MCC Palestine Update #48
28 May 2002
A new permit, or pass, system is being introduced into the occupied territories, one which is rapidly creating a new reality of geographical dismemberment. The past nineteenth months, as we have written repeatedly, have witnessed an increased tightening of the closure, or siege, on Palestinian populations centers in the occupied territories, making movement from town to town for education, health care, work, family visits, etc. difficult at best and dangers at worst. Now the Israeli military government has begun requiring permits from Palestinians who wish to travel from one part of the West Bank to another. Thus, if one lives in Jenin but wishes to study in Nablus, one must obtain a permit.
In the first article below, Amira Hass outlines the ongoing devastation being wrought by this policy of closure and canonization. The viability of any sustainable development projects will, of course, be severely compromised by this new reality. Please keep MCC--and, more importantly, our courageous Palestinian partner organizations--in your prayers as we and they seek to continue to implement projects in the fields of women's development, rehabilitation of persons with disabilities, conflict resolution, land reclamation, and early childhood education.
In addition to the piece by Amira Hass from Ha'aretz, we include three more pieces. Yoav Peled, writing in The Guardian, provides another debunking of the myths surrounding former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's allegedly "generous" offers at the Camp David II summit in July 2002. Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions provides a sobering assessment of the current situation. Finally, MIT professor Noam Chomsky explains why the United States is not a honest broker in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
1. The Real Disaster Is The Closure
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, May 21 2002
Half the Palestinians in the West Bank are unemployed, half are in dire poverty, and the economy is sliding into barter.
When the director general of the Palestinian Finance Ministry, Ataf Alaune, returned to his office on April 21, a few hours after the army pulled out of Ramallah, he found that in addition to the hard disks in his computers, the soldiers had taken all the books, reports, and research studies that were in his library. Only one document, 133 pages long, remained. Dated March 18, 2002, it was titled "15 Months: Intifada, Closures, and the Palestinian Economic Crisis - an Assessment" and was prepared by the World Bank.The document was prepared because in the second half of 2001, the donor countries to the Palestinian Authority already wanted an estimate the damage done to the economy during the first months of the intifada, so they could adjust their allotments to the PA for rehabilitation. The initial assessments were that the situation would stabilize and improve, so there were expectations for a quick report. Instead, because of the deterioration in the security situation and the tightening of the closures and sieges on all the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza, the study grew into a working plan, based on three scenarios:1. A continuation of the closures and the restrictions on freedom of movement for commodities and people2. Political rapprochement that would lead to an end to the hostilities and a lifting of the closure3. A pessimistic scenario, in which the military hostilities would grow even more intense and there would be even more severe disruptions of freedom of movement for goods and people.Each scenario has a ceiling on the money that would be available - from $2.1 to $2.7 billion. A fourth scenario, "the authority collapses," is depicted separately from the other three. That scenario would require a total change in the mode of aid to the Palestinians, from rehabilitation to emergency humanitarian aid, which, in the absence of governing institutions, would be reduced.The report was completed in mid-March, two weeks before the Park Hotel bombing and the military operation in Ramallah and six other Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Palestinian and foreign economists and researchers worked on it, and it was written by two senior World Bank officials, Sebastien Dessus and Nigel Roberts, who has been the World Bank's representative in the country for the past 11 months.The silent destructionIn a conversation with Ha'aretz on March 27, Roberts still hoped that the optimistic scenario of political rapprochement and calm was possible. But the next day, on the night of the Seder, 29 people were killed in the Park Hotel massacre and on March 29, the IDF began Operation Defensive Shield that lasted a month. On May 9, in another interview with Ha'aretz, Roberts said the sieges on the Palestinian towns, then being tightened further, would require the donor countries to consider giving $2 billion instead of the $1.7 billion that was earmarked in case of the "pessimistic scenario." In the same interview, Roberts reiterated four axioms that had become clear during the preparation and writing of the report:1. The ongoing damage to the Palestinian economy from the sieges and closures is much more than the physical damage created by the military operations, including Operation Defensive Shield. In the first 15 months of the intifada, from October 2000 to December 2001, the physical damage to infrastructure and Palestinian institutions was an estimated $503 million. Last week, an estimate of $360 million was published, referring to the physical damage resulting from the military actions in March and April this year. But in the first 15 months of the intifada, at least $2.4 billion in damage was done to the economy, in terms of lost gross national revenues because of the mounting restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israel on the Palestinians in, and out, of the territories. Roberts, who is British, and usually careful with his words, calls the closure policies "the silent destruction."2. The Palestinian public has proved to be very resilient when challenged by the shocks caused by the economic disaster. Palestinian handling of the enormous economic and social difficulties is characterized by intra-community support, family involvement, and mutual help to a degree that is not known in developed, Western countries. Roberts is convinced that developed Western societies would have collapsed if confronted with "an economic disaster of such proportions."3. During all the months of the intifada, major institutions in the Palestinian Authority function "impressively," and dealt well with the challenges posed. "That's the untold story in the tale of this intifada," says Roberts. He says that despite what Palestinians themselves - let alone Israelis and the rest of the world - may believe, the PA, as a complex of institutions providing services to its constituencies, not only did not collapse but rose to the occasion in a number of areas. He makes special note of the education, health and finance ministries as well as the Public Works Ministry and the city halls, which he regards as part of the decision-making structure for initiatives during the crisis.4. The fourth axiom, which Roberts repeated in both meetings with Ha'aretz, does not derive directly from the report on the damage caused by the closures, but rather from a "working paper" published by the World Bank in May 2001 called "Government and the Business Environment in the West Bank and Gaza." That paper's researchers discovered that, as opposed to what is commonly believed, the level of corruption (meaning informal payments to government officials) in the PA territories is much less than in neighboring countries and in other developing countries, where similar studies were done at the same time. Progress toward transparency and accountability, often under international pressure but also as a result of domestic Palestinian criticism, could reduce the anxiety level of those Palestinians worried by the phenomenon of corruption, which in large part is based on the lack of laws guaranteeing equality to all citizens.Make-work jobsThe World Bank report opens with the definition of "closure" as "a term referring to the restriction placed by Israel on the free movement of Palestinian goods and labor across borders and within the West Bank and Gaza. Israel asserts that closure is a response to Palestinian violence. Closure has come to dominate much of Palestinian life over the past 15 months." The Palestinians, the report says, have been required to carry IDF-issued authorizations for travel since 1993 (actually, since 1991 - A.H.). Since October 2000, most of such authorizations for travel into Israel were canceled, Palestinian freedom of movement for goods and people into Egypt and Jordan was drastically reduced, and internal closures and sieges around various Palestinian towns and villages were tightened through physical blockades. Checkpoints are manned, backed up by tanks and armored personnel carriers, to reduce to a minimum any movement of people and merchandise inside the Palestinian territories, between village to village, city to village or village to city.Closures cause a chain reaction of damage that ultimately harms all of Palestinian society. The loss of tens of thousands of jobs inside Israel meant a drop in purchasing power inside the territories that leads to a further shrinking of productive economic activity, and a wave of domestic unemployment paralyzes any possible investment. Thus, in the beginning of 2002, the average real income was 30 percent lower than in 1994, on the eve of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The number of poor, defined as those living on $2 a day or less, grew from 600,000 (in a population of some 3 million) to 1.5 million by the end of 2001. Roberts believes that after the April military operation, three-quarters of the Palestinian population in the territories is now living under that $2 a day poverty line.The gross domestic product dropped 6-7 percent in 2000, as a result of the dramatic drop in economic activity in the last quarter of that year. In 2001, the GDP dropped another 21 percent. Gross national revenues fell 11.7 percent in 200l and another 18.7 percent in 2001. That comes to $2.4 billion, compared to a gross domestic product of $5.4 billion in 1999.There are large gaps in food prices in the West Bank, depending on where the food is purchased, because of limitations on freedom of movement and the internal closures. In areas where food is produced, prices have fallen drastically, since the goods can't reach the markets. In non-agricultural areas, especially the cities, prices have risen dramatically, because of the shortages in supplies. In Gaza, prices have lowered because of a drop in demand, as a result of shrinking household income and purchasing power.Israel takes a cutThe decline in PA revenues, because of the shrinking economic activity, was made even worse since December 2000 when Israel ceased transferring to the PA taxes it collected on goods imported into the PA from Israel, on grounds the PA was paying terrorists with the money. The World Bank mentions that fact at least five times in the report, and emphasizes the monies do not belong to Israel. The current estimate of money Israel owes to the PA, up to December 2001, is half a billion dollars.The report comments negatively on a well-known phenomenon in the PA: the lack of a shared governmental vision of how to manage the crisis. A number of ministries, especially the Planning Ministry, treasury and PEDCER (Palestinian Economic Development Council for Economic Rehabilitation) worked out emergency plans, but they were written separately and were not adopted. No umbrella forum was established to manage the crisis, and inter-ministry coordination, problematic even before the intifada, did not improve. The World Bank report is meant to solve that problem and to propose to the donor countries and the PA an appropriate, coordinated working program for dealing with the crisis (according to all three scenarios mentioned at the outset). The PA, for its part, is committed in the document to adopt a series of steps in the context of internal reforms, both administrative and financial. Those promises came a long time before Israel and the U.S. began insisting on reforms. Some of the reforms were implemented, under the watchful eyes of the International Monetary Fund and the donor countries, before the intifada. Others were done during the crisis, especially all those dealing with economic legislation that would encourage the private sector, as well as a pension fund for civil servants, to guarantee a social safety net.On March 27, Roberts still hoped the action plan would help, to some degree, in reviving the Palestinian economy, on condition the closures, particularly the internal closures, were lifted. On May 9 he was speaking differently. All the signs show, he said, that Israel intends to tighten the internal closures even more, and to limit to an absolute minimum the movement of people and goods from one Palestinian township or village to another. People leaving besieged cities need "authorizations for movement under closure" that only go to a very narrow category of people. Most of the goods going to the cities are transported "back to back" meaning a truck full of goods backs up to an empty truck on the outskirts of the city at the checkpoint, and the goods are transferred from one to the other. It adds time and costs to the entire process.The damage caused by the closures to the Palestinian economy, says Roberts, creates a barter economy that is not appropriate for the private sector and for any vision of economic development. Under such circumstances, he adds, the donor countries are forced - against their will - to become charitable organizations to an impoverished population, without any political framework. Roberts allows himself to say that the closure policy "is more damaging to security in the long run" and says he finds it difficult to be persuaded that a process that is impoverishing the entire Palestinian society - causing damage to stability in the long run - can lead to rapprochement in the future. "Militarily, I have no opinion on the effectiveness of the closures. But strategically, it is clear they are creating an atmosphere that is not conducive to the security of Israel."
2. Was Barak telling the truth?
Yoav Peled
The Guardian, 24 May 2002
The ex-PM's disparagement of the Palestinians began long ago
Astute observers of Israeli politics have been wondering, ever since Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in 1999, whether his "peace offensive" was a real effort to achieve peace with Israel's neighbours or only an attempt to "expose" the Arabs' intention of destroying Israel.
The debate intensified when the failure of the Camp David II summit in the summer of 2000 was almost universally interpreted as a rejection by Yasser Arafat of Barak's "generous" offer to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and enable the Palestinians to establish an independent state.
An interview Barak recently gave to Benny Morris - a convert to the cause of the Israeli rightwing - which was published in the New York Review of Books (and reprinted in this newspaper yesterday) allows a glimpse into some of his underlying assumptions.
The controversy over what actually transpired at Camp David is well known by now, and Barak's version of events is disputed (yet again) in the same issue of the New York Review by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. What is more revealing is Barak's view of the people with whom he was purportedly trying to reach a peace agreement.
"Repeatedly during [the] interview," Morris reports, Barak spoke of the Palestinians as products of a culture "in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't." Curiously, Morris, who did more than anybody to dispel official Israeli lies about the war of 1948, does not record his own reaction to these racist stereotypes.
Polite western society no longer tolerates such characterisations of entire cultures, although I suspect things may have changed, at least in the US, since September 11. But in Israel the public denigration of Arab culture was historically acceptable, since, like all colonial movements, Zionism had to dehumanise the indigenous inhabitants of its country of settlement in order to legitimise their displacement. Thus, as many studies have shown, depictions of the Arabs as conniving, dishonest, lazy, treacherous and murderous were commonplace in Israeli school textbooks, as in much of Israeli literature in general.
For the past two decades, however, Israeli society has been going through a profound and wide-ranging process of liberalisation. A great deal of effort was invested, by the upper-middle strata of Jewish Israeli society (the people who voted for Barak in 1999), in the struggle against the mutual stereotyping of Jews and Palestinians.
A whole industry of "dialogue and coexistence" groups sprouted up. As a result, generalisations such as the ones used by Barak were delegitimised to the point where it became difficult, in classroom situations for example, to make any general statement about a particular group in society. Tragically, all of this was halted by the breakdown of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada.
The question, then, is whether Barak's statements reflect a genuine frustration over the Palestinians' response to his peace efforts; are an effort to cater to changing public opinion; or whether he held this view of the Palestinians all along.
As chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, he opposed the Oslo accords, and as minister of the interior in Yitzhak Rabin's cabinet he abstained in the crucial vote on the Oslo II agreement. When he took office as prime minister he reneged on the commitments undertaken by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the Wye Plantation agreement, to further withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory. And throughout his tenure as prime minister he refused to abide by any clause of the Oslo agreements that mandated further Israeli "concessions" to the Palestinians. This behaviour is perfectly understandable if the Palestinians are all pathological liars and agreements signed by them are not to be trusted.
During Barak's year and a half in office as prime minister, he kept warning that Israel was like a ship heading towards certain collision with an iceberg, and that his peace efforts were crucial for avoiding a catastrophe. Unfortunately, what is revealed in the Morris interview is that the captain of the ship may have been blinded by prejudice, so that instead of avoiding the iceberg he sailed full steam ahead right into it.
Yoav Peled teaches political science at Tel Aviv University. He is co-author, with Gershon Shafir, of Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (CUP).
· Israel/Palestine: The Way Forward, a Guardian discussion with Yasser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin takes place at Church House, Dean's Yard, Westminster, London SW1 on Wednesday May 29 at 2pm. Entrance by ticket only (£10); call 020-7494 5551
3. After defeat, autonomy
Jeff Halper
ICAHD, 15 May 2002
Despite protestations by Sharon, the vote by acclamation of the Likud Central Committee against the establishment of any Palestinian state flowed logically and smoothly from "Operation Defensive Shield." In that ferocious incursion into Palestinian areas, the Sharon government believes it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all, and can thus drop the pretense of even a Palestinian mini-state. It has three good reasons for thinking so:1. Jenin. Although the Israeli attacks of March-April 2002 (disingenuously called "Operation DEFENSIVE Shield") extended far beyond the Jenin refugee camp, Jenin became the focal point and symbol of Israel's thrust to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism." In fact, it represents for Sharon the final defeat of any Palestinian attempt to resist the Occupation. The Palestinians, in his view, have nowhere to go. Their infrastructure is demolished, and given Israel's suffocating control of the besieged islands of Areas A and B, they will never be able to reorganize.There may be isolated incidents, but the problem of terrorism/resistance has been reduced to manageable proportions.2. Ramallah. Although the Israel assault on Ramallah received far less press and was focused on events around Arafat's compound, it represents nothing less than the destruction of the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. In Ramallah virtually the entire civil infrastructure was destroyed - all the data of the government ministries, hospitals and clinics, the land registry office, the courts and banking system, businesses, non-governmental organizations and research institutes, even the Palestinian Academy of Sciences. What has this to do with the destroying "the infrastructure of terror?" Nothing. But, then, fighting terror was always a convenient excuse for maintaining the Occupation. Into the vacuum created by the destruction of Palestinian civil society the Civil Administration, Israel's military government, is already stepping. Palestinians wishing to leave the country now need a special Civil Administration permit. And we must not miss the "message" of the soldiers left behind: "Death to Arabs" scrawled on walls with excrement, excrement and urine spread throughout offices and homes, wanton destruction of furniture, equipment, artworks, gardens, infrastructure.3. The American Congress. On May 2nd, in the wake of the attacks and in anticipation of Sharon's visit to Washington, Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution (94-2 in the Senate, 352-21 in the House), supporting Israel's campaign to destroy "the terrorist infrastructure and attacking the Palestinian Authority. The resolution showed clearly why the US Congress is Israel's "trump card," allowing it to defy the international community while thumbing its nose at American administrations. It will stand with Israel no matter what. And it will do so for many reasons that have nothing to do with the issue itself: defense dollars, the influence of the Israeli-American Jewish lobby AIPAC and of the Christian right, perceptions of a common "Judeo-Christian heritage," anti-Arab and anti-Muslim phobia, a common reduction of the world's problems to the fight against terrorism, and plain ignorance. Congress, at this stage, appears unassailable.Believing it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all, the government's task is now to construct a form of occupation dressed in the old but respectable clothes of "autonomy." Autonomy allows Israel to retain control of the West Bank and the settlements while dumping its two million Palestinian residents into a truncated set of disconnected islands. In a worst-case scenario, autonomy resembles apartheid, with the Palestinians exercising some local control over their municipal affairs but still governed by Israel and lacking citizenship. The best such a scheme offers is a mini-state representing the old South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana.Sharon's own grand scheme envisions a three-fold "solution" to the Palestinian problem:First, Arafat will be transferred to Gaza, which will become one large prison for PLO members. At some point, probably when Arafat leaves the scene and a more compliant leader can be found, Gaza will become the Palestinian state as a sop to international demands for Palestinian independence.The West Bank will then be divided into three separate cantons according to settlement blocs and Israeli highways also in place. A northern canton would be created around the city of Nablus, a central one around Ramallah and a southern one in the area of Hebron. Each would be connected independently to Israel, with thin Israeli-controlled links between them. Each canton, whose residents would be denied any citizenship, would be granted local autonomy.Finally, Israel would ensure Palestinian submission through "quiet transfer" and economic cooptation. "Quiet transfer" is the policy, practiced today, to make life so miserable for the Palestinian middle classes that they leave the country "voluntarily." Emigration of the educated Palestinian middle classes to render the society weak, leaderless and easily controlled. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada it has been estimated that 150,000 Palestinians have left the Occupied Territories, the vast majority of them middle class (many Christians from the Bethlehem and Ramallah areas). Those that remain, the working classes, will benefit from seven industrial parks being built on the "seam" between Israel and the Occupied Territories by the Peres Center for Peace. The combination of weak leadership and adequate employment - similar to the Maquiladoras along the US-Mexican border - would, Israel believes, effectively counteract any tendency towards renewed resistance.Fanciful as all this may seem, this is the scenario being pursued by Sharon and Sharon's likely successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, with the acquiescence of Labor. Having struggled all the years since Oslo to transform Israel's concept of a Palestinian mini-state into a viable and truly sovereign one, we find ourselves back in the 1970s when the struggle was to transform autonomy into a semblance of independence. Time is running out. Every day the Occupation grows stronger -another road, another settlement, another barrier, greater repression, greater separation, increased emigration, growing despair. There seems no sense of urgency in the slow pace of international intervention. With few countervailing forces, are we witnessing the victory of occupation over freedom? The answer is still blowing in the wind.
(Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at <icahd@zahav.net.il>)
http://www.icahd.org/eng/articles.asp?menu=6&submenu=2&article=48
4. The solution is the problem
Noam Chomsky
The Guardian, 10 May 2002
The US presents itself as the peace-broker in the Middle East. The reality is different
A year ago, the Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that "what we feared has come true - War appears an unavoidable fate", an "evil colonial" war. His colleague Ze'ev Sternhell noted that the Israeli leadership was now engaged in "colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era". Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" in this conflict, which is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years.
The Oslo "peace process", begun in 1993, changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever". He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in 2000, which kept to this condition. At the time, West Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian communications. The fifth canton was Gaza. It is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is their prototype, the Bantustan "homelands" of apartheid South Africa, ever mentioned.
No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive. It is crucial to understand what that role has been, and how it is internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors of the New York Times, praising President Bush's "path-breaking speech" and the "emerging vision" he articulated. Its first element is "ending Palestinian terrorism" immediately. Some time later comes "freezing, then rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders" to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis will be encouraged to "take the Arab League's historic offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously". But first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are "legitimate diplomatic partners".
The real world has little resemblance to this self-serving portrayal - virtually copied from the 1980s, when the US and Israel were desperately seeking to evade PLO offers of negotiation and political settlement. In the real world, the primary barrier to the "emerging vision" has been, and remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the current "Arab League's historic offer".
It repeats the basic terms of a security council resolution of January 1976 which called for a political settlement on the internationally recognized borders "with appropriate arrangements ... to guarantee ... the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the area". This was backed by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states and the PLO but opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history. Similar initiatives have since been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed in public commentary.
Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant humiliation. Israeli plans for Palestinians have followed the guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labour leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Thirty years ago Dayan advised the cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave". When challenged, he responded by citing Ben-Gurion, who said that "whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist". He could have also cited Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, who held that the fate of the "several hundred thousand negroes" in the Jewish homeland "is a matter of no consequence".
The Palestinians have long suffered torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water. These policies have relied on decisive US support and European acquiescence. "The Barak government is leaving Sharon's government a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the transition took place: "the highest number of housing starts in the territories since Ariel Sharon was minister of construction and settlement in 1992 before the Oslo agreements" - funding provided by the American taxpayer.
It is regularly claimed that all peace proposals have been undermined by Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel (the facts are quite different), and by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited "our trust". How that trust may be regained is explained by Edward Walker, a Clinton Middle East adviser: Arafat must announce that "we put our future and fate in the hands of the US" - which has led the campaign to undermine Palestinian rights for 30 years.
The basic problem then, as now, traces back to Washington, which has persistently backed Israel's rejection of a political settlement in terms of the broad international consensus. Current modifications of US rejectionism are tactical. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered, the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the newly-invaded territories "without delay" - meaning "as soon as possible", secretary of state Colin Powell explained at once. Powell's arrival in Israel was delayed to allow the Israeli Defense Force to continue its destructive operations, facts hard to miss and confirmed by US officials.
When the current intifada broke out, Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, hardly in self-defense. Clinton responded by arranging what the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz called "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade", along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for assassinations. These extended last August to the first assassination of a political leader: Abu Ali Mustafa. That passed in silence, but the reaction was quite different when Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi was killed in retaliation. Bush is now praised for arranging the release of Arafat from his dungeon in return for US-UK supervision of the accused assassins of Ze'evi. It is inconceivable that there should be any effort to punish those responsible for the Mustafa assassination.
Further contributions to enhancing terror took place last December, when Washington again vetoed a security council resolution calling for dispatch of international monitors. Ten days earlier, the US boycotted an international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the fourth Geneva convention applies to the occupied territories, so that many US-Israeli actions there are "grave breaches", hence serious war crimes. As a "high contracting party", the US is obligated by solemn treaty to prosecute those responsible for such crimes, including its own leadership. Accordingly, all of this passes in silence.
But the US has not officially withdrawn its recognition that the conventions apply to the occupied territories, or its censure of Israeli violations as the "occupying power". In October 2000 the security council reaffirmed the consensus, "call[ing] on Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations..." The vote was 14-0. Clinton abstained.
Until such matters are permitted to enter mainstream discussion in the US, and their implications understood, it is meaningless to call for "US engagement in the peace process", and prospects for constructive action will remain grim.
chomsky@MIT.edu
Tuesday, May 28
Wednesday, May 1
MCC Palestine Update #47
MCC Palestine Update #47
1 May 2002
Through the East Jerusalem YMCA Women's Training Program MCC is supporting the repairs of the water tanks and solar water heating panels for 160 families in the West Bank districts of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem. During the Israeli re-invasions of these areas during the past year, many families had their water tanks shot up. Palestinian families depend on water in these tanks, as they can only count on running water a few days out of each month. (Illegal Israeli settlements, meanwhile, have running water continuously, with water confiscated from West Bank aquifers).
MCC Palestine's North American staff will be in Egypt for regional meetings and retreat from May 5-20. No MCC Palestine Updates will appear during this time.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, details the way in which the Israeli military targeted the Palestinian civilian infrastructure during the April re-invasions. The second, by Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri, provides an analysis of the present impasse between Palestinians and Israelis. The final piece appeared in the British newspaper The Independent and represents a detailed preliminary investigation into what happened when the Israeli military entered Jenin refugee camp.
1. Operation Destroy the Data
Amira Hass
Haaretz
It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.
It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country.
These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.
The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one office.
The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or soldiers.
Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them. This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order or wink come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier?
Was it from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command or from general headquarters?
Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.
2. The Real Aim
Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, 27 April 2002
The real aim of “Operation Defensive Shield” was not to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”.
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on the bandwagon of President Busch’s “war against international terrorism”. Under the umbrella of “destroying the infrastructure of terrorism” one can do practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”, he would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon’s aim. His program is far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the country altogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of “ethnic cleansing”. When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured as a man determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism as a means to achieve quite different aims.
No more.
Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the military commander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for myself. I visited the Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed.
Take, for example, the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposing building, probably going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European and oriental styles. In front of it there was a rose garden – “was”, because a tank has crisscrossed it, for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To teach them a lesson.
On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was total. The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the papers strewn around, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just plain vandalism. The money in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers dispersed. But when one looked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the hard disks were taken from the computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty shells remained. All the important contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of pupils, examination results, lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian school system.
The Ministry if Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all the information, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics of the hospitals had been taken.
Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these two ministries – Education and Health – had been functioning well. They have been utterly destroyed.
This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the information pertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure, car tests and drivers’ licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.
The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvious: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to push it back with one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the primitive society of Turkish times.
This is true for the civil society, and even more so for the security system. The headquarters of the security services were destroyed, files burned, computers crushed, the information concerning armed underground organizations and all other details pertaining to the war against terrorism were obliterated. There is no better evidence of the aims of this operation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of organized Palestinian society.
By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the center of Ramallah – from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged headquarters of Yasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and not a single sign of hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference between the Israeli peace camp and those who responsible for this brutal attack. Here, perhaps, lies the only glimmer of hope.
3. Once upon a time in Jenin: What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin?
Justin Huggler And Phil Reeves
The Independent, 25 April 2002
The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counter-terrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode - the nastiest so far - in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?
A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverized under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left - the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings -reeked.
The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of
Israel" - a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins.
"It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said. The Israeli army insists that its
devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always - although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim –it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.
But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organisations - in the short term, at least - nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli
operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.
The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.
Ariel Sharon, Israel's premier, and his ministers responded by activating a plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the heartland of violent resistance to Israel's 35-year occupation.
The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 suicide bombers had come out of the camp, which was a centre for bomb-making. Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.
The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of arms - 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and heavy machine guns.Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, with members of the militias - Hamas, al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad -fighting alongside Yasser Arafat's security forces, mostly armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives.
The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after entering, the Israeli army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. Twenty -three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area - 400m by 500m - lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. "We were not expecting them to fight so well," said one exhausted-looking Israeli reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers were kept away for five more days while the Israeli army cleaned up the area, after the serious fighting ended on 10 April.
The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organisation. Many of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the bulldozers and that were open to the street.
An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.
Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu Sba'a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba'a, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The bulldozer turned back, said Mr Abu Sba'a - but his father was almost immediately shot in the chest where he stood.
Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani's screaming and came to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.
"We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion," she said. "I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the wounded.
"Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, 'I'm wounded.' She said, 'I'm wounded too.' She had been shot in theside of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn't answer, she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times."
Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse's uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were "very near". As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest.
Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed near the wounded in Jenin camp
Until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a civilian, was killed.
As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side."There was shooting all around the house. At about 5pm I went to check the building. I told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I've never seen the way he looked at me. He said, 'I'm wounded', and started bleeding from his mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him what happened but he couldn't talk.
"His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis."
It was Thursday 4 April, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped indoors with the body for a week.
A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was allowed through.
Ismehan Murad, another neighbour, told us the soldiers had been using her as a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came to the young woman's house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so that they would not be fired on.
Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk. The family had
already moved him from house to house to avoid the fighting. When Mr Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.
Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, theIsraelis made use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a man in his eighties, before Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr Hamduni had sought shelter in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched with age, and Mr Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.
Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14 -year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday 11 April. Faris's eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us what happened.
"It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn't know. Faris told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we saw the front of the tank move towards us and I was scared. Faris told me to go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and put Faris in a car."
Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been about 80m away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't do anything for him. He had been shot in the face."
In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Mr Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Mr Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's wheel chair.
"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in the grass.
The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.
"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Mr Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called 'martyrs'. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that."
The events at Jenin - which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel - have created a crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: the soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the ministries of health and education.
To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 100 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.
No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army realising that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin - has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m square - about one- twentieth of its true area.
One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent civilians" - also untrue.
The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.
The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban - which violates the Geneva Convention - as "unacceptable".
The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of collapse.
The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.
What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli detention,
buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere.
Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli army. They cite the Israeli army's differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation - first it said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme court.
Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.
A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians' crude pipe bombs and the Israelis' state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.
These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights - including extra-judicial executions and has called for a war crimes inquiry.
At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.
(c) Independent
1 May 2002
Through the East Jerusalem YMCA Women's Training Program MCC is supporting the repairs of the water tanks and solar water heating panels for 160 families in the West Bank districts of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem. During the Israeli re-invasions of these areas during the past year, many families had their water tanks shot up. Palestinian families depend on water in these tanks, as they can only count on running water a few days out of each month. (Illegal Israeli settlements, meanwhile, have running water continuously, with water confiscated from West Bank aquifers).
MCC Palestine's North American staff will be in Egypt for regional meetings and retreat from May 5-20. No MCC Palestine Updates will appear during this time.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, details the way in which the Israeli military targeted the Palestinian civilian infrastructure during the April re-invasions. The second, by Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri, provides an analysis of the present impasse between Palestinians and Israelis. The final piece appeared in the British newspaper The Independent and represents a detailed preliminary investigation into what happened when the Israeli military entered Jenin refugee camp.
1. Operation Destroy the Data
Amira Hass
Haaretz
It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.
It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country.
These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.
The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one office.
The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or soldiers.
Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them. This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order or wink come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier?
Was it from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command or from general headquarters?
Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.
2. The Real Aim
Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, 27 April 2002
The real aim of “Operation Defensive Shield” was not to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”.
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on the bandwagon of President Busch’s “war against international terrorism”. Under the umbrella of “destroying the infrastructure of terrorism” one can do practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”, he would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon’s aim. His program is far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the country altogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of “ethnic cleansing”. When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured as a man determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism as a means to achieve quite different aims.
No more.
Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the military commander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for myself. I visited the Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed.
Take, for example, the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposing building, probably going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European and oriental styles. In front of it there was a rose garden – “was”, because a tank has crisscrossed it, for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To teach them a lesson.
On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was total. The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the papers strewn around, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just plain vandalism. The money in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers dispersed. But when one looked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the hard disks were taken from the computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty shells remained. All the important contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of pupils, examination results, lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian school system.
The Ministry if Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all the information, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics of the hospitals had been taken.
Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these two ministries – Education and Health – had been functioning well. They have been utterly destroyed.
This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the information pertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure, car tests and drivers’ licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.
The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvious: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to push it back with one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the primitive society of Turkish times.
This is true for the civil society, and even more so for the security system. The headquarters of the security services were destroyed, files burned, computers crushed, the information concerning armed underground organizations and all other details pertaining to the war against terrorism were obliterated. There is no better evidence of the aims of this operation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of organized Palestinian society.
By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the center of Ramallah – from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged headquarters of Yasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and not a single sign of hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference between the Israeli peace camp and those who responsible for this brutal attack. Here, perhaps, lies the only glimmer of hope.
3. Once upon a time in Jenin: What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin?
Justin Huggler And Phil Reeves
The Independent, 25 April 2002
The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counter-terrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode - the nastiest so far - in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?
A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverized under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left - the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings -reeked.
The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of
Israel" - a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins.
"It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said. The Israeli army insists that its
devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always - although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim –it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.
But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organisations - in the short term, at least - nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli
operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.
The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.
Ariel Sharon, Israel's premier, and his ministers responded by activating a plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the heartland of violent resistance to Israel's 35-year occupation.
The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 suicide bombers had come out of the camp, which was a centre for bomb-making. Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.
The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of arms - 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and heavy machine guns.Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, with members of the militias - Hamas, al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad -fighting alongside Yasser Arafat's security forces, mostly armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives.
The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after entering, the Israeli army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. Twenty -three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area - 400m by 500m - lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. "We were not expecting them to fight so well," said one exhausted-looking Israeli reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers were kept away for five more days while the Israeli army cleaned up the area, after the serious fighting ended on 10 April.
The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organisation. Many of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the bulldozers and that were open to the street.
An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.
Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu Sba'a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba'a, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The bulldozer turned back, said Mr Abu Sba'a - but his father was almost immediately shot in the chest where he stood.
Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani's screaming and came to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.
"We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion," she said. "I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the wounded.
"Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, 'I'm wounded.' She said, 'I'm wounded too.' She had been shot in theside of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn't answer, she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times."
Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse's uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were "very near". As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest.
Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed near the wounded in Jenin camp
Until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a civilian, was killed.
As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side."There was shooting all around the house. At about 5pm I went to check the building. I told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I've never seen the way he looked at me. He said, 'I'm wounded', and started bleeding from his mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him what happened but he couldn't talk.
"His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis."
It was Thursday 4 April, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped indoors with the body for a week.
A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was allowed through.
Ismehan Murad, another neighbour, told us the soldiers had been using her as a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came to the young woman's house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so that they would not be fired on.
Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk. The family had
already moved him from house to house to avoid the fighting. When Mr Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.
Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, theIsraelis made use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a man in his eighties, before Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr Hamduni had sought shelter in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched with age, and Mr Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.
Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14 -year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday 11 April. Faris's eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us what happened.
"It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn't know. Faris told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we saw the front of the tank move towards us and I was scared. Faris told me to go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and put Faris in a car."
Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been about 80m away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't do anything for him. He had been shot in the face."
In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Mr Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Mr Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's wheel chair.
"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in the grass.
The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.
"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Mr Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called 'martyrs'. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that."
The events at Jenin - which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel - have created a crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: the soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the ministries of health and education.
To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 100 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.
No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army realising that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin - has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m square - about one- twentieth of its true area.
One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent civilians" - also untrue.
The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.
The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban - which violates the Geneva Convention - as "unacceptable".
The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of collapse.
The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.
What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli detention,
buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere.
Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli army. They cite the Israeli army's differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation - first it said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme court.
Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.
A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians' crude pipe bombs and the Israelis' state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.
These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights - including extra-judicial executions and has called for a war crimes inquiry.
At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.
(c) Independent
Saturday, April 27
MCC Palestine Update #46
MCC Palestine Update #46
The talk in the international media this past week was of an Israeli pullout from West Bank towns. Reality proved more complex, with Israel still very much present in many West Bank towns while completely besieging others. Curfews and severe restriction on movement are the order of the day in many places.
Palestinian institutions--be they non-governmental or governmental, private or public--are beginning to dig out from under the looting, vandalism and destruction. Banks, development organizations, human rights organizations, the Ministry of Education, shops: the list of places trashed and from whom valuables were stolen goes on and on. The Israeli military has been engaging in a war against the Palestinian infrastructure, on the Palestinians' ability to function as a normal society. One example: the Ramallah and Nablus offices of the East Jerusalem YMCA were trashed and looted. MCC supports women's development programs and projects with persons with disabilities operated by the East Jerusalem YMCA: now they'll have to operate without needed equipment and records.
MCC continues to participate, along with Catholic Relief Services, World Vision International, Caritas International, the Pontifical Mission for Palestine, the Lutheran World Federation and the International Orthodox Christian Committee, in relief convoys to West Bank cities. Last Saturday we went to Nablus; this Thursday to Jenin.
Below you will find four pieces. The first, by Edward Said, provides a trenchant analysis of the first three weeks of April. The second, by Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, details the obstacles the current Israeli government places before peace. The third, by Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper, provides a report from the Jenin refugee camp. Fourth, Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz asks what, if any, political horizon Israel's currently military action presupposes. In the fifth and final piece, Naseer Aruri provides some historical perspective to the recent conflict, examining claims (which have been received repeated airings recently) that Israel generously offered the Palestinians an end to occupation.
1. What Israel Has Done
Edward Said
Al Ahram Weekly, 19 April 2002
Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its extraordinarily destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as has Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media. That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's campaign has actually (has always) been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society. The official line (which the US, along with nearly every American media commentator has basically supported) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating for the suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been done to it.
Plucking out the terrorist network, destroying the terrorist infrastructure, attacking terrorist nests (note the total dehumanization involved in every one of these phrases): the words are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have therefore given Israel the right to do what it has wanted to do, which in effect is to destroy Palestinian civil life with as much damage, as much sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation, vandalism, purposeless but overwhelming technological violence as possible. No other state on earth could have done what Israel has done with as much approbation and support as the US has given it. None has been more intransigent and destructive, less out of touch with its own realities, than Israel.
There are signs, however, that the amazing, not to say grotesque, ature of these claims (its "fight for existence") is slowly being eroded by the harsh and nearly unimaginable devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Take this front-page report, "Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust" by the New York Times's Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on 11 April: "There is no way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns -- Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin -- while they remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state --roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines has been devastated." By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using 50 tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and dozens of F-16 sorties, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over a week, a one square kilometre patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and with no defenses whatever, no leaders, no missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a response to terrorist violence and the threat to Israel's survival? There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble Israeli bulldozers are now trying to heap over the camp's ruins.
Are Palestinian civilians, men, women, children, no more than rats or cockroaches that can be killed and attacked in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in their defense? And what about the capture of thousands of Palestinian men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers without a trace, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in all Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.
A monstrous transformation of an entire people by the most formidable and feared propaganda machine in the world into little more than "militants" and "terrorists" has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of 1982 with its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind. What anti-terrorist purpose is served by destroying the building and then removing the records of the Ministry of Education, the Ramallah Municipality, the Central Bureau of Statistics, various institutes specializing in civil rights, health and economic development, hospitals, radio and television stations? Is it not clear that Sharon is bent not only on "breaking" the Palestinians, but on trying to eliminate them as a people with national institutions?
In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power, it seems deranged to keep asking the Palestinians, who have neither army, nor air force, nor tanks, nor defenses of any kind, nor functioning leadership, to "renounce" violence, and to require no comparable limitation on Israel's actions. Even the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be examined from a view point that permits a hidden racist standard to value Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been lost, maimed, distorted and foreshortened by long- standing Israeli military occupation, and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against Palestinians from the beginning of his career in the 1950s until now.
There can be no conceivable peace, in my opinion, that does not tackle the real issue: Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of a Palestinian people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and most of the people supporting him consider exclusively to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza. A profile of Sharon in the 6-7 April issue of the Financial Times concluded with this extremely telling extract from his autobiography, which the FT prefaced with "he has written with pride of his parents' belief that Jews and Arabs could live side by side." Then the relevant quote from Sharon's book: "But they believed without question that only they had rights over the land. And no one was going to force them out, regardless of terror or anything else. When the land belongs to you physically... that is when you have power, not just physical power but spiritual power."
In l988, the PLO made the concession that the partition of historical Palestine into two states would be acceptable. This was reaffirmed on numerous occasions and certainly again in the Oslo documents. But only the Palestinians explicitly recognized the notion of partition. Israel never has. This is why there are now over 170 settlements on Palestinian lands, why a 300-mile network of roads connecting them to each other and totally impeding Palestinian movement exists (according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, it has cost $3 billion and has been funded by the US), why no Israeli prime minister, from Rabin on, has ever conceded any real Palestinian sovereignty to the Palestinians, and why of course the settlements have increased on an annual basis. The merest glance at a recent map of the territories reveals what Israel has been doing throughout the peace process, and what the consequent geographical discontinuity and shrinkage in Palestinian life has been. In effect, then, Israel considers itself and the Jewish people to own the land of Israel in its entirety: there are land ownership laws in Israel itself guaranteeing this, but on the West Bank and Gaza the network of settlements, roads, and no concessions whatever on sovereign land rights to the Palestinians serve the same function.
What boggles the mind is that no official -- US, Palestinian, Arab, UN, European, or anyone else -- has challenged Israel on this point, which has been threaded through all of the Oslo documents, procedures and agreements. That is why, of course, after nearly 10 years of "peace negotiations," Israel still controls the West Bank and Gaza. They are more directly controlled (owned?) by over 1,000 Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters who are the majority in his government) has either officially recognized the occupied territories as occupied territories or gone on to recognise that Palestinians could or might theoretically have sovereign rights that is, without Israeli control over borders, water, air, security on what most of the world considers Palestinian land. So to speak about the "vision" of a Palestinian state, as has become fashionable, is mere vision alas, unless the question of land ownership and sovereignty is openly and officially conceded by the Israeli government. No Israeli government ever has made this concession and, if I am right, none will in the near future. It needs to be remembered that Israel is the only state in the world today that has never had internationally declared borders; the only state not the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state where over 90 per cent of the land is held in trust for the exclusive use of the Jewish people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have recognised any of the main provisions of international law (as argued recently in these pages by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.
This is why I have been sceptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context simply means that Palestinians will have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land. It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible leadership (to say nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in general) that he never made the decade-long Oslo negotiations focus on land ownership, and thus never put the onus on Israel to declare itself constitutively willing to give up title to Palestinian land; nor did he ever ask that Israel be required to deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to save himself again, whereas what we really need are international monitors to protect us, as well as elections to assure a real political future for the Palestinian people.
The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: is it willing juridically to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible land ownership assertions for which Sharon and his parents and his soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 per cent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the last 22 per cent, both times to Israel. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel's untenable extra-territorial claims, those absurd Biblically-based pretensions, and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people completely. Why is that kind of fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel? Can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence: whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of all other states in the world today. The record is not reassuring.
2. America must see that Sharon is the problem
Avi Shlaim
The Observer, 14 April 2002
The Middle East conflict cannot be resolved while the Israelis are led by a man who sees military force as the only instrument of policy.
When running for Prime Minister in February of last year, Ariel Sharon, Israel's ferocious hawk, tried to reinvent himself as a man of peace. Against the background of the al-Aqsa intifada, which he had helped to trigger by his provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), he ran on a ticket of peace with security. In his first year in power, Sharon has achieved neither peace nor security but only a steady escalation of the violence. In the last two weeks Sharon has revealed himself once again as a man wedded to military force as the only instrument of policy.
The 74 year-old Israeli leader has been at the sharp end of confrontation with the Arabs for most of his life. The hallmarks of his career are mendacity, the most savage brutality towards Arab civilians, and a persistent preference for force over diplomacy to solve political problems. These features found their clearest expression in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which Sharon masterminded as defense minister in Menachem Begin's Likud government.
The war that Sharon is currently waging on the West Bank fraudulently named 'Operation Defensive Shield', is in some ways a replay of his war in Lebanon. It is directed against the Palestinian people; it stems from the same stereotypes that the Palestinians are terrorists; it is based on the same denial of Palestinian national rights; it employs the same strategy of savage and overwhelming military force; and it displays the same callous disregard for international opinion, international law, the UN, and the norms of civilized behavior. Even the principal personalities are the same: today, as in 1982, Ariel Sharon confronts Yasser Arafat.
The invasion of Lebanon was not a defensive war but a war of deception. Sharon obtained cabinet approval for a limited military operation against the PLO forces in southern Lebanon. From the beginning, however, he planned a much bigger operation to serve broader geo-strategic aims. The principal objective of Sharon's war was to destroy the PLO as a military and political organisation, to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism, to spread despair and despondency among the inhabitants of the West Bank, and to pave the way to its absorption into Greater Israel. A second objective was to give Israel's Maronite allies a leg-up to power, and then compel them to sign a peace treaty with Israel. A third objective was to expel the Syrian army from Lebanon and to make Israel the dominant power in the Levant.
Under Sharon's devious direction, an operation that was supposedly undertaken in self-defence developed into a merciless siege of Beirut and culminated in a horrendous massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila which led to the removal of Sharon from the ministry of defence.
In his crude but relentless propaganda war, Sharon tries to portray Arafat as the master terrorist who orchestrates the violence against Israel and secretly encourages suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. To be sure, Arafat is not above using violence. Nor has he done as much as he could to curb the activities of the Islamic militants. Yet Arafat is the leader who persuaded his movement to abandon armed struggle and adopt the political path in the struggle for independence. By signing the Oslo Accord in 1993, and clinching it with a hesitant handshake, he and Yitzhak Rabin undertook to resolve the outstanding differences between their two nations by peaceful means. Until the assassination of Rabin two years later, Arafat proved himself an effective partner on the road to peace. The subsequent decline of the Oslo peace process was caused more by Israeli territorial expansionism than by Palestinian terrorism. Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which Sharon's government continues to expand, are the root of the problem.
Ever the opportunist, Sharon was quick to jump on the bandwagon of America's 'war against terror' in the aftermath of 11 September. Under this banner, Sharon has embarked on a sinister attempt to destroy the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. His real agenda is to subvert what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into the ground, and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood. To add insult to injury, he wants to remove Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader and symbol of the Palestinian revolution, and to replace him with a collaborationist regime which would serve as a sub-contractor What Sharon is unable or unwilling to comprehend is that security cannot be achieved by purely military means. The only hope of security for both communities lies in a return to the political track, something that the champion of violent solutions has always avoided. Consequently, Sharon's second war, like his first, is doomed to failure. If the history of this conflict teaches anything, it is that violence breeds more violence.
Many people who do not necessarily support Sharon's brutal methods nevertheless have sympathy for Israel's predicament. They point out that the suicide bombs against innocent Israeli civilians pre-dated the incursion of Israeli tanks into West Bank towns and villages. Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however, goes back to 1967 and constitutes the underlying cause of Palestinian frustration, hatred, and despair of which the suicide bombs are only the cruelest manifestation. They say that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deny altogether Israel's right to exist. These are, however, them extremist fringes. The savage treatment meted out by Sharon to the Palestinians is self-defeating precisely because it undermines moderates and strengthens extremists.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current crisis is America's complicity in the Israeli onslaught. One might have expected George Bush Jr. to resume the even-handed policy of his father towards Arabs and Israelis. Instead, he has reverted to a blatantly pro-Israeli policy reminiscent of the Reagan years. Although America is a signatory to the Oslo Accord, Bush has abandoned the Palestinian side.
Sharon is holding Arafat hostage in his headquarters in Ramallah, depriving him of food, water, medicines and telephone lines. The only concession that the American President has managed to extract from the truculent Israeli Prime Minister is a promise not to kill the Palestinian leader. The Israelis have destroyed much of Arafat's police force and security services, leaving him with a mobile phone. Under these conditions the embattled Palestinian leader does not have the means to prevent suicide attacks even if he had the will to do so.
In an apparent reversal of American policy a week ago, President Bush called on Sharon to pull out his troops from the Palestinian towns and villages. Sharon insisted they would stay as long as necessary to accomplish their mission of uprooting the infrastructure of terror. Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to the region to broker a cease-fire and restore the political track. He is unlikely to get far with Sharon unless he backs up his words with the threat to cut economic and military aid to Israel. The death toll in 'Operation Defensive Shield' is more than 200 Palestinians and 60 Israelis. How many more lives will have to be sacrificed before the Americans understand that General Sharon is part of the problem, not the solution?
Avi Shlaim is a professor of International Relations at Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)
3. What kind of war is this?'
Amira Hass
Haaretz, April 26, 2002
It is still impossible to know how many people are buried under the ruins in the Jenin refugee camp, where the smell of decomposing bodies mingles with the stench of garbage and the scent of geraniums and mint.
Leaning on a cane, the man stood on a huge pile of ruins: a jumble of crushed concrete, twisted iron rods, shreds of mattresses, electric cables, fragments of ceramic tiles, bits of water pipes and an orphaned light switch. "This is my home," he said, "and my son is inside." His name is Abu Rashid; his son is Jamal, 35, and confined to a wheelchair. The bulldozer began to gnaw into the house when members of the family were inside it. And where would they be, if not in the house, seeking - like all the inhabitants of the refugee camp in Jenin - the safest place to hide from the firing of the mortars and the rockets and the machine guns, and waiting for a brief respite?
Abu Rashid and the other members of his family hurried to the front door, went out with their hands up and tried to yell to the huge bulldozer, the operator of which was unseen and unheard, that there were people inside. But the bulldozer did not stop roaring, retreating a bit and then attacking again, returning and taking a bite out of the concrete wall, until it collapsed on Jamal before anyone could save him.
All around Abu Rashid other people were climbing up or down heaps of rubbish, making their way between piles of cement, sharp iron wires and fragments of metal, concrete pillars and ceilings that had collapsed, fragments of sinks. Not all of them were as as Abu Rashid, who talked to himself more than he talked to those who stopped to listen to him. There were those who tried to rescue something from the ruins: a garment, a shoe, a sack of grain.
Nearby, a young girl almost stumbled on a pile of broken cement blocks, pointed at the ceiling, at her feet, and wept and wept. Between the wails, she managed to say that this had been her parents' home and that she does not know who is buried under it, who had managed to get away, whether anyone was alive under the ruins, who would get them out, or when.
Among the piles of ruins, and in the midst of some houses that were still partially standing, the walls that had not collapsed riddled with numerous bullet holes of all sizes, a broad expanse had been created. Where, up until two weeks ago, several houses had stood, some of them three stories high, one or more Israel Defense Forces bulldozers had gone over the piles of cement several times, flattened them, ground them to dust, "made a `Trans-Israel highway,'" as A.S. put it. His home had also fallen victim to the bulldozers' teeth. Someone indicates a small opening in one pile of rubble. From it he had heard cries for help until Sunday night. On Monday morning there were no longer any sounds coming from it. Someone else points to what had formerly been a house where two sisters lived. Someone says that they are crippled. It is still unknown whether they are under the ruins or whether they got out of the camp in time.
Relative quiet
There are houses that were empty of inhabitants when they were demolished. In some cases the soldiers ordered people to leave immediately, so that they would not get killed. One old man, people say, refused to leave his home. "Fifty years ago you expelled me from Haifa. Now I have nowhere to go," they report he had said. The soldiers lifted the stubborn old man bodily and hauled him out. And there were cases in which they did not bother to issue a warning -and the bulldozers came. Without announcing over the bullhorns, without checking whether anyone was inside. This happened on Sunday, April 14, to the members of the Abu Bakr family, who live on the thin line between the refugee camp and the city of Jenin proper.
In both city and camp, a curfew had been imposed; soldiers were circulating in tanks and armored vehicles and on foot, shooting from time to time, tossing stun grenades or blowing up suspicious objects. But relative to the previous week it was quiet: There was no longer any firing from helicopters, no more exchanges of fire with a handful of armed Palestinian activists. But all of a sudden, at four in the afternoon, the members of the Abu Bakr family heard the sound of a wall being crushed. The father of the family went outside, waved a white flag and yelled to the soldiers: "We are in the house; where do you want us to go, why are you demolishing our home with us inside?" They yelled at him: "Yallah, yallah, get inside," and stopped the bull- dozer.
This narrow seamline where the house is located, several meters wide, has in recent days served as a transit bridge from the city to the refugee camp. The residents of the city, many of whom come from the refugee camp, tried to evade the soldiers and bring their relatives and friends water, food and cigarettes. At the Abu Bakrs' home they concluded that the soldiers wanted to expand the area that separates the city from the camp in order to prevent "smuggling" of one sort or another.
In the evening, an armored vehicle was positioned next to the house and soldiers combed the surrounding courtyard. Then the armored vehicle left. M. went to make coffee. He managed to put a teaspoon of sugar into the narrow-necked, long-handled coffee pot and began to stir the boiling water when someone or something came quickly in through the window,
broke the glass and set the kitchen on fire. A stun grenade? A tear-gas grenade? Did the soldiers outside think someone was firing at them when he lit the gas burner? M. thanks God that only his hands and face were burned in the flames that were immediately extinguished, and that other people in the family weren't hurt, and that the house was not destroyed.
Mohammed al-Sba'a, 70, was not so lucky. On Monday, April 8, the bulldozers thundered near his home in the Hawashan neighborhood, in the middle of the camp. He went out of his house to tell the soldiers that there were people inside - he and his wife, his two sons, their wives and seven children. He was shot in his doorway, hit in the head and killed, related one of his sons this
week. Members of his family managed to bring him inside. But then they were ordered to come out: The men were arrested, and then released and taken to the village of Rumani, northwest of Jenin. The women were taken to the Red Crescent building. The father's body remained in the house. When the men of the family returned from arrest, they could not find the house.
The destruction of dozens of houses by bulldozers began on Saturday, April 6, four days after the Israel Defense Forces attack on Jenin began. It is not yet possible to know how many people were buried under the ruined houses. The horrible smell of dead bodies of which new ones are being discovered every day - mingles with the stink of the garbage that has not been collected, the garbage that has been burnt and the surprising smells of geraniums, roses and the mint that grows near the bougainvillea that people cultivated in the narrow strips of ground between the crowded houses. When the time comes, UNRWA and the Red Cross will make lists of the detained, the wounded and the missing. But the most urgent mission right now is the distribution of water, food and medicines. The camp has been defined as a disaster area.
The demolition of the homes by bulldozers was preceded by heavy shooting and shelling from tanks, from the beginning of the IDF action on the night of Tuesday, April 2. The tanks surrounded the camp, took up positions on the hill to the west of it, rumbled into the main street. Two days later, firing from helicopters began, people relate: rocket fire and submachine-gun fire. People took shelter under staircases, on the ground floor, in interior bathrooms, in storehouses near the inner courtyards. People crowded into small rooms, feeling each other in the dark, frightened. They blocked their ears and shut their eyes, cuddled the small, crying children.
Damage statistics
When the shooting died down, they related, they went out and found their houses scorched, flames and smoke rising from them, riddled with holes, their floors shaky, doors and windows ripped out, windowpanes smashed to bits, huge holes in the front walls. The turn of the damage statistics will also come, and when it does, UN teams will tell of how many houses were destroyed by the bulldozers, how many were damaged by the shooting and whether they can be repaired or whether it is safer to demolish them altogether. How many families were in them. How many individuals.
Yumm Yasser rescued a year-old baby from the neighbors' house, which was shelled. The baby's father, Rizk, she related, crawled out with his two legs injured and his back burned by fire. He came out with his arm stretched forward, bleeding, she said. The house was surrounded by soldiers. A military doctor or paramedic came, cleaned the wounds, bandaged them, and soldiers took him to the area of the cemetery and left him there. Neighbors who saw him gathered him up and called a doctor. They managed to get him to a hospital only a week after he was wounded.
H. and her family were in their house when it was bombarded. They ran to take shelter in her father's home nearby. H. thinks that this was on April 8. People find it hard to remember exact dates; all the days of the attack have become a jumble of fear and blood and destruction, without nights or days. Y., her husband, was wounded by the shooting when he went out the door. She dragged him to her father's house. There they bandaged his leg, prayed that everything would be all right and managed to get him to a private hospital only on Sunday, April 14, evading the soldiers who patrolled the alley on foot.
A.S. was wounded in the course of performing an IDF mission: A foot patrol took him out of his house to accompany soldiers, walk ahead of them and open the doors of the neighborhood for them. A.S. did as he was told, and as he stood by one of the doors, another unit of soldiers appeared. Perhaps they thought he belonged to the mukawamin (insurgents, armed activists), because no one else dared to roam the streets during those first days of the IDF takeover of the camp. He was shot and wounded. For four days he lay in the home of neighbors, until his brothers managed to take him to medical care. Their home, on the second floor of the family's house on the hillside, was damaged by three to five rockets and numerous bullets. Soldiers took up positions in a tall house nearby, and shot.
His mother tells the story at length, leading visitors from one destroyed room to the next. And then she takes us out to the garden: he loved to plant things, he loved life, not death, she said of her son. Her other sons offered the visitors fruit from the garden: pleasantly tart loquats, refreshingly juicy plums. Most of the water tanks in the camp had been hit during the first days of the shooting. The water pipes were burst by the IDF bulldozers and the tanks. The fresh water supply was cut off immediately. Therefore, when every drop of water must be saved, biting into these fruits is a luxury.
Abu Riyad, 51, was also enlisted, like many others, for IDF missions. For five days he accompanied soldiers: During the day he walked ahead of them, from door to door, knocked on the doors as the soldiers concealed themselves behind him, their rifles aimed at the door and at him. At night he was with them in a house they had taken over. They handcuffed him and two soldiers guarded him, he said. At the end of his mission, they told him to stay in a certain house,alone. All around the bulldozers and the tanks thundered. One of the tanks rolled onto the house. Abu Riyad jumped to another house, leaping from one destroyed house to another until he got to his home, which he also found partially in ruins, from hits by three rockets. There were 13 people in the house when the rocket landed on it.
A soldier cleaned the bathroom
S. declared that she had been lucky. Her family's house was only occupied for a week, like a dozen other houses in the camp that climbs up the hillside and the cliffs. S. is a widow who lives withher brother and his family in a house at the western edge of the camp: four adults, 10 children. Most of the residents had left the neighborhood before the IDF invasion. On the first and second nights soldiers took over two or three houses adjacent to the home of S.'s family. The members of the family took shelter in the kitchen, which they thought was the most protected room. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, someone came in through the wall, made a gaping hole near the floor and came in right over the head of 8-year-old Rabiya. Windowpanes shattered and the room was covered in dust. The 14 people in the kitchen began to scream. Through the hole in the wall they heard someone shouting in Arabic: Anyone who leaves the house will die. They peeked and saw a group of soldiers in the narrow alley. They tried to negotiate with the soldiers; perhaps they would go out to the neighbors' house, to a safer room, but the only answer they heard was: "Whoever leaves the house will die."
After a short while, the soldiers made a hole in the wall that leads to the staircase and came in through it. The members of the family, huddled together in one corner, looked on in astonishment as more and more soldiers came in, their faces painted black. The members of the family were put in another room, full of broken glass and dust. They were held there from the evening until early Friday morning. The soldiers, related S., did not allow them to leave the dimly lit room. When they pleaded to go to the bathroom, the soldiers brought them a pot from the kitchen. S.'s brother-in-law was arrested, and three women and their children were left along in a house filled with strange soldiers.
At dawn, S. opened the door and discovered that the soldiers had been replaced. With hand gestures and body language she signaled that she wanted to go to the bathroom, to take the children to the bathroom, to bring food. Someone who looked to her like an officer said to go ahead. She had to make her way through any number of soldiers who were lying on the floor of her home, tiptoeing among them. The filth she found in the bathroom disgusted her. The officer who was next to her hung his head and she concluded that he was ashamed of what he saw. He went to a nearby house, where no one was home, and brought water. And he cleaned the bathroom. When they leave in about a week the soldiers will leave behind a large pile of leftovers from their rations.
During that night, when the family was locked into one room, the soldiers made a search of the house. They emptied drawers and cupboards, overturned furniture, broke the television, cut the phone line, took away the telephone and broke another hole in a wall that leads to another apartment. Along the broken wall is a picture done in watercolors that was painted by her brother-in-law's brother when he was 15. He drew a Swiss landscape: a lake, snowcapped mountains, evergreen trees, a deer, a house with a red-tiled roof and smoke curling from the chimney. By the shore of the lake he painted two mustached men dressed as Palestinians, riding a donkey. The date: May 10, 1995. The signature: Ashraf Abu al-Haija.
Al-Haija was killed on one of the first days of the IDF attack, hit by a rocket. On Tuesday of last week his scorched body was still lying in one of the rooms of the half-destroyed house. Al-Haija was an activist in Hamas, who together with members of other armed groups had sworn to defend the camp to the death. J.Z., two of whose nephews were among the armed men who were killed, estimates that they numbered no more than 70. "But everyone who helped them saw himself as active in the resistance: those who signaled from afar that soldiers were approaching, those who hid them, those who made tea for them." According to him, no door in the camp was closed to them when they fled from the soldiers who were looking for them, the people of the camp, he said, decided not to abandon him, not to leave the fighters to their own devices. This was the decision of the majority, taken individually by each person.
Despite his family and emotional relationship with many of the armed men, he admits that it is hard for him to describe exactly how the fighting went in which they were killed and in which Israeli soldiers were killed. "From reconstructions that we made together, it appears to us that the army attacked the camp with tank and machine gun fire from several directions and tried to get infantry forces in. But because of the resistance by our fighters, this failed. Then they started to attack all the houses in the camp with helicopters and tanks, indiscriminately. The soldiers that took over the houses at the edge of the camp signaled where to fire and hit." Gradually, the armed Palestinians were routed deeper into the camp, to their last battles.
J.Z. is a construction worker who built his own home and homes of friends. His house was destroyed by direct hits from several rockets. He is sleeping at the home of his young friend, A.M. When darkness envelops the camp, whose electricity has been cut off since April 3, candlelight shines through only a few of the windows. There is an illusion that a window through which light does not shine will not be hit by shooting. IDF fire continues at intervals, though there are no longer any Palestinians who will shoot in the direction of the soldiers. From time to time the silence is shattered by the sound of an explosion.
Anxiety and uncertainty are overcome in a conversation typical of these days, with A.N.'s mother and his aunt. On Monday evening the conversation with the guest from Israel began with the enumeration of those J.Z. knows were killed: Seven of them were armed men killed in battle. There were 10 civilians, among them three women and at least two old men. There are scores of people whose fate is still unknown.
The conversation jumps from memories of the prison installation at Ketsiot, where J. was imprisoned during the first intifada and which has now been reopened, for soldiers. One soldier, someone had told A.M., had left his skullcap in a house he had searched. Heavy shooting enveloped the neighborhood and the house where he had forgotten the skullcap. The soldier told a young Palestinian who had been "recruited" that if he brought him the skullcap he would be released. Dodging the bullets, the young man ran to the house, brought the skullcap and was allowed to go home. J. tells another story that is going around the camp, about soldiers who were attacked from inside a house they had taken over earlier, from which they fled, leaving their weapons behind. It is said in the camp that one of them cried: "Mother, mother, what kind of war is this?"
4. Listen to Barghouti
Gideon Levy
It's a good thing Israel did not kill Marwan Barghouti; but it's a shame that it arrested him. Following dozens of assassinations, the Israel Defense Forces suddenly proved that when it wants to arrest someone instead of assassinating him, it knows how to do it quite well. If Israel had only adopted the same approach with Fatah activist Dr. Thabet Thabet, or the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa, plus a long list of other targeted Palestinians, the intifada's flames would be a lot lower and a lot of blood would have been spared on both sides.
Regrettably, however, Israel did not take the wiser course of action and allow the Tanzim leader to remain in hiding, the way it has done with some of the other leaders of the Palestinian security services whom, Israel says, have been involved in terror attacks. Arresting Barghouti may have been just, but it is not wise. Now he'll become the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
Now that Barghouti is under arrest, Israel must put him on trial in a civilian court, as befits a political leader suspected of serious crimes. As for the difference between civilian courts and military ones, it has already been said that it's about the same as the difference between a philharmonic orchestra and a military band - the same instruments, but with different results.
Barghouti has a much greater chance of getting a fair trial to which, like any suspect, he is entitled - in a civilian court in Jerusalem than in the military tribunals of Beit El. The court hearings should be open to the public, so that the representatives of the Shin Bet security service and the State Prosecution are required to display the evidence against the man to the entire world. And do we still need to point out that Barghouti should not be tortured, as happened the last time he was arrested? Humiliating him will also fan the flames of rage in the Palestinian and Arab street.
Of no less importance is to listen to the accused. Not only could the Shin Bet learn quite a bit from him, all Israelis should take heed as well. Look at Barghouti and you'll understand the entire story.The path he took was the only one we showed the Palestinians a path on which we tripped and pushed them deeper and deeper into despair and ultimately to violence.
Barghouti may be responsible for ruthless terror attacks, but Israel is likely to long for leaders like him, because his heirs will be much, much worse. Full of vengeance and hate, they will not be partners to a compromise like he would be. "You think tomorrow they'll find someone more moderate than me, someone to make [Chief of Staff Shaul] Mofaz coffee in the morning?" he quipped to me a few months ago when he feared he was on Israel's death list.
Barghouti did not begin by killing. As a politician, who apparently turned into a terrorist, it cannot be said of him that he did not try the path of negotiations. He was a peace activist. Few Palestinians were as active as he in promoting peace. He was deeply involved in contacts with many Israelis - and not only ones from the left and never hid his admiration for certain elements of Israeli life. "I wake up in the morning and look West, not East," he once told me. In those days, he marched in peace demonstrations, his arms locked with those of Meretz lawmakers Dedi Zucker and Zahava Gal-On.
That image may be surreal now, just like the days when he used to take his children to the Safari animal park in Ramat Gan. He would visit the political parties' central committees and MKs, making friends with some of them on joint delegations overseas, never missing a meeting and believing all the time in the purpose of the dialogue. "When will you finally understand that nothing frightens the Palestinians the way the settlements do?" he asked me on Land Day in 1997, while we drove around burning tires in his little car.
A few months ago, while already in hiding, he still called himself "the Palestinian peace camp." An alumnus of Israeli prisons, Barghouti is practically the last vestige of those Palestinians who knew Israelis well and even admired some of their characteristics. "I tell myself how patient we were," he said recently. "I was ready to meet with Shas and the Likud - with everyone. To talk. To persuade. But the Israelis don't want to understand." Now, the beloved has become an enemy. "I know how I've changed," he admits.
More than anything else - and he should be believed on this he wanted an end to the occupation, not the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. But the path grew longer and longer, until, as far as he was concerned, it was never-ending. As in any criminal case, pay attention to the motive for the crime: Barghouti's motive was politically justified, even if his actions cannot be. The politician became the leader of a violent organization that chose terror. At first, he limited his organization to actions only inside the occupied territories, apparently escalating its efforts until he eventually sent suicide bombers to Tel Aviv. "Why should you feel safe in Tel Aviv when we don't feel secure in Ramallah?" he asked.
The image of Barghouti shackled by Israeli soldiers is also a picture that goes back terribly far in time. The former prisoner and deportee, who became a leader and a legitimate partner for dialogue, is once again in irons. Israeli tanks are in the casbahs, soldiers are in the refugee camps, the Ketziot Prison has reopened, and Barghouti is under arrest once again. The long path Israelis and Palestinians walked together seems to have vanished, as if it had never existed at all. When Barghouti is released again from prison, he'll be even more extreme. Maybe by then, there will be nobody to talk with.
"This is our gift for Independence Day," one IDF officer so arrogantly defined his arrest. No gift could be more depressing.
5. Israel’s recipe for perpetual conflict"
Naseer Aruri on why Oslo was doomed to fail
19 April 2002 Page 7
NO ISRAELI defense of its war on Palestinians would be complete without a reference to Yasser Arafat’s supposed rejection of "peace" at the Camp David summit hosted by Bill Clinton in 2000. The story is so engrained in the mythology of the conflict that the mainstream media repeat it at the drop of a hat--that an irrational Arafat walked away from a generous Israeli offer that would have given his Palestinian Authority (PA) control of 95 percent of the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
The facts are different. NASEER ARURI is the author of The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. He explained the reality to ANTHONY ARNOVE.
DID YASSER Arafat reject peace at Camp David?
ARAFAT WAS offered neither a credible peace nor a viable Palestinian state at Camp David II.
Israel had reneged on its obligation to make an agreed-upon withdrawal, and proceeded to Camp David with a speech by Prime Minister Barak in which three no’s were delivered: not to any return to the 1967 borders of Israel, no to any change in the status of Jerusalem, and no to the return of refugees.
The myth of the "generous offer" consisted of four enclaves, bisected by illegally built colonial settlements and bypass roads for Jews only that would have prevented the Palestinians from ever establishing a viable, independent and contiguous state in any area between the River Jordan and
the Mediterranean Sea.
Although the four cantons (northern West Bank, central West Bank, southern West Bank and Gaza) may have been called a "state," the requirements of nation-states were sorely missing. It would have been a state without sovereignty, without geographic continuity and lacking control over its borders, airspace and economic and water resources. In fact, it would have consisted of 64 clusters as islands in the midst of Israel--a "state" existing within Israel, but not alongside Israel.
Moreover, the often-touted story that Barak offered to relinquish 95 to 96 percent of the West Bank-Gaza territory was never examined by the army of U.S. journalists who never spare a chance to repeat it.
The percentage game didn’t take into account the fact that occupied and annexed East Jerusalem was expanded from six square kilometers to 70 square kilometers--to include the land of 28 Palestinian villages. Israel’s total percentage figures have conveniently excluded Jerusalem,the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley and the settlements.
Needless to say, the West Bank and Gaza constitute 22 percent of pre-Israel Palestine, in which Jewish ownership comprised 7 percent. So the generous offer was not 95 percent of the 22 percent, but more like 70 percent of the 22 percent--which would be about 15 percent of historic
Palestine at best.
Moreover, Arafat was expected to relinquish the right of the refugees to return, which is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as by UN General Assembly Resolution 194. In addition, Israel would have retained sovereignty on the land on which Muslim and Christian Holy places are built, while the Palestine Authority would have had control over the buildings.
This was certainly a recipe for perpetual conflict rather than peace.
DO YOU think the Oslo "peace" process was doomed to fail?
THE OSLO process failed because it was an agreement to reach an agreement with built-in gridlock. It was intended to create a facade of diplomacy that would enable Israel to conquer additional Palestinian territory for colonial settlements and bypass roads, under presumed peace
conditions.
The Israeli strategy behind Oslo was based on pursuing a settlement that excluded any sovereign existence for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. It was designed to be a cost-effective strategy, in which the economic and moral cost of policing the occupation would be transferred to Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, while Israel would be released to pursue its world trade ambitions in an atmosphere of normalization with the Arab Middle East.
Knowing that the end game would never include Palestinian independence and the dismantling of the occupation, Israeli governments--irrespective of whether they were led by Likud or Labor--exploited the gridlock in order to procrastinate and prolong the interim period, but never arrive at the final-status negotiations.
The Oslo process became, in effect, a mere process with little substance--a process of creating a self-governing modality for thePalestinians, instead of reaching accords on sovereignty, borders, water, Jerusalem and refugees.
That was the reason for Bill Clinton’s personal involvement in what became known as the Wye River agreement and the Hebron agreement during the late 1990s, among other attempts to iron out problems.
During these endless meetings, the Palestinian Authority was pressed to make one concession after another, including becoming virtually a CIA operative whose mission was to eliminate any popular resistance to the occupation (defined as terrorism).
When Ehud Barak finally decided to renege on Israel’s obligations to make scheduled withdrawals and opted for a final settlement at Camp David in July 2000, the pillars of a credible settlement were absent. Arafat, however, was coaxed into attending a prematurely arranged conference that was bound to fail. Having realized that they had more than exhausted the search for a negotiated settlement, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories rebelled, and the rest is well-known.
WHAT STRATEGY is Sharon following now?
SHARON’S STRATEGY right now is a continuation of his strategy from more than a quarter of a century ago--the redefinition of Israel’s borders to include all of pre-1948 Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. He has been an outspoken advocate of the notion that the
Palestinians should have their sovereign state--in Jordan.
Under the pretext of dismantling the "terrorism infrastructure," he launched an all-out onslaught designed to obliterate not only the Palestinian Authority, but also the economic and political infrastructure of the Palestinians, including cultural, medical and humanitarian institutions.
As prime minister, he has been vigorously trying to browbeat Palestinians into an unconditional surrender--forcing them to end their uprising against the occupation once and for all and accept a fragmented entity under Israel’s overall control.
He has tightened the economic siege and blocked communication between towns, villages and cities--making life unbearable for the ordinary Palestinian, with the purpose of persuading as many as possible to leave.
This is calculated to implement the policy known in Israel as "transfer"--meaning expulsion of Palestinians, or ethnic cleansing.
A negotiated settlement, even on the basis of Oslo, hasn’t been and isn’t now on Sharon’s agenda. That doesn’t mean that it’s on the agenda of the Labor Party, whose luminaries such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak have adhered to the same strategies with different tactics.
Thus, any attempts by Colin Powell to broker a settlement will be futile unless the occupation is dismantled in accordance with international law, and negotiations begin over implementing international law relating to the principal issues, such as the status of Jerusalem, rights of refugees, water and borders.
The talk in the international media this past week was of an Israeli pullout from West Bank towns. Reality proved more complex, with Israel still very much present in many West Bank towns while completely besieging others. Curfews and severe restriction on movement are the order of the day in many places.
Palestinian institutions--be they non-governmental or governmental, private or public--are beginning to dig out from under the looting, vandalism and destruction. Banks, development organizations, human rights organizations, the Ministry of Education, shops: the list of places trashed and from whom valuables were stolen goes on and on. The Israeli military has been engaging in a war against the Palestinian infrastructure, on the Palestinians' ability to function as a normal society. One example: the Ramallah and Nablus offices of the East Jerusalem YMCA were trashed and looted. MCC supports women's development programs and projects with persons with disabilities operated by the East Jerusalem YMCA: now they'll have to operate without needed equipment and records.
MCC continues to participate, along with Catholic Relief Services, World Vision International, Caritas International, the Pontifical Mission for Palestine, the Lutheran World Federation and the International Orthodox Christian Committee, in relief convoys to West Bank cities. Last Saturday we went to Nablus; this Thursday to Jenin.
Below you will find four pieces. The first, by Edward Said, provides a trenchant analysis of the first three weeks of April. The second, by Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, details the obstacles the current Israeli government places before peace. The third, by Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper, provides a report from the Jenin refugee camp. Fourth, Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz asks what, if any, political horizon Israel's currently military action presupposes. In the fifth and final piece, Naseer Aruri provides some historical perspective to the recent conflict, examining claims (which have been received repeated airings recently) that Israel generously offered the Palestinians an end to occupation.
1. What Israel Has Done
Edward Said
Al Ahram Weekly, 19 April 2002
Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its extraordinarily destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as has Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media. That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's campaign has actually (has always) been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society. The official line (which the US, along with nearly every American media commentator has basically supported) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating for the suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been done to it.
Plucking out the terrorist network, destroying the terrorist infrastructure, attacking terrorist nests (note the total dehumanization involved in every one of these phrases): the words are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have therefore given Israel the right to do what it has wanted to do, which in effect is to destroy Palestinian civil life with as much damage, as much sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation, vandalism, purposeless but overwhelming technological violence as possible. No other state on earth could have done what Israel has done with as much approbation and support as the US has given it. None has been more intransigent and destructive, less out of touch with its own realities, than Israel.
There are signs, however, that the amazing, not to say grotesque, ature of these claims (its "fight for existence") is slowly being eroded by the harsh and nearly unimaginable devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Take this front-page report, "Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust" by the New York Times's Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on 11 April: "There is no way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns -- Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin -- while they remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state --roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines has been devastated." By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using 50 tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and dozens of F-16 sorties, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over a week, a one square kilometre patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and with no defenses whatever, no leaders, no missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a response to terrorist violence and the threat to Israel's survival? There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble Israeli bulldozers are now trying to heap over the camp's ruins.
Are Palestinian civilians, men, women, children, no more than rats or cockroaches that can be killed and attacked in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in their defense? And what about the capture of thousands of Palestinian men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers without a trace, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in all Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.
A monstrous transformation of an entire people by the most formidable and feared propaganda machine in the world into little more than "militants" and "terrorists" has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of 1982 with its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind. What anti-terrorist purpose is served by destroying the building and then removing the records of the Ministry of Education, the Ramallah Municipality, the Central Bureau of Statistics, various institutes specializing in civil rights, health and economic development, hospitals, radio and television stations? Is it not clear that Sharon is bent not only on "breaking" the Palestinians, but on trying to eliminate them as a people with national institutions?
In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power, it seems deranged to keep asking the Palestinians, who have neither army, nor air force, nor tanks, nor defenses of any kind, nor functioning leadership, to "renounce" violence, and to require no comparable limitation on Israel's actions. Even the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be examined from a view point that permits a hidden racist standard to value Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been lost, maimed, distorted and foreshortened by long- standing Israeli military occupation, and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against Palestinians from the beginning of his career in the 1950s until now.
There can be no conceivable peace, in my opinion, that does not tackle the real issue: Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of a Palestinian people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and most of the people supporting him consider exclusively to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza. A profile of Sharon in the 6-7 April issue of the Financial Times concluded with this extremely telling extract from his autobiography, which the FT prefaced with "he has written with pride of his parents' belief that Jews and Arabs could live side by side." Then the relevant quote from Sharon's book: "But they believed without question that only they had rights over the land. And no one was going to force them out, regardless of terror or anything else. When the land belongs to you physically... that is when you have power, not just physical power but spiritual power."
In l988, the PLO made the concession that the partition of historical Palestine into two states would be acceptable. This was reaffirmed on numerous occasions and certainly again in the Oslo documents. But only the Palestinians explicitly recognized the notion of partition. Israel never has. This is why there are now over 170 settlements on Palestinian lands, why a 300-mile network of roads connecting them to each other and totally impeding Palestinian movement exists (according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, it has cost $3 billion and has been funded by the US), why no Israeli prime minister, from Rabin on, has ever conceded any real Palestinian sovereignty to the Palestinians, and why of course the settlements have increased on an annual basis. The merest glance at a recent map of the territories reveals what Israel has been doing throughout the peace process, and what the consequent geographical discontinuity and shrinkage in Palestinian life has been. In effect, then, Israel considers itself and the Jewish people to own the land of Israel in its entirety: there are land ownership laws in Israel itself guaranteeing this, but on the West Bank and Gaza the network of settlements, roads, and no concessions whatever on sovereign land rights to the Palestinians serve the same function.
What boggles the mind is that no official -- US, Palestinian, Arab, UN, European, or anyone else -- has challenged Israel on this point, which has been threaded through all of the Oslo documents, procedures and agreements. That is why, of course, after nearly 10 years of "peace negotiations," Israel still controls the West Bank and Gaza. They are more directly controlled (owned?) by over 1,000 Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters who are the majority in his government) has either officially recognized the occupied territories as occupied territories or gone on to recognise that Palestinians could or might theoretically have sovereign rights that is, without Israeli control over borders, water, air, security on what most of the world considers Palestinian land. So to speak about the "vision" of a Palestinian state, as has become fashionable, is mere vision alas, unless the question of land ownership and sovereignty is openly and officially conceded by the Israeli government. No Israeli government ever has made this concession and, if I am right, none will in the near future. It needs to be remembered that Israel is the only state in the world today that has never had internationally declared borders; the only state not the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state where over 90 per cent of the land is held in trust for the exclusive use of the Jewish people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have recognised any of the main provisions of international law (as argued recently in these pages by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.
This is why I have been sceptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context simply means that Palestinians will have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land. It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible leadership (to say nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in general) that he never made the decade-long Oslo negotiations focus on land ownership, and thus never put the onus on Israel to declare itself constitutively willing to give up title to Palestinian land; nor did he ever ask that Israel be required to deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to save himself again, whereas what we really need are international monitors to protect us, as well as elections to assure a real political future for the Palestinian people.
The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: is it willing juridically to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible land ownership assertions for which Sharon and his parents and his soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 per cent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the last 22 per cent, both times to Israel. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel's untenable extra-territorial claims, those absurd Biblically-based pretensions, and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people completely. Why is that kind of fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel? Can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence: whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of all other states in the world today. The record is not reassuring.
2. America must see that Sharon is the problem
Avi Shlaim
The Observer, 14 April 2002
The Middle East conflict cannot be resolved while the Israelis are led by a man who sees military force as the only instrument of policy.
When running for Prime Minister in February of last year, Ariel Sharon, Israel's ferocious hawk, tried to reinvent himself as a man of peace. Against the background of the al-Aqsa intifada, which he had helped to trigger by his provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), he ran on a ticket of peace with security. In his first year in power, Sharon has achieved neither peace nor security but only a steady escalation of the violence. In the last two weeks Sharon has revealed himself once again as a man wedded to military force as the only instrument of policy.
The 74 year-old Israeli leader has been at the sharp end of confrontation with the Arabs for most of his life. The hallmarks of his career are mendacity, the most savage brutality towards Arab civilians, and a persistent preference for force over diplomacy to solve political problems. These features found their clearest expression in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which Sharon masterminded as defense minister in Menachem Begin's Likud government.
The war that Sharon is currently waging on the West Bank fraudulently named 'Operation Defensive Shield', is in some ways a replay of his war in Lebanon. It is directed against the Palestinian people; it stems from the same stereotypes that the Palestinians are terrorists; it is based on the same denial of Palestinian national rights; it employs the same strategy of savage and overwhelming military force; and it displays the same callous disregard for international opinion, international law, the UN, and the norms of civilized behavior. Even the principal personalities are the same: today, as in 1982, Ariel Sharon confronts Yasser Arafat.
The invasion of Lebanon was not a defensive war but a war of deception. Sharon obtained cabinet approval for a limited military operation against the PLO forces in southern Lebanon. From the beginning, however, he planned a much bigger operation to serve broader geo-strategic aims. The principal objective of Sharon's war was to destroy the PLO as a military and political organisation, to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism, to spread despair and despondency among the inhabitants of the West Bank, and to pave the way to its absorption into Greater Israel. A second objective was to give Israel's Maronite allies a leg-up to power, and then compel them to sign a peace treaty with Israel. A third objective was to expel the Syrian army from Lebanon and to make Israel the dominant power in the Levant.
Under Sharon's devious direction, an operation that was supposedly undertaken in self-defence developed into a merciless siege of Beirut and culminated in a horrendous massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila which led to the removal of Sharon from the ministry of defence.
In his crude but relentless propaganda war, Sharon tries to portray Arafat as the master terrorist who orchestrates the violence against Israel and secretly encourages suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. To be sure, Arafat is not above using violence. Nor has he done as much as he could to curb the activities of the Islamic militants. Yet Arafat is the leader who persuaded his movement to abandon armed struggle and adopt the political path in the struggle for independence. By signing the Oslo Accord in 1993, and clinching it with a hesitant handshake, he and Yitzhak Rabin undertook to resolve the outstanding differences between their two nations by peaceful means. Until the assassination of Rabin two years later, Arafat proved himself an effective partner on the road to peace. The subsequent decline of the Oslo peace process was caused more by Israeli territorial expansionism than by Palestinian terrorism. Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which Sharon's government continues to expand, are the root of the problem.
Ever the opportunist, Sharon was quick to jump on the bandwagon of America's 'war against terror' in the aftermath of 11 September. Under this banner, Sharon has embarked on a sinister attempt to destroy the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. His real agenda is to subvert what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into the ground, and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood. To add insult to injury, he wants to remove Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader and symbol of the Palestinian revolution, and to replace him with a collaborationist regime which would serve as a sub-contractor What Sharon is unable or unwilling to comprehend is that security cannot be achieved by purely military means. The only hope of security for both communities lies in a return to the political track, something that the champion of violent solutions has always avoided. Consequently, Sharon's second war, like his first, is doomed to failure. If the history of this conflict teaches anything, it is that violence breeds more violence.
Many people who do not necessarily support Sharon's brutal methods nevertheless have sympathy for Israel's predicament. They point out that the suicide bombs against innocent Israeli civilians pre-dated the incursion of Israeli tanks into West Bank towns and villages. Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however, goes back to 1967 and constitutes the underlying cause of Palestinian frustration, hatred, and despair of which the suicide bombs are only the cruelest manifestation. They say that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deny altogether Israel's right to exist. These are, however, them extremist fringes. The savage treatment meted out by Sharon to the Palestinians is self-defeating precisely because it undermines moderates and strengthens extremists.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current crisis is America's complicity in the Israeli onslaught. One might have expected George Bush Jr. to resume the even-handed policy of his father towards Arabs and Israelis. Instead, he has reverted to a blatantly pro-Israeli policy reminiscent of the Reagan years. Although America is a signatory to the Oslo Accord, Bush has abandoned the Palestinian side.
Sharon is holding Arafat hostage in his headquarters in Ramallah, depriving him of food, water, medicines and telephone lines. The only concession that the American President has managed to extract from the truculent Israeli Prime Minister is a promise not to kill the Palestinian leader. The Israelis have destroyed much of Arafat's police force and security services, leaving him with a mobile phone. Under these conditions the embattled Palestinian leader does not have the means to prevent suicide attacks even if he had the will to do so.
In an apparent reversal of American policy a week ago, President Bush called on Sharon to pull out his troops from the Palestinian towns and villages. Sharon insisted they would stay as long as necessary to accomplish their mission of uprooting the infrastructure of terror. Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to the region to broker a cease-fire and restore the political track. He is unlikely to get far with Sharon unless he backs up his words with the threat to cut economic and military aid to Israel. The death toll in 'Operation Defensive Shield' is more than 200 Palestinians and 60 Israelis. How many more lives will have to be sacrificed before the Americans understand that General Sharon is part of the problem, not the solution?
Avi Shlaim is a professor of International Relations at Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)
3. What kind of war is this?'
Amira Hass
Haaretz, April 26, 2002
It is still impossible to know how many people are buried under the ruins in the Jenin refugee camp, where the smell of decomposing bodies mingles with the stench of garbage and the scent of geraniums and mint.
Leaning on a cane, the man stood on a huge pile of ruins: a jumble of crushed concrete, twisted iron rods, shreds of mattresses, electric cables, fragments of ceramic tiles, bits of water pipes and an orphaned light switch. "This is my home," he said, "and my son is inside." His name is Abu Rashid; his son is Jamal, 35, and confined to a wheelchair. The bulldozer began to gnaw into the house when members of the family were inside it. And where would they be, if not in the house, seeking - like all the inhabitants of the refugee camp in Jenin - the safest place to hide from the firing of the mortars and the rockets and the machine guns, and waiting for a brief respite?
Abu Rashid and the other members of his family hurried to the front door, went out with their hands up and tried to yell to the huge bulldozer, the operator of which was unseen and unheard, that there were people inside. But the bulldozer did not stop roaring, retreating a bit and then attacking again, returning and taking a bite out of the concrete wall, until it collapsed on Jamal before anyone could save him.
All around Abu Rashid other people were climbing up or down heaps of rubbish, making their way between piles of cement, sharp iron wires and fragments of metal, concrete pillars and ceilings that had collapsed, fragments of sinks. Not all of them were as as Abu Rashid, who talked to himself more than he talked to those who stopped to listen to him. There were those who tried to rescue something from the ruins: a garment, a shoe, a sack of grain.
Nearby, a young girl almost stumbled on a pile of broken cement blocks, pointed at the ceiling, at her feet, and wept and wept. Between the wails, she managed to say that this had been her parents' home and that she does not know who is buried under it, who had managed to get away, whether anyone was alive under the ruins, who would get them out, or when.
Among the piles of ruins, and in the midst of some houses that were still partially standing, the walls that had not collapsed riddled with numerous bullet holes of all sizes, a broad expanse had been created. Where, up until two weeks ago, several houses had stood, some of them three stories high, one or more Israel Defense Forces bulldozers had gone over the piles of cement several times, flattened them, ground them to dust, "made a `Trans-Israel highway,'" as A.S. put it. His home had also fallen victim to the bulldozers' teeth. Someone indicates a small opening in one pile of rubble. From it he had heard cries for help until Sunday night. On Monday morning there were no longer any sounds coming from it. Someone else points to what had formerly been a house where two sisters lived. Someone says that they are crippled. It is still unknown whether they are under the ruins or whether they got out of the camp in time.
Relative quiet
There are houses that were empty of inhabitants when they were demolished. In some cases the soldiers ordered people to leave immediately, so that they would not get killed. One old man, people say, refused to leave his home. "Fifty years ago you expelled me from Haifa. Now I have nowhere to go," they report he had said. The soldiers lifted the stubborn old man bodily and hauled him out. And there were cases in which they did not bother to issue a warning -and the bulldozers came. Without announcing over the bullhorns, without checking whether anyone was inside. This happened on Sunday, April 14, to the members of the Abu Bakr family, who live on the thin line between the refugee camp and the city of Jenin proper.
In both city and camp, a curfew had been imposed; soldiers were circulating in tanks and armored vehicles and on foot, shooting from time to time, tossing stun grenades or blowing up suspicious objects. But relative to the previous week it was quiet: There was no longer any firing from helicopters, no more exchanges of fire with a handful of armed Palestinian activists. But all of a sudden, at four in the afternoon, the members of the Abu Bakr family heard the sound of a wall being crushed. The father of the family went outside, waved a white flag and yelled to the soldiers: "We are in the house; where do you want us to go, why are you demolishing our home with us inside?" They yelled at him: "Yallah, yallah, get inside," and stopped the bull- dozer.
This narrow seamline where the house is located, several meters wide, has in recent days served as a transit bridge from the city to the refugee camp. The residents of the city, many of whom come from the refugee camp, tried to evade the soldiers and bring their relatives and friends water, food and cigarettes. At the Abu Bakrs' home they concluded that the soldiers wanted to expand the area that separates the city from the camp in order to prevent "smuggling" of one sort or another.
In the evening, an armored vehicle was positioned next to the house and soldiers combed the surrounding courtyard. Then the armored vehicle left. M. went to make coffee. He managed to put a teaspoon of sugar into the narrow-necked, long-handled coffee pot and began to stir the boiling water when someone or something came quickly in through the window,
broke the glass and set the kitchen on fire. A stun grenade? A tear-gas grenade? Did the soldiers outside think someone was firing at them when he lit the gas burner? M. thanks God that only his hands and face were burned in the flames that were immediately extinguished, and that other people in the family weren't hurt, and that the house was not destroyed.
Mohammed al-Sba'a, 70, was not so lucky. On Monday, April 8, the bulldozers thundered near his home in the Hawashan neighborhood, in the middle of the camp. He went out of his house to tell the soldiers that there were people inside - he and his wife, his two sons, their wives and seven children. He was shot in his doorway, hit in the head and killed, related one of his sons this
week. Members of his family managed to bring him inside. But then they were ordered to come out: The men were arrested, and then released and taken to the village of Rumani, northwest of Jenin. The women were taken to the Red Crescent building. The father's body remained in the house. When the men of the family returned from arrest, they could not find the house.
The destruction of dozens of houses by bulldozers began on Saturday, April 6, four days after the Israel Defense Forces attack on Jenin began. It is not yet possible to know how many people were buried under the ruined houses. The horrible smell of dead bodies of which new ones are being discovered every day - mingles with the stink of the garbage that has not been collected, the garbage that has been burnt and the surprising smells of geraniums, roses and the mint that grows near the bougainvillea that people cultivated in the narrow strips of ground between the crowded houses. When the time comes, UNRWA and the Red Cross will make lists of the detained, the wounded and the missing. But the most urgent mission right now is the distribution of water, food and medicines. The camp has been defined as a disaster area.
The demolition of the homes by bulldozers was preceded by heavy shooting and shelling from tanks, from the beginning of the IDF action on the night of Tuesday, April 2. The tanks surrounded the camp, took up positions on the hill to the west of it, rumbled into the main street. Two days later, firing from helicopters began, people relate: rocket fire and submachine-gun fire. People took shelter under staircases, on the ground floor, in interior bathrooms, in storehouses near the inner courtyards. People crowded into small rooms, feeling each other in the dark, frightened. They blocked their ears and shut their eyes, cuddled the small, crying children.
Damage statistics
When the shooting died down, they related, they went out and found their houses scorched, flames and smoke rising from them, riddled with holes, their floors shaky, doors and windows ripped out, windowpanes smashed to bits, huge holes in the front walls. The turn of the damage statistics will also come, and when it does, UN teams will tell of how many houses were destroyed by the bulldozers, how many were damaged by the shooting and whether they can be repaired or whether it is safer to demolish them altogether. How many families were in them. How many individuals.
Yumm Yasser rescued a year-old baby from the neighbors' house, which was shelled. The baby's father, Rizk, she related, crawled out with his two legs injured and his back burned by fire. He came out with his arm stretched forward, bleeding, she said. The house was surrounded by soldiers. A military doctor or paramedic came, cleaned the wounds, bandaged them, and soldiers took him to the area of the cemetery and left him there. Neighbors who saw him gathered him up and called a doctor. They managed to get him to a hospital only a week after he was wounded.
H. and her family were in their house when it was bombarded. They ran to take shelter in her father's home nearby. H. thinks that this was on April 8. People find it hard to remember exact dates; all the days of the attack have become a jumble of fear and blood and destruction, without nights or days. Y., her husband, was wounded by the shooting when he went out the door. She dragged him to her father's house. There they bandaged his leg, prayed that everything would be all right and managed to get him to a private hospital only on Sunday, April 14, evading the soldiers who patrolled the alley on foot.
A.S. was wounded in the course of performing an IDF mission: A foot patrol took him out of his house to accompany soldiers, walk ahead of them and open the doors of the neighborhood for them. A.S. did as he was told, and as he stood by one of the doors, another unit of soldiers appeared. Perhaps they thought he belonged to the mukawamin (insurgents, armed activists), because no one else dared to roam the streets during those first days of the IDF takeover of the camp. He was shot and wounded. For four days he lay in the home of neighbors, until his brothers managed to take him to medical care. Their home, on the second floor of the family's house on the hillside, was damaged by three to five rockets and numerous bullets. Soldiers took up positions in a tall house nearby, and shot.
His mother tells the story at length, leading visitors from one destroyed room to the next. And then she takes us out to the garden: he loved to plant things, he loved life, not death, she said of her son. Her other sons offered the visitors fruit from the garden: pleasantly tart loquats, refreshingly juicy plums. Most of the water tanks in the camp had been hit during the first days of the shooting. The water pipes were burst by the IDF bulldozers and the tanks. The fresh water supply was cut off immediately. Therefore, when every drop of water must be saved, biting into these fruits is a luxury.
Abu Riyad, 51, was also enlisted, like many others, for IDF missions. For five days he accompanied soldiers: During the day he walked ahead of them, from door to door, knocked on the doors as the soldiers concealed themselves behind him, their rifles aimed at the door and at him. At night he was with them in a house they had taken over. They handcuffed him and two soldiers guarded him, he said. At the end of his mission, they told him to stay in a certain house,alone. All around the bulldozers and the tanks thundered. One of the tanks rolled onto the house. Abu Riyad jumped to another house, leaping from one destroyed house to another until he got to his home, which he also found partially in ruins, from hits by three rockets. There were 13 people in the house when the rocket landed on it.
A soldier cleaned the bathroom
S. declared that she had been lucky. Her family's house was only occupied for a week, like a dozen other houses in the camp that climbs up the hillside and the cliffs. S. is a widow who lives withher brother and his family in a house at the western edge of the camp: four adults, 10 children. Most of the residents had left the neighborhood before the IDF invasion. On the first and second nights soldiers took over two or three houses adjacent to the home of S.'s family. The members of the family took shelter in the kitchen, which they thought was the most protected room. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, someone came in through the wall, made a gaping hole near the floor and came in right over the head of 8-year-old Rabiya. Windowpanes shattered and the room was covered in dust. The 14 people in the kitchen began to scream. Through the hole in the wall they heard someone shouting in Arabic: Anyone who leaves the house will die. They peeked and saw a group of soldiers in the narrow alley. They tried to negotiate with the soldiers; perhaps they would go out to the neighbors' house, to a safer room, but the only answer they heard was: "Whoever leaves the house will die."
After a short while, the soldiers made a hole in the wall that leads to the staircase and came in through it. The members of the family, huddled together in one corner, looked on in astonishment as more and more soldiers came in, their faces painted black. The members of the family were put in another room, full of broken glass and dust. They were held there from the evening until early Friday morning. The soldiers, related S., did not allow them to leave the dimly lit room. When they pleaded to go to the bathroom, the soldiers brought them a pot from the kitchen. S.'s brother-in-law was arrested, and three women and their children were left along in a house filled with strange soldiers.
At dawn, S. opened the door and discovered that the soldiers had been replaced. With hand gestures and body language she signaled that she wanted to go to the bathroom, to take the children to the bathroom, to bring food. Someone who looked to her like an officer said to go ahead. She had to make her way through any number of soldiers who were lying on the floor of her home, tiptoeing among them. The filth she found in the bathroom disgusted her. The officer who was next to her hung his head and she concluded that he was ashamed of what he saw. He went to a nearby house, where no one was home, and brought water. And he cleaned the bathroom. When they leave in about a week the soldiers will leave behind a large pile of leftovers from their rations.
During that night, when the family was locked into one room, the soldiers made a search of the house. They emptied drawers and cupboards, overturned furniture, broke the television, cut the phone line, took away the telephone and broke another hole in a wall that leads to another apartment. Along the broken wall is a picture done in watercolors that was painted by her brother-in-law's brother when he was 15. He drew a Swiss landscape: a lake, snowcapped mountains, evergreen trees, a deer, a house with a red-tiled roof and smoke curling from the chimney. By the shore of the lake he painted two mustached men dressed as Palestinians, riding a donkey. The date: May 10, 1995. The signature: Ashraf Abu al-Haija.
Al-Haija was killed on one of the first days of the IDF attack, hit by a rocket. On Tuesday of last week his scorched body was still lying in one of the rooms of the half-destroyed house. Al-Haija was an activist in Hamas, who together with members of other armed groups had sworn to defend the camp to the death. J.Z., two of whose nephews were among the armed men who were killed, estimates that they numbered no more than 70. "But everyone who helped them saw himself as active in the resistance: those who signaled from afar that soldiers were approaching, those who hid them, those who made tea for them." According to him, no door in the camp was closed to them when they fled from the soldiers who were looking for them, the people of the camp, he said, decided not to abandon him, not to leave the fighters to their own devices. This was the decision of the majority, taken individually by each person.
Despite his family and emotional relationship with many of the armed men, he admits that it is hard for him to describe exactly how the fighting went in which they were killed and in which Israeli soldiers were killed. "From reconstructions that we made together, it appears to us that the army attacked the camp with tank and machine gun fire from several directions and tried to get infantry forces in. But because of the resistance by our fighters, this failed. Then they started to attack all the houses in the camp with helicopters and tanks, indiscriminately. The soldiers that took over the houses at the edge of the camp signaled where to fire and hit." Gradually, the armed Palestinians were routed deeper into the camp, to their last battles.
J.Z. is a construction worker who built his own home and homes of friends. His house was destroyed by direct hits from several rockets. He is sleeping at the home of his young friend, A.M. When darkness envelops the camp, whose electricity has been cut off since April 3, candlelight shines through only a few of the windows. There is an illusion that a window through which light does not shine will not be hit by shooting. IDF fire continues at intervals, though there are no longer any Palestinians who will shoot in the direction of the soldiers. From time to time the silence is shattered by the sound of an explosion.
Anxiety and uncertainty are overcome in a conversation typical of these days, with A.N.'s mother and his aunt. On Monday evening the conversation with the guest from Israel began with the enumeration of those J.Z. knows were killed: Seven of them were armed men killed in battle. There were 10 civilians, among them three women and at least two old men. There are scores of people whose fate is still unknown.
The conversation jumps from memories of the prison installation at Ketsiot, where J. was imprisoned during the first intifada and which has now been reopened, for soldiers. One soldier, someone had told A.M., had left his skullcap in a house he had searched. Heavy shooting enveloped the neighborhood and the house where he had forgotten the skullcap. The soldier told a young Palestinian who had been "recruited" that if he brought him the skullcap he would be released. Dodging the bullets, the young man ran to the house, brought the skullcap and was allowed to go home. J. tells another story that is going around the camp, about soldiers who were attacked from inside a house they had taken over earlier, from which they fled, leaving their weapons behind. It is said in the camp that one of them cried: "Mother, mother, what kind of war is this?"
4. Listen to Barghouti
Gideon Levy
It's a good thing Israel did not kill Marwan Barghouti; but it's a shame that it arrested him. Following dozens of assassinations, the Israel Defense Forces suddenly proved that when it wants to arrest someone instead of assassinating him, it knows how to do it quite well. If Israel had only adopted the same approach with Fatah activist Dr. Thabet Thabet, or the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa, plus a long list of other targeted Palestinians, the intifada's flames would be a lot lower and a lot of blood would have been spared on both sides.
Regrettably, however, Israel did not take the wiser course of action and allow the Tanzim leader to remain in hiding, the way it has done with some of the other leaders of the Palestinian security services whom, Israel says, have been involved in terror attacks. Arresting Barghouti may have been just, but it is not wise. Now he'll become the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
Now that Barghouti is under arrest, Israel must put him on trial in a civilian court, as befits a political leader suspected of serious crimes. As for the difference between civilian courts and military ones, it has already been said that it's about the same as the difference between a philharmonic orchestra and a military band - the same instruments, but with different results.
Barghouti has a much greater chance of getting a fair trial to which, like any suspect, he is entitled - in a civilian court in Jerusalem than in the military tribunals of Beit El. The court hearings should be open to the public, so that the representatives of the Shin Bet security service and the State Prosecution are required to display the evidence against the man to the entire world. And do we still need to point out that Barghouti should not be tortured, as happened the last time he was arrested? Humiliating him will also fan the flames of rage in the Palestinian and Arab street.
Of no less importance is to listen to the accused. Not only could the Shin Bet learn quite a bit from him, all Israelis should take heed as well. Look at Barghouti and you'll understand the entire story.The path he took was the only one we showed the Palestinians a path on which we tripped and pushed them deeper and deeper into despair and ultimately to violence.
Barghouti may be responsible for ruthless terror attacks, but Israel is likely to long for leaders like him, because his heirs will be much, much worse. Full of vengeance and hate, they will not be partners to a compromise like he would be. "You think tomorrow they'll find someone more moderate than me, someone to make [Chief of Staff Shaul] Mofaz coffee in the morning?" he quipped to me a few months ago when he feared he was on Israel's death list.
Barghouti did not begin by killing. As a politician, who apparently turned into a terrorist, it cannot be said of him that he did not try the path of negotiations. He was a peace activist. Few Palestinians were as active as he in promoting peace. He was deeply involved in contacts with many Israelis - and not only ones from the left and never hid his admiration for certain elements of Israeli life. "I wake up in the morning and look West, not East," he once told me. In those days, he marched in peace demonstrations, his arms locked with those of Meretz lawmakers Dedi Zucker and Zahava Gal-On.
That image may be surreal now, just like the days when he used to take his children to the Safari animal park in Ramat Gan. He would visit the political parties' central committees and MKs, making friends with some of them on joint delegations overseas, never missing a meeting and believing all the time in the purpose of the dialogue. "When will you finally understand that nothing frightens the Palestinians the way the settlements do?" he asked me on Land Day in 1997, while we drove around burning tires in his little car.
A few months ago, while already in hiding, he still called himself "the Palestinian peace camp." An alumnus of Israeli prisons, Barghouti is practically the last vestige of those Palestinians who knew Israelis well and even admired some of their characteristics. "I tell myself how patient we were," he said recently. "I was ready to meet with Shas and the Likud - with everyone. To talk. To persuade. But the Israelis don't want to understand." Now, the beloved has become an enemy. "I know how I've changed," he admits.
More than anything else - and he should be believed on this he wanted an end to the occupation, not the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. But the path grew longer and longer, until, as far as he was concerned, it was never-ending. As in any criminal case, pay attention to the motive for the crime: Barghouti's motive was politically justified, even if his actions cannot be. The politician became the leader of a violent organization that chose terror. At first, he limited his organization to actions only inside the occupied territories, apparently escalating its efforts until he eventually sent suicide bombers to Tel Aviv. "Why should you feel safe in Tel Aviv when we don't feel secure in Ramallah?" he asked.
The image of Barghouti shackled by Israeli soldiers is also a picture that goes back terribly far in time. The former prisoner and deportee, who became a leader and a legitimate partner for dialogue, is once again in irons. Israeli tanks are in the casbahs, soldiers are in the refugee camps, the Ketziot Prison has reopened, and Barghouti is under arrest once again. The long path Israelis and Palestinians walked together seems to have vanished, as if it had never existed at all. When Barghouti is released again from prison, he'll be even more extreme. Maybe by then, there will be nobody to talk with.
"This is our gift for Independence Day," one IDF officer so arrogantly defined his arrest. No gift could be more depressing.
5. Israel’s recipe for perpetual conflict"
Naseer Aruri on why Oslo was doomed to fail
19 April 2002 Page 7
NO ISRAELI defense of its war on Palestinians would be complete without a reference to Yasser Arafat’s supposed rejection of "peace" at the Camp David summit hosted by Bill Clinton in 2000. The story is so engrained in the mythology of the conflict that the mainstream media repeat it at the drop of a hat--that an irrational Arafat walked away from a generous Israeli offer that would have given his Palestinian Authority (PA) control of 95 percent of the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
The facts are different. NASEER ARURI is the author of The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. He explained the reality to ANTHONY ARNOVE.
DID YASSER Arafat reject peace at Camp David?
ARAFAT WAS offered neither a credible peace nor a viable Palestinian state at Camp David II.
Israel had reneged on its obligation to make an agreed-upon withdrawal, and proceeded to Camp David with a speech by Prime Minister Barak in which three no’s were delivered: not to any return to the 1967 borders of Israel, no to any change in the status of Jerusalem, and no to the return of refugees.
The myth of the "generous offer" consisted of four enclaves, bisected by illegally built colonial settlements and bypass roads for Jews only that would have prevented the Palestinians from ever establishing a viable, independent and contiguous state in any area between the River Jordan and
the Mediterranean Sea.
Although the four cantons (northern West Bank, central West Bank, southern West Bank and Gaza) may have been called a "state," the requirements of nation-states were sorely missing. It would have been a state without sovereignty, without geographic continuity and lacking control over its borders, airspace and economic and water resources. In fact, it would have consisted of 64 clusters as islands in the midst of Israel--a "state" existing within Israel, but not alongside Israel.
Moreover, the often-touted story that Barak offered to relinquish 95 to 96 percent of the West Bank-Gaza territory was never examined by the army of U.S. journalists who never spare a chance to repeat it.
The percentage game didn’t take into account the fact that occupied and annexed East Jerusalem was expanded from six square kilometers to 70 square kilometers--to include the land of 28 Palestinian villages. Israel’s total percentage figures have conveniently excluded Jerusalem,the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley and the settlements.
Needless to say, the West Bank and Gaza constitute 22 percent of pre-Israel Palestine, in which Jewish ownership comprised 7 percent. So the generous offer was not 95 percent of the 22 percent, but more like 70 percent of the 22 percent--which would be about 15 percent of historic
Palestine at best.
Moreover, Arafat was expected to relinquish the right of the refugees to return, which is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as by UN General Assembly Resolution 194. In addition, Israel would have retained sovereignty on the land on which Muslim and Christian Holy places are built, while the Palestine Authority would have had control over the buildings.
This was certainly a recipe for perpetual conflict rather than peace.
DO YOU think the Oslo "peace" process was doomed to fail?
THE OSLO process failed because it was an agreement to reach an agreement with built-in gridlock. It was intended to create a facade of diplomacy that would enable Israel to conquer additional Palestinian territory for colonial settlements and bypass roads, under presumed peace
conditions.
The Israeli strategy behind Oslo was based on pursuing a settlement that excluded any sovereign existence for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. It was designed to be a cost-effective strategy, in which the economic and moral cost of policing the occupation would be transferred to Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, while Israel would be released to pursue its world trade ambitions in an atmosphere of normalization with the Arab Middle East.
Knowing that the end game would never include Palestinian independence and the dismantling of the occupation, Israeli governments--irrespective of whether they were led by Likud or Labor--exploited the gridlock in order to procrastinate and prolong the interim period, but never arrive at the final-status negotiations.
The Oslo process became, in effect, a mere process with little substance--a process of creating a self-governing modality for thePalestinians, instead of reaching accords on sovereignty, borders, water, Jerusalem and refugees.
That was the reason for Bill Clinton’s personal involvement in what became known as the Wye River agreement and the Hebron agreement during the late 1990s, among other attempts to iron out problems.
During these endless meetings, the Palestinian Authority was pressed to make one concession after another, including becoming virtually a CIA operative whose mission was to eliminate any popular resistance to the occupation (defined as terrorism).
When Ehud Barak finally decided to renege on Israel’s obligations to make scheduled withdrawals and opted for a final settlement at Camp David in July 2000, the pillars of a credible settlement were absent. Arafat, however, was coaxed into attending a prematurely arranged conference that was bound to fail. Having realized that they had more than exhausted the search for a negotiated settlement, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories rebelled, and the rest is well-known.
WHAT STRATEGY is Sharon following now?
SHARON’S STRATEGY right now is a continuation of his strategy from more than a quarter of a century ago--the redefinition of Israel’s borders to include all of pre-1948 Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. He has been an outspoken advocate of the notion that the
Palestinians should have their sovereign state--in Jordan.
Under the pretext of dismantling the "terrorism infrastructure," he launched an all-out onslaught designed to obliterate not only the Palestinian Authority, but also the economic and political infrastructure of the Palestinians, including cultural, medical and humanitarian institutions.
As prime minister, he has been vigorously trying to browbeat Palestinians into an unconditional surrender--forcing them to end their uprising against the occupation once and for all and accept a fragmented entity under Israel’s overall control.
He has tightened the economic siege and blocked communication between towns, villages and cities--making life unbearable for the ordinary Palestinian, with the purpose of persuading as many as possible to leave.
This is calculated to implement the policy known in Israel as "transfer"--meaning expulsion of Palestinians, or ethnic cleansing.
A negotiated settlement, even on the basis of Oslo, hasn’t been and isn’t now on Sharon’s agenda. That doesn’t mean that it’s on the agenda of the Labor Party, whose luminaries such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak have adhered to the same strategies with different tactics.
Thus, any attempts by Colin Powell to broker a settlement will be futile unless the occupation is dismantled in accordance with international law, and negotiations begin over implementing international law relating to the principal issues, such as the status of Jerusalem, rights of refugees, water and borders.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
