Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Houglande-mail: thefantompowa@fantompowa.org
United
Kingdom: Concern over anti-terrorist arrests Centre
for Peace in the Balkans Depleted
Uranium in Afghanistan AL
QAEDA, THE KLA AND 'JUDGE' MAY ON PROPER
CROSS-EXAMINATION We have become the Jews of the Jews. Palestinian
official interviewed on BBC Newsnight, 08.04.02 The Israeli Defence Force has begun to withdraw from some
of the areas on the West Bank and in the Occupied
Territories amidst allegations of war crimes and crimes
against humanity. Reports of large scale destruction of the
civilian properties and infrastructure in those areas
invaded by the IDF are emerging; as well as more worrying
allegations of massacre, summary execution, demolition of
houses containing civilian families, the mass burial of
bodies in sewers by the retreating Israeli forces, the
wholescale detention of civilian males under brutal
conditions and the denial of medical treatment to the
wounded, sick, dying and women in labour. There are calls already from senior representatives of
the United Nations, as well as other leading human rights
organisations to investigate these aspects of the latest
Israeli war on the Palestinian people, and subject those
responsible to the strictures of international law. So much has been made in recent months of the trial of
Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague for war crimes comitted in
the civil war in Yugoslavia. Despite undoubted atrocities being perpetrated on all
sides, there was never any real belief that Milosevic
himself was in any direct control of the paramilitary forces
of the Bosnian Serbs; indeed evidence points to the opposite
conclusion - that he realised they were doing more harm than
good to the Yugoslav and Serbian cause. This is why the sight of 'Lord' David Owen ( in an
interview broadcast on UK Channel 5 News on 19.04.2002 )
defending Israel and its rights to pursue its 'war on
terror' by any means; rejecting any calls for prosecution
of Sharon as head of a State guilty of directing the above
crimes, makes one realise the amount of double-standards and
hypocrisy applied in different circumstances. Owen, a man already known by the soubriquet of 'Dr.
Death' in Britain, who supervised the dismeberment of the
state of Yugoslavia into a number of ethnically pure
bantustans and pursued the case against Milosevic, despite
recognising him as a legitimate negotiating partner- seems
to forget that he was one of the cheerleaders for the recent
NATO war on Yugoslavia. If I remember rightly, this was launched in response to a
crackdown on the KLA, an armed terrorist group funded by
major foreign powers, operating from a neighbouring
territory, and carrying out indiscriminate acts of terror
against civilian targets to pursue their goal of an
independent state. At no time did the admittedly
heavy-handed actions of the Yugoslav army in Kosovo ever
breach the basic international laws of conflict and
treatment of civilians to the extent listed above. Even as this is being written the IDF have about 200
people including monks, nuns and civilians under siege in
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In a superb demonstration of the respect paid by this
Israeli Government to the religion and culture of any other
people; they are prepared to transform the supposed
birthplace of the Prophet Jesus into a charnel house of
death. The leader of the besieged Palestinian people is himself
trapped in a few rooms of his headquarters in Ramallah,
starved of food, water, medicine and contact with the
outside world. Outside he can see rings of soldiers and battle armour,
supplied or indirectly paid for by the United States of
America - a country thousands of miles away. The only country with the pwer to demand that its
negotiator is allowed to see Arafat seems incapable of
exerting any power over the Government of Sharon. Is this, one wonders, beacause the ownership of the
ultimate weapon - and an obvious willingness to use them
-negates any control that the US can affect over its client
state in terms of defence policy. It would be naive to pretend that the disproportionate
strength of the pro-Israel lobby in the US Senate and
Congress also means that Sharon need not fear any
curtailment of the vast 'aid' budget received every year
from the US coffers. It is worth remembering that the first shots fired in
this present war were into the body of the Prime MInister of
Israel, Rabin. His killer is currently living in a state of luxurious
confinement - compared to the fate of the kidnapped Israeli
technician , Mordechai Vannunu, who has spent the best part
of the last fifteen years in solitary confinement in a cell
in the desert for having revealed the 'secret ' of Israels
Jericho nuclear missiles. The sheer irony of the current situation - with its
complimentary resonances in the recent history of the Jewish
people themselves - perhaps demonstrate quite clearly the
central paradoxes concerning the formulation of the State of
Israel. Disregarding this paradox, which is dealt with elsewhere
in detail on this site, makes the other 'intractable
riddles' of the conflict incomprehensible, and ultimately
unsolvable. What other State sanctions assassination of foreign and
domestic nationals ? Disregards all UN Resolutions
concerning territory and the use of force in Occupied
Territories ? Justifies its claim to land lived in and
cultivated by other people on the assumption that "God"
granted them exclusive ownership a few thousand years
ago. The danger in the current situation is of course
omnipresent for both the Palestinian and Jewish people. It
is perhaps a fact forgotten by the Zionists that the Jewish
people survived cultural and literal persecution without a
homeland for nearly two millennia. Their communiity thrived
by learning to survive adversity, and in effect become truly
international citizens. It is this above all else which probably accelerated the
development of humanistic philosophy in Jewish thought, and
eventually resulted in the great influence of Jewish
thinkers in the development of international socialism. It was this, more than any traits of genetic 'Jewishness'
( always a debatable point, considering the diversity of
'tribes' containing Jewish community, stretching from
Whitechapel to Chechenya, Ethiopia to China) that made the
National 'Socialist' movements of Europe in the 20's and
30's so keen to target the Jews as internal opposition. After the First World War the majority of European
workers had returned from the greatest mass slaughter in
history which, cock-up or conspiracy, was undoubtedly the
result of the European ruling classes being unable to
operate on an international level without resorting to
conflict, with its subsequent massive loss of life. Even more galling, modern warfare made it unnecessary for
the better connected senior officers to go near the front,
let alone onto the battlefield. We can see the result of this today, where the last power
with truly global pretensions is running its war in
Afghanistan directly from computer terminals in Tampa,
Florida. The results have been felt by both Afghan civilians
wrongly targetted, and most recently a group of Canadian
soldiers (four killed, eight others grievously wounded). The result of this mechanised slaughter arranged and
pursued by the ruling classes for the maintaining the vast
profits from their overseas colonies might well have been to
divert the working classes of Europe from their 300 year
struggle to achieve human rights. Feudalism had been replaced by slavery; Republicanism was
diverted into Imperialism (as in Britain and France). Finally, with the end of the carnage of WWI the
disillusionment with the status quo threatened to produce a
real revolution across Europe. In this country for
instance,to encourage a feeling of social reform inevitably
following the war, every working man was promised a house -
a promise that has still not been kept, ninety years
later. In Germany, socialists and communists, inspired by the
Revolution in Russia, soon began to replace the old order
throughout the different regions as the impoverished
population attempted to reconstruct a new life from the
chaos. The Prussian military and industrialists realised that it
was a make-or-break situation, and quickly engaged the
services of unemployed soldiers to act as the ironically
named 'Freikorps'. Using tactics of brutal intimidation and
murder, they 'eradicated' the left wing and replaced them
with the same liberal bougoisie who had allowed the war to
develop, and then profited from it. Meanwhile, the Freikorps, funded by the resurgent ruling
class, and soon even opportunist anti-semitic industrialists
such as Henry Ford, slowly transformed themselves into the
National Socialist party. The name itself was meant to
attract the rank and file of the left-wing parties which had
been decimated by the onslaught of the right-wing
paramilitaries. Russia, under attack from the allied armies of the West
(yes, their war wasn't allowed to end in 1918) retreated
into the isolationist State Socialism of Stalin, whose agent
murdered Leon Trotsky, the last great Russian Jewish
internationalist remaining from the original Bolshevik
core. Before long, the ruling classes were again ruthlessly
pursuing their philosophy of international capitalism,
whilst ensuring no comparable international social movement
developed to challenge them. The Crash of the Twenties briefly punctured that balloon;
but ultimately only the poorer members of the real
international aristocracy ever lost much in the grand
lottery. It is an inescapable fact that the European ruling
classes welcomed Nazi Germany as a possible model for their
own countries. A happy compliant working class; their aspirations and
fears engineered by the elite, with a restitution of the
philosophy that died with the Napoleonic codes in most of
Europe, and an axe blow in Britain - the divine right of
Kings. The Nazi's targetting of the Jews (and Romanies),
alongside Communists, Socialists and other groups ranging
from Freemasons to Jehovas Wiitnesses was a wish to
eradicate 'foreign influence' on the German people; to
ensure, like the leader of a cult, that his people's
perception of the word was only seen through his own dark
glass. His hatred of Jewish art, culture and philosophy was
because its humanistic rationalism, its international vision
so challenged his own narrow power, balanced on top of a
two-dimensional pyramid. It also explains why the overwhelming Jewish population
of Europe had no wish to emigrate to Palestine. They
appreciated how their perception of the world had been an
integral part of the rise of European socialism, and
European thought and culture in general. They had improved
their social standing in most parts of Europe by a rational
resistance to injustice and by seeking common cause with the
oppressed working classes in the countries they lived
in. Zionism was promoted by very few, as it instantly gave
virtue to anti-semites, who also advocated expulsion of
Jews; it became popular for instance amongst the upper
middle-class Jews of Britain in the early twentieth century
who feared that Jewish immigrants escaping the pogroms in
Russia would produce a backlash against them. So some
supported candidates standing on anti-immigration tickets,
and recommended the refugees go to Palestine. Meanwhile, the British, clinging on to the remains of
their tattered Empire, were trying to live up to the spirit
of the hastily produced Balfour Declaration to re-invent
Palestine as a religous homeland for a people persecuted in
Europe. The paradoxes involved in the creation of the State of
Israel and how those ghosts are still shaping the way the
State moves are explored in the piece by Lenni
Brenner. Sharon's perception of the State of Israel is
fundamentally the same as the extremists of the Zionist
movement; his heart is closed to the whisperings of so many
other ghosts Those ghosts are not only from the victims of the suicide
bombers, but also the resistors of the Warsaw Ghetto, the
King David Hotel and the village of Deir Yassim. By the sheer brittle intransigence of his approach to the
Palestinians, he risks producing an unbeatable spirit of
resistance in the Palestinian people, coupled with an
implacable hatred of not only the Prime minister and the
IDF, but all the civilians who justified what has been done
in their name. Meanwhile, the so called 'War on Terror" continues. Human
Rights lawyers have brought a case to the US courts charging
US Attorney General Ashcroft with serious infringements of
the human rights of the thousands of detainees swept up and
imprisoned without trial or charges following September 11th
(a situation mirrored in the UK to a lesser extent). No-one seems to remember Enron; and it is only now that
we are remembering that the headlines before September 11th
were largely concerned with the way that international
protest against the forces of international capitalism had
finally started to have an effect. In Washington this weekend, the pretence of a fear of
terrorism will allow the US authorities to suppress any
meaningful dissent or popular protest against the meeting of
the WTO - ostensibly to manage world poverty. At the same time, the US - after effectively removing the
head of one international body regulating climate control,
on the orders of Exxon - are now, despite widespred protest,
attempting to do the same with the convention for the
control of chemical weapons . They apparently fear that his
integrity is so widely respected, that he will be able to
broker a deal with Iraq that would remove any US rationale
for an attack on that country. It is apparent that the Bush regime feels empowered to
remove anyone who stands in the way of their imperial
ambition. In Venezuela,President Chavez survived an attempt by the
military to remove him from office, force him to resign and
fly into exile in Cuba - in a plane reportedly provided by
that great 'friend of democracy', the United States. His replacement by a US-friendly 'liberal businessman',
who immediately dissolved congress and assumed total power,
was short lived. However, we can be sure that there must be a few people
in the US State Department who have noticed a few blindingly
obvious points. That the US power; military and economic, rests on oil
consumption - virtually all of which comes from abroad. Even
Alaska, momentarily saved, could only supply 5% of North
America's oil needs. The worlds biggest oil producers are: Venezuela - see above Saudi Arabia - more unstable by the day,
especially since the recent Israeli offensive in Palestine,
and threat of war against Iraq Iraq - in a state of siege, inherently unstable
and under risk of all-out war; And finally, Russia, who recently became the
world's foremost oil exporter. With Putin's 'restructuring'
of the vast power and energy firms, the Russian economy has
grown by an amazing 4% in the last year. There are still some there who probably realise that the
pursuit of such an imperial agenda is storing up trouble for
the future, just as Israel's treatment of the Palestinian
people will return as tragedy to the Jewish people.
War Crimes in Occupied Territories
International
socialism and Zionism in 20th century Europe
' War
on Terror' used to distort political agenda
