Israel expands West Bank settlements
Aerial photos reveal extent of land grab, say peace groups

Months after Ariel Sharon announced his dramatic plan to pull Jewish settlers out of Gaza, portraying it as a sacrifice for peace, the government is grabbing more land for West Bank settlements. Israeli peace groups and Palestinian officials say thousands of homes are under construction in the main settlements, in addition to an expansion of Jewish outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Mr Sharon has promised the US he will dismantle the outposts, which are usually clusters of containers or trailer homes serviced by government-built roads, but has failed to do so.

[more]

200,000 Israeli Fascists Demand Colonization of Gaza

Tens of thousands of rightwing Israeli imperialists formed a human chain aimed at stretching between Jerusalem and Gaza to protest plans of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli colonists from Gaza. Let's just talk a little bit about Gaza. The Palestinians are largely descendants of people who have lived there for literally thousands of years. Male Palestinians and male Jews are very closely related according to DNA research. Gaza was not given to Israel by the United Nations in the 1948 partition, and it was never a site of significant Jewish population. It was conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, but the United Nations charter forbids the acquisition of territory by military force. This is a place where hundreds of thousands of people face severe poverty and even hunger, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Palestinians in general are facing unprecedented poverty and malnutrition, including the children. So this is the place you choose to insert 7500 Israeli colonizers? While we are at it, why not steal some land from starving Ethiopians and colonize Ethiopia (oops, that was the 1930s)? I mean, it is one thing to lack compassion for people who are suffering. It is another to want to kick them while they are down. The justifications given by the fascist protesters in Israel for colonizing Gaza included the conviction that God had given them the Palestinians' land, that Palestinians did not educate their children to want "peace" (i.e. to accept being stolen from?), and that failing to colonize Gaza would somehow endanger Israel itself (hunh?). Of course I am being provocative in calling the protesters fascists. Fascism, unlike other mass ideologies such as Communism, is not easily defined (and for definitional purposes it is better to look at Spain, Italy and Japan in the 1930s rather than Germany, whose ideology was in many ways peculiar and the scale of whose atrocities, including the Holocaust, make almost all comparisons invidious). The Likud Party is deeply influenced by the thought of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist extremist deeply influenced by 1930s fascism. Fascism remains a useful analytical tool for understanding modern politics. Each country's fascism has been different, since fascism is more a style than a specific ideology.

[more]

Israel-Palestine: Walled In

Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect based in Tel-Aviv, argues that the border between Israel and Palestinians is no longer a single continuous line, but a sequence of convoluted boundaries, security apparatuses and internal checkpoints---a series of unstable pockets. (see "Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation" at www.opendemocracy.net.) The Sharon government is preparing a fragmented Palestinian state by establishing facts on the ground,––– scattered and separated territorial islands surrounded and perforated by Israeli territory. A state without borders to the outside world. These islands will be, strung together by tunnels and bridges under and over Israeli territory and they will have no jurisdiction over water resources or airspace. Israel has periodically launched major operations in cities like Nablus "to strike at terrorists," deploying soldiers, snipers military vehicles, tanks, and bulldozers. In the view of a radio journalist from Nablus, the purpose of this siege of the city was to turn attention away from Israel's construction of its "Wall" across the West Bank, its policy of strangulation.. The true aim of this stranglehold, as John Berger has phrased it, is the destruction of the Palestinians' sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they leave the country or become indentured servants.

[more]

Bantustans: South Africa and Palestine

Ha'aretz claims "Six Armed Palestinians Killed in Tulkarem"

The Ha'aretz account, which relies on Israeli military sources, distorts reality by portraying all the victims as members of the armed resistance, by suggesting that Palestinians opened fire and were about to carry out a "terror attack", by failing to note the killing of four Palestinians not involved with armed resistance, and the wounding of at least three others and the subsequent denial of access for Palestinian medical personnel. This account in Ha'aretz, probably the most reputable Israeli newspaper, presents an inaccurate description to Israelis and to the world of Israeli military operations in the Occupied Territories and of how Palestinians experience Israeli military occupation. The Ha'aretz account is complicit in covering up brutal Israeli military killings of four Palestinians who were not involved in armed resistance. The hundreds of stories of this type that are printed every year, in which every Palestinian killed is a "militant" on his way to carry out a "terror attack", suggest an entirely different reality from what occurs on the ground daily. This type of one-sided reporting dehumanizes Palestinians and covers up Israeli military crimes rather than increasing readers' knowledge and understanding.

[more]

Marie and the Ghosts
by Uri Avnery