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   WEEKDAY PRESS PICKS FROM
   THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
     ELECTRONIC LEBANON
    AND ELECTRONIC IRAQ

 http://electronicIntifada.net
 http://electronicLebanon.net
   http://electronicIraq.net
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News For 7 December 2006

NEWS:
1) Indiscriminate Israeli fire wounds youth; 15 kidnapped (AFP)
2) Israel angry refugees right of return in Iraq group report (AFP)
3) Israelis alarmed by Baker report's talk of peace, dialogue (Ynet)
4) Sen. Biden objects to ISG report on behalf of Israel lobby (Forward)
5) Zionist scholar resigns in attempt to discredit Carter book (WP)
6) Twenty years later, still no charges in Alex Odeh assassination (EI)

7) Bush told: alter Iraq policy or risk disaster (Guardian)
8) 79 recommendations and a President forced into a corner (Ind)
9) Professionals targeted for killing in Iraq (Electronic Iraq)

ANALYSIS & VIEWS:
10) Apartheid Israel: A Beacon of Hope? (Virginia Tilley)
11) Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report (Jim Lobe/IPS)
12) The Memo: Rumsfeld's Last Stand (Tom Engelhardt)
13) The Roman Empire is falling so it turns to Iran and Syria (Robert Fisk)
14) Historic Days in Beirut and a White Rose (Samia Halaby/eLeb)

Ali Abunimah

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(1) Israeli gunfire wounds Palestinian in Gaza

Agence France Presse 7 December 2006

GAZA CITY, Dec 7 2006--One Palestinian was wounded Thursday by Israeli gunfire in the Gaza Strip, on the 12th day of a fragile ceasefire between the army and militants, medics said.The 23-year-old was wounded in the north of Beit Lahiya near the border with the Jewish state, they said.The army said it opened fire on a group of Palestinians who were "causing damage" to the fence along the border.

"The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) force told them to leave the area, they didn't, it fired warning shots into the air, they didn't leave, then it fired at the lower body of one of the men," said an army spokeswoman.

Under the terms of a truce that took effect between Israel and militants on November 26, the Jewish state withdrew its forces from the territory and militants were supposed to stop firing rockets into Israel.Seventeen rockets have landed in the Jewish state since, but the ceasefire has so far held amid hopes that it could help jumpstart the dormant Middle East peace process.

Meanwhile in the occupied West Bank, the army arrested 15 Palestinians overnight on suspicion of belonging to armed groups, it said.

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(2) Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows

Agence France Presse 6 December 2006

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/06/061206204349.qjq06iek.html

A reference to Palestinians' "right of return" in the report issued by the high-level Iraq Study Group broke a diplomatic taboo which sparked immediate concern in Israel and surprise among Middle East policy experts.

The reference was buried deep inside a 160-page report that urged US President George W. Bush to renew efforts to revive Israel-Palestinian peace talks as part of a region-wide bid to end the chaos in Iraq.

"This report is worrisome for Israel particularly because, for the first time, it mentions the question of the 'right of return' for the Palestinian refugees of 1948," said a senior Israeli official, who was reacting to the US policy report on condition he not be identified.

A Middle East analyst who was involved in the Iraq Study Group discussions but did not participate in drafting the report expressed surprise when the reference was pointed out to him by a reporter.

"It's hard to know whether that language got in there because of carelessness -- I know there were many revisions up to the very last minute -- or whether it was a deliberate attempt to fuse something to the Bush rhetoric which wasn't there before," the analyst said.

The 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians calls for a resolution of the issue of Israeli and Palestinian "refugees" as part of a final status agreement that would include the creation of a Palestinian state.

But they do not use the term "right of return", which is a long-standing Palestinian demand -- rejected by Israel -- that Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what was to become the Jewish state in 1948, as well as their descendants, be allowed to return home.

Bush, in a 2002 speech in the White House Rose Garden, became the first US president to formally back the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, but he also did not mention a right of Palestinian 'return'.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group's co-chairman is former secretary of state James Baker, who as the top diplomat for Bush's father in the early 1990s clashed with Israel over its handling of the Palestinian issue.

Among his group's 79 recommendations for a policy shift on Iraq, number 17 concerned five points it said should be included in a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The final point in the list was: "Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush's two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return and the end of conflict."

"'Right of return' is not in Oslo I or Oslo II, it's not in the Bush Rose Garden speech, it's not even in UN 181, the original partition resolution -- it's part of the Palestinian discourse," said the US analyst.

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(3) Dore Gold: Israel must prepare for different reality

Ynet 7 December 2006

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/ CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3337038,00.html

Will Baker-Hamilton report change US view of Israel? Former UN ambassador says 'willingness of report's author to talk to Iran, Syria is a very alarming development'. Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan: Israel shouldn't worry about report but rather lack of leadership and vision Attila Somfalvi

The Baker-Hamilton report  handed over to US President George W. Bush on Wednesday is being considered with the utmost severity in America. The majority of the report deals with Iraq, but a significant portion addresses the Israel-Arab conflict, which the report sees as the heart of the Mideast unrest .

So how will the report affect Israel? Former UN Ambassador Dore Gold says, "Israel will have to prepare for completely different reality." Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan states that "the report shouldn't worry Israel. What should worry Israel is a lack of leadership and vision." Palestinian Reaction

Palestinians: Americans realized cause of conflict / Ali Waked

Deputy chair of Palestinian Legislative Council believes Baker-Hamilton report extremely important; says Americans seem to want real change in Mideast Full Story

"The Baker-Hamilton report is indicative of a growing trend in both American parties," said Gold. "This approach sides with a US withdrawal from Iraq . Within two years American presence in Iraq will be minimal.

"Another thing, and this is more important, the very willingness of the reports' author to start a dialogue both Iran and with Syria , is an alarming development. It's alarming because the United States isn't requiring any preliminary conditions for this dialogue, and there is no mention of the Iranian nuclear program which continues to advance.

"The recommendation in this report, to talk to Syria and Iran despite the fact that they're responsible for the growing instability in Iraq, will only encourage them to continue employing their policies."

Gold says that "the report proves that Israel has been unsuccessful in conveying a clear message to the US elite regarding the Iranian threat. How can the United Stated see Iran as a stabilizing force in Iraq when Iran is funding and supplying arms to terror factions, both in Iraq and in Lebanon."

Gold saID that things will change both in short and long terms.

"In the immediate sense," he said, "the US will try to renew the political process as part of a general regional strategy."

He also pointed to several questions that arise from the report: "Will the US demand that Syria stop supporting terror? Will Israel be dragged into negotiations with those who will not even recognize it? Will America come to terms with the Iranian nuclear program?"

Bush between rock and hard place "Israel has to take into account Iran's growing influence," said Gold, "and not only in Syria but also in Iraq and anywhere where there is a Shiite population operating on behalf of Iran."

Former National Security Advisor Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland also addressed the issue: "The report, if we look at the Israeli aspect of it, wants to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict come to an end."

However Eiland said that the US doesn't want to pressure Israel beyond a certain point as, according to Eiland, President George W. Bush is caught between a rock and a hard place and he doesn't want to be perceived as a terror appeaser.

"The report - and this depends on how it is received by President Bush - hints that more weight should be given to the first part, the advancement of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It doesn't strategically change the Israeli reality," said Eiland.

Eiland's predecessor, Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, said that the report will "directly affect US strategy, not Israel. It speaks of US policies, the report shouldn't worry Israel. What should worry Israel is the lack of leadership and vision."

"The report calls for deeper American involvement. It basically says that the US should be more involved in the Mideast process.

"A country like Israel, a country with a strong economy and security, shouldn't fear American involvement. If we know how to use our strength, if we provide personal safety and if we know how to employ our economic strength (we shouldn't fear US involvement)."

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(4) Democratic Senator Slams Iraq Study Group's Report

By Marc Perelman

Forward 8 December 2006

http://www.forward.com/articles/democratic-senator-slams- iraq-study-group-s-repo/

Just days before its publication, the much-anticipated report of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission on Iraq came under attack Monday from the Democrats' top foreign-policy voice, Senator Joseph Biden, in an address to a Jewish group in New York.

Biden, incoming chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the Baker-Hamilton report, parts of which had been leaked to the press days earlier, does not provide a plan to reach a sustainable political settlement there. He also derided proposals, associated with Baker, to link progress in Iraq to the revival of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as "dangerously naive."

"The notion that an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement would end a civil war in Iraq defies common sense," Biden told the Israel Policy Forum. "Israeli-Palestinian peace should be pursued aggressively on its own merits, period -- not as some sort of diplomatic price to make the Arab states feel good so they will help us in Iraq."

Biden, who is believed to be considering a presidential run in 2008, blasted President Bush for "going AWOL" on the Israeli-Palestinian track over the past six years, saying he could "not fathom" how the president did not find the time to visit Israel even once since he was elected.

The Baker-Hamilton commission, formally known as the Iraq Study Group, issued its recommendations Wednesday. They include a gradual and partial withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and a call for direct talks with Syria and Iran, as well as more vigorous American mediation on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

"The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability," the group's executive summary said. "There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria and President Bush's June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment includes direct talks with, by and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel's right to exist), and Syria."

Bush recently launched two internal administration reviews of Iraq policy, in what some critics called an attempt to offset the impact of the Baker-Hamilton report. In several statements last week, the president appeared to be dismissing in advance the expected recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, including troop withdrawals. However, his advisers have repeatedly said in recent days that there would be a new course once the various policy reviews were digested.

Some observers saw political significance in the fact that the Democrats' incoming foreign policy chief chose the peace-oriented Israel Policy Forum for his first appearance before a Jewish group after the election.

At the same time, the president of the Israel Policy Forum, attorney Seymour Reich, distanced himself afterward from parts of Biden's talk. He said that while the senator was "technically correct" in claiming that no linkage should be made between Israel and Iraq, the perception in the region and in many parts around the world was different.

"Israel should take advantage of this to actually make some peace overtures," Reich said. "This is what Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert is already doing by reaching out to the Palestinians."

Biden focused most of his address on his advocacy of a federalized and decentralized Iraq, a plan he initially proposed with Leslie Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations. Biden said he hopes the plan will attract fellow lawmakers as the situation in Iraq continues to escalate and as the policy of supporting a strong central government in Baghdad is failing.

"I will push this in Congress with my colleagues and through hearings," Biden told the Forward before his speech. "I believe other Democrats will join me, but I doubt the administration will do so."

His Republican counterpart on the Senate committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, has expressed support for a federal solution and agreed to a grueling schedule of in-depth hearings on Iraq when Congress reconvenes next month.

While Biden's plan has won few formal endorsements in Congress, his aides claim it is gaining traction, despite widespread Democratic calls for troop withdrawal. "The Biden plan has some good points, but we need to make sure we don't shortchange the Kurds again," said Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York. "But our main focus in Congress is now on bringing the troops home."

The administration has rejected the plan, claiming it has no support among Iraqis. A poll released in June by the International Republican Institute found that 78% of Iraqis disagree with the idea of segregating Iraqis according to religious or ethnic sects, and 89% believe that establishing a unity government is extremely important to Iraq's future.

Gelb, who initially proposed the federal plan three years ago, said the administration tried to undercut the plan by misrepresenting it. "They purposefully claim we want to partition the country," he said. "They are bending to pressure from the Saudis who do not want any breakup of Iraq."

Last week, Nawaf Obaid, a consultant with the Saudi government, published an opinion article in the Washington Post claiming in no uncertain terms that the oil-rich kingdom would consider funding and arming Sunni militias in Iraq to counter Iran's influence if American troops withdrew. Saudi Arabia distanced itself from Obaid and terminated his consultancy contract as a result. However, most observers saw his essay as a calculated Saudi warning about the possibility of a regional war if Washington decided to pull out or cater to the different sectarian groups in Iraq.

Gelb noted that support for the federal plan was "picking up steadily" in Congress because people are beginning "to focus on the fact that no insurgency ends without a political deal. This leads ineluctably to a federal solution as an alternative to what we have tried and failed to achieve in the past three years."

Leading Republican senators such as Lugar and John Warner of Virginia, the outgoing chair of the Armed Services Committee, as well as Sam Brownback of Kansas, have publicly stated that a federal solution should be seriously considered.

On the campaign trial, several lawmakers, including Texas GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson and newly elected Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes of New Hampshire, expressed support for a more drastic proposal put forth by American diplomat Peter Galbraith to partition Iraq in three states along ethno-religious lines -- Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.

Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and an adviser to the Kurds on constitutional issues, said the partition had already happened and that Washington should not try to put together what is in effect already a broken-apart country.

In an opinion article published May 1 in the New York Times, Biden and Gelb argued that since sectarian strife has become a bigger security threat than the insurgency and a de facto partition is already in place, the argument in favor of maintaining a unified Iraq is becoming increasingly moot by the day. Blaming Bush for his absence of strategy and warning that Congress could end up mandating a quick pullout, they proposed maintaining "a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shi'ite Arab -- room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests." The central government would also ensure that the oil-poor Sunni Arab region receives 20% of Iraqi oil revenues. The Iraqi parliament recently passed legislation envisioning strong regional entities.

Some analysts said splitting the country along ethnic and sectarian lines would ignite massive population relocations and major upheaval in Iraq's major cities, where all three groups reside. Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now working as a research fellow at the National Defense University, termed the Biden plan "naive" in that it fails to spell out how the regional division would be implemented and lacks support among Sunnis and Shi'ites.

However, other experts said that populations in those mixed areas are separating on their own because of the growing sectarian militia activity, including in the capital. "I do think that we are likely to hear people say that there is an informal Biden plan underway naturally as the ethnic communities in Iraq self-align in response to intimidation or to avoid bloodshed," said John Hamre, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former deputy defense secretary official in the Clinton administration. "Baghdad is the central problem in that regard -- like Sarajevo was in the Balkans."

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(5) Carter Book on Israel 'Apartheid' Sparks Bitter Debate

By Karen DeYoung

The Washington Post 7 December 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/ 12/06/AR2006120602171.html

A veteran Middle East scholar affiliated with the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned his position there Monday in an escalating controversy over former president Jimmy Carter's bestselling book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," traces the ups and downs of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process beginning with Carter's 1977-1980 presidency and the historic peace accord he negotiated between Israel and Egypt and continuing to the present. Although it apportions blame to Israel, the Palestinians and outside parties -- including the United States -- for the failure of decades of peace efforts, it is sharply critical of Israeli policy and concludes that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."

Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University, accused Carter of factual errors, omissions and plagiarism in the book. "Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information," Stein wrote in a harshly worded e-mail to friends and colleagues explaining his resignation as the center's Middle East fellow.

Stein offered no specifics in his e-mail to back up the charges, writing only that "in due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins."

A statement issued by the center yesterday in Carter's name said he regretted Stein's resignation "from the titular position as a Fellow" and noted that he had not been "actively involved" there for the past 12 years. Carter thanked Stein for his advice and assistance "during the early years of our Center" and wished him well.

While acknowledging that the word "apartheid" refers to the system of legal racial separation once used in South Africa, Carter says in his book that it is an appropriate term for Israeli policies devoted to "the acquisition of land" in Palestinian territories through Jewish settlements and Israel's incorporation of Palestinian land on its side of a separating wall it is erecting.

He criticizes suicide bombers and those who "consider the killing of Israelis as victories" but also notes that "some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians."

Accusing the Bush administration of abandoning the effort to promote a lasting peace, he calls for renewed negotiations on the basis of security guarantees for Israel and Israel's recognition of U.N.-established borders.

Formally published three weeks ago, the book quickly became a bestseller. Carter has been prominently interviewed in the media and has been mobbed at book appearances around the country.

Speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," he said he was glad the book had raised controversy. "If it provokes debate and assessment and disputes and arguments and maybe some action in the Middle East to get the peace process, which is now completely absent or dormant, rejuvenated, and brings peace ultimately to Israel, that's what I want," he said.

Criticism of the book, primarily from Jewish groups and leaders, began even before it was published, and it became an issue in the midterm elections last month. The New York-based Jewish Daily Forward noted in October that Democrats were trying to distance themselves from its reported contents as Republicans were seeking to widely disseminate Carter's views in an effort to win Jewish votes.

Speaking to the Forward about Carter, Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matthew Brooks said the coalition had "not shied away from shining a light on some of his misguided and outrageous comments about Israel in the past. . . . So far, there's been nothing but silence on the part of the Democratic establishment in terms of holding Carter accountable."

Rep. Steve Israel, a Democrat from New York, told the Forward that the "book clearly does not reflect the direction of the party."

Since then, the controversy has only grown. In a widely published commentary last weekend, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that Carter's "use of the loaded word 'apartheid,' suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous."

In a statement issued Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles contended that Carter "abandons all objectivity and unabashedly acts as a virtual spokesman for the Palestinian cause."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Stein said that Carter had "taken [material] directly" from a published work written by a third party but that legal action was being contemplated and he was not yet at liberty to make the details public. He said accounts in the book about meetings he had attended with Carter between 1980 and 1990 had left out key facts in order to "make the Israelis look like they're the only ones responsible" for the failure of peace efforts.

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(6) Twenty years later, still no charges in Alex Odeh assassination

By Erik Skindrud

The Electronic Intifada 6 December 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6176.shtml

Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh was assassinated in Santa Ana, California 21 years ago. No one was ever charged with the crime. An agreement with the Israeli government prevents the extradition and prosecution of the prime suspects.

On the morning of Oct. 11, 1985 Alex Odeh made his way to his Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee office in Santa Ana, California. Odeh was likely tired as he climbed to the second-story office -- he had been up past midnight the night before, appearing on a late-night talk show where he condemned the killing days earlier of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year old Jewish New Yorker shot and dumped into the Mediterranean by Palestinian gunmen aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship. On the show, Odeh had also repeated his oft-stated belief that peace and cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis was not only necessary, it was possible.

The group's West Coast coordinator, Alex had a busy day in front of him. He was to speak that evening at Friday prayer services at Congregation B'Nai Tzedek, a synagogue in Fountain Valley.

He wouldn't make it. Around 9 a.m. Odeh unlocked the door to the 17th Street office, triggering a powerful pipe bomb that ripped through his face and chest. (The blast also blew out office windows, injuring seven passersby on the street below.) According to his brother Sami -- who still lives in Orange, California -- Alex also inhaled enough hot blast chemicals to cook his lungs from the inside. Sami reached the emergency room at Tustin Community Hospital in time to meet a silent surgeon emerging from an operating room.

"His face told me everything," Sami Odeh recalls.

Sami faced up to the task -- delivering the news to Alex's wife Norma and the 41-year-old's three little girls, Helena, Samya and Susan. The FBI says the case remains open -- even though government documents and newspaper reports strongly suggest that the man who orchestrated the assassination is already in federal custody

Each October marks another year since the day that is still recalled by Arab Americans in Orange County and by Muslims, Arabs and others around the world (the Odeh family are Palestinian Roman Catholics). More than two decades later, no one has been arrested in connection with Odeh's assassination, nobody has been charged with the crime and nobody is likely to be convicted. The FBI says the case remains open -- even though government documents and newspaper reports strongly suggest that the man who orchestrated the assassination is already in federal custody.

In September 2005, one strand of the mystery was tied up when U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew sentenced Earl Krugel, a 63-year-old former dental assistant from Reseda, to 20 years in prison for conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and assassinate Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), a congressman of Lebanese descent. Following sentencing, defense attorney Jay Lichtman told reporters that Krugel had supplied investigators with four names in connection with the Odeh killing. The names, Krugel said, had been mentioned by the late Irv Rubin -- Krugel's co-conspirator, who committed suicide last year by slashing his throat with a razor blade and leaping from a walkway inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.

Strangely, just three days after arriving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Ariz. (in Nov., 2005), Krugel was murdered in an exercise yard by another prisoner.

After Krugel's death, his wife suggested his killing was related to Odeh's assassination.

"It was all about Alex Odeh and my husband did not know anything about Alex Odeh," Lola Krugel told the Associated Press.

In 1985, Rubin was chairman of the Jewish Defense League, a group of radical pro-Israelis listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Following Odeh's killing, Rubin openly gloated about the Palestinian-born American's death, telling the Los Angeles Times, "No Jew or American should shed one tear for the destruction of a P.L.O. front in Santa Ana or anywhere else in the world."

Rubin was arrested in 2002 after the FBI recorded Krugel and others plotting "a wake-up call" for Arab Americans by destroying one of their "filthy mosques," according to court records.

Before his suicide, Rubin told Krugel that four men had been involved in the Odeh killing. Investigators haven't released the names, but Sami Odeh believes they include three names previously listed by the FBI as suspects: Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs and Andy Green.

Fuchs and Green continue to reside in (relative) safely at Kiryat Araba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. All three were disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the rabidly anti-Arab founder of the JDL.

The presumed mastermind of the Odeh killing, Manning fled to Israel immediately after the Santa Ana incident. He was extradited to the U.S. in 1993, where he was convicted of the 1980 killing of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary who had the misfortune of opening a package bomb aimed at Manning's estranged business associate. (Manning's fingerprints were found on the package by investigators.)

It wasn't the first time Manning had been caught tinkering with explosives, however. In 1972, he was convicted of bombing the Hollywood home of Palestinian activist Mohammed Shaath. In what amounts to a political compromise of Biblical proportions, Manning can't be tried for Odeh's murder because of an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Israel

With so many arrows pointing, why wasn't Manning prosecuted for Odeh's killing? In what amounts to a political compromise of Biblical proportions, Manning can't be tried for Odeh's murder because of an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Israel. The reason: the assassination occurred after he became an Israeli citizen.

Manning swallowed 20 sleeping pills on the eve of his extradition in an attempt to escape justice.

According to an internal FBI memo made public in 1987, the agency made multiple requests to Israel for cooperation in solving Odeh's murder. Israel has refused repeatedly, although the details of the behind-doors discussions have never been released. This is despite the fact that both Fuchs and Green -- like Manning -- have been tried and convicted of other bombings and shootings in the U.S. and the West Bank.

The contradiction is more than boggling in the post-9/11 world, where the U.S. government's vow to take action against states that harbor terrorists is repeated regularly. Writing in 2003 about the Odeh killing and several similar incidents, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called the failure "a glaring double standard applied to Arab Americans and Muslims that can be neither denied nor defended."

There was no ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of Odeh's killing by terrorists. There will be no birthday remembrance.

"He was a very intelligent, very calm but passionate young man," recalls Haitham Bundakji, former director of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. "He loved the U.S. as his new country, but he never forgot Palestine, which was his homeland. He believed in the Palestinian people and he worked very hard to shed some light on the other side of the coin, the other side of the issue that most Americans don't hear about."

Arabs, Muslims and others in Orange County, Calif. and elsewhere continue to feel frustrated about the apparently immovable roadblock that still sits in the path to justice.

Contacted for this article, Arab-American academic Jack Shaheen (who spoke at a memorial service for Odeh in November 1985) said the lack of resolution continues to trouble the community.

"Sadly," he said, "the tragedy of Alex's assassination shows that the life of an American civil rights advocate with Palestinian roots is not valued by our government or media as much as the lives of other Americans."

"There is the feeling that the great influence pro-Israel groups have in this country had an influence on the investigation," Bundakji said.

Surprisingly, Sami Odeh, who works as a real estate broker in Orange, Calif., is more sanguine about the case.

"We remain hopeful that eventually, justice will prevail," he said. "I happen to believe that despite the enormous power that the Israeli state wields in this country, the American justice system will continue to push.

"You have to understand that the FBI is up to their ears in cases. I know that the Israelis are making it tremendously difficult for them to do their job, but given enough time, I think they can finish it.

"And even if they aren't brought to justice here -- God will mete out justice eventually. And when He does, He won't be under anyone's political influence."

Erik Skindrud is a magazine editor and journalist in Huntington Beach, California. He attended U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

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(7) Bush told: alter Iraq policy or risk disaster

By Julian Borger in Washington and Ewen MacAskill

The Guardian 7 December 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1965997,00. html

President Bush was warned yesterday that his policy in Iraq was "not working" and that to have a chance of avoiding a regional disaster he would have to repudiate much of the foreign policy he has pursued over the past six years.

In stark language, the long awaited bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for US combat troops to be withdrawn by early 2008 in parallel with comprehensive Middle East peace negotiations that would include talks with Iran and Syria on Iraq's future, a conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a land-for-peace deal between Israel and Syria.

The Bush administration opposes talks with Tehran or Damascus, and is against putting pressure on Israel to negotiate with groups Washington sees as terrorists or sponsors of terrorism.

The White House asked for time to study the proposals and any change of course will be put off until the new defence secretary, Robert Gates, takes office. Mr Gates, a former ISG member, was approved by the Senate last night but may not take over from Donald Rumsfeld until later in the month.

President Bush was non-committal in his response when he met ISG members at the White House. "It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion," he said, but then warned "we probably won't agree with every proposal".

In its report, "The Way Forward - A New Approach", the ISG put forward 79 recommendations to contain a conflict that it says could end up costing the US $2 trillion. Nearly 3,000 US soldiers have been killed - 10 on the day the report was presented in four separate incidents.

Members of the panel pointed out that the war was dividing American society.

"Many Americans are understandably dissatisfied," Lee Hamilton, the Democratic co-chairman said. "Our ship of state has hit rough waters. It must now chart a new way forward."

One of the more controversial recommendations was for the Iraqi government to be presented with an ultimatum whereby political, military and economic support would be cut if it does not make more progress towards a resolution of the country's sectarian divide.

It called for US combat troops to be reassigned as advisors to local Iraqi units or rapid reaction forces, for some to be brought home, while some would be sent to Afghanistan where the chances of "American failure" were also increasing.

"It is critical for the US to provide political, economic and military support for Afghanistan, including resources that might become available as forces are moved from Iraq," the report said.

The "new diplomatic offensive" proposed by the ISG includes the creation of an Iraq "support group" including the US, the European Union, the UN and Iraq's neighbours, notably Syria and Iran. It also advocated a Middle East peace conference that would involve Israel restoring the Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace guarantees, and the reopening of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations also based on the exchange of land for peace. Tony Blair is expected to join the calls for a new Middle East peace initiative when he meets President Bush in Washington today.

The White House has pointed out that there are other reports in the pipeline, one from the joint chiefs of staff and another from the national security council. However, President Bush will find the ISG hard to ignore, particularly if its report gains support among Republicans anxious about damage to the party's standing.

James Baker, the Republican co-chairman of the panel and a close ally of President Bush's father, pointed out that the report was the only approach to Iraq that enjoyed "complete bipartisan support".

But the report was criticised by some Iraq experts in Washington last night, who questioned the ISG's advocacy of potential punitive measures against the Baghdad government. "The Study Group is threatening to weaken a weak government; good for its opponents, but bad for the US and Iraq," argued Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Few quarrelled however, with the ISG's description of the situation in Iraq, which it said was "grave and deteriorating".

"We do not know if it can be turned around," Mr Hamilton said. "But we think we have an obligation to try." The report did not lay out a fixed timetable for withdrawal but made it clear that it should take place soon.

"The primary mission of US forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations," the ISG said. "By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq."

The White House is likely to be particularly resistant to opening a dialogue with Tehran without an Iranian pledge to halt uranium enrichment, but Mr Baker was insistent it was essential to the panel's blueprint. "For 40 years, we talked to the Soviet Union, during a time when they were committed to wiping us off the face of the earth," Mr Baker said. "So you talk to your enemies, not just your friends."

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(8) Apocalypse now: 79 recommendations and a President forced into a corner

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Colin Brown

The Independent 7 December 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/ article2054657.ece

A gauntlet was thrown at George Bush's feet yesterday when a long-awaited report on Iraq recommended that he seek the help of Iran and Syria, significantly bolster Iraqi forces and prepare to withdraw most US troops within 14 months.

It warned that finding a way forward had to be part of a broader Middle East settlement that established a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict and provided peace for Lebanon.

In a 100-page, bleak, uncompromising report that contained 79 separate recommendations, the Iraq Study Group warned "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating" and that a regional conflict could be triggered if things continued to slide. It added: "There is no path that can guarantee success but the prospects can be improved."

Many of the report's recommendations had been leaked in advance and in some cases - for instance the deployment of US troops with Iraqi units - are already being carried out on the ground.

But, crucially, the bipartisan report may provide the political cover required by Mr Bush to break from his refusal to alter strategy.

With every day bringing more bad news from Iraq, and with US casualties having passed 2,900, Mr Bush is under increasing pressure to offer a solution to the violence and to find some way of withdrawing the 140,000 US troops.

On Tuesday his nominee for Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, admitted the US was not winning in Iraq and last night Tony Blair arrived in Washington intent on pressing the President to adopt the ISG's proposal of finding a regional solution. The two leaders are due meet later today. Before leaving for the US, Mr Blair was challenged in the Commons by the Tory leader, David Cameron, as to whether he agreed with Mr Gates's bleak assessment.

The Prime Minister replied: "Of course. On July I said myself that the situation Baghdad with sectarian killing was appalling and the bloodshed was appalling.

"What is important, however, is, as he went on to say, that we do go on to succeed in the mission that we have set ourselves."

Mr Bush said he would take "every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion". But the President is not obliged to adopt the report's recommendations and he has continued to insist he is not seeking a "graceful exit out of Iraq".

The report does not directly criticise the government and neither does it consider how the US happens to be involved in a bitter, bloody conflict that has claimed the lives of perhaps 655,000 Iraqis. But taken together, its recommendations can be read as both a clear rebuke of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and a rejection of its rhetoric about the extent to which events have slipped out of US control.

For instance, whereas Mr Bush pursued a policy of unilateralism, the report now recommends launching a "diplomatic offensive"; whereas Mr Bush insists the US is "winning", the report makes clear that attacks against US and Iraqi forces are "persistent and growing"; whereas Mr Bush often speaks as though the US is the blameless bystander in the middle of a sectarian war the report makes clear that "because events in Iraq have been set in motion by American decisions and actions, the US has both a national and moral interest in doing what it can to give Iraqis an opportunity to avert anarchy". It concludes that the current strategy "is not working".

In addition to recommending that the number of US troops embedded with Iraqi forces be increased in the short term from 4,000 to up to 20,000, the report also considers ways of improving Iraq's oil sector, the reconstruction efforts and US intelligence capacity.

It said there was significant under-reporting of the level of violence in Iraq and raised questions about the effectiveness of US intelligence saying the government "still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias".

Though written overwhelmingly from a US perspective, the report also stresses the issues faced by the Iraqi population. "There is great suffering and the daily lives of many Iraqis show little or no improvement," it says. "Pessimism is pervasive."

Underlining such an assessment, at least eight more people were killed and dozens wounded yesterday in the Sadr City district of Baghdad by a mortar assault and a suicide bomb attack.

The devastating findings

* US should launch new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region, drawing in every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq, including all of its neighbours. They and other key states should form a support group to reinforce security and national reconciliation within Iraq

* US should engage Iran and Syria constructively, given their ability to influence events within Iraq. Iran should stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity and use its influence over Iraqi Shia groups to encourage national reconciliation. The issue of Iran's nuclear programme should continue to be dealt with by the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Syria should control its border with Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents and terrorists in and out of Iraq

* Troops not needed for force protection could be pulled out of Iraq by the first quarter of 2008, depending on the security situation. "Substantially more" US combat troops should switch to a role of training and advising Iraqi security forces by working within Iraqi units

* There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts.

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(9) Professionals Targeted in Iraq

Mohammed A. Salih

Electronic Iraq 6 December 2006

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2698.shtml

ARBIL (IPS) - The call from his mother changed Dr. Harb Zakko's life. "Someone has been calling me to open the door, saying he has something for you," his mother said.

Soon after, apparently the same person called him at his clinic, asking personal questions. The doctor got the message. He returned home and asked his family to pack. Two days later they drove out of their ethnically mixed Karrada neighbourhood in Baghdad and headed for Arbil in Kurdistan to the north.

The calls had sounded like the beginning of an abduction threat. They came only ten days after a colleague's son was abducted. The family paid 10,000 dollars ransom, but got back only the body of their son.

Such stories are common in Karrada neighbourhood, home to many academics and professionals.

"It's a mess in Baghdad, there is no law thereait's militias who are ruling the streets," Zakko told IPS. The doctor now works at a beauty centre in the predominantly Christian district Ainkawa north of Arbil.

Zakko is among hundreds of Iraqi professionals who have been leaving the "blind violence" behind them to move to Kurdistan, the northern region of Iraq, or to other countries.

This migration has created fears of a brain drain from a country already paralysed by years of isolation and wars. Iraq was placed under sanctions after the first Gulf War in 1991, and faced the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Professionals seem to have become a particular target. "Experts and academics are killed almost daily," Fuad Massoum, head of the Kurdistan Alliance Slate in the Iraqi Parliament told IPS in a phone interview from Baghdad. "This will do tremendous harm to Iraq and its infrastructure, a significant part of which is these professional people."

He said that the issue of targeting of the professional elites has been discussed frequently in parliament. "But it is the government that must take action on that since parliament has no executive authority."

There are varying, but alarming figures about the number of professionals being affected by violence in Iraq. According to the Washington-based Brookings Institute, an independent think-tank, 40 percent of Iraq's professionals have left the country since 2003.

The Britain-based charity Medact says that 120 doctors and 80 pharmacists have been killed over the past three years, and more than18,000 medical professionals have fled Iraq.

The Brussels Tribunal, an anti-occupation group, has produced a list of 281 university professors killed in Iraq from April 2003 to late November 2006. More than 70 other names are on a list of academics who have been threatened or kidnapped, according to the group.

Many professionals who move to Kurdistan are being employed in local government institutions, and have filled gaps in areas of their specialty.

Rezan Sayda, a senior official in the Kurdistan Regional Government's health ministry told IPS that her ministry has employed 600 doctors who fled insecure parts of the country, and that another 320 doctors are on a waiting list for employment. Ten to 12 physicians move to the Kurdish region daily, among them some big names in their field, she added.

"The Iraqi government does not give permission to the doctors who want to be employed in Kurdistan, because they fear that will encourage other to come here," Sayda said. But the doctors come anyhow.

The motives of those who target professionals vary from political and sectarian to plain crime by highly organised gangs who kidnap for money.

"They target academics randomly, and the famous have been threatened a lot," said Dr. Qasim Hussein Salih, 57, a professor of psychology who left Baghdad in late 2004. Salih, who was educated in Britain, was head of Iraq's Psychology Association.

"What is going on in Iraq now is an attempt to stop life in this country," said Salih, who now teaches psychology at Arbil's College of Education. "If this continues, then the final disaster is only a matter of time."

The professor is struggling to survive. The salary he gets is not enough even for bare needs, he said.

Salih lost two of his colleagues during the mass kidnapping of staff at Iraq's Higher Education Ministry last month. He says he can hardly bear the pain.

"When I am alone at night, I cry for my friends who were killed, and for my country," he said. "Iraq is a rich country and it is very sad to see Iraq like this, and I blame America for that."

**************** ANALYSIS & VIEWS ****************

(10) Apartheid Israel: A Beacon of Hope?

By VIRGINIA TILLEY

Counterpunch 5 December 2006

http://counterpunch.org/tilley12052006.html

Johannesburg, South Africa

On November 27, Ehud Olmert responded to frantic international pressure and US hand signals by delivering what was billed as a "landmark" policy speech. The BBC has raised a faint cheer for the "new mood" it seems to signal. But the occasion, an annual memorial for Ben Gurion, was appropriate: in silky language, Mr. Olmert baldly reiterated the same terms and conditions that have blocked all progress toward Middle East peace for years.

Talks with the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Olmert declared, will begin only after a newly elected Palestinian government "renounces violence", recognizes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, abandons the right of return on behalf of the entire Palestinian people, and agrees that the large urban Israeli settlements that now dismember the West Bank will be permanently annexed to Israel.

After this abject betrayal of all Palestinian national aspirations and social needs, Mr. Olmert said, Israel will then open "negotiations" with the new government (unless Israel doesn't like that government), "significantly diminish the number of roadblocks" (how many does Israel consider "significant"?), "improve the operation of the border crossings to the Gaza Strip" (what does "improve" mean?), and release Palestinian VAT funds that Israel is illegally withholding.

In this dubious context, what about progress toward a regional peace agreement? Of the Arab states' 2002 peace initiative, which offered Israel a full peace upon its withdrawal from the West Bank, Mr. Olmert says that "some parts" are "positive" but responds only with diplomatese: "I intend to invest efforts in order to advance the connection with those States". Well then, how about talks with the Palestinians? He hopes the Arab states will "strengthen their support of direct bilateral negotiations between us and the Palestinians." But the Palestinian Authority and Fatah have been scraping their knees asking for bilateral talks with Israel, so this is meaningless - unless it means that the Arab states should pressure the Palestinians to capitulate to the model he is proposing, which even Arab quisling governments cannot successfully do.

Israel will also "assist" the new Palestinian government "in formulating a plan for the economic rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip and areas in Judea and Samaria," which might sound promising until we consider that "assist in formulating a plan" does not mean Israel will assist in implementing any plan. But "areas in Judea and Samaria" is especially ominous wording. First, "Judea and Samaria" are biblical-era terms for the West Bank used by Israelis to conceptualize the West Bank as an intrinsic part of Israel. Using them in diplomatic language regarding peace negotiations signals that Mr. Olmert is now so secure in this notion that he is willing to deploy it casually as a political given. Second, Israel will evacuate only "areas" (plural) of the West Bank. Later, Mr Olmert again uses the plural form when he says that Israel "will agree to the evacuation of many territories and communities which were established therein". To everyone else, the West Bank is one territory. Now carved up by Israeli settlements, it is several territories only if those settlements remain.

In other words, we are back to Olmert's old Convergence Plan, already combusted on the altar of Lebanon. The entire speech was a stale reiteration of the same old hogwash.

Israel-Palestine sits at the eye of the Middle East blood-bath that now rightly obsesses world security debates. No serious analyst of Middle East politics believes that regional stability, and therefore world stability, is remotely obtainable without resolving this conflict. Yet the best Israel can offer are talks for which no legitimate Palestinian government can conceivably qualify, which cannot achieve anything, and that, given the prerequisites, cannot even be launched in the first place. Instead of the serious emergency summit we so urgently need, we have a tableau of foolery: Mr. Olmert scraping to save his hollow leadership; a compliant media bleating again about "hope"; Mr. Abbas shuffling and grinning.

The bankruptcy of Mr. Olmert's speech did accomplish one useful task: it highlighted and capped the current state of world paralysis. In fact, no one knows what to do. Daily in the West Bank, land is taken, people are confined, jobs are ruined or lost, families are divided, hopes are crushed. Daily in Gaza, conditions are far worse, as close to a million people face starvation while mortars, bulldozers, and tanks grind up people's lives. Anguished cries from Beit Hanoun  "why? why?" - receive no answer from Israel or anyone else. As one commentator noted, no one notices Gaza as long as the Palestinians' daily death toll remains in the single digits. We leave the Palestinians only the job of dying more dramatically to get any attention at all.

Flailing for direction, some eyes still turn mechanically to the US hegemon: e.g., Zahi Khouri (San Diego Union-Tribute), who insists that "America alone has the influence" to do something. But the "do-something" mantra cannot be sensibly directed toward the Bush administration now that it has openly urged Israel to smash Lebanon and Gaza both. The spotlight turns to the Democrats, but what hope is there for a party that takes every chance to pronounce on Israel's outrages by ritually enthusing over Israel's "right to defend itself"? Kathleen and Bill Christison have put it flatly: "The Democrats don't care". Indeed, the Bush administration's only response to meltdown in Palestine and Iraq is to argue for bombing Iran, on the idiot notion that this trauma will trigger regime change and solve the Palestinian problem by cutting off its regional support networks. Hence the whole world remains hostage to the absurd neocon and Zionist fantasy that Hizbullah and Hamas oppose Israel only because they are paid to do it.

But indeed, few still ask or expect the US to act on Israel-Palestine. Getting the imperium's shredded talons out of Iraq will be hard enough.

As for Europe, its moral bankruptcy is emblemized by the UK official who admitted that Israel's blasting a sleeping eighteen-member Palestinian family into fragments was "hard to defend." (One wonders what she might have said if a Palestinian rocket barrage had smashed eighteen Israeli Jewish citizens to bloody fragments in their beds. "Hard to defend" seems unlikely.)

Still, some things are happening. The Palestinians are slowly winning the propaganda war, at terrible cost. Israel's stunning crimes in Lebanon and Gaza have turned the tide: Israel has never been such an international pariah in all its years. The Arab states finally ended the financial boycott of the Hamas government that they should be ashamed before their families and clans that they ever deployed in the first place. The heroic new international boycott movement, finally standing up to shrieking Zionist slander and charges of anti-Semitism, expands rapidly through cyber-space and into serious and principled activism. Hopeful eyes turn to Ireland's victories and bold statements from Canada.

But direction is lacking, and that lack is dangerous. "End the occupation" is an empty call as Israeli city-settlements drape ever more broadly over the West Bank. Solidarity movements focus mainly on negative goals - trying to stop Israel from bombing helpless Palestinian civilians or bulldozing their houses. Lacking positive goals, activists remain in reaction mode and exhaust themselves battling Israel's defenders in the "letters" columns of newspapers. Worn-out editors eventually close their forums to these wars, leaving activists fuming to each other in cyberspace.

We know the agents of this debacle: the complicit US government and the brilliant Zionist lobbying machine; dithering Europeans; legless Arab states; a rhetorically heated but intimidated and divided global South. But to sort out what to do, we need to consider how we got here.

First, let's finally face it: The two-state carrot, dangled before the diplomatic donkey for the past fifteen years, has led us straight to this debacle.

The Oslo and Road Map processes were not only fruitless. They were deceptions. Preying on collective hopes for a Palestinian state, Israel never actually agreed to one. The Oslo Accords, which Israel signed, never mentioned a Palestinian state. The Road Map explicitly called for one, but Israel signed onto it only with fourteen "reservations", the first of which precluded any Palestinian state. Before it would lift a finger toward its own obligations, Israel required the PA to ensure complete cessation of all Palestinian resistance, collect and turn over all "illegal" weapons, stop all smuggling of arms (how?), "dismantle" Hamas and the other militant groups "and their infrastructure" (how?), submit all Palestinian resistance fighters to arrest, detention, and interrogation, support a system of laws that ensures their continuing arrest, detention, and interrogation, cease "incitement" (what is that?) and "educate for peace" (again vague - instil an ethos of surrender in Palestinian youth?). Complete success in all these measures was required to proceed even within the Road Map's three stages. Moreover, the Palestinians must give up the right of return and any claim on Jerusalem.

Since no rational observer can consider these conditions workable, they clearly signified Israel's intention not to comply with the Road Map. That a wilfully gullible world has pretended that this sham was meaningful, and therefore placed a moral and legal onus on the Palestinians to fulfil their obligations to the Road Map, is only more shame.

No wonder Israel bombed Lebanon to smithereens. Its leadership was fatuous with victory.

Second, Israel's sovereignty in Mandate Palestine has moved into a new stage. Israel has long controlled the airspace, sea, ports and border controls, economy, land, water, infrastructure, and the social management of the entire territory's population. But Israel has also become sovereign in Max Weber's famous sense: "a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Of course, Israel's claim to a monopoly on violence is not "successful" as long as the Palestinians continue to resist it. And certainly Israel's brutal methods are not considered "legitimate" by the Palestinians or by anyone with moral sensibilities the world over. But consider: the international community has endorsed Israel's insistence that Hamas and all Palestinians are required to "abandon terror" and "recognize Israel". These conditions signal that continuing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is now considered illegitimate.

This shift is immensely important. The right of a population to resist occupation is enshrined in the UN Charter. Resistance to occupation becomes illegitimate only if and when the occupier is recognized as the legitimate sovereign. Of course, the international community has not admitted openly that Israel is sovereign in all of Mandate Palestine, because that would wreck the already-shaky collective pretence that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are territories from which Israel can be expected to withdraw someday. But denying Palestinians the right to resist occupation demonstrates that Israel's occupation itself has been tacitly redefined.

Israel's own model is not occupation. The word "occupation" rarely appears in Israeli government parlance. (Ariel Sharon used it once or twice, but it caused an enormous stir, and it appears now only in the formula "Israel ended its occupation of Gaza", patently untrue in any case.) Israel's model regarding the West Bank is openly one of sovereignty. Jewish-Israeli settlers potter about peacefully in their gardens in the West Bank because they know it is "Israel". The big settlements around Jerusalem, which divide the West Bank in half, are called "neighbourhoods". Israeli government maps of the country still do not show the green line. The West Bank, as we know it, is not there for Israel.

In sum, Israel has used the Road Map only to mask its own one-state program: retain sovereignty over all the land and exclude the native people. Israel is even being treated like a sovereign power. But here is the trick: Israel is getting away with its astoundingly brutal treatment of the Palestinians  and Israeli Jewish citizens sustain their impressive immunity from caring about it - only through the collective fiction that Israel is not sovereign.

Israel evades any open claim to sovereignty over all Palestine because its hands would then be tied. No government that styles itself a democracy could get away with slaughtering and terrorizing its own citizens this way or, alternatively, refusing to enfranchise parts of its territory's permanent population this way. Israel excuses its treatment of the Palestinians on grounds that they are, in fact, aliens. The world has accepted this formula, viewing the territory's native people as citizens of some other country that exists only in the future, in territory that no one can find. Israel is understood to be "at war" with this nonexistent country, represented by these aliens. (That the native people have no weapons worthy of the term "war" is an inconvenient fact very poorly veiled by nuclear Israel's thumping accusations that the impoverished Palestinians, with their automatic rifles and hand-painted homemade rockets, still stubbornly want to "destroy Israel".)

Political power often lies in defining the situation. Right now Palestinians are in the grip of Israel's definition. Israel does not claim openly to have consolidated sovereignty over all Palestine because it would then face the logical consequence: the moral and legal onus of abandoning racial exclusion and making the native people citizens. In Israel's dual model, the Palestinians remain aliens in their own country, who have no rights. Their politicians are legitimate only when they collaborate. Their fighters, lacking uniforms, are "illegal enemy combatants" to whom Israel owes only bullets and torture.

The way out? Change the definition to suit the facts. Right now, one state power is sovereign in Palestine and that state is Israel. It is an apartheid state because it excludes the territory's indigenous people from citizenship solely on the basis of ethnicity. For let us remember: The Palestinians' original sin - the "failing" has consigned them collectively to expulsion, dispossession, exile, and a cruel and humiliating occupation - is not bad leadership, missed opportunities, stubborn insistence on their demands, Arafat, or any of the usual shibboleths. It is that they are not Jewish.

And, just as apartheid did in southern Africa, Israel's fearful and zealous commitment to racial exclusion of the indigenous people is tearing the entire region apart.

What do we get from recognizing this fact? We may take clues from public indications that Ariel Sharon before his stroke and Mr. Olmert after him have been terribly anxious that we not do so. For what can Israel do if it is truly held accountable for denying its territorial population the right to vote? How can it exclude its native people from equal citizenship if they ask for it? The common defence, the need to preserve Jewish statehood, will instantly ring hollow. For Israel styles itself a western-style democracy. Yet no western democracy is presently attacking its own territory's population with mortar barrages and helicopter gunships solely because of their ethnic identity. No western democracy is blasting whole families to bits with mortars solely because their ethnicity is unwelcome. No western democracy is now encircling millions of people within walled cantons solely on the basis of their religion or ethnicity.

Like "White Australia" and apartheid South Africa before it, Israel is attempting to be racial state and a democratic state at the same time. No western democracy has survived the obvious contradictions of this formula: they all had to give it up. And apartheid Israel will not survive it if we call the shots as they are. Like the US, South Africa, New Zealand, and "White Australia" before it, Israel must admit its Muslim and Christian population as citizens and then grapple with the ensuing tough work of pluralist democracy like the rest of us.

This was the hard-won South African solution, where the state now represents everybody. Seventeen languages and differing historical narratives are recognized and dignified. Whites have retained their property and wealth, while black Africans are rising rapidly to join the middle and upper classes. After some early economic missteps, the government has launched new social policies and steered booming trade with the African continent that are channelling wealth and rapid growth throughout the country. The press is free and vibrant. Is South Africa still struggling for racial equality and economic justice? Sure. Is it plagued by the racial legacy of settler colonialism? Sure. But ongoing struggles for equality and mutual respect are the human condition and the noble burden of democracy. South Africa is a vigorous, growing, vital society. And there is peace.

John Dugard, the eminent South African legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on the Question of Palestine, wrote frankly in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that racial oppression in Israel is worse than it was in South Africa. But his assessment also offers hope. Identifying that we presently have a one-state solution - Israel's apartheid version - allows us to affirm a different one: a unified secular-democratic state, in which everyone is equal in dignity and rights, and where the Jewish and Palestinian national homes can share the land as they should. With that shared goal, disparate activist struggles around the world can find, at last, true direction.

Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.

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(11) Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report

By Jim Lobe

Electronic Iraq 6 December 2006

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2699.shtml

WASHINGTON (IPS) - To have read the neo-conservative press here over the past month, one would think that former Secretary of State James Baker poses the biggest threat to the United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein.

As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991 Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as close to the devil himself.

But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday, has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious" French.

The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard and The National Review -- has been to discredit the ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are published.

Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of a much bigger effort at training and strengthening Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008.

On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen. John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region, leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as part of its diplomatic strategy.

Baker himself telegraphed this aspect of his approach after meeting with Damascus's foreign minister and Tehran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif, who reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "(I)n my view, it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," he said.

Those remarks set off a tidal wave of protest and criticism beginning with the published announcement in the Weekly Standard by Michael Rubin, a fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), that he had resigned from an "expert working group" advising the ISG. Rubin accused Baker and his Democratic co-chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, of having "gerrymandered (the) advisory panels to ratify predetermined recommendations" -- panels, he noted, which included Middle East experts who had actually opposed the Iraq war.

In a preview of attacks that appeared with increasing frequency over the following month, Rubin also assailed Baker for what he called the former secretary of state's "legacy" in the Middle East -- namely, his approval of the 1989 Taif Accords which "sacrificed Lebanese independence" to Syria and his "betrayal" of Kurdish and Shiite rebels after the first Gulf War.

Rubin was quickly followed by Eliot Cohen, a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, who, writing in the Wall Street Journal, mocked the ISG as a "collection of worthies commissioned by Congress that has spent several days in Iraq, chiefly in the Green Zone."

"To think that either (Syria or Iran), with remarkable records of violence, duplicity and hostility to the U.S., will rescue us bespeaks a certain willful blindness," Cohen wrote.

The campaign against Baker and the ISG hotted up after the Nov. 7 Democratic landslide followed by the resignation of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Robert Gates, an ISG member who two years ago had called for negotiations with Tehran.

The Journal published a series of harsh attacks in mid-November by both Rubin and columnist Bret Stephens on Baker and other alumni, like Gates, who held top posts in the realist-dominated administration of former President George H. W. Bush.

In an appeal to "progressives" who had opposed the realism of both the Reagan and senior Bush administrations, Rubin noted that Baker served as Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and Gates as his deputy CIA director when Washington sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war and "sent people across the third world to their graves in the cause of U.S. national interest."

The following day, Stephens blamed Baker for forcing Israel to take part in the Madrid conference "which set the groundwork for the Oslo Accords (which) for Israel... meant more terrorism, culminating in the second intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass radicalisation in the movement of Hamas."

Things got even more personal with columns by Frank Gaffney, president of the neo-conservative Centre for Security Policy, and Mark Steyn in the Washington Times suggesting that Baker's thinking was motivated as much by anti-Semitism as by realism.

"Jim Baker's hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the region," wrote Gaffney, suggesting that the ISG -- which, in another column published Tuesday, he called the "Iraq Surrender Group" -- would recommend a regional approach similar to Madrid that would "throw free Iraq to the wolves" and "allow the Mideast's only bona fide democracy, the Jewish State, to be snuffed in due course."

Indeed, the past week has witnessed a veritable orgy of Baker- and ISG-bashing, beginning with a Weekly Standard article by former Republican House of Representatives Speaker and AEI fellow Newt Gingrich that warned that "any proposal to ask Iran and Syria to help is a sign of defeat" and "appeasement".

At the same time, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, an Iraq war hawk who has blamed Washington's troubles in that country on the Iraqis themselves, resurrected the charge that "Baker gave Lebanon over to Syria as a quid pro quo" for its backing in the 1991 Gulf War and mocked the notion that "Iran and Syria have an interest in stability in Iraq".

For sheer consistency, however, the Weekly Standard, which in this week's edition featured no less than three articles denouncing the ISG -- including one that described the Commission's membership as "deeply reactionary" and the "K-Mart version of the Congress of Vienna -- has led the field.

In successive lead editorials by chief editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the magazine first assailed the notion that Washington should engage Syria and Iran as "capitulation," and then, reassured by Bush's declaration last week that he was not prepared to follow the ISG's advice on talking with either Damascus or Tehran, accused Baker of having "quite deliberately created... the disastrous impression... that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq."

"At home and broad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on. Happily, that is not the case," according to Kagan and Kristol, who recently called Bush "the last neocon in power".

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(12) The Memo: Rumsfeld's Last Stand

Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch 6 December 2006

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2696.shtml

Last week, someone slipped New York Times reporters Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud the secret memo finished by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld just two days before he "resigned." It was the last in a flurry of famed Rumsfeldian "snowflakes" that have fluttered down upon the Pentagon these past years. This one, though, was "submitted" to the White House and clearly meant for the President's eyes. In it, the Secretary of Defense offered a veritable laundry list of possible policy adjustments in Iraq, adding up to what, according to Gordon and Cloud, is both an acknowledgement of failure and "a major course correction."

Think of this last zany, only semi-coherent Rumsfeldian document -- part of Washington's grim ongoing silly season over Iraq -- as Rumsfeld's last stand. In it, he quite literally cycles (as in bicycles) back to the origins of the Bush administration's shredded Iraq policy. It is, in a pathetic sense, that policy stripped bare.

Here are just three last-stand aspects of the memo that have been largely or totally overlooked in most reporting:

1. "Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start 'taking our hand off the bicycle seat'), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country."

From the early, carefree, "stuff happens" period of the occupation comes the wonderfully patronizing image embedded in this mixed metaphor of a passage -- though I suppose Iraqis perched on bike seats could indeed have crumpled socks. The image of the Iraqi (child) learning how to ride the bike of democracy -- or whatever -- with the American (parent) looming behind, hand steadying the seat, was already not just a neocolonial, but a neocon classic by the time the President used it back in May 2004. (In fact, in an even more infantilizing fashion, he spoke of taking the "training wheels" off the Iraqi bike.)

Many others in the administration proudly used it as well. Rumsfeld in his rococo fashion elaborated wildly on the image in a speech to U.S. troops that same year:

"Getting Iraq straightened out... was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.'"

And now, long after kids stopped riding bikes in Iraq and started ending up dead in ditches, our nearly former Defense Secretary just couldn't help cycling back to the good old days.

2. "Conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases. We have already reduced from 110 to 55 bases. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007."

Talk about cycling back to the beginning, Rumsfeld's "major course correction" takes us right to the original basing plans the Pentagon had on entering Iraq. As the New York Times reported in a front-page piece on April 19, 2003 (and then no one, including reporters at the Times, paid much attention to again), the Pentagon entered Iraq with plans already on the drawing board to build four major bases well beyond urban areas. These were to be permanent in all but name and, from them, the Bush administration planned to nail down the oil heartlands of the planet (while making up for the loss -- thanks to Osama bin Laden's efforts -- of our bases in Saudi Arabia).

Now, here we are, over three and a half catastrophic years later, back to those four bases (built to the tune of multibillions of American taxpayer dollars) plus one -- undoubtedly the former Camp Victory, the huge American base that grew up on the edge of Baghdad International Airport (as well, of course, as the new, almost finished billion-dollar U.S. embassy with its "staff" of thousands inside Baghdad's Green Zone).

3. "Aggressively beef up the Iraqi MOD [Ministry of Defense] and MOI [Ministry of the Interior], and other Iraqi ministries critical to the success of the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] -- the Iraqi Ministries of Finance, Planning, Health, Criminal Justice, Prisons, etc. -- by reaching out to U.S. military retirees and Reserve/National Guard volunteers (i.e., give up on trying to get other USG Departments to do it.)"

This mad suggestion, hardly noticed by anyone, cycles us back to the attitude with which Bush & Co. first entered Iraq. Iraqi sovereignty? Who ever heard of it? Just do what you want. Flood any ministry with a bunch of U.S. military retirees, all of whom can have their heavy hands on untold Iraqi bureaucratic bike seats. This is an idea just about as brilliant as every other one initiated by this administration in Iraq.

And why do I have a sneaking suspicion that all those "U.S. military retirees" and other "volunteers" might just not rush to offer their services to Iraq's death-squad infiltrated Ministries of the Interior and Defense? If you biked around that corner without those training wheels -- and some body armor -- I suspect you'd be likely to find yourself in the Baghdad morgue in no time at all.

In this way was Rumsfeld's last stand remarkably like his first pedal. If only, after September 11, 2001, someone had left the training wheels on when the Bush administration went pedaling off on its merry, shock-and-awe way.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

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(13) The Roman Empire is falling - so it turns to Iran and Syria

By Robert Fisk

The Independent 7 December 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2054595.ece

The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia.

Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James?

This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

The strategies

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

Cut And Run

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

Stay The Course

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (#1bn) a week and has lost public support.

Send In More Troops

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

Regional Devolution

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.

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(14) Historic Days in Beirut and a White Rose

By Samia A. Halaby

Electronic Lebanon 6 December 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6178.shtml

3 Decmeber 2006: Historic Days in Beirut

Today is the third day of the great events in Beirut. A congregation of people, a coming together of individuals from all over Lebanon from all religious groupings, all seeking to change the majority ruling government of the country.

All this is happening under the leadership of Hezbollah, which is being cool, keeping its alliances strong and its supporters disciplined.

On the first day there were approximately two million people. If you were part of it you would not have been able to tell how many people were there. In the front of the event, very near the speakers' stand where I stood with friends, I could see and hear but only a fragment of the crowd. It was crowded but there was no insane pushing. On departing I felt disappointed that the crowd was not huge. But then I saw on Al Manar television, Hezbollah's station, scans of the crowd which clearly told me that I was completely mistaken. I must therefore assume that I was among very considerate and polite people and that for so big a crowd there were no incidents of note to my knowledge.

Then people put up tents and stayed overnight. On the next day the crowds again began to swell. At night I did some channel hopping enough to hear the BBC proclaim that hundreds stayed over night to sleep. But then from other reports, I saw and heard that there were hundreds of tents and at least five thousand slept. By the third day, things are growing and growing. Now CNN is said to have described it as Woodstock minus the sex and alcohol. As a friends mentioned, at least they admit it is huge.

People are sleeping, partying, singing, dancing, eating, and generously sharing everything. Toilets have been put up and a very wary security is keeping a sharp eye on everything. The military is at the outskirts with full equipment. In many places, coils of razor wire had been strung up. They remind me of the Israeli checkpoints where I have often been pushed against it by the swelling of crowds mercilessly pushed by the Israeli soldiers. But not here! The soldiers are looking bored. Their presence is mild and non-threatenning.

I have to make special note of the fact that the crowds have been disciplined in amazing ways. They were requested to come to this open sit-down demo without pictures, flags, or other identifying material regarding their political affiliation. They were invited to come with only Lebanese flags and they cooperated. Still yet, some could not resist and party paraphenalia is beginning to make its appearance.

I also want to make special note of the fact that Manar showed us scans of the millions who came to attend. This was unusual as most other stations did their best to minimize the numbers by showing a quick glimse of only one section of the crowd. The crowd filled two squares and many many of the nearby streets and bridges. Feeder marches came from northern Lebanon and the nothern Bekaa valley where the great city of Baalbak is located. People came from Dahye and from the south as well in huge numbers. People came from everywhere.

They used to tell me that in all of Lebanon there are three million people. If that is the case, then two million is a clear majority and they should be respected and their wishes fulfilled. So when you tell this to the naysayer, they say, oh well there actually are four and a half million in Lebanon. Now they begin to tell the truth. Maybe before they forgot to count the Syrians and the Palestinians and people they consider "other." But two million is still substantial and a majority if one considers that the opposing forces, ten days earlier, only managed to attract approximately 75,000 people to attend the funeral of Pierre Gemayel, best known for his grandfather's manners, which he embraced, as a murderer of Palestinians. However, the event was described by the Western press as attracting hundreds of thousands, of course!

Now well into the third day, people look like they intend to stay the course till their wishes are fulfilled. Meanwhile, one has to wish them well. Many Lebanese have not had the opportunity to experience nationalist equality. They are enthusiastic for it.

5 December 2006: A White Rose

Today I went down again to the great congregation of people. My friends and I took a walk through both Solh and Shuhada squares and were impressed by the size of the encampment. There are at least one thousand tents, growing all the time. People are there with all their needs, resting, socializing, smoking argile (water pipe), eating, strolling, dancing, listening to music, to speeches, and when the time comes, chanting. This is Tuesday night and what we see is people clearly persuaded that they have taken their fate into their own hands and that here and now begins participatory democracy come what may.

Leadership of the alliance resisting the government is being very cautious, very intelligent and very serious. They are handling all things with a level head and with much forethought. The troubling events of Sunday night were, after all, just skirmishes with one young man killed by thugs, not two. Leadership declared that the resistance will not be provoked, that it will only respond by increasing the size of the demonstration.

The first death caused by the great congregation of the Lebanese in the heart of Beirut brought forth respectful ceremony and serious attention. It was a young man called Ahmad who was only 20 years old. He was honored with a massive funeral and a candlelight ceremony. His family, friends, and sweetheart were offered condolences before the huge crowd and by many speakers.

Speakers are urging Siniora to consider that once western allies, the US and Israel, have finished using him and his government, they will toss him aside. They call to him that they are his Lebanese brothers and they offer a rose, a white one not a red one.

The theme of this great and historic event is "we want a clean government." The chants are: "Siniora, go outside, leave, we want a clean government, a clean government" and, "We are tired of lies, we are tired of tears, we want a government that can stave hunger." What the alliance leadership, the opposition, is asking for is the formation of a new government, a new parliamentary majority, and early elections. They are demanding that all parties have a right to participate and that elections should be free, open, honest.

It is interesting that religion is playing a very small role in the great event. In fact, we who are here take note that there is much more religion in American demos. We have not heard calls of takbeer nor have we seen any prayers from the podium. Christians and Moslems alike have occasionally said religious phrases of the type that normally permeate discussion everywhere. There are many churches and mosques downtown Beirut and those who wish to pray have places to go and have kept it out of the great demonstration of Beirut.

I wonder what to call this great event in Beirut. I wanted to call it a confluence because people have come here like rivers and the event has a great and natural feeling, like a huge flood or meeting of great rivers. I have never before seen the Arabness of Lebanon so clearly and beautifully expressed and asserted. I have rarely seen such outpouring of friendship between Christian and Muslim Arabs. The balance is wonderful.

Tonight before the candlelight ceremony for the departed shaheed, women in hijab and women with hair flying in the air, danced the dabke together with men, holding hands, chanting to honor the departed hero, placing candles in clusters on the ground, planting a Lebanese flag among them and dancing around them to honor him.

The level of discourse of the demonstrators is highly developed. We have not heard much talk of class but we have heard much of serious analysis. People here are politicized. They have thought of these things and they show an understanding of imperialism. They support the right of the poor and oppressed. They understand that US hegemony is harming them and that Israel is its pawn. They also understand that the US government is different form the American people.

Samia Halaby is a Palestinian artist based in the US.