IDF massing troops near Gaza ahead of retaliatory strike

The IDF began massing forces on the border with the Gaza Strip late Wednesday night, in preparation for a retaliatory operation following the suicide bomb attack in Rishon Letzion which killed 15 people.

The army was also reportedly preparing to issue additional emergency call-up orders to reservists.
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Witness to Devastation 05/02/02
A sobering firsthand view from Ramallah

For the past 19 days, each and every resident of this town and of its twin city of El-Bireh has been under a strict, around-the- clock curfew. This means that anyone moving outdoors who is not an Israeli soldier can and will be shot on sight. Just four (or was it five?) days ago, a young Palestinian woman was shot dead by an Israeli sniper as she went out to hang the laundry-on her balcony. About a week earlier, a woman in her mid-50s was similarly killed the moment she emerged from Ramallah Hospital, where she had a cast removed from her leg.

The siege and curfew means there are no busy pupils testing patient teachers in our schools, no pushy customers trying friendly tellers in our stores, no bored employees being harassed by greedy managers in our offices, no frustrated citizens yelling at arrogant bureaucrats in our government buildings, no silent lovers or cackling teenagers in any of our pubs, restaurants or theaters. Life as you and I know it has simply ceased to exist; the city might as well have been hit by a neutron bomb and has been reduced to a ghost town.

Speaking of schools, stores, offices and government buildings and, for that matter, of human-rights organizations, cultural and commercial centers, and private homes-there are substantially fewer of them today than several weeks ago. Some have simply been reduced to rubble by air-to-ground missiles, tank shells, anti-aircraft guns pointed directly at buildings, heavy-caliber machine guns and plastic explosives. Others have only been damaged. Virtually all of them have been plundered and vandalized, their archives and equipment carted off or destroyed.
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thanks to Dr. Menlo at American Samizdat

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Remember The Palestinians

The toll of Palestinian children 15 and younger is 151. That's a lot of Little League teams. Many of these children were shot through the head by Israeli snipers who, 200 yards away in armored vests and helmets, apparently feared a rock thrown by a 12-year-old that landed many yards short. I can easily imagine killing people. After all, I was in the Army. I cannot imagine lining up a child's head in the scope of my rifle and squeezing the trigger.
(...)

But I have a question: If Israel has killed three times as many Palestinians, the bulk of them unarmed civilians and the rest police officers with pistols and rifles, how can it be that Israel is fighting "for its survival"? The prime minister says it is. A lot of cheap American politicians are saying it is. What I want to know is how a few despairing teen-agers with homemade bombs can threaten the survival of a nation that has the strongest military force in the Middle East.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation in a recent story, Israel has the following assets: 134,000 army troops, 32,000 air force, 7,000 navy and 8,000 border police. The reserves are 400,000 for the army, 20,000 for the air force and 5,000 for the navy. In addition, Israel has 440 combat aircraft, 3,900 main battle tanks, 130 helicopters, 9,600 artillery tubes and 100 or more nuclear bombs.

Since the Palestinians have no army, no air force, no navy, no aircraft, no tanks, no helicopters and no nukes, one has to wonder indeed how these defenseless civilians can threaten Israel's existence. Gosh, you don't suppose Israeli and American politicians are lying, do you? Perish the thought.
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thanks to Cursor

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Educating the Palestinians
by Amira Hass

Long before it became popular in the United States and Israel to demand "democratization and changes in the structure of the Palestinian Authority," many Palestinians, from all walks of life, were demanding it, whether in public and private discussions or at demonstrations. Minor Fatah officials, not only well-known critics like Dr. Haider Abed Shafi, have been heard saying that the Israeli occupation cannot be blamed for every domestic wrong. The Palestinians are more frustrated than anyone else that their critical discourse has yet to yield changes in the political system and in the style of government and public administration. Ultimately, they are the ones who experience the universal phenomenon of the over-privileged in government and business doing everything they can to not lose those privileges.

Both in Israel and the United States, people like to forget that domestic Palestinian demands for democracy and transparency were part-and-parcel of domestic Palestinian criticism of the manner of negotiations for a political settlement, and, from the Palestinian perspective, the despairing results of those negotiations. Many Palestinians believe that it was a non-democratic Palestinian government that made it easy for Israel to shape the Oslo process into something different from what the Palestinian public perceived as fulfillment of its national rights. The main focus of that critique is on the expansion of settlements, with the number of settlers nearly doubling during the decade of political negotiations.
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Robert Fisk: There is a solution to this filthy war - foreign occupation

Ariel Sharon's "peace" plan presented to President Bush in Washington last night – get rid of Arafat, devise a more obedient Palestinian Authority and keep building settlements for Jews and Jews only on Palestinian land – is fantasy.

That the Americans should smooth his way by claiming that Arafat's need to reform his authority is more important than a halt to settlement-building – the gormless contribution of Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security Adviser, to this sterile debate – shows just how out of touch the Bush administration is.

Sharon's hopeless attempts to suppress a vicious anti- colonial war are accompanied by all the usual psychological weapons: dishonest attempts to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, fraudulent assertions that the Israeli army behaves with restraint, mass rallies and continued attempts to portray Palestinians as beast- like, suicidal animals.
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Israel's black propaganda bid falters as documents reveal an impotent leader not a terrorist mastermind

Israel's so-called Book of Terror – designed to prove that Yasser Arafat is a master of terror involved in suicide attacks on Israel – is riddled with errors, omissions and deliberate misinformation.

The dossier, which was presented to President George Bush by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, characterises Mr Arafat as an evil, scheming warlord funded by Iran and Saudi Arabia.

But in some cases, translations of Palestinian documents allegedly seized by Israeli troops in the West Bank have been doctored to "prove" Arafat's responsibility for anti-Israeli attacks. At least one "translation" of a Palestinian document posted on the Israeli army's website is a palpable falsehood.

In reality the documents portray Mr Arafat's military impotence. The papers the Israeli intelligence service have so far produced – assuming that most of them are genuine – paint a vivid, pathetic picture of his loss of power within the Palestinian community over the past 12 months, the suborning of his lieutenants and the gradual recruitment of his men by Hamas and Islamic Jihad opponents.
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