Disgrace
The Seeds of Fascism

Disgrace: this is one of my first emotions when I watch the settlers' uprising against the eviction of the settlements of Gaza and a couple in the West Bank. Take a look at these guys: adults and youth, men and women, with no fear, no hesitations, no need to apologize when they struggle against their own state. All over the country they block roads. They put chains on school gates at night, they pour glue into the door locks in state offices. They obtain the schedule of the prime minister and boo him wherever he goes. They threaten to kill the chief-of-staff, they harass individual officers at home. They pour oil and scatter nails on the highways. They sabotage army and police vehicles; they pour sugar into bulldozers' oil tanks. They resist and hit soldiers and police; their favorite curse for the Israeli forces is "Nazi." They incite soldiers to disobey orders, and they actually disobey them. An inner uprising like Israel has never seen.

[more]

Jerusalem and Terrorism
by Juan Cole

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!) This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility. And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.

[more]

`It is all Israel'
By Amira Hass

Listen to the soldier in the field. He says what his commanders were trained to cover up and embellish. Listen to the red-headed soldier, who prevented residents of Qafin from passing through the gate in the separation fence last month to get to their lands. These are 5,000 out of 8,200 dunams of agricultural land in a village in the northwestern West Bank. These are lands belonging to the families of these residents for several generations, and for so-called security reasons they were separated from the village - as has happened, and will happen, with hundreds of other Palestinian villages.font> Several residents have Civil Administration permits allowing them to pass through the closed gate. Signed permits serve as written proof - intended for the High Court of Justice, and indirectly for the world court at The Hague - that the security establishment and the state are keeping their promises, whereby the security fence does not keep farmers away from their land, that it is "measured." This could be used as evidence in a future international court that will clean out the entire system: the commanders, the politicians, the judges. A written document is better evidence than the undocumented long hours during which people waited for nothing outside the gate, under the beating sun. But the soldier knows better, because he's in the field, and he doesn't lie: These permits don't obligate the army, he said (and the Civil Administration confirmed this, when asked), because this gate is only for the olive harvest season. That is, the autumn - but now it's summer. Since the gate near their land is closed, there's no chance that the Qafin farmers can pass through to plant 7,500 olive saplings received as a donation, to replace the 12,000 trees destroyed by the fence. Since the gate near their land is closed, when fires break out they can't get there quickly and save the groves their grandfathers planted. And since the gate is closed, they are unable to plant wheat, okra or corn between the groves to slightly improve the nutrition of their families, which are trapped in a cycle of poverty and unemployment.

[more]

A Quarter of a Million Dollars Per Settler

The state of Israel – which, the last time I checked, was both a foreign and a sovereign nation – wants the American taxpayers to cough up $2.2 billion in addition to our regular $3 billion-or-so annual subsidy to pay for the withdrawal from Gaza.

[more]

Gaza and the Orange Shirt Protests
Or the Middle East Made Simple
by Juan Cole

Even in ordinary circumstances, Gaza is a mess-- a crowded slum with nearly a million and a half people crammed into a tiny portion of the strip, living in grinding poverty. Children's health statistics have been plummeting. Gaza used to be much nicer, but the Arab-Israeli conflict cut it off from its natural markets and recreated it as a vast bidonville. In recent years the Israelis have turned it into a sort of jail and have razed Palestinian dwellings at a time when there is not enough housing for them. A lot of Gaza residents are refugees from the 1948 war when Zionist forces kicked them out of their homes and exiled them from Palestine.

[more]