Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
23, 2003
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
23, 2003
A Fence of Deception
The Truth About the Wall
By YIGAL BRONNER
When Israel's finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu
was interviewed for the radio on the morning after the horrific
terror attack on Café Hillel in Jerusalem he was asked
whether this was the right time for cutbacks in the military
budget. In answer to this question Netanyahu promised, once again,
that the money set aside for the so-called "separation fence"
would not be affected by the cutback--on the contrary it would
be flowing faster so as to speed up construction. This, he said,
would be done to ensure the safety of the citizens of Israel.
It did not even occur to the interviewer to ask whether the fence
would actually lead to peace and security.
As is the case with other related issues,
when violence escalates and the debate becomes emotionally charged,
it becomes impossible to express any other opinion. Israel's
political parties, across the board, from Meretz to the Likud,
are vying in their expressions of support for the "fence".
One of the most dramatic geo-political changes in the history
of the region is taking place in the absence of any public debate.
We must stop and look through the fog of lies concerning this
wall.
The first lie comes in the shape of the
name, "separation fence". This notion promises the
worried and exhausted Israeli public that the Palestinians, together
with all the misery in our dealings with them, will be "behind
the fence". Us here, them there--and peace to all. But the
fence does not really mean separation between Palestinians and
Israelis. On the contrary. The wall that is under construction
will lead to the annexation by Israel of a considerable percent
of the West Bank. On the western, Israeli, side of the fence
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will remain. On the eastern,
Palestinian, side, there will be thousands of Jewish settlers.
So separation this isn't.
The second lie is that what we have here
is a fence that constitutes a border on whose eastern side the
"Palestinian state" about which Sharon likes to talk
will be established. For the idea is not of one fence but rather
of, at least, two sets of walls. And while one of them, the one
on the west side, will steal as many kilometers as possible of
Palestinian land alongside the Green Line, the other--on the
eastern side--will annex the remoter settlements, like Ariel
and Kiryat Arbah. Between these two walls there will be various
types of obstacles, fences and trenches. This set up will irreversibly
turn the West Bank's centers of population into isolated human
cages. What this amounts to is not a state but a smattering of
ghettos.
Take Jerusalem, for example. The wall
that is being erected there does not coincide with the dividing
line that runs between the city's Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods.
It cuts all of the former into two. In doing so it will annex
well over 100,000 Palestinians. Moreover, hundreds of thousands
Palestinians will be left outside the fence, the majority of
whom are residents of Jerusalem, in the possession of a valid
Israeli ID card, whose life is wholly involved with and dependent
upon the city. These people will not only be prevented from entering
the city and, thus, reaching the source of their livelihood,
their centers of education and hospitals--they will also be unable
to turn eastward instead.
For to the east they will be surrounded
by walls and roads built to envelope Ma'aleh Adumim, Pisgat Zeev,
Nokdim and Tekoa. It is hard to describe the vast variety of
humanitarian problems that these walls will create on the eastern
side of metropolitan Jerusalem which will be cut up into a many-branched
system of enclosures. But the Israeli public is not willing to
consider this humanitarian issue because they have been promised
that the fence will finally bring the longed-for security. And
that's the third lie about the wall. Again, a glimpse at the
Jerusalem area is instructive. During the present Intifada, East
Jerusalem has been the most quiet Palestinian area. The wall,
which will cut through families and streets alike, will harvest
a great number of people who have nothing left to lose. Tens
of thousands of Palestinians, once annexed to Israel, will be
disconnected from their brothers, while, at the same time, the
settlers' drive for domination will only intensify (they are
already at Har Homa, Jabel Mukkaber, Ras el Ammud, Sheikh Jarrakh,
the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, etc.). The demolition project
of Palestinian houses will receive a serious boost and the government
will do anything in its power to push out Palestinian citizen.
What we have here is a huge barrel full of explosives. Instead
of removing Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem, the wall will
in fact import them into the city.
Obviously, the problems are not restricted
to Jerusalem. And there are also areas--though few in number--in
which the fence will be constructed on the Green Line, without
annexing Palestinian land and its inhabitants. This for instance
will be the case in Kalkilyah and Tulkarm. But those who delude
themselves with the thought that the fence will bring security
there are mistaken. Believers in the fence point, time and again,
at the example of the Gaza Strip. This is, indeed, a fascinating
case. Gaza, which is encircled by a fence, is virtually under
lock and bolt thanks to a handful of settlements that together
have control over a substantial proportion of the land. It is
so peaceful over there that the IDF constantly lobbies for a
large scale invasion, while its airforce is engaged in the continuous
of shelling of the place. The fence-made security enjoyed by
the people of Sderot and Ashkelon, who come under fire from make-shift
missiles, is also widely renowned. As long as the occupation
continues the people of Gaza will go on resisting it and it is
only a matter of time until they find more sophisticated weapons
and better ways to dig their way through, underneath and above
the fences.
Exploiting the genuine security related
worries of the Israeli people and the majority's wish for a political
parting from the Palestinians, the Sharon government is constructing
a system of fences that will not achieve separation, that will
not draw a border, and that will not, eventually, bring security.
What we are facing in the "fence" is yet another typical,
thoroughly calculated "Sharonic" act of deception.
The real purpose of the walls is very different. They are intended
as another layer--maybe the ultimate one--in the complex matrix
of control which constitutes the Israeli occupation: the settlements,
the roads, the roadblocks, the curfews, the closures, and the
use of brute military force. The walls that Sharon is building
now are intended to render Israel's hold over the land it captured
in 1967 irreversible. They are the last nail in the coffin of
the two-states solution. We shall wake up, in another year and
a half from now, to a drastically different reality: a cruel
state consisting of pens enclosures will stretch between the
Jordan river and the Mediterranean. A state besides which South-Africa's
apartheid pales into insignificance. Violence will not merely
fail to be reduced--it will increase, hatred and racism will
intensify. The outcome of this is too terrifying to contemplate.
Yigal Bronner
teaches South Asian studies at the Tel-Aviv University and is
an activist in Ta'ayush -- Arab-Jewish Partnership.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|