Category: Politics

Not really a news development, as the peace activists who have been regular targets of Israeli attacks know well, but it would actually be real news over here, except that it’s not in the news. The reason neither the existence of such groups nor the official assault on their activities is covered by our media is political, not because it’s too routine to merit report.
My friend Steve, an American leaving at this moment for his flight to Israel and Palestine, just emailed myself and others this comment, accompanied by a link to a story and dramatic photo from the Israeli daily Haaretz:

“If you’re asked why Palestinians don’t engage in
non-violent protest (they do), or why Israeli and
Palestinian peace activists don’t work together (they
do), you can point to this not at all unusual Israeli
police/army attack on a joint Israeli/Palestinian
peaceful protest.”

We don’t get the full story here, in the country which virtually invented the free press.
[I expect to share with others, on this log, Steve’s reports from the Middle East over the next several weeks.]

Reportage specific to the experience of the arabs around Har Homa (the project discussed below) concludes the article:

A small group of Israeli Arab and Palestinian workers is also living in Har Homa, in a plywood shack. They work and sleep in shifts, guarding the construction materials from theft. They wash outside, from a spigot, and they watch movies in Arabic received on a large satellite dish.
Under threat of suicide bombers, Israel has seized control of seven of eight Palestinian cities in the West Bank and placed them under curfew. It has dug ditches around cities like Bethlehem and filled them with barbed wire. Still, Israeli security officials say, thousands of Palestinians find ways each day to get into Israel, not, in their case, to kill others and themselves but to find work.
The Palestinian workers said they could make up to 100 shekels daily here — about $21 dollars — compared with nothing at all in the West Bank. As the conflict has ground on and Israel has sealed off Palestinian areas, the Palestinian economy has collapsed.
The men said other Palestinians did not criticize them. “Everybody knows that it’s a settlement, but nobody asks you not to work,” said one man, who gave his name only as Hassan, 30, the father of five. “They know the alternative: not to eat.” Hassan lives half an hour away, but he stays at Har Homa for two weeks at a stretch to avoid getting caught.

One of the guards at the site, Salem Alkuran, 18, an Israeli arab from Beersheba, is quoted disputing the statement of a more irreconcilable compatriot, whose family owned part of the land before it was captured by Israel in 1967, “We can live together,” he said. “It’s impossible to move the whole country.”

I know the biblical Tower of Babel was probably located near the Black Sea, but it seems that modern Israelis have decided to build a new one between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, on Palestinian land of course.
The complete story of this latest tower’s origins and construction should give pause to anyone thinking of occupying this colonial outpost, and not only if they are superstitious.
The land belongs to the Palestinians and the labor is Palestinian, but the project is entirely Israeli, and for Israelis alone. The status of the Palestinians as virtual slaves of an occupying power could hardly be better illustrated than by this example. The people to whom the land belongs (as long and still recognized by the entire world) must toil to build this complex for its masters, because there is no other employment available to them under the rule, and the curfew, imposed by the Israelis.

[Foreign laborers] work alongside a few Palestinians who — conscience-stricken but desperate for the wages, understanding the conflict in their bones — sneak past the Israeli police, defying Israeli law to help Israeli contractors build what the Palestinians regard as an Israeli settlement on stolen land.
“My heart is bleeding,” said Salman Jahalin, 28, his corduroys covered with the hilltop’s powdery white dust. “I feel guilty for being here and doing this kind of work. But I have no other choice.”
Mr. Jahalin, the father of four, is from the West Bank village of Zaatara. In addition to being a laborer at Har Homa, he has become one of its first — if illegal — residents. He sleeps most nights on the stone floor of a newly built storeroom rather than risk being caught and arrested by the Israeli border police while returning home.

This is a horrendous injustice, but is an evil whose consequences cannot fail to be thrown back upon its perpetrators. It’s simply wrong, and not a good idea, for anyone who thinks ahead–or who even looks back.
Where is the authority? Where is the argument? These questions don’t have to be asked, since there are no respectable answers. There is only power greed, mysticism, xenophobia and fundamentalism. There is no book.
Did the modern Palestinians cause the diaspora which drove Jews from Palestine and scattered the around the world? Did the modern Palestinians cause the holocaust which drove so many Jews to seek a Jewish homeland in their midst?

Reuters caught up with the vacationing Shrub on a golf course today and shares their conversation about Saddam Hussein and Iraq with a public awaiting with baited breath.

“I described them [Iraq] as the ‘axis of evil’ once. I describe them as an enemy until proven otherwise,” Bush told reporters after teeing off at the Ridgewood Country Club Golf Course.

[something like his administration’s attitude toward U.S. government captives, American or otherwise–guilty until proved innocent, that is, if we don’t just forget all about them altogether]

Asked if Americans were prepared for casualties in a war with Iraq, Bush–whose stated policy is to seek Saddam’s ouster–replied: “That presumes there is some kind of imminent war plan. As I have said, I have no timetable.

[notice it’s his supposedly nonexistent timetable he speaks of, not ours, or even that of the government in Washington]

“But I do believe what the American people understand is that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of leaders such as Saddam Hussein are very dangerous for ourselves,” he said. “They understand the concept of blackmail.

[well, our friends, allies and every other nation on earth knows that concept, since we have been employing the device rather heavily lately]

“They know that when we speak of making the world more safe we do so not only in the context of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups but nations that have proved themselves to be bad neighbors and bad actors,” he added.

[is he for real?]

Asked if he was surprised he had not built more support for action against Saddam, Bush said: “Most people understand he is a danger, but as I have said in speech after speech I have a lot of tools at my disposal. I have also said I am a deliberate person.”

[huh?]

“They [Hussein or Iraq] obviously desire weapons of mass destruction. I presume that he still views us as an enemy.”

[where would they/he get that idea?]

He’s getting better–and stronger!
[and donate money, if you can, since this stuff doesn’t come cheap once he gets the heavy traffic he’s now attracting]

Of course it has absolutely nothing to do with the global warming the Shrub tells us we just have to adjust to. Are there mosquitos in Crawford, Texas?

Well, if it’s not total hell for everyone, it’s still a very long way from the promise of this beautiful land, and it’s very much a purgatory for all. Even if you don’t believe in the concept of expiation, it’s certainly going to be a long wait.
Anees, a dear friend of ours, recently flew from his home in New York to visit his Palestinian family in Jerusalem, where he remains at this time. When I asked for his permission, he said I could log this email report, and I expect there will be others. I believe that his account will at least fill some of the blanks left by our media’s coverage, and that it succeeds in humanizing the consequences of our society’s politics of indifference.

It is quiet and safe here in East Jerusalem. in fact, it is almost like living in an illusion since all the hell is happening elsewhere, just a few kilometers away. Here people stay home after work, if they can get to work at all, and watch a lot of satellite television. I like the Hair Bear Bunch on the Cartoon Network. My sister is coming tomorrow and my brother’s wedding is on Tuesday. (There are so many people getting hitched. It is marriage season here.)
The other day my brother’s friends arranged a very nice dinner for him and his wife-to-be and I came along. It was in a Maronite Christian monastery in the middle of the old city. Those Lebanese sisters sure know how to cook. Everything was scrumptious. I went up to the roof of the monastery before eating, and the view was just amazing. It showed everything inside the walls, yet was not so high up that you couldn;t see the details. It was as if I was seeing something with fresh eyes. Strange this time; as if I have been sufficiently ‘away’, mentally as well as geographically, to see things differently now. I notice more keenly the graceful old white-stone Arab houses. Even the men I find somehow more attractive than before. (Perhaps the arabophile homos I befriended last year have rubbed off on me.) But the rest I complain endlessly about: the bagel seller who touches the bagels and money with his bare hands; the vulgar signage on stores; the total lack of order in queues. Third-worlditis.
A couple weeks ago my parents and I went up to a panoramic look-out area on Mount Scopus, overlooking the walled old city. That was the day before the Hamas shithead blew himself up to kill the more enlightened of people–students, just a few minutes’ distance away on the same hill. All around Jerusalem Israelis continue to seize key hills, key buildings. The nicer hills and the nicer old buildings. We later went to the old city to grab some Armenian pizza. As we were walking around, the muezzin started the melodic call for prayer. My dad, an atheist, smirked; he said something like, ‘At least they can’t do anything about the muezzins; they must get so pissed every time they hear it’. ‘They’ meaning the Israelis that are agressively judaizing the city, leaving us with bitterness and disappointment.
I might be stuck here for a while since the US consulate has changed rules. For Palestinians the INS will take 45 days or more to process the request, they said. Probably I will miss the beginning of the semester. Meanwhile, my parents are stuffing me silly with food hoping to fatten me up. little do they know of my hyper metabolism. It is the new yorker in me.

–for total hegemony.
You want our money, you want us to not make trouble for you? Then you’d better sign here right now, giving us the right to do our war-crime thing and our genocide thing without any interference.
The people who occupy the White House intend to buy-off the world’s governments in order to spread the blessings of their regime to the rest of the planet.

The Bush administration, still wary of the new International Criminal Court, is trying to line up nations one by one to pledge not to extradite Americans for trial, administration officials said today.
So far, the administration has signed agreements with Romania and Israel. Both countries have agreed that they will not send American peacekeepers or other personnel to the court, whose purpose is to prosecute individuals for war crimes and genocide when national governments refuse to act.

And what do our sorta-elected representatives think of this?

In Congress, lawmakers from both parties said the administration’s tactics were both legal and welcome.

Blinking toadies.

From TIME, for gawds’s sake!
Nader’s a saint. Alright, he looks like Abe Lincoln, but he really comes just after Francis of Assisi. Here he is on “CEO’s behaving badly.” [TIME‘s phrase]

For almost four decades, Ralph Nader has been the scold of corporate America. Now the man and the moment have merged as America recoils at CEOs’ behaving badly. TIME’s Matthew Cooper spoke to Nader about greed, corruption and why the presidential spoiler won’t even think about playing golf.
Did you think there was this much corporate corruption?
No. And isn’t it saying something that it exceeded my anticipation? It is impossible to exaggerate the supermarket of crime. It’s greed on steroids.
Why didn’t we know about it all sooner?
What amazes me is that there are thousands of people who could have been whistle-blowers, from the boards of directors to corporate insiders to the accounting firms to the lawyers working for these firms to the credit-rating agencies. All these people! Would a despotic dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for them all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there’s total silence. I mean, the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags.

[straight from a Citizen Works email]

Citizen Works made national news last week by noting that during Vice President Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries incorporated in offshore foreign tax havens rose from 9 to 44.
Meanwhile, Cheney is supportive of a heavily expanded military budget, a budget that is increasingly being picked up by ordinary taxpayers who can’t funnel their money through offshore tax havens. And a solid chunk of that military budget will go straight to Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary that has a $1.8 billion contract to support U.S. troops through 2004. Despite being under federal investigation for fraud, Brown & Root is the Army’s only private supplier of troop support services over the next decade, according to the Associated Press. The corporate state in action invites citizen action!
Check out Citizen Works in a Washington Post story.
Also, check out Reuters.

So it’s on to Iraq! Tomorrow the rest of the world!