Posted on 10/07/2001 3:57:41 PM PDT by ouroboros
Special Edition
October 7, 2001
As US missiles rained down on Afghanistan, the chilling voice of Osama bin Laden, carried by Aljazeera television in Qatar, rang out over Western airwaves, directly addressing Americans as well as his fellow Muslims: "America," he said, "is full of fear from its north to its south," and Americans "will never feel safe until we and the Palestinians feel safe." "It’s greatest buildings are destroyed," he hissed, agreeing with Jerry Falwell that "here is America struck by God Almighty," and adding that "America is tasting now only a copy of what we have tasted."
In what amounts to an open admission of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden wrapped his monstrous confession in the rhetoric of vengeance, in effect saying: feel our pain. He is claiming the right of retaliation when he says "Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated." In this first fusillade in the propaganda war, bin Laden used all the weapons at his disposal. "A million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak," he said, "killed in Iraq without any guilt." An American reporter, Leslie Stahl, brought this issue up to then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright in an infamous 1996 interview:
Leslie Stahl: "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."
~ Sixty Minutes, May 12, 1996
To win the war on terrorism, the US is going to have to come up with a different answer than the one offered by Mad Madeleine.
"Israeli tanks rampage across Palestine," continued bin Laden, his soft voice and gentle eyes a bizarre counterpoint to the unrelenting harshness of his message. The voice of pure evil, and a very effective evil – one that contains within it a grain of truth: Israeli tanks barrel into "Ramallah, Rafah and Beit Jala and many other parts of the land of Islam, and we do not hear anyone raising his voice or reacting. But when the sword fell upon America after 80 years, hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honor and sanctities of Muslims." Here he is speaking directly to the Arab "street," while also taunting his Western enemies: he scores points with the former by not only pointing out the hypocrisy of the West, but also in holding it accountable.
The Bush administration knows how very effective this line of argument is in the Middle East: the appeal of bin Laden’s message goes way beyond the ultra-fundamentalist faction of Islam represented by the Taliban. No wonder Colin Powell is putting pressure on the Qatari authorities to close down Aljazeera TV, ironically one of the few freewheeling and uncensored media outlets in the region.
This unusual broadcast by bin Laden clarifies two issues beyond any possibility of doubt:
1) The Al Qaeda terror network and Osama bin Laden personally are responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, and the US is fully justified in going after them and ripping up this order of assassins root and branch.
2) In order to win the war against terrorism, America will have to change its foreign policy. If the Bush administration is now engaged in an effort to win over Muslim hearts and minds, then a wide-ranging review of US policy perspectives in the Middle East is in order. Unconditional support not only for Israel but for the decadent and tottering Saudi regime – everything must be put on the table.
The Ladenite declaration of war – clearly made before the US military assault – also clarifies the role and program of the peace party: to limit this war as much as possible. Excluding pure pacifists, non-interventionists can make only one argument against this war: that it will have the exact opposite of its intended consequences, and that therefore American war aims must be narrowly focused on the elimination of the terrorist threat. A just war against bin Laden and Al Qaeda could easily escalate into a broader, regional war – and then the world war metaphor so beloved by our pro-war intellectuals and pundits in the cheering section would become a grisly, bloody, futile reality.
Our argument against that kind of war is simple: it is not in America’s interest to take on the entire Muslim world. That the Bush administration agrees with this perspective is underscored by the Powellian strategy of building a broad coalition including Arab countries – an effort which so enraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he grotesquely likened it to Munich! Naturally, the Israelis are pursuing their own national interest, and one reason many Americans admire Sharon is that he does this so doggedly and unrelentingly. On the other hand, it is neither surprising nor any less admirable when an American President and his secretary of state pursue the same policy on behalf of our own nation.
The worst case scenario is a war, a world war, pitting the US and Israel against the world’s Muslims, and a good deal of the rest. Yet that is the war that is coming, unless principled non-interventionists unite around a program of limited war aims. "Peace now" is no longer a viable option, but, then again, neither is perpetual war.
Retaliation, yes – occupation, no! That must be the battle-cry of the noninterventionist movement as we face a new challenge to our analysis. For once, America is fighting a defensive war, a just war – at least, so far. But it is an almost effortless transition from a just war to a war of conquest, so that most never notice when that point has been passed and there’s no turning back. Already the President has alluded to the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan as comparable to the rebuilding – and occupation – of Japan and Germany. Of course, US soldiers are still occupying Germany and Japan, and the question is: will they be occupying Afghanistan 60 years after an American "victory." That would be a Pyhrric victory indeed, one that recalls the statement of old King Pyhrrus: "One more ‘victory’ such as this and we are finished."
Typical CWOJackson profundity.
LOL!
Excerpted from Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997), by Samih K. Farsoun with Christina Zacharia, pp. 72-86.
The terms of the British Mandate over Palestine set up irreconcilable and contradictory goals of self-rule for the native Palestinians and a national home not specifically defined by Britain for European Jews. For the Zionists Jews, the national home meant quite simply a "Palestine that was as Jewish as England is English or Canada is Canadian," as the Jewish Chronicle wrote on 20 May 1921. Britain provided for the establishment of a Jewish agency to be, in its official language, "recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social, and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish population in Palestine." The facilitation of the immigration of Jews to Palestine, and "the close settlement by Jews on the Land." The Mandate agreement was thus framed largely with clauses that favored the Zionist cause over Palestinian self-determination.
The Zionist project was fraught with discontinuities, contradictions, and conflicts with the Palestinian natives and occasionally the British Mandate administration, but in the final analysis its implementation was quite successful.
Factors that led to this success include:
In-Migration and Demographic Transformation
Land Acquisition
Separate Jewish Economy
Jewish Labor
Separate Social and Political Institutions
Creation of a Jewish State within a State
In-Migration and Demographic Transformation: Palestine in 1882 had a small, native, and migrant religious Jewish community of roughly 24,000 among a Palestinian population of nearly 500,000. There were several waves of politically inspired immigration into the country. The first occurred between 1882 and 1903 and totaled about 25,000. The second, between 1904 and 1914, brought in around 35,000 immigrants, which resulted in a total Jewish population of 85,000. The third wave between 1919 and 1923 brought another 85,000 immigrants, mostly Polish and middle class. The December 1931 British census of the country showed that of the 1.04 million people, 84 percent were Arab and 16 percent were Jewish. While the increase in the Jewish population was due largely to in-migration, the Palestinian population increased naturally at 2.7 percent per year. Because of the rise of Nazism, 174,000 Jews migrated to Palestine between 1932 and 1936. Suddenly the Jewish population in Palestine rose to an estimated 28 percent of the total inhabitants. This radical change, occurring in a brief span of only five years, must certainly be recognized as an important cause of the Palestinian Arab rebellion of 1936 against British Mandate authorities. Both legal and illegal Jewish immigration (according to Mandate authorities) into Palestine increased during World War II and its aftermath. By the end of 1947, Palestine Mandate government estimates indicate that of a total population of 1.9 million, Jews made up only 31 percent. Thus, only a year before the state of Israel was unilaterally declared, the Jewish population constituted less than one-third the total inhabitants. Nevertheless, the Jewish minority in Palestine became a powerful community.
Land Acquisition: Despite their contention that Palestine was a land without people, Zionists discovered that Palestinian land was not uninhabited nor was it readily available. Palestine was densely populated and intensively cultivated. Moreover, the land tenure and ownership system was complex. Available land was expensive and became more so with the rising demand of a population growing as a result of both natural increase in-migration. With the establishment of the Palestine Mandate, Zionist hopes that state land-perceived as vast and potentially accessible-would serve as a basis for land acquisition also turned out to be unrealistic. From the data, it is possible to discern three periods of land acquisition by Zionists and Jews. While Jews in 1922 owned 3 percent of the land of Palestine, the additional land purchased by 1947 raised the total owned by the immigrant Jews to 7 percent of the whole area of the country. The British Mandate government classified Palestinian land as good, medium, and poor. After the general armistice of the 1948 war, Israel had captured over 77 percent of Palestine and more than 95 percent of the "good" soil. The newly sovereign state of Israel also expropriated 80 percent of privately owned Palestinian land and confiscated at least 40 percent of properties held by Palestinian Arabs who remained on the land and became citizens. The total losses of Palestinians are estimated at a staggering 7.43 billion Palestinian pounds (equal then to the British pound).
Separate Jewish Economy: The roots of Jewish separatism within Palestine extend from the first decade of the mandate. British policy of economic development in Palestine, and specifically, of granting Jewish settlers monopolistic concessions and industrial protectionism facilitated the building of an exclusive Jewish economy, little connected to the overall Palestinian economy. British Mandate government policy advantaged Jewish industry at the expense of Palestinian industry. The result of this situation for Arab industrial development was that Jewish-owned industry grew in light industries in which Arabs were trying to make headway. Thus, the Jewish sector came into direct competition with the Arab sector. Although Palestine has a primarily agricultural economy, especially in the Palestinian Arab sector, the Jewish community acquired only 7 percent of its food from the Arab sector in 1939 and 6 percent in 1944.
Jewish Labor: The initial Zionist project of redemption of the land with Jewish labor quickly transformed during the mandate period into the development of an urban and industrial Jewish economy and labor force. As in the development of an exclusive Jewish economy, institutions, and land base, the British colonial government of Palestine contributed to the creation, protection, and unemployment relief of exclusive Jewish labor. The British did not, however, extend the same policy to the Palestinian Arab labor force. Further, the British facilitated the creation of a two-tier wage structure of Palestinian Arabs and Jews in both the private and public sectors. These discriminatory labor policies handicapped Palestinian labor in wage levels and working conditions. The principal means through which the Zionists succeeded in building a separate and privileged labor force was the Histradrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labor, established in 1920, which also owned construction, consumer, banking, and marketing cooperatives.
Separate Social and Political Institutions: The Histadrut was perhaps one of the most developed Jewish social institutions in Palestine. Among many activities of this unique union were health insurance programs, training and education programs, job placement and pension programs. Like other practices of Zionists, these social institutions were exclusive to Jews. One of the most important factors in recreating the Jewish national identity was their educational system. In the Mandate agreement, Zionists won from the British and the League of Nations the recognition of Hebrew as an official language, along with Arabic and English. They also acquired British consent and support for a separate and exclusive private Jewish school system. Zionists gained autonomy over the curriculum, which was imbued with Jewish nationalism. The British Mandate government denied these freedoms and financial support to the Palestinian Arabs. Palestine's educational system for the two communities under the Mandate was separate and unequal in terms of quality, financing, levels of education, and delivery. Separation of the two communities was promulgated in 1926 by the British Mandate government's Religious Communities Organization Ordinance. It granted the Jewish settler community in Palestine a juridical personality and the power of taxation for charitable and educational purposes.
Jewish State-within-a-State: The British authorized the establishment of the Jewish Agency to represent, lead, and negotiate on behalf of the Jewish settler community in Palestine on all aspects of British policy. In turn, the Jewish Agency established various social, economic and political agencies, institutions, and organizations-including military and intelligence. These organizations were the nucleus of an emerging autonomous Jewish political authority within the Palestine Mandate government. The Palestinian Arabs had no such centralized political agency, nor did the political leaders have the capacity to mobilize the population effectively on a national level. It was this well-organized, well-financed, and well-armed state-within-a-state political authority that defeated the Palestinian resistance an Arab expeditionary forces and conquered most of Palestine in 1948. In 1948, the Zionist movement unilaterally declared the state of Israel. The majority of the Palestinians became stateless refugees.
For more information, go to www.palestinecenter.org. Click on the link "Modern Palestine."
She perhaps wanted to demonstrate a mental toughness, and hence resolve, but it sure didn't sound right. As though she and the U.S. had to "pay the price" of half a million dead Iraqi children.
I'll bet she put that sentence in the proper context by explaining that the blame lied entirely with Saddam in not letting the food for oil through to the children, and that even more children would die if Saddam carried out his plans unhindered. At least I hope she did.
Most of the Arabs in Palestine did not own their land? I believe that assertion is in dispute. Please see the "Modern Palestine" section at www.palestiniancenter.org. It provides a complete history of the region. Even those Arab lands that were "owned" by Jordan and Syria in 1948 were taken without compensation.
It appears the Zionists simply took the land they wanted (the lands that were classified the best) without offering any monetary compensation.
If you have any facts that dispute the above information, please post them here.
Un-PC
What's done is done. We must simply live in the here and now.
As for your rhetorical question, "Most of the Arabs in Palestine did not own their land?" that is also correct. There was a great deal of tenant farming for absentee landlords. The Jews bought their land- not the 'best land'- they had to drain swamps or work in very arid conditions.
Frankly I wouldn't trust information from the "Jersulaem Fund"- a pro Palestinian propoganda organization.
Uh, I believe that there was a civil war in the lands of Israel. If the Palestinians had won, there would be no Israel. You take to task the Israelis for defending themselves...
To a certain mentality, YES! Before WWI the Nazis published a map of the world showing lands that "belonged" to German, because people of German bllod lived there in large numbers. That included South Texas.
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