Ernesto Che Guevara:At the United Nations 1964

This address was delivered to the Nineteenth General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. It was published in the December 12, 1964, issues of Revolucion and Hoy. Mr. President; Distinguished delegates:
The delegation of Cuba to this assembly, first of all, is pleased to fulfill the agreeable duty of welcoming the addition of three new nations to the important number of those that discuss the problems of the world here. We therefore greet, in the persons of their presidents and prime ministers, the peoples of Zambia, Malawi, and Malta, and express the hope that from the outset these countries will be added to the group of Nonaligned countries that struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.
We also wish to convey our congratulations to the president of this assembly [Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana], whose elevation to so high a post is of special significance since it reflects this new historic stage of resounding triumphs for the peoples of Africa, who up until recently were subject to the colonial system of imperialism. Today, in their immense majority these peoples have become sovereign states through the legitimate exercise of their self-determination. The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination and to the independent development of their nations.
We wish you, Mr. President, the greatest success in the tasks entrusted to you by the member states.
Cuba comes here to state its position on the most important points of controversy and will do so with the full sense of responsibility that the use of this rostrum implies, while at the same time fulfilling the unavoidable duty of speaking clearly and frankly. We would like to see this assembly shake itself out of complacency and move forward. We would like to see the committees begin their work and not stop at the first confrontation. Imperialism wants to turn this meeting into a pointless oratorical tournament, instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent it from doing so. This session of the assembly should not be remembered in the future solely by the number nineteen that identifies it. Our efforts are directed to that end.
We feel that we have the right and the obligation to do so, because our country is one of the most constant points of friction. It is one of the places where the principles upholding the right of small countries to sovereignty are put to the test day by day, minute by minute. At the same time our country is one of the trenches of freedom in the world, situated a few steps away from United States imperialism, showing by its actions, its daily example, that in the present conditions of humanity the peoples can liberate themselves and can keep themselves free.
Of course, there now exists a socialist camp that becomes stronger day by day and has more powerful weapons of struggle. But additional conditions are required for survival: the maintenance of internal unity, faith in one's own destiny, and the irrevocable decision to fight to the death for the defense of one's country and revolution. These conditions, distinguished delegates, exist in Cuba.
Of all the burning problems to be dealt with by this assembly, one of special significance for us, and one whose solution we feel must be found first--so as to leave no doubt in the minds of anyone--is that of peaceful coexistence among states with different economic and social systems. Much progress has been made in the world in this field. But imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, has attempted to make the world believe that peaceful coexistence is the exclusive right of the earth's great powers. We say here what our president said in Cairo, and what later was expressed in the declaration of the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Nonaligned Countries: that peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace.' Peaceful coexistence must be exercised among all states, regardless of size, regardless of the previous historical relations that linked them, and regardless of the problems that may arise among some of them at a given moment.
At present, the type of peaceful coexistence to which we aspire is often violated. Merely because the Kingdom of Cambodia maintained a neutral attitude and did not bow to the machinations of United States imperialism, it has been subjected to all kinds of treacherous and brutal attacks from the Yankee bases in South Vietnam.
Laos, a divided country, has also been the object of imperialist aggression of every kind. Its people have been massacred from the air. The conventions concluded at Geneva have been violated, and part of its territory is in constant danger of cowardly attacks by imperialist forces.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam knows all these histories of aggression as do few nations on earth. It has once again seen its frontier violated, has seen enemy bombers and fighter planes attack its installations and U.S. warships, violating territorial waters, attack its naval posts. At this time, the threat hangs over the Democratic Republic of Vietnam that the U.S. war makers may openly extend into its territory the war that for many years they have been waging against the people of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China have given serious warnings to the United States. We are faced with a case in which world peace is in danger and, moreover, the lives of millions of human beings in this part of Asia are constantly threatened and subjected to the whim of the U.S. invader.
Peaceful coexistence has also been brutally put to the test in Cyprus, due to pressures from the Turkish government and NATO, compelling the people and the government of Cyprus to make a heroic and firm stand in defense of their sovereignty.
In all these parts of the world, imperialism attempts to impose its version of what coexistence should be. It is the oppressed peoples in alliance with the socialist camp that must show them what true coexistence is, and it is the obligation of the United Nations to support them.
We must also state that it is not only in relations among sovereign states that the concept of peaceful coexistence needs to be precisely defined. As Marxists we have maintained that peace, (1) coexistence among nations does not encompass coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed. Furthermore, the right to full independence from all forms of colonial oppression is a fundamental principle of this organization. That is why we express our solidarity with the colonial peoples of socalled Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique, who have been massacred for the crime of demanding their freedom. And we are prepared to help them to the extent of our ability in accordance with the Cairo declaration.
We express our solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico and their great leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, who, in another act of hypocrisy, has been set free at the age of seventy-two, almost unable to speak, paralyzed, after spending a lifetime in jail. Albizu Campos is a symbol of the as yet unfree but indomitable Latin America. Years and years of prison, almost unbearable pressures in jail, mental torture, solitude, total isolation from his people and his family, the insolence of the conqueror and its lackeys in the land of his birth--nothing broke his will. The delegation of Cuba, on behalf of its people, pays a tribute of admiration and gratitude to a patriot who confers honor upon our America.
The United States for many years has tried to convert Puerto Rico into a model of hybrid culture: the Spanish language with English inflections, the Spanish language with hinges on its backbone--the better to bow down before the Yankee soldier. Puerto Rican soldiers have been used as cannon fodder in imperialist wars, as in Korea, and have even been made to fire at their own brothers, as in the massacre perpetrated by the U.S. army a few months ago against the unarmed people of Panama--one of the most recent crimes carried out by Yankee imperialism.(2) And yet, despite this assault on their will and their historical destiny, the people of Puerto Rico have preserved their culture, their Latin character, their national feelings, which in themselves give proof of the implacable desire for independence lying within the masses on that Latin American island.
We must also warn that the principle of peaceful coexistence does not encompass the right to mock the will of the peoples, as is happening in the case of so-called British Guiana. There the government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan has been the victim of every kind of pressure and maneuver, and independence has been delayed to gain time to find ways to flout the people's will and guarantee the docility of a new government, placed in power by covert means, in order to grant a castrated freedom to this country of the Americas.(3) Whatever roads Guiana may be compelled to follow to obtain independence, the moral and militant support of Cuba goes to its people.
Furthermore, we must point out that the islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique have been fighting for a long time for self-government without obtaining it. This state of affairs must not continue.
Once again we speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over another remains of ficial policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?
I would like to refer specifically to the painful case of the Congo, unique in the history of the modern world, which shows how, with absolute impunity, with the most insolent cynicism, the rights of peoples can be flouted. The direct reason for all this is the enormous wealth of the Congo, which the imperialist countries want to keep under their control. In the speech he made during his first visit to the United Nations, Companero Fidel Castro observed that the whole problem of coexistence among peoples boils down to the wrongful appropriation of other peoples' wealth. He made the following statement: "End the philosophy of plunder and the philosophy of war will be ended as well."
But the philosophy of plunder has not only not been ended, it is stronger than ever. And that is why those who used the name of the United Nations to commit the murder of Lumumba are today, in the name of the defense of the white race, murdering thousands of Congolese. How can we forget the betrayal of the hope that Patrice Lumumba placed in the United Nations? How can we forget the machinations and maneuvers that followed in the wake of the occupation of that country by United Nations troops, under whose auspices the assassins of this great African patriot acted with impunity? How can we forget, distinguished delegates, that the one who flouted the authority of the UN in the Congo--and not exactly for patriotic reasons, but rather by virtue of conflicts between imperialists--was Moise Tshombe, who initiated the secession of Katanga with Belgian support? And how can one justify, how can one explain, that at the end of all the United Nations activities there, Tshombe, dislodged from Katanga, should return as lord and master of the Congo? Who can deny the sad role that the imperialists compelled the United Nations to play?
To sum up: dramatic mobilizations were carried out to avoid the secession of Katanga, but today Tshombe is in power, the wealth of the Congo is in imperialist hands--and the expenses have to be paid by the honorable nations. The merchants of war certainly do good business! That is why the government of Cuba supports the just stance of the Soviet Union in refusing to pay the expenses for this come.
And as if this were not enough, we now have flung in our faces these latest acts that have filled the world with indignation.(4) Who are the perpetrators? Belgian paratroopers, carried by United States planes, who took off from British bases. We remember as if it were yesterday that we saw a small country in Europe, a civilized and industrious country, the Kingdom of Belgium, invaded by Hitler's hordes. We were embittered by the knowledge that this small nation was massacred by German imperialism, and we felt affection for its people. But this other side of the imperialist coin was the one that many of us did not see. Perhaps the sons of Belgian patriots who died defending their country's liberty are now murdering in cold blood thousands of Congolese in the name of the white race, just as they suffered under the German heel because their blood was not sufficiently Aryan.
Our free eyes open now on new horizons and can see what yesterday, in our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that "Western Civilization" disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals. That is the only name that can be applied to those who have gone to fulfill such "humanitarian" tasks in the Congo. A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples. That is what imperialism does to men. That is what distinguishes the imperial "white man."
All free men of the world must be prepared to avenge the crime of the Congo. Perhaps many of those soldiers, who were turned into subhumans by imperialist machinery, believe in good faith that they are defending the rights of a superior race. In this assembly, however, those peoples whose skins are darkened by a different sun, colored by different pigments, constitute the majority. And they fully and clearly understand that the difference between men does not lie in the color of their skin, but in the forms of ownership of the means of production, in the relations of production.
The Cuban delegation extends greetings to the peoples of Southern Rhodesia and South-West Africa, oppressed by white colonialist minorities; to the peoples of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Swaziland, French Somaliland, the Arabs of Palestine, Aden and the Protectorates, Oman; and to all peoples in conflict with imperialism and colonialism. We reaffirm our support to them.
I express also the hope that there will be a just solution to the conflict facing our sister republic of Indonesia in its relations with Malaysia.
Mr. President: One of the fundamental themes of this conference is general and complete disarmament. We express our support for general and complete disarmament. Furthermore, we advocate the complete destruction of all thermonuclear devices and we support the holding of a conference of all the nations of the world to make this aspiration of all people a reality. In his statement before this assembly, our prime minister warned that arms races have always led to war. There are new nuclear powers in the world, and the possibilities of a confrontation are growing.
We believe that such a conference is necessary to obtain the total destruction of thermonuclear weapons and, as a first step, the total prohibition of tests. At the same time, we have to establish clearly the duty of all countries to respect the present borders of other states and to refrain from engaging in any aggression, even with conventional weapons.
In adding our voice to that of all the peoples of the world who ask for general and complete disarmament, the destruction of all nuclear arsenals, the complete halt to the building of new thermonuclear devices and of nuclear tests of any kind, we believe it necessary to also stress that the territorial integrity of nations must be respected and the armed hand of imperialism held back, for it is no less dangerous when it uses only conventional weapons. Those who murdered thousands of defenseless citizens of the Congo did not use the atomic bomb. They used conventional weapons. Conventional weapons have also been used by imperialism, causing so many deaths.
Even if the measures advocated here were to become effective and make it unnecessary to mention it, we must point out that we cannot adhere to any regional pact for denuclearization so long as the United States maintains aggressive bases on our own territory, in Puerto Rico, Panama, and in other Latin American states where it feels it has the right to place both conventional and nuclear weapons without any restrictions. We feel that we must be able to provide for our own defense in the light of the recent resolution of the Organization of American States against Cuba, on the basis of which an attack may be carried out invoking the Rio Treaty.(5)
If the conference to which we have just referred were to achieve all these objectives--which, unfortunately, would be difficult--we believe it would be the most important one in the history of humanity. To ensure this it would be necessary for the People's Republic of China to be represented, and that is why a conference of this type must be held. But it would be much simpler for the peoples of the world to recognize the undeniable truth of the existence of the People's Republic of China, whose government is the sole representative of its people, and to give it the seat it deserves, which is, at present, usurped by the gang that controls the province of Taiwan, with United States support.
The problem of the representation of China in the United Nations cannot in any way be considered as a case of a new admission to the organization, but rather as the restoration of the legitimate rights of the People's Republic of China.
We must repudiate energetically the "two Chinas" plot. The Chiang Kai-shek gang of Taiwan cannot remain in the United Nations. What we are dealing with, we repeat, is the expulsion of the usurper and the installation of the legitimate representative of the Chinese people.
We also warn against the United States government's insistence on presenting the problem of the legitimate representation of China in the UN as an "important question," in order to impose a requirement of a two-thirds majority of members present and voting. The admission of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations is, in fact, an important question for the entire world, but not for the machinery of the United Nations, where it must constitute a mere question of procedure. In this way justice will be done. Almost as important as attaining justice, however, would be the demonstration, once and for all, that this august assembly has eyes to see, ears to hear, tongues to speak with, and sound criteria for making its decisions.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons among the member states of NATO, and especially the possession of these devices of mass destruction by the Federal Republic of Germany, would make the possibility of an agreement on disarmament even more remote, and linked to such an agreement is the problem of the peaceful reunification of Germany. So long as there is no clear understanding, the existence of two Germanysmust be recognized: that of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic. The German problem can be solved only with the direct participation in negotiations of the German Democratic Republic with full rights.
We shall only touch on the questions of economic development and international trade that are broadly represented in the agenda. In this very year of 1964 the Geneva conference was held at which a multitude of matters related to these aspects of international relations were dealt with. The warnings and forecasts of our delegation were fully confirmed, to the misfortune of the economically dependent countries.
We wish only to point out that insofar as Cuba is concerned, the United States of America has not implemented the explicit recommendations of that conference, and recently the U.S. government also prohibited the sale of medicines to Cuba. By doing so it divested itself, once and for all, of the mask of humanitarianism with which it attempted to disguise the aggressive nature of its blockade against the people of Cuba.
Furthermore, we state once more that the scars justify by colonialism that impede the development of the peoples are expressed not only in political relations. The so-called deterioration of the terms of trade is nothing but the result of the unequal exchange between countries producing raw materials and industrial countries, which dominate markets and impose the illusory justice of equal exchange of values.
So long as the economically dependent peoples do not free themselves from the capitalist markets and, in a firm bloc with the socialist countries, impose new relations between the exploited and the exploiters, there will be no solid economic development. In certain cases there will be retrogression, in which the weak countries will fall under the political domination of the imperialists and colonialists.
Finally, distinguished delegates, it must be made clear that in the area of the Caribbean, maneuvers and preparations for aggression against Cuba are taking place, on the coasts of Nicaragua above all, in Costa Rica as well, in the Panama Canal Zone, on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico, in Florida, and possibly in other parts of United States territory and perhaps also in Honduras. In these places Cuban mercenaries are training, as well as mercenaries of other nationalities, with a purpose that cannot be the most peaceful one.
After a big scandal, the government of Costa Rica--it is said--has ordered the elimination of all training camps of Cuban exiles in that country. No one knows whether this position is sincere, or whether it is a simple alibi because the mercenaries training there were about to commit some misdeed. We hope that full cognizance will be taken of the real existence of bases for aggression, which we denounced long ago, and that the world will ponder the international responsibility of the government of a country that authorizes and facilitates the training of mercenaries to attack Cuba.
We should note that news of the training of mercenaries in different parts in the Caribbean and the participation of the U.S. government in such acts is presented as completely natural in the newspapers in the United States. We know of no Latin American voice that has officially protested this. This shows the cynicism with which the United States government moves its pawns.
The sharp foreign ministers of the GAS had eyes to see Cuban emblems and to find "irrefutable" proof in the weapons that the Yankees exhibited in Venezuela, but they do not see the preparations for aggression in the United States, just as they did not hear the voice of President Kennedy, who explicitly declared himself the aggressor against Cuba at Playa Giron. In some cases, it is a blindness provoked by the hatred against our revolution by the ruling classes of the Latin American countries. In others--and these are sadder and more deplorable--it is the product of the dazzling glitter of mammon.
As is well known, after the tremendous commotion of the socalled Caribbean crisis, the United States undertook certain commitments with the Soviet Union. These culminated in the withdrawal of certain types of weapons that the continued acts of aggression of the United States--such as the mercenary attack at Playa Giron and threats of invasion against our homeland--had compelled us to install in Cuba as an act of legitimate and essential defense.
The United States, furthermore, tried to get the UN to inspect our territory. But we emphatically refuse, since Cuba does not recognize the right of the United States, or of anyone else in the world, to determine the type of weapons Cuba may have within its borders.
In this connection, we would abide only by multilateral agreements, with equal obligations for all the parties concerned. As Fidel Castro has said: "So long as the concept of sovereignty exists as the prerogative of nations and of independent peoples, as a right of all peoples, we will not accept the exclusion of our people from that right. So long as the world is governed by these principles, so long as the world is governed by those concepts that have universal validity because they are universally accepted and recognized by the peoples, we will not accept the attempt to deprive us of any of those rights, and we will renounce none of those rights."
The secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant, understood our reasons. Nevertheless, the United States attempted to establish a new prerogative, an arbitrary and illegal one: that of violating the airspace of a small country. Thus, we see flying over our country U-2 aircraft and other types of spy planes that, with complete impunity, fly over our airspace. We have made all the necessary warnings for the violations of our airspace to cease, as well as for a halt to the provocations of the United States navy against our sentry posts in the zone of Guantanamo, the buzzing by aircraft of our ships or the ships of other nationalities in international waters, the pirate attacks against ships sailing under different flags, and the infiltration of spies, saboteurs, and weapons onto our island.
We want to build socialism. We have declared that we are supporters of those who strive for peace. We have declared ourselves to be within the group of Nonaligned countries, although we are MarxistLeninists, because the Nonaligned countries, like ourselves, fight imperialism. We want peace. We want to build a better life for our people. That is why we avoid, insofar as possible, falling into the provocations manufactured by the Yankees. But we know the mentality of those who govern them. They want to make us pay a very high price for that peace. We reply that the price cannot go beyond the bounds of dignity.
And Cuba reaffirms once again the right to maintain on its territory the weapons it deems appropriate, and its refusal to recognize the right of any power on earth--no matter how powerful--to violate our soil, our territorial waters, or our airspace.
If in any assembly Cuba assumes obligations of a collective nature, it will fulfill them to the letter. So long as this does not happen, Cuba maintains all its rights, just as any other nation. In the face of the demands of imperialism, our prime minister laid out the five points necessary for the existence of a secure peace in the Caribbean. They are:
"A halt to the economic blockade and all economic and trade pressures by the United States, in all parts of the world, against our country;
A halt to all subversive activities, launching and landing of weapons and explosives by air and sea, organization of mercenary invasions, infiltration of spies and saboteurs, acts all carried out from the territory of the United States and some accomplice countries;
A halt to pirate attacks carried out from existing bases in the United States and Puerto Rico;
A halt to all the violations of our airspace and our territorial waters by United States aircraft and warships;
Withdrawal from the Guantanamo naval base and return of the Cuban territory occupied by the United States."
None of these elementary demands has been met, and our forces are still being provoked from the naval base at Guantanamo. That base has become a nest of thieves and a launching pad for them into our territory. We would tire this assembly were we to give a detailed account of the large number of provocations of all kinds. Suffice it to say that including the first days of December the number amounts to 1,323 in 1964 alone. The list covers minor provocations such as violation of the boundary line, launching of objects from the territory controlled by the United States, the commission of acts of sexual exhibitionism by U.S. personnel of both sexes, and verbal insults. It includes others that are more serious, such as shooting off smallcaliber weapons, aiming weapons at our territory, and offenses against our national flag. Extremely serious provocations include those of crossing the boundary line and starting fires in installations on the Cuban side, as well as rifle fire. There have been seventyeight rifle shots this year, with the sorrowful toll of one death: that of Ramon Lopez Pena, a soldier, killed by two shots fired from the United States post three and a half kilometers from the coast on the northern boundary. This extremely grave provocation took place at 7:07 p.m. on July 19, 1964, and the prime minister of our government publicly stated on July 26 that if the event were to recur he would give orders for our troops to repel the aggression. At the same time orders were given for the withdrawal of the forward line of Cuban forces to positions farther away from the boundary line and construction of the necessary fortified positions.
One thousand three hundred and twenty-three provocations in 340 days amount to approximately four per day. Only a perfectly disciplined army with a morale such as ours could resist so many hostile acts without losing its self-control.
Forty-seven countries meeting at the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Nonaligned Countries in Cairo unanimously agreed:
Noting with concern that foreign military bases are in practice a means of bringing pressure on nations and retarding their emancipation and development, based on their own ideological, political, economic, and cultural ideas, the conference declares its unreserved support to the countries that are seeking to secure the elimination of foreign bases from their territory and calls upon all states maintaining troops and bases in other countries to remove them immediately.
The conference considers that the maintenance at Guantanamo (Cuba) of a military base of the United States of America, in defiance of the will of the government and people of Cuba and in defiance of the provisions embodied in the declaration of the Belgrade conference, constitutes a violation of Cuba's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Noting that the Cuban government expresses its readiness to settle its dispute over the base at Guantanamo with the United States of America on an equal footing, the conference urges the United States government to open negotiations with the Cuban government to evacuate their base.
The government of the United States has not responded to this request of the Cairo conference and is attempting to maintain indefinitely by force its occupation of a piece of our territory, from which it carries out acts of aggression such as those detailed earlier.
The Organization of American States--which the people also call the United States Ministry of Colonies--condemned us "energetically," even though it had just excluded us from its midst, ordering its members to break off diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba. The OAS authorized aggression against our country at any time and under any pretext, violating the most fundamental international laws, completely disregarding the United Nations. Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico opposed that measure, and the government of the United States of Mexico refused to comply with the sanctions that had been approved. Since then we have had no relations with any Latin American countries except Mexico, and this fulfills one of the necessary conditions for direct aggression by imperialism.
We want to make clear once again that our concern for Latin America is based on the ties that unite us: the language we speak, the culture we maintain, and the common master we had. We have no other reason for desiring the liberation of Latin America from the U.S. colonial yoke. If any of the Latin American countries here decide to reestablish relations with Cuba, we would be willing to do so on the basis of equality, and without viewing that recognition of Cuba as a free country in the world to be a gift to our goverment. Because we won that recognition with our blood in the days of the liberation struggle. We acquired it with our blood in the defense of our shores against the Yankee invasion.
Although we reject any accusations against us of interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we cannot deny that we sympathize with those people who strive for their freedom. We must fulfill the obligation of our government and people to state clearly and categorically to the world that we morally support and stand in solidarity with peoples who struggle anywhere in the world to make a reality of the rights of full sovereignty proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.
It is the United States that intervenes. It has done so historically in Latin America. Since the end of the last century Cuba has experienced this truth; but it has been experienced, too, by Venezuela, Nicaragua, Central America in general, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In recent years, apart from our people, Panama has experienced direct aggression, where the marines in the Canal Zone opened fire in cold blood against the defenseless people; the Dominican Republic, whose coast was violated by the Yankee fleet to avoid an outbreak of the just fury of the people after the death of Trujillo; and Colombia, whose capital was taken by assault as a result of a rebellion provoked by the assassination of Gaitan.(6)
Covert interventions are carried out through military missions that participate in internal repression, organizing forces designed for that purpose in many countries, and also in coupe d'etat, which have been repeated so frequently on the Latin American continent during recent years. Concretely, United States forces intervened in the repression of the peoples of Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala, who fought with weapons for their freedom. In Venezuela, not only do U.S. forces advise the army and the police, but they also direct acts of genocide carried out from the air against the peasant population in vast insurgent areas. And the Yankee companies operating there exert pressures of every kind to increase direct interference. The imperialists are preparing to repress the peoples of the Americas and are establishing an International of Crime.
The United States intervenes in Latin America invoking the defense of free institutions. The time will come when this assembly will acquire greater maturity and demand of the United States government guarantees for the life of the Blacks and Latin Americans who live in that country, most of them U.S. citizens by origin or adoption.
Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of Blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the Black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men--how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom? We understand that today the assembly is not in a position to ask for explanations of these acts. It must be clearly established, however, that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetuator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population.
To the ambiguous language with which some delegates have described the case of Cuba and the OAS, we reply with clear-cut words and we proclaim that the peoples of Latin America will make those servile, sell-out governments pay for their treason.
Cuba, distinguished delegates, a free and sovereign state with no chains binding it to anyone, with no foreign investments on its territory, with no proconsuls directing its policy, can speak with its head held high in this assembly and can demonstrate the justice of the phrase by which it has been baptized: "Free Territory of the Americas."
Our example will bear fruit in the continent, as it is already doing to a certain extent in Guatemala, Colombia, and Venezuela.
There is no small enemy nor insignificant force, because no longer are there isolated peoples. As the Second Declaration of Havana states:
No nation in Latin America is weak--because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbor the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future, and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world....
This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American lands. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers....
But now from one end of the continent to the other they are signaling with clarity that the hour has come--the hour of their vindication. Now this anonymous mass, this America of color, somber, taciturn America, which all over the continent sings with the same sadness and disillusionment, now this mass is beginning to enter definitively into its own history, is beginning to write it with its own blood, is beginning to suffer and die for it.
Because now in the mountains and fields of America, on its flatlands and in its jungles, in the wilderness or in the traffic of cities, on the banks of its great oceans or rivers, this world is beginning to tremble. Anxious hands are stretched forth, ready to die for what is theirs, to win those rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years. Yes, now history will have to take the poor of America into account, the exploited and spurned of America, who have decided to begin writing their history for themselves for all time. Already they can be seen on the roads, on foot, day after day, in endless march of hundreds of kilometers to the governmental "eminences," there to obtain their rights.
Already they can be seen armed with stones, sticks, machetes, in one direction and another, each day, occupying lands, sinking hooks into the land that belongs to them and defending it with their lives. They can be seen carrying signs, slogans, flags; letting them flap in the mountain or prairie winds. And the wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights trampled underfoot, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labor amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected,
For this great mass of humanity has said, "Enough!" and has begun to march. And their march of giants will not be halted until they conquer true independence--for which they have vainly died more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at Playa Girdn. They will die for their own true and never-to-be-surrendered independence.
All this, distinguished delegates, this new will of a whole continent, of Latin America, is made manifest in the cry proclaimed daily by our masses as the irrefutable expression of their decision to fight and to paralyze the armed hand of the invader. It is a cry that has the understanding and support of all the peoples of the world and especially of the socialist camp, headed by the Soviet Union. That cry is: Patria o muerte! [Homeland or death]
Ernesto CHE GUEVARA

Che, alive as they never wanted you to be!

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (son of Ernesto Guevara Lynch) was born on 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, into a relatively upper-middle class family with Irish and Basque roots. His father, was a construction engineer. He was the first of five children. Develops a severe asthmatic condition at the age of two, prompting his family to move to the drier climate of Alta Gracia, Cordoba. Most of his early education was provided by his mother at home. He is reported to have read widely and deeply from his father's library, encountering Marx and Freud in his early teens. In 1941, he attends the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, a secondary school in Cordoba. Enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires in 1948, studies medicine, becomes interested in leprosy. His asthma disqualifies him for military service. Makes a 4,000 mile long journey through Northern Argentina alone on a moped, encountering many indigenous tribes and experiencing first hand the impoverished conditions of their lives. In 1951, he takes off on a motorcycle journey with his good friend, Alberto Granado. They travel from Buenos Aires, down the coast of Argentina, through the Andes into Chile, and then north into Peru, Columbia and Venezuela. The diary Che kept during this time has been published as: The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America. He qualifies as a doctor in 1953, specializing in dermatology. Around this time he was exposed to the attempted worker reforms following the National Revolution of 1952 in Boliva.Walks and hitchhikes to Guatemala, witnesses the overthrow of the radical socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz by USA-supported Castillo Armas. He could not help but note the vital role that the CIA played in the counter-revolution. Establishes connections with Peruvian Apristas and other Latin American radicals. In September of 1954, he moves to Mexico City, finding work in the General Hospital. Through Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian Marxist, he meets Fidel Castro and involves himself in the planned invasion of Cuba. He marries Gadea. They have a daughter, Hildita. Under the influence of Castro, Alberto Bayo and the writings of Mao Tse-tung, he begins to form the primary axioms of his philosophy of guerrilla warfare. In this time he also began to be called 'Che', for his habit of ending his sentences and calling his friends 'Che'- which is an Argentinian expression for buddy. In 1956, the revolutionaries land in Cuba on the "yacht" Granma, initating a three-year guerrilla war against the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Che is included at first for his medical expertise but soon rises through the ranks to become the Commandante of the Revolutionary Army of Barbutos. In this role, he is directly responsible for dozens of executions of defectors and Batista loyalists.
The revolutionaries succeed in overthrowing the Batista regime in January of 1959. Che is now considered second only to Castro, who appoints him Governor of the National Bank. He marries Aleida March de la Torre, with whom he eventually has four children. He is made Minister for Industry in 1961, becomes increasingly hostile towards US interests in the Cuban economy, strengthens relationship with USSR. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che advocates nuclear confrontation. From 1961 to 1965, he travels with his wife around the world as an ambassador for Cuba. Becomes disillusioned with Soviet Communism, makes a formal break in a speech delivered in February of 1965. Calls for guerrilla-type revolutionary actions in Africa, Asia and South America. Che goes underground, traveling through Africa, eventually assembling a group of Cubans to fight in the Kinshasa rebellion in the Congo. The rebellion fails and Che withdraws in August of 1965. Castro informally removes Guevara from office, their ideas for the future of Cuba having radically diverged. He disguises himself as Uraguayan economist, shaving off his beard and not wearing his famous beret, in order to travel incognito through Latin America. In November 1966, he leads a group of guerrillas through southeastern Bolivia, hoping to inspire the peasants and workers into a revolutionary movement that would spread all throughout Latin America, sparking off "twenty new Vietnams". Dispirited by casualties, illness and depression, the ragged group is cornered by a Bolivian battalion (which had been trained by US Special Forces in anti-guerrilla warfare) in a gorge on October 8. Two jets and a helicopter provide air support. Che is taken to the nearby town of La Higuera. He refuses all attempts at interrogation by CIA and Bolivan officials. The Bolivian president, General Rene Barrientos, orders the execution of Guevara as soon as possible. 9 October 1967. After a few false starts and Che's telling them to get it over with, six or more shots are fired into Guevara's torso. One version of his reported last words were: "I knew you were going to shoot me; I should never have been taken alive. Tell Fidel that this failure does not mean the end of the revolution, that it will triumph elsewhere. Tell Aleida to forget this, remarry and be happy, and keep the children studying. Ask the soldiers to aim well." Others have claimed his last words to have been: "Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man." After his death, a death mask was made and his hands were cut off to ensure identification. His body was buried in a secret grave. Guevara was 39 years old. In June of 1997, a team of Cuban and Argentinian scientists recovered the skeleton, missing both hands, of Guevara in the town of Vallegrande, Bolivia. The bones have since been "repatriated" to Cuba. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch said in 1969: ''The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels''.Quotes: "It is better to die standing than to live on your knees." "The question is one of fighting the causes and not just the effects. This revolution is bound to fail if it doesn't succeed in reaching deep inside them, stirring them right down to the bone, and giving them back their stature as human beings. Otherwise, what's the use?" "Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." "Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity."
Subcultural RelevanceThe 30 year anniversary of Guevara's death, the publication of a slew of books, and the timely recovery of his bones have amply served to underscore the recent surge in the popularity of the sixties guerrilla leader. The famous photograph of Che in black beret taken by Korda has become an icon all over the world. His image is used by everyone from politically subversive rock bands to advertisers seeking credibility . In Cuba and many parts of Latin America, he is spoken of in an almost Christ-like reverence. The Cuban government actively cultivates a "Che mythos", exploiting the nostalgia for the good old revolutionary days. The issue of Che Guevara's relevance is two-fold. Primarily, his life represents the archetype of revolutionary in the late 20th century political theater. On the other hand, the blatant and nothing less than pornographic whoring of his image vividly illustrates the dangers of mediated manipulation and recontextualization of a threatening personality. It would be a sad, but telling, fate if Che ended up only being remembered as fashionable martyr-rebel icon for Madsion Avenue. The imperative here is to not become seduced by the advertized images and empty slogans; but to see through it into the complexities and, at times, difficult aspects of the extraordinary human being that was Che Guevara.

George Bush doesn't know anything about freedom Damu Smith Speach in washingtonDC

DAMU SMITH: Yesterday I watched the president in his inauguration speech. He mentioned freedom 20-plus times. The day before I heard his stone-faced reactionary nominee for Secretary of State, Miss Condoleezza, speak so incessantly about the issue of torture. George Bush doesn't know anything about freedom, because he's not hearing the cries of the Haitian people. He is not hearing the cries of the Palestinian people, who live under the boot of Israel’s brutal and barbaric and racist occupation of the Palestinian people. He does not hear the cries of the Iraqi people. He does not hear the cries of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He does not hear the cries of the people in the Congo, where the United States policy of so many years created the division in that country that we're seeing right now. I didn't hear him talk about the people in the far region of the Sudan. I didn't hear him talk about the people in the ghettos and barrios of America. I didn't hear him talk about the working people of our country who don't have a living wage and don't have health care. I didn't hear him talk about our youth who are dying in our streets and our children who are going hungry every day. I didn't hear him talk about any of these things. He knows nothing about freedom.
We know everything about freedom. We are the moral authority of our nation. Our responsibility is to be the other voice, and the other authority, because there's a dual authority in the country. There's one authority representing the reactionary and evil and criminal policies of this administration, and there's the authority of people who love and yearn for justice and peace and human rights. Our authority is the authority that must prevail in the moral universe that God has created, because really, the Bible says, blessed are the peacemakers for we are the sons and daughters of God. And the Bible says that justice must roll down like a mighty stream, not like a trickle. If that is the mandate that we have, we have a responsibility to go forth from this meeting tonight to insure that justice is done by organizing in the schools, organizing in the mosques, organizing in the churches, organizing in the community centers, getting out to the metro stops, doing everything that's necessary to educate the people to bring people who are not with us along. We cannot win this struggle by ourselves. We must exponentially expand the race of those who are fighting for freedom. We cannot do it just with ourselves.
So what I am saying to you in my two-and-a-half minutes left, that we have the responsibility to speak out forcefully against racism. People don't want to talk about racism anymore. But let me tell you something, we're not whining about it. Why did 60% of the white electorate vote for Bush, and 89% of the black electorate vote for Kerry? It's not genetics. It's experiential. I want to say to my white brothers and sisters, you have a responsibility tonight to go forth and talk to some of your racist white brothers and sisters who are so blinded by their racism and their ultra-nationalism that they cannot see the forest for the trees. So, as I conclude, go and write your letter, go and send your postcard, go and march, if you're sitting on the sideline, you're part of the problem. And you are not part of the solution. You are not doing God's work. In my 30 seconds left, I love you all. Black Voices for Peace loves you, and I did it in five minutes

May I Quote You, Mr. President? by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

A selection of 50 quotes from President George W. Bush, for entertainment or meditation
A man lost in his geography:
1-"We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe."
George W. Bush
2-"It's time for the human race to enter the solar system."
George W. Bush
3-"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."
George W. Bush
•A man lost in his logic:
4-" It isn't pollution that's harming the environment.
It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. "
George W. Bush
5-"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."
George W. Bush
6-"These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave..."
George W. Bush
7-"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
George W. Bush
8-"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
George W. Bush
9-"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
George W. Bush
10-Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness.
George W. Bush
•A man lost in space:
11-"For NASA, space is still a high priority."
George W. Bush
•A MAN WITH HEAVEN ON HIS SIDE:
12-"I believe God wants me to be president."
George W. Bush
13- [I was] "chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment."
George W. Bush
14-"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
George W. Bush
15-"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job."
George W. Bush
•The man lost in his vocabulary:
16-" Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children."
George W. Bush
17-"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'."
George W. Bush
18-"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is, 'to be prepared'."
George W. Bush
19-'There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.'
George W. Bush
• Thoughts coming straight from George Orwell's '1984':
20-"Iraq and Afghanistan ...are now democracies and they are allies in the cause of freedom and peace."
George W. Bush
21-"Ariel Sharon ... is a man of courage and a man of peace."
George W. Bush
22-"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
George W. Bush
•THE DECEIVING PACIFIST:
23-"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."
George W. Bush
24-"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table."
George W. Bush
25-"Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
George W. Bush
26- “Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools—not weapons of mass destruction.” (N.B.: The U.S. has 10,000 nuclear weapons)
George W. Bush
•The theologian:
27-"Islam, as practiced by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion."
George W. Bush
28-"The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur'an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."
George W. Bush
•THE Flip-Flopper:
29-"I favor leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question."
George W. Bush
30-"I am pro-life."
George W. Bush
31- "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."
George W. Bush
32- "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
George W. Bush
33-"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
George W. Bush
•The forecaster of things to come:
34-"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties [in Iraq]."
George W. Bush
35-"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur. "
George W. Bush
36-"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future."
George W. Bush
37-"Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you."
George W. Bush, (speech of March 17, 2003)
38-"To the C students, I say you too can be president of the United States."
George W. Bush
The astute observer:
39-"A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls."
George W. Bush
40-"Brownie (Michael Brown of FEMA), you're doing a heck of a job."
George W. Bush
•A man and his environment:
41-"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
George W. Bush
•The double-talker:
42-"There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory, because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy." (N.B.: The Hamas government was elected)
George W. Bush
43-"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make—it would hope—put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see."
George W. Bush
•THE WOULD-BE DICTATOR:
44-"In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power."
George W. Bush
45-"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."
George W. Bush
46-"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
George W. Bush
47-"I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president."
George W. Bush
48- "I will not withdraw [from Iraq], even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me."
George W. Bush
49- "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best."
George W. Bush
•And, last but not least, CONSIDERING THE MESS IN IRAQ:
50-“I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.”
George W. Bush
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and a frequent contributor to Global Research. He is the author of 'The New American Empire'.
The above article was first published on Professor Tremblay's blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog

Mrs Saddam says Saddam is not Saddam ?

After the Russians applied enormous diplomatic pressure, America was finally obliged to allow Sajida Heiralla Tuffah access to her husband in Qatar, where he had been flown in some luxury aboard a United States Air Force VIP jet. The facilities at Baghdad Airport were considered to be sub-standard, besides which, people were beginning to talk about the laughing and bourbon-swilling Muslim prisoner, who was the only one in sight not wearing a hood and sensory deprivation earphones, and not being sexually abused by Ricardo Sanchez.
Well, you could have heard a pin drop all the way across Qatar. Sajida arrived from Syria with her official escort Sheikh Hamad Al-Tani, and then entered the prison, emerging only moments later pink with rage and shouting, "This is not my husband but his double. Where is my husband? Take me to my husband".
American officials rushed forward to shield Mrs Saddam from perplexed Russian observers, trying to insist that Saddam had changed a lot while in custody and she probably didn't recognise him. This was certainly not the best way to handle the Iraqi President's wife. "You think I do not know my husband?" Sajida shouted furiously, "I was married to the man for more than twenty-five years!" Then she stormed off, never to return.
This remarkable confrontation was reported by Pravda and four other newspapers in the east between 13 and 17 April, but the New York Times and others made damn sure you didn't read or hear about it in the west. After all, this was an integral part of Wall Street's psychological campaign to convince the public that America was "Winning the War", so please to send more sons and body bags to Iraq.

Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast Fact Sheet

This fact sheet is compiled from the August 2006 report Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast by Rita J. King.

The hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005 created a situation ripe for exploitation by corporations, a "free-for-all" maintained by government incompetence and corruption, especially by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).Amount appropriated by Congress for hurricane relief: $85 billionAmount received by FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund: $38 billionAmount granted by FEMA in contracts so far: $6 billionContracts for small businesses made up only 13% of the net worth of all contracts granted by FEMA, and only 1.5% of all contracts went to minority-owned businesses. Only 16.6% of all contracts have been awarded to businesses headquartered in the three worst-hit states. Meanwhile, firms from Virginia alone have laid claim to more than 30% of FEMA’s largesse (again, in dollar value)
For example, the Department of Homeland Services (DHS) has paid out a combined worth of $3.4 billion to four companies, mostly for housing, or more than double their original value. The companies are Bechtel, CH2M Hill, Fluor and Shaw.Under “Operation Blue Roof" these companies got almost $2,500 for each blue tarpaulin used to cover storm-damaged roofs in the worst-hit areas from FEMA — almost enough to pay for a new roof in many cases (and the tarps were only designed to last 3 months). The workers who actually tacked the tarp onto the roof (a two-hour job) were probably making closer to minimum wage.
Disaster profiteers in the Gulf Coast have used their friends in high places to secure uncompetitive contracts, and continue to try to evade responsibility for shoddy work and overcharge the federal government by millions of dollars. These are some of the worst corporate offenders (many of which first landed military contracts in Iraq):

Akima Site Operations
The Army Corps of Engineers awarded Alaska-based Akima a $39.5 million no-bid contract for providing portable classrooms. Local businessman Paul Adams of Adams Home Center, said he submitted a bid at half the price but was rejected.

Americold Logistics
Contracts totaling $1.7 billion were awarded to Americold, which provides ice and cold storage facilities, thanks to another former FEMA director-turned-lobbyist, James Witt. One of these was to deliver ice, a container of which moved from location to location by truck, for over 1600 miles before melting, unused.AshBrittAshBritt landed a $500 million contract for debris removal, with the help of the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, lobbyists with close ties to Republicans, and Florida governor Jeb Bush. But the Army Corps was so disappointed with AshBritt’s performance that it threatened to terminate the contract.

AshBritt’s
$500 million contract for debris removal amounted to about $23 for every cubic yard of debris removed. AshBritt in turn hired C&B Enterprises, which was paid $9 per cubic yard. That company hired Amlee Transportation, which was paid $8 per cubic yard. Amlee hired Chris Hessler for $7 per cubic yard. Hessler, in turn, hired Les Nirdlinger, a debris hauler from New Jersey, who was paid $3 per cubic yard.

Blackwater USA
This private security contractor, provided protection to FEMA employees arriving in the flooded city at a cost of $950 per guard per day.

Carnival Cruise Line
This company rented three ships to FEMA for $236 million for six months, which works out at $1,275 a week per evacuee. By comparison, the company sells cruise deals for $599 per person per week including entertainment. The ships were half empty most of the time, so the real cost was probably closer to $2,500 per person. Given that they were moored in one place and neither entertainment nor food was provided, the company must have cleared a nice profit.
Meanwhile the nation of Greece offered the use of ships for free. The Carnival Cruise Line proposal was promoted by the president's brother Jeb Bush.

CH2M Hill
The City of New Orleans initially awarded C2HM Hill a $23 million contract to remove flooded cars, despite receiving lower bids from local firms. The contract was rescinded after mounting criticism. Along with Fluor, Shaw, and Bechtel, the company was the first to be awarded about $400 million (initially) in no-bid contracts to provide temporary housing following the hurricanes. All the companies are donors to the Republican party and are major contractors in Iraq.

Clearbrook, LLC
Clearbrook billed FEMA $5 million dollars before the start of an $80 million contract to build camps for emergency personnel—plus another $3 million in overcharges

Emergency Disaster Services (EDS)
EDS won a $3.6 million FEMA contract for 30 days for providing meals to 200 to 400 emergency personnel—at the dubious cost of between $100 and $279 per meal.

EntergyEntergy
is threatening to cut off gas and electricity to New Orleans unless the federal government grants it $718 million to maintain and rebuild its damaged infrastructure. Otherwise the company says it will have to charge the average ratepayer $8,943 in the form of a rate increase of at least 140 percent, or $45-a-month increase per household.Meanwhile the company's parent earned up $10 billion in revenues last year and has $29 billion in collective assets. Its 2005 profits of $923.8 million alone could easily have covered the shortfall in New Orleans.

Fluor
Even though Fluor had a history of over-billing the federal government, FEMA awarded around $1.3 billion in contracts for temporary housing and other services. This was achieved in part by exploiting federal law intended to set aside contracts for minority-owned businesses.

Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton KBR’s
$30 million naval contract for repairing military bases was secured with the help of the same lobbyist that got the Shaw Group’s foot in the door.
KBR subcontracted with a company called Tipton Friendly Rollins that sub-contracted the work to Kansas City Tree, who sub-contracted the work to Karen Tovar Construction, who did not pay their workers. It took a lawsuit by Mississippi Immigrant Workers Alliance to get them their back pay: $141,000. By that time it was too late, as Karen Tovar had threatened the undocumented workers with jail, so many of them had fled.

Kenyon, a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI)
Kenyon, a funeral-services firm headed by a close family friend of the Bush clan, recovered 535 bodies in New Orleans, but billed the government over $6 million—or about $12,500 per victim. Local black morticians volunteered their services to help in recovery and processing of bodies, but were turned away by FEMA. Kenyon billed the state thousands of dollars for beef jerky, a DVD player, and model cars, to entertain its staff.

Murphy Oil
In St. Bernard Parish, home to multiple oil refineries and power plants, an estimated million gallons of oil saturated the parish post-Katrina from 44 spills. The worst was Murphy Oil’s Meraux refinery, a 100,000 barrel a day facility. Katrina knocked over a 250,000 gallon above-ground tank, sending an oily, muddy slick through the parish. Soil samples taken by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade show the presence of arsenic, heavy metals, pesticides, diesel, benzene and other toxic compounds. It will cost Murphy $70 million to clean up the six miles of coastline sullied by the Meraux accident. The company has paid $30,000 per home in settlements with some homeowners; others are embroiled in a lawsuit with the company.

Shaw Group
A total of $600 million in no-bid contracts were secured for the Shaw Group with the help of a lobbyist who was President Bush’s former campaign manager and later the head of FEMA.

United Recovery Group (URG)
FEMA initially contacted URG without a competitive bid system, but ended up awarding URG a competitively bid contract for $369.7 million. However, a local company insists that its own bid was $137 million lower.

Waste Management Inc. (WMI)
The Vietnamese community in New Orleans East once known as Versailles (for the nearby housing project) has re-opened 45 of 53 of its businesses. Ninety-five percent of the homes have been cleaned up. Unfortunately they live next to the Chef Menteur dump site owned and operated by Waste Management Incorporated (WMI). Debris haulers may “tip” their load into the landfill for $5 a cubic yard. With between 7,000 and 9,000 yards being hauled into the 87 acre facility each day, WMI is earning between $35,000 and $45,000 daily in tipping fees.

While poverty persists, there is no freedom By Nelson Mandela

11/04/06 "The Guardian" -- -- In Johannesburg, this week, in the warm company of friends, like Nadine Gordimer, I became an Amnesty International ambassador of conscience. It was a joy for me to receive this honour from the members of the world's largest human rights movement. It was heartening too that the award was inspired by the great Irish writer Seamus Heaney's poem From the Republic of Conscience, which reminds us all of our duty.Their embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved.Like Amnesty International, I have been struggling for justice and human rights for long years. I have retired from public life now. But as long as injustice and inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest. We must become stronger still.Through the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, I am continuing my struggle for human rights. These three charitable institutions operating in my name are tasked with continuing my work in important areas I have been concerned with throughout my life: children and youth, memory and dialogue, and building new generations of ethical leaders.It is my wish that this award should help all activists around the world to shine their candles of hope for the forgotten prisoners of poverty. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is people who have made poverty and tolerated poverty, and it is people who will overcome it.Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of fundamental human rights. Everyone everywhere has the right to live with dignity, free from fear and oppression, free from hunger and thirst, and free to express themselves and associate at will.Yet in this new century millions of people remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. Massive poverty and inequality are terrible scourges of our times - times in which the world also boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation.While poverty persists, there is no true freedom. Amnesty International is right to stand up against the rights violations that drive and deepen poverty.People living in poverty have the least access to power to shape policies - to shape their future. But they have the right to a voice. They must not be made to sit in silence as"development" happens around them, at their expense. True development is impossible without the participation of those concerned.Take the right to housing. Three million people in Africa have been evicted from informal settlements since the turn of the century.We have also seen in Africa the scourge of HIV-Aids, decimating the lives of our people, especially those living in poverty. All of us - rich and poor, governments, companies and individuals - share the responsibility of ensuring that everyone has access to information, means of prevention and treatment. And our starting point must be respect for individuals' rights.We know that it is the already marginalised who are most affected by HIV-Aids. And we know that, within this group, women are marginalised yet more and bear the most significant burden. As daughters, mothers, sisters and grandmothers, every day they experience and live out the reality of this pandemic.Women are also being killed by other preventable causes. One woman dies every minute from conditions relating to pregnancy. And where do almost all these women live? In the developing world - in poverty. Amnesty International is working to make rights real for women, through its work on poverty, and through its campaigning against the violence they face.Women and girls need safe environments to learn and to work. At the moment, discrimination and violence exacerbate their lack of access to the very tools they need to make their own rights a reality. If girls do not have a safe and non-discriminatory environment to pursue education or gain employment, the consequences reverberate throughout their lives, denying them the choice and freedom we take for granted.Women and girls living in abusive relationships, for example, are unable to flee the violence because they are financially dependent on their abusers. This balance of power, and the broader one it represents, must be shifted.I have spoken before about the need for a turning point. I see this ambassador of conscience award as one more step towards that turning point. Nadine Gordimer has recalled a conversation she and I had in 1998, when I said: "What I want to see is an environment where the young people of our country have a real chance to develop the inherent possibilities they have to create a better life for themselves... That is what development is about."If all human rights activists around the world believe this, and act on this, and get others to believe, we will have our turning point.· This is an edited version of a speech given by Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg on Wednesday when he became an Amnesty International ambassador of conscience.

The Unreported Vietnam-Iraq Parallel By Danny Schechter

NEW YORK, May 2, 2005 — There is a word missing in most of the coverage of Iraq. It's a ghost-laden word that conjures up distressing memories that Washington and most of our media prefer to keep in that proverbial "lock box," hidden away in dusty archives and footage libraries.
The word is Vietnam.
Its absence was never more noticeable than in the coverage this past weekend of the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War, marked in Vietnam with celebrations, but largely ignored in America where CNN led with the story of a bride who went missing when she had second thoughts. Is this denial or is it deliberate? Just this past month, the national Smithsonian Museum of American History installed a new patriotically correct permanent war-positive exhibition, "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War."
If you want to know about the pain of the war official America wants you to forget, you have to head a few blocks south on the mall in Washington to the Vietnam Memorial with its nearly 60,000 names engraved in black marble. That's where you will see the tears of visitors every day and their lingering memories three decades later.
While American media outlets avoid any parallels — with pundits insisting that none exist — overseas some see what many of us don't or won't. A BBC story by Matt Frei reports, "Thirty years after the end of the war, Vietnam continues to divide and haunt America far more than the country that lost 50 times as many people."
His is one of few Vietnam reports that references Iran even though the Iraq connection is buried in the last paragraph, an association even the journalist seems uncomfortable with:
"Iraq is far from becoming another Vietnam. But today the ghosts of the jungle are busy getting resurrected in the sands around Baghdad."What are those ghosts? And why do they deserve more than media burial in the jungles of Asia or the sands of Iraq?
Here are some of the largely ignored parallels:
Both wars were illegal acts of pre-emptive aggression unsanctioned by international law or world opinion. Earlier, U.S. interventions involved successive U.S. administrations. JFK's CIA helped put Saddam in power, Reagan armed him to fight Iran. George Bush, 41 led the first Gulf War against him. Clinton tightened sanctions. George Bush, 43 invaded again. Five Administrations — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford fought in Vietnam.
Both wars were launched with deception. In Iraq it was the now proven phony WMD threat and contrived Saddam-Osama connection. In Vietnam, it was the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and the elections mandated by the Geneva agreement that were canceled by Washington in l956 when the U.S. feared Ho Chi Minh would win.
The government lied regularly in both wars. Back then, the lies were pronounced a "credibility gap." Today, they are considered acceptable "information warfare." In Saigon military briefers conducted discredited "5 O' Clock Follies" press conferences. In this war, the Pentagon spoon-fed info at a Hollywood style briefing center in Doha.
The U.S. press was initially an enthusiastic cheerleader in both wars. When Vietnam protest grew and the war seen as a lost cause, the media frame changed. In Iraq today most of the media is trapped in hotel rooms. Only one side is covered now whereas in Vietnam, there was more reporting occasionally from the other. In Vietnam, the accent was on progress and "turned corners." The same is true in Iraq.
In both wars, prisoners were abused. In South Vietnam, thousands of captives were tortured in what were the called "tiger cages." Vietnamese POWs were often killed; In North Vietnam, some U.S. POWs were abused after bombing civilians. In Iraq, POWs on both sides were also mistreated. It was U.S. soldiers that first leaked major war crimes and abuses. In Vietnam, Ron Ridenour disclosed the My Lai Massacre. In Iraq, it was a soldier who first told investigators about the torture in Abu Ghraib prison. (Seymour Hersh the reporter who exposed My-Lai in Vietnam later exposed illegal abuses in Iraq.)
Illegal weapons were "deployed" in both wars. The U.S. dropped napalm, used cluster bombs against civilians and sprayed toxic Agent Orange in Vietnam. Cluster bombs and updated Mark 77 napalm-like firebombs were dropped on Iraqis. Depleted uranium was added to the arsenal of prohibited weapons in Iraq.
Both wars claimed to be about promoting democracy. Vietnam staged elections and saw a succession of governments controlled by the U.S. come and go. Iraq has had one election so far in which most voters say they were casting ballots primarily to get the U.S. to leave. The U.S. has stage-managed Iraq's interim government. Exiles were brought back and put in power. Vietnam's Diem came from New Jersey, Iraq's Allawi from Britain.
Both wars claimed to be about noble international goals. Vietnam was pictured as a crusade against aggressive communism and falling dominos. Iraq was sold as a front in a global war on terrorism. Neither claim proved true.
An imperial drive for resource control and markets helped drive both interventions. Vietnam had rubber and manganese and rare minerals. Iraq has oil. In both wars, any economic agenda was officially denied and ignored by most media outlets.
Both wars took place in countries with cultures we never understood or spoke the language, Both involved "insurgents" whose military prowess was underestimated and misrepresented. In Vietnam, we called the "enemy" communists; in Iraq we call them foreign terrorists. (Soldiers had their own terms, "gooks" in Vietnam, "ragheads" in Iraq) In both counties, they was in fact an indigenous resistance that enjoyed popular support. (Both targeted and brutalized people they considered collaborators with the invaders just as our own Revolution went after Americans who backed the British.) In both wars, as in all wars, innocent civilians died in droves.
In both countries the U.S. promised to help rebuild the damages caused by U.S. bombing. In Vietnam, a $2 Billion presidential reconstruction pledge was not honored. In Iraq, the electricity and other services are still out in many areas. In both wars U.S. companies and suppliers have profited handsomely; Brown &Root in Vietnam; Halliburton in Iraq, to cite but two.
In Vietnam, the Pentagon's counter-insurgency effort failed to "pacify" the countryside even with a half a million U.S. soldiers "in country." The insurgency in Iraq is growing despite the best efforts of U.S. soldiers. More have died since President Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" than during the invasion.The Vietnamese forced the U.S. into negotiations for the Paris Peace Agreement. When the agreement was continually violated, they brilliantly staged a final offensive that surprised and routed a superior million-man Saigon Army. Can the Iraqi resistance do the same?
The BBC is wondering too, reminding us, "As the casualties mounted so did the questions about how much a threat the Vietcong could really pose. Today another pre-emptive war against an enemy far from home has posed similar questions."
As the insurgency in Iraq escalates and continues to seize the initiative with the capacity to attack where and when it wants, is it unthinkable to suspect that another April 30th campaign of the kind that "liberated" Saigon is possible in Baghdad?
We have already seen "the fall" of Baghdad. Can it "fall" again? Of course not!
Repeat after me. We are winning.
Democracy is on the march.


News Dissector Danny Schechter, editor and "blogger in chief" of Mediachannel.org, reported from Vietnam in 1974 and 1997. His film, "WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception)," examines media coverage of the Iraq War.

When Evil Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

Kathy Kelly, Electronic Iraq, 10 October 2006

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butcheredthere was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.--Bertolt BrechtLast summer, crimes piled up in Iraq. 3,590 people were killed in July '06; 3009 in August. In Baghdad alone, the Coroner's Office reported 1,600 bodies arrived at the morgue in June and more than 1,800 bodies in July. 90% of the killings were executions. It seems impossible to count how many people were tortured in Iraq over the past several months. The chief expert on torture for the United Nations, Manfred Nowak, says bluntly that the current situation is "out of control." The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released a report in September which said that bodies sent to the capital's morgue "habitually bore signs of severe torture, including acid-induced injuries, burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones, backs, hands and legs, missing eyes and teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails." The Iraqi authorities confirmed that most of the bodies that were found in the past six months bore serious signs of torture. Not surprisingly, in the past seven months, a quarter of a million Iraqis are now displaced people after having fled the violence. UN reports estimate that one out of every four Iraqi children suffers from acute malnourishment. The colloquial word for this condition is "wasting."
When evil doing comes like falling rain, of course we must call out "Stop!" How could we not do so? But we must also say, "We're sorry. We're so very sorry." Following those crucial words, it might be possible to extend our hands, emptied of weapons, and try to make amends.Why are so many Iraqi children hungry and ill? One major cause of illness is impure water. Although an estimated $30 billion to $45 billion of Iraqi and American financing has gone toward reconstruction efforts in Iraq, only about 55% of the planned water projects have been completed.Health care delivery has also suffered under U.S. supervised reconstruction efforts. At a September 28th, 2006 congressional hearing, Mr. Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction in Iraq, reported that the construction of over 150 primary health care centers across Iraq has consumed $180 million dollars but has resulted in the completion of only six centers. Bowen further noted that Iraq has lost $16 billion in oil sales--and not just because of insurgent attacks. He pointed to situations in which contractors botched the job of repairing the country's oil production infrastructure. Mr. Bowen's earlier report, issued in 2004, also gave scathing reviews of bungled reconstruction efforts marred by corruption and incompetence.Now Mr. Bowen can begin to wrap up his investigations. The monitoring project has been terminated and is expected to be phased out by October 2007. This isn't to say the Bush administration and the Pentagon won't welcome certain reports about projects undertaken by U.S. military contractors and the U.S. military in Iraq. Over the next two years, a D.C. based firm called the Lincoln Group will be paid 6.2 million dollars to develop positive talking points for the U.S. military. This firm was the subject of considerable controversy last year when it was part of a Pentagon project that paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive articles about the U.S. Coalition. How will the Lincoln Group find a positive spin for the recent poll which found that 78 percent of Iraqis believe the American military presence causes more conflict than it prevents? 71 percent said American soldiers should be withdrawn within a year. 92 percent of Sunnis and 62 percent of Shiites support attacks on U.S. soldiers. In September, former Secretary of State James Baker III assured the U.S. government, after spending four days in Iraq's fortified Green Zone, that he and the Iraq Study Group he chairs won't spend any time "wringing their hands in memory of past mistakes that may or may not have been committed." Brecht's lines in the poem "When evil doing comes like falling rain" would be a fitting backdrop for Mr. Baker's approach to Iraq. Blanket the past in silence. Disparage sorrow over the torture, bloodshed, starvation and ruin as useless "hand wringing." Count on new reports of death and torture in Iraq to become so routine that they're barely reported. Use the leverage of U.S. threat, force and economic manipulation to carve Iraq into three autonomous regions, modifying a once sovereign country into more easily controlled client states. And if anyone does dare to call out "stop," what better alternative can they suggest to reverse the mayhem and chaos? Remember, we won't wring our hands over memory of what caused this havoc. Participants in the nationwide "Declaration of Peace" campaign likewise don't believe in "wringing our hands" over past mistakes, but we believe it's essential to tell the truth about this cruel, illegal and immoral war. From a perspective of remorse for suffering caused and a desire never again to value convenient control of other people's resources over respect for human rights and human decency, this campaign aims to go forward with a commitment to nonviolently end the U.S. war in Iraq. Elected representatives in the Congress and Senate will be pressured consistently to call for closure of U.S. military bases, withdrawal of U.S. troops and support for an Iraqi-led peace process, including a peace conference to shape a post-occupation transition and an international peacekeeping presence if mandated by this peace process. The Declaration of Peace also calls for return of Iraqi control over Iraq's oil resources and for reparation payments to address the destruction caused by the U.S. war and thirteen years of economic sanctions.When evil doing comes like falling rain, of course we must call out "Stop!" How could we not do so? But we must also say, "We're sorry. We're so very sorry." Following those crucial words, it might be possible to extend our hands, emptied of weapons, and try to make amends.

Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Bombing of Cuban Jetliner30 Years Later

New Documents on Luis Posada Posted as Texas Court Weighs Release from Custody
Colgate Toothpaste Disguised Plastic Explosives in 1976 Terrorist Attack
Confessions, Kissinger Reports, and Overview of Posada Career Posted
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 202
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Yvette White
here is the link for Complete report http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB202/index.htm

Facts About Saddam US Relations

Here We have Some Quick Facts About Saddam And US Relationship

In 1959 the CIA put Saddam Hussein on its covert operations payroll. The CIA wanted to assassinate then-lraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim, who was buying weapons from the Soviet Union and putting Iraqi communists in positions of power. To that end, the agency hired Saddam, then 22, and five other men. The hit failed because Saddam began firing too soon, wounding Qasim and killing his driver.
Qasim finally met his end in a Ba'ath party coup in 1963. After the coup, the CIA provided the anti-communist Ba'athists with a list of suspected communists, who were rounded up and executed en masse. A former CIA official told the United Press International's Richard Sale: "It was a bit like the mysterious killing of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. A11 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."
On September 22, 1980, Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, beginning a war that lasted eight years and left an estimated 1 million dead. In April 1981, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig visited the Middle East and upon his return wrote a debriefing paper for President Ronald Reagan in which he said, "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through [Saudi then-Prince, now-King] Fahd."
(Haig's notes, marked "top secret," were discovered by investigative reporter Robert Parry in the documents from a congressional investigation into the Reagan administration's contacts with Iran. They can be viewed at www.consortiumnews.com, a Web site Parry founded. As a correspondent for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the '80s, Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. His chronicle of Saddam's relationship with the United States, "Missing U.S.-lraq History," can be read at www.inthesetimes.com.)
In 1982, the Reagan administration, though officially neutral, began to fear an Iranian victory. In a 1995 affidavit in a federal criminal court case, Howard Teicher, a one-time member of Reagan's National Security Council staff, said that in 1982 he helped draft a secret National Security Decision Directive, signed by Reagan, to provide covert support to Iraq.
Teicher wrote, "The CIA, including both CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director [Robert] Gates, knew of, approved of and assisted in the sale of non-U.S.-origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq." The Reagan administration also began providing Saddam Hussein's military with satellite photos of the battlefield and dual-use technology that Iraq used to build chemical and biological weapons. And the Reagan administration allowed Iraq to buy computer software that Saddam could use to track political opponents.
At a Senate hearing on September 19, 2002, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.V.) asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-lraq war? Are we in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?" Rumsfeld, who was Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East in 1983 and 1984 and who met personally with Saddam on December 20, 1983, replied that he had "no knowledge" of such U.S. assistance. Was that a lie?
The Washington Post's Michael Dobbs, after poring through thousands of unclassified government documents, wrote in a December 30, 2002, article: "The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague."
In 1986, then Vice President George H.W. Bush encouraged Saddam, through Arab intermediaries, to strike Iran harder, according to a November 2, 1992 New Yorker story by Murray Waas and Craig Unger. Indeed, that year, the Iraqi air force began to bomb civilian neighborhoods in Tehran and other cities. The United States allegedly desired an intensified bombing to make Iran more dependent on U.S. supplies of anti-aircraft parts to defend their cities. Such spare parts were an integral part of the Reagan administration's illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.
In his 1995 affidavit, Teicher wrote, "In 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran. This message was delivered by Vice President Bush, who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein." The Clinton administration declared that Teicher's affidavit was false and then promptly classified it as a state secret.
In 1988 it became known that Saddam Hussein had used his chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja. In response, a number of senators, including Al Gore (D-Tenn.), introduced the "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988," which sought to impose sanctions against Iraq. The act passed the Senate unanimously, but the Reagan White House killed the bill in the House. Peter Galbraith, the former ambassador to Croatia who worked in the Senate as an Iraq expert at the time, wrote in the
Boston Globe Magazine: Secretary of State Colin Powell was then the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan's decision to give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds. Dick Cheney, then a prominent Republican congressman and now vice president and the Bush administration's leading Iraq hawk, could have helped push the sanctions legislation but did not.
In 1990, with Iraq's economy devastated by the war with Iran, Saddam invaded Kuwait-but only after consulting with the Bush administration. The State Department informed Saddam that Washington had "no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." And later, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Foreign Policy, in its January-February 2003 issue noted that the "United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did.

Background to the Israel-Palestine Crisis by Stephen R. Shalom

What are the modern origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
During World War I, Britain made three different promises regarding historic Palestine. Arab leaders were assured that the land would become independent; in the Balfour declaration, Britain indicated its support for a Jewish national home in Palestine; and secretly Britain arranged with its allies to divide up Ottoman territory, with Palestine becoming part of the British empire. Historians have engaged in detailed exegesis of the relevant texts and maps, but the fundamental point is that Britain had no moral right to assign Palestine to anyone. By right Palestine belonged to its inhabitants.
In the late l9th century, anti-Semitism became especially virulent in Russia and re-emerged in France. Some Jews concluded that Jews would only be safe in a Jewish state and thus founded Zionism. Most Jews at the time rejected Zionism, preferring instead to address the problem of anti-Semitism through revolutionary or reformist politics or assimilation. For many orthodox Jews, especially the small Jewish community in Palestine, a Jewish state could only be established by God, not by humans. At first Zionists were willing to consider other sites for their Jewish state, but they eventually focused on Palestine for its biblical connections. The problem, however, was that although a Zionist slogan called Palestine "a land without people for a people without land," the land was not empty.
Following World War I, Britain arranged for the League of Nations to make Palestine a British "mandate," that is, a colony to be administered by Britain and prepared for independence. To help justify its rule over Arab land, Britain arranged that one of its duties as the mandatory power would be to promote a Jewish national home.

Who were the Jews who came to Palestine?
The early Zionist settlers were idealistic, often socialist, individuals, fleeing oppression. In this respect they were like the early American colonists. But also like the American colonists, many Zionists had racist attitudes toward the indigenous people and little regard for their well-being.
Some Zionists thought in terms of Arab-Jewish cooperation and a bi-national state, but many were determined to set up an exclusively Jewish state (though to avoid antagonizing the Palestinians, they decided to use the term Jewish "national home" rather than "state" until they were able to bring enough Jews to Palestine).
Jewish immigration to Palestine was relatively limited until the 1930s, when Hitler came to power. The U.S. and Europe closed their doors to immigration by desperate Jews, making Palestine one of the few options.

Who were the indigenous people of Palestine?
Pro-lsrael propaganda has argued that most Palestinians entered Palestine after 1917, drawn to the economic dynamism of the growing Jewish community, and thus have no rights to Palestine. This argument has been elaborated in Joan Peters's widely promoted book, From Time lmmemorial. However, the book has been shown to be fraudulent and its claim false. The indigenous population was mostly Muslim, with a Christian and a smaller Jewish minority. As Zionists arrived from Europe, the Muslims and Christians began to adopt a distinctly Palestinian national identity.

How did Zionists acquire land in Palestine?
Some was acquired illegally and some was purchased from Arab landlords with funds provided by wealthy Jews in Europe. The legal purchases were often morally questionable as they sometimes involved buying land from absentee landlords and then throwing poor Arab peasants off the land. Land thus purchased became part of the Jewish National Fund, which specified that the land could never be sold or leased to Arabs. Even with these purchases, Jews owned only about 6 percent of the land by 1947.

Was Palestinian opposition to Zionism a result of anti-Semitism?
Anti-Semitism in the Arab world was generally far less severe than in Europe. Before the beginning of Zionist immigration, relations among the different religious groups in Palestine were relatively harmonious. There was Palestinian anti-Semitism, but no people will look favorably on another who enter one's territory with the intention of setting up their own sovereign state. The expulsion of peasants from their land and the frequent Zionist refusal to employ Arabs exacerbated relations.

What was the impact of World War Il?
As war approached, Britain shrewdly calculated that they could afford to alienate Jews-who weren't going to switch to Hitler's side-but not Arabs, so they restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. This was precisely when the need for sanctuary for Europe's Jews was at its height. Many Jews smuggled their way into Palestine as the Western nations kept their borders closed to frantic refugees.
At war's end, as the enormity of the Holocaust became evident, for the first time Zionism became a majority sentiment among world Jewry. Many U.S. Christians supported Zionism as a way to absolve their guilt for what had happened, without having to allow Jews into the United States. U.S. Zionists, who during the war had subordinated rescue efforts to their goal of establishing a Jewish state, argued that the Holocaust confirmed the need for a Jewish state: Had Israel existed in 1939, millions of Jews might have been saved. Actually, Palestine narrowly avoided being overrun by the Nazis, so Jews would have been far safer in the United States than in a Jewish Palestine.
During the war many Jews in Palestine joined the British army. By war's end, the Jewish community in Palestine was well armed, well-organized, and determined to fight. The Palestinians were poorly armed, with feudal leaders. The Mufti of Jerusalem had been exiled by the British for supporting an Arab revolt in 1936-39 and had made his way to Berlin during the war where he aided Nazi propaganda. From the Zionist point of view, it was considered a plus to have the extremist Mufti as the Palestinians' leader. As David Ben Gurion, leader of the Jewish community in Palestine and Israel's first prime minister, advised in 1938, "rely on the Mufti."

What were the various positions in 1947?
Both the Palestinians and the Zionists wanted the British out so they could establish an independent state. The Zionists, particularly a right-wing faction led by Menachem Begin, launched a terror campaign against Britain. London, impoverished by the war, announced that it was washing its hands of the problem and turning it over to the UN (though Britain had various covert plans for remaining in the region).
The Zionists declared that, having gone through one of the great catastrophes of modern history, the Jewish people were entitled to a state of their own, one into which they could gather Jewish refugees, still languishing in the displaced persons camps of Europe. The Zionist bottom line was a sovereign state with full control over immigration. The Palestinians argued that the calamity that befell European Jews was hardly their fault. If Jews were entitled to a state, why not carve it out of Germany? As it was, Palestine had more Jewish refugees than any other place in the world. Why should they bear the full burden of atoning for Europe's sins'? They were willing to give full civil rights (though not national rights) to the Jewish minority in an independent Palestine, but they were not willing to give this minority the right to control immigration and bring in more of their co-religionists until they were a majority to take over the whole of Palestine.
A small left-wing minority among the Zionists called for a binational state in Palestine, where both peoples might live together, each with their national rights respected. This view had little support among Jews or Palestinians.

What did the UN do and why?
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two independent states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, joined by an economic union, with Jerusalem internationalized.
In 1947 the UN had many fewer members than it does today. Most Third World nations were still colonies and thus not members. Nevertheless, the partition resolution passed because the Soviet Union and its allies voted in favor and because many small states were subject to improper pressure. For example, members of the U.S. Congress told the Philippines that it would not get U.S. economic aid unless it voted for partition. Moscow favored partition as a way to reduce British influence in the region; Israel was viewed as potentially less pro-Western than the dominant feudal monarchies.

Didn't Palestinians have a chance for a state of their own in 1947, but they rejected it by going to war with Israel?
In 1947 Jews were only one-third of the population of Palestine and owned only 6 percent of the land. Yet the partition plan granted the Jewish state 55 percent of the total land area. The Arab state was to have an overwhelmingly Arab population, while the Jewish state would have almost as many Arabs as Jews. If it was unjust to force Jews to be a one-third minority in an Arab state, it was no more just to force Arabs to be an almost 50 percent minority in a Jewish state.
The Palestinians rejected partition. The Zionists accepted it, but in private Zionist leaders had more expansive goals. In 1938, during earlier partition proposals, Ben Gurion stated, "when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine."
The Mufti called Palestinians to war against partition, but very few Palestinians responded. The "decisive majority" of Palestinians, confided Ben Gurion, "do not want to fight us." The majority "accept the partition as a fait accompli," reported a Zionist Arab affairs expert. The 1936-39 Arab revolt against the British had mass popular support, but the 1947-48 fighting between the Mufti's followers and Zionist military forces did not.
But even if Palestinians were fully united in going to war against the partition plan, this can provide no moral justification for denying them their basic right of self-determination for over 50 years. This right is not a function of this or that agreement, but a basic right to which every person is entitled. (Israelis don't lose their right to self-determination because their government violated countless UN cease-fire resolutions.)

Didn't Israel achieve larger borders in 1948 as a result of a defensive war of independence?
Arab armies crossed the border on May 15, 1948, after Israel declared its independence. But this declaration came three and a half months before the date specified in the partition resolution. The U.S. had proposed a three-month truce on the condition that Israel postpone its declaration of independence. The Arab states accepted and Israel rejected, in part because it had worked out a secret deal with Jordan's King Abdullah, whereby his Arab Legion would invade the Palestinian territory assigned to the Palestinian state and not interfere with the Jewish state. (Since Jordan was closely allied to Britain, the scheme also provided a way for London to maintain its position in the region.) The other Arab states invaded as much to thwart Abdullah's designs as to defeat Israel.
Most of the fighting took place on territory that was to be part of the Palestinian state or the internationalized Jerusalem. Thus, Israel was primarily fighting not for its survival, but to expand its borders at the expense of the Palestinians. For most of the war, the Israelis actually held both a quantitative and qualitative military edge, apart from the fact that the Arab armies were uncoordinated and operating at cross purposes.
When the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, the Palestinian state had disappeared, its territory taken over by Israel and Jordan, with Egypt in control of the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, which was to have been internationalized, was divided between Israeli and Jordanian control. Israel now held 78 percent of Palestine. Some 700,000 Palestinians had become refugees.

Why did Palestinians become refugees in 1948?
The Israeli government claims that Palestinians chose to leave Palestine voluntarily, instructed to do so via radio broadcasts from Arab leaders who wanted to clear a path for their armies. But radio broadcasts from the area were monitored by the British and American governments and no evidence of general orders to flee has ever been found. On the contrary, there are numerous instances of Arab leaders telling Palestinians to stay put, to keep their claim to the territory. People flee during wartime for a variety of reasons and that was certainly the case here. Some left because war zones are dangerous environments. Some because of Zionist atrocities-most dramatically at Deir Yassin where, in April 1948, 254 defenseless civilians were slaughtered. Some left in panic, aided by Zionist psychological warfare, which warned that Deir Yassin's fate awaited others. Some were driven out at gunpoint, with killings to speed them on their way, as in the towns of Ramle and Lydda. In short, the Palestinians were subjected to ethnic cleansing similar to that seen in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
There is no longer any serious doubt that many Palestinians were forcibly expelled. The exact numbers driven out versus those who panicked or sought safety is still contested, but what permits us to say that all were victims of ethnic cleansing is that Israeli officials refused to allow any of them to return. (In Kosovo, any ethnic Albanian refugee, whether he or she was forced out at gunpoint, panicked, or even left to make it easier for NATO to bomb, was entitled to return.) In Israel, Arab villages were bulldozed, citrus groves, lands, and property seized, and their owners and inhabitants prohibited from returning. Not only was the property of "absentee" Palestinians expropriated, but any Palestinians who moved from one place within Israel to another during the war were declared "present absentees" and their property expropriated as well.
Of the 860,000 Arabs who had lived in areas of Palestine that became Israel, only 133,000 remained. Some 470,000 moved into refugee camps on the West Bank (controlled by Jordan) or the Gaza Strip (administered by Egypt). The rest dispersed to Lebanon, Syria, and other countries.

Why did Israel expel the Palestinians?
In part to remove a potential fifth column. In part to obtain their property. In part to make room for more Jewish immigrants. But mostly because the notion of a Jewish state with a large non-Jewish minority was extremely awkward for Israeli leaders. Because Israel took over some territory intended for the Palestinian state, there had actually been an Arab majority living within the borders of Israel. Nor was the idea of expelling Palestinians something that just emerged in the 1948 war. In 1937, Ben Gurion had written to his son, "We will expel the Arabs and take their places...with the force at our disposal."

How did the international community react?
In December 1948, the General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which declared that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so" and that "compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." This same resolution was overwhelmingly adopted year after year. Israel repeatedly refused to carry out the terms of the resolution.

Did the Arab countries take steps to resettle the Palestinian refugees?
Only in Jordan were Palestinians eligible for citizenship. In Lebanon, the government feared that allowing
Palestinians to become citizens would disturb the country's delicate Christian-Muslim balance; in Egypt, the shortage of arable land led the government to confine the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip. It must be noted, however, that the Palestinians were reluctant to leave the camps if that would mean acquiescing in the loss of homes and property or giving up their right to return.
It is sometimes implied that the lack of assistance to Palestinians from Arab nations justifies Israel's refusal to acknowledge and address the claims of the refugees. But if you harm someone, you are responsible for redressing that harm, regardless of whether the victim's relatives are supportive.

Hasn't there been a population exchange, with Jews from Arab lands coming to Israel and replacing the Palestinians?
This argument makes individual Palestinians responsible for the wrong-doing of Arab governments. Jews left Arab countries under various circumstances: some were forced out, some came voluntarily, some were recruited by Zionist officials. In Iraq, Jews feared that they might be harmed, a fear possibly helped along by some covert bombs placed by Zionist agents. But whatever the case, there are no moral grounds for punishing Palestinians (or denying them their due) because of how Jews were treated in the Arab world. If Italy were to abuse American citizens, this would not justify the United States harming or expelling Italian-Americans.

How were the Palestinians who remained within Israel treated?
Most Arabs lived in the border areas of Israel and, until 1966, these areas were all declared military security zones, which essentially meant that Palestinians were living under martial law conditions for nearly 20 years. After 1966, Arab citizens of Israel continued to be the victims of harsh discrimination: most of the country's land is owned by the Jewish National Fund which prohibits its sale or lease to non-Jews; schools for Palestinians in Israel are, in the words of Human Rights Watch, "separate and unequal"; and government spending has been funneled so as to keep Arab villages underdeveloped. Thousands of Israeli Arabs live in villages declared "unrecognized" and hence ineligible for electricity or any other government services.

Following 1948, didn't the Arab states continually try to destroy Israel?
After Israel's victory in the 1948-49 war, there were several opportunities for peace. There was blame on all sides, but Israeli intransigence was surely a prime factor. In 1951, a UN peace plan was accepted by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, but rejected by Israel.
When Nasser came to power in Egypt, he made overtures to Israel that were rebuffed. When Nasser negotiated an end to British control of the Suez Canal zone, Israeli intelligence covertly arranged a bombing campaign of western targets in Egypt as a way to discourage British withdrawal. The plot was foiled, Egypt executed some of the plotters, and Israel responded with a major military attack on Gaza. In 1956, Israel joined with Britain and France in invading Egypt, drawing condemnation from the United States and the UN.

How were the Occupied Territories occupied?
In June 1967, Israel launched a war in which it seized all of Palestine (the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt), along with the Sinai from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Large numbers of Palestinians, some living in cities, towns, and villages, and some in refugee camps, came under Israeli control. (In 2001, half the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories lived in refugee camps. The Israeli conquest also sent a new wave of refugees from Palestine to surrounding countries.)
Israel's supporters argue that although Israel fired the first shots in this war, it was a justified preventive war, given that Arab armies were mobilizing on Israel's borders with murderous rhetoric. The rhetoric was indeed blood-curdling and many people around the world worried for Israel's safety. But those who understood the military situation-in Tel Aviv and the Pentagon-knew that even if the Arabs struck first, Israel would prevail in any war. Nasser was looking for a way out and agreed to send his vice-president to Washington for negotiations. Israel attacked when it did in part because it rejected negotiations and the prospect of any face-saving compromise for Nasser. Menachem Begin, an enthusiastic supporter of this (and other) Israeli wars, was quite clear about the necessity of launching an attack. In June 1967, he said, Israel "had a choice." Egyptian Army concentrations did not prove that Nasser was about to attack. "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
However, even if it were the case that the 1967 war was wholly defensive on Israel's part, this cannot justify the continued rule over Palestinians. Sure, punish Egypt and Jordan-don't give them back Gaza and the West Bank (which they had no right to in the first place, having joined with Israel in carving up the stillborn Palestinian state envisioned in the UN's 1947 partition plan). But there is no basis for punishing the Palestinian population by forcing them to submit to foreign military occupation.
Israel immediately incorporated occupied East Jerusalem into Israel proper, announcing that Jerusalem was its united and eternal capital. It then began to establish settlements in the Occupied Territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit a conquering power from settling its population on occupied territory. These settlements, placed in strategic locations throughout the West Bank and Gaza, were intended to "create facts" on the ground to make the occupation irreversible.

How did the international community respond to the Israeli occupation?
In November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously passed resolution 242. The resolution emphasized "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territory occupied in the recent conflict." It also called for all countries in the region to end their state of war and to respect the right of each country "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries. "
Israel argued that because resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal from "territories," rather than "the territories," occupied in the recent conflict, it meant that Israel could keep some of them as a way to attain "secure" borders. The official French and Russian texts of the resolution include the definite article, but in any event U.S. officials told Arab delegates that it expected "virtually complete withdrawal" by Israel, and this was the view as well of Britain, France, and the USSR.
Palestinians objected to the resolution because it referred to them only in calling for "a just settlement to the refugee problem" rather than acknowledging their right to self-determination. By the mid-1970s, however, the international consensus-rejected by Israel and the United States-was expanded to include support for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, perhaps with insignificant border adjustments.

How did the United States respond to the Israeli occupation?
Prior to the 1967 war, France, not the United States, was Israel's chief weapons supplier. But now U.S. officials determined that Israel would be an extremely valuable ally in the Middle East and Washington became Israel's principal military and diplomatic backer.
Why, given the U.S. concern for Mideast oil, was Washington supporting Israel? This assumes that the main conflict was Israel vs. the Arabs, rather than Israel and conservative, pro-Western Arab regimes vs. radical Arab nationalism.
Egypt and Syria had been champions of the latter, armed by the USSR, and threatening U.S. interests in the region. (On the eve of the 1967 war, for example, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were militarily backing opposite sides in a civil war in Yemen. Israel had plotted with Jordan against Palestinians in 1948, and in 1970 Israel was prepared to take Jordan's side in a war against Palestinians and Syria.)
Diplomatically, the U.S. soon backed off the generally accepted interpretation of resolution 242, deciding that given Israel's military dominance no negotiations were necessary except on Israel's terms. When Secretary of State Rogers put forward a reasonable peace plan, President Nixon privately sent word to Israel that the U.S. wouldn't press the proposal. When Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, proposed a peace plan that included cutting his ties with Moscow, Washington decided he hadn't groveled enough and ignored it. But after Egypt and Syria unsuccessfully went to war with Israel for the limited aim of regaining their lost territory, and Arab oil states called a limited oil embargo, Washington rethought its position. This led in 1979 to the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David Agreement under which Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in return for peace and diplomatic relations. Egypt then joined Israel as a pillar of U.S. policy in the region and the two became the leading recipients of U.S. aid in the world.

What progress was made toward justice for Palestinians during the first two decades of the occupation?
The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, but it was controlled by the Arab states until 1969, when Yasser Arafat became its leader. The PLO had many factions, advocating different tactics (some carried out hijackings) and different politics. At first the PLO took the position that Israel had no right to exist and that only Palestinians were entitled to national rights in Palestine. This was the mirror image of the official Israeli view-of both the right-wing Likud party and the Labor party-that there could be no recognition of the PLO under any circumstances, even if it renounced terrorism and recognized Israel, let alone of a Palestinian state anywhere in Palestine.
By 1976, however, the PLO view had come to accept the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. In January 1976 a resolution backed by the PLO, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Soviet Union was introduced in the Security Council incorporating this consensus. Washington vetoed the resolution.
The 1979 Camp David agreement established peace along the Egyptian-Israeli border, but it worsened the situation for Palestinians. With its southern border neutralized, Israel had a freer hand to invade Lebanon in 1982 (where the PLO was based) and to tighten its grip on the Occupied Territories.

What was the first Intifada?
Anger and frustration were growing in the Occupied Territories, fueled by Israeli repression, daily humiliations, and the establishment of sharply increasing numbers of Israeli settlements. In December 1987, Palestinians in Gaza launched an uprising, the Intifada, that quickly spread to the West Bank as well. The Intifada was locally organized and enjoyed mass support among the Palestinian population. Guns and knives were banned and the main political demand was for an independent Palestinian state coexisting with Israel.
Israel responded with great brutality, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Labor Party Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, urged Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian demonstrators. PLO leader Khalil al-Wazir, who from Tunis had advised the rejection of arms, was assassinated (with Rabin's approval); Israel was especially eager to repress Palestinian leaders who advocated a Palestinian state that would coexist with Israel. By 1989, the initial discipline of the uprising had faded, as a growing number of individual acts of violence by Palestinians took place. Hamas, an organization initially promoted by the Israelis as a counterweight to the PLO, also gained strength; it called for armed attacks to achieve an Islamic state in all of Palestine.

What were the Oslo Accords?
Arafat had severely weakened his credibility by his flirtation with Saddam Hussein following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. (The Iraqi leader had opportunistically tried to link his withdrawal from Kuwait to an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.) Israel saw Arafat's weakness as an opportunity. Better to deal with Arafat while he was weak, before Hamas gained too much influence. Let Arafat police the unruly Palestinians, while Israel would maintain its settlements and control over resources.
The Oslo agreement consisted of Letters of Mutual Recognition and a Declaration of Principles. In Arafat's letter he recognized Israel's right to exist, accepted various UN resolutions, renounced terrorism and armed struggle. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin in his letter agreed to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestine people and commence negotiations with it, but there was no Israeli recognition of the Palestinian right to a state.
The Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. In it, Israel agreed to redeploy its troops from the Gaza Strip and from the West Bank city of Jericho. These would be given self-governing status, except for the Israeli settlements in Gaza. A Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established, with a police force that would maintain internal order in areas from which Israeli forces withdrew. Left for future resolution in "permanent status" talks were all the critical and vexatious issues: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and borders. These talks were to commence by year three of the agreement.
In September 1995 an interim agreement-commonly called Oslo II-was signed. This divided the Occupied Territories into three zones, Area A, Area B, and Area C. (No mention was made of a fourth area: Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.) In area A, the PA was given civil and security control but not sovereignty; in area B the PA would have civil control and the Israelis security control; and area C was wholly under Israeli control (these included the settlements, the network of connecting roads, and most of the valuable land and water resources of the West Bank). In March 2000, 17 percent of the West Bank was designated area A-where the vast majority of Palestinians lived-24 percent area B, and 59 percent area C. In the Gaza Strip, with a population of over a million Palestinians, 6,500 Israeli settlers lived in the 20 percent of the territory that made up area C. Palestinians thus were given limited autonomy-not sovereignty-over areas of dense population in the Gaza Strip and small, non-contiguous portions of the West Bank (there were 227 separate and disconnected enclaves), which meant that the PA was responsible chiefly for maintaining order over poor and angry Palestinians.

How did Israel respond to the Oslo Accords?
Whatever hopes Oslo may have inspired among the Palestinian population, most Israeli officials had an extremely restricted vision of where it would lead. In a speech in October 1995, Rabin declared that there would not be a return to the pre-1967 borders, Jerusalem would remain united and under exclusive Israeli sovereignty, and most of the settlements would remain under Israeli sovereignty. Rabin said he wanted the "entity" that Palestinians would get to be "less than a state." Under Rabin, settlements were expanded and he began a massive program of road-building meant to link the settlements and carve up the West Bank. (These by-pass roads, built on confiscated Palestinian land and U.S.-funded, were for Israelis only.)
In 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli and he was succeeded as prime minister by Shimon Peres. But Peres, noted his adviser Yossi Beilin, had an even more limited view than Rabin, wanting any future Palestinian state to be located only in Gaza. Yossi Sarid, head of the moderate left Israeli party Meretz, said that Peres's plan for the West Bank was "little different" from that of Ariel Sharon. Settlements and by-pass roads expanded further.
In May 1996, Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu who was openly opposed to the Oslo accords was elected prime minister. Netanyahu reneged on most of the already agreed-on Israeli troop withdrawals from occupied territory, continued building settlements and roads, stepped up the policy of sealing off the Palestinian enclaves, and refused to begin the final status talks required by Oslo.
In 1999, Labor's Ehud Barak won election as prime minister. Barak had been a hardliner, but he had also confessed that if he had been born a Palestinian he probably would have joined a terrorist organization-so his intentions were unclear. His policies, however, in his first year in office were more of the same: settlements grew at a more rapid pace than under Netanyahu, agreed-on troops withdrawals were not carried out, and land confiscations and economic closures continued. His proposed 2001 government budget increased the subsidies supporting settlements in the Occupied Territories.

What was the impact of the Oslo accords?
The number of Israeli settlers since Oslo (1993) grew from 110,000 to 195,000 in the West Bank and Gaza; in annexed East Jerusalem, the Jewish population rose from 22,000 to 170,000 - 30 new settlements were established and more than 18,000 new housing units for settlers were constructed. From 1994-2000, Israeli authorities confiscated 35,000 acres of Arab land for roads and settlements. Poverty increased, so that in mid-2000, more than one out of five Palestinians had consumption levels below $2.10 a day. According to CIA figures, at the end of 2000, unemployment stood at 40 percent. Israeli closure policies meant that Palestinians had less freedom of movement-from Gaza to the West Bank, to East Jerusalem, or from one Palestinian enclave to another-than they had before Oslo.

What was U.S. policy during this period?
The United States has been the major international backer of Israel for more than three decades. Since 1976 Israel has been the leading annual recipient of U.S. foreign aid and is the largest cumulative recipient since World War II. This doesn't include all sorts of special financial and military benefits, such as the use of U.S. military assistance for research and development in the United States. Israel's economy is not self-sufficient and relies on foreign assistance and borrowing. During the Oslo years, Washington gave Israel more than $3 billion per year in aid and $4 billion in FY 2000, the highest of any year except 1979. Of this aid, grant military aid was $1.8 billion a year since Oslo, and more than $3 billion in FY 2000, two-thirds higher than ever before.
Diplomatically, the U.S. retreated from various positions it had held for years. Since 1949, the U.S. had voted with the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly in calling for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. In 1994, the Clinton administration declared that because the refugee question was something to be resolved in the permanent status talks, the U.S. would no longer support the resolution. Likewise, although the U.S. had previously agreed with the rest of the world (and common sense) in considering East Jerusalem occupied territory, it now declared that Jerusalem's status too was to be decided in the permanent status talks. On three occasions in 1995 and 1997, the Security Council considered draft resolutions critical of Israeli expropriations and settlements in East Jerusalem; Washington vetoed all three.

What happened at Camp David?
Permanent status talks between Israel and the Palestinians as called for by the Oslo agreement finally took place in July 2000 at Camp David, in the United States, with U.S. mediators. The standard view is that Barak made an exceedingly generous offer to Arafat, but Arafat rejected it, choosing violence instead.
A U.S. participant in the talks, Robert Malley, has challenged this view. Barak offered-but never in writing and never in detail; in fact, says, Malley, "strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer"-to give the Palestinians Israeli land equivalent to 1 percent of the West Bank (unspecified, but to be chosen by Israel) in return for 9 percent of the West Bank, which housed settlements, highways, and military bases effectively dividing the West Bank into separate regions. Thus, there would have been no meaningful independent Palestinian state, but a series of Bantustans, while all the best land and water aquifers would be in Israeli hands. Israel would also "temporarily" hold an additional 10 percent of West Bank land. (Given that Barak had not carried out the previous withdrawals to which Israel had committed, Palestinian skepticism regarding "temporary" Israeli occupation is not surprising.) It's a myth, Malley wrote, that "Israel's offer met most if not all of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations" and a myth as well that the "Palestinians made no concession of their own." Some Israeli analysts made a similar assessment. For example, influential commentator Ze'ev Schiff wrote that, to Palestinians, "the prospect of being able to establish a viable state was fading right before their eyes. They were confronted with an intolerable set of options: to agree to the spreading occupation...or to set up wretched Bantustans or to launch an uprising."

What caused the second Intifada?
On September 28, 2000 Ariel Sharon, then a member of Parliament, accompanied by a thousand-strong security force, paid a provocative visit approved by Barak to the Al Aqsa mosque site. The next day Barak sent another large force of police and soldiers to the area and, when the anticipated rock throwing by some Palestinians occurred, the police responded with lethal fire, killing four and wounding hundreds. Thus began the second Intifada.
The underlying cause was the tremendous frustration among the population of the Occupied Territories, who saw things getting worse under Oslo, whose hopes had been shattered, and whose patience after 33 years of occupation had reached the boiling point.

Who is Ariel Sharon?
Sharon was the commander of an Israeli force that massacred some 70 civilians in the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953. He was Defense Minister in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, causing the deaths of 17,000 civilians. In September 1982, Lebanese forces allied to Israel slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian non-combatants in the Sabra and Shitila refugee camps, a crime for which an Israeli commission found Sharon to bear indirect responsibility. As Housing Minister in various Israeli governments, Sharon vigorously promoted settlements in the Occupied Territories. In January 2001, he took office as prime minister.

How did Israel respond to this second Intifada?
Israeli security forces responded to Palestinian demonstrations with lethal force even though, as a UN investigation reported, at these demonstrations Israeli Defense Forces, "endured not a single serious casualty." Some Palestinians proceeded to arm themselves, and the killing escalated, with deaths on both sides, though the victims were disproportionately Palestinians. In November 2001, there was a week-long lull in the fighting. Sharon then ordered the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, which, as predicted, led to a rash of terror bombings, which Sharon used to justify further assaults on the PA. By March 2002, Amnesty International reported that more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed. "Israeli security services have killed Palestinians, including more than 200 children, unlawfully, by shelling and bombing residential areas, random or targeted shooting, especially near checkpoints and borders, by extrajudicial executions and during demonstrations."
Palestinian suicide bombings have targeted civilians. Amnesty International commented: "These actions are shocking. Yet they can never justify the human rights violations and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions which, over the past 18 months, have been committed daily, hourly, even every minute, by the Israeli authorities against Palestinians. Israeli forces have consistently carried out killings when no lives were in danger." Medical personnel have been attacked and ambulances, including those of the Red Cross, "have been consistently shot at." Wounded people have been denied medical treatment. Israel has carried out targeted assassinations (sometimes the targets were probably connected to terrorism, sometimes not, but all of these extrajudicial executions have been condemned by human rights groups).
The Israeli government criticized Arafat for not cracking down harder on terrorists and then responded by attacking his security forces, who might have allowed him to crack down, and restricting him to his compound in Ramallah.
Israeli opinion became sharply polarized. At the same time that hundreds of military reservists declared their refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza, polls show 46 percent of Israelis favor forcibly expelling all Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.

What has U.S. policy been?
U. S. military, economic, and diplomatic support has made possible the Israeli repression of the previous year and a half. Much of the weaponry Israel has been using in its attacks on Palestinians was made in the United States (F-16s, attack helicopters, rockets, grenade launchers, Caterpillar bulldozers, airburst shells, M-40 ground launchers) or made in Israel with U.S. Department of Defense research and development funding (the Merkava tank).
On March 26, 2001, the Security Council considered a resolution to establish an international presence in the Occupied Territories as a way to prevent human rights violations. The United States vetoed the resolution. Because Israel did not want the U.S. to get involved diplomatically, Washington did not name a special envoy to the region, General Zinni, until November 2001, more than a year after the Intifada began. Bush met four times with Sharon during the Intifada, never with Arafat. In February 2002, Vice President Cheney declared that Israel could "hang" Arafat.

What caused the current crisis?
As the Arab League was meeting to endorse a Saudi peace proposal-recognition of Israel in return for full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders-a Hamas suicide bomber struck. Sharon, no doubt fearing a groundswell of support for the Arab League position, responded with massive force, breaking into Arafat's compound, confining him to several rooms. Then there were major invasions of all the Palestinian cities in the West Bank. There were many Palestinian casualties, though because Israel has kept reporters out, their extent is not known.
In the early days of Sharon's offensive, Bush pointedly refused to criticize the Israeli action, reserving his condemnation for Arafat, who, surrounded in a few rooms, was said to not be doing enough to stop terrorism. As demonstrations in the Arab world, especially in pro-U.S. Jordan and Egypt, threatened to destabilize the entire region, Bush finally called on Israel to withdraw from the cities. Sharon, recognizing that the U.S. "demand" was not backed up by any threat of consequences, kept up his onslaught.

Is there a way out?
A solution along the lines of the international consensus-Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, the establishment of an independent and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem-remains feasible. It needs only the backing of the United States and Israel.
The Arabs already have 22 states. Why do they need another one?
Not all Arabs are the same. That other Arabs may already have their right of self-determination does not take away from Palestinians' basic rights. The fact that many Palestinians live in Jordan and have considerable influence and rights there doesn't mean that the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, or who were expelled from their homes and are in refugee camps, aren't entitled to their rights-any more than the fact that there are a lot of Jews in the U.S., where they have considerable influence and rights, means that Israeli Jews should be packed off across the Atlantic.

How can terrorists be given a state?
If people whose independence movements use terrorism are not entitled to a state, then many current-day states would be illegitimate, not the least of them being Israel, whose independence struggle involved frequent terrorism against civilians.

Won't an independent Palestinian state threaten Israeli security?
Conquerors frequently justify their conquests by claiming security needs. This was the reason Israel gave for years as to why it couldn't return the Sinai to Egypt or pull out of Lebanon. Both of these were done, however, and Israel's security was enhanced rather than harmed. True, the Oslo Accords, which turned over disconnected swatches of territory to Palestinian administration, may not have improved Israeli security. But as Shimon Peres, one of the architects of the Oslo agreement and Sharon's current foreign minister acknowledged, Oslo was flawed from the start. "Today we discover that autonomy puts the Palestinians in a worse situation." The second Intifada could have been avoided, Peres said, if the Palestinians had had a state from the outset. "We cannot keep three and a half million Palestinians under siege without income, oppressed, poor, densely populated, near starvation."
Israel is the region's only nuclear power. It is also the strongest military power in the Middle East. Surely it cannot need to occupy neighboring territory in order to achieve security. Nothing would better guarantee the Israeli people peace and security than pulling out of the Occupied Territories.

Isn't the Palestinian demand for the right of return just a ploy to destroy Israel?
Allowing people who have been expelled from their homes the right to return is hardly an extreme demand. Obviously this can't mean throwing out people who have been living in these homes for many years and would need to be carefully worked out. Both Palestinian officials and the Arab League have indicated that in their view the right of return should be implemented so as not to create a demographic problem for Israel. Of course, one could reasonably argue that an official Jewish state is problematic on basic democratic grounds. (Why should a Jew born in Brooklyn have the right to "return" to Israel while a Palestinian born in Haifa does not?) In any event, neither the Arab League nor Arafat have raised this objection.

Don't Palestinians view their own state as the first step in eliminating Israel entirely?
Hamas and a few other, smaller political groups in Palestine object not just to the occupation but to the very existence of Israel. But the Hamas, et al., position is a distinctly minority sentiment among Palestinians, who are a largely secular community that has endorsed a two-state settlement. To be sure, Hamas has been growing in strength as a result of the inability of the Palestinian Authority to deliver a better life for Palestinians. If there were an independent Palestinian state, one can assume that Hamas would find far fewer volunteers for its suicide squads. It must be acknowledged, though, that the longer the mutual terror continues, the harder it will be to achieve long-term peace.

Is a two-state solution just?
There is broad international consensus on a two-state solution along the lines of the Saudi peace proposal. Such a solution is by no means ideal. Palestine is a small territory to be divided into two states; it forms a natural economic unit. An Israeli state that discriminates in favor of Jews and a Palestinian state that will probably be equally discriminatory will depart substantially from a just outcome. What's needed is a single secular state that allows substantial autonomy to both national communities, something along the lines of the bi-national state proposed before 1948. This outcome, however, does not seem imminent. A two-state solution may be the temporary measure that will provide a modicum of justice and allow Jews and Palestinians to move peacefully forward to a more just future.

Stephen R. Shalom teaches political science at William Paterson University and is the author of Imperial Alibis (South End Press). A fully documented version of this article will be posted at www.zmag.org.