Seattle Demos Friday January 25th, 4pm Westlake Park 4th & Pine
Saturday Demo: stay tuned, will send out more info soon!

Contents

Role of the Media – Where does it end?
Ali Abunimah

Economic warfare in Gaza
ByYossi Wolfson,

Massacre of Palestinians: An outcome of Bush-Olmert deal
By Hassan Hanizadeh

Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this president
By Robert Fisk

The march of cynics
By Mexon Benvenisti

Seattle Demo: Friday, January 25, 4 p.m., Westlake Park, 4th & Pine Sts
End the Criminal Israeli Siege of Gaza NOW!
Stop the Collective Punishment of the Palestinian People!

Coalition Calls for Emergency Protests Jan. 25-26 in Washington, San Francisco, Anaheim and other cities

Role of the Media – Where does it end?
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 21 January 2008
Much of Gaza is once again in darkness, as Israel cut off the fuel to its only power plant. Hospital patients have reportedly died, communications are out, and movement and commerce in an already beleaguered economy have come to a near halt.

Michele Mercier, spokesperson for the the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Gaza hospitals still had medications “but it won’t last for more than two or three days.” Now, Gazans must also contend with the possibility of already scarce food supplies being cut off. Christopher Gunness of UNRWA, the UN relief agency, said the agency could be forced to suspend food distribution to 860,000 people because of the shortage of fuel and plastic bags.

The New York Times, always to be counted on to provide the right euphemisms, reported that “Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, ordered a temporary halt on all imports into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip late last week. The measure, along with stepped-up military operations in Gaza, was meant to persuade Palestinian militants there to stop firing rockets at Israel.” (Isabel Kershner, “Fuel Shortage Shuts Gaza Power Plant, Leaving City Dark,” 21 January 2008.)

Terms like “measures” and “persuasion” sound so gentle. But they cover up a brutal reality that Israeli leaders are keen to boast about: they are acting with premeditation to inflict suffering on the Palestinian civilian population, and they display an extraordinary degree of callousness for their victims.

Israel must instruct its army to “eliminate the rocket fire from Gaza” completely, “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians,” Israeli Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter told the cabinet on Sunday. (”Dichter: We must stop attacks from Gaza at all cost,” Ynet, 20 January 2008.)

“We are impacting the overall quality of life in Gaza and destroying the terror infrastructure,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak boasted.

As news of mounting suffering came out of Gaza, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert provided further confirmation that civilians were on Israel’s target list: “We are trying to hit only those involved in terrorism, but also signaling to the population in Gaza that it cannot be free from responsibility for the situation.” With fuel running out, he scoffed, “As far as I’m concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn’t allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace.”

The punishment of Gaza’s population is apparently succeeding beyond Israel’s wildest dreams. Unnamed Israeli “defense officials” told The Jerusalem Post on 20 January “that food supplies were running low in Gaza and would dry up by the middle of the week.” (”Gaza food will run out by midweek,” 20 Jan 2008). Meanwhile, the Israeli daily Haaretz cited “Israeli security officials” who said “that the electrical supply difficulties in the Gaza Strip were greater than Israel had previously expected when it cut off fuel to the coastal territory earlier in the day.” (”Barak: Gaza to get one-time fuel, medicine delivery,” 21 January 2008.)

Israeli leaders are usually careful to lace their statements with pro forma denials that they are deliberately trying to create a “humanitarian” crisis — though they never define what level of deliberately inflicted suffering might cross that threshold. Gaza’s residents “are hostages of a deranged regime, but there is no real humanitarian crisis there,” said housing minister Zeev Boim, apparently referring to Hamas, not his own government.

The logic seems to be that Israel can do whatever it wants, as long as officials use euphemisms to describe it. As Dov Weissglas, Olmert’s advisor, so notoriously put it when Israel began its strangulation of Gaza in early 2006, “It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.” But they do die, in large numbers.

Some top Israelis make it clear that they do not actually believe that Palestinian civilians even exist. Yuval Diskin, head of the Israel Security Agency (ISA), or Shin Bet secret police, responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial executions of Palestinians, told the cabinet on 13 January that the army and Shin Bet agents had “killed 1,000 terrorists in the Gaza Strip in the past two years.” By B’Tselem’s count Israel had killed 816 Palestinians in Gaza in the previous two years, of whom 152 were children and many others were adult civilians “who took no part in the hostilities.” Thus, B’Tselem concluded, the “head of the ISA defines every Palestinian killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip as a terrorist.” (B’Tselem, “Head of ISA defines a terrorist as any Palestinian killed by Israel,” 13 January 2008.)

And, Israel’s exasperated foreign minister Tzipi Livni explained, “Israel is the only country in the world that supplies electricity to terror groups which in turn fire rockets at it.” Thus she confirmed that like Diskin, she sees no distinction between civilians and combatants — in her view the million people plunged into darkness are all part of one giant “terror group.” (”Livni: Hamas can end Gaza siege in minute’s time,” Ynet, 21 January 2008)

Virtually every news report on Gaza faithfully reproduces Israel’s claim that it is “retaliating” for rockets fired from Gaza that have caused minor injuries and damage. When these reports — like those from National Public Radio’s Linda Gradstein or The New York Times — do report on the high Palestinian death toll they usually claim, without citing evidence, that most of the dead were “militants” or “gunmen.”

Almost ignored are the comments of John Dugard, UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, who countered that the “killing of some 40 Palestinians in Gaza in the past week, the targeting of a government office near a wedding party venue with what must have been foreseen loss of life and injury to many civilians, and the closure of all crossings into Gaza raise very serious questions about Israel’s respect for international law.” He condemned Israel for violating “the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Nor do these news reports mention that Hamas has observed unilateral ceasefire after unilateral ceasefire, never welcomed with Israeli reciprocation. And nor do they notice that Israel continues extrajudicial executions and military attacks throughout the West Bank even though no rockets have been fired from there.

Israeli officials claim that all Palestinians are justifiable targets of their wrath because they fail to stop Palestinians resistance groups from firing rockets. This is exactly the same logic that Palestinian resistance fighters use when they fire rockets at Israeli towns. “One’s heart goes out to the residents of Sderot,” wrote Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy today of the town that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rockets, “but one should also remember that they bear the same responsibility for the situation as do all Israelis. If a survey were conducted in this battered city, it would show that there is also a majority in Sderot in favor of continuing the occupation and siege, as everywhere else in Israel.”

Where then does it end?

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006

Economic warfare in Gaza
Yossi Wolfson, The Electronic Intifada, 21 January 2008

No more lies or twisted tongues. Israel is saying at last what, in the past, it always refused to acknowledge: its war is against the Palestinian population.

Until now, in discussions about the separation wall, closures, blockades, house demolition, and other sorts of collective punishment, the State Attorney’s Office lacked the gumption to admit in court that the aim of such measures is to harm civilians. It always came up with convoluted security claims in order to present some vital military necessity for the sake of the War against Terror. Harm to the population was described as a regrettable side effect.

But now a Rubicon has been crossed. This happened after ten human rights organizations petitioned the High Court on 28 October 2007 against cuts in the supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza. The petitioners claimed that the cuts amount to collective punishment, which is forbidden under international law. The state might have answered that the cuts are a necessary military measure aimed at stopping the production of Qassam rockets. Or it might have tried some other tongue twister. But no. In their response to the petition, Dana Briskman and Gilad Shirman from the State Attorney’s Office announced openly, without blinking an eye, that the cuts’ main purpose is to exert pressure on the economy as a way of influencing Hamas.

Thus the state clamps the arteries of life for 1.5 million Gazans and describes its action as an economic war. Here it infringes a basic principle of the international laws concerning warfare, which distinguish between the civilian population and the armed forces. One main purpose of these laws is to shield civilians from the battlefield and mitigate the effects war can have on them. The lawyers for the State Attorney do not dispute this principle. Rather they would limit it to strictly military operations. Cutting the supply of electricity or gasoline is not a strictly military operation. In an economic war, they hold, the principle does not apply. Following this logic to its absurd conclusion, we find that it is forbidden to blow up a civilian installation, but it is permissible to disable it by cutting off raw materials. It is forbidden to blow up a power plant, but it’s OK to turn off the electricity.

This is not to imply that Israel abides by the law in its strictly military decisions. In summer of 2006, for example, it did blow up the Palestinian power plant in Gaza, raising the Strip’s dependence on itself for electricity — the same electricity that it today proposes to cut.

The state turns international law on its head. Various provisions regulate civilian supplies in wartime, with the aim of keeping the situation from reaching the threshold of a humanitarian crisis. Israel cites these provisions but interprets them as allowing it to harm civilians as long as it stops short of that threshold, defined by it.

What is the humanitarian threshold in Israel’s view? The blockade of Gaza has been going on at various levels for years. Since Hamas ousted Fatah there in the summer of 2007, the shipment of goods to the Strip has been restricted almost totally to basic foods, medicines, medical equipment, cooking gas, gasoline and electricity. Karni, the main checkpoint for transfer of goods, earlier functioned in a spotty manner, but today it is completely shut. The code for importing goods to Gaza has been deleted from the computers of Israel’s Customs Authority, which (according to the Paris Protocol) is supposed to collect the tariffs. The supply of fuel (except cooking gas) has been cut (without court interference). The electricity cut has not yet been implemented, but the shortage is already severe. Electricity and water are available only intermittently. Most of the industrial plants are closed for lack of raw materials and replacement parts. Hospitals, water and sewage services have been operating for the last year and a half (since Israel blew up the power plant) by means of emergency generators. Because replacement parts are lacking, the infrastructures are running down, and there is increasing danger of disaster. A harbinger was the bursting of the cesspool wall in Um al-Nassar last year, where five people drowned in a river of sewage.

According to statistics from the summer of 2007, [1] before Israel hardened its measures, 87 percent of Gazans lived beneath the poverty line, which was reckoned at $2.40 per day. Already then there were perceived shortages in basic products, and food prices rose by tens of percentage points. According to figures of the World Food Programme, 85 percent of Gazans depend on aid to purchase food.

In the view of Israel, however, the existing supply of goods is above what the law obligates it to allow, and the supplies of electricity and gasoline are even twice the minimum required. Below the humanitarian threshold as defined by it, Israel includes little more than hospitals run by generators, ambulances, supply trucks, and minimal public transport. On 1 November, it repeated its assurances to the court that its measures are carefully weighed and considered. It promised to watch the situation closely to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Yet the government had no up-to-date figures on the likely effects of an electricity cut. The court asked for data, but the state did not provide them. Instead, it became clear that even the partial statistics cited earlier were misleading. [2]

Israel claims in court that it has the right to choose the countries it trades with, as if Gaza were just one independent state among the many. It views a cut in electricity to Gaza as not essentially different from, say, a cut in the sale of diamonds to Spain. This claim conceals the self-righteous notion that Israel, having disengaged, is no longer responsible for the Strip. But who presides over Gaza’s borders? Who rules its air space? Whose jets and attack helicopters are those up there? Who controls Gaza’s sea, preventing the erection of an independent harbor?

Gaza’s economic dependence on Israel is the fruit of a deliberate policy that has been in effect for decades. Here as well as in the West Bank, Israel stymied any fledgling industry that might compete with it. It developed Gaza’s dependence on it for electricity and gas. It turned the Gazans into a cheap labor force to serve Israeli industry — at first by having them commute into Israel and later by developing an industrial area at Erez checkpoint. Israel also benefited from Gazan dependence on its products. When Karni was closed, among the loudest protesters were Israeli farmers. According to reports from the summer of 2007, about a fourth of the fruit grown in Israel was marketed in the occupied territories. The cut in gasoline shipments also made a dent in the income of Dor-Alon, the Israeli energy company supplying Gaza.

Yet Israel’s conceptual change about Gaza is not consistent. Disengaged or not, it can’t resist the temptation to exploit the Strip’s resources. Parallel to the discussion on cutting energy supplies, there is another petition before the High Court that also concerns energy — but here the supply would go from Gaza to Israel. In this petition, two corporate groups are battling for an Israeli license to pump natural gas from the reservoir off Gaza’s coast, a reservoir that — if Gaza belonged to a Palestinian state — would be in its territorial waters. The pumped gas is slated to become a major energy source in Israel’s economy. Did the Justices happen to recall another case they are hearing, in which the state says it no longer occupies Gaza? If so, they haven’t indicated this. Needless to say, no Justice cried in astonishment, “By what right do you intend to exploit the gas reserves of the Gaza Strip? This is against the provisions of international law, which forbid an occupying power from exploiting the natural resources of an occupied territory for its own use!”

Finally, we cannot ignore the similarities between Israel’s policies in Gaza and in Lebanon. In southern Lebanon too (if to a lesser degree), Israel for years used the population as a cheap commuting workforce and as consumers of its products, all in the framework of the so-called “Good Fence” policy. This ended, as in Gaza, in a unilateral withdrawal (May 2000). Israel’s interest in controlling the water that flows its way from southern Lebanon brings to mind its interest in Gaza’s gas reserves. Its attack on Lebanon in 2006 also has its Gazan parallels. In both places Israel learned that it has no military answer to the threat of rockets in the hands of militias. With Hizballah as with Hamas, Israel refused to negotiate. In Lebanon too, it hesitated to open a broad ground war, and rightly so. It learned that it cannot rule a hostile area in the face of attrition from guerrillas. When it undertook military action in Lebanon, the weakness of its own armed forces became apparent. This weakness derives from the moral corruption of the military and political leadership. The war revealed an impossible combination: on the one hand, the leadership’s overall contempt for human life, and, on the other, Israeli society’s unwillingness to accept battle casualties.

In both cases, Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has made indiscriminate war from the air on civilians while hesitating to commit ground forces. In both it has sought to destroy the economic infrastructure and reduce the civilian population to primitive conditions. By harming them, it was thought, you could get them to pressure their leaders and thus make political gains. This notion proved false in Lebanon, as in Gaza. The Israeli attacks amount to an expression of weakness, but the price will not be paid by those who launch them, rather by civilians on both sides.

This article was originally published by Challenge and is republished with permission.

Endnotes
[1] Gisha, Commercial Closure: Deleting Gaza’s Economy from the Map [Word document], June 2007.
[2] Gisha, Court criticizes State attorneys, 25 December 2007.

Massacre of Palestinians: An outcome of Bush-Olmert deal
By Hassan Hanizadeh
www.tehrantimes.com
January 17, 2008

The recent attacks of the Zionist regime against the residents of the Gaza Strip was a result of U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to the occupied Palestine.

During Bush’s visit to Palestine the Zionist Prime Minister Ehud Olmert needed to conduct some military raids to repair the image of the regime’s military which suffered a great defeat in the 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

In his visit Bush gave Olmert the green light that he can even extend the domain of his attacks to southern Lebanon if the Zionist lobby supports Republicans in the U.S. presidential elections.

The large-scale and unjustified attacks of Israel’s jet fighters to Gaza and the killing of the innocent Palestinian people was part of the deal agreed between Bush and Olmert.

Bush allowed the Zionist leaders to assassinate Hamas leaders and the murder of the son of Mahmoud al-Zahar who acts as the foreign minister of the Hamas government is interpretable within this scenario.

On the other hand the suspicious explosion which targeted the U.S. embassy in Beirut can be part of the joint Bush-Olmert plan to make Lebanon insecure and thereby pave the ground for a renewed interference in Lebanon’s affairs by the Zionist regime.

The outcome of Bush’s evil trip to the region will definitely open a new wave of state terrorism and managed chaos in the Middle East.

There are strong indications that Bush sought many aims in his regional tour, but since he failed to achieve some of his goals he turned to a managed chaos.

In his meetings with the regional Arab leaders Bush pushed for containing Iran and distancing the countries on the two sides of the Persian Gulf but the Arab leaders shunned the plan.

The regional countries believe that Iran as a powerful neighbor is not a threat to their security, and on the contrary see Iran as a regional stabilizer.

Bush’s main purpose of Iranophobia was to force Arabs to sign lucrative arms deals with United States.

The only outcome of Bush’s visit was the agreement with Zionist leaders for starting a series of terrorist acts against the leaders of Palestinian and Lebanese movements which seems to push the region into a turbulent future.

The Zionist regime will definitely resort to large-scale terror acts in Palestine and Lebanon to revitalize its unstable power.

Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this president
By Robert Fisk

http://www.tehrantimes.com
January 17, 2008

BEIRUT (The Independent) — Twixt silken sheets — in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk — and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning (Wednesday) to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the (Persian) Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy.
The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly monarch Tuesday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold “Order of Merit” — it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor’s chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit earned Mr. Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime’s imaginary enemies.

It was illusory, of course, like all the words that the Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven days, ever since the fading President began his tourist jaunt around the Middle East.

You wouldn’t think it though, watching this preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to by Mr. Bush as “the disputed West Bank”.

Is this how lame-duck American presidents are supposed to behave? Certainly, the denizens of the Middle East, watching this outrageous performance will all be asking this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution, a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the Middle East — but is this how Mr. Bush thinks one should fight for the soul of Islam?

Already by dusk Tuesday night, the U.S. President’s world was exploding in Beirut when a massive car bomb blew up next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying American embassy employees, killing four Lebanese and apparently badly wounding a U.S. embassy driver. And while Mr. Bush was relaxing in the Saudi royal ranch at Al Janadriyah, Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of them the son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement. He later claimed that Israel would not have staged the attack if it had not been encouraged to do so by George Bush.

The difference between reality and the dream-world of the U.S. government could hardly have been more savagely illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a “sovereign and contiguous state” before the end of the year, and pledging “security” to Israel — though not, Arabs noted, security for “Palestine” — Mr. Bush had arrived in the (Persian) Gulf to terrify the kings and oligarchs of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the danger of Iran… As usual, he came armed with the usual American offers of vast weapons sales to protect these largely undemocratic and police state regimes from potentially the most powerful nation in the “axis of evil”.

It was a potent — even weird — example of the U.S. President’s perambulation of the Arab Middle East, a return to the “policy by fear” which Washington has regularly visited upon (Persian) Gulf leaders. He agreed to furnish the Saudis with at least £41m of arms, a figure set to rise to more than £10bn ($20bn) in weaponry to the (Persian) Gulf potentates under a deal announced last year — all of which is supposed to shield them from the supposed territorial ambitions of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As usual, Washington promised the Israelis that their “qualitative edge” in advanced weapons would be maintained, just in case the Saudis — who have never gone to war with anyone except Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait —decided to launch a suicidal attack on America’s only real ally in the Middle East.

This, of course, was not how the whole shooting match was presented to the Arabs. The Saudis, needless to say, are well aware that Mr. Bush’s reign is ending amid chaos in Pakistan, a disastrous guerrilla war against Western forces in Afghanistan, fierce fighting in Gaza, near civil war in Lebanon and the hell-disaster of Iraq.

The bomb in Beirut, just before five in the Tuesday evening, must still have come as a rude shock to the luxuriating President who has such close ties with the Saudi regime that he allowed its junior princes to fly home from the United States immediately after the attacks. Two trips to Mr. Bush’s Texas ranch by King Abdullah was apparently enough to earn the U.S. President a night in the Saudi king’s palace-farm, surrounded by groomed lawns and grassy hills.

Heard across many miles of the Lebanese capital, the bomb devastated buildings in a narrow street in the east of the city through which the vehicle was passing, just as the U.S. ambassador — on a different route into the city — was traveling to a central Beirut hotel reception before leaving for Washington. A State Department spokesman, however, insisted that no U.S. citizens had been hurt. The American SUV had taken an obscure laneway close to the Karantina bridge to travel north of Beirut along the bank of the city’s only river when it was struck, leading local Lebanese military officials to ask themselves if the bomber had inside knowledge of the route they were taking.

There was talk that this was a “dummy” convoy staged to distract potential bombers from the journey which Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was taking to a reception at a downtown hotel. A carpet manufacturer’s factory was smashed by the blast which tore down roofs and smashed windows more than half a mile from the scene.

For Arab leaders, Mr. Bush’s message to the (Persian) Gulf leaders was wearily familiar. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, Washington spent its time warning (Persian) Gulf leaders of the danger of Iranian aggression. Once Saddam invaded Kuwait, America’s emphasis changed: It was now Iraq which posed the greatest danger to their kingdoms. But once the emirate was liberated, the oil-wealthy monarchs were told that — yet again — it was Iran that was their enemy.

Arabs are no more taken in by this topsy-turvy “good-versus-evil” narrative than they are by Washington’s promises to help create a Palestinian state by the end of the year, scarcely a day before Israel publicly admitted to plans for yet more houses for settlers on Arab land amid Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian territory.

Yet to understand the nature of this extraordinary relationship with the (Persian) Gulf monarchs, it is necessary to recall that ever since the President’s father promised a weapons-free “oasis of peace” in the (Persian) Gulf, Washington — along with Britain, France and Russia — has been pouring arms into the region.

Over the past decade, the (Persian) Gulf Arabs have squandered billions of their oil dollars on American weapons. The statistics tell their own story. In 1998 and 1999 alone, (Persian) Gulf Arab military spending came to £40bn. Between 1997 and 2005, the sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates – Mr. Bush’s hosts before he continued to Riyadh — signed arms contracts worth £9bn with Western nations. Between 1991 and 1993 — when Iraq was the “enemy” — the U.S. Military Training Mission was administering more than £14bn in Saudi arms procurements and £12bn in new U.S. weapons acquisitions. By this time, the Saudis already possessed 72 American F-15 fighter-bombers and 114 British Tornados.

How little has changed in the past 17 years. On 17 May 1991, for example, George Bush Senior said there were now “real reasons to be optimistic” about a peace in the Middle East. “We are going to continue to work in the (peace) process,” he said then. “We are not going to abandon it.”

James Baker, who was the American Secretary of State, warned on 23 May 1991 that the continued building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land “hindered” a future Middle East peace, just as the present Secretary of State said last week. At the time, the Israelis were reassured by Dick Cheney that the U.S. would safeguard their “security”.

The West may have a short memory. The Arabs, who happen to live in the piece of real estate which we call the Middle East and who are not stupid, have not. They understand all too well what George W. Bush now stands for. After advocating “democracy” in the region — a policy which gained electoral victories for Shia in Iraq, for Hamas in Gaza and a substantial gain in political power for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — it seems to have dawned on Washington that something might be slightly wrong with Bush’s priorities. Instead of advocating a “New Middle East”, Mr. Bush, lying amid his silken sheets in the Saudi king’s palace, is now pursuing a return to the “Old Middle East”, a place of secret policemen, torture chambers — to which prisoners can be usefully “renditioned” — and dictatorial “moderate” presidents and monarchs. And which of the (Persian) Gulf despots is going to object to that?

The march of cynics
By Mexon Benvenisti
Haaretz January `7, 2008

The prize for the most sharply cynical remark goes to President George W. Bush, who said in Ramallah of the Israel Defense Forces crossing points: “You’ll be happy to hear that my motorcade of a mere 45 cars was able to make it through without being stopped.” No doubt, he was speaking ironically, but even if he added that he wasn’t “so exactly sure that’s what happens to the average person,” he should be reminded of the saying that one doesn’t mention rope in a hanged man’s home. Okay, so there’s a lack of political and human understanding here, but isn’t there even a drop of sensitivity and empathy?

This cynical remark made only the slightest impression on those who heard it. After all, the people who met with Bush are not the ones who are exposed to the humiliations that thousands go through at the barriers every day, and they even receive VIP treatment. Why should they express dissatisfaction with a spontaneous bit of nonsense when they feel no need to react to a stupid thing that someone in Bush’s retinue formulated for the president? “Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the outline of a state. And I mean that,” declared Bush. Right after that he said the drawing up of the future border will reflect the current reality. But it is the reality of the settlement blocs that has created the “Swiss cheese.”

And really, what’s the point of fussing over trivia when the very fact of the event is the embodiment of cynicism? The president of the United States visits a bunch of Palestinians who deck themselves in lofty titles, as though they represented a sovereign authority, and discusses a peace with them that will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state within a year. These leaders owe their existence to the protection of the Israeli occupation – which of course they condemn and about which they managed to wring from the president a comment on the “need to end it.” And they owe their survival to unprecedented financial aid.

With appalling cynicism, they have pretensions to conducting negotiations to end the conflict when they do not represent even one-quarter of the Palestinian population – the part that lives in the West Bank. They are discussing “the core issues” of the conflict when the core of their efforts is to get that huge sum of money that was promised them at the Paris conference. That money will come to them only if they concentrate on the appearance of negotiations. Those billions will allow them to go on supporting their inflated bureaucracy and their system of charitable handouts that covers most of the Palestinian population in the West Bank. But it is impossible to come complaining to a bunch of losers who are trying to survive. The leader of the only superpower is using them to improve his own position. Clearly, when he doesn’t need them anymore and finds that he has no use for them, he will toss them to their fate without a moment’s hesitation.

Bush and Abu Mazen (PA President Mahmoud Abbas), for whom cynicism is their means of survival, are joined by the greatest cynic of all, who has made cynicism into an art. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can give Bush and Abbas lessons on how to spin a story that exploits the hopes of naive people and relies on the feeling that if important people are busy with something, it is a sign that this something is important.

Olmert’s cynicism is astonishing. He says bombastic things about how he was “elected with a broad diplomatic agenda, wants to bring about an agreement and intends to realize his vision.” He is conducting negotiations in the prior knowledge that he is not capable of moving them ahead and completing them, never mind implementing them. He is intentionally blurring the difference between a theoretical “shelf agreement” and an agreement for which there is a commitment to implement it. Since he will never arrive at the first, there is no need to worry about the implementation of the second. Olmert is wringing every last drop out of people’s desire for peace and will unashamedly exploit the weakness of the Palestinians, who are having to conduct peace negotiations, ostensibly, when scores of them are being killed by the Israeli army.

All means are justified to survive politically