An
investigative committee condemns PM Ehud Olmert for haste in embarking on
the second Lebanon War. The Right condemns him for not hitting Hezbollah
hard enough. He wasn't willing to pay a high price in casualties, for
Israel can no longer stand casualties. Yet it cannot stand, either, the
price of peace, and he isn't willing to pay that either. In his
Janus-faced unwillingness, Olmert is an authentic slice of post-Zionist
Israel, The Leader It Deserves .
Cementing itself
into limbo, Israel continues building its Wall around the West
Bank. It has cut 75,000 Palestinians off from Jerusalem, on which
they depend for livelihood. The workers rebound into settler
Sweatshops, where they earn a fourth of the minimum wage. Welcome
to the Occupation's 40th year.
WAC
recently organized and
accompanied an international delegation of trade unions to
study Israeli agriculture. In the fields we saw workers from Thailand, some of the 26,000 (soon to be increased), who go into
debt to come here but earn far below the legal minimum. The delegates
studied the effect on the Israeli Labor Market. We record some of
the main voices in this journey and present the group's
recommendations.
Our spring
has blossomed into a "Future Vision" for this country, proposed
by the Arab Elite. We test it against Reality.
We also
explore some Last-Ditch Myths of the Zionist Left , including the
notion that Israel can be both Jewish and
democratic.
Finally,
after almost ten years of grass-roots organizing, WAC-Ma'an
publishes its Principles for Organized Labor in Israel.
Front Cover: Dawn
at a checkpoint near Tul Karem in the West Bank. Palestinian workers wait
to enter factories on the other side of Israel's separation
wall.
Photo: Nir Kafri
