Israel’s strategy: the impotence of arms

The real purpose of Israel’s military assault on the Palestinian Authority is to systematically destroy its ability to function as a state. By pursuing the logic of force, Ariel Sharon’s government is putting Israel’s security at serious risk.
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Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime

A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.

A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.
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Letter from a Palestinian to an Israeli

Dear neighbour: I am in pain. I see people on the streets dying, I see people in their homes bombed, I see people in restaurants killed. I decided to write to you today despite all the barriers between us. This is just an explanation of how we Palestinians think and what we Palestinians believe. Maybe, just maybe, it will bring us closer.

Some of my words you will not trust. Some of my words will shock you. Indeed, some might even hurt you. But you must read on because life is too short and the land we share is too small. Because our children are too troubled. Because our dreams are too precious.
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You won't break them
Breyten Breytenbach: A leading South African writer's passionate open letter to Ariel Sharon

Sir,

You don't know me. There's no reason why you should and little cause for you to listen to what somebody like myself may have to say. Should it interest you, I'm a writer born in South Africa, now living and working abroad. As a writer, I'm deeply apprised of the need to keep words uncluttered of any urge to rouse easy emotions. This is what facile comparisons do - they nullify the understanding of complexity by a rush of outrage, heating the throat and staining the adversary with vicarious condemnation. Apartheid was not nazism, though to say so was a striking slogan. And the policies now perpetrated by Israeli forces on the Palestinian people should not be equated with apartheid. Each one of these processes and systems is evil enough to merit a thorough description of its own historical singularity.

And yet, it is all only too familiar. The underlying assumptions informing your actions are racist. As was the case with the South African regime, the methods by which you hope to subjugate the enemy consist of force and bloodshed and humiliation. Cynically you think you can get away with this as long as you play up to the supposed vital interests of the United States. I don't think you really care a fig for America's interests. Your doppelgänger, Netanyahu, employs this crude propaganda more openly. But you too, by echoing the American president, who describes every "other" as a terrorist, have shown that you take the rest of the world for fools. Surely, not all of us agree that the highest good in the world is America's greed for cheap oil, and that we are hence expected to adhere to the inviolability of corrupt regimes in the region.
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