Reports from international activists in Palestine: 1-Joint Palestinian and ISM direct action reclaims Jerusalem Street, Nablus. (Note: a great success. ISM is becoming an integral part of a wider Palestinian non-violent resistance. This is what ISM was intended to be and we are arriving there. Ghassan Andoni) 2-The Detention of Mustafa Shawkat Samha in Jayyous 3-A Young Man's Life: Barbara Thiel

Selection of Articles:

1-Liberman's Supreme Soviet -Uri Avnery
2-At least 40 Palestinians injured during protest at brutal
treatment in prison camp
3-The '48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion - Ilan Pappe
4-Interesting Arts about Palestine

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Reports from international activists in Palestine:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1-Joint Palestinian and ISM direct action reclaims
Jerusalem Street, Nablus.

Today, Sunday 5th January 2003 the two largest Israeli military
roadblocks in the largest city in the West Bank, Nablus were opened by a
joint Palestinian/International direct action between 11am and 4pm.

Over 200 Palestinians representing all political parties, medical
committees, educational groups, and local democracies took part,
supported by over 50 internationals working with the International
Solidarity Movement (ISM) .

The day began with a march towards the first and oldest roadblock that
has been there for many months. Protesters brought picks and shovels to
attack rocks and wrecked vehicles compacted into the huge mounds of
earth. Banners demanding an end to the occupation and the increased
fortifications of the Israeli Occupying Forces were
exhibited in the sunlight in six languages as the work continued. The
action was observed from a cliff top by an Israeli military post.

Then a road building machine arrived and internationals protected the
brave Palestinian driver from a possible Israeli attack by
riding with him on the roof and sides of the machine. Eventually a
Bulldoser arrived and once again internationals rode the machine as it
made the first road block passable by vehicles. A huge hole was made in
the roadblock allowing buses, taxis,and trucks to pass by for the first
time in months, to cheers and applause from the
protesters.

Then the bulldoser moved on to the second and larger roadblock that was
only built a few weeks ago, despite much resistance by local
children with stones, against tear gas, live ammunition, and the tanks
of the IOF that were protecting the D9 armoured bulldosers
that built it.

Jerusalem Street was soon reopened in both directions and within ten
minutes the streets beneath the Maquata, the bombed out headquarters of
the Palestinian Authority thronged with yellow taxis.

The most immediate benefit to Nablus residents has been the
reduction of the cost of a taxi ride from Balata refugee camp to
Nablus city centre by 30%.

The ISM international activists who took part came from thirteen
countries; Germany, Sweden, UK, USA, Italy, France, Holland,
Denmark, Norway, Spain, Japan, Switzerland.

12 Photographs of the days action by Foad Rad are down loadable from:
http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/qaliente2000/lst?.dir=/Makata+road+block&.
view=t

Ceri Gibbons
ISM Nablus
cerigibbons@yahoo.com
==================================================================2-The
Detention of Mustafa Shawkat Samha in Jayyous Area: Qalqilya
Date: January 4, 2003
Author: Patrick O'Connors

Mustafa Samha of Jayyous was detained by the Israeli
military on December 29th at a rally in Jayyous
against the Apartheid Wall. Mustafa was accused by
Israeli soldiers of throwing rocks at them. The
internationals and Palestinians present at the march
deny that Mustafa was involved in any rock throwing.
Nonetheless, Mustafa has been detained for the last
six days.

As part of the Qalqilya rally against the Apartheid
Wall on December 29, over 500 Palestinian and about
100 international and Israeli participants converged
in the village of Jayyous for speeches and a
non-violent march to farmland they are being prevented
from reaching because of the construction of the
"security wall". After the non-violent march was met
with sound bombs, tear gas, rubber bullets and clubs
by Israeli soldiers and private contractor security,
Palestinian youths began throwing rocks at the
soldiers. A small number of Palestinians and
internationals, among them Mustafa Samha, took shelter
on the porch of a home in between the Israeli soldiers
and the remaining Palestinians and internationals.
According to eyewitnesses, when Israeli soldiers
approached the home and Mustafa, he stepped forward to
present them with his Palestinian press pass. When
the soldiers began to grab Mustafa, american Radikha
Sainath attempted to step in the way, but was thrown
to the ground by the soldiers, who then took Mustafa
away to Army and Border Police jeeps parked in the
olive groves.

Aware the Mustafa was not a person who participates in
any violence, within a few minutes, about fifteen
international visitors began to walk slowly into the
olive groves towards the jeeps to negotiate with the
soldiers and Border Police. All attempts were made to
appear non-threatening. As was the case earlier
during the peaceful march, our polite requests for
discussion were met by cocked rifles, screams that we
stop and threats that we would be shot. After a
standoff lasting about 20 minutes and continued
threats from the soldiers, the soldiers and border
police forced their jeeps through the group of
internationals and into the village of Jayyous.

We caught up to the jeeps in the village and found
soldiers forcibly entering homes and demanding the IDs
of Palestinian men and youths. During those forced
entries into homes, we were able to spot Mustafa in
the back of one of the jeeps and exchange a few words
with him. At that the same time I was able to briefly
discuss Mustafa's situation with a few soldiers and
the regional military commander Leon. Leon said that
three of his soldiers had seen Mustafa throw rocks
(the punishment for throwing rocks at heavily armed
Israeli soldiers who enter one's village is at least
six months in jail !).

I told them that foreigners and Palestinians all
witnessed that Mustafa did not throw rocks at the
rally, that furthermore we all knew that Mustafa is
not an individual who used violence. I explained that
we have all witnessed that Mustafa is one of the young
men who tries and succeeds in stopping boys from
throwing rocks. I asked Leon and the other soldiers
what conclusion Mustafa and other community members
who practice non-violence would draw from Mustafa's
unjust detention, said that Mustafa was exactly the
wrong type of person to detain, and suggested that
this type of detention sent the wrong message to
everyone. It implies that Palestinians who seek
peaceful solutions will be punished by Israel, in the
same way as those Palestinians who are involved in
violence, and strengthens the arguments of
Palestinians who suggest that Israel does not really
want peace.

Leon repeated that three of his soldiers had seen
Mustafa throwing rocks. Leon said Mustafa would be
released unharmed after twenty-four hours if in fact
he had done nothing. It is now six days later, and
Mustafa is still being detained. A number of
internationals have signed statements saying that
Mustafa did not throw rocks during the protest. These
statements have been forwarded to the Israeli Military
Base in Qedumim where Mustafa is being held. Mustafa
is being represented by the Israeli lawyer Shamai
Leibovitz, also the lawyer for jailed Palestinian
leader Marwan Barghouti.

I last talked with Mustafa about a week before the
Jayyous rally. Mustafa had recently received his
press credentials from the Palestinian press union and
was working on a story about the harassment of
international journalists and peace activists by the
Israeli Army. Typically, Mustafa was polite and
thoughtful as he took gathered the information for
this story. Other internationals have noted that
Mustafa is one of the young men in Jayyous who is most
supportive of non-violent activities. Most regard
Mustafa as a model citizen.

We have been told by Mustafa's lawyer that an Israeli
judge must make a decision by Sunday about whether to
charge Mustafa and arrest him, or to instead release
him.

Below is a brief story about Mustafa written in
November by Barbara Thiel of the World Council of
Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Program.
Ironically, as Mustafa noted in the story below in
commenting about his brother in November, it appears
that Mustafa is being detained "because he is a
Palestinian."

We hope that tomorrow Mustafa will be released.
=======================================================3-A Young Man's
Life: Barbara Thiel

I met Mustafa on his field, where he and his brother
started to replant their olive trees. The field is now
divided into one part in the West of the Israeli
Security Fence and one in the East; the place for the
fence itself has already eaten the place for 77 Olive
trees. Mustafa and his brother rented a bulldozer to
open new holes in the Olive field, to transport the
trees and to bring them into the new holes. The work
is hard; most of the trees are old and heavy, so, that
at least for every tree 3 to 4 people are necessary to
manage the replanting. Good that they have friends
here to help. The bulldozer is on his way to bring the
next trees. Mustafa now has time to tell me:

"It is very hard for me. I am not a farmer. I studied
psychology at the University in Nablus and got my B.A.
But in this time there is no way to continue, the way
to reach Nablus - only 25 km far away from Jayyous -
is very difficult because of different road blocks and
checkpoints and long term closures and curfews in
Nablus itself, and beside this it is too expensive. So
I opened a small shop in Jayyous, but, of course, if
most people don't have money, you can't sell so much.
By the way, we are able to replant 55 Olive trees. We
miss 22 trees. We believe, that the Israeli contractor
took them to sell them inside of Israel."

Some days later we visited Mustafa again on his field.
It was the time, when he started to water the
replanted trees. On the field he has a water
reservoir, where he can collect the rainwater. We can
see, how Mustafa starts his work. First he has to chop
the soil. Then he takes his bottle and goes to his
water reservoir, the bottle goes down on a long rope,
and he gets the bottle back, full of water. He turns
to the tree, waters it, and goes again to the
reservoir. Ten or twelve times. It is a hard job.
After he finished one tree he needs a rest. "Please
excuse me. You know, I am not a farmer", he says. The
volume of the reservoir of 200 m3 is normally enough
for the needs of one year. Now, short term before the
raining period, it is nearly empty. But he needs in
the next 3 or 4 years every year per tree
approximately 3 times 100 l water. Then, after this
time, he will know if his replanting was successful.

The cost's he has this year are:

Rent for the bulldozer: per h 120,- NIS, the
need was 16 h or 1920, - NIS.
Water tanks: per tank (10 m3) 100,- NIS, needed
3 tanks or 300,- NIS

Mustafa is 23 years old. He has 3 brothers and 5
sisters, but nobody has a job. His father worked as a
teacher in Jayyous for many years, later he was the
manager of a charity for disabled in Qalqylia, now he
lost this job and stays at home because of the
circumstances, the closures, curfews, troubles of the
checkpoints. One brother studied sociology, the other
one and one of the sisters religion. One sister
studied English, two married early, the last one is
studying teaching. One of the brothers studied sports.
He recently came back from the prison, a prisoner's
camp in the desert, where he had to stay for 16
months. I asked why. The answer was a laughing:
"Because he is a Palestinian. May be, because he is
religious. There was no court, now law, no right. This
is our life."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Selection of Articles:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1-Liberman's Supreme Soviet -Uri Avnery

I have received a lot of curses in my lifetime, and here and
there some compliments, too. But I have never received a compliment like
this one: an important party, represented in the Knesset, has mentioned
my name in its official election platform.
Under the heading "Legislation and strict supervision of
organizations and activists of the extreme left", the National Union
party's program says:
"We shall anchor in legislation more severe measures, including
the cancellation of citizenship, against people like Uri Avnery,
Leah Tsemel and refuseniks of all kinds, who are defaming the
country abroad."
I don't know whether to be proud, laugh or be angry.
To be proud, because my name is used to symbolize the whole
peace camp. And also because I appear side by side with Leah Tsemel, the
valiant lawyer who defends Palestinian prisoners, and the
refuseniks, who represent the conscience of Israel.
To laugh, considering the abysmal Chutzpa of this sentence. The
leader of the National Union party is Avigdor (Ivette) Liberman, a
person brought up in the Bolshevik education system of Stalin and who
has absorbed – as we can see - the racist and power-hungry
attitudes of the red tyrant. He has come here when everything was ready,
to a state that we have created (literally) with our blood, and now
demands, no more no less, to cancel our citizenship.
To be angry, because Liberman, together with National Religious
leader Effi Eytam and some of the Likud leaders, is in the vanguard of
the dirty column that is besieging Israeli democracy. Last week they
succeeded in inducing the majority of the politicians in the General
Election Committee to disqualify two Arab Knesset-members (Ahmed Tibi
and Azmi Bishara) and an Arab election list (Balad) from participating
in the elections, expelling in practice 20% of
Israel's citizens from the political arena.
If some people still entertain the illusion that this attack is
directed solely against the Arab citizens (a totally unacceptable act by
itself), they should be reminded of one of the most important sayings of
the 20th century, the murderous century of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
The saying belongs to Martin Niemoeller, a German U-Boat
commander in WWI who later became a Protestant pastor and pacifist. The
Nazis threw him into a concentration camp. After miraculously surviving,
he coined the following unforgettable sentences:
"When the Nazis took the communists away, I was silent; after
all, I was no communist.
"When they put the social-democrats in prison, I was silent;
after all, I was no social-democrat.
"When they took the trade-unionists away, I did not protest;
after all, I was no trade-unionist.
"When they took me away, there was nobody left to protest."
Liberman's program shows clearly that something similar is
happening now in our country. They started with the incitement
against the Arab citizens and their expulsion from the political
system. Now they speak of eliminating the "extreme left". Is there any
doubt, that in the next stage they will demand the elimination of all
the left, "moderate" and "patriotic" as they may be? And
then, following the historic precedents, it will be the turn of
the "liberal" Likud members.
An apocalyptic vision? Not really. The President of the Supreme
Court, Aharon Barak, this week compared our situation with Nazi
Germany. In the presence of the President of Israel, the Chief
Justice, himself a Holocaust survivor, said that "if it has happened in
the country of Kant and Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we do
not defend democracy, democracy will not defend us!" (It will be
interesting to see how he will conduct himself next week, when he will
have to decide on the Tibi-Beshara expulsion case.)
In Israel, we don't like to make comparisons with the dark
regimes. The memories are too fresh, and nobody in Israel advocates
genocide. But undoubtedly, parties and leaders who openly
advocate "transfer", would have been called anywhere else in the
world Neo-Fascists (even if the term "Neo-Bolsheviks" would be more
appropriate, since it was Stalin who used to transfer whole peoples in
the Soviet Union.)
Joerg Haider does not propose to cancel the Austrian
citizenship of people who disagree with his obnoxious views, nor
does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to expel from the National Assembly every
deputy who is not of pure French blood.
For 54 years, the State of Israel has prided itself of
being "the only democracy in the Middle East". All Israeli
propaganda abroad, and especially in the United States, is based on this
slogan. Now Liberman and the Libermen come and try to destroy Israeli
democracy, our creation, and to set up a kind of Fascistan, somewhere
between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
If somebody is "defaming our country abroad", it is surely
this person.
==============================================================2-At least
40 Palestinians injured during protest at brutal treatment in prison
camp

At least 40 Palestinians were injured last night during a protest which
began yesterday against conditions in the Ofer prison camp
near Ramallah, which houses close to 1,000 Palestinian detainees.

The detainees were protesting their brutal treatment at the hands of
Israeli authorities, and began an open-ended strike on 31 December --
citing beatings by Israeli border police during transportation from
the detention center to Israeli military courts, even though the
detainees are handcuffed. Their protest was met with tear gas and sound
bombs.

According to figures recently released by Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem, Israel is now holding a record number of
administrative detainees - 1,007 - who are being held indefinitely
without charge or trial. The group said Israel is violating
international law by using so-called administrative detentions on a wide
scale, arbitrarily and in cases where there are only slight
suspicions against people.

For more information contact: The Palestine Monitor,
+972 (0)2 298 5372 or +972 (0)59 387 087
http://www.palestinemonitor.org
==================================================================3-The
'48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion - Ilan Pappe

Between The Lines

Dr. Ilan Pappe is a Profesor of History at Haifa University. This
article is based upon the transcript of a lecture presented by Dr. Pappe
to the Right To Return Coalition - Al Awda UK, held at the
School for Oriental and African Studies in London Monday 16th
September 2002. It is hereby published after receiving Dr. Pappe's
consent and editorial remarks. [BTL]
___________________________________________________________________

I have come here to present the comprehensive story of the history of
the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and its
relevance to the present and future agenda to peace in
Palestine.

For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which
contradict each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish
aspirations to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a
homeland after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other
words, it was considered a miraculous event that only positive
adjectives could be attached to, and that you could only talk about and
remember as a very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the
worst chapter in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in
Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most
evil and most glorious moment converged into one. What Israeli collective
memory did was to erase one side of the story in order to co-exist or to
live with only the glorious chapter. It was a
mechanism for solving an impossible tension between two collective
memories.

Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948,
this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native
Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and
they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally
from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying
to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel.
If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula,
media, and political discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish
history - the chapter of expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and
the burning of villages - is totally absent. It is not there. It is
replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious campaigns and
amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard of in any other
histories of people's liberation in the 20th century. So
whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, we must
remember that not just the very terms of "ethnic cleansing"
and "expulsion" are totally alien to the community and society from
which I come and from where I grew up; the very history of that
chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or
totally absent.

Zionist Leaders' Strategy:
Settlement and Expulsion

Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism, and
researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the movement's
conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the very
beginning there had been the realization that the
aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine contradicts the fact that an
indigenous people had been living on the land of Palestine for centuries
and that their aspirations contradicted the Zionist schema for the
country and its people. The presence of a local society and culture had
been known to the founding fathers of Zionism even
before the first settlers set foot on the land.

Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and
impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the
dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its re-
populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The
colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet
won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land,
and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire
was very helpful in bringing this scheme into
reality. Yet from the very beginning of Zionist strategy, the
leaders of Zionism knew that settlement is a very long and measured
process, which may not be sufficient if you want to revolutionize the
reality on the ground and impose your own interpretation. For that, you
needed something more powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the
leader of the Jewish community in the 1930s and later the first
Prime Minister of Israel, mentioned more than once, that for that
[imposing your interpretation on the ground] you need what he
called "revolutionary conditions". He meant a situation of war - a
situation of change of government, a twilight zone between an old era
and the beginning of a new one. It is not surprising to read in the
Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon thinks that he is the new Ben
Gurion who is about to lead his people into yet another
revolutionary moment - the war with Iraq - in which expulsion, and not a
political settlement, can be used to further, indeed, to
complete the process of de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it,
which had begun in 1882.

Towards the end of the British Mandate, there was a need to make
these more theoretical and abstract ideas about expulsion into a
concrete plan. I have been writing about 1948 since 1980, and for much
of that time have been concerned with the question of whether there had
or hadn't been a Zionist master plan to expel the
Palestinians in 1948. Then I realized, (largely as a result of what I
have learned in the last two years), that this was not the right track:
neither for academic research nor from more popular
ideological research of what has happened in the past. Far more
important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation of an ideological
community, in which every member, whether a newcomer or a veteran, knows
only too well that they have to contribute to a recognized
formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is to empty the
land of its indigenous population.

Mass Ideological Indoctrination
Behind '48 Nakba

Master plans are not the most important component in preparing
yourself for that time of a revolutionary juncture or for the
contingency plans of how to practically make the idea of expulsion a
reality. You need something else: you need an atmosphere, you need
people who are indoctrinated, you need commanders in every link of the
chain of command who would know what to do even if they don't have
explicit orders when the time comes. Most of the
preparations before the '48 War were less about a master plan
(although I do think there was one). The commanders were busy
compiling intelligence files for each Palestinian village for the use of
Jewish commanders on all levels, so they would know how
wealthy and how important each particular village was as a military unit
etc. Armed with such intelligence, they were also aware of what was
expected from them by the man who stood at the top of the Jewish pyramid
in Palestine, David Ben Gurion and his colleagues. These
leaders wanted only to know how each operation contributed to the
Judaization of Palestine, and they made it perfectly clear that they did
not care how it was done. The expulsion plan worked very
smoothly exactly because there was no need for a systematic chain of
command that had to check whether a master plan was fully
implemented. Anyone who has done any research on ethnic cleansing
operations in the second half of the 20th century knows that this
is exactly how ethnic cleansing is achieved: by creating the kind of
education and indoctrination systems that ensures that every soldier and
every commander, and everyone with his individual esponsibility, knows
exactly what to do when they enter a village, even if they
haven't received any specific orders to expel its inhabitants.

Just recently, as a result of reading testimonies not only of
Palestinians but also of Israeli soldiers, it became clear to me
that the master plan, although significant in itself, pales in
comparison to the whole machinery of indoctrination of a community. In
1948, the Yishuv's [the pre-'48 Zionist community] population was a
little more than half a million, and before 1948 was even less. Those
who had an active role in the military aspects of their
community knew precisely what to do when the moment came and not one
moment too soon.

But it should be remembered that the plan was successful not only
because of the ideological indoctrination. It was done under the
eyes of the UN, which had been committed ever since its General
Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to the safety and welfare of
those 'cleansed'. The UN was obliged to protect the life of the
Palestinian people who were supposed to live in the areas
allocated to the Jewish State (they were meant to make up almost
half of the population of the prospective state). Out of 900,000
Palestinians living both in these areas and additional areas
occupied by Israel from the designated Arab states, only 100,000
remained. Within a very short period during the time in which the UN was
already responsible for Palestine, a massive expulsion operation took
place within a very short period of time.

We have yet to be told the most horrific stories of 1948, although so
many of us have been working as professional historians on that. We
haven't talked about the rape. We haven't talked about the more than 30
or 40 massacres which popular historiography mentions. We haven't yet
decided how to define the systematic killing of several individuals that
took place in each and every village in order to create the panic that
should produce the exodus. Is this a massacre or not when it is
systematically repeated in every village? It is quite possible that some
chapters will never be revealed, and many of them do not depend on
archives, but rather on the memory of
people whom we are loosing each day as vital witnesses. There were not
specific orders written, only an atmosphere that has to be
reconstructed. A glimpse into that atmosphere can be found on the
bookshelves of almost every house in Israel - in the official books that
glorify the Israeli army in its activity in 1948. If you know how to
read them, you can see how the Palestinians were de-humanized to such a
degree that you could rely on the troops, and that they would know what
to do.

Israeli and Palestinian Leaders
Accept the American Game:
Shrinking Palestine Physically & Morally

Noam Chomsky was correct in his analysis that we in Palestine/
Israel and the Middle East as a whole were eagerly playing the
American game ever since they decided to take an active role in the
peace process, beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the
Kissinger initiatives. Ever since then, the peace agenda has
been an American game. The Americans invented the concept of the
peace process, whereby the process is far more important than
peace. America has contradictory interests in the Middle East, which
include protecting certain regimes in the area that preserve
American interests (therefore entailing paying lip service to the
Palestinian cause) while also has a commitment to Israel. In order not
to find itself facing these two contradictory agendas, it is
best to have an ongoing process which is not war and not peace but
something which you can describe as a genuine American effort to
reconcile between the two sides - and God forbid if this
reconciliation works.

We were playing this game not only because the Americans invented it,
but also because the replacement of peace with a "peace process" became
the main strategy of the Israeli peace camp. When the peace camp of the
stronger party in the local balance of power accepts
this interpretation then the world at large follows suit.

Such a process, which can and should go on forever, coached by the only
superpower and supported by the peace camp of the stronger
party in the conflict, is presented as peace. One of the best ways of
safeguarding the process from being successful is to evade all the
outstanding issues at the heart of the problem. In such a way it was
possible to erase the events of 1948 from the peace agenda and focus on
what happened in 1967. The outstanding issue became the
territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war. The concept
of "territories for peace" was invented simultaneously in Tel
Aviv, London, Paris and New York for United Nations Resolution 242. It
presents a very concrete variable, in fact about 20% of
Palestine, while wiping out the remainder 80% from the formula and
juxtaposes it against "peace", which is in fact the never-ending
peace process. A process that was not meant to bring a solution, let
alone reconciliation. In return for a peace process, the
Palestinians would be allowed to talk about and maybe gradually
build something of a political entity on 20% of Palestine.

In 1988 [after the PNC accepted UN 242 in Algiers] and 1993 [at the Oslo
Accords] even the Palestinian leadership joined this game. No wonder
then that after Oslo, the American policy makers felt that they could
round up the whole story. They had Palestinian and
Israeli leaderships that accepted the name of the American game.
This was the beginning of the process, which culminated with
the "the most generous Israeli offer ever made about peace"
in the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. Had this process been
successful, history would have witnessed not only the expulsion of the
Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 but the eradication of the
refugees, as well as of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and maybe
even Palestine, from our collective memory.

It was a process of elimination that succeeded to a certain extent, were
it not for the second uprising. I wonder what would have
happened had the second Intifada not broken out. If the Palestinian
leadership continued to partake in the ploy to shrink Palestine,
physically and morally, it would have succeeded. The second Intifada was
trying to stop this. Whether or not it will succeed, we do not know.

Agenda for Peace Activists
in the Shadow of Transfer Scheme

The problem for us as peace activists, is that any coordinated
pressure on Israel to stop its plans, can in an absurd way lead the
Israelis to accelerate their plans for wiping out Palestine, namely to
feel that the revolutionary circumstances have arrived. This is my
greatest fear for the second Intifada. I fully support it and
regard it as a popular movement determined to stop a peace process which
would have destroyed Palestine once and for all. The uprising, and
certainly on top of it the coming war against Iraq, have
produced in the minds of Israelis - of all walks of life not only
within the circles of the Right-wing camp - the idea that "we have
reached yet another fortuitous juncture in history where
revolutionary conditions have developed for solving the Palestine
question once and for all." You can see this new assertion talked about
in Israel: the discourse of transfer and expulsion which had been
employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon ton of the
center. Established academics talk and write about it, politicians in the
center preach it, and army officers are only too happy to hint in
interviews that indeed should a war against Iraq begin, transfer
should be on the agenda.

This brings me to chart what I think are three agendas of peace, for
anyone involved in supporting peacemaking in Israel and Palestine,
otherwise we may miss the train, so to speak.

The first agenda is the most urgent one: we must all take the danger of
a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is not
just paranoia when I directly - not indirectly - link the war against
Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba.

Take it seriously, believe me. There is a serious Israeli
conceptualization of the situation in which Israeli leaders say to
themselves, "we have a carte blanche from the Americans. The
Americans will not only allow us to cleanse Palestine once and for all,
they even will help create the window of opportunity for
implementing our scheme. We will be condemned by the world,
but this will be short-lived and eventually forgotten. This is a rare
opportunity to 'solve' the problem."

The second agenda is the immediate one, and that is ending the
occupation. We should be very careful in adopting the American, the
Israeli Peace Now, and I'm sorry to say, the Palestinian Authority
discourse about a two-state solution. Because the two-state solution
nowadays is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a
different way. It is meant to be the end of the conflict with no
solution to the refugee problem and the complete abandonment of the
Palestinian minority in Israel. Anybody who has not learned this
after the Oslo Accords has a problem of understanding and
interpreting reality. We have to make sure that the idea of peace is not
hijacked by people who are seeking indirect ways of continuing the
present situation in Palestine. This is not easy because the
western media has already adopted within its main vocabulary that anyone
who wants to present himself as a peacemaker or as a
supporter of peace, must talk about a two-state solution.

Only after the occupation ends can we talk about what it entails. Then
it is possible to discuss the political structure best needed to prevent
a reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it should be
clear that the political structure needed to end the conflict is a
different one. It has to be one that enables us to end refugeehood and
the apartheid policies against the Palestinians
inside Israel. We have to be sure not to get caught in the same cul de
sac that Yassir Arafat found himself in Camp David when he was asked to
equate the end of occupation (when it wasn't even the end of occupation)
with the end of the conflict.

Finally, and this is our third agenda, we have to keep on thinking about
how to devise concrete plans for making the Right of Return feasible and
for making possible the end of discrimination against Palestinians in
Israel. These are the two pillars of a comprehensive settlement and they
have to be specified. I think it is quite clear that we haven't done
that job yet: we are still stuck with slogans of the 1960's, of a
secular democratic state. These slogans have to be updated according to
the reality of 2002. What was meant in the 1960's by a secular
democratic state is a possible vision for
the distant future. Our focus on the urgent and immediate agenda
should not absolve us from long-term strategies. What people need to
hear from us are concrete plans, even if they sound utopian given the
situation on the ground. This is a delicate enterprise which
entails not only creating a political culture and structure that
would rectify past evils, and prevent another catastrophe, but also one
which would not inflict another evil, or replace the past evil with a
new one. We are not calling for the expulsion of the Jews. We do want
the Right of Return. We do want equal rights for the
Palestinian citizens.

I think many of us who think in such a long-term span would like to see
one state or a political structure which has one state in it. But you
cannot disseminate these ideas by just giving highlights, nuggets or
slogans. There needs to be a very serious and detailed presentation of
such a solution, to convince people of its
feasibility.

Finally I want to come back to where I started. In the collective
Israeli memory there are two 1948s: one is totally erased, and one is
totally glorified. But there is a young generation in Israel - and I
have ample opportunities to meet with young audiences - who may prove to
have a potential to look differently at the reality in the future. The
fact that you have generations of young people who are basically willing
to listen to universal principles, provides the opportunity to break the
mirror and show them what really
happened in 1948, and what is going on in 2002. I think we shall
eventually find partners, even to our wildest dreams, on how a
solution should look like.

The problem is of course, that while we do this - educate,
disseminate information etc. - the government of Israel is preparing a
very swift and bloody operation. If it succeeds, even our best
dreams and energies would be wasted.
=============================================================4-Interesting
Arts about Palestine

http://www.sinkers.org/latuff
http://www.44an.com/latuff/index.htm
http://www.terrornapalestina.kit.net/cartoons/page_01.htm
http://www.antiglobalizacion.org/Germinal/arte/ap00001.htm
http://www.antiglobalism.net/ig/thumbnails.php?album=1