Was Barak telling the truth?
The ex-PM's disparagement of the Palestinians began long ago

"Repeatedly during [the] interview," Morris reports, Barak spoke of the Palestinians as products of a culture "in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't." Curiously, Morris, who did more than anybody to dispel official Israeli lies about the war of 1948, does not record his own reaction to these racist stereotypes.

Polite western society no longer tolerates such characterisations of entire cultures, although I suspect things may have changed, at least in the US, since September 11. But in Israel the public denigration of Arab culture was historically acceptable, since, like all colonial movements, Zionism had to dehumanise the indigenous inhabitants of its country of settlement in order to legitimise their displacement. Thus, as many studies have shown, depictions of the Arabs as conniving, dishonest, lazy, treacherous and murderous were commonplace in Israeli school textbooks, as in much of Israeli literature in general.
[read more]

----------

The final touches of putting 3.5 million people in prison.

Israelis Consider New Limits on West Bank Palestinians

The Israeli Army is stringing barbed wire around this city as part of what aid workers fear are sweeping new restrictions that will further squeeze the Palestinians' already crippled economy and perhaps stoke more violence.

The barbed wire, evidently intended to prevent Palestinian attacks, blocks what used to be a way to sneak in and out of Ramallah without passing checkpoints. It is likely only to increase the frustration at the nearby Kalandia checkpoint, the only approved way to and from Jerusalem. The checkpoint is already the source of deep Palestinian frustration and recently seems to have become more permanent with the addition of various concrete blocks to channel traffic.
[read more]

----------

Israel and South Africa
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy

The apartheid government of South Africa came to power in 1948, the same year that the State of Israel was created in Palestine. Having lived and witnessed the legacy of Zionism, I wonder sometimes if this shared birth year was not an accidental prophecy.

Both governments were born on the miserable premise of entitlement for a select group of people. This entitlement, to land rights and resources, spawned laws and societies that measured human worth by human irrelevancies. In the case of South Africa, it was skin color. In the case of Israel, it is religion. In both lands, the privilege accorded to the chosen group came at the expense and detriment of the natives--the 'un-chosen.'
[read more]

----------

Sharon's War Plans
The Great Reformer?

When the inhabitants of Bethlehem came out of their homes, after the long weeks during which Israeli soldiers shot at everything in town that moved, they discovered that the landscape had changed. While they were imprisoned in their homes, the army had been working day and night to separate them from the world by a trench two meters deep and a murderous wire fence, sharp as a razor, that could cause anyone entangled in it to bleed to death. The town and its suburbs (Bet-Jala, the Aida and other refugee camps) had become a big prison.

This week, members of the Palestinian parliament tried to get to the session that dealt with "reform". The trip to Ramallah, half an hour in ordinary times, took them four hours, including a series of humiliations at the many army checkpoints.

Bethlehem is a suburb if Jerusalem. Hundreds of threads tie it to the city. All these threads are cut now. Jerusalem is further from Bethlehem than the dark side of the moon.

This kind of fence is being erected now in many places around the country, cutting the Palestinian enclaves off not only from Israel, but from each other, too. The slogan is "separation", and that sounds good to Israeli ears. "We are here and they are there," as the lamentable Ehud Barak used to declare. The real situation is quite different: "We are here and we are there." Because the separation is not only unilateral, but also unidirectional. Palestinians are forbidden to cross into Israel, but the settlers and soldiers cross into Palestine.
[read more]