minister from September, 2003 to July, 2004. He was one of the Palestinian team who worked on the Oslo Declaration of Principles.
62. The questions of safe passage and territorial contiguity for Palestinians were addressed in part in the 2005 Rand Plan, which consisted largely of turning the proposed Palestinian state into a high-speed railway between urban Palestinian areas. The plan effectively cut off agrarian Palestinians from their land, confining them to their cities and the railway between them. The Rand plan died quickly after an initial blitz of US and Israeli hype. Though not discussing the Rand plan itself, Avnery addresses the issue of safe passage in an article entitled "Safe (for whom?) passage," originally published on October 4, 1999 in Ma'ariv. The full text is available at http://zope.gushshalom.org/home/en/
channels/avnery/archives_article68.
63. Interestingly, Avnery's prediction of the "violent fight" spilling over manifested first in another Lebanon war-this time while Sharon lay in a coma.
64. Va banque: play for the whole fortune.
65. Formalin is a compound of formaldehyde.
66. This is a plan proposed by a group of Palestinian political prisoners. For the full text, see http://www.onevoicemovement.org .
67. In early 2007 a unity government was formed due to the US-led rejection of the elected Hamas government. The unity government fell in June, 2007 and serious clashes between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza marked serious dissension among Palestinians. The situation in May 2008 is slightly more stable, but still absolutely critical.
68. Carl von Clausewitz, late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century Prussian soldier, military historian and theorist who wrote On War and whose work is still taught and currently being much discussed again in the context of the Bush administration "war on terror."
69. There have been many "incidents" at the Kami crossing between the southern Gaza strip and Israel-a crossing administered by the Israeli airport authority rather than the IDF. The one Avnery refers to here occurred on Januaryl3, 2005, when members of the Palestinian resistance blew a hole in the crossing entrance, ostensibly to smuggle arms and fighters into Israel. Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade (Fatah) claimed credit.
70. One form of Palestinian non-violent resistance is the concept of samudArabic for steadfastness. Samud involves keeping up daily routine, refusal to flee, refusal to surrender to the occupation.
71. Both Yassin and al-Rantisi were assassinated by Israel, Yassin in March, 2004 and his successor al-Rantisi in April, 2004.
72. Hamas also gained popularity for its social programs and its honest reputation in contravention to Fatah's corruption.
73. Gush Shalom instigated a boycott against products made in Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory in the late 1990s, and are continuing the boycott to include artists and intellectuals operating within the settlements. Here, however, Avnery is referring to a British university decision to impose a boycott on all Israeli artists and intellectuals that was taken during the spring 2002 Israeli invasions into the West Bank.
For the full text of a debate between Avnery and Israeli "new historian" Ilan Pappe regarding boycott within the context of a discussion on one-state (Pappe) and two-state (Avnery) solutions see http://toibillboard.info/Transcript
_eng.htm. The British boycott movement is part of an overall strategy being