Labour out in cold as Sharon shifts to right
New pact dashes hopes of talks with Palestinians

The Israeli Labour party last night finally ruled out joining a national unity government with Ariel Sharon after the Israeli prime minister insisted on including a rightwing party as a partner.

Amram Mitzna, the Labour leader, said that Mr Sharon had missed a "historic opportunity" by refusing to agree to a framework for peace with the Palestinians.

Instead, Mr Sharon has chosen the National Religious party as a coalition partner. The NRP's major constituency is the settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. It rejects any evacuation of the settlements and the formation of an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan.
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Israel's continued domination and destruction in the Bethlehem area

Kids are gathered round a burned-out car in Bethlehem's Manger Square. There is no school today, their town is under curfew. A Palestinian ambulance is stopped and searched in the rain. It's another day under Israeli military occupation.

For weeks Israeli soldiers have been invading and reinvading the Bethlehem area, holding the residents captive in their homes. In the past two nights Israeli soldiers abucted 20 Palestinians from the Bethlehem area, adding them to the approximatly 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners being held, largely without charge, in Israeli jails.

A man who lives in a refugee camp called a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) ambulance for his sick child last night. UNRWA informed him, "We are under orders to not move." This is the United Nations, too afraid of the Israeli military to use its own ambulance service. UNRWA is also talking about the one million Palestinians who could starve to death in the West Bank when the US officially declares war on Iraq -- and an expected punishing curfew is implemented.
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It's only Sderot. Only us

Focusing exclusively on our victims while ignoring the other's victims is morally contemptible, but above all this it has grave political ramifications. With such selective and distorted information at the disposal of the Israeli public, it is little wonder the country has moved so far to the right. Every sensible person who is nourished by the Israeli press would reach the same conclusions. If the Palestinians really are firing rockets at us while they are ensconced securely in their homes, as could be understood from the reports of the Israeli media, the political conclusion is clear: the only solution is force. If there is no occupation, no appalling wrongs and no war crimes, the only possible conclusion is that the Palestinians really were born bloodthirsty. The news pages and the current events programs on radio and television shape public opinion in this way more than a thousand learned and enlightened op-eds.

"We have different views partly because we see different news," the columnist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times last week. Krugman was talking about the great divide that has opened up between Europe and the United States, but his comment is even more true of the Middle East. Every night the Arab world - and to a lesser degree, the Western world - is exposed to images of atrocity from the territories, whereas the Israeli viewer doesn't have a clue about what is happening less than an hour's drive from his home. He knows only about the brutal suicide bombings and the Qassam rockets.
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