YASSER ARAFAT walked free early today after Israeli troops lifted their siege of his compound in Ramallah.
The Palestinian leader's release, following 34 days of being trapped, came as British and American officials took custody of six wanted men, a key Israeli demand for ending the stand-off.
There was jubilation inside the badly damaged compound as the last Israeli tanks roared off into the night and men draped in Palestinian flags rushed over the earth barricades to greet their leader.
But the mood quickly turned to anger. Reports reached Ramallah of a gun battle around the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which is also surrounded by Israeli troops, and a fire at the Catholic monastery there.
Incandescent with anger, Mr Arafat said: "It is not important what happened to me here. What is important is what is happening at the Church of the Nativity. It is a crime."
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Israeli forces have completed their withdrawal from the ravaged compound of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah following a deal transferring six Palestinians to international custody.
The pull-out means an end of Mr Arafat's confinement in Ramallah where tanks besieged his headquarters for more than a month.
In his first public comments after the withdrawal, an emotional Mr Arafat condemned the continuing stand-off at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where renewed clashes broke out during Wednesday night.
Heavy exchanges of gunfire and explosions were heard, and sources inside the Church compound said a number of fires were burning.
A furious Yasser Arafat last night emerged from five months confined to his Ramallah compound denouncing Israel even as it withdrew its tanks and troops to the cheers of Palestinian fighters.
As Mr Arafat was freed, fighting broke out at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem - where another siege has been under way - sparking a fire and provoking the Palestinian leader to accuse the Israeli government of a launching an attack.
"This is a big crime against this holy place, this nativity church," he said.
Israel withdrew most of its troops and armour from Mr Arafat's compound within hours of the Palestinians handing over six high-profile prisoners to Anglo-American custody in a US-brokered move to end the siege.
The Palestinian leader's supporters kissed and hugged each other, shouting anti-Israeli slogans and promising to defend their leader to the death.
Experts and advisors are nowadays working behind closed doors in both Jerusalem and Washington. One of the hot topics is how to design a Palestinian state that is weak in order to help Israel’s expansionist policies.
In addition, the plan must be acceptable to Israel and also serve US interests and goals in the region.
A year ago I wrote an article when Sharon the Butcher became Israel’s prime minister. In that article I said that the US was more keen than ever to see an independent Palestinian state. My predictions were based on US endeavors during the Balkan conflict and the resolutions imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbs, with absolute support from the Europeans and complete silence from the US, ensured the blocking of any efforts to establish an independent Muslim government on the pretext that it would represent a future danger to Europe. The Serbs, in order to achieve their goal, committed genocide and atrocities, threw bodies into mass graves, demolished mosques and Muslim buildings in an endeavor to abolish any sign of an Islamic heritage. They also committed rapes, destruction of property and farms and displacement of native people in a bid to expel them to other regions. The Europeans kept shamelessly silent and the UK protected the Serb’s plan until they finished their dirty war against defenseless Muslims.
On the shambles that is the Bush foreign policy
If the administration's foreign-policy apparat (minus the increasingly isolated Colin Powell) were placed under one roof -- Rice, Rumsfeld, and Reich; Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush -- what watchword would be inscribed over the door? No, not "Abandon all hope, ye who enter." There are any number of supplicants who should not abandon hope -- Latin American putschsters, China's Leninist social Darwinists, the Colombian paramilitary, Ariel Sharon, even al-Qaeda terrorists scrambling over mountaintops with no U.S soldiers around to impede them. If not Dante, then, the inscription could be provided by another immortal. Casey Stengel, whose term in purgatory managing the '62 Mets prompted the deathless line that fits the Bush gang to a tee, said, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
Apparently not. In record time, the Bush administration's foreign policy has become a cosmic shambles -- its interventions increasingly ineffectual and counterproductive; its refusals to intervene only making bad situations worse; its unilateralism undone by the impossibility, even for the world's superpower, of going it alone; its Manichaeism unsustainable in the face of complex, not to mention simple, realities; and its president's pronouncements good for the life span of a gnat.
Dr. 'Adel Sadeq, chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at 'Ein Shams University in Cairo, recently published an article titled "Class Isn't Over Yet, Stupid!" in the Egyptian newspaper Hadith Al-Madina,(1) which took the form of an open letter to President Bush. Dr. Sadeq, a recipient of the 1990 Egyptian State Prize, is an enthusiastic supporter of Palestinian suicide attacks. In an interview with Iqraa, a Saudi-Egyptian satellite television channel, he glorified martyrdom (suicide) operations. The following are excerpts from Sadeq's article and his interview with Iqraa:
The 'Hadith Al-Madina' Article
"Although you [President Bush] invest a lot of effort in proving yourself, you are not successful in doing so because you are stupid and understand nothing about what is happening in the world. 'Stupidity' and 'idiocy' are synonyms, and if you don't like the word 'stupid,' you are an evil person with an ugly soul."
"I equate your stupidity with mercilessness and inhumanity, and swear that I knew you were stupid long before it became known to the entire world, and before your cronies admitted it."
"Your stupidity is reflected in your facial features. Your face reminds me of the face of those who frequent a clinic for the mentally retarded. Your gaze is mindless and unfocused. Your eyes are misleading. Your facial expressions are incompatible with the matter [being discussed], and your tone of voice is completely disconnected from the content of your words ? a salient characteristic of the mentally retarded."
GAZA CITY: On Wednesday morning, Israeli forces led an assault in Gaza, killing 5 Palestinians, including a 2 year old girl. Israel alleges that the assault was in response to clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters.
The young girl was killed in her home when the house was attacked by Israeli tank shelling.
Corporate America and corporate boardrooms across the globe wield enormous political influence. It may in fact be argued that in today's material world corporate interests are the primary motivating factors for political action.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that power, for a multitude of reasons, has been unjustly mobilized to help sustain 35 years of an illegal Israeli military and economic domination of the Palestinian people.
In light of this and the deteriorating situation in the Middle East the time has come for corporate boardrooms of companies involved in that region to reassess their role, even if that role has been to remain silent for all these years. The corporate world must channel its influence to end the Israeli occupation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has reached a dangerous point that has the potential to disrupt business activity, especially U.S. business interests throughout the Middle East. Long-term U.S. national strategic interests in the region are also at risk, namely the cost and uninterrupted flow of oil. Millions of U.S. corporate and citizen tax dollars spent on building the Palestinian economy were lost in this latest Israeli offensive against the Palestinian civil and national infrastructure. It would be negligent for corporate America to remain silent while its government recommits yet more tax dollars to the region without addressing the source of the conflict. Ending Israeli occupation is the only solution that will put the region back on track.
First the Arab states should allocate a hundred billion dollars to us, and only then will we be able to start talking about going to war against Israel. These were the terms set by Egypt's Prime Minister Atef Ebeid, when he was asked last week about the possibility of Egypt declaring war on Israel.
Ebeid shrewdly grasps the way his political colleagues feel; in particular, he understands the point of view of his boss, President Hosni Mubarak. War, Mubarak has noted, happens to cost a lot of money. So, first of all, the people have to be asked about it, since it is the country's young men who would be sent to the battlefield, and citizens of the state would suffer from a drastic decline in the level of public services. The Arab states haven't even been able to come up with a billion dollars to help the Palestinians; so a hundred billion is out of the question.
This thinking pretty much summarizes the Egyptian position on war.
Last Tuesday night, three 14-year-old Palestinian schoolboys from the Gaza strip armed themselves with knives and crude homemade explosives and headed towards the Israeli settlement of Nezarim.
Their aim was to break through the heavily guarded security fencing of the settlement, but they did not even get close.
The confrontation between the United Nations and Israel over a proposed UN fact-finding team to investigate what happened in the Jenin refugee camp appears to have reached a head.
The UN has tried to reassure the Israelis over the investigation
The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has said that he thinks the team should be disbanded because of Israel's failure to co-operate with it.
His announcement shows that UN patience with Israeli objections over the proposed Jenin investigation appears to have run out.
Over a week of wrangling and delays, the UN has already met a number of Israel's demands - including the addition of a counterterrorism expert to the team and an offer to show Israel the findings of any report before the Security Council even sees it.
ARIEL SHARON, the Israeli Prime Minister, faces a deep split with Mossad, the country’s famed intelligence agency, over his strategy to defeat the Palestinian uprising.
According to Israeli officials and intelligence sources, the split could result in the departure of Ephraim Halevy, the highly respected spy chief, who has on several occasions openly challenged the Israeli leader.
The British-born Mossad director has been named as a possible Ambassador to Washington, a post which became vacant earlier this month. Although he has told colleagues that he is not interested in the appointment, he is coming under pressure to take it and open the way for a new intelligence chief from within Mr Sharon’s circle of confidants.
“Some people (in Government) are mentioning his name in connection to the post in Washington, because they want him out of Mossad,” an Israeli official said. “It has become very political.”
Israel Defense Forces sources have admitted that Palestinian claims of the systematic destruction of property, particularly computers, during the recent military operations in Ramallah are, for the most part, true. "There were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena of vandalism," a senior military sources told Ha'aretz yesterday.
And while another military source said that the army had yet to undertake a full investigation into the matter, there are already many individual cases that are being prosecuted through the military justice system.
Within the context of Operation Defensive Shield, an intelligence unit specialized in systematically going through public institutions of the Palestinian Authority and collecting hard disks from computers in offices, for the purposes of examining them based on the assumption that some would contain information on terrorist activity.
JERUSALEM, April 30 (AFP) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's reluctant acceptance of a US plan to lift the siege of Yasser Arafat showed just how far Israel can push things with Washington, which previously gave it carte blanche.
"Every Israeli prime minister holds a bit of rope that is held on the other end by the president of the United States. The rope is long. It can be pulled and it can be released," said Nahum Barnea in Israel's Yediot Aharonot daily.
"The great mystery is at what point the game is over and the time has come to bow your head and submit," he wrote.
For Sharon, that point appears to have been reached last weekend when President George W. Bush telephoned him with a compromise to lift the siege of the West Bank headquarters of Arafat, where the Palestinian leader has been pinned down since December.
The Bush administration is moving to block a bill that recommends sanctioning Syria for its continued support of terrorism and other bad behavior. It is the administration’s latest attempt in a series of efforts to block legislation being pushed by pro-Israel lobbyists.
Last Thursday, congressmen Eliot Engel (D-New York) and Dick Armey (R-Texas) introduced the bill. A similar version was introduced in the Senate.
Subsequently, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Paul Kelly drafted a letter to Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) expressing the administration’s opposition to the bill. Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had sought the department’s opinion. As of Tuesday night, he had not received a copy of Kelly's letter.
THE United Nations was last night preparing to disband the team investigating Palestinian claims of a massacre during the Israeli army assault on the Jenin refugee camp after Israel refused to let it start work.
The Israeli security cabinet had earlier decided that Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, had not met its demands for amending the mission's mandate, "so there is no possibility of beginning the inquiry".
In New York Mr Annan denied the Israeli government's charges. "We've really done everything to meet them, to deal with their concerns. I think we've been very forthcoming," he said.
Rene Aquarone, spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency that looks after Palestinian refugee camps, blamed Israeli security measures such as road blocks that restrict access to and limit movement within Palestinian areas.
"This is a crisis on top of an emergency," Aquarone said.
Aquarone said the agency was having to rely on its international staff to drive aid convoys because its Palestinian staff was barred from entering Israel.
A physicist has been sentenced to 40 months in federal prison and fined $20,000 for illegally exporting to Israel tiny electronic components that could be used as triggers for nuclear weapons.
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Despite the havoc wrought by Palestinian suicide bombers, it is Israel that has proven to be the incontestable historical master of controlled and directed fury; from the callous, calculating terrorism of its pre-state underground to the most recent thorough and systematic lynching of the Palestinian Authority - security agencies and civilian infrastructure alike. Against this background, recent events take on a certain cyclical consistency: Israeli oppression met by Palestinian acts of resistance - sometimes bold, often bloody - met in turn by Israeli force, always excessive, invariably disproportionate and purposely designed to inflict maximum pain.
While the world's attention is caught by the agreement which seems to bring an end to the prolonged siege of Yasser Arafat's headquarters, the city of Hebron with its 200,000 inhabitants, which had been spared invasion in the earlier stages of Sharon's war, is now enduring what the other West Bank cities had gone through weeks ago: dozens of tanks churning the asphalt of its streets and crushing private cars; inhabitants imprisoned in their homes by a tight curfew; soldiers invading houses and turning some of them into firing positions, with families crowded into a single room of their home; confrontations and shooting on the streets (10 Hebronites are reported dead, so far). On the TV screens we again witness the sickening sight of dozend of blindfolded and hancuffed Palestinians being led into detention.
I heard the shooting from the balcony of my apartment. Ismail, Yusuf, and Anwar tried to infiltrate the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night. They may have carried knives with them. That's what Abdul Aziz Rantissi said, a leader of Hamas in Gaza. They weren't suicide bombers as the New York Times claimed; they were kids in the 9th grade doing something they hadn't carefully thought through.
It was stupid and it was a total waste of their young lives, which is why Hamas issued a statement calling on children not to act as martyrs for Palestine until they were ready; until they were old enough. There were three funerals in Gaza Thursday morning, April 24th, and the fathers of each of the boys spoke about their sons to my friend Robert and me. The fathers didn't even know the three boys were friends and each of the funerals took place separately in different parts of the city, the families unknown to each other; the grief equally palpable in each location.
SAUDI ARABIA's Crown Prince Abdullah seemed to have only one message for President Bush at their meeting in Crawford, Tex., Thursday: that America's failure to restrain Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatens to send the region and U.S. interests in it "over a cliff," as the prince's spokesman put it. There is some truth in that. Though Mr. Bush has repeatedly called on Israel to end its military incursion into the West Bank -- and did so again both Thursday and Friday -- his messages to Israel have conveyed an ambivalence that Mr. Sharon has ruthlessly exploited.
Israel's chance of receiving an additional $200 million American aid package in the coming financial year has diminished because of fears that additional aid to Israel at this time would be seen as a further pro-Israel bias, sources in Washington say.
The State Department had originally asked Congress for additional aid - on top of the $2.8 billion in military and economic aid that Israel gets every year - but this was axed because the White House asked all government offices to cut additional aid requests because for fear of a budget deficit.
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel decided Tuesday not to cooperate with a U.N. inquiry into the fighting at the Jenin refugee camp for now, defying a call by Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) to allow his fact-finding team to begin working immediately.
(CBS) When gasoline shot past $2 a gallon last June, oil companies blamed the price spike on a heavy summer driving season and depleted inventories, reports CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr. But a Senate investigation puts the blame squarely on the oil companies themselves.
In a scathing report released by a Senate subcommittee, Big Oil is accused of manipulating the market to drive up profits. "In a number of instances," the report concludes, "refiners have sought to increase prices by reducing supply."
That conclusion will be the topic of hearings that begin Tuesday, with oil industry executives set to answer questions from the Senate Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee.
Ramallah, 30 April 2002) ---- Almost 3am, and there is no point in trying to ignore the sounds and to try sleeping anymore. It is just too loud, too near. The heavy machine gunfire, the thuds of tank shelling. A few silences in between. Silences that hang in the air, expectant.
When the Israeli shelling of Ramallah started to be part of the 'normal' nightly sounds, we quickly learned about the differences in the noises. Two thuds, and it is relatively far. Loud, but nothing will hit our house. One loud thud and it is pretty near. I don't know how near. But it is near now.....
I think that a few hours ago I might have heard some of the Palestinian fire mixed in --the random and almost hollow clak, clak, clak!---- I don't hear any Palestinian fire anymore. Not for the past few hours.
Before one engages the question of what Palestinians have gained and lost over the last 18 months of confrontation, it is important to note two things. First, it makes more sense to ask that question to the party responsible for the transformation of relations. Israel, by creating a political vacuum in which Palestinians were asked to take-or-leave the Camp David proposals, stirring up hostility by sending right-wing extremist leader Ariel Sharon to visit Jerusalem's holiest Muslim shrine and then killing non-violent Palestinian demonstrators at a rate of ten a day in the start of the Intifada, bears the bulk of the responsibility for the situation we are in right now. As such, it would be interesting to know what Israel believes it has gained, other than bloodshed on both sides.
At least nine Palestinians were killed and 30 wounded during yesterday's incursion by the Israel Defense Forces into Hebron. No casualties were reported on the Israeli side. IDF sources said the operation, aimed at rounding up wanted suspects in terrorist incidents, should be over within a few days.
THE Israeli army has begun a pull out from the north of Hebron, the West Bank's most populous city which it seized yesterday, the commander of the operation said.
Palestinians have charged that during their eight-day occupation of the camp, Israeli forces:
Indiscriminately fired on civilians, killing hundreds of people
Used armoured bulldozers to flatten houses without verifying whether there was anyone inside
Carried out between 60 and 70 summary executions
Used Palestinian civilians as human shields during house-to house searches.
Prevented medics from treating the wounded
Israel today said it would not cooperate with a UN inquiry into its offensive at the Jenin refugee camp, defying the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.
Israel's security cabinet said in a statement that Israel had raised several issues with UN officials that it considered vital for holding a fair inquiry.
The statement said: "As long as these conditions have not been met, there is no possibility of beginning the inquiry."
The Palestinians claim the West Bank camp was the scene of a massacre earlier this month, with the killing of more than 250 Palestinians, including civilians.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Every day, I receive anguished letters, e-mails and phone calls from members of my congregation and others who have been tagged with the label "self-hating Jews." Why? Solely because they've raised questions about Israel's policy toward Palestinians.
There is something deeply hurtful about that term and about the way the Jewish community is treating its dissenters, something reminiscent of the cultural repressiveness of 1950s McCarthyism and its labeling of dissidents as "anti-American."
Monday, April 29, 2002
(Jenin, 27 April 2002) --The reality left behind by the Israelis in Jenin Refuge Camp defies even the most vicious imagination. One after another, the people of Jenin have been trying to tell anyone in the world who will listen what they have witnessed and lived through since the beginning of their most recent tragedy on April 3, 2002. Even though the Israeli checkpoints have been turning back aid workers, human rights monitors and journalists, some have made it through and as April ends, the horror of Jenin is left painfully visible for all who dare to look.
I went as a journalist, and it was as a journalist that I must say that some of the most disparaging things I saw were the actions of representatives of the English-speaking and other Western media. Not because the wreckage that had been the homes and livelihoods of thousands of people, or the stories of death, destruction and dehumanization, were not as awful as the most paranoid among us would imagine, but precisely because they were. Yet, to most of the journalists I encountered during my three days in Jenin, the people of Jenin and what remained of their world were secondary to the “real story.” It would seem that the journalists who made it into Jenin had already writen their stories in advance with the assistance of the Israeli government while they were kept from setting foot in the camp; it was as if their only reason for going to the camp was to obtain visuals and carefully contrived soundbytes.
I watched as an English-speaking French journalist spent 15 minutes manipulating a 10-year-old boy into saying, “I want to be a fighter. I will kill Jews with my kalishnikov.” It was quite a labor for him to get the child to enunciate “kalishnikov” clearly enough to suit his eager cameraman. I saw an American photojournalist pressure a clean-up crew with one of the rare and much-needed bulldozers working to find bodies in one house to stop their work there and move to another area in order to get a “better shot.”
More than anything, I saw journalist after journalist ask person after person who came to them with their story, “Are you a fighter?” When the answer was, “No, I’m just a regular person,” the journalist moved on.
Aid workers in Jenin have welcomed an offer by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help rebuild the devastated West Bank refugee camp.
The UAE says it will rebuild 800 homes destroyed in recent fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces.
The UAE says it has also sent a plane carrying 40 tonnes of food and medical supplies for the Palestinians.
"It is a unique contribution, with no other union of states giving such a blanket commitment to a major chunk of repairing the damage that's done," said United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) commissioner-general Peter Hansen.
Mr Hansen said the aid amounted to about $35m.
Israeli forces invaded the West Bank town of Hebron this morning, reportedly killing nine Palestinians, while in Bethlehem a Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity was shot dead by Israeli snipers.
The incursion into Hebron came just hours after Israel's cabinet reluctantly agreed to US proposals to release the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, from his month-long confinement at his West Bank headquarters.
Israel said Mr Arafat was free to leave his compound in Ramallah now, but his aides suggested he would not do so until six Palestinians wanted by Israel had been moved from his headquarters to a prison in the nearby town of Jericho within the next two days.
WASHINGTON –– President Bush's stepped-up pressure on Israel to halt its military offensive in the West Bank may not calm growing Arab anger. Already, there are signs the hostility is leading to possible danger for Americans, and less cooperation in the war against terrorism.
After a two-week lull, guerrillas again are attacking Israel from another front, Lebanon. In Egypt, long allied with the United States, young people have tried to sneak into Israel to join the fight and there are worries they could turn their wrath on Americans as easily as Israelis.
U.S. officials say privately that Yemen is stalling plans to deploy U.S. military counterterror trainers because of the situation in the Mideast. In addition, Arab nations' cooperation in any potential U.S. plan to attack Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seems stalled.
JERUSALEM -- To generations of Israeli fans, Yaffa Yarkoni has been "the Singer of the Wars." Whenever troops marched into battle, they could be sure Yarkoni would follow. Clad in fatigues, she raised spirits at the front with her rousing renditions of patriotic songs.
So it seemed natural for Army Radio to interview the iconic singer in her home a few days before Israel's Independence Day this month. Once again, Israeli troops were at war, this time in the West Bank, where they were sweeping through Palestinian towns and refugee camps in Israel's largest military operation there since the 1967 Middle East War.
But this time, Yarkoni offered no words of encouragement. Instead, she bitterly criticized the troops, the government and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in an anguished tirade that shocked her interviewer and enraged many Israelis. "When I saw the Palestinians with their hands tied behind their backs, young men, I said, 'It is like what they did to us in the Holocaust,' " Yarkoni said. "We are a people who have been through the Holocaust. How are we capable of doing these things?"
NEVE SHALOM/WAHAT AL-SALAM, Israel - A broad grin crossed Lior Shalem's boyish face as he drove up the long, winding road leading into this picturesque village and made a turn toward the plot of land where his house will be built.
Here, he and his wife will have Jewish and Arab neighbors. They will hear Arabic on the street as much as Hebrew. And his 14-month-old daughter will go to school with Jewish and Arab children.
Suzanne Goldenberg reveals the extent of abuses against civilians in Israel's four-week military offensive