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New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Cockburn on the Roadmap: It's a Big Hoax in a Long Line of Hoaxes; St. Clair on The Rat in the Grain: Daniel Amstutz and the Looting of the Farms of Iraq; All About David Horowitz: the Dazed and Confused Dirigible of the Right; Handicapping the Democrats: Will It be Graham vs. Dean?; Kucinich Wows Madison: But Seems to Have Forgotten the Horrors of Clintontime; Blumenthal v. Hitchens: Inside the Conspiracy; Merle Haggard Stays the Course: Country Legend Defends Dixie Chicks, Bashes Bush. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide web audience is soaring, with more than 60,000 visitors a day. This is inspiring news, but the work involved also compels us to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Recent Stories

June 13, 2003

David Vest
Bush Roadmap to What?

Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?

John Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There

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Michael Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media

Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America

Saul Landau
Shiite Happens

Hammond Guthrie
Then and Now

Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/13

 

June 12, 2003

Gary Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology

Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day War

Wayne Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign

Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security

Tarif Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba

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Bush's Wars Web Log 6/12

 

June 11, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the Generals Hate the A-10

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Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's Top Gremlin

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Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004

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June 10, 2003

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A Season in the Anti-War Movement

Chris Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi Germany

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Jason Leopold
Powell's Denials Ring Hollow

Richard Lichtman
Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World Domination

Ray Close
A CIA Analyst on Why the Lies About WMD Matter

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Banking on Saddam?

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Bush's Wars Web Log 6/10

 

June 9, 2003

Alex Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons

Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!

Lee Sustar
Is Iran Next?

Agustin Velloso
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Gila Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others

Dr. Gerry Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America

Michael S. Ladah
A True Liberation

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June 7 / 8, 2003

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The Terrible Truth

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Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species

Joanne Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers

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A Different Theory of Everything

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Pauperizing the Periphery

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Another Powell, Another Capitulation

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June 6, 2003

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Ashcroft the Insatiable

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The Big Lie

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His Own Little Country

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Cracks in the Consensus

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Ari's Great Set

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June 5, 2003

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Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth

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June 14, 2003

The Destruction is Nearing Its Completion

Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Razor wire, electrical & steel fences, concrete barriers and road blocks, watchtowers and tanks, helicopters, drones and F16s overhead, and the looming gray wall of separation encircling us --these are the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. Jennifer, these are what imprison us on our ever-shrinking land, what scar and desecrate our towns and villages. Bulldozers maul the earth and eat away at our homes and orchards. Hideous robotic claws tear up our land and the pavement on our streets and even walking becomes impossible. How can I run away? The borders around me trap me at every bend. Worst of all is that when I close my eyes the same barbed wire cuts across my mind so that I cannot escape. Not even in my dreams.

A parallel universe runs alongside the one being conjured up in the press. There, where the Road Map to Peace is analyzed and criticized, lauded or condemned, a difficult reality faces readers worried that the latest violence will shatter this recent attempt to make peace --or dismissive as the words turn into bits of human flesh on the streets. Far away from critical commentary, a fifty-five-year-old process of human displacement and destruction continues uninterrupted by the tempest raging in the news headlines.

To understand the Palestine conflict, one must strip away the words that obscure it. There is no state in the making, no autonomy being created, no sovereign Palestinian authority, no withdrawal from illegally settled territories, no cessation of occupation. A real map would show the West Bank cut in two by the sprawling settlement of Ariel, strangled within by checkpoints and military outposts, slashed by Jewish-only roads, divided and encircled by a creeping apartheid wall, fragmented into dried up villages whose resources Israel has stolen for itself and its settlements and intends to keep.

A real map would show the Gaza Strip gnawed away at either end by bulldozers, the homes and businesses at the edges of Rafah and Beit Hanoun heaps of tangled wire and broken stone. The borders of Gaza are receding slowly, before our eyes, as families flee to the interior, to the overcrowded camps --themselves isolated by yet more checkpoints and settler bypass roads. Sewage pools go untreated as wadis and wells fill with bacteria and disease, the air and water made putrid by environmental suffocation. The shoreline belongs almost exclusively to the Gush Katif settlement block and patrolling Israeli gunboats out at sea.

The destruction of the land of Palestine is nearing completion. What was cut to 46% in 1947 had become 22% twenty years later and is less than half of that now. There are no plans, processes, or maps that seek to restore it even partially. The big problem remaining is what to do with the natives who refuse to leave. Slowly, in piecemeal fashion, they are being bulldozed and dynamited, targeted or imprisoned, deported, detained, bombed, buried, surrounded, shot, or gradually transferred out of sight. The international community stands mutely by unwilling to intervene.

Why don't our papers report this?

Forget about the Road Map. Don't be seduced by the talk of peace. Israel is an offshore US military base and weapons testing ground. It is a westernized colony for white supremacists seeking ways to discreetly dispose of its nigger population. It is an American franchise for the new global economy, a consumer outlet, an ad for Disney-World-gone-native, a terrorist training camp for Jewish fundamentalists, the most well-funded terrorist organization outside the mainland United States, a strategic foothold in the Middle East for oil-thirsty, power-hungry neo-cons.

It is suicide's most willing accomplice.

Jennifer Loewenstein lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She spent a good part of the last three years in Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. She is a member of the Palestine/Israel Peace & Justice Alliance (PIPAJA) and a founder of the Rafah-Madison Sister City Project. She can be reached at: jsarin@facstaff.wisc.edu


Yesterday's Features

David Vest
Bush Roadmap to What?

Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?

John Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There

Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence

Michael Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media

Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America

Saul Landau
Shiite Happens

Hammond Guthrie
Then and Now

Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/13

 

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