Re: Israeli destruction catalogued

While the  post from Trich Ganesh does bring up the issue of oil, it is
subsumed underneath the inaccurate tone expressed in the comment that there
are "6 million US-based Zionists."  I assume he is referring to US Jews.


Many U.S. Jews support the Sharon government. Many do not. There are many
conservative Christians who support the Sharon government. The issue is not
one of religion at the most basic level, although religion plays an
important role in winnig people to oppose their own actual interests. The
issue is oil and imperialism and creating pro-US government
military/security areas to protect those interests. To focus on "Jews" might
APPEAR to be militant, but it actually diverts anger and protest AWAY from
those forces who are actually driving these terrible crimes against the
Palestinians, and allows those criminals to avoid being held accountable for
their crimes.

Alan Spector

============================================

 and
----- Original Message -----
From: "Trich Ganesh" <TGanesh@southampton.liu.edu>
To: "Syed Khurram Husain" <skhurram@lums.edu.pk>
Cc: <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 12:05 AM
Subject: Re: Israeli destruction catalogued


> There is little doubt regarding what is going on in the occupied
> lands of Palestine.  The problem is manifold: (1) There is the
> unabashed attempt to destroy all memory of belonging to
> Palestine: anyone who returns to that land encounters unfamiliar
> names for places that in the not so distant past were quite familiar.
> (2) There is the demonization of all Palestinians as terrorists, and
> there is the facile representation of the same in the British and the
> US news agencies.  (3)  There is the most powerful lobby
> representing some 6 million US-based Zionists who navigate US
> foreign policies (and domestic representations of those policies)
> and who go on to dictate terms to their counterparts in the Israeli
> state.  (4)  There is the almost complete absence of opposition to
> state terror within Zion, the Zionist left being after all Zionist and
> ultimately right of left.  (5) There is the misunderstanding in US
> minds that there are no Palestinians who live in the space called
> Israel and that much of what is happening is between Israelis and
> their "territorial" neighbors - almost none of my students knew that
> Palestine is actually the name for a place where many lived before
> being forced to live with Zionists, and then forced to move out.  (6)
> The Intifadahs are all represented as terrorist attacks on the
> legitimate state of Israel.  (7) The sellout of Arafat, of the states of
> Egypt and Syria as well,  during and after Oslo, has not left the
> struggles leader-less, but it has given rise to charges of
> numberless groups who engage in acts of terror.
>
> So many layers, so many systematic erasures, and so little unity
> among the Arab states!  The oil factor stays most important: the
> Saudi state is the largest seller of oil to the US.  Venezuela is the
> third largest seller of oil to the US - can a coup against the elected
> government of Chavez be far behind?  How long can Venezuela
> last?  Or will a new coalition of OAS states emerge - learning from
> Argentina - that will start to redefine the politics of that continent?
> And will that complicate further the question of Palestine?
>
> One able  critique of Labor and Likud and the Ha'aretz
> representations of the carnage in Palestine, is in the recent works
> of Yitzhak Laor.
>
> TKGanesh.
>
>
> Date sent:      Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:28:07 +0500
> To:             wsn@csf.colorado.edu
> From:           Syed Khurram Husain <skhurram@lums.edu.pk>
> Subject:        Israeli destruction catalogued
>
>
>
> Is the Israeli incursion into Palestine really about "uprooting the
> infrastructure of terror" or is it about uprooting all infrastructure?
The
> actions detailed in this report from Ha'aretz newspaper appear to
> corroborate the argument that the larger Israeli strategy, which remained
> active throughout the Oslo Peace Process, is to strangulate the
> Palestinians till they either die of suffocation or leave their homes.
> There is mounting evidence now that Zionism has turned into an
> exterminationist ideology of the very sort that it sought to flee from
once
> upon a time.  This includes the nature of the rhetoric that is used to
> justify its actions.  The phrase by the Israeli army officer cited in
> Ha'artez saying that the IDF should learn from the German army's actions
in
> the Warsaw ghetto is only one example.  Listening to the propaganda of
> Israeli spokesmen, one wonders whether Goebbels himself would have been
> able to do a better job.
>
> Khurram Husain
> Lahore,
> Pakistan
>
>
> Ha'aretz Daily
> Tuesday, April 23, 2002 Iyyar 11, 5762
>
> Ramallah Diary
>
> `So much damage in just one hour'
>
> By Amira Hass
>
> Two days ago, the charred pile next to the building with wide glass
windows
> was still emitting heat. Given the countless number of empty canned food
> tins, one might conclude that they were the leftover combat rations the
> soldiers set on fire earlier that morning, just before they left Ramallah.
> But some papers that were not totally burned indicated that it was not
just
> garbage that was set on fire. Fragments of checks attached to bank record
> books indicated that bank documents were also added to the fire.
>
> The building under discussion is a five-story structure in El Bireh that
> houses the Palestine International Bank. It was captured by the Israel
> Defense Forces on Friday, March 29, the first day of its incursion into
> Ramallah and its twin city, El Bireh.
>
> For 23 days, a large force of soldiers remained in the building, on the
> bank's three floors (plus the basement) and on the two floors housing
> private consulting and advertising agencies (including the Sky advertising
> agency, which won the monopoly on Palestinian advertising on Palestinian
> television and is run by Tarek Abbas, Abu Mazen's son).
>
> For three weeks, four or five armored vehicles and a tank or two were
> permanently positioned next to this building that symbolized a milestone
on
> the road to developing the Palestinian yuppie business sector, considered
a
> pillar of the concept of "building a peace process by developing the
> private sector." The building and the main branch of the Palestine
> International Bank were described as a "five-star hotel"; it had marble
> corridors, designer furniture, matching drapes, state-of-the-art
> electronics, pleasant waiting rooms, the latest computers and a parking
lot
> for clients' cars.
>
> For three weeks mounds of dirt and flattened cars dragged into the middle
> of the adjacent streets ensured that no one would approach the building.
On
> the third day of the IDF's invasion of the city, March 31, two days after
> it had taken over the building, the soldiers were observed bringing some
> things into it and removing other things from it. With guns aimed, they
> instructed journalists to leave the place and said they were searching for
> weapons and wanted individuals.
>
> Two days ago, walking from room to room and floor to floor, one found it
> was possible to discover what had transpired in this building.
>
> The IDF force's attempt to break into the main safes was apparently
> unsuccessful and the locks were ruined. Bank officials' safes were broken
> into and their contents disappeared. The safe of the automated teller
> machine also could not be broken into, but the soldiers did manage to ruin
> the actual machine, which costs around NIS 40,000.
>
> The soldiers smashed glass doors and windows; on some floors, they broke
> down walls, apparently in a not very thorough search for weapons that were
> not found (otherwise they would have broken down all the walls), tore out
> marble tiles, ripped out telephone wires, destroyed telephones (other
> equipment disappeared), broke a few pieces of furniture, littered the
> floors with food scraps and scrawled in Hebrew on the walls.
>
> The state-of-the-art telephone switchboard (made by Telrad) was removed.
> The soldiers threw around files of documents while other folders
> disappeared or were found piled up in a corner of the room.
>
> But the main focus of the force's mission was to destroy the bank's entire
> computer network.
>
> "The saboteur knows about computers," concludes the bank's director
> general, Osama Khader, who on Sunday wondered around from room to room in
a
> daze and pointed out the damages. The bank, which was founded in 1997,
> serves 16,000 clients. The up-to-date database of accounts, recent
> transfers, transactions, checks paid out to and received by customers -
all
> was destroyed. The soldiers, Khader pointed out, damaged the main computer
> room, ripped out wires, took away diskettes and damaged the hard drives or
> took them away. The bank's computer terminals were all thrown around,
> broken or had missing or broken drives. Computer parts were found strewn
> around the courtyard and other parts were found charred in the pile of
food
> that had been set alight.
>
> "Please don't litter," was written on a piece of paper found hanging on a
> wall in the manager's office. The floor was covered with sunflower seed
> shells and coffee stains. There were blue booklets strewn next to
> demolition tools and hammers, and the stamp on each one indicated that
they
> were a donation from the Kabbala Learning Center for world peace, love and
> human dignity.
>
> There was a similar scene in the offices of Sky: a decorative wall near
the
> entrance had disappeared; Tarek Abbas, the director, wondered where the
> wall had disappeared to: there was no trace of it. The clogged toilets
> emitted a stench. There were computers strewn about the room that had been
> damaged, disk drives that had been broken and hard drives that had
> disappeared. One drawer had had $1,000 in it and that too disappeared. A
> VCR disappeared. Children's toys marketed by the company were destroyed.
> All of the business cards of customers and potential customers had
> disappeared.
>
> Similar and even worse scenes of destruction were uncovered two days ago
in
> other offices in Ramallah and El Bireh (as well as in Nablus and
Bethlehem)
> which the soldiers had stormed into: in the housing bank and in all of the
> Palestinian Authority's offices (except for the Ministry of Planning
headed
> by Nabil Sha'ath and the Ministry of Sport and Youth), the computers had
> been destroyed by various methods and documents were tossed out, torn up
> and disappeared. The offices of human rights organizations, independent
> research institutes and non-governmental health organizations were
> destroyed: at the Medical Relief Committees' eye center, all the
eyeglasses
> were found broken and scattered on the floor, the same organization's
> warehouse for aids for handicapped people was broken into and some of the
> equipment was destroyed; data bases and computers used by the research
> institutes to monitor health, agriculture and environmental and water
> quality were destroyed.
>
> Officials at the Higher Education Authority thought that they had been
> spared the destruction: Last Friday, when the curfew was lifted for a few
> hours, its three floors of offices and six wings were still intact.
> Officials even made sure to leave the doors open so that the soldiers
would
> not break them down if they wanted to enter the offices in their search
for
> wanted individuals and weapons.
>
> But on Friday night, the soldiers burst into the building. A neighbor
> counted 11 explosions and related that the soldiers remained in the
> building no more than an hour. On Sunday morning, Dr. Gabi Baramki, the
> authority's adviser on academic affairs and a former president of Bir Zeit
> University, hurried to the place. "So much damage in just one hour," he
> said stunned and searching for words to describe the losses incurred.
>
> All of the computers were piled up in a few corners and blown up, along
> with the printers. The explosion tore a hole in the floor of one of the
> rooms. In the Ministry of Education, which had been broken into two weeks
> earlier, written documents, books and printed research papers were
> destroyed or had disappeared. In the offices of the Higher Education
> Authority, at least some of the hand-written documents remained intact.
But
> as Baramki says, the general destruction indicates that the purpose of the
> operation was to strike at the infrastructure of Palestinian civil
society,
> to cause it to regress, erase its accomplishments and halt its
development.
>
> The IDF also blew up the computers in the large Max supermarket in the
> city's southwest. A few Palestinian businessmen built it in 1998. Some of
> them had lived for years in the United States. The force entered the
> supermarket twice: once some food products were taken from the shelves,
but
> that isn't what bothers Hisham Abd al-Rasul, one of the owners; when the
> computers were blown up or disappeared, the large supermarket lost all of
> its business records, receipts and orders.
>
> The first time the force went into the store, it tried unsuccessfully to
> break open the safe. Two weeks later, the force returned with more
> appropriate equipment for breaking into safes. There was NIS 60,000 in the
> safe, but one day after the curfew was lifted, the supermarket's managers
> discovered that the money had disappeared. Neighbors and managers
> circulated this information in e-mails that were sent all over the world.
> After a few days, Civil Administration officials contacted Palestinian
> liaison officials and informed them that this was not the objective. The
> money was returned.
>
> Dozens of Ramallah residents (and residents of other cities) were not so
> lucky even though many of them wrote in e-mails about the money, jewelry
> and electronic items that disappeared from their homes after IDF soldiers
> broke in or were positioned there. An eight-year-old girl's gold earrings,
> gold jewelry, cash (NIS 800 here, $400 there and more), VCRs and video
> cameras were hidden beneath a soldier's coat. Hundreds of people have been
> busy over the last two days cleaning the mess left behind by the soldiers,
> trying to straighten out the apartments and offices and recording the
> damages incurred: the office owners and private banks, at least, are
> planning to file suit against the IDF.
>
>
>
>