Author: Helena

August 15: Palestine and Iraq

In the Gaza Strip portion of occupied Palestine, today is the announced deadline for the evacuation of all the Israeli settlers who have enjoyed decades of extremely pampered (and quite illegal) residence there until now.
Lest we forget, these settlers are far from the first in modern times to be evicted from from a heavily government-subsidized existence when the government of the metropole decided that maintaining their colonial venture in a foreign land was no longer a good thing to do.
In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily over to the FLN.
How much slaveringly attentive media coverage did the pieds noirs get from the rest of the world as they rushed back to France with often only the clothes on their backs?
In 1975, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique learned in turn that Lisbon had changed its mind and would no longer subsidize and protect their colonies. Many fled to South Africa; others slunk back to Portugal, dazed and confused.
In those earlier cases– and scores of others around the world– the deeply racial order of things that had previously supported their exploitative colonial-settler lifestyle was brought to an end. Millions of (mainly European-origined) colonists from around the world found their previous dreams and expectations rudely cancelled or curtailed. That can be a difficult thing for anyone to come to terms with…
On the other hand, if the earlier dreams and expectations were based on the continuation of a deeply inegalitarian system and the actual maintenance of highly abusive military rule of “the Other”, then evidently they needed to be curtailed or cancelled… And the indigenous “Other” certainly needed to be given a chance to pursue her dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.
No discussion yet of such reparations in the case of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Lest we forget, meanwhile, the Israeli settlers departing Gaza are being given very generous compensation packages for giving up the subsidized lifestyle they have enjoyed for much of the past 38 years. (Paid for through the generosity with which the US Congress hands out my tax dollars to the Israelis, time after time after time.)
But despite all the evident inequities that continue between pampered Israel and the Palestinians… despite all that… at least Ariel Sharon and a huge chunk of the Israel center seem finally to have understood that a contraction of Israel’s former colonial order is a wise thing to do. But in the US meanwhile, there is still sadly little public recognition yet from the Bush administration or the mainstream of the US political elite that exactly the same is true regarding their former dreams of neocolonial domination in Iraq.
Grassroots sentiment inside the US body politic now does, thankfully, seem to be pushing increasingly harder for a speedy pullback from Iraq. But President Bush is still– publicly, at least– “standing tall”. He is “resolute”. He is “staying the course.” And so on.
That’s in public. In private, though, there are increasing signs that his administration is preparing to undertake a maneuver that none of us should be so insensitive as to call “cutting and running”…. Um, “reordering and rationalizing the US presence in Iraq” might be, perhaps, what we could call it.
In this important piece in yesterday’s WaPo, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer– reporting from Washington and Baghdad, respectively– wrote:

    The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
    The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
    “What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

Immediately, one tries to judge how high-up and therefore how well-informed about current cabinet-level thinking this anonymous “senior official” is. One first point: No-one that I can think who truly fits the description “senior official”– and who’s a civilian– only started his/her involvement in policy in 2003. There were no major turnovers of civilian policymakers at a high level that year, that I can remember. Therefore, we are most likely talking about one of the generals.
Interesting.
Later in the piece, Wright and Knickmeyer write:

    “We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”

And later still, this:

    Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
    “We’ve said we won’t leave a day before it’s necessary. But necessary is the key word — necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us,” a U.S. official said.

Not clear if this is the same official as the first one quoted. Or maybe it’s the second one. But anyway, the picture that emerges is that rather quietly, behind the scenes, people actually involved in implementing the policy are starting to implement one involving considerable retrenchment and downsizing of goals… And– speaking always “off the record”– they are now starting to be ready to admit to this.
But how about the president, with his puffed-up little chest down there in Crawford, Texas? When will he be able to start leveling with the US citizenry, and to tell the worried parents of the US fighters in Iraq that the lives of their loved ones are now being put on the line there for a venture that, as is increasingly evident, has failed?
By the way, George Bush, if you want someone to help you write the speech in which you do this, in stirring rhetoric that reaches to the heart of our national principles, just give me a call…

    We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men [and women] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Note, George, how this refers to all men [and women.] Not just to “US citizens” or any other subset of world humanity.
So yes! Now surely is the time to pull speedily out of Iraq– just as Israel is pulling out of Gaza– and to allow the Iraqis to exercize their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
(As for the Iraqi “Constitution”– deadline being today– you’ll note that I’m still steadfastly not writing about it. What a sad, sad, farce.)

Imshin on disengagement

Imshin, the author of the “Not a fish” blog from Israel, has been posting some interesting reflections on the Israeli disengagement from Gaza.
In this Aug 12 post she expresses her support for the rule of law in Israel:

    I am neither orange or blue. I think it is too late for flying colors. It is no longer relevant. My personal view has long been that leaving Gaza was always inevitable, but I did feel that the question of timing was important. There are pros and cons to leaving Gaza at this particular time.
    But what I think is no longer relevant, it has been decided.
    The stand I am taking is in support of the rule of law, in support of the sovereignty of the State of Israel. The decision was made by a democratically elected government with the support of an also democratically elected legislator. The only important question now, in my opinion, is who rules the country

Contract employees at Gitmo

Today I was cruising the always informative portion of the American Civil Liberty Union’s website where the ACLU has been posting the documents re US torture that it has painstakingly been able to get released by the Dept. of Defense.
One of the documents they have there (see below) gives a graphic description– by a civilian contractor employee working in a “monitoring room” overlooking an interrogation room in Gitmo in April 2003– of extremely humiliating sexual abuse of a detainee being performed by a female military interrogator.
(The DOD is currently trying to say it can argue in secret as to why it need not comply with court orders to release further photos, videos, and other documents providing evidence of abuse of detainees in various US-run detention centers.)
Anyway, I was looking through this collection of government docs that was released– in heavily “redacted” form– by the government on July 26. ( A short guide to what’s in that large, lengthy PDF document can be found here.)
What interested me in the 139-page-long PDF collection was the “story” that gradually emerged there in which a contractor for a company called ACS Defense working alongside uniformed military personnel in Gitmo in April 2003, reported on some bad abuse he’d seen being used inside an interrogation room there… But what this guy did was he rported it to his own supervisors in the contractor company, rather than keeping his testimony within the military chain of command.
It’s kind of hard to read the story clearly… Primarily because of the huge swathes of black-out redactions, but also because the DOD unhelpfully released the docs in reverse order… The general effect is of reading a mystery novel in which only a small proportion of the “clues”, and of the final resolution of the story, are ever provided– plus, you have to read it backwards. Also, given that nmost of the names are redacted, the dramatis personae is very thin and hard to follow.
So anyway, if you go down to p.87 in the PDF file, you find the contractor’s original description of what he saw as he stood with others in a “Monitoring room” overlooking two interrogation rooms in Camp Delta, Gitmo, on April 22, 2003.
The author of this memo, which was dated April 26, 2003, describes himself as having previously been trained in, and used, interrogation techniques in the US army. He says, ” I had never seen in FM [Field Manual] 34-52 any section describing or prescribing what [the interrogator] had done to the detainee.”
So you’ll have to go to the doc to read what that contract employee saw… Basically, it was this:

Continue reading “Contract employees at Gitmo”

Sartre speaks from beyond the grave

This afternoon I walked to the library in 94-degree heat to pick up some books I’ve been wanting to read for a while. On the way home, I already nearly finished reading (in English) Sartre’s “Introduction” to Henri Alleg’s classic testimony of his 1957 torture at the hands of the French in Algeria, The Question.
Alleg was a French-Algerian communist who had previously been a newspaper editor. The portion of his narrative that I’ve read so far already provides a chilling preview to what the US has been doing in its ongoing global gulag, including sickening descriptions of being tortured with electricity and of being “waterboarded”.
Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
Oh, and at one point they tied his neck-tie onto him like a dog-leash and tried to parade him round on his knees like a dog. All that in the first 20 pages, and many more to go… Not for the faint of heart.
Regarding Sartre’s text there, he speaks very strongly to the current condition of US citizens regarding our society’s condoning of the vilest tortures and abuses of “the Other”. I did a quick Google search to see if I could find an online version of it and could not.
Might I suggest to the publisher of Harper’s magazine or some similar publication that they contact the publisher of this English-language edition, George Braziller, and get permission to republish Sartre’s entire text?
Not being able to link to an existing on-line version, I shall type out a few quick excerpts here:

Continue reading “Sartre speaks from beyond the grave”

Iraqi poll’s bad news for Jaafari

[Version edited for clarity here…]
An Iraqi NGO called the Tammuz (“July”) Foundation for Social Development has just completed an opinion poll of 265 citizens in four neighborhoods of Baghdad. The results are very shocking for the US-backed government led by Dr. Ibrahim Jaafari.
Respondents were asked: “How do you evaluate the government of Dr. Ibrahim Jaafari in the following [five] main fields?” The answers were that respondents answered “bad” in the five categories covered, as follows:

    Security and combating terrorism– 67%
    Combating Corruption– 74%          
    Resolving the problem of electricity– 90%
    Resolving the problem of unemployment– 77%
    imetable for withdrawal of the multinational forces– 68%

The neighborhoods where the poll was conducted were listed as Zayouna, al-Shaab, al-Talibiya, and al-Thawra (al-Sadr). I don’t know enough about the political geography of Baghdad to tell how “representative” these areas of the capital are of the national population as a whole. The only one I know a little about is Sadr City…
But still, these results have to be deeply worrying for Jaafari– and for the US government that’s been backing him.

Palestinians in Gaza (and Israelis)

Okay, yesterday I was complaining here that the US MSM hasn’t paid much attention to the 1.38 Palestinians of Gaza– or to their 6-million-plus compatriots in other places– amidst all the coverage of the “fate” of the handsomely compensated 8,500 Israeli settlers now being required to leave the Gaza Strip.
Today, Greg Myre of the NYT has a fairly well-done piece on the aspirations of the Gaza Palestinians. It is a good job, and very welcome. However, in general the amount of coverage that NYT has given over, say, the past two months to 8,500 people who’ve been enjoying a heavily subsidized lifestyle to live in colonies illegally established on land under military occupation versus that given to the territory’s 1.39 million indigenous residents has still been very disproportional.
Myre’s piece notes that,

    Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has carried out many of the deadliest attacks against Israel, are both claiming credit for the Israeli withdrawal, and they may hold rival events.

Obviously, the way that that plays out over the days ahead will be very interesting. Yesterday or the day before Hamas did come to some agreement with Abu Mazen on allowing the Israeli withdrawal to happen in as orderly a fashion as possible. I think we can surmise that this is in the joint interest of Hamas, Abu Mazen, and Ariel Sharon…
But evidently, Hamas wants to claim the Israeli withdrawal has been forced by the militant actions it has sustained against the Israelis for many years, while Abu Mazen will want to claim it is a fruit only of his diplomacy.
Expect some truly massive Palestinian street rallies in the cities and towns of Gaza– and quite likely, also of the West Bank– as the Israelis withdraw from Gaza. They will probably dwarf the gathering of some 100,000 Israeli settler activists that was held in Tel Aviv recently.
By the way, regarding the nature of media coverage, the BBC website has an interesting “diary” by a Gaza-based, 47-year-old PA employee called Hakeem Abu Samra who says, among other things,

    My father and cousin have owned about 60 dunums of land [about 15 acres] close to the border between Gaza and Israel since 1936, when the whole area was still under British Mandate.
    We have not been on that land since 1970, when we got a military order forbidding us from entering the area.
    This land was sliced into three by streets connecting the four settlements built there, including Dugit, the one nearest to us.
    It was very upsetting for our family – especially as our grandfather had died on that land, shot by Israeli soldiers on patrol in 1956, two years before I was born.
    I cannot describe what it is like to see your land, to be near to it, but to be forbidden from entering it. You cannot put it into words.
    Seeing settlers on our land, planting their crops, making money, it is like someone has stolen something from you.
    These people hurt me and my family, they built their house on my family’s land and kept it for nearly 40 years.
    My father and cousin have since died, but my brothers and my cousin’s brothers are looking forward to seeing the settlers leave and getting the land back.
    Once we get the land back, we will look for compensation from the International Court of Justice.
    But most importantly, once we get rid of the occupation in Gaza we hope to live just like human beings, as in any other country.
    We want to be safe and free, to be left alone to take care of ourselves.
    We can live as good neighbours, so Israel should stop bothering our lives.

The BBC also has a “diary” by a soon-to-depart Jewish settler, that it launched one day before Abu Samra’s. (Why?) This guy, Pesach Aceman, displays all the self-referential provincialism of pampered colonists similarly subjected to decolonization in other parts of the world over the past half century. Interesting in that regard, perhaps…
An example:

    We hear that the Palestinians are preparing thousands of flags to fly from the abandoned Jewish houses, synagogues and shops. How disgusting and how painful this will be. What will it do to the kids and young teenagers to see this on the TV news?

No hint there that the category “kids and young teenagers” would actually, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, nowaadays include more young Palestinians than young Israelis– and that just about every young Palestinian seeing Palestinian flags flying over previous Israeli settlements is going to be completely delighted at the sight. No, for Pesach Aceman and his pampered ilk, the category “kids and young teenagers” would necessarily only apply to Israelis, with the Palestinians remaining, for him, apparently quite invisible.
Oy vey.
The NYT, by the way, today has an interactive map feature that’s interesting to look at. You can click on various points and get seatellite images of what’s underneath. In this way you can get an idea of how many thousands of dunums of land within the settlements’ perimeters have been turned into greenhouses.
(I note, though, that the NYT interactive feature has zero clicking points above Palestinian population centers… Are they too insignificant to care about, I wonder?)
Re the greenhouses, Haaretz is reporting that the economic envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli talks, Jim Wolfensohn, has pulled together a deal that will reward the plantation owners of the “Gush Katif” settlement bloc with $14 million, as the “purchase price” for 75 percent of their greenhouses.
It can often really hurt the feelings of earlier victims when their victimizers get handsome payoffs simply for agreeing to stop their acts of victimization. In this case, the PA objected most strenuously to the idea that US aid funds earmarked for the Palestinians should be used to help buy out (= “reward”) the Israeli settler plantation owners.
So now, Wolfensohn has found $14 million of “private money” to fund the purchase. The greenhouses in question will be transferred to “a PA company.”
I’m not sure how necessarily desirable or how stable over the longer term this arrangement is. Many private Palestinian landowners have title to lands that were used by the settlements. Their claims need to be discussed. Also, why should we assume that PA ownership and the pursuit of a set of economic projects that met the colonists’ economic needs though not necessarily those of the Palestinians, are what is required?
Well, this is how it’ll work out for now. Those Gush Katif plantation owners will make out like bandits. They’ll pocket both the Israeli government compensation for their houses (in which they have already lived a heavily subsidized life for many years now), and now the international money being paid for their (also previously subsidized) greenhouses. The PA will get its hands on an economic project of some present viability. Jim Wolfensohn will look like a talented philanthropist.
But I imagine the real issues over the socioeconomic development of Palestinian Gaza, and the question of who gets to exercize political control over it, all still lie ahead.

George and Cindy

I guess practically every reader of JWN is well familiar by now with the campaign of that persistent and heroic woman, Cindy Sheehan. She’s been camping outside GWB’s vacation home in Crawford, Texas, trying to win a face-to-face meeting with the man whose disastrous decision to launch the invasion of Iraq resulted in the death of her son Casey, some 1,840 other US service-members, and scores of thousands of Iraqis and others.
Sheehan has already– around a year ago– had one face-to-face meeting with Bush. On Wednesday, Juan Cole published the excerpt from the Wolf Blitzer interview in which Sheehan described the bizarre, affect-less way that Bush behaved during that meeting:

    He didn’t even know Casey’s name. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything about Casey. He wouldn’t even call him “him” or “he.” He called him “your loved one.”
    Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject. And he acted like it was a party.

(See also Lakshmi Chaudry’s interview with Sheehan, on Alternet.)
So I’ve been thinking about George W. Bush. It’s clear that Ronald Reagan– a consummate acting professional– could have summoned an appropriate set of words and gestures to convey “comfort” to a recently bereaved mother. Indeed, given Reagan’s inability to recognize any clear distinction between acting and reality, he may well– once having been programed by his expert handlers to “perform” comfort-to-the-bereaved– have actually started to feel it. He did after all, have these sudden flashes of real human feeling from time to time during his presidency.
But the question I had about GWB was why, back during Sheehan’s June 2004 meeting with him– he could not even summon a performance of comfort-to-the-bereaved… Was he totally emotionally frozen??
Then I thought, why, maybe his emotional freezing-up at that time was the only thing that stood between his maintaining his amour propre as president and his completely losing it in face of the growing realization that his blithely embarked-upon, gung-ho adventure in Iraq was coming very badly unglued, indeed… With very real human consequences, as exemplified by the very real, grieving family then standing before him.
This may sound far-out. But I tested the proposition last night in a discussion with Bill and some friends. Bill recalled that something eerily like “losing it” in politically very similar circumstances was indeed what had happened to Israeli PM Menachem Begin back in September 1983.
What happened to Begin at that time has been referred to by Sam Lewis– then the US ambassador to Israel– as “his extraordinary self-imposed withdrawal from public life.”
September 1983 was 15 months after Begin’s government– at the intense urging of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Defense Minister– launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that was intended to “transform the political geography of the whole Middle East.”
By September 1983 it was clear the Israelis were stuck deep over their heads in Lebanon… The promised transformation was backfiring and the Israeli troops were stuck in a debilitating Lebanese quagmire from which it would take them a further 17 years to extricate themselves…
In June 2004, it was 15 months after Bush’s governement– at the intense urging of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime Minister– launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq that was intended to “transform the political geography of the whole Middle East.”
By June 2004 it was clear the US was stuck deep over its head in Iraq… The promised transformation was backfiring and the US troops were stuck in a debilitating Iraqi quagmire from which it would take them…
Well, you get the drift.
I guess the other thing that happened to Begin around September 1983 was that his wife had died.
I do wonder what role Laura Bush plays in providing counsel to her husband on the war and other issues???
Another difference between Begin and GWB: Begin was a very fully developed, intelligent, and well-informed adult personality, agree with him or not…
As for GWB???
Anyway, I still think this idea that his bizarre lack of appropriate affect in so many public encounters must be a key to something is this very weird guy’s personality…

CSM column on Gaza

I have a column in the Christian Science Monitor today on the imminent pullback of Israel’s troops and settlers from Gaza.
It was a hard column to write, for a number of reasons… Not least of which was that the calendar for doing it kind of snuck up on me this month. (I have a “regular” slot on the second Thursday of each month, plus can suggest as many additional pieces– most of which also run on Thursdays– to my editors there as I want.)
One of the basic underlying theses of this piece is that pure surface area is not, in itself, what determines the “viability” (or otherwise) of a state in modern times. Rather, it is the presence or absence of extrenally imposed constraints on the ability of that state to build economic relations with other states around the world. The two paradigms I was looking at were (1) Singapore and (2) South Africa’s Bantustans.
Singapore has a very restricted surface area (693 square kilometers). Gaza’s is even more restricted (360 sq. km.) Gaza is certainly heavily peopled, but its population density is not as high as Singapore’s. Singapore’s GDP per capita is $27,800; Gaza’s is c. $600; and Israel’s is $20,800.
The South African Bantustans were all located on economically marginal chunks of the RSA’s land… But South Africa is a huge country; so even those Bantustans had considerably more territory than Gaza’s– plus, I think, a lower general population density. But what hampered them most from registering significant social, economic, and political development was the chokehold that South Africa maintained on their borders (and also on the functioning of their security services.)
It was those South African restrictions on the Bantustans’ ability to conduct independent relations, including economic relations, with the outside world that led just about every other government in the world– with the exception of Israel!— to completely reject SA’s claims that those ten territories qualified as “independent states.”
Nowadays, Israel still seeks to maintain controls over all of Gaza’s borders. Along the short border with Egypt, it will subcontract some of the routine patrolling tasks to the Egyptian Army. But it still crucially seeks to maintain its own hand over the crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, just as it seeks to maintain control over Gaza’s airport (once it has been rebuilt– Sharon’s armies having destroyed its EU-built runways back in 2002) as well as over the Gaza seaport, once rebuilt (ditto) and all other access along Gaza’s lengthy coastline onto the Mediterranean.
Israel also seeks to exert control over all of Gaza’s border with itself. That is its right. If Gaza had real independence none of its other borders with the outside world would be any of Israel’s damn’ business.
So why are European and other western governments lining up to laud Sharon’s “courageous” move to create a small, tightly controlled Bantustan in Gaza? Beats me. Especially since it has always been quite clear to everyone that Sharon has agreed to undertake this pullback from Gaza in place of doing anything positive to respond to those portions of the EU-US-UN-Russian-sponsored “road map” that require Israel to make non-trivial troop withdrawals in the West Bank.
It has also been quite clear to everyone who has followed Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in any depth that an Israeli “concession” regarding the territory of Gaza will never satisfy the Palestinians’ quite legitimate demands to exercize their national independence over the whole of the Palestinian territory that was occupied in 1967— that is, Gaza plus the West Bank, including East Jerusalem– with or without minor and mutually agreed territorial adjustments with Israel.
Remember, the whole land of the WB plus Gaza still only constitutes around 23 percent of the land of historic (British mandate-era) Palestine– and considerably less, too, than the area of the Palestinian Arab state envisaged in the Partition Plan adopted by the UN back in 1947. So to the Palestinians– some millions of whom are refugees from inside the Israeli lines of 1948-49– ceding their claim to exercize political control over the other 78 percent of their ancesrtal homeland was already a big deal. It was a move that was hotly contested within the Palestinian arena when it was first proposed by the PLO leadership 30-plus years ago; and has periodically been contested since then, too.
Therefore, to expect that the Palestinians will at any point be “satisfied” with just Gaza alone– which contains just 1.3% of the land of Mandate-era Palestine– has always been a completely unrealistic proposition.
Add to that the fact that some 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees from inside 1948 Israel, whose demand for some satisfaction of their claims to ancestral properties that they and their forebears left behind during their conflict-driven flight from them in 1948 is currently completely ignored by Israel, and you’ll see that Sharon’s Gaza pullback is not destined to provide anything like a situation of longterm or even medium term stability.
Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that the pullout of Israeli soldiers and settlers might prove to be only a prelude to the establishment of an ugly free-fire zone inside Gaza, in which the IDF can escalate its bombings and incursions as much as it wants– without, at that point, any fear of the Palestinians making life a little hard for the settlers and Israeli troops stationed until now throughout the Strip.
I hope to heck that that is not the outcome (or one hidden intention) of the imminent pullback… But it is certainly a distinct possibility.
I guess one of the other important things I refer to in my column is the degree to which the western MSM has concerned itself with the settler-driven narrative of giving huge exposure to the “battle” inside Israeli society over the fate of some 8,500 Jewish Israelis whose residence inside occupied Gaza has anyhow all along been illegal under international law— while it has given little play at all to the effects of this pullout on what I called the “fates and dashed hopes” of the eight million or so Palestinians worldwide… By that, I meant their hopes for a viable and robust independent national state.
So there you have it… The western MSM thinks that 8,500 Jewish Israelis somehow count for more than eight million Palestinians??? To me, that really is an important part of what has been going on here– and of what Sharon and his friends in the Israeli settler movement have really “achieved”.
To which, all I can say is: “Human equality now!”

What is ‘the rule of law’?

The rule of law: In a democracy, does it apply to everyone, including the highest in the land?
Lawyers for Maher Arar argue that it should. Arar is the Canadian citizen who was “rendered” to Syria by the Bush administration when he was passing through New York’s Kennedy airport in September 2002. He’s been seeking redress from the US government in a New York courtroom, for the foul torture he was subjected to as a result of that rendering.
(The term “rendering” is used for when slaughter-houses boil down excess animal products to make tallow, glue, etc. For that that reason I find it approproately distasteful as the word for what happens to the phsyical bodies of people treated in this atrocious way by the US authorities and their partners-in-torture in other countries.)
In that same article from the Toronto Star about Arar’s case, Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason tried to argue that what happened to Arar was no big deal– because “198 aliens have been sent to Syria in the past five years, 46 of them during the same year Arar was sent back to his country of birth.”
And that is an argument???
Arar is not testifying directly in the case because he is not allowed into the US. He is seeking a monetary settlement from the Bush administration. But, his lawyer says, more importantly, he wants a U.S. court to declare that what was done to him was wrong and “will never happen again.”
Good for the Toronto Star covering the story. Bad for the US MSM that hasn’t been. Hat-tip to a good friend for sending it to me.