News From Haifa

July 22, 2006 9:57:24 AM EDT

emily
news from haifa
the rockets hit 50 meters from my mums house, the post
office in my neigborhood in haifa is smashed. and my
mum left for jaffa..my sister works in the hospital in
haifa.
mostly all the injured in haifa are palestinians...i am just
against war by default
and what does this do?..i didnt have any sleep for a
week.
my mum and sister and large family and friends are in
haifa..my deebi part, all my uncles are in bierut...
i call haifa and beirut ...
what realy makes me angry, is the Arab world, the have left
Lebanon and Palestine alone....
aissa


Friends -
The media is not covering the fact that Palestinians are under attack in their cities and towns...Nazareth, Haifa, Majd il Krum....their numbers are often included as "Israeli victims" or "Israeli deaths".....
There is a lack of bunkers, shelters and alarms for all the Arab villages inside Israel.
Palestinians inside the 1948 boundaries are citizens of the state of Israel. The Israelis like to call them "Israeli Arabs".
Many obviously have relatives throughout Lebanon due to the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.
Often forgotten by the rest of the world, unable to travel or visit Arab countries because of their citizenship, they are completely abandoned...

Today I am including an excellent article at the end of this email by one of my FAVORITE Palestinian leaders writing from inside Israel.
- Azmi Bishara - Palestinian from Nazareth.
His article is entitled "Blackmail by Bombs"

Here are some links to websites of Palestinians on the inside....fil dakhil...

http://www.arabs48.com
http://www.aljabha.org
http://www.assennara.net
http://www.panet.co.il

We are one.
Salamaat
Emily


http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20200&Itemid=1
Palestinian Citizens of Israel Unprotected and Unwarned: 2 Children killed in Nazareth
Until the deaths of the children, the media had demonstrably ignored the bombs and missiles that have landed on Druze and Arab communities and the despair of those citizens has not been heard.
Home Front Command does not publish its announcements in Arabic, and the Palestinian towns themselves don’t qualify for government aid for being in the "line of fire.". At times of war the state deals only with the Jewish home front

Nazareth: No one told us, the Arabs, to take shelter
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278550,00.html

Israel's Arab citizens caught in a war they never wanted
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1183353.ece


http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/804/op1.htm
Blackmail by bombs
Azmi Bishara.

Any comparison between Olmert's and Nasrallah's political rhetoric must
conclude that the latter is the more rational. His speeches are more consistent
with the facts and rely less than Olmert's on religious expressions and
allusions. Nasrallah would never dare seal a parliamentary speech with a lengthy
prayer, as Olmert did in his latest speech before the Knesset.

Israeli politicians have no cultural or moral edge over resistance leaders.
The latter are far less attached to Iran than the former are to the US, and
Hizbullah's constituency is less attached to Iran than the organised Jewish
community abroad is to Israel.
The people who unleashed the brutal war against Lebanon are neither
intelligent nor courageous. Quite the opposite; they are mediocrities, cowards and
opportunists, but they happen to have military superiority. And they possess the
keys to the machinery of a state, a real state, one that is secure in its
identity, that has clear national security goals and channels of national
mobilisation, as opposed to a long deferred project for statehood and a states built on
the fragmentation of national identity. On the other side is a resistance
movement operating in the context of a denominationally organised society, a
Lebanese government neutralised to everything but sectarianism, and an Arab order
parts of which are rooting for Israel to do what it is incapable, or too
embarrassed, to do itself, which is to deal with the resistance as a militia
because it foregrounds their own lack of national and popular legitimacy.

Israel has nothing to show for ten days of barbaric vandalism and the
deliberate targeting of civilians. It cannot claim a single military victory against
the Lebanese resistance. It can, though, point proudly to whole residential
quarters that have been reduced to rubble, to the burned out hulks and ruins of
countless wharfs, factories, bridges, roads, tunnels, electricity generators
and civil defence buildings. In terms of explosive and destructive power Israel
has thrown an atom bomb on Lebanon, it is the Israeli Hiroshima.
True, Israel suffers a paucity of intelligence on the whereabouts of
Hizbullah members, which is why it has been targeting the homes of their families. But
this does not justify the systematic bombardment of Lebanese society, and the
attempts to destroy its economy. This is the epitome of terrorism: the
incitement of terror in a civilian populace by unleashing massive violence and
destruction against it in an attempt to compel the people's political leaders to
act against the Lebanese resistance or to change their positions.

The current Israeli assault against Lebanon has nothing to do with freeing
two captured soldiers. That is a purely tangential concern, and Israel will
probably agree to a prisoner exchange when the time comes. Of prime concern, on
the other hand, is an agenda that has bearings on Lebanese domestic, as well as
American agenda for regional, politics.
The issue is not why the resistance chose this particular time for its
operation. Timing, here, becomes another pretext for vilifying the resistance and
justifying the aggression. The fact is that, over the past few months, the
resistance made several attempts to capture Israeli soldiers. The difference is
that its last attempt succeeded. Also, the Israeli soldiers that died in this
operation were not killed in combat, but rather because their tank rolled over a
landmine while pursuing the kidnappers. A more important question is why
Israel choose this time to launch a full scale attack?

The timing is an Israeli-American one. And the answer resides with the Arabs
and the US, and their inability to implement UN Security Council Resolution
1559 and dismantle the Lebanese resistance with Arab tools. So Israel stepped
forward. The only difference between today and the earlier bombardments -- the
"Day of Reckoning" and "Grapes of Wrath" between 1993 and 1996 -- is that
Syrian forces are no longer present in Lebanon. Instead there is an
American-sponsored project for the country, involving the rest of the Arab world, which was
to change the structure of government in Lebanon and transform it into an ally
of the US, a good neighbour to Israel and a participant in US- oriented
alliances in the region.

The project took off following the assassination of Al-Hariri, but in recent
months it had run aground as it became increasingly clear that the Arabs had
no practical means to keep it afloat. What kept discussions in Beirut from
collapsing completely was the fact that the only alternative was internal violence
and civil war. But while it was obvious that the talks were useful in keeping
violence at bay and, hence, good for the tourist season, they were not
helping to advance the American project in Lebanon. It was equally obvious,
therefore, that those who wanted to push this project were expecting something to
happen -- a US strike against Iran, for example, or an Israeli strike against
Lebanon. Given the Iranian option remains currently out of bounds Israel knew it
could count on a tacit green light from major Arab powers for its attack
against Lebanon, and they did not disappoint it. It was the scope and vehemence of
Israel's actions in Lebanon that came as the surprise.
This is neither an Iranian nor a Syrian war.The fist is just being involved
in dialogue with the Americans and the second has been trying to avoid a war
with Israel for decades.
Israel's aim is to change the rules of the game between Israel and Lebanon
and, therefore, within Lebanon itself. This is the only point of similarity
between the current campaign and the war of 1982. The major differences are that,
on the negative side, international and regional circumstances favour Israel,
while on the positive side the resistance, which is not Palestinian but
Lebanese this time, is much stronger and better organised. To these two we can add
another, which is that the Lebanese are not heading towards another 17 May;
that experience they have put firmly behind them and no one wants to rake it up
again. Even after the Syrian withdrawal the Lebanese society has much more
positive attitude towards the Lebanese resistance than it had towards the
Palestinian resistance, in those days of 1982 a part of the Lebanese people fought on
the side of the Israelis. The initiative now lies in the hands of the Lebanese
people and the resistance. They, alone, have the ability to thwart the
conspiracy.

International delegations will soon appear in Lebanon to reap the fruits of
the aggression. They will promise the Lebanese a ceasefire if they implement
1559, saying that there is no longer any excuse for delaying implementation now
that the Israeli army has demonstrated the consequences of non-
implementation.

Roed-Larsen's visit was not a fact-finding mission. Sending Roed-Larsen was
in itself a political statement. He is not only the Israeli Labour Party's man
on the conflict with the Palestinians, he is also the spokesman of the Israeli
position with respect to the Lebanese resistance. He is the one who is after
blood-money to compensate for Barak's loss of honour after withdrawing from
Lebanon and the one who was called in to supervise the implementation of
Resolution 1559. Larsen has not only drawn a red line at crossing the blue line, he
regards the Lebanese resistance as a local militia. He is also a foremost
exponent of that now old term, "the New Middle East", by which is meant, at best,
the normalisation of Arab relations, ie according inter-Arab relations no more
priority than bilateral relations between individual Arab states and Israel.
Larsen was the sworn enemy of Yasser Arafat, who spoiled the Oslo recipe and
refused to behave as he was supposed to. He is filled with a mixture of hatred
and bitterness against "Arab extremists" and harbours low expectations of, and
disappointment with, "Arab moderates" who should always demonstrate that they
are up to the Israeli establishment's expectations.
That's what it's all about; the rest is décor. We'll see Larsen in the garb
of mediator, which hardly suits him since he is not an arbitrator and nowhere
near the middle. And, we'll be inundated with details about ceasefires, truces,
and preparations for implementing 1559.
The resistance isn't playing the role of victim. It didn't ask for
international sympathy with the victims but for solidarity among freedom-seeking
peoples. These are the rules of another game, a language that Arab regimes have
forgotten, if they ever really knew it, though they owe their own existence to such
a discourse. I am speaking of the language of liberation movements that exact
a payment for colonisation from the coloniser. Resistance movements attempt
to exact a price that their adversaries cannot afford and that the societies of
their adversaries do not wish to pay, and they try to encumber their
adversaries in a manner that inhibits the full use of force. This is how resistance
movements try to neutralise military superiority.

The resistance was not being unduly reckless; it did not even select the
timing. It was Israel that chose to open a broad battlefront against the
resistance. It feared that putting off an inevitable battle with the Lebanese
resistance would only give the resistance time to grow stronger and increase its
arsenal. One reason why Israel chose this time in particular was that it already
knew how key Arab regimes would react. The situation, therefore, is the opposite
of what is being portrayed: the charge that the resistance has courted
disaster betrays the existence of an Arab camp that regards robust resistance in
Lebanon and Palestine as an adventure.

The US, meanwhile, is futilely trying to regulate Israel's cowardly assault
against civilians and its destruction of civilian infrastructure. It wants
Israel to target the resistance and the society that supports it without
jeopardising the American project in Lebanon. It wants Israel to bully and blackmail
America's allies without crushing them, alienating them completely or driving
their supporters into the arms of the resistance. The difference between the
Israel and the US, here, maybe tactical, but it is important. It is one of
degree, of pushing or not pushing people over the edge.

Whereas the US wants Israel to promote the American project in Lebanon rather
than throw out the baby with the bathwater, Israel wants the US, Washington's
allies and all the international agencies at their disposal, to negotiate
with the Lebanese government a ceasefire that fulfils several conditions. The
first is to disarm Hizbullah, the second to deploy the official Lebanese army in
the south and substitute the international force with a proper NATO force, the
third to release the Israeli captives. But it is the first condition that is
the one that counts; meeting this will be sufficient for Israel to agree to a
ceasefire. The political order that emerges from the rubble of Israel's
destruction in will see to the rest. Israel, in other words, has decided to settle
internal Lebanese dialogue by Israeli force of arms.

A Nato force accepted by the government without the consent of the people
will be considered an occupation force and will be the next target of the
resistance thus creating a new Iraq, a fragmented Lebanon. If the Lebanese government
agrees to the proposed settlement that includes dismantling Hizbullah a
process of attrition will start also from the inside aimed at getting Lebanese
society to pressure the resistance into conceding. This is how internal strife is
ignited and it is part of the plan.

Israel decided that this would not only be a good time to go on the offensive
but that the battle would be decisive. If the Israeli terrorist project and
military adventure is not to prevail, it is not just the resilience of the
resistance that matters but also the unity of the Lebanese against Israeli
aggression and its political aims.