Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
September 3, 2003
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
Recent
Stories
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
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
3, 2003
Building a Mighty
Ghetto State
"First
of All This Wall Must Fall"
By URI AVNERY
This slogan was born spontaneously, opposite the
Wall in Kalkiliya, at the place where it becomes a fence and
turns east, penetrating deep into Palestinian territory. On the
other side of the wall the Palestinians were demonstrating. We
were looking for a short rhyme to broadcast by megaphone. A common
effort brought forth the seven words that carry the whole message.
True, this is not the wall of Jericho
that could be destroyed by the sounding of trumpets. The people
who are building this obstacle want it to stand for eternity,
much as "united" Jerusalem is the "eternal capital
of Israel". The Israeli Right has no concept of a period
of time less than eternity. But among Israeli Leftist there are
also some who believe that the wall has created an "irreversible"
situation.
Not me. Because I remember other "irreversible"
situations. And other "eternities", too.
Our Wall is frequently being compared
to the Berlin Wall. Visually and politically, this is a reasonable
comparison. Also because the "Berlin Wall" was not
only an urban monstrosity. It was part of the German section
of the Iron Curtain, cutting all of Germany into two and extending
from the Baltic Sea in the north to the border of Czechoslovakia
in the south almost a thousand km, approximately the same
as the planned length of Sharon's monster.
In Germany, too, it was a huge obstacle,
a combination of walls and fences, watchtowers and firing positions,
"death zones" and patrol paths. It divided the country,
scarred the landscape and separated parents from children. An
awesome monster, arousing fear and loathing, a symbol of power
and finality.
Especially finality. Everyone who saw
it felt that this was a point of no return in German history,
that the separation was eternal, that there was no point fighting
against it.
Indeed, serious politicians based their
policy on the wall's permanency. Leftists and Rightists resigned
themselves to the fact. No serious commentator questioned it.
The situation was "irreversible".
And then, one day, like a completely
unforeseen eruption of a volcano, it just happened. The terrible
wall disappeared, as if by itself. A communist minister made
a slip of the tongue, the police had a moment of indecision,
a crowd gathered and the "irreversible" became
eminently "reversible". The situation had changed.
Like the dinosaurs, the terrible monster disappeared from the
earth.
(Some time before that I drove from
West Germany to Berlin. I had to pass a DDR border station. Vopos
(Volkspolizei) with hard faces and raw commands: "Your passport!
Sit there! Wait!" No "please", "thank you"
or "excuse me". Like the Nazis in Hollywood movies.
Same uniform, same peaked caps. same behavior, same everything.
Some days after the fall of the wall
I passed there again. The same policemen were still there, but
they were unrecognizable. Smiles from ear to ear. Unbounded civility.
Please, Sir. Thank you, Sir. Would you please, Sir. Just a moment,
Sir. Obviously not only walls are reversible, people are reversible,
too.)
There is, of course, an important distinction
between the German and the Israeli wall. East Germany had a border
fixed by international agreement (between the Soviet Union and
the Western allies at the end of World War II). The wall was
built entirely on this line. Its path was self-evident. But here
there is no agreement, no border, no self-evident path. Everything
is determined by anonymous planners.
It is easy to imagine them sitting in
their air-conditioned offices, a map spread out before them.
A very special map, because it shows only Jewish settlements
and bypass roads. The Palestinian towns and villages do not appear
on it at all. As if the ethnic cleansing, that so many in Israel
(and in the Sharon government) are longing for, had already happened.
That is what's so special about this
Wall: it is inhuman. The planners have completely ignored the
existence of (non-Jewish) human beings. They took into account
hills and valleys, settlements and bypass roads. But they totally
ignored the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages, their inhabitants
and their fields. As if they did not exist.
And so the Wall stands between children
and their school, between students and their university, between
patients and their doctor, between parents and their children,
between villages and their wells, between peasants and their
fields. Like a big armored bulldozer that crashes into a village
and crushes and destroys everything in its path without faltering,
the Wall cuts thousands of the thin threads that constitute the
fabric of people's daily lives, as if they weren't there.
For the planners, these lives simply
do not exist. The country is empty of non-Jews. At the beginning
of the 21st century they act in accordance to the Zionist slogan
that was current at the end of the 19th : "A land without
a people for a people without a land".
Indeed, the idea of the wall is rooted
deep in the Zionist consciousness and has accompanied it right
from the beginning. In his book "Der Judenstaat"
that gave birth to the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl
was already writing: "In Palestine we shall constitute a
part of the wall of Europe against Asiaan outpost of culture
against barbarism." More than a hundred years later, Sharon's
wall expresses exactly the same outlook.
Outsiders won't understand this. Yasser
Arafat told me this week that Abu-Mazen, on his recent visit
to the United States, showed President Bush a map of the Wall.
Bush was shocked. He shook the map before the Vice President,
Dick Cheney, and cried: "What's this? Where is the Palestinian
State?"
By its very existence the wall seems
to express power. It announces: "We are mighty. We can do
whatever we want. We shall imprison the Palestinians in little
enclaves and cut them off from the world." But that is make-believe.
In reality, the Wall expresses ancient Jewish fears. In the Middle
Ages, the Jews surrounded themselves with walls in order to feel
safe, long before they were obliged to live in ghettoes.
A State that surrounds itself with a
Wall is nothing but a ghetto-state. A strong ghetto, for sure,
an armed ghetto, a ghetto that frightens everybody in the neighborhood,
- but a ghetto, nevertheless, that feels save only behind walls
and barbed wire and watchtowers.
We shall not achieve peace unless we
overcome this ghetto mentality. And first of all, we must get
rid of the Wall.
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. One of his
essays is also included in Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming
book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 30 / Sept. 1, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
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