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George Bisharat
Last May 14th, the 55th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem. It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir, author of the famous remark that “the Palestinian people do not exist” when she was Israel’s foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, “Papa” to all of us.
Gideon Levy
This is the story of another boy, the seventh in the past few months who was killed for no good reason, this time in the Qalandiyah refugee camp near Ramallah. It’s the story of another Palestinian who was shot with appalling thoughtlessness by Israeli soldiers, just as Gil Na’amati, a kibbutz member, was shot last Friday by Israeli soldiers while demonstrating against the separation fence - only in the case of the boy there was no public furore in Israel. It’s also the story of an American dream, between Qalandiyah and Jelazoun, which was almost realized but finally was brutally shattered.
Ilan Pappe
The Palestinians have been told by the Israeli left-wing that the Geneva Accords are their last chance. The current offer is the best and most generous Israelis have ever made them. The Palestinians, so the argument goes, had better accept the Accords, or suffer the consequences of yet more governments like that of Ariel Sharon. But, as this excellent article shows, Palestinians with any kind of memory at all will have heard the same arguments before, and bereft as the Accords are of any justice for the millions made homeless by previous ethnic cleansing, they would only be used by the Israeli right-wing to further entrench Zionist domination over all of historical Palestine.
Ali Abunimah
When, on Christmas Day, a Palestinian blew himself up at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, the mass media was quick to declare that the suicide bombing marked the end of a period of “relative calm” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which had supposedly lasted since the last Palestinian suicide attack in Haifa on 4 October. In fact, the period has been one of intense Israeli violence, in which 117 Palestinians were killed, including 23 children. Clearly, someone’s not telling the whole story.
Joseph Massad
One of the most important changes that the Oslo process brought about was the de facto transformation, indeed the ultimate corruption, of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, from a liberation movement representing the entire Palestinian people, into a vassal regime called the Palestinian Authority, representing only one third of the Palestinian people. While Israel continues to speak as if representing world Jewry, the exiled Palestinian majority are simply referred to, in accordance with US and Israeli parlance, as “refugees”, and Israeli Palestinians are referred to by Israeli diktat as “Israeli Arabs”.
Uri Avnery
It is no surprise that the establishment interpreted nothing new in Ariel Sharon?s speech setting out his plans for “unilateral actions” concerning the Occupied Territories. The commentators just did not understand what they had heard. That?s why they wrote things like “He did not say anything new”, “He has no plan”, “He is marking time”, “He is old and tired”, and the usual Washington reaction: “A positive step, but?” However, it is all nonsense. In his speech, Sharon outlined a whole, detailed ? and extremely dangerous ? plan.
Peter Preston
There’s a logic to these things. Muammar Gadafy, growing older, and his isolated Libya, growing poorer, were getting nothing worthwhile from the atomic bomb they hadn’t built yet or chemicals they had scant residual use for. Logic - and common sense - meant changing tack. Good for logic. But logic doesn’t stop there. What next? If weapons of mass destruction are a menace in unstable regions such as the Middle East, if their availability must be reduced, then logic begins to move us closer to the confrontation we never seek with the nuclear power we - let alone Messrs Bush and Blair - seldom mention: Israel.
Michael Brown
Ariel Sharon’s recent speech on the future for the Occupied Territories acknowledged there will be a Palestinian state, but said nothing about that state which Palestinians could latch on to as a sign of future peace. His vision for Israel seems to be one of constant siege, and his idea of Palestine fits very closely with the the Apartheid South African policy of state-supervised bantustans.
Leah Tsemel
My Parents left Europe just before the Holocaust and they lost most of their family members in it. They came to that part of the world which today is called Israel, and used to be called Palestine, to promise me a better life and the security of a state of our own. After almost 60 years I cannot say that they succeeded; on the contrary. It seems that my parents and others who wanted to build the state of Israel did not understand that it is impossible to build a new future on the relics of oppression.
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