_______________________________
WEEKDAY PRESS PICKS FROM
THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
ELECTRONIC LEBANON
AND ELECTRONIC IRAQ
http://electronicIntifada.net
http://electronicIraq.net
http://electronicLebanon.net
_______________________________
News Items For 18 August 2006
NEWS:
1) Occupier extends kidnapping of elected Palestinian Speaker (Aljaz)
2) Israeli aggression destroyed up to 30,000 Lebanese homes (AFP)
3) Even after war, invader's shells continue to sow death (AFP)
4) Israel officially shelves West Bank partial pullout (BBC)
5) Israeli government faces deep post-Lebanon crisis (AFP)
6) Israel: only pro-Zionist states may join UN force (BBC)
7) Hizbullah fighter recalls pitched battles with invading forces (DS)
8) Hizbullah begins monumental task of rebuilding southern suburbs (DS)
9) After abetting their murder, US tries to bribe Lebanese with aid (LAT)
10) Jewish state's president to be charged with rape (Haaretz)
11) Israel "justice minister" charged with sexual assault (Haaretz)
12) US politicians squabble over who is more Zionist (J'lem Post)
ANALYSIS & VIEWS:
13) The army is back, but don't expect it to disarm Hizbollah (Fisk/Ind)
14) Palestinians fear Israeli revenge will be in Gaza (Amayreh/Al-Ahram)
15) Despite the bombing, Hizbullah appeals to Arab-Israelis (Alpher/DS)
16) Rationality and Israeli violence (Issa Khalaf/Al-Ahram)
17) The Real Threat We Face in Britain Is Blair (Pilger/Antiwar)
Ali Abunimah
**********************************************************
(1) Israel extends Hamas MP's detention
Aljazeera
17 August 2006
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8F7F4036-301D-452F-
A573-523847DED23A.htm
An Israeli military court has extended the detention of
Abd al-Aziz Dweik, the Palestinian parliament speaker,
until next Tuesday.
On Thursday, Dweik, 57, who was hospitalised with chest
pain after his arrest earlier this month, shouted to
television cameras at the court hearing complaining that
his arrest was unjust.
"I am the elected representative of the people," he said.
"This is unjust treatment by an occupation which lacks
legitimacy. We do have the right and the legitimacy, but
these [Israelis] are unjust and usurpers [of land] who do
not observe human dignity or human rights.
"My rightful place is among the people."
Dweik, whose hands and feet were cuffed, said he has been
held in solitary confinement. Dweik, a Hamas member, was
elected in January elections that gave the Islamist
resistance group an overwhelming majority.
He opposes the extension of his detention until he
receives a medical examination. He also said he did not
recognise the legitimacy of the court.
His defence team says his health is deteriorating. He was
taken to hospital earlier in his detention amid claims he
had been beaten.
The defence has also stated that Israeli soldiers had
forced Dweik to take a medicine that caused him to lose
concentration and balance.
Asked by Aljazeera regarding his health, Dweik, an
academic, said: "My health condition is bad, but my
determination is stronger than Israel's injustice.
"Justice will triumph, the oppression will end, while the
Palestinian people will remain heroes," he added.
Dweik was seized by Israeli forces on August 7 from his
home in Ram Allah in the West Bank. Israel is holding tens
of Hamas politicians.
**********************************************************
(2) Israeli offensive destroyed up to 30,000 homes - Finnish
aid chief
Agence France Presse
18 August 2006
HELSINKI, Aug 18 2006-- Between 15,000 and 30,000 homes
were destroyed during Israel's month-long offensive in
Lebanon, the aid minister of Finland, which holds the
current EU presidency, said Friday.
"The numbers on how many houses or house units were
destroyed are very rough estimates. Numbers we heard are
something between 15,000 and 30,000 house units," Paula
Lehtomaeki said following a four-day visit to Lebanon
accompanied by the EU's commissioner for development and
humanitarian aid Louis Michel.
"That makes at least 100,000 people without a home and
decent shelter. Winter is not so far away, we only have a
couple of months to provide the basic shelter for these
people," she told a news conference.
Aid is urgently needed, she said.
"The ceasefire that began on Monday morning, hours before
we arrived in Beirut, has improved the possibility to meet
the humanitarian needs, and it has improved the
possibilities to have humanitarian access to victimes in
need.
"But it has also changed the internal situation in Lebanon
in the way that people who had escaped from their home
areas because of the bombings in the beginning of the
conflict started immediately on Monday to return back to
their homes, and this movement has been much broader and
much faster than anybody could have expected."
A ceasefire took effect in Lebanon on Monday, following a
UN resolution which paves the way for the deployment of
the international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.
**********************************************************
(3) After Lebanon war, unexploded bombs continue to sow death
By Anne Chaon
Agence France Presse
18 August 2006
TEBNIN, Lebanon, Aug 18 2006--Kneeling in the rubble, the
deminer gently handled a tiny metallic tube, trying to
defuse one of the thousands of bomblets littering southern
Lebanon.
These deadly leftovers of weeks of fighting between Israel
and Hezbollah guerrillas continue to kill and maim nearly
a week after both sides silenced their guns, creating what
one munitions expert called a "humanitarian catastrophe"
as thousands displaced by the war return home.
"This has the potential to be a huge humanitarian issue,"
said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human
Rights Watch.
"People are coming back to their homes, they're hugging
and kissing and glad just to have survived and then there
are bombs going off," he said.
Just hours after the announcement of a cessation of
fighting on Monday, one civilian was killed and six others
wounded when Israeli cluster bombs exploded in the
southern village of Ansar.
In the southern Lebanon hillside town of Tebnin, Israeli
warplanes dropped hundreds of bombs right up to the last
day of the month-long conflict, which ended Monday.
In front of a hospital, a half-meter-deep crater has been
gouged into the pavement where one cluster bomb slammed
into the road, spraying the area with hundreds of tiny,
shrapnel-filled devices designed to shred anything they
strike.
"On Wednesday we removed 54 cluster bombs from the main
road in front of the hospital, and yesterday another 44,"
said Marck Masche, an expert with the British demining
organisation Mine Action Group (MAG).
"The main problem is cluster bombs -- there are hundreds
and hundreds of them," he told AFP.
As much as a quarter of the ordnance fired during the
fighting failed to explode, creating vast minefields in
villages and fields where hundreds of thousands of people
who fled the war are trying to return.
Masche's team has found countless bomblets in a home in
Tebnin that would have been undetectable to untrained
eyes, he said.
"We don't want people to try this for themselves," he
said, bending over one of the bomblets, protected only by
an armoured vest.
"If this exploded, I would die," he said, explaining why
he wore neither helmet nor protective bomb apron.
With no bomb disposal units arriving that morning, the
team -- four Lebanese munitions experts and a medic --
have to detonate the explosive on the site.
Surrounded by sandbags, the bomblet erupts in a sharp
blast that echoes off the hills. But countless others
remain.
"Some of the villages are completely contaminated from one
end to the other ... people are moving in and living among
UXOs (unexploded ordnance)," said Steven Priestley,
director for international projects with MAG.
MAG is currently trying to raise money for a three-month
emergency phase that gives priority to clearing homes of
the explosives, he said.
Many of the bombs are hard to see because they are very
small and likely covered in dust and debris, he said.
Disposing of them is no problem, "but finding them all is
a real nightmare".
Back in Tebnin, 27 year-old Lebanese ordnance expert Fatel
Fahes recounted how his team had cleared one home of
explosives, saying the family had "just returned with the
children but could not even go in the door".
He warned that the area's tobacco fields are also infested
with unexploded bombs -- again affecting the lives of
those caught in the area.
"If they cannot reach their fields, they lose everything
they have," he said.
Masche refused to guess how long it might take to clear
the area of unexploded bombs. On top of those left by the
most recent fighting, an estimated half-million landmines
still lie along the Lebanon-Israel border, put down during
previous conflicts, according to MAG's Priestley.
"The entire area deserves a year of solid cleaning, but
for the moment we only remove (the bombs) that we can
see," he said.
**********************************************************
(4) Olmert 'suspends' withdrawal plan
BBC News
18 August 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5262334.
stm
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has suspended his plans
for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, a
government minister says.
Housing minister Meir Shetreet said the plan had not been
abandoned entirely.
He was commenting on media reports press that the pullout
was no longer at the top of Mr Olmert's agenda.
Mr Olmert was elected on a platform of withdrawal from
some of the West Bank, while tightening Israel's hold on
large settlements and the Jordan Valley.
The BBC's Bethany Bell in Jerusalem says the development
comes at a time when support in Israel both for the
withdrawal and for Mr Olmert's government appears to be
slipping.
Growing criticism
Fighting and violence in Lebanon and in Gaza this summer
has caused many Israelis to question the plans.
Speaking on Israel army radio the housing minister Meir
Shetreet confirmed the report in the Haaretz newspaper
that the pullout is now no longer at the top of Mr
Olmert's agenda.
"It is my assessment the prime minister will not deal with
this [the West Bank pullout] in the coming period, because
it's really not on the agenda," Mr Shetreet said.
"I cannot say that the prime minister has dropped the
plan. I don't think he has reached such a conclusion."
Our correspondent says there has been growing criticism of
Israel's political and military leadership in recent days,
with many Israelis are asking what was actually achieved
in the weeks of fighting Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
The defence ministry has appointed a commission to
investigate how the military campaign in Lebanon was
conducted.
**********************************************************
(5) Israeli government faces deep post-Lebanon crisis
By Marius Schattner
Agence France Presse
18 August 2006
JERUSALEM, Aug 18, 2006 (AFP) - Israel's government,
under fire over military failures in Lebanon, runs the
risk of ultimate collapse with its cornerstone policy of
unilateral pullback from the occupied West Bank now off
the agenda.
The liberal Haaretz newspaper quoted Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert as telling ministers and senior member A
front-page editorial in the newspaper on Friday, entitled
"fight for survival", said the war in Lebanon convinced
the premier "that it is impossible to sell the public
another unilateral withdrawal". Olmert was "stuck", it
said.
"His problem is that in giving up the unilateral
withdrawal he is left without a political direction or a
diplomatic agenda," wrote Aluf Benn.
The so-called "convergence plan" was the centrepiece of
Olmert's political programme. He had considered the March
28 electoral victory of the newly-formed Kadima party as
endorsement of his plan.
US President George W. Bush had also endorsed it by
welcoming Olmert at the White House in May.
But commentators had started to predict the doom of the
West Bank pullouts when the war broke out with the
Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.
Israel launched a massive offensive against Lebanon
following the July 12 border attack in which eight
soldiers were killed and two captured by the Shiite
militia group. Hezbollah responded by firing 4,000
rockets on northern Israel, killing 41 civilians and 12
soldiers there.
There were more Israeli casualties in the ground fighting
that took place in south Lebanon from which Israel had
pulled out in May 2000, ending 22 years of occupation but
allowing Hezbollah's power to grow.
The further failure of Israel's historic withdrawal from
the Gaza Strip to yield promised results also
strengthened the resolve of those opposed to more
unilateral pullouts from occupied land.
Israeli troops returned to the Gaza Strip on June 28,
launching a massive operation there following the capture
of a soldier by three militant groups, including the
armed wing of the governing Hamas movement.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
"The convergence plan died the day the Israeli Defence
Forces (army) returned to the Gaza Strip, following the
abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit on 25 June," Benn
wrote.
"At that point, it became clear that the legitimacy of the
recognised international border offers Israel no
protection against terrorism." When Olmert defended
the government's and military's performance in front of
parliament, opposition Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu
vehemently criticised past decisions to give up territory
held by Israel.
"This concept of unilateral withdrawals has collapsed," he
said.
"This policy has expressed weakness and above all was
conceived by our enemies as a weakness. It should be
replaced by a policy of force, deterrence, victory and
reciprocity." Netanyahu is in an ideal position to
challenge for the premiership again, as Olmert's Kadima
suffers a string of setbacks and its stalwarts hit by
scandal.
Defence Minister Amir Peretz's popularity is at all-time
low, paying the price for his lack of military experience
that many, including within the ranks of the army,
believe cost Israel a more decisive victory against
Hezbollah.
"If the movement of disgruntled reservists snowballs, the
government will be seriously threatened," political
analyst Hanan Kristal told AFP.
"Israelis believed the war was justified but it was badly
managed," said Kristal, giving Olmert and embattled army
chief Dan Halutz no more than six months before they
would have to resign.
Justice Minister Haim Ramon, a vocal proponent of the
"convergence plan", faces an indictment for sexual
harassment while Olmert himself faces a probe into a
property deal.
All recent opinion polls show that many Israelis believe
the Jewish state did not win the war against Hezbollah
and have little faith in the government.-AFP
**********************************************************
(6) Israel alarm at UN force members
BBC News
18 August 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5262490.
stm
Israel says it would be "difficult if not inconceivable"
to accept nations which do not recognise its right to
exist as part of a UN force in Lebanon.
Israeli UN envoy Dan Gillerman was speaking after
Indonesia and Malaysia, which do not recognise Israel,
pledged troops for the UN deployment.
Malaysia said Israel should have no say in the make-up of
the force.
The UN has expressed cautious optimism that it can deploy
an initial 3,500-strong force within two weeks.
UN deputy chief Mark Malloch Brown warned earlier that
delay could threaten the ceasefire.
But building the force has proved problematical. Mr
Malloch Brown said a lot of work was needed in the coming
days to meet the two-week deadline.
There is concern that the offers do not necessarily
provide the right mix of troops and capabilities needed
for the deployment, the BBC's Bridget Kendall in New York
says.
France, which had agreed to lead the force, said it would
send only 200 extra troops immediately, far fewer than
expected.
Bangladesh and Nepal have also pledged troops, while
Germany has offered a maritime task force.
The UK and the US say they will provide logistical
support, while Italy and Belgium have also indicated a
willingness to contribute.
The UN had been planning for a stronger European
contingent, and is disappointed by France's offer.
"We had hoped - we make no secret of it - that there would
be a stronger French contribution," Mr Malloch Brown said.
The French government has expressed concern that the
mission and mandate of the force are not yet sufficiently
clear and has been seeking clarification.
Disappointment
As the UN's efforts to build the force continued, Mr
Gillerman made clear Israel's unhappiness with some of the
contributors.
"It would be very difficult if not inconceivable for
Israel to accept troops from countries who do not
recognise Israel, who have no diplomatic relations with
Israel," he told the BBC.
He said they would be "very happy" to accept troops from
Muslim countries they have friendly relations with.
"But to expect countries who don't even recognise Israel
to guard Israel's safety I think would be a bit naive," he
said.
His comments were dismissed by Malaysia, which, along with
Indonesia, has a Muslim majority population.
"We're going to be on Lebanese territory ... We're not
going to be on Israeli territory," Foreign Minister Syed
Hamid Albar said.
'Positive sign'
Under the terms of the UN ceasefire resolution which ended
the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the
expanded UN force should work alongside the Lebanese army
in the south to keep the peace.
Each force should eventually number 15,000.
The Lebanese army is continuing its move south after
crossing the Litani river on Thursday into areas
previously controlled by Hezbollah.
It was the army's first move back into some parts of the
south since the 1960s.
As the troops arrived in the devastated town of Khiam,
near the Israeli border, one resident hailed it as a
"positive sign".
"We hope that the two parties, Hezbollah and the Lebanese
army, have an agreement on this [deployment]," Ahmed
Zoghbi said.
Israel says it has now withdrawn from two-thirds of its
positions in southern Lebanon, including the port city of
Tyre and villages of Qana, Hadatha and Beit Yahoun.
The Lebanese government has been accused of being slow to
seize the initiative over reconstruction efforts in the
south, accusations it rejects.
Senior Lebanese reconstruction official, Al-Fadel Chalak,
said Hezbollah had filled the gap, with potential
political repercussions.
**********************************************************
(7) Hizbullah fighter recalls pitched battles with invading
forces
By Mohammed Zaatari
The Daily Star
18 August 2006
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&
categ_id=2&article_id=74828#
SOUTH LEBANON: Camouflaged in a dense tree, Adam orders
his comrades through a wireless set to stay on the alert
as he observes Israeli tanks withdrawing from Lebanese
territory.
One of thousands of Hizbullah fighters who took part in
battles against Israeli forces during the war, Adam is
from the Bint Jbeil-area village of Aitaroun, where fierce
battles took place and where the prints of tanks destroyed
by resistance missiles remain visible.
Virtually every part of the area bears witness to the
destructive battles that took place there.
"Houses and commercial stores were leveled to the ground,
but we arose from under the rubble like lions, not caring
about the shooting of the machine guns, tanks and bombs,"
he recalls of the fighting in Aitaroun over three weeks.
"The invincible army became the laughingstock of the
people," he adds. "It is a feeble army that fled
panic-stricken."
Adam explains how Hibzullah members ambushed an armored
force on the outskirts of Aitaroun.
"We gave an Israeli squad the impression that the land was
ready for them and they fell into the trap," he says. "A
bulldozer, a tank and few soldiers proceeded in. Upon
their arrival ... we had been divided into two groups. The
first was entrusted with striking the bulldozer, whereas
the second was to set fire to the tank and kill the
soldiers, and we did it!!
"We saw with our own eyes how the soldiers fell and
started crying as the fire of our rifles and machine guns
nailed them," he adds. "God was by our side.
Despite coming under very heavy fire from Israeli
artillery and fighter-bombers, he says, Hizbullah fighters
retained the initiative.
Asked how ammunition and other supplies were provided to
the front line, Adam laughs: "It was Providence, believe
me! I am not exaggerating. Everything was supplied, even
fruit and tea."
He says the most sensitive moment was when Hizbullah's
leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, told the fighters in a
speech: "I kiss your pure foreheads and feet."
"Everyone [at first] thought 'these words are not
acceptable from our sayyed, you are our leader and what we
do is a blessing from God and from the sense of struggle
that you sowed and that we learnt from your school," Adam
recalls. Subsequently, however, the fighters accepted
their leader's expression of respect: "This reinvigorated
us and strengthened our fierceness."
**********************************************************
(8) Hizbullah begins monumental task of rebuilding southern
suburbs
By Osama Habib
The Daily Star
18 August 2006
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&
categ_id=3&article_id=74824
BEIRUT: Under a red banner which read "made in the USA,"
heavy earth-moving machinery, bulldozers and trucks lifted
massive rubble and debris from a bombed-out residential
building in the heart of the southern suburbs, an area
that was once the home of 500,000 mostly Shiite residents.
Four days after the UN sponsored cease- fire between
Israel and Hizbullah fighters, the southern suburbs turned
into one giant 20-kilometer workshop made up of buildings
and shops that are either totally destroyed or partially
damaged.
But the heavy machinery clearing the rubble to pave the
way for reconstruction belong to Hizbullah, the party
responsible for the capture of two Israeli soldiers that
triggered the 34-day war.
"The party is keeping its promise to help rebuild the
southern suburbs and the villages in the South that were
hit by the Israeli forces," Ghassan Darwish, a senior
Hizbullah official, told The Daily Star.
Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah pledged in the
early days of the war that his party, with help of
friendly countries, will rebuild all the destroyed
properties in the suburbs and South Lebanon.
Some critics say that Nasrallah's promise to rebuild these
areas was nothing but an attempt to silence growing
criticism of the war as well as a way of retaining his
wide support among the Shiites that represent more than 40
percent of Lebanon's population.
But whatever the reasons behind Nasrallah's motives, most
of residents of the southern suburbs believe that the
party will keep its promise to rebuild the area.
According to Darwish's survey, the intense Israeli
bombardment destroyed 198 buildings and damaged another
200.
The Council for Development and Reconstruction estimated
the total cost of infrastructure destruction in Lebanon at
$3.6 billion. The CDR declined to estimate the cost of
damage in the suburbs but some contractors say the cost is
close to $1 billion.
In addition to the residential buildings, over 600
businesses and shops were damaged during the conflict.
Apart from its pledge to rebuild the damaged houses,
Hizbullah has started collecting the names of all the
Southern residents who were directly affected by the war.
"We are offering to pay one year's rent plus buying the
furniture to give us time to either rebuild destroyed
houses or repair the damaged apartments," said Bilal Naim,
a Hizbullah official responsible for the volunteers
department.
He added that each resident who lost his or her house will
receive between $8,000 to $10,000.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
"This money can be used to pay one years' rent in any area
or town the residents of the southern suburbs want," Naim
said.
Hizbullah officials said that money is not a problem so
far, but expressed a willingness to receive additional
help from the government or any other party.
The party is very discrete about its sources of funding or
the size of donations coming from different donors.
It is widely believed that Iran is one of the main
financial backers of Hizbullah.
"We have lot of friends in the Arab and Muslim world who
make handsome contributions to our party," Darwish said.
He added that there is enough money to cover the cost of
rent for those who lost their houses. "We are carefully
studying every stage and the money will come though once
reconstruction starts in earnest."
An elderly woman standing next to a destroyed building
while one of her sons tries to recover some items from her
apartment looked in shock at the view of destruction all
around her.
"I came here two days ago to check on our apartment which
we rented a few months ago," she said, adding Hizbullah
has promised to pay her rent until her house is fixed.
"I trust Hizbullah will pay us the money for the rent and
once we get this money I will rent a house in the
mountains," she said.
One of the contractors supervising work in one of the
areas said that his company had sent all the heavy
machinery for free to help clear the debris.
"The party rented some of the heavy machinery while other
contracting companies sent their men and equipment to
reduce the pressure on our brothers," he said.
Darwish said that it would take less than two years to
rebuild the southern suburbs if everything goes according
to plan.
Asked why Hizbullah did not seek the help of the
government, Darwish said the government was welcome to
come and take the lead in reconstructing the area.
"We are not competing with the government. They [the
government] have the right to be here just like us. But we
cannot wait indefinitely until the state makes up its mind
to act."
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said earlier that the
government would also compensate those who lost their
houses and businesses during the war.
The government has already received more than $1 billion
in donations with which to begin reconstruction work.
**********************************************************
(9) U.S. Hopes to Rival Hezbollah With Rebuilding Effort
Los Angeles Times
17 August 2006
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes356.
html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is scrambling to
assemble a plan to help rebuild Lebanon, hoping that by
competing with Hezbollah for the public's favor it can
undo the damage the war has inflicted on its image and
goals for the Middle East.
Administration officials fear that unless they move
quickly to demonstrate U.S. commitment, the Lebanese will
turn more fully to the militant group, which has begun
rolling out an ambitious reconstruction program that
Washington believes is bankrolled by Iran.
American officials also believe that the administration
must restore its influence to keep a newly assertive Syria
from undermining U.S.-supported reformers in Lebanon.
A major rebuilding investment would put the United States
in the position of subsidizing both the Israeli munitions
that caused the damage and the reconstruction work that
will repair it. Such a proposal could meet with resistance
from Congress, but administration officials said that the
need for action was urgent.
"People have been seized by the need to do more, in a
tangible way, and they're working feverishly on this,"
said a senior administration official who asked to remain
unidentified because he was speaking about plans still in
development. "They know we're in a race against time to
turn around these perceptions."
U.S. officials and private experts agree that the
administration faces an uphill effort trying to outdo
Hezbollah, which has a broad local base, well-developed
social service programs and the confidence of many
Lebanese.
"Hezbollah is deeply integrated into Lebanese society,"
said Jon Alterman, a former State Department official who
is head of Middle East studies at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington.
"We're coming in when there's a sense that we stood by the
destruction of Lebanon by an ally, with U.S. weapons, and
didn't complain. So we may be too late."
Even so, Alterman said he supported the idea of trying to
rebuild U.S. influence in Lebanon at a time when the
political situation there is in flux.
The United States has only $50 million in the pipeline for
relief and rebuilding in Lebanon, a figure dwarfed by
multibillion-dollar estimates of the need. The U.S. is
lagging behind some other contributors, such as Saudi
Arabia, which has pledged $1.5 billion. An international
donors conference is to be held Aug. 31.
But American officials say they expect to expand the
effort, which is largely focused on rebuilding the
airport, restoring electric power, cleaning up
environmental damage and reconstructing some of the
estimated 150 destroyed bridges.
The U.S. effort is aimed in part at supporting its allies
in the fragile Lebanese central government, which is
competing with Hezbollah for influence. Moving rapidly,
Hezbollah officials fanned out across the country this
week, canvassing the needs of residents and promising
help. In some areas of the south, Hezbollah already had
fielded cleanup teams with bulldozers.
The U.S. official said talk of a deeper rebuilding role
was one of several discussions underway within the
administration. He said there was talk about launching a
broader diplomatic and economic initiative for the Middle
East aimed at increasing involvement in mediating the
Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as in regional economic
development and politics.
Officials are "focused on the idea that things better
change, or we're going to have serious problems," he said.
Many people in the region believe the United States was a
"co-combatant" in the war, he acknowledged.
With Congress on its August break, lawmakers have not
explicitly taken positions on funding for rebuilding. But
some influential members have given indications.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he
would like the United States to take a lead role in the
rebuilding by giving generously and organizing meetings of
donors. He has argued that the U.S. missed an opportunity
by failing to do more in Lebanon last year, as Syria
withdrew its troops from the country, leaving a partial
vacuum.
Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, voted for a resolution that called
for a postwar donors conference. But he made it clear that
there should be careful planning before the U.S. committed
large sums, an aide noted.
Alterman, the analyst, said providing aid posed
complicated challenges in Lebanon, and that the money
could easily be wasted without the United States getting
any advantage from it.
"Lebanon is a tough commercial environment.... It's tough
coming from the outside, trying to identify reliable
people," he said. "We could end up getting no credit -- or,
worse yet, it could end up in the bank accounts of the
very people who are trying to get us out."
**********************************************************
(10) Police may charge Katsav with rape in light of woman's
claims
By Jonathan Lis and Roni Singer-Heruti
Haaretz
18 August 2006
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/752162.html
Officials investigating an alleged extortion attempt aimed
at President Moshe Katsav are expected to question him
following claims by a female former employee that she was
coerced into engaging in sexual relations with the
president.
Police said Thursday that Katsav will be questioned in the
coming days. Investigators have yet to determine which
specific charges will be brought against the president on
the basis of the woman's accusations.
Law enforcement officials said Thursday that if the former
employee's claims that she was powerless in turning away
Katsav's advances are deemed credible, the investigation
would then focus on possible rape charges against the
president.
By law, intimate relations with a woman who is precluded
from providing full consent by her own volition is
considered rape. If, however, investigators find the
relations were consensual, police could recommend charging
Katsav with "forbidden consensual intercourse," a statute
which forbids exploiting a position of authority in the
workplace for the purposes of having sex.
The former employee at the President's Residence told the
police that since the affair surrounding Katsav's alleged
sexual harassment and attempted extortion became known,
the president's men had been pressuring her in an attempt
to silence her.
Some two months ago, Katsav gave Attorney General Menachem
Mazuz a letter, in which he said that he believed the
former employee had tried to extort him, threatening that
if he denied her requests she would accuse him of sexual
harassment.
The woman consented to take a lie detector test about a
week ago. The test included questions about the sexual
contact between the employee and the president, and
indicated that the woman had answered several questions
truthfully. However, in other cases her answers were not
unequivocal and the police were collecting testimonies to
corroborate or refute her testimony.
About a month ago the special inquiry team in charge of
the affair, headed by Brigadier General Yoav Sigalovitch,
summoned the former employee to the station in Lod. At
first they questioned her under warning on suspicion of
attempted extortion. Later, however, she gave them a
detailed account of her grievances against the president,
although she did not submit an official complaint.
Haaretz learned that unlike the first reports on the
affair, which dealt with the president's alleged sexual
harassment, the former employee told the police under
caution that the president had used his authority and
senior position to coerce her into having sexual relations
with him.
Although the inquiry has been going on for almost two
months, the investigators have not received Mazuz's
permission to question the president yet, police said.
In the course of the last few weeks, the detectives have
collected testimonies of employees and former employees at
the President's Residence, in a bid to corroborate the
information and avoid a situation whereby the case depends
on the employee's word alone against the president's.
The affair began when the president met Mazuz and told him
he suspected a former employee, whom he had met recently,
had threatened to accuse him of sexual harassment unless
he did as she asked. She also threatened to expose alleged
irregularities in the president's process of granting
pardons.
After Katsav's meeting with the attorney general, Mazuz
decided to open a criminal probe into the affair.
The former employee's attorney, Kinneret Brashi refused to
comment "in view of the fact that the inquiry hasn't even
reached the President's Residence yet. It is unthinkable
and improper that one party hasn't been questioned yet,
while the testimony of the other is made public and
revealed to the first party."
**********************************************************
(11) Ramon to resign on Sunday, will face trial on indecent
assault
By Yuval Yoaz
Haaretz
18 August 2006
Justice Minister Haim Ramon announced on Friday to
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz that he waives his
parliamentary immunity and his right to a special hearing,
and plans to resign from his post on Sunday.
This announcement follows Mazuz's decision on Thursday to
charge Ramon with indecent assault for allegedly having
forcibly kissed an 18-year-old female soldier in a
government office.
Ramon asked Mazuz to ensure a speedy trial "for personal
reasons, but also because of public interest."
Ramon said that he is certain that he would be successful
in court, and that he would prove that a kiss of two,
three seconds, based on the complainant's version, cannot
be considered an act with criminal intent.
In his interrogation, Ramon said that the accuser was the
one who initiated the kiss, which took place July 12, at a
social event held at the defense ministry complex in Tel
Aviv. He also maintained that the woman had given him her
phone number following the kiss.
The justice ministry refused to reveal the details of the
investigation, but sources reported that in her
interrogation, the complainant convinced the attorneys
following the case that her version is reliable. Mazuz
himself did not meet with the accuser, but was also
convinced that an indictment was in order.
In his official announcement of the indictment on Thursday
Mazuz wrote, "at the end of the day, the events of the
alleged transgression between Ramon and the complainant
spanned only a few seconds, and was not witnessed by
anyone. The variations between the two opposing versions
boil down to these few seconds. "
"In a case of two conflicting versions," Mazuz continued,
"when the accuser's version is consistent, appears
believable and is independently supported by other
testimonies, there is no other option but to indict and
leave the decision up to the court. In a case involving a
cabinet minister and a young soldier and an event
occurring during work hours inside a government office, a
decision must be made. There is considerable public
interest in a clear and decisive conclusion.
**********************************************************
(12) Israel becomes fodder in US congressional war
The Jerusalem Post
17 August 2006
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525888330&
pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
DAVID J. SILVERMAN/JTA, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 17,
2006 When is asking "is it good for Israel" not so good
for Israel? Democrats and Republicans, politicking hard
ahead of midterm elections that could end Republican
control of the US Congress, are battling over which party
was more supportive of Israel in its war with Hizbullah in
Lebanon.
"Republicans only offer support to Israel when they think
that they'll get something for it," Democrats howled after
the Republican-led Congress feted Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's
prime minister who stood with Hizbullah in the recent
conflict.
A ranking Democrat "is publicly supporting a terrorist
organization," Republicans barked back after Rep. John
Dingell (D-Mich.) dithered on whether Congress should
support Israel in the war. Jewish leaders have spent years
carefully cultivating the bromide that support for Israel
is the one bipartisan issue; some tried hard not to wince.
"I do not see the point of constantly testing members of
Congress on their Israel bona fides," said Steve
Rabinowitz, a former Clinton aide and Democratic
strategist who was unhappy with both sides for making the
war political fodder. "Just for partisan purposes to
routinely, constantly test how far you can push members of
Congress, I think it's totally alienating."
Others said the process was healthy.
"I think it's a good thing to have members of Congress
outdo their colleagues by showing that their pro-Israel
credentials are stronger than the next guy's," said
William Daroff, vice president of public policy at United
Jewish Communities and a former Republican activist.
"When Israel is in the existential battle for survival
that it now finds itself in, having people argue whether
they are the best friend of Israel or the bester friend of
Israel really shows the parameters of where the vast
majority of public officials are in America today," he
said.
At stake is a community that votes in disproportionately
high numbers, that breaks ties in swing states like
Florida and Ohio, and that has historically favored
Democrats in votes and in campaign contributions.
The opening salvo came in the days after the war started
on July 12. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the minority leader
in the US House of Representatives, refused to sponsor a
resolution affirming the House's support for Israel in its
war against Hizbullah.
Pelosi, who otherwise supported the resolution and
instructed her caucus to vote for it, objected to the
omission of language calling on both sides to safeguard
civilian lives.
The wrangling went on behind closed doors, but Republicans
sidestepped congressional niceties by leaking the dispute
to Jewish reporters. That infuriated Democrats, who noted
that Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, had voiced similar concerns. They were
ready the next week when Maliki came to town.
The Iraqi prime minister was to have represented President
Bush's promise of a democratic Iraq emerging from the
ashes of civil war - but Jewish lawmakers seized control
of the coverage, lambasting Maliki's refusal to join other
Arab leaders in condemning Hizbullah for launching the
war.
"His comments condemning Israel were wrong but
predictable, but his refusal to condemn Hizbullah is
painful," said Sen. Charles Schumer, the Jewish Democrat
from New York.
Republicans fired next, when Dingell, the longest serving
member in the House, explained his vote - one of just
eight - against the resolution supporting Israel.
"I don't take sides for or against Hizbullah or for or
against Israel," he said in a TV interview. His next
sentence in what was a confused interview was: "I condemn
Hizbullah as does everybody else, for the violence." The
second sentence was left out in Republican releases. The
National Republican Congressional Committee accused
Dingell of "support for a known terrorist organization."
Often the digs, which increased in frequency as the war
continued, come down to headcounts: Democrats made hay of
the fact that Republicans made up 10 of 12 US senators who
failed to sign a letter to the European Union urging it to
classify Hizbullah as a terrorist group.
Just because the guns have fallen silent, doesn't mean the
shouting has stopped.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is launching an ad
campaign this week linking Democratic Sen. Joseph
Lieberman's loss in the Connecticut primary last week to
what it says is receding Democratic support for Israel.
"Joe Lieberman was a voice of support for Israel," the ad
says. "That voice has been silenced by the Democratic
Party. America and Israel are worse off for it." The
National Jewish Democratic Council is urging newspapers
not to take the ad, calling the RJC "beyond hypocritical"
because of its earlier broadsides against Lieberman, who
was the first Jew to make a viable presidential ticket in
2000. Democrats had no choice but to respond, said Ira
Forman, the NJDC executive director.
"When they play this hypocritical gotcha game, we're
stupid unless we respond," he said. "If you're going to
play that gotcha game, you live by the sword you die by
the sword."
The attacks make political sense for Republicans. A recent
Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, conducted between July
28 and August 1, found a striking partisan gap in support
for Israel: Democrats supported neutrality over alignment
with the Jewish state, 54 percent to 39%, while
Republicans supported alignment with the Jewish state over
neutrality, 64% to 29%.
Forman attributed the results to the GOP's substantial
evangelical base. "If you take evangelical Christians out
of the equation, Democrats and Republicans look about the
same on Israel," he said.
Republican Jews say the poll indicates the Democrats are
no longer steadfast on Israel's security.
Noam Neusner, a former Jewish liaison to the current Bush
administration, said that although the trend represents an
opportunity for his party, it is disquieting for those who
want support for Israel to remain bipartisan.
"What concerns me is that the Democratic Party's rank and
file appears to be becoming hostile to Israel's security
needs," Neusner said.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, said that if anything, the
bickering was a comfort to him. He had feared that the war
would mean Israel would get sucked into the pre-election
for-Bush/against-Bush polarization "What we've seen is the
reverse," Foxman said. "The Democrats who are opposed to
the president on 99 percent of things are closing ranks on
Israel."
****************
ANALYSIS & VIEWS
****************
(13) The army is back, but don't expect it to disarm Hizbollah
The Independent
18 August 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1220077.
ece
Now you see them, now you don't. Hizbollah weapons? None
to be seen. And none to be collected by the Lebanese army.
For when this august body of men crossed the Litani river
yesterday, their officers made it perfectly clear that it
would not be the army's job to disarm the Hizbollah. Nor
was anyone in Lebanon surprised. After all, most of the
Lebanese troops here are Shias - like the Hizbollah - and
in many cases, the soldiers who crossed the Litani are not
only from the same southern villages but are related to
the guerrillas whom they are supposed to disarm. In other
words, a typical Lebanese compromise. So whither UN
Security Council Resolution 1701?
True, the French are on their way - or are supposed to be.
It is the French - whose own General Alain Pellegrini
already commands the small UN force here - who will run
the new international army in Lebanon. But are they
supposed to disarm Hizbollah? Or fight them? Or just sit
in southern Lebanon as a buffer force to protect Israel?
The French are still demanding - very wisely - a clear
mandate for their role here. But Lebanon does not provide
clear mandates for anyone, least of all the French.
The Lebanese gave their soldiers the traditional welcome
of rice and rose water when they drove over their newly
built military bridges on the Litani. But then, some of
the same villagers once gave the same traditional welcome
to the Israelis in 1982 - and to Hizbollah after that. But
the Lebanese army represented peace in our time - at least
for a while - to those who are still digging the corpses
of their dead families out of the hill villages of
southern Lebanon.
It looked good on television, all those clapped-out Warsaw
Pact T-54 tanks and elderly Panhard personnel carriers on
flatbed trucks, supposedly returning to the far south for
the first time in 30 years. Of course, it wasn't true.
Though not deployed on the border, thousands of Lebanese
soldiers have been stationed in southern towns since the
civil war, dutifully turning a blind eye to Hizbollah's
activities, providing none of their fighters were rude
enough to drive a truck-load of missiles through their
checkpoints.
Among those Lebanese soldiers most familiar with the south
were members of the 1,000-strong garrison at the southern
Christian town of Marjayoun, who fled after Israel's small
ground incursion a week ago. And herein, as they say, lies
a tale. For their commander, the Interior Ministry
Brigadier General Adnan Daoud, has just been arrested for
treason after Israeli television showed him taking tea
with an Israeli officer in the Marjayoun barracks. Even
worse, Hizbollah's television station Al-Manar - which
stayed resolutely on air throughout this latest war
despite Israel's best attempts to bomb it out of existence
- picked up the Israeli tape and rebroadcast it across
Lebanon.
Prior to his arrest, General Daoud was even rash enough to
unburden his thoughts to Lauren Frayer, an enterprising
reporter for the Associated Press who arrived in Marjayoun
in time to record the general's last words before his
arrest. The Israelis, he said, "came peacefully up to our
gate, asking to speak with me by name". An Israeli officer
who introduced himself as Col Ashaya chatted to Daoud
about future Israeli-Lebanese military relations.
"For four hours, I took him on a tour of our base." the
general said of "Ashaya". "He was probably on an
intelligence mission and wanted to see if we had any
Hizballah in here." But an hour after the supposedly
friendly Israeli left, Israeli tanks blasted their way
with shells through the gates of the Lebanese garrison.
The Lebanese soldiers did not fire back. Instead, they
fled Marjayoun - only to find that their long convoy,
which included dozens of civilian cars, was attacked by
Israeli pilots who killed seven civilians, including the
wife of the mayor, who was decapitated by a missile.
In Beirut, all this was forgotten as the Prime Minister,
Fouad Siniora, repeated that there would be no more
"states within a state" and that the Hizbollah would leave
the area south of the Litani. This statement came under
the category of "a likely story". Not only do most of the
Hizbollah live in villages south of the Litani but several
of their officers made it clear that they had told the
Lebanese army not to search for weapons. So much for the
disarmament of the Hizbollah south of the Litani river.
And so much for President Bush's "war on terror" which the
Israelis claim to be fighting on America's behalf.
**********************************************************
(14) Don't forget Gaza
Al-Ahram Weekly
17 - 23 August 2006
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/808/re91.htm
On the back of Israel's military defeat in Lebanon,
Palestinians fear that their blood will be used to bolster
public confidence in Olmert's government, writes Khaled
Amayreh in the West Bank With the UN-sponsored ceasefire
between Israel and Hizbullah going into effect,
Palestinians are apprehensive that Israel might embark on
a fresh rampage in Gaza in order to boost the morale of a
conspicuously dispirited Israeli public.
In fact, the Israeli army never stopped murdering
Palestinians and destroying their homes for even a single
day during the war on Lebanon. Palestinian medical sources
revealed this week that more than 187 Palestinians were
killed, mostly in the Gaza Strip, since the beginning of
July.
According to Riyad Awad, director of the Gaza-based Health
Information Centre, the killings of Palestinians is
becoming a "macabre daily routine". "Not a day passes
without the Israeli army killing an average of five or six
Palestinians, mostly children and women and other innocent
civilians. Israel feels the world is giving it a mandate
to kill and maim at will," he said.
On Monday, the day the ceasefire in Lebanon went into
effect, the Israeli army exterminated a mother and her two
children in northern Gaza when a Merkava tank fired an
artillery shell into their home, tearing their bodies to
pieces.
Hours later, Israeli warplanes bombed and destroyed three
civilian homes in Jabalya and Beit Hanun minutes after the
Shin Bet -- Israel's domestic security agency --
telephoned the affected families, warning them to leave or
be bombed immediately.
The bombing wreaked havoc on each neighbourhood, injuring
as many 14 innocent civilians, some seriously.
Ghazi Hamed, the Palestinian government spokesman, told
Al-Ahram Weekly that the chances of Israel carrying out
"another orgy" of terror and murder in Gaza were more than
real. "Israel believes, maybe correctly, that the world
that said nothing and did nothing while Israel was
systematically destroying Lebanon, slaughtering civilians
en masse, would behave similarly if Israel did the same in
the Gaza Strip."
Hamed believes that any fresh Israeli campaign in Gaza
would not necessarily seek to achieve specific political
or security goals. Rather, a fresh slaughter would pay a
domestic dividend for a now beleaguered and
much-humiliated prime minister and defence minister. "You
know nothing would enhance the collective Israeli mood
like murdering Palestinian children and shedding
Palestinian and Lebanese blood," said Hamed.
Another goal of a renewed strafing of Gaza would be to
punish Palestinians for their solidarity and
identification with Hizbullah during the war. To be sure,
Palestinians, relentlessly savaged and starved by Israel,
did express satisfaction at seeing the Israeli army take a
beating at the hands of Hizbullah fighters. Hizbullah's
leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, whose portrait is
ubiquitous throughout the West Bank and Gaza, has fast
become the most popular political figure among
Palestinians.
Many Palestinians, especially within the resistance camp,
dream of emulating Hizbullah in the level of deterrence it
presented the Israeli army. At present, the main means
available to Palestinians to disturb Israel are homemade
Qassam projectiles. These, however, are mainly a
psychological weapon creating collective anxiety among
Israelis living in the vicinity of Gaza.
Indeed, Palestinian resistance and political leaders
realise, at least privately, that the situation in Gaza
and Lebanon are very different, since Lebanon is, in the
final analysis, a sovereign state while the Palestinians
are effectively prisoners languishing under a military
occupation that controls nearly every aspect of their
lives. Hence, Palestinian guerrilla groups will continue
to opt for low-profile resistance, aiming not so much to
defeat Israel militarily -- a goal clearly beyond their
capacity -- but rather to make the occupation costly for
Israel.
Meanwhile, efforts to strike a prisoner swap deal between
Israel and the Palestinians have yet to yield substantive
results as Israel, badly bruised by the war in Lebanon, is
refusing to permit any linkage between the demanded
release of a captured Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad
Shalit, and Palestinian political and resistance detainees
languishing in Israeli jails, many without charge or
trial.
A Palestinian government official this week described the
Israeli posture with regard to the Shalit affair as
"arrogant, insolent and condescending". "They want us to
free Shalit in return for a vague and noncommittal promise
to release an unspecified number of Palestinians from
Israeli detention camps," said the official, who asked for
anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the
media.
On Monday, 14 August, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
told the parents of two Israeli soldiers captured by
Hizbullah fighters five weeks ago (the incident Israel
used as justification for its pre-prepared war on Lebanon)
that his government would negotiate with Hizbullah for the
release of the soldiers. The remarks, which drew sharp
criticism from some on the grounds that Olmert could have
done this without launching a war that led to the death of
over 100 Israeli soldiers, indicated that the Israeli
government might eventually agree to swap Palestinian
detainees and hostages held in Israel for Shalit.
For the time being, however, Israel is striving to free
Shalit either through a lopsided deal with the Palestinian
Authority -- which is unlikely given the adamant rejection
of both Hamas and Shalit's captors to such a deal -- or by
finding the soldier's whereabouts through intensive
intelligence efforts, as indeed the Israeli army has been
trying since Shalit's capture on 25 June.
Finally, with the Hamas-led Palestinian government barely
functioning, due in part to the abduction by Israel of
many of its ministers and dozens of Palestinian lawmakers,
Fatah and Hamas leaders have been meeting in the Gaza
Strip in a renewed effort to form a government of national
unity.
There are many Palestinians, of various political
backgrounds, who have come to the conclusion that a
government of national unity is probably the only thing
Palestinians can do to save the Palestinian Authority (PA)
from disintegration and collapse. Last week, Palestinian
Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh pointed out that Palestinian
leaders ought to seriously study dismantling the PA, which
he suggested was becoming a national liability.
Haniyeh argued that there was no point "in deceiving
ourselves and giving the world an erroneous impression
that there is a Palestinian national government when the
Israeli occupation army is killing every shred of
authority and abducting ministers and lawmakers and
forcing officials to go underground." The tacit call to
dissolve the PA drew unexpected support from the
Tunis-based Fatah Chief Farouk Qaddumi who argued that
there was no point in maintaining an "Authority that has
no authority."
PA President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the call as "out of
the question for the time being". However, it is
increasingly clear that should a government of national
unity fail to end Israel's US-supported blockade and give
Palestinians fresh hope for freedom from occupation,
demands for dissolving the PA would be too overwhelming to
be resisted, even by Abbas.
**********************************************************
(15) Despite the bombing, Hizbullah appeals to Arab-Israelis
By Yossi Alpher
The Daily Star
18 August 2006
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&
categ_id=5&article_id=74808
The monthly peace index published by Tel Aviv University's
Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research found on July
31-August 1 that 68 percent of Arab citizens of Israel
defined Israel's war in Lebanon as unjustified; 79 percent
claimed that Israel's air attacks on Lebanon were
unjustified; 56 percent judged Hizbullah leader Sayyed
Hassan Nasrallah's declarations to be credible while 53
percent found that Israeli military reports were not
credible.
These findings corresponded roughly with declarations made
to the media by Arab-Israeli citizens under fire in the
north; only a small minority of those directly affected by
Hizbullah's rocket attacks spoke out against the party,
while most either condemned Israel or adopted the neutral
pose of condemning the war and the mutual destruction and
supporting an immediate cease-fire. In the Knesset, too,
after an initial stunned silence, the 10 representatives
of Arab parties spoke out angrily against Israel's war
effort and drew furious responses from Jewish politicians
and the press, who here and there went so far as to
advocate ways of depriving them of their citizenship.
The readiness of a sizable majority of Arab-Israelis, who
are predominantly Sunni Muslims, to identify with a
Lebanese Shiite movement that rejects Israel's right to
exist and indiscriminately bombarded the Israeli north,
which is about 50 percent Arab, must give us pause.
Ostensibly, these findings contradict those of more
routine polls taken in recent years indicating a growing
readiness among the Arab citizens of Israel to come to
terms, in one manner or another, with Israel and its
Jewish nature. Obviously, they contradict the 80-90
percent support evinced for the Lebanon war by the Israeli
population overall.
Indeed, the only time we heard serious and vocal
Arab-Israeli objections to Nasrallah was when he advised
Arab residents of Haifa to leave their homes temporarily
to avoid harm, implicitly admitting that he had little
control over where his rockets fell. In fact, despite 17
deaths and dozens of wounded in Arab communities from
Haifa to Nazareth and Mrar, few Arab-Israelis left their
homes (unlike Jewish residents of the north, most of whom
moved if they could afford to), thereby attesting to their
determination not to be displaced again as Palestinians
were in 1948.
None of this behavior stopped Arab-Israeli communities hit
by the rockets from complaining that the government had
not provided them with adequate early warning facilities
and shelters. The government clearly had not taken into
account just how inaccurate Hizbullah's rockets were and
how indiscriminate Hizbullah would be in its rocket
campaign, to the extent of bombarding a population that
empathized with its cause. http://www.dailystar.com.lb
At the end of the day, the Arab-Israeli community reacted
to the war more or less the way the Arab "street"
elsewhere reacted, whether in Cairo or Kuwait.
Arab-Israelis also had special reason for concern in view
of the large number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who
were affected by Israel's bombing campaign. The bedouin
and Druze communities, who serve in the Israeli armed
forces and are more closely identified with the state,
here and there expressed open criticism of Hizbullah and
support for the Israeli war effort. The Christian minority
kept its silence.
But the large Muslim majority of Arab citizens of Israel
opposed the Israeli war effort even as Hizbullah fired
rockets at them and despite the fact that a number of
moderate Arab governments openly took their distance from
Nasrallah. This represented a palpable widening of the
internal Arab-Israeli-Jewish gap. While Israel's citizens
will - and should - hasten to get back to their diverse
modes of peaceful coexistence when this war ends, this
issue should not be swept under the carpet. Hizbullah,
with Iran's backing, has in recent years successfully
recruited several Arab-Israeli agents. The party has also
made progress in winning over the hearts and minds of the
Arab citizens of Israel.
The gap will hardly disappear merely by increasing Israeli
state budgetary allotments to the Arab population, though
that is a much-needed step. And it will only be
exacerbated needlessly by jingoistic calls to boycott or
disenfranchise leaders of the Arab-Israeli community. On
the other hand, the gap could potentially be seriously
narrowed by a successful conclusion to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Nasrallah exploits
with great skill. But that is not about to happen soon.
Yossi Alpher is a former director of the Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and was a senior
adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This commentary
first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletter
publishing contending views of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
**********************************************************
(16) Rationality and Israeli violence
By Issa Khalaf
Al-Ahram Weekly
17 - 23 August 2006
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/808/op13.htm
Israel's goals in Palestine and Lebanon are inherently
irrational. They, argues Issa Khalaf*, represent a
distorted rationalisation of power and create the
conditions for consequences that Israel cannot control
As we witness the unfolding spectacle of ferocious,
indiscriminate violence, destruction, and brutality in
Gaza and Lebanon, it's difficult to resist the conclusion
that there is something terribly wrong with the Israeli
state and society. It's as though all moral and
psychological constraints and boundaries have been
breached, deviancy normalised. Not that state terrorism,
deliberate aggression, extreme disproportionate force, and
massive violations of international humanitarian law are
new to the Israeli state: from 1948, the list is long, the
evidence widely available. And anyway, in this case,
disproportionality -- a concept actually inapplicable to
the evil being rained on defenceless Lebanon or the
genocide in Palestine -- implies that Israel is reacting
to others' provocations and acts of aggression, as if the
Palestine problem began with Hamas and Hizbullah's capture
of Israeli soldiers, or as if only Israel has the right to
use force to defend itself while its enemies do not, a
concept apparently supported by the West, never mind the
slavish idiocy of Bush administration pronouncements.
The Israeli self-image of rationality, self- confidence,
restraint, pragmatism, and marshal moral superiority are
delusions and myths, constructed to protect the Israeli
psyche, manipulated by the state to keep alive the specter
of existential terror in the Israeli public and to
disguise the state's raison d'etre, expansion and ethnic
cleansing in Palestine, and maintain the deeply
sociologically and institutionally entrenched Israeli
military nature, increasingly blurring the lines between a
civilian and military state
In the past five years, one can observe and feel a
qualitative change for the worse in Israeli Jewish
political psychosis, a turn to the acute. How does one
explain the copiously routine, feral, violently racist and
bigoted language of Israeli leaders, politicians,
bureaucrats, settlers, rabbis, and even academics? The
profoundly disturbing disregard for innocent "Arab" life,
including children, among Israeli soldiers and the
military? The polls that consistently, bizarrely reveal a
majority of the Israeli Jewish citizens repelled at living
next to or befriending "Arabs"? The rising voices
advocating "transfer" of Israeli Arabs or expulsion of the
Palestinians? The crazy, unpredictable military rage and
terrorism directed at Arab populations? The extremist,
self-destructive right-wing drift of Israeli politics?
The Zionist state of Israel seems to be in moral,
political, and psychiatric free fall. Unfortunately, its
self-imploding, overweening arrogance and terrifyingly
dangerous actions are supported by an equally militant
government in Washington and a Western world intent on
accommodating its violent delusions, not to mention the
growing extremism among the organised American Jewish
community in support of Israel. This at a time when the
principal Arab states and the Palestinians are seeking
peace, stability and co-existence, the former's feebleness
and inability to defend their people leaving the door open
to Islamo-nationalist non-state actors and terrorists.
Those without power increasingly revert to rationality
while those with power increasingly rationalise it.
Rational people assume that Israel's behaviour, its
"strategy", can be apprehended through reason and
political analysis, though its actions in Gaza and
Lebanon, apparently meant to cause maximum death and
destruction, defy rationality, including when measured
against Israel's self-interest. Sure, its actions can be
better understood in the context of Zionism's grand design
for a Palestinian-free Jewish state in control of maximum
territory and its attendant goal (in concert with the Bush
administration) of destroying all indigenous resistance
and populist, democratic opposition to Israeli military
hegemony in the region.
In Lebanon, the apparent objective is to directly destroy
Hizbullah, or turn the Lebanese against them, or weaken
and politically fragment Lebanon through civil war, or
install a collaborative Lebanese government.
Israeli actions are wildly, characteristically
disproportionate to the challenges, excluding the
peaceful, rational, measured use of instruments for
resolving disputes or crises. This has been the story
since before 1948. The fury against Lebanon, as in the
reaction in Gaza, lacks sensibility, strategic coherence
or even calculated utilitarian self-interest, obvious to
everyone except those who run the state of Israel,
creating the conditions for consequences that Israel
cannot control.
The fundamental Israeli goal in laying waste to, and
socially and politically fragmenting, Palestine and
Lebanon (now that Iraq has been taken care of) is to
encourage Islamist extremism in the region and thereby
gain Western support in the fight against Islamic terror.
While an apparent strategic reason or rationale, it
remains fundamentally self-defeating in the long run,
contrary to a rational state's calculations for peace,
stability, and security for its citizens. Its logic
ultimately leads to continual wars and the eventual
destruction of Israel itself.
Thus Israel's Palestine-Lebanon (and wider regional) goals
are inherently irrational, representing a distorted
rationalisation (or in the words of Israeli novelist David
Grossman, "mutation") of power -- a distortion of
rationality -- the application of which has become a
mechanism for its own, nihilistic ends, overturning the
modern Western assumption that rationality is universal
and constant. This state of affairs obscures, renders
fuzzy and indistinct, the domains between reality and
fantasy.
And that's where Zionism resides, in states of fantasy,
paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, displacement, underlain
by absolute power gone amuck. For a time it was
fashionable to delineate decades of war, continual states
of emergency and existential fear as causes of hate and
violence towards Palestinians and Arabs generally. No
doubt this is so.
But the problems lie deeper, with a "mutated" power
wielded by a narcissistic people with a keen historical
sense of both specialness and victimhood, now inheritors
of a powerful, exclusionary nation-state, founded through
colonial means, predicated on eradication of another
nation.
Israel is an ethnic state, with an ethno-religious-
nationalist-messianic ideology, based on group identity,
not individual rights, whose institutionalised preference
is for Jewish superiority, disallowing the possibility of
equality for a systematically and sophisticatedly excluded
and discriminated against Arab minority. This is far from
the system of majority rule based on the principle of
moral individual equality, protected through minority
rights, rule of law, and civil rights generally found in
Western democracies.
Michel Warschawski suggests that these contradictions are
dealt with through, one, "denial" leading to schizophrenia
(Ilan Pappe also refers to the psychological "mechanism of
denial" permeating Israeli society), manifested by the
racism and violence and ethnic cleansing and torture and
collective punishment of Palestinians and by their general
invisibility within Israeli society itself; and, two,
through "personalised legislation", that is, the
malleability, in the absence of a constitution, of easily
changeable electoral and other laws in the absence of the
concept of rights in Israel.
Power and its corollary, violence, both physical and
psychological, are institutionalised in Israeli state and
society. The military, that is, the distorting effect of a
culture of militaristic nationalism and the cosy and
symbiotic relationship between military and political
institutions and leadership of state, has been pointed to
by Uri Avnery, Ran HaCohen, Pappe, and Warschawski. A
state cannot have apparently liberal minority rights while
insisting on the separation of peoples and the
institutionalised inferiority of one to the other, a
condition similar to Jewish life in Russia of a century
ago. Jewish schizophrenia has been transposed onto the
Palestinians. Now Israeli Jews are white and European and
civilised, keeping at bay genetically and culturally
defective and shifty and violent dark skinned Arabs.
The pathological tension between absolute, unconstrained
power, aggressiveness, defiance and victimhood,
existential fear, and insecurity, produce the violence
inherent in the Israeli state. On one level, the stubborn
presence of the Palestinians challenges the denial
mechanisms and leads to the drive to extirpate the
cultural, political, and physical presence of the Other so
as not to be reminded of oneself, one's humanity. Israelis
are conscious of the fact that their state was created at
the original and continuing expense of the Palestinians,
through force, but react to this psychosis by denial and
violence. Haim Hanegbi expresses the Israeli condition
this way:
"I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who
lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself
to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this.
It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's
impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria.
When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and
the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the
Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude
that there is something very deep here in our attitude to
the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of
our minds.
"There is something gigantic here that doesn't allow us
truly to recognise the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us
to make peace with them. And that something has to do with
the fact that even before the return of the land and the
houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation
towards the natives of this land must be to restore to
them their dignity, their memory, their justness.
"But that is just what we are incapable of doing. Our past
won't allow us to do it...Even if Israel surrounds itself
with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't help.
Because... Israel as a Jewish state will not be able to
exist." (Ari Shavit interview, in Haaretz, with Haim
Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, 28 August, 2003).
It's as if there is no middle ground for Zionism, no
doubt, no introspection: it's our existence or theirs.
This psychopathology is made all the more palpable because
of the intense moral contradictions: while it has
accomplished impressive things, including "Jewish
democracy", a place for some Jews to take refuge or to
find pride, survival at all odds, and economic and
technological development, Israel is a colonial settler
society in origin as much as Zionism is also a variant of
Jewish nationalism; it is both non-democratic in its
exclusion of non-Jews and democratic for its Jewish
majority.
Regardless of how one sees it, the end result is, as
Israeli observers themselves have commented, a
barbarisation, moral decline or debasement, of Israeli
society. How could it be otherwise, what with a Zionist
ideology that, from its origin, treated the Palestinians
with cruelty, disdain, violence, and loathing, traits
common to all colonial-settler societies. And with the
state since 1948 having so thoroughly indoctrinated
Israeli society, through wars and manipulation of
existential fears, occupation and relentlessly violent
oppression. And with a racist educational system -- which
portrays the "Arabs" as inferior, lazy, fatalistic, dirty,
easily inflammable, violent and bloodthirsty -- and
socialisation of superiority and separation and alienation
of Jews from non-Jews, in cities and neighbourhoods, on
Jewish owned lands and public domains.
The pathological nature of this indoctrination is
illustrated by the cold-blooded murder of the 13-year-old
schoolgirl, Iman Al-Hams, by a "Captain R", who was
subsequently acquitted and promoted. After shooting her
twice in the head, he walked away then turned around and
emptied the entire magazine of his automatic rifle, 17
bullets, into her to "confirm the kill". The captain, on
tape, "clarifies" why he killed Al-Hams: "This is
commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the
[security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to
be killed."
Journalists and human rights organisations have documented
countless cases of Israelis killing children, even for
sports and game. Notice, here, the captain's language:
Anything that's mobile...needs to be killed . Not anyone
who is mobile. Palestinian children are like animals, like
anything, like animals they are moving, like animals, not
human, they, it, need(s) to be killed.
Captain R turns out to be a Druze, a powerful telling of
the sick success of Israeli socialisation and
indoctrination. This Druze, historically the marginal
outsider in mainstream Islamic society, internalised
Israel's ethnic/racial pecking order -- its colonially
inherited psychopathology in which the indigenous become
animals -- therefore violently displacing his inferiority,
as Mizrahi Jews do, onto the Palestinians. Dehumanising,
hating and killing Palestinians is the ultimate, disturbed
act of belonging and loyalty to a society accustomed to
its influential members referring to Palestinians as
beasts, two-legged animals, cockroaches and worms, unaware
of their own degradation and dehumanisation in the
process.
The possession of power fused with acute political and
social psychosis, manifested by power's irrational
application and self-dehumanising behaviour, betrays a
deep-seated fear: while Israel possesses unequalled power
and its political/military class was historically
confident of its ability to militarily prevail against
Arab armies, the country is unceasingly, silently,
troubled by the possibility of one day being abandoned by
the United States. Without its patron, its power is as
nothing, not necessarily militarily, but emotionally and
psychologically.
Awesome military might and the myth of invincibility is a
tenuous psychological condition, masking Israelis' deepest
existential fears that the millions they've dispossessed,
killed, and continue to torment cannot ultimately be
silenced and will come back to haunt them. But Israel's
current elites seem unable to transcend their
psychological paralysis: they resist abandoning, even
self-critically reflecting on, their worn-out ideological,
expansionist aspirations yet fervently desire acceptance
of the surrounding peoples, to whom they relate only in
the language and logic of absolute violence.
The Israeli/Zionist condition, unchanged, is a sure recipe
for widespread regional annihilation.
* The writer has a PhD in political science and Middle
East studies from Oxford University.
**********************************************************
(17) The Real Threat We Face in Britain Is Blair
By John Pilger
Antiwar
18 August 2006
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=9554
If the alleged plot to attack airliners flying from London
is true - remember the lies that led to the invasion of
Iraq, and to the raid on a "terrorist cell" in east London
- then one person ultimately is to blame, as he was on
July 7 last year. They were Blair's bombs then; who
doesn't believe that 52 Londoners would be alive today had
the prime minister refused to join Bush in his piratical
attack on Iraq? A parliamentary committee has said as
much, as have MI5, the Foreign Office, Chatham House, and
the polls.
A senior Metropolitan Police officer, Paul Stephenson,
claims the Heathrow plot "was intended to be mass murder
on an unimaginable scale." The most reliable independent
surveys put civilian deaths in Iraq, as a result of the
invasion by Bush and Blair, above 100,000. The difference
between the Heathrow scare and Iraq is that mass murder on
an unimaginable scale has actually happened in Iraq.
By any measure of international law, from Nuremberg to the
Geneva accords, Blair is a major prima facie war criminal.
The charges against him grow. The latest is his collusion
with the Israeli state in its deliberate, criminal attacks
on civilians. While Lebanese children were being buried
beneath Israeli bombs, he refused to condemn their killers
or even to call on them to desist. That a cease-fire was
negotiated owed nothing to him, except its disgraceful
delay.
Not only is it clear that Blair knew about Israel's plans,
but he alluded approvingly to the ultimate goal: an attack
on Iran. Read his neurotic speech in Los Angeles, in which
he described an "arc of extremism," stretching from
Hezbollah to Iran. He gave not a hint of the arc of
injustice and lawlessness of Israel's occupation of
Palestine and its devastation of Lebanon. Neither did he
attempt to counter the bigotry now directed at all Arabs
by the West and by the racist regime in Tel Aviv. His
references to "values" are code for a crusade against
Islam.
Blair's extremism, like Bush's, is rooted in the righteous
violence of rampant Messianic power. It is completely at
odds with modern, multicultural, secular Britain. He
shames this society. Not so much distrusted these days as
reviled, he endangers and betrays us in his vassal's
affair with the religious fanatic in Washington and the
Biblo-ethnic cleansers in Israel. Unlike him, the Israelis
at least are honest. "We must use terror, assassination,
intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all
social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab
population," said Israel's founding prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion. Half a century later, Ariel Sharon said, "It
is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public
opinion ... that there can be no Zionism, colonization, or
Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the
expropriation of their lands." The current prime minister,
Ehud Olmert, told the U.S. Congress: "I believe in our
people's eternal and historic right to this entire land"
(his emphasis).
Blair has backed this barbarism enthusiastically. In 2001,
the Israeli press disclosed that he had secretly given the
"green light" to Sharon's bloody invasion of the West
Bank, whose advance plans he was shown. Palestine, Iraq,
Lebanon - is it any wonder the attacks of July 7 and this
month's Heathrow scare happened? The CIA calls this
"blowback." On Aug. 12, the Guardian published an
editorial ("The challenge for us all"), which waffled
about how "a significant number of young people have been
alienated from the [Muslim] culture," but spent not a word
on how Blair's Middle East disaster was the source of
their alienation. A polite pretense is always preferred in
describing British policy, elevating "misguided" and
"inappropriate" and suppressing criminal behavior.
Go into Muslim areas and you will be struck by a fear
reminiscent of the anti-Semitic nightmare of the Jews in
the 1930s, and by an anger generated almost entirely by "a
perceived double standard in the foreign policy of Western
governments," as the Home Office admits. This is felt
deeply by many young Asians who, far from being "alienated
from their culture," believe they are defending it. How
much longer are we all prepared to put up with the threat
to our security coming from Downing Street? Or do we wait
for the "unimaginable"?