Exchange trips should be off: no holidays in sunny Eilat, even Christian pilgrims to the holy places might delay their trips
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (The Independent)
First let me say the following as clearly and loudly as I can: I have fought against anti-Semitism all my life, against friends, colleagues, lovers, anyone who expressed anti-Jewish sentiments. I remember one night in 1974 when I stood for four hours under a lamp-post in north Oxford recovering from a screaming row with my ex-husband after he accused me of being excessively emotional about the Holocaust. My nine-year-old daughter was taken to see The Merchant of Venice in the week when all her friends were flooding to Harry Potter because we feel she needs to understand anti-Semitism as it arises around the world once again. I refused to support the UN conference against racism in Durban because I feared it would give licence to people to abuse Jews and it did. And as I observe the unsheathed hatred of Jews among many Muslims here and around the world, I feel shame and rage.
I condemn the acts of suicide bombers whose own hopelessness makes them target Israelis in caf�s, at weddings, in street markets, bursting open the bodies of the young and the old and themselves; and by each act blowing away peace and progress. Israel -- as it was originally created -- has an absolute right to exist and to flourish, without fear.
But Israel has absolutely no right to do what it wants, to use such overpowering weaponry against mostly unarmed people (we will never ever know how many are being killed in the current deluge) and justify that by referring to the horrendous history which led to the creation of the Jewish homeland. In fact I would suggest that Ariel Sharon should be tried for crimes against humanity in Sabra and Shatila, and Jenin and other occupied areas and be damned too for so debasing the profoundly important legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop forever nations turning themselves into ethnic killing machines.
Remind yourself of this. Read the gripping new biography of Primo Levi by Carole Angier to understand the inimitable humanity of great Jewish thinkers, people who had every reason to surrender to the abomination of all-out vengeance but never did. Levi's painstaking testimonies about what happened in Auschwitz illuminate connections and avoid the traps of special pleading. He surely would not have been able to witness without protest the depravity of the current Israeli leadership.
Sharon can only carry on with his invasion of the West Bank because Colin Powell and his master in the White House crumble before his brutish ways and the US pro-Israeli lobby. He knows too he has the blind support of Americans and Britons whose anti-Arab racism has this year reached new lows. One columnist writing in a US journal captures the view held by many: "Israeli tanks should mow down Arab youths as they throw stones. Kill them. Keep going until the Arabs decide whether they hate Jews more than they love their children. I don't think the Israelis would have to dispose of too many Arab children before the white flag would go up."
So do we just blink back our tears and wait for these deaths? No. That would be like killing all imagination and optimism. I have just come back from Cape Town where I met inspirational people who fought those long, long years against apartheid. They gave me courage that all is not lost. We don't have to depend on craven British ministers who still insist on blaming Arafat (no saint he) more than they can bring themselves to accuse Sharon.
These South African liberationists have already persuaded many people not to buy anything from Israel. No, they admit, apartheid was not exactly the same as what is happening in Palestine. Yet, they recognise the familiarities. The racism against Arabs which fuels hard-line leaders; the systematic violence and humiliation to force a population to succumb to what is an unjust deal; the bulldozers, oh the bulldozers which evoke such trembling memories in so many South Africans who remember how they too had their homes and lives turned to dust not that long ago.
They have not forgotten either that Israel for many years supported apartheid and that some Tories thought white South African rulers were just fine people. Nelson Mandela was also declared a terrorist for not denouncing the use of violence against the iniquitous system built on a permanent state of heightened paranoia, just like Israel today.
I think we ? all those who want Israel to leave the occupied territories ? should follow the example of the South African activists. I have already started looking at labels and putting back anything made in Israel. Many of my friends are doing the same. We are e-mailing organisations ? not those based on religion because Palestinians are not only Muslims ? but all those who want to see a world committed to universal human rights. Money will count more than words. The US will not be able to prop up the economy of Israel forever and these hard wars are expensive.
We should call on unions, especially Equity, to advise artists and others to cut relations with the state of Israel. Exchange trips should be off; no holidays in sunny Eilat (perhaps this is happening already because of fear), even Christian pilgrims to the holy places need to think if this is when God may want them to delay the trip. Please note these actions are not directed at Jewish people but at the Israeli government. We will not, for example, stop buying from shops in Britain owned by Jewish people.
I was heartened to find out that others are doing their bit. Professor Stephen Rose and Professor Hilary Rose have started a boycott of institutional, cultural, academic and research links with Israel. They have collected 300 names across Europe. Jewish academics have signed up too. The signatories must know that this means cutting off much that is of value. There are hundreds of joint research projects between Arab and Israeli academic institutions ? scarce spaces where decent dialogue and co-operation has been able to carry on. But I think they are right to sign up because we are in the middle of an unprecedented inferno which politicians are doing nothing to quell.
We know some Israeli soldiers are rejecting Sharon's strategy and that small peace groups keep going, enduring rejection, accusations of treachery and worse every time another suicide bomber goes off. Several Jewish women who work for human rights are trying to find ways to make their objections heard. They know they must tread carefully so as not to give succour to Jew-haters but unless they take an ethical position, they will be violating all that they stand for. As one Jewish South African friend, an artist, who lives in London put it: "I owe it to my father who fought against apartheid and my grandfather who died in Germany, not to let my people turn into fascists. Don't name me but I say that many of us are beginning to think that Israel is a burden on our backs instead of the imagined haven we grew up thinking it was, the place of safety and honour in an evil world. I will not stand by and let them do this in my name."
She is not alone. These brave Jewish dissidents and others who refuse to retreat and cower will stop the tanks; or, if not, at least they will ensure the nameless hundreds who are being killed did not die undefended as the world looked on helplessly. So remember to read the label; put it back if it is made in Israel. You will know you did a little something.
From Warsaw to the West Bank
by Sherri Muzher (RamallahOnline)
Women throw hand grenades. Children fight like soldiers. Occupying soldiers prevent food and medicine from the civilian population. Buildings and homes are destroyed. Arms are smuggled. A relatively unarmed civilian population fights one of the most powerful armies in the world.
Welcome to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April, 1943. Under the leadership of Mordecai Anielewicz, Warsaw Ghetto Jews staged the first urban uprising in Occupied Europe. Jewish fighters held out against heavy German attack for 27 days. Their arsenal consisted of nine rifles, 59 pistols, and several hundred grenades, explosives, and mines.
Clearly, Jews faced overwhelmingly superior forces. Consider the results of the Nazi?s military victory: Of the Jews captured, 7,000 were shot, 7,000 were transported to the death camp of Treblinka, and 15,000 were shipped to Lublin. Among the Nazis and their collaborators, the losses were 16 dead and 85 wounded.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was truly a turning point in Jewish and European history. The significance and symbolism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represented more than just who beat who or how many casualties were inflicted on either side. Anielewicz wrote to his colleague, Yitzhak Zuckerman, ??what really matters is that the dream of my life has become true. Jewish self-defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed resistance and retaliation have become a reality. I have been witness to the magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters.?
For Anielewicz and other Jews, the Uprising represented fighting for honor. The Jews knew the awful fate that the Nazis had in store for them. And they knew they would lose militarily. But a conflict is not just won on military might, as the Jews in Warsaw proved.
On April 19, 1993, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave a speech before the Central Memorial Assembly in Warsaw on the 50th Anniversary of the Uprising. ". . . They fought from the rooftops of houses and from the sewers, the cellars and courtyards, behind collapsing walls and rooms engulfed in flames. They had no chance, yet they were victorious. In human history, the rebels of the ghetto will be remembered as those who kept alive the embers of honor. Their honor was the last asset of one thousand years of Polish Jewry, which were consumed by fire but their honor did not perish."
Fast forward nine years. Women pull pins on hand grenades. Children fight like soldiers. Occupying soldiers prevent food and medicine from the civilian population. Buildings and homes are destroyed. Arms to resist an army are allegedly smuggled. A relatively unarmed civilian population fights one of the most powerful armies in the world.
Welcome to the West Bank, where one Palestinian recently resorted to using a single shot Carbine rifle from WWII to attack soldiers. Yes, the arms can be that elementary. More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in this Uprising and nearly 20,000 injured. The numbers increase each day. The comparisons may be disturbing to some but realities are realities. And when a human being's honor is the only thing he or she has left to lose, it is very likely that many Palestinians will share Mordecai Anielewicz's dream, as well as the late Yitzhak Rabin's pride.
Scenes of lining up blind-folded Palestinian prisoners with identification numbers on their bodies should rile the majority of the Israeli population, besides Peace Now members. Unfortunately, fellow right-wing comrades of the Sharon government are pressing for even more force in achieving a crushing victory over the Palestinians. It seems they have forgotten their own history and Jewish heroes, like Mordecai Anielewicz.
But Israelis say they are fighting a war against "terror." Clever, given our sensitivity to terrorism since 9-11. But others see it differently. From Secretary of State Colin Powell to normally silent nations in the European Union, questions are being raised at the motives of the Israeli government policy of destroying refugee shanties and killing civilians. Even the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano argued, ?. . . at first it seemed designed to humiliate a people, now it appears designed to destroy them.?
Certainly, everyday Palestinians themselves will tell you that. A friend from the West Bank town of Beit Jala put it in the simplest terms as to why Palestinians remain strong in the face of such adversity. "Everyone expects to die . . ."
True, the awful gas chambers are missing. But the techniques of resistance and motivation in both uprisings are similar: fighting against a powerful force to keep the embers of honor alive.
Sir, It's the Wrong War!
by Uri Avnery
After the invasion of the Balata refugee camp by a regular brigade of the IDF, the brigade commander appeared on television and said that he had expected the Palestinians to fight like tigers, but that they behaved like pussycats.
This is a frightening sentence, because it discloses a startling fact: the Brigade commander does not understand in what kind of campaign he is engaged. He has to be told, with all due respect: "Sir, you are fighting the wrong war!"
Clearly, he believes that he is engaged in a conventional war between armies. The enemy is supposed to stand up and fight like men, assault rifles against tanks and fighter planes.
The commander and all his colleagues, including the Chief-of-Staff and his deputy, would be well advised to read a good book about guerilla warfare, such as Mao Tse-Tung's treatise, which tells the guerilla fighter: Never confront the regular army. When the army attacks, you disappear. When the army is not ready, you attack.
For example: The army surrounds Arafat in Ramallah, Destroy a Merkava tank in Gush Katif. A whole brigade invades Balata; Get out and send a single fighter to kill the team of a check-point near Ofrah. A brigade attacks Jenin; Get out of their sight and infiltrate Atzmona settlement.
The statement by the brigade commander indicates that the IDF is fighting on a front that does not exist, and is not prepared for fighting on the front that is there. It's like a general setting out to conquer Syria and holding a map of the Sudan in his hands.
Since Chief-of-Staff Mofaz and his senior officers don't even understand the nature of this struggle, they are failing. Out of frustration and anger they shoot in all directions and commit a small massacre every day, without any purpose or chance of success. Since they were not trained for this kind of struggle and do not understand it, they are condemned to commit every possible mistake. One after another, they use all the methods that have already failed in Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, Vietnam and a dozen of other countries.
They try to starve the inhabitants into submission ("closure"), and inadvertendly turn them into potential suicide-bombers with nothing to lose. They assassinate the chiefs of the fighting groups ("targeted prevention"), and clear the way for younger, more efficient and more energetic commanders. The kill massively ("you have to strike them") and turn the relatives of the victims into avengers.
If this is the way of the generals, the "political echelon", composed of pensioned generals, is worse. They imprison Arafat in Ramallah in order to prove that he is "irrelevant", and turn him into the most relevant person in the entire Middle East. As a result, all internal criticism of Arafat has ceased. Practically all Palestinians admire their President, who is taking part in their lot, suffers like them and is risking his life like them.
And beyond that: tens of millions of Arabs, who see rousing reports from beleaguered Palestine every hour on al-Jazira TV, compare the courageous Palestinian leader to their own rulers, who are now very worried indeed. In response they sounded the alarm in Washington and have compelled President Bush to do something.
Sharon and Ben-Eliezer declare that if the Palestinians are made to suffer more and more, they will eventually surrender and agree to live in several Ghettos, as proposed by Sharon. In practice, the opposite is happening: the more the pressure on them mounts, the more their unity grows, their methods of resistance improve and their readiness to suffer and not to surrender increases.
Thousands of Palestinians are ready to undertake actions leading to certain death, and their number is growing. How many Israelis are ready to go into action if there is no chance at all of coming out alive? Palestinians know full well that they are fighting for their very existence; Israelis know that they are fighting for the settlements and bankrupt politicians.
The Israeli government cannot win this struggle. After paying a terrible price - slaughter and destruction - this will become clear to the public, the government will fall and we shall make peace according to the Saudi Crown Prince's excellent proposal.
America Must See that Sharon is the problem
The Middle East conflict cannot be resolved while the Israelis are led by a man who sees military force as the only instrument of policy.
Observer Worldview
Avi Shlaim
The Observer
When running for Prime Minister in February of last year, Ariel Sharon, Israel's ferocious hawk, tried to reinvent himself as a man of peace. Against the background of the al-Aqsa intifada, which he had helped to trigger by his provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), he ran on a ticket of peace with security. In his first year in power, Sharon has achieved neither peace nor security but only a steady escalation of the violence. In the last two weeks Sharon has revealed himself once again as a man wedded to military force as the only instrument of policy.
The 74 year-old Israeli leader has been at the sharp end of confrontation with the Arabs for most of his life. The hallmarks of his career are mendacity, the most savage brutality towards Arab civilians, and a persistent preference for force over diplomacy to solve political problems. These features found their clearest expression in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which Sharon masterminded as defence minister in Menachem Begin's Likud government.
The war that Sharon is currently waging on the West Bank, fraudulently named 'Operation Defensive Shield', is in some ways a replay of his war in Lebanon. It is directed against the Palestinian people; it stems from the same stereotypes that the Palestinians are terrorists; it is based on the same denial of Palestinian national rights; it employs the same strategy of savage and overwhelming military force; and it displays the same callous disregard for international opinion, international law, the UN, and the norms of civilised behaviour. Even the principal personalities are the same: today, as in 1982, Ariel Sharon confronts Yasser Arafat.
The invasion of Lebanon was not a defensive war but a war of deception. Sharon obtained cabinet approval for a limited military operation against the PLO forces in southern Lebanon. From the beginning, however, he planned a much bigger operation to serve broader geostrategic aims. The principal objective of Sharon's war was to destroy the PLO as a military and political organisation, to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism, to spread despair and despondency among the inhabitants of the West Bank, and to pave the way to its absorption into Greater Israel. A second objective was to give Israel's Maronite allies a leg-up to power, and then compel them to sign a peace treaty with Israel. A third objective was to expel the Syrian army from Lebanon and to make Israel the dominant power in the Levant.
Under Sharon's devious direction, an operation that was supposedly undertaken in self-defence developed into a merciless siege of Beirut and culminated in a horrendous massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila which led to the removal of Sharon from the ministry of defence.
In his crude but relentless propaganda war, Sharon tries to portray Arafat as the master terrorist who orchestrates the violence against Israel and secretly encourages suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. To be sure, Arafat is not above using violence. Nor has he done as much as he could to curb the activities of the Islamic militants. Yet Arafat is the leader who persuaded his movement to abandon armed struggle and adopt the political path in the struggle for independence. By signing the Oslo Accord in 1993, and clinching it with a hesitant handshake, he and Yitzhak Rabin undertook to resolve the outstanding differences between their two nations by peaceful means. Until the assassination of Rabin two years later, Arafat proved himself an effective partner on the road to peace. The subsequent decline of the Oslo peace process was caused more by Israeli territorial expansionism than by Palestinian terrorism. Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which Sharon's government continues to expand, are the root of the problem.
Ever the opportunist, Sharon was quick to jump on the bandwagon of America's 'war against terror' in the aftermath of 11 September. Under this banner, Sharon has embarked on a sinister attempt to destroy the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. His real agenda is to subvert what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into the ground, and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood. To add insult to injury, he wants to remove Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader and symbol of the Palestinian revolution, and to replace him with a collaborationist regime which would serve as a sub-contractor charged with upholding Israeli security.
What Sharon is unable or unwilling to comprehend is that security cannot be achieved by purely military means. The only hope of security for both communities lies in a return to the political track, something that the champion of violent solutions has always avoided. Consequently, Sharon's second war, like his first, is doomed to failure. If the history of this conflict teaches anything, it is that violence breeds more violence.
Many people who do not necessarily support Sharon's brutal methods nevertheless have sympathy for Israel's predicament. They point out that the suicide bombs against innocent Israeli civilians pre-dated the incursion of Israeli tanks into West Bank towns and villages. Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however, goes back to 1967 and constitutes the underlying cause of Palestinian frustration, hatred, and despair of which the suicide bombs are only the cruelest manifestation. They say that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deny altogether Israel's right to exist. These are, however, the extremist fringes. The savage treatment meted out by Sharon to the Palestinians is self-defeating precisely because it undermines moderates and strengthens extremists.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current crisis is America's complicity in the Israeli onslaught. One might have expected George Bush Jr. to resume the even-handed policy of his father towards Arabs and Israelis. Instead, he has reverted to a blatantly pro-Israeli policy reminiscent of the Reagan years. Although America is a signatory to the Oslo Accord, Bush has abandoned the Palestinian side.
Sharon is holding Arafat hostage in his headquarters in Ramallah, depriving him of food, water, medicines and telephone lines. The only concession that the American President has managed to extract from the truculent Israeli Prime Minister is a promise not to kill the Palestinian leader. The Israelis have destroyed much of Arafat's police force and security services, leaving him with a mobile phone. Under these conditions the embattled Palestinian leader does not have the means to prevent suicide attacks even if he had the will to do so.
In an apparent reversal of American policy a week ago, President Bush called on Sharon to pull out his troops from the Palestinian towns and villages. Sharon insisted they would stay as long as necessary to accomplish their mission of uprooting the infrastructure of terror. Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to the region to broker a ceasefire and restore the political track. He is unlikely to get far with Sharon unless he backs up his words with the threat to cut economic and military aid to Israel. The death toll in 'Operation Defensive Shield' is more than 200 Palestinians and 60 Israelis. How many more lives will have to be sacrificed before the Americans understand that General Sharon is part of the problem, not the solution?
� Avi Shlaim is a professor of International Relations at Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)
Sharafat and the child ghosts
ARAD, Israel On Saturday night a 9-month old baby girl, an Israeli, was murdered in Netanya by a group of Palestinian gunmen. A few days earlier another baby girl, a Palestinian, was blown up by an Israeli bomb. Innocent civilians are dying, killed on both sides nearly every day. They are dying not because there is no way of resolving the crisis, but on the contrary precisely because a way exists and is known very well by all. .Every Israeli in the street knows what the solution is, just as every Palestinian knows it. Even Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat know the solution: peace between two states, established by the partition of the land roughly in accordance with demographic realities based on Israel's pre-1967 borders. During this period of long sleepless nights, I sometimes wish I could believe in ghosts. I turn and toss and imagine being able to send the ghosts of all the dead children, Israeli and Palestinian, to haunt Sharon and Arafat. I imagine that I am able to assemble these innocents around the beds of the two leaders - two men more than 70 years old, each a prisoner of the other, at the mercy of the other. Each ready to act every day exactly as the enemy foresees, to throw more fuel on the flames, to spill yet more blood. Sometimes during these nights I see these two men fused into the persona of an ancient warrior, a wicked Nero, amusing himself by playing with fire, laughing savagely while stoking the flames. During the same troubled nights I find myself hoping for the opposite, too - that Sharon and Arafat will not be haunted by the ghosts of the dead children but will instead be sent away to sleep for weeks and months, to be awakened only after the signing of a peace treaty. .History will never forget their offenses, because the solution is here, visible, manifestly clear before us all. Every Israeli and every Palestinian knows that this land will be divided into two sovereign nations and become like a semi-detached two-family house. Even those who loathe this future already know, deep in their hearts, that all this is inevitable. .I suspect that even the Siamese twins Sharon and Arafat - I now call them Sharafat - know this. But fear and stagnation stifle them both. .They are living under the dominion of a bloodstained past. They are hostages to one another, so much so that the entire historical dynamic of the conflict of the Middle East has become captive to their fears, their immobility. .One day when the peace treaty is achieved, and the Palestinian ambassador presents his credentials to the president of Israel in the western section of Jerusalem, while the Israeli ambassador presents his to the Palestinian president in East Jerusalem, we shall all have to laugh at the stupidities of our past. .Even as we laugh, we shall have to answer for the spilling of so much innocent blood. But the mothers and fathers of the dead will not be laughing.
The writer is author most recently of "The Same Sea," a novel in verse. He contributed this comment to The New York Times.