Patching up torture victims in an open-air prison

In an unprecedented criticism of the Israeli siege of Gaza, a senior official in the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has described his organisation’s work among the 1.8 million besieged Palestinian refugees as akin to being “in an open-air prison to patch up prisoners in between their torture sessions”.

Jonathan Whittall, head of humanitarian analysis at MSF, who has worked in Pakistan, Libya during the 2011 war, in Bahrain during the uprising of the same year, in Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Darfur, has bluntly asked his colleagues: “At what point does MSF’s repeated medical action in an unacceptable situation [like Gaza] become complicity with aggression and oppression?”

Unlike other medical charities, MSF has always encouraged its staff to speak frankly about the dangers and moral problems they face, and the long and passionate report from Mr Whittall — unlike those of other humanitarian groups, which prefer to silence their staff — is in keeping with MSF’s rules.

But its accusations against Israel are sure to arouse fierce Israeli condemnation during a disproportionate war — supposedly fought to prevent Hamas rocket attacks on Israel — in which the Israeli military has killed well over 200 civilians, many of them women and children.

“An entire population is trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison,” Mr Whittall writes.

“They can’t leave and only the most limited supplies — essential for basic survival — are allowed to enter. The population of the prison have elected representatives and organised social services. Some of the prisoners have organised into armed groups and resist their indefinite detention by firing rocketsover the prison wall. However, the prison guards are the ones who have the capacity to launch large-scale and highly destructive attacks on the open-air prison.”

In a comparison which is also certain to infuriate Israel, Mr Whittall, who is based in Beirut, says that the limitations of humanitarian groups in Gaza are not unique. “In 2012,” hewrites, “MSF closed its projects in the prisons of Misrata, Libya. Our doctors were outraged to be in a position where we were providing treatment to patients who were being tortured by state authorities.

At the time, MSF spoke out strongly: ‘Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not repeatedly to treat the same patients between torture sessions’.”

Since 2010, MSF has run a post-operation clinic in Gaza City, where 80 per cent of the patients suffer from severe burns, and provides specialised hand surgery in the Nasser hospital at Khan Younis, and intensive care training to medical and paramedical personnel at both the Nasser and Shifa hospitals.

During conflict, Mr Whittall adds: “The voice of outrage of MSF medical teams is drowned out by the propaganda war that erupts each time a [military] operation such as this takes place and by the concerns that too loud a voice of criticism could cut off the organisation’s surgical teams from being able to reach the Gaza Strip.” Although Mr Whittall does not say so, the same
constraints were felt by humanitarian groups when confronted by civilian populations in desperate need of help in the Syrian war.

In another sideswipe at the Israeli military’s actions against Gaza, Mr Whittall remarks that “everyone pays the price for living under siege and for their acts of resistance. Medical workers have been killed and health structures damaged. In such a densely populated environment, the claims of not targeting civilians in air raids are of little comfort. There are always limits to humanitarian action. Huma­nitarian organisations can treat the wounded. But we can’t open borders to end violence.”

LIMITS OF HUMANI­TARIANISM: The MSF official also notes that while confronting the “limits of humanitarianism” is a daily reality for MSF field workers, “it is made only more apparent by the duration of the suffering and the international political configuration that allows for the sick political statements and endless violence to continue.” Mr Whittall says that as “the open-air prison of Gaza braces for more air raids and a possible ground operation”, the limits of MSF’s work remain obvious, and he demands that Palestinians should be allowed “to move freely and to seek safety in times of violence, including into Egypt... “Civilians and civilian infrastructure — including medical workers, health centres and ambulances — should never be targeted.

Humanitarian aid and its workers should be given unhindered access at all times — not as a favour but as a legal responsibility.”

Mr Whittall’s analysis will evoke much sympathy among other humanitarian organisations, and with EU officials who find that their assistance in the Palestinian occupied territories or Gaza is taken for granted — or even abused — by the Israelis. EU humanitarian projects, both in Gaza and the West Bank, have been destroyed by the Israeli army — with afterwards scarcely a breath of criticism from the EU itself, which has no connection with MSF.

Robert Fisk Is the writer of the above post

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2014

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An obsessive’s documenting of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon can show us how the West lost respect for international law

One Norwegian officer left Lebanon with a typed report on torture taped to his chest

Robert Frisk 

Odd Karsten Tveit was always a very obsessional chap. Every story he covered, he always wanted to dig deeper, study further, hear one more tale of horror, one more joke, one more historical fact. We all covered the story of Israel’s wars in Lebanon, in 1978, in 1982, in 1996, in 2006. Over the years, I covered the story of Israel’s torturers in Khiam jail in southern Lebanon, the massive Ansar prison camp in 1982, the frightful interrogation of Lebanese and Palestinian inmates.

But Karsten has put together a book of immense research which will remain the volume on Israel’s shame in Lebanon and its historical defeat. That’s the title of the English edition – Goodbye Lebanon: Israel’s First Defeat. His detailed questioning of torture victims – hanged by their arms, electrocuted, in one case apparently raped and in another mistreated in an Israeli hospital – have an unstoppable power to convince. Not only did he cover the events on the ground in southern Lebanon, he interviewed Israeli veterans in Israel itself.

He reported constantly on Norwegian television and radio; he wanted to learn so much of the vicious Israeli-Hezbollah guerrilla war that he actually took time off to serve in the Norwegian UN battalion n southern Lebanon, wearing the blue beret. Now that is obsession for you.

It is a terrible tale, stories which upset many of the UN peacekeepers, especially military doctors, as evidence mounted of the Israeli brutality on prisoners in Lebanon and inside Israel itself. One Norwegian officer even left Lebanon via Tel Aviv with a typed report on torture taped to his chest for the eyes of a Norwegian government minister.

Prisoners at Ansar were grossly mistreated. Outside the walls of Khiam prison, I visited a post of UN unarmed truth supervisors who told me they could hear the screams of tortured men and women at night. Karsten did the same. Israeli interrogators were present, Karsten says. Israel denied responsibility, saying Khiam was under the control of their local Lebanese militia. The UN did not believe it.

There are also stories of great courage. Two out of the four men who managed to escape from Khiam were hunted through the night and only reached Beirut with the secret help of UN soldiers. They had been inspired by Allied escapes from prison camps in the Second World War. “The prisoners in Stalag III had managed to get hold of equipment by bribing a German guard,” Karsten writes. “In Khiam, such an attempt would likely have meant more torture and confinement in the ‘chicken cage’, the 90-cubic-centimetre enclosure used for extra-severe punishment.”

It was only thanks to an Israeli lawyer that Lebanese prisoners held in Israel – illegally under international law – managed to have their cases heard. Many were held for years without trial, as they were in Khiam, naked during interrogations, refused visits from the International Red Cross, wounds untended or untreated for days.

And I wondered, reading this shameful narrative, why we were so surprised when we found that the American military were torturing and killing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Karsten says at one point that Israeli soldiers in the occupation zone in southern Lebanon – the Israelis called it a ‘security zone’, a description that many newspapers gutlessly repeated – were joint Israeli-American nationals. Did any of them also serve in the American army in Iraq?

The mass prison camp at Ansar sounds like a hot version of Guantanamo. And when the US repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s treatment of Lebanese civilians, I wonder whether somehow that’s when American governments lost their respect for international law – as they showed in their treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (or the Iraqi invasion itself).

There are painful details of the torment of Western hostages in Lebanon and the merciless judgements bestowed on informers by Hezbollah. There are not many good guys in Karsten’s reporting. In the end, it turned out that the prisoners of the Israelis were hostages too – the Israelis called them “bargaining chips”, another phrase the press used freely – and they were freed to secure the release of Israeli prisoners or their bodies.

Khiam is long gone. The war in Lebanon is now outclassed by the bloodbath in Syria. Karsten’s work is a reminder that cruelty has no geographic boundaries. How much more is there to learn about the horrors of Lebanon? Or Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria?

Parallels with Ireland not so clear

I see that Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative – which holds no truck with either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority – has been holding forth in Dublin about the parallels of Irish and Palestinian history. “I find great similarity between the struggle of Irish people and the Palestinian struggle for independence and freedom,” he says. That deserved one response: Hmmm.

Visiting Kilmainham jail, he told the Irish Times that he intended to read more about Robert Emmett, executed for a hopeless rising in 1803. “We were also colonised by the British colonial system,” said Barghouti (pictured). “My grandfather and uncle were imprisoned in similar prisons.” Now, he says, the Netanyahu government is “bulldozing the two-state solution and the possibility of a Palestinian state”.

Barghouti wants Ireland’s political help, claiming that without “international solidarity” for a peaceful solution, the Palestinians will not have a state. But I’m not sure Barghouti has chosen quite the right period of Irish history. I would have thought the dispossession of the Catholics and the Protestant settlement in the Pale was a more likely parallel with Netanyahu’s colonial expansion. Getting rid of the Penal Laws wasn’t much of a prospect at the time. Catholics couldn’t even buy land. And “international solidarity” with the Irish wasn’t much use then. 

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Israel Demands Our Support Because It Fights Its ‘War Against Terrorists’ in Our Name

We westerners set the precedent when it comes to "collateral damage", now the Israelis are reeling out the same tired excuses

By Robert Fisk

Enough is enough. Now we have even “National Infrastructure” Minister Uzi Landau – one of my favourite dogsbodies in the Israeli government – talking about “collateral damage” and the justification for bombing Hamas’s broadcasting station. It could be used for transmitting military instructions, he said.

But wasn’t that exactly what our own beloved Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara – now, I suppose, Lord Blair of the Holy Land – said after Nato bombed the Serb television station in Belgrade, when Nato, too, was blathering on about “collateral damage”?

We Westerners set the precedents in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq – trains, bridges, TV stations, wedding parties, blocks of civilian apartments, you name it – and now the Israelis can trot along behind and produce, whenever necessary, the same tired list of excuses we invented for Nato.

It’s odd, the way they all get away with it. Lord Blair, whose 92 Business Class trips to the Holy Land have produced a peace beyond all peace, is now talking about how it’s in everybody’s interest to have a truce – is his face getting a bit skeletal, or is that my imagination? – and a truce, I suppose, we shall have, well over 100 Palestinian and three Israeli dead too late. But is it all worth it? Was the murder by Israel of Hamas’s military leader Ahmed al-Jabari in fact not staged to provide an excuse to bomb all those new missiles that Hamas has acquired?

That wise old Israeli owl Uri Avneri – he is 89 years old – thinks this is just the trap that Hamas fell into by launching its preposterous “Gates of Hell” rocket attacks in revenge for Jabari’s death. The whole Operation “Pillar of Defence” was about destroying Hamas’s weapons – not about the largely ineffective missiles themselves.

Isn’t this why Israel gave its operation the name it did? For, despite our constant repetition of “Operation Pillar of Defence”, Israeli friends tell me that the correct Hebrew translation of this sick war is Operation Pillar of Cloud. Which makes a lot more sense. For this comes from the Book of Exodus (13:21) – “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way.”

I wonder, indeed, if the ridiculous William Hague realised he was doing God’s work when he gave his support to this bloodletting?

But this leads me to another little matter. One of the new Israeli lines on the war runs like this. Israel kills “terrorists” by the score along with a handful of “collateral damage” innocents – and the world rages against Israel. Yet isn’t the Syrian regime killing Syrian innocents by the thousand every month? Where are the mass protests, the venting of wrath at Bashar al-Assad? What hypocrisy! But of course, this is in itself a hypocrisy. We know the old “Hama rules” of Syria; no one asks us to support them. And comparing Israel’s brutality to that of the Assad regime is playing the old Lord Blair game: we weren’t perfect in Iraq – but we weren’t as bad as Saddam.

No. Israel claims to hold the same values as the supposedly moral West. It says that it is fighting “terrorism” in our name as well as its own. It says it is fighting like us. It is playing by our Western rules. We are all Israelis now; that is what we are meant to say. Hamas is our enemy, as well as Israel’s. And so – for this is the effect – we too must be contaminated by the war crimes of Israel’s pilots. That, I believe, is why we protest against Israel. Operation Pillar of Cloud must not be committed in our name.

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Robert Fisk Attacked by The Zionist

Robert Fisk: Condemn me, but get your facts right first

Here we go again. This libellous and racist quotation comes from an email sent to The Independent by "Bernadette", a member of a pro-Israeli lobby group in Australia.

"Robert Fisk is the most anti-Semitic, rabid, prejudiced, blithering fool in Britain, if not the world – he is a non-journalist, in fact he's a raving idiot with a very small mind and a very large ego. He stops at nothing to put his personal anti-Semitic message across, which he gets sent to him from the where? [sic] the Middle East, not through any personal investigation; he tells any number of lies that gullible, unthinking people can't wait to agree with. He's a pawn of the Muslims – may he enjoy them when they set up sharia law in Britain and Europe – which is what they intend doing – chances are, if he makes one slip, they would turn on him and have him stoned to death, or even publicly behead him. Unfortunately far too many people are totally fooled because of people like him."

I don't care about the vicious personal abuse – that's what you get from pro-Israeli lobby outfits when they don't like you – though I do care about the appalling sloppiness in the letter's use of English grammar. But what really enrages me is the suggestion that my life is in danger, that I will be "stoned to death" or even publicly beheaded. Last time I faced this sort of filth, it came from the actor John Malkovich who told the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me and George Galloway. Quite apart from associating me with a jerk like Galloway, Malkovich spawned a heap of vileness on the internet from even less rational people, one of whom portrayed my face covered in blood with the caption: "Malkovich is jumping the queue."

I should add that The Independent took this matter up with the South Cambridgeshire police, who interviewed those present at the union but concluded that Malkovich had not spoken with "intent". So that's all right then. Yet in a subsequent interview in The Observer, he made no attempt to apologise for his threat and the paper itself repeated the libel of anti-Semitism against me. The Observer later carried a printed apology and withdrew the Malkovich interview from its website. None of this surprised me.

In 2001, after I was beaten by Afghan refugees on the Pakistani border, by men whose families had just been killed in a B-52 raid on Kandahar, Mark Steyn wrote an article about me in The Wall Street Journal under the headline: "A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due." Steyn, who made much of my suggestion that, if I were an Afghan who had lost his family, I would also beat Robert Fisk, cackled – without mentioning the loss of the families, of course – that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter". Steyn might be dismissed for such nonsense, but he doesn't stop. Last year, he claimed that the London bombings of 2007 and the Madrid train bombings were the "opening shots of a European civil war".

As Europe's white population fled, the continent would become "reprimitivised". Author Kenan Malik – incorrectly claiming that Steyn also said that Muslims "were expanding like mosquitoes" – has pointed out that there are currently 13 million Muslims in Europe out of a population of 491 million. To outnumber the majority by 2020, Muslims would have to increase their numbers 20-fold in just over a decade. I suppose this is why every act against humanity is now attributed so quickly to Muslims. Yes, of course, Muslims – or those who claim to be Muslims (though this is at times a dodgy argument) – have committed individual crimes against humanity, the 11 September 2001 attacks being the most terrible example. But did that merit The Sun's headline after right-wing Norwegian killer and self-styled crusader against Islam Anders Behring Breivik – who drew on Steyn's work in his proto-Nazi "manifesto" – murdered 77 people in Oslo and a nearby island last year. It read: "Al-Qa'ida Massacre: Norway's 9/11."

Needless to say, the Islamophobes, after ritual condemnation of Breivik, largely avoided referring to him as a "terrorist" – a term reserved for Muslims – and called him "mad" instead. I notice that this is exactly how Israel deals with its own "terrorists" (by their own definition of the word). The mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Palestinians in the Hebron mosque massacre in 1994, was always referred to as "deranged" rather than a "terrorist". Thus his act, like Breivik's last year, was de-politicised, de-"terrorised".

Back in 2006, a Brussels schoolboy, Joe Van Holsbeeck, was murdered at the city's central station for his MP3 player. Paul Belien, a far-right Catholic conservative journalist (now an adviser to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders), published an op-ed article headlined "Give Us Weapons". Muslims, Belien wrote, are "predators that have learned from childhood... how to slaughter warm herd animals". Imams were asked to hand over the Muslim murderer. Then newspapers revealed that the killers were Poles. And then – worse still – Roma! Ian Buruma found the real perspective when he wrote that "aggressiveness is seen as a sign of genuineness and the showing of anger a proof of moral integrity". Ergo Mr Belien, Dr Goldstein, Mr Breivik, Mr Steyn and even "Bernadette", the Aussie who predicts my public beheading. Be angry. Be right

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

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Bye bye US dollar.

"In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq."
The Demise of the Dollar, Robert Fisk,

http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/9635-focus-the-demise-of-the-dollar

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

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Robert Fisk: The 'invented people' stand little chance

Robert Fisk

Thank goodness we don't have to hear Newt Gingrich for a while.

His statement that the Palestinians were an "invented people" marked about the lowest point in the Republican-Christian Right-Likudist/Israel relationship. So deep has this pact now become that you can deny the existence of an entire people if you want to become US president. It's time, surely, to take a look at this extraordinary movement, to remind ourselves – since US "statesmen" cannot – just what its implications really are.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York on 23 September, few noticed a quite remarkable reference in his speech. In refusing Newt's "invented" people's request for statehood, he made an extremely unpleasant remark about "the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam". But far more disturbing was this: "In 1984, when I was appointed Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubovich. He said to me ... you'll be serving in a house of many lies ... remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide."

Did Obama and Clinton or anyone else pick up on this reverent memoir, indeed the only quotation from any of Netanyahu's meetings which he chose to mention at the UN? For this is the rabbi who viewed himself as a messiah and whose followers stood behind Netanyahu in his successful 1996 election campaign. Only Sefi Rachlevsky in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz appeared to spot the significance of Netanyahu's remark.

"The Lubavitcher Rebbe [sic] was famous for his vehement opposition to even the tiniest withdrawal from any territory ever held by the Israel Defence Forces, even in the framework of full peace," Rachlevsky wrote. "The most prominent emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – the great rabbi, as Netanyahu termed him at the United Nations – included Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre, and Yitzhak Ginsburg, the rabbi of Yitzhar, he of the radical book Baruch the Man (which celebrates the massacre)." The rabbi, Rachlevsky continued, believed that in the land of the messiah, there is no room for Arabs. Newt was right on track, it seems. "Thus racism entered Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations – not 'merely' against Islam, but also against Arabs."

And so the ghost of Goldstein slid into the UN, the doctor who put on his IDF uniform to enter the mosque of Abraham and slay 29 praying Arabs before being almost torn to pieces. His grave, in the neighbouring settlement of Kiryat Arba, is today treated by his admirers as a shrine. But, for the Prime Minister of Israel, the "crocodile" was militant Islam. Of course, Netanyahu can lavish praise on whatever oddball he wants – his predecessors, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, officially received a Lebanese militiaman called Etienne Saqr whose civil war "Guardians of the Cedars" routinely mutilated Palestinian prisoners before putting them to death, and whose motto was "it is the duty of each Lebanese to kill one Palestinian" – but something very dark was getting loose here. The Israel of socialist kibbutzim and phoenix-like power, of honour and renewal that the world believed in after the Second World War, had vanished.

What came in its place? The Arab Awakening has allowed us to avoid this all-consuming question. That Israel has "veered to the right" (as if it might soon "veer" back to the left) has long been a sop phrase for American journalists – though it's not long ago that one of them was instructed to refrain from referring to a Netanyahu cabinet as "right wing" on the grounds that this upset his paper's Jewish readers. The presence of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister – Nicolas Sarkozy has many times beseeched Netanyahu to get rid of him – is proof of that; it would be difficult to find a better Israeli "match" for the crackpot president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But something far more worrying is taking place.

In the United States, where Netanyahu received so many standing ovations from a Congress that apparently thought it was the Knesset – far more ovations than he would ever have received in the real Knesset in Jerusalem – Israel is increasingly relying on the support of Christian fundamentalists.

This support has now coalesced with the Republican Party against Obama – whose grovelling to Netanyahu has won him no new friends – so that over recent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is routinely used to attack the Democrats. Having once been sustained by the progressive left, Israel now draws its principal support from right-wing conservatism of a particularly unpleasant kind. Christian evangelicals believe that all Jews will die if they do not convert to Christianity on the coming of the Messiah. And right-wing racists in Europe – the most prominent of them being Dutch – are welcome in Israel, while the likes of Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are not.

Not a word about this from the would-be Republican candidates and their followers these past few days. Governor Rick Perry has long accused Obama of "appeasement" in the Middle East, and former New York mayor Ed Koch has never withdrawn his claim that Obama "threw Israel under the bus". Mitt Romney has said that he wants "to increase military and intelligence co-ordination with Israel" – as if the US hasn't been handing out aircraft and billions of dollars to Israel for decades. What chance do an "invented people" have against this?

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

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Fighting talk: The new propaganda

Here is an excellent article by Robert Fisk on the politics of language and discussion of the Middle East. Just in case you missed it. Published on June 21, 2010.

Ed Corrigan

Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game, argues Robert FiskFollowing the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. Remember the "bunker buster" and the "Scud buster" and the "target-rich environment" in the Gulf War (Part One)? Forget about "weapons of mass destruction". Too obviously silly. But "WMD" in the Gulf War (Part Two) had a power of its own, a secret code – genetic, perhaps, like DNA – for something that would reap terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. "45 Minutes to Terror".

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and State Department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, between America and Israel.

In the Western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops "correct" our spelling, "trim" our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

For two decades now, the US and British – and Israeli and Palestinian – leaderships have used the words "peace process" to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people. I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo – although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis.

Poor old Oslo, I always think. What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty – in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies, even timetables – were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn – though, yes, we remember the images – upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Koran, and Arafat who chose to say: "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr President." And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was "a moment of history"! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? "The peace of the brave". But I don't remember any of us pointing out that "the peace of the brave" was used by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We Western journalists – used yet again by our masters – have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan, as saying their war can only be won with a "hearts and minds" campaign. No one asked them the obvious question: Wasn't this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War? And didn't we – didn't the West – lose the war in Vietnam? Yet now we Western journalists are using – about Afghanistan – the phrase "hearts and minds" in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition, rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades.

Just look at the individual words we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we Westerners find that "our" enemies – al-Qa'ida, for example, or the Taliban – have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it "a spike in violence".

Ah yes, a "spike"! A "spike" is a word first used in this context, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase, our journalistic invention. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up then sharply downwards. A "spike in violence" therefore avoids the ominous use of the words "increase in violence" – for an increase, of course, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar – a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands – they call this a "surge". And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these "surges" really are – to use the real words of serious journalism – are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to conflicts when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about "surges" without any attribution at all. The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the "peace process" collapsed. Therefore our leaders – or "key players" as we like to call them – tried to make it work again. The process had to be put "back on track". It was a train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC. But there was a problem when the "peace process" had repeatedly been put "back on track" – but still came off the line. So we produced a "road map" – run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who – in an obscenity of history – we now refer to as a "peace envoy". But the "road map" isn't working. And now, I notice, the old "peace process" is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And earlier this month, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies whom the TV boys and girls call "experts" told us again that the "peace process" was being put "back on track" because of the opening of "indirect talks" between Israelis and Palestinians. This isn't just about clichés – this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between the media and power; through language, we, the media, have become them.

Here's another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East. We are told, in many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are "competing narratives". How very cosy. There's no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. "Competing narratives" now regularly pop up in the British press.

The phrase, from the false language of anthropology, deletes the possibility that one group of people – in the Middle East, for example – is occupied, while another is doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly "competing narratives", a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are – are they not? – "in competition". And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an "occupation" becomes a "dispute". Thus a "wall" becomes a "fence" or "security barrier". Thus Israeli acts of colonisation of Arab land, contrary to all international law, become "settlements" or "outposts" or "Jewish neighbourhoods". It was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as Secretary of State to George W Bush, who told US diplomats to refer to occupied Palestinian land as "disputed land" – and that was good enough for most of the US media. There are no "competing narratives", of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, you'll know the West has lost.

But I'll give you an example of how "competing narratives" come undone. In April, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, "hotly dispute" that this was a genocide.

So the interviewer called the genocide "deadly massacres". Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She couldn't call the massacres a "genocide", because the Turkish community would be outraged. But she sensed that "massacres" on its own – especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians – was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the "deadly massacres". How odd! If there are "deadly" massacres, are there some massacres which are not "deadly", from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

Yet the use of the language of power – of its beacon words and its beacon phrases – goes on among us still. How many times have I heard Western reporters talking about "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them "foreign fighters". Immediately, we Western reporters did the same. Calling them "foreign fighters" meant they were an invading force. But not once – ever – have I heard a mainstream Western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan, and that all of them happen to be wearing American, British and other NATO uniforms. It is "we" who are the real "foreign fighters".

Similarly, the pernicious phrase "Af-Pak" – as racist as it is politically dishonest – is now used by reporters, although it was originally a creation of the US State Department on the day Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoids the use of the word "India" – whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, "Af-Pak" – by deleting India – effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir – after all, Holbrooke was made the "Af-Pak" envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase "Af-Pak", which completely avoids the tragedy of Kashmir – too many "competing narratives", perhaps? – means that when we journalists use the same phrase, "Af-Pak", which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the State Department's work.

Now let's look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W Bush thought he was Churchill. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam War protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the "appeasers" who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, "the Hitler of the Tigris". The appeasers were the British who didn't want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill's waistcoat and jacket for size. No "appeaser" he. America was Britain's oldest ally, he proclaimed – and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true. Britain's oldest ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during the Second World War, which flew its national flags at half-mast when Hitler died (even the Irish didn't do that).

Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the Luftwaffe blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality, and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Similarly, back in 1956, Eden called Nasser the "Mussolini of the Nile". A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956. When it comes to history, we journalists let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language.

Over the past two weeks, as foreigners – humanitarians or "activist terrorists" – tried to take food and medicines by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should have been reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel – our own servicemen dying as they did so – to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today: which Western journalist – since we love historical parallels – has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Instead, what did we get? "Activists" who turned into "armed activists" the moment they opposed the Israeli army's boarding parties. How dare these men upset the lexicon? Their punishment was obvious. They became "terrorists". And the Israeli raids – in which "activists" were killed (another proof of their "terrorism") – then became "deadly" raids. In this case, "deadly" was more excusable than it had been on CTV – nine dead men of Turkish origin being slightly fewer than a million and a half murdered Armenians in 1915. But it was interesting that the Israelis – who for their own political reasons had hitherto shamefully gone along with the Turkish denial – now suddenly wanted to inform the world of the 1915 Armenian genocide. This provoked an understandable frisson among many of our colleagues. Journalists who have regularly ducked all mention of the 20th century's first Holocaust – unless they could also refer to the way in which the Turks "hotly dispute" the genocide label (ergo the Toronto Globe and Mail) – could suddenly refer to it. Israel's new-found historical interest made the subject legitimate, though almost all reports managed to avoid any explanation of what actually happened in 1915.

And what did the Israeli seaborne raid become? It became a "botched" raid. Botched is a lovely word. It began as a German-origin Middle English word, "bocchen", which meant to "repair badly". And we more or less kept to that definition until our journalistic lexicon advisors changed its meaning. Schoolchildren "botch" an exam. We could "botch" a piece of sewing, an attempt to repair a piece of material. We could even botch an attempt to persuade our boss to give us a raise. But now we "botch" a military operation. It wasn't a disaster. It wasn't a catastrophe. It just killed some Turks.

So, given the bad publicity, the Israelis just "botched" the raid. Weirdly, the last time reporters and governments utilised this particular word followed Israel's attempt to kill the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in the streets of Amman. In this case, Israel's professional assassins were caught after trying to poison Meshaal, and King Hussain forced the then Israeli prime minister (a certain B Netanyahu) to provide the antidote (and to let a lot of Hamas "terrorists" out of jail). Meshaal's life was saved.

But for Israel and its obedient Western journalists this became a "botched attempt" on Meshaal's life. Not because he wasn't meant to die, but because Israel failed to kill him. You can thus "botch" an operation by killing Turks – or you can "botch" an operation by not killing a Palestinian.

How do we break with the language of power? It is certainly killing us. That, I suspect, is one reason why readers have turned away from the "mainstream" press to the internet. Not because the net is free, but because readers know they have been lied to and conned; they know that what they watch and what they read in newspapers is an extension of what they hear from the Pentagon or the Israeli government, that our words have become synonymous with the language of a government-approved, careful middle ground, which obscures the truth as surely as it makes us political – and military – allies of all major Western governments.

Many of my colleagues on various Western newspapers would ultimately risk their jobs if they were constantly to challenge the false reality of news journalism, the nexus of media-government power. How many news organisations thought to run footage, at the time of the Gaza disaster, of the airlift to break the blockade of Berlin? Did the BBC?

The hell they did! We prefer "competing narratives". Politicians didn't want – I told the Doha meeting on 11 May – the Gaza voyage to reach its destination, "be its end successful, farcical or tragic". We believe in the "peace process", the "road map". Keep the "fence" around the Palestinians. Let the "key players" sort it out. And remember what this is all about: "Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror."

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Does The Flotilla Massacre mean the World will not accept Israel's rule?

Robert Fisk: Western leaders are too cowardly to help save lives It is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events

Has Israel lost it? Can the Gaza War of 2008-09 (1,300 dead) and the Lebanon War of 2006 (1,006 dead) and all the other wars and now yesterday's killings mean that the world will no longer accept Israel's rule?

Don't hold your breath.

You only have to read the gutless White House statement – that the Obama administration was "working to understand the circumstances surrounding the tragedy". Not a single word of condemnation. And that's it. Nine dead. Just another statistic to add to the Middle East's toll.

But it's not.

In 1948, our politicians - the Americans and the British staged an airlift into Berlin. A starving population (our enemies only three years before) were surrounded by a brutal army, the Russians, who had erected a fence around the city. The Berlin airlift was one of the great moments in the Cold War. Our soldiers and our airmen risked and gave their lives for these starving Germans.

Incredible, isn't it? In those days, our politicians took decisions; our leaders took decisions to save lives. Messrs Attlee and Truman knew that Berlin was important in moral and human as well as political terms.

And today? It was people - ordinary people, Europeans, Americans, Holocaust survivors and yes, for heaven's sake, survivors of the Nazis who took the decision to go to Gaza because their politicians and their statesmen had failed them.

Where were our politicians yesterday? Well, we had the ridiculous Ban Ki-moon, the White House's pathetic statement, and dear Mr Blair's expression of "deep regret and shock at the tragic loss of life". Where was Mr Cameron? Where was Mr Clegg?

Back in 1948, they would have ignored the Palestinians, of course. It is, after all, a terrible irony that the Berlin airlift coincided with the destruction of Arab Palestine.

But it is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events. Our politicians are too spineless, too cowardly, to take decisions to save lives. Why is this? Why didn't we hear courageous words from Messrs Cameron and Clegg yesterday?

For it is a fact, is it not, that had Europeans (and yes, the Turks are Europeans, are they not?) been gunned down by any other Middle Eastern army (which the Israeli army is, is it not?) there would have been waves of outrage.

And what does this say about Israel? Isn't Turkey a close ally of Israel? Is this what the Turks can expect? Now Israel's only ally in the Muslim world is saying this is a massacre and Israel doesn't seem to care.

But then Israel didn't care when London and Canberra expelled Israeli diplomats after British and Australian passports were forged and then provided to the assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. It didn't care when it announced new Jewish settlements on occupied land in East Jerusalem while Joe Biden, the Vice-President of its erstwhile ally, the United States, was in town. Why should Israel care now?

How did we get to this point? Maybe because we all grew used to seeing the Israelis kill Arabs, maybe the Israelis grew used to killing Arabs. Now they kill Turks. Or Europeans. Something has changed in the Middle East these past 24 hours and the Israelis (given their extraordinarily stupid political response to the slaughter) don't seem to have grasped what has happened. The world is tired of these outrages. Only the politicians are silent.

Diplomatic storms

*Goldstone report, November 2009

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 with the declared aim of halting rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the three-week conflict along with 13 Israelis. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone's report into the conflict found both Israel and the Hamas movement that controls the Strip guilty of war crimes, but focused more on Israel. Israel refused to co-operate with Goldstone and described his report as distorted and biased.

* The al-Mabhouh assassination, January-May 2010

Britain and Australia expelled Israeli diplomats after concluding that Israel had forged British and Australian passports used by assassins to kill a Hamas commander in Dubai. Israel has neither confirmed or denied a role in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. Britain said such misuse of British passports was "intolerable". Australia said it was not the behaviour of "a nation with whom we have had such a close, friendly and supportive relationship".

*Settlements row, March 2010

Israel announces plans, during visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden, to build 1,600 homes for Jews in an area of the West Bank annexed by Israel. The announcement triggers unusually harsh criticism from the United States. Washington said it damaged its efforts to revive the Middle East peace process. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the project was an insult. Netanyahu said he was blindsided by planning bureaucrats and apologised to Biden. Today's meeting with Barack Obama at the White House, called off by Mr Netanyahu so he could return home to deal with the flotilla crisis, was supposed to be another part of the fence-mending between the two allies.

*Nuclear secrecy, May 2010

Israel, widely assumed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, has faced renewed calls to sign a global treaty barring the spread of atomic weapons. Signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) last week called for a conference in 2012 to discuss banning weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East. The declaration was adopted by all 189 parties to the NPT, including the US. It urged Israel to sign the NPT and put its nuclear facilities under UN safeguards

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Robert Fisk: Britain's explanation is riddled with inconsistencies. It's time to come clean

How could the Arabs pick up on a Mossad killing, if that is what it was? Well, we shall see

REUTERS

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh - the victim of British collusion with Israel?

Collusion. That's what it's all about. The United Arab Emirates suspect – only suspect, mark you – that Europe's "security collaboration" with Israel has crossed a line into illegality, where British passports (and those of other other EU nations) can now be used to send Israeli agents into the Gulf to kill Israel's enemies. At 3.49pm yesterday afternoon (Beirut time, 1.49pm in London), my Lebanese phone rang. It was a source – impeccable, I know him, he spoke with the authority I know he has in Abu Dhabi – to say that "the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?"

The voice – I know the man and his origins well – wants to talk. "There are 18 people involved in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Besides the 11 already named, there are two Palestinians who are being interrogated and five others, including a woman. She was part of the team that staked out the hotel lobby." Two hours later, an SMS arrives on my Beirut phone from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It is the same source.

"ONE MORE THING," it says in capital letters, then continues in lower case. "The command room of the operation was in Austria (sic, in fact, all things are "sic" in this report)... meaning the suspects when here did not talk to each other but thru the command room on separate lines to avoid detection or linking themselves to one another... but it was detected and identified OK??" OK? I ask myself.

My source is both angry and insistent. "We have sent out details of the 11 named people to Interpol. Interpol has circulated them to 188 countries – but why hasn't Britain warned foreign nations that these people are using passports in these names?" There was more to come.

"We have identified five credit cards belonging to these people, all issued in the United States." The man will not give the EU nationalities of the extra five – this would make two women involved in Mr Mabhouh's murder. He said that EU countries were cooperating with the UAE, including the UK. But "not one of the countries we have been speaking to has notified Interpol of the passports used in their name. Why not?"

Video: UK demands Israel answers

The source insisted that one of the names on a passport – the name of a man who denies any knowledge of its use – has travelled on it in Asia (probably Indonesia) and EU countries over the past year. The Emirates have proof that an American entered their country in June 2006 on a British passport issued in the name of a UK citizen who was already in prison in the Emirates. The Emirates claim that the passport of an Israeli agent sent to kill a Hamas leader in Jordan was a genuine Canadian passport issued to a dual national of Israel.

Intelligence agencies – who in the view of this correspondent are often very unintelligent – have long used false passports. Oliver North and Robert McFarlane travelled to Iran to seek the release of US hostages in Lebanon on passports that were previously stolen from the Irish embassy in Athens. But the Emirates' new information may make some European governments draw in their breath – and they had better have good replies to the questions. Intelligence services – Arab, Israeli, European or American – often adopt an arrogant attitude towards those from whom they wish to hide. How could the Arabs pick up on a Mossad killing, if that is what it was? Well, we shall see.

Collusion is a word the Arabs understand. It speaks of the 1956 Suez War, when Britain and France cooperated with Israel to invade Egypt. Both London and Paris denied the plot. They were lying. But for an Arab Gulf country which suspects its former masters (the UK, by name) may have connived in the murder of a visiting Hamas official, this is apparently now too much. There is much more to come out of this story. We will wait to see if there are any replies in Europe.

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Arieli is a man with a plan. The trouble is, it's a map of Israel

Robert Fisk

How do you make sense of this place, with its weird Areas A, B and C?

Tel Aviv is a pleasant city, a relief after the clergy-led madness of Jerusalem, a place of laid-back street cafés and real shops and decent restaurants, although I am reminded of a rival British newspaper that once considered basing its correspondent in Tel Aviv in order to report Israel as a normal country.

The paper quickly realised that Israel is not a normal country; it is a state wherein we nice friendly Western liberals – for this is how we like to think of ourselves – seek out nice friendly liberal Israelis in order to recapture something we were once taught about: a light among the nations. I'm not sure that such countries ever exist, but it was good to stroll into a dull-looking Tel Aviv office block and find a reserve colonel in the Israeli army who talks sense.Shaul Arieli runs his fingers over a keyboard and his desktop screen produces a mass of green and orange and red that turns out to be a map of the West Bank. How do you make sense of it, this liver-sized mess with its weird Areas A, B and C, the first being Palestinian-"controlled", the second shared between Palestinian police and Israeli troops, and the third – by far the largest part – occupied by the Israeli army? How do you persuade, cajole, force the 300,000 Jewish colonists and the 200,000 Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem to up sticks and leave so that the Palestinians can live independently in the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine that is left to them? Since Barack Obama demanded a permanent freeze to these vast concrete cities and towns – and was crushed by Bibi Netanyahu's refusal – a Palestinian state is a non-starter. I should add that Arieli was one of those Israeli officials responsible for portioning out Areas A and B back in 1994.

But Arieli, who last wore his uniform at the end of 2001, was a negotiator of the Geneva accords, the unofficial Israeli-Palestinian agreement that sought a way out of the tormented landscape which Israeli has created since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Bespectacled, prematurely bald but as fit as a leopard, Arieli positively glows with excitement. It can be done. The Palestinians can have a state. It's just a matter of sorting out, well, 2 per cent of the land. Arieli sees me shaking my head. So off he goes:

"In 1993, there were only 107,000 settlers in the West Bank (excluding east Jerusalem). During the Oslo talks, between 2001 and 2009, Israel added another 100,000 settlers. Today, there are 300,000 settlers in the West Bank with another 200,000 settlers in east Jerusalem. This is not a natural growth. It's a very clear Israeli policy – to extend the settlement area. We have come to be identified with occupation rather than 'kibbutzim'. There is an intent to turn Israel into a pariah state. There are now 500,000 Israelis outside the 1967 borders. But" – and here Arieli hears me draw in my breath – "65 per cent of the settlers are on only 1.2 per cent of the area. In November 2007, (Mahmoud) Abbas said he was prepared for a 2 per cent swap of land. This is a territorial issue – it's about (UN Security Council Resolution) 242. This means the 1967 borders."

I understand what this means. Keep the huge Jewish colonies around Jerusalem – Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim and Gush Etzion – and near the Dead Sea, but squeeze settlers from other illegal sites (all settlements are internationally illegal, whatever Israel says) into the 0.8 per cent difference between the 1.2 per cent of the land on which 65 per cent of the settlers live and the 2.0 per cent allowed by Abbas. This is optimism of a bleak kind. The Netanyahu government and its Lieberman clique are hell-bent on the continued Jewish settlement of east Jerusalem and – after a few months – the colonisation of the West Bank. Area C is almost all lost to the Palestinians. Besides UN resolution 242, upon which Arieli depends, deliberately calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 war – not "the" lands. That missing definite article avoids full withdrawal (even though it appears in the French version of the resolution).

But Arieli doesn't give up. "There is a current reality and there are facts on the ground. Every Palestinian knows there is no possibility of any Israeli prime minister having the political ability to evacuate so huge a number of Israelis. The only solution is a swap. The '67 border will have to be the basis of the swap – we would have to keep 75 per cent of the settlers on two per cent of their land." The current Israeli position appears to be 81 per cent of the settlers on 6.5 per cent of the land and my head is becoming dizzy. "Facts on the ground" are dodgy things.

And Jerusalem? Arieli produces an even more beflecked map. He would have it divided up on demographic lines. The Old City, a mere 2.5sq km containing more than 100 holy sites of all religions, could also be ruled internationally, governed under the old UN partition plan with an international committee composed of Israel, the US, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan – and maybe Morocco. "Sovereignty belongs to God, so we have to deal with this challenge."

I like Arieli, but I am worried about this plan. If East Jerusalem is to be portioned out, its very streets divided, it will be a hate-filled place like the disgrace that Hebron has become. "Hebron will have to be evacuated," Arieli says angrily. He agrees the place is an outrage. But would the Palestinians settle for a passage to what would have to be their capital that would run through Abu Dis? Arieli puts his thumb on Abu Dis. "It's not that small," he says. But it looks bloody small to me, a rat run for Arabs who want to visit their capital – and which can be effectively closed whenever Israel chooses.

I dare not ask about the Gaza Strip. Yossi Alpher has already been reminding readers of the Jerusalem Post that under the Oslo Accords, Israel promised to treat the West Bank and Gaza as a "single territorial unit' but never promised to link the two across 40km of Israel's sovereign territory. If the Palestinians won't accept a "swap", they'll have to think what they are going to give in return for a corridor joining Gaza and the West Bank. The fact that this corridor would divide up Israel just as it would join up Palestinian land is ignored. And what of Israeli Arab villages – are they going to be brought into the swapping game? But Arieli is resilient. Even the Wall – or the "barrier" as he keeps on referring to it – can be dealt with, section by section, "because in each section of the barrier, we can find a balance between Israeli security and the daily lives of the people who live there".

I have my doubts. Long may the Arielis of this world survive. But I fear that Palestine has gone.

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Robert Fisk: Gaza's defiant tunnellers head deeper underground

They are threatened with drowning by the Egyptians and punitively taxed by Hamas. Our correspondent meets the Palestinian smugglers bringing oranges, car batteries and bottle tops to a territory under siegeThey are the real resistance. They are the lung through which Gaza breathes. True, missiles must pass along their subterranean tracks, Qassam rockets, too, Kalashnikov ammunition, explosives. But by far the greatest burden of the tunnellers of Gaza is the very life-blood of this besieged little pseudo-Islamic statelet: fresh meat, oranges, chocolate, shirts, trousers, toys, cigarettes, wedding dresses, paper, entire motor-cars in four bits, car batteries, even plastic bottle tops. The tunnellers of Gaza are bombed by the Israelis, they die in their own collapsing tunnels – and now they face a new Egyptian wall, even the fear of drowning. Terrorists they may be to the Israelis – the promiscuous use of this word makes it fairly meaningless these days – but heroes they are to the Palestinians of Gaza. Rich ones, too, perhaps.

But right now, Abdul-Halim al-Mohsen is worried about the Egyptians. He sits by the spitting log fire near the shaft of his tunnel, turning his hands to the flames, breathing in the thick blue smoke, a vast white tent above him casting his fellow-tunnellers into Rembrandt-like shadow, half-faces, thick pullovers, bright flames amid the gloom, the generator purring in the corner.

"Of course I'm afraid of the Egyptian wall," al-Mohsen says. "They will pour water down. How can we defeat this? We may drown." He holds out the palms of his hands towards me in that familiar "what-can-we-do?" gesture of so many Palestinians – but he is speaking in a matter-of-fact voice. The tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egyptian frontier are a business, a professional's game, Israel's bombs a challenge rather than a problem. There's even a four-truck miniature railway down one of the shafts. Money makes the wheels go round.

True to their treaties with Israel and the Quartet (of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara fame), the Egyptians announced last month that they will build a wall – walls being the currency of the Middle East these days, from Kabul and Baghdad to the West Bank – between the southern-most rubble of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and Egypt, in order to break through and close down the "terrorist" tunnels. Foreign NGOs in Gaza dismiss this as the usual Egyptian window-dressing to please the Israelis – which means to please the Americans – adding that the Egyptian wall will only descend 18 feet beneath the ground, falling far short of the tunnels' depth. Perhaps it is in the tunnellers' interest to be more pessimistic. Al-Mohsen seems genuinely troubled by the Egyptian initiative.

"If they flood our tunnel, our dangers increase," he says. "It takes an hour to get out of the tunnel if we are stooping or on our hands and knees. When the Israelis are bombing, we clamber through to the Egyptian end – the Israelis won't bomb the Egyptian side – but if the Egyptians stop us, we will be caught by the bombing if the tunnel collapses."

I wonder about this, especially when Abu Wadieh invites us to look at the cavernous vault which opens in the far corner of the tent. This is no dirt hole in the ground but a solidly built stone-and-brick vertical tunnel, almost 15 feet in width and 90 feet deep – so deep that I can scarcely see the tiny arms of the men far below me as they heap bags of fruit on to a big steel hook – and more than half a mile long. A hawser whisks the bags to the surface as the generator whines and the men at the rim of the tunnel give them a gentle push so that they swing back into their arms. These men know their job. All profess to be uninterested in politics, of course. No weapons pass through their tunnel. Oh no, indeed.

A truck has backed into the tent, a squad of men piling fruit and vegetables and furniture and bottles of Egyptian Coca-Cola on to the lorry. I ask al-Mohsen – he swears he will be a construction engineer if peace (a muffled gasp here) looms – for his inspiration. He's seen pictures of tunnels before and he saw a film long ago in which foreign prisoners – British – escaped from a German camp through a tunnel. Of course. The Great Escape! Richard Attenborough and James Garner and Steve McQueen and the truck on railway lines which ferries them out of their Stalag. It accounts for the professional quality of the tunnel – even for the underground railway line. Though I don't choose to remind al-Mohsen of what happened to Attenborough.

But this is no laughing business. NGOs estimate that Hamas skims 15 per cent of the profits off the tunnellers' turnover, giving that august institution – excoriated by Israel, the US and Europe ever since they had the temerity to win the 2006 Palestinian elections – a quiet $350m (£225m) income per annum.

So while the world blockades Gaza and condemns the 1.5 million souls here to penury and – in some cases – near-starvation, Hamas supplies itself with all the concrete, building materials, iron and weapons that its plentiful supplies of money can buy.

While the EU gutlessly allows Israel to deprive Palestinian civilians of cement to rebuild their homes after last year's bloodbath in Gaza – because Hamas might use the cement to build bunkers – Hamas itself has more than enough cement to build a city of bunkers or a fleet of mosques, not to mention the buildings it has erected opposite Israeli troops at Erez.

In other words, the tunnels keep Hamas in pocket and Gaza alive. The Palestinian poor, of course, have to be fed by the United Nations. The tunnels thus represent not just a series of blood vessels between Gaza and Egypt, but a massive international hypocrisy.

Abu Wadieh, who employs 35 men working in and above al-Mohsen's tunnel, stands beside the crackling fire, a kuffiah wound round his head like a builder's helmet, rubbing his hands in the cold wind that pours into the tent as the latest truck carries its riches off to Gaza City.

"I'm afraid the men will all leave if there's another war," he says. "But they are experts. They know what to do."

Only 100 metres away, the yellow shaft of an Egyptian drilling machine stands against the horizon and the very beginning of a grey wall. Behind it, an Egyptian flag snaps above a watchtower where the soldiers of Arab Egypt ensure that their Arab Palestinian brothers stay besieged in the rubbish pit of Gaza.

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Why Is America The Bitch For For Israel?

Robert Fisk: Why does the US turn a blind eye to Israeli bulldozers?

Most of the West Bank is under rule which amounts to apartheid by paper.

"Palestine" is no more. Call it a "peace process" or a "road map"; blame it on Barack Obama's weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a Middle East peace was "more difficult" to reach than he imagined.But the dream of a "two-state" Israeli-Palestinian solution, a security-drenched but noble settlement to decades of warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is as good as dead.

Both the United States and Europe now stand idly by while the Israeli government effectively destroys any hope of a Palestinian state; even as you read these words, Israel's bulldozers and demolition orders are destroying the last chance of peace; not only in the symbolic centre of Jerusalem itself but – strategically, far more important – in 60 per cent of the vast, biblical lands of the occupied West Bank, in that largest sector in which Jews now outnumber Muslims two to one.

This majority of the West Bank – known under the defunct Oslo Agreement's sinister sobriquet as "Area C" – has already fallen under an Israeli rule which amounts to apartheid by paper: a set of Israeli laws which prohibit almost all Palestinian building or village improvements, which shamelessly smash down Palestinian homes for which permits are impossible to obtain, ordering the destruction of even restored Palestinian sewage systems. Israeli colonists have no such problems; which is why 300,000 Israelis now live – in 220 settlements which are all internationally illegal – in the richest and most fertile of the Palestinian occupied lands.

When Obama's elderly envoy George Mitchell headed home in humiliation this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated his departure by planting trees in two of the three largest Israeli colonies around Jerusalem. With these trees at Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim, he said, he was sending "a clear message that we are here. We will stay here. We are planning and we are building." These two huge settlements, along with that of Ariel to the north of Jerusalem, were an "indisputable part of Israel forever."

It was Netanyahu's victory celebration over the upstart American President who had dared to challenge Israel's power not only in the Middle East but in America itself. And while the world this week listened to Netanyahu in the Holocaust memorial commemoration for the genocide of six million Jews, abusing Iran as the new Nazi Germany – Iran's loony president supposedly as evil as Hitler – the hopes of a future "Palestine" continued to dribble away. President Ahmadinejad of Iran is no more Adolf Hitler than the Israelis are Nazis. But the "threat" of Iran is distracting the world. So is Tony Blair yesterday, trying to wriggle out of his bloody responsibility for the Iraq disaster. The real catastrophe, however, continues just outside Jerusalem, amid the fields, stony hills and ancient caves of most of the West Bank.

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How Can You Trust The Cowardly BBC?

The BBC Trust is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which abused Bowen

By Robert Fisk

The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.

But I am mincing my words.The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.

Let's go step by step through this pitiful business. Zionism does indeed instinctively "push out" the frontier. The new Israeli wall – longer and taller than the Berlin Wall although the BBC management cowards still insist its reporters call it a "security barrier" (the translation of the East German phrase for the Berlin Wall) – has gobbled up another 10 per cent of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" that Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas were supposed to negotiate. Bowen's own brilliant book on the 1967 war, Six Days, makes this land-grab perfectly clear.

Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only, against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that this defies everyone's interpretation of international law except its own?

Even when the International Court in The Hague stated that the Israeli wall was illegal – the BBC, at this point, was calling it a "fence"! – Israel simply claimed that the court was wrong.

UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 called upon Israel to withdraw its forces from territories that it occupied in the 1967 war – and it refused to do so. The Americans stated for more than 30 years that Israel's actions were illegal – until the gutless George Bush accepted Israel had the right to keep these illegally held territories. Thus the BBC Trust – how cruel that word "trust" now becomes – has gone along with the Bush definition of Israel's new boundaries (inside Arab land, of course).

The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war".

Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war. The BBC Trust – and I now find this word nauseous each time I tap it on my laptop – says that Bowen didn't give evidence to prove the Jewish settlement at Har Homa was illegal. But the US authorities said so, right from the start. Our own late foreign secretary, Robin Cook – under screamed abuse from Zionists when he visited the settlement– said the same thing. The fact that the BBC Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen.

Haaretz gave considerable space to the BBC's findings yesterday. I'm not surprised. But why is it that Haaretz's top correspondents – Amira Hass and Gideon Levy – write so much more courageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I'm asked by lecture audiences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broadcasting station. I'm afraid it's the same old story. If you allow yourself to bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will stay on your knees forever.

And this, remember, is the same institution which said that to broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza might upset its "neutrality". Legless Palestinian children clearly don't count as much as the BBC's pompous executives.

How do we solve this problem? Well I can certainly advise viewers to turn to Sky TV's infinitely tougher coverage of the Middle East and – I admit I contribute to this particular station – I can recommend the courage with which Al-Jazeera English covers Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian-Israeli war.

I can well see how BBC executives will say that this article of mine today is "over the top". Jeremy Bowen may indeed think the same. But the First World War metaphor would be correct. For Bowen and his colleagues are truly lions led by BBC management donkeys.

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