American columns supporting Palestinian rights

U.S. should oppose terrorism by Israelis. 2

Palestinians can absorb whatever Israel hurls at them.. 5

Only thing to negotiate is timetable for Israel's withdrawal 12

Mideast peace process dead -- no hope for revival.. 15

In Search Of Truth, Not Dogma.. 18

U.S. should oppose terrorism by Israelis

Bob Ray Sanders

http://web.star-telegram.com/content/fortworth/columnist/1955746394.htm?template=articleTemplateID.htm

July 16, 2001

Terrorism. The very definition of the word speaks volumes, and yet there is no way to completely define it.

The American Heritage Dictionary, after giving a pronunciation guide and noting an "n" for the part of speech

(noun), tells us: "1. The use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end. 2. Fear and subjugation

produced by this. 3. A system of government that uses terror to rule."

In this country we tend to despise those who would resort to such methods. After all, doesn't the word

"terrorist," the perpetrator of such horrible deeds, imply the worst of human nature: cowardly, criminal,

maniacal, ruthless?

Yes, when it applies to individuals or groups who don't share our values or our culture.

No, when it applies to people (individually and collectively) who represent those ideals in which we've come

to believe.

Those foreign faces - the stereotypes of all that is antithetical to our basic religious and political beliefs -

become our posters of what terrorists must look like.

Although we should have learned a lesson in the Oklahoma City bombing, when most Americans initially

assumed that some foreigner and/or Muslim was responsible, many of us still find it hard to believe that a

fellow countryman can be a terrorist.

Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist, as were those who torched churches, defaced synagogues, bombed

abortion clinics or went to a home wearing a white hood, carrying a rope or lighting a cross.

This country has had its share of terrorists.

Although the individual acts of terrorism give me great heartache, I am most disturbed when governments

resort to such savage acts.

Our own government, at all levels, has acted as terrorists.

Every time we have dropped a bomb on unknown subjects in foreign countries as retaliation for some tragic

deed, we have practiced terrorism.

Every time a local police force or prison official or overzealous prosecutor has knowingly abused citizens'

rights, it is an act of terrorism.

But I really don't want to talk about the United States right now. I'll get back to that another time.

Let's look to one of the most troubled spots on the globe.

Now, terrorism of any kind bothers me. When I hear of a sniper, suicide bomber or a young kid with a Molotov

cocktail killing or injuring innocent civilians - men, women and children - it pains me.

Indeed, it angers me.

Even if we may understand the frustration of the perpetrators, the world should condemn such acts.

But it hurts me more when a state - a powerful government - strikes out against innocent, unarmed and

helpless people.

The world, and especially the United States, should cry out even louder.

I know most Americans really don't pay attention, and perhaps don't even care, what happens in the Middle

East. But they should.

Everyone's hands are bloody in this never-ending conflict.

I understand that an oppressed, occupied people will eventually rise up against its oppressors, and it's

understandable that a nation feeling under siege will react with force.

But when a nation like Israel, which has enjoyed the support of this country and most of the Western world,

responds with such indiscriminate violence against helpless people, it should be condemned for its barbarism.

That takes us back to that third definition of terrorism: "A system of government that uses terror to rule."

Israel has systematically occupied land inhabited by others. It has practiced assassination of political

dissidents without shame and without reproach from the rest of the civilized world.

This week, Israeli army bulldozers destroyed 14 Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, displacing more

than 150 people, while our nation's leaders remained pathetically silent.

Such brutal provocation must not be tolerated.

In its fight against terrorism, the state of Israel has become one of the world's most notorious terrorists.

Somehow it must be stopped.

Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. (817) 390-7775

Palestinians can absorb whatever Israel hurls at them

By Charley Reese

July 11, 2001, 11:14 PM EDT

The Israelis bulldozed another 14 Palestinian homes this week in a refugee camp in Gaza. The

United States said the act was "provocative."

Actually, it was a war crime. Actually, what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians has

been correctly characterized by the International Red Cross as war crimes and by a United

Nations official as "an

affront to civilization."

But, hey, you misled, sleeping Americans, you don't know what a breakthrough it is for the U.S.

State Department to utter even the mildest criticism of some Israeli atrocity.

"Provocative."

Wow. Golly gee whiz. Old George W. Bush promised he would provide leadership, and that's real

leadership, calling a war crime "provocative." Finally, after eight months of refusing to utter even

that bland a

criticism, he managed to say the destruction of homes so precious to such terribly poor people is

"provocative."

It is such an improvement over Warren Christopher. When he was secretary of state, the Israelis

were indulging in one of their periodic and gratuitous artillery attacks against villages in South

Lebanon.

A group of about 100 Lebanese women and children fled to a United Nations compound for safety.

It didn't matter. The Israelis fired on it deliberately, as a subsequent U.N. investigation

demonstrated. They were

all killed, along with the U.N. peacekeepers. Bits and pieces of their flesh hung like grotesque

decorations, dripping blood from shattered debris and blasted trees.

Do you know what Christopher said?

"The United States urges both sides to show restraint."

I wonder how he expected the shattered flesh of the dead Lebanese women and children to show

restraint. Perhaps he thought that they should not bleed so profusely from their wounds. I think

that was the very first time I felt ashamed to be an American, listening to that rat-faced,

cold-blooded international lawyer brushing off an atrocity like a crumb on his expensive coat

sleeve.

One day, Americans are going to wake up from more than 50 years of Zionist propaganda and

suddenly feel like strangers in a strange land, to borrow the title of an old science-fiction work.

They're finally going to see the simple truth:

Israelis drove Palestinians out of their own country and confiscated their land and wealth. Israelis

refused to allow (and still refuse) Palestinian refugees to return, despite United Nations

resolutions instructing them to do so.

In 1967, the Israelis attacked and took the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Since then,

they have ruled it and still rule, despite U.N. resolutions against their actions.

Now, after dragging out so-called peace negotiations for 10 years -- how can the simple

question, "When are you going to withdraw from the territories you illegally occupy?" take 10

years? -- the drama is heading toward a climax.

The Israelis have tried economic strangulation. They have tried to force the Palestinians to

accept a chopped-up pseudo-country. They have tried killing their children, demolishing their

homes and assassinating their leaders. They tried uprooting their agricultural orchards and sealing

the Palestinians off from normal travel.

By the way, where are you environmentalists while the Israelis commit this environmental

atrocity? Don't you know how long it takes for an olive tree to reach maturity and start bearing

fruit? I thought you were

concerned about the environment. Oh, excuse me -- not when it's a Palestinian environment. My

mistake. I sometimes forget who is a hypocrite and who isn't, because there are so many these

days.

What's next, of course, is for the Israelis to take off the bloody glove and commit one super

massacre in an attempt to drive the Palestinians out or to break their spirit. This is what the

Palestinians expect.

They are bracing for it. They know that the Israelis have elected the one politician, Ariel Sharon,

willing to do it.

They figure they can absorb that blow. If the survivors can rise from the rubble and say to the

Israelis, "You can bury us here, but you can never drive us out of our own country," then the

Israelis will have exhausted their options. They will dump Sharon and replace him with somebody

who will finally, at long last, do some serious talking.

It's already terrible what the Palestinians are going through, and this new assault, when it comes,

will be far worse. They need the support now of decent people with the courage to stand up for

human rights. As

you can see, the Bush administration prefers to remain on its knees. Most members of Congress

are afraid even to do that. They prefer the supine position, total prostration.

If you can't find the courage to speak out against evil financed with your tax money, then at

least watch as Palestinian children show you how real men and women live and die with honor.

Reach Charley Reese at 407-420-5315 or creese@orlandosentinel.com.

Visit OrlandoSentinel.com

Learn the truth about Middle East

Julio Noboa

San Antonio Express-News

May 26, 2001

If we believe the U.S. media's portrayal of the Middle
East conflict, then we already have identified the good
guys and the terrorists.

From local newspapers to Hollywood films, we recognize
Israeli Jews as civilized, reasonable and democratic and Palestinians as terrorists.

Now this simplistic scenario is beginning to unravel as we see images of stone-throwing Palestinian youths facing Israeli tanks and supersonic F-16 jets bombing
neighborhood factories. So to ensure continued
unconditional U.S. support, Israeli Prime Minster Ariel
Sharon recently called for a total cease-fire.

But after rejecting a key recommendation of the Mitchell commission — a freeze on Israeli settlements — Sharon's offer is a deceitful ploy. The Palestinians would be foolish to accept more settlement expansion, which further reduces what little territory they have left. Moreover, these settlements are in violation of U.N. resolutions and international law.

There are two kinds of terrorism in this ancient,
contested land: The terror of occupation and the terror of desperation.

Suicide bombers are desperate, but they are not
simpletons propagandized into martyrdom. Their family
members, friends and neighbors have been killed,
tortured, maimed or made homeless by Israeli
authorities. The media will call them cowards, but what
would any red-blooded American do if invaders were to
occupy and terrorize our country?

The terror of desperation is born out of brutality,
deprivation and powerlessness; it is sporadic,
indiscriminate and often counterproductive. The media
would have us believe Israel is only responding to
terrorism, but this belies the historical realities of the terror of occupation.

It wasn't the Palestinians but Zionist extremists who
introduced terrorism into the Holy Land. In the 1920s,
they placed bombs in Arab marketplaces to terrorize
civilians. It was Zionist terrorism that, after two decades, drove the British out of Palestine to establish a Jewish state.

With the establishment of Israel, Palestinians became
aliens in their own land. Ruled by military edict, they
were denied freedom of movement, equal education and
rights to own land. In fact, 78 percent of what historically had been Arab Palestine became Israeli. Today, Palestinians are fighting just to recover the West Bank and Gaza, 22 percent of historic Palestine. Yet Israel controls about half these territories.

The terror of Israeli occupation is akin to slow
strangulation — houses are demolished, orchards
destroyed, roads blockaded and water and power
manipulated.

Most of all, the terror of occupation is unforgivingly
violent. A disproportionate amount of military aggression will be used against protesters, stone-throwers bystanders and even security police.

Local physicians long ago determined that most of the
stone-throwing youth and children who were killed had
been shot in the head or upper body. This shoot-to-kill
extends to Palestinian leaders, with Israeli missiles
acting as judge, jury and prosecutor.

As many predicted, the violence has escalated
dramatically since the election of Sharon. His election
was hailed by major pro-Israel Jewish organizations. The American Jewish Congress noted, "He is widely
recognized as one of Israel's greatest military heroes."

Sharon does have a quite a record. In 1953, he led a
commando squad that massacred 69 men, women and
children in Qibbiya. After the 1976 war, he ordered the
assassination of more than 100 Palestinian resistance
leaders. In 1982, his forces allowed, if not encouraged, Israeli-supported Lebanese militia to murder more than 900 Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila.

Yet Sharon already has met twice with President Bush,
while Yasser Arafat awaits his first invitation.

Still, we are told Uncle Sam is the only unbiased broker for Middle East peace. That's certainly demonstrated by U.S. aid to Israel, which — including military support from 1949 through 2001 — exceeds $90 billion. Moreover, our Mideast policy has long been dictated by Israel's powerful lobby, as documented by former Congressman Paul Findley in his book, "They Dare To Speak Out."

Neither Israel nor Uncle Sam would permit an
international peace-keeping force or international
observers, because they wouldn't "be fair" to Israel.
Perhaps they know that for decades Israel has violated
numerous U.N. resolutions by denying basic human rights
to Palestinians.

And then we wonder why our allies voted us off the U.N.
Human Rights Commission.

I urge Americans to take off their media blinders, check out other sources of information, such as the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (www.
washington-report.org), and open their hearts and minds
to the full story.

Julio Noboa is an educator and free-lance writer. To
message him, e-mail JNPAPR@aol.com

Only thing to negotiate is timetable for Israel's withdrawal

Charley Reese

The Orlando Sentinel

It's the occupation.

That's the complete summation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. For 34 years, Palestinians have lived under Israeli military rule. They are now

determined to be free of it.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians have only the facts, morality and international law on their side. The Israelis have a powerful army and the U.S. government, which not only gives Israel an annual $3 billion subsidy

but also blocks any and all international efforts to make Israel comply with United Nations resolutions and the Geneva Convention.

(Americans ought to ask themselves why their children are expected to die to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions directed at other countries if the United States is going to block enforcement of all those directed at Israel.)

Right now the Israelis are spinning the line that they made a generous offer and that, because the Palestinians rejected it, why, they must not want peace. The fly drowning in that glob of salad dressing is that it wasn't a

generous offer. It was, in fact, an offer that no Palestinian could have accepted.

First, Palestinians would have had to kiss goodbye West Bank and Gaza land already confiscated by the Israelis. They would have had no control over their borders or the water under their feet. They would have had to endure

Israeli "military supervision" for an indefinite period. They would have had to write off the rights of Palestinian refugees, acknowledge Jewish ownership of the land underneath the third holiest site in Islam, and they

would have gotten, in return, a non-viable country cut into giblets and at the mercy of the Israelis.

In fact, the only thing to be negotiated is the timetable for Israel's complete withdrawal and dismantling of all the Jewish settlements. Palestinians already have conceded 78 percent of their country. They are not going to concede hunks of the remaining 22 percent.

Furthermore, the Palestinians are daily victims of war crimes. The score card, according to Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, director of the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute, runs thus since the intifada started:

More than 500 Palestinians killed, a third of them children; 27,000 trees uprooted; 12,000 dunums of land (a dunum is 1,000 square meters) leveled in the Gaza Strip; 3,200 buildings destroyed, of which 1,200 were homes; and

23,000 Palestinians wounded. In comparison, he said, 106 Israelis have been killed and 760 injured. The numbers may have changed since he addressed the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, a Washington think tank. I've never

seen in the Middle East any two sets of numbers that agree, but you can verify the approximate accuracy of these with Amnesty International and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

It's not fair to call Palestinians terrorists. It is not they who have used tanks, advanced war planes and helicopter gunships against civilians; it is not they who use death squads and assassinations; it is not they who imposed collective punishments on innocent civilians. The Israelis are doing all of these things, which are war crimes, to the Palestinians with American-made

military equipment.

I know that it's hard for Americans to undo so many years of pro-Israeli brainwashing. Just remember that the Palestinians, like the Founding Fathers of this country, are trying to throw off a foreign occupier of their

homeland.

It is equally absurd to say the Palestinians don't want an end to the conflict. It is they, not the Israelis, who are suffering. Israel has become a rich country; the West Bank and Gaza are incredibly poor. Some of the Jewish settlements have plush lawns, gardens and even a swimming pool while, at the bottom of the hill, Palestinians have to get water from a communal pump for cooking and washing.

Israelis live in houses, apartments and villas. Millions of Palestinians are jammed in sordid refugee camps. Other than the loss of tourist business, a loss they deserve given the destruction they've laid on the Palestinians, Israelis are leading normal lives behind the green line. If they're nervous because of an occasional suicide bomber, they should think how nervous they would be if they had to face tanks, helicopter gunships and assassins.

I'm sorry our government is an accessory to war crimes and is such a world-class hypocrite. So long as we ignore the terrible plight of the Palestinians, no American should open his or her mouth about human rights, the rule of law or democracy. Such hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils of every sensible man and woman in the world.

One day God will free the Palestinians. I wonder what he will do to us. At least those who had the courage to stand up for human rights and justice will be able to look at themselves in a mirror without gagging.

Reach Charley Reese at 407-420-5315 or creese@orlandosentinel.com.

Mideast peace process dead -- no hope for revival

Charley Reese

Published May 8, 2001

The key to peace in the Middle East is in

Washington, not Jerusalem. It is our

government that empowers the Israeli

government.It is vain for people to keep

saying, "Renew the peace talks." The peace

process in the Middle East is dead. Kaput.

Finished.

People should take Israeli Prime Minister

Ariel Sharon at his word. In recent interviews

he has made it clear: There will be no

permanent agreement with the Palestinians; all

Jewish settlements remain; the Golan and East

Jerusalem belong to Israel; and no Palestinian

refugees will be allowed to return or be

eligible for compensation.

Can people not understand plain Hebrew

translated into plain English?

The peace process is dead. Sharon and a

majority of Israelis don't want peace. They

want the territory they have, and they want a

defeated, despairing and docile Palestinian

population living in isolation.

If they wanted peace, they wouldn't have killed

more than 400 Palestinians, wounded more

than 13,000, destroyed God knows how many

homes, businesses and orchards. They would

not have continued to expand settlements. They

would not have continued to violate the Fourth

Geneva Convention and defy some 60-plus

United Nations resolutions.

So what's going to happen?

It's simple. The Palestinians will continue to suffer and die and will continue to try to kill as many Israelis as their limited means permit. What you have is the military occupation by a regional superpower of a largely unarmed population. Palestinians, like people everywhere

and for all time, have the right to resist military occupation by a foreign power. What you are seeing are the final acts of European colonialism being played out in Palestine, which was never Europe's to give away in the first place.

This will go on until Sharon's need for enemies provokes a regional war or until the conscience of individual Americans is aroused. The key to peace in the Middle East is in Washington, not Jerusalem. It is our government that empowers the Israeli government to defy international law and human decency. The Israelis wouldn't last six

months without American backing, and they know that.

The old canard that the Israelis and Palestinians must settle their differences themselves is just an Israeli-dictated ploy to make sure nobody interferes with their treatment of the Palestinians. It's the same as if the police told a child rape victim, "Go work it out with your rapist."

There can never be negotiations between a strong party and a

powerless party. To pretend otherwise is to engage in public

deception. For years, Israelis would say that force is the only language the Palestinians understand. Now the Palestinians are saying the same thing about the Israelis. It's ugly stuff. If you love violence, then get a satellite dish and you can watch them kill each other on Arab television indefinitely.

You may not like this, but the lives of 2 million Palestinians, many of them children, depend on us. Their deaths will be on our conscience. They do not have the power to stop the Israelis from occupying their land and brutalizing them. Our president and our Congress do. But

they are afraid of the Israeli lobby. Therefore, if we do not give the American politicians some backbone by letting them know Americans are tired of being accessories to Israeli aggression, their misery will be unending.

Think about what it's like to be poor in a devastated landscape with no hope of relief. Then think what it's like to be blinded or paralyzed by an Israeli bullet with utterly no safety net. The Palestinian people do not deserve what is happening to them. Their plight puts us in the uncomfortable position of standing either by the innocent victims or

by the oppressors.

There is no longer any neutral ground for people with an ounce of morality left in them. One way or another, we will all have to choose. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee," said the poet John Donne.

Indeed it does, for with every Palestinian death a little bit of our own souls will die as long as we do nothing, say nothing, think nothing as if we could hide from our own conscience.

The most damned will be those in Washington who let their own fears and lust for the comfortable position condemn a whole people to a hellish existence when all along they had the power to relieve them with simply a frown and a stern word.

Reach Charley Reese at 407-420-5315 or

creese@orlandosentinel.com

In Search Of Truth, Not Dogma

The Hartford Courant December 19, 2000

By Amy Pagnozzi

Dear Readers,

You may have noticed that in the weeks that have passed since I began writing about Intifada 2000, I've been under a great deal of fire from critics.

Flamed? Charbroiled is more like it.

Outraged readers wrote the letters to the editor.

Lists of corrections ran - so long, they should have had my byline on them.

The paper's reader representative, Elissa Papirno, not satisfied with trashing my reputation in her Sunday column, took shots at the talented, decent man who edited my copy.

A declaration of war, and my first instinct was to strike out (or rather, meet her aggression with Israeli-style "resolve").

But perhaps Papirno's attack was a reflex - the conditioned response of a person programmed to believe that Israel does no wrong. I used to be one of them.

Whatever Israel says, the United States swears to. Then the palace court press duly records the sophistry, turning it into "fact."

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group, has fired off one action alert after another, lambasting the American media for biased coverage of the current conflict, but it's been to no avail.

Watchdog groups are as easily ignored by the print media as the U.N. consensus to draft a resolution condemning Israel's "excessive use of force against Palestinians."

As for the networks, they are more biased - and even less accountable. "Occupied territories are no longer `occupied' on TV news," states FAIR.

FAIR says that a typical 90-second story on "Palestinian violence (as it is routinely called) neglects to mention that Palestinians are "fighting against a [foreign] military occupation." ... Their right "to use force ...universally recognized and enshrined in international law."

That's a concept we understand when it's anti-Milosevic Serbs in Yugoslavia throwing bricks and bottle bombs, "taking their struggle ... for democracy into the streets," as a Fox News promo put it.

But Palestinians tossing rocks or Molotov cocktails in the occupied territories are thugs, rioters - anything but freedom fighters.

Substitute the word "terrorists," and the slaughter of what fact-finding groups estimate is approaching 300 Palestinians and the wounding of thousands more (most unarmed, according to humanitarian groups) seem almost good deeds.

That's right. Organizations including the Israeli peace group B'Tselem and the international Physicians for Human Rights have, in recent weeks, released reports that support the fundamental assertions of my columns.

On Oct. 24, Physicians for Human Rights members were on the outskirts of Ramallah as a demonstration took place. Doctors from the organization "saw [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers fire live and rubber ammunition at Palestinian civilians," yet saw "no evidence of Palestinians using firearms," a statement said.

The physicians' group concluded that: 1) Israeli soldiers are not firing in only life-threatening situations; and 2) they are firing at heads and thighs to injure and kill, not to avoid loss of life and injury.

Military brutality comes as no surprise to Israelis who have witnessed it first-hand, whose level of denial is but a fraction of ours - and whose newspapers print more of the truth.

The Independent of London's Robert Fisk - dean of the Middle East correspondents, with 24 years in the region - calls the American media "supine."

In particular, coverage in the Israel newspaper Ha'aretz "outshines anything" reported in the States, says Fisk. The Israeli paper's Gaza correspondent, Amira Hass, recently reported on an Israeli Defense Forces sniper whose orders were to shoot anyone over 12 as fair game.

We have as many peace groups trying to tell us the truth as Israel does, but fewer here care to listen.

As Palestinian-born intellectual Edward Said puts it, Zionism is "literally the last taboo in American discourse. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with some freedom.

"The American flag can be burned in public, whereas ... Israel's 52-year-old treatment of the Palestinians is ... a narrative with no permission to appear," Said says.

Israelis may freely criticize Israel in Israel, not so American Jews here.

Remarks made by Ami Ayalon - former chief of Israel's secret service, Shin Bet - were front page news in Israel, but they didn't even get reported in America, and no wonder.

Tossing around the word "apartheid" as if it were Israel's acknowledged system of governing the occupied territories, Ayalon blamed Israel for habitually bolting from negotiations - and refusing to honor what concessions were already made.

"We ... returned to [the peace process] only under threat of violence," giving "only when there was a gun to our heads," Ayalon said at an economics meeting on Dec. 4.

The Palestinians riot at the Western Wall, Israel cedes part of Hebron to them; they kidnap or kill soldiers - and only then does Israel comply with Palestinian demands for the release of political prisoners, he said.

"What should the Palestinians and Hezbollah understand from this?" Ayalon asked. "The Palestinians learned that Israel only understands force."

It was natural they should rebel, confined by the tens of thousands to impoverished, isolated "bantustans" whose borders were defined by their military occupiers.

"The things a Palestinian has to endure, simply coming to work in the morning, is a long and continuous nightmare that includes humiliation bordering on despair," said Ayalon. "Is the option of Jewish democracy with apartheid acceptable? I think not."

Any hope for true democracy in Israel depends on the ability of Jews and Palestinians to have a joint dialogue of their joined futures, Ayalon said.

Imagine, attempting to float the idea of an open dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis about how Israel should be run - as if the two groups were equals.

You'll peddle that soft stuff elsewhere if you know what's good for you. Here in America, we take our Zionism straight up. Skip the truth, ma'am, and just give us the facts. We'll correct them for you.