From Challenge # 74  July-August 2002

In This Issue

This Challenge finds the Territories in a state of limbo. Israel has destroyed the creature it made at Oslo, the PA, in all but name. The result is a vacuum, abhorred by politics as by nature. New tendencies arise: jobless Gazans, for example, demonstrate against the PA. Behind their cries for a decent living, our editorial detects a rare stroke of something like normalcy, a demand for the BREAD OF LIFE, not the CULT OF DEATH. Among Palestinian academics. too, as well as NGO's and political activists, we hear a deeper pondering than before of the SUICIDE BOMBINGS –  of the circumstances under which it is or isn't legitimate to criticize them.

 In Israel's camp there is a vacuum too – of moral vision or even just enlightened self-interest. The government tries to fence this vacuum in: "FENCE NOW!" After closing their doors nine years ago, Israelis are putting a wall on the rest of the house, with slots for the settlement cats.  

The ODA has just held a three-day seminar on Marxism and Contemporary Issues. We print one of the lectures, REVOLUTION AND TRAGEDY, which compares the TWO INTIFADAS and finds, in their difference, a concrete example of what the phrase "alternative leadership" means.

 There are updates, too, on various campaigns we have been following: one  in support of conscientious objectors, another for Arab workers. The latter were "THE FIRST FOREIGN WORKERS," says Dr. Aziz Kheidar in an interview with VIDEO '48. We publish the transcript, part of a documentary-in-the-making. 

CHALLENGE, finally, would not be complete without its usual religious dimension, enshrined in a piece on the Via Dolorosa of Sindyanna's Olive Oil Soap.

 

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