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MER WEEKEND READING:


                      UP IN ARMS AGAINST APARTHEID

                         By Abdul-Jawwad Saleh*
                   * The writer is a prominent member
                   of the Palestinian Legislative Council


          "Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority,
          conditions for the Palestinians have worsened.  Poverty
          has increased...  Corruption has spread."

At the end of the second millennium, three million Palestinians are imprisoned
in ghettoes by the very man whom the Palestinian leadership hailed as the saviour
of peace. Netanyahu had driven the peace ship off course. Barak scuttled it.

For the past 12 weeks, collective punishment, in every form, has been imposed
on the inhabitants of these ghettoes -- the Palestinian people. Five hundred
settlers in Hebron impose a curfew on 40,000 Palestinians.

Under a racist colonial policy of separation, the Israeli occupation forces are
digging deep trenches in bypass roads to prohibit the Palestinians from using
them to escape imprisonment. Over 200,000 labourers, the products of Israel's
policy of dependency, are unable to reach their places of work in Israel. Movement
into and out of these ghettoes is restricted. Muslims and Christians are prohibited
from praying in their holy shrines in Jerusalem. Women in labour, especially
those travelling from villages, are stopped at Israeli military posts and prevented
from reaching the hospital. Wounded children and young men are left to bleed
to death. Ambulances are shot at, and their drivers are killed.

The colonisers, backed by the army, are impoverishing and starving the population
of the rural areas, preventing the population from harvesting their olive crops.
They have uprooted 23,465 fruit trees so far. Greenhouses have been destroyed
by bulldozers and homes have been razed, leaving whole families with no shelter
under the barren cold skies. Schools are closed, and classes are held in tents,
without desks or chairs.

The Palestinian ghettoes are besieged by two armies: the official military forces
of the occupation, and the army of the Zionist colonisers, mostly fanatical ideologues
who regard Baruch Goldstein -- who slaughtered tens of Palestinians praying at
dawn in Hebron -- as a hero and an example to be emulated. Many of these settlers
have been found guilty of killing Palestinian children and other innocent bystanders
in cold blood. They are the perpetrators of the assassination attempts on the
mayors of Nablus, Ramallah and Al-Bireh.

These two armies are perpetrating the most horrendous collective crimes imaginable
against Palestinian cities, towns and villages, as well as the refugee camps
where the victims of Israeli attacks in 1948 live today. This is an apartheid
regime.

The generals of the official Israeli army are united with the settler army. The
occupation forces have used extravagant violence, deploying gunships, snipers
and tanks to crush civilians who are struggling to defend their land and their
very existence. Assassination campaigns have been launched against Palestinian
activists. Palestinian journalists and photographers as well as foreigners have
been wounded.

A former Shin Bet security service director criticised such policies recently.
Ha'aretz newspaper quoted him in its editorial of 6 December as saying: "This
is the same security outlook whose failure to realise its aims led almost naturally
to the idea of separation from the Palestinians... Is the option of a Jewish
democracy with apartheid acceptable? In my opinion, no."

Under Barak's government, the state of Israel has become the state of the Israeli
army. Barak has outdone Shamir and Netanyahu in allocating budgets for building
new and expanding old colonies in the Palestinian occupied territories. The Israeli
press has also launched a propaganda campaign against the Palestinian people's
uprising. One of its most outrageous and perverse claims has been that Palestinian
parents send their children out to be killed by Israeli soldiers. Some American
and Israeli writers have described this as "Palestinian paganism." This is more
than racist folly -- it is fascism. It is not even an attempt to dehumanise the
Palestinians -- it is far worse, for even animals protect their young.

If willingness to sacrifice their children makes the Palestinians something less
than animals, however, what are the civilised Israelis who are more than eager
to massacre those children?

The Palestinian ghettoes will never surrender to Oslo and its conditions. The
Al-Aqsa Intifada, as a popular uprising, is a refusal of Clinton's attempt to
dictate the priorities of the political process in the interest of Israeli security.
It is an outcry against the creation and enlargement of Palestinian intelligence
agencies at the expense of democratisation and essential public services.

Since the establishment of the PA, conditions for the Palestinians have worsened.
Poverty has increased, according to World Bank and United Nations reports. If
the closures continue, poverty will reach the dangerous rate of 50 per cent.
Corruption has spread.

Many factors triggered the Al-Aqsa Intifada, among them internal Palestinian
problems, and the leaking of a "final solution" that would have legitimised permanently
the Israeli occupation of the territories taken in 1967.

The PA does not yet know the people it governs. This time, it has succeeded in
channelling the Intifada against the occupation. But the Palestinian leadership
should think twice before returning to the negotiating table on the same terms.

        *The writer is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council






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