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Recent
Stories
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What
Democracy Looks Like: the Streets of Cairo
Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings
on the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood
Indicator: Casualties and the Stock Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
Country
March 24,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers
at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The
Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How
to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony
Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We
Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other
America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
Stephen Banko
I Was
a Soldier Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did
We Become an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
Myths
and Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come
On Democrats, Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch
from Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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April 4,
2003
Israel's Bloody
Excesses
Was Einstein
Right?
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
"My awareness of the essential nature
of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an
army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest.
I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially
from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks,
against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without
a Jewish state."
Albert Einstein
Einstein is one of my favorite twentieth-century
characters. He was remarkable, and I don't mean only for his
profound contributions to our understanding of the physical world.
He was someone who drove authoritarians like J. Edgar Hoover
mad. He was one of those rare souls, like George Orwell, who
despite mistakes and flaws, consciously worked to direct his
actions, and redirect them after missteps, by principles of decency,
humanity, and rational thought. He never subscribed to menacing
slogans like "My country, right or wrong" or "You're
either with us or against us." Quite the opposite, he knew
any country was capable of being wrong at times and did not deserve
blind allegiance when it was.
Einstein's was one of the most important
names lent to the cause of Zionism. His name and visits and letters
raised a great deal of money towards establishing universities
and resettling European Jews suffering under violent anti-Semitism
long before the founding of Israel.
But even in a cause so dear to his heart,
Einstein never stopped thinking for himself. He not only opposed
the establishment of a formal Israeli state--he was after all
a great internationalist--but he always advocated treating the
Arabic people of Palestine with generosity and understanding.
Clearly Einstein's Zionist path was not
the one followed. The actual path chosen by Israel has been pretty
much that of "the iron wall," a phrase put forward
by Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s as the appropriate posture
for Zionists to adopt towards Arabs in Palestine.
Charles de Gaulle, up until the Six Day
War, demonstrated great understanding and support for Israel.
This thoughtful and highly individualistic statesman felt an
instinctive sympathy for the struggle of the Jews, but the Six
Day War caused him to alter France's policies towards the Jewish
state.
The Six Day War was a much darker and
more complex affair than it is portrayed in official Israeli
myths. The war was not simply an attack by a gang of Arab states
against Israel--a description which suggests not just Goliath,
but the entire tribe of Philistines, attacking little David with
his slingshot. While this is an appealing image, naturally arousing
great sympathy in American Puritans raised on the Old Testament,
it is not an accurate one. A fine Jewish scholar like Avi Shlaim,
a specialist in the first half century of Israeli policy, recognizing
that not all important documents bearing on the matter have been
released, agrees there are doubts and ambiguities here rather
than light and darkness.
Before the Six Day War, David Ben Gurion
made it clear to de Gaulle and other western leaders that Israel
wanted more land to absorb migrants. Before the war, Israel also
high-handedly diverted water from the Jordan river, a hostile
act in a water-short region and the kind of thing that caused
more than one "range war" in America's Southwest.
A very tense situation arose with a surge
in Soviet armaments to Arab states, although any knowledgeable
observer understood that Israel continued to hold the upper hand
in any potential conflict. A major diplomatic mission was undertaken
by Abba Eban to gather support for Israel's intended violent
response to Egypt's blockade of the Straits of Tiran. Just as
we now have Bush's obdurate, hasty demand for war with Iraq,
Eban made it clear that Israel had no stomach for diplomacy to
end the blockade. The blockade meant war.
De Gaulle made a remarkably prescient
observation to the Israeli government: "If Israel is attacked,
we shall not let her be destroyed, but if you attack, we shall
condemn your initiative. Of course, I have no doubt that you
will have military successes in the event of war, but afterwards,
you would find yourself committed on the terrain, and from the
international point of view, in increasing difficulties, especially
as war in the East cannot fail to increase a deplorable tension
in the world, so that it will be you, having become the conquerors,
who will gradually be blamed for the inconveniences."
De Gaulle also understood that Israel's
behavior was nourishing nationalistic aspirations on the part
of the Palestinians, a development Israel either greatly underestimated
or chose to ignore, perhaps reflecting the arrogance of those
supported by great power towards those without power. De Gaulle's
advice was, of course, ignored. Israel managed easily to overwhelm
the Arab states, as its leaders had known it would, and it has
occupied a good portion of the territories seized ever since.
It has ignored many quiet diplomatic voices on this matter. It
has stood in contempt of UN resolutions for years. It has suffered
innumerable guerilla attacks and launched innumerable reprisals,
even starting a bloody war in Lebanon complete with atrocities.
Israel finally came to toy with the notion of a Palestinian state
but never made the genuine effort or concessions necessary to
see this become a reality. It has, in short, fulfilled de Gaulle's
warning of trouble more than thirty years ago.
The 9/11 attack on America, coming under
the administration of perhaps the most aimless, blundering, and
least informed president in American history, was a godsend for
Israel's belligerent policy. The people Israel has occupied and
mistreated for a third of a century are regarded by this American
president as something akin to al Qaeda. We have even had trial
balloons released by Republican figures like Donald Rumsfeld
and Dick Armey concerning Israel's right to hold the land and
drive out its people, although it is possible these represent
pre-assault softening-up by Washington to make Palestinians grateful
for a second pathetic offer of statehood now in the works, pathetic
because it is impossible to imagine anything else being blessed
by both Bush and Sharon.
Perhaps most revealing of the moral state
to which Israel has been reduced since the Six Day War were preparations
for Mr. Bush's war on Iraq. All Israeli citizens were issued
gas masks. A debate and legal moves centered around whether foreign
workers, of which there are large numbers, should also receive
gas masks. If they wanted gas masks, they must rent or buy them,
and the masks available for rental were those considered as expired
and unsuitable for Israelis. In families of mixed marriages,
apparently spouses who remain unregistered under Israel's now
more restrictive registration requirements, do not receive gas
masks. Most Palestinians under Israeli occupation are not issued
gas masks, it being considered the responsibility of the broken
Palestinian Authority, almost without resources, to look after
this.
There is something especially repugnant
in establishing a hierarchy of people whose safety should be
the responsibility of the state, and the various adjustments
made to this hierarchy in the face of criticism hardly reflect
humane policies.
In recent months, not a week passes in
which Israel's army does not kill fifteen or twenty Palestinians.
Often, this many are killed in a day or two. These killings are
generally reported as the deaths of "militants," although
we have no way of determining the legitimacy of that term. We
do know that quite a number of people who cannot possibly be
characterized as militants, including women and children and
peaceful foreign observers, have been killed by Israeli soldiers.
Of course, even those who might justifiably be called militants
are in their view only putting up a pathetic defense of their
homes against Merkava tanks and Apache helicopters.
The assassination of suspected terrorists
is now an accepted, ordinary event in Palestine, and Mr. Bush
has granted Israel the right to extend this violence to America
territory. Mr. Sharon's secret services have conducted scores
of assassinations. Perhaps assassination is the wrong word since
it is generally used to describe the killing of a high-level
political opponent. Mr. Sharon's bloody work is precisely that
of a police force murdering, instead of arresting, criminal suspects
by the score.
At this writing, as America bombs and
burns its way through Iraq, Israel has again rolled out its bulldozers
and tanks into Gaza--killing, wrecking, and making many improper
arrests. Most horrifying is what Israel is doing to Bedouin farmers
in the Negev desert. Israel has used crop dusters spraying poisonous
chemicals to destroy the Bedouin crops. The charge is that they
are illegal squatters--a remarkable accusation coming from those
who still hold lands seized in 1967 and regularly build new settlements
on them for brand-new, heavily-armed immigrants.
Defenders of Israel's excesses in the
United States have been driven to advocate policies as chilling
as creating a legal framework for torturing terrorist suspects
in the United States and Israel's undertaking the cold-blooded
reprisal killing of the families of desperate suicide bombers.
These are powerful measures of the corrupting long-term effects
of the Six Day War and Israel's determination to retain control
over much or all of the seized land.
Regrettably, Einstein appears to have
been right about what Israel had the potential for becoming.
No person of principle can support Israel's present policies,
and I believe there is little doubt that would include Einstein
had he lived. Perhaps it is just as well he did not.
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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