All of today's Israel/Palestine links are from Aron Trauring's Aron's Israel Peace Weblog. His site is much more than links. He has written about his experiences in the IDF in the first Intifada. You can start reading them with this three part piece: The City of the Dead - Introduction, The City of the Dead - Part 1, and The City of the Dead - Part 2.

This is one of the best pieces on Israel/Palestine that I have read in some time. Please read it now.

Too late for two states?
More than three years into the intifada, the Palestinian situation seems worse than ever: the weekly death toll, the poverty and now the wall. So has the uprising failed? And how can suicide bombings ever be justified? Seumas Milne had exclusive access to leaders across the political spectrum - from president Yasser Arafat in his devastated compound to the underground strategists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He found an unprecedented willingness to compromise - but a growing belief that the wall will scupper the best ever hope for peace

The Islamist group is often regarded as the most extreme of the Palestinian armed resistance organisations, notorious for suicide attacks against Israeli targets, both civilian and military. But in his manner at least, Azzam turns out to be the image of bookish moderation, as he reflects on the failure of the Palestinian armed factions to agree a new ceasefire - or hudna. "We want to minimise the suffering of our people, avoid internal Palestinian conflict and demonstrate that we are not an obstacle to achieving a settlement." But, referring to the breakdown of last summer's two-month unilateral Palestinian ceasefire after repeated Israeli killings of activists, he adds: "Israel violated and abandoned it. This time we asked whether there were any guarantees on offer from the other side and were told no. So it was very difficult to expect us to agree a hudna for free. We know the balance of power is not in our favour, but we will not allow that to force us to surrender." When challenged to justify attacks on civilians, Azzam seems almost apologetic, citing a string of Israeli massacres and killings of civilians - from the slaughter of the villagers of Deir Yassin in 1948 to the shooting of 12-year-old Muhammad Durrah in his father's arms at the beginning of the current al-Aqsa intifada in 2000. "We are never happy about the death of any innocent human being, regardless of their religion, but Israel initiated these killings. Palestinians were pushed into such operations in an effort to stop Israel killing our civilians. A year ago, Islamic Jihad proposed that both sides avoid civilian targets - and that was recently repeated by Hamas - but the Israelis have not responded positively." [...] The Hamas leader is more outspoken than Azzam - a natural politician, restless and sharp-tongued. He pulls up his left trouser leg to reveal a livid red scar running up his calf to his thigh, where his artery was severed in last June's attack. Rantissi was being driven through Gaza by his son and a bodyguard when their Jeep was attacked by two Israeli helicopter gunships with a barrage of missiles. The bodyguard was killed, along with a woman and her eight-year-old daughter passing by. His son was left paralysed in every limb and 25 bystanders were wounded. But Rantissi staggered free, as he puts it, "through a sea of blood" - convinced that his son's precaution of not stopping at junctions and red lights ("the police always wave us through") had saved his life. Behind the scenes, Palestinian leaders have for months been trying to draw Hamas into agreeing a common national platform. But Rantissi - who has spent more than two years in Palestinian jails, as well as seven in Israeli prisons, for his role as a Hamas leader - warns that his organisation will be offering no more comprehensive ceasefires without a full Israel withdrawal. "We are resisting because we are under occupation," he declares, "not because we are being hit by Apaches or F16s. The enemy must withdraw or they will continue to bleed. But if the occupation ends, there will be no need for resistance."

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Too late for two states? Part II

It was Ariel Sharon's walkabout at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem that triggered the intifada, but - coming in the wake of the failure of the Camp David talks - it was in one sense a revolt against the Oslo process, which had delivered so little to Palestinians in their daily lives, while Israel forged ahead with settlement expansion and land confiscations. Since then, more than three times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis (2,648 to 842) - five times as many when it comes to children. As the former US senator George Mitchell reported in 2001, there was no plan by the Palestinian leadership to launch a "campaign of violence" - even if some tried to ride the tiger of popular anger - and the bloodshed was unleashed by Israeli troops repeatedly using live ammunition against stone-throwing demonstrators. In the first 10 days after Sharon's visit, 74 Palestinians were killed as against five Israelis. Even then, the character of the intifada as a mass popular movement against occupation continued and it was not until the early months of 2001 that the suicide attacks began. The experience of Zakaria Zubeidi is typical. In a secure house in Jenin refugee camp, the 27-year-old local leader of the Fatah-linked al-Aqsa Brigades, recalls how he and other activists demonstrated at the main Israeli checkpoint outside the West Bank town during the first weeks of the intifada. "Almost every day, one of the demonstrators was shot dead. Eventually, we gave up throwing stones and in the same place where the Palestinians had been killed, we killed an Israeli soldier." Zubeidi, who still believes the Oslo agreement was a "good step", helped run a "peace theatre" with Israelis in the 1990s. Now he is a hunted man whose mother was shot dead at her window by an Israeli sniper last year and whose brother was killed in the 2002 siege of Jenin. As we talk, he and his bodyguards leap to their feet every time a car accelerates down the alleyway outside - raids by Israeli hit squads are commonplace. Although the Brigades were drawn into launching suicide attacks in Israel at the height of the conflict, Zubeidi insists they are "against operations inside Israel unless the Israelis exceed certain limits, such as assassinating our leaders. We are here to defend our people and fighting without a political vision goes nowhere - our work should improve the position of the negotiators." But even though the Palestinian bombing campaign in Israel has subsided, the Israeli military onslaught on the occupied territories has pressed relentlessly on. While no civilians were killed in Israel in the three months from early October until at least the middle of this month, both Palestinian civilians and fighters are shot dead in attacks every week - in Nablus alone, 19 were killed in a three-week period over the new year. Given the scale of Palestinian suffering, there are those - including some around the leadership of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority - who now regard the intifada as a mistake that gave Israel an alibi to seize more land. One senior Palestinian security official argues: "The militarisation of the intifada led us down a blind alley. Fatah allowed itself to be drawn into a competition with Hamas and by doing so legitimised violence in Palestinian society and alienated public opinion in the west and Israel. And the violence is out of our control." Hanan Ashrawi, the prominent Palestinian legislator and academic, is guarded, but more critical. "The intifada has been very costly and has distorted the nature of our struggle," she says, leaving towns and villages in the hands of "armed gangs and militias".

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We Refuse to Take Part in the Occupation
The following is the text of a speech by Yonathan Shapira, a former Blackhawk pilot and signer of the Pilots’ letter refusing to serve in the Territories. The speech was given at a symposium in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University on January 18, 2003. Shapira and Prof. Asa Kasher from Tel Aviv University presented opposing views

I am Yonathan, one of the initiators and signatories of the pilot’s letter. Until some weeks ago I was a pilot and active leader in a squadron of “Blackhawk” helicopters in the air force. On the eve of last Yom Kippur I was called for an interview with the commander of the air force, wherein he told me that I was dismissed and that I was not a pilot anymore in the Israeli air force and all this because I announced that I will not agree to take part in obeying illegal and immoral orders

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The aftermath of the Nablus invasion
by Gideon Levy

Nablus, West Bank - The knafeh here is still the best in the world, living up to its reputation. In the early evening, Abu Salha's pastry shop, by the side of the road that climbs to the Refidiya neighborhood, is deserted, the shelves almost empty. A salesperson wearing transparent gloves slices the traditional sweet oriental hot cheese delicacy, the taste of which is the only thing that remains unchanged in this beaten and battered city. From one visit to the next, one sees Nablus declining relentlessly into its death throes. This is not a village that's dying behind the concrete obstacles and earth ramparts that cut it off from the world; this is a city with an ancient history, which until just recently was a vibrant, bustling metropolis that boasted an intense commercial life, a large major university, hospitals, a captivating urban landscape and age-old objects of beauty. An hour's drive from Tel Aviv, a great Palestinian city is dying, and another of the occupation's goals is being realized. It's not only that the splendid ancient homes have been laid waste, not only that such a large number of the city's residents, many of them innocent, have been killed; the entire society is flickering and will soon be extinguished. A similar fate has visited Jenin, Qalqilyah, Tul Karm and Bethlehem, but in Nablus the impact of the death throes is more powerful because of the city's importance as a district capital and because of its beauty. A cloud of dust and sand envelops the city, which gives the impression of being a combat zone during a cease-fire; its roads are scarred, its electricity poles and telephone booths are shattered, government buildings have been reduced to heaps of rubble. But the true wound lies far deeper than the physical destruction: an economic, cultural and social fabric that is disintegrating and a generation that has known only a life of emptiness and despair. More than any other place in the territories, a state of anarchy is palpably close here.

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