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From Challenge # 83  January - February 2004

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In This Issue 

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon nowadays bruits the populist notion that one can dispense with the Palestinians by a Unilateral disconnect. This, claims our editorial, is Delusion. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost – and that "something" will overcome. The failure to find a negotiated solution takes concrete form, quite literally. Israel's "separation barrier" is the Wall at the End of the Cul-de-Sac. Protesting the "Jerusalem Envelope", as Israel gently calls it, WAC teams from all over the country joined their Jerusalem colleagues on a Saturday in December. Against the Solidarity of organized Workers no wall is solid.

The other Great White Hope nowadays is the Geneva Accord. It darkens, however, in the Margins, where it takes on the aspect of a Neo-liberal Front, an attempt to make the region safe for globalization.

Speaking of which, we bring a curious tale of Trading Tanks for Workers. Israel's military industry has won its biggest contract ever, upgrading Turkey's Pattons. The "offset": an influx of Turkish construction workers over a 20-year period, diminishing the chances of Palestinians ever to regain their jobs.

Globalization provokes, wherever it reaches, the Rise of the Radical Right. The forms of this reaction, in the Middle East, include a deadly import from Europe: Unwilling to take responsibility for their impotence against Israel and the US, some Muslim leaders and opinion makers have begun a Flirtation with Anti-Semitism.

Where shall we find hope, then, at the start of 2004? In a prize-winning story by a 16-year-old member of the Baqa Center in Nazareth: Two Faces to One Name.  n

We wish our readers a productive year in the struggle against war and poverty.

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