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Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
7, 2003
Israeli Roulette
The
Settlements as Cancer Cells
By URI AVNERY
In the Six-Day War, hundreds of Israeli soldiers
were murdered while storming the Sinai desert, the West Bank
and the Golan heights.
In the Yom-Kippur War, more than 2000
Israeli soldiers were murdered in the defense of the conquered
territories.
In the 18 year long Lebanon War, more
than a thousand Israeli soldiers were murdered while conquering
and occupying South Lebanon.
They would have been surprised to learn
that they were "murdered". Perhaps they would have
been insulted. After all, they were not helpless Jews in the
ghetto who were killed during a pogrom by drunken Cossacks. They
fell as soldiers in war.
Now we are back in the ghetto. Again
we are poor, fearful Jews. Even when we are in uniform. Even
when we are armed to the teeth. Even when we have tanks, airplanes,
missiles and the nuclear option. Alas, we are murdered.
The application of the verb "murder"
to combat soldiers who fall in action is a semantic novelty of
the present intifada in the Sharon era. It was very conspicuous
last week, in the wake of two military incidents.
In the Palestinian village of Ein Yabroud,
three soldiers were ambushed and killed. Their job was to safeguard
the road to the nearby settlement Ofra, north of Ramallah. They
were patrolling the main street of the village on foot, following
their regular route. On the way back, three Palestinian fighters
lay in wait for them, killing three and wounding one. The attackers
got away.
A classic guerilla engagement. Not terrorism.
Not an attack on civilians. The action of guerilla fighters against
armed soldiers in an occupied area. If it had involved German
soldiers in France or French soldiers in Algeria, nobody would
have dreamed of saying that they were "murdered". But
on our television, military correspondents talked of the three
being "murdered" by "terrorists".
A few days later, an even more shocking
event took place. One single Palestinian fighter cut through
the fence of Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip, entered a
military camp and killed three soldiers--one male, two female.
He was pursued and killed.
In connection with this event, too, the
military correspondents said on TV, without blinking, that the
three were "murdered" by "terrorists" in
a "terrorist" action.
Murder? Terrorism? Against soldiers in
uniform? Inside a fortified settlement?
It is worth analysing this incident in
order to understand the current military campaign as a whole.
Netzarim is a small, isolated settlement
on the sea shore, in the heart of the Gaza Strip, far from any
other settlement. It was implanted in the middle of a Palestinian
population of a million and a quarter, half of them refugees,
in the most densely inhabited place on earth. A whole battalion
of the IDF defends it, and that is not enough. To reach it from
Israel, one has to cross the entire width of the Gaza strip.
All traffic is by armored vehicles. Up to now, more than twenty
soldiers have been killed in the defense of the settlement and
the road leading to it.
Crazy? The settlers themselves maintain
that it was the army that had demanded to set up the settlement
as a base for observation and control. The fanatical nationalist-religious
founders have since disappeared, their place taken by adventurers
who risk their own lives and the lives of their children--not
to mention the soldiers, male and female, who have no choice.
The government sacrifices them on the altar of the settlement.
The Palestinians, of course, suffer more
than anyone else. Any who come near the settlement are shot.
Anything that was standing or growing nearby, or along the road,
has been destroyed or uprooted long ago. This week, the army
demolished two Palestinian high-rise apartment blocks, each 12
floors high, some hundreds of meters from the settlement, because
from there the goings on in the settlement could be "observed".
This is typical: like a cancer in the body that gradually extends
its malign influence, every settlement slowly destroys its surroundings
in an ever-widening circle.
The process can be outlined as follows:
(1) On a hilltop, an "outpost"
consisting of one or two mobile homes is set up without government
permission.
(2) The government declares that it will
not tolerate such illegal actions and talks about removing it.
(3) The army sends soldiers to defend
the outpost, saying that it cannot leave Jews in a hostile region
without protection as long as they are there, even illegally.
(4) For the same reason, the outpost
is connected to the water, electricity and telephone networks.
(5) The discussion in the cabinet is
postponed, and in the meantime the settlement expands.
(6) The cabinet decides to accept the
accomplished fact and the outpost becomes a legal settlement.
(7) The Military Governor expropriates
large stretches of cultivated land for the development of the
settlement.
(8) A bypass road is build to allow for
the safe movement of the settlers and soldiers. For this purpose,
the army expropriates more stretches of cultivated land from
the neighboring Palestinian villages. The road with its "security
area" is 60-80 meters wide.
(9) Palestinians try to attack the settlement
that stands on their land.
(10) To prevent attacks on the settlement,
an area 400 meters wide around the settlement is declared a "security
zone" closed to Palestinians. The olive groves and fields
in this area are lost to their owners.
(11) This provides the motivation for
more attacks.
(12) For security reasons, the army uproots
all trees that might afford cover for an attack on the settlement
or the road leading to it. The army has even invented a new Hebrew
word for it, something like "exposuring".
(13) The army destroys all buildings
from which the settlement or the road could be attacked.
(14) For good measure, all buildings
from which the settlement can be observed are demolished, too.
(15) Anyone who comes near the settlement
is shot, on suspicion that he has come to spy or attack.
This way the settlement sows death and
destruction in a ever-widening circle. The life of the Palestinian
villages in the neighborhood becomes hellish. They lose the sources
of their livelihood. Hundreds of such villages find themselves
trapped between two or more settlements, which close in on all
sides, sometimes right up to their courtyards. Their lives and
their property are at the mercy of gangs of settlers.
This process has already been going on
for decades all over the occupied territories. It is a slow,
continuous, day-to-day offensive, unseen by Israeli eyes. Last
year, the "separation fence" was added, a monster that
snakes its way deep into the West Bank in order to "defend"
the settlements. It makes the life of hundreds of thousand of
Palestinians well-nigh impossible.
The fence is supposed to cost 10 billion
shekels (more than two billion dollars). It is impossible to
calculate the cost of the settlements themselves, which certainly
runs into many billions of shekels every year.
It is much easier to calculate the price
in human lives. The killing of the three soldiers in Netzarim
has caused a shock. Many Israelis are beginning to ask--perhaps
for the first time--Why? What for?
The father of one of the soldiers killed
in Ein Yabroud has called this "Israeli roulette".
The mother of a female soldier killed in Hebron gave vent to
her anger on TV: "She died because of the settlers!"
There are many signs of a general sobering-up, even in the army
command.
Is this the beginning of a change in
public opinion? That could be.
Uri Avnery
is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He
is one of the writers featured in The
Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also
a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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