Opinion/Editorial

The double suicide bombing at the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv yesterday evening is dominating headlines internationally. The attack resulted in at least 23 deaths, and over 100 injured, many very seriously. Israel’s predictable response is to tighten the military occupation over Palestinians. Jaggi Singh reports.

“It is amazing that the U.S. invests effort and political capital in establishing an objective — an end to the occupation so that two states, Israel and Palestine, can live side by side — and then invests extra efforts into diluting, undermining and avoiding anything that could bring this closer.” Occasional EI commentator Hasan Abu Nimah writes about the diplomacy of buying time.

The Israeli voter has a rare opportunity to find out how the right-wing government looks to the world when the rouge provided by Shimon Peres and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has been wiped off. Israel’s image in December 2002 is beginning to be reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s after he took off his mask. Akiva Eldar writes in Ha’aretz.

The recent attacks on an Israeli hotel and the firing of missiles on an Israeli plane taking off from Mombassa, Kenya, indicate again that terrorism has neither been defeated, exhausted nor even intimidated by the loudly acclaimed American-led “war on terror.” On the contrary, terrorist activities seem to be gathering strength, spreading faster and hitting harder than the most cynical assessments predicted. Hasan Abu Nimah, in this contribution to EI, explains why America’s failure to distinguish among the difference causes of violence is making things worse. At the same time, he warns Palestinians not to allow their just cause to be hijacked by those who carry out atrocities against civilians.

This is the Big Secret, which Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, Jr., and Ariel Sharon do not want you to know: There are no Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Israelis, or Americans in this world. There are only human beings. They cannot be boxed in, excluded out, extra-judicially killed, illegally imprisoned, economically disenfranchised, collectively deported, silently tortured, or buried in mass graves without risking a further descent into the wreck where all of us now live.

I loath Binyamin Netanyahu, and therefore I hoped that he would be elected leader of the Likud. I am sorry that Sharon won the primary election instead. Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery comments.

Maintaining a website offering information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a pro-Palestinian perspective, my e-mail in-box is regularly filled with ‘advice’ about how the Palestinians should manage their Intifada. Some recent messages have bemoaned the decision by Palestinian military groups to fire mortars at Israeli settlements. EI’s Nigel Parry comments.

No matter what the case, whether it is a 53-year-old British UNRWA official, or an 8-year old-boy standing next to his house, the lie is always the same. The victim was a “terrorist” or appeared to be a “terrorist,” who with a cell phone, a rock, his bare hands, or even a pepsi bottle full of solvent, threatened the lives of heavily armed occupation troops riding around in 65-ton Merkava tanks in the middle of a refugee camp. EI’s Ali Abunimah writes about Israel’s killing of a senior UN official in Jenin and what it tells us about violence throughout the Occupied Territories.

“It seems that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Zionism as a nationalist ideology, and US support for Israel are still topics that many scholars prefer to keep at arm’s length, and given what I learned from some younger colleagues attempting to teach college classes about the Middle East in respected US institutions of higher learning, it is no wonder. ” A report from the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association by EI’s Laurie King-Irani.

Ambassador Hasan Abu-Nimah surveys the Palestinian-Israeli situation five months after President Bush’s famous “vision” was announced, and on the eve of another Israeli election. He writes, “It is astonishing that there are still many around who would warn against the grave risk of losing Sharon because the alternative could be Netanyahu, or would hope that a Labour victory would instantly remove the barricades from the way of a just, comprehensive and lasting peace; they had pinned their hopes on Barak before, but do not seem to have learned the lesson. How many more precious years do we need to spend switching from a seeming “dove” to a seeming “hawk” in a futile process of trial and error, while our people’s suffering continues, before we realise that until and unless we take the initiative ourselves, we will continue to long for the mirage and count disasters.”