No image available
/ 9 November 2008
A German, Frenchman, Englishman and a Jew decided to write about elephants, the story goes.
Poet Mahmoud Darwish united the fractured and fragmented Palestinian people, writes Uri Avnery.
In a classic American western, there are good guys and bad guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom; the bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The hero is the cowboy — with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.
What happens when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families? Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union, writes Uri Avnery.
The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government. That was the aim of Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it.
No image available
/ 2 December 2005
A political earthquake is itself a rare event. Two major political earthquakes in quick succession is almost unheard of. But it happened in Israel recently with the election of Amir Peretz as leader of the Labour Party and the departure of Ariel Sharon from the Likud to form a new party.