Every clipping in this archive printed between 2000 and 2009: 134 of them, oldest first, as plain text that can be read, searched and quoted without running any code. Each entry links to its own record, where the scan is.
· The Bulletin · Bend · page 1
The poetry of Arab pain: Are Israeli students ready?
Susan Sachs, N.Y. Times News Service, Ramallah
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Mahmoud Darwish, the poet whose lyrical writings have long been a touchstone of Palestinian national passions, was banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly 30 years. Now he finds himself watching — still from afar, but with considerable bemusement — as his poetry becomes a weapon in the hands of right-wing Israeli politicians who would like to bring down the government. ‘The Arabs are always accused of being a nation of poetry,’ Darwish said Monday in his sunny office in a Ramallah arts center. ‘But it’s Israel that now is putting poetry in the eye of the storm.’ The storm began brewing late last week, when Yossi Sarid, the iconoclastic education minister, announced that Darwish’s poetry would be included in a new multicultural literature curriculum for Israeli high school students. The outcry from hard-liners in the opposition was not long in coming. Darwish is ‘anti-Zionist and an Israel-hater who calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity,’ complained one member of the right-wing Likud Party. His poetry, said a member of the even more conservative National Union Party, is racist. To impose it on Israeli students, said a member of the National Religious Party, is ‘a Bolshevik decision.’ Prime Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was not yet ready for Darwish’s poetry to be taught… ‘We cannot continue to grant legitimacy to the delegitimizing that is done to us,’ declared Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member of parliament. For Darwish, the dispute is like the rumbling of a distant thunderstorm. It is ominous, but there is nothing he can do about it. His poetry may have infiltrated Israel, but he cannot. Although he was born in a village in the Galilee region in what is now Israel, and was educated in Israeli schools and studied Zionist poetry, he was barred from re-entering the country after he left in 1970. He has lived in Cairo, Beirut and Paris, and served until 1993 as a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Long after other PLO figures were permitted to return home, the Israeli prohibition on Darwish remained. The ban was lifted only four years ago and then only to allow Darwish to live in the parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Palestinian control. The poet who once wrote that his homeland was a suitcase moved to the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank, about a 20-minute drive and a world away from Jerusalem. Except for one trip for a funeral, he was not allowed even to visit his aging mother in the Galilee. But three months ago, to his surprise, he received a six-month pass to enter Israel — a goodwill gesture toward the Palestinian leadership, he believes, from Barak. The pass expires in May. Darwish fears that the uproar over the teaching of his poetry in Israeli high school classes could jeopardize a renewal. ‘I feel embarrassed, really, by all this,’ he said. ‘The accusation is that I hate Jews. It’s not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don’t hate Jews.’”
“Palestinian poet: Mahmoud Darwish, 58, the poet whose lyrical writings have long been a touchstone of Palestinian passions, was banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly 30 years.” · Rina Castelnuovo / N.Y. Times News Service. A map beside it marks the zone of Israeli control and Ramallah.
The same week as the St. Petersburg report and a different news agency, with more of him in it. One sentence holds the whole case: his poetry may have infiltrated Israel, but he cannot. Except for a single trip to a funeral he was not permitted to visit his mother in the Galilee — and among the poems of his that the obituaries in this archive list as having been set to music and become anthems is the one called ‘I yearn for my mother’s bread.’ The two facts are printed in different American newspapers eight years apart and neither mentions the other.
The education minister is assailed for suggesting Mahmoud Darwish’s poems as optional reading
Susan Sachs, New York Times News Service, Ramallah
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Mahmoud Darwish, the poet whose lyrical writings have long been a touchstone of Palestinian national passions, was banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly 30 years… ‘The Arabs are always accused of being a nation of poetry,’ Darwish said Monday in an interview in his sunny office in a Ramallah arts center. ‘But it’s Israel that now is putting poetry in the eye of the storm.’… Prime Minister Ehud Barak weighed in, saying that Israel was not yet ready for Darwish’s poetry to be taught in the schools… The ban was lifted only four years ago and then only to allow Darwish to live in the parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Palestinian control. The poet, who once wrote that his homeland is a suitcase, lives in Ramallah on the West Bank. ‘I feel embarrassed, really, by all this,’ he said. ‘The accusation is that I hate Jews. It’s not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don’t hate Jews.’ Darwish, 58, has written poems that range from dreamy reflections on love to bitter longing for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was created in 1948. ‘I became addicted to exile,’ he said. ‘My language is exile. The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.’ One poem in particular, published in 1987, has rankled many Israelis. Called ‘Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,’ it is a tirade against unnamed interlopers in what Darwish calls ‘our land.’ ‘It is time for you to be gone,’ the poem reads. ‘Live wherever you like, but do not live among us. It is time for you to be gone. Die wherever you like, but do not die among us. For we have work to do in our land.’ Darwish has said that he did not mean, as some Israeli critics charged, that he wanted to evict the Jews from Israel. The poem, he said, was a call for Israel to leave the Palestinian territories it captured in the 1967 Middle East War.”
“DARWISH — Former PLO member”
The third printing of this row in the archive and the third headline, and the only one that prints both the poem and his answer to it. That makes the poem’s whole American life visible: quoted in a wire story in April 1988 as a demand for all of Israel; here in March 2000 with his own explanation that it meant leaving the territories taken in 1967; and again in 2008, in six obituaries, where Yitzhak Shamir is reported reading it aloud in the Knesset and a specialist says it was misunderstood and mistranslated. The correction was in American newspapers eight years before the obituaries repeated the charge.
An uproar over introduction of poet into curriculum
Israeli schools to offer works as optional reading
Samar Assad, Associated Press Writer, Ramallah
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — It has little to do with poetry, and a lot with politics. A decision by the Israeli education minister to introduce five works by the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, as optional reading in Israeli schools has incensed hawkish and religious lawmakers, who threatened Monday to try to bring down Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government over the verses. Barak, apparently fearing another defeat in parliament after his coalition crumbled last week in a key vote on peace with Syria, said time ‘is not ripe’ to teach Darwish, who as a PLO member was banned from entering Israel for 26 years. The emotional dispute over a few lines of poetry illustrates how hard it still is for Israelis and Palestinians to put aside resentments accumulated in a century of conflict.… Introducing Darwish into the curriculum is part of reforms begun by dovish Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid. ‘It is very important to know one another. Ignorance is not the best recipe for good neighborliness,’ Sarid said. The opposition Likud party accused Sarid of ‘legitimizing the negation of Zionism’ and submitted a motion of no confidence in the government. The religious Shas faction, a member of Barak’s coalition, hinted it might join Likud in next week’s vote on the motion, which would embarrass, but not topple the prime minister. Darwish said Monday the uproar shows how fearful many Israelis are of challenging long-held negative stereotypes about Palestinians. ‘The first step of real peace is to know the other side, its culture and creativity,’ Darwish said in an interview. Those who object to teaching his poetry in Israeli schools ‘cannot digest that the other side has culture, creativity and intellect,’ Darwish said. ‘They consider this to be a dangerous recognition of the other side.’”
“Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, speaks to The Associated Press in his office in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday.” · AP Photo
The fourth printing of this row held here, from a third news service, and the one that carries the sentence the rest of this section is circling. Objecting to his poems in a classroom, Darwish says, means being unable to digest that the other side has culture, creativity and intellect — and treating that recognition as dangerous. The number of poems at issue, given only in this version, is five, offered as optional reading.
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — In his tweed jacket and tortoise-shell glasses, Mahmoud Darwish doesn’t look very threatening. Sitting in his immaculate office sipping coffee recently, the acclaimed 58-year-old Palestinian poet talked about his search for new metaphors and his latest collection of love poems. Yet Darwish is in the middle of a political storm that threatens Israel’s government. The dispute erupted last week when Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, decided to add works by Darwish to Israel’s high school curriculum. What began as an attempt to better reflect the multicultural reality here quickly became a political liability for Prime Minister Ehud Barak.… In the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Darwish has been the subject of heated debates this week. Right-wing politicians have pored over his prolific body of work looking for ammunition. Quoting a line from a 1987 poem in which Darwish says ‘it is time for you to be gone,’ some have accused the poet of wanting to evict Jews from Israel. The uproar caught Darwish by surprise. He took no part in the decision to alter Israel’s curriculum and has watched the uproar unfold from the sidelines. ‘I don’t like scandals,’ he said. ‘I’m well-enough known in my field and I don’t want to be an obstacle to Israeli unity.’ ‘The storm makes me believe Barak is right,’ Darwish said with a wink. ‘Israel is not ready to listen to the culture of others. Israelis do not recognize Palestinians as cultural producers. They accept us as obstacles, as part of the landscape but nothing beyond that.’… According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, the controversy is ‘a combination of coalition politics and a battle in an ongoing cultural war that is raging in this country’… Sarid has refused to back down for the sake of the coalition. Fanning the flames of the religious party’s anger, Sarid told the Knesset that he had drafted the new literature curriculum on a Saturday — a desecration of the Sabbath. On a deeper level, the controversy is a struggle over Israel’s identity. ‘Geographically Israelis are living in the Middle East, but culturally they don’t want to be here,’ said Darwish, who was born in the Arab village of Barweh, now part of Israel, but was forced to live in exile for more than 20 years because he was a PLO member. Sarid was careful not to choose overly political poems as an introduction to Arabic poetry. But the attempt to open Israelis to Palestinian culture has been perceived as an affront to Zionism. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, Darwish’s poetry focused on the themes of dispossession, exile and resistance to Israeli occupation. ‘Nothing of our ancestors remains in us, but we want / the country of our morning coffee,’ he wrote in one poem. ‘I am the son / of simple words / I am the martyr of the map,’ another reads. ‘Return to me my hands / Return to me / my identity.’ Darwish said Israelis should not fear his poetry. Noting that as a high school student in Israel he was forced to read the works of Haim Bialik, the poetic voice of Zionism, Darwish said Bialik ‘did not change me into a Zionist. He did not even get me to like his poems.’”
“Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is surprised at the debate over teaching his poetry in Israeli schools. ‘I don’t like scandals,’ he says. ‘I’m well-enough known in my field and I don’t want to be an obstacle to Israeli unity.’” · Associated Press
The line that the 2008 obituaries reduce to one sentence, reported here while it was happening, with the poet interviewed in his own office. He had nothing to do with the decision and watched it from the sidelines. Asked about it, he says Israelis do not recognize Palestinians as cultural producers and accept them as obstacles, as part of the landscape and nothing beyond that — which is this section’s subject, stated by him, in a Florida newspaper, eight years before he died. He also points out that being made to read the poet of Zionism at school did not turn him into a Zionist, and did not even get him to like the poems.
Arafat rejected $30 billion for refugee relocation, aide says
By Ibrahim Barzak, The Associated Press, Gaza City
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected an American plan to set up a $30 billion international fund to resettle refugees, a top Palestinian official said Thursday. Salim Zanoun, chairman of the PLO Central Council, said the offer came during last month’s summit at the Camp David presidential retreat outside Washington. He said it was part of American pressure on Arafat to compromise on the refugee issue. The Palestinians are demanding that millions of refugees be allowed to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. Rejecting the offer, Arafat ‘told the Americans that the issue of refugees is non-negotiable,’ Zanoun said. In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher declined to comment. Israel is willing to allow a few thousand Palestinian refugees to be reunited with their families in Israel. The others would settle in a Palestinian state or in countries where they now live. Palestinians fled during the 1948 war that followed Israel’s creation. They were confined to refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many still live with their descendants. Some of the camps came under Israeli control in 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
“Yasser Arafat won’t negotiate on refugees.”
Attributed to an aide. The headline is the refusal; what was being refused — resettlement in a Palestinian state or in the countries where the refugees now live — is further down the column.
CONTESTED HOLY SITES · Arafat’s refusal of plan dims peace hopes · Palestinian leader and Barak say they’re still committed to reaching an accord
By Barry Schweid, Associated Press writer
“UNITED NATIONS — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has rejected a proposal by President Clinton for control of Muslim and Jewish holy sites in East Jerusalem, but Clinton refused to abandon his effort to bring about a Mideast peace accord. Although Arafat’s action dimmed already fading hopes for an agreement, Clinton directed his senior mediator, Dennis B. Ross, to keep talking to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak are still committed to concluding a settlement, and ‘they understand the time is short,’ Clinton said.”
“Revered ground: Nuns climb the stairs to the site of the crucifixion of Jesus at Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat both said, after meeting with President Clinton at the U.N. Millennium Summit in New York, that they could not yield any further ground, especially in Jerusalem, the holy city claimed by Israelis and Palestinians as a capital.” Jacqueline Larma / The Associated Press.
Three weeks before the second intifada. The headline puts the failure on one man’s refusal; the line under it says both leaders are still committed, which is the same fact arranged the other way. The caption is the neat version of the whole problem: a city claimed by Israelis and Palestinians as a capital, with both claims given the same verb and neither given a history. The photograph is of nuns on a staircase.
“UNITED NATIONS — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has rejected a proposal by President Clinton for control of Muslim and Jewish holy sites in East Jerusalem, but Clinton refused to abandon his effort to bring about a Mideast peace accord. Although Arafat’s action dimmed already fading hopes for an agreement, Clinton directed his senior mediator, Dennis B. Ross, to keep talking to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak are still committed to concluding a settlement and ‘they understand the time is short,’ Clinton said. Arafat has reserved the right to proclaim Palestinian statehood without Israel’s blessing on Sept. 13, though he has hinted the PLO’s top policy-making body, which will make the final decision, is likely to delay such a proclamation until later this year… Even if Arafat accepted the proposal, east Jerusalem’s future would still be undecided. At the Camp David summit in July, Barak offered the Palestinians local control of some neighborhoods and suburbs, but Arafat rejected the overture, insisting on sovereignty over the entire part of the city Israel won from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war.”
“Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, left, shakes hands with President of Yemen during their meeting at the United Nations Millennium Summit.” Associated Press photo.
The same Barry Schweid dispatch the Columbian ran the same day (CP-2000-002), under a different headline and a different photograph. Here it is a transaction — Clinton proposal rejected by Arafat — and the picture is Arafat shaking hands at a summit. There it was Arafat’s refusal of plan dims peace hopes, over a photograph of nuns climbing a staircase in the Old City. Neither headline carries the second half of the first sentence, which is that Clinton refused to give up. The last paragraph is the one worth reading twice: it says Barak offered local control of some neighborhoods and suburbs of a city Israel won from Jordan, which is a lot of the argument in one sentence.
Sept. 30: Clashes erupt in West Bank and Gaza Strip
Fourteen Palestinians killed by Israeli fire, including 12-year-old Mohammed Aldura, whose death is captured by a television cameraman and broadcast around the world.
Correction: {'note': 'uncaptioned; from a 2000 second-intifada chronology'}
A PALESTINIAN MOTHER flees with her children after a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter at the port of Gaza City on Thursday
“A PALESTINIAN MOTHER flees with her children after a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter at the port of Gaza City on Thursday. The Israeli Army hit several Palestinian targets in retaliation for the killings of two Israeli soldiers by a group of Palestinians.” AP photos.
Gore-Lieberman will likely support genocide in Palestine
Bill A. Cobb, Brighton
“Gore-Lieberman will likely support genocide in Palestine. I have not heard one word, whether from citizens or editorials, about Joseph Lieberman’s position on the Palestine occupation issue. After seeing the photo sequence of the 13-year-old boy shot to death in his father’s arms, it makes me think that the U.S. foreign aid program (both money and diplomatic support) is responsible for this insanity. I wonder where Lieberman’s loyalty is on this issue: balanced for the security of Israel versus the sovereignty of Palestine, or imbalanced in a position towards eminent domain boldly taken by Israel. I can’t help but feel that those supporting Al Gore also wind up supporting the dismantling and genocide of Palestinian civilization (and perhaps others). I’ve noticed a strong U.S. English accent in practically all interviews of Israeli settlers in Palestine, making me believe Americans are directly responsible for the problems there now. If Bloomfield Hills residents drove out your way, looked around and decided to take over your backyard, on the grounds that their grandfathers wrote a book about it, would you sit back and allow it to happen, would you have a little Internet chat-room discussion about it to get consensus among participants, or would you resist up to the point of blowing them to kingdom come? I think the first two options have been tried and failed. I have fear that round three is in the works. Where do Gore and Lieberman stand? Why aren’t more Democrats speaking out on this issue? I think I know the answer.”
An election-season letter in a Michigan paper, three weeks after the death of Muhammad al-Durrah, which it refers to only as “the photo sequence of the 13-year-old boy shot to death in his father’s arms.” It runs between a letter about Nader and one about executions in Texas.
· The State Journal-Register · Springfield · page 1
Israel has no ‘partners for peace’
George Will
“JERUSALEM — Since 1948, when Israel was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land carelessly called ‘the Arab world,’ the conflict has been not about what land Israel should occupy but whether it should occupy any land. The conflict has been constantly violent but now, in today’s world climate of appeasement, the Palestinians’ violence is self-legitimizing: The assumption always is that they must have been provoked. Today, and as usual, the problem is not that Israel is being provocative, but that Israel’s being is provocative. And now the potentially lethal asymmetry in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this: Israel’s government desperately wants to end the conflict, the Palestinian Authority fiercely wants to win it.”
The phrase in a headline in October 2000, in quotation marks.
JERUSALEM — Israeli combat helicopters battered a West Bank village Wednesday to rescue wounded Israeli soldiers trapped by Palestinian fire, and five Palestinians were killed in a battle in the Gaza Strip. The clashes did not scuttle plans for the highest level meeting since fighting began 35 days ago.
“A Palestinian child takes cover next to a police officer behind a wall as Israeli helicopters open fire with machine guns during clashes in the West Bank on Wednesday.” Associated Press.
Karin Laub filed from Jabalia in 1987. Thirteen years later the byline is hers again; her name is on clippings here through 2017.
Amounah Al Deges, the mother of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Deges, weeps over her dead son at the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza city
“Amounah Al Deges, the mother of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Deges, weeps over her dead son at the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza city. Al Deges was shot and killed Saturday during clashes with Israeli soldiers.” Associated Press
“Amounah Al Deges, the mother of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Deges, weeps over her dead son at the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza city. Al Deges was shot and killed Saturday during clashes with Israeli soldiers.” Associated Press
A photograph and its caption, and the caption names both of them: the boy who was killed and his mother.
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli soldiers gunned down a Palestinian activist Tuesday, witnesses said, the fourth West Bank leader killed in a little over a month — all considered political assassinations by the Palestinians. The Israeli military refused to comment on the killing of Yousef Abu Swayeh, nor would it confirm that the 27-year-old was even on its wanted list. But Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh told Israel radio earlier in the day that the only way to stop Palestinian attacks on Israelis is to ‘strike at those who are leading the shooting cells and their deputies.’ The killing in the West Bank town of Bethlehem came as Prime Minister Ehud Barak, beginning his re-election campaign, said he hoped conditions would soon be right for resuming peace negotiations with the Palestinians. First, he said, violence must be substantially reduced… The violence, which has left more than 310 people dead, and Barak’s response to it, are at the center of the campaign… An activist in the Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Abu Swayeh was gunned down in front of his home in a village near Bethlehem, witnesses said, demanding anonymity. They said Israeli soldiers fired at him from a road under Israeli control and hit him with 17 bullets. At least three other regional Palestinian leaders have been killed since the current unrest began. Israel took responsibility for two of the killings. On Nov. 9, not far from where Abu Swayeh died, Israeli helicopters fired at a car carrying the local Fatah commander, Hussein Abayat, killing him and two women bystanders. In Cairo, Egypt, the chairman of an international inquiry committee appointed by President Clinton said the group will not limit itself to reading reports and will gather evidence on the ground to determine the causes of the violence between Israel and the Palestinians. ‘We’ll receive information from the widest possible range of sources and we will make the appropriate judgment at the appropriate time on what is necessary,’ said former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell.”
The witnesses are quoted anonymously and the paper says why they asked for it. The two women killed beside Hussein Abayat are counted but not named.
Palestinians don’t want to give up ‘right of return’
Saeed Ahmed, sahmed@ajc.com
“Saber Ayoub was 23, newly married and about to take over the family farm when his family was forced out of the village of Safad in northern Palestine by advancing Israeli troops. He thought the family would return in a week or two. Fifty-three years later, Ayoub is still waiting. Now a frail 76, the Palestinian exile, who settled in Atlanta in 1989 after decades in refugee camps in Lebanon, still speaks longingly of his family home — where the vineyards produced the sweetest grapes and wildflowers cast the hills in a brilliant yellow. His desire to return has never wavered, even as the 150 acres of land that once constituted his farm has given way to Jewish settlements. ‘I have moved from place to place, stateless, all my life, and all I ask for is a graveyard in the land that I call home,’ says Ayoub, the tears welling in his eyes, ‘but even that has become a political issue.’ And so it goes for the nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees, whose families fled or were driven from their homes during Israel’s 1948 war of independence and subsequent fighting. Hundreds settled in metro Atlanta, but the exact number is difficult to come by. Most had to assume the citizenship of another country as Palestine is not officially recognized as a nation. Some carry rusty keys to homes destroyed long ago, others yellowed land deeds or faded photographs. As Israeli and Palestinian diplomats try to hammer out a peace deal, the fate of these refugees is proving to be one of the biggest obstacles. To such displaced Palestinians, sovereignty over the disputed Jerusalem shrine the Muslims call Haram Al-Sharif means nothing if they have to trade away their ‘right of return.’ ‘That’s like spitting in our faces,’ says Ayoub’s son Nabil. ‘The Israeli position on the refugee situation has been that “the old will die and the young will forget,” but the names of our towns and where we belong has been fed to us with the milk of our mothers nursed us with.’ While Palestinians say their right to return is well-grounded in international law — they cite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Fourth Geneva Convention and United Nations Resolution 194, which mandates that refugees wishing to return to their homes be permitted to do so — Israel has resisted. To Israelis, opening the door to all Palestinian refugees would not only place an unbearable economic strain on their country but would result in what Israel calls ‘demographic suicide.’ Israelis fear an influx of Palestinians would dilute the Jewish character of Israel and, with the country’s population already 20 percent Arab, reignite the 5 million Jews to minority status. ‘The very nature of the state of Israel is in jeopardy if all Palestinian refugees are given an unlimited ability to live in Israel,’ says Kenneth Stein, professor of Middle Eastern history at Emory University. But Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the refugees have a fundamental right that ought to be granted. ‘The rights of refugees is one that is upheld so vociferously by the international community that we even went to war with Yugoslavia, a sovereign state,’ says Ibish. ‘We didn’t buy into Serbia’s ethno-national ambition, but somehow in this instance, we find this argument compelling.’ The Palestinian refugee crisis has had as many phases as Israel has had wars. About 700,000 Palestinians fled in 1948, and more waves of refugees followed the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli conflicts. Among those living in the worst conditions are the 370,000 refugees marooned in Lebanon, where Ayoub lived for 41 years before moving to the United States… Following the assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel, members of the South Lebanon Army — vowing to avenge his death — slaughtered 7,000 civilians in a 36-hour rampage in Shatila and a second camp, Sabra. The Ayoub family escaped unharmed, and soon after, Ayoub’s eldest son, Nabil, made his way to America, graduated from college and landed a job as a software engineer. The father followed in 1989. Now sitting in a friend’s house in south Cobb, Ayoub swaps stories with other refugee families. His son Nabil is now 33 and has never set foot in his hometown. Unlike his father, his emphasis is on the ‘right’ more than on an actual ‘return’ to Palestine. He doesn’t want to live under Israeli sovereignty now that he has made a life for himself in another land, he says. But still, he insists, he ought to be given that option. ‘Until that dream is reached, I will pass on to my child the dream my father has willed to me,’ says the younger Ayoub.”
“Saber Ayoub (left), who settled in Atlanta in 1989, visits with the family of another Palestinian refugee, Hany El-Nazzer (second from right). El-Nazzer, who came to the United States in 1977, lives in Austell with his U.S.-born wife, Pat, holding Amin, 3, and their son Ismail, 9.” Andy Sharp / Staff
A father and son in Atlanta disagreeing about what the right of return means: the father wants a graveyard in Safad, the son wants the right without the return. Both are named, and so is a second refugee family photographed with them. The Israeli objection is quoted at equal length.
Palestinians Deserve Rights, Including Right To Return
Mazin Qumsiyeh
“Recent calls for the Palestinians to abandon their right to go home should not be acceptable to anyone with elemental knowledge of legality and morality. The British ‘mandate’ to fulfill Lord Balfour’s promise of a Jewish homeland in populated Palestine (which had a minority Jewish presence of 7 percent at the time) was implemented by force without consulting the wishes of the Palestinian inhabitants. Jewish land ownership at the eve of the British-inspired, American-pushed declaration of dividing Palestine into a ‘Jewish state’ (55 percent of the land) and an ‘Arab state’ (45 percent) in 1947 was less than 8 percent of all privately held lands. From that time forward, Zionists have methodically altered the character of the land and the people. As a result of sometimes ingenious and other times brutal ways of ethnic cleansing, over 95 percent of Palestinian families (Muslim and Christian) have lost lands or homes to Zionists. This is not a Palestinian story but a fact attested to by Israeli historians themselves and in the published words and documents of Israeli leaders. Israel/Palestine now has about 4.5 million Jews and 3.7 million Christians and Muslims. Of the 8 million Palestinians in the world, more than 5 million are refugees or ‘displaced persons.’ A quarter of Israel’s 1.2 million ‘Gentile’ citizens are considered by the Israeli legal system as ‘present absentees’ and their land is confiscated. Lands and homes vacated by Christian and Muslim refugees and ‘absentees’ are considered state property and turned over to the Jewish agency that administers the land and leases it only to Jews. Palestinians are treated much worse than blacks were in South Africa under apartheid. Incomplete success of ethnic cleansing led Israeli governments to attempt to isolate Palestinians in bantustans (homelands) and to ensure that refugees never return (3,000 were killed trying to ‘infiltrate’ back before fences were put up). The 30-year-old Israeli-American solution to the Palestinian ‘problem’ was reinvented at Oslo and re-presented lately by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton as final deals to Palestinians. Modeled after apartheid in South Africa, it envisions no return of refugees and disjointed segments of a demilitarized ‘Palestine,’ without control of natural resources or borders surrounded by the Israeli army and settlements. But even if Arafat agrees to this sham ‘peace,’ it cannot last. Palestinian refugees know their return is an inalienable, individual and collective right supported by international law and morality. Research has also shown return to be feasible and not a threat to other. On the contrary, no lasting peace can occur without it; annulling it would set a precedent in international law. Israel also needs to evolve from a Jewish state to a state of its citizens. It is only logical to expect that the current Palestinian citizens of Israel (and secular Israelis in general) are not thrilled to stand in awe at a national anthem that talks about Jewish yearning for a homeland. They are not keen about a state that has no constitution to protect Gentiles but rather has specific laws to discriminate against them and insure Jewish-only settlements continue to flourish while Arab towns and villages are destroyed or strangled. They are not content with an Israeli law of return giving automatic citizenship to any Jew in the world who desires it while denying return to people born and raised there for generations simply for being Gentile (many of them relatives of those Palestinians remaining and who have not seen each other in 52 years). Why does the U.S. government give more money to Israel than it gives to any state in the union? And why do we fund the Israeli military oppression of Palestinian Muslims and Christians?… They still prefer to talk about everything from geopolitics to religion but not address basic human rights and true coexistence in equality. It is time for U.S. citizens to demand a change.”
A Palestinian academic given the op-ed page. The paper identifies him: director of cytogenetics services at the Yale University School of Medicine, and chairman of the media committee of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition.
“Even familiar terminology is being cast aside. In a move approved by Secretary of State Colin Powell, the phrase ‘peace process’ is being jettisoned in favor of specific references. ‘There is no official term to describe our efforts to achieve Middle East peace,’ a State Department memorandum says.”
A State Department memorandum about what not to call something, reported as news. The photograph beside it is captioned: Secretary of State Colin Powell approved a move to jettison the phrase ‘peace process.’ The main story on the page is Karin Laub’s Sharon vows to keep Jerusalem — her third appearance in this collection, after Jabalia in 1987 and the naming story of 2013.
“Palestinian police and civilians go through the rubble left behind Friday after Israeli bulldozers withdrew from Deir El Balah in the southern Gaza Strip.” Elizabeth Dalziel, The Associated Press.
The photograph and its headline run above the fold; the story itself is not part of this clipping.
Seven words. Three dead, a place, and a protest. Nobody kills them: they are killed in the protest, as though the protest were the thing that did it. This is the sentence shape the archive finds in 1989 and again in 2022.
In deepest incursion yet, Israeli forces raze Palestinian homes, police station
Jamie Tarabay, AP
DEIR EL BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli bulldozers flattened a police station and five homes Friday in the deepest foray into Palestinian territory since field commanders last week were given a free hand to carry out such retaliatory raids. In Jerusalem, a pipe bomb exploded in a flowerbed on the promenade leading to the Jaffa Gate of the walled Old City, and two Polish tourists were slightly injured, police said… In the past seven days, there have been more than two dozen Israeli incursions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip in which Israeli troops razed 60 homes and hundreds of acres of farmland, Palestinian police said. Four Palestinians have been killed and dozens wounded in the raids. Palestinians accused Israel of systematically slicing away at the Palestinian areas. “We might now be witnessing the gradual undoing of the peace process,” said Palestinian commentator Ghassan Khatib. Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said he had no intention of retaking land handed to the Palestinians in interim peace accords. He said the incursions are short-term and aimed at achieving security goals. The army would not say how many raids it has carried out.
“Palestinians who had been going through the rubble of destroyed homes duck for cover as Israeli soldiers fire in their direction, at Deir El-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip, Friday. Israeli tanks and a bulldozer made their deepest penetration into Palestinian-controlled territory yet, demolishing a Palestinian police outpost and five houses after a grenade attack on an Israeli military post early Friday.” AP.
Correction: {'note': 'Resolved. The microfilm caption gave 1988-07-21. The clipping names Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as Defense Minister and refers to land handed to the Palestinians in interim peace accords, neither of which was true in 1988. Dated here to 2001-07-21.'}
“Once again, after a few years of relatively balanced treatment of the State of Israel and other Jewish concerns, the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and pro-Arab/Islamic majority at the United Nations has returned to its familiar Orwellianism… the infamous libel that ‘Zionism is racism’ has reared its ugly head in statements by the so-called ‘moderate’ leaders of Iran, who have urged its readoption at the upcoming United Nations World Conference on Racism.… The resolution remained on the official U.N. books until it was rescinded in 1991 at the urging of then President George H.W. Bush, who said the resolution ‘mocks the principles upon which the U.N. was founded.’… Chaim Herzog came to the lectern to publicly rip to shreds a copy of the resolution which ranks alongside the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the anti-Jewish blood libels of history as among the most vicious anti-Semitic actions of all time.… The infamous ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution belongs on the ash-heap and in the dustbin of history.”
The page this runs on is an argument with itself. The column is illustrated by a cartoon of the cover of Orwell’s 1984 in which the Party slogans read WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH and ZIONISM IS RACISM. Directly beneath it the paper prints a letter from Hedy Epstein, who grew up in Nazi Germany, objecting to the paper’s own repeated hook-nosed caricatures of Yasser Arafat and comparing them to Der Stuermer. The editor answers in two lines: your point is well-taken, we will attempt to be more respectful in our future cartoons.
“The delegates haven’t even arrived in Durban, and already a huge slugfest is in progress over what subjects should or should not be discussed. The Europeans are demanding that there be no discussion of the compensation against gypsies… The Indians insist on avoiding talk about the caste system… Portugal, Spain, France and Great Britain want to derail any talk about reparations for colonial oppression… And the United States government is threatening to boycott the conference unless it receives assurances that there’ll be no talk about reparations for slavery or revived efforts to equate Zionism with racism.… ‘Zionism as racism is ridiculous, but the government delegation should show up and register its opposition, rather than pout and stay at home’… [And, against:] ‘it took several days of incessant bickering during the drafting of the agenda in Geneva to decide whether ‘Holocaust’ should be capitalized in reference to the Nazi extermination of Jews. But that’s probably tied into the most blatantly discriminatory of the agenda items, the one that equates Zionism with racism. That hateful canard, which keeps resurfacing at the United Nations whenever the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grows more bitter, is in direct contradiction of another agenda item that condemns anti-Semitism directed at Jews. Go figure.’”
Two syndicated columnists set against each other on the same page a fortnight before Durban opens, one arguing the United States should attend and object, the other that the conference is doomed by the length of its own agenda. Both take it as given that the formula is the thing that will wreck it.
“The forum’s document brands ‘Israel as a racist apartheid state’ and calls for an end to the ‘ongoing, Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes, including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.’… Shimon Peres said the gathering ‘is an outburst of hate and of anti-Semitism.’ ‘It appears like a camp that has neither understanding nor tolerance nor a message for the future.’ Shawqi Issa, spokesman for the Arab caucus at the forum, thought the document was ‘a very good one.’ ‘It’s just facts. The Israeli government is a racist government . . . and the Israeli government is an apartheid government. These are facts, and we can prove it,’ he said. Mary Robinson… said she regretted the language equating Zionism with racism. Palestinians have the right to protest what they believe to be their victimization, but ‘it is not appropriate that text emerged that revictimizes and is hurtful in itself,’ said Robinson. ‘Israel has committed serious crimes against the Palestinian people, but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide and wrong to equate Zionism with racism,’ said Reed Brody, the New York-based group’s advocacy director… Black U.S. lawmakers attending the conference expressed disappointment Sunday that criticism of Israel has overshadowed efforts to raise the question of reparations to Africa and African-Americans for slavery and colonialism.”
The jump page of the same dispatch, carrying everything the front page did not have room for: the Palestinian who says it is a statement of fact, the human rights director who says it is inaccurate, the UN commissioner who regrets it, and the American congressional delegation watching a conference about slavery reparations get taken over.
“DURBAN, South Africa — Pro-Palestinian groups scored a victory Sunday when a human rights forum coinciding with the World Conference Against Racism equated Zionism with racism and called for international sanctions against Israel. But Jewish, Christian and international human rights groups rejected the forum’s final resolution, which was presented to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to be included in a final declaration by the U.N. conference… Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was also decried as colonialism, a potent political label in much of the world. The forum brought together 166 non-governmental rights groups from around the world… The forum also recommended that the United Nations reinstate a resolution equating Zionism with racism, the establishment of a U.N. committee to prosecute Israeli war crimes and the complete isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Mordechai Yedid speaks at a news conference at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, on Sunday.
Ten years after the repeal, a parallel forum of 166 organizations votes to put the resolution back. The caption calls Mordechai Yedid Israel’s foreign minister; he was the head of its delegation.
“NEW YORK (AP) — Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Columbia University professor Edward Said, an outspoken advocate for the Palestinian cause, have won awards from the Lannan Foundation. Darwish, who writes in Arabic, will receive the foundation’s $350,000 award for cultural freedom. Said, a prominent literary scholar and a former adviser to Yasser Arafat, will receive the foundation’s $200,000 literary award for lifetime achievement. The foundation, based in Santa Fe, N.M., announced the awards Thursday through David Lerner, a spokesman in New York. The award to Said is the first by the foundation for a work of nonfiction. The lifetime achievement award, which honors writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature, is the largest monetary prize for literary achievement in the world after the Nobel Prize, which comes with a $900,000 award. Patrick Lannan, who heads the family-run foundation, said Darwish and Said were chosen long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Lannan Foundation describes itself as dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity. In a telephone interview, Lannan described Darwish as ‘arguably, the most prominent contemporary poet writing in Arabic in the world. We felt his poetry was important and deserved wider translation into English. We wanted to call attention to his social conscience.’ Said, an English professor, was honored because ‘he founded a theory for literary criticism and literary evaluation and there’s not a university professor in the Western world who doesn’t know his work,’ Lannan said. Said, who is an American citizen, sparked a controversy last year when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.”
Six weeks after 11 September 2001, an American foundation gives its largest prizes to a Palestinian poet and a Palestinian professor, and the man who runs it tells a reporter they were chosen long before the attacks. Nobody asked him about a connection; the sentence is there because the connection is assumed. The archive also holds this poet’s photograph illustrating a review of this professor’s book fifteen years earlier.
· The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia · page 1
Sales of first Palestinian beer go flat
This Mideast brew of hope was popular before the renewed violence.
Michael Matza, Inquirer Staff Writer, Taybeh
“TAYBEH, West Bank — They said Nadim Khoury was crazy, back in 1994, when he staked his future on a microbrewery in an Arab land where devout Muslims don’t drink and alcohol advertising is prohibited. Clearly off his rocker, they said, amid suicide bombers and restricted borders, when he sank $1.5 million into a West Bank plant whose success hinged on the prospect of peace in the Middle East. But Khoury, 41, general director of the Taybeh Brewing Co., made history with the first Palestinian beer. His was a business built on hope, and when peace seemed more than a mirage, business was good. But a year of violence has soured both hope and prosperity here… And as thousands of expatriate Palestinians began streaming back to help with the birth to a nation, Khoury was a bright example that not every Palestinian was a penniless refugee living a desultory, angry life. ‘We got our approval from the Israeli [Civil Administration] before they pulled out. Yasir Arafat gave us his blessing. When we had peace, we had lots of business,’ Khoury recalled last week inside his dank, 10,000-square-foot brew house, amid the gurgle of gleaming stainless-steel tanks and a picture of himself with Palestinian leader Arafat. Taybeh is a preservative-free brew of Belgian malt and Bavarian hops mixed with local springwater. Khoury named it for his village of 1,200 Christian Arabs in the ancient, terraced Samaritan hills between Ramallah and Jericho, and the handcrafted ale grew to such success that even upscale shops and bars in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were starting to stock it. Taybeh, which in Arabic means nice and delicious, was consumed in the secular cafes of Ramallah and sold under the counter in some shops during Ramadan, the Muslim holiday month. It was a staple on the menu at the legendary American Colony Hotel in Arab East Jerusalem, a frequently requested choice at the casino in Palestinian-controlled Jericho, and an off-hours favorite of the Marines assigned to guard the U.S. Consulate. (The refrigerator in the soldiers’ house wears a jaunty Taybeh bumper sticker. ‘If you’ve had it — smile,’ reads the sticker, replete with grinning happy face.) A small but growing number of peace-camp Israelis smiled on Taybeh. A West Bank rabbi even pronounced it kosher. Now, more than a year of intifadah violence has drained its success to the dregs. ‘Business isn’t bad, it’s terrible. And it’s getting worse every day,’ Khoury said. ‘Making business in this country is like a nightmare.’ From a once-high capacity of 5,000 barrels a year, the brewery is down to 1,000… Where Khoury once supplied 63 hotels in Jerusalem, he now supplies only three… To keep one of his Tel Aviv restaurant clients happy, Khoury said he’s had to mask the Taybeh label by wrapping layers of white tape around the kegs. The restaurant sells Taybeh on tap but identifies it only as the ‘house brand’ to avoid angering Israelis who don’t want to drink a Palestinian beer. ‘It hurts me to do it, because I’m really proud of my beer,’ said Khoury. ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ Khoury attended Hellenic College in the Boston area, where he worked in a liquor store and dabbled in homemade brews during the beer boom of the ’80s and ’90s. From Massachusetts he headed to the University of California at Davis, where he got a brew-master’s degree… Yet Khoury remains optimistic… ‘If peace doesn’t take place in this region, the whole world will be on fire. We haven’t seen peace yet,’ he said. ‘But we have seen pieces of peace. We just have to be patient and keep on hoping.’”
A man taping over his own label so that the people drinking it will not know who made it. Photo credit: Evelyn Hockstein / For The Inquirer.
Leila Khaled, the ‘deadly beauty,’ says bin Laden does not represent her people’s cause
By Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle, Amman
“AMMAN, Jordan — Palestinian girls would carry her photograph and dream of being a revolutionary. Men would swoon at her looks, amazed that a woman so striking could use rifles and grenades. In the Arab world 30 years ago, Leila Khaled was treated like a celebrity for hijacking jetliners, a practice that led to a slew of sensational labels, including ‘deadly beauty.’ These days, Khaled is a 57-year-old mother of two who leads a relatively quiet life in Amman… ‘I feel sorry for the innocent people who were killed (on Sept. 11),’ says Khaled. ‘They were not involved. By comparison, when we hijacked planes, it was very well known that we wanted to keep (the passengers and crews) safe. We declared that.’ ‘Bin Laden,’ she says, ‘has no contacts with any Palestinian group… The Palestinian issue is important to Arabs and Muslims. That’s why he used it. But, practically speaking, he hasn’t done anything for the Palestinians.’… A year later, Khaled, after having plastic surgery to disguise her looks, boarded an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York… Khaled concedes that Israel has a right to exist within certain borders. But she insists that a state of Palestine must have East Jerusalem as its capital… The mother of boys 19 and 16, and the wife of a physiotherapist, Khaled says she doesn’t worry about her safety.”
Leila Khaled is a 57-year-old mother of two living in Jordan. Thirty years ago, she was a celebrity terrorist who hijacked her first plane in 1969 for the Palestinian cause.
Thirty-one years after eight American papers ran one photographer’s account of a day with her under eight headlines about how she looked, a paper writes the phrase down: a slew of sensational labels, including deadly beauty. Four paragraphs later, in a subordinate clause, it records that before the second hijacking she had surgery to change her face.
Peres: Declaration of Palestinian state could start talks
The Associated Press
“In new violence, Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip killed a mentally disabled Palestinian man and critically wounded a 13-year-old boy, Palestinian security officials said… In the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a mentally disabled and deaf Palestinian man walking a few hundred yards from an Israeli watchtower east of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, Palestinian security officials and relatives said. The army said soldiers fired only after the man ignored their warnings in Arabic and Hebrew not to come any closer. Soldiers also fired warning shots, the army said.… Near the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was critically wounded when he was shot in the head by Israeli troops, Palestinian witnesses and doctors said. The boy was watching a soccer game at the time, the witnesses said. The army said the youth appeared to soldiers to be at least 16 and was carrying a large bag as he tampered with a security fence… Soldiers warned him and then shot toward his lower body, the army said… ‘Maybe the best thing to re-open negotiations is the declaration of a Palestinian state. Maybe,’ Peres said. ‘I want to check it. I don’t reject it immediately.’”
He was deaf. The army’s account of why he was shot is that he did not respond to spoken warnings in two languages. The paper prints both sentences, one after the other, and draws no line between them. He is not named. Two paragraphs on, a boy shot in the head is answered by an army statement that soldiers fired toward his lower body. All of it runs above a furniture advertisement, fifty to seventy per cent off, just in time for the holidays.
OPINION · Friday, December 7, 2001 · Arafat has never been a ‘partner in peace’
Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Media Services. Cartoon by Mike Shelton, The Orange County Register.
“Say you’re having an argument with your neighbor. He thinks your fence extends a couple feet onto his property. You agree in principle to talk about moving the fence. But you insist that before you both sit down to hash things out, he’s got to stop kneeing you in the groin… Now, doesn’t that sound reasonable? That, in effect, was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s so-called ‘hard line position’… The 1993 Oslo peace accords identified Arafat, ludicrously, as a ‘partner in a peace.’… So Israel gave Arafat control of 98 percent of the Palestinian population and authority over Gaza, the West Bank and other strategically critical areas… The Israelis are systematically destroying the symbols of Arafat’s authority: his beloved helicopters, his airport, his police stations. The message: what Israel grants a partner in peace, it can take from an enemy in war.”
Editorial cartoon, three panels. A figure in a keffiyeh and a figure in a suit with a Star of David on the lapel face each other, pointing. In the second panel the suited figure reaches across. In the third the keffiyeh is lettered HAMAS and the word SMACK! runs across the panel. Signed Mike Shelton, The Orange County Register.
The phrase this archive follows for thirty years, in an opinion headline, with the quotation marks placed around partner in peace to mark it as someone else’s idea. What the column argues, in its own closing line, is that the relationship was always conditional: “what Israel grants a partner in peace, it can take from an enemy in war.” The opening analogy makes the land a fence dispute between neighbors and the occupation a knee to the groin, in that order. Above it, a cartoon whose third panel replaces the man with the word HAMAS.
“It was quite easy for the Israel lobby and our misguided media to mislead the American public into believing that the Palestinians were the victimizers rather than the victims in the recent spate of violence. Where was the media the week before the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa? Why didn’t the media show the body parts of the Palestinian children who were blown to pieces by an Israeli shell in Gaza?… The media needs to constantly remind its readers and viewers that the Israeli occupation is the root cause of the violence that takes place in Palestine. Is it not odd that the word ‘occupation’ seems to be vanishing from the vernacular of reporters, editors, columnists and anchormen?”
A reader in Yorktown, Virginia, making a point about American newspapers in an American newspaper.
“BEIT JALA, West Bank — It was a friendship that defied Mideast odds — between a Brooklyn-born architect who came to Israel in the 1960s, led by Zionist convictions, and a Palestinian hotel owner in the West Bank whose brother was a hijacker killed by Israel in the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation. But Avi Boaz and Jamal al-Arja remained close through decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sharing meals, vacationing together and attending the weddings of each others’ children — until the 71-year-old Boaz was killed Tuesday by Palestinian militants. ‘If we were born as a family, we couldn’t have loved each other more,’ the 65-year-old al-Arja said Wednesday, his eyes red-rimmed from crying. Only a day earlier, the two men had shared lunch at al-Arja’s Everest hotel and restaurant on a hill in the Palestinian town of Beit Jala — as they had for most days in the past 33 years. Sometime after the meal, Boaz, who was building a home in the nearby Jewish West Bank settlement of Har Gilo, drove off with al-Arja’s son Bashir to shop for building supplies and furniture. During the trip, the two encountered a Palestinian police checkpoint. Four armed Palestinian civilians stopped Boaz’s silver Rover convertible, dragged Bashir out of the car and took off with Boaz. The police did not intervene, and the journey ended at a soccer field in nearby Beit Sahour, where the gunmen pumped 20 bullets into the windshield of the Rover, killing Boaz. Boaz had unknowingly got caught up in one of the many unexpected twists of the conflict — a day earlier, a local militia leader elsewhere in the West Bank had been killed by a bomb widely attributed to Israel, and Palestinian gunmen clamored for revenge. The Al Aqsa Brigades, to which the militia leader belonged, announced in a belief Tuesday that it killed Boaz in a revenge attack. Boaz’ son-in-law, Evyatar Cohen, said Boaz never cared about politics. ‘For him, there weren’t any borders. He would just go (to the West Bank) and come back. He was always sure that because he was an American citizen, he was safe in every place,’ he said… Two years ago, Boaz and his U.S.-born wife Eve, who died this month of cancer, went on a 15-day trip to Egypt with Jamal al-Arja and his wife, Nawal. There were also trips to Jordan and picnics in the West Bank hills. When Boaz’ daughter got married two years ago, the al-Arja clan filled an entire table in the reception hall. Boaz was a regular at Beit Jala weddings, often driving the newlyweds to church in his Rover… However, Cohen and her husband said they would never set foot in the West Bank again. ‘If they (the Palestinians) killed him, then it can happen for normal relations between us. We need to separate and that’s it,’ said Evyatar Cohen. Makram al-Arja, 30, said he believed peace would come one day. ‘How much longer can they (Israelis and Palestinians) shoot at each other?’ he wondered.”
Jamal al-Arja’s brother was among the hostages Israeli commandos rescued at Entebbe in 1976; Avi Boaz’s brother was a hijacker killed in the same operation. The two men ate lunch together most days for the next thirty-three years. The parenthesis in Makram al-Arja’s question is the paper’s own.
Explodes, in a headline about a siege, and the thing exploded is hopes. The word for the actual explosions of that month does not appear. The siege is named as Israeli, which many of these headlines do not do.
Subject, verb, object, all five words assigned. Round up is what the papers chose for it, which is a phrase used of cattle and of suspects, and it carries the scale without giving a number.
“RAMALLAH, West Bank – Israeli tanks and troops broadened their offensive into Palestinian areas yesterday with a thrust into the West Bank town of Qalqilya while Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remained surrounded by a cordon of heavy armor at his headquarters in Ramallah. Tanks and troop carriers were also reported massing near Bethlehem, and alarmed residents began to stock up on bread and other foods. In Ramallah, roundups of young Palestinian men intensified. Dozens were led away from homes and office buildings shackled by white plastic handcuffs… Life has come to a standstill in Ramallah. Sporadic shooting echoed throughout the day. Garbage is piling up. Cars smashed by roving tanks lie in twisted heaps. A few burned buildings line major roadways. The curbsides and garden walls have been smashed and utility poles knocked over. Only ambulances, reporters and cats roam the streets. Once known as the Bride of Palestine, Ramallah is a wreck. Soldiers also tried to invade Ramallah Hospital, the city’s biggest. Hospital workers, led by deputy health minister Munzer Sharif, stood between two tanks that had entered a parking lot outside the emergency room.”
“An Israeli soldier orders two Palestinian men to carry the body of a dead Palestinian inside a house in central Ramallah yesterday. Israeli soldiers rounded up suspected gunmen for detention. Circumstances of the man’s death are unknown.” AP.
The sentence giving Israel’s reason runs off the bottom of the clipping: “Israel said it began the operation in response to a suicide…”
“DEMONSTRATION. Come join us to protest the genocide in Palestine and to end the Israeli Occupation. Date: Saturday, April 20. Time: 12:00-1:00 p.m. Location: Intersection of Kimberly and Brady in Davenport. Contact: 359-8123. Sponsored by: Muslim Community of Q.C.”
Paid space, not reporting. A local Muslim community buying a box in an Iowa daily in 2002 to use the word, with a street corner and a phone number under it.
Under “Increased criticism of Israel justified”: “Robert Klein (April 13 ‘In Reply’) is ‘troubled’ by Khalil Amiri’s reasoned presentation (April 6 ‘Community View’) of the Palestinian cause. More troubling to him should be the erosion of good will toward Israel that has long existed in America.” Under “Israel must defend its population”: “It was the Arabs who rejected this plan and every other plan since. Israel’s territorial expansion since 1948 has come at a great price due to the invasion or threats of invasion by its Arab neighbors.” Under “Zionist propaganda dehumanizes Arabs”: “I was shocked that The Journal News published Ann Ganeles’ hate-filled April 13 letter. She personally attacked Maher Al-Jamal, a fellow Westchester resident, who simply expressed his wish to educate his children on their ancestral language and customs by sending them to live in his native Jordan.”
Four letters on one page, running in both directions: Richard Cross of Tarrytown, Nancy Rabin Neff of New Rochelle, Lynn R. Lowin of Scarsdale and Anabela DeAlmeida of Yonkers. They are arguing with each other and with two pieces the paper had already run, one of them a Community View by Khalil Amiri.
MOURNING: A young Palestinian prays for a loved one at the Jenin refugee camp hospital, where corpses were being delivered. Mike Nelson / AP.
The photograph is the item: rows of body bags on the ground, one person kneeling among them with their face in their hands. The headline runs underneath it.
U.S., Israel both failing in war against terrorism
Donald J. Martel, Corvallis
“Ariel Sharon of Israel and George W. Bush of the United States of America, are demonstrating to the world that killing is not putting an end to terrorism. Israel has a trained army, Palestine does not; Israel has 3,900 tanks, Palestine has none; Israel has artillery, Palestinian children throw stones; Israel has an air force, Palestine does not; Israel has bulldozers, Palestine does not; Israel is supported by the United States of America, Palestine is not. Sharon claims that he is conducting a war against terrorism. Bush claims that he is conducting a war against terrorism. Sharon and Bush, after spending many billions of dollars, have shown no positive results. Both Bush and Sharon are killing people, creating more terrorists and propagating more hatred. Our Congress permits these men of little intellect to lead us down a pathway to possible chaos. Civilization, as we know it, could be destroyed by unending warfare but these fearless leaders continue their misguided policies that are akin to genocide in Palestine and indistinguishable from terrorism elsewhere.”
A reader’s letter built as a list of asymmetries, one clause each.
"What happened in Jenin camp has caused enormous suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians."
“What happened in Jenin camp has caused enormous suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians.”
A pull quote set across a column in the Baltimore Sun nine days after the fighting in Jenin ended. What happened is the subject of the sentence — a thing that happened, with no one making it happen — and what it caused is suffering. The people it happened to are given two qualifiers before they are given a noun.
Thousands at D.C. rally denounce Israeli, U.S. policies
Kristoffer A. Garin, The Journal News
“…wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ baseball cap struggled with a sign nearly as big as he was. On his wavering placard was a gruesome photo of a bloody Palestinian infant and the words, ‘Our tax dollars at work.’ Marchers also voiced their opposition to global economic policies, racial profiling and nuclear weapons. Police reported no arrests. Near the main rally, a small group supporting America’s war on terror staged a counterprotest. In front, a handwritten sign had an arrow pointing to the pro-Palestinian demonstration with the message: ‘Cowards and traitors rally.’ But Alaby called the suicide bombings desperate acts of people who believe the world could not care less about their fate. ‘Those who support the Palestinian struggle generally don’t support suicide bombing,’ she said. ‘But to speak of terrorism in this issue, you have to start with Israeli terrorism.’ The marchers came from all over the country, including at least 200 from Westchester County. Early in the morning, rest stops along the highways between New York and Washington filled with busloads of expectant marchers. Red- or black-checkered scarves, known as kaffiyehs, were worn by many either as an expression of cultural pride or solidarity with the Palestinians. As the protesters chanted in front of her, Tami Anaya could not muster such hate. Still tired from an eight-hour bus trip from Buffalo, the former Marine Corps lance corporal and Seattle native sat on the edge of the protest. Just over seven months after losing her brother on Flight 93, which crashed Sept. 11 in Pennsylvania, the 38-year-old painter and photographer cried much of the morning thinking about him. Although she has reason for revenge, Anaya said she wants peace because too many people have suffered. ‘What happened to my brother woke me up, and I’m not comfortable being passively patriotic,’ she said. ‘I just can’t support terrorizing another human being.’”
“Protesters march in Washington, D.C., yesterday, carrying a stretcher with a child to signify violence against children in the Israeli-occupied territories.” Robert A. Sabo / The Journal News. A placard in the crowd reads “STOP US FUNDING OF GENOCIDE.”
A jump page; the story begins on 1A, which is not on this clipping. A sister of a Flight 93 passenger is quoted at the end, at the edge of the march.
· San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco · page 1
Ex-ambassador calls Arafat obstructionist
Clinton envoy fuels criticism in Congress
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
“WASHINGTON — A former top U.S. Mideast negotiator’s statement that Yasser Arafat scuttled attempts to reach an accord under former President Bill Clinton fueled criticism of the Palestinian leader yesterday and set the stage for a congressional vote as soon as today that would tag Arafat as an obstacle to peace. Former Ambassador Dennis Ross’ remarks, vigorously disputed by Palestinian representatives, buttressed the view of many in Congress and the Bush administration who believe Arafat ruined ambitious peace initiatives by Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the final days of Clinton’s presidency. The peace talks’ failure, in turn, led to the anger that fueled Palestinian suicide bombings and Israel’s recent West Bank military action, Arafat’s critics say… According to Ross, Arafat rejected a deal in January 2001 that would have given the Palestinians 97 percent of the disputed West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, a capital in East Jerusalem, a $30 billion international fund to pay for resettling Palestinians in their own state and an international force in the Jordan Valley. Ross, who spent thousands of hours in talks with Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, said on Fox News that he now believes Arafat was never interested in an agreement, although his aides in the Palestinian Authority were. ‘Arafat’s whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause. ... For him to end the conflict is to end himself,’ Ross said in an interview on Fox News… Palestinian negotiators, however, say Ross’ version of events is wrong. Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian representative in Washington since 1994, said those who said that the Palestinians had caused the current crisis were mistaken. ‘Some in this town say, “Well, the Palestinians deserve it. They brought it onto themselves, because they were offered a very generous deal in Camp David, and they rejected it.” And this lie has been repeated so often in this town to the point where it has become a fact or appears to be a fact,’ he said at a forum sponsored by the U.S. Institute for Peace. Rahman contended that no formal offer had ever been made, and that Israel’s positions on resettling refugees, the future of Jerusalem, security arrangements for the West Bank and its insistence on controlling West Bank airspace were all unacceptable. Rahman said Arafat had told Clinton not to force the sides into the Camp David summit because they weren’t ready. ‘We offered Israel a compromise with the hope that they will behave as neighbors with us, that they will respect our humanity and our dignity, not to perpetually control us and deprive us of every right that every one of you take for granted,’ Rahman said. Ross’ remarks sparked Feinstein to take to the Senate floor, where she read large pieces of his interview to colleagues, and said his comments were the most thorough account she had yet seen of Clinton’s lame-duck peace efforts. ‘When push came to shove, Yasser Arafat said no,’ said Feinstein. Last week, she and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced a bill that would designate Arafat’s group as a terrorist organization and enact sanctions against it. ‘I think Yasser Arafat is totally responsible for the problems in the Middle East,’ said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.”
“Former U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross said Yasser Arafat rejected a peace deal last year.”
The generous-offer claim and the Palestinian answer to it in one column, and the Palestinian representative names the mechanism he objects to: that a thing repeated often enough in Washington becomes a fact.
Binghamton demonstrators criticize actions by Israelis
Scott Rockefeller, Correspondent
“BINGHAMTON — About 60 demonstrators gathered Friday in front of the Broome County Courthouse to protest the treatment of Palestinians in Israel. The demonstrators carried a wide array of signs, some reading ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ ‘Stop Genocide in Palestine’ and ‘Sharon Must Stop His Nazism.’ Farouq Al-Khalidi of Binghamton said it was their responsibility to speak out against the terror being directed at Palestinians. ‘We would feel terribly guilty if we didn’t exercise our rights as citizens and express our views,’ Al-Khalidi said. He said there is a lack of support for the Palestinians because of ignorance. ‘If most Americans knew the real story, they would probably be more sympathetic,’ Al-Khalidi said. The demonstration, organized by the Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier, included a march from the courthouse to the Federal Building. Among the protesters were local religious leaders and students. Union-Endicott High School student Mohammed Ansari had one reason for demonstrating…”
“These are not the faces of Terrorism . . . but of Massacre,” reads a sign held by Moinuddin Ansari of Binghamton, who attended Friday’s Pro-Palestinian Peace Protest with his 3-year-old son Ammaar, not pictured, in front of the Broome County Courthouse.” Suzie O’Rourke / Press & Sun-Bulletin · “About 60 people gathered Friday in front of the Broome County Courthouse to show their support for peace in the Middle East. As demonstrators later walked from the courthouse to the Federal Building, they chanted phrases like ‘End the occupation!’ ‘No Justice. No Peace.’ and ‘Stop the Genocide in Palestine.’ The demonstrations were peaceful.”
Sixty people outside a courthouse in upstate New York. The photographed sign is a board of pasted-on newspaper pictures with a hand-lettered line across it. The story continues on 4B, which is not on this clipping.
Arafat is ‘partner for peace’ all right — as in ‘rest in peace, Israel’
Michael Kelly, Washington Post Writers Group, Boston
“BOSTON — On June 6, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban laid before the United Nations Security Council Israel’s case for pre-emptively striking in a war sought and forced by the Arab nations. As the historian Michael Oren describes in his first-rate new account of the conflict, ‘Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,’ Eban looked at each ambassador before him and said: ‘Look around this table and imagine a foreign power forcibly closing New York or Montreal, Boston or Marseilles, Toulon or Copenhagen, Rio or Tokyo or Bombay Harbor. How would your government react? What would you do? How long would you wait?’… Officially, at least, the United States still believes this; and so, before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington, various senior Bush administration officials were taking to the newspapers and the Sunday public-affairs talk shows to pressure Sharon to, as Secretary of State Colin Powell delicately put it, ‘recognize who the Palestinian people look to as their leader,’ no matter ‘how disappointed we’ve been with him over time.’ Yes, we have been a little disappointed, haven’t we? You give a fellow a perfectly good peace process, not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize; award him much of the land he demands and a $90 million monthly budget; let him build an armed force on Israeli territory; and, finally (as America’s former top negotiator, Dennis Ross, recently revealed in a remarkable Fox News interview), get both the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel to promise him all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank as an independent and joined Palestinian state, with a right of Palestinian return to that state, plus a multibillion-dollar reparations fund — and, what does he do? He goes to war against you… The New York Times buried its coverage of the report on A10 and sniffed that the evidence did ‘not appear to show definitively that the Palestinian leader ordered terror attacks.’… Imagine that the government of the United States believed, on evidence, that a certain Islamic leader was responsible for directing a campaign of murder against Americans. To ask Abba Eban’s question, what would we do? Actually, the answer doesn’t require much imagination, does it? We would mount an army against that leader and all his followers, and we would bomb them and shoot them and chase them and arrest them and ship them to Guantanamo Bay. If we had the leader in question trapped in a room, we would not let him out and set him up again as a partner for peace.”
A syndicated column written five months after Guantanamo opened, arguing from the American precedent. It quotes the New York Times and the Washington Post against themselves for how they played the Israeli documents.
“Anytime someone questions the actions of the state of Israel, one is likely to be called anti-Semitic. In other words, a ‘bigot.’ Black and white. For us or against us.… Why are so many Americans so adamantly justifying whatever Israel did in Jenin while Israel is so adamantly denying that whatever it did was unjustified?… The purpose of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is to colonize in order to create the Greater Israel. In so many ways it is reminiscent of the American West. Settlers would move on to Native American lands. In reprisal for this theft, the indigenous people would attack and often kill the settlers and their families. As Sitting Bull said, ‘The need to own land is like a sickness with the White Man.’ Zionism is racism. As ‘God’s Chosen People,’ the chosen ones are special with a predetermined destiny. We may say: ‘a manifest destiny.’”
A reader in Tolna, North Dakota, opens with the complaint the rest of this section traces and then reaches for the nearest local comparison he has. It runs between a letter about a county sheriff’s missing evidence and a letter about the war on terrorism that quotes Martin Luther King Jr.
Peace in the Middle East still proving to be very elusive
Morton Kondracke, syndicated columnist
“President Bush’s Mideast speech last week was visionary and direct — a reality bath for the Palestinian people — but it is unlikely to lead to peace, unfortunately. The message to the Palestinians was simple and truthful: Without political reform and an end to terrorism, they will never have a state. But with reform, the United States will work to get them one. But early indications are that even ardent Palestinian reformers heard only the ultimatum in Bush’s remarks — ‘elect new leaders,’ i.e. not Yasser Arafat — and not the opportunity… Participants included proven Palestinian reformers Khalil Shikaki and Ziad Abu Amr, who confirmed that significant elements of their society yearn for dependable government and the rule of law. ‘We want to be a democracy,’ said Shikaki, a scholar and pollster. ‘We don’t want to be a corrupt, mismanaged entity — just another Arab country.’ In May, Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83 percent of the population believe that the Palestinian Authority is corrupt and 91 percent support fundamental reform. Many of the specific reforms called for by Bush also had wide support among Palestinians — unification of security services, 81 percent; dismissal of corrupt ministers, 95 percent; adoption of a constitution, 92 percent; establishment of a democracy, 89 percent. On the other hand, both Shikaki and Abu Amr criticized Bush’s speech and said it would hurt the cause of reform, not help it. Shikaki said Bush’s ‘attempt to oust Yasser Arafat is an attempt to make the Palestinian people swallow a deal with Israel that they will never accept. Reform will be set back.’ Shikaki predicted that Bush’s implicit call for Arafat’s ouster would boost the Palestinian leader’s approval ratings by only 10 percent from its lowly 35 percent. Yet, he said, if Arafat runs for re-election, he’ll win — both because he’s seen as ‘the symbol of Palestinian aspirations’ and out of fear that ‘if he’s removed, there’d be chaos.’ Abu Amr, chairman of the political committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council, scathingly declared, ‘Bush told us who not to elect. Maybe next he’ll tell us whom we should elect.’ Abu Amr interpreted Bush’s speech as being primarily driven by domestic politics — a desire ‘not to upset the Israel lobby and the conservatives’ — and said Bush ‘is not offering the Palestinians anything but [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon’s view of a long interim period of negotiations.’ He predicted that the Bush proposal would ‘create more despair and radicalism’ among Palestinians, not impetus for reform… A late May poll by the Jerusalem Media & Communication Centre showed that 68 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings in Israel. Shikaki’s poll found that support at 52 percent and found that 86 percent oppose the arrest of those planning bombings. Illustrating a deep inner conflict among Palestinians, 70 percent in Shikaki’s poll said they favor ‘reconciliation’ with Israel in a peace agreement, yet the Jerusalem Centre survey showed that 51 percent want Israel eliminated… In 2000, Arafat rejected a peace proposal by Clinton that would have given Palestinians a state comprising 97 percent of the land occupied by Israel since 1967, plus shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Arafat triggered terrorism to get more. So as not to reward violence, Bush is offering a lot less — a ‘provisional state’ whose borders will have to be determined in negotiations with Israel. Arafat rejected the best offer Palestinians are ever likely to get. The danger now is that Palestinians will reject Bush’s offer — and end up with nothing.”
A pull quote is set in reverse across the top of the column: “Arafat rejected the best offer Palestinians are ever likely to get. The danger now is that Palestinians will reject Bush’s offer - and end up with nothing.”
Two Palestinians quoted at length in an American column arguing against their leader: a pollster and a legislator, both named, both critical of the Palestinian Authority and of Bush. The polling figures point in opposite directions and the column prints both sets.
“Neo-Nazis and white supremacists from Georgia to Europe are stepping up efforts to forge ties with Arab groups and governments who share their hatred of Israel. Some homeowners in Atlanta and North Georgia recently found leaflets in their mailboxes from the white supremacist New Order. The fliers had a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning and the words: ‘Want to stop terrorism? Tell your government to stop subsidizing Israeli genocide against Palestine.’ Pro-Palestinian groups in Atlanta have been approached this year by the National Alliance, another supremacist group, as well as other anti-Israeli groups claiming to support a Palestinian homeland… ‘It’s something we have to live with and start dealing with,’ said Adam Levenstein, who is Jewish and a member of Atlanta Palestine Solidarity. ‘We want nothing to do with these people.’ Samir Moukaddam, Southern regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, recalls at least three episodes within the last year in which anti-Jewish groups tried to co-opt his committee’s anti-Israel message. ‘They sometimes approach us stealthily or show up and say, “We’ve been following the news and we are supporters and I can’t believe what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians,”’ Moukaddam said. ‘At some point, they start saying, “Jews are this and Jews are that.”’”
“Asmahan Hooper participates in a pro-Palestinian rally Monday organized by Atlanta Palestine Solidarity at the Israeli Consulate in Midtown. Some white supremacists seek to ride the anti-Israeli cause.” Bita Honarvar, staff.
The hardest clipping in the archive to place, and it is here because it names the mechanism: a white supremacist group using the word genocide about Palestine on a leaflet, and Palestinian and Jewish organizers in Atlanta both refusing them.
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian artists built a mock Statue of Liberty atop the rubble in Yasser Arafat’s ruined headquarters Thursday to protest U.S. support of Israel. Israeli forces have repeatedly besieged the Palestinian leader’s Ramallah compound, most recently last month in a response to a Palestinian suicide bombing. Israeli tanks and bulldozers destroyed most of the buildings in the city-block-size compound. Sculptors Nabil Anani and Abdel Hadi Yaish created the 6-foot-high, corrugated cardboard model on the wreckage of a building. Anani said the message was that the United States violates its own values of freedom by backing Israel. ‘Therefore we have turned the torch upside down, to say that American values are also upside down,’ Anani said, adding that ‘the destruction around the statue in Arafat’s compound’ is proof of Israel’s misdeeds. Israel charges that Arafat has done nothing to stop militants from attacking Israel, but Palestinians counter that Israel has decimated Palestinian security forces during its many military raids, leaving them powerless to act. The United States in recent months has shunned Arafat and called for his replacement and has been supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Borrowing the most familiar object in American civic iconography and turning it upside down. The Messenger ran the same dispatch as “Palestinians mock Statue of Liberty,” which is a different claim about what they were doing. Photo credit: Nasser Nasser / Associated Press.
Palestinians say occupation excessive; Israelis say it derails suicide attacks
The headline names the siege as Israel’s and the verb it gives it is scars, which is what a wound does afterwards. Underneath, the two sides are set out in one line each. The Palestinian line is an opinion about a degree — the occupation is excessive, which concedes the thing and argues about the amount. The Israeli line is a function.
OCCUPATION OF A WEST BANK CITY. Israeli says military curfew is necessary to prevent suicide bombings
Jamie Tarabay, Associated Press, Jenin, West Bank
“JENIN, West Bank – Israel’s renewed occupation of Jenin – now in its third week – has left its mark everywhere: tanks have knocked down electricity poles and palm trees lining streets, and a military curfew confines tens of thousands of residents to their homes. Israel says it has no choice but to keep what it calls the ‘capital of terror’ in a chokehold. A disproportionately large number of suicide bombers have come from Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp by the same name. ‘The minute you open the road, you get two, three, four bombers a day,’ said Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Palestinians say the Israeli measures are excessive and counterproductive. ‘The presence of the army in Jenin will not stop operations inside Israel. If they leave and hand it back to us, the operations (attacks) would cease,’ said the Jenin governor, Haider Arshaid, pausing while an armored vehicle rumbled by his home.”
“Palestinian children violate a curfew by playing in front of their home last week near a heap of uncollected garbage in the West Bank city of Jenin. There has been a virtually constant Israeli army presence in Jenin since a Palestinian suicide attack against Israelis in June prompted a crackdown.” Brennan Linsley, AP.
Both officials named and quoted in consecutive paragraphs, the Israeli adviser and the Palestinian governor of the city under curfew.
White House document blames Palestinians for failing to curtail militants' violence.
Ahmed Rabah, a doctor at the Al-Aqsa hospital in nearby the nearby village of Deir el Balah. He said the toll could rise. Rabah did not identify the casualties. A day earlier, an Israeli helicopters fired a missile into a Gaza City building, killing a… Palestinian Cabinet Minister S… called it “unfair and unacceptable”… The Palestinians blame Israe… crackdown for fueling the violence.
The scan is a narrow crop and the right-hand column is cut. Two printing errors are kept as set: in nearby the nearby village and an Israeli helicopters.
Israeli army incursion into Gaza refugee camp leaves 10 dead
Israeli army is in the first two words, which the Ventura County Star the same day left out (CP-2002-019). What it gives up for that is the verb: an incursion that leaves ten dead has the deaths as something found afterwards, like litter. Put the two headlines side by side and a reader can have the actor or the act, not both.
Two papers carried this on 7 December 2002 and between them they hold all the pieces, but neither holds them at once. Here the verb is strong — an incursion kills ten — and no army is in the sentence. In the Standard Speaker the army is named and the verb goes soft: the incursion leaves ten dead (CP-2002-018).
“JERUSALEM — Israeli troops shot and killed a mentally disabled Palestinian yesterday and arrested an alleged gunman accused of killing a 10-month-old Israeli girl last year in the West Bank city of Hebron… In yesterday’s violence, Israeli troops shot and killed a 28-year-old mentally disabled Palestinian, Basel al-Koa, at a military checkpoint near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The army said soldiers opened fire when the man refused an order to halt and started running… Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said attacks on all Israeli civilians must stop, including those on Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ‘Stopping targeting Israeli civilians is a step that needs to be implemented,’ Shaath said. The Palestinian Authority has condemned attacks on civilians in Israel but has said settlers and soldiers remain legitimate targets.”
The same Associated Press dispatch as the Star-Ledger, and the headline is the finding. Three papers here carried it. Two wrote Disabled Palestinian is shot dead and Mentally disabled Palestinian killed, both of which leave out who fired. This one writes it down. The masthead is not in the scan, so the paper is recorded as unidentified rather than guessed at.
Another Arafat aide joins the call to end attacks on Israeli civilians
By Steve Weizman, Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Israeli troops shot and killed a mentally disabled Palestinian yesterday and arrested an alleged gunman accused of killing a 10-month-old Israeli girl last year in Hebron… In yesterday’s violence, Israeli troops shot and killed a 28-year-old mentally disabled Palestinian, Basel al-Koa, at a military checkpoint near Tulkarem. The army said soldiers opened fire when the man refused an order to halt and started running. Near the city of Nablus, a 25-year-old woman was shot dead by troops and her husband and her mother were wounded as they drove along a dark road in defiance of a dusk-to-dawn curfew, Palestinian security sources said. The army had no immediate comment.… Jewish settler leaders called for the death penalty for the alleged gunman. ‘The murder of this baby, which shocked the entire nation, requires more severe punishment than the usual prison sentences,’ the settler leaders said in a statement… Israel’s Supreme Court yesterday temporarily put on hold government plans to tear down 15 Palestinian homes in Hebron to make way for a wider road connecting a Jewish settlement to shrines in the city center.”
An Israeli soldier welds a fence restricting movement of Palestinians at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus.
Basel al-Koa is named, and so is the Israeli baby whose killer was arrested the same day. The woman shot dead near Nablus that night is not. The story runs as one column across the top of page eight; the rest of the page is a one-day sale on bras and sleepwear.
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israeli troops chasing militants in the West Bank surrounded homes, a hospital and a downtown square Thursday, killing five armed Palestinians and two bystanders, while soldiers reoccupied Bethlehem after withdrawing over Christmas. The military activity reflected Israel’s strategy of seizing the initiative in its conflict with the Palestinians instead of reacting to Palestinian attacks… Israel’s latest occupation of Bethlehem came after a Palestinian suicide bomber from the town blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem on Nov. 21, killing 11 passengers. Israel says it has warnings of other militants planning attacks originating in Bethlehem… Later, after soldiers imposed a curfew, hundreds of Palestinians protested and threw rocks at soldiers, who opened fire, killing an 18-year-old and wounding 20 other people, Palestinians said. The military said Palestinians threw rocks and fire-bombs at soldiers.”
A named agent in the headline, the strategy in the second paragraph, and the Israeli account of why, all in one dispatch.
Eight months after Jenin, a state banning a film about it, printed as news in New Jersey. The word the headline uses for what the film is about is battle — which is one of the two available words, and the one the ban presumably preferred.
· San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco · page 1
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
By Mahmoud Darwish · University of California; 210 pages; $39.95, $16.95 paperback
Jonathan Curiel
“If there is one writer who best reflects the hopes and frustrations of the Palestinian people, it is Mahmoud Darwish. For 40 years, the poet has chronicled the Palestinians’ experience with Israel, the Palestinians’ exile from historic lands and the Palestinians’ yearning to return to a kind of normalcy. Yet it would be a mistake to see Darwish as only a ‘protest poet,’ as a new collection of his work makes clear. ‘Unfortunately, It Was Paradise’ covers the full range of Darwish’s career. There are poems about love, such as ‘Lesson From the Kama Sutra.’ (‘Speak to her as a flute would to a frightened violin string, as if you knew what tomorrow would bring’). And poems with references to New York, Paris and other Western cities, like ‘As Fate Would Have It.’ (‘He didn’t look at his watch, nor was he tempted by the trees standing tall under our tenth-floor room in Manhattan. He was wrapped in memories.’). The poems are a window into Darwish’s own diaspora. Born in a village in what is now Israel’s Galilee, Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon during the war that followed Israel’s creation. When Darwish returned to Israel a year later, the government legally considered him a ‘present-absent alien’ — an identity he considers in his poem ‘The Owl’s Night,’ which talks about ‘a present not embraced by the past.’ In his 20s, after being jailed by Israeli authorities, Darwish lived much of his life in Lebanon, France, Tunisia and the Soviet Union. For the past seven years, he has divided his time between Amman, in Jordan, and Ramallah in the West Bank. Many of the poems in ‘Unfortunately, It Was Paradise’ deal with freedom, separation and exile, and about strangers meeting and feeling connected. There are dreams and sadness in these beautiful poems. The full depth of a man and a people are evident. Poet and professor Carolyn Forche and Munir Akash, an Arab American editor, led the team that translated Darwish’s work into English. This book’s publication is a major event — especially for those who can’t read Arabic and have only heard of Darwish’s reputation. Now they can discover what the Arab world has known for decades: Darwish is a literary giant whose voice is passionate and universal.”
The book jacket of “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems,” translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein.
An American reviewer saying, in 2003, the thing this section is about: that it would be a mistake to read him as only a protest poet, and here are the love poems to prove it. The jailing appears in one clause and the poems get the rest of the column. The phrase the Israeli state used for him when he came home, present-absent alien, is printed beside the line of his it produced: a present not embraced by the past.
· estimated · The Charlotte Observer · Charlotte · page 1
Israeli forces kill two Palestinians
RAID NETS FUGITIVE - Sharon speaks with Bush about meeting to discuss peace plan
Jason Keyser, The Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM – Israeli undercover troops killed two Palestinians, including a fugitive Islamic militant, in a gun battle at a West Bank firehouse yesterday. Also yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was reported to be trying to arrange a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush. Sharon, re-elected this week to another term, spoke with Bush by phone about meeting in Washington to discuss a U.S. peace plan that aims to create a Palestinian state by 2005, a senior official in Sharon’s office said on condition of anonymity.”
“Ismail Hamed, 7, lies in a hospital bed in Jabalia after being injured by, Palestinian security forces said, tank shells fired by Israeli tanks yesterday. Israeli tanks are reported to have fired three tank shells, injuring seven Palestinians under the age of 17, two of them seriously. According to witnesses and hospital officials, they children had been playing soccer in an open area between Jabalia and Beit Hanoun. An Israeli military source said the shells had been fired at a group of Palestinians who tried to launch rockets from the same area.” Andrea Comas, Reuters.
The caption carries the Palestinian account, the hospital account and the Israeli military account in four sentences. “they children” is the paper’s.
A Palestinian boy holds a bomb used by Israeli soldiers as he stands in the rubble of his family home Monday in Jabalia in Gaza
Abid Katib, Getty Images
“A Palestinian boy holds a bomb used by Israeli soldiers as he stands in the rubble of his family home Monday in Jabalia in Gaza.” Abid Katib – Getty Images photo.
A boy in a keffiyeh holding the casing of a bomb, standing in what is left of his house. The caption says who used the bomb, which is more than most of them do. It does not say who he is. Jabalia again — the camp that had one army base inside its boundaries in 1987 (CP-1987-005).
Some Israelis contemplate low-grade ‘genocide’ for Palestinians
Comment
Robert Jensen, Austin, Texas
“AUSTIN, Texas — One way to cover up a crime is to find a benign term that hides the violence and cruelty of the act. Such is the case with ‘transfer,’ an idea increasingly being put forward in Israel as a solution to conflict with the Palestinians. Transfer conjures up images of a worker reassigned to a new office, or a slip allowing a rider to change buses for free. But transfer of the Palestinians would be nothing less than ethnic cleansing. The main public proponents of this have been on the far right of Israeli politics, such as the Moledet Party, which refuses to recognize Palestinian rights. But in a poll earlier this year, 46 percent of Israelis supported transfer of Palestinians out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while 31 percent favored transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country. As Israeli author Tanya Reinhart argues in her new book ‘Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948,’ there has long been planning for ‘the second half of 1948’ by some Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The phrase refers to the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, which ended with Israel controlling 78 percent of Palestine that existed under the British Mandate (compared with 56 percent under the U.N. partition plan in 1947). Now some Israelis ponder whether can they take 100 percent. A military campaign to achieve that had been unthinkable, but many now believe that under the cover of a U.S. war against Iraq, Israeli soldiers would be free to finish the job. I say ‘finish,’ because a slow ethnic cleansing is already under way, primarily through the systematic destruction of the Palestinian economy; when people cannot make a living, many will leave. A study for the U.S. Agency for International Development released in August showed that one-fifth of Palestinian children were malnourished, due to dramatically lowered Palestinian incomes and disruptions of food distribution because of the tightened Israeli occupation. Life for Palestinians means constant harassment at checkpoints. Olive trees, central to agriculture there, are bulldozed by Israeli troops who claim they provide cover for snipers. Palestinian homes are demolished, supposedly because Palestinians built on their land without appropriate permits, which Israel will not give them. This fall the residents of the Palestinian village Yanun chose to leave rather than continue to endure the property destruction and assaults from Israeli settlers from nearby Itamar. As Effi Eitam of the right-wing National Religious Party has put it, if Palestinians find ‘the situation so hard and so dangerous that they prefer to move to some other part of the world,’ well, he will shed no tears. The plan appears to be working. According to the Jerusalem Post, by August last year about 80,000 Palestinians had left the West Bank and Gaza, a 50 percent increase over last year. If this ethnic cleansing — either the slow version or expulsion by Israeli soldiers — is successful, another term may come into play: genocide. The crime of genocide is generally associated with mass killing, but international law defines genocide as acts intended ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.’ One of the five types of acts is ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ Creating conditions ‘so hard and dangerous’ that they drive people off their land is a way to eliminate the Palestinian people. Not all the Palestinians need be killed; once completely dispersed in other countries, they will cease to be a recognizable group that could press a claim to that land. Is the world ready to accept that kind of genocide as a solution to the conflict? No doubt the world is not; for years there has been a consensus on a diplomatic settlement that calls on Israel to withdraw from illegally occupied territory in return for peace. The key is whether the United States will allow it. For years the United States — which supplies Israel with diplomatic support, military assistance, and at least $3 billion a year in economic aid — has backed Israeli power and called it a ‘peace process.’ Unless we demand that our government press for peace rooted in justice, this process will be the end of the Palestinian people.”
A cartoon runs with the column: a figure on a ladder painting over the word PEACE with the letters PLO. Signed Barkalov.
An American journalism professor arguing the case for the word in 2003, and doing it by quoting the legal definition clause by clause. He is identified at the foot as teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.
Violence Continues as Sharon Tries to Form Government
Gunmen shot dead after killing Israeli officer and soldier
By James Bennet, The New York Times, Jerusalem
“In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces, apparently firing from helicopters, killed two 21-year-old male nurses at a hospital for rehabilitating the disabled, Palestinian officials said. The shooting, which the Israeli army said it was investigating, occurred shortly before midnight Wednesday.… The army said it was still investigating the death Wednesday of a 65-year-old woman, Kamla Said, who was crushed when Israeli forces demolished the family home of her stepson. She apparently did not hear the Israelis’ warnings to evacuate, her family said. The army said that its soldiers followed the proper procedure.… Near the Israeli-Arab town of Umm el-Fahm shortly after noon Thursday, officers of the border police stopped a man who was walking with a group of Palestinians and who aroused their suspicions… the police ordered the man to lift his shirt to demonstrate he was not wearing a bomb… Another officer then shot and killed the man, who was identified only as Arab.”
Fifteen months after a deaf man was shot near a watchtower because, the army said, he ignored spoken warnings, a woman of sixty-five is crushed in a demolition because, her family says, she did not hear them. In both cases the warning is the defense. He was never named. She is: Kamla Said. The same page reports two nurses killed at a rehabilitation hospital, and a man shot at Umm el-Fahm who is identified only as Arab.
Sioux Falls Muslims take their views to the streets
Iraq war prompts protests, prayer
John-John Williams IV, Argus Leader
“About 50 people walked up and down Sixth Street Friday afternoon, carrying signs and protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The group gathered in front of the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls to let the community know they oppose the war. ‘We condemned the killing of innocent people on September 11 (2001), now we condemn the killing of innocent people in Iraq,’ said Mohamed Sahrif, director of the Islamic Center. Among messages on protesters’ signs: ‘Sharon Is the Terrorist,’ ‘Genocide in Palestine,’ ‘Work for Peace,’ ‘S.D. Values Justice,’ and ‘Stop the War.’ Mustapha Dibba said the U.S. invasion disheartened him. ‘This is the worse experience in my life,’ said Dibba. ‘We must not forget our history. We were all guided here because of suppression.’ Azeem Muhammad called the war unjust. ‘It needs to come to a stop,’ Muhammad said. ‘If he (Saddam) had any weapons of mass destruction, it was because the Americans sold it to him.’ John Koch, a spokesman for the Islamic Center, said most people expected the bombing. Many think both President Bush and Saddam…”
“Members of the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls protest the war against Iraq after midday prayers Friday. John Koch, a spokesman for the Islamic Center, said most members wish President Bush and Saddam Hussein could have found a peaceful solution.” Lloyd B. Cunningham / Argus Leader. A placard in the photograph reads “GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE.”
The word on a hand-lettered sign in South Dakota, carried at a protest about Iraq. The paper lists it among the messages without comment. The story continues on 3B, which is not on this clipping.
“JERUSALEM — About 300 Palestinian minors have been rounded up in Israeli army sweeps over the past year and are being held in crowded lockups, some without charges, lawyers and human rights monitors say. The army acknowledges it has locked up teens, but treats those over 16 as adults, despite international conventions defining minors warranting special treatment as those under 18. Israel says militant groups often recruit teens, pointing to a 16-year-old suicide bomber, Issa Bdair from Bethlehem, who killed two Israelis in a blast in Tel Aviv last year. Several other bombers have been minors. Roundups of Palestinians have intensified in the past year, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says a total of 7,600 Palestinians are currently in custody. Red Cross officials say they have visited 260 minors in Israeli lockups… A 14-year-old, Ali Rahman, said he was jailed for eight days after throwing a stone at an army jeep that drove past his home in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Ali said he slept on a floor with a blanket, sharing a cell with 15 other boys at the West Bank’s Etzion military detention center. Israeli human rights lawyer Tamar Peleg represents several Palestinian teens, including Mohammed Najar from Bethlehem who was first arrested when he was 15… Najar is being held in so-called administrative detention, a practice held over from British Mandate rule that allows the army to jail Palestinians without trial or charges… Israel is in violation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defines minors as younger than 18, said Jessica Montell, director of B’tselem. The treaty, which Israel signed and ratified, says the arrest and imprisonment of children should be a last resort and for the shortest appropriate time, and they should not be jailed with adults.”
Both arguments inside one dispatch, including the Israeli one, named and dated. Two of the children are named and their ages given, and so is the Israeli lawyer acting for them.
“In 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, told his government that Palestine ‘is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.’ Ten years later, Mark Twain visited the Holy Land, recording his impressions in ‘The Innocents Abroad.’ Jericho was ‘a moldering ruin,’ he wrote. About the Galilee, he noted ‘a desolation … that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.’ Which is pretty desolate. As for the land around Jerusalem, ‘The further we went … the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became,’ Twain wrote. ‘There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive and cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.’ Things hadn’t changed much by 1881, when British cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley observed, ‘In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there is no appearance of life or habitation.’ To be sure, there were at this time Arabs (and Jews) living in Palestine, but 1881 hardly marks the shimmering high point of civilization Yasser Arafat would describe to the United Nations in 1974 when he conjured visions of ‘a verdant land, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture.’ Why it is that the world came to accept the mendacious vision of a terror-kingpin over a wealth of historical impressions recorded by writers, scientists and officials is a tantalizing question… Somehow, the weight of the world’s collective understanding of history flipped: Myth turned to fact, and the facts were forgotten… I just know I never came across such vivid eyewitness accounts of 19th-century Palestine as those above until I read them (and others) in the 2000 edition of Benjamin Netanyahu’s excellent Middle East primer ‘A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations.’… What is different now, I fear, is that the world sees Palestinian terrorism, including suicide terrorism, in a new light.”
A syndicated column making the empty-land argument in 2003, and saying where it read the sources: a book by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Arafat sentence it is written against is quoted here as the column quotes it.
“Thumbs down: To the Bureau of Immigration Control and Enforcement (formerly the INS) for deporting Munir Lami with no notice to his family members. The 54-year-old Palestinian, who is blind and suffers from diabetes, was a detainee at the York County Prison. But recently he called his family and said he’d been asked to sign release papers and was a free man. Before his family could come from Philadelphia to pick him up, he’d been placed on a deportation plane to the Middle East. They argue that it’s not fair to ask a blind man to sign legal papers without his lawyer present. Granted, Lami was slated for deportation because he’d broken the law and had served time for ‘conspiracy’ pertaining to ‘welfare checks and food stamps,’ according to family members. But that doesn’t justify dumping a blind, diabetic, stateless Palestinian someplace where he has no support — at least not without first notifying his family.”
Six sentences on an editorial page in Pennsylvania. A blind man is asked to sign his own release without a lawyer and put on a plane before his family can drive from Philadelphia. The paper cannot name where he was sent, because he has no country to be sent to.
Palestinian Authority freezes funds of Islamic charities
Associated Press, Gaza City
“Palestinian authorities said Thursday they froze the bank accounts of nine Islamic charities to investigate whether the organizations funnel money to militants — the Palestinians’ most striking action yet in a U.S.-sought clampdown on armed groups… The Palestinian Monetary Authority issued the order to shut down 39 accounts of the nine charities on Sunday. The move became known Thursday, when hundreds of Palestinians relying on welfare payments from charities tried to pick up their monthly checks at banks in Gaza City. The banks said the accounts were blocked and turned them away.… The airstrike in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis killed Hamdi Kalakh, 23, as he was driving a donkey cart along a residential street… Dore Gold, an Israeli government spokesman, praised the move. ‘There have been charities that Israel has long suspected of being front organizations for Hamas,’ he said.”
Disabled Palestinian citizens hold signs during a rally organized by Islamic charity associations in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah Thursday to protest the freezing of bank accounts.
The story is the freeze. The photograph is who it landed on: men in wheelchairs at the front of a march in Rafah, carrying signs written in English. One of them reads LET US LIVE WITH DIGNITY. It is the first time in this thread that disabled Palestinians appear doing something rather than having something done to them.
Israeli occupation generates lots of violence of its own
An Arab perspective
Ray Hanania
“Occupation, land confiscation, indiscriminate arrests, and police and military violence all add up to the same kind of terrorism often associated with Arab extremism. Ironically, ‘occupation terrorism’ results in more civilian deaths than the more horrific suicide bombings that get the majority of the American media’s attention. Since the current intifada three years ago, Israelis have killed 2,216 Palestinians, including 12 Israeli Arabs, nine foreign citizens and 389 victims under the age of 18. During the same period, Palestinians killed 768 Israelis, including 190 settlers, 346 in Israel, seven foreign citizens and 72 minors. Nearly three times as many Palestinians are killed by the Israeli occupation than Israelis are killed by retaliation attacks and suicide bombings. Which is the more violent?… The Israelis love to talk about the trees they plant in Israel, but they never talk about the trees owned by Palestinians that they uproot.”
A standing column in a suburban Chicago daily, labeled An Arab perspective, with the columnist’s photograph beside it.
Palestinians camp out in compound, saying they will act as ‘human shields’
Mohammed Daragmeh, The Associated Press
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Two dozen Palestinians at Yasser Arafat’s headquarters settled down for a third straight night Saturday, pledging to serve as human shields if Israel tries to forcibly expel the Palestinian leader. The men put up two tents next to Arafat’s bullet-pocked, sandbagged office in what remains of his headquarters compound, largely destroyed in previous Israeli raids. ‘We are here because we decided to be human shields to protect our leader,’ said Mohammed Diek, a 22-year-old university student. ‘We don’t have any weapons. We just have our bodies.’… When 28-year-old construction worker Morad Hashash heard of the Israeli decision to banish Arafat, he rushed to the compound… ‘When I heard there would be a human shield I decided to be one of them,’ Hashash said. For the third consecutive night, thousands of Palestinian men, women and children marched into the compound in a demonstration of support for Arafat, who emerged and kissed children. ‘I wanted to see him for the first time,’ said 77-year-old Fatima Kosba. ‘I wanted to talk to him, to sing for him, to do everything I can for him. He is our national symbol.’”
The earliest human-shields clipping here, and the shields are volunteers who say so by name. Three are named on one page; the record had held one and a half.
“How irresponsible the opening words are in the Sept. 16 editorial, ‘Arafat Must Go’: ‘Let us be honest about Yasser Arafat. He is not a man of peace … He must go.’ Half a truth can be as dishonest as any lie. Your words reflect the moral bankruptcy of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Sure, Arafat is no prince of peace. Neither is Ariel Sharon every bit the war criminal Arafat is claimed to be. The Register espouses the same hypocrisy the U.S. government practices in its blind support of the criminal, lethal actions of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Outside of Palestine and Israel, U.S. hypocrisy is the single major reason for the continued blood bath and killing going on in these ancient and Holy Lands… There are people in Palestine and Israel who truly want peace and are willing to work toward that goal. Editorials like the Register’s ‘Arafat Must Go,’ do not help them get closer to their goals.”
A reader answering the paper’s own editorial of 16 September, and citing a second piece in the same issue, “Carter: U.S. Must Push Harder.”
“My town and its people are slowly suffocating… Qalqilya is a lovely town, an ancient Canaanite town, home to 45,000 Palestinian men, women and children… We had a decent life; we prospered. We were a rare oasis of co-existence where Israelis came to buy our fruit, eat in our restaurants and visit our zoo… One-third of Qalqilya’s water supply is inaccessible; the wells now lie outside the wall… It is time to start building bridges instead.”
The highest-standing Palestinian byline in this collection: a signed essay by the elected head of a town, in a major American paper’s Sunday opinion section, beside two commissioned essays and a Tribune photograph taken at the Erez checkpoint at three in the morning. American newspapers were capable of this. The question this archive asks is how rarely it happened.
“Israel’s assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin was a spectacular setback to the peace process in the Middle East… The Jerusalem Post referred to Sheik Yassin as Israel’s Osama bin Laden in its justification of the move… While much of the world probably would exult in the death of Mr. bin Laden, the military assassination of an elderly and disabled cleric held in wide esteem has had the opposite effect. What fragile chance there was of reaching a peace settlement was badly shattered.… President George W. Bush needs to use all his clout to quiet the furor, bring the two sides back to the negotiating table and assure that Israel doesn’t have any further surprises in store. The trouble with this is that President Bush, like Mr. Sharon, is an unabashed unilateralist… But acts like the murder of Sheik Yassin only provide legitimacy to the organization and further the violence. That is not the road to peace.”
An editorial page reaches for his disability as a measure of how badly the killing will play. Yassin’s quadriplegia is not the subject of the sentence; it is the reason the paper expects the assassination to backfire. The standfirst above the column calls him an elderly, disabled Palestinian leader before it calls him anything else.
Citing security reasons, Israel tightens its grip on Rafah. Three die in missile attack, say Palestinians.
The headline is four words and a past participle with nothing attached: a camp hit. The summary underneath names Israel, gives its reason first — citing security reasons — and then hands the three dead to the Palestinians to claim: say Palestinians. The tightening is reported; the dying is attributed.
Sharon refuses to alter his nation’s policy for security reasons
Here for the last four words. For security reasons is a phrase this archive follows across sixty years of American papers, attached to demolitions, closures, permits, deportations and curfews. This is the same phrase doing the same work at the level of a nuclear arsenal, printed without comment in a Texas daily.
Many Israelis say artist’s estimated 170 works glorify death, incite more violence
Margaret Coker, International Staff
“Many Israelis say Hasni’s pictures glorify death and incite more violence. To the bespectacled father of six, however, this criticism misses the point. He says his estimated 170 martyr portraits reflect his society’s desire to project strength amid despair. ‘This is our genre, the genre of our time,’ said Hasni, waving a paint-spotted arm toward the canvases of slain young men stacked in his makeshift garage studio. ‘Some cultures have movies, some have museums. Day after day, we have more martyrs.’… In this grim social scene, Hasni plays a crucial role. His two-story concrete home wedged down the narrow, congested back alleys of the Beach Refugee Camp in northwestern Gaza City is where relatives and friends come with photographs of loved ones, seeking to glorify them in death beyond what they were in life… That commissions cost an average six-month salary — from $100 to $200 depending on the size — is seldom a concern. ‘It’s proper that my brother be remembered, not only by my mother and the shabab (his neighborhood gang), but by the whole city,’ said Ahmad Shaghnabi, whose 19-year-old brother, Akram, died in January when his gun accidentally discharged while he was cleaning it. Shaghnabi’s family paid $140 for his portrait… ‘It saddens me that they don’t want the painting to reflect the people they were. But I’m obligated to fulfill their wishes,’ Hasni said. ‘If they say camouflage clothes and guns and bravery, then that’s what I paint.’ The industrial paint that Hasni uses because it is cheaper than better oil colors makes the skin of his subjects appear as waxy as a grocery store apple and leaves their eyes flat and glassy, giving them an odd magnetism… Israelis criticize the portraits as another way Palestinian culture glorifies violence. An Israeli army officer once called artists such as Hasni ‘worse than jackals’ for making money from death. Hasni, however, denies such charges… ‘A people who lives without any right to travel or possibility of finding a well-paying job doesn’t need artistic inspiration to feel hate,’ Hasni said. ‘My work is not centered around making money. I’m establishing a social chronicle. People (want) to remember their fallen.’ While the criticism doesn’t irk him, his backlog of commissions does. Steady demand for his work means more Gazans have died. When the killings hit too close to home — at least 10 of his paintings have been of former students or of neighborhood children — he anguishes. ‘When I paint I need to have a calm space,’ Hasni said. ‘When a face that I recognize as a child I once nurtured looms down at me in a death mask, that space is shattered.’”
An arts story whose headline is about his critics and whose second line leads with what Israelis say. The painter is identified in the pull quote as Fayez al-Hasni and in the body as Hasni. Photo credit: Margaret Coker / International Staff.
Pressured not to run, Palestinian women did well at polls
By Mohammed Ballas, Associated Press, Yabed
“YABED, West Bank — Women faced pressure not to run as candidates in the Palestinian local elections. But they did — and they won, with more than half of them defeating their male opponents in this conservative, traditional Arabic society. Palestinian women won 51 seats in Thursday’s elections, 32 of them winning their place outright without having to claim a seat reserved for women by Palestinian law. Maisoun Badarneh, a 44-year-old teacher elected as an independent candidate to the council in the town of Yabed, said she faced intense opposition from relatives and neighbors who argued it was unacceptable for a woman to hold a position requiring daily contact with the public. ‘The majority of my problems were due to society’s inability to accept the idea of women participating in the municipality,’ Badarneh said, adding that four other female candidates in her town dropped out before the elections due to family pressure. The role of women in the Palestinian struggle has seen peaks and valleys. Leila Khaled pushed women into the forefront in 1969 when she hijacked a TWA airliner to Syria, and Hanan Ashrawi has had a long career as a Palestinian spokeswoman, legislator and human rights activist.… ‘We were hoping for more, but this is a beginning,’ she said of the elections. ‘We’re delighted and plan to have a big celebration for the women.’ In the village of Abwein, north of Ramallah, Fatima Suhweil, 59, received more votes than any of the 27 other candidates despite religious-based parties campaigning relentlessly against her. Now she will be mayor of the village… Suhweil attributed her support, from both men and women, to her record in building up and running a girls’ high school. ‘People knew that I would be successful regardless,’ she said, adding that she wanted to use the position as a springboard to run for parliament… ‘Women are demanding a say,’ he said.”
Seventy-five years after the first Arab Women’s Congress drove through Jerusalem in seventy automobiles and the wire counted the cars, four Palestinian women are named in one dispatch, three with ages and jobs, two of them elected. The paper also draws the line this archive draws: it explains Palestinian women’s politics by starting with Leila Khaled.
Disabled Palestinian-American comic builds bridges with laughter
She gives others a chance to entertain while sharing diversity
By Heather Salerno, Gannett News Service
“When Maysoon Zayid takes the stage, she knows the audience probably never has seen a comic like her. So she lays it all out right from the start. ‘I’m a Palestinian-American virgin from New Jersey with cerebral palsy.’ With that zinger, Zayid loosens up a crowd, which otherwise might not know what to expect from this wild-haired woman with an Arabic name and shaking limbs. ‘I get these things out of the way, so they know who I am,’ Zayid says. ‘And I always laugh, because I wonder when I’ll stop saying I’m a virgin.’… She’s brassy, tough and opinionated — not exactly traits most Americans associate with Muslim women… ‘Stop with the suffering,’ she playfully told her fellow Arab-American artists. ‘That’s so easy. Stop making the suffering films and suffering plays where people are killed. Start doing something funny that make people feel good and want more of.’ That’s not to say she hasn’t seen her share of horror back in her parents’ homeland. Zayid’s stand-up earnings pay for an art program she runs for disabled and wounded children in Palestinian refugee camps four months out of the year. The barbs in her comic routines come from personal experience: Two of her students have been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the past three years.… She’s called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal, though she notes that she was just as tough on the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Zayid is very clear on one point: She might poke fun at Israel, but never at Jews. ‘Judaism isn’t Zionism,’ she says. ‘I live and work in a society of all three Judeo-Christian religions, and I have respect for all three.’… She is vague about her exact age, putting it between 25 and 30. ‘Too old to be unmarried, too young to be dead,’ she deadpans… The only concession Zayid makes to her disability is a stool she uses during performances… ‘Yes, I’m a sit-down stand-up,’ she chuckles.… ‘I’ve been told by some great, great, great comics that I respect, ‘Baby, step away from the Palestine thing. You’re not going to go anywhere with this. You need to be careful. People don’t like it. It’s a ball and chain,’ Zayid says. ‘But I say, no, no way. I can’t.’”
She co-founded the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival in 2003, funds an art program for children in the camps out of her own stand-up earnings, has lost two of those children to Israeli soldiers, and tells her fellow Arab-American artists to stop making suffering plays. Comics she admires have advised her to drop the Palestine material. She is also the only person in this archive to settle in three words a question the United Nations spent sixteen years voting on.
Day of Israel’s creation painful for Palestinians · Refugees continue the fight for return of homeland, rights
Mohammed Daraghmeh, Associated Press, Ramallah, West Bank
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Protesters marched through the streets and traffic halted throughout the West Bank and Gaza on Sunday as Palestinians mournfully commemorated the day Israel was created, calling it one of the darkest days in their history. Israelis held barbecues, concerts and launched fireworks to celebrate the 57th anniversary of their independence Thursday — according to the date on the Hebrew calendar. Palestinians see the day very differently, marking it Sunday as Al-Nakba, which is Arabic for ‘the catastrophe’… About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes in the fighting that followed Israel’s independence in 1948. Their demand to return to their homes with their descendants — a total of 4 million people by a United Nations estimate — represents one of the toughest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Palestinian cities and towns Sunday, traffic stopped and people stood silent at noon. The sirens paralleled those that sound throughout Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, but the silence was broken by shots fired in the air by gunmen… ‘The Nakba is still a black day in the history of the Palestinian people, and we’ve been suffering since that day,’ said 61-year-old Gaza resident Suleiman Arabeed. Like many of the protesters, Arabeed is a Palestinian refugee. Hamas, the largest Palestinian militant group, released a statement referring to Israel as a ‘cancer’ and promising to continue fighting ‘until the liberation of the last inch of our land and the last refugee heads back to his home.’ In his speech, Abbas called on the host countries to ensure basic civil rights for the refugees, demanding they be granted the right to work and travel freely. Some 350,000 Palestinians live in 12 refugee camps in Lebanon and have no civil rights. In Syria, Palestinians can work and join the army. In Jordan, most have Jordanian citizenship.”
“Palestinians march Sunday in Gaza City to mark Al-Nakba — Arabic for ‘the catastrophe’ — which is how they describe Israel’s creation 57 years ago. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said, ‘Palestinians have a homeland, and it is called Palestine.’” Hatem Moussa, Associated Press. And: “Meryam Amarneh, 70, who lives in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the West Bank, holds the key to her family’s former house Sunday. Amarneh and her family left their home in Rassa Abu Ammar village west of Jerusalem during fighting in 1947.” Musa Al-Shaer, Getty Images / Agence France-Presse.
The qualifier is in the banner over the page: a solemn anniversary for some.
“Abbas said Israel’s unilateral withdrawal was only the first step. ‘Tomorrow they will start leaving part of the West Bank,’ Abbas told a group 400 disabled Palestinians wounded in uprisings against Israel. ‘It’s a beginning of the full withdrawal from all the settlements. We will not close our eyes. We will not rest until they leave from all our land.’… At Sanur, the most hardline West Bank settlement earmarked for evacuation, young men were welding bars onto the open windows of an old British police structure known as ‘the fortress’… On the roof, settlers flew a hand-painted Israeli flag that was taken from a refugee boat in 1947 that was trying to break the British blockade of pre-independence Israel. Painted on a sign under the flag: ‘The British didn’t succeed in expelling. And you?’… The 5-year-old daughter of the rabbi put a handful of sand in her purse… Some evacuated settlers set up tent cities on vacant Israeli land near Gaza’s borders, with signs at the perimeters calling them ‘refugee camps.’ Sharon has called the camps a political ploy to create sympathy.”
Jewish settlers remove a Menorah from the synagogue at the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip on Monday.
Four hundred Palestinians wounded in the uprisings, assembled as an audience for a speech. They are the population the 1996 lawsuits were filed by, nine years on, and they appear here as a room Abbas is speaking to. On the same page, evacuated settlers pitch tents and call them refugee camps, and the prime minister calls that a ploy.
‘Paradise’ paints a compelling portrait of two ordinary guys turned mass killers
Kevin Canfield, The Journal News
“Said and Khaled are best friends. Boyish young men in their 20s, they live at home with their parents and share meals with siblings and friends. They work together at an automobile repair shop, but you get the sense that like lots of others their age they haven’t quite decided what to do with their lives. In short, they’re very much like you or someone you know. Except for this: They’re Palestinian suicide bombers in waiting. The protagonists of the brilliant new film ‘Paradise Now,’ Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are ordinary men in an extraordinary situation and their sheer averageness makes director Hany Abu-Assad’s film a compelling portrait. The carnage these men are about to set in motion, like the branch of zero-sum militancy they subscribe to, is loathsome. But as humans they are not loathsome, and that disconnect, that raising-of-questions, is the stuff of great art.… (Hamas, the Palestinian organization responsible for many such suicide bombings is never mentioned by name, but the implication is clear.)… In one of the film’s many emotionally resonant scenes, Said silently watches his mother chop vegetables. He wants to speak but can’t. Khaled, whose father was badly injured by Israeli soldiers, is certain he’s doing the right thing — ‘Now it’s our turn,’ he says gleefully — but Said is clearly spooked, equally afraid of dying and murdering innocents. Later that night he will sneak out for a final, chaste visit with the woman he seems to be in love with. Her late father was also a bomber, complicating his feelings all the more… Abu-Assad knows exactly what he’s doing. By portraying Khaled and Said as unimpeachably normal, even likable, young men, he argues that moments in history make men — that any of us, or at least many of us, would act irrationally were we raised in similar straits. This is a terribly unsophisticated argument, one that seems to suggest a given person’s makeup is all nurture and no nature. Coexistence, of course, isn’t merely a matter of seeing one another as human. But maybe that’s a start? Rating PG-13 (mature thematic material and brief strong language). Running time 90 minutes. Bottomline A-.”
“Ali Suliman and Kais Nashef in director Hany Abu-Assad’s ‘Paradise Now.’” · Seamus Murphy / Warner Independent Pictures
An A-minus review that calls the film brilliant and then objects to the thing it does. Showing two Palestinians as unimpeachably normal is, the reviewer writes, a terribly unsophisticated argument. The scene he singles out as most affecting is a young man watching his mother chop vegetables. Nine years later this archive holds the same director in the Los Angeles Times insisting his next film is not about the conflict, and an American paper filing a Palestinian screenwriter under the label CONFLICT seven months after that.
“PARADISE NOW (PG-13). Two Palestinians (Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman), friends since childhood, agree to carry out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Director Hany Abu-Assad’s hyper-realist film is provocative, chilling and tense, even after it’s over. With Lubna Azabal and Amer Hlehel. 1:30 (some vulgarisms). In Arabic with English subtitles. At select theaters… ‘Paradise Now’ walks a narrow tightrope in trying to make sense out of what many regard as senseless behavior. Even making the film required the nerves of a high-wire artist. It was shot in the West Bank city of Nablus where director Hany Abu-Assad had to deal with both the Israeli army and Palestinian citizens. However tense the filmmaking process was, it could scarcely be any more wrenching than the story being told. It’s about Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who have been friends since childhood, growing up as Palestinians under Israeli occupation. They work as auto mechanics for low wages, filling the empty hours between shifts smoking a hookah and drinking tea. Their lives seem so numbingly nonextraordinary that it’s hard for anyone, especially them, to imagine what could give such lives meaning. Maybe it’s the pretty young customer (Lubna Azabal) who’s attracted to Saïd on first sight. But before he and she can get to know each other better, a professorial-looking man named Jamal (Amer Hlehel) offers Saïd and Khaled a chance to carry out a suicide bombing attack in Tel Aviv… The movie weaves debate over tactics, ideology, belief and existence into the airtight framework of the plot. If Abu-Assad is a high-wire walker with the movie’s issues, he also shows a safecracker’s poise with building tension and teasing suspense. As a visceral experience, ‘Paradise Now’ chills and absorbs, wearing down one’s resistance to its subject matter. It is in no way an apologia for terrorism. But it’s a character study that subtly nudges the viewer toward greater understanding.”
“Kais Nashef as Saïd and Hiam Abbass as Saïd’s mother in director Hany Abu-Assad’s ‘Paradise Now’”
The second American review of this film in the archive, printed the day after the first, and both reviewers feel obliged to take a position on the same thing. One calls showing Palestinians as unimpeachably normal a terribly unsophisticated argument. This one assures readers the film is in no way an apologia for terrorism. Six Palestinian actors are named between the two notices, including Hiam Abbass, who plays the mother.
“CHICAGO — ‘From the most unexpected place, comes a bold new call for peace.’ That’s the rosy-eyed, punctuation-challenged poster slogan for ‘Paradise Now,’ a suspense-filled character study of two Palestinian suicide bombers. But that’s not how writer-director Hany Abu-Assad sees his movie. ‘Honestly, it’s not my interpretation,’ the 44-year-old filmmaker said while in Chicago recently. ‘My principle is film is for others. When you make it, others have the right to find in it what they think they find in it. It’s impossible to force your idea.’… Abu-Assad, who was born in Nazareth but has lived for many years in Amsterdam, has an open face and a laugh that operates like a comical shrug, as if to say: What can you do?… The production was squeezed between Israeli checkpoints (and missiles) on one side and rival Palestinian factions, some suspicious that the film would criticize suicide bombers, on the other. Eventually, one of these factions kidnapped the movie’s location manager, and Abu-Assad wound up contacting Yasser Arafat to negotiate his release. When a landmine exploded 300 feet from the set, the production finally moved to Nazareth. Looking back, Abu-Assad said he’s not sure he would make ‘Paradise Now’ again, knowing the circumstances. ‘I don’t want to complain, but really I don’t sleep well anymore,’ he said. ‘It’s a difficult experience to live five months in such stress in order to make this film.’ He’s not ambiguous about blaming the Israeli army for those conditions. ‘When you are controlling the borders, you are making a big jail, and the people who are making this jail are responsible for the inside chaos,’ he said. Let there be no confusion: ‘Paradise Now’ is the work of a filmmaker who, like many Palestinians, rejects the legitimacy of Israel not only from its 1967 borders but as it was conceived in 1948. Abu-Assad contends that peace will come only when Jews and Palestinians are sharing the entire country equally. ‘Paradise Now’ is about the Palestinian characters debating violence vs. non-violence, despair vs. positive action. It’s a debate that, Abu-Assad said, is a constant in Palestinian life… Abu-Assad said he focused on suicide bombers ‘because we know nothing about them — they have no face.’ You have to give them their face. You have to understand them in order to know what’s the problem. For me the unknown, the dark, is more scary than to give light and to make something invisible visible.’”
“Lubna Azabal, left, as Suha and Kais Nashef as Said in director Hany Abu-Assad’s ‘Paradise Now,’ a Warner Independent Pictures release.” Pull quote: “I don’t sleep well anymore.” — Hany Abu-Assad, Filmmaker
The headline calls the film an examination of terrorists. The director, given the length of an interview, says the opposite: that he made it because we know nothing about these men and they have no face, and that the unknown frightens him more than making something invisible visible. The clipping stays whole: it also reports that he rejects Israel’s legitimacy as conceived in 1948, and that a faction kidnapped his location manager so that he had to ask Arafat to get the man back. Nine years later the same director tells the Los Angeles Times that his next film is not about the conflict.
Ibrahim Barzak, The Associated Press, Rafah Terminal
“RAFAH TERMINAL, Gaza Strip — It was a smooth debut Saturday for the first Palestinian-run border. Hundreds of travelers zipped through passport control without having to submit to Israeli security checks, savoring their new freedom after 38 years of military occupation… Under a U.S.-brokered deal, the Palestinians are in charge, with backup from European monitors. Israel watches over closed-circuit TV, but cannot veto travelers. Jihad Zanoun, 30, a government employee, was the first to cross. ‘It is the beginning of a new era that will open a new horizon for me,’ said Zanoun, who was visiting relatives in Egypt. The border was open for just four hours Saturday — a day after Palestinians took control with an inauguration ceremony — to give European monitors more time to settle in, but it will eventually operate around the clock. European officials said 1,587 people crossed on the first day. ‘We are extremely happy,’ said Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. ‘It has gone very smoothly.’ For fenced-in Gazans, the opening of the border between Gaza and Egypt marked the most dramatic improvement in their lives since Israel withdrew from the coastal strip in September. Before the pullout, Israelis security checks at Rafah — meant to stop militants and weapons smuggling — often caused delays of hours or days. During the last five years of fighting, Israel also imposed travel restrictions on the ages of 18-45, and most couldn’t leave.”
The first man through a border his own government ran. The photograph beside him shows a Palestinian traveler shouting as she protests the four-hour opening. The Chronicle Tribune carried the same dispatch as “First Palestinian-run border opens.” Photo credit: Amr Nabil / The Associated Press.
Mind-set of suicide bombers covered in Globe-winning film
Not all Palestinians, Israelis appreciate effort
Ali Daraghmeh, The Associated Press, Nablus
“NABLUS, West Bank — The Palestinian film ‘Paradise Now,’ which explores the lives of a pair of suicide bombers and just won the Golden Globe for best foreign film, is getting mixed reviews in this tough West Bank city where it was filmed. Although the film has never been screened in Nablus, many residents here have viewed several clips widely broadcast on satellite television, and some are not happy with what they have seen. Those giving the film thumbs down feel it portrays the bombers as less than heroic and godless. ‘This movie doesn’t help the Palestinian cause,’ said an armed Palestinian militant who would not give his name. ‘People who go to carry out bombings do not hesitate so much.’… The movie generally has been praised around the world and has been shown in about 60 countries, according to director Hany Abu-Assad, an Arab born in Israel — currently living in Holland — who considers himself Palestinian. Speaking during the glitzy Golden Globes ceremony Monday, Abu-Assad said he believed the film’s success stemmed from the world’s recognition the Palestinians deserve ‘liberty and equality unconditionally.’ The announcement at the ceremony that the award was going to Abu-Assad from Palestine ruffled some feathers in Israel and elsewhere, since Palestinians do not yet have a state. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said it was incorrect to refer to a Palestine before a Palestinian state has been established. ‘There is a Palestinian Authority, but not a Palestinian state,’ Regev said. Official origin notwithstanding, Abu-Assad worked closely with Israelis and Palestinians and filmed the movie on both sides of the divide. Most of the movie was shot in Nablus, a militant stronghold and the home base of many of the suicide bombers sent to attack Israeli targets in recent years. The conflict served as a constant backdrop for the film, which showed houses demolished in Israeli army operations, the sound of airstrikes against Palestinian militants and large crowds waiting at army roadblocks. The violence even interrupted filming — once when Israel carried out a missile strike at militants near the camera crew and once when militants briefly kidnapped a cameraman in an effort to stop the filming of a movie they believed would portray them in a negative light. Filming was moved to an Israeli Arab city to avoid further interruptions.”
“Trophy time: Hany Abu-Assad, the writer and director of ‘Paradise Now,’ accepts the Golden Globe Award for foreign language film at the Golden Globe Awards on Monday in Beverly Hills, Calif.” · AP Photo
A government objecting to a word spoken at an awards ceremony. The Globes announced the winner as coming from Palestine, and Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman told reporters that was incorrect because there is a Palestinian Authority and not a Palestinian state. The piece is filed from Nablus by a Palestinian Associated Press reporter, and it also reports that Palestinians there disliked the film — for the opposite reason to the American reviewers in this archive, because it made the bombers hesitate. On the same page, a grid of critics’ picks for twenty-three current films does not list it.
Will the controversial ‘Paradise Now’ grab Oscar gleam, or will the message of human unity in ‘Joyeux Noel’ win out?
James P. Pinkerton, Newsday
“But a furor is starting to erupt around another movie, ‘Paradise Now,’ nominated as best foreign-language film. The film is obscure (director Hany Abu-Assad is not a name heard much around Hollywood), and it hasn’t made much money (barely more than $1 million), but the topic is red hot: suicide bombing in Israel. The tagline of the movie declares, ‘From the most unexpected place comes a bold new call for peace,’ and the film is nuanced and ambiguous. Still, it’s hard to refute the argument that it humanizes Palestinian suicide bombers. A private group called The Israel Project has led the charge against ‘Paradise Now’; the project this week held a news conference in Jerusalem in which the Israeli father of a teenager killed by a suicide bomber referred to the film as ‘Hell Now.’ And the project is running an ad in Variety that asks, ‘Is it right to honor a film that puts a human face on deliberate murders of children?’ That’s a great question, although Hollywood, of course, humanizes murderers all the time. ‘Capote,’ one of the films in contention for the best picture Oscar, puts human — and to Truman Capote, at least, sexually alluring — faces on the men who killed four people in Kansas, including two teenagers, back in 1959. Still, ‘Paradise Now’ might turn out to be too edgy for the Hollywood crowd. The Academy Awarders might not want to vote for the movie some say will encourage more suicide bombers in Israel — and maybe, too, in Iraq. Instead, there’s another foreign film that might actually cleanse some of the blood on Hollywood’s hands. It’s ‘Joyeux Noel,’ and it’s about temporarily ending a war that never should have been fought, World War I… on Sunday Hollywood has a chance to remind us that audiences can be warmed and heartened by what unites us — not thrilled and chilled and bloodied by what divides us.”
“ABOVE: Hany Abu-Assad, director of ‘Paradise Now’ (center, with cast members Ali Suliman and Kais Nashef) has garnered criticism, but could reap an Oscar… TOP: Then again, so could the French film ‘Joyeux Noel,’ which offers a more uplifting message about the humanity brought out by war.” · Mario Anzuoni / Reuters
The organized campaign against the film, reported in a column that argues against it and then concedes the case. A group took out an advertisement in Variety asking whether it is right to honor a film that puts a human face on the murder of children. The columnist calls it a great question and answers it himself in the next sentence: Hollywood humanises murderers all the time, and Capote was up for best picture the same year for doing it to two men who killed four people in Kansas. This is the fifth American notice of this film in the archive, and between the five of them a Palestinian director is told his work is unsophisticated, is cleared of being an apologia, is objected to by a foreign ministry for the country named on his award, and is asked whether his characters may have faces at all.
Israeli government takes an unexpected step and covers medical costs of a Palestinian family whose car was bombed by mistake · A family shattered
“A FAMILY SHATTERED. Trying to atone for deadly error. Israeli government takes an unexpected step and covers medical costs of a Palestinian family whose car was bombed by mistake.”
“GRIEVING: A Palestinian man weeps at the funeral of his mother, wife and son, who were killed by an accidental Israeli airstrike in late May.” Emilio Morenatti : Associated Press
The clipping is the photograph, its caption and the headline stack; the story below was not clipped. The man in the photograph is not named, and neither are his mother, his wife or his son.
GAZA STRIP · ISRAELI AIR STRIKES · Palestinian women human shields
Associated Press, Beit Hanoun
“BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — Housewife Tahrir Shahin left her seven children sleeping at home Friday morning and did something out of the ordinary: She marched into a combat zone, along with hundreds of other Palestinian women. The women, dressed in long robes and headscarves, were responding to appeals by the local Hamas radio station that they try to rescue Palestinian gunmen trapped in a local mosque surrounded by Israeli troops. By nightfall, two women were dead and at least 10 wounded, including Shahin, whose left leg was amputated above the knee because of a severe gunshot wound. Shahin, 36, said she had no regrets but was saddened by the loss of a limb… In another new tactic for Gaza, troops have rounded up hundreds of men for questioning, releasing most of them but detaining dozens, the army official said. On Friday evening, for example, soldiers ordered men between the ages of 16 and 46 in Beit Hanoun’s Al Masri neighborhood to report to the local agricultural school for questioning.”
“Palestinian women, one holding a copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, chant anti-Israeli slogans during a rally supporting the Hamas government in Gaza City, Friday. At least one Palestinian woman was killed, witnesses said, by Israeli army fire when hundreds of women streamed to serve as human shields for militants inside a Gaza mosque besieged by Israeli troops.” Associated Press.
The headline is three words with no verb: Palestinian women human shields. Underneath it the reporting does something the headline does not — it gives one of them a name, an age, a job, seven children and an amputated leg, and then lets her say what she thought about it. Tahrir Shahin is one of the named ordinary Palestinians in this archive. The phrase in the headline is the one this archive follows for twenty years as it changes sides: see the human shields section. Note also what the caption does with the killing — witnesses said — and what the last paragraph reports without comment: every man between 16 and 46 in one neighborhood ordered to report to a school.
Palestinian human shields thwart Israeli airstrikes on Gaza homes
Sarah El Deeb, The Associated Press, Beit Lahiya
“BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — Hundreds of Palestinians serving as human shields guarded the homes of two top militants yesterday, a new tactic that forced Israel to call off missile strikes on the buildings and re-evaluate a mainstay of its aerial campaign in Gaza. In recent months, the Israeli air force has repeatedly struck the homes of militants after warning residents by phone to clear out. Israeli security officials said they did not know how to respond to the human shield tactic, but pressed ahead with other airstrikes yesterday. In Gaza City, an aircraft fired a missile at a car, killing one man and wounding nine, including two Hamas militants. Four of the wounded were children, ages 5 to 16, who suffered shrapnel injuries, hospital officials said… The standoff over the homes of the militants began late Saturday when Mohammed Baroud, local leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, was informed by the army that his house would be hit. The three-story building is home to 17 people from Baroud’s family… Instead of fleeing, though, the two decided to stay in their homes and called in reinforcements. They were quickly joined by crowds of supporters, including dozens of armed men, who gathered on balconies, rooftops and in the streets outside. ‘Death to Israel, Death to America,’ the crowds chanted… The army said it called off the nighttime airstrikes because of the crowds. It condemned what it said was a cynical exploitation ‘by the terrorists of uninvolved people as human shields.’ Israeli military officials acknowledged they had no solution for the standoff… Baroud’s mother, Umm Wael, said shifts had been organized in preparation for a long standoff. ‘Where should we go?’ she said. ‘We will stay here or die in the house. Let them bring it down on our heads.’… Also yesterday, Hamas militants in Gaza fired eight rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, seriously wounding one person.”
“Palestinians acting as human shields gather around and on top of a house in the northern Gaza Strip to keep it from being struck by Israeli warplanes. Israel called off the attacks on the homes of suspected terrorist leaders.” Mahmud Hams, Agence France-Presse.
The pivot. The Associated Press calls it a new tactic, the shields are volunteers, and the Israeli army supplies the sentence in which the same words mean the opposite.
U.S. nun, priest are human shields at Palestinian militant’s house
The Associated Press
“BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — An American priest and nun spent several hours Wednesday at a militant’s home that Israel has targeted for destruction, the first foreigners to join a weeklong standoff between Palestinian ‘human shields’ and the Israeli air force. Father Peter Dougherty, 65, and Sister Mary Ellen Gundeck, 55, both Michigan-based peace activists, said they were sent by God to help protect the Palestinians. The pair arrived Wednesday morning at the family home of Mohammed Baroud, a militant involved in rocket attacks on Israel… The use of human shields is a new tactic in the Palestinians’ war against Israel’s mighty military. Since militants allied with the ruling Hamas party kidnapped an Israeli soldier in June, the air force has destroyed the homes of at least 73 militants, usually after calling owners and warning residents to evacuate. House demolitions are considered harsh punishment in crowded Gaza. Most people live in densely populated apartment blocks with extended families, and dozens are often left homeless when one building is destroyed… ‘It is wrong for Israel to bomb people’s houses,’ Dougherty said. ‘We are here in solidarity, and to try to communicate to the world what is really going on.’ The nun and priest, dressed in shirts and pants, said they were staying for several hours at each of the targeted houses. They were warmly welcomed by Ahmed Baroud, a brother of the militant… However, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said militants calling on civilians to act as human shields was a ‘war crime.’ ‘There is no excuse for calling civilians to the scene of a planned attack,’ said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director. The rights group also criticized Israel’s policy of shelling houses. The Israeli military said the militants were exploiting civilians. ‘It just further demonstrates the cynical use of civilians by terrorists,’ said Israeli army Capt. Noa Meir… Visiting U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbor said Tuesday the human shield tactic was a sign of Palestinian desperation. ‘There is something frankly almost pathetic in the sense of despair … civilians rallying in a defensive gesture,’ she said during a Gaza visit.”
Three days later, the human shields are an American nun and an American priest. The page carries the answers from all sides: the activists, Human Rights Watch calling the tactic a war crime, the Israeli army, and the U.N. commissioner. The paper spells her Arbor.
Use of human shields complicates Israel’s approach
Middle East tactics
Joel Greenberg, Tribune foreign correspondent, Beit Lahiya, Gaza Strip
“BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — On a rooftop in a crowded neighborhood here, about 30 Palestinian women sat on chairs and mattresses on a recent afternoon, serving as human shields against a possible Israeli air strike on the family home of a prominent Hamas militant. As an Israeli drone buzzed overhead, the women were defiant. ‘Our technology is faith in God,’ said Itaf al-Masri, 47. The scene was an example of the kind of struggle waged here in recent months between the Israeli military and the Palestinians, a battle between a high-tech army and the simpler arms and tactics of militants and their civilian supporters… Gaza militants fired crude but deadly homemade rockets at Israel and dug tunnels under the border with Egypt to smuggle in arms. In one standoff with Israeli troops, Palestinian women marched to a mosque where militants were holed up and enabled them to escape. The Israelis used sophisticated surveillance technology and aircraft to hunt down rocket squads and kill militant leaders, often also hitting civilians… A united front. Flags of several Palestinian factions flew from the threatened house in Beit Lahiya last week, showing a united front against the Israelis, who had warned in a telephone call that residents should leave because the house would be hit. ‘We can’t go out and fight with guns, so we are participating in the resistance this way, protecting our houses, and our children from expulsion. Where else can we go?’ said Maha Rajab, 35, who lives in the targeted home. The shielding tactic, used in at least two other houses whose residents were warned to vacate, created a new challenge for the Israeli army, which had been bombing homes of suspected militants with regularity in recent months, saying the buildings were used to store weapons. A total of 105 homes were destroyed in the Gaza Strip since July after residents were warned to leave, according to figures compiled by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem. With human shields gathering at targeted houses, that tactic will have to be reconsidered in any future confrontation. ‘It definitely complicates the situation, and Israel will have to overcome it,’ said Boaz Ganor, an Israeli expert on counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. ‘That’s the whole story of asymmetric war: The number of troops and type of weapons is not as important as in regular warfare.’ Army weighing its strategy. Maj. Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman for the army, acknowledged that the army was weighing its tactics. ‘We have to examine what we will do in the next cases,’ she said. ‘It is a dilemma, and we are looking for a possible solution in the future. But this dilemma is created by the militants every time. They are responsible for the life of innocent women and children if they get hurt.’ The New York-based group Human Rights Watch called the Palestinian use of human shields a war crime and said the Israeli army had respected its obligations under international law by suspending an attack on one house that could have inflicted heavy civilian casualties. But Palestinians who came to the homes said they were acting to protect their neighborhoods from further destruction. Nihad Rajab, 30, came to the house in Beit Lahiya with her two daughters, ages 4 and 1. She said that every Israeli bombing threatened people in adjacent homes and that the whole area was at risk. ‘I don’t feel secure in my own house,’ she said.”
The women are named and asked why. Human Rights Watch calls the practice a war crime and in the same sentence says the Israeli army respected its obligations by calling off a strike. The army spokeswoman calls it a dilemma. Everything is in one column.
“A recent letter sneaked in a mention of ‘genocide’ in Palestine and compared it to the Nazis. There is no comparison. No one seeks to wipe Palestinians off the face of the Earth the way the Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews and gypsies; that is, unless it is Hamas trying to wipe out Fatah, and vice-versa. Adolf Hitler never handed the Jews their own place to live. Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinian Authority and is willing to give up most of the West Bank, too. No Jews or gypsies fired artillery (the 1940s equivalent of rockets) into Germany or any other part of Europe, for that matter. If either side is Nazi-like, it is the Palestinians, whose charter still calls for wiping Israel off the face of the Earth and forbids Jews from living in any eventual Palestinian country.”
The answer, in the same letters column, with the word back inside quotation marks. Kept because the argument ran both ways on these pages and the archive is not a clipping service for one side of it.
Most Palestinians killed in Israeli raids were civilians, Amnesty says
The finding, the agent and the source in one line. What lets the sentence carry Israeli raids plainly is the last two words: it is Amnesty saying it, so the paper can print it. Which is the same arrangement as the 1987 Courier Post headline that let Israelis killing innocents run because Egypt had said it (CP-1987-003).
“…mercial cargo and humanitarian relief supplies. Those goods, including United Nations-administered food aid to two-thirds of Gaza’s population, passed into Gaza through border crossings under U.S.-supervised agree…”
Four days after Hamas took the Gaza Strip. The headline puts the takeover in the subject position and cripples as its verb, and the object is the aid. The fragment of the story that survives on this scan carries the fact that gives the sentence its weight and that the headline leaves out: two-thirds of the population of Gaza was living on United Nations-administered food before any of this happened.
EU cuts electricity funding to Gaza, says Hamas ‘diverting’ revenues
Ibrahim Barzak, Associated Press Writer, Gaza City
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Electricity in Gaza on Monday became the latest battleground in the struggle between the coastal strip’s Islamic Hamas rulers and their Fatah rivals, who have accused Hamas of pocketing electricity revenues. The losers are hundreds of thousands of Gazans, who have been plunged into darkness as European donors cut off key electricity aid. On Sunday, the European Union stopped paying for fuel to power generators that produce electricity for at least half of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million. On Monday, it said the payments would not resume because it had received word that Hamas was ‘diverting’ electricity revenues. ‘We are ready to resume our support to the Gaza power plant within hours once we receive the appropriate assurances that all the funds will be exclusively used for the benefit of the Gaza population,’ the European Commission — the EU’s executive branch — said in a statement. Hamas has controlled Gaza since it vanquished Fatah gunmen in fierce fighting in June. The Fatah-led government that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas set up in the West Bank has accused Hamas of siphoning off electricity revenues. ‘Hamas is collecting all the electricity fees and never pays the costs of the electricity,’ said [a Fatah official]… ‘In the next few days, the government will announce the investigations of the former director of the company, who stole money the EU donated,’ [said] Araj, a Hamas adviser. In recent weeks, Hamas has been going door to door in Gaza ordering residents to pay long overdue electricity bills. While Hamas denies that it controls the electricity company, Fatah insists it does — citing the director’s arrest as evidence. Jehad Hamad, a political analyst based in Gaza, said electricity is one of many battlegrounds the two sides are using to try to gain the upper hand. The Ramallah government, Hamad added, might be worried that Hamas has uncovered proof that Fatah officials skimmed off money from the electrical company in the past. ‘Electricity is a “hot-button” issue,’ he said. The suspension of the EU fuel payments dealt a harsh blow to at least 700,000 Palestinians who live in central Gaza. Electricity had already been cut back sharply last week after Israel closed a fuel crossing into the coastal territory, citing security concerns. Israel reopened the passage Sunday, but the plant’s Israeli fuel supplier didn’t deliver fuel to the power plant, on instructions from the European Union.”
“A Palestinian man uses candles for light as he prepares water pipes at his cafe after the electricity was cut in the area of Gaza City, Sunday. The European Union cut off vital funding to a Gaza power plant on Sunday, forcing it to shut down the last of its generators and darken tens of thousands of Palestinian homes. The shutdown was another blow to the long-suffering residents of the Gaza Strip, where the Islamic group Hamas has been governing, largely under international isolation, since June.” AP Photo / Khalil Hamra
Written from Gaza City by a Palestinian reporter for the Associated Press. One quotation in the left column is cut by the clipping’s edge and the speaker’s name with it; nothing has been supplied for it.
Israel claims it foiled Palestinian plot to kill Olmert
By Josef Federman, Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli officials on Sunday said they foiled a recent attempt by Palestinian militants to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during a trip to the West Bank and warned the plot could hurt prospects for an upcoming U.S.-hosted Mideast peace conference… ‘It clouds the atmosphere of the conference,’ Olmert said before leaving on a trip to France… Diskin did not say how close the militants were to carrying out the plot, and it was not clear why Olmert was allowed to proceed on his trip if there was a threat to his life.… ‘The interrogation did not reveal according to our security services anything that was imminently dangerous,’ [Salam Fayyad] said… ‘This is one more attempt to put obstacles in the way to the fall conference,’ said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Abbas.”
Disabled Palestinian artist Mohammed Shaban paints a mural on a wall depicting the face of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday.
He is named, he is called an artist, his work is the only picture on the page, and he is in no sentence of the story. Ten weeks later another American paper ran a second photograph of the same man and the same wall, and did the same thing. The photographer here is Mohammed Ballas, who also shot the 2004 story about Palestinian women winning council seats.
“Claire Gumbs’ Dec. 4 letter, ‘Palestine no longer exists,’ provides a flagrant example of ‘al-Nakba denial.’ No less objectionable than Holocaust denial, our human rights community should protest this ignorance. Gumbs’ letter reflects a carefully orchestrated, 59-year campaign of al-Nakba memoricide in an attempt to legitimize an apartheid state supported by U.S. taxpayer money. Gumbs states, ‘there is no such thing as … a Palestinian.’ Please tell that to the indigenous refugees and their families of the 531 villages and 11 urban areas that were brutally ethnically cleansed in 1948. Palestinians with U.N.-registered claims against Israel now number more than 4 million, the world’s largest refugee group, now spanning four generations. Called ‘al-Nakba’ (‘the catastrophe’), this Arabic term should be as familiar to us as the Holocaust which it soon followed. The campaign to expel as many Arabs as possible — in any way possible — was executed against a largely defenseless population by the Jewish terrorist groups Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang. Israel’s Palestinian victims continue to be denied their basic human rights under the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and some 90 U.N. resolutions against Israel. Peace in Israel-Palestine will elude fruition until Israel’s 1948 crimes against humanity are acknowledged and the right of return or just compensation is granted to the refugees as required under U.N. Resolution 194 and pledged by Israel upon admission to the United Nations. For background, read Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.’”
A reader answering another reader by name, ten days later, in the same letters column.
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Furious over the killing of two Israelis hiking in the West Bank, Israel’s prime minister said Sunday that no peace will come until Palestinians crack down on militants, a declaration that clouds a coming visit by President Bush. To clear the way for Bush to push for progress, the two sides had just agreed to paper over another spat: Israel’s plan to build 307 new apartments in a Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem, the section claimed by the Palestinians.… ‘As long as the Palestinian Authority doesn’t take the necessary steps and act with the necessary vigor against terror organizations, Israel won’t be able to carry out any change that would expose it to any jeopardy or endanger Israel’s security,’ he said… ‘To address this issue between Palestinians and Israelis, we need the resumption of a meaningful peace process,’ Erekat said.”
Disabled Palestinian artist Mohammed Shaban painted a mural on a wall depicting the face of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, left, next to a mural depicting late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Jenin, Sunday.
The second time in ten weeks that this man’s painting is the photograph on an American page and this man is in none of its sentences. Both papers name him. Both call him a disabled Palestinian artist. Neither asks him anything.
Palestinians draw cultural focus to cuisine and away from combat.
Diaa Hadid, Associated Press Writer, Bethlehem
“BETHLEHEM, West Bank — It’s the most talked-about conflict in the world — but the food remains a mystery. Despite decades of attention to the Mideast, Palestinian cooking is all but unknown to a world more familiar with images of angry Palestinians with AK-47s than chefs creating delicate salads or carefully roasted stuffed pigeon. ‘We do have fighters,’ said Fadi Kattan, organizer of the Second Palestinian Culinary Competition, a recent effort to raise the profile of the region’s cuisine. ‘But we also have other things that make us Palestinian.’ One reason so little is known about those other things, Palestinians say, lies with politics: Years of Israel-Palestinian fighting have ravaged the Palestinian middle class, leaving enough patrons for only a handful of high-end Palestinian restaurants. With so many families destroyed by poverty and fighting — more than 80 percent of Gazans and almost 50 percent of West Bank residents live on less than $2 a day — the attention paid to food elsewhere in the world can seem frivolous… ‘We can’t wait forever,’ said Abu Mahmoud, a Jerusalem taxi driver who cheered the idea of a competition. Palestinian cooking is a regional variation on the Arabic-Mediterranean kitchen. It generously uses fresh seasonal vegetables such as cauliflower, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, carrots, beans and potatoes. You can count on tasty spiced stews, padded with rice. Chicken or meat tends to flavor dishes, not star in them, except for celebrations, where roasted whole goats and sheep are still served on platters of rice. There’s also traditional Palestinian ‘fast food’ — shared with its regional neighbors — hummus, falafel and shawarma… In conservative Palestinian culture, women mostly marry young and stay home, learning to cook from their mothers and neighbors. There’s no need for cooks to teach them new tricks… Palestinians and Israelis both claim ownership of some foods, especially hummus. That’s prompted an online protest called ‘Hummus not Chummos,’ a dig at the inability of some Israelis of European origin to pronounce the guttural ‘h’ in hummus. During Kattan’s competition this year, 11 Palestinian chefs from Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem were invited to innovate on traditional Palestinian recipes, as well as produce a freestyle dish of their choice. Iyad Jallaf, 28, stood nervously before cool-eyed judges, presenting a slightly tweaked traditional Palestinian dish: grape leaves stuffed with rice and herbs alongside chicken filled with crushed nuts, instead of rice or barley. Meanwhile, George Srour piled small rounds of flat bread topped with fried onions and chicken to create the classic Palestinian dish musakhan… ‘This is our first step,’ Goric said of the 2-year-old competition, adding that it shows ‘Palestinian cuisine is important’… Nahed Mona, who works at the shop, says buyers mostly are Westerners looking to recreate meals enjoyed in the region… Anthropologist Ali Qleibo said despite the Palestinian notion that their food has always been the same, he said Palestinian kitchens had already seen dramatic changes during the past 80 years… ‘Palestinians know how to cook their own food. They don’t need a book to tell them that,’ said Mona.… Now Qleibo thinks Palestinian food should be pushed forward again and improved for modern tastes and the small Palestinian middle class who want to try new things. ‘Life is consuming beauty,’ Qleibo said.… BALILAH (Chickpea Salad). Start to finish: 20 minutes (10 minutes active). Servings: 4 to 6. 3 cups canned chickpeas, drained · 3 scallions, ends trimmed, thinly sliced · ½ cup chopped fresh parsley · ¼ cup lemon juice · ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil · 1½ teaspoons salt · 1½ teaspoons cumin · ⅓ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. In a medium bowl, combine the chickpeas, scallions and parsley. Toss to combine. In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients, then pour over the chickpeas and toss to coat evenly. Let sit 10 minutes for the flavors to develop. Source: Christiane Dabdoub Nasser’s ‘Classic Palestinian Cookery,’ (Saqi Books, 2001)”
“Chickpeas are a staple of the Palestinian diet. In this salad, they are seasoned with a pungent but pleasing blend of cumin, olive oil and lemon juice.” · AP photo. Quick Bite box: “Maqluba, which means ‘upside down’ in Arabic, is one of the most popular family dishes in Palestine. Essentially an eggplant and rice casserole, the dish is turned over before serving.”
A food page that states this archive’s subject in its first sentence and then answers it: the most talked-about conflict in the world, and the food remains a mystery. Seven Palestinians are named, a recipe is printed with a source, and the sidebar defines maqluba — the dish that turns up in three more American papers over the next fourteen years. Diaa Hadid, who filed this, also wrote the Associated Press obituary of Mahmoud Darwish seven months later, and Ali Qleibo is quoted in both.
“RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — On foot, in cars and in donkey carts, tens of thousands of Gazans flooded into Egypt Wednesday through a border fence blown up by militants — puncturing a gaping hole in Israel’s airtight closure of the Gaza Strip… For ordinary Gazans, it was a day of joy and plenty. Osama Hassan, 25, said the border opening will enable him to marry his 17-year-old fiancee next week, because they were able to buy items they need to set up a household. He bought a special mattress for his injured back and she assembled kitchen supplies.… ‘Freedom is good. We need no border after today,’ said Mohammed Abu Ghazal, a 29-year-old out-of-work Gazan. Children bought soft drinks and chocolate, women scooped up cheese and cleaning products, and men stocked up on cigarettes — all expensive or simply unavailable in Gaza because of Israel’s shutdown of cargo crossings… Some brought in goats and chickens. Four Palestinians in wheelchairs were pushed over the border, where ambulances picked them up for treatment in Egypt.”
A Palestinian in a wheelchair is helped back home to Rafah after traveling to Egypt for a day of medical treatment. Even physically disabled Palestinians moved across the border of Gaza to Egypt through a gap in a fence Wednesday.
A hole in a fence, and what people did with it: a mattress for an injured back, kitchen supplies, goats, chickens, cigarettes, and four people pushed across in wheelchairs to meet ambulances on the other side.
Palestinians mourn Israel’s anniversary as the ‘Nakba’
Black-clad marchers, moments of silence mark the ‘catastrophe’
Ashram Khalil, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem
“Jerusalem — Across Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians on Thursday mourned their exodus from the land with moments of silence, black clothing and displays of defiance. The day marked the 60th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of statehood, an event that Palestinians still refer to as the Nakba: the catastrophe. It led to a war between the new state and the surrounding Arab nations — and lives as rootless refugees for generations of Palestinians. In Ramallah, thousands of black-clad marchers marked the day by rallying in Manara Square. Throughout the West Bank protesters released 21,195 black balloons — one for each day since May 15, 1948. A two-minute siren and a moment of silence preceded the event and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the rally via satellite from Kuwait. ‘We mark this anniversary not to feel sorry for ourselves, but to remind everyone of the long and glorious struggle of this people, whose suffering and pain have not ended yet,’ Abbas said. ‘It is time the occupation came to an end and the mark of disgrace in human history called the Palestinian Nakba also came to an end.’ Scattered clashes broke out throughout the day between Israeli soldiers and rock-throwing Palestinian youth near the Qalandia checkpoint that bisects the Jerusalem-Ramallah road. No serious injuries were reported. In the Gaza Strip, intra-Palestinian disputes marred Nakba protests. Supporters of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, fought with cadres from the rival Fatah faction during a Fatah-sponsored Nakba rally. Thirty people were reported injured in the clashes… On Monday, students at mostly Arab East Jerusalem’s Al Quds University staged a mocked wedding between a bride named ‘thawra,’ or revolution, and a groom named ‘aid,’ or return. It was meant to symbolize the demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to Israel, a major sticking point in peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Palestinians release black balloons during an activity marking Israel’s 60th anniversary Thursday in the West Bank refugee camp of Kalandia.” Muhammed Muheisen / AP
One balloon for each day since 15 May 1948. The paper prints the number: 21,195. It also prints the fighting between Hamas and Fatah that marred the day in Gaza.
Remembering the Nakba on Israel’s 60th anniversary
Guest column
Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr, Madison Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace
“This month, Jews around the world are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. These celebrations reflect the understandable joy of Jews who view Israel as the symbol of 60 years of freedom from centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. While Israel provided a safe haven for many Jews, the terrible fact is that more than 700,000 Palestinians were made into refugees to make room for the future state of Israel. Sixty years later, that number has swelled to an estimated 7 million. Many live in 58 registered refugee camps dispersed throughout the Middle East, and some 4 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continue to endure reprehensible collective punishment to this day. That is why the creation of the state of Israel is known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe to Palestinians. Any peaceful future depends on recognizing both the Palestinian and the Israeli narrative. And yet, just as the names of more than 400 pre-1948 Palestinian towns and cities have been deliberately erased from maps, the history of the Palestinian Nakba itself has been all but erased from consciousness. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-Semitism and Hitler’s genocide. Today, because much of the world has forgotten, we remember that: In April, 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin, Plan Dalet was put into operation. It authorized the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. On May 22, 1948, Jewish soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade entered the house of Tantura residents killing between 110-230 Palestinian men. In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every person ‘has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’ Israel has never accepted this basic human right as a basis for peace negotiations, whether by return, compensation, or resettlement. We will not celebrate as long as Israel continues to violate international law, inflicts a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza, and continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations. We cannot participate in celebrations that erase both the history and modern-day injustices experienced by Palestinians. We choose instead to work towards justice and self-determination for both peoples. We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.”
A guest column by two members of Jewish Voice for Peace in Madison, on the sixtieth anniversary. The paper ran it as a column, not a letter.
Israel-Palestinian coverage is a matter of perception
Miami Herald Ombudsman
“‘The Herald is biased towards Jews,’ Nidal Hussain, a local Palestinian leader, said in an interview this week. He cited stories he did not find in The Miami Herald but read in The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist and the website for National Public Radio on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, the source of the rockets Ms. Fried wrote about. ‘I know you guys try very hard to be fair, but you have a long way to go.’ So, on this 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, with President Bush celebrating in Israel as I write, I decided to take a look at The Miami Herald’s Israel coverage over the last three months. There were 77 articles in which Israel and/or the Palestinians were mentioned in the first two paragraphs. That is considerable attention to a small region of seven million people, plus an additional four million Palestinians. By comparison, there were 319 articles on Cuba and 203 on Iraq. Further breaking down the 77 stories, I found that only three mentioned Palestinians alone. This is a very imprecise measure of what the stories were about, but it does reflect a general trend I found. Not only did Israel get more attention, but more importantly, stories about the conflict between the two were overwhelmingly told from inside Israel, even if critical of Israeli actions. This is partly understandable: Almost all of the foreign correspondents in the area, including The Miami Herald’s shared McClatchy correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, are based in Jerusalem. Compared with Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has far superior safety, communications, support services, cultural affinity and functioning government. Plus, it occupies the West Bank. Reporting on what is happening inside Israel is of importance to more South Florida readers, too… One warm front page feature, for example, recounted the anniversary celebration trip to Israel of 120 South Floridians on behalf of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. No similar article ran on local Palestinians. They refer to the establishment of Israel as al naqba — the catastrophe. There were no corresponding activities by local Palestinians, either, which lets The Miami Herald a little off the hook, though a reporter should have at least asked. In Palestinian territories, black balloons were released into the sky. The constant reporting from the Israeli vantage is unfortunate. As much as the stories may include Palestinian views, the trend denies readers the opportunity to see more articles through Palestinian eyes, and thus better understand Palestinian thinking, for better or worse. The effect is a subtle bias that isn’t intentionally or even necessarily for or against one side, but does over time give readers a greater shared understanding of Israelis than Palestinians. With understanding, there is greater chance for sympathy. All that said, I found the articles in the news pages to be fair, with no appreciable bias for one side or the other… ‘I don’t think we have problems trying to balance the issues that arise, but it takes work,’ said Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal. He noted that Palestinians locally were not particularly ‘robust’ in presenting their views, making it the paper’s responsibility to get it. Mr. Hussain and others said that since 9/11, Palestinian and other Arab groups were afraid to be too outspoken. Any thoughts of Jewish conspiracies are, of course, nonsense. Neither McClatchy nor Knight-Ridder before it had Jewish owners, and the few news organizations that do, such as The New York Times, where I once reported, are among the most critical newspapers of the Israeli occupation. Art Teitelbaum, former director of the Anti-Defamation League, said it best when he said the greater issue is not bias but space for news, as The Miami Herald, like so many newspapers, have had to cut back. Context and perspective get sacrificed. ‘I would say to you that all interested communities, whether Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics or subsets thereof, when they are close to a story and its facts, see imperfections that the general public does not see,’ he said.”
A newspaper counting its own coverage: 77 articles in three months, only three about Palestinians alone, against 319 on Cuba. The ombudsman names the mechanism — correspondents based in Jerusalem, stories told from inside Israel — and calls the result a subtle bias that nobody intended.
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died yesterday in Houston. He was 67. The predominant Palestinian poet, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won numerous international awards, died following open heart surgery at a Houston hospital… Born to a large Muslim family in historical Palestine — now modern-day Israel — he emerged as a Palestinian cultural icon eloquently describing his people’s struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership… ‘He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,’ said Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist and lecturer in cultural studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Darwish first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, ‘Bird without Wings.’ It included the poem ‘Identity Card’ that defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number — a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments — and vowing to return to his land. Many of his poems have been put into music — most notably ‘Rita,’ ‘Birds of Galilee’ and ‘I yearn for my mother’s bread’ — and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs. He wrote another 21 collections, the last, ‘The Impression of Butterflies,’ in 2008. Qleibo described Darwish’s poetry as ‘the easy impossible’… ‘He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,’ said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi. ‘He embodied the best in Palestinians… even though he became iconic he never lost his sense of humanity. We have lost part of our essence, the essence of the Palestinian being.’… Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence. He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers… In 2000, Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system. In 1988, a Darwish poem, ‘Passing in Passing Words,’ was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel’s parliament as an example of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews… Adel Usta, a specialist on Darwish’s poetry, said the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated. ‘He created a national Palestinian identity that no other poet could achieve,’ Usta said. Darwish married and divorced twice. He does not have any children. Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and longtime friend of Darwish, said he traveled to a hospital in Houston 10 days ago for the surgery and asked not to be resuscitated if it did not succeed.”
“Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, during an interview in 2000 in his West Bank office.” · Jacqueline Larma / Associated Press
This archive holds the same paper’s front-page treatment of another dead Palestinian writer thirty-six years earlier. In July 1972 the Star-Ledger headline was “Explosion kills leader of Arab terrorist group.” Here it is “voice of Palestine.” One of them was assassinated and one of them died after heart surgery in Texas, and this collection does not claim that is the only difference between the two headlines. It simply holds both.
“‘FELT THE PULSE OF PALESTINE’: Palestinian poet and journalist Mahmoud Darwish, shown on stage last July in Israel, died Saturday after open heart surgery at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center.”
“‘FELT THE PULSE OF PALESTINE’: Palestinian poet and journalist Mahmoud Darwish, shown on stage last July in Israel, died Saturday after open heart surgery at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center.” · Gil Cohen Magen / AFP / Getty Images
A display page rather than a story: his dates set as a rule across the top, a photograph of him with both hands raised, and a caption. He died about four miles from this newsroom, which is the only reason a Houston paper gave a Palestinian poet the full width of a page.
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died on Saturday in Houston. He was 67. The predominant Palestinian poet, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won numerous international awards, died following open heart surgery at a Houston hospital, said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Born to a large Muslim family in historical Palestine — now modern-day Israel — he emerged as a Palestinian cultural icon eloquently describing his people’s struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity.… ‘He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,’ said Ali Qleibo… Many of his poems have been put into music — most notably ‘Rita,’ ‘Birds of Galilee’ and ‘I yearn for my mother’s bread’ — and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs… Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence.… ‘He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,’ said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi… Last year, Darwish recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as ‘a public attempt at suicide in the streets’… ‘He created a national Palestinian identity that no other poet could achieve,’ Usta said. Darwish married and divorced twice. He does not have any children.”
“Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in an undated file photo. A Palestinian presidential aide said Saturday that the renowned poet has died at a hospital in Houston following complications from an open heart surgery.” · Associated Press
The fifth American printing of this obituary held here, and the fifth headline. Every one of the five calls him a poet. The archive also holds six printings of the killing of Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian novelist, in July 1972; one of those six headlines called him an artist. Both men belonged to Palestinian political organizations and one of them was assassinated, so the two sets are not a controlled comparison. The counts are given because they are counts.
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — A Palestinian presidential aide says that renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died. Darwish died at a hospital in Houston following complications from an open heart surgery, according to Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Darwish is the world’s most recognized Palestinian poet and became a Palestinian cultural icon. He was a vocal critic of both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. His poetry is considered to have given voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and he had won many international prizes.”
A portrait, captioned “DARWISH”.
The seventh and shortest American printing of this death held here. Seven paragraphs, a photograph, and the word poet three times. Set against the other set in this archive, the counts now stand: ten American printings of the killing of the novelist Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, of which one headline called him an artist and nine called him a leader, a chief, a militant, a guerrilla or a terrorist; and seven printings of the death of the poet Mahmoud Darwish in 2008, of which seven called him a poet. One man was assassinated and the other died after heart surgery, and both belonged to Palestinian political organizations, so the two sets are not a controlled comparison. They are counts, and this is what they count.
· San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco · page 1
Mahmoud Darwish — poet, Palestinian cultural icon
Obituary
Diaa Hadid, Associated Press, Gaza City
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian cultural icon whose poetry eloquently told of his people’s experiences of exile, occupation and infighting, died Saturday in Houston. He was 67… Born to a large Muslim family in historical Palestine — now modern-day Israel — he described his people’s struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity.… Mr. Darwish gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, ‘Bird without Wings.’ It included the poem ‘Identity Card’ that defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number — a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments — and vowing to return to his land. Many of his poems have been set to music — most notably ‘Rita,’ ‘Birds of Galilee’ and ‘I yearn for my mother’s bread’ — resulting in anthems for at least two generations of Arabs.… Qleibo described Mr. Darwish’s poetry as ‘the easy impossible,’ for Mr. Darwish’s ability to condense the Palestinian narrative into simple, evocative language… Mr. Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence.… In 1988, a Darwish poem, ‘Passing in Passing Words,’ was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel’s parliament as an example of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews. The poem suggested that Mr. Darwish called for Jews to leave the region. Adel Usta, a specialist in Mr. Darwish’s poetry, said the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated. ‘He created a national Palestinian identity that no other poet could achieve,’ Usta said. Mr. Darwish married and divorced twice. He does not have any children.”
A portrait, with the pull quote: “Mahmoud Darwish wrote several poems that were set to music and became Arab anthems.”
The sixth American printing of this obituary held here, and the only one filed under a standing Obituary head rather than as news. That makes the two sets even: six printings of the death of Mahmoud Darwish, six headlines, every one of which calls him a poet or a cultural icon; and six printings of the killing of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, of which one headline calls him an artist and the other five call him a leader, a chief, a militant, a guerrilla and a terrorist. One man was assassinated and one died after heart surgery, and both belonged to Palestinian political organizations, so this is a count and not an experiment.
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip >> Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian cultural icon whose poetry eloquently told of his people’s experiences of exile, occupation and infighting, died Saturday in Houston. He was 67… Born to a large Muslim family in Palestine — now modern-day Israel — he described his people’s struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity. ‘He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,’ said Ali Qleibo… Darwish first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, ‘Bird Without Wings.’ It included the poem ‘Identity Card,’ which defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number — a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments — and vowing to return to his land… Qleibo described Darwish’s poetry as ‘the easy impossible,’ for his ability to condense the Palestinian narrative into simple, evocative language… Darwish wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, read by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat when he unilaterally declared statehood. The declaration was symbolic.… ‘When we think of Darwish … he is our heart and our tongue,’ said Issam Makhoul, an Arab lawmaker and veteran member of the Israeli Communist Party… In 2000, Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system… Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and longtime friend of Darwish, said he traveled to a hospital in Houston 10 days ago for the surgery and asked not to be resuscitated if it did not succeed. She said Darwish had a history of heart problems and had been operated on twice. Akram Haniyeh, editor-in-chief of the Al Ayyam newspaper and a friend of Darwish, was by Darwish’s bedside in Houston. He said Darwish underwent an operation Wednesday and that there were complications.”
The fourth American printing of this obituary in the archive and the fourth headline: voice of Palestine in Newark, controversial legacy in Bangor, a full-width display page of his dates in Houston, and here, in Honolulu, told of his people’s plight. This version keeps the last hours — the friend at the bedside, the operation on Wednesday, the complications — and the instruction he left that he was not to be resuscitated.
Author of Palestinian Declaration of Independence dies in Houston after heart surgery
Diaa Hadid, The Associated Press, Gaza City
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian cultural icon whose poetry eloquently told of his people’s experiences of exile, occupation and infighting, died Aug. 9 in Houston. He was 67… Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence. He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers… ‘When we think of Darwish … he is our heart, and our tongue,’ said Issam Makhoul, an Arab lawmaker and veteran member of the Israeli Communist Party.… ‘He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,’ said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi… In 2000, Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system. In 1988, a Darwish poem, ‘Passing in Passing Words,’ was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel’s parliament as an example of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews. The poem suggested that Darwish called for Jews to leave the region.”
The same Associated Press obituary the Star-Ledger ran three days earlier as “Mahmoud Darwish, voice of Palestine.” Here the headline is “controversial legacy.” This version also keeps a line the other cut: Issam Makhoul, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, saying he is our heart and our tongue.
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel rejected international pressure to suspend its air offensive against Palestinian militants, sending warplanes Wednesday to demolish smuggling tunnels that are the lifeline of Gaza’s Islamic Hamas rulers. The diplomatic action was set in motion by the scale of destruction in Gaza since Israel unleashed its campaign Saturday, and a casualty toll that Gaza officials now put at 390 dead and some 1,600 wounded. Hamas says some 200 uniformed members of Hamas security forces have been killed, and the U.N. says at least 60 Palestinian civilians have died. Four Israelis have been killed by rocket fire, including three civilians. The chief of Israel’s internal security services, Yuval Diskin, told Cabinet ministers Wednesday that Hamas’ ability to rule had been ‘badly impaired.’ Weapons development facilities have been ‘completely wiped out’ and the network of smuggling tunnels has been badly damaged, a participant in the meeting quoted Diskin as saying. Calls for an immediate cease-fire have also come from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice personally called leaders in the Middle East on Tuesday to press for a durable solution. Underlying the Israeli decision to keep fighting are the mightier weapons that Hamas has smuggled into Gaza through underground tunnels along the border with Egypt. Newer weapons have dramatically expanded their range and put more than a 10th of Israel’s population in their sights. More than two dozens rockets and mortar shells were fired by midday Wednesday, including five that hit in and around the major southern Israeli city of Beersheba, 22 miles from Gaza. No serious casualties were reported. While rejecting a truce, Israel said it would allow 2,000 tons of food and medical supplies to enter Gaza on Wednesday, in addition to 4,000 tons the military says have been allowed in since the offensive began. Meanwhile, in Iran, hard-line student groups have appealed to the government to authorize volunteer suicide bombers to leave Iran and fight against Israel in response to the Gaza attacks.”
“Pro-Palestinian demonstrators line Wilshire Boulevard in front of the Israeli Consulate in Beverly Hills, Calif., Tuesday night to protest Israel’s attacks in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Arab-Americans and other supporters marched in a number of U.S. cities, including New York, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa in Florida, and the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. In several cities there were also demonstrations of support for Israel.” Gus Ruelas — The Associated Press. Placards read “STOP U.S. FUNDED ISRAELI MASSACRES,” “STOP MASSACRES IN PALESTINE NOW,” “BREAK THE SIEGE FREE GAZA” and “Death and destruction in Gaza: Our taxes at work.”
Three separate counts of the Palestinian dead in one paragraph — Gaza officials’, Hamas’ and the United Nations’ — and the Israeli dead counted separately with their civilians named as a number. The caption notes there were also demonstrations of support for Israel.
“Once again, the apartheid state of Israel has launched a genocide wave against unarmed civilian Palestinians. The last existing apartheid state is murdering hundreds of children, women and men, and no one cares. This is a result of the blank check that was given Israel by the U.S. government. This genocide must be stopped before it is too late. All civil people must stand together against this atrocity. Please contact your congressional representative and ask for an immediate stop of the killing and an immediate stop of support to Israel.”
A letter from Sioux Falls in 2009. The Argus Leader quoted a Mohamed Sahrif of the same city, director of the Islamic Center, in 2003; the two printings spell the name differently and nothing on either clipping says they are the same man.
“U.S. foreign policies have supported the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, so it is our duty to demand an end. We call for an unconditional, immediate cease-fire; full humanitarian access to Gaza and a lifting of Israel’s siege; and accountability for Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons to kill Palestinian civilians.” Posted by ISLAMIISPEACE at 8:47 p.m. Thursday. “Hmmm, let’s look at what’s happening here: 1. Hamas has fired over 180 rockets into Israel since the ‘cease-fire’ agreement lapsed several days ago. 2. Hamas continually says they want to ‘rid the Earth of the Israelis for all time.’ 3. Hamas is purposely using human shields as a way to deter retaliation attacks. My question here is, what would the USA do if Cuba sent even one missile rocket into Miami? I think Israel’s reaction is justified, appropriate and long over due.” Posted by jeffmd at 11:05 p.m. Thursday. “They’ve been at it a long time and finding neutral ground is impossible.” Posted by realraker at 5:28 a.m. Friday.
The paper reprinting its own comment board, carrying both directions in one column, with the screen names and the timestamps as printed.
Slice, for an army entering a place where a million and a half people live. It is a verb for cake and for surgery, and what it does here is make the ground the object and leave the people out of the sentence entirely. Eight days later a Washington paper used advance and had to say where they were advancing into: Gaza’s urban areas (CP-2009-015).
Diplomats converge on Israel in push for truce as Gaza death toll mounts
Two clauses joined by as. In the first, diplomats do something; in the second, a death toll mounts by itself. The toll is the only place the dead appear, and the preposition puts them in the background of the diplomacy. The same paper that day ran the funeral of the three Samouni toddlers with their names (CP-2009-005).
Palestinians carry the bodies of three toddlers Ahmed, Mohamed, and Issa Samouni, killed in an Israeli strike, during their funeral in Gaza City
“Palestinians carry the bodies of three toddlers Ahmed, Mohamed, and Issa Samouni, who according to Palestinian medical sources were killed in an Israeli strike, during their funeral in Gaza City today.” Photo by HATEM MOUSSA, The Associated Press.
Three children carried in three pairs of arms, in three white shrouds, and the caption gives all three of them their names. That is unusual in this archive and worth saying plainly. What the caption also does is put the cause at one remove — according to Palestinian medical sources — a qualification attached to how they died and not to who they were.
· The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia · page 1
Israeli ground operation cuts Gaza Strip in two
Sebastian Scheiner, Associated Press
“An Israeli tank fires at targets in the southern Gaza Strip from a position along Israel’s side of the border with Gaza. Medical officials there said more than 80 Palestinians, including 21 children, were killed and 140 injured in the ground offensive.” Sebastian Scheiner, Associated Press.
A front page given to the photograph and the headline; the story is not part of this clipping. The count is in the caption, attributed to medical officials.
CASUALTIES: A Palestinian man carries a girl killed in an Israeli strike into Shifa Hospital in Gaza City; a wounded Israeli soldier arrives at a hospital in Beersheba
“CASUALTIES: A Palestinian man carries a girl killed in an Israeli strike into Shifa Hospital in Gaza City; a wounded Israeli soldier arrives at a hospital in the town of Beersheba.” Photos by KHALIL HAMRA, Associated Press, and TARA TODRAS-WHITEHILL, AP.
Two photographs side by side under one word. On the left a man carrying a dead child; on the right a soldier with a head wound, walking. The caption calls both of them casualties and gives neither a name. The girl is dead and is described by what was done to her; the soldier is wounded and arrives.
About 300 of 670 Palestinians killed so far are civilians
“About 300 of 670 Palestinians killed so far are civilians… …has adopted tougher tactics to prevent the killing or capture of soldiers. One concern is that troops could be lured toward booby-trapped houses, said the… are civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. figures. Of those killed, at least 130 are children age 16 and under, says the Gaza-based Palestin… killed and 55 wounded Tuesday when Israeli mortar shells hit near a U.N. school where hundreds of civilians had sought refuge from the fighting. Israel…”
Palestinians pray over the bodies of 14 people killed near a United Nations school Tuesday during their funeral in the Jebaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip today. At least 39 people died and 55 were wounded when mortar shells hit the school. AP Photo.
The clipping is a crop of the top of the page, so three of its columns break mid-sentence. Nothing has been supplied to complete them.
“Relief aid to Gaza disrupted. The U.N. and the Red Cross curtailed aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip Thursday, citing Israeli attacks on their staff and installations. The death toll in Israel’s offensive climbed higher as international diplomats worked on a proposed cease-fire deal.” The labels on the map read: “Militants in Lebanon fired rockets into Israel Thursday, striking a house in Nahariya. Israel responded with mortar fire on open areas in southern Lebanon.” “Hundreds of families fled their homes in Rafah, according to the Palestine Red Crescent.” “The bodies of 35 people were found in the rubble of a battle zone in Gaza City.” “Refugees fleeing to Deir el-Balah from the western shore, villages near Netzarim and the eastern border areas.” “A U.N. official said Israeli forces fired on a U.N. aid truck in northern Gaza, killing the driver.” Sources: ESRI; United Nations. The Associated Press.
A wire-service map. Both directions of fire are labeled on it, and so is the aid truck.
Correction: {'note': 'The graphic carries no date. It refers to a proposed cease-fire deal, rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon on a Thursday, and 35 bodies found in Gaza City, which places it in the first ten days of January 2009.'}
Six words in a single column, thirteen days in. The number is children and the number is 257. The preposition is upon, which is a formal word, and there is nobody attacking. A reader gets the count and not the army.
The same paper, the same day, two headlines. This one has Israel as the subject and fires on as the verb, stated flat. The other one on that page counts 257 dead children and has nobody doing it: 257 children killed in attacks upon Gaza (CP-2009-010). The thing that changes between them is who was hit. When it is the United Nations and the Red Cross, the army appears in the sentence.
A state addressing a population directly, and what it tells them to expect is an escalation — a word with no object. Gazans is the noun, which makes them residents of a place rather than a people, and there is nothing in the sentence they can do with the warning.
Palestinians sought food aid at a United Nations food distribution center in Shati refugee camp in Gaza City
“Palestinians sought food aid at a United Nations food distribution center in Shati refugee camp in Gaza City yesterday. Israeli forces pounded dozens of targets and edged closer to Gaza City, while southern Israel came under renewed rocket fire.” Hatem Moussa / Associated Press.
Women and children pressed against a metal grille with their hands through it. The first sentence of the caption is what the photograph shows. The second is the war, and it is balanced: Israeli forces pounded, southern Israel came under fire. Nobody in the picture is part of either clause.
“JERUSALEM — Human Rights Watch said Sunday that Israel’s military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies. Researchers in Israel from the rights group witnessed hours of artillery bombardments that sent trails of burning smoke indicating white phosphorus over the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. But they could not confirm injuries… An AP photographer and a TV crew based in Gaza visited Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Sunday and recorded images of several burn patients. One of them, Haitham Tahseen, recalled sitting outside his home with his family in the morning when something exploded above them. ‘Suddenly, I saw bombs coming with white smoke,’ said the man, whose burned face was covered with medical cream. ‘It looked very red and it had white smoke. That’s the first time I’ve seen such a thing.’ His cousin, in another hospital bed, was more severely burned, with patches of skin—”
“Palestinian Akram Abu Roka is treated for burns at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. The hospital’s chief doctor said the injuries might have been caused by munitions containing white phosphorus.” Eyad Baba, Associated Press.
The headline says said to use. The photograph names the man in the bed.
Israeli forces advance deep into Gaza's urban areas
Urban areas is where people live, said in a way that does not say so. Still, this is the only headline in this January cluster that concedes the army is going in among them; the Dayton Daily News on 5 January had the tanks slice deep into Gaza and nothing else (CP-2009-003).
Alan M. Dershowitz, special to the Los Angeles Times
“A temporary cease-fire in Gaza that simply allows Hamas to obtain more lethal weapons will assure a repetition of Hamas’ win-win tactic of firing rockets at Israeli civilians while using Palestinian civilians as human shields.” The pull-quote set into the column reads: “A bad day for Hamas is a day in which its rockets fail to kill or injure any Israeli civilians.”
Two years after the Gaza clippings in which the shields volunteered, a syndicated column makes the phrase mean the opposite, and the archive holds both. The scan is 146 pixels wide across four columns, so only the line under the headline, the byline, the opening sentence and the pull-quote have been re-read against it.
Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces 4781. Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians 45. Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians 237. Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians 245. Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces 952. Israeli minors killed by Palestinians 123. Source: B’Tselem - Israel Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
Both columns of the count, printed together, from an Israeli source. The spelling of Centre is B’Tselem’s own name for itself as the paper sets it.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 - when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel - is on quite a different scale.
Robert Fisk, The Independent, Jan. 7, 2009
“Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel- is on quite a different scale.” — Robert Fisk, The Independent, Jan. 7, 2009
A Canadian paper lifting a British columnist’s paragraph and setting it as a display quotation, ten days after it ran in London.
A paper putting quotation marks around undeniable. The marks are there because the word is somebody’s, which is the rule, and the effect is that a claim about evidence arrives looking like a claim about language. The Boston Globe the same day attributed it differently and got a different sentence (CP-2009-021).
Israel is the subject and then held at two removes: accused, and then group says. Both are ordinary newspaper practice. The same day a Canadian paper ran the same finding as White phosphorus use in Gaza ‘undeniable’ (CP-2009-020) — the fact in the subject position, and the quotation marks moved onto the word that means it cannot be argued with.
“Israel’s Prime Minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu is seen before giving a speech at an economic conference in Jerusalem, Wednesday, March 25, 2009. Netanyahu on Wednesday promised to resume peace talks with the Palestinians after he takes office, saying his government will be a ‘partner for peace.’” (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
Netanyahu: Israel ‘partner for peace’ with Palestinians
Likud leader reverses course, willing to talk
Amy Teibel, The Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday his government would be a ‘partner for peace with the Palestinians,’ softening his hawkish rhetoric a day after the centrist Labor Party joined his coalition in exchange for vaguely worded promises to pursue negotiations. During his election campaign, the Likud Party leader painted himself as an opponent of peace talks. But facing the prospect of a clash with the Obama administration, Netanyahu has been tempering his line. Peace is a ‘common and enduring goal for all Israelis and Israeli governments, mine included,’ Netanyahu told an economic conference in Jerusalem. ‘This means I will negotiate with the Palestinian Authority for peace,’ he added. ‘The Palestinians should understand that they have in our government a partner for peace, for security, for the rapid development of the Palestinian economy,’ Netanyahu said. But he remains vague on the issue of Palestinian statehood, a key component of current peace efforts. With the backing of at least 69 lawmakers, and likely more, he plans to present his government to parliament next week for its approval, he said. His spokeswoman Dina Libster said the vote likely would take place Tuesday. Palestinians welcomed Netanyahu’s words, but said they must be matched by deeds. On Wednesday, Netanyahu said his plan to develop the Palestinian economy was not a substitute for political negotiations but ‘a complement to them.’ A strong Palestinian economy is a ‘strong foundation for peace,’ he said. Netanyahu spoke hours after Labor voted to join his coalition, adding a moderate element to what had been shaping up to be a narrow, hawkish government.”
The phrase the archive tracks, used the other way round: here Netanyahu is claiming to be the partner for peace.
“Biblical Claim. CONTRARY TO the ideas expressed in a recent letter, Israel has neither a just nor an historic claim to Palestine. Her claim is biblical and in a world in which two-thirds of its inhabitants do not recognize the Bible as divinely inspired nor as historical fact, this claim can hardly be considered legitimate. True, there were Hebrews in Palestine from about 900 B.C. onward, but they were only one of a myriad of peoples who lived in the Fertile Crescent area. For the Jews to portray themselves as an exclusive, significant and powerful people in ancient Palestine is a gross distortion of historical fact. Jewish power and influence flowered in Europe, not in the Middle East. Nor do the Jews have a just claim to Palestine. There is no justice in asking Arabs to pay the price for the atrocities committed by Europeans. Furthermore, to continually hold the specter of World War II before the American public is not a plea for justice, but only cheap emotional blackmail.”
A reader's letter answering another reader, printed whole.
“Israel’s warring actions in Gaza are terroristic and our country should cut off all aid to it… We are horribly complicit in the deaths of more than 500 Gazan children. We have pledged $30 billion to Israel over the next 10 years. Most of the funds must be used to purchase American weapons. We recently pledged $900 million to help rebuild Gaza. It is insanity to fund both the destruction and the rebuilding of Gaza.”
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday rejected President Barack Obama’s demand for a freeze on West Bank Jewish settlement construction, but his government’s move to dismantle some squatter camps set off a rampage by Jewish settlers against Palestinians… Netanyahu said Israel cannot ‘freeze life’ in settlements, according to a participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed. Netanyahu was quoted as saying that ‘there are reasonable requests and unreasonable requests.’ Settlers have vowed to retaliate with attacks on Palestinians after removal even the tiniest enclave — a tactic known as ‘price tag.’”
An elderly, disabled Palestinian man sits with his relatives.
The whole caption is eight words. No name, no place, no date, and no connection to the story, which is about settlement construction. The photograph is there to be a picture of Palestinians.
Part of Covering Palestine, an archive of 1262 newspaper clippings about Palestinians printed in 512 papers between 1799 and 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023.