Without question the best article I've had the pleasure to read on the subject.
Thanks to Ulhas Joglekar.
-Macdonald
************
Subject: Israel's killing fields
Volume 17 - Issue 23, Nov. 11 - 24, 2000
India's National Magazine on indiaserver.com
from the publishers of THE HINDU
ESSAY
Israel's killing fields
The structural reasons for the Palestinian uprising and the Israeli terror
are connected not only with the consequences of the Oslo Accords of 1993 but
also the very nature of the Israeli state and the support it gets from the
United States.
AIJAZ AHMAD
IT is very difficult to write about Israel now, in the ideological climate
currently prevailing in India. For several decades, when anti-colonialism
was a substantial ingredient in the secular nationalism that informed even
India's foreign policy, distance from Israel as a settler-colonial state
and close relationship with the Palestinian national movement as
representing the victims of that settler-colonialism was taken for granted
in the polity. So was India's solidarity with the anti-imperialist currents
in the Arab world in general - be it the war of national liberation in
Algeria, the Nasserist commitments to non-alignment, or some other current
of that kind.
This aspect of Indian foreign policy was noted and admired, I might add, by
Arab diplomats and intellectuals. I remember visiting a number of the Arab
countries and regularly meeting a broad cross-section of the intellectuals
there, in the 1960s and 1970 s. I was very young then and it was always very
striking to me that Pakistan's support for Palestine was usually seen as
shallow and Islamicist, whereas the Indian solidarity with the Palestinian
cause was regarded as a natural and secular, non-religious response from a
country that had played so seminal a role in the making of the non-aligned
movement.
I was therefore very surprised when I read the statement of Jaswant Singh,
during the course of his recent visit to Israel, that India's foreign policy
in the past decades was held hostage by the Muslim vote bank and that the
government was now going to correct that error. India's anti-colonialist
past was simply being erased, and what even Arab intellectuals, from their
great distance, could see as an expression of India's secular solidarity
with anti-Zionist forces in Palestine was now being presented , by a suave
and insufferable Foreign Minister, as an error forced by the Muslim minority
in the country upon those whom the Bharatiya Janata Party is fond of calling
"pseudo-secularists". Hindutva was now going to undo all that and make a
strategic alliance with its natural counterpart: Zionism.
What, then, about the current uprising in Palestine? It is said that the
uprising, which the Palestinians themselves are calling "Al-Aqsa Intifada",
was triggered by the visit of Ariel Sharon, the Likud Party leader, to
Al-Aqsa, the holiest Muslim shrine in Palestine (known to the Jewish people
as Temple Mount), with the announced purpose of demonstrating "Jewish
sovereignty" over the Al-Aqsa compound. The visit was clearly authorised by
the Ehud Barak government, which also provided more than 1,000 armed
policemen to protect Sharon.
It is important to recall, though, that the Palestinian agitation did not
begin with that Thursday visit. Rather, the agitation came the next day,
when Israeli security forces were massed in the compound at the time of
Friday prayers, in a calculated provocation when a large crowd was present
and someone or the other could be trusted to fan the flames. That is when
the Israelis started shooting. It is also worth remarking that during the
first couple of days the Palestinian agitation was restricted to
slogan-shouting and stone-throwing. Palestinian gunmen entered the fray only
after the corpses had begun to mount, at the hands of the Israeli
sharpshooters who were clearly under orders to kill. The ratio of the
Palestinians and Israelis killed is still about 20 to 1.
There was, in other words, a deeper design which seems to have been prepared
many months ago. Saeb Arikaat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, has said
that he and Arafat went personally to Barak's house to persuade him not to
grant permission to Sharon to make the visit and to warn of the possible
consequences; Faisal Husseini, another senior leader of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO), says that he too appealed personally to
Barak. Barak rejected all such requests, knowing well that among
Palestinians Sharon was the most hated man. To understand the motivation, we
need to understand something about Sharon and Barak, and then reflect also
on the consequences of the Oslo Accords and on that monstrosity which is
represented in the media as the " peace process".
ON March 23 this year, well before the latest uprising, Professor Tanya
Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, wrote in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot
Aharanot: "Barak is the most dangerous Prime Minister in the history of
Israel. Already in 1982 he proposed to extend the Lebanon war to a total
war on Syria. Then he explained (in a memorandum to Sharon) that the best
way to do that is without sharing the plans with the government. Today he is
consulting only with the heads of the army and the security services. Never
had the army as much grip on Israeli politics as in the times of Barak."
During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when he wrote that notorious
memorandum, Barak was merely an army general, albeit an important one,
secretly suggesting that Israel create an excuse to invade Syria and destroy
its army, to Ariel Sharon, the Defence Minister at that time, who, as Noam
Chomsky recently put it, "is the very symbol of Israeli state terror and
aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going back to 1953." In the
recent days, Barak, now the Labour Prime Minister of Israel, and Sharon,
currently the head of the Likud Party and himself aspiring to become Prime
Minister, have been negotiating the formation of a government of national
unity.
To the matter of Barak we shall return in a moment, but who is Ariel Sharon?
As the Israeli police and border guards train their guns at Palestinian
demonstrators with orders to "shoot to kill," Uri Avnery, an authoritative
veteran of the peace movement in Israel, reminds us that
the practice itself is not new. It was used first by Ariel Sharon in the
first years of the occupation, when he instituted a reign of terror in the
Gaza Strip. As he told me himself afterwards, he gave the order "not to take
prisoners". Palestinians caught bearing arms were killed on the spot.
Later, the practice was employed by the "Mista'arvim" ("Pretending to be
Arabs") undercover units, whose slogan was "ensure death". This was
discovered when the Mista'arvim killed one of their own men, mistaking him
for a "terrorist". After wounding him, they dispatched him at very close
range with a shot in the head (A Lost War, October 9, 2000).
Avnery goes on to point out that - quite aside from tanks, helicopter
gunships and other weapons of war of that kind - which the Israelis have
deployed against largely unarmed, stone-throwing demonstrators, the
deadliest introduction in this phase of quelling the Palestinian uprising
is the "sharpshooter" - a particular kind of soldier with a special kind of
training whose task is to zero in on specific individuals, presumably
'leaders', in the demonstration and shoot them on the spot. This, he says,
is in line with the policies Sharon framed some 30 years ago; the training
for the latest deployments bagan, according to both Avnery and Reinhart, in
June 2000.
Sharon, in fact, was the one who, as Minister for Agriculture, first planted
the "settlements" of armed Israelis in the Palestinian "territories"
occupied after the 1967 war, mostly members of the Far Right. As Minister
for Defence, he pressed Prime Minister Menachem Begin to invade Lebanon,
leading to the destruction of Beirut, the most cosmopolitan city in the Arab
world, and the occupation of southern Lebanon. In all his diverse
ministerial assignments, he has fixed the borders of annexation for which
the present war is being fought. And he was the one who ordered the
massacres of the Sabra and Shattila camps in 1982. He fits, in other words,
every conceivable definition of a war criminal. Today he is the head of
Likud, the other major party in Israeli politics which alternates with
Labour as the ruling party, and he has been invited by Barak, "the most
dangerous Prime Minister in the history of Israel," to form a government of
national unity. How has this situation come about? For the most recent
background, we can take recourse to a lengthier quotation, also from Avnery:
Just a month ago, Barak was bankrupt; a politician at the end of his career.
He had lost his majority in the Knesset, his partners had left him, the days
of his government were numbered and it only managed to carry on because of
the Knesset recess. The polls predicted that he would lose the imminent
elections by a large margin.
Ariel Sharon was in a similar situation. His career was nearing its end. It
was clear that his Likud Party would oust him and replace him with
Netanyahu, who would win the elections.
And then, as if by a miracle, everything changed. Barak started to talk
about the "holy places of the nation", because of which he could not agree
to Palestinian sovereignty over the holy mosques. Sharon announced that he
was going to visit this Muslim compound. Barak took the visit under his
wing and sent 1,200 police officers to accompany Sharon. The visit caused
the expected explosion. The next day seven Palestinians were killed by
Israeli policemen near the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The timing of the Barak-Sharon provocation was thus determined by their own
political compulsions. On the one hand, Barak was expected to face and lose
by a very wide margin a no-confidence motion in a Knesset session that was
due in the last week of October. On the other hand, the Attorney-General
had on September 27 dropped charges of corruption and bribery against
Netanyahu, the former Likud Prime Minister and by far the most popular
politician in Israel at the time, who was now free to reclaim the Likud
leadership from Sharon. The latter appeared in the Al-Aqsa compound the next
day and the killing began the day after that.
Once the methodical killing of Palestinians began, Barak's popularity
ratings rose from 20 to 50 per cent and the very coalition partners who had
deserted him began reassuring him that they would not press the
no-confidence motion for at least a month. Having come in the limelight
again, meanwhile, Sharon declared that he would join a government of
national unity only if Barak forgoes the so-called "peace process"
altogether. In her latest commentary, Professor Reinhart says that "in the
Sharm El-Sheikh summit..., Barak got from the U.S. his green light to
slaughter... There is talk about the Palestinian Kosovo, with 2,000 to 3,000
Palestinians dead. As usual, the blame for this slaughter is put in advance
on Arafat, who, the story goes, wants his people to be slaughtered, to gain
international sympathy."
The timing was thus surely determined by the political compulsions of Barak
and Sharon. However, the structural reasons for both the uprising and the
terror run much deeper and are connected, in the immediate past, with the
consequences of the Oslo Accords of 1993 and, in the larger perspective,
with the very nature of the Israeli state and the unconditional material and
moral support it gets from the United States. Both these aspects should bear
some commentary.
THE basic flaw of the Oslo Accords was simply that, as Robert Fisk, the
award-winning British correspondent, has put it (The Independent, October
13): "The Palestinians were being forced by Americans and Israelis to sign a
peace that would give them neither a state nor an end to Jewish settlements
on Arab land, nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem... Many outstanding
issues have been left to the final negotiations: water, the fate of the 3.6
million Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem and the Israeli
settlements, and the extent of Palestinian sovereignty. After the agreed
Israeli withdrawals have been completed, 59 per cent of the West Bank will
still remain under Israeli control. Will the resulting Palestinian state be
a "mini-state" with limited sovereignty?"
In other words, Arafat had written away all the gains of the 1987-1992
intifada for not much more than municipal authority over little patches of
Palestinian land, while all else was left to a long-drawn process of
negotiations in which the final settlement talks were postponed until six
years later. Israel used this extended time to build so many Jewish
settlements and security highways, dividing the West Bank into many pieces
which are isolated from one another, that the Palestinian entity which
finally results from the peace process would not be much more than a
scattering of apartheid-style Bantustans.
Seven years after the Oslo Accords, Israel has security and administrative
control of most of the West Bank and 20 per cent of the small principality
of Gaza. As Amira Hass wrote in the prestigious Israeli daily Ha'aretz
(October 18), Israel has been able during this period to double the number
of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its
discriminatory policy of cutting back water quotas for three million
Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the
West Bank, and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in
a network of bypass roads meant only for Jews. During these days of strict
internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can see how carefully
each road was planned: so that 200,000 Jews have freedom of movement, about
three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they
submit to Israeli demands. The bloodbath that has been going on for weeks is
the natural outcome of seven years of lying and deception, just as the
first Intifada was the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation.
In speaking of "200,000 Jews" Hass is obviously referring to the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank alone; another 200,000 such settlers were introduced over
the years into Jerusalem itself. We might add that the whole of the Gaza
Strip is ringed by an electrified fence and the airport, the strip's main
contact with the outside world, is controlled by the Israelis. A Palestinian
uprising there is basically a prison riot.
Putting an end to the so-called "peace process" at this point is important
for Israel because it has gained from the Oslo Accords everything it had
desired. And the next stage, aimed to bring about a final solution, would
require it to make some basic changes in its historic positions, for which
there is no consent in the broad Israeli population which, barring the small
number of anti-Zionists, is very much in tune with the Baraks and the
Sharons.
THIS brings us, then, to the very nature of Israeli society and state. The
first thing to be said here is that Israel is the only nation-state in the
world which derives the legitimacy of its existence, its claim to territory
and nationhood, the sanctity of its national language, its very identity as
a "Jewish state", its claimed right to evict the Muslim and Christian
populations of historic Palestine and replace them with a Jewish population
imported from the four corners of the globe - in short its very raison
d'etre - to a religious text, in this case the Old Testament.
Palestinians have no right to return to homes from which they have been
evicted within the last half century, either because they don't exist (as
Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, once said) or because they are said to
have left by their own accord for greener pastures (which is the official
position of the entire Zionist establishment and its supporters, inside
Israel and the world over). By contrast, every Jewish person living anywhere
in the world has a permanent "right of return" because these are , after
all, "the Biblical lands"; Palestine must therefore be re-named "Israel",
and what the rest of the world knew simply as "the West Bank" must be
re-named "Judea and Samaria" because those are the names used for these
areas in the Old Testament.
When Pakistanis call their country an Islamic Republic, Indians consider
them - quite rightly - obscurantist and anti-secular. When the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) claims that India must be turned into a "Hindu
Rashtra" and mobilises its goons to attack the minorities as well as their
churches and mosques, Indians call them - quite rightly - fascist. Israel,
by contrast, is free to be, in letter and spirit, a "Jewish state," with all
the racial and religious meanings that the term implies, without coming in
for any kind of criticism; it must always be considered modern, secular,
democratic, beleagured by anti-semitism, "Islamic fundamentalism" and so on.
To dissent from this view of Israel is to lay yourself open, if you are not
Jewish, to the charge of being anti-semitic. If you are Jewish but also
anti-Zionist, like Noam Chomsky, you will be portrayed as a "self-hating
Jew". Thanks to the Israeli military capability which keeps the whole of
the middle eastern and north African oil-producing world at bay, and thanks
to the Zionist success in portraying the state of Israel as the state of the
survivors of Nazi death camps, which then naturally evokes all kinds of
sympathy for it, Israel commands in the western world, and increasingly on
the global scale, a matchless propaganda machinery.
Israel is quite possibly the most savage of the existing nation-states, and
surely the one where "nation" is so very thoroughly identified with race and
religion; even in Iran "nation" is not identified with "race". Yet it is
very difficult to be believed if one says - and documents - that Israel has
been doing to the Palestinians for some half a century what the various
ethnic militias in the former Yugoslavia have learned to do only within the
last decade, after the breakdown of the socialist state there, and that in
some respects the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians bear a marked
resemblance to the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people themselves.
But there is more.
Nelson Mandela, the man who heroically led the struggle of the South African
peoples against what is commonly considered the most savage racist regime in
the world, once said that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is
"worse than apartheid." Coming from Mandela, this is as severe an
indictment as one can imagine. Unfortunately, the assessment is accurate.
Unlike Algeria or South Africa where the indigenous peoples managed to fight
back against eviction and extermination, regaining sovereignty after heroic
wars of liberation, Israel is the only successful settler colony of the 20th
century, evicting the majority of the indigenous population, subjugating
the remaining segment, and transplanting on the Palestinian land populations
which originated elsewhere. The great majority of the Jewish population of
Israel is descended from families that were not resident there 50 years
ago.
By contrast, the majority of Palestinians were evicted from their homes in
two waves, mainly at the time of the establishment of the state of Israel in
1948 and then, on a relatively smaller scale, in the aftermath of the
Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Estimates of the Palestinian diaspora, scattered
around the world, vary greatly, from six million to eight million. Over five
million of them are concentrated in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the states
bordering on the territories of the historic Palestine, or in the
territories Israel captured in 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza). A million or
so live in Israel proper as internal refugees; Israel is by definition a
"Jewish state," in which the non-Jew can only be a second-class citizen. In
all, Palestinians are actually not very numerous. Yet, according to the
United Nations, one in four of the world's refugees is a Palestinian.
Palestinian losses accruing from those evictions are estimated at $180
billion. U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948 affirms the right of all Palestinians
either to return to their lost homes or elect to receive compensation. The
same right has been re-affirmed i n Resolutions 242 and 338, and the U.N.
General Assembly has re-affirmed this resolution over a hundred times.
Israel has steadfastly rejected all these resolutions, however, and no
Palestinian has ever been compensated for loss of ancestral property.
Instead, some 90 per cent of the Israeli territory is reserved for Jewish
settlement and some 70 per cent of the territories occupied in 1967 are - in
addition to pre-1967 Israeli borders - already taken for establishing
Israeli "settlements" or building roads, military checkposts and so on. The
so-called Palestinian Authority, to which Israel has assigned mainly
municipal duties in civil affairs and whose police and paramilitary forces
have been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ensure Israeli
security in the face of Palestinian anger, actually controls something like
12 per cent of the area of West Bank.
This is the arrangement that is sought to be stabilised by the new plan that
Ehud Barak unveiled in late October, which he proposes as the basis for a
final settlement. As Noam Chomsky puts it, "This plan, extending
U.S.-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier years, called for
cantonization of the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967, with
mechanisms to ensure that usable land and resources (primarily water) remain
largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt
and brutal Palestinian Authority, playing the role traditionally assigned
to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule:
the Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the most
obvious analogue."
The U.S. underwrites these atrocities militarily, financially,
diplomatically. Thus, on October 3, after a week of bitter fighting and
killing, the defence correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest
purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade", an
agreement with the U.S. to provide Israel with 35 Blackhawk military
helicopters and spare parts at a cost of $525 million, along with jet fuel,
following the purchase shortly earlier of patrol aircraft and Apache attack
helicopters. These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack
helicopters in the U.S. inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. When asked
whether these were "tools for crowd control," a Pentagon spokesman said that
the U.S. weapons sales "do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't
be used against civilians."
Meanwhile, on October 25, when Israel had settled down to its killing
fields, Aluff Benn, the diplomatic correspondent of Ha'aretz, reported that
Israel had asked the U.S. for an $800 million in emergency military aid, "on
top of the usual military aid package, which will total $1.98 billion next
year." This is only the tip of the iceberg, considering that Israel has been
the top U.S. aid recipient for several decades.
The same applies to the arena of diplomatic and moral support, where too the
U.S. defies all pressure from diverse quarters. Gush Shalom (the Israeli
Peace Bloc) declared on October 9: "What is happening in Nazareth today is a
pogrom, bearing all the hallmarks which were well known to Jews in Czarist
Russia." Already on October 3, Amnesty International had condemned the
indiscriminate killings of civilians. "The dead civilians, among them young
children, include those uninvolved in the conflict and seeking safety," it
said, adding "the loss of civilian life is devastating and this is
compounded by the fact that many appear to have been killed or injured as a
result of the use of excessive or indiscriminate force... We have been
saying for years that Israel is killing civilians unlawfully by firing at
them during demonstrations and riots." Even Jacques Chirac, the French
President, accused Sharon of "irresponsible provocation." But not the U.S.,
where Madeleine Albright declared that Palestinians were the ones "laying
siege to Israel."
On October 7, the U.N. Security Council voted 14 to 0 for a resolution
condemning Israel's "excessive use of force against Palestinians" and
deploring the "provocation" of Sharon's September 28 visit to Temple Mount.
The U.S. was the only Security Council member to abstain from the vote. The
outcome was generally interpreted as assigning most of the responsibility
for the violence to Israel. The conservative The Times (of London) called it
on the editorial page a "stinging rebuff" (September 10, 2000). On October
19, when the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution condemning
Israel for "widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights"
while describing some of the Israeli atrocities as "war crimes", the U.S.
and its principal allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)
voted against the resolution.
The saddest part of this mess is that Yasser Arafat, once the symbol of
Palestinian resistance, has settled down to the role of a quisling, begging
the U.S. for largesse and handing over his own security apparatus to the
CIA; Alu Ben reported in Ha'aretz on October 18, regarding Arafat's promise
at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit to do what he could for Israeli security: its
implementation will be overseen by CIA chief George Tenet and the CIA
representative in Tel Aviv. This agreement will, for the first time,
involve CIA observers in the field in addition to CIA participation in
Israeli-Palestinian meetings."
Part of the Al-Aqsa Intifada is perhaps against Arafat himself and his bunch
of corrupt cronies - "the Oslo class" as the rebellious Palestinian youth
calls them.
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