigil. At the same time, a small knot of people in a tent nearby read aloud the names of people killed by the Nazis, part of a 24-hour vigil for Holocaust remembrance day.

The pro-Palestinian protests Tuesday were part of a series of demonstrations held in universities across the United States coinciding with Holocaust day. In at least one case, protesters wore yellow stars of David, drawing a parallel between the victims of the Nazis and Palestinians in areas where the IDF is carrying out operations.

 

SECURITY HEIGHTENED IN ISRAELI EMBASSY & SYNAGOGUE IN OSLO

Report: Muslims volunteer to bomb Jewish targets in Oslo
The Associated Press
April 10, 2002

Security at the Israeli Embassy and a main Jewish synagogue in the Norwegian capital have been drastically increased with heightened tensions in the Middle East.

Part of a main street through Oslo was closed off to traffic and concrete barricades raised around the Israeli Embassy late Tuesday. Similar steps were taken at the main synagogue in another part of the capital.

The respected Oslo newspaper Aftenposten said today in an unconfirmed report that security was increased because police heard about young Muslim men volunteering to become suicide bombers against Jewish targets. Aftenposten said plans discussed included specific targets in Norway and dates.

 

NEW ATTACK ON PARIS SYNAGOGUE

Paris synagogue targeted in new attack
Reuters
April 10, 2002

An unknown attacker hurled a petrol bomb at a synagogue in a Paris suburb late on Tuesday in the latest assault on Jewish sites in France linked to the spiraling violence in the Middle East.

The home-made bomb was thrown into a courtyard at the synagogue in Garges-les-Gonesse, 10 km (six miles) northeast of Paris. People inside put out the fire before it caused serious damage, police said.

 

PERES COMMENTS ON JENIN "COMPLETELY DISTORTED BY THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA"

(Communicated by the Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman)

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres wishes to clarify that his comments on the situation in Jenin have been completely distorted by the international media. The Foreign Minister expressed his concern that Palestinian propaganda is liable to accuse Israel that a "massacre" took place in Jenin rather than a pitched battle against heavily armed terrorists.

TEL AVIV COFFEE SHOP VICTIM DIES OF HER WOUNDS

April 4, 2002

Rachel Darhi, 37, of Bat Yam, died today of her wounds following last week's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv's My Coffee Shop. Her husband, who was injured in the terror attack, is still being treated at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

Frieda Britvich, 70, wounded in the Pessah massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, succumbed to her wounds yesterday, a day after her husband, Alter Britvich, died, bringing to 26 the death toll in the March 27 suicide bombing. They will be buried at 1 p.m. today. Among the 23 persons seriously wounded in the attack, one woman has now lost both her legs.

Carlos Yerushalmi, 52, of Haifa, who was critically wounded in the suicide bombing attack on the Matza restaurant on March 31, died in Rambam Hospital, bringing to 15 the death toll in that attack, raising the number of victims of terror attacks in March to 129.

Border police officer Patrick Parag, 30, was killed today, April 4, in a Hebron gun battle between soldiers and armed Palestinians, as he attemptied to arrest a wanted member of Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigade.

Sgt.-Maj. Einan Sharabi, 32, of Rehovot, was killed by Palestinian gunfire this morning in Jenin. Another soldier was seriously wounded, and several soldiers were lightly wounded.

Maj. (res.) Moshe Gerstner, 29, of Rishon Lezion, was killed by Palestinians in Jenin overnight.

Ofir Roth, 22, from Gan Yoshiya, was killed by a Palestinian sniper firing from the Beit Sahur area Monday afternoon near a roadblock at Har Homa. Roth had been working to save for a trip overseas, working mornings with his father in the family carpentry shop, and evenings at a pub in Kfar Vitkin.

Tomer Mordechai, 19, of Tel Aviv, the policeman who was killed Monday night after stopping a Palestinian suicide bomber heading toward the center of Jerusalem, was buried in Tel Aviv's Kiryat Shaul Cemetery. On Monday night, Mordechai blocked a Palestinian suicide bomber from reaching a crowded area, thereby giving his own life while saving the lives of many others.

Palestinians said a senior Fatah terrorist on Israel's wanted list was killed in Jenin on Thursday.

 

HYSTERIA AROUND THE WORLD AGAINST ISRAEL AND JEWS

Activist for Palestinian cause kills himself in Tokyo Park
April 1, 2002

TOKYO - A Japanese campaigner for Palestinian rights committed suicide by setting himself on fire in a Tokyo park to protest Israeli military operations in the West Bank, a fellow activist said today.

Takao Himori, 54, poured gasoline over his body and set himself alight, said his friend Masao Adachi.

Police spokesman Koji Hata confirmed that a man burned to death over the weekend in the park, but refused to reveal his identity.

"People watching the cherry blossoms suddenly saw flames shoot up and called the police," Hata said.

A number of Japanese activist groups held rallies on Saturday, comemorated by Israeli Arabs as "Land Day," to protest Israel's crackdown on Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Several Japanese ultra-leftist groups carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis in support of Palestinian liberation during the 1970s.

 

BOMB THREATS AGAINST JEWS IN HELSINKI

Finnish police evacuate synagogue, Jewish old age home
The Associated Press
April 4, 2002

HELSINKI, Finland - Police evacuated a synagogue, a Jewish home for the elderly, and a Jewish school today in central Helsinki after a bomb threat, officers said.

The threat was telephoned to the Jewish school at 10:15 a.m. (local Helsinki time) with a warning that a bomb would explode an hour later. Officers and sniffer dogs interrupted the bomb search temporarily at 11:15 a.m. but returned when no explosion occurred.

 

TURKISH PM ACCUSES ISRAEL OF "GENOCIDE"

Turkish PM accuses Israel of 'genocide'
By James C. Helicke
The Associated Press
April 4, 2002

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey's prime minister accused Israel today of committing "genocide" against Palestinians - an unusually harsh denunciation from a country with strong ties to the Jewish state.

Turkey, a predominantly Muslim and secular nation, has sharpened its criticism of Israel since the beginning last week of the Israeli siege on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's statement today was his strongest to date.

Both Turkey and Israel are close US allies and have conducted joint military exercises, sometimes angering. Despite Ecevit's increasing criticism, earlier this week he refused to cancel a $668 million deal for an Israeli firm to modernize 170 Turkish tanks.

 

GREEK PARLIAMENTARIANS IN "SYMOBOLIC INITIATIVE"

Greek parliamentarians head for the Palestinian territories
News agencies
April 3, 2002

A group of 20 Greek Parliamentarian and activists will head today for the Palestinian territories in a "symbolic initiative" as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people against the escalations of the Israeli aggression.

The Greek parliamentarians explained that the group also intends to take part in a march calls for establishing peace due to be organized in "occupied Jerusalem."

Earlier this week Apostolos Kaklamanis, the speaker of the Greek parliament, accused Israel of committing "genocide" against the Palestinian people.

 

SWITZERLAND RECONSIDERING ECONOMIC & MILITARY RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL

Switzerland 'reconsidering' relations with Israel
The Associated Press
April 4, 2002

BERN - The Swiss government said yesterday it is reconsidering its economic and military relations with Israel in light of events in the Middle East.

"Until recently we had contact with a country that was engaged in a peace process and had signed agreements with Palestinian authorities," said Swiss Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Muriel Berset Kohen. Now, she said, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly says Israel is at war.

 

ARSONISTS ATTACK JEWS IN MONTPELLIER & PARIS

Arsonists renew attacks on Jewish sites in France
Reuters
April 4, 2002

PARIS - Arsonists struck Jewish targets in two French cities in the latest of a wave of such attacks, firebombing a religious centre and torching a school bus, police said on Thursday.

Attackers threw several firebombs at the Jewish religious centre in the southern city of Montpellier overnight, setting a nearby office ablaze. The bus was torched at a Jewish school in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers on Wednesday evening.

Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has ordered police to mount guards at Jewish schools and synagogues throughout France.

France deployed riot police at Jewish religious sites and schools countrywide after the arson attack late Sunday at Marseille's Or Aviv temple. The fire destroyed the synagogue, leaving it a blackened mass of wood and metal.

Early yesterday, a Jewish cemetery building near Strasbourg was burned down, the latest target in a rash of attacks. Since last Friday, synagogues in Lyons, Marseilles and Strasbourg have been attacked by youths throwing Molotov cocktails.

A Jewish couple was attacked in a Lyons suburb and a kosher butcher was shot at in Toulouse.

 

BRUSSELS SYNAGOGUE DAMAGED BY GASOLINE BOMBS

Fires set at synagogues in Belgium
Riot police deployed
The Associated Press
April 2, 2002

In Brussels, a synagogue was damaged by gasoline bombs, and police in Turkey heightened security at religious sites amid fears that violence in the Middle East could take its toll on European communities.

 

TWO AMERICAN JEWS ATTACKED IN BERLIN

American Jews assaulted in Berlin
News agencies
April 3, 2002

Police in Berlin said yesterday a gang of seven or eight men who appeared to be Arabs attacked two American Jews who were walking on one of the city's smartest streets on Sunday after visiting a synagogue.

 

2,000 DANISH DEMONSTRATORS COMPARE SHARON TO HITLER

Danish demonstrators compare Sharon to Hitler
News agencies
April 3, 2002

About 2,000 demonstrators massed in front of the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen.

The protesters -- mainly Palestinians or other Arabs -- carried banners with slogans comparing Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, to Adolf Hitler and denouncing Israeli "terrorism."

A large contingent of riot police monitored the protest. Police are bracing for new protests when Israel's football team arrives in Copenhagen to play an exhibition game on April 17 as part of the Danish team's warm-up for this summer's World Cup in Japan and South Korea.

 

SYNAGOGUE ATTACKED IN KOSTROMA

Synagogue attacked in Russia
The Associated Press
April 2, 2002

Vandals in the Russian city of Kostroma scrawled a large black swastika across a synagogue on Sunday night, the latest in a series of anti-Semitic incidents in the region, NTV television reported.

 

SWEDEN CONSIDERS BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

Sweden considers boycott of Israel
April 4, 2002

Sweden will consider today whether to declare a boycott of Israel. The debate comes in the wake of a decision made this morning by Norway's largest food import company, which said it has placed a boycott on Israeli-made products.

A poll conducted in Norway indicates most citizens of that nation support the Palestinians. Only nine percent of poll respondents expressed support for Israel.

 

"MISSILE FACTORY BLOWS UP IN SYRIA"

"Missile factory blows up in Syria"
Special to World Tribune
April 3, 2002

LONDON - An explosion has been reported at a leading Syrian weapons factory, killing 35 people.

The explosion was reported early last week in the northern Syrian city of Homs. Western diplomatic sources said a factory in a huge Syrian weapons complex exploded, killing many of the technicians in the building and causing widespread damage.

 

21 ALGERIANS KILLED BY AN ARMED GROUP

21 killed in Algeria
News agencies
April 3, 2002

Some 21 Algerians were killed by an armed group in Molai al-Arabi in Sida area, 420 Km to the southern west of the capital Algiers, according to an Algerian official source on Tuesday.

 

9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORY BOOK FLYING OFF SHELVES IN FRANCE

Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theory Book Lures French
By Rebecca Harrison
Reuters
April 1, 2002

The French are lapping up a Sept. 11 conspiracy theory that argues the plane that smashed into the Pentagon never existed and that the world has been duped by a murky U.S. government plot.

Thierry Meyssan's book "The Frightening Fraud" is flying off shelves according to booksellers and has topped bestseller lists.

Meyssan, president of Reseau Voltaire, a respected left-wing think tank, reckons the American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington killing 189 on September 11 did not exist and that the whole thing was staged by the government.

"I believe the American government is lying... No plane crashed into the Pentagon," he told France 2 television.

Meyssan did not provide an alternative theory for what may have damaged the Pentagon.

And although French media has scoffed at Meyssan's musings, the public are intrigued.

"Copies have been flying off shelves," a saleswoman at FNAC bookshop in central Paris told Reuters. It shot to the top of Amazon France's bestseller list and made it to second place in the booksellers' weekly Livres Hebdo's sales list.

HAIFA MAYOR, AMRAM MITZNA: "THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS A BATTLEFIELD"

Selection of Quotes:

Amram Mitzna, mayor of Haifa (March 31, 2002): "There is no longer a front and a rear. The whole country is a battlefield."

Yasser Arafat (March 29, 2002): "Nobody is shaken, afraid, or retreating. We are going to Jerusalem, giving millions of martyrs on the way."

George Bush (March 30, 2002): "The Iranians must step up and stop sponsoring terrorism. The Syrians must participate... there has got to be a united effort against terror."

Donald Rumsfeld (April 1, 2002): "States like Iran, Iraq and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing. The people in Syria ought to know that their government is facilitating the flow of weapons and financing and terrorist activity down from Iran and into Lebanon and into Israel."

Kofi Annan (April 1, 2002): "Israel's presence inside the compound of Chairman Arafat and its military actions in the West Bank and Gaza can only produce a further deterioration and the loss of more innocent Palestinian and Israeli life, and should be ended immediately."

Shimon Peres (March 31, 2002): "The idea to return human sacrifice to the altar of political ambition is barbaric and dangerous. It is dangerous not only to Israel, but for the rest of the world if this will become a tactical strategy. Everybody may use it. We have to do whatever we can, morally, legally, politically, and militarily to stop it. This crime will spread to the whole world."

Shimon Peres (March 31, 2002): "No one in Israel can understand why the Palestinians are fighting and killing, since whatever they are demanding was offered to them at Camp David, namely a Palestinian state. What they are trying to achieve by murder they could have gotten on the negotiating table."