Opinion/Editorial

Imagine that it is September 2010. The site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan is just a garbage dump now. Weather permitting, teenagers meet to play pick-up games of soccer or baseball in this space filled with the ashes of thousands.

6:30a.m, and the refugee camp is alive with noises. There is electricity this morning and the appliances whir; the television is loud with news of lives no longer, re-occupations of Ramallah and al-Bireh.

The following remarks were made on behalf of The Electronic Intifada at a press conference organised by the Minnesota branch of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in Minneapolis on 15 March 2002.

The United States is entirely correct to insist that there can be no justification for the deliberate and indiscriminate use of violence - i.e. terrorism - against civilian non-combattants in political conflicts. Yet in the Middle East it has honoured this principle mainly in the breach, and applied it in a manner at best laughable.

There is little doubt that the recent intense developments have placed our region at a turning point. The previous fragile status quo has collapsed.

There is no news today. Or rather the news today is full of stories about Yasir Arafat’s release from his Ramallah prison. This is variously being presented as a cause for jubilation among Palestinians, a personal victory for a ‘defiant’ Arafat, and a ‘success’ for US ‘diplomacy.’

We quite rightly call on the peoples of the world to renounce terrorism as a tactic to further their cause while, quite wrongly, we simultaneously undermine other peaceful, legal avenues where these same people can address their grievances.

Social anthropologists are always on the lookout for dominant ideologies, those structuring systems of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that undergird and orient everyday thoughts and actions.

Torture is abhorrent. Torture is illegal. Yet torture is inflicted on virtually every imprisoned Palestinian, including children. Despite the universal condemnation of torture, it is still used to extract confessions, to interrogate, to punish or to intimidate. The victims of torture are not just the people in the hands of the torturers. Friends, families and the wider community all suffer.

The falsehood that Israel ever made significant withdrawals from the occupied territories or that the three and a half million Palestinians subject to its military rule ever enjoyed more freedom than any people corralled into tiny ghettos by an oppressor serves the same purpose as the thoroughly debunked myth that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made ‘far-reaching compromises’ at Camp David.