From Occupied Palestine

The jailer
JUAN COLE
Salon.com, 12 January 2006

Ariel Sharon is lauded for breaking with his hard-line past. But the truth is that he simply embraced a smarter way of locking up the Palestinians.

Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.

Mustafa Barghouti: Palestinian Defiance
MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI and ERIC HAZAN
New Left Review 32, March-April 2005

The Ramallah doctor and activist, general secretary of the Al Mubadara coalition, on struggles against the Israeli Occupation, from the popular movement of the first Intifada to the tactical errors of the second, via the disaster of Oslo. As Abu Mazen is levered into place, what alternatives can combat both IDF stranglehold and the flyblown Palestinian Authority?

Death, delusion, and democracy
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 14 November 2004

It's worth noting how this narrative has been written. The Israelis, with their continued occupation, their continued illegal construction of colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, their air strikes and helicopter executions and live-fire shooting at stone-throwing children, are not part of this equation. They are just innocently waiting to find a new "negotiating partner" now that Arafat is in his grave. Ariel Sharon, held "personally responsible" for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by the Kahan commission report, remains, in George Bush's words, "a man of peace". No one asks whether he can control his own army.

Obituary: Yasser Arafat
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 11 November 2004

Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically, to the Jordanian army.

The truth is that Arafat died years ago
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 30 October 2004

Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he'd been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there. Then we thought he'd died in a plane crash in the Libyan desert -- but it was the pilot who died and the bodyguard who shielded him in his airline seat. Then we thought he'd bought it on the road to Baghdad when he suffered a blood clot. But Jordanian doctors brought him back to the world of the living. Now, again, we're preparing for the old man's death. Yet like the Pope, he seems to go on and on and on.

A Jewish state? 'Definitely'
DAVID LANDAU and AKIVA ELDAR
Ha'aretz, 18 June 2004

Arafat is ready to sign an agreement that would give Palestinians 97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza - with the rest in a land swap, and the right of return of not all, but at least some refugees. In a free-ranging interview with Haaretz, conducted in the carefully preserved ruins of the Muqata, the PA Chairman also spoke of the historical family bonds between the two peoples.

Zacharia Zubeidi: The marked man
DONALD MacINTYRE
Independent, 28 May 2004

Zacharia Zubeidi, head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in Jenin, has survived four assassination attempts by Israeli forces. He tells DONALD MacINTYRE he is fighting for his sons' future

Jenin -- A tendency to fidget is the nearest Zacharia Zubeidi gets to betraying the nervousness of a man who can reasonably expect to be gunned down any day now.

South Africa, Israel-Palestine, and the contours of the contemporary world order
NOAM CHOMSKY and CHRISTOPHER J LEE
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies, Issue 13/14 April 2004

On behalf of Safundi, Christopher J. Lee interviewed Professor Noam Chomsky on March 9, 2004, in his office at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They spoke on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid, the building of the so-called "separation wall" in Israel-Palestine and its comparison to apartheid measures, and his general resurgence as a critical voice against U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001.

Remembering Edward Said
TARIQ ALI
New Left Review 24, October-November 2003

Edward Said was a longstanding friend and comrade. We first met in 1972, at a seminar in New York. Even in those turbulent times, one of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way.

Palestinian, intellectual, and fighter, Edward Said rails against Arafat and Sharon to his dying breath
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 26 September 2003

The last time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukaemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving "state-of-the-art" treatment from a Jewish doctor and - despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him - he always acknowledged the kindness and honour of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest.