|
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
Weekend
Edition
July 7, 2002
The Tugs of War:
Palestinian
Life Under Curfew
by Lori Allen
Occupied Ramallah. The West Bank is under curfew. Every resident
of six of the seven major Palestinian cities, about seven hundred
thousand people, is under house arrest. Stepping into the street
is tantamount to breaking the rules of occupation. A punishable
offence.
On 24 June, Israeli jeeps passed through
Ramallah, a town that has gotten used to being under the nominal
sovereignty of their own elected Palestinian National Authority
for almost a decade. Israeli soldiers announced from their
loudspeakers, their burly voices resounding up and down the neighborhood
roads: "To the people of Ramallah: It is forbidden to move
around. Anyone breaking curfew will be shot." Silent houses,
closed shops, and deserted streets greeted their orders for good
reason. These are no idle threats. Last week, several Palestinian
civilians, including six children, were killed and injured when
they went outside during what they thought was a lifting of the
curfew.
Residents pass some of this time inside
peering out of windows, watching their gaolers, the tanks, jeeps,
and APCs, file through town. I survey the neighborhood through
my kitchen window, and see other faces doing the same, searching
for the source of random, window-rattling explosions and occasional
shots fired throughout the city, day and night. What some
witnessed a few nights ago were two tanks shooting at a street
light, then ramming into the light pole, cracking its wooden
beam. Was this more wanton destruction, as happened during the
last incursions, or was there a method to this madness? My
neighbor soon found out the answer.
He was dragged from his bed by Israeli
soldiers around midnight. They ordered him to turn out the lights
and come with them. Terrified and pleading with them to let
him go, telling them that he was the father of three small children,
he was ordered outside. The commander told him to shut up-"Sheket!"
he hissed in Hebrew---- and ordered him to walk in front of
a huge tank, equipped with a spinning meters-long turret . One
of the five soldiers told him to move something from the middle
of the street. Neither the soldiers nor my neighbor knew what
the object was. Probably fearing a locally made bomb, as were
used in Jenin, the Israelis enlisted the unwilling assistance
of this Palestinian civilian to clear away the suspicious object.
My neighbor tried to refuse. The soldiers
raised their guns to his face, the tank spun its turret towards
him. He had no choice but to do as they asked. He stretched
out a foot and tentatively gave the thing a shove, and then picked
up what turned out to be a small, empty carton. The soldier
told him to throw it to the side, which he did. Next he told
his human landmine sweeper to retrieve it again, and throw it
further down the street, which he also did. Then the soldier
said, "Thank you," and allowed him to return to his
house and crying children.
"Thank you?!?" the father said.
"Were they kidding? Thank you?!?
They would just as soon have had me exploded as not," he
told me the next day, still shaken up. "In having me pick
up this thing-something kids were probably playing with--they
knew that I would either be blown up and killed, or at the very
least terrified senseless. They could have shot at it with their
guns. If they had, the thing would have been blown away, and
their tanks could pass. But instead they used me."
The next afternoon, two tanks pulled
up in front of their house again. Six soldiers hopped out, some
went into the neighbor's house, a few others scurried into their
back yard. According to his wife, one of the soldiers took a
cursory look in one of the cabinets. Then they used the fatheras
a human shield and English translator as they invaded another
neighbor's house. Their search was perfunctory, they found nothing,
and drove away.
His wife wondered why they were targeting
this house. "I've never been involved in anything,"
her husband explained. Unlike tens of thousands of Palestinian
men and boys, this mild-mannered school teacher has never been
arrested, never partaken in stone throwing demonstrations. The
most political thing he has done was to help supervise a ballot
station during the 1996 Palestinian elections. "Someone
else might be driven to revenge by this kind of treatment.
Me, I just want to live in peace. Why did they pick on me?"
Despite the curfew, and in order to spite
it, after several days of enduring this collective punishment,
many in the neighborhood began sitting outside, on porches or
roofs. I do likewise, listening to the chorus of migrating birds
chirp, stutter, and coo. I try to ignore the neighbors' goats
bleating for their breakfast of garden weeds. The stray cats,
now with the run of the streets, mewl and whine, carrying out
their own turf wars, pawing through over-flowing garbage dumpsters
that have not been emptied for nearly a week. My neighbors
water their garden, their kids harass a turtle, and a large old
woman dressed in her brightly colored house robe and gauzy white
head scarf bravely waddles down my street, the only pedestrian
within view.
But in the midst of all these pleasant sounds, and some of the
normal sights of small-town life, one's ear is always tuned to
the sound of approaching tanks or jeeps. I tense up with each
far away gust of wind, confusing it with the grumbling roar of
tank treads churning asphalt. My neighbor, a vigilant mother,
shunts her children under a large-leafed fig tree, warning them
of the dangers of being exposed.
The breeze dies down, and slowly her
brood emerges back into the sun and dirt. Quiet reigns for a
few minutes, before we are disturbed again by the familiar sqawk
of a jeep's horn, and orders, garbled through a loudspeaker.
I run inside. Peeking through my kitchen window I see a jeep
parked at the intersection down the block. I warn my neighbors,
and the whole gardening crew runs inside, the goats half-fed,
the watering hose left on to drown the gladiola, the children
scampering in a half-crouch, alarmed little faces with confused,
wide-eyed concern. Only the turtle is free.
Then the jeep moves on, the family comes
back outside, and my neighbor remarks on how pleasant the weather
is. We try to remain positive, despite this game of cat and
mouse, our efforts at optimism dissolving with each tug from
the sounds of war and occupation. The neighbor continues her
chatter. Isn't it nice that there are no snipers this time, she
asks me?
I reconsider the sagacity of sunbathing
under curfew. In fact, we have no idea if there are snipers
or not. We have no idea if the relative calm of this last invasion
will hold. True, there has been no Palestinian "resistance,"
this time. Most of the young men with rusty Kalashnikovs who
confronted the tanks during the previous incursions have been
killed or imprisoned, hundreds of them corralled into a desert
prison, Ansar III, in the Negev desert. According to human rights
groups, most of them are being tortured and maltreated, many
beaten severely, few formally charged and tried.
The absence of these men means that the
Israelis have come in unimpeded, free to search, seize, shoot
and explode things at will and whim. It also means the Israelis
have no immediate excuse for shooting randomly, killing anything
that moves. But this is little comfort. The Israelis need no
excuses. For his part, George Bush has given them the green
light: it is in "self-defense," after all, and how
they defend themselves is no concern of his, and apparently,
no body else's either. This collective punishment of hundreds
of thousands of people has been barely mentioned in the western
press. The enthusiastic foreign reporters who flocked to the
West Bank when Palestinians were shooting and dying in March
and April are nowhere to be found during the few hours of "freedom"
residents have every couple of days. Watching people rush around
trying to stock up on supplies before the curfew is reimposed
is not news. Repression through stifling is apparently not dramatic
enough.
But the drama of Palestine under occupation
continues on its "Determined Path," the name Israel
has given this latest operation. On June 21, two Palestinian
boys, 9-year-old Ahmad Ghazawi and 6-year old Sujud Fahmawi,
were killed by Israeli tank fire in a market in Jenin. In Bethlehem,
children threw stones at tanks, making a game of who could get
close enough to the massive machines to touch them before running
away from the Israeli bullets and tear gas.
And the drama of resistance takes many
forms. High-school students are doing what they can to reach
their classrooms, taking their final exams. The Minister of Education,
Mr. Humus, praised these efforts as a clear challenge to the
occupation's efforts to bring a halt to everyday life. A father
of several school age children told me how his family passes
the time under curfew: he encourages his children to study every
day, they play cards, they paint murals on their backyard walls.
He gardens. "We have to stay busy and productive. We can't
just give up."
Palestinians call these forms of rebellion
"sumood": staying power as resistance. Albert Camus
described a similar obstinacy manifest in the French resistance
during WWII: "That hopeless hope is what sustains us in
difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the
executioners and more numerous than the bullets. As you see,
the French are capable of wrath."
As the situation in Palestine attests,
hopelessness and patience are not the sole preserve of the French
and times past. Those who sincerely want to see security for
the people of the region must know that not even overwhelming
military force and daily indignities can stamp out the wrath
against occupation--a wrath which only grows with every passing
day under curfew.
Lori A. Allen is a graduate student
in the Dept. of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She
is currently conducting research in the West Bank on Palestinian
nationalism.
This
Weekend's Features
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|