Articles

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, page 98

Publishers’ Page

Peaceful protesters trying to halt the insidious progress of Israel’s devastating apartheid wall. Despite Israeli assassinations, home demolitions, settlement expansions and other provocations, the Palestinian resistance movement is beginning to resemble earlier nonviolent civil rights actions led by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu. There is one major difference, however. Thanks to this country’s Israel-first mainstream media, Americans neither see nor read about...

This issue of the Washington Report features dramatic photos from the West Bank village of Kharbatha showing Palestinian men, women and children, whose fields are about to be eaten up by the wall, resolutely sitting on their land, in harm’s way—in the form of Israeli soldiers firing rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas at them. Thanks to the Internet, the world can read first-hand reports of the protests by internationals who join village residents in

One of these heart-stopping accounts, by ISM volunteer Neal Ahern, is on p. 14 of this issue. When we first saw the photographs we chose for the front and back covers, which illustrate the day’s events, we thought the pictures resembled a surreal...

On that most bloody Civil War battlefield, however, Union and Confederate soldiers alike were slaughtered. In Kharbatha, by contrast, soldiers with access to some of the world’s most sophisticated weapons—supplied by American tax dollars—targeted unarmed civilians trying to prevent the ongoing theft of Palestinian land. Not only is Israel’s wall the latest manifestation of that theft, but the Sharon government has requested...

And who is going to Israel to negotiate that approval? Assistant Secretary of State William Burns was accompanied—and outnumbered—by Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, the red spec-wearing assistant to Condoleezza Rice who neglected to ensure that his boss knew that the story of Iraq acquiring uranium from Niger was a hoax, and National Security Council Middle East Affairs head Eliot Abrams of Iran-Contra fame. Perhaps it’s no accident that the trio arrived in Israel on...

To the streets of Spain, Gaza, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. The March 11 explosions in Madrid, which killed nearly 200 people and injured many more, may well have been al-Qaeda’s response to the Spanish government’s backing of Washington’s war on Iraq. The fact that 90 percent of the Spanish people opposed their government’s stance makes the murders even more twisted. (As John Gee notes in his “View” on p. 16, however, al-Qaeda demonstrated that same indifference in its attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where the victims were overwhelmingly Africans, not Americans.) Spaniards’ subsequent ousting of the conservative government, however, should not be seen as caving in to terrorism. Rather, it expressed voters’ realization that their safety lay in demanding that their government reflect the will of the people. Now, there’s a concept!

However, not a rag-tag al-Qaeda cell, who claimed personal responsibility (shades of Sabra and Shatila?) for the March 22 assassination in Gaza of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon seems to live in mortal fear of any Palestinian peace overture or lull in the conflict. (How else to explain his murderous attacks on Gaza, for example, when virtually all suicide bombers are from the West Bank?) Regardless of how many Israelis—or Americans—die as a result, Sharon clearly is determined to inflame Palestinians and crank up the cycle of revenge, so he’ll have an excuse for more killing and closures. Not only has he angered the entire Arab world, of course, but...

Most of the Arab world believes that Sharon must have cleared the assassination of such a high-powered leader with President George W. Bush. While National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Bush had not been consulted, neither she nor anyone else in the administration criticized the extrajudicial murder. In fact, the U.S. once again vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel—and thereby giving a green light for even more bloodshed. (One wonders if Washington would veto a resolution condemning the murder of Israel’s chief rabbi on the grounds that it was not even-handed because it failed to mention the assassination of Yassin.) Israel plans to assassinate Palestinian leaders as if they were animals, and a senior Israeli security official warned that...

Of course, all Palestinians—not just their leaders—are potential Israeli targets. An IDF sniper shot a six-year-old Palestinian boy in the head March 27 as he stood near a window inside his home in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus. The child died of his wounds after Israeli troops blocked the ambulance taking him to the hospital. And in Rafah, Gaza, an Israeli army Caterpillar bulldozer finally managed to demolish Dr. Awas al-Shaer’s home on March 30—a year after International Solidarity Movement volunteer Rachel Corrie was killed trying to defend it.

Included shootouts, explosions and suicide bombings which killed at least 19 people and wounded another 26 in the ancient Uzbek city of Bukhara March 28 and, the next day, in the capital, Tashkent. Uzbekistan Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev blamed international terrorists seeking to split the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition. In Iraq, 50 American soldiers were killed and another 300 wounded in March, making it the second deadliest month since Bush declared an end to major combat May 1. Morale is low, as soldiers and their commanders openly wonder why they’re in Iraq instead of battling those responsible for the attacks on 9/11. Iraqis don’t want to be occupied (maybe they’re more like us than we thought), and they’re doing battle in the only way open to people without weapons, an army, or a vote: terrorism—or resistance, depending on whether you’re...

Election season is well under way, and it’s rather looking to be a contest between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber. We’ll have in-depth coverage of the presidential race as the campaign progresses, but don’t forget your congressional representatives. It’s precisely because “Congress Is Israeli-Occupied Territory” that the legislative branch ceded its constitutionally mandated power to declare war to the executive branch, and the White House is the country’s only hope to stand up to Israel. We hope you’ll reward those in Congress who vote their conscience and the interests of their American constituents, and let the members of Israel’s back bench know why they won’t be getting your vote. To that end, the first installment of our compilation of pro-Israel PAC contributions begins on p. 26.

Has resulted in advertisements (see sample on p. 95) in The Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Library Journal, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. The ads produced a flurry of interest and a good number of calls for sample copies or subscriptions. We thank Washington Report subscribers whose support made this possible.

The Washington Report and the National Council on Canadian-Arab Relations (NCCAR) are embarking on a northern adventure. We’ll send boxes of each issue to NCCAR, who will call in volunteers to stuff envelopes addressed to Prime Minister Paul Martin, media figures, and 450 members of the Canadian Senate and House of Commons. We applaud NCCAR for its work in helping spread the word to Canadian decision-makers—and we hope readers will help keep both our organizations from going broke! Give as much as you can and...

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