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From the Vol.1,No.2 issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly
MIDEAST NEWS DIGEST

Rafsanjani, Tehran Times on LaRouche

For full coverage of former Iranian President Rafsanjani, and the Tehran Times, on Lyndon LaRouche's evaluation of Sept. 11, see Indepth.

UN Security Council Resolution Not Too Late, But May Be Too Little

At the proverbial "five minutes to midnight" on March 12, the day of the most serious Israeli war crimes in the last decade, between 11:45 and 11:59 p.m. the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution by a vote of 14-0 that attempts to stop unprecedented warfare conducted by Israel against the Palestinians.

For the first time, the resolution, sponsored by the United States, stated that it was acting in support of "a vision of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side, within secure and recognized borders." This formal language referring to "two states," is unprecedented coming from the United States, although both President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to a "state of Palestine," and a vision of two states side by side, in speeches given in, respectively, October and November 2001.

In the March 12 vote, Syria alone abstained, expressing serious concerns about the limitations of the resolution, which it had requested include the important formulation that Israel was "occupying" Palestine.

As passed, the UNSC resolution stresses the "safety of civilians ... [and] the need to respect the universally accepted norms of international humanitarian law," which is taken to be a reference to Israel's policy of closures of Palestinian towns, and "collective punishment." The resolution "welcomes and encourages the diplomatic efforts of special envoys of the U.S., the Russian Federation, the European Union, and the UN," and is also "welcoming the contribution of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah." It further "calls upon the Israeli and Palestinian sides and their leaders to cooperate in the implementation of the Tenet work plan and the Mitchell report."

While maintaining the same old "cessation of all acts of violence" language that has been ineffective for a year, the resolution specifically criticizes Israeli actions. It states that the UNSC is "stressing the need for all concerned to ensure the safety of civilians" and "stressing also the need to respect the universally accepted norms of international humanitarian law." Israel's closure policy, the bulldozing of homes, the cutting off water supplies, and other means of "collective punishment" have been denounced as humanitarian atrocities.

If implemented, the UNSC resolution implicitly forces Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to abandon the rightwing military camps known as "settlements" in Occupied Palestine, which are illegal under UN Resolutions 242 and 338. However, Sharon and his right wing vehemently oppose the UN resolutions that say that Israel must return to the borders it had prior to the 1967 war.

The vote came as U.S. Presidential envoy Anthony Zinni, a critic of the "Clash of Civilizations," was dispatched to the Middle East for the third time by President Bush, with mission orders to "implement" the Mitchell recommendations. Observers believe the Zinni mission will fail unless the U.S. cracks down, with unprecedented moves, such as sanctions, against the actions of the Sharon government. Two days after the March 12 vote, the two rightwing fanatics in Sharon's government, Avigdor Lieberman and Benny Elon from the National Unity-Yisrael Beiteinu, walked out of the governing coalition.

Denazify the Israeli State, Says Israeli Journalist

The U.S. Israeli lobby should be put on trial for war crimes along with Ariel Sharon, says Israel Shamir, an Israeli journalist, in a March 13 article exposing the Warsaw Ghetto-style drills carried out by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians. Shamir says that Israel and the U.S.-based Israeli lobby have "accepted Nazi doctrine as its policy and genocide as its practice."

An example is provided by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, says Shamir; he quotes Dershowitz writing in the Conrad Black-owned Jerusalem Post of March 11: "The first act of [Palestinian] terrorism should result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings." Comments Shamir, "It was the standard practice of Nazi troops in occupied Europe."

Shamir concludes, "Mankind still has a chance to save Palestinians and to save itself. Dershowitz, Black and Co. should be treated as accessories to Sharon's war crimes, and the Jewish state must be denazified, as thoroughly as Germany after 1945."

Israeli Reservist: We Are the Occupiers

On March 9, the New York Times published a commentary by Ishai Menuchin, a major in the Israel Defense Forces reserves and the chairman of Yesh Gvul, the "movement of selective refusal." Menuchin writes with great eloquence on the responsibilities of the citizens of a democracy to hold themselves accountable for their actions. He writes that "daily funerals and thoughts of revenge among Israelis tend to blur the fact that we, the Israelis, are the occupiers. And as much as we live in fear of terrorism and war, it is the Palestinians who suffer more deaths and live with greater fear because they are the occupied."

After describing how the 1982 Lebanon war proved his assumptions wrong about defending his country, Menuchin declares that "I still defend my country, but I will not participate in a military occupation that has over the decades made Israel less secure and less humane.... Being a citizen of a democracy carries with it a commitment to democratic values and a responsibility for your actions. It is morally impossible to be both a devoted democratic citizen and a regular offender against democratic values."

Israeli Women Use 'Lysistrata' Tactics To End Occupation

Israeli mothers, wives, and girlfriends of reserve soldiers and officers are taking a lesson from the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes' famous comedy Lysistrata. Although it is not known whether they are denying sexual intimacy to their husbands (as the wives did in Aristophanes' play), a March 16 article in the newspaper Ha'aretz, under the title, "Lysistrata 2002," reports on several women's groups that have been formed to support refusal to serve in the territories, and in some cases refusal to serve in the Israeli military. The motivation is to end the illegal occupation, and the brutalization of their husbands and sons in the Army and in a general sense to purge the "blood and soil" brutality from Zionism.

Shoshan Brosh-Weitz, from the group Re'ot (Friends), which is made up of wives and girlfriends who support the signers of the Combatants 2002, relates how, during her husband's last reserve duty, she went with him and stood guard with him at a road block, but "today I'd go with a megaphone and stand there with slogans like 'Muli, I'm worried about you. Service in the territories is corrupting your virtues' or 'at the checkpoint you're going to, soldiers have killed, babies and sick people have died, people have been humiliated. Does this suit you?' "

Iraq War Preparations Under Way in Washington, Despite Powell Denials

There is mounting evidence that the Wolfowitz imperial war cabal inside the Bush Administration is going full steam ahead with plans to launch an Iraq war, despite the military, political, and economic realities that show this war to be a "utopian" disaster. Speaking on March 13, President Bush said, "all options are on the table," including nuclear weapons, "because we want to make it very clear to nations that you will not threaten the United States or use weapons of mass destruction against us or our allies or our friends." That Iraq was the case in point, was also explicit: "One thing I will not allow is a nation such as Iraq to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction."

Vice President Cheney is repeating the phrases verbatim on his Middle East tour, as he attempts, so far unsuccessfully, to get Arab nations to acquiesce to the war on Iraq.

Cheney's Iraq Folly Rebuffed by Arab Leaders

Complete unity prevails among the Arab countries at present, in their opposition to a war on Iraq. In fact, said a Washington diplomatic source with long experience in the Middle East, if this war push against Iraq were to go forward, while Sharon's offensive continues against the Palestinians, many of the governments in the area would be overthrown. Hitting Iraq would destabilize the region, and the Arab countries, especially in the Persian Gulf, are not willing to be sacrificed to this U.S. drive. Many leaders in the region believe that Saddam Hussein should be left to run his course.

The Washington source said that, going into the Arab League summit, the region is highly unified. All this creates for the U.S. not only political problems, but functional ones. Look at the map. Visiting Vice President Dick Cheney got a "no" from Jordan; he got a "no" from Egypt; he will get a "no" from Saudi Arabia. An army of 200,000 to 400,000, which is what U.S. military professionals talk about, cannot be based only in Kuwait, and Kuwait does not want to go it alone with the United States.

Lastly, the source said, President Bush's "axis of evil" formulation, and the inclusion therein of Iran, did tremendous damage in the region, triggering an extremist action, and setting back by years the progress moderate Iranian President Khatami had been able to make. The U.S. should be able to see that Iran is at the center of the region, and could become a center of economic progress, with the use of its railroads, and other infrastructure.

Former UN Weapons Inspector: U.S. Will Undermine New Inspections in Iraq

Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter said, in an interview with EIR March 12, that the real question to be asked is "why would we want to" launch a war against Iraq?—pointing out that the strongest proponents of war have "no justification for it." In all of the discussions of war plans, such as the Foreign Affairs article by Ken Pollack, the war promoters cannot answer the challenge, "where are your facts?—put them on the table."

"We all know [Saddam Hussein] had weapons, but we [UN inspectors] dismantled them with the inspections," asserted Ritter. He said, of those who claim the capabilities were rebuilt, "It's just speculation.... If you look at what existed in 1998 [when inspections were cancelled by the U.S. during the Gore impeachment takeover], how could it have been rebuilt? ... Weapons of Mass Destruction do not pop up out of nowhere ... we had destroyed the military industrial base."

Finally, Ritter insisted that the U.S. and Britain are doing everything possible to undermine the possibility that weapons inspections can take place, using "childish tricks" to "denigrat[e] the inspection process" and to impose impossible demands, like inspection of Presidential residences. This way, he charged, they hope to be sufficiently provocative to make war inevitable.

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