[The expected cover-up:]
Israeli report clears troops over US death. Peace activist killed by bulldozer acted 'illegally and dangerously,
The Guardian (UK), April 14, 2003
"An Israeli army investigation into the death of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist, has concluded that its forces were not to blame for her death. It accused Corrie and other members of the International Solidarity Movement of 'illegal, irresponsible and dangerous' behaviour. Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an army bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, as she protested against house demolitions. The investigation, led by the chief of the general staff of the Israeli Defence Force, found that Israeli forces were not guilty of any misconduct. The result of the investigation comes as Tom Hurndall, 21, from London lies in hospital with severe brain damage after being shot in the head on Friday by an Israeli soldier as he tried to help a Palestinian woman and her children. Mr Hurndall was also a peace activist working with the ISM. He was shot in a different area of Rafah while wearing the same kind of bright orange vest as Corrie when she died. Yesterday his family arrived from London to visit him in hospital in the southern Israeli town of Beersheva. The army report obtained by the Guardian says Corrie: 'was struck as she stood behind a mound of earth that was created by an engineering vehicle operating in the area and she was hidden from the view of the vehicle's operator who continued with his work. Corrie was struck by dirt and a slab of concrete resulting in her death.' 'The finding of the operational investigations shows that Rachel Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.' However, Joe Smith, 21, from Missouri who witnessed Corrie's death said that the army's description bore little resemblance to what he saw. 'Rachel was kneeling 20 metres in front of the bulldozer on flat ground. There was no way she could not have been seen. We only maintain positions that are clearly visible.' 'She had been doing this all day but this time the driver did not stop. Once she had fallen under the bulldozer, the driver stopped when she was under its middle section and reversed,' he said. The report also says that the army was patrolling no man's land by the border zone, searching for explosives. But according to Mr Smith, Corrie believed that they intended to demolish the house where she had been staying ... Tom Wallace, a spokesman for the ISM, said that the army's investigation had been far from credible and transparent as it had promised. 'The conclusions are outrageous. If they found that the driver was not culpable what did they find to explain this? How could they find a driver who had run someone over in a slow and deliberate manner in no way responsible?' he said. Corrie's parents, Craig and Cynthia, from Washington, had called on the US state department to investigate the death of their daughter."

Israel to use flechette shells,
News 24, April 14, 2003
"Israel's Supreme Court has given the army the green light to use controversial flechette tanks shells which spray thousands of darts over hundreds of metres, ripping apart anyone in the killing zone. Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli advocacy group, said the use of such shells was in contravention of the Geneva Convention covering the rules of warfare and should be banned. It said the shells had killed 10 innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Palestinian urpising, or intifada, in September 2000. The army has argued that it has used the weapons very selectively in its fight against terrorism. Israeli media reports have said the army uses the shells mainly against mortar crews firing rounds at Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. 'If we bowed to your demand today, we would be asked tomorrow the ban the army from using teargas and sound bombs,' one of the judges quipped. According to Jane's Defence Weekly, the British military analysis journal, Israel uses flechette shells acquired from the United States in the 1970s which fire 5 000 darts in in a cone-shaped pattern 300m long and about 94m wide. The rounds were developed for use against infantry units."

Hundreds of Palestinian Minors in Custody,
Yahoo!News (from Assoicated Press) Apr 17, 2003
"About 300 Palestinian minors have been rounded up in Israeli army sweeps over the past year and are being held in crowded lockups, some without charges, lawyers and human rights monitors say. The army acknowledges it has locked up teens, but treats those over 16 as adults, despite international conventions defining minors warranting special treatment as those under 18. Israel says militant groups often recruit teens, pointing to a 16-year-old suicide bomber, Issa Bdair from Bethlehem, who killed two Israelis in a blast in Tel Aviv last year. Several other bombers have been minors. Roundups of Palestinians have intensified in the past year, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says a total of 7,600 Palestinians are currently in custody. Red Cross officials say they have visited 260 minors in Israeli lockups. Israeli human rights monitors, including the respected B'tselem group, estimate about 300 Palestinians under 18 are in detention, and say many of those detained are held for minor offenses, such as throwing stones. A 14-year-old, Ali Rahman, said he was jailed for eight days after throwing a stone at an army jeep that drove past his home in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Ali said he slept on a floor with a blanket, sharing a cell with 15 other boys at the West Bank's Etzion military detention center. Israeli human rights lawyer Tamar Peleg represents several Palestinian teens, including Mohammed Najar from Bethlehem who was first arrested when he was 15. Najar is being held in so-called administrative detention, a practice held over from British Mandate rule that allows the army to jail Palestinians without trial or charges. He is serving the first of renewable six-month detentions in the Ketziot tent camp, a crowded prison in Israel's southern Negev Desert. Peleg, who works for Israel's Center for the Defense of the Individual, said military prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to charge Najar with a crime, but persuaded a military judge he was dangerous enough to keep locked up anyway. Before being sent to Ketziot, he spent 45 days in solitary confinement in a West Bank army lockup because a judge ordered him held separately from adult prisoners. The day after he turned 16, he was moved to Ketziot prison, Peleg said. The lawyer said Najar is one of about 30 minors, half of them under 16, being held without trial or charges. Some of the other young prisoners she's met at military judicial hearings have complained of beatings, hunger, overcrowded rooms stuffed wall to wall with mattresses and too few trips allowed to the toilet. Many are interrogated without the presence of lawyers and are held for months without visits from their parents, she said. Israel is in violation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines minors as younger than 18, said Jessica Montell, director of B'tselem. The treaty, which Israel signed and ratified, says the arrest and imprisonment of children should be a last resort and for the shortest appropriate time, and they should not be jailed with adults. It also gives minors the right to legal assistance, visits from relatives and to be informed of the charges against them."

Israel Continues U.S. Policy of Killing Journalists/Witnesses.,
AP Cameraman Shot and Killed in West Bank,
The March for Justice, April 19, 2003
"An Israeli soldier shot and killed a cameraman with Associated Press Television News who was covering a skirmish between troops and rock-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus on Saturday, witnesses said. The Israeli military had no immediate comment but said it was looking into the shooting. Nazeh Darwazeh, 45, was filming clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians that began early Saturday. Doctors said Darwazeh died of a bullet wound to the head. Video footage taken by a Reuters cameraman showed young Palestinian men running up an alley toward a parked armored personnel carrier. After they threw rocks at the vehicle, troops fired shots. Witnesses said several firebombs were thrown toward the vehicle, and later footage showed a small area in the back of it on fire. The footage then showed a man with a rifle in green combat fatigues kneeling down between the armored personnel carrier and the wall of a house at the top of the alley. Witnesses identified the man as an Israeli soldier. The footage showed him pointing his weapon toward the journalists. Seconds later, Darwazeh was seen lying in a doorway in a pool of blood. He and other cameramen, still photographers and reporters had been at the bottom of the alley and were wearing brightly colored vests that said `Press.'"

UK envoys held at gunpoint by Israelis,
by Chris McGreal, The Guardian (UK), May 6, 2003
"Israeli forces opened fire above a British embassy convoy and held it at gunpoint in Gaza while it was carrying diplomats and the family of an English peace activist left in a coma by an Israeli bullet. Two armoured Range Rovers with diplomatic plates were forced to halt as they drove through the Abu Houli crossing on Sunday, even though British officials had notified Israeli forces of their arrival 10 minutes earlier. The group was en route to the Rafah refugee camp where Tom Hurndall, 21, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper last month as he tried to protect a five-year-old girl. During the standoff one of the diplomats, Andrew Whitaker, emerged from one car with his hands above his head to try to talk to soldiers hidden behind concrete pillboxes, while the British defence attache to Tel Aviv, Colonel Tom Fitzallen Howard, phoned the army for an explanation. 'There's a complete lack of control. They fire without warning,' said Tom Hurndall's father, Anthony, who was in one car with his wife and 12-year-old son. 'As we passed the first pillbox a shot was fired over the cars. We weren't clear why, or what was happening. Nobody came out, we couldn't tell if we were supposed to get out or go on. 'The political officer from Jerusalem bravely got out of the car and had to put his hands over his head not knowing if they viewed us as hostile. They wouldn't let us move from under their guns.' After several minutes a hand emerged from one of the pillboxes and waved on the vehicles without explanation. Mr Hurndall said Col Fitzallen Howard immediately called the army contact he had spoken to minutes earlier. "His immediate reaction was to say he didn't get the message down in time. The colonel said: 'Regardless of that, why did you fire at us? You shot at official embassy cars for no reason.' The Israeli's excuse was that we didn't stop. He said we were supposed to go through one by one but that is simply not true,' Mr Hurndall said. 'Then they tried to say they did it to check our documents but they never did.'"

Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US,
By David R. Francis, The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 2002
"Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person. This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby. For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War. And now Israel wants more. In a meeting at the White House late last month, Israeli officials made a pitch for $4 billion in additional military aid to defray the rising costs of dealing with the intifada and suicide bombings. They also asked for more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to help the country's recession-bound economy. Considering Israel's deep economic troubles, Stauffer doubts the Israel bonds covered by the loan guarantees will ever be repaid. The bonds are likely to be structured so they don't pay interest until they reach maturity. If Stauffer is right, the US would end up paying both principal and interest, perhaps 10 years out. Israel's request could be part of a supplemental spending bill that's likely to be passed early next year, perhaps wrapped in with the cost of a war with Iraq. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years. Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, Stauffer reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel. 'Consequently, politically, if not administratively, those outlays are part of the total package of support for Israel,' argues Stauffer in a lecture on the total costs of US Middle East policy, commissioned by the US Army War College, for a recent conference at the University of Maine. These foreign-aid costs are well known. Many Americans would probably say it is money well spent to support a beleagured democracy of some strategic interest. But Stauffer wonders if Americans are aware of the full bill for supporting Israel since some costs, if not hidden, are little known. One huge cost is not secret. It is the higher cost of oil and other economic damage to the US after Israel-Arab wars. In 1973, for instance, Arab nations attacked Israel in an attempt to win back territories Israel had conquered in the 1967 war. President Nixon resupplied Israel with US arms, triggering the Arab oil embargo against the US. That shortfall in oil deliveries kicked off a deep recession. The US lost $420 billion (in 2001 dollars) of output as a result, Stauffer calculates. And a boost in oil prices cost another $450 billion. Afraid that Arab nations might use their oil clout again, the US set up a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That has since cost, conservatively, $134 billion, Stauffer reckons. Other US help includes: • US Jewish charities and organizations have remitted grants or bought Israel bonds worth $50 billion to $60 billion. Though private in origin, the money is "a net drain" on the United States economy, says Stauffer. • The US has already guaranteed $10 billion in commercial loans to Israel, and $600 million in "housing loans." Stauffer expects the US Treasury to cover these. • The US has given $2.5 billion to support Israel's Lavi fighter and Arrow missile projects. • Israel buys discounted, serviceable "excess" US military equipment. Stauffer says these discounts amount to "several billion dollars" over recent years. • Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel. US help, financial and technical, has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier. Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often resent the buy-Israel requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers. • US policy and trade sanctions reduce US exports to the Middle East about $5 billion a year, costing 70,000 or so American jobs, Stauffer estimates. Not requiring Israel to use its US aid to buy American goods, as is usual in foreign aid, costs another 125,000 jobs. • Israel has blocked some major US arms sales, such as F-15 fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. That cost $40 billion over 10 years, says Stauffer. Stauffer's list will be controversial. He's been assisted in this research by a number of mostly retired military or diplomatic officials who do not go public for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic if they criticize America's policies toward Israel."

Quiz yourself on Israeli Democracy,
Palestine Remembered, April 22, 2002
"Is it Israeli Democracy or "Jewish Democracy", you be the judge. Are you aware that: Prior to the 1948 war, Palestinian Christians and Muslims were a two-third majority, who owned and operated 93% of Palestine's lands? Prior to the 1948 war, most Israeli Jews were persecuted and dispossessed European Jews who made a one-third minority? For Israel to become a "Jewish majority" it opted to expel and dispossess the two-third Palestinian majority? 80% of the Palestinian people were dispossessed from their homes, farms, and businesses for the past 54 years? 95% of Israel's lands (which is mostly owned by Palestinian refugees) are open for development to Jews only? Israeli-Palestinian citizens live almost in segregated communities (or ghettos) because development is strictly limited outside their villages? Ironically, the word "ghetto" was invented to describe the living conditions of Eastern European Jews in Tsarist Russia! For just being "Jewish" you gain an automatic citizenship in Israel? Plus tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies too. Palestinian Muslims or Christians refugees, who were born in the country and later expelled, cannot gain Israeli citizenship? Of course, unless they convert to Judaism first! Pretending to be Jewish in Israel is punishable by law with up to one year imprisonment? On the other hand, if you pretend to be a Muslim or Christian the law does you no harm! When the Palestine problem was created by Britain in 1917, more than 92% of the population of Palestine were Arabs and that there were at that time no more than 56,000 Jews in Palestine? That Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians at that time lived in peace with each other? Palestinians in the early 20th century owned 97.5% of the land, while Jews (native Palestinians and recent immigrants together) owned only 2.5% of the land? Close to 4 million Palestinian Muslims and Christians are being subjected to Israeli laws that are different than the laws governing the 4.5 million Israeli Jews? Is this a "democratically" elected apartheid, or not, that is the question? In the occupied West Bank there are "Jewish Roads" and "Non-Jewish Roads"? Israel issues national identify cards where the religion of the card holder is clearly bolded? Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza drive vehicles with license plates that have different coloring than the cars driven by Israeli settlers? Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza hold ID cards that are of different colors than the cards held by Israeli settlers? The only form of Judaism recognized by the "Jewish state" is Orthodox Judaism, so most US Jews could not get married in Israel. Furthermore, the only conversion to Judaism recognized is Orthodox, so most US converts aren't Jewish enough. Just prior to the 1948 war, Jews owned under 7% of Palestine's land, and to increase their share after the war, they passed the "Absentees' Law" which dispossessed the Palestinian majority land owners who later became "absent". What is even more tragic was the passage of an oxymoron law, called "Present Absentees' Law," which dispossessed the Palestinian-Israeli citizens who became internal refugees in Israel. It is worth noting that the internal Jewish refugees were not dispossessed as a result of this racist law. The U.S. funneled into the Israeli economy over 130 billion dollars, which is almost twice the amount devoted to rebuilding Western Europe after WW II! Israeli democracy is a facade to "Jewish Democracy?" Israel has nuclear weapons, and it was close to dropping one on Cairo in 1973? Israeli soldiers use human shields in battle to minimize their casualties? Israel killed over 20,000 Lebanese and Muslims (90% of whom are civilians) with American made and paid for weapons? Ariel Sharon is under indictment in Belgium for war crimes against Palestinian civilians?

Gaza visitors must sign waiver in case army shoots them,
by Chris McGreal, The Guardian (UK), May 9, 2003
"The Israeli military yesterday began obliging foreigners entering the Gaza Strip to sign waivers absolving the army from responsibility if it shoots them. Visitors must also declare that they are not peace activists. The move came hours before an autopsy on James Miller - the British cameraman killed in a Gaza refugee camp - confirmed that he was almost certainly killed by an Israeli soldier, despite the army's assertions to the contrary. Yesterday, the British government demanded an Israeli military police criminal investigation into Miller's death and the shooting of another Briton by the army in Gaza, Tom Hurndall, a peace activist. Mr Hurndall is in a coma with severe brain damage after being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier last month as he attempted to protect a small child from gunfire. The Foreign Office minister, Mike O'Brien, called in the Israeli ambassador to London to press the demand, which diplomatic sources portrayed as a ratcheting up of pressure on the Israeli government. 'On the basis of the evidence we've seen, we feel this case is so serious that we are asking for a military police investigation,' said a Foreign Office spokesperson. The waiver to enter Gaza requires foreigners, including United Nations relief workers, to acknowledge that they are entering a danger zone and will not hold the Israeli army responsible if they are shot or injured. The army document also warns visitors they are forbidden from approaching the security fences next to Jewish settlements or entering "military zones" in Rafah refugee camp close to the Egyptian border where Miller was shot dead on Saturday. He was the third foreigner killed or severely wounded in the area in recent weeks, besides numerous Palestinian civilians hit by Israeli fire, many of them children. The army invariably claims the victims were caught in crossfire. Palestinians say most of the shooting is indiscriminate and reckless, or worse. The latest victims include a one-year-old boy, Alian Bashiti, shot dead in his home in neighbouring Khan Younis refugee camp on Wednesday. Yesterday, Israel's forensic institute issued its autopsy report which backs up the accounts of witnesses who say that Miller was killed by a shot from an Israeli armoured vehicle. A video of the shooting also appears to undermine Israeli army claims that Miller, 34, was caught in crossfire and that soldiers shot in his direction in response to incoming fire from a Palestinian gunman nearby. The film shows three journalists in flak jackets and helmets, clearly marked with the letters TV. They are shouting 'Is there anyone there? Is there anyone there? We are British journalists.' A single shot is heard and then another followed by the sound of Miller groaning after he was hit. There is no sound of crossfire. Yesterday, the army said it had yet to receive the report and therefore could not comment."

Eye witnesses. Two Israelis who witnessed Palestinians being shot by the IDF could not believe their eyes. In recent weeks, columnist Gideon Levy described two violent incidents in the territories in which a Palestinian boy was killed and a Palestinian girl was injured. In the wake of these articles, two eyewitnesses sent their testimonies on the circumstances of the shootings. Both raise serious questions concerning the behavior of IDF soldiers,
Haaretz (Israel), May 2003
"1. Deliberate shooting at children. I read Gideon Levy's article about the death of Omar Matar ('The 144th Child,' Haaretz Magazine, April 11) following my own personal familiarity with the events that are described in it. As someone who personally witnessed the incident at the Qalandiyah checkpoint, on Friday, March 28, I can say that it was a traumatic, terrible, unimaginable experience. My girlfriend and I arrived at the site as members of WATCH, a group of Israeli women who oppose the occupation and who observe the checkpoints every day in the area of Jerusalem and the West Bank. This was not the first time we have seen what has become routine at the checkpoints: Children throwing stones at the fence near the Qalandiyah neighborhood and burning tires. Within a few minutes, a group of about 10 soldiers advanced in the direction of the children and began shooting at them. Stunned by what we were seeing - soldiers armed with rifles, wearing helmets and flak jackets shooting at a small group of schoolchildren - we immediately called the Benjamin Brigade commander, who told us that the orders to the soldiers that we had seen were to shoot rubber bullets in the air. I told him that I could see with my own eyes that they were not shooting in the air, but that they were shooting right at the children and that it is known that rubber bullets (which are really steel bullets covered in rubber) can kill. Within a short time, an ambulance came to the neighborhood's main street and we learned that a boy, Omar Musa Matar, had been shot in the head. Our warnings to the army had fallen on deaf ears and failed to prevent Omar's death. This incident brings a number of difficult thoughts to mind - thoughts about the imperviousness, cruelty and total contempt for Palestinian lives, which is reflected in the fact that after years of intifada, the Israel Defense Forces and the police have not yet found ways to disperse civilian riots that comply with international law; about the soldiers armed with rifles facing off against little children with stones; about the horrific disparity between the orders given by senior commanders and the reality on the ground, in which each soldier acts as he sees fit in the full knowledge that he will not be tried for murder, abuse, robbery or any other trampling of the law and human rights. According to figures provided by B'Tselem [The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories], the number of incidents in which the Military Police launches an investigation following the killing of innocents by soldiers is minimal, the manner in which the investigations are conducted ludicrous and the number of the convictions negligible. Consequently, I will not be surprised if the murderer is not brought to justice in this case either. This is not a trigger-happy soldier, but rather a group of soldiers acting like a murderous gang, storming a group of children that do not represent a genuine danger. -- Adi Dagan ...
2. No danger to the soldiers In the article about the Tul Karm refugee camp (Haaretz Magazine, March 28), Gideon Levy mentioned a 15-year-old girl 'who apparently tried to stab a soldier' at a checkpoint. She was shot and 'has been lying wounded in Meir Hospital, handcuffed, for a few weeks now.' On February 20 of this year, I was serving in the reserves at the checkpoint between Taibeh and Tul Karm. At about four o'clock in the afternoon, I went up to my post. About an hour and a half afterward, a girl of about 15 arrived, walked behind me and continued in the direction of a group of soldiers at the main area of the checkpoint. She stopped and at a certain point, took out a knife and stood without moving for quite a while. True, she did wave the knife in the air, but what she did was far from endangering the soldiers. The commander of the checkpoint, who arrived meanwhile, carried out the proper procedure for arresting a suspect and shot at her from a few meters away. The procedure calls for a warning shot in the air; if the suspect still does not stop, shots may be fired at the the suspect's legs and only after that at the suspect's torso. I heard three shots. After that, for a long while, she lay there bleeding and crying, 'I want my mother."'It was quite a difficult sight to see. An ambulance that arrived was not allowed to approach her until IDF sappers had finished checking her. I have been doing my reserve duty in the territories since April 1988. I have accumulated quite a bit of experience, and this time I decided to use my own judgment during my work at the checkpoint. When I saw older people coming to ask for permission to go through to visit their children in Taibeh, or mixed couples, I let them go through. My behavior caused some disagreement and consequently, the subject was brought out in the open. I explained that I was not working from a particularly leftist position, but rather from a human point of view. A number of things should be made clear about the shooter. The officer that shot the girl is an educator in his civilian life ... -- Peleg Levy"

Francophone Quebecers see Israel in negative light: poll,
By DAVID LAZARUS, Canadian Jewish News, May 15, 2003
"A newly released Gallup Poll indicates that francophone Quebecers think less favourably of Israel than they do of North Korea and Saudi Arabia. The same poll also shows that francophone Quebecers' attitudes toward Israel are more negative than those of other Canadians. The poll was conducted by the Gallup Organization to gauge Canadians' and Britons' ratings of a variety of countries, including their own, the United States, some European and Asian nations, and several in the Middle East. Countries were rated using a 10-point scale ranging from -5 (least favourite) to +5 (most favourite). The results were released March 11, days before the start of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, as part of a Gallup briefing on the Internet for special subscribers. The Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) recently received permission from Gallup to release the findings. The poll surveyed 1,000 Canadians including 350 francophones in Quebec, and found that Canadians in general gave a marginally negative (-0.06) average rating to Israel. However, when broken down by language, the findings show that English Canadians gave Israel a marginally positive average rating of +0.31, while francophone Quebecers gave Israel a -1.29 average rating. By comparison, francophone Quebecers gave North Korea a -1.23 average rating and Saudi Arabia a -1.12, both slightly higher than Israel. According to ACS executive director Jack Jedwab, the disparity between Israel's ratings in francophone Quebec and the rest of Canada lies in the 'much stronger leftist outlook' of Quebecers."

[The Israeli destruction of Christian Armenians.]
The unseen village,
By Sara Leibovich-Dar, Haaretz (Israel), May 18, 2003
"Not known to many, but forever remembered by its former residents - the story of the Armenian village Sheikh Brak is one of Israeli ambivalence toward the Armenian Holocaust. Every few weeks, Naomi Nalbandian travels to the abandoned Armenian village of Sheikh Brak, near Atlit [in Isrsel] . As a child, she lived there for just one year, but she still misses it. 'As the years go by, the abandonment of the village saddens me more and more,' she says. 'If I'd have been older then, I would have fought with all my might against the abandonment and tried to get other Armenians to join the struggle.' Last week, on the eve of Independence Day, Nalbandian, a nurse in the rehabilitation department of Hadassah University Hospital on Mount Scopus, lit one of the ceremonial torches on Mount Herzl. She wanted to mention the Armenian holocaust during the ceremony. In 1915-16, about 1.5 million people were killed in the Armenian genocide carried out during ther time of the Ottoman Empire. The organizer of the ceremony - the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport's 'Merkaz Hahasbara' (Center of Information) - pressured Nalbandian to do no more than allude to the genocide. Turkey continues to deny responsibility for the annihilation of the Armenians and contends that the number killed was much smaller. And, apparently, the diplomatic, economic and defense-related ties between Israel and Turkey are too important to endanger with even an indirect reference to another people's holocaust. Nalbandian gave in, and the process also sapped her energy to fight for permission to mention the other ethnic trauma: that of the abandonment of Sheikh Brak. In 1920, a few dozen Armenians who had fled Turkey to escape the massacres settled near Atlit. A Christian Arab landowner leased them the village lands. When he fled to Lebanon in 1948, the lands were appropriated and distributed to the kibbutzim in the area. 'Your state and mine deceived them and took all the land from them,' says former agriculture minister Pesach Grupper, an Atlit resident who once employed the Armenians in his fields. Not only was the land taken away from them, their village was not connected to the electricity grid and did not have proper sewage ... Naomi Nalbandian became very attached to the village: 'It was a wonderful place for kids, a whole world unto itself. To this day, it pains me to think about the village. Whenever I go to visit my mother in Haifa, I pass by and get all emotional remembering how we celebrated the Armenian holidays there. Even after I returned to Haifa, I went there every weekend and during every summer vacation. It's a shame that it ended the way it did. We gave up too easily. We didn't realize that we were losing the only Armenian village in Israel.' 'No one forced us to leave," says Salfi Morjalian of Haifa, who was born in Sheikh Brak and lived there until she was 12. 'But, politically, they tried to make it hard on us so we wouldn't be able to stay there. We didn't have electricity or running water or a sewage system. We did our business outside - each family found a far-off, hidden spot to do it i' ... Pesach Grupper asks rhetorically. 'Electricity only came to Atlit in 1924.' The Armenians had no electricity until 1981."

Secrecy over shoot-to-kill fear in Gaza,
by Sandra Jordan, The Observer (UK), May 18, 2003
"Two journalists have been gunned down by Israeli troops, but their families' pleas for an investigation are met with silence. The two men met on the road to Baghdad, shortly before the war - Tom Hurndall, 21, aspiring photojournalist, and James Miller, award-winning director and cameraman. Disturbed by the levels of risk, both Hurndall and Miller left Iraq before the war to cover the more manageable risks of the 'low-intensity' war in Palestine's Gaza Strip. Now Hurndall lies in a coma so deep he is more dead than alive, and Miller is dead. Hurndall was wearing an orange day-glo jacket in broad daylight when he was shot in the head by the Israeli army. James Miller was shining a torch on to a white flag and wearing a helmet with 'TV' on it in large bright letters when he too was shot by Israeli soldiers. Both men were carrying cameras. Their families believe they were targeted by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), as part of a deliberate strategy of suppressing foreign eyewitnesses in the Occupied Territories. IDF killings in the Gaza are not new. Since September 2000, 2,300 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories, many of them children; 773 Israelis have been killed. Palestinians don't expect justice, but the Hurndall and Miller families did from a country that constantly stresses it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Both families are disturbed by the IDF's refusal to conduct an open inquiry into the two shootings; most IDF investigations are internal and criminal proceedings rare. A secret IDF document obtained by The Observer points to a culture of impunity in the army. In the paper, an IDF Commander, now one of the most powerful generals in the army, appeals to the Chief Military Attorney to quash an open inquiry in the deaths of five children saying the exposure of soldiers to the legal system would damage troop morale and 'completely paralyse the IDF's abilities to take combative action'. To some, it looks like the IDF is running a 'shoot to kill' policy in Gaza. The IDF insist they do not target civilians, but they refuse to release independent eyewitness statements or CCTV and night vision footage ... Gaza is the 'hottest' part of the Occupied Territories, and Rafah is the most war ravaged city. It is surrounded by Israeli towers and tanks to the south, Israeli settlements to the north and west, and the green line on the east. Watchtowers enable the Israeli army to kill in the city without entering it. Since this conflict began 32 months ago, more than 250 people have been killed here, a third of them children. More than 2,500 have been wounded. It was 5pm on 11 April, with plenty of daylight left, when Hurndall was shot in the head as he and a group of ISM activists set up a 'peace tent' to stop a tank entering the Yibna area of Rafah. According to those at the scene, there were no Palestinian gunmen in the area. Hurndall had rushed to help three children who were immobilised by fear. He got the boy to safety but as he went back for the girls he was shot in the head, said Allison Phillips, a 62-year-old retired Scottish teacher and ISM worker who saw it happen ... 'I don't believe it's possible for that sniper not to have seen the orange jacket,' said Anthony Hurndall, Tom's father, a trained lawyer, who has left his work to investigate his son's shooting. 'There have been peace activists in that area for some time and they have caused a lot of trouble to the Israelis as they see it because they have obstructed a number of demolitions and other activities.' He is convinced he won't get answers from the IDF, which has refused his requests for a meeting. He has been to Rafah three times but has not returned since his last visit when the British Embassy convoy he was travelling with was fired on by the IDF. Three weeks after Hurndall was shot, and not far away, James Miller was killed. He had approached an Israeli APC to ask for permission to leave an area. He was shining a torch on a white flag when the IDF opened fire. In Miller's case, the IDF asserts that the armoured personnel carrier from where Miller had been shot had been fired on by an anti-tank missile immediately before they returned fire, 'at the source', hitting Miller. Film footage of Miller approaching the APC shows that this is not the case. Saira Shah, Miller's assistant producer, said: 'We knew they could see we were civilians, that we weren't armed and that were carrying a white flag. We trusted them not to kill us and under those circumstances they shot James anyway.' The IDF is investigating Miller's death. So far they have declined to take evidence from eyewitnesses. They have not released their own footage. In the past week, at least 20 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Before Ariel Sharon flies to Washington to meet President George Bush on Tuesday, more will have died. No one will ever investigate their deaths. It has always been like this for Palestinians and now it is so for foreign peace and aid workers."

Zionist meeting brands 'road map' as heresy,
By Julia Duin, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 19, 2003
"A Washington conference of Christian and Jewish Zionists yesterday heard attacks on the U.S. 'road map' for peace in the Middle East as a breach of a 4,000-year-old covenant between God and Israel. 'The land of Israel was originally owned by God,' said Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a Republican presidential contender in 2000. 'Since He was the owner, only He could give it away. And He gave it to the Jewish people.' Terrorists, he said, 'don't understand why Israel and the United States are joined at the heart.' Called the 'Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit,' the conference attracted to the Omni Shoreham Hotel about 1,000 participants, who debated how evangelical Christians could best unite with Jews to support Israel. A three-page statement was adopted, to be delivered to President Bush this week, demanding Palestinian concessions before Israel is asked to return to its pre-1967 borders, which would turn over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority ... Evangelical organizations represented at the conference included the Christian Coalition, the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Religious Roundtable. One organization distributed bumper stickers saying: 'Pray that President Bush will honor God's covenant with Israel' ... The conference, underwritten by a $100,000 grant from Zionist House, a Boston-based Jewish group, appeared to be closely balanced between Christians and Jews, with a slight Jewish majority."

Survey: Israel yet to grasp concept of democracy,
By Mazal Mualem, Haaretz (Israel), May 19, 2003
"More than half the Jewish population of Israel - 53 percent - is opposed to full equal rights for Israeli Arabs, according to a survey conducted last month by the Israel Democracy Institute. The general conclusion of the survey, which is dubbed the 'Israeli Democracy Survey' and will be conducted every year, is that Israel is basically a democracy in form more than in substance, and that it has yet to internalize fully the concept of democracy ... The current survey discovered the lowest support in the last 20 years for the assertion that democracy is the best form of governance: Only 77 percent of the respondents supported this premise - as compared to 90 percent in 1999. Israel is also one of the only four countries of the 32 listed in the study, in which most of the public believes that 'strong leaders can do more for the country than debates or legislation.' Prof. Asher Arian and Prof. David Nachmias, who conducted the survey, say that Israeli democracy is particularly vulnerable today because of the occupation, the intifada and the war on terror. Consequently, Israel scores relatively low on human rights and freedom of the press, which they say should be a warning sign. On freedom of the press, Israel scored 70 out of 100 - the minimum requirement for the press to be considered free. One of the reasons attributed to the dip in Israel's rating in this area, from 72 points in the mid-1990s, is the attitude of the authorities toward the foreign press since the onset of the intifada. In this respect, Israel is ahead of only Romania, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico and India. Concerning discrimination against minorities, Israel scored 3 on a scale of 0-4, and thus belongs to the bottom third of the 28 countries covered in the survey. In human rights violations, Israel (including the territories) also scores very high, leading the list together with South Africa. The only parameter in which Israel scored highest in a positive way regards the extent that political competition is open to everyone and enables governmental change. But the flipside of this achievement is frequent changes in the government and deep social rifts, reflecting instability and lack of social cohesiveness, according to the survey. Of 26 countries, only India beat Israel in terms of social gaps. Israel and Argentina share first place in the frequency of changes in governments - five in 10 years - and thus also share first place in terms of instability."

Analysis: Israel weighing EU membership,
By Martin Walker, UPI, May 21, 2003
"The visiting delegation from the European Union was startled this week when Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said his government was weighing an application to join the EU. 'It doesn't mean he is preparing the dossier for applying tomorrow,' an Israeli spokesman said. 'In principle, the minister thinks a possibility exists for Israel to join the EU, since Israel and Europe share similar economies and democratic values' .. But if and when Israel does achieve a peace settlement with Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinians (it already has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan), Israeli membership could make a great deal of sense for Israel and the EU alike ... For Israel, EU membership would mean an end to the regional isolation it suffers, and a strong security guarantee, along with all the economic advantages of the vast EU market. Joining the EU would presumably mean joining the euro, shielding Israel from the kinds of currency crises that have hit the shekel since the intifada battered its important tourism industry. For the EU, Israel's impressive high-tech industry could be useful, but any economic advantages to Israeli membership would have to be balanced against the wider political costs to the EU, unless the Jewish state's relationship with its Arab neighbors is transformed ... The EU and Israel already have a formal Cooperation Agreement, ratified by the Knesset, Israel's parliament, three years ago. Its provisions include regular political dialogue, liberalization of trade in goods and services, the free movement of capital and competition rules, the strengthening of economic cooperation on the widest possible basis and cooperation on social and cultural matters. (Israel has long taken part, for example, in the annual Eurovision Song Contest.)"

A-G decides to indict Rabbi Ginzburg for incitement,
By Gideon Alon, Haaretz (Israel), June 3, 2003
"Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein decided Monday to indict rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg for incitement to racism. Rubinstein's decision came after a police investigation that was launched following a complaint filed against the rabbi by attorney David Shonberg from Jerusalem, who said that Ginzburg's book Tipul Shoresh ("Root Treatment") contains inciteful comments, such as comparing the Arabs to a cancer. Rubinstein decided to hold a hearing for Ginzburg's attorney Naftaly Varzburger before submitting the indictment to a court. Army Radio quoted Ginzburg's lawyer as saying that the timing of the decision was puzzling, because the book was distributed two years ago, and that Ginzburg was being persecuted for expressing religious and philosophical beliefs. Rubinstein has previously rejected several demands to indict Ginzburg. In 2001 the State Prosecutor closed a sedition case against the rabbi, launched following a petition submitted by attorneys Shonberg and Moshe Frankfurter. In their petition, they said that Ginzburg made inciteful comments to the Jerusalem weekly newspaper Kol Hazman and the daily newspaper Ma'ariv. In both, he reiterated his support for Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of Palestinians at prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In Ginzburg's book, he claims that the land of Israel belongs only to the Children of Israel and that no 'goy' (non-Jew) has the right to live in the area unless he is a convert or a righteous Gentile. The book contains calls for the Arabs to be expelled from Israel and for the land to be 'cleansed' of foreigners. Ginzburg, one of the heads of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva (which was located in Nablus before it was evacuated during the Intifada and subsequently destroyed by Palestinians), also calls on readers not to employ or trade with Arabs. A similar police investigation against Ginzburg was launched following the 1998 publication of his book Baruch Hagever ("Baruch the Man"), which praised Baruch Goldstein's deeds in Hebron, but in the end, the state prosecutor decided not to indict Ginzburg."

Jewish Nazis raise heil in Israel,
By CORKY SIEMASZK, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, June 24, 2003
"Hamas, Islamic Jihad - and now Jewish Nazis. As if they didn't have enough trouble with Palestinian militants, Israelis now have to contend with threats from a homegrown neo-Nazi group called Israeli White Unity. And they don't just hate Arabs - they hate their fellow Jews as well. Worse, they've infiltrated the Israeli Army and operate a Russian-language Web site on which they deny the Holocaust, make concentration camp jokes - and maintain links to other neo-Nazi groups elsewhere. 'It's not a big group, but unfortunately it's there,' said Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate. Israeli officials have launched an investigation into the group, whose members are recent immigrants from Russia. 'They immigrated as Jews, but you have to understand the question of who is a Jew is not as clear-cut as in the U.S.,' Weitzman said. 'You have people who claimed Jewish ancestry to get out of Russia but who aren't all that Jewish.' Last night, the group's Web site, which is routed through a server in Holland, was shut down. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published photos of White Unity members wearing Israeli Army uniforms and giving Nazi salutes."

North Kansas City company settles charge related to boycott of Israel,
By DAN MARGOLIES, The Kansas City Star, June 25, 2003
"Cook Composites and Polymers Co. has agreed to pay a $6,000 fine to settle charges that it violated Commerce Department regulations aimed at countering the Arab boycott of Israel. The department's Bureau of Industry and Security had charged that, in response to a request from a customer in Bahrain, Cook had furnished information stating that the goods being shipped were not of Israeli origin and did not contain Israeli materials. The bureau also charged that Cook had failed to report its receipt of the request. Cook, of North Kansas City, neither admitted nor denied the allegations, but agreed to pay the $6,000 civil penalty. The antiboycott provisions bar U.S. companies from providing information about their business relationships with Israel. They also require that receipt of boycott requests be reported to the Bureau of Industry and Security, formerly known as the Bureau of Export Administration ... The settlement with the Commerce Department came after the Bush administration in November warned U.S. companies not to heed calls to boycott Israeli goods and services. The warning followed a call by the 22-member Arab League to reactivate its decades-long boycott of Israel. In a statement released at the time by the department, Commerce Undersecretary for Industry and Security Kenneth Juster reminded American companies that the "U.S. government is strongly opposed to restrictive trade practices or boycotts targeted against Israel." Knowing violators of the anti-boycott provisions face fines of up to $50,000, or five times the value of the exports at issue, and possible imprisonment. Offenders can also be denied export privileges. The Bureau of Industry and Security says it has imposed more than $26 million in fines for violations of the provisions."

Swiss group boycotts Israeli and Jewish products,
By Fredy Rom, Jewish Teleghraphic Agency, June 24, 2003
"More than a dozen Palestinian and left-wing organizations in Switzerland are calling for a boycott of Israeli consumer goods to protest Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. The boycott is aimed not only at Israeli products, but also at products of Jewish-owned businesses. Organizers concede that the campaign is unlikely to have a significant impact on the Israeli economy, but say it will give Swiss people the chance to make a statement about the situation in the Middle East. Launched this week in the Swiss capital, Bern, the campaign calls on Swiss consumers to avoid a variety of Israeli brands. Bruno Vitale, of the Geneva branch of Urgence Palestine, one of the groups supporting the boycott, told Swissinfo that campaigners wanted to encourage debate in Switzerland. "We are trying to help people think about what they buy and that every day they can make a small political action — even a personal one," Vitale said at a news conference in Bern. "The point is to start educating people that political life is everyday life." The campaign has aroused the ire of Switzerland´s Jewish community."

Huge risks for Romanian illegals,
By Nick Thorpe, BBC, June 30, 2003
"Tens of thousands of East Europeans, Romanians in particular, have worked in Israel in the past decade. They were needed as the security situation deteriorated, and Israelis felt they could no longer trust the Palestinians who had worked as labourers until then. The foreign workers had and have a rough life. Most have to pay middle-men for the chance to go to work in Israel in the first place. Once there, their passports are often taken away from them by their employers. Vain hope.According to Ioan's story, they are paid only pocket money while there, and told that their wages are being put safely into a bank account in their names. When their contracts are up, they are sent back to their own countries, with only a fraction of the money they are owed. For the past seven years, Ioan Lupascu has been writing letters to the Romanian and Israeli authorities, so far in vain. I showed his written testimony, detailing every hour he worked in Israel, to Giaro Iahr, the ex-president of the Association of Israeli Entrepreneurs in Romania. 'Everything that is written here is true,' he said. 'I feel very unhappy about what happened. They were exploited - to the full extent possible. I feel ashamed of what my fellow (Israeli) citizens are doing' ... At the Romanian Ministry of Labour, state secretary Razvan Cirica wrings his hands. Like Iahr, thousands of cases like this have been sitting on his desk for years. But he says he too is helpless. 'We tried to conclude a bilateral agreement with Israel. It was impossible,' he said. 'We cannot exercise any more pressure. The only thing that might make a difference would be for the workers to find a lawyer.' And so the story goes, round and round, with no-one willing to take responsibility. Some blame Romanian naivety - some men were cheated several times, by different employers, each time hoping they would be lucky. To compound their misery, several have been killed and injured in suicide bombings. And many now sit in Israeli jails - arrested during a crackdown on illegal foreign workers. Giaro Iahr estimates that Romanians who worked in Israel are still owed between $50m and $60m. The only glimmer of hope comes from fellow East Europeans. More than 200 Bulgarians have just started legal action against an Israeli construction firm, alleging similar treatment."

Mideast Roadblocks: U.S. churches shouldn't fund Israeli outposts,
Dallas Morning News [Editorial], July 1, 2003
"President Bush's road map for Middle East peace lays out an arduous journey. There is no excuse for American churches to throw up roadblocks by supporting Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Yet some congregations, mainly evangelical ones, are doing that. This runs counter not only to U.S. policy, but now to Israeli policy as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has committed his state to rolling back the settlement tidal wave. Some settlers don't want to leave, and Mr. Sharon is going to have to face them down. Sending funds to the settlers is like Americans writing checks for the Irish Republican Army or the Ulster Defense Association. The Dallas Morning News long has cautioned people giving money to Arab charities to check the organizations to make sure no funds are diverted to terrorism. We add the same caution for Americans who wish to send money to Israel – make sure none goes to extremists. There are several good reasons for not funding settlements. They not only are impediments to a regional peace accord, they are illegal under international law. And the settlement movement has spawned extremists. The ones who have scuffled with Israeli soldiers removing unoccupied settlements have gotten recent American attention. But there also are thugs who have terrorized the West Bank for decades, destroying property, beating up Palestinians and sometimes even murdering. By not facing up to extremists in the settler movement, Israel has delayed and possibly worsened an inevitable confrontation."

[Israel helps another Jewish myth to bite the dust: Jews are exceptionally "book"-driven, "studious," ad nauseum:]
Education Min. to examine low scores reflected in int'l survey,
By Relly Sa'ar, Haaretz (Israel), July 2, 2003
"he Education Ministry announced Tuesday that Education Minister Limor Livnat and ministry Director-General Ronit Tirosh decided to appoint a committee to determine the reasons for the "problematic" scores that Israeli 15-year-olds attained in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA-2000) survey on industrialized countries (OECD. Israel ranked in the lower third of the 41 countries that took part in the survey. The committee will also seek explanations for the decline in scholastic achievements by middle school students. According to the results of the survey, one third of Israeli 15-year-olds are unable to understand what they have read, due to lack of basic reading skills. The survey was published simultaneously on Tuesday in the 41 countries, including Israel, that took part in the research. Israeli youngsters scored an average grade of 453 in the reading-skills section of the survey, positioning them in the bottom third on the international achievement scale, with a ranking of 30 out of the 41 participating countries. Finnish students ranked first, averaging a score of 546 points, and American students were also placed in the top third of the scale. To quantify the reading comprehension of 15-year-old students around the world, those who conducted the survey ranked the students' abilities according to five levels, with one being the lowest and five being the highest. Only four percent of Israeli students were in the fifth level, while one-third were in the first level or below. In comparison, almost twenty percent of Finnish students were in the fifth level. Israeli students also performed poorly in the other subjects included in the survey, and were ranked 33rd for both math and sciences, with a score of 433 in math, and 434 in science. The low grades in reading skills, math and sciences were likely related to the Education Ministry's Monday decision to set up a panel of experts to look into the poor results. The PISA survey included some 300 thousand students worldwide and was based on data collected two years ago."

[Pro-Israel fanatic supports "transfer" of Palestinians out of the Jewish Land Grab:]
Is Population Transfer the Solution to the Palestinian Problem—And Some Others?,
By Robert Locke, V-Dare, July 8, 2003
"Let me lay my cards on the table: I am an American supporter of Israel, non-Jewish but a philo-semite. Perhaps not all VDARE.COM readers will agree with me. But the ideologies governing all Western nations are closely interlinked. What happens in one nation is likely to happen in the others. Nationalism as such is under systematic attack by globalist ideology. We can no longer afford to fall into the classic trap that has always bedeviled nationalists: instinctive difficulty in cooperating with the nationalists of other nations ..."

Israeli Woman Swallows Cockroach, Fork,
Washington Post, July 10, 2003
"An Israeli woman swallowed a cockroach and then a fork she used to try to remove the insect from her throat. The winged cockroach jumped into the 32-year-old woman's mouth as she was cleaning her home in a village in northern Israel this week. "It's a bit of a strange story," said Dr. Nikola Adid, who operated on the woman Tuesday to remove the fork from her stomach. "This is the first time I've ever encountered anything like this. None of my medical colleagues in this country have heard of anything similar either."

Hundreds of American Jews Move to Israel,
by AMY WESTFELDT, Kansas City Star, July 11, 2003
"Tali Berman was born in America, but surrounded by her baby and belongings at Kennedy Airport, she said she was flying home - to Israel. "We're Jewish, and it feels like home," said Berman, 27, who was "making aliyah" - making Israel her new home - with husband Joshua and their 15-month-old daughter, Anava. Berman and her family joined about 330 Jews from the United States and Canada who flew to Tel Aviv on Tuesday. Another chartered jet of about 300 people is leaving later this month. About 2,040 North American Jews moved to Israel last year, and the numbers are up more than 20 percent this year, according to the Jewish Agency, an Israeli quasi-governmental agency that helps the immigration process. Some Jews feel compelled to show their support for the country as it faces heightened violence in its conflict with the Palestinians, according to agency officials. "It's the feeling of the community that this time Israel is really needing them," said Michael Landsberg, executive director of the agency's North American aliyah movement. He said others with bills to pay are taking advantage of loans of $7,000 to $18,000 offered by a privately funded organization called Nefesh B'Nefesh. The loans become grants if the immigrants remain in Israel for at least three years. "I know that there are many Jews who would consider aliyah if they could escape from their loans and mortgages," Landsberg said. Nefesh B'Nefesh, or Jewish Souls United, is sponsoring the moves of about 940 North American Jews this year, up from 519 last year, spokesman George Birnbaum said. About 300 are leaving on a chartered jet July 22, the rest in groups of 30 or so over the following six weeks. "In terms of immigrants moving en masse," Birnbaum said, "there haven't been these numbers in 25 or 30 years." Nevertheless, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics said this year that worldwide immigration to Israel in 2002 had fallen to its lowest level in 13 years. About 33,000 people immigrated in 2002, about 10,000 fewer than in 2001."

TROUBLE IN THE HOLY LAND. Americans defy terror, emigrate to Israel Organized effort to prevent Arabs from outnumbering Jews,
World Net Daily, July 12, 2003
"While international mediators press for the full implementation of the "road map" to peace in the Middle East, hundreds of North American Jews are blazing a trail to boost Israel's right to exist. More than 300 secular and religious Jews – single individuals, married couples and families – boarded El Al jets in New York this week to emigrate to Israel. They're part of an exodus organized by Nefesh B'Nefesh, or Jewish Souls United, an organization that offers grants of up to $25,000 to immigrants who stay for at least three years. The 300 are among 1,000 Americans and Canadians expected to make the move this summer. They follow in the footsteps of some 500 others in 2002. Of those 500, only one returned to the U.S., according to the Jerusalem Post. The goal, according to the group's co-founder Tony Gelbart, is to prevent Arabs from outnumbering Jews. "The Palestinians still dream of overcoming Israel demographically. They are wrong," Gelbart told the New York Post. "No amount of terror or economic hardship will prevent Jewish people from coming to Israel." The paper reports the 46-year-old Florida businessman put up $2 million of his own money toward the effort. But it's not the money that motivates most. "We see Israel as our homeland, we believe this is our country," Harry Zettel told the Toronto Star. "And while there is some fear, some trepidation at taking a step like this, I believe in God. I believe this is where we should be." Zettel told the paper he and his wife Suzanne and their five young children will settle in Israel proper – not the territories – in order to "strengthen Israeli society." "God gave us this land," Zettel added. "Israel is at war right now. We have to do something to support the country. I don't think we can idly sit back and not help out." The new arrivals were welcomed at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

[A lesson is Jewish social engineering: Israel destroy's the Palestinians and creates "terrorism," then wants Europe to pay for the damage. The whole world is expected to finance the ravages of Israeli racism:]
Israel proposes European role providing social help to Palestinians,
Yahoo News (AFP), July 15, 2003
"Israel is proposing that Europe takes a role in Mideast peace efforts by setting up social and welfare services in the Palestinian territories like those run by Hamas, in a bid to erode the radical Islamic group's support base, a senior Israeli official said. Speaking after a late-night meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his British counterpart Tony Blair (news - web sites), the official said the two leaders discussed an Israel proposal to bring about "the complete delegitimisation of Hamas" and other radical groups. The plan would allow for Europe to take a role in Mideast peacemaking efforts by providing the Palestinian public with some of the social and welfare services currently offered by Hamas."

JEWISH CRITICISM OF ZIONISM,
by Edward C. Corrigan, Middle East Policy Council Journal, Winter 1990-91
"I. F. Stone, the award-winning American Jewish journalist, who died on June 18, 1989, wrote: "Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews might fight elsewhere for their very security and existence -- against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel."

Cant and the Middle East,
by Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 2002
"When [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] sent his troops into Jenin, he said he would leave “no seed of terror behind." But he surely knows this is nonsense. The destruction of that refugee camp, the murder of Palestinians of all ages, and the delay in allowing access to rescue workers can only sow the seeds of terror, not destroy them. Considering what we know about human nature and the Middle East, it is unlikely that the young people who lived through the onslaught against Jenin will conclude that cooperation with the Israeli government is their most promising course. Their world-view, if anything, has been confirmed by Sharon’s cruelty. Anyone who looks forward to a falling off of Palestinian violence is fooling himself. But isn’t Israel justified by that very violence? Blowing up innocents cannot be condoned. But it is folly to think that that is all one needs to know. Young Palestinian men and women do not kill Israelis because they hate Jews for being Jews. One must blind oneself (and avoid objective historical accounts) to believe there is something inherently irrational about Palestinian animosity toward Israel. After all, Jews and Arabs lived together in Palestine for many years before the twentieth century. As my orthodox grandfather taught me, the relationship between the two communities deteriorated when Judaism was transformed (by secular Jews) into a political movement whose program included encroachment on innocent Arabs in the quest for Greater Israel. (It may come as a surprise, but the harshest critics of Zionism were Reform and Orthodox Jews.) It was the first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Judah Magnes, who said, “The slogan ‘Jewish state or commonwealth’ is equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews on the Arabs." In candid moments, Israeli military leaders acknowledged that the land belonged to Arabs."

Special Report. The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion,
By Thomas R. Stauffer, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003
"Conflicts in the Middle East have been very costly to the U.S., as well as to the rest of the world. An estimate of the total cost to the U.S. alone of instability and conflict in the region-which emanates from the core, Israeli-Palestinian conflict-amounts to close to $3 trillion, measured in 2002 dollars. This is an amount almost four times greater than the cost of the Vietnam war, also reckoned in 2002 dollars. Even this figure underestimates the costs because certain classes of expenditure remain unquantified. In particular, no reliable figure is available for the costs of "Project Independence," Washington's lavishly promoted effort to reduce U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East. That effort, which was subverted early on by diverse local special interests, was designed primarily to insulate Israel from any new "Arab oil weapon" after 1973/74, and may easily have cost $1 trillion. Even though the outlays were rationalized in the interest of "national security," however, they contributed little or nothing to reducing U.S. strategic dependence upon imported oil from the Middle East. Similarly, aid to Israel-and thus the regional total-also is understated, since much is outside of the foreign aid appropriation process or implicit in other programs. Support for Israel comes to $1.8 trillion, including special trade advantages, preferential contracts, or aid buried in other accounts. In addition to the financial outlay, U.S. aid to Israel costs some 275,000 American jobs each year."

Israeli settler numbers rise to record high,
Prolog, July 24, 2003
"The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has risen by 5,400 during the last 12 months to reach a record 231,443, according to figures from the interior ministry Thursday. Maale Adumin, east of Jerusalem, is now the biggest settlement with 28,000 inhabitants. The next biggest are the ultra-Orthodox settlements of Modiin Illit, to the west of Ramallah where 23,000 live, and Beitar Illit, south of Bethlehem, which is home to 21,500 settlers. The number of settlers who now live in the centre of the West Bank town of Hebron, under the protection of some 100 Israeli soldiers, is put at 532. The ministry also said that the total number of settlers in the Gaza Strip was 7,700."

Our foppish self-righteousness,
by Shulamit Aloni, Haaretz (Israel), July 24, 2003
"Since the start of the intifada, more than 800 Israelis, mostly civilians, have been killed by Palestinians. We, justifiably, call it "murder." Some were killed by suicide bombers and the rest with other instruments of death. At the same time, more than 2,200 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis - some as armed suspects, and almost all from soldiers' fire. We don't call these casualties "murdered." But perhaps these deaths should also be referred to as murders. All the instruments of death that came from the sky, and the tanks, and the snipers were aimed at "the enemy" as the chief of staff says, or in "wartime operations" as Judge Advocate General Menachem Finkelstein says; and so there's no need to interrogate soldiers and prosecute the killers of civilians. Furthermore, adds the law-abiding JAG, "It is impossible to conduct 2,000 investigations into 2,000 deaths" (Haaretz, July 10). But he didn't conduct investigations when there were only 50 cases of murdered Palestinians or when there were 100. So why put murderers and abusers on trial now when there are so many? Wait, he did, finally, find eight cases to investigate, for shooting incidents. And of course, there's no comparing Jewish blood to Palestinian blood. Palestinians, after all, use the terrible weapon of suicide; while on our side, everything is aesthetic and elegant: Bombs fall out of the sky and the pilot goes home safely; the tanks fire flechettes; and our skilled snipers always hit their target. Of course, nobody ever asks which target. We fight the "enemy" and a large number of the "murders" are acts of war. Of course they - the Palestinians - aren't fighting an enemy; they are fighting an enlightened occupation that has anted to give them sovereignty for the last 36 years, but has found it difficult to do so because they are living on land that was ours 1,900 years ago and we want it only for ourselves. Or maybe we are a greedy occupier, looting their land (at least as far as they are concerned), uprooting, and demolishing, and expelling, and breaking into their homes. And still, we aren't an enemy; and still, we think it's an enlightened occupation; and our chief of staff is doing everything he can to sear into the consciousness of the occupied that they should love the occupier who holds them prisoners in their homes until they are hungry, until they are completely humiliated - and all for the sake of getting them to finally understand who are the masters of the land and who are the servants. Everything I've written here is known by everyone, but forbidden to state aloud because it is not patriotic. After all, everything we are doing is so our enemies won't bring another Holocaust down upon us. That's how it is explained to us - over and over again. And how can our enemies bring down another Holocaust upon us? That, apparently, must not be asked. After all, we have peace with Egypt and Jordan, and Iraq is no threat, and Iran is the entire world's problem. So, who are we afraid of? The Palestinians? Isn't that a bad joke? But we aren't allowed to say that because our Jewish paranoia is very serious, and the public relations people of the army and the greedy of the Greater Land of Israel know how to manipulate it very nicely. And that's the reason we are allowed to kill them and assassinate them and murder them without any indictment or trial, to arrest their patriots without any explanation, any trial and without any time limit."

Child shot dead by Israeli soldier,
Telegraph (UK), July 25, 2003
"A five-year-old Palestinian boy has been shot dead by an Israeli soldier after he accidently fired a round of bullets from his machinegun. Mahmoud Qabha, who was travelling with his family in the northern West Bank, died immediately. His two sisters, aged six and seven, were also injured in the shooting. They were taken to a hospital in the city fo Afula. The accident happened at a checkpoint, near the entrance of Barta'a village, southwest of Jenin. A spokesman for the Israeli army said that "due to an operational mistake" the soldier had fired at the car. The army has opened an inquiry into the incident. The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, is due to meet President George W Bush in Washington later today. He is expected to ask the US leader to put pressure on Israel to remove military checkpoints in the West Bank."

'I can't imagine anyone who considers himself a human being can do this'. On Friday a four-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by a soldier - the most recent child victim of the Israeli army. Chris McGreal investigates a shocking series of deaths, Guardian (UK), July 28, 2003
"Nine-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadallah's promise to the corpse of the shy little girl who lived up the street was, in all probability, kept for him by an Israeli bullet. The boy - Rahman to his family - barely knew Haneen Suliaman in life. But whenever there was a killing in the dense Palestinian towns of southern Gaza he would race to the morgue to join the throng around the mutilated victim. Then he would tag along with the surging, angry funerals of those felled by rarely seen soldiers hovering far above in helicopters or cocooned behind the thick concrete of their pillboxes. Haneen, who was eight years old, had been shot twice in the head by an Israeli soldier as she walked down the street in Khan Yunis refugee camp with her mother, Lila Abu Selmi. "Almost every day here the Israelis shoot at random, so when you hear it you get inside as quickly as possible," says Mrs Selmi. "Haneen went to the grocery store to buy some crisps. When the shooting started, I came out to find her. She was coming down the street and ran to me and hugged me, crying, 'Mother, mother'. Two bullets hit her in the head, one straight after the other. She was still in my arms and she died." Later that day, the crowds pushed into the morgue at the local hospital to see the young girl on the slab, partly in homage, partly to vent their anger. Rahman pressed his way to the front so he could touch Haneen. Then he went home and told his mother, Haniya Abed Atallah, that he too wanted to die. "Rahman went to the morgue and kissed Haneen. He came home and told us he had promised the dead girl he would die too. I made him apologise to his father," Mrs Atallah says. Weeks passed and another Israeli bullet shattered the life of another young Palestinian girl. Huda Darwish was sitting at her school desk when a cluster of shots ripped through the top of a tree outside her classroom and buried themselves in the wall. But one ricocheted off the window frame, smashed through the glass and lodged in the 12-year-old girl's brain. Huda's teacher, Said Sinwar, was standing in front of the blackboard. "It was a normal lesson when suddenly there was this shooting without any warning. The children were terrified and trying to run. I was shouting at them to get under their desks. Suddenly the bullet hit the little girl and she slumped to the floor with a sigh, not even screaming," he says. Sinwar dragged Huda from under her desk and ran with her across the road to the hospital, itself scarred by Israeli bullets. After weeks in hospital, she has started breathing for herself again, through a windpipe cut into her throat. She has regained use of her arms and legs, but will be blind for the rest of her life ... Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently praised the Israeli military as the most humanitarian in the world because it claims to risk its soldiers' lives to avoid killing innocent Palestinians. It is a belief echoed by most Israelis, who revere the army as an institution of national salvation. Yet among the most shocking aspects of the past three years of intifada that has no shortage of horrors - not least the teenage suicide bombers revelling in mass murder - has been the killing of children by the Israeli army. The numbers are staggering; one in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000 ... On Friday, a soldier at a West Bank checkpoint shot dead a four-year-old boy, Ghassan Kabaha, and wounded his two young sisters after "accidentally" letting loose at a car with a burst of machinegun fire from his armoured vehicle. The rate of killing since the beginning of the ceasefire has dropped sharply, but almost every day the army has continued to fire heavy machineguns into Khan Yunis or Rafah. Among the latest victims of apparently indiscriminate shooting were three teenagers and an eight-year-old, Yousef Abu Jaza, hit in the knee when soldiers shot at a group of children playing football in Khan Yunis. The military says it is difficult to distinguish between youths and men who might be Palestinian fighters, but the statistics show that nearly a quarter of the children killed were under 12. Last year alone, 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Israeli army in Gaza: eight, one of whom was two months old, were slaughtered when a one-tonne bomb was dropped on a block of flats to kill a lone Hamas leader, Sheikh Salah Mustafa Shehada. But Rahman, Huda and Haneen were not "collateral damage" in the assassination of Hamas "terrorists", or caught in crossfire. There was no combat when they were shot. There was nothing more than a single burst of fire, sometimes a single bullet, from an Israeli soldier's gun. It was the same when seven-year-old Ali Ghureiz was shot in the head on the street outside his house in Rafah. And when Haneen Abu Sitta, 12, was killed while walking home after school near the fence with a Jewish settlement in southern Gaza. And when Nada Madhi, also 12, was shot in the stomach and died as she leaned out of her bedroom window in Rafah to watch the funeral procession for another child killed earlier. The army offered a senior officer of its southern command to discuss the shooting of these six children over a period of just 10 weeks earlier this year. The military told me I could not name him, even though his identity is no secret to the Israeli public or his enemies; it was this officer who explained to the nation how an army bulldozer came to crush to death the young American peace activist, Rachel Corrie. "I want you to know we are not a bunch of crazies down here," he says. At his headquarters in the Gush Khatif Jewish settlement in Gaza, the commander rattles through the army's version of the shootings: either the military knew nothing of them, or the children had been caught in crossfire - a justification used so frequently, and so often disproved, that it is rarely believed. But three hours later, after poring over maps and military logs, timings and regulations, he concedes that his soldiers were responsible - even culpable - in several of the killings. The Israeli army's instinctive response is to muddy the waters when confronted with a controversial killing."

New Law for Israeli-Palestinian Couples,
The Guardian (UK), July 31, 2003
"Israel's parliament on Thursday passed a new law that would force Palestinians who marry Israelis to live separate lives or move out of Israel despite charges from human rights groups and Israeli Arabs that the law is racist. The law would prevent Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who marry Israeli Arabs from obtaining residency permits in Israel. The vote was 53 in favor, 25 against and one abstention, a spokeswoman for the parliament said. ``We see this law as the implementation of the transfer policy by the state of Israel,'' said Jafar Savah from Mossawa, an advocacy center for Israeli Arabs, referring to a plan by far right groups to transfer Israeli Arabs to other Arab countries. Savah said the law was an attempt to legalize unofficial policy that has been in effect since September 2000 when violence broke out and warned that the law would damage relations between Israel and its Arab minority. Both local and international human rights groups have condemned the law as racist. ``This is a racist law that decides who can live here according to racist criteria,'' said Yael Stein from the Israeli rights group B'tselem. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have sent letters to the parliament protesting the law and urging lawmakers not to pass it, a statement from Human Rights Watch said. Israel's government contends that such a law is necessary for security reasons, citing instances where Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza have exploited their residency permits, granting them freedom of movement in Israel, to carry out terror attacks. ``This law comes to address a security issue,'' Cabinet Minister Gideon Ezra told Israel Radio. ``Since September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks, between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs,'' Ezra said. Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in a bloody conflict for 33 months, though a cease-fire declared by the Palestinians on June 29 has significantly reduced violence. The law, which passed its first reading on June 18, would force newly married couples to choose between living in the Palestinian areas or living separately and would be in effect for a year when the parliament must renew it."

BBC Transcript of "Israel's Secret Weapon,"
Transcript, BBC World Service, (posted here at Electronic Intifada), broadcast on June 29, 2003
"Israel declared over the weekend that it is cutting off ties with the BBC to protest a repeat broadcast of a documentary about non-conventional weapons said to be in Israel. The program was broadcast for the first time in March in Britain, and was rerun Saturday on a BBC channel that is aired all over the world. The boycott decision was made by Israel's public relations forum, made up of representatives from the Prime Minister's Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Government Press Office. It was decided that government offices won't assist BBC producers and reporters, that Israeli officials will not give interviews to the British network, and that the Government Press Office will make it difficult for BBC employees to get press cards and work visas in Israel. Before the broadcast Saturday, Israeli officials tried to pressure the BBC to cancel the broadcast, saying that the program was biased and presented Israel as an evil dictatorship. Here is a complete transcript of the program."

Advanced military satellites unveiled,
By Amnon Barzilai, Haaretz, August 3, 2003
"Israel is developing simultaneously three advanced military satellites for intelligence gathering purposes - Ofek 6, Ofek 7 and the radar satellite TECHSAR. According to the head of the Defense Ministry's Space Program, Professor Haim Eshed, the three satellites will be ready by 2007/8. In a first interview with the Israeli press, Eshed, who is also a brigadier general (res.), said that Ofek 7 and TECHSAR will be more advanced than the current Ofek 5 by a full generation. By the end of the year, the communications satellite Amos 2 is scheduled to be launched. A military communications satellite, almost twice the size of Amos 2, is being planned. "Since the war in Iraq there has been a growing understanding that there is no substitute for space and that it is one of the important elements in the conduct of war," Eshed said. He also warned, "We have reached the red line in budgetary cuts and further slashes may harm the foundations of the Israeli space program" ... "With the exception of the Americans, we are superior to all other countries in two fields of satellite technology - resolution of photographs and picture quality."

Rice: Security fence will not affect loan guarantees,
By Nathan Guttman and Aluf Benn, Haaretz (Israel), August 2003
" U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice yesterday told Dov Weisglass, the prime minister's bureau chief, that deducting the cost of the separation fence from U.S. loan guarantees is not on the agenda. During a phone call from Rice to ask why Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas were not meeting as scheduled, Weisglass asked about the loan guarantee deductions for the separation fence costs, as reported by Haaretz at the weekend. In Crawford, Texas, where President George Bush is on vacation, his spokesman also said that "at this stage" no decision had been made about the loan guarantees ... "A nation is within its rights to put up a fence if it sees the need for one," Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday in a broadcast to the Arab world. However, he said, "in the case of the Israeli fence we are concerned when the fence crosses over on to the land of others."

Current Titles: BEN-GURION'S SCANDALS,
by Naeim Giladi, Booksurge
Description: States Iraqi-born Jewish journalist, Naeim Giladi: “I write this book to tell the American people, and especially the American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was a part of it.” Giladi delivers the painful truth about the Zionist rape of Palestine and deliberate planting of anti-Semitism in Iraqi Jewish communities during David Ben-Gurion’s political career in order to persuade the Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel. The goal of the Zionists was to import raw Jewish labor from the Middle East to plow and plant the newly-vacated lands. Also, the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the stolen lands."

[To raise the issue of "dual loyalty" against American Jews who have both Israeli and American passports is considered an act of "antisemitism." And the view from Israel?]
Ministry angry with envoy's request for Romanian citizenship,
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz , August 12, 2003
"The Foreign Ministry Monday leveled harsh criticism at Israel's Ambassador to Romania, Sando Mazur, after Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the former chief of the Israel Police Criminal Investigations Department had asked for Romanian citizenship and is going to stay in the country to run an Israeli investment firm there, once his term in office is over at the end of this year. Born in Romania, Mazur is eligible for a non-resident's citizenship status. Formally, ministry regulations do not prohibit envoys from holding the citizenship of the country where they are posted, but it is a violation of the Vienna Treaty, which regulates diplomatic relations. The U.S., for example, forbids foreign envoys posted to it to hold American citizenship. In a letter to Mazur Monday, the ministry's legal adviser said that the report caused "great consternation" to the minister and ministry. "If it is true that you asked for citizenship, it raises suspicions about a conflict of interest with your role as ambassador there," said the letter. Mazur confirmed to Yedioth that he asked for the Romanian citizenship and that he does not think he will need a cooling-off period if he wants to remain in the country to work, since he is not a Foreign Ministry employee."

Israel needs to do some soul searching,
By Timothy D. Naegele, Israel Insider, August 13, 2003
"Written in response to Fighting the same battle from Europe to the Mideast by Natan Sharansky. Can anyone be truly surprised by the rise of anti-Semitism around the world? Only someone who has been living in a time warp, or who was lost in the jungles of Borneo for years, can fail to know the reasons why. From the strong-arm tactics of those who have sought reparations from the Swiss and Germans (among others), to the occupation of Palestinian territories - and yes, the settlement policies and the oppression of Palestinians - to the attempted silencing of critics of Israel by labeling them as anti-Semites, such actions and similar policies have backfired. Instead of Israel being viewed as the righteous underdog, it is seen by many around the world as an immoral aggressor. Instead of standing for the rights of Jews and non-Jews alike - a shining beacon to the world, from those who survived one of history's worst nightmares - Israel's conduct has morphed into that of its Nazi oppressors in the eyes of many. Simon Wiesenthal once spoke about survivors of the Nazi Holocaust owing a duty to Jews and non-Jews to insure that other holocausts did not occur. Monuments have been erected to those who died at the hands of Hitler and his thugs, but the 30 million who died under Stalin during the 1930s are forgotten. So too are those who died in Cambodia under the Khymer Rouge, and the millions who have died in Africa and elsewhere. Instead of more monuments, the world needs even-handed examples of humanity by the survivors and their offspring to lead the way toward a better world for Palestinians and Jews alike, and for all who suffer injustice and oppression at the hands of others anywhere in the world. Until that happens, with due respect, Mr. Sharansky and others will be like boys crying in the night, wondering why there is lightening - and nightmares. America is Israel's only true ally in this world, and it provides extensive military, economic and diplomatic support, without which there would be no Israel; it would collapse both militarily and economically ... Instead of convening forums to fight against anti-Semitism, as Mr. Sharansky suggests, Israel and Jews around the world should recognize that Israel's actions produce reactions; and instead of once again blaming others, Israelis need to do some soul-searching and address the root causes of the rise of anti-Semitism in recent years. It is clear that some Israelis know this all too well, but others seem to have their heads firmly planted in the ground."

Colombian gun-running scandal links shady Israelis, Al-Qaeda. Trio sought for providing arms to group branded ‘terrorist’ by US Report: 3 from Jewish state also have ties to Lebanese and bin Laden’s network,
by Ed Blanche, antiwar.com (from The Daily Star BEIRUT)
"Guatemalan authorities this week ordered the arrest of three Israelis for allegedly running 3,117 AK-47 assault rifles 5 million rounds of 7.62mm ammunition to a group of right-wing Latin American paramilitaries, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which the US State Department has branded a terrorist group and says has links to the country’s cocaine barons. Israeli arms dealers and mercenaries have been linked to South American drug cartels and unsavory right-wing regimes in the region since the 1970s, often apparently doing the United States’ dirty work. But the latest arms scandal has a particular resonance given President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” and Washington’s support for the Colombian government against leftist terrorists known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The 11,000-strong AUC is also fighting the FARC. The smuggled weapons significantly boosted the right-wingers’ ability to wage war on the leftists and to protect the cocaine and heroin industries at a time when the Bush administration is seeking to increase and broaden military assistance to the Bogota government to stamp out the multi-billion-dollar narcotics trade. An exhaustive report on the scandal that involved Nicaragua, Guatemala and Colombia by the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), obtained by The Daily Star, links the Israeli arms dealers with Lebanese arms brokers in West Africa allegedly involved in guns-for-diamonds deals that helped fund Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. On Aug. 8, a Guatemalan court issued arrest warrants for the three Israelis, Shimon Yelinek, who headed the DIGAL S.A. arms trading company in Panama, and Ori Zoller and Uzi Kissilevich, who own the Guatemala-based company Grupo de Representaciones Internacionales (GIR SA), which handled the purchase of the weapons and ammunition. They are accused of illegally shipping the arms ­ enough to equip three battalions of fighters ­ from Nicaragua, ostensibly bound for Panama National Police Force through a forged purchase order, to the remote fishing port of Puerto Turbo on Colombia’s Atlantic coast on Nov. 7, 2001. The OAS report, dated Jan. 6, 2003, identifies Zoller as GIR SA’s owner and as a representative of Israel Military Industries (IMI), the state-owned flagship of Israel’s defense industry ... The OAS report said that its investigation team had uncovered links between Yelinek and his associates with Lebanese arms dealers operating in Sierra Leone, one of whom is under investigation by several governments for ties to Al-Qaeda. The report said that Samih Osailly, a Lebanese arrested in Belgium in June 2001, had been in contact with Yelinek to buy arms and ammunition for the neurotically brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) faction in Sierra Leone."

[The former Executive Editor for the New York Times argues for the racist, Jewish "Berlin Wall."]
The fence makes sense,
by A. M. Rosenthal, New York Daily News, August 13, 2003
"The idea was to take what was once a British colonial territory and divide it into two nations, one Jewish, one Muslim. For a long time, most Jews were against that concept. But over time, more and more would come to accept partition - just as more and more Muslims would turn against it. Israel and the Palestinian Arabs each claimed that the entire territory belonged to them on religious, historical and national grounds. But at least among the Jews, there were more who believed that separation would be the way to end the fighting. I was a correspondent for The New York Times covering the UN back then, and I remember a Jewish diplomat taking me aside and writing one word on a piece of paper: partition ... This year, there was a major advance for Israel: President Bush's decision to go to war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been for three decades one of Israel's major enemies - and will be again, if his fascistic regime ever comes back from the grave. Meanwhile, seeking Muslim backing in the Middle East, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, the European Union and the UN have worked out what they think is a jim-dandy plan to create an independent, democratic Palestine ... There is another way of establishing secure borders. That is a fence on the Israeli side loaded down with sensors that can spot terrorists. Somehow, that idea does not thrill either the Palestinians or the Israelis. "The thought that a Palestinian state next to Israel would be a peaceful neighbor is ludicrous. ... The Arab world is presently comprised of 22 states of nearly 5 million square miles. ... There seems to be no need for another Muslim Arab state, especially for one that would serve as an advance base for the ultimate destruction of Israel." That statement is from an organization called Flame, which dissects Arab statements with a red-hot scalpel. That does not make it necessarily wrong, does it?"

Inside View Of West Bank Nightmare - 'One Huge Prison',
By Jim Phillips, rense.com (from Athens NEWS), August 14, 2003
"When the Bush administration unveiled its "road map" for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, many observers hoped the plan would lead to genuine progress in resolving the long-standing and bloody conflict in the Middle East. A retired Ohio University professor who recently visited the Gaza Strip and West Bank, however, said the violence and oppression seems to be as bad there as it has ever been. "I wanted to see for myself what was going on over there," explained Jim Coady, a former linguistics prof who visited the region last month. Coady also visited the region last summer, he said. Coady said getting into Gaza was quite a trick, as even journalists are now finding it nearly impossible to gain access to the area which is surrounded by a security fence. His arrangements were made surreptitiously, and he declined to reveal what they were. "It's very difficult to get in," he said. "I'd rather not reveal my methods, if I could." He described Gaza as a roughly triangular wedge of land, around 10 miles at the base and 20 miles on the sides, into which are crammed more than 1 million Palestinians. Within the strip, he said, unemployment is more than 80 percent, and Israel controls all elecricity. The Israelis have methodically taken control of the region's resources including water, he added. "All they've left the occupants is the sand," he said. "These people are in a giant prison." He noted that there are only two gates out of the territory. Coady also visited the West Bank, traveling to a "peace camp" near Masha where he saw part of the huge "security fence" the Israelis have begun building around the Palestinian territory. What Coady saw during his time in the region left him with a bleak outlook for the hopes of peace. "It's the most depressing place I've ever visited in my entire life," he said. The so-called "security fence" now under construction -- actually, according to Coady, a huge and impassible wall -- is going to surround thousands of Palestinians in what will essentially be a giant concrete cell. Among the sites Coady visited was the place where American activist Rachel Corrie was killed in March by an Israeli bulldozer operator, while she stood with a bullhorn in her hand, urging the operator not to destroy a building in the Rafah refugee camp. Coady said he spoke with two eyewitnesses to the event, who told him that after the bulldozer ran Corrie down, it backed up and drove over her body again. Coady also visited the site where British activist Tom Hudnall was shot to death by a sniper from an Israeli guard tower on the Egyptian border of the Gaza strip. "The saddest part of the story is, there were some kids out in the street," Coady said. "The firing started, and he went out to rescue a kid." According to witness accounts, the 23-year-old activist was shot in the head while trying to pull children out of the range of sniper fire coming from the guard tower. He had taken a young boy out of the firing zone, and had gone back to try and rescue two young girls who were afraid to move, when he was killed. Coady stressed that the name "security fence" hardly does justice to the barrier the Israelis are erecting. "This so-called 'security fence' is a football field wide, and on the two extreme edges are large rolls of concertina wire," he recounted. It is also protected by a deep V-shaped trench, he said. "If you went down (in it), you couldn't get back up," he said. According to information from the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network, the wall is being built from the northwest to the southwest of the West Bank. Even without possible expansions, it is expected to be at least 220 miles long when completed. It will average 25 feet high, with armed concrete towers, and a buffer zone of about 100 to 300 feet, for trenches, electric fences, cameras, sensors and security patrols. If completed with no expansions, it is expected to isolate 95,000 Palestinians, or around 4.5 percent of the West Bank population, as well as cutting off 200,000 people in East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. "They are essentially building giant prisons for the Palestinians," Coady said. "They really don't want to look at these Palestinians... You should see it. It's unbelievable." The daily life of Palestinians, Coady said, is a steady stream of harassment, never-ending threats of violence, and petty humiliations at the hands of Israeli soldiers. He recalled staying with a Palestinian family whose home was near a guard tower. From inside the house, Coady looked out at the guard tower, and drew the guard's eye. "I'm standing about five feet inside the kitchen, and suddenly the guard fires off a round, just to let me know he sees me," he said. During the night, he heard the rumbling of tanks on patrol. "The owners of these homes say, 'Don't go out at night -- if you even stick your nose out, they'll kill you,'" he recalled. The harassment is unceasing, and according to Coady, seems designed to make the Palestinians lives as miserable as possible in the hopes that they'll emigrate ... Despite the promise of the "road map," Coady concluded, "they haven't changed a thing. It's a giant police state, and nothing has changed for the Palestinians as far as I can see, from when I was there last summer. It's a big shell game." Coady suggested that the Israelis may be deliberately trying to goad the Palestinians into increased violence, to justify going on with business as usual. "They want the Palestinians to start shooting again," he alleged. "Because all the American public hears is, 'Those Palestinians started shooting again.'"

[Idi Amin, who recently died, was the notoriously brutal dictator in Uganda.]
Revealed: how Israel helped Amin to take power,
By Richard Dowden, The Indpendent (UK), August 17, 2003
"When Radio Uganda announced at dawn on 25 January 1971 that Idi Amin was Uganda's new ruler, many people suspected that Britain had a hand in the coup. However, Foreign Office papers released last year point to a different conspirator: Israel. The first telegrams to London from the British High Commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater, show a man shocked and bewildered by the coup. But he quickly turned to the man who he thought might know what was going on; Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché. He found the Israeli colonel with Amin. They had spent the morning of the coup together. Slater's next telegram says that according to Colonel Bar-Lev: "In the course of last night General Amin caused to be arrested all officers in the armed forces sympathetic to Obote ... Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of [the] army which controls vital points in Uganda ... the Israeli defence attaché discounts any possibility of moves against Amin." The Israelis moved quickly to consolidate the coup. In the following days Bar-Lev was in constant contact with Amin and giving him advice. Slater told London that Bar-Lev had explained "in considerable detail [how] ... all potential foci of resistance, both up country and in Kampala, had been eliminated". Shortly afterwards Amin made his first foreign trip; a state visit to Israel. Golda Meir, the Prime Minister, was reportedly "shocked at his shopping list" for arms. But why was Israel so interested in a landlocked country in Central Africa? The reason is spelt out by Slater in a later telegram. Israel was backing rebellion in southern Sudan to punish Sudan for supporting the Arab cause in the Six-Day War. "They do not want the rebels to win. They want to keep them fighting." The Israelis had helped train the new Uganda army in the 1960s. Shortly after independence Amin was sent to Israel on a training course. When he became chief of staff of the new army Amin also ran a sideline operation for the Israelis, supplying arms and ammunition to the rebels in southern Sudan. Amin had his own motive for helping them: many of his own people, the Kakwa, live in southern Sudan. Obote, however, wanted peace in southern Sudan. That worried the Israelis and they were even more worried when, in November 1970 Obote sacked Amin. Their stick for beating Sudan was suddenly taken away."

British Cameraman Shot Dead Near Baghdad,
Earthlink, (from Associated Press), August 17, 2003
"A Reuters cameraman was shot and killed Sunday while working near a U.S.-run prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, the London-based news agency said. Witnesses reported that Mazen Dana, 41, was filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in western Baghdad when he was shot, Reuters said. A Reuters staffer told The Associated Press in Baghdad that Dana, a Palestinian, appeared to have been shot by U.S. soldiers as he was videotaping outside the Abu Ghraib prison after a mortar attack there Sunday, in which six prisoners were killed and about 60 others were wounded. The staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the videotape in Dana's camera showed two U.S. tanks coming toward him, two shots, apparently from the tanks, ringing out and Dana falling to the ground. He was taken away by a U.S. helicopter for treatment ... An outspoken critic of the Israeli government's treatment of journalists, Dana was honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists with an International Press Freedom Award in November 2001 for his work covering conflict in his hometown of Hebron in the West Bank. He was shot at least three times in 2000, according to the citation on the group's Web site."

Israel ECtel wins U.S. telecoms carrier deal,
Forbes, August 19, 2003
"A major U.S. telecoms carrier has ordered Israeli company ECtel's lawful interception application, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday. A valuation for deal was not given and a spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment on the size of the contract. ECtel, a unit of telecoms equipment holding firm ECI Telecom, makes monitoring equipment for communications networks. Shares in ECtel were up 0.7 percent at $6.15 in morning trade on the Nasdaq exchange.

[The natural consequence of the Jewish (CEO Michael Eisner, et al) take-over/guidance of Disney:]
Disney heir's investment firm to expand in Israel,
Reuters, August 19, 2003
"Shamrock Holdings Inc, the U.S. investment arm of Disney DIS.N heir Roy Disney, plans to set up a $120 million fund for investment in various industries in Israel, the country's industry, trade and labour ministry said on Tuesday. Stanley Gold, chairman of Shamrock, told Industry, Trade and Labour Minister Ehud Olmert of the firm's plans during Olmert's vist to Los Angeles, the ministry said in a statement. Shamrock owns half of Israel's third-largest mobile phone company, Pelephone, and has invested in Tadiran Communications TDCM.TA . Olmert also held meetings with businessmen to discuss Israel's privatisation and infrastructure plans and proposed changes to Israel's investment encouragement law."

True Stories: Israel's Secret Weapon,
By Robin Oliver, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), August 21, 2003
"Show of the week. True Stories: Israel's Secret Weapon ABC, 10pm tonight The title of this admirably persistent report by the BBC's Correspondent team means that the answers to four questions it poses will not surprise, but the opening is stark enough to shock: "Which country in the Middle East has undeclared nuclear weapons?" it asks. "Which country . . . has undeclared biological and chemical capabilities . . . no outside inspections . . . jailed its nuclear whistleblower for 18 years?" The whistleblower is Mordechai Vanunu, former physicist at Dimona, the top-secret nuclear plant in Israel's Negev. Sworn to secrecy, Vanunu received a warning after a minor breach, but decided to leave, taking with him the only known interior photographs of Israel's plutonium factory. The pictures were offered to the London Sunday Times, his claims were substantiated and Vanunu was smuggled into the newspaper offices to tell his story. When Vanunu's revelations were published in 1986, Mossad triggered a classic honey trap with an American woman Vanunu met in apparent innocence. She suggested it would be safer if he flew with her to Rome. He did, but Mossad was waiting; he was drugged, chained and taken by boat to Israel. Sentenced to 18 years for treason and espionage, Vanunu was held in solitary confinement for 11 years and remains in jail. The program pinpoints where Israel assembles and stores the weapons of mass destruction that make it the sixth strongest nuclear nation, tells of nuclear submarines based on Haifa and how a Dutch investigation into a cargo plane crash in Amsterdam revealed that Israel had been importing DNMP , a key component in the manufacture of biological weapons. Was it tear gas, as claimed, or nerve gas as suspected that Israeli troops used on Palestinians in Gaza in February 2001? Is Dimona, 40-years-old, a safety risk? Admire the eloquent elusiveness of Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister who ordered Vanunu's capture, and understand the exclusive protection gained by Israel in the "Treaty of Nuclear Ambiguity" ratified by every US president since Lyndon Johnson. Have there been lies? "If somebody wants to kill you and you use a deception to save your life, it's not immoral," Peres says."

MEDIA ADVISORY: Journalists Find "Calm" When Only Palestinians Die,
Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR), August 22, 2003
"The deadly bus bombing in Jerusalem on August 19 was foreshadowed by a pair of suicide attacks a week earlier which killed two Israeli civilians. While U.S. media tended to portray these attacks as a return to violence after a relatively peaceful period, there were numerous killings in the weeks leading up to the suicide bombings that underscore the lack of evenhanded attention given to loss of life in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. When the two Palestinian suicide bombers each killed an Israeli civilian along with themselves on August 12, U.S. news outlets immediately depicted the attacks as an apparent resurgence in Mideast violence. "Summer truce shattered in Israel," announced CBS (8/12/03), while NBC (8/12/03) reported that "the attacks broke more than a month of relative silence." The Los Angeles Times (8/13/03) wrote that the bombings "broke a six-week stretch during which the people of this war-weary land had enjoyed relative quiet." During this six-week period of "relative quiet," however, some 17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The dead included Mahmoud Kabaha, a four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the back seat of a jeep with his family at a checkpoint when an Israeli soldier shot him dead-- in a spray of bullets that the army simply called an "accidental burst of gunfire" (Associated Press, 7/25/03). Virtually none of the major U.S. news reports on the August 12 bombings alluded to the Palestinian death toll in this period, leaving out a key piece of the story: For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the violence had never ceased; while the Israeli attacks had decreased, there had never been anything like an Israeli cease-fire. An Associated Press report on August 19 (filed prior to that day's bombing) did acknowledge that since June 29, "more than 20 people have been killed on the Israeli and Palestinian sides." What it didn't note was that of those "more than 20," at least 21 were Palestinian, according to the Red Crescent. After a month and a half in which Palestinians were being killed several times a week and receiving relatively little mention, the Washington Post and New York Times both put the bombings on their August 13 front pages, each declaring the violence a break from weeks of "relative calm," and each including a front-page photo of the victims' relatives in mourning. USA Today also put grieving relatives on the front page, along with the headline, "Two Suicide Attacks End a Six-Week Lull in Conflict." One can empathize with the losses of those survivors while recognizing that the families of the Palestinians who died during the "lull" were virtually invisible. On CNN, the August 12 bombings were a major story, with eight separate segments mentioning the attacks in a three-hour period. Anchor Wolf Blitzer declared a "grim return to the battle days in Israel and the Palestinian territories." His colleague Aaron Brown echoed that theme, noting that "after a period of relative calm there has been a major surge in violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories." Correspondent Jerrold Kessel reported that the bombings "cast doubt on the viability of this peace process known as the road map for peace." These bombings had killed four people, including the bombers. Just four days earlier, on August 8, two Palestinians and one Israeli were killed in an Israeli raid on a suspected militant, while two more Palestinians were killed at an ensuing rally-- one shot, and the other killed by Israeli tear gas (Chicago Tribune, 8/9/03). But those five deaths-- mainly Palestinian-- were not deemed a "major surge in violence" or a "grim return to the battle days" on CNN. Instead, anchor Carol Costello (8/8/03) suggested that the Israeli raid "may be another smudge, a bump if you will, on that road map to peace." The media's tendency to downplay-- or completely ignore-- Palestinian suffering and death is nothing new."

[More from the Nightmare Israel Police State:]
Inside Israel's secret prison,
By Aviv Lavie, Haaretz (Israel) August 24, 2003
"Detainees are blindfolded and kept in blackened cells, never told where they are, brutally interrogated and allowed no visitors of any kind. Dubbed 'the Israeli Guantanamo,' it's no wonder facility 1391 officially does not exist. M, who serves in the Intelligence Corps reserves, remembers the first time he was sent to do guard duty at Camp 1391. Before climbing to the top of the observation tower he received an explicit order from the responsible officer: "When you're on the tower you look straight ahead only, outside the base, and to the sides. What happens behind you is none of your business. Do not turn around." M., of course, couldn't resist the temptation and occasionally snuck a look behind him. From atop the tower he saw the double fence surrounding the camp, enclosing a compound ruled by trained attack dogs; the jeep that patrols inside the two fences; the vehicles utilized by the members of the unit who man the base; and especially the large concrete structure, dating from the British Mandate period, when it was used by the British police, and which now bears a description that carries an aura of mystery: Israel's secret detention facility. Some of the people who were interviewed for this article dubbed the camp "the Israeli Guantanamo." There are in fact certain points of resemblance between the American detention camp in Cuba and the Israeli site, mainly in relation to the legal questions that hover over them and the gnawing doubt about whether they are consistent with the values of democracy ... What really surrounds Camp 1391, more than physical protection, is an entrenched wall of silence. Since the 1980s, when the facility was moved from a more southerly location to its present site, the Israeli authorities have made every effort to keep its very existence secret. And even now that its existence has been revealed, the state refuses to answer the many questions of the world and of the Israeli public: Where is the facility? Who is being held there, why, and for how long? Were they tried before being locked up in Camp 1391, or are they awaiting trial? What are their conditions of incarceration? In every other lockup in Israel the answers to these and many other questions are open and amenable to external, legal, public and international review. As far as is known, the 1391 site is the only detention facility whose detainees don't know where they are. If they ask, the warders may answer, "on the moon," or "in outer space," or "outside the borders of Israel." It is also the only detention facility that the state prevents the International Red Cross from visiting. Nor, as far as can be ascertained, have Knesset members ever visited the place, and many of the politicians who have been asked about it in the past few weeks said they had never heard of it - including some who have held senior positions in the government, such as Prof. David Libai, who was justice minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin and a member of the ministerial committee that deals with the secret services: "I will not say a single word about the subject, for the simple reason that I am not familiar with it. This is the first time I have ever heard about such a thing." If a former justice minister doesn't know about it, a disturbing question arises: who does? ... According to attorney Dan Yakir, the legal adviser of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), "A secret detention facility contradicts basic principles of every democracy - transparency and public supervision over the governmental authorities. And those principles are especially important in relation to the deprivation of freedom - which is one of the most severe infringements of human rights. The existence of a lockup like this gives rise to a double concern: first, of secret arrests and `disappearances' of people; and second, an abuse of power, unfair treatment, violence and torture" ... One of the reasons for the wall of secrecy that surrounds it is the fact that it is located in the center of a military base that belongs to one of the secret units of the Intelligence Corps - Unit 504 (according to foreign sources the unit's name has recently been changed). Unit 504 gathers intelligence by means of the human factor - "humint." Most of its work is done by using agents outside Israel ... Another example is the testimony of Ahmed Ali Banjek, a Lebanese citizen who was brought to Israel and interrogated in the facility on suspicion of smuggling an anti-helicopter missile into the former Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon. Banjek was convicted on the basis of his confession but afterward submitted an affidavit to the military court in Lod stating that the confession had been extracted under torture. He said he had been beaten with a wooden stick between the legs, forced to sit on a wooden stick until it penetrated into his body, made to drink coffee mixed with ashes from cigarettes and force-fed with large amounts of onions and water. In a rare judgment, the military court in Lod, under the president of the court, Lieutenant Colonel Elisha Caspi, found in April 1998 that "a certain doubt remains as to whether it can be asserted with the certainty required in a criminal trial that his statement was made by the defendant and signed by him." In other words, the court did not reject Banjek's account of the horrors that occurred in the interrogation rooms of Camp 1391, and he was released.

[The following Israeli article is about Amdocs. What is Amdocs? This, from Fox News reporter Carl Cameron (at http://cryptome.org/fox-il-spy.htm) : "Most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and billing in the U.S. are done for the phone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private telecommunications company. Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it. In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once. The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing. But sources tell Fox News that in 1999, the super secret National Security Agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands ­ in Israel, in particular. Investigators don't believe calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is plenty valuable in itself. An internal Amdocs memo to senior company executives suggests just how Amdocs generated call records could be used. “Widespread data mining techniques and algorithms.... combining both the properties of the customer (e.g., credit rating) and properties of the specific ‘behavior….’” Specific behavior, such as who the customers are calling. The Amdocs memo says the system should be used to prevent phone fraud. But U.S. counterintelligence analysts say it could also be used to spy through the phone system. Fox News has learned that the N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used."]
Billing firm Amdocs closes in on two massive deals,
By Gitit Pincas, Haaretz (Israel), August 24, 2003
"Billing software developer Amdocs has reached the advanced stages in a $100 million tender conducted by credit card and financial services company Visa, according to a source in the industry. ABN AMRO, the world's 10th largest bank, is also examining Amdocs solutions. Amdocs refused to comment on the reports. Amdocs' billing and customer relationship management (CRM) software is directed primarily at the telecommunications sector, but the company has recently tried to penetrate the banking and financial services sectors, as well as technology manufacture, health care, commerce and retail. The industry believes the company has a good chance of entering the financial services market, as its CRM solution, Clarify, has already been applied under similar circumstances. Amdocs maintains secrecy surrounding expansion plans, code-naming projects like the Visa tender, Venus, and the ABN AMRO project, Beta. Staff members involved in the projects are asked only to use the code names to prevent information leaks. The Clarify software became part of the Amdocs product line after the company purchased Nortel subsidiary Clarify for $200 million in October 200 ... Visa has issued more than 1 billion cards in 150 countries and handled $2.4 trillion in transactions in 2002. ABN AMRO boasts more than 3,000 branches in 60 countries."

JAG orders full probe of shooting death of British cameraman by IDF,
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz (Israel), August 25, 2003
"Judge Advocate General Menahem Finkelstein has instructed the Military Police to open an investigation into the May 2 killing of British photographer James Miller in southern Rafah, close to the border with Egypt. Major General Finkelstein ordered the inquiry following several requests from Miller's family and its representative, attorney Avigdor Feldman. Furthermore, ballistic tests conducted by the British Embassy in Tel Aviv on 10 rifles belonging to Israel Defense Forces soldiers who were in the area of the shooting revealed that the bullet that killed Miller was fired from one of these weapons. The IDF had refused to order a Military Police investigation, opting for an internal inquiry of the unit to which the soldiers belong and one at the Southern Command. For the first few days after the incident, military sources hinted several times that Miller apparently had been shot by Palestinians. The hints were based on an erroneous observation by both soldiers and officers, who mistook an exit wound in Miller's back for an entrance wound. Following the incident, Miller's family, which constantly claimed the IDF was trying to avoid an investigation so as not to expose the soldiers to criminal charges, hired a ballistics expert, who collected testimony from Miller's crew and witnesses, and a pathologist, whose autopsy on the cameraman's body revealed the bullet that killed him. The findings led to a demand for a check of the weapons of soldiers who were in the area at the time. The results of the ballistic tests formed the basis for Finkelstein's decision to order a full Military Police investigation, which will have to determine, among other things, whether the soldiers' actions were performed with criminal intent ... "The ballistic tests show that the shooting was carried out by an IDF soldier under criminal circumstances and not operational ones, for which there was no justification," said Feldman. "The fact that Miller was a journalist was known to the soldiers, and is connected to the reason for the shots fired at him."

For the Sake of Jerusalem,
by Shoshana Rubin, Israel National New, Aug 25, 2003
"We wonder aloud, is this not Egypt again? My people have forgotten why Thou called us here, among the raging, vile, perverted, baby-killing evildoers. Thy people do not hear the L-rd. His middle name is Revenge - this is what wakes our G-d, this is when we do see Him, do hear Him. We need to awaken, we need to seek Revenge. "But we do retaliate," I hear you say. But there is a difference between retaliate, which is tit-for-tat in military terms, but not the way of Hashem. Indeed, where revenge is necessary, it is a great thing. It is a great mitzvah to take the revenge of the righteous and humble from the evildoer. Whoever forgoes or rejects such an opportunity is cruel, and he denies belief in G-d. "The righteous man shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked ... This is the secret of the greatness and holiness of revenge. It explains why it is a mitzvah and why the righteous are joyous when they see it carried out ... How does one human plot and plan to get on a bus in Jerusalem, with the sole intention of murdering as many Jewish children and mothers and fathers as possible, and to commit suicide? How does one do that? Only one way - he believes we are not humans. Exactly as Hitler and his gangs believed. As easily as choosing which can of bug spray to kill spiders. I have a few questions for our leaders. Why were these PLO Nazis able to have a successful parade? This was not a funeral, by any stretch of the imagination. This was not a funeral, but a victory parade, complete with masks and banners and flags and weapons-shooting and celebrating our deaths. Yes, celebrating the horrible, burning deaths of our little children, yes - of our people. Why was this vile, perverted, evil parade not bombed? Why do we allow them to celebrate our deaths, to have a victory parade? Let their next funeral be a massive, collective funeral, which will be their very last funeral in Israel ... We must stop blaming the local and foreign media for our problems. They see our lack of revenge. This they may not articulate well, they may not even know it, but the enemy Arabs know it. They know it too well, and that is our weakness. My people Israel, there is only one solution, and thank G-d there is still one. We must expel or kill enemy Arabs."

[By Shapiro's corrupt logic, he should find justice in being "expelled" out of America and to Israel, with all other American Jews.]
Transfer is not a dirty word,
by Ben Shapiro, Townhall, August 27, 2003
" The "road map" was doomed from the start. The Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process. The time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless. Roadblocks, touch fences, midnight negotiations and cease-fires are useless. Some have rightly suggested that Israel be allowed to decapitate the terrorist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. But this too is only a half measure. The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership. Half measures merely postpone our realization that the Arabs dream of Israel's destruction. Without drastic measures, the Arab dream will come true. In the short term, the establishment of a "Palestinian state" based in Judea, Samaria and Gaza cuts Israel to the bone. In some places, Israel would be an unthinkable 9 miles wide. In the long term, the growth of the hostile Israeli-Arab population within pre-1967 Israel bodes ill for the future of the Jewish state. As University of Haifa professor Arnon Soffer says, "The trends and indicators all point to an economic and ecological catastrophe waiting to happen and of the death knell of the ideological dream of a Jewish state." Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum. When two populations are constantly enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that somehow deep-seated ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing the two sides to live together ... Any time the Jews get wise and threaten mass expulsion of Arabs, the Arabs pull out their big stick, equating Nazism with Zionism. Their cartoons merge swastikas with stars of David. Their newspapers call Ariel Sharon another Adolf Hitler. Their spokespeople cry "Genocide!" And the Jews cower in fear that they could be equated with their parents' murderers. The Jews don't realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. There are no gas chambers here. It's not genocide; it's transfer."

Israel deports Scots peace activist after house protest,
by CAMERON SIMPSON, The Herald (UK), August 28, 2003
"A Scottish peace activist was deported from Israel yesterday, 10 days after being arrested near Nablus. Andrew Muncie, who is a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), was detained on August 17 after trying to stop soldiers blowing up and bulldozing the house of a Palestinian family where he was staying. Mr Muncie, a 29-year-old first-class honours graduate, from Spean Bridge, Lochaber, near Fort William, was deported along with Andreas Koninek, another activist, from Sweden. According to the Israelis, Mr Muncie chained himself to a pole in the house at a refugee camp near Nablus and was arrested by their defence force who "blindfolded, handcuffed, and took him to the police station in Ariel".

[Israel is a corrupt, amoral Hellhole. Even the former speaker of Israel's Knesset (Parliament) agrees with this assessment.]
A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent,
By AVRAHAM BURG, [Jewish] Forwad, August 29, 2003
"The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly. There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down. The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun ... A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing. We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands. Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below — from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption. If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative ... Israel's current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law — combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead. Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? ... Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 and is a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is currently a Labor Party Knesset member."

[Self-delusion is a foundation of modern Jewish identity. Jews are not interested in "facts" that impugn the innocent, Jewish victimology tradition. The fact that what Jews define as "antisemitism" exists across all time, geographical, cultural, and political realms is decreed to be illogical, meaningless, and confirmation that criticism of Jewry and its racist state is an irrational disease of bigotry.]
Just do it,
By David Landau, Haaretz (Israel), August 31, 2003
"In Alan Dershowitz's new book, "The Case for Israel," the famed advocate and Harvard law professor argues that the State of Israel has become "the Jew among the states of the world." Only the age-old phenomenon of blind anti-Semitism, he says, can explain "the world's bizarre reaction to Israel's generous peace offer [in the Barak era - D.L.] and the Palestinians' violent response to it." Throughout history, the Jew has been judged "by different and far more demanding standards," writes Dershowitz. "So too [now] with the Jewish nation." Dershowitz's Canadian friend and colleague, the veteran human rights campaigner Irwin Cotler, offers a similar diagnosis. After years of battling in United Nations forums and international conferences, Cotler, a member of the Canadian parliament, says Israel "has become the new anti-Christ for large parts of the Western world, and a kind of Salman Rushdie in the eyes of many Muslims." Many Israelis have been coming to the same conclusion. Whereas in the past a preoccupation with anti-Semitism was associated mainly with the political right ("the whole world is against us"), nowadays liberals and people on the left are finding it increasingly difficult to explain what is happening to us, both in the region and in the wider world, without reaching for terms like double standards, irrational hatred and anti-Semitism ... Actually, these questions were answered a hundred and some odd years ago, in the days of the old anti-Semitism, by the founding father of Zionism. He intuitively grasped - and therein lay his greatness - that in respect of anti-Semitism, there was nothing to argue about and no point in self-justification. A prejudice that is essentially irrational could not be countered or abated by explanations and rationales taken from the realm of logic. Facts were equally useless. Even if a Jew converted, assimilated and turned his back on his genes, it did him no good."

Palestinian schoolgirl shot dead,
news.com.au, August 31, 2003
"An eight-year-old Palestinian girl shot dead by Israeli troops in the central Gaza Strip was killed while showing off her new school uniform to friends, the youngster's grieving mother said today. Some 1500 people gathered in Khan Yunis for the funeral of Aaya Mahmud Fayaad, who relatives and witnesses said was hit by bullets fired from an Israeli observation post on the edge of a Jewish settlement. The girl's mother, Am Isam, told mourners at the family home that Aaya had been killed as she showed off her new uniform ahead of the start of the school year tomorrow. "These are clothes that I bought for her yesterday," said the distraught mother as she showed off the outfit. (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) "Sharon is a terrorist who cannot live without seeing of the blood of Palestinian children," she added."

Israeli commission criticizes government treatment of Arab citizens,
USA Today, September 2, 2003
"A groundbreaking Israeli commission of inquiry found police used excessive force in quelling Arab riots three years ago and said in a stinging report released Monday that the Jewish state has systematically neglected its Arab minority. The document — the product of three years of investigation — was based on the testimony of 377 witnesses and only the fifth probe of such scope in Israel's history. The panel's findings came as Israeli-Palestinian violence flared anew Monday. An Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car carrying three Hamas militants in Gaza City, killing one and wounding another. Twenty-five bystanders also were hurt in the sixth Israeli missile strike in two weeks ... The panel of two judges and an academic urged the government to come up with a detailed plan for narrowing the gaps between Jews and Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of the population of 6.6 million people. Israeli Arabs say they have long been discriminated against in economic opportunities, land distribution and civil rights. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said the panel's recommendations would be discussed by the Cabinet. Successive Israeli governments have promised to do more for Arab communities, but little has been achieved. Arab leaders said the report did not go far enough, and that they had hoped senior police officers would face prosecution ... The commission was appointed after police shot and killed 13 Arab citizens in weeklong riots in October 2000. A Jewish motorist was killed by a rock in the protests. Thousands of Israeli Arabs had taken to the streets to show support for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who a month earlier had embarked on an uprising against Israeli occupation ... The report put the blame for the riots squarely on the shoulders of the Israeli establishment, saying a major cause was systematic government neglect of the Arab minority. "The state and all its governments failed consistently in dealing with the problems raised by the existence of a large Arab minority within a Jewish state," it said. "The government's approach to the Arab sector was in large part characterized by neglect and discrimination. The establishment did not demonstrate sufficient sensitivity to the Arab sector, nor did it budget its resources in an equal way to the Arab population."

Critics warn Israel's war on Hamas may backfire,
By Ian James, Seattle Times, September 3, 2003
"Every two or three days, Israeli helicopters track down suspected Islamic militants and unleash Hellfire missiles, blowing up cars and sending crowds surging around the charred bodies. Israel says its new war on Hamas, unprecedented in intensity, is helping prevent suicide attacks. "Hamas is in distress because of our activity," Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said yesterday, summing up two weeks of airstrikes that have killed 11 Hamas members, including a senior leader. But the attacks have killed five bystanders, including an 11-year-old girl, and wounded 46. Critics warn that Israel's self-declared "all-out war" on Hamas will be counterproductive by provoking more attacks and adding to resentment among Palestinians. "For everyone they kill there will be someone else (in Hamas) who will take his place," said Ali Jarbawi, a Palestinian analyst. In all, about 140 terror suspects have been killed in what Israel calls "targeted attacks," according to Palestinian medical officials, though that total also includes fugitives killed resisting arrest. More than 100 bystanders also have died in targeted killings. Israel's security Cabinet approved an intensified campaign of killings — Palestinians call them assassinations — in response to a Hamas bus bombing that killed 21 people in Jerusalem Aug. 19. The new policy broadened the list of targets. Political leaders were now also in the cross hairs, including senior Hamas official Ismail Abu Shanab, who was killed in the first strike Aug. 21. The new tactics raised questions about why Israel is starting all-out attacks on Hamas only now. During much of the past three years, Israel tended to target Palestinian security forces in retaliation for attacks by militants, expecting that this would somehow pressure the Palestinian Authority to crack down on armed groups. Some observers suggest the new war on Hamas is possible because a U.S. government intent on fighting terrorism no longer objects to such methods, giving Israel a green light to press ahead. In the past, the United States used to criticize targeted killings, particularly a July 2002 attack in which an F-16 jet dropped a laser-guided bomb on a building in Gaza City, killing a Hamas leader and 14 other people, including eight children. The United States has not condemned the latest strikes."

[Arab-Jewish "peace front" groups are mostly fraudulent. The Jewish presence in them is the arm of control. People like Michael Lerner are bigoted Zionists before they are anything else. Racist Jews drove Palestinians out of Palestine and they don't want them back. Period.]
Peace Front Faces Schism Over 'Right Of Return',
By ERIC MARX, [Jewish] FORWARD, September 5, 2003
"Arab groups are threatening to quit the country's largest anti-war coalition unless it does more to support the Palestinian cause, but Jewish members say that such a move would lead them to break ranks. Several Arab and Muslim groups announced last week that they would drop out of United for Peace and Justice, a leading American-based coalition opposed to the Iraq war, unless the umbrella group explicitly endorses the Palestinian "right of return" to Israel. But Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor of Tikkun Magazine and chairman of the Tikkun Community, which is part of the anti-war coalition's steering committee, said he would quit if such a position is adopted. The complaints from pro-Palestinian groups come despite their gains in recent months. United for Peace and Justice, which brought together 650 local and national groups from 38 states last October to oppose the invasion of Iraq, has formulated a pro-Palestinian stance, arguing that American political, economic and military aid to Israel is underwriting the occupation of Palestinian territory. Still, at its June conference in Chicago, the anti-war coalition refused to explicitly endorse the "right of return" for Palestinians out of fear of alienating the bulk of its members with a phrase that's commonly associated with the eventual demise of Israel as a Jewish state. Coalition leaders also rejected a description of Israel as an "imperialist" state and opted not to join what many Jewish groups say was an anti-war demonstration deliberately scheduled by pro-Palestinian groups to take place later this month during Rosh Hashana. The debate over such decisions played out last week in postings to an Internet message board operated by members of United for Peace and Justice. The dispute could end up undermining both the anti-war effort and the Palestinian cause, but Palestinian solidarity groups, including Al-Awda, Badil, and International ANSWER, say settling for anything short of an endorsement of the "right of return" would be "morally repugnant." "Right Of Return [ROR] is the litmus test of whether one really supports the cause of Palestine or not," wrote one Al-Awda member."

IDF refuses to clear mines from land for Arab school in J'lem,
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz (Israel), September 9, 2003
"The IDF is refusing to clear an old Jordanian minefield near Tsur Baher in Jerusalem, where a school for the Arab neighborhood's children is supposed to be built. The IDF chief of staff's office sent a letter this week to Jerusalem's city hall saying that it is army policy not to clear minefields for civilian purposes "because of the risk to soldiers... especially when it is a foreign minefield that includes anti-personnel mines." The decision not to clear the Jordanian minefield was made by General Headquarters even though the Central Command had approved a plan by a private company to clear the field. But Colonel Michal Yizthaki Shoshani, of the chief of staff's office, was highly critical of the city decision to build the 30-classroom school in an area that had mines and said the city should reconsider its plans. City hall is furious at the army over the decision. Over the last four months, an architectural firm has worked out plans for a junior high school and elementary school, based entirely on aerial photographs of the site, because it is impossible to access it due to the mines. Pepe Alalu, a Jerusalem city council member who went to the High Court 18 months ago to petition for more classrooms in East Jerusalem, is convinced the army's decision is part of the army's overall attitude toward Arabs in Israel. "Only a few days ago we saw in the Or Commission report how the security services regard Arabs in Israel," he said. "Now we can see the army's attitude toward Arabs in Jerusalem. East Jerusalemites fall through all the bureaucratic loopholes in the country." Alalu noted that two years ago the army cleared a minefield at Har Adar, a Jewish community outside Jerusalem ... There are two private companies that can clear land mines, but the IDF refuses to give the two companies clearance to work in Israel, even though the companies send staffers around the world clearing mines."

Amnesty blasts separation fence as `disastrous,'
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz (Israel), September 9, 2003
"The construction of a West Bank security fence between Israel and the West Bank barrier is deepening the crippling economic impact of its tough travel restrictions on Palestinians, Amnesty International said Monday. In a new report, "Israel and the Occupied Territories: Surviving under Siege," the London-based human rights group said some 60 percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line of $2 per day and unemployment is close to 50 percent. The government, saying "apparently willful one-sidedness" ran through the report, charged Amnesty had ignored "the fundamental right of the Israeli people to live in security and Palestinian obligations to combat terrorism". An official from the Foreign Ministry, Daniel Taub, criticized the report for not calling on the Palestinians to stop suicide bombers. "If they're only concerned about human rights on one side of the conflict, that's not human rights, that's politics," Taub said. Amnesty said the barrier - an electronic fence topped with razor wire in most places and a cement wall in others - has serious economic and social consequences for more than 200,000 Palestinians. "The barrier/fence cuts off scores of Palestinian villages from the rest of the West Bank or from their farming land. The land in these areas is among the most fertile in the West Bank, with better water resources than elsewhere," it said ... "Closures, blockades, checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews and other restrictions have had a disastrous impact on the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and have crippled the Palestinian economy," the report said. Accusing Israel of collective punishment, the document said: "Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians cannot be made to pay for the crimes of a handful of individuals."

[Separation of Church and State, the Jewish banner in America? In the racist Bigot Nation of Israel, which Americans have subsidized with tens of billions of dollars, Judaism is a mandatory part of ALL school's curriculum]
Court halts change in method of teaching Judaism in secular schools,
By ABIGAIL RADOSZKOWICZ AND DAN IZENBERG, gsnonweb.com (from Jerusalem Post), September 8, 2003
"The High Court of Justice on Sunday granted a show-cause order instructing the Education Ministry to explain why it has changed the system of teaching Judaism in non-religious schools. The new system no longer allows non-governmental organizations to teach these classes. The court heard two petitions filed by a coalition of secular and pluralistic religious groups headed by Panim for Jewish Renaissance in Israel. One petition asked that the court stop the ministry's plan to end these non-governmental groups' activities designed to strengthen secular children's Jewish identity and knowledge as mandated by the Shenhar Commission. The other called for the ministry to change the criterion for distributing funds for education to strengthen Jewish identity. The court gave the groups two weeks to correct the second petition, and called for a resumption of the hearings in October. Until now, the state has allowed non-governmental organizations, including Panim, Melitz, Meitar, the Shechter Institute, the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Conservative Movement, to teach programs on Judaism in secular schools. From now on, the teaching is to be done by regular teachers. The Education Ministry has argued that it has the right to change the method in which it provides Jewish education in secular schools. During Sunday's hearing, the state maintained that it is actually increasing funding for Jewish education in secular schools under to the new system. It also argued that it had asked the universities and teaching colleges to prepare their students to teach Jewish subjects."

[One of the premises of modern Israeli education is its fantastic ethnocentrism and racism: to highlight "Israeli democracy" without even mentioning the Palestinians! Hypocritical American Jews, in the vanguard of expanding multiculturalism in America, overwhelmingly support Jewish apartheid in their Zionist nation.]
Operation Brainwashing,
By Gideon Samet, Haaretz (Israel), September 10, 2003
"Like the defense establishment, the Israeli education system can't complain about the deep cuts into its slice of the national pie. It is still one of the world's highest budgeted educational systems proportionate to the budget and the GDP. It has maintained that level even as the local welfare society and its counterparts internationally have absorbed body blows from the rules of unfettered capitalism. Those who should be complaining are the clients for education, the hundreds of thousands of households that are getting a flawed product from one of the most important services, which must maintain its level even in this brutal age of neoconservatism. In a multilayered crisis, education has become another sphere of bad judgment. Regrettably, there's a plethora of evidence for this. This time, boys and girls, we'll only talk about what the Education Ministry prepared to broaden your knowledge base, which has so shamefully declined, with ever growing black holes that threaten to turn the chosen people, starting in first grade, into a society of sheer ignoramuses. This ignorance is not the invention of the snootily refined. "We are ashamed of the ignorance of the pupils of Israel," said Prof. Yaakov Katz, chairman of the ministry's own pedagogical secretariat. "Children don't know the anthem, can't recognize the flag or identify Herzl." It's insulting, Katz added mournfully, to live like that. As often happens in the twilight zones of state authorities, the type of solution Katz proposed is most apparently part of the problem. The learned Prof. Katz led a team that for a full year prepared the list of "the 100 concepts for junior high school." And what a folly it is ... [T]he root of the problem is the composition of the list and what isn't - and can't be - among the meager 100, which range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Katz said the team included the ministry's supervisor of Arabic education. Alongside phrases like "man was created in the image of God" (and the Human Rights Treaty), missing is any concept at all of a fifth of the citizens of the state [Arabs]. Didn't Ali Assad, the supervisor, propose any? Did they erase his choices? There is a cacophony of Judaism and what Prof. Katz and his team understand as "Israeli democracy," one of the three chapters in this disgraceful document (the others are Jewish heritage and Zionism). From the difference between the new moon and the full moon, mourning days and fast days, the superficial mantra of the "Jewish bookshelf," with a poor sampling of sayings of the sages, the sin of the spies, the Egoz Moroccan refugee ship (but no mention of the "Exodus") - all the way to MKs, courts, the symbol of the state, the flag, ombudsman and more sawdust from the carpentry shop of Limor Livnat, who recited "a child can not grow up in the country without knowing these concepts" at the inaugural ceremonies for the list. In short, there's nothing there except the same old blather that already fills the Education Ministry. A list of knowledge can't be just an empty beginning of what's promised to fill it. There is nothing about the culture of the world, as if Katz and his colleagues didn't want to trouble the already weak minds of the pupils with another chapter. The missing items - and if such a project is undertaken, then there are at least 200-300 missing to reach a reasonable level - kept out entire chapters of the state's history. And there's no mention of the Palestinians. Actually, the list just raises the banner of ignorance even after making you recite who and what was Rabbi Kook, Hannah Senesh, the Jewish National Fund, Yad Vashem, the President, the National Insurance Institute and even the State. The baseless shrinking and twisting of the list is obviously evidence of the opposite of what its creators declared. The best that can be said in the defense of its creators is that maybe they were not entirely aware that "Operation Knowledge" was a basic effort to brainwash, not enrich, the pupils. The only enlightening thing in this list is that it was so shamefully unenlightened."

Personal Reflections On Palestine. Postscript To German Edition Of The Rise And Fall Of Palestine,
by Norman Finkelstein, ZNet, September 11, 2003
"Since completing this memoir in 1995 I've returned to Palestine every year. In fact, apart from traveling abroad to lecture, Palestine is the only place I've been since I first journeyed there 15 years ago. I sometimes fantasize vacationing in Greece or Italy but never do. If I have time and cost isn't prohibitive, I always return to Palestine. I do so mostly from a sense of duty - do I have a right to be elsewhere? - relieved by the authentic affection I've developed for friends. I cannot say I enjoy going back. From the moment I arrive, even before arriving, I count the minutes left before I depart. The eminent Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Gaza as "the largest concentration camp ever to exist." The West Bank ranks only a mite less awful. Once the Israeli wall currently under construction is finished, the West Bank will replace Gaza with top honors. Bordered on both sides by four meter deep trenches, fortified with guard towers at regular intervals, and topped with barbed wire, this massive barricade will stretch across fully 347 kilometers - twice the size of the Berlin Wall. (One-third has already been completed.) Cutting deep into the West Bank and causing massive disruption for the Palestinians wedged between it and the "Green Line" (Israel's pre-June 1967 border), the wall will probably lead to the de facto annexation of 10% of the West Bank and the expulsion of the Palestinians living there, while also isolating as many as 300,000 Palestinians (14% of the West Bank population) living in East Jerusalem. To judge by recent Israeli pronouncements, it could eventually completely enclose Palestinians and herd them into less than half the West Bank, which Prime Minister Sharon (with U.S. blessing) will then christen a Palestinian "state." There is no reference in the Bush administration's current initiative, the "Roadmap," to the wall, let alone a demand that its construction be suspended ... Although unable to condone Palestinian suicide bombers I can nevertheless understand them. Were members of my family imprisoned, beaten, tortured, killed, our home demolished, our land stolen, our lives destroyed, marking time until death, half wishing it would come sooner rather than later - I would certainly hope I would retain my humanity but in all honesty cannot predict how I would react. Unlike myself, many Palestinians who once dissented on principle from targeting Israeli civilians no longer do. In fact, of my many friends there, only Moussa and Afaf, and Samira and Stephan are still categorically opposed. Some believe this is the only tactic that will make Israel budge, while others just want revenge - for a change let them suffer ... With evident satisfaction Rantisi reports that the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed at the outset of the new intifada was 10-1 but now it's only 3-1. I would be lying if I denied that this argument resonates. Palestinian life won't be taken on the cheap: if you kill one of ours you must pay a price. It's brutal, it's primitive, but still I can relate to this arithmetic. In fact, I too secretly calculate the ratio. If Israeli death squads execute a Palestinian, part of me cries out for revenge. If Palestinians don't react, I'm disappointed. Where is the dignity, the self-respect? In the face of Israel's merciless brutality, like many Palestinians I too have grown hard-hearted. But comprehensible as his satisfaction may be, I keep repeating to Rantisi, it's plainly immoral. Now I begin to feel uncomfortable. My responsibility isn't to lecture Rantisi but to oppose the occupation. Aren't I being arrogant? He was in an Israeli prison for 10 years; now he's an inmate in an Israeli concentration camp. Who am I to instruct him on the finer points of morality from the comfort and safety of my tourist visa? ... I have no more compunction as a Jew about Israeli soldiers (and settlers) suffering setbacks in the Occupied Territories than I have as an American about G.I.s suffering setbacks in Iraq. I celebrate every victory over foreign occupiers. Just as I rejoice in the blows partisans inflicted on the Nazi occupiers in Europe, so I rejoice in the blows Hezbollah inflicted on the Israeli occupiers in Lebanon, Palestinians inflict on the Israeli occupiers, and Iraqis inflict on the American occupiers. This solidarity doesn't spring from intellectual or political artifice. I don't struggle against my tribal or patriotic impulses to be morally consistent. Rather the contrary, it's constitutional - I viscerally loathe occupiers, all occupiers. (Another family gene?) It makes not a whit of difference whether they're Jewish or American."

[A new kind of journalism: cheerleading for murder. ]
Jerusalem Post Says: "Kill Arafat","
Israel National News, September 11, 2003
"The Jerusalem Post took a strong editorial stand today, calling on Israel to kill Yasser Arafat: "The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly as possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative" ... "When the breaking point arrives," the paper concludes, "there is no point in taking half-measures. If we are going to be condemned in any case, we might as well do it right. Arafat's death at Israel's hands would not radicalize Arab opposition to Israel; just the opposite... Arafat does not just stand for terror, he stands for the refusal to make peace with Israel under any circumstances and within any borders. In this respect, there is no distinction, beyond the tactical, between him and Hamas."

Israeli Says Killing Arafat Is an Option,
Earthlink (from Associated Press) September 14, 2003
"Israel's vice prime minister said killing Yasser Arafat is an option for Israel, as Palestinians on Sunday took to the streets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip promising to protect their leader. Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert echoed threats by other Israeli officials who suggested last week's decision to "remove" Arafat means he might be sent into exile, further isolated at his West Bank compound or dealt with more harshly. But Olmert, considered a likely future candidate for premier, is the closest official to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to say outright he might be killed. "Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here," he told Israel Radio. "Expulsion is certainly one of the options, killing is also one of the options." The statement underscored the collapse of recent U.S.-backed peace efforts and the depths to which Israeli-Palestinian relations have sunk a decade after Arafat and then-premier Yitzhak Rabin agreed on the first Israel-PLO deals in September 1993 amid hopes the long-standing conflict might be resolved. On Saturday, Arafat urged Israel to return to the negotiating table to end three years of violence in which more than 800 Israelis and some 2,500 Palestinians have been killed. Israeli leaders say Arafat is responsible at least indirectly for terror attacks, and they seek alternative Palestinian leaders. Hundreds of Arafat's supporters streamed into his devastated West Bank compound Sunday for a fourth straight day, chanting that their 74-year-old leader "is a mountain that the wind can't shake." A crowd of thousands, including many children, also marched through the West Bank city of Nablus. At the weekly Israeli Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz laid down a list of demands from any new Palestinian government, according to a senior official who briefed reporters. Mofaz was quoted as saying Israel will not cooperate with any government that carries out Arafat's orders or that strengthens his standing, and that any Palestinian government must act against militant groups and unite all security forces under the authority of a single person - not Arafat."

[Jews in Israel who most support intermarriage are those described as "new immigrants" to Israel. This would mostly be the secular Jewish immigants from the Soviet Union who had not been so strongly socialized into "Jewish" culture and identity under communism.]
Majority of Israelis are opposed to intermarriage, survey finds,
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz (Isrel), September 15, 2003
"Around 60 percent of all Israeli Jews are against intermarriage, according to a survey carried out by the Geocartography Institute for the New Family organization. But among respondents who call themselves as secular, only 35 percent object to intermarriage, compared to 68 percent of those who say they are traditional and 95 percent of those who are religious. The survey, which polled 500 people, found that 47 percent of the respondents "strongly oppose" intermarriage, 13 percent were "somewhat opposed," and 18 percent "support" or "strongly support" it. The remaining 21 percent had no opinion. The poll found that opposition to intermarriage increased with age. The strongest support for intermarriage, 41 percent, came from those who defined themselves as new immigrants."

Israel in Dubai angers Arabs,
Al-Jazeera, 18 September 2003
"The UAE has no say on Israeli's participation at the WB-IMF meetings. Some say they are disgusted, others feel disappointed, but most Arabs are resigned to Israel's participation at a global economic meeting being held for the first time ever in an Arab country. Israel's presence at the 18-24 September World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meeting in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates has caused a stir in the region, as anger at Israel runs deep. Particularly so, over its recent decision to expel or kill Palestinian President Yasir Arafat. Many say that the expected participation of Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reviled by many Arabs since his days as prime minister, adds insult to injury."

Israeli Dissident Seeks Political Refuge in Norway,
by Johannes Wahlstrom, International Middle East Media Center News, September 23, 2003
"Igor Zhemajlov, one of the leading figures of the anti-Zionist Slavic Union, was last week forced into political exile. The political movement was formed last year with its base in the million strong Israeli Russian community. In February an historical alliance was forged between the Slavic Union and Palestinian grass-roots under the leadership of Mustafa Barghouti, in a combined effort for a democratization of Israel/Palestine. The alliance shifted from the more accepted two-state separatist approach to the conflict, and focused on developing a civil rights movement to create one, democratic state for all citizens. In the beginning of the 90’s Israel commenced a massive campaign for the “repatriation” of Jews from the former Soviet Union. The multibillion dollar, US subsidized, campaign was intended to strengthen Jewish demography, while simultaneously providing the country with a well needed workforce and military personnel. Out of the new Russian community, approximately half are appreciated to be non-Jewish in a judicial or practical sense. According to the leader of the Slavic Union, Alexei Korobov, they have become “third grade citizens”. “As long as we keep quiet and work everything is fine, but as soon as we try to make our voices heard we are brutally silenced. We have no political representation in the Knesset nor in Israeli mass media.” Korobov asserts that the official Russian functionaries represent Zionist interests rather than that of the Russian community. When the alliance between the Slavic Union and the NGO’s of Barghouti was formed in February, Korobov proclaimed their common interest. “We want a democratic state for all its citizens. A state where Jews and non-Jews have the same rights. We will not die and kill for a state that is not made for us, we want to unite our efforts and struggle for a democratic Israel/Palestine.” The Slavic Union carried an immense demographic significance as the Russians, initially imported for Israeli interests, started turning against the state. The nascent alliance was even more threatening. Integrating the Israeli and Palestinian populations would disrupt the foundations of Israel as a Jewish State. It was clear that an occurrence as such would not pass un-remarked. Nor would it be an easy task. “I have already been offered $2000 to leave the country, and who knows, maybe tomorrow I will have been sacked,” Korobov said after the formation of the alliance. Little did he know the magnitude of his words. Preceding the subsequent media storm, the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot published an article on the theme. The following day Igor Zhemajlov and Alexei Korobov, the two leaders of the organization, were discharged from work, due to “restructuring”. The article, with mutilated pictures, was pasted all over their workplaces. “This will only make us stronger in our belief” Zhemajlov said after facing sudden unemployment. In the wake of the Israeli reactions to the Slavic Union, the alliance also collapsed. Barghouti explained that fighting for a one-state solution, although desirable, would be political suicide. A one-state solution, or a democratization of Israel/Palestine is essentially a movement against political Zionism. Such a solution is regarded apprehensively by large portions of the Palestinian movement, as anti-Zionism is commonly equated with anti-Semitism in Israel and the Wes ... The Israeli community has over the years developed a means of turning proponents of democracy into political dissidents, where anti-Zionist political parties are outlawed, journalists are silenced and workers are discharged. After loosing his work, having his son assaulted in school, and been forced to divorce, Zhemajlov finally decided last week to go into political exile. Zhemajlov is as of now in Norway with uncertain hopes of being granted refugee status."

DJ Israel Panel: Evidence Lacking For Argentine Extraditions,
Dow Jones Newswires, September 23, 2003
"An Israeli committee of inquiry into the disappearance of at least 1,000 Argentine Jews during the country's "Dirty War" ruled Tuesday that there was insufficient evidence to ask for the extradition of former officers implicated in their torture and presumed murder. But the committee recommended a separate investigation into allegations by relatives of the missing men and women that the Israeli government made only halfhearted efforts to free imprisoned Argentine Jews in order to protect multi-million-dollar arms sales to the military dictatorship. Argentine government figures say at least 9,000 leftists and dissidents disappeared between 1976-83, when Argentina's military systematically cracked down on opponents, a period called the Dirty War. Argentine Jews at the committee's Jerusalem news conference Tuesday said about 1,000 of the victims were Jewish, around 12% of the total, although Jews make up less than 1% of Argentina's population. Israel's parliament in July passed a resolution calling for the extradition of Argentine officers who took part in or ordered the killing of Jews, and for Argentina to open mass graves of victims to enable Jewish remains to be reburied in Israel. The inquiry, which went on three years, endorsed the call for exhumation but found no legal basis for extradition ... The Israeli committee cited testimony by witnesses and experts that while representatives of the Jewish Agency in Argentina did their best to get Jews out of custody or to pre-empt their arrest by helping them emigrate, the government of Israel didn't make vigorous protests, wishing to preserve its lucrative arms sales to the military dictatorship. Israeli defense analyst Yossi Melman said that between 1976 and 1982, Israel sold Argentina Skyhawk warplanes, mortars and small arms for up to $100 million. Israeli government spokesmen refused to reply to the criticism."

Israel A Danger,
Charley Reese, September 24, 2003
"What country in the Middle East occupies the lands of other people? What country in the Middle East is in violation of more than 60 United Nations resolutions? What country in the Middle East openly practices a policy of assassinating its political opponents? What country in the Middle East routinely violates international law? What country in the Middle East possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities? The answer to all of the above is Israel. And here's one more question: What country in the world poses the greatest danger to the future of the United States? Same answer: Israel. OK, I know that sounds shocking. How could a little country the size of New Jersey pose any threat to the United States? Well, how could a little country drain more than $100 billion from the U.S. Treasury? How could a little country attack and try to sink a U.S. Navy ship in international waters and avoid any kind of congressional investigation? How can a little country openly brag to third parties that it controls the U.S. Congress? And partner, Israel does. In Queen Noor's recent book, she says that her husband was dismayed when Congress told Jordanians that they would definitely not be given the things promised to them in exchange for a peace treaty with Israel. Queen Noor said her husband called Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin and told him of the problem. "Don't worry about it," Rabin replied. "I'll take care of it." And he did. Now, let's be clear about this. Here you have the prime minister of one foreign country telling the king of another foreign country that he can get the U.S. Congress to reverse its position. And he did it. Too bad American governors don't have that kind of influence. And, as a quick aside, why do American taxpayers have to pay for Israel's peace treaties? There are many examples to cite, but let me refer you to a book, "They Dare to Speak Out," by former U.S. Rep. Paul Findley. The publisher is Lawrence Hill books. The problem and danger to the United States is that Israel effectively dictates U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel supporters were the architects of the war against Iraq, and if they can, they will get us into wars with Syria and Iran, thus eliminating Israel's enemies. They would like nothing better than for the United States to be at war with the entire Muslim world. As I write this, the United States has once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Israel not assassinate the elected leader of the Palestinians. Great God, how do you think that plays in the Arab world when we cannot bring ourselves to condemn what would be a war crime? It's no wonder the World Trade Center towers came down. It's no wonder American soldiers are ducks in an Iraqi shooting gallery. Israel is the source of terrorism in the Middle East, both that directed at it and that directed at us."

Immigrant Brigades a Financial Front,
by Tim Covi & Johannes Wahlstrom, International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC), September 24, 2003
"A former [Israeli] Immigrant Brigade participant on Thursday rebuked a series of claims about the Brigades that have surfaced in recent news reports. The reports claim that the Israeli army is using former Russian soldiers to buttress special security needs in the West Bank. According to Reuters, the Israeli army confirmed that Israel is employing ex-Russian sharpshooters to reinforce “weak points” in West Bank security control. Reuters reported that the Russian units, called the Immigrant Brigades, are being recruited to serve in semi-official security squads around Israeli settlements. An Israeli army spokesperson told Reuters that the recruits were informally absorbed into the Israeli army, acting primarily as snipers. " The military found their sharpshooter training -- and their dedication -- too good to ignore," another security source added. In contrast to these claims, a previous participant in the Brigades, Vadim, told IMEMC on Thursday that the organization is fraudulent and corrupt, lining the pockets of a Russian-Israeli entrepreneur. Vadim, who emigrated from Russia to Israel in 1995, worked in Israeli security from the time he arrived ... A short while into his involvement, Vadim had his suspicions regarding the background of the organization’s leader, a man who went by the name of Roma, and, according to Vadim, called himself the “Commander” of the Brigades. Roma claimed to be a special forces operative in the Russian army before immigrating to Israel. Vadim, who also worked in the army, told IMEMC that Roma was unable to answer the simplest questions about details that, according to him, any special forces operative would know. Looking into the background of the organization, it became apparent that it simply wasn’t what it claimed to be. As Vadim dug deeper, he found that the Immigrant Brigades was simply a family owned security business that Roma sought to profit by. Shortly after the organization started, Vadim said, Roma and his cadres went to the US to find supporters and came back with nearly $750,000. Vadim went on to describe the organization as defunct and ineffective, consisting of members who range from “patriots,” “blood thirsty” fanatics, and “entrepreneurs” ... Vadim, a former patriot who would begin parties by playing the Israeli national anthem, told IMEMC he has left the Brigades and thrown his cassette in the trash. “Real specialists wouldn’t stay involved in that project,” Vadim concluded."

[Zionists don't need to invade Patagonia. Take the American example: pro-Israel Judeocentrism that dominates American life is a consequence of Jewish stealth and power.]
Furor in Argentina over official’s allegations of Israeli invasion plan,
By Florencia Arbiser, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sept. 25, 2003
"As Argentine President Nestor Kirchner left this week for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he hoped to continue making progress on the investigation of the 1994 bombing of Buenos Aires’ main Jewish community center. That probe, he believed, would improve relations with the country’s Jewish community, which had long complained about the government’s slow and inept investigation of the AMIA attack, which killed 85 people. But Kirchner’s trip is being overshadowed by a scandal at home involving accusations of anti-Semitism. On Aug. 13, the head of the Argentine army, Roberto Bendini, was giving a class to second-year captains at the War School. Bendini allegedly said that “small Israeli groups” disguised as tourists were planning to invade Argentina’s southern Patagonia region. Almost a month later, on Sept. 12, the local newspaper Infobae published new information about the substance of that classroom lecture, unleashing a public debate that has resisted government efforts to resolve it. The journalistic director of Infobae, Jorge Grecco, told JTA that the newspaper story was based on such materials as student notes. The Jewish community’s DAIA political umbrella organization and the AMIA Jewish community center were furious and demanded explanations from the government. Radical and Peronist party senators also demanded that the government explain Bendini’s comments. Government officials met several times with Jewish representatives and created a special commission to investigate the reports, but many have expressed their support for Bendini ... The government told Jewish leaders it was making every effort to ascertain if Bendini indeed had talked of a supposed Israeli plot against Patagonia. If true, the remarks would be seen as a sign of anti-Semitism in Argentina, where fantastical allegations of a supposed Jewish or Israeli plot to attack Patagonia featured prominently in the arrests and interrogations of many Argentine Jews under the military dictatorships of the 1970s ... After an investigation that lasted less than two days, the commission said it had determined that Bendini had not made the remarks in question ... Another journalist, Horacio Verbitsky, said Bendini not only referred to Israeli groups interested in attacking Patagonia, but also accused ORT schools of backing the invasion. Kirchner, who plans to attend Rosh Hashanah services at Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, had hoped to dispel any suggestions of anti-Semitism before the Jewish new year began ... “If the head of the army makes anti-Semitic remarks, it’s a threat for democratic institutions, not only for Jews,” said one Buenos Aires Jewish man asked not to be identified. “Why does the head of the national Cabinet feel he has to satisfy the Jews, rather than Argentine society?”

[Israel is becoming so corrupt that -- unprecedented in history -- a few Jews are stepping out for the record to hint at the truth.]
The time for decisions on Israel has arrived for British Jews,
By Edward Kessler, The Independent (UK), September 27, 2003
"The Jewish New Year, Rosh ha-Shana, which began last night, is traditionally a time when Jews look back over the last year, reflect on our sins and resolve not to transgress again. The events of 5763, the year just ending, appear to demonstrate the victory of violence over dialogue in many parts of the world. We think not only of the violence in Israel and Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia and in parts of Europe. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, a strictly observant Jewish charismatic movement, taught that we see or experience evil so that we can learn of our own guilt and repent for what is shown to us is also within us. What should we learn from this evil? How should we respond to today's violence? ... Over the year now past it has become more and more evident that the decision to use military force sparingly has changed. Today in Israel military force and violence are being used aggressively as well as defensively, for conquest as well as for self-defence. The government of Israel has chosen the path of the gentile nations by building tanks, aircraft and bombs, and now fences and walls. Whilst there are many valid and justified reasons for relying on military prowess to survive, it seems unlikely that a small people can wage an ethical military effort and carry on a decent society at the same time. Not even the Soviet Union, a continental superstate, could shoulder this burden. It is not altogether clear that even the richest society in the history of the world, the United States, can for generations wage continuous war - even "a war against terror" - and remain or create a decent society at home. The chances that Israel can do so are very small. Pursued to its logical fulfilment, this reversion to the biblical path leads to a dead end. And I do mean a dead end. One of the Israeli leaders opposing Ariel Sharon's policy is Avraham Burg, who was Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. He has also acknowledged the dead end towards which Israel is moving. Burg has courageously called for a change of course. There is not much time, he warns. The time for decisions has arrived. "We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs." Burg calls on Diaspora Jews, for whom Israel is one pillar of their identity, to be bold and speak out. There is no better time than Rosh ha-Shana. As a friend of Israel I do not believe that Israel can do no wrong; rather, as a friend and admirer of Herzl's and Ben-Gurion's vision of Zionism I criticise it with care."

[Signs of a tiny bit of moral life in corrupt Hellhole Israel. These Jews who resist inhumane Israeli policy are obviously "antisemitic" bigots.]
Israel Grounds Pilots Who Refused Mission,
By KARIN LAUB, Yahoo! News (from Associated Press), Thu Sep 25, 2003
"Israel on Thursday temporarily grounded reserve air force pilots who — in an unprecedented protest — condemned airstrikes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "immoral" and refused to fly such sorties. The declaration by 27 pilots, including nine on active duty, was widely criticized in Israel as subversive at a time of war, but it also revived a flagging debate on the ethics of Israel's three-year war on Palestinian militants. The protest struck a nerve because many Israelis believe their military has higher moral standards than that of their neighbors, and that other countries would have been much more ruthless. The military is also seen as an institution that binds the fractious nation; Israelis get jittery at signs of cracks in the ranks. The air force in particular is considered key to Israel's survival, and pilots are held in the highest regard. Critics also say such talk gives ammunition to Israel's enemies. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the rebel pilots would be dealt with swiftly. "Everyone can express his opinion, but it is unacceptable that a group of people in the military would interfere in a subject that does not apply to them," he told Israel TV. The air force quickly tried to contain the damage. Commander Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz said the nine active pilots, grounded for now, could face suspension and perhaps military jail if they don't retract. He said the rebels are a tiny minority among thousands of pilots. Hundreds of pilots began circulating declarations Thursday that expressed support for their commanders."

Israel: The Alternative,
By Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, Volume 50, Number 16, October 23, 2003
"The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done? At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home. But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge. The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism ... As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic. This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith. It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting? On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record, that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same. Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? ... For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit .... The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews ... The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews. In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp. To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect."

See also: Israel and Zionism, pt. 7

Also, long text: Israel