It seems that for Abu Mazen, talking to George Bush is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Real dialogue is certainly not going to happen, nor does anyone expect it to, this week in Washington, or anywhere else for that matter. Why would Bush, the funder of Israeli atrocities, Sharon’s moral support, and international war monger, suddenly become the honest broker he wishes the world believed he was?
PM Abbas was picked to sell-out Palestine during Road Map talks just as Arafat was required to during Oslo. And Bush has not hesitated to let Sharon interpret the Road Map as he likes. We watched the removal of five uninhabited outposts, including fights between angry settlers and Israeli soldiers, which the London Financial Times this week reported were staged.
The Road Map, in plain language, requires the removal of all settlements built since March 2001. And this does not take into account the fact that all settlements are illegal under international law. This is a heavily orchestrated and very depressing stage show.
During this “cease-fire” Israeli Occupation Forces opened fire from a tank on a Palestinian family stopped in their car at a road-block Thursday. The IOF killed a small boy in the car and injured his two sisters, but claim it was an accident.
Early Wednesday morning Israeli police and border guards invaded Sha’fat Refugee Camp in northern Jerusalem. They took 200 Palestinians and had thirty home demolition orders. Palestinians inside the camp say the Israelis want more space for the nearby settlement.
IOF continues to demolish homes and shoot into Khan Younis, Deir Belah, and Rafah, all in the southern half of the Gaza Strip. After the heavily publicized Israeli pull-out from Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, not much international attention is being paid to Israeli conduct inside the Strip. This was indeed the case when the IOF spent several months destroying the Beit Hanoun area outside of any public spotlight before they left.
Throughout this time the IOF is destroying hundreds of dunams of agricultural land. The Gaza Strip was a fertile area, with Palestinian farmers growing produce for internal consumption and for the residents of Jericho in the southern West Bank. But after destroying most of the farmland over the past year and confiscating much of it for Israeli settlements, there is little produce in the last month found inside the Gaza Strip, and what the residents of Jericho must now rely on comes from Israeli sources inside 1948 boundaries. This is part of the ethnic cleansing process. The dependency that occupation forces are foisting on Palestinians is deepening.
A woman whose husband was exiled to Gaza describes the potatoes sold now. She says, “These are terrible, lumpy little things. These are not grown by us. Now they have to get all the vegetables, everything from Israel.” She also says of the West Bank, “Go look in the stores. Almost everything is Israeli now.”
To deny a people its ability for production is a form of ethnic cleansing that is often missed as the limited news coverage generally focuses on the death toll. Two months ago the IOF destroyed a factory in Gaza that produced tea-biscuits, one of the shrinking number of things that Palestinians were still able to produce. The same woman says, “You know we can’t have anything. They won?t let us have anything.”
As we watch the IOF continue to incur into Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, and the Gaza Strip, continue its settlement and apartheid wall construction, one wonders how Bush can look Abu Mazen in the eye today, and tell him he must, crack down on terror. Who is writing this script?
The head of a Palestinian organization promoting nonviolent resistance applied to travel outside for a conference. He was questioned for five hours by an Israeli deputy military governor about his work. He requests the details remain vague for fear of reprisal. At the end of the interrogation, the Israeli official, as if he wanted to be helpful by telling the man the truth, told him earnestly,
“Look, you can forget about nonviolence. You can tell your friends to forget about violence. Forget about the Road Map and forget about Oslo. What Israel wants is the land and we don’t want you on it.”
Kristen Ess is an independent journalist working in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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