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There is a tendency to dehistoricize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash of personalities, Sharon versus Arafat, or as an intractable tribal and religious struggle. Recently this tendency has been magnified by an exaggerated focus on the military aspect of the conflict, typified by the ritualistic recitation of the latest body count. Since 9/11, saturation media coverage, especially in the United States, has obscured more than it has clarified of the underlying dynamics of the conflict.

I highly recommend "The Children of Shatila"; it shows what the children in refugee camps are subjected to on a daily basis. Shafir Ahout, a well-known Palestinian politician (who was part of the Palestinian Authority until he broke off after Oslo), has written about how he became a refugee:

A group of us have been working on a documentary in Lebanon. We visited four different refugee camps, including Shatila-the site of the 1982 massacre coordinated by the war criminal Ariel Sharon.

One way that capitalism maintains its hegemony is by repressing discussion or even awareness of Marx’s particular concept of class – the one he invented and added to the tradition of class analyses before him. Marx’s new concept focused on the exploitation of a surplus from workers, replacing the old concepts that defined class chiefly in terms of property and power. Conservatives, liberals, and radicals all contribute to the repression of Marx’s class analysis, albeit in different ways.

In considering the historic developments that led to the Palestinians' participation in the Oslo Accords, it is first necessary to reject the mythmaking that is perpetuated not only by the Israeli occupation forces and the American media, but also by the Palestinian Authority, to the effect that there is a peace process there, that there is peace there [February, 2001], that they're trying to reach a solution to the problem, that they're trying to correct historic injustices, and that the outcome of the process is going to be an independent Palestinian state.

Samir Awad is a graduate student in political science at Columbia University. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Columbia, NYU, and Brooklyn College. A graduate of Birzeit University, he earned his M.A. in Economic Development from the University of Bradford, U.K. He has published papers on ex-prisoners in Palestine, the Peace Process after Oslo, and the Intifada.

Editorial introduction: Although the idea of a Palestinian state has now been accepted by the U.S. government, it is clear that any serious response to the bloodshed in Israel/Palestine must go beyond such token recognitions. On one side, it is necessary to understand why Washington maintains its undiminished material support for an expansionist Israel. On the other, we need to get a fuller sense of the actual forces at work within the region. It is to the latter task that the following essays are addressed.

Imagine that you have to drive your kids to school along the beach because a foreign occupying power has closed off all the roads in your city. Imagine that you switch on your TV each morning to find out where shooting is going on that day so you can chart your commute to work. Imagine that you have to interrupt rehearsals at your local theater because it's being routinely shelled from the surrounding hills. Imagine that enemy "settlers" create fortified towns near your ancestral village and spray your family with bullets when you go to pick your harvest.

[Editorial introduction: In December 2001/January 2002, five Cubans who had been doing undercover investigative work within the Miami exile community, aimed at protecting their country against Miami-based terrorist attacks (such as the bombings carried out in recent years at tourist hotels in Cuba), were sentenced to long prison terms in the United States.

Nine months into Washington’s “war on terrorism,” its predictable adverse consequences are becoming sharply etched. Incipient resentments in many parts of the world have been enhanced rather than diminished. An already dangerous situation has become more so¾both in a direct military/paramilitary sense and in terms of the obstacles confronting any movement to stem the expansion of global capital, which seeks to occupy every region and control every resource to its own advantage.