From Challenge # 65
January-February 2001

IN THIS ISSUE

As the new year opens, the Middle East finds itself in desperate straits. Our editorial investigates What Went Wrong and Why.
Politics makes Strange Bedfellows, and strange it is indeed, writes Samya Nasser, to see Arab Knesset members getting into bed once again with Labor, whose government gunned down thirteen of their constituents in October.
Within the Occupied Territories, youngsters between 12 and 18 make up a third of the civilian martyrs and more than half the wounded. Israel is to blame for their deaths, but the PA too, writes Michal Schwartz, is No Catcher in the Rye.
One of eight foreign volunteers living in Hebron, Kathy Kern describes life under curfew in Area Two, where Israel's army protects 400 settlers from 35,000 unprotected Palestinians, who must rely on weapons like the Necklace of Umm Yusef.
Amid the darkness of present and imminent wars, it is fortunate to find in our midst a man with a quick solution to all our problems. We refer to Dr. Theodore ("Ted") Schmerzl, who after five years of solitary meditation has emerged from the deserts of Vienna with a new proposal, which he entitles The Next Failed Ape.
In the spirit of our ancestors, failed apes who could stand upright, Yacov Ben Efrat looks over the tall grass beyond the two-state formula (now defunct) to a long-term Solution from an Internationalist Perspective, defining the need of the present hour in its terms.
And in the present hour: Israel has closed the Employment Bureau in Arab East Jerusalem since the intifada started three months ago. Thus it deprives 1500 jobseekers of their benefits, dealing out collective punishment because of their support for the new intifada. The Workers Advice Center (WAC) has opened a campaign to re-open the Bureau. And still in the present hour: 45 well-known Israeli artists donated their works to the Baqa Center in Jaffa for a fundraising exhibition. We netted $21,000 in a single day toward much-needed renovation. Dani Ben Simhon and Nir Nader report.

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