[OK, folks. More Jewish Israeli "democracy" and its implicit satire of American-style "separation of Church and State" government which American Jewish Money and Complaint is central in maintaining. Transpose this Israeli religious authoritarianism to America: The American government hereby declares that anyone who hires a Christian to work on Sunday faces a fine.]
Companies to face fines for employing Jews on Sabbath,
By Ruth Sinai, Haaretz (Israel), January 5, 2004
"Trade and Industry Minister Ehud Olmert has decided that his ministry will soon started levying fines on businesses that employ Jews on the Sabbath. Olmert said Wednesday that in light of a recent legal opinion, he has realized that there is little choice but to reimpose fines. The ministry employs four Druze inspectors who visit businesses on the Sabbath. The inspectors send their reports to the legal department, which dispatches the fines. When he first took up his position, Olmert acquiesced to a request by Justice Minister Yosef Lapid not to issue any more fines, though the inspectors continued in their work. Then-attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, however, said the fines must be imposed since the political level is not allowed to order someone to evade the law. The ministry is however looking into amending the law to cut the fine from NIS 5,000 to NIS 500 per Jewish worker."

State mulls steps to muzzle Vanunu,
By Gideon Alon, Haaretz (Israel), February 10, 2004
"The defense establishment is considering ordering the administrative detention of Mordechai Vanunu, convicted of nuclear espionage, when he is released from prison in two months. Discussions on the matter were held yesterday by the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud) with and MK Ehud Yatom (Likud), Yehiel Haruv, head of security in the Defense Ministry, and representatives of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the attorney general's office. In the discussions, held behind closed doors, defense officials listed a a number of measures they were considering against Vanunu to prevent him from leaking secrets on the nuclear reactor in Dimona when he is released from prison. Vanunu served 18 years in prison after releasing information on Israel's nuclear status in an interview with The Sunday Times of London. Other steps under consideration include prohibiting Vanunu from leaving the country, confiscating his passport, cutting off his phone and Internet access, and keeping him under surveillance. These steps are similar to those taken when Marcus Klingberg, also convicted of espionage, was released from prison. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz will be asked to examine the legal aspects of steps to be taken, so as not to contravene the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom. MKs Steinitz and and Yatom expressed concern that Vanunu might expose significant secrets that could endanger the state, and supported the defense establishment's intention to limit his freedom."

[Pardon us for being skeptical, but "cancer? " What more sordid atrocities hath the Usual Immoral Monster wrought, under tight security? An innovative poison factory, using locals as guinea pigs?]
Israeli team on secret Mauritania visit,
Interest! Alert (from UPI), February 10, 2004
"A 20-member Israeli team reportedly is setting up a cancer treatment center in secret amid tight security in Mauritania. The weekly al-Marsad magazine, which is close to Muslim fundamentalist circles in the country, said "most members of the Zionist (Israeli) team are of Russian origin and their visit is an example of Israeli infiltration of Mauritania." The magazine quoted health ministry sources as saying the Israeli team, comprising technicians and medical specialists, will spend 45 days in Mauritania to set up the equipment of a new cancer treatment center in the capital Nouakchott. It said the team is closely guarded by special security units. Mauritania, a member of the 22-nation Arab League, normalized relations with Israel in 1996 by opening trade representation offices. In 2000 full diplomatic relations were established, but the Mauritanian people are resisting normalization."

Israel Hems In a Sacred City. Encircling of Jerusalem Complicates Prospects for Peace,
By John Ward Anderson,Washington Post, February 10, 2004; Page A01
"Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats. The status of Jerusalem -- a city sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians -- is one of the most divisive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides claim Jerusalem as their religious and political capital, but most countries do not officially recognize it as such, and the United States and others keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. Under past Israeli-Palestinian accords, neither side is supposed to take any action to change the city's status, which is to be resolved through negotiation. Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say. The web of projects includes 13 settlements to the north of the city that are being linked with each other and with Jerusalem by access roads that act as physical barriers to Palestinian communities. To the east, Israel has approved expansion of the West Bank's largest settlement, Maleh Adumim, to absorb a swath of Palestinian land between the community and East Jerusalem. To the south, access and bypass roads and Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian lands into a checkerboard. At the same time, a new barrier combining trenches, walls, electronic sensors and steel fences is being built around Jerusalem. The project, part of a large fence that is designed to cordon off the West Bank, has split some Palestinian neighborhoods and separated many Palestinians from their schools, jobs, families and lands. Israeli officials say that several of the measures are designed to deter the movement of Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank into Israel and that others are aimed at increasing the proportion of Jews in Jerusalem. Palestinians describe the measures as an attempt to break their religious, economic, political and cultural ties to the city and preempt negotiations over its final status."

[Literally, it's the scamsters's old shell game. Which nut is the Jewish racist under? Watch the sleeves closely ... ]
Israel Considers Moving Gaza Settlers to West Bank,
by Jeffrey Heller, Yahoo! News (from Reuters), February 11, 2004
"Israel may move Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new plan to evacuate Gaza settlements, officials said on Friday. "It is one of the options being considered," an official in Sharon's office told Reuters. Other officials have said the government is also considering moving Gaza settlers back into Israel and paying them compensation. Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned any relocation of Gaza settlers to the West Bank, demanding the removal of all settlements from the occupied territories ... Sharon's shock announcement on Monday that he planned to give up almost all Gaza settlements appeared already to have paid him political dividends, with his poll rating rising this week, as he confronts a bribery scandal that could unseat him. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that in a visit to Washington expected later this month or in March, Sharon would seek U.S. approval to expand West Bank settlement blocs that Israel might annex in a future peace deal with the Palestinians. It said the prime minister -- a longtime champion of settlement building on occupied land -- would justify the request by explaining that West Bank enclaves would have to be expanded to accommodate some of the 7,500 Gaza settlers."

[At first we thought this was an article about Ariel Sharon.]
Israeli rabbi urges pig fat use to stop bombers,
eir.com (from:Reuters), February 12, 2004
"A prominent Israeli rabbi has proposed hanging bags of pig fat in buses to deter Muslim suicide bombers who may want to avoid contact with an "unclean" animal, an Israeli official says. The idea -- suggested by Rabbi Eliezer Fisher, a rabbinical judge, in a letter to police -- signalled the extremes to which some Israelis may be willing to go to stop Palestinian bombers who have killed hundreds of Israelis in recent years. Judaism, like Islam, considers pigs unclean. But the ultra-Orthodox rabbi has ruled that special dispensation can be given for placing bags of lard in buses and public places in an effort to prevent attacks. Police had no immediate comment on the proposal. Asked about the deterrent capability of pig fat on Israeli buses, Palestinian sources called it an exercise in futility. Islamic militants are told by those who send them on bombing missions that their souls enter Paradise instantly after they explode despite any contamination or defilement of their bodies."

[More Jews today head for Germany than Israel. Now why would this be? Because the Palestinians around Israel have risen up in violence against their violent Jewish oppressors. But in Germany no one can look at a Jew cross-eyed without going to jail for it. Jewish hustling in Germany -- guilt-tripped into total submission by the Jewish Lobby -- has an open field.]
More Jews move to Germany than to Israel,
Washington Times, Feb. 12, 2004
"A recently released German study shows more Eastern Europeans of Jewish descent immigrated to Germany than to Israel in 2002. The study, performed by the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam, found 19,200 Jews left Eastern Europe for Germany in 2002, compared with 18,000 who moved to Israel. "The difficult Hebrew language, the climate and certain conflicts in the near East deter many (Eastern European Jews) from emigrating to Israel," Julius Schoeps, the center's head, told the German Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The Jewish community in Berlin, whose official membership has doubled since the fall of the Soviet Union to 13,000, is made up of about 80 percent Eastern European emigrants. Schoeps, who is also vice president of the official Berlin Jewish community, said those figures do not take into account many new Jewish immigrants who are not included in official numbers. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Germany has had extremely liberal immigration laws for Jews from former communist nations."

Thomas Moorer, Ex-Joint Chiefs Chair Dies,
Las Vegas Sun, February 5, 2004
"Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, a Pearl Harbor veteran who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, died Thursday. He was 91 ... He joined one of the early generations of naval aviators, flying fighters off of the first American carriers, according to an official Navy biography. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. The following February, he was flying a PBY patrol plane over the water north of Darwin, Australia, when he was attacked by Japanese aircraft. He and his co-pilot landed the plane in the water and were rescued by a ship. That ship was attacked and sunk later that day. He received a Silver Star for gallantry throughout the ordeal and a Purple Heart for his wounds. He also received a Distinguished Flying Cross for a patrol mission later that year. After the war, he rose through the ranks. President Johnson selected him to be chief of naval operations, the service's top officer, in 1967. He was reappointed by President Nixon in 1969. Nixon also nominated him to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the following year. During the next few years, he supervised the U.S. troop withdrawal from South Vietnam. After he retired, Moorer appeared frequently in the news media to comment on various issues. In 1998, CNN cited him as confirming the American use of sarin, a nerve agent, in a mission to hunt down U.S. defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. But he soon said he had simply heard of unconfirmed stories about it and had no independent knowledge. The network later retracted the story and reached a settlement with Moorer. He also accused Israel of deliberately attacking the USS Liberty, an American spy ship monitoring the 1967 Six Day War. Israel said it was an error."

Benny Morris’ Second Thoughts About Israel: Three Quibbles And A Question,
By Paul Gottfried, VDare, February 4, 2004
"An interview in Ha’aretz (January 5) with Benny Morris, dean of Israel’s “new historians,” has unsettled the Israeli and European Left. Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987) argued that in 1948 between 600 and 750 thousand Palestinians were expelled from their homes, while others were massacred, as part of an Israeli policy of encouraging Arabs to leave. But now this controversial historian has had second thoughts about these actions. When asked by his interviewer Ari Shavit whether Israel’s founder and first premier David Ben Gurion was a “transferist,” Morris replied: “Of course Ben Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.” Moreover, Morris went on, “Ben Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not come into being.” [Survival of the fittest, By Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz January 09, 2004]. Insisting that he is a Zionist rather than a post-Zionist, Morris declares that he does not regret the expulsion of his declared enemies: “When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.” What makes these remarks noteworthy is that Morris has been a fixture of the Israeli Left through most of his life. From his youth in an Israeli socialist kibbutz, whither his parents had come from England, through his refusal in 1988 as an Israeli soldier to serve in the occupied West Bank, down to his career in exposing Israeli ethnic cleansing, Morris has enjoyed popularity among Israeli peaceniks while being anathema to the Jewish nationalist Right. His interview with Ha’aretz and his publicized defense of Sharon’s Security Wall, intended to separate West Bank Palestinians from Israelis, as being necessary for “a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another,” have altered his image profoundly. Morris continues to call himself a leftwing Zionist. But he has begun to find support among Likud supporters both here and in Israel. In the last week, several pro-Israeli hardliners (including my younger son) have recommended to me the interview in Ha’aretz. These acquaintances praise Morris for understanding the geopolitical necessity for what happened to the Palestinians in 1948. His former critics now admire Morris for letting it be known that ”from my point of view the need to establish this [Jewish] state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.” And when asked whether he had any “problem with that deed,” Morris answers that he has none and points out: “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” One can of course dismiss such appeals to the “final good” as self-interested pleading by the victor, who thinks it a good thing that the other side should lose. But Morris’s assertions also represent a moral improvement over other cases that have been made for Israel. Morris confronts the historical truth: lots and lots of Palestinians were deliberately expelled as a vast ethnic cleansing that preceded the creation of an Israeli state. Those expulsions and in some cases organized terror were instruments by which a transfer of population was effected, one that allowed a Jewish polity and a Jewish country to come into being ... If Israel is entitled pull out every stop to preserve its Jewish national character, why shouldn’t others be allowed to do the same to protect their group identity? Why should Frenchmen who want to send their Islamicist population back to North Africa be attacked as “fascists?” Unlike the Israeli leaders that Morris defends, these French nationalists do not call for ethnic cleansing. They would be quite happy to be able to control future immigration."

[Jewish Neurosis linked to Jewish Power is dangerous to everyone. Jewish American support for the religious fascists of Hellhole Israel, as we see below by this Jewish author, is a threat to all humankind.]
Pursuing the Millennium. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel,
by David Hirst, The Nation, February 2, 2004
"This essay is excerpted from David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch, recently re-released by Nation Books. In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble. There is, in fact, a great ignorance of, or indifference to, this whole subject in the outside world, and not least in the United States. This is due at least in part to that general reluctance of the mainstream American media to subject Israel to the same searching scrutiny to which it would other states and societies, and especially when the issue in question is as sensitive, as emotionally charged, as this one is. But, in the view of the late Israel Shahak, it reflects particularly badly on an American Jewry which, with its ingrained, institutionalized aversion to finding fault with Israel, turns a blind eye to what Israelis like himself viewed with disgust and alarm, and unceasingly said so. American Jews, especially Orthodox ones, are generous financiers of the shock troops of fundamentalism, the religious settlers; indeed a good 10 percent of these, and among the most extreme, violent and sometimes patently deranged, are actually immigrants from America. They are, says Shahak, one of the "absolutely worst phenomena" in Israeli society, and "it is not by chance that they have their roots in the American-Jewish community." It was from his headquarters in New York that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Menachem Schneerson, seer of possibly the most rabid of Hasidic sects, the Chabad, gave guidance to his many followers in both Israel and the United States. The ignorance or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish fundamentalism is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question. Israel was always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly outsized military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a combination which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most extreme, theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only, Israeli-supporting superpower. Like its Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century. Its committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body of the more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some 20 to 25 percent of the population. They, and more particularly the settlers among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to their numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and especially in relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which, beneath its secular exterior, actually shares much of their febrile, exalted outlook on the world. It is fundamentalism of a very special, ethnocentric and fiercely xenophobic kind, with beliefs and practices that are "even more extremist," says Shahak, "than those attributed to the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the most totalitarian system ever invented." Like fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel celebrated by the American "friends of Israel" as a "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" would, most assuredly, be no more. For, in its full and perfect form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its place would elevate a stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any new-fangled, heathen concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties or human rights. It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish religious law, of which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and whose observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of citizens legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities. A monarch, chosen by the rabbis, would rule and the Knesset would be replaced by a Sanhedrin, or supreme judicial, ecclesiastic and administrative council. Men and women would be segregated in public, and "modesty" in female dress and conduct would be enforced by law. Adultery would be a capital offense, and anyone who drove on the Sabbath, or desecrated it in other ways, would be liable to death by stoning. As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of systematic discrimination against them, in which every possible crime or sin committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or adultery to robbery or fraud, would be far more heavily punished than the same crime or sin committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if, indeed, the latter were considered to be a felony at all, which it often would not be. All forms of "idolatry or idol-worship," but especially Christian ones (for traditionally Muslims, who are not considered to be idolaters, are held in less contempt than Christians), would be "obliterated," in the words of Shas party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yossef. According to conditions laid down by Maimonides, whose Halacha rulings are holy writ to the fundamentalists, those Gentiles, or so-called "Sons of Noah," permitted to remain in the Kingdom could only do so as "resident aliens," obliged under law to accept the "inferiority" in perpetuity which that status entails, to "suffer the humiliation of servitude," and to be "kept down and not raise their heads to the Jews." At weekday prayers, the faithful would intone the special curse: "And may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish instantly." One wonders what the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons think of all this; for it is strange, this new adoration by America's evangelicals of an Israel whose Jewish fundamentalists continue to harbor a doctrinal contempt for Christianity only rivaled by the contempt which the Christian fundamentalists reserve for the Jews themselves ... The mainstream secular Zionist leadership had wanted the Jewish people to achieve "normality," to be as other peoples with a nation-state of their own. The messianics--and indeed, though for emotional more than doctrinal reasons, much of the nationalist right--hold that that is impossible; the Jews' "eternal uniqueness" stems from the covenant God made with them on Mount Sinai. So, as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a Gush [Emunim]leader and head of a yeshiva that studies the ancient priestly rites that would be revived if and when the Temple were rebuilt, put it, "while God requires other, normal nations to abide by abstract codes of 'justice and righteousness,' such laws do not apply to Jews." Since Zionism began, but especially since the 1967 war and Israel's conquest of the remainder of historic Palestine, the Jews have been living in a "transcendental political reality," or a state of "metaphysical transformation," one in which, through war and conquest, Israel liberates itself not only from its physical enemies, but from the "satanic" power which these enemies incarnate. The command to conquer the Land, says Aviner, is "above the moral, human considerations about the national rights of the Gentiles in our country." What he calls "messianic realism" dictates that Israel has been instructed to "be holy, not moral, and the general principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them."

[The wall that codifies by concrete and barbed wire the "chosen" Jewish world Ghetto. It is fulfillment of Jewish xenophobic will throughout history. It is the great wall of "Mordar," to protect abject Evil from the gaze of the rest of the world.]
Hitting the wall,
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz (Israel), February 4, 2004
"Along the route of the mighty `Jerusalem envelope,' just before its completion. Before long, the gate will be locked. This one, too. One giant slab will be connected to another, like Lego blocks, and the concrete will close off everything. Here there is no debate: This is a wall - not a separation fence. A wall. A mighty structure, twice as high as its historic sister, the Berlin Wall. Why this height - over eight meters? Is it due to the contractors' megalomania? An insatiable desire to humiliate? To put them in their place, like tiny insects before this colossal wall? To remove them from our sight and thus realize the ultimate Israeli dream of "separation"? To believe that if we don't see them anymore, hidden behind the wall, they'll cease to exist? A wall in the middle of the town, cutting Abu Dis in two. No one asks why - why here of all places, right in the middle of the town; and why at such an inhuman height? No one is interested, no one bothers to explain. The "Jerusalem envelope." Another pleasant, soothing name for another horror of the occupation. Before long, the gate will be locked, after the last of the Palestinian laborers finishes installing the bars of their cage. Us here and them there - and we're also there, of course: quarrying, uprooting, demolishing, paving, digging, pouring concrete, raising, straightening, tightening, connecting, protecting - until we have a wall, an apartheid wall. Perhaps the day will come when this wall will be sold in little pieces in souvenir shops in Jerusalem's Old City, in the Jenin refugee camp and in the casbah of Nablus. This week, that day seemed very far off. In the meantime, the golden Dome of the Rock glints in the sun, overlooking the activity; soon it, too, will be hidden from the eyes of the residents of Abu Dis, who have been so accustomed to seeing it. Jerusalem's beauty is becoming ever more obscured. A Palestinian driver shifts a crane with huge, tank-like treads into reverse, slowly lifting the concrete slabs, gradually caging in his own people. Slab after slab is lifted up and placed on the scarred ground to build the wall. Another bar in the cage and then another, 24 hours a day, working as quickly as possible, around the clock. Have to finish it all before the hearing in The Hague. Dense, gray, smooth concrete - the great victory over terror. Separation between Palestinians and Palestinians, the "good" from the "bad" - though no one can say just why these are good and those are not, just what the criteria are. What did the free ones do to deserve their freedom and what sin did their caged-in brethren commit to deserve their fate? Separation between a farmer and his field, between a teacher and his students, between a patient and his doctor, between brother and brother. Neighborhoods will be torn apart, families will be divided - and they're all part of the same village, Abu Dis. Meter after meter, the wall wends its way up the mountain and down into the valley. What began with the "conquest of work" and the "stockade and tower" is turning into the conquest of a people and a stockade without a tower. But not to worry: The towers will sprout up here, too, right after the first terror attack on the wall. And after them will come the smuggling tunnels, like in Rafah and Sarajevo, like in every place that is bisected by a wall. And that will be followed by the razing of homes and the leveling of trees and, of course, by blood. Blood is always spilled on concrete walls that provoke and imprison. The houses right next to the wall, that practically abut the wall, won't last long. Once their occupants have had all they can take of the Border Police in the yard and soldiers at the gate, the houses will "be abandoned" and then suddenly be considered "abandoned property" that we can do with as we please. "This morning, the Israel Defense Forces demolished another row of abandoned buildings in Abu Dis," the laconic news report will say, just like the almost-daily reports we hear from the forgotten killing fields in Rafah ... The Promised Land is being dressed in concrete, huddling behind thick concrete walls like Ze'ev Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall." Imprisoning a people behind them, scarring the land and its inhabitants, building a bad fence that will create even worse neighbors, built almost entirely on land that is not ours. A column of olive trees alongside the route awaits the day when it will be uprooted from this land. Their time is past. Another few days and they will have to be cut down. A cold wind whips through them, rustling the leaves in their final days. They have been here for decades. Maybe they'll be uprooted on Tu Bishvat? Maybe they'll bring groups of schoolchildren dressed in blue and white, and show them how to cut down olive trees, just like we once used to go out and excitedly plant trees on this holiday, the Jewish Arbor Day. Abu Dis residents quickly cross over the ditch where the concrete slabs will soon be placed, as if to get the most they can out of the last days in which they'll be able to freely traverse their town. The last moments of freedom, before the gate is locked. No prayers will be able to reach over this high wall, this wall of fear and hate. The day will come when these residents will tell their children about the time when this monstrosity wasn't here and they could move freely wherever they wanted to in the town, and the children will find it hard to believe. What - Abu Dis without a wall? Being able to go straight from home to school? There has never been anything like this - this Maginot Line in Abu Dis, this Berlin Wall of united Jerusalem. First we'll take Abu Dis and then Al-Ram, the security envelope's next stop. How many Israelis have seen it? And how many will see it? How many understand what we are doing here to a people that we have been suffocating - there is no other word for it - for 37 years now, by adding this wall on top of everything else? This is where Israeli schoolchildren should be brought on their class trips - so they will see."

An Alliance of Insecurity,
by Amitabh Pal, AlterNet, February 11, 2004
"When Ariel Sharon traveled to India last September, it was the first visit of an Israeli Prime Minister since the two nations achieved independence more than 55 years ago. Although his plans to commemorate Sept. 11 on Indian soil were cut short by suicide bombings back home, the trip indicated the burgeoning love affair between the two countries. In recent years, the two nations have been sharing intelligence and cooperating over military affairs at an unprecedented level. India's second-largest arms supplier is Israel, which provided between an estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion worth of military hardware to India in 2002. India is Israel's best customer, representing roughly half of its total sales in 2002. So it is no coincidence that ten out of thirty members of Sharon's delegation to India were executives of Israeli defense corporations. In addition, Israel has provided extensive counterterrorism training to the Indian military in the recent past. The Jerusalem Post reports that nearly 3,000 Indian soldiers were sent to Israel for training last year. A big reason for the new-found intimacy is the Indian government's desire to solidify its friendship with the United States. Indian officials have been bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the pro-Israel lobby in Washington in order to work Congress and to gain access to the neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration's foreign policy. India's National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra first announced Sharon's visit in May at the annual dinner of the powerful American Jewish Committee. In words designed to please his hosts, Mishra extolled the "common vision of pluralism, tolerance and equal opportunity" shared by India, Israel and the United States. His speech also clearly delineated the shifting alliances created by the war of terror. The three countries, he declared, "have to jointly face the same ugly face of modern-day terrorism" and that "such an alliance would have the political will and moral authority to take bold decisions in extreme cases of terrorist provocation." The speech must have undoubtedly been effective since the committee now plans to set up a liaison office in New Delhi. They're not alone. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) organized a conference bringing together security experts from the United States, India and Israel, in New Delhi last year, and is set to do another such conference this month in Israel. A group of neoconservatives, drawn from rightwing pro-Likudnik outfits such as the Center for Security Policy and JINSA, are setting up a think-tank to bring India and the United States closer. According to foreign policy analyst Conn Hallinan, the move to create the U.S. -India Institute for Strategic Policy has the support of Bush administration officials like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Last July, the U.S.-India Political Action Committee, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee organized a reception on Capitol Hill together. "The Indian community is learning very well from its colleagues within the Jewish community how to penetrate ... through the solid wall of the political processes here," Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY) told the Gannett News Service. "On the Jewish side of the equation, right now, Israel could use a billion new friends." The courtship of Tel Aviv has already begun to yield tangible benefits. Last July, Israel and India joined together to successfully lobby the House to require the Bush administration to regularly report to Congress on Pakistan's moves to halt cross-border infiltration of militants and stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They also worked together to persuade Washington to lift its objections to Israel's plans to sell India an early-warning airborne radar system. The clout on foreign policy is also translating into a greater willingness to influence U.S. domestic politics. Indian-American groups campaigned alongside Jewish-American organizations to defeat Rep. Cynthia McKinney in 2002 due to her supposedly pro-Pakistan and anti-Israel positions. The U.S. government has publicly given its blessings to the India/Israel alliance."

Elbit Systems’ El-Op unit wins $63m contract. The contract, for thermal sight systems, is in addition to the $53 million night-vision systems contract won by El-Op in December,
Globes (Israeli Business Arena), January 25, 2004
"Elbit Systems announced today that its wholly owned subsidiary, Elop Electro-Optics Industries (El-Op), had received a new order for ground Thermal Sight Systems, valued at $63 million. The customer was not named. Elbit said that the equipment was due to be supplied over a period of 24 months. This new contract is in addition to the previously received orders for night vision equipment valued at over $53 million announced by Elbit Systems in December. Elbit Systems president and CEO Joseph Ackermansaid, "These recent orders demonstrate our leading role in the growing market of advanced electro-optical systems for defense and homeland security. They reflect Elbit Systems' in-house vertical integration capabilities and the company's extensive experience in developing advanced solutions for Israel Defense Forces and other customers worldwide." El-Op’s products include night vision products for sighting and observation, laser products for range finding and target designation, airborne displays, stabilized payloads, airborne and space cameras, sights for Armored Fighting Vehicles, electro-optical countermeasures, and products for the homeland security market."

Elbit Systems unit wins $32.6m contract from US Air Force,
EFW will supply systems that interface between pilot entry and cockpit displays in F-16 aircraft,
Globes (Israeli Business Arena), February 10, 2004
"Elbit Systems [an Israeli company] announced today that its wholly owned subsidiary EFW Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas, had been awarded a $32.6 million firm fixed price contract by the USAir Force’s (USAF) Ogden Air Logistics Center to provide Common Data Entry Electronics Units (CDEEU). CDEUU acts as an interface between pilot entry and cockpits displays. The company said that a total of 694 would be procured in support of USAF requirements, and approximately another 609 in support of Foreign Military Sales requirements ... The Elbit Systems Group continues to expand its operations in the US.EFW has over1000 employees operating in six states, delivering annual revenues in excess of $300 million.”

Elbit Systems wins orders worth $10m for surveillance system,
by Yuvel Mendelson, Globes (Israel's Business Arena), Febuary 4, 2004
"Elbit Systems’ string of new contract announcements is continuing. The [Israeli] company, which announced in recent weeks contracts amounting to $146 million, today announced it had won over $10 million in contracts to supply its new CoMPASS surveillance systems to European and Asian countries. The surveillance systems, developed by Elbit Systems subsidiary El-Op Electro-Optics Industries, provide advanced solutions for fixed and rotary wing aircraft, marine patrol boats, unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs), and ground vehicles."

Seamier and seamier, this seam-line,
By Lily Galili, Haaretz (Israel), February 13, 2004
"Just to sleep in their own beds, some 6,000 Palestinian residents of the seam-line expanse require permits. And visitors cannot enter, businesses are folding, farmland has dried up and houses are being demolished. With a bit of positive thinking, it's possible to see the patterns of life that have been forced upon the Palestinians within the so-called expanse of the seam line as a kind of compliment. If the prolonged occupation has mainly necessitated a talent for survival, then the "regime of permits" - as the new procedures in the area were defined by the High Court of Justice this week (in reference to the petition of the HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel) - could be considered an expression of admiration for the Palestinians' intelligence. Your average Israeli, who collapses under the burden of filling out an income tax form, would not survive for a single day in the thicket of permits, 11 in total, that Palestinians need in order to exist in this area. The prevailing assumption among the Palestinians is that the purpose of making life in the area impossible is to bring about pressure for voluntary transfer, to enable the annexation to Israel of territories close to the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border). It's an interesting term, "the seam-line expanse." The word "expanse" suggests some sort of openness; "seam line" could be perceived as an interesting connection between two experiences. In fact, these are people who are imprisoned in an area located between the Green Line and the separation fence. Trapped in this area are more than 6,000 Palestinians, who are in fact living in a closed military zone, under what is called in military language "The Declaration of Closing of Territory No. 2/03 C. (Seam-Line Expanse) - 2003." Luck did not smile on the village of Jabara south of Tul Karm: It is located within the seam-line expanse. According to initial plans, the route of the fence was supposed to pass to the west of the village and leave it in the West Bank. However, according to the change that was subsequently made, apparently in order to include the Jewish settlement of Sla'it to the south of Jabara on the Israeli side of the fence, the route was moved eastward and thus Jabara and Sla'it are living unhappily ever after in the seam-line expanse ... This is the existential situation of the 300 inhabitants of Jabara, an especially lovely village in a pastoral area not far from the Green Line. But everything that was once a geographical advantage has now become a geopolitical obstacle ... In effect, this is a large prison in which life has become intolerable. At first, the inhabitants refused, via a hopeless civil revolt, to apply for the permits that have been imposed on them. For an entire month the village was closed: No one went out and no one came in. Then they surrendered and obtained the permits, but life has not improved much. The following is a list of the permits that the inhabitants in the seam-line expanse need in order to conduct their everyday lives. The most important permit allows a person to sojourn and to sleep, and is not issued to residents as a matter of course. There are those who receive such a permit for one year, and those to whom this permit - enabling them to live in their own houses - is issued for three or six months, and who must renew it when it expires ... Life, after all, is not a one-way street and naturally it creates situations in which it is necessary for some other person - a relative, a tradesman, a doctor or other person with a reason - to visit someone living in the seam-line expanse. For this purpose, 11 different kinds of permits have been defined that must be requested by persons wishing to enter the area: a permit for a proprietor of a business inside the expanse; a permit for a merchant; a permit for a person who is employed in that area; a permit for a farmer there; a permit for a teacher; a permit for a student; a permit for an employee of the Palestinian Authority; a permit for a visitor to the area; a permit for a worker for an international organization; a permit for an employee of a local authority; and a permit for a member of a medical team. One entrance Are you exhausted just from reading about the thicket of permits? This is what is required of everyone who needs permission for themselves and their vehicle to enter the seam-line expanse. Thus it happens that all these people elect simply not to get involved and to give up entering the area, while its inhabitants remain isolated and cut off. In its deliberations on the seam-line expanse, the High Court of Justice recognized that the plethora of permits for entry, sojourning and working "makes the fabric of life very difficult" for the population of the area. However, this recognition is barely an understatement for the reality that has developed in Jabara. With the blocking of the other entries, the village has only one opening, via the Kafriyat roadblock. Even the soldiers there admitted this week that of all the roadblocks, this one is perhaps the most insane."

[The Ultimate Scam -- truly worthy of the Chosen People. Hey. For half the price, send your prayers to us and we'll hand-deliver them to Santa Claus.]
Israel offers Jews e-mail to God service,
CTV (Canada - from Associated Press), February 16, 2004
"God's got mail. Jews who want to send notes to heaven used to have to travel to Jerusalem and stuff them into the crevices of the Western Wall. Now, they can log onto the Internet and send them by e-mail. The service, announced Monday by Israel's Bezeq telephone company, expands on the company's existing fax service to the Wall, which receives about 200 notes a week and more on holidays. Since more people have access to the Internet than fax machines, Bezeq hopes the e-mail service will bring many more notes. Tradition holds that God will grant the pleas placed between the massive stones of the Wall, a retaining wall that surrounded the Jewish Temple. Bezeq currently takes the faxed notes, puts them in special envelopes and twice a week brings them to the Wall. Most of the notes come from New York and Europe, but the company says it has received notes in Japanese and even one that came with a letter saying it had been smuggled out of Iran, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel. While the company promises it does not read God's mail, workers who put the notes in the wall say they recognize people who use the service on a regular basis, including some who send the same request every month."

[More Jewish 'ethnic cleansing:']
'Hebron's H-2 area is being cleansed of Palestinians',
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz (Israel), Febraury 16, 2004
"The activity of the settlers and the army in the H-2 area of Hebron is creating an irreversible situation. In a sense, cleansing is being carried out. In other words, if the situation continues for another few years, the result will be that no Palestinians will remain there. It is a miracle they have managed to remain there until now." This view of the situation in the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron comes from Jan Kristensen, the former head of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), who completed his one-year term of office last week. Kristensen, 58, is a former lieutenant colonel in the Norwegian army and has also held various positions in UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon). H-2, the 4.3 square kilometers of Hebron assigned to Israeli control by the Hebron Agreement, contains all of the city's Jewish settlers. When the intifada began, it had 35,000 Palestinian residents. Kristensen had no exact figures for how many Palestinians have since left but he said, "more and more people are leaving the area and it is effectively being emptied. The settlers' activities, which are aimed at causing the Palestinians to leave, and the army's activities, which impose severe restrictions, create an irreversible reality. Anyone whose economic situation permits him to do so, leaves. "There are roadblocks in the area all the time. Once there were more than 100 days of continuous curfew, with only brief interruptions. The markets are closed, the roads are closed, and if you're a Palestinian who does not appear on the lists, you can't enter. The settlers go out almost every night and attack those who live near them. They break windows, cause damage and effectively force the Palestinians to leave the area. "I don't see how this situation can change, and I see no possibility that the IDF will once again open the area and enable the Palestinians in it to lead normal lives. Personally, I don't believe it is possible for normal life to exist in Hebron between the communities, even if there are agreements between the leaders." TIPH, originally established after Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994, is comprised of volunteer observers from six countries - Norway, which runs the operation, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland. Its annual budget is about $2 million, not including the observers' salaries, which are paid directly by their governments. The 71 unarmed observers patrol the city under an agreement between Israel, the Palestinians and the other six nations concerned - the UN is not involved. Almost no one in Hebron - not Israelis, Palestinians nor international agencies - believe TIPH has done much good, yet inertia has caused its mandate to be renewed every three months. For its European sponsors, its main value lies in creating a precedent for international observers in the territories. It was fear of such a precedent that made Israel insist that neither the UN nor any other international agency be involved."

[The foundation of Israel is fraud and lying.]
$20-million approved for Jewish settlements,
Globe and Mail, February 17, 2004
"A parliamentary committee has approved more than $20-million in new funding for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent calls to evacuate parts of these areas. The decision Monday by the Finance Committee outraged the Palestinians as well as opposition legislators. It also threatened to complicate a visit this week by senior U.S. diplomats, who are to arrive to discuss peace efforts with Mr. Sharon.

Interview: Wendy Pearlman, author of 'Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada',
by Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2004
""It's almost a shame that this book has to be written, to [have to] try to say, 'Palestinians are decent human beings and are not all terrorists and hate mongers,'" Wendy Pearlman tells me over tea and hot cocoa during a cold, snowy winter day in Chicago. I know where Pearlman's coming from, the endemic frustration experienced by the Palestinian sympathizer who has to expend so much energy explaining to other Americans that Palestinians are indeed regular people who have cares and concerns just like anyone else -- except they have the extraordinary burdens of dispossession and living under foreign military rule. Pearlman, author of the book Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada, interviewed over two dozen Palestinian civilians residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to give readers a better sense of what life is really like for those living under Israeli military occupation, and the humanity that, as she explains it, "gets filtered out when the headlines are just about how many people have died." Photographic portraits by Finnish photographer Laura Junka accompany the individual stories of each interviewee. Everyday people Indeed, the interviews reveal the details of peoples' lives and the nuances of individual personalities that can't fit in a 600-word Associated Press report. Take the fiery Suzanne, a reporter from Jenin (not to be confused with her twin Jehan, as Pearlman often did while friends with the two at Bir Zeit University). In her interview with Pearlman, Suzanne explains that after the Israelis set up barriers blocking the road to her school, the only way to get to class "was by passing underneath this tunnel. So every day we got down on our hands and knees and crawled through. It was humiliating. Can you imagine? You and you teacher and your classmates -- everyone who has to get to school -- crouching on their knees ... What more can I tell you than that?"

Oxford legal experts take aim at the fence,
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz (Israel), February 23, 2004
"Scholars at Oxford University say the security measures that Israel is adopting to defend itself violate international law. "In its current form, Israel's construction of the separation Barrier in the Occupied Territories violates both international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Israel has not presented any compelling justification on security grounds for the Barrier as it is currently being constructed, and the Barrier imposes unnecessary and disproportionate restrictions on the human rights of the Palestinians." That is the unequivocal conclusion underlying the legal opinion prepared by OXPIL (Oxford Public Interest Lawyers), experts in international law from Oxford University in England, who were asked about the "legal implications" of the construction of the separation fence by Israel in the West Bank. The opinion, which reached Haaretz and is being published here for the first time, is a useful tool for prophesying the results of the proceedings beginning today on exactly the same question, in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It is surprising to find that the document, which is 57 pages long, was prepared at the request of an Israeli organization. It was requested by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which has two petitions on the issue of the separation fence pending in the High Court of Justice."

[The Jewish Nation as literal Thief:]
Security forces nab 'terror funds' in Ramallah banks,
by Arnon Regular and Amos Harel, Haaretz (Israel), February 26, 2004
"The United States said Wednesday that Israel's seizure of some NIS 37 million in cash in Palestinian banks could destabilize the Palestinian banking system, and reiterated its call for Israel to coordinate such moves with the sector's Palestinian authorities. Security forces on Wednesday raided four banks in the West Bank city of Ramallah, seizing the money which Israel said was mostly sent by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah to fund Palestinian militants. "Some of these actions that were taken risk destabilizing the Palestinian banking system, so we'd prefer to see Israeli coordination with the Palestinian financial authorities in order to stem the flow of funds to terrorist groups," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Washington. An aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat on Wednesday called the operation "a provocation" that was "asking for Palestinian retaliation." ... Palestinian medics said 42 people were injured, five critically, when stone-throwers confronted the biggest raid for months into Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's headquarters city of Ramallah. Palestinians rained stones on Israeli jeeps. ... The offices of an Islamic charity in the West Bank city of Tul Karm were also raided on Wednesday. Computers and documents were taken from there too. "It's like the mafia, it's like a kind of mafia war," Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia told Channel 10 television news. Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said the raids were unjustified. "This is destructive to the Palestinian economy and people are really worried," Erekat said. He said he fears Palestinians will lose confidence in their banking system and their would be a run on the banks Thursday. Arafat aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim told Reuters: "This is provocation. They are asking for Palestinian retaliation. I do not see any justification."

Rabbis block traffic in New York to protest fence hearing overseas,
By Rachel Pomerance, Deep South Jewish Voice, February 23, 2004
"Two rabbis and a coffin blocked traffic across from the United Nations to protest the International Court of Justice´s hearings in The Hague. It may sound like the opening to a joke, but the activists involved were deadly serious. "We were carrying the coffin to the steps of the United Nations to tell them that this is ‘exhibit A´ in their trial," said Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the vice president of Amcha-The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, which earlier Monday staged a rally that drew hundreds to lambaste the hearings, which also began that day. "The coffin symbolizes the many hundreds of people who have been killed by this terrorism that has affected the world like a plague," he said. Herzfeld, along with Rabbi Eliot Pearlson of Miami Beach and Amcha´s media adviser, Glenn Richter, were arrested for obstructing traffic on Manhattan´s busy First Avenue, but soon released with a summons to appear in court April 2. At that time, Herzfeld says he will continue to make his case — defending Israel´s security fence in the face of Palestinian terrorism and claiming anti-Israel bias at the United Nations. In December, the U.N. General Assembly recommended that the international court take up the fence. Amcha underscored its views about Israel and the United Nations in a rally that drew some 600 New York area high schoolers to the United Nations and several members of New York´s Jewish community ... "I´m a Jew. I´m a survivor of the Holocaust, and I believe in the Bible," Paul Scheck, 73 said. Israel is "the country that God gave to the Jews and no one has the right to contest" it. If Scheck had his way, the "fence should be at the real border," he said, suggesting Israel encompass the West Bank, Gaza and even Jordan, he said, but hinted that conquering Jordan was a lost cause."

Why Israel boycotted the International Court hearing on West Bank wall,
By Jean Shaoul, World Socialist Web Site, 28 February 2004
"Israel’s refusal to appear before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing on the West Bank security wall demonstrates its longstanding contempt for the United Nations and flouting of international law. Yet, instead of eliciting condemnation and threats of reprisals from the United States, Britain and the European Union for having acted as a “rogue state,” Israel has been supported in its insistence that the ICJ—and by extension the United Nations—has no right to interfere in Israel’s affairs without prior agreement. Only the politically naive would accept that the stance of Washington, London and Brussels is determined solely by considerations of legal precedent. The International Court of Justice was set up by the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II as a mechanism for resolving international disputes, and its functions indeed have the limitations that Israel has sought to exploit. It can only decide a case between states when a defendant state agrees to accept its jurisdiction and has no power to enforce compliance with its judgments. It can, however, give a non-binding legal opinion when asked to do so by relevant UN organisations that can become the basis for moves to pass a UN resolution. ... For decades after World War II, the received wisdom propagated by political leaders, the media and numerous academics was that the war and barbarism of the first half of the twentieth century were things of the past. Through enlightened policies, respect for national self-determination and the rule of law, including international conventions, and the mediation of the UN lay the road to peace and prosperity. Now all that has been ripped apart in favour of a policy of might makes right. The effective repudiation of international law and its administrative institutions heralds a new era of militarism, colonial adventures and oppression abroad, and a savage assault on the democratic rights of the working class at home."

U.S. rights report: IDF 'uses excessive force',
By Nathan Guttman, Haaretz (Israel), February 27, 2004
"Israeli forces often used excessive force when confronting Palestinian demonstrations or pursuing suspects, according to the annual report on human rights issued by the U.S. State Department. The report, published late Wednesday, said Israeli troops impeded medical assistance to Palestinian civilians at roadblocks, and carried out policies of demolitions, strict curfews, and closures that directly punished innocent civilians. Israel's human rights record in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2003 "remained poor and worsened in the treatment of foreign human rights activists," the report said. The report said that Israeli security forces killed at least 573 Palestinians and one foreign national and injured 2,992 Palestinians and others during the year, including bystanders, the report found. Israel targeted and killed at least 44 Palestinians, many of whom were terrorists or suspected terrorists. The report said security forces carried out many of the targeted killings in areas where civilian casualties were likely, killing 47 bystanders in the process, and added that the government said it made every effort to reduce civilian casualties during these operations."

THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS, by Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army, 1999
"Abstract This paper is a history of the Israeli nuclear weapons program drawn from a review of unclassified sources. Israel began its search for nuclear weapons at the inception of the state in 1948. As payment for Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956, France provided nuclear expertise and constructed a reactor complex for Israel at Dimona capable of large-scale plutonium production and reprocessing. The United States discovered the facility by 1958 and it was a subject of continual discussions between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Israel used delay and deception to at first keep the United States at bay, and later used the nuclear option as a bargaining chip for a consistent American conventional arms supply. After French disengagement in the early 1960s, Israel progressed on its own, including through several covert operations, to project completion. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, they felt their nuclear facility threatened and reportedly assembled several nuclear devices. By the 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel had a number of sophisticated nuclear bombs, deployed them, and considered using them. The Arabs may have limited their war aims because of their knowledge of the Israeli nuclear weapons. Israel has most probably conducted several nuclear bomb tests. They have continued to modernize and vertically proliferate and are now one of the world's larger nuclear powers. Using “bomb in the basement” nuclear opacity, Israel has been able to use its arsenal as a deterrent to the Arab world while not technically violating American nonproliferation requirements."

Phalcon sale to India shows growth of Israel’s international arms deals,
By Leslie Susser, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 1, 2004
"To every black cloud, they say, there is a silver lining. Under constant threat from terrorists and hostile neighbors, Israel has become an expert in security — and that expertise is generating huge profits. Israel has been one of the world’s big arms sellers for more than a decade, yet it really joined the major leagues this week when the government approved the $1.1 billion sale of the Phalcon command-and-control radar system to India. Israel’s annual sales of weaponry worldwide total about $30 billion. Figures released by the Defense Ministry during the Phalcon presentation to the Cabinet on Sunday show that with about 10 percent to 14 percent of the world market, Israel is the fifth-largest exporter of weapons systems after the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan. Aside from the moral issues raised by arms sales, there are some practical problems of realpolitik. For one, the sales sometimes bring Israel into direct conflict with its closest ally, the United States, which has its own geopolitical interests — as well as a domestic arms industry that it wants to protect from competition. For another, selling Israeli know-how to other countries means some of it could wind up in enemy hands, neutralizing key advantages Israel might need in a future battlefield. On Sunday, the government gave the go-ahead for what will be Israel’s single biggest export deal to date: the sale of three Phalcon airborne early-warning systems to India for $1.1 billion. Though the Phalcon does not have any American components and was developed entirely by Israel, the Israelis sought and received American permission for the sale last August. That followed Israel’s embarrassing cancellation of a similar deal with China in July 2000 after strenuous American objections. Washington argued then that giving the Chinese such sophisticated systems could make things far more difficult for the United States in any future air battle with mainland China over Taiwan. Israeli officials claimed that the American objection had more to do with a desire to keep Israel out of the competition for lucrative early-warning system contracts. The Americans only approved the India deal after they were convinced that it would not destabilize relations between India and Pakistan. In 2003, Israel signed contracts for weapons sales amounting to $3 billion. The target this year is more than $4 billion. Israel leads the world in a number of systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, small spotter planes that fly over territory and send back data on troop and other movements; a sophisticated system for analyzing air battles, and electronic systems for fighter planes. A partial list of current sales gives an idea of the scope of the Israeli operation. Israel sells UAVs to South Korea; the Phalcon, electronics, a sophisticated radar system, UAVs and missiles to India; anti-tank missiles to Poland; UAVs to Finland, Belgium, France and Switzerland; the system for analyzing air battles to Finland and Holland; a system for pinpointing fighter plane targets to Spain and Greece; and night-vision systems to Denmark. Israel has upgraded tanks and fighter planes for Turkey; has sold naval systems to Australia; and has sold armor for personnel carriers, UAVs, fighter-pilot sights and the system for pinpointing fighter plane targets to the United States. Paradoxically, Israel’s big advantage over other countries is its dire security situation, which turns the country into a laboratory for arms development. Israel has to keep developing new weapons to survive. Often, because of the conflict with the Palestinians, the systems are tested and proven in battle conditions."

[The Israeli Gestapo:]
Moving to Canada, far from the Israeli police,
By Yoash Foldesh, Haaretz (Israel), March 3, 2004
"Bryan, get up! Wake up!" Two months ago, three burly policemen not in uniform entered Bryan Atinsky's bedroom in Rehovot after quickly brushing past his wife, Efrat, who got up to see who was knocking on the door at 6:30 A.M. The three said they had a search warrant. "They didn't waste any time and started opening drawers and searching the shelves, but they didn't show us any document," says Atinsky, 34. "When they finished, they said my computer was confiscated and that I must come with them for questioning. Efrat continuously asked what I was suspected of, and they said `you tell us.' In the end, I asked if it was because of the caricature." And indeed, it was because of the caricature. Atinsky is one of the volunteer English editorial coordinators of the Israeli Web site of the Indymedia network, an international anti-globalism organization set up after the protests against the International Monetary Fund as it met in Seattle. Like all the other branches of Indymedia, the Israeli site, which has been closed for the meantime, also enabled surfers to post announcements, articles and creations as they wished, alongside reports written by organization activists. While the major media outlets are subject to the control of several stockholders, Indymedia tried to create an alternative medium open to the public at large. Its agenda also differed from that of the major media outlets: it included, for example, extensive reports on Israel Defense Forces operations in the territories and on violence on the part of settlers, and of course, attempts to expose the seamier side of big corporations. "We don't censor anything," says Atinsky, "but the editors have the right to erase the link to reports that call directly for violence, racist reports, clearly false reports or those that have commercial interests behind them. The reports themselves are not erased from the servers nor are the responses they elicit, because we believe in transparency and freedom of information. In most cases, the intelligent responses expose the cheap provocations." On December 19, a Brazilian surfer, called Latuf, took advantage of the site's freedom to post a caricature depicting Ariel Sharon enthusiastically kissing Adolf Hitler. Following the post, the Police's Computer Crime Investigation Unit began an inquiry, with the approval of the attorney general, into the possibility of incitement and insulting a civil servant. In the past, the police investigated several posts on the site and summoned its operators for questioning - among others, after another caricature posted by Latuf, which depicted Sharon dressed in an SS uniform - but this time, the responses surprised Atinsky. Two days after the posting of the caricature and after news of the inquiry was reported in the media, the Israeli company that provided the server on which the site is located was swamped with threats from right-wing activists and complaints from users. "They told us we had to find a different server," relates Guy West, another volunteer editor of the site, "and we had no choice but to take down the site. Within a week it was to be up again." The next day the police knocked on the door of Atinsky, who is now editor of the Israeli-Palestinian magazine News From Within, and took him with them to the Computer Crime Investigation Unit offices in Bat Yam. "In the station, they sat me down outside one of the offices, so I should wait for my interrogation," he relates. "In the meantime the policemen who'd brought me in joked between them, and one of them picked up some sort of metal rod that was lying on the floor, waved it in front of me and said `this is what we use to hit suspects because it leaves serious bruises.' For him, it may have been a joke, but even so it was scary enough. I kept telling them that I wanted a lawyer, but they said that only in the United States does such a right exist, and that I could contact a lawyer only after the questioning was finished." Atinsky was questioned for eight hours and only then did the interrogators allow him to call a lawyer. "They shouted at me that everything written on the site was my responsibility because the domain is registered in my name," he says. "They said that the fact that surfers can post whatever they want on the site was as if I had left a pistol on the table and left the room - even if someone else uses it, it would still be my fault. They kept on shouting and said that we have to start censoring the site, and that it cannot operate this way. They don't understand that freedom of expression doesn't refer to nice things that everyone wants to hear, but actually to the right to say hurtful things and occasionally also stupid and provocative things." At the same time, Guy West, 29, of Herzliya, was also summoned for lengthy questioning. "The policemen asked us for all the IP addresses of surfers who had entered the site - not of one or two surfers, but all of them," he relates. "If the owner of the server had cracked and given it to them, they could have used it to monitor all of the organization's activists and supporters." Three months have elapsed since then. For fear of police investigations, the site has still not resumed operations. Nimrod Keret, another activist with the organization, arranged not long ago to lease a server in Canada, and the site will apparently resume operations in another two to three weeks. West and Atinsky have since been repeatedly summoned for questioning, and Atinsky's computer has yet to be returned to him. "I've been weaned from Indymedia," says Atinsky, "the police succeeded in getting what they wanted." The police request to censor surfers' responses on the open posting area of the Indymedia site and its temporary closure, prompts some tough questions about freedom of expression on the Web. "Questioning has long been a campaign of pressure and scare tactics and an attempt, without the jurisdiction to do so, to restrict freedom of expression," wrote Attorney Avner Pinchuk of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in a letter to Attorney General Meni Mazuz. The police investigation, according to Pinchuk, is based on a legal interpretation that is contrary to views that are accepted in Israel and around the world. "A committee set up by the Ministry of Justice determined that Internet service providers are not responsible for the postings of surfers or site owners," he says. "Even the rulings issued thus far around the world and in Israel support this view: the inclination is not to try the owners of the Ynet site, for example, because of the racist response published in its Talk-back forum." In the case of Indymedia, says Pinchuk, the investigators could not get to the Brazilian surfer who posted the caricature and therefore they chose to investigate the site's operators. "Even if their investigation doesn't find anything," he says, "the police have in effect determined facts on the ground. "Political activists or others who see how Indymedia's operators got in trouble will not risk providing an open platform to the public. "The result will be that only large corporations, which can employ attorneys who will supervise the content posted by surfers, will be able to run `open' platforms on their sites. The other sites will not be able to take that risk."

No Arabic at McDonald's. Israel Discrimination against Israel's Palestinian citizens has been expanding to include a total ban of the use of Arabic language by workers,
reports Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram (Egypt), March 4-10, 2004
"A photograph of Abeer Zinaty shows the 20- year-old student from the mixed Arab and Jewish city of Ramle in central Israel wearing a T- shirt branded with the logo "Excellent Worker 2003 -- McDonald's Israel". Less than a year later she is unemployed, fired by the world's most famous fast food company. Her crime, according to the branch manager, is that she was caught speaking Arabic to another Arab employee. Zinaty's treatment at the hands of the Israeli management of McDonald's is a stark illustration of an ever-swelling tide of discrimination against Arab workers, director of Mossawa -- a political lobbying group for Israel's one million Palestinian citizens -- Jafar Ferah told Al-Ahram Weekly. Nominally, Arabic is an official language of the State of Israel, but it has been long-standing practice in many Israeli firms to ban its use among staff. It is the first time, however, that a company of McDonald's stature has implicitly acknowledged that speaking in Arabic provides grounds for dismissal. The decision to fire Zinaty for speaking Arabic was confirmed by McDonald's Ramle branch manager to Al-Ittihad, a local Arab daily newspaper, last month. In a subsequent letter to Mossawa, the company's Human Resources Director Talila Yodfat said that all workers are instructed "to use only Hebrew when talking among themselves or in front of customers to avoid uncomfortable situations". However, faced with threats of legal action, Yodfat is now also arguing that the ban on Arabic was not racist in intent but to avoid possible "miscommunication" between staff of different ethnic groups. The sacking of an Arab worker for speaking her own language is only the tip of an iceberg of decades-old discriminatory practices against the Palestinian minority in the workplace, said Wahbe Bidarne, director of the Arab workers' pressure group Voice of the Labourer. "It doesn't matter whether we are talking about small private firms, like restaurants, or governmental institutions: the racism is the same," he said. "However well-qualified, most Arabs can only find work -- if they can find work at all -- as day labourers in roles such as olive picking, or working in construction or in factories." Discrimination against Arab workers is apparently being reinforced by repeated incitement against the minority from senior public figures. Even government ministers regularly accuse the Palestinian minority -- some 20 per cent of the population -- of being involved in terror, or of posing, together with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, a danger to the future of Israel."

[The CEO of McDonalds, until fairly recently was Jewish, one Mr. Greenberg.]
McDonald's Confirms 'no-Arabic' policy at its restaurants in Israel,
by Ali Abunimah & Nigel Parry, The Electronic Intifada, 5 March 2004
"McDonald's Corporation today confirmed that it has a policy banning its employees from speaking Arabic in its restaurants in Israel, despite the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel form 20% of its workforce, and Arabic is one of the two official languages of Israel. The Corporation denied, however, that Abeer Zinaty, a former "Excellent Worker 2003 -- McDonald's Israel," was fired because she spoke Arabic on the job. EI co-founder Ali Abunimah received a statement from Julie Pottebaum, a spokesperson for Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's corporation, after EI contacted the company about the allegations contained in an article in Al-Ahram Weekly ... At the same time we are outraged that McDonald's has confirmed that it has banned the use of Arabic by employees at its 80 restaurants in Israel. The McDonald's statement said: "As the largest quick-service restaurant employer in Israel, [McDonald's Israel is] proud that about 20% of its employees are Israeli Arabs and another 20% are Russian immigrants, which reflects the general population of Israel. Israeli Arabs and Russian immigrants are also represented in the many levels of management. While Hebrew, the common language between all employees, is required to be spoken when on duty in order to best conduct business and best serve our customers, no one has ever been let go for speaking their own language." EI can see no justification for banning Palestinian citizens of Israel from using Arabic, their native language, a native language of the country and one of only two official languages of Israel. This policy directly contradicts McDonald's stated principles encouraging and celebrating diversity, fairness and respect for all its employees. It not only discriminates against Arabic-speaking employees, but also Arabic-speaking customers. It is unimaginable that in its American restaurants, McDonald's would prohibit the use of Spanish, the most-commonly spoken language in the United States after English. In a context where Palestinian citizens of Israel face documented, systematic discrimination in employment, education and public services, McDonald's ought to be setting an example of equal treatment for all. Instead, it has, like so many other companies working in Israel, apparently chosen to make its Arab employees and patrons second class citizens."

[JTR Contributor's Note: "what's the global corporate plan? all nations of the world must be "diverse", except for one....... guess which?" Except for Sacred Jews who push and shove for special treatment everywhere. Arabs are 20% of the Israeli population. Hispanics are 11% of the American population. Jews bend McDonalds to their racist will.]
¿Habla Español? Translating Your Marketing Message, More restaurant companies are creating Spanish-language advertising campaigns and other special promotions to reach the growing Hispanic market,
By Jay Iwanowski, Restaurants USA, January 1997
"'You can't ignore a 28-million-people market," says Keith A. Card, director of marketing for Benihana Inc., based in Miami. "And we want to serve an increasingly growing market. We've always advertised to the mass market, but this is our first attempt at segmenting." Benihana is one of many companies creating advertising campaigns geared toward Hispanics in the United States. Today, big-name operations, including Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.; Office Depot Inc.; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; Discovery Channel; and Procter & Gamble Co., are advertising in Spanish through such mediums as television, radio and print to reach this lucrative market. Some operations, such as McDonald's, have been marketing to Hispanics for the past 20 years. But advertising in Spanish is still a relatively recent phenomenon for most restaurant companies ... "Any business that wants to find a growing, untouched segment should look at the Hispanic market," says Aida Levitan, principal and executive vice president of Sanchez & Levitan, an integrated Hispanic advertising agency based in Miami. "The Hispanic market is very food-oriented, and it's an important market with a lot of potential."

Arrest of Jew for terror plots sends shock waves throughout Israel,
by Dan Baron, Virtual Jerusalem (from Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
"Just as Jews prepared to celebrate Purim, whose story culminates in the Jews’ slaying of their enemies, one Israeli Jew was quietly planning to slay the people he saw as his own enemies. Eliran Golan, a 22-year-old from Haifa, is under arrest for a three-year-long bombing campaign against Israeli Arabs, including a bombing against a member of Knesset. Only one person was hurt in nine attacks attributed to Golan, suggesting that he is inept with explosives. But police said Thursday that more than 30 homemade devices had been found in Golan’s room when he was arrested, suggesting that Golan had the makings of a major terrorist. At his arraignment in Haifa District Court, Golan pleaded guilty to nine counts of politically motivated violence. “He declares himself a member of the ideological far right, and made this clear during interrogation — that he was active against Arab targets, that he hated of Arabs,” a chief police investigator, Effi Paz, told Army Radio. Golan’s father, Meir, a civilian who works for the Israel Defense Forces, also is under arrest on suspicion of knowing about the bombings and not telling authorities about them. He denies the charges. The arrests were made public Thursday after a gag order was lifted, and they sent shock waves through a nation used to equating Jewish terrorism with fringe settler groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Last September, three Jewish settlers were jailed for 12 to 15 years for trying to bomb an Arab girls school in Jerusalem. Police and the Shin Bet still are searching for the perpetrators of drive-by shootings in the West Bank that killed at least eight Palestinians in the current intifada. The fact that Golan was from Haifa, renowned as a haven of Jewish-Arab coexistence, made the arrest even more unsettling for some Israelis. According to media reports, Golan allegedly tried to bomb the homes of Jews who socialized with Arabs in the picturesque port city. Issam Mahoul, the Arab lawmaker from the pro-Communist Hadash Party who survived unscathed a bomb attack on his car last year, said Golan’s arrest hardly puts him at ease. “If truth be told, I am not yet calm,” he said. “I welcome the police efforts, but I think they have only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.” “Jewish terrorism is alive and well,” he said."

[So let's see if I 've got this right. If someone yells out for Jews (generally) to "commit unnatural acts with a camel" in a "quasi-riot" at a university and throw a violent temper tantrum in a university official's office, the Anti-Defamation League, in full dedication to its convictions about "tolerance" for all, will represent the offender against University punishment? Or is this a special protective game, as always, exclusively for Jews, wherein Jews swarm to the aid of a wild pro-Israel kook? What do you think? Even a Jewish fanatic is beloved to the Jew Klux Klan.]
Outspoken right-wing Israel advocate faces five-year S.F. State suspension,
by joe eskenazi, Jewish Bulletin March 5, 2004
"Unabashed pro-Israel advocate Tatiana Menaker is facing a potential five-year suspension from San Francisco State University after a pattern of “disruptive behavior,” in the words of school officials. The university accused Menaker — who was forced to serve 40 hours of community service after loudly urging pro-Palestinians to commit unnatural acts with a camel during a May 7, 2002, SFSU quasi-riot — of nine instances of disruptive behavior during the past two years. Menaker, a Russian-born mother of three and journalist in the San Francisco Russian press and right-wing online publications, claims the university is being used by “anti-Israel factions” to silence contrary voices, and said she is being disciplined “for ideological reasons, not because I did something criminal.” Acting university spokeswoman Christina Holmes said Menaker loudly and publicly threatened lecturer Deborah Gerson in November, and then flew into a rage and threw objects around the office of student discipline officer Donna Cunningham in a Monday, Feb. 23, meeting that resulted in Menaker being escorted off campus by police ... At the behest of the Jewish Community Relations Council, lawyer Ephraim Margolin took on Menaker as a client, pro bono. He met with SFSU counsel Patty Bartscher on Tuesday, March 2, but declined to discuss the content of that meeting and refused general comment because he “is still preparing the case.” A meeting between university officials and Menaker and Margolin is tentatively set for Monday, March 15. Any future hearing will be administered by an outside administrative judge. Both Rabbi Doug Kahn, executive director of the JCRC, and Jonathan Bernstein, Anti-Defamation League regional director, met this week with SFSU administrators, with both emerging “cautiously optimistic” that a satisfactory solution could be worked out. Bernstein had wondered if the university was “overreacting” and “clamping down too hard” prior to the meeting, but he emerged confident that justice will be done."

Israel refuses to return enriched uranium,
Interest Alert, (from UPI), March 7, 2004
"Israel is among 12 countries refusing to return enriched uranium to the United States, the Ha'aretz news service reported Sunday. Ha'aretz cited an internal U.S. Department of Energy report, saying the United States has been working since 1996 to retrieve enriched uranium that was given to friendly countries under the Atoms for Peace program. The program was meant to prevent its being misused for nuclear weapons construction. The Department of Energy has been able to collect just 2.6 tons, while former members of the program still have 15 tons of enriched uranium. Israel is included in a list of 12 countries the report says "are not expected to take part in the program." Other countries on the list include Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Israel purchased a reactor for its Nahal Sorek nuclear research facility from the United States and began operating it in 1960, using U.S. provided enriched uranium. The U.S. Congress in 1978 passed a law to stop sending nuclear fuel to countries which have nuclear facilities that are not internationally monitored."

Drunken ultra-Orthodox Jews attack four Arabs in J'lem,
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz (Israel), March 8, 2004
"Ultra-Orthodox Jews under the influence of alcohol attacked four Arab cab drivers in Jerusalem on Monday, lightly wounding them. On Joseph Karo Street, dozens of drunken ultra-Orthodox Jews attacked an Arab cab driver. When police arrived at the scene to rescue the driver, they also beat the policemen, and tried to steal equipment from their patrol car. The cab driver sustained light wounds. Police dispersed the crowd and arrested three suspects. Later in the day, on Highway No. 1, ultra-Orthodox Jews hurled stones at an Arab cab near the Novotel Hotel in the capital. The driver of the cab suffered light wounds and was taken to Hadassah University Hospital, Mt Scopus. Police forces were searching the area in an effort to locate the attackers. Two other Arabs drivers were hurt Monday after ultra-Orthodox threw stones at their vehicles in the Mea She'arim neighborhood. Drunken Haredim also hurled stones at passing vehicles in the Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood in Jerusalem."

[Israel is a corrupt Hellhole, in many respects. This Israeli author makes that concession with the twisted addenda that he blames the eternal scapegoat: the goyim -- the British, and eveywhere else in Europe Jews came from to apartheid Israel. So why are Jews in Israel so corrupt? Why in world is corruption in Jewry's Beloved Homeland institutionalized? Why, because of non-Jews, of course! Mr. Pasko, look to your Talmud. Look to your Jewish history. Look to your Jewish identity itself. Look to historical Jewish scheming and their undermining of existing non-Jewish social systems: one moral standard for Jews, and quite another for the non-Jewish neighbor. Then affix blame.]
Reforming Israel's Culture of Corruption,
by Ariel Natan Pasko, Israel National News, Mar 9, 2004
"The daily newspaper headlines ring out, "Sharon Gets Questionable Loan." Israeli television news tells us, "Former Prime Minister Barak Investigated For Phony Organizations." The radio blasts, "Knesset Members Accused Of Double Voting." Israeli Internet sites let us know that, "Former Knesset Member investigated for bribery during primaries." Well they're politicians, so what do you expect? Then, every so often, the Central Bureau of Statistics reminds us that the heads of companies in Israel - including state owned companies - are making gosh awful lots of money. But who cares? The workers at the Electric and Water companies are the highest paid salaried workers in Israel - about twice the national average and three times the salary of teachers - and they are public regulated utilities. Don't forget that the workers at Israel Electric Corp. also get free, unlimited electricity to boot. Now you know why electricity prices keep rising in Israel ... A small clique of oligarchs have run the union from the start, making the decision to strike or not, to accept the terms of a new agreement or not, as if it was their private fiefdom, without the workers', i.e. members', permission ... Details of payments and bonuses for central bank staffers are generally difficult to acquire due to the bank's practice of obfuscation over employment conditions. For example, it was learned the Governor of the Bank of Israel, David Klein, received an "efficiency bonus" of some 80,000 shekels in 2000, his first year heading the central bank, for his work as a senior official the previous year. The issue of "efficiency" bonuses has recently been a hot topic, and it has even reached the Labor Courts due to the annulment of the bonus, which was paid quarterly to bank workers, by the Finance Ministry's Wages Director Yuval Rachlevsky. Senior bank employees are among the best paid in the public sector; they received an average efficiency bonus of 64,000 shekels a year until mid-2002, when Rachlevsky put an end to the practice. Senior bank staffers also get a company car, which they are free to use for their personal use. However, they are also paid a monthly "car maintenance" fee for the vehicle's upkeep. Such a payment is usually made to civil servants who have to use their own vehicles for work purposes. It's just another perk at the Bank of Israel, I guess. There isn't just scandal at the national political level in Israel, but in local politics as well. A new 22-page report, issued by the Finance Ministry, accuses the Jerusalem Municipality of overpaying at least 80 senior employees millions of shekels/month, in contravention of the law and past agreements with the Treasury. The newly elected mayor has appointed six deputies at the enormous monthly salary of 40,000 shekels each. Under public pressure, because of a growing budget deficit and a planned 3% property tax hike, the Jerusalem Municipality spokesman recently announced that a planned 5% cut in the salaries of the deputy mayors would be carried out. But a 5% wage cut leaves them with a monthly salary of 38,000 shekels, five-and-a-half times the average wage in Israel. This, at a time when there is near-record unemployment, a long recession, and serious national government budget cuts. Don't worry; later it was learned that the deputy mayors turned the proposal down. All this is the "norm" in Israel. Distorted wage levels, massive perks, breaking rules; sounds to me like a third-world country. Israel, as I've said many times before, is not an information society. Although politically democratic, with a mixed economy leaning further and further toward free enterprise, Israel lacks a culture of transparency and accountability. This inability to find out information leads to cronyism - in Israel called protectzia - protection. For example, someone has a friend, who "knows" someone else that can get you a job. No public tender for the position in a local government office, no need to "apply" and take tests for civil service, just go meet Mr. X. A couple of years ago, I came across a description of the British civil service's bureaucratic culture. The operative phrase was, "need to know." That is, give out as little information as possible to the public or other levels of the bureaucracy, or even limit information to politicians. Share information only on a "need to know" basis. Suddenly, I realized, many of the "Israeli evils" were in fact probably leftovers from the British Mandate days, that ubiquitous "Israeli mentality". Where else would Israel have learned bureaucratic culture, if not from the British Mandate Administration? Oh yes, most immigrants to the Mandate or later Israel, until at least the 1960s, were either from Eastern Europe - Soviet Russia, Poland, Romania, etc. - or, the Arab Middle East and North Africa, also not great bastions of democracy and transparency. The culture of corruption in Israel is probably not due to some "genetic" weakness of Israelis, but has a lot to due with a lack of transparent institutions and accountability. Now for the reason that I decided to write this article.... Breezing through the news recently, I read an article on "corruption" in the non-profit sector. What disappoints me is that these are the people who provide vital non-governmental health, education, and welfare services. These are the organizations that help the weak, but are getting fat by doing so. The article, based on a leaked Interior Ministry report, described the exaggerated salaries of the top officials in the non-profit sector. The Efrati Committee completed this report almost a year ago. And to make maters worse, it's been presented to Interior Minister Avraham Poraz - from the Shinui Party - whose free market and clean government election campaign seems a distant memory. Poraz hasn't done anything to implement the recommendations of the report yet. Surprised? There are about 13,000 Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) or Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Israel. In some, salaries of the three top officials make up 50% of total expenditures. In the majority of organizations, the report said, salaries make up about 80% of expenses. Anyone familiar with business, the non-profit sector, and economy in modern Western democracies today should realize that this flagrant theft. ... Israel must reform itself until scandal and corruption are an exception, like elsewhere, not the way things are done. Lack of transparency and accountability, and rampant corruption in business and public life, must not be ignored, tolerated, or worse, quietly praised, for someone's ability "to get more for himself or herself". Success in the modern global economy requires reform, stability in Israel's society necessitates reform, and Jewish ethics and tradition demand reforming Israel's "culture of corruption".

Israel ends Arab worker 'marking'. Red cross marking were for security reasons, said Knesset officials,
Israeli security officials have been told to stop making Arab construction workers at the Knesset wear distinctive identifying marks on their hard hats,
BBC (UK), March 10, 2004
"Israeli parliamentary speaker Reuven Rivlin, ordered an end to the controversial policy. The Arab builders had been made to wear helmets with red crosses on top so they were identifiable to marksmen guarding parliament, the daily Maariv reported. The practice outraged local politicians and human rights groups. "Even though Israel is dealing with various security issues... it must not use any signs that are liable to be interpreted as distinguishing people on the basis of race, nationality or religion," Mr Rivlin said in a statement."

Arab taxi driver beaten by mob in Jerusalem. Spate of attacks on Arabs in capital reported in recent days. Today -- Purim in Jerusalem -- taxi driver and police officers attacked by drunken youngsters,
by Tal Yamin-Wolvovitz, Maariv (Israel), March 8, 2004
"A worrisome increase in Jewish attacks on Arabs in Jerusalem has been reported in recent days. Today, an Arab taxi driver traveling through the ultra-Orthodox Shmuel Ha'navi neighborhood in the capital was attacked by dozens of drunken youngsters (Purim, the only Jewish holiday when intoxication is permitted, was celebrated in Jerusalem today). The driver was pulled out of his car and severely beaten. A police cruiser called to the scene also became a target for attack. The three police officers found themselves in a middle of a riot, as they were being attacked by the angry mob. Police reinforcements subsequently arrived at the scene and managed to rescue the police officers and the taxi driver. The injured driver drove himself to the hospital, while the lightly injured police officers were treated at the scene. In a different incident in Jerusalem today, Ultra-Orthodox youngsters stoned a taxicab driven by an Arab. The taxi driver sustained light injured and was taken to hospital for treatment. The attackers managed to flee the scene. In two incidents yesterday, an Arab worker at a central Jerusalem pharmacy was also beaten, while another taxi driver sustained light injuries after being attacked by youngsters, who shattered his windshield."

[Israel is a sordid island of vice, criminality, racism, and institutionalized corruption. Wherever there are "questionable" practices, there are Jews getting rich off them.]
Israel a haven for foreigners looking to fill drug prescriptions,
By Gabriella Burman, Atlanta Jewish Times (from JTA) March 9, 2004
"Looking for a new way to support the Jewish state in these turbulent times? Try buying drugs from Israel. Over the last several months, companies buying discounted prescription medications from Israel and other countries have placed advertisements in U.S. Jewish newspapers and sent promotional material to Jewish groups proposing a new way to support Israel’s economy while also saving money. Consumers who rely on a heavy volume of medication to treat chronic conditions are flocking to the Web sites to purchase their drugs and support small businesses. “It’s depressing enough having to be on something for five years. I feel better knowing it’s from Israel,” said Janice Epstein, 51, a breast cancer survivor who lives in Columbus, Ohio. Thus the increasingly prevalent — and questionable — practice of obtaining federally approved drugs from online business brokers is spilling over into the Jewish communit ... While Pharmacy International orders drugs from chains — and in many instances has made deposits up front so that the pharmacies will fill orders — MagenDavidmeds.com works directly with Israel’s independent drug stores. “In this way, we’re supporting small businesses, keeping them alive, generating tax revenue for Israel,” said Jacobson, a Toronto-based entrepreneur who holds dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship. So far, 20 pharmacists have agreed to fill prescriptions for MagenDavidMeds.com. Jacobson is hopeful hundreds more will sign on. Jacobson also plans to employ couriers to bring packages to the post office, thereby creating jobs. “I want to help the Israeli economy,” he said. “I’m not hiding that we’re for-profit, but we’re spreading the wealth. It’s really exciting.” Intentions notwithstanding, the practice also has been met with skepticism. Tom Glaser, the Southeast region president of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, says he received information on Isrameds.com six months ago, but felt it was “not something we could get behind,” because of questions the chamber had about “quality and legitimacy.” Likewise, he is not yet throwing his support behind MagenDavidMeds.com, from which he received a letter last week. As part of its marketing effort, for every order that comes from members of an organization that signs up as an “affinity partner,” the company will give back 5 percent to that organization ... “My reaction is it’s illegal,” said Mitchel Rothholz, a Washington pharmacist who is vice president for professional practice at the American Pharmacists Association, which represents more than 50,000 pharmacy industry professionals in the United States ... "There are other ways to support Israeli entities, he says. “Teva is one of the largest generic manufacturers in the world. When you go to your pharmacy, ask if there is a generic drug made by Teva that is available for you.”

Christian peacemaker denied entry to Israel,
Ekklesia, March 12, 2004
"A member of Christian Peacemaker Teams member has been barred as he tried to enter Israel and forcibly returned to Amsterdam Greg Rollins. was denied entry to the country at Ben Gurion airport in the early morning hours of March 11. "I'm surprised, we have a very strong court order , it seems the Israeli security people at the airport made a mistake," said Sani Khoury, with the law firm of Kuttab and Khoury. "Our settlement is in writing and it has the force of a court order. It says that there are no restrictions on Greg's entering Israel, any past restrictions in Interior Ministry computers must be removed, previous (attempted deportation) proceedings will not be held against him - no restrictions." Rollins was the centre of a case before the Israeli High Court last year when he challenged an Israel military order barring all Israelis and internationals from Palestinian-controlled areas. The order was rarely enforced but had a chilling effect on the work of Israeli and international peace groups. Rollins was arrested while observing the detention of a large number of Palestinian men in Hebron, and the ruling on his case held that the military order was too broad and should not be enforced absent any specific illegal activity. Kuttab and Khoury have asked for a reversal of the deision not to allow him into the country, from the Israeli Interior Ministry. If Rollins is not re-admitted, they plan on a "contempt of court" procedure against the Interior Ministry. Campaigners say this case will have an important effect on the continuing ability of human rights monitors to operate in the West Bank and Gaza."

[Rich Jews, go to Israel! Water your lavish lawns with Palestinian blood.]
An ecological paradise to lure American Jews,
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz (Israel), March 15, 2004
"If Jake Leibowitz's dream comes true, hundreds of rich American Jewish families will pick up their money and start moving to Israel in the next two years. Leibowitz, once a building contractor in the United States, has dedicated himself over the past few years to convincing American families to leave their homes and invest in a new and revolutionary planned community to be built in the Ha'ela Valley called "Harei Eden." A plan for the new community will soon be submitted to a regional committee for consideration. The new community, to be built near Moshav Roglit just meters from the Green Line, will be characterized by a number of services heretofore unknown in Israel. The town's drinking water will be recycled and reused for irrigation, Harei Eden's garbage will be collected by a special underground system and vehicles will be forbidden from driving within the residential areas of the community. "I am convinced that most of the Jews' problems both in Israel and out can be solved if we just unite our forces," Leibowitz said enthusiastically. "Israel has many talented people, but we are lacking just a few pennies. American Jews will happily come here, because we will give them better living conditions, spirituality and history. They will bring their money with them." Leibowitz's original idea was to establish an ecological community that would not harm the land and would blend in with the natural landscape ... Artificial lakes and fountains will be part of the town's water recycling system. The initial stages of planning will examine the option of providing every resident with a computerized scooter. At the moment permits for the plan have still not been granted by the Transportation Ministry and those who don't want to walk will be forced to ride bicycles. Leibowitz returned this week from a trip during which he attempted to recruit potential residents to Harei Eden. The price of homes in the planned town will start at $200,000 for a small apartment. One of the clients has already said he plans to build a villa at the cost of more than $3 million. Hundreds of American families, most of them under the age of 40, have already paid advances on homes in the planned town, Leibowitz said. Some 500 housing units are planned for Harei Eden according to the tender, but Leibowitz is convinced he can expand the project by another 1,000 units. Leibowitz came up with the idea for the community some 15 years ago. "A combination of capitalism and Zionism," he explained ... "Maybe you'll laugh, but I believe the American Jews who come to the community will bring billions of dollars to Israel via the projects and businesses they establish here," Leibowitz said."

Police suspect right-wing figures involved in anti-Arab attacks,
By David Ratner, Haaretz (Israel), March 19, 2004
"Haifa police are investigating the possible involvement of 12 right-wing figures in a conspiracy with Eliran Golan, the man suspected of planting explosives in several attacks on Arabs and Jews in Haifa, Channel Two reported Thursday night. The potential suspects comprise rabbis and pro-settlement activists. According to the Channel Two report, Golan was in contact with these right-wing figures and asked for their ideological support during the period in which he allegedly planted the bombs. Golan also sought financial support from the figures, police investigators suspect. The police are to begin summoning the 12 men for questioning next week, according to the report. A senior police source confirmed to Haaretz on Thursday that the report is accurate. A right-wing activist from Haifa, Aviad Visoli, said Thursday that nobody in his circle is connected with Golan. "In my opinion, he is a disturbed man who operated alone," he said. The Jewish terror case in Haifa became public a month ago. Three-and-a-half years after the first in a series of bombs were planted in Haifa, Golan, a 22-year-old resident of the city, was arrested. Explosives were aimed at Arab targets: houses, mosques and automobiles. The most notorious incident occurred a year-and-a-half ago, when a bomb was planted under the car of Hadash MK Issam Makhoul. Other bombs were aimed at Jews who associated with Arabs. In two instances, Golan allegedly used explosives to attack the house and car of his employer at a delivery company. Police believe that Golan planted bombs in two different periods. He allegedly planted a series of bombs three-and-a-half years ago, and then stopped temporarily for unknown reasons. Two years and two months later, he is suspected of restarting the attacks before he was apprehended. At the time of his arrest, police were unsure whether Golan worked alone, though he is believed to have disseminated circulars in which he referred to an underground group. During his interrogation, it became clear to police that Golan had accomplices."

[This article includes the obligatory fawning crap about the "genius of the Jews," but the author makes some good points about world Jewish censorship on behalf of racist Israel. (In today's world, it is necessary to grovel a bit before you can criticize Jews (or their racist "homeland") in any manner in public). In the modern world, however, "racial antipathy towards Jews" is virtually non-existent. This comment below is a cop-out. The issue that alienates people is the ethnocentric and exploitive tribal core that is the lifeblood of Jewish identity, best manifested today as brutal apartheid Israel, with its Zionist tentacles throughout the world. Jewish Klan identity separates the Jew from the Other, not the other way around. What is called "anti-semitism" is the natural defensive response to oppressive, swarming Jewish racism. The charge of "anti-Semitism" is a Jewish censorial political tool. More and more people see this, at least per Israel, as obvious. And once you understand that, keep looking. If you care to honestly see.]
A grotesque choice. Israel's repression of the Palestinian people is fuelling a resurgence of anti-semitism,
by Max Hastings, The Guardian (UK), March 11, 2004
"It is impossible to doubt that genuine anti-semitism - racial antipathy towards Jews - is resurgent in Europe and even, in some circles, becoming respectable. A few years ago, my wife and I found ourselves at a dinner party that included several Austrian guests. Mischievously, I asked a female member of the Vienna government sitting opposite me how her country was coping with the Nazi embarrassments of its president, Kurt Waldheim. She stiffened. "President Waldheim is a fine and good man, who has been grossly traduced by a conspiracy of Jews," she said severely. Her husband interjected: "My father always told me that most of the things the Jews say about the war are lies." Our English host added supportively: "Jews cause most of the trouble in the world, what?" At this point, the Hastingses departed without explanation. In the car, still shaking with rage, my wife said: "They weren't just pretending to be anti-semitic, were they? They were the real thing." ... I would suggest that the first stirrings of renewed animosity towards Jews in Europe emerged in the 70s. When I made this point to an Israeli acquaintance, he observed sourly: "Yeah, when the world stopped seeing us losers on trains to the death camps." For it is, of course, the issue of Israel that has provoked some change of sentiment. Many of the remarks that Jewish critics denounce as anti-semitic are, in reality, criticisms of Israel or its government. Five years ago, when I was editing the Evening Standard, the Board of Deputies of British Jews asked to send a delegation to my office to protest at our coverage of the Middle East. I refused, saying that I would meet at any time to discuss matters pertaining to British Jews, but that Israeli affairs were the province of the Israeli ambassador. A month or so later, I was lunching with Vere Rothermere, then chairman of the family newspaper company. "I had a visit on your account yesterday," he said with a quixotic grin. "From the Board of Deputies. They said you wouldn't see them. They say you are anti-semitic. They warned me that the Israeli Likud wants to organise a boycott of the Evening Standard." I asked how he had responded. "I told them that such a boycott would be a very good story for the Standard," said Lord Rothermere, which helps to explain why, as an editor, I held his family in such respect as proprietors. In general, across the British media, managerial attitudes are less robust. Several proprietors are fervent Zionists, while rather more take the cynical view that the Middle East is an intractable issue of no more interest to their readers than Northern Ireland. Palestinians present an unsympathetic face to the western world. Given the ferocity with which some Jewish readers respond to criticism of Israel, many executives perceive sceptical coverage of Israel's excesses as more trouble than it is worth. In this country, only the Guardian and Independent deal thoroughly with what is taking place, and display real sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Elsewhere a lot of space is given to apologias for Israeli conduct, some of which reveal a contempt for Palestinian human rights that invites the most baleful of historical comparisons. It is a tribute to Israeli propaganda success that many commentators seem happy to regard as just a possible peace deal that would leave Israel in control of settlements and strategic roads in a Palestinian state. It is a measure of how far matters have gone that when Ariel Sharon announced the closure of some settlements in Gaza, it was hailed as a historic breakthrough. In the eyes of some of us, even the Oslo accords promised no realistic prospect of a viable Palestinian society. They represented the outer limit of what Israeli liberals believed they could sell to their own nation, but they offered the Palestinians no chance of economic, social or political lift-off because the terms denied any hope of self-respect. I reply to every reader's letter accusing me of anti-semitism because the issue seems so important. They make the cardinal error of identifying the Jewish people with the Israeli government, wilfully confusing anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. Often, they seem to demand that the behaviour of Israel should be judged by a special standard, that allows the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu a special quota of excesses, in compensation for past sufferings. For many years, Israelis in debating difficulties have played a decisive trump: "You have no right to criticise our actions, because of the Holocaust." Ruthless exploitation of the Holocaust card has been successful in deflecting much international criticism, especially from European democracies. Charges of anti-semitism are not infrequently levelled against the growing number of Jews who express dismay about the behaviour of the Israeli government; they are "self-hating Jews", who betray their own kin. Yet surely it is those who make such cruel allegations who bring shame upon themselves. Jewish genius through the centuries has been reflected in the highest intellectual standards. Attempts to equate anti-Zionism, or even criticism of Israeli policy, with anti-semitism reflect a pitiful intellectual sloth, an abandonment of reasoned attempts to justify Israeli actions in favour of moral blackmail. In the short run, such intimidation is not unsuccessful, especially in America. Yet in the long term, grave consequences may ensue. In much of the world, including Europe, a huge head of steam is building against Israeli behaviour. More than a few governments are cooperating less than wholeheartedly with America's war on terror because they are unwilling to be associated with what they see as an unholy alliance of the Sharon and Bush governments. One of Germany's most distinguished postwar leaders expressed to me a few months ago his frustration that, as a German, he is unable to vent his feelings about the wickedness of what is being done in Israel's name. I feel a commitment to the Jewish people, founded on awareness partly of their history, partly of their genius. Yet I see no reason why this should prevent me from asserting that the policies of Sharon and Netanyahu bring shame upon Israel. It is ironic that Israel's domestic critics - former intelligence chiefs and serving fighter pilots - have shown themselves much braver than overseas Jews. If Israel persists with its current policies, and Jewish lobbies around the world continue to express solidarity with repression of the Palestinians, then genuine anti-semitism is bound to increase. Herein lies the lobbyists' recklessness. By insisting that those who denounce the Israeli state's behaviour are enemies of the Jewish people, they seek to impose a grotesque choice. The Israeli government's behaviour to the Palestinians breeds a despair that finds its only outlet in terrorism. No one can ever criticise the Jewish diaspora for asserting Israel's right to exist. But the most important service the world's Jews can render to Israel today is to persuade its people that the only plausible result of their government's behaviour is a terrible loneliness in the world. · Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard."

Leaders of Israel,
Terra

[The racist Israeli state murders with impunity -- even old men in wheelchairs as they're pushed out of mosques. This man's slaughter is the utmost provocation, surely fomenting more Palestinian "terrorism," widening resistance to Zionist-controlled American imperialism, and giving the racist Jewish state self-decreed license (with its puppet U.S. government in tow) to slaughter Arabs in even larger numbers. Jews and Israel lead us all closer and closer to world disaster.]
Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin killed in Israeli air strike,
by IBRAHIM BARZAK, National Post (from Canadian Press), March 22, 2004 "Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of the Hamas militant group that targeted Israelis in suicide bombings, was killed by missiles fired from Israeli helicopters as he left a mosque at daybreak Monday, witnesses said. Tens of thousands of Gaza residents, many of them in tears, poured into the streets after Hamas announced the death of the quadriplegic Yassin over mosque loudspeakers. Masked fighters at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where Yassin's body was taken, shot into the air in rage. Hamas vowed revenge against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Witnesses said Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin and two bodyguards as they left the mosque, killing them instantly. He was carried around in a special car that could accommodate his wheelchair. A total of four people were killed and 12 were wounded in the attack, witnesses said. Yussef Haddad, 35, a taxi driver, said he saw the missiles hit Yassin and the bodyguards. "Their bodies were shattered," he said. Yassin was by far the most senior Palestinian militant killed in more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Since September 2000, 474 people - the majority of them Israelis - have been killed in 112 Palestinian suicide bombings, most of them carried out by Hamas. One Israeli official recently said Yassin was "marked for death." Sharon's government has gone after militant leaders using Israeli helicopter gunships in a controversial policy that has resulted in a number of civilian casualties in addition to the deaths of senior figures in Hamas and other groups. More than 150 Palestinian militants have been killed in targeted raids, according to Palestinian medical officials, although that total also includes militants killed resisting arrest. Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned the killing. "Assassinations, incursions, walls, will not produce peace and security. On the contrary, it will just add fuel to the fire," he said. Yassin was viewed as an inspirational figure by his followers in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. His death could spur violent protests not only in the Palestinian areas but in the wider Arab and Islamic world, where he was well regarded as a symbol of the Palestinian battle for independence. In announcing Yassin's death, Hamas said, "(Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head." Ambulances and fire trucks raced to the scene with sirens wailing, and rescue workers gathered up the shattered bodies. Outside the morgue at Shifa Hospital, Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, a close associate of Yassin, had tears in his eyes as he confirmed Yassin's death and pledged revenge. "This is the moment Sheik Yassin dreamed about," Haniyeh said. "Sheik Yassin lived and died and offered his life to Palestine. Sheik Yassin was a hero and a fighter and the leader of a nation, and (he) is in heaven now" ... Past Israeli governments were reluctant to target Yassin, fearing a firestorm of revenge attacks."

[More on the world Jewish Death Totem: Israel. Quick! More conferences on, and condemnation of, "anti-Semitism."]
World fears after Yassin killing. Sheikh Yassin's killing has been widely condemned,
BBC, March 22, 2004
"The killing of Sheikh Yassin has drawn widespread condemnation in the Arab world and Europe, while the US State Department has appealed for calm. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak described it as cowardly and King Abdullah of Jordan called it a crime. Iranian officials said the killing would trigger an even bigger struggle against Israel and the US. European Union foreign ministers condemned what they called Israel's "extra-judicial killing". "Not only are extra-judicial killings contrary to international law, they undermine the concept of the rule of law, which is a key element in the fight against terrorism," they said at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described the assassination as "unacceptable" and "unjustified". Mr Straw said he did not think Israel would benefit from an attack on an old man in a wheelchair. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said such acts could only "feed the spiral of violence". The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the killing was "very, very bad news" for the Middle East peace process. In Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry said it was "deeply concerned" at the assassination, which it feared would cause "a new wave of violence". Restraint urged The US was among the first countries to issue an official reaction in the wake of the killing of Sheikh Yassin by Israeli forces. State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said: "The United States urges all sides to remain calm and exercise restraint." An Australian foreign ministry spokesman also urged efforts to "try and prevent any further decline into violence". Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he had cancelled a visit by Egyptian members of parliament to Jerusalem in protest at the assassination. The delegation was to have taken part in celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Mr Mubarak described the killing as "regrettable and cowardly". When asked about its possible impact on the Middle East peace process, he said: "What peace process?" Iran's ex-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned that Sheikh Yassin's "martyrdom" would trigger an "even more serious struggle by the oppressed Palestinians against the Israeli terrorist occupiers and their US supporter". Roadmap fears Other leading figures in the Arab world have also criticised the killing of Sheikh Yassin. Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said it was "state terrorism in its most hideous form", while Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council said it could escalate danger in Iraq. One member of the Council, Muwaffaq al-Rubaiye, told the AFP news agency: "We condemn the killing, which will only serve to strengthen the justifications for terrorist acts in the world and does not serve peace." Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah said: "Violence will increase now because violence always breeds violence." Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said Israel was "mistaken" if it thought that by killing resistance fighters, it could kill the Palestinian cause. The spiritual leader of Egypt's outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Mehdi Akef, said Sheikh Yassin had fallen as a "martyr" in a "cowardly operation". BBC diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason says the world's big powers are likely to be dismayed that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has chosen to escalate Israeli military action against Hamas. Our correspondent says there will also be concern, especially in the British government, that the killing might further hinder the progress of the international roadmap peace plan for the Middle East."

The Unmentionable Source of Terrorism,
by John Pilger, antiwar.com, Mardh 20, 2004
"The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent colonial terrorism exposes "us" to retaliation. The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined. Read the melancholy Palestinian Monitor on the Internet; it chronicles the equivalent of Madrid's horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the West acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims. Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure, is protected and rewarded in the west. In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians." Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any other state since the founding of the world body. Last October, the UN General Assembly voted by 144 to four to condemn the wall that Israel has cut through the heart of the West Bank, annexing the best agricultural land, including the aquifer system that provides most of the Palestinians' water. Israel, as usual, ignored the world. Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East. The former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison have described how "two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice-president heavily invested in oil." The "neoconservatives" who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington. In 1997, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office..." Chalabi is the CIA-backed stooge and convicted embezzler at present organising the next "democratic" government in Baghdad. Until recently, a group of Zionists ran their own intelligence service inside the Pentagon. This was known as the Office of Special Plans, and was overseen by Douglas Feith, an under-secretary of defence, extreme Zionist and opponent of any negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was the Office of Special Plans that supplied Downing Street with much of its scuttlebutt about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; more often than not, the original source was Israel. Israel can also claim responsibility for the law passed by Congress that imposes sanctions on Syria and in effect threatens it with the same fate as Iraq unless it agrees to the demands of Tel Aviv. Israel is the guiding hand behind Bush's bellicose campaign against the "nuclear threat" posed by Iran. Today, in occupied Iraq, Israeli special forces are teaching the Americans how to "wall in" a hostile population, in the same way that Israel has walled in the Palestinians in pursuit of the Zionist dream of an apartheid state. The author David Hirst describes the "Israelisation of US foreign policy" as being "now operational as well as ideological." In understanding Israel's enduring colonial role in the Middle East, it is too simple to see the outrages of Ariel Sharon as an aberrant version of a democracy that lost its way. The myths that abound in middle-class Jewish homes in Britain about Israel's heroic, noble birth have long been reinforced by a "liberal" or "left-wing" Zionism as virulent and essentially destructive as the Likud strain. In recent years, the truth has come from Israel's own "new historians," who have revealed that the Zionist "idealists" of 1948 had no intention of treating justly or even humanely the Palestinians, who instead were systematically and often murderously driven from their homes. The most courageous of these historians is Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who, with the publication of each of his ground-breaking books, has been both acclaimed and smeared. The latest is A History of Modern Palestine, in which he documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore apart Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully. As for the modern "peace process," he describes the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a plan by liberal Zionists in the Israeli Labour Party to corral Palestinians in South African-style bantustans."

["No one" is now immune to Israeli Death Squads. Takes in a lot of ground, don't you think?]
Hanegbi: Rantisi's time will come too,
By MARGOT DUDKEVITCH, Jerusalem Post, March 22, 2004
"PA Chairman Yasser Arafat is not immune; no one is immune anymore. We should stop apologizing for defending ourselves," [Israeli] Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said Monday night in a statement on the assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin "The time came for someone to close accounts with him [Yassin]," Hanegbi added. [Hamas political leader Abdel Aziz] Rantisi's time will also come," he warned. Rantisi survived an IAF targted killing last year. ... The prime minister said he personally called the chief of staff, the commander of the air force and the head of the shin bet to congratulate them on the attack. Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter opposed the assassination, and warned that Hamas would attack Isareli interests abroad, as well as targets close to Yassin's heart - a top Israeli religious leader, Channel 10 reported. Channel 2 reported Monday night that while the Defense establishment favored the plan, Shin Bet head Avi Dichter expressed reservations at the security cabinet meeting, fearful of the Palestinian reaction and worried that the cost of the action would outweigh its benefits. Channel 1, however, reported that Dichter was only opposed to the timing, and wanted Israel to act against all the Hamas leaders at once, since the targeted killing of Yassin alone would send all the others so far into hiding that it would be difficult to target them in the future. Although American officials were not told about the assassination is advance, Sharon told the MKs that American officials were aware that significant steps against terror were on the horizon, which would be taken before Israel withdraws from Gaza Strip settlements. "In all meetings with American and other international officials, it was made clear that specifically because we intend to take far-reaching [diplomatic] steps, our actions against terror would become more severe," Sharon said. Yassin was killed in an Israeli missile attack shortly before dawn as he left a Gaza mosque after morning prayers. According to initial reports three of Yassin's bodyguards were killed and 17 people were wounded in the attack, including two of Yassin's sons. "His wheelchair was twisted. Two or three people were lying next to him on the ground. One was legless," said taxi driver Yousef Haddad, who had rushed out of a nearby grocery when the missiles shook the Sabra neighborhood in Gaza City ... Mofaz, who met with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee several hours after the killing, acknowledged that Israel may face a "wave of terror" in reprisal for the killing over the next few weeks, but said that "war on Hamas" and anti-terror operations would continue on all levels."

[More disguised atttempts at Israeli mass murder. In Israeli eyes, Arabs are animals.]
Israel barred from using toxic spray,
Aljazeera, March 24, 2004
" Israel's Supreme Court has issued a temporary injunction banning the government from using a crop spray deemed a health hazard to beduins by human rights groups, a petitioners' statement said. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Negev Coexistence forum were among the groups, non-governmental organisations and villagers who lodged the appeal on Monday against the use of "Roundup" herbicide. Israeli authorities have frequently used crop-dusting planes to destroy the harvest of bedouin Arabs living in so-called "unrecognised" villages in Israel's southern Negev desert. According to the statement, "on seven different days in the last years at least 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) of wheat, barley, and some vegetables have been sprayed in 12 villages. The crops are a part of the food consumed by the villagers and their livestock in the 'unrecognized' villages." "The authorities ignored the simple instructions prohibiting aerial spraying, the exposures were produced without the notification or consent of the subjects, which, even if given, would still make the entire exercise unethical," said the statement, quoting the assessment of a leading epidemiologist. Elihu Richter charged that the way the herbicide was being used was "a health risk to the residents and their animals, and can cause fertility problems, birth defects, and there is even some evidence that this substance is cancerous." Caution In a petition to the court by the various groups, it is stated that the Israeli Ministry of Health claims that "according to the literature research that we conducted, Roundup (the herbicide) is not poisonous to humans when it is used according to manufacturer's specifications". The herbicide poses health risks to Palestinian livestock as well However, the petition points out that the manufacturer's directions state: "Do not apply this product using aerial spray equipment". The reason, the NGOs and other concerned groups point out, is the danger of spread of the chemical to adjacent residential areas and human exposure to it. In the warnings, the petition adds, it is cautioned that "regular caution must be used, as is used with any herbicides. Do not inhale, during spraying wear clothes that cover the entire body, keep livestock away from the sprayed area for seven days after spraying." The spraying, the groups say, was done without any prior notice. "Part of the spraying was done in close proximity to people's residences." In two cases, the petition adds, "people were in or near to the fields and were sprayed directly." 'Unethical' The beduins did not receive any information about the area where their fields were sprayed, "nor were there fences to obstruct the livestock from entering the area". "Part of the spraying was done in close proximity to people's residences... In two cases people were in or near to the fields and were sprayed directly" Rights groups petition These people obtain their food "from these livestock and the harm caused to the livestock could bring about indirect harm to the people", the petition added. Experts further charged that "the (Israeli) authorities ignored the simple instructions prohibiting aerial spraying… the exposures were produced without the notification or consent of the subjects, which, even if given, would still make the entire exercise unethical." Many beduins, pastoral shepherds who have grazed their goats, sheep and camels on the same lands from generation to generation, now live in seven authorised settlement towns into which the Israeli authorities have tried to corral them since the 1970s. But many reject what they call these "reservations", where unemployment is high, and an increasing number have moved back to their old lands, living in around 40 unrecognised villages where they build homes without planning permission."

[JTR Contributor's comment: "The following quote seems pertinent: Voltaire usually said much more hostile things: "The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and the Negroes of Guinea are much more reasonable and more honest people than your ancestors, the Jews. You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny." "They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race." --J-- link for quote above: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11525 ]
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,
by Gilad Atzmon [Atzmon is Jewish-born, from Israel], gilad.co.uk
"Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was murdered at daybreak on Monday. Israel Air Force helicopters fired missiles at the car carrying the wheelchair-bound head of the Islamic group as he left a mosque near his house in Gaza City. It also appears Ariel Sharon was in direct command of the assassination operation, not entirely surprising considering his bloody history. For those who fail to realise, today's barbaric Israeli act is an open call for a world war. It is the final wake up call for every Muslim around the world. It is violent proof that Israel isn't only against the Palestinians but rather against Islam. Israel killed a prime spiritual leader on his way out of the mosque. I have no doubt that this Israeli act won't be forgiven. I also have no doubt that many Israelis will pay with their life for Sharon's act. Moreover I am sure that sooner rather than later many innocent non-Israelis around the world will die just for being near by an Israeli embassy, Israeli consulate, a synagogue or even an American bank... This is the reality Sharon favours the most. This is exactly what Israel wants: to turn the entire world into a victim of terror. This might help us to realise the main difference between the Israeli left and right. While both believe in the right of the Jews to live in Zion on the expense of the Palestinian people, the Israeli right wing rely on maintaining a bloody struggle, oppressing the Palestinian people (in particular) and humiliating Arabs (in general). While the Israeli left would attempt to come up with some unrealistic righteous suggestions to appease the Palestinian people and the world community (Oslo accord for instance), the right wing Israelis will suggest that the only method to guarantee Israeli security is to maintain the conflict with the Palestinian people and to let it escalate into an international battle. On the surface it seems bizarre, considering Sharon was just recently pretending to suggest a plan of Israeli disengagement from the Gaza strip. Today he gave us a real chance to peep into his mind. The 'disengagement plan' was just another of Sharon's tricks. In fact, Sharon and the Israeli right wing need the Palestinians, they need them oppressed and humiliated, they need their terror. Israeli right wing hegemony is fed by terror. And now there is a new need emerging. Israel is facing a demographic disaster. Within five years there will be a Palestinian majority in the territories controlled by Israel (between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River). This is literally the end of the Zionist dream. Eventually Israel will have to give away its Jewish identity. While the Israeli left remains confused about this reality, the Israeli right wing is fully prepared. For years Israeli warmongers have openly discussed 'transfer': the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Considering the current world affairs and general opposition to Israel it is hard to believe that large scale ethnic cleansing would go ahead unless some colossal catastrophe was in place. Sharon is preparing the ground for such a disaster. He needs a war, a big one, something that will allow him to go wild, to go out of control, to initiate a campaign in which Israeli soldiers will become murderous squads ready massacre against the Palestinian civilians. Sharon wants to re-launch the 1948 Nakba. Sharon fully understands that this is what the Israeli public wants. He is very good at reading their innermost desires. The killing of Sheikh Yassin pushed the violence far beyond any recognisable measure. It is pushing the Palestinian masses towards martyrdom. According to the Israeli military doctrine, Israel would never be defeated by terror. But at the same time every Israeli realises that the Zionist adventure will be categorically defeated by a demographic crisis. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin is there to push the Palestinians towards acts that will allow the Israelis to impose the most murderous measures against the Palestinian civilians. Mr Sharon, a world acclaimed war criminal and serial murderer proved again that at least when blood games are concerned, he is one step ahead of the game."

Sharon is dragging his people towards an abyss of perpetual war and death,
by Johann Hari, The Independent (UK), March 24, 2004
"Yassin is more dangerous dead than alive. He will become a ghost at every Palestinian feast, urging martyrdom."

Zionism And The Politics Of Assassination. On Extra-judicial Executions,
By Mazin Qumsiyeh, Information Clearinghouse, March 22, 2004
"As the fourth strongest army in the world, Israel could have arrested the quadriplegic and partially blind spiritual elder of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). But history shows that such extrajudicial executions (200 so far) create instability and a cycle of revenge that is calculated to serve Zionist colonization efforts. Political Zionism started in 1845 with a British feasibility study for Jewish colonization in Palestine to further British interests in weakening the Ottoman Empire and establish connections to colonial holdings in India. The adoption of this political (as opposed to religious or cultural) Zionism by a small but very influential segment of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe was deemed crucial for success. Zionism remained marginal among Jews until it capitalized on the atrocities of WWII. Early advocates of Zionism did not shy away from using the term colonization to describe their activities or to describe the use of violence to achieve their goals because natives will always resist such efforts. This violence against native Palestinians started in 1917 when the Zionist Herbert Samuel was appointed as British high commissioner. He made it clear with violent action that the end result will be the creation of a Jewish state in a land that had less than 6% Jewish population. Most native Jews, including the Palestinian Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, were opposed to Zionism at the time. Before 1917 Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted in relative harmony. Violence between 1917 and 1949 resulted in the establishment of a Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of 530 Palestinian villages and towns. Israel rejected International law by adopting exclusionary laws that prevent refugees from returning while offering automatic citizenship to Jews (including converts) from anywhere in the world. Zionists expected resistance of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. 800,000 were made refugees by 1949 (now nearly 5 million including Yassin's family). Israeli leaders from Ben Gurion to Sharon have always used the 'Zionist response' to resistance: overwhelming violence and increased colonization. It was Zionist Jews who first to plant bombs in market places (1930s), first bomb civilian neighborhoods using aircraft (1947), first sent mail letter bombs (1940s), and first to hijack (1954) and shoot down (1973) civilian airplanes. As our biased mainstream US media keeps emphasizing, Palestinians also engaged in expected violent resistance. Violence is a symptom and was used to further colonization efforts whether in Palestine or in America (against Native Americans). It is not a coincidence that the major waves of expulsions of Palestinians occurred between October 1947 to January 1949 and in June 1967. It is not a coincidence that in the name of 'security', Israel destroyed over 3000 Palestinian homes rendering some 15,000 civilians homeless most in the most desirable land. The Apartheid wall being built with the excuse of the violence is not separating Israel from the occupied areas but is surrounding Palestinians in small cantons to starve them and force them to leave. Thus, Zionist leaders deem violence and escalation a sound strategy because, as the first Prime Minister of Israel admitted, peace would mean having to restore rights to native people. Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassin was described as stupid (Gush Shalom), horrendous mistake (Yossi Beilin), contrary to International law (Amnesty International and the European Union), and a war crime (Israeli liberal leaders). I think such actions remove any doubt about the fact that political Zionism is incompatible with peace in the 21st century. As for us here, Israel's strong lobby in congress drained us of over $100 billion in direct aid and much more indirectly. It is responsible for the low standing of the US around the world."

Maariv survey: 61% support Yasin killing, 21% object,
Maariv (Israel), March 23, 2003
"Even though only 9% expect terror to decline after Hamas leader's elimination; small majority wants Arafat killed too. An evening poll conducted yesterday (Monday) by Maariv and “The New Wave” indicates that 61% of the population supports the IDF's killing of Hamas leader Ahmad Yasin. 21% thought Israel should not have killed the Hamas leader. The poll also reveals that the Israeli public is more evenly divided on the question of whether Israel should also assassinate the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat. 43% believe Israel should eliminate Arafat, while 38% object to such an operation. According to the survey, respondents are already resigned to the new terror wave that is expected following the Yasin hit: 55% believe terror will increase. 36% think it would not change while only 9% claim the level of terror would decrease. The survey sample was 504 adult Israelis, including Arabs -- which appears to indicate that among Jews support for the Yasin killing is even higher. The margin of error was 4.2%."

Moroccan Jewish Leader Attacks 'Bestial' Killing of Yassin,
Scotsman (Scotland), March 24, 2004
"The head of the Jewish community in Casablanca today described Israel’s deadly attack on Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin as “bestial” and likened it to state terrorism. Simon Levy said the targeted missile strike on Yassin amounts not to a success but to “the failure of (Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon to ensure the security of Israel”. The spiritual leader of Hamas was killed in Gaza City on Monday. Levy, who founded and heads the Museum of Moroccan Judaism, called the killing a “bestial act that comes under state terrorism”. He said he spoke as a “Jewish Moroccan.” He also castigated US President George Bush, saying he “sanctified” state terrorism. Levy pleaded for a return to the peace process to resolve the crisis in the Middle East. “There are extremists on both sides who do not want to accept the necessary, painful compromises of Oslo, who did everything to ruin things,” Levy said, referring to the Oslo accords that gave the Palestinians wider control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Levy noted that the Jews of Morocco were in favour of the creation of a Palestinian state “viable with Al Qods (Jerusalem) as its capital”

[Jews treat Christians like shit. Will anyone in the world lift a finger to help the nuns, priests and others in racist, apartheid Israel? No. Some fellow Christians (Christian Zionists) would rather piss on their own kind than roil the feathers of rich Jewish bigots who dangle their Christian supporters like puppets.]
ISRAEL: Franciscans and other religious treated like illegal immigrants,
For the first time in over 50 years, Israel’s government has refused to renew visas belonging to some one hundred nuns, priests and other religious. Now the Holy Land Custodian Spokesman is appealing to Churches around the world for moral and legal support. Jerusalem, Asia News, March 24, 2004
"There has never been a crisis of the sort in the 56 years of Israel's existence as Church clergy and personnel are deprived of visas to remain in the country. The crisis affects the lives and work of hundreds of priests, nuns and other religious who now must all live under clandestine conditions. They are subject to being stopped and questioned along the road and even arrested like illegal immigrants. Only last week, March 17, two Most Holy Rosary sisters were stopped by police and two days before that a Franciscan brother was also halted in his steps by security patrols. The point is that these persons have been residing in Israel or the Occupied Territories for years. Yet requests to renew their visas or receive one for the first time now gather dust in Interior Ministry offices. The visa issue is also a humanitarian problem. Some religious urgently need to leave Israel to be near their dying parents. Yet they can’t leave the country since they run the risk of not being able to renter Israel on their return. The policy to not remit visas to Church clergy and its staff began during the previous government when Ministry of the Interior was headed by a Shas party fundamentalist. Then one year ago when a Shinui liberal secular party exponent took over the position it was hoped that things would change. However, the new interior minister and other government advocates have gone back on their promises to Church officials. The visa stalemate also raises questions over the Fundamental Agreement the Holy See struck with Israel, an international accord now in its tenth year. The agreement recognizes the lawful right of the Church to bring in its own workers and carry out activities within its Holy Land institutions. According to the estimates of some religious officials there are at least 100 “illegals”, while the number is ever increasing as visas expire every day and are not renewed. The cases especially concern those who entered the country legally but simply need to renew their legal right to stay. The situation involves not only Church personnel in Israel, but in the Occupied Territories as well since to enter areas under Palestinian control they must first pass through Israel . In the past, bureaucratic procedures were smooth and transparent: priests assigned to serve the Church in the Holy Land had their visas automatically renewed every 2-3 years. Yet Israeli authorities have kept completely silent, a reaction some define as a “rubber wall”. At first Church officials supposed delays were due to simple bureaucratic errors and slowdowns. Yet now the phenomenon is too widespread, lasted too long and has affected too many people to be understood as such. Now the Church in the Holy Land risks not having enough religious to make sanctuaries, parishes, hospital and schools function well. And all this is happening in pure silence while the Israeli government utters not one single opinion or explanation and without any proclamation of new rules and requirements. Church leaders, bishops from the Holy Land and from abroad, have all turned to Israeli authorities for help, but have received only vague promises or answers. At the beginning of 2003 government authorities promised to discuss new procedures, but still nothing has come about. Fr. David Jaeger, a Franciscan father and Holy Land Custodian spokesman, told AsiaNews: “The situation here is really amazing –Kafkian, to say the least. We are dealing with a very serious problem indeed, one which is getting worse by the day. Promises made by top ranking government officials have not been kept so far. They won’t let us know their reasons behind the new policy. There are no official channels of dialog to bring about a resolution to the situation. For some time now the Catholic Church in the Holy Land has been appealing to the solidarity of other Churches worldwide. The country’s rulers must realize that the situation now involves the entire Catholic Church across the globe.”

[It is illegal for a Jew and non-Jew to marry in modern Israel. How many non-Jews in western countries know that?]
They talk of change, but liberal parties thwart reform of Israel’s marriage laws,
By Jason Gitlin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, march 24, 2004
"Earlier this month, Israel’s Knesset defeated two bills that would have finally allowed civil marriages as well as recognized religious marriages performed by Reform and Conservative rabbis. The decision, which wasn’t even close, didn’t just severely wrong Israel’s growing number of non-Jewish and secular citizens. It also disappointed and embarrassed non-Orthodox Jews in the United States and those who support Israel’s claim as the Middle East’s only democratic, enlightened nation. Under current laws, couples that wish legally to be wed in Israel must be married in a religious ceremony, and one conducted by a state-recognized clergyman. For Jews, that means only one thing: an Orthodox rabbi. If the couple is comprised of a Jew and a non-Jew — an arrangement most common among the country’s Russian immigrant population — or members of a non-recognized faith or no faith at all, it means they are completely out of luck. For many Israelis, such requirements simply are untenable. Consequently, thousands of Israelis leave their home country to get married abroad, most often flying to nearby Cyprus. They marry abroad either because they do not qualify for wedlock — the state has determined them not marriage-worthy — or because they want to bypass the religious establishment. Israel’s archaic approach to marriage can be traced back to the state’s establishment, when then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion conceded authority over religion and personal-status issues — such as birth, marriage and divorce — to the Orthodox Jewish establishment. Although evidence suggests that Ben-Gurion believed this was a dwindling population whose power would only erode in the future, the opposite turned out to be true. Over time, Israel’s charedi, or fervently Orthodox population, not only failed to wither, but it grew both in size and political influence. In Israel’s last election, frustration over perceived religious coercion and the discriminatory practices of the state’s religious political parties led to a backlash. The result was that Shinui, a secularist party that campaigned on curbing the power of the Orthodox establishment, went from seven Knesset seats to 15, making it the third-largest party after Likud and Labor. In addition, advocates for a more pluralistic approach to Jewish life in Israel gained widespread attention in the 1990s amid the “Who is a Jew” debate, which centered on the religious authority’s refusal to recognize Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel. So, in light of such developments, how did our enlightened brethren vote? As might sadly be expected, 58 Knesset members from Israel’s religious and right-wing parties — Likud, the Nation Union, the National Religious Party, Shas and United Torah Judaism — voted against the bill to allow for non-Orthodox marriage. Far more distressing was that only 28 Knesset members from the secular and left-leaning parties — Labor, Meretz, Shinui and the Arab parties — voted in favor of the bill. The biggest disappointments were Shinui and Labor. Shinui, a partner in the current governing coalition, lamely cited a commitment by coalition ministers not to vote against the official coalition stand. Despite trampling on the party’s raison d’etre, Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, Shinui’s party head and Israel’s justice minister, had the gall to gloat after the vote that nine of his party’s members — just over half — voted in favor of the bill while only seven of Labor’s did. For its part, Labor performed the most dishonorably. Despite being in the Knesset at the time of the vote, most of the party’s leaders did not even show up for the session. Among those who decided to skip it were party leader Shimon Peres, Matan Vilnai, Haim Ramon and Amram Mitzna. It is hard to explain the disconnect that is reflected in the actions of Israel’s ostensibly progressive leaders. On the one hand, Mitzna and other Labor leaders tour American Reform and Conservative synagogues peddling support for their peace plans, claiming Jews are all one people and together we can bring security and international respect to Israel. On the other hand, they do not have the time even to appear as though they care about an issue of clear importance to the entire Jewish people. Moreover, their dismal performance in the vote suggests they either do not understand or refuse to admit that Israel’s current isolation does not stem solely from the occupation of Palestinian territories or a disconcerting rise in anti-Semitism. The upholding of such clearly discriminatory practices, as those relating to personal-status issues, is impossible to defend. It also arms those who wish to paint Israel as a racist society, and will continue to do so even after peace eventually is made with the Palestinians."

Palestinians: Israel gets licence to kill,
Al-Jazeera, March 26, 2004
"Palestinians fear Israel has free reign over killing its leaders. Palestinians have accused the United States of granting Israel a licence to kill by vetoing UN condemnation of its assassination of Hamas leader Shaikh Ahmad Yasin. At the United Nations, the US late on Thursday vetoed a Security Council resolution by Arab nations to censure Israel for assassinating Hamas's founder in a missile strike outside a Gaza mosque on Monday. Washington, alone among major powers in not condemning Monday's assassination as an extrajudicial killing, rejected the resolution because it did not also denounce Hamas for bombings in Israel. The vote was 11 in favour, three abstentions, and the US veto that killed the measure ... The measure was backed by China, Russia, Algeria, Pakistan, Angola, Benin, Brazil, Chile, France, Spain and the Philippines. Palestinians denounced the US action, and 10,000 people demonstrated in the West Bank against Yasin's killing. "I'm afraid this US veto will be taken by Israel as encouragement to continue on the path of violence and escalation, assassinations and reoccupation" of Palestinian territory, cabinet minister Saib Uraiqat told Reuters. Israel's 'green light' Calling the United States the "chairman of the axis of evil in the world", Hamas political leader Muhammad Ghazal said the veto was "Israel's green light to carry out assaults and crimes". An Israeli government official in Jerusalem welcomed the US veto but expressed disappointment that Washington had been left no other option. "We are troubled by this cynical attempt to condemn those who are fighting terrorism without denouncing the terrorists themselves," he said. Worshippers at Friday prayers in the Gaza mosque where Yasin had prayed minutes before his assassination wept and demanded revenge as they looked upon the empty spot where the paralysed 67-year-old cleric used to sit in his wheelchair."

[A Palestinian boy set to be a suicide bomber for 100 shekels? 100 shekels is somewhere around $30.]
Israel 'fabricated' child-bomber story; Media turned up two hours before the incident,
Prison Planet (from Al Jazeera), March 25 2004
"Palestinian leaders have accused Israel of fabricating a story about a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who planned to blow himself up. The Israeli army said he was caught wearing an explosive belt at an army roadblock in the northern West Bank. The boy, identified as Husam Abdu from Nablus, was shown on TV screens around the world, with an explosive belt strapped to his waist. The Israeli army said the boy told interrogators that his dispatchers promised that he would have sex with 72 virgins in heaven soon after his death. "We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z. Would you believe that a 13 or 14-year old would agree to blow up himself in return for a hundred shekels which he would receive after his death? "It seems to me that the Israelis are bad liars as well," said Yaqub Shahin, a director-general of the Palestinian Authority ministry of information. Painting a 'terrorist' picture In an interview with Aljazeera.net, Shahin accused Israel of seeking to justify slaughtering Palestinian children by spreading the false impression that they are used as human bombers. "Their [Israel's] goal is to besmirch Palestinian childhood so that when they slaughter the children, the world won't feel sorry for them," he said. Arab Knesset member Muhammad Baraka has also voiced "serious doubts" about the veracity of the Israeli narrative. "I have very serious doubts about the whole story. I can't give the Israeli army the benefit of the doubt." However, Baraka urged all parties to "keep children away from this sinister and bloody conflict. "Using children as bombs is infinitely diabolical. It is totally inconsistent with all religious, moral and human values." Fatah denial The armed wing of Fatah, the Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, has denied any involvement in the incident, accusing Israel of "concocting the whole story for the purpose of justifying the killing of more Palestinian children". The Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahranot reported on Thursday that Abdu told Shin Beth interrogators that an anonymous person had promised him 100 shekels if he blew himself up in the midst of Israeli soldiers. Samir Khiwairah, a Nablus journalist who personally knows the boy's family, told Aljazeera.net that the boy's mental capacity to distinguish things is very low. "I don't completely rule out the possibility that some evil person gave him the explosive belt and told him he would become a hero ... but this is a very tiny possibility." Khiwairah said the Israeli army had a history of "fabricating and concocting stories" for the purpose of vilifying the Palestinians and winning public relations points. Similar story A few weeks ago, another boy from Nablus, Muhammad Kuraan, made headlines when the Israeli army presented him to the media as a child who had been dispatched to blow himself up at an Israeli roadblock. However, when the boy returned home, he reportedly told his family and relatives "Jews told me to do this or else they would kill me." Aljazeera.net asked the Israeli army spokesman in Tel Aviv to explain why Abdu would accept 100 shekels to get blown up and what good the money could possibly do? The army was also asked to explain why it had TV cameras ready at the roadblock more than two hours before the event. Despite two hours of waiting, the army failed to provide an answer. Child-killing The controversy of using children in the Israeli-Palestinian strife underscores the brazen ugliness of the conflict. According to human rights groups operating in the occupied territories, the Israeli army has killed hundreds of Palestinian children since the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada more than three and a half years ago. According to a spokeswoman for the East Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (HRMG), the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish settlers have killed 263 Palestinian children from age 0-14 and 236 minors from the age of 15-18 during the ongoing Intifada. The total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the outbreak of the Intifada is estimated at 2670. The figures for the injured and maimed are believed to be in the thousands. The number of Israelis killed by Palestinians during the same period is around 838, including soldiers, settlers and civilians. Israel claims its army does not target Palestinian civilians deliberately but admits, rather grudgingly, that the killing is carried out knowingly. However, human rights groups argue forcefully that, in the final analysis, killing knowingly is killing deliberately."

A malignant tumor onto the world: Israel and its self-defeating actions,
By Manuel Valenzuela, Online Journal, March 26, 2004
"What were Sharon and the Israeli government thinking when they decided to decapitate Hamas through the assassination of its founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin? If the state sponsored murder of Yassin was not so recklessly self-defeating, one might be inclined to think that Sharon is on a mission to implode the state of Israel. The evaporation of a wheelchair-laden Yassin through American Apache helicopter missiles underscores the vicious cycle the state of Israel has thrust upon itself for years on end. Its ceaseless terror-inducing actions on an occupied and resisting people continue to haunt it and its own citizens; its continued oppression, violence and dehumanization on the indigenous people of Palestine inevitably always boomerangs, yet Israel does not relent, nor understands, nor seems to care about the consequences of its actions. As if addicted to perpetual death, fear and violence, the state of Israel continues to escalate a war it cannot win, an occupation it cannot escape and a state of siege it does not fully care to understand. Israel has through the years only increased its oppression of a population it cannot erase, no matter how hard it tries to cleanse the Holy Land of its native inhabitants. It continues to masochistically seek the principle of kill and be killed, of cause and effect and action and reaction, making one wonder if suffering and hardship are necessary ingredients for life in the Middle East. For decades Israel has tried everything to no avail, collective punishment, virtual imprisonment, economic genocide, killing, maiming, oppressing, occupying, cleansing and dehumanizing. Does it not see that her continued actions are leading not to the "promised land" but rather straight to hell on Earth and that life is only getting harder and much less safe? ... The right-wing Likud government has systematically provoked the wrath of Palestinians through its harsh collective punishment, its continued dehumanization and the incessant unleashing of terror through American Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks. Likud has survived by fostering the current cycle of violence that has attached itself to the fears of Israeli citizens. In essence, it has maintained power through the continued shedding of blood, both Jewish and Muslim. It is therefore in its best interest to maintain the status quo, using Israelis and their fears to hold its grip on power. Israel's citizens are being used, becoming pawns in the game of power, in essence easily disposable bodies possessing the blood and flesh necessary for the cameras to record and disseminate the carnage and the fear necessary to control the population. Through fear Likud thrives and survives; through the maiming of body parts and splashing of blood Sharon maintains his hegemony over the Israeli people. The world is tired that the greatest threat to world peace and stability comes from a minute part of the world involving a few million people (out of a world population of over 6 billion). We are tired that so much of our security is determined by those entities fighting for a land promised by ancient myths and fables, by primitive peoples with archaic outlooks seeking antiquated solutions in bygone times. The world is tired of the continued shedding of human blood for cynical purposes that is sending the entire globe perilously close to world war. It is hard to believe that one area, no bigger than a small American state, is the cause of so much trouble and anxiety and that in a simmering second can help engulf the world in flames. The greatest threat to world peace is the continued occupation of Palestinian land and the criminal oppression of the Palestinian people. The world is tired of the inequality, the unfairness, the injustice, the dehumanization, the apartheid and the crimes against humanity being committed in the Middle East. It is tired of an oppressor categorically treating like caged animals a race of humanity whose only crime was continuously living in land deemed Holy by Zionists. The world is tired of the one-sided fiction that comes out of Israel that distorts the reality of what is occurring and makes terrorists of an oppressed people resisting occupation. We are sick and tired of government leaders doing nothing but plucking their anal whiskers while millions of people are rotting away their existence in a cesspool of misery and hopelessness, trapped in cages of squalor, deprived of opportunity and at living a life worthy of a human being. What is happening in Palestine affects us all, whether we like it or not. The ramifications of not heeding the warning signs emanating from the region will endanger all corners of the globe."

[JTR Contributor's comment: "What a shock! Israel faked "intelligence" to get the West to fight a war against it's #1 enemy, Iraq. Most of us knew this all along, but apparently, this is supposed to be some new revelation." Our comment: The World Zionist scam continues towards endless imperial war against Arabs and Muslims. Americans, Arabs, Jews, and others are dying in devotion to a foundation of Jewish LYING for the Israeli moral cesspool.]
Report: Israel Wrong on Iraq Weapons,
By PETER ENAV, Yahoo! News (from Associated Press), March 25, 2004
"JERUSALEM - Parliamentary investigators have determined that Israel's intelligence services delivered an erroneous assessment of pre-war Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, an Israeli newspaper reported. Prior to the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Israeli services reported Iraq had large amounts of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents. Since ousting Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led coalition's technical experts have failed to find any such weapons. An investigative subcommittee was formed eight months ago to consider if Israeli intelligence agencies provided an accurate picture of Iraqi unconventional weapons capabilities on the eve of the Iraq war. The Haaretz daily said the 80-page report — set to be released next week — had criticized all Israeli intelligence branches for providing erroneous assessments of Iraq's non-conventional weapons. It said the report recommended that Israeli intelligence services re-examine their techniques and the way responsibility is divided among them. A spokesman for legislator Yuval Steinitz, who chaired the parliamentary committee, would not comment on the Haaretz report. The Israeli military and various intelligence agencies also declined to comment. Based on intelligence warnings that a U.S.-led invasion could trigger an Iraqi missile attack on Israel, the Israeli military ordered citizens to update their gas mask kits in the run-up to the Iraq war. The step cost the country millions of dollars. No missiles were fired on Israel during the war ... The parliamentary report was based on the closed-door testimony of some 70 witnesses, including the prime minister, defense minister, military chief of staff, and the heads of the Mossad foreign intelligence service, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, and the military intelligence service. After the report's release, some sections will remain classified. Last December, a former Israeli intelligence officer charged that Israel produced a flawed picture of Iraqi weapons capabilities and substantially contributed to mistakes made in U.S. and British prewar assessments on Iraq. The comments of reserve Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom represented an unusual criticism of the Israeli intelligence community, long regarded as one of the world's best."

United Nations report: Israeli forces have inflicted a “reign of terror”,
By Jean Shaoul, World Socialist Web Site, March 24, 2004
"A recent report by John Dugard, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur, stated that Israeli forces had “inflicted a reign of terror upon innocent Palestinians in the course of their assassinations of militants in densely populated towns, their destruction of homes, and their random firing in built up areas—not to mention the methodical intimidation and humiliation of civilians at checkpoints.” Dugard’s report is an addendum to the Special Rapporteur’s report of September 2003. After visiting the Occupied Territories last February, he said that the situation was characterised by serious violations of general international law, of human rights law and of international humanitarian law. His mandate was to investigate Israel’s “violations of the principles and bases of international law, international humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons of 1949” in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli Defence Force has openly flouted all the international conventions aimed at securing humane treatment for people under occupation. Despite the fact that more than 2,500 Palestinians have died at the hands of the Israeli armed forces since September 2000, the start of the intifada, only 15 soldiers have been charged, usually with minor offences. The world’s press has studiously ignored Dugard’s report. Yet it came as the Sharon government—secure in the knowledge that it has Washington’s unconditional support in its criminal venture— had stepped up its campaign of murder, collective punishment and house demolitions against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, illegally occupied along with the West Bank since 1967, that culminated in the March 22 assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Since the beginning of 2004, the IDF has killed more than 140 Palestinians and wounded more than 200, mostly children. Each month has seen an increase in the death toll. Thirty-two Palestinians were killed in January and 52 in February. In just the first two weeks of March, 44 have been killed, 30 of whom were killed in Gaza. The giant ghetto that is the Gaza Strip has borne the brunt of Israel’s military and economic repression. On March 21, the day prior to Yassin’s assassination, the Israeli military mounted a predawn operation against Abassan, a village near Khan Yunis, a refugee camp in the south of the Gaza Strip, killing one Palestinian militant and at least four other Palestinians. On March 17, Israeli forces used tanks and helicopter gun ships to attack Gaza, killing four Palestinians. The day before, security forces killed seven Palestinians and bulldozed houses."

By any means necessary. It is not simply Israel's current hardline government that is to blame for the subjugation of Palestinians, but Zionism itself,
by Ghada Karmi, Guardian (UK), Thursday March 18, 2004
"Israel's deputy defence minister, Ze'ev Boim, recently wondered whether there was a genetic defect that made Arabs terrorists. "What is it with Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular?" he asked on Israel army radio. "Is it some sort of cultural deficiency? Is it a genetic defect?" The dismay this arouses will be discounted by some of Israel's friends simply as evidence of the extreme nature of its present government, with its barrier wall and its "transfer" enthusiasts. If only Sharon and his hardliners were replaced by moderates, they say, we could return to a halcyon pre-Likud past that promised peace and coexistence. But to believe this is to misunderstand the nature of Israel's dominant ideology - of which Ariel Sharon and his minister are nothing more than devoted servants. It is not he that is the problem, but the Zionism he espouses. For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism meant in practice, the Israeli historian, Benny Morris's latest revelations and comments - published first in the Israeli daily Haaretz and then in the Guardian - make salutary reading. They have raised a storm of controversy that is still raging two months later, perhaps because they were too honest about an ideology that some would rather keep hidden. Morris, who first exposed the dark circumstances of Israel's creation in his groundbreaking 1988 book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, explains the Israeli project with a brutal candour few Zionists have been prepared to display. Using Israeli state archives for his recently revised study, he reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape and massacre. The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic cleansing and, he asserts, more may be necessary in future to ensure its survival. This bald assertion should shock no one, for it is entirely consistent with the basic Zionist proposition of an ethnically pure state. ... As the intifada continues, despite draconian suppression, there is a near panic over a "demographic spillover" that might dilute Israel's "Jewish character". One recent opinion poll shows that 57% of Israelis support transferring the Arabs, and government ministers such as Avigdor Lieberman advocate this idea quite openly. It is against this background that the monstrous barrier wall in the West Bank can be understood. "The Palestinians will always pose a threat and they must therefore be controlled and caged in," Morris explains. Hence, also, Ariel Sharon's offer last December of a "unilateral" withdrawal from 40% of the West Bank, and his hardline deputy Ehud Olmert's support for partition "because of demography". But the problem also exists inside Israel, whose Arab population is 20%, and growing. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be an Arab majority in the whole of Israel-Palestine. How will the Zionists stem the tide and keep the state Jewish? If Zionism is to prevail, there are few choices. As Morris says, it can only be by superior force to overcome "the barbarians who want to take our lives". The Arabs have "no moral inhibitions", he claims, insisting that in Islam "human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the west". Is this observation much different from Boim's Arab genetic defect? And can the rights of such inferior people equate to those of Jews? "The right of [Palestinian] refugees to return ... seems natural and just," Morris says. "But this 'right of return' needs to be weighed against the right to life and wellbeing of the 5 million Jews who currently live in Israel." Apparently, Jewish self-determination is an imperative that supersedes the rights of the people at whose expense it was promulgated. And in this he encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Though creating Israel entailed Palestinian suffering, Morris argues, it was for a noble aim. That is why Zionism is still a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral rightness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means massive military - including nuclear - force, unsavoury alliances, theft of others' resources, aggression and occupation, the brutal crushing of all resistance - then so be it. No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is a spent force, regardless of current discourse about "post-Zionism". That a benign Zionism, sympathetic to Palestinians, also exists means little while these basic tenets remain. We must thank Morris for disabusing us of such notions. But a project that is morally one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no long-term future. As he himself says: "Destruction could be the end of this process."

The Chilling Implications Of This State Killing,
by Robert Fisk, Information Clearingouse (from The Indepentent - UK) March 23, 2004
"It doesn't take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Yes, he endorsed suicide bombings - including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday - and something infinitely more dangerous, another sinister precedent - was set for our brave new world. Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheikh Yassin was the "head of the snake" - to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London - the head of Hamas, "one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organisations". But then came obfuscation from the world's media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us at lunchtime, was originally freed by the Israelis in a "prisoner exchange". It sounded like one of those familiar swaps - a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. And then, later in the day, the BBC told us that he had been freed "following a deal brokered by King Hussain (of Jordan)". Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This "head of the snake" was in an Israeli prison. And then, bingo, this supposed monster was let go because of a "deal". Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right- wing Likudist Benjamin Netanyahu when he was Prime Minister of Israel. King Hussain wasn't a "broker" between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison and the late King Hussain called the US President in fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn't given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn't released. Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the "head of the snake" was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the Israeli Prime Minister - a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten yesterday. Which is all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Mr Netanyahu let him go in the first place? It was not a question that anyone wanted to ask yesterday. But there was something infinitely more dangerous in all this. Yet another Arab - another leader, however vengeful and ruthless - had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill Osama Bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam's two sons. The Israelis repeatedly threaten to murder Yasser Arafat. It's getting to be a habit. No one has begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there has been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government-versus- guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides - government ministers, spiritual leaders - were allowed to survive. Now all is changed utterly. Anyone who advocates violence is now on a death list. So who can be surprised if the rules are broken by the other side? With all their own security, Bush and Blair may be safe, but what about their ambassadors and fellow ministers? Leaders are fair game. We will not say this. If, or when, our own political leaders are gunned down or blown up, we shall vilify the killers and argue a new stage in "terrorism" has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all- out assassination spree."

[Maybe some Israeli army soldiers are in the wrong (racist) army?]
Shas Leader Opposes Citizenship for Parents of Non-Jewish Soldiers,
Israel National News, March 28, 2004
"Shas leader MK Eli Yishai expressed his opposition to this morning’s cabinet decision to grant citizenship to the parents of lone IDF non-Jewish soldiers. The leader of the opposition party stated that while serving as the Minister of the Interior, he always made allowances for humanitarian cases but objects to all encompassing decisions that he believes are intended to undermine the Jewish character of the state, in line with the agenda of the avidly ultra-secular Shinui Party."

Kaufman wants economic sanctions against Israel,
Yahoo! News, March 29, 2004
"Labour MP Gerald Kaufman called for economic sanctions against Israel, including cutting off arms supplies, to force it back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians. "It is not enough for the world community, including our own government, to condemn the Israeli government's brutal policies of repression," he said late Sunday while addressing members of his Manchester constituency. "Only widespread economic sanctions on Israel, together with cutting off arms supplies, can make any impact on this government without a conscience". Kaufman, himself Jewish, said President George W. Bush's father, the former president Bush, had "understood the importance of forcing the Israelis to the conference table by imposing economic sanctions on a previous Likud Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir." Kaufman, once a front-bench Labour foreign affairs spokesman when the party was in opposition, criticised a decision by George W. Bush to receive Sharon in Washington. "Bush has shown whose side he is on in this grossly unequal struggle by refusing to invite the Palestinian prime minister, even though the ostensible purpose of the invitation to Sharon is the Middle East peace process," Kaufman said. Sharon has received an invitation to meet Bush on April 14."

Academic boycott of Israel gathers momentum,
by Polly Curtis, Guardian (UK), March 25, 2004
"Leading advocates of an academic boycott of Israel have stepped up their campaign calling for an "outing" of Israeli universities which support their government's policy on the occupied territories. Nearly 300 academics from around the world have published an open letter calling for leaders of Israeli universities to lay their political cards on the table and reveal whether they support the government's policies on the border conflict. One Israeli academic said the move echoed the days of "McCarthyism" in America. The letter, which is addressed to Professor Menachem Magidor, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and "members of Israel's forum to combat the academic boycott", says that Palestinian universities are being severely compromised. "Harassment, arrests, random shootings and assaults" are carried out regularly by Israeli troops on Palestinian campuses, it claims. It goes on: "Given the destructive nature of Israeli government action against Palestinian education and academic freedom, and your simultaneous expression of concern for Israeli academic freedom in the face of the boycott, we feel that it is only fair to ask the Israeli academic leadership where it stands on the issue of current Israeli policy as described above, and to share with us what Israeli academic institutions are doing to challenge the behavior of your government." The letter also calls for an international public debate to be held at an Israeli institution. Among the signatories, who hail from 12 countries including Israel, are Andre Brink, the South African novelist, Ronnie Kasrils, minister of water affairs and forestry of South Africa, and Hilary and Steven Rose who were among the first in the UK to call for the boycott. Mona Baker who caused a row after she sacked two Israeli academics from a journal she edited after signing the original petition two years ago is also on the list. Hilary Rose said: "I'm hoping that this will re-open... and deepen the discussion of what is happening to the Palestinian academic system at every level - schools are shut, universities are shut, the military enter the campuses at will; it is a completely impossible situation." "It's about outing Israeli academics and saying you can't actually pretend that this isn't going on." She said that the recent assassination of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas's founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had "intensified" her belief in the boycott and added that they were calling for a public meeting so people could see that such a meeting would be impossible for Palestinian academics to attend in the current climate."

The logic of body counts,
By Ze'ev Sternhell, Haaretz (Israel), April 2, 2004
"[T]he founding fathers [of Isrel] and those who immediately followed them knew that if the Jews wanted to inherit the land, they would have to take it by force. Until the War of Independence they had no other choice. The problem begins when it turned out that after the great victories of 1948, 1949 and 1967, that same basic approach still dictates Israel's national policy. As opposed to the conventional wisdom, the Yom Kippur War and the peace with Egypt did not change that overall view. Less than a decade after the bitter battles on the banks of the Suez Canal, Israel chose to go to war in Lebanon. Sticking to the familiar furrows, paralyzed thinking and conservatism - the deep conviction that Israel's future is dependent on repressing the Palestinian national demands - led to a gradual diversion of the goals of Zionism. Nowadays, Israel no longer makes do with the demand that the Arabs recognize it as a sovereign state but also demands acceptance of its hegemony. That explains the fact that instead of regarding the fall of Iraq as a divine gift that could enable putting an end to the Israeli-Palestinian war, the Israeli regime is trying to exploit Arab weakness to the fullest: in the eyes of Ariel Sharon and the ruling security establishment, now is the time to eliminate, once and for all, any possibility for an autonomous Palestinian existence. In that context, there is logic to the policy of body counts and the killing and punishment campaigns in Gaza and Nablus. Since the use of our military and technological superiority has been so successful, why not continue to use it the same way, while constantly improving the methods of operation? Negotiations are underway with the Americans, not the Palestinians. There's nothing to fear from Europe, which is paralyzed by the occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism, especially in those countries with Muslim immigrants. That is also a weapon in the overall struggle: Nobody is more expert than Israelis at emotional extortion. That's why every condemnation of the killing of Palestinian children, even by friends, is immediately interpreted as an expression of anti-Semitism. Therefore, the upper levels of the establishment believe that since the U.S. rules unchallenged in the region, there is no reason not to continue consolidating Israel's position of hegemony, by constantly and calculatedly raising the threshold of violence. Who needs peace if the price is conceding a unique opportunity to turn into a local empire? ... And indeed, without social equality, democracy is like a body that has had an organ removed and continues to bleed. Therefore, striving for the fulfillment of equality in all its aspects is existentially critical for democracy and is not wishful utopian thinking any more than the demand for equality before the law once was. The job of a worthy leadership is to help people overcome their fear of the unknown. Regrettably, just as we don't have a leadership capable of rethinking our relationship with the Arab world, we don't have among our ruling elite those who can imagine a social order in which there is both liberty and equality. True, processes need to mature, but people are not only pawns in the hands of powers over which they have no control. People also make their own history."

Israeli troops seek to erase memory of Rachel Corrie,
Palestine Monitor, April 3, 2004
"Early this week four Israeli jeeps, 16 tanks and two bulldozers invaded the highly populated area in the Al-Salam neighborhood in the city of Rafah, along the Egyptian border of the Gaza Strip, an area constantly under continuous firing. They headed straight towards Dr. Samir Nasrallah's home, the very house Rachel Corrie died in front of a year ago while trying to prevent its destruction. Corrie was the 23-year-old American peace activist from Olympia, USA, killed by an Israeli army bulldozer which ran over her while nonviolently trying to prevent the demolition of yet another Palestinian house in the city of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah's house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers clearing a security zone around the border. For a while Nasrallah's abode had stood alone in a sea of sand and debris. Almost every other structure in the area has been knocked down in recent months. Dr. Nasrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist, lived in the house with his wife and children. “ When I returned to the site of my house I was in shock: they not only demolished the house, but all the rubble and dust were totally removed and gone….”. In this operation also some trees were uprooted and the surrounding landscape was totally razed. Locals are convinced that this targeted demolition took place as one more attempt to erase the memory of crucial events that took place in the area and to cover the crime of the assassination of Rachel Corrie, since the place used to attract many journalists and members of various solidarity groups and activists, who would visit the place and gather with the family."

[Buried in the usual apologetics and dissimulation is that we notice World Jewish lying for Israel is endemic to Jewish tribal solidarity, as noted below. This "deceit" against the non-Jew follows a direct line from Eastern European Jewish communities (which largely built Zionism ) to the situation today. JTR Contributor's Note: "An interesting interview from a Jewish historian who discovered the truth about Israel's history of expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but has come to the conclusion that it wasn't taken far enough. As a self-professed realist, however, and one who has taken heat in the past over his work, he is aware of the need for deceit when dealing with Gentiles on this issue."]
Interviews: The Lonely Historian. Benny Morris discusses the new version of his famously controversial book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which has left him alienated from both the left and the right,
Elizabeth Wasserman, Atlantic Monthly, March 25, 2004
"As a reporter covering the war in Lebanon in 1982, Benny Morris paid his first visit to a Palestinian refugee camp—the Rashidiye Camp, near Tyre. The people there had originally come from the Galilee, and many of them had fled during the war of 1947-48. The stories they told Morris about their flight shook him, and made him want to probe deeper into the question that lay at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict: how did 700,000 Palestinians come to evacuate their homeland during the war of 1947-48, and who was responsible? Drawing on documents in Israeli, British, American, and UN archives, Morris began the work that he published in 1988 as The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. It was one of the most influential books ever published in Israel, a dense and harrowing 400-page account from which neither party in the conflict emerged unscathed. Israeli leaders had discussed privately the possibility of the "transfer" of large numbers of Arabs out of Palestine before the war, Morris discovered, but ultimately found it too morally repugnant to mention to their international sponsors. When Arabs began to flee from Israeli troops and scramble for the border of their own free will, however, many Israelis viewed it as a godsend and vowed not to allow the refugees to return. "The most spectacular event in the history of Palestine—more spectacular in a sense than the creation of the Jewish State—is the wholesale evacuation of the Arab population," wrote Israeli Cabinet member Moshe Shertok to the chairman of the World Jewish Congress in 1948. "The reversion to the status quo ante is unthinkable." Morris also gave a share of the blame for the evacuation to the Palestinians' own muddled, cynical leaders, who initially encouraged the panicked flight for its propaganda value and in order to create a pretext for intervention by Arab states. But by far the most disturbing data in Birth had to do with the war crimes of the Israeli troops: excruciating detail about the rape, pillage, and massacre of Arab civilians and prisoners of war. Morris concluded that both the Arab and the Israeli official versions of the story were wrong. Israeli leaders had not, as Arabs charged, masterminded a large-scale expulsion of Palestinians. Nor had the Palestinians simply fled voluntarily from war-torn regions, as Israel claimed. Morris rendered no final verdict on the guilt or innocence of either party, but his assessment was clear: a mass evacuation of Arabs had always been desired by the Israeli leaders, and their permissive and even encouraging attitude in the face of atrocities committed by their troops amounted to a kind of ad hoc policy of expulsion. Morris's revelations struck at the heart of Zionist self-esteem, supplanting the heroic myth of the birth of Israel with a story that was morally ambiguous at best. Despite protest from the right, Morris's rigorous scholarship won him widespread respect in Israel. He published several more scholarly books throughout the nineties, including the popular overview, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, and won a reputation for being the most "objective" Jewish writer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was neither pro-Palestinian nor pro-Zionist. His books and his intellectual approach, known as post-Zionism, which involved a re-examination of the legitimacy of Israel's founding ideals, soon became standard in Israeli high school classrooms and on college campuses worldwide. But his research on the refugee problem remained incomplete. Israel's military and intelligence archives from 1947-48 were closed by law for a fifty-year period ... "Transfer," he writes in Revisited, "was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism—because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population." In a much-publicized recent interview with Ha'aretz entitled "Survival of the Fittest," Morris took this position to its logical conclusion. Referring to Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's hesitant support for the wartime expulsions, he said: I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered... [Morris:] If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types, but my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. The irony of having published an even more incriminating version of his famously damning work just as he seeks to vindicate his country is not lost on him...
[Morris]: I think the Jews, having lived in exile and as minorities in the Gentile world over the past two thousand years, learned that they had to be very wary and careful of the Gentiles. It was inbred into these Jewish officials, diplomats, ministers, and so on. In 1948, they almost all hailed from Eastern Europe, and they had a lot of fear and suspicion. There was a sense that there's a good likelihood that the Gentile you're talking to from the United Nations—the American officer, the Turkish officer, whoever—has anti-Semitism in him. That he isn't full of good will toward the Jewish state but rather the opposite. And therefore, you must handle him very carefully and even with a certain amount of deceit. Secondly, we're talking about a bunch of very clever people who are also manipulative. And clearly, we're talking about a society that has just undergone the Holocaust and now they face this potential Holocaust at Arab hands. This isn't some sort of luxury war in Vietnam. It's a war for their very homes and their very families and their very lives. So they felt that they should employ everything they could, including deception, in order to assure their success and their survival. They would lie a bit. Ben Gurion especially would lie quite bluntly to lots of people about lots of things in the course of '48 and feel good about it, because he knew that it was much more important, morally speaking, to assure the survival of his people and of his state than to speak truthfully to some guy from Turkey or France."

What do Palestinians and Arab-Jews Have in Common? Nationalism and Ethnicity Examined Through the Compensation Question,
by Yehouda Shenhav, McGill University
"ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in the early 1950s and examines the manner in which the Israeli State has used this immigration to offset the claims of the Palestinian national movement. It also sheds light on actions taken by WOJAC (World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries) to further Israel’s national interests, as well as on how these interests were challenged and re-formulated by WOJAC’s non-Israeli members. The history of WOJAC serves as an example of the anomalous relationship between nationality and ethnicity in the Zionist context. Lastly, this article underscores the conspicuous compartmentalization of “the Palestinian question” and the “Mizrahi question” within Israeli political and intellectual discourse."

In Praise of Diasporism, or, Three Cheers for Irving Berlin,
by Adam Shatz, The Nation, Aapril 9, 2004
"'Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988?" This is, in fact, a question on the minds of many secular, progressive Jews in 2004, when the security of Jews in Israel and the diaspora-not to mention the human rights and national aspirations of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation-have fallen hostage to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's vision of a Greater Israel, a super-armed bunker state, governed by right-wing ideologues and ruling an archipelago of Palestinian ghettos surrounded by a barbed wire "security" fence. Contrary to what the Jewish establishment would have us believe, to raise this question is not to call for driving the Jews of Israel into the sea, or, for that matter, back to Europe. The question today is not whether Jews will remain in Israel-Palestine, but where (within the 1967 borders or in a Greater Israel?) and on what terms (in an increasingly theocratic state in which Palestinians remain second-class citizens, or in a democracy based on Arab-Jewish equality?) they will do so. But the impersonator's critique of Zionism-of its romantic attachment to the soil, its glorification of military might and undisguised contempt for the gentle values of the diaspora, its oppressive treatment of Palestine's indigenous inhabitants-contains flashes of undeniable insight. The Zionist solution to the Jewish question has created a whole new set of problems, which it has so far proved incapable of solving. As with the fool in King Lear, there is wisdom in his lunacy. Like Roth's impersonator, Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel have been treated by the Jewish establishment as, at best, innocent oddballs, naïve about the ever-present danger of another Holocaust, and too soft to inflict the brutalities necessary for the preservation of "Jewish democracy" in the Arab world-a "tough neighborhood," as Thomas Friedman constantly reminds us. At worst, such critics have stood accused of being irresponsible, crazy and "self-hating," if not downright disloyal. I prefer to see them, however, as heirs to a prophetic Jewish tradition of moral criticism, and to the secular, cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment, grounded in a commitment to human equality and solidarity. By opposing the injustices committed in their name, they have shown that there is another way of honoring the memory of Jews who perished in the pogroms and concentration camps of Europe, and that a concern for the fate of the Jews need not come at the expense of the Palestinian people. This book, a collection of writings by Jewish dissidents, pays tribute to a tradition of which few Jews--and even fewer non-Jews--are aware. This is no accident. The Jewish establishment and Israel lobby have done their best to suppress the dissident tradition, and, where they have failed, to vilify it. In these efforts they have enjoyed lamentable success ... The title of this book, Prophets Outcast, borrowed from the historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a great Jewish dissident, is meant to underscore the terrible price these remarkably prescient men and women have paid for speaking out. Far greater, however, is the price the world has paid for ignoring their warnings. Over the last century, these writers have predicted with uncanny precision the steady deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations under Zionism, the seemingly inexorable drift toward territorial expansionism and theocratic fanaticism in Israel, and the consequent erosion of Jewish ethics ... I began editing this book a year ago, in a state of despair over the situation in Israel-Palestine. There was open talk of "transfer," Israeli code for expelling Palestinians from their land, in Sharon's cabinet, one of whose members, Housing Minister Effi Eitam--a racist, right-wing zealot who heads the National Religious Party--was describing Palestinians as a "cancer." The Bush administration, backed by the Israel lobby and Christian evangelicals, was giving its full support to Sharon, with a few minor quibbles. The Jewish establishment, meanwhile, was practicing a form of McCarthyism against critics of Israeli policy. Roger Cukierman, the leader of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France and a prominent Likudnik, remarked that when Sharon visited France shortly after September 11, "I told him it was essential to get a Minister of Propaganda, like Goebbels." ... The American Jewish establishment and the Israel lobby both claim to speak in your name. Israel, for its part, defines itself not just as a Jewish state, but as the state of the Jewish people, whose demographic majority must be maintained by whatever means necessary, including transfer, which nearly half of Israeli Jews have said they would support. And each year, over $3 billion in American tax dollars flow to Israel, which provides such useful services to our government as training in counter-insurgency and "interrogation" methods to the troops in Iraq. If you don't want to be a party to all this-if you believe that it is rotten for everyone involved, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans-you have no choice but to speak out. Like most American Jews, I had a Zionist education. In the Sunday school I attended at a Reform Synagogue in Massachusetts, we read about the "birth" of Israel, but not about the expulsion of Palestinians; Zion, after all, had been a barren country, waiting to be rediscovered by hardy Jewish pioneers, "a land without people for a people without land." We were told of the glories of Israeli democracy--but not of its peculiar limitations: for instance, the ways in which it denies equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel (the "Israeli Arabs"), in effect turning them into internal exiles. We were told of Arab terrorism, which was real enough, but never of what provoked it. We were told that not only the Arabs but the goyim could never be trusted, and that the only conceivable reason someone would have for faulting Israel was animosity toward the Jews. We were taught to think of ourselves as eternal victims, despite the obvious affluence of our suburban surroundings ... Still, the indoctrination had its effects. When the first intifada erupted in December 1987, my first impulse, as a nice Jewish boy, was to defend Israel. The Arabs, after all, were "terrorists," I mindlessly told my high school history teacher, a left-wing Vietnam veteran who'd become my mentor. Yet I felt ill at ease in my views--or rather, in my half-digested prejudices. The televised images of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children for throwing stones and harassing old women at checkpoints reminded me of pictures I'd seen of the Soweto uprising. And what did I know of "the Arabs"? The only real Arab I knew was my Lebanese friend Jackie, whom our classmates taunted as a "Puerto Rican Jew"--a Semite, like me. My history teacher gently admonished me to read up on the subject. I followed his advice--and discovered, with a mounting sense of outrage, followed soon thereafter by sorrow--that I had been fed a series of nationalist myths. To my delight, however, I discovered that some of the most eloquent critics of Israel were Jews like Isaac Deutscher, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, IF Stone, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Amira Hass and Gidon Levy. Their work corroborated the findings of Palestinian writers and historians like Edward Said, Rashid and Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whom I also came to admire ... I can anticipate the protests of some readers. Isn't Israel a democracy--in fact the region's only democracy? Indeed it is--for Jews. As the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling notes, Israel's democracy, for all its vitality, remains a Herrenvolk democracy, based on blood rather than citizenship. Today, democracies are judged not only by the freedoms they extend to their citizens but, more crucially, by the exceptions they make. It is revealing that those who praise Israel as the "only democracy in the Middle East"-a line most American politicians have committed to memory-have no wish to extend full citizenship rights to the Arabs within its 1967 borders (a fifth of Israel's population and rapidly growing), much less to Palestinians under occupation. In fact, the call for Israel to become a "state of all its citizens," raised by the Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, is considered tantamount to a call for "the destruction of Israel." But isn't Israel a sanctuary for the Jewish people, a guarantee that Jews will always have a place to go if there is another outbreak of virulent Jew hatred? There is no denying that Israel once provided a refuge for Hitler's victims, a "Jewish hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror," as Roth's impersonator puts it. Leaving aside the question as to why this sanctuary should come at the expense of the Palestinians, who played no role in the Holocaust, it is by no means clear today that the existence of a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East makes Jews safer today, or whether it actually exposes them to greater dangers. What is clear is that, as the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery recently observed, Israel under Sharon has become a "laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitic virus." ... The infernal logic at work today should be obvious by now: Sharon's campaign of politicide fosters terror, and terror reinforces Sharon. The primary responsibility for breaking the current cycle lies with Israel, the vastly more powerful party ... For too long, the Jewish left has been splintered into sectarian camps that have wasted precious energy on quarrels with little echo in the real world. This is no time for petty feuds over doctrinal purity, but for organized resistance to the Occupation, both in solidarity with the Palestinian people and out of concern for Jewish security. The narcissism of small differences is a luxury we can scarcely afford."

Israel's Tourism Ambassador Presents Continental Airlines Chairman & CEO Gordon Bethune with Israel Tourism Ambassador Award,
U.S. Newswire, April 13, 2004
"Rami Levi, Israel's Ambassador of Tourism to North & South America presented Gordon Bethune, Chairman & CEO of Continental Airlines with "The Israel Tourism Ambassador Award" during a recent meeting at Continental's headquarters in Houston, Texas. The award on behalf of Israel's Ministry of Tourism is for Continental's continued support to tourism to Israel. Effective March 31, Continental Airlines added 7 weekly flights to Tel Aviv from its New York hub at Newark Liberty International Airport, for a total of 14 weekly flights. Continental began the service in 1999. "I am honored to present Mr. Bethune with The Israel Tourism Ambassador Award for his tremendous leadership in supporting tourism to Israel," stated Ambassador Rami Levi. "We will continue to provide Continental with marketing support to ensure continued success with their Israel flights." "It's nice to be honored in this way," said Gordon Bethune. "It's a tribute not to me but to the professionalism of our employees in both Israel and the United States in providing consistent, reliable, high-quality air service between our two countries over the past five years. The Holy Land is a uniquely popular tourist destination, and our decision to double the frequency of the Tel Aviv service was driven by strong market demand, from both tourists and business travelers." MARKETING COOPERATION During the meeting, representatives of the Israel Ministry of Tourism committed to increased marketing assistance for Continental's flights to Israel. "We are pleased to work with Continental and look forward to helping one of America's largest airlines fill seats, which in turn continues to fill hotels, restaurants and benefit the entire tourism industry," stated Israel's Minister of Tourism, Benny Elon. "Tourism continues to rise, and we are confident Continental will experience tremendous success with this route. Thank you Gordon Bethune, and thank you Continental Airlines."

[Let the American Jewish Congress define it for you. If you are disgusted with brutal apartheid Israel, and recogize the principles of Zionism to be racist bigotry, you are an "anti-Semite." Period. Pure and simple. Stop fooling around. The Thought Police Jewish Lobby paints you into its corner. What's your option? If Jews want to call the struggle for moral justice "hate," then so be it, don't you think? If you dare to follow your conscience in exposing the injustices embedded in the Israeli state, the Jewish Lobby paints you as categorically evil. What's left but to accept their dictate in the public sphere? Climb up into the MORAL wagon as the "anti-Semitic" crowd continues to grow. Subvert the Jewish Tribal fraud. The American Jewish Committee forces you to stand on the side of Good or Evil, which implicitly involves ignoring its "accusation of anti-Semitism" tool and exposing it for what it is: a propaganda ploy.]
Defining Anti-Semitism,
New York Times, Published: April 14, 2004 [Letter to the Editor]
"To the Editor: "What the Good Book Says: Anti-Semitism, Loosely Defined" (Week in Review, April 11) wrongly rejects the definition of anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism. Zionism is nothing more than a belief that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for Jews. Those who are anti-Zionist assert that Israel, regardless of its leaders or policies, has no right to exist. To say that Jews alone of all the peoples on the planet don't have a right to self-determination in a part of their historic homeland is clearly anti-Semitic. This is not merely a matter of semantics. Throughout the Arab world and elsewhere, Israel is regularly demonized and the Jews dehumanized. Jews have been attacked as stand-ins for Israelis on the streets of London and Paris, and Jewish institutions have been torched, most recently in Montreal, in supposed retaliation for Israel's actions. If that is not anti-Semitism, what is?
HAROLD TANNER President American Jewish Committee New York, April 12, 2004"

The Demented Logic of the Occupation Israel: Suicide Nation?,
By M. JUNAID ALAM, CounterPunch, March 31, 2004
"A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains. -Karl Marx Politics, being the art of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci. Its smug self-portrait as a 'civilized democracy', rendered with brushes dipped deeply in the oil paint of antipathy for Arabs, has won much admiration among impressionable Americans. Galvanizing and amplifying latent Western hatred of Muslim Arabs in order to rally the West under the banner of 'Judeo-Christian civilization', and intimidating doubters by abusing the memory of the Holocaust to claim special 'unique victim' status, Israel intones, 'Stand with us because we are white and bomb towel-heads in F-16s just as you do, and don't dare stand against us because you once persecuted our forefathers and should atone for your sins--by abetting ours.' The result of this most cynical ploy is that the Palestinians, dark-skinned victims of Israel's perpetual campaign of ethnic cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are always grotesquely caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide attacks. There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide. The trouble hardly stems from any defect in Israel's elaborate propaganda campaign. To the contrary, its message has been widely accepted with fawning awe and reverence by all dominant presses, pundits, and politicians, whose necks and knees strain from displaying the proper respect accorded to the lies of the powerful ... What is therefore falling to pieces is not Israel's 'smug self-portrait', but rather the cheap, crumbling edifice of arrogance on which it and all the other aspirations of Israeli colonialism are mounted. Propping up this arrogance in the past was the basic assumption among Israeli elites that after enough murder, rape, torture, bulldozing, looting, and expropriating, the Palestinians will break. This prognosis has failed miserably. Compounding the original crime of mass expulsion with more violence has not allowed Israel to escape its consequences. Zionism's "original sin", as one Israeli historian calls his nation's original 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians and massacre of hundreds more, is the basis of both Israel's existence and the continued non-existence of the more than four million caged, dispossessed Palestinian victims who demand justice. This demand for justice expresses itself in continued endurance and resistance, separate forms of defiance with interdependent consequences--consequences that Israeli society cannot cope with and sees as its greatest threat. Endurance means, first and foremost, staying in place. Its greed for land and settlements partially hindered by Palestinian presence, Israel has responded by robbing the natives of any legal, political or human rights, and has constructed what Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper calls a "matrix of control" to stifle their lives, including settlements, military checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews, embargoes, and detention centers. But merely living in this hellish scenario constitutes a victory against the root logic of Israeli colonialism, which is to 'purify' the land by removing its indigenous population. Resistance, on the other hand, refers to active measures against the occupation ... Israel's viciously disproportionate use of force against all forms of Palestinian resistance to the occupation has created a maximum escalation of violence in which any citizen of Israel is now a potential target of weaponized desperation--suicide bombing. Rocking Israeli cafes, discos, and streets at will, this tactic has narrowed the 25:1 death ratio to almost 3:1, and exploded Israel's basic founding ideal--that it is a safe haven for Jews. Indeed, Jews are now safer in almost any place in the world other than Israel ... All of this obviously had disastrous consequences for Israeli civilians. Then there are those infamous media-created 'periods of calm' during which no Israelis die but dozens of Palestinians are murdered and thrown into the trash heap of forgotten history, such as August 1st, to September 1st, 2002 when 39 Palestinians were killed; 18 days later a suicide bomber exploded in Israel--a 'shattering' of the 'lull'. (Haaretz, September 2, 2002). Even more telling is a study conducted by the Israeli weekly, Ha'Ir, of ten Israeli assassinations against targeted Palestinian activists that followed periods of relative calm (a revelation in itself), from July 31, 2001 to September 9, 2003. The results? In retaliations immediately following the deaths of the ten targeted militants, a total of 180 Israeli civilians were killed. (Ha'Ir, September 25, 2003) This makes the results of recent Israeli polls all the more remarkable, for they show not only that 80% of Israelis believe the Yassin assassination will increase Palestinian terrorist attacks, but that 62% of Israelis support it. (AFP, March 23, 2003). Even a generous interpreter would have to admit that a significant portion of those who predicted dire consequences from the attack nonetheless approved of it. That Israel's political strategy involves the jeopardizing and killing of its own citizens, apparently with loud approval from some of its own population, speaks volumes about its moral bankruptcy. Along with this bankruptcy comes a high degree of irony, since Israeli propagandists never tire of demonizing Palestinians based on suicide bombings. Their smugness precluding any possibility of sincerity, Israeli pundits ask, 'Why do Palestinians blow themselves up just to kill us?', and always answer themselves (who else is there?) in a somber tone as if they are suddenly concerned with Palestinian well-being, 'They place no value on their own lives.' If given a chance, the Palestinian native would respond, 'If you would be so kind as to donate us those tanks and helicopters you safely slaughter us with from afar, we would be happy to spare you the agony you undoubtedly feel about our deaths.'"

Palestinian Women Hard Hit by Israeli Occupation,
by Thalif Deen, Palestine Chronicle, February, 2004
"Israel's repressive policies in military-occupied West Bank and Gaza have had a devastating impact on the lives of Palestinian women and children, a new U.N. study says. And only an end to Israel's occupation of the territories will reverse that trend, add experts interviewed by IPS. ''The capacity of Palestinian women to cope with this new situation has been declining, and the number of women dependent on emergency assistance, particularly food assistance, has risen,'' the report said. Women have not only been subject to increasing violence, but their responsibilities within households have expanded due to the death, imprisonment or unemployment of male members of households. The study quotes the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) saying that 38 percent of Palestinian mothers have reported increased difficulties in gaining access to health services, and 65 percent reported the quality of their food had deteriorated. Since the Israeli military restricts the physical movement of Palestinians, there has also been a sharp increase in the number of births in ambulances and at home, ''causing distress and complications to mothers'', said the study, which will go before a meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, Mar. 1-12. According to the Palestinian ministry of health, delays at military checkpoints have resulted in 46 women delivering their babies while waiting for permission to pass. As a result, 24 women and 27 newborn babies have died since June 2003. The study also says that the construction of a controversial wall inside occupied territories -- described by Israel as a security barrier -- has resulted in the demolition of Palestinian homes and the confiscation of some 1,150 ha of high-income-generating land. Despite strong protests from Palestinians and the 15-member European Union (EU), the Israeli government has refused to terminate the project ... ''Foreign governments need to press these issues with Israel'', John Quigley, professor of law at Ohio State University, told IPS. The European Union (EU) in particular, he argued, is well positioned to bring about changes in Israeli policies because the country depends on the European market to sell its products. ''The United Nations can use its moral authority on the issue, and can mobilise collective action by member states. The United States is well positioned because of the financial aid it gives Israel,'' Quigley added. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid, worth more than three billion dollars annually. Much of the suffering of Palestinian women happens beyond the international media spotlight on violence in the territories, said Quigley. ''Instances of use of armed force gain media attention, but what does not get attention is the living conditions that are the result of the totality of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank'', added the author of 'Genocide in Cambodia and Palestine and Israel' ... By March 2003, the number of poor had tripled from 637,000 in September 2000 to nearly two million, and more than 50 percent of the Palestinian workforce was unemployed, according to the World Bank. But women and children continue to bear ''a special and enduring burden'' from the military occupation, the U.N. study said."

Two Portraits from the West Bank Health Under Siege,
By ELLEN CANTAROW, CounterPunch, April 9/11, 2004
"With three others including a Boston-based OB/GYN, a medical student and a public health student, I'm here to get some sense of how Israel's occupation and war of attrition impact health in the West Bank. The social worker has offered interviews with two of her clients, children wounded by the IDF. Between September, 2000 and March 1, 2004, 2,859 Palestinians have been killed, 82 percent of them civilians. Nineteen percent of these were children under age eighteen. 41,000 Palestinians have been injured of whom 35.7 percent are children, 32.4 percent of these were struck, as was the little boy in the story below, by live ammunition, 64.9 percent in the upper body. 39 percent of the injuries were "moderate to severe"--as were those of our second interviewee. Among the injured, 2500 people have been permanently disabled, of whom 500 are children like Hakim and Mazin, described below ... I'd long read about the "Jewish-only bypass roads" that take settlers and foreign visitors through the West Bank without having so much as to skim a Palestinian town, but I was hardly prepared for what they were. Plop them down in New York state or New Jersey and they'd fit right in -- sleek, smooth, multi-laned. The commuters who speed along them from Jerusalem to the settlements don't even have to think about, let alone see, the misery that surrounds them in cities like Qalqilya, Tulkarem, Jenin, and the villages surrounding them ... General closure, which prevents Palestinians from entering Israel either from the West Bank or Gaza, was imposed shortly after the Oslo accords. Internal closure, which restricts a population of 3.4 million to their cities and villages, was imposed when the second intifada began. Families like the ones described below have often not left their villages and towns for three years. Unemployment rates have skyrocketed: in the West Bank, 48% with rates in cities like Jenin and Qalqilya far above that. In Gaza the rate is 67%. 75% of Palestinians live in poverty--84.6% in Gaza, 57.8% in the West Bank. In the 1980s there was occupation, an apparatus of collective punishment--house demolitions, long curfews on whole villages for the alleged acts of individuals--but the Palestinian economy was still viable. Now, after nearly four years of the Sharon regime's war of attrition, it is not. Roadblocks and checkpoints are the physical apparatus of internal closure. The roadblocks, usually unmanned, are designed to hamper passage from one point to the next. They assume a myriad of forms, from boulders heaped in the middle of the road to huge steel contraptions barring all vehicles from crossing. Vehicles can circumvent the roadblocks by jolting up and down narrow back roads, but sooner or later they will come to a checkpoint. Checkpoints bristle with armed soldiers, watch towers, concrete dividers or heavy wire chutes that track lines of people towards Israeli sentries, many if not most of whom are as young as eighteen. Everyone's fate, from infants to the elderly, depends on their whims. According to the United Nations Coordination Committee there are 757 checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. It is impossible to overemphasize the catastrophic effect of closure on health care. Given that permission is needed to leave one's village in Jenin district to access the hospital in Jenin, if there's an emergency--a child is wounded; a woman goes into labor--it's too late to apply for permission. You have to take your chances at getting lucky with the soldiers on duty at the checkpoint. Free access to medical care is therefore nonexistent. According to Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committee figures, at least 100 people have died because the Israeli army prevented them from crossing checkpoints to access hospitals. All of this is said to exist for "security reasons," but according to Israeli writer Baruch Kimmerling Ariel Sharon's aim is to finish what he started in Lebanon in 1982--"politicide" (Kimmerling's word) against the Palestinian people, terminating their viability as a political entity."

Parents of American Killed by Israel Speak on Campus,
by Ayesha Ahmad, Muslim American Society, April 13, 2004
"Cindy Corrie is unmistakable as the mother of the young woman whose death inspired respect for the American flag for the first time in years in Gaza, said her parents. A year after the death of Rachel Corrie, 23, a college student in Olympia, WA, her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are carrying their daughter’s message on to as many they can. “We just had so many requests from the very beginning,” said Cindy, describing presentations at churches and universities in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere. Although responses to their message have been generally very supportive, “I’m happy sometimes when people raise the difficult questions,” she added. “I sometimes fear people don’t want to be unkind to us.” The Corries spoke on April 7 at the University of Maryland, College Park - a campus known for its volatile tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - mentioning during their presentation a controversial cartoon that had been published in the university’s student newspaper, The Diamondback, that ridiculed Corrie after her death for “sitting in front of a bulldozer to protect terrorists.” The house she died protecting belonged to a Dr. Samir Nasrallah, his wife Intiman and children Kareem, Reem and Iman. The audience saw photos of the family, whom the Corries visited after Rachel’s death. On March 16, 2003, Rachel was standing with other members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a nonviolent group of volunteers who use their international status to protect Palestinians from what they term “collective punishment” by Israeli forces. Israel says home demolitions, checkpoints, curfews and other initiatives are necessary to ensure its own security from suicide attacks. When Rachel stood before an American-made bulldozer as it came towards the Nasrallah house, plowing the land in front, the bulldozer did not stop, and crushed her underneath. “Our tax dollars bought the bulldozer that crushed our daughter,” Craig Corrie said. An Israeli investigation cleared the driver of any wrongdoing, but ISM witnesses said Rachel’s top half was clearly visible to the driver as he moved forward. They, and Rachel’s parents, have called for an independent investigation. But the Corries have been disappointed in the response from their own government. Congress and the State Department have offered sympathies, they said, but “on balance” the U.S. government has been “notably quiet.” However, the congressman in Rachel’s home district, Brian Baird (D-Dist. 3), has co-sponsored a House concurrent resolution (HCR111) calling for “a full, fair, and expeditious investigation” by the U.S. government. The Corries encouraged the audience to phone their local representatives to encourage congressional support for the resolution. As of March 25, the bill has been referred to the House Committee on International Relations. That was only part of the message they hoped to pass on in the presentation they provided. The couple also showed a video - with poignant and graphic details that drew tears from many students in the audience - of the horrors of life under occupation, as well as a video made of Rachel and other activists just two days before her death. Throughout, they tried to tell the story of their daughter’s death in such a way as to inspire the values of nonviolence, compassion and courage that fueled her life. Cindy Corrie said their ability to communicate all these things was a tremendous force in how they coped with Rachel’s death. Not all families have such an opportunity when they lose someone they love, she said. “People all around the world have done such wonderful things to remember our daughter,” she added. “If it can bring attention [to the plight of Palestinians], I’m grateful for that.”

What are Israeli Army Reconnaisance Teams doing in Patagonia?,
The Daily Life of Kawhter Salam
"In January I went for vacations to the Chilean Patagonia, expecting some time far away from the bad news in the media. I found a Land of a wild beauty almost impossible to describe, but I also found my old acquaintances from Hebron, the IDF [Israel Defense Force] soldiers. It was as if the same people occupying my city had been transplanted to Patagonia after their genocidal rampages. The second rather strange thing which called my attention in Patagonia is that “foreigners” are buying up large swathts of land in Chile and in Argentina ... In a Land where the only growth industry is Tourism, I heard several Chileans commenting that foreigners always seem to receive more leniency from the government than they themselves. Others comment the buyout of Patagonia by foreigners as the prelude to the foundation of a new state. No wonder, they see Israeli military exploring their country since the early 1980’s and even before. I saw the IDFs myself: first on the ship from Puerto Montt to Chaiten, and then everywhere until Candelario Mansilla, 1.200 Km. to the south. They always travel in groups of 5-7 persons, always one or two women among them, every group has an officer, and they reduce contact with locals and others to the necessary minimum. A Chilean with some knowledge in these matters told us that they travel in configurations which would correspond to missions of “reconnaisance and insertion” in military terminology. This person confirmed to us that the exploration of the Patagonia under guise of tourism has been going on since 1976, intensifying after about 1982. While the incessant incursion by the IDF has piqued the curiosity of the Chileans, it remembers me of what happened in my Homeland Palestine since the late 1920s and early 1930s, when massive waves of Jews immigrated as “farmers”. Jews began buying large extensions of land in Palestine through frontmen and front companies. At that time the Palestinians were the majority and owned most land in Palestine. I asked myself if the future of Patagonia will look like the history of Palestine. IDF Soldiers arresting a Palestinian Farmer for entering his Land (Credit: AFP) Before these massive Jewish immigration waves, the British Lord Balfour issued the fraudulent “Balfour Declaration” in which the dying British Empire handed over the Land of Palestine to the Zionists and “allowed” the Jews to take over the Arab lands, probably in a misguided effort to get rid of the Jews from Europe ... The activities of the Jewish “tourists” and the foreigners who buy whatever available property is clearly seen by the Chilean people and these subjects are matter of much controverse and discussion, but what is not clear for the Chileans from Patagonia is the future. What will happen later? What will happen to them if the Jews become the majority in Patagonia and start talking about building a new Jewish state there? Nobody knows for sure why the Israeli military headquarter is sending their soldiers on exploration missions to Patagonia. The Israeli government is obviously interested in Patagonia and they are spending money to serve this interest. Several “Hayalim” (Hayalim: Hebrew, the plural of “Hayal”, soldier) told my friend that the IDF finances their trip after they complete military service, and the people with whom he could speak had all had a role in intelligence, be it doing unspecified “office work” or running around with a video camera filming the shootings in southern Lebanon and the West Bank Most Jews believe that there is no safe future in Israel and Palestine. The war will break down between both peoples at any time even if they have peace agreements. Lots of Jews have already left Israel and even asked for foreign Passports. Lots of Jews have bought lands in Europe and the States. Interestingly, the cases of corruption against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon involve the attempted acquisition of a Greek island ... In Patagonia, I saw lots of Israelis, in Coffee Shops and restaurants, in Internet Cafes where they would often represent 90% of the clientele, in the streets, on the ship and the bus, in the field and the forest, they were all from the IDF units, soldiers and officers, the same like I used to see in occupied territories but without weapons and military uniform. For a while I thought that I was not in Patagonia, but back in the streets of Hebron or in Israel. On the ship between Puerto Montt and Chaiten I was with a group of Israeli military, four soldiers and a woman. They were all talking in English on the ship during the trip. When the ship arrived at Chaiten in the middle of the night, there was another group of Jews waiting for them, and then they all started talking in Hebrew. They identified me as a Palestinian when I made a phone call. I was talking with my friend, telling him there was a group of Israeli soldiers walking behind me. Suddenly one of them shouted at me and asked where I was going to stay. I remember I answered him “In the Hell made by Israel”. The next day in the morning I met more Israelis at the transportation office. I decided to ignore them. My friend had recommended me not to talk with the Israelis. He said “Patagonia is full of Israeli soldiers; better avoid troubles and don’t talk with them”. Further to the south, on the ship between Villa O’Higgins and Candelario Mansilla, an Israeli officer was talking with a group of tourist. When told them he was from Israel, a Scottish man replied in a strange way, “O, we have never seen an Israeli travelling alone, they are always in groups, probably there is somebody waiting for you on the other side” (this turned out to be true). The officer promptly stopped talking with the Europeans. When this Israeli asked me if I was a Jew or if I could speak Hebrew, I replied that I was a Palestinian, but my friend cut off our talking. During the rest of the trip, this officer was visibly preoccupied with his backpack, never leaving it out of sight. He would not let anybody touch it, not even the ships crew when stowing it away. If somebody else went below deck to get something, the officer would go down and ensure that his own backpack would not be touched or moved from its place ... One of the IDFs recognized me from my film “Hebron: City without Mercy” which he had seen, and he informed his friends that I am a Palestinian journalist."

[Context for the following article: U.S. Federal agents have identified, says Kapit, what it calls "the Cocaine Triangle. Its sides are: Colombian drug barons, Israeli-Jewish money launderers, and Jewish-Russian mafiosos ... You need only look at the list of arrests and indictments of the past three years in order to grasp the enormous scope of Israeli involvement in the field." [KAPIT, p. 3]  There are numerous murky criminal interfaces between these Israeli drug dealers, the so-called "Russian" mafia, and some of the most pious Jewish Orthodox religious circles.  The link between Israeli weapons dealing and South American underworld organizations is also deep.  In 1988, for example, an Israeli paramilitary training company called "Spearhead," directed by a former senior army officer, Yair Klein, was hired to train members of a drug cartel in Colombia. Klein was eventually fined all of $13,000 by Israeli authorities for "exporting defense know-how not covered in his permit." [HIRSCHBERG, p. 13]   In 1990 the Jewish Week reported that "three United States officials were in Israel ... investigating possible Israeli connections to the Colombian drug cartel" and that earlier NBC had reported that "Israeli reserve officers.... [were providing] military training to drug-cartel gunmen." [GOLBERG, A, p. 51]
Drug dealers got surveillance helicopters sold by Israel,
World Tribune, April 15, 2004
"Israel has acknowledged that U.S.-origin military helicopters were sold to Colombia and might have landed in the hands of drug dealers. Israeli officials said five MD-500 surveillance helicopters were sold by the Defense Ministry and ended up in the hands of a Colombian national. The helicopters were not transferred to the authorized end-user, they said. The MD-500 helicopters were transferred from U.S. Air Force surplus to Israel as part of Washington's military aid to the Jewish state, Middle East Newsline reported. From there, Israel's Defense Ministry sold the aircraft to the private firm, Globus Aviation. Officials said the end-user for the MD-500 was to have been either authorities in Mexico or Spain. The MD-500 was manufactured by McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing."

[Another major Hamas figure assassinated by Israel in the goldfish bowl of Gaza.]
Reaction to al-Rantisi assassination,
Al-Jazeerah, Saturday 17 April 2004
"Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi died within minutes of arriving at Gaza City hospital, where thousands of angry supporters congregated after the Apache helicopter gunship attack on his car. Regional and international reaction has followed swiftly after the air raid on Saturday that killed the 56-year-old Hamas spokesman and the two passengers - one of whom was al-Rantisi's son - travelling in his car. "The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called 'targeted assassinations' of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counter-productive." -- Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary ... "We condemn this. It is state-terrorism and this is clear proof that Israel cannot live in a climate of stability. They do not want a climate of stability. They need a climate of tension and violence." -- Hussam Zaki, Arab league spokesman "Israel has been given a free hand by the United States to continue its policy of destruction, of siege, of assassination. Right now what is happening is very dangerous. You are closing off all options. You are saying to the Palestinians: 'You have no political recourse, no recourse to the law, no justice anywhere'." -- Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian law maker."

Nuke Whistleblower Wants Israel's Reactor Destroyed,
by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, Common Dreams (from Reuters), April 19, 2004
"Mordechai Vanunu, about to complete an 18-year jail term for spilling Israeli nuclear secrets, has called for the destruction of Israel's secretive Dimona reactor, newspapers reported on Monday. "Just like the Iraqi reactor was destroyed, I want the Israeli reactor destroyed," Vanunu, referring to Israel's 1981 bombing near Baghdad, was quoted as saying in a videotaped meeting recently with security officers. "I am defending the Arab world," he said in the interview, according to a transcript carried by newspapers. The tape was to be broadcast later in the day. Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona reactor, was jailed in 1986 as a traitor after disclosing information to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper which led analysts to conclude Israel had produced as many as 200 nuclear bombs at the facility. Israel maintains a strategic ambiguity over its nuclear program in an attempt to ward off its foes while avoiding a regional arms race. It has kept the Dimona facility, in southern Israel, closed to international inspection. Vanunu, 49, is expected to be placed under restrictions as soon as he is released on Wednesday, the government having decided to bar him from leaving the country, tap his phone and bar his access to the press for a probationary period. Release of the videotape appeared aimed at bolstering the government's case in a court challenge Israel's civil liberties union is mounting on Vanunu's behalf against the edicts. Challenging Israel's right to exist, he declared: "There is no need for a Jewish state. There should be a Palestinian state. Whoever wants to be Jewish can live anywhere." Vanunu said he hoped to fight the restrictions and move overseas. He denied having anything sensitive left to divulge and threatened to defy some restrictions using the Internet. "I've been inside for 20 years, everything has changed. Science has advanced...so what I saw seems very outdated to me," Vanunu said. Vanunu also maintained he was neither a spy nor a traitor. "I wanted to inform the world about what happened. It's not treason," and outside Israel "five or six billion people (see me)...as a positive figure." Asked why he had chosen to convert to Christianity back in the 1980s, Vanunu replied: "I think Islam and Judaism are both the same backward religion...Christianity is progressive."