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News :: Israel / Palestine |
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Israelis Contemplate 'genocide' For Palestinians |
Current rating: 0 |
by posted by "Miler" AKA DAN
(No verified email address) |
07 Mar 2003
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AUSTIN, Texas--One way to cover up a crime is to find a benign term that hides the violence and cruelty of the act. Such is the case with "transfer," an idea increasingly being put forward in Israel as a solution to conflict with the Palestinians. |
Transfer conjures up images of a worker reassigned to a new office, or a slip allowing a rider to change buses for free. But transfer of the Palestinians would be nothing less than ethnic cleansing.
The main public proponents of this have been on the far right of Israeli politics, such as the Moledet Party, which refuses to recognize Palestinian rights. But in a poll earlier this year, 46 percent of Israelis supported transfer of Palestinians out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while 31 percent favored transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country.
As Israeli author Tanya Reinhart argues in her new book "Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948," there has long been planning for "the second half of 1948" by some Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The phrase refers to the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, which ended with Israel controlling 78 percent of Palestine that existed under the British Mandate (compared with 56 percent under the U.N. partition plan in 1947). Now some Israelis ponder whether can they take 100 percent.
A military campaign to achieve that had been unthinkable, but many now believe that under the cover of a U.S. war against Iraq, Israeli soldiers would be free to finish the job.
I say "finish," because a slow ethnic cleansing is already under way, primarily through the systematic destruction of the Palestinian economy; when people cannot make a living, many will leave. A study for the U.S. Agency for International Development released in August showed that one-fifth of Palestinian children were malnourished, due to dramatically lowered Palestinian incomes and disruptions of food distribution because of the tightened Israeli occupation.
Life for Palestinians means constant harassment at checkpoints. Olive trees, central to agriculture there, are bulldozed by Israeli troops who claim they provide cover for snipers. Palestinian homes are demolished, supposedly because Palestinians built on their land without appropriate permits, which Israel will not give them. This fall the residents of the Palestinian village Yanun chose to leave rather than continue to endure the property destruction and assaults from Israeli settlers from nearby Itamar.
As Effi Eitam of the right-wing National Religious Party has put it, if Palestinians find "the situation so hard and so dangerous that they prefer to move to some other part of the world," well, he will shed no tears.
The plan appears to be working. According to the Jerusalem Post, by August last year about 80,000 Palestinians had left the West Bank and Gaza, a 50 percent increase over last year.
If this ethnic cleansing--either the slow version or expulsion by Israeli soldiers--is successful, another term may come into play: genocide. The crime of genocide is generally associated with mass killing, but international law defines genocide as acts intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." One of the five types of acts is "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
Creating conditions "so hard and dangerous" that they drive people off their land is a way to eliminate the Palestinian people. Not all the Palestinians need be killed; once completely dispersed in other countries, they will cease to be a recognizable group that could press a claim to that land.
Is the world ready to accept that kind of genocide as a solution to the conflict?
No doubt the world is not; for years there has been a consensus on a diplomatic settlement that calls on Israel to withdraw from illegally occupied territory in return for peace. The key is whether the United States will allow it.
For years the United States--which supplies Israel with diplomatic support, military assistance, and at least $3 billion a year in economic aid--has backed Israeli power and called it a "peace process." Unless we demand that our government press for peace rooted in justice, this process will be the end of the Palestinian people.
ROBERT JENSEN, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of "Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream."
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Pyongyang: We'll Put A Torch To America |
by Shane Green, posted by DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Mar 2003
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North Korea's unofficial spokesman, Kim Myong Chul, disclosed at a professional luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan yesterday that North Korea has more than one hundred nuclear bombs and will likely declare its nuclear-power status sometime this year unless the Bush Administration agrees to hold bilateral talks with North Korea. Kim Myong-chol, who has links to the Stalinist regime, told reporters in Tokyo that a US strike on the nuclear facility at Yongbyon "means nuclear war".
"If American forces carry out a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon facility, North Korea will immediately target, carry the war to the US mainland," he said, adding that New York, Washington and Chicago would be "aflame".
A pre-emptive strike on Yongbyon is one of the strategic options in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms program. The US has deployed 24 long-range bombers to the Pacific base of Guam capable of launching such a strike.
Mr Kim, who has written a text studied by North Korean military leaders, predicted North Korea would restart its reprocessing plant to make weapons-grade plutonium this month.
A nuclear weapon would be produced by the end of next month, with another five by the end of the year, he said. This was on top of a suspected nuclear arsenal of 100 weapons.
The ultimate aim of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, was the "neutralisation of the American factor" in the region, Mr Kim said.
This would be achieved by striking a non-aggression pact with the US or becoming an "official" nuclear power, thereby making the US nuclear umbrella in the region irrelevant. "Both ways, Kim Jong-il is a winner," Mr Kim said.
"By the end of the year, I predict Bush will be in Pyongyang suing for peace," Mr Kim said. While his comments are extreme, they match the heated and belligerent rhetoric of North Korea, which has previously warned of nuclear war and turning the cities of its enemies into a "sea of ashes".
The Bush Administration yesterday made renewed calls on China and other countries in the region to help broker a solution to the crisis. In his live televised press conference, Mr Bush said North Korea's nuclear program was a regional issue.
"I say 'regional' because there's a lot of countries that have got a direct stake into whether or not North Korea has nuclear weapons," Mr Bush said. "We've got a stake as to whether North Korea has nuclear weapons. China clearly has a stake as to whether or not North Korea has a nuclear weapon."
The Bush Administration is pushing for multilateral talks with North Korea but the communist state wants direct talks with Washington.
In the meantime, diplomatic activity is continuing behind the scenes. "We have a number of diplomatic initiatives under way - some of them very, very quietly under way - to see if we cannot get a multilateral dialogue started," the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told a US Senate Committee.
Yesterday the US also flagged the possible withdrawal of its 37,000 troops from South Korea, part of the rethink of a deployment in place since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said the US was consulting with South Korea and he suspected "we'll end up making some adjustments there".
"Whether the forces come home or whether they will move further south of the [Korean] peninsula or whether to some neighbouring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out," he said at a "town hall" meeting in Germany.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826533281.html
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