From Occupied Palestine

Welcome to 'Palestine'
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 16 June 2007

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Another brick in the wall
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 2 April 2006

We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned. West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away. Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres. This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our journalists, "analysts" and "commentators". But it is a lie.

Ariel Sharon
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 6 January 2005

I shook hands with him once, a brisk, no-nonsense soldier's grip from Sharon as he finished a review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers - the men who butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few weeks earlier - had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That's when old Pierre Gemayel - still alive and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon - watched the "order" of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this "order" to Lebanon. That's what Gemayel told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this. Of course, he must have done.

There will be no Middle East peace without justice
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 9 February 2005

So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centres. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" - ie. murders - of Israeli military leaders.

Death, delusion, and democracy
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 14 November 2004

It's worth noting how this narrative has been written. The Israelis, with their continued occupation, their continued illegal construction of colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, their air strikes and helicopter executions and live-fire shooting at stone-throwing children, are not part of this equation. They are just innocently waiting to find a new "negotiating partner" now that Arafat is in his grave. Ariel Sharon, held "personally responsible" for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by the Kahan commission report, remains, in George Bush's words, "a man of peace". No one asks whether he can control his own army.

The truth is that Arafat died years ago
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 30 October 2004

Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he'd been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there. Then we thought he'd died in a plane crash in the Libyan desert -- but it was the pilot who died and the bodyguard who shielded him in his airline seat. Then we thought he'd bought it on the road to Baghdad when he suffered a blood clot. But Jordanian doctors brought him back to the world of the living. Now, again, we're preparing for the old man's death. Yet like the Pope, he seems to go on and on and on.

The things Bush didn't mention in his speech
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 26 May 2004

I can't wait to see Abu Ghraib prison reduced to rubble by the Americans -- at the request of the new Iraqi government, of course. It will be turned to dust in order to destroy a symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality. That's what President Bush tells us. So the rewriting of history still goes on.

A warning to those who dare to criticise Israel in the land of free speech
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 24 April 2004

Behold Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would-be graduation commencement speaker at Emory University in the United States. She has made a big mistake. She dared to criticise Israel. She suggested - horror of horrors - that "the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation". Now whoah there a moment, Mary! "Occupation"? Isn't that a little bit anti-Israeli?

By endorsing Ariel Sharon's plan George Bush has legitimised terrorism
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 16 April 2004

So President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.

The man who knew too much
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 23 March 2004

He was drugged, kidnapped and locked up for 18 years after revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to the world. Next month Mordechai Vanunu is finally set to be released, but just how much freedom will he be allowed? Robert Fisk reports

Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate - once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets - wants to endanger his country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal secrets..."