Here's the way
one paper phrases today's "news":
A key aide to acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says there are plans for further withdrawals of Jewish settlers from the West Bank.
"Withdrawal"? Really? No, only in some universe where "withdrawal" means "reployment" (kind of like the Murtha position on Iraq):
Jewish settlers will be relocated to major settlement blocs.
Of course those "major settlement blocs," unspecified in this particular article, are actually in the West Bank.
Another paper runs a headline reading "More West Bank pullouts promised" and reports:
Israel will abandon more Jewish settlements in the West Bank if Ehud Olmert, the interim prime minister, and his Kadima party win election later this month, one of the party's leaders said Sunday.
"Abandon"? Really? No, only in some universe where "abandon" means "replace settlers with soldiers":
Israeli soldiers would remain after civilians were removed from isolated settlements and resettled elsewhere.
This article continues with this remarkable statement:
Dichter's comments during an interview with Israel Radio reinforced expectations that a Kadima government without Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would accelerate the unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, which Sharon began last summer.
Sharon began a withdrawal from the West Bank? Who knew? His "withdrawal" was actually exactly like the rumored new ones:
Residents of the evacuated settlements would be moved into the three main West Bank settlement areas -- Ariel, Maale Adumim and the Gush Etzion bloc -- or be absorbed into four smaller clusters, the newspaper said.
"Settlement areas." "Clusters." What nice words for illegally occupied land.
Last night at the San Jose film festival Cinequest I watched a screening of Occupied Minds, a documentary about two U.S.-based journalists, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who travel to Israel and Palestine to gain a better understanding of the situation there by talking to a cross-section of people, from a Palestinian resistance fighter to a right-wing Israeli settler, and all sorts of people in-between. The viewer definitely learns a lot more about the reality on the ground, just as the filmmakers did.
You can watch a 20-minute "rough cut" of the movie on the Frontline website here. Several moments stood out in that film for me: one, watching an elderly Palestinian woman struggling to climb through a crack in the wall, and another, listening to some children at a rally of right-wing Israelis singing this song:
The whole world is against us, but this is not terrible, because we will still triumph, and we just don't give a damn!
In the full film (not the 20-minute online "Rough Cut"), the right-wing Israeli settler actually offers a "compromise" to Palestinians - they should settle on the East Bank of the Jordan River (also known as Jordan), and the Israelis will leave them in peace, even though, he says, that land also rightfully belongs to the Jews!
Not the world's greatest film as a piece of film, but definitely worth seeing for the information it imparts.
Reprinted from Left I on the News