yeru,
Terror is terro and NEVER justified. Go try to explain your theories of terrorism to the mother of the babies blown up by homicide bombers.
killing is always terrible and i hate war and military in any form. unfortunately israel doesn't leave the palestinians with much of a choice.
i assume you still support the war against hussein (although it is absolutely clear by now that there were no WMD...certainly not the 600.000 tons you were talking about!) and the many other wars the US and israel have faught (with the millions of killed civilians). at the same time you condemn the arabs for what they do? don't you see a slight double standard here?
these are the first pages of finkelsteins book.
here is the link to his page where you can read the first 10 pages...look at if you want to get a better grasp of the historical context all of this takes place in. http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/
>>>The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into
coherent territorial states, each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically
homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination
of minorities. Such was and is the murderous
reductio ad absurdum of
nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated
until the
1940s. … The homogeneous territorial nation could now
be seen as a programme that could be realized only by barbarians, or at least
by barbarian means
. E.J. Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism since .... Background
To resolve what was called the ‘Jewish question’ – i.e., the reciprocal
challenges of Gentile repulsion, or anti-Semitism, and Gentile attraction,
or assimilation – the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth
century to create an overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state
in Palestine.
1 Once the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine
through Great Britain’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration,
2 the main
obstacle to realizing its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on
the eve of Zionist colonization, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish
but Muslim and Christian Arab.
3
Across the mainstream Zionist spectrum, it was understood from the
outset that Palestine’s indigenous Arab population would not acquiesce in
its dispossession. ‘Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was
not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine’, Zeev Sternhell observes.
‘If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was
xii
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the
Zionist way of thinking … [I]n general both sides understood each other
well and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the
expense of the Palestinian Arabs.’ Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) contemptuously
dismissed the ‘illusive hopes’ of those who spoke about a ‘"mutual
misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common interests"
[and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal
peoples."’ ‘There is no example in history’, David Ben-Gurion declared,
succinctly framing the core problem, ‘that a nation opens the gates of its
country, not because of necessity … but because the nation which wants
to come in has explained its desire to it.’
4
‘The tragedy of Zionism’, Walter Laqueur wrote in his standard history,
‘was that it appeared on the international scene when there were no
longer empty spaces on the world map.’ This is not quite right. Rather it
was no longer politically tenable to
create such spaces: extermination had
ceased to be an option of conquest.
5 Basically the Zionist movement
could choose between only two strategic options to achieve its goal: what
Benny Morris has labeled ‘the way of South Africa’ – ‘the establishment
of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited
native majority’ – or the ‘the way of transfer’ – ‘you could create
a homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish
majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out.’
6
Round One – ‘The Way of Transfer’
In the first round of conquest, the Zionist movement set its sights on ‘the
way of transfer’. For all the public rhetoric about wanting to ‘live with
the Arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honor and together with
them to turn the common homeland into a flourishing land’ (Twelfth
Zionist Congress,
.... ), the Zionists from early on were in fact bent on
expelling them. ‘The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement
from its very beginnings’, Tom Segev reports. ‘"Disappearing" the
Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary
condition of its existence. … With few exceptions, none of the Zionists
disputed the desirability of forced transfer – or its morality.’ The key was
to get the timing right. Ben-Gurion, reflecting on the expulsion option
in the late
.... s, wrote: ‘What is inconceivable in normal times is possible
in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed
and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out – a whole
world is lost.’
7
The goal of ‘disappearing’ the indigenous Arab population points to a
virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature:
xiii
Introduction to the Second Edition what spurred Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism,
in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of Jews, but rather the
prospect – very real – of their own expulsion. ‘The fear of territorial
displacement and dispossession’, Morris reasonably concludes, ‘was to be
the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism.’ Likewise, in his magisterial
study of Palestinian nationalism, Yehoshua Porath suggests that the
‘major factor nourishing’ Arab anti-Semitism ‘was not hatred for the Jews
as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine.’ He goes on to
argue that, although Arabs initially differentiated between Jews and Zionists,
it was ‘inevitable’ that opposition to Zionist settlement would turn
into a loathing of all Jews: ‘As immigration increased, so did the Jewish
community’s identification with the Zionist movement. … The non-
Zionist and anti-Zionist factors became an insignificant minority, and a
large measure of sophistication was required to make the older distinction.
It was unreasonable to hope that the wider Arab population, and
the riotous mob which was part of it, would maintain this distinction.’
8 It
ought also to be remembered that Zionist leaders consistently claimed to
be acting on behalf and with the support of ‘world Jewry’, a claim which
to many Palestinians seemed increasingly credible, as first non-Zionist
Jews in Palestine were marginalized during the Mandate as noted above
and, especially after
.... , as non-Zionist Jews around the world became,
if not a small minority, certainly an increasingly voiceless one.
From its incipient stirrings in the late nineteenth century through the
watershed revolt in the
.... s, Palestinian resistance consistently focused
on the twin juggernauts of Zionist conquest: Jewish settlers and Jewish
settlements.
9 Apologetic Zionist writers like Anita Shapira juxtapose benign
Jewish settlement against recourse to force.
10 In fact, settlement
was force.
‘From the outset, Zionism sought to employ force in order to realize
national aspirations’, Yosef Gorny observes. ‘This force consisted primarily
of the collective ability to rebuild a national home in Palestine.’ Through
settlement the Zionist movement aimed – in Ben-Gurion’s words – ‘to
establish a
great Jewish fact in this country’ that was irreversible (emphasis
in original).
11 Moreover, settlement and armed force were in reality
seamlessly interwoven as Zionist settlers sought ‘the ideal and perfect fusion
between the plow and rifle.’ Moshe Dayan later memorialized that ‘We
are a generation of settlers, and without the combat helmet and the barrel
of a gun, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house.’
12 The
Zionist movement inferred behind Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement
a generic (and genetic) anti-Semitism – Jewish settlers ‘being
murdered’, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘simply because they were Jews’ – in
order to conceal from the outside world and itself the rational and legitimate
grievances of the indigenous population.
13 In the ensuing bloodshed
xiv
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict the kith and kin of Zionist martyrs would, like relatives of Palestinian
martyrs today, wax proud at these national sacrifices. ‘I am gratified’, the
father of a Jewish casualty eulogized, ‘that I was a living witness to such
a historical event.’
14
It bears critical notice for what comes later that, from the interwar
through early postwar years, Western public opinion was not altogether
averse to population transfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) method for
resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe’s Jewish press
supported in the mid-
.... s the transfer of Jews to Madagascar to solve
Poland’s ‘Jewish problem’.
15 The main forced transfer between the two
world wars was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the
Treaty of Lausanne (
.... ) and approved and supervised by the League of
Nations, this brutal displacement of more than
. . . million people eventually
came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent.
The British cited it in the late
.... s as a model for resolving the
conflict in Palestine. The right-wing Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky,
taking heart from Nazi demographic experiments in conquered territories
(about
. . . million Poles and Jews were expelled and hundreds of
thousands of Germans resettled in their place), exclaimed: ‘The world has
become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become
fond of them. Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a
good name in the world.’ During the war the Soviet Union also carried
out bloody deportations of recalcitrant minorities such as the Volga
Germans, Chechen-Ingush and Tatars. Labor Zionists pointed to the
‘positive experience’ of the Greek-Turkish and Soviet expulsions in
support of the transfer idea. Recalling the ‘success’ (Churchill) of the
Greek–Turkish compulsory transfer, the Allies at the Potsdam Conference
(
.... ) authorized the expulsion of some thirteen million Germans from
Central and Eastern Europe (around two million perished in the course
of this horrendous uprooting). Even the left-wing British Labour Party
advocated in its
.... platform that the ‘Arabs be encouraged to move
out’ of Palestine, as did the humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell, to
make way for Zionist settlement.
16
In fact, many in the enlightened West came to view displacement of
the indigenous population of Palestine as an inexorable concomitant of
civilization’s advance. The identification of Americans with Zionism came
easily, since the ‘social order of the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine]
was built on the ethos of a frontier society, in which a pioneeringsettlement
model set the tone’. To account for the ‘almost complete
disregard of the Arab case’ by Americans, a prominent British Labour
MP, Richard Crossman, explained in the mid-
.... s: ‘Zionism after all is
merely the attempt by the European Jew to build his national life on the
xv
Introduction to the Second Edition soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed
the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the
benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go
down before the march of progress.’ Contrasting the ‘slovenly’ Arabs with
enterprising Jewish settlers who had ‘set going revolutionary forces in the
Middle East’, Crossman himself professed in the name of ‘social progress’
support for Zionism. The left-liberal US presidential candidate in
.... ,
Henry Wallace, compared the Zionist struggle in Palestine with ‘the fight
the American colonies carried on in
.... . Just as the British stirred up
the Iroquois to fight the colonists, so today they are stirring up the
Arabs.’
17
Come
.... , the Zionist movement exploited the ‘revolutionary times’
of the first Arab–Israeli war – much like the Serbs did in Kosovo during
the NATO attack – to expel more than
.. per cent of the indigenous
population (
... , ... Palestinians), and thereby achieve its goal of an overwhelmingly
Jewish state, if not yet in the whole of Palestine.
18 Berl
Katznelson, known as the ‘conscience’ of the Labor Zionist movement,
had maintained that ‘there has never been a colonizing enterprise as typified
by justice and honesty toward others as our work here in Eretz Israel.’ In
his multi-volume paean to the American settlers’ dispossession of the native
population,
The Winning of the West , Theodore Roosevelt likewise concluded
that ‘no other conquering nation has ever treated savage owners of
the soil with such generosity as has the United States’. The recipients of
this benefaction would presumably have a different story to tell.
19
Round Two – ‘The Way of South Africa’
The main Arab (and British) fear before and after the
.... war was that
the Zionist movement would use the Jewish state carved out of Palestine
as a springboard for further expansion.
20 In fact, Zionists pursued from
early on a ‘stages’ strategy of conquering Palestine by parts – a strategy it
would later vilify the Palestinians for. ‘The Zionist vision could not be
fulfilled in one fell swoop’, Ben-Gurion’s official biographer reports,
‘especially the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state. The stageby-
stage approach, dictated by less than favorable circumstances, required
the formulation of objectives that appeared to be "concessions".’ It acquiesced
in British and United Nations proposals for the partition of Palestine
but only ‘as a stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation’
(Ben-Gurion).
21 Chief among the Zionist leadership’s regrets in the aftermath
of the
.... war was its failure to conquer the whole of Palestine.
Come
.... , Israel exploited the ‘revolutionary times’ of the June war to
xvi
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict finish the job.
22 Sir Martin Gilbert, in his glowing history of Israel, maintained
that Zionist leaders from the outset conceived the conquered
territories as an undesired ‘burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel’. In
a highly acclaimed new study,
Six Days of War , Michael Oren suggests
that Israel’s territorial conquests ‘came about largely through chance’, ‘the
vagaries and momentum of war’: they just happened. A careful review of
the historical record, however, suggests that they were just
waiting tohappen
. In light of the Zionist movement’s long-standing territorial imperatives,
Sternhell concludes: ‘The role of occupier, which Israel began
to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June
.... , was
not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that
period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another
step in the realization of Zionism’s major ambitions.’
23
Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank
and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land
but not the people.
24 Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option.
In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for
demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting
any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth
Geneva Convention, ratified in
.... , for the first time ‘unequivocally
prohibited deportation’ of civilians under occupation (Articles
.. , ... ). 25
Accordingly, after the June war Israel moved to impose the second of its
two options mentioned above – apartheid. This proved to be the chief
stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict.
The ‘Peace Process’
Right after the June war the United Nations deliberated on the modalities
for achieving a just and lasting peace. The broad consensus of the General
Assembly as well as the Security Council called for Israel’s withdrawal
from the Arab territories it occupied during the June war. Security Council
Resolution
... stipulated this basic principle of international law in
its preambular paragraph ‘
emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition
of territory by war’ (emphasis in original).
26 At the same time, Resolution
...
called on Arab states to recognize Israel’s right ‘to live in peace
within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of
force’. To accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, the international
consensus eventually supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the
West Bank and Gaza once Israel withdrew to its pre-June borders. (Resolution
...
had only referred obliquely to the Palestinians in its call for
‘achieving a just resolution of the refugee problem’.)
xvii
Introduction to the Second Edition Although Defense Minister Moshe Dayan privately acknowledged that
Resolution
... required full withdrawal, Israel officially maintained that
it allowed for ‘territorial revision’.
27 Israel’s refusal in February .... to
fully withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt’s offer of a peace
treaty led directly to the October
.... war. 28 The basic parameters of
Israeli policy regarding Palestinian territory were set out in the late
.... s
in the proposal of Yigal Allon, a senior Labor Party official and Cabinet
member. The ‘Allon Plan’ called for Israel’s annexation of up to half the
West Bank, while Palestinians would be confined to the other half in two
unconnected cantons to the north and south. Sasson Sofer notes generally
the ‘fertile dualism’ of Israeli diplomacy – one might rather say ‘fertile
cynicism’ – of ‘pointing to the uniqueness of the Jewish question in order
to obtain legitimacy, and then stressing the normality of Israel’s sovereign
existence as a state which should be accorded all the international rights
and privileges of a national entity’. In the case at hand Israel demanded,
like all sovereign states, full recognition yet also claimed a right, in the
name of unique Jewish suffering and despite international law, to territorial
conquest. As shown elsewhere, invocation of the Nazi holocaust
played a crucial role in this diplomatic game.
29
The United States initially supported the consensus interpretation of
Resolution
... , making allowance for only ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’
adjustments on the irregular border between Israel and the Jordaniancontrolled
West Bank.
30 In heated private exchanges with Israel during
the UN-sponsored mediation efforts of Gunnar Jarring in
.... , 31 American
officials stood firm that ‘the words "recognized and secure" meant
"security arrangements" and "recognition" of new lines as international
boundaries’, and ‘never meant that Israel could extend its territory to
[the] West Bank or Suez if this was what it felt its security required’; and
that ‘there will never be peace if Israel tries to hold onto large chunks
of territory’. Referring to it explicitly by name, the US deplored even
the minimalist version of the Allon Plan as ‘a non-starter’ and ‘unacceptable
in principle’.
32
In a crucial shift beginning under the Nixon–Kissinger administration,
however, American policy was realigned with Israel’s.
33 Except for Israel
and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international
community has supported, for the past quarter-century, the ‘twostate’
settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition
formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The
United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in
....
and
.... affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and neighboring Arab states. A
....
General Assembly resolution along similar lines passed ... – . (Israel,
xviii
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict US, and Dominica). Despite the historic geo-political changes in the past
decade, the international consensus has remained remarkably stable. A
....
General Assembly resolution (‘Peaceful settlement of the question of
Palestine’) affirming Israel’s right to ‘secure and recognized borders’ as
well as the Palestinian people’s right to an ‘independent state’ in the West
Bank and Gaza passed
... – . (Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of
Micronesia, US). The
.... UN voting record on virtually every resolution
bearing on the Israeli–Palestinian (and –Syrian) conflict was similarly
lop-sided. In the UN Third Committee the vote was
... – . (Israel,
Marshall Islands, US) regarding ‘the right of the Palestinian people to
self-determination’, while in the Fourth Committee the vote was
... – .
(Israel) regarding ‘Assistance to Palestinian refugees’,
... – . (Israel, Marshall
Islands, Micronesia, US) regarding ‘Persons displaced as a result of the
June
.... war’, ... – . (Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, US)
regarding ‘Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
for Palestine Refugees’,
... – . (Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, US)
regarding ‘Palestine refugees’ properties and their revenues’,
... – . (Israel,
Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, US) regarding ‘Applicability of the
Geneva Convention … to the Occupied Palestinian Territory’,
... – .
(Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Tuvalu, US) regarding ‘Israeli
settlements in the Occupied Territories’,
... – . (Israel, Marshall Islands,
Micronesia, Nauru, US) regarding ‘Israeli practices affecting the human
rights of the Palestinian people’, and
... – . (Israel) regarding ‘The occupied
Syrian Golan.’ Responding to the Syrian charge that ‘Israel stood
isolated’ in the international community Israel’s ambassador rejoined that
‘to the right’ it had truth and ‘to the left, justice’, and he did not call that
isolation. Indeed, he left out Nauru, Tuvalu, Micronesia, and the Marshall
Islands. This record is often adduced as proof of the UN’s bias against
Israel. In fact the exact reverse is true. A careful study by Marc Weller of
the University of Cambridge comparing Israel and the occupied territories
with similar situations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, East
Timor, occupied Kuwait and Iraq, and Rwanda found that Israel has
enjoyed a ‘virtual immunity’ from enforcement measures such as an arms
embargo and economic sanctions typically adopted by the UN against
member states condemned for identical violations of international law.
Given its conflict with the ‘entire world community’, Israel has unsurprisingly
set as a crucial precondition for negotiations that Palestinians
‘must drop their traditional demand’ for ‘international arbitration’ or a
‘Security Council mechanism’.
34
The main obstacle to Israel’s annexation of occupied Palestinian territory
from the mid-
.... s was the PLO. Having endorsed the two-state
settlement, it could no longer be dismissed as simply a terrorist organi-
xix
Introduction to the Second Edition zation bent on Israel’s destruction. Pressures mounted on Israel to reach
an agreement with the PLO’s ‘compromising approach’. Consequently, in
June
.... Israel invaded Lebanon, where Palestinian leaders were headquartered,
to head off what Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv dubbed
the PLO’s ‘peace offensive’.
35 With the Palestine question diplomatically
sidelined after the invasion, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rose up in
December
.... against the occupation in a basically non-violent civil
revolt, the
intifada . Israel’s brutal repression (compounded by the inept
and corrupt leadership of the PLO) eventually resulted in the uprising’s
defeat.
36 After the implosion of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Iraq,
and the suspension of funding from the Gulf states, Palestinian fortunes
reached a new nadir. The US and Israel seized on this opportune moment
to recruit the already venal and now desperate Palestinian leadership –
‘on the verge of bankruptcy’ and ‘in [a] weakened condition’ (Uri Savir,
Israel’s chief negotiator at Oslo) – as surrogates of Israeli power. This was
the real meaning of the Oslo Accord signed in September
.... : to create
a Palestinian Bantustan by dangling before Arafat and the PLO the perquisites
of power and privilege, much like how the British controlled
Palestine during the Mandate years through the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin
al-Husayni, and the Supreme Muslim Council.
37 ‘The occupation continued’
after Oslo, a seasoned Israeli observer, Meron Benvenisti, wrote,
‘albeit by remote control, and with the consent of the Palestinian people,
represented by their "sole representative," the PLO.’ And again: ‘It goes
without saying that "cooperation" based on the current power relationship
is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that
Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization.’ The ‘test’
for Arafat and the PLO, according to Savir, was whether they would
‘us[e] their new power base to dismantle Hamas and other violent opposition
groups’ contesting Israeli apartheid.
38
Israel’s settlement policy in the Occupied Territories during the past
decade points up the real content of the ‘peace process’ set in motion at
Oslo. The details are spelled out in an exhaustive study by B’Tselem
(Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)
entitled
Land Grab . 39 Due primarily to massive Israeli government
subsidies, the Jewish settler population increased from
... , ... to ... , ...
during the Oslo years, with settler activity proceeding at a brisker pace
under the tenure of Labor’s Ehud Barak than Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Illegal under international law and built on land illegally seized
from Palestinians, these settlements now incorporate nearly half the land
surface of the West Bank. For all practical purposes they have been
annexed to Israel (Israeli law extends not only to Israeli but also non-
Israeli Jews residing in the settlements) and are off-limits to Palestinians
xx
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict without special authorization. Fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected
and unviable enclaves, they have impeded meaningful Palestinian
development. In parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem the only
available land for building lies in areas under Israeli jurisdiction, while the
water consumption of the
. , ... Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley is
equivalent to
.. per cent of the water consumption of all two million
Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank. Not one Jewish settlement was
dismantled during the Oslo years, while the number of new housing
units in the settlements increased by more than fifty per cent (excluding
East Jerusalem); again, the biggest spurt of new housing starts occurred
not under Netanyahu’s tenure but rather under Barak’s, in the year
....
– exactly when Barak claims to have ‘left no stone unturned’ in his quest
for peace. During the first eighteen months of Prime Minister Sharon’s
term of office (beginning early
.... ), forty-four new settlements –
rebuked by the UN Commission on Human Rights as ‘incendiary and
provocative’ – were established in the West Bank.
40
‘Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation
based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same
area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality’, the B’Tselem
study concludes. ‘This regime is the only one of its kind in the world,
and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid
regime in South Africa.’
As Jewish settlements expand, Israel has begun corralling West Bank
Palestinians into eight fragments of territory, each surrounded by barbed
wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must
load and unload on the borders ‘back-to-back’), thereby further devastating
an economy in which roughly one-third of the population is unemployed,
half the population lives below the poverty line of $
. per day, and one-
fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused –
according to US, UN and European relief agencies – by Israeli restrictions
on transporting food. ‘What is truly appalling’, a
Haaretz writer
lamented, ‘is the blasé way in which the story has been received and
handled by the mass media. … Where is the public outcry against this
attempt to divide the territories and enforce internal passports … [and]
humiliate and inconvenience a population that can scarcely earn a living
or live a life as it is?’
41
After seven years of on-again, off-again negotiations and a succession
of new interim agreements that managed to rob the Palestinians of the
few crumbs thrown from the master’s table at Oslo,
42 the moment of
truth arrived at Camp David in July
.... . President Clinton and Prime
Minister Barak delivered Arafat the ultimatum of formally acquiescing in
a Bantustan or bearing full responsibility for the collapse of the ‘peace
xxi
Introduction to the Second Edition process’. Arafat refused, however, to budge from the international consensus
for resolving the conflict. According to Robert Malley, a key
American negotiator at Camp David, Arafat continued to hold out for a
‘Palestinian state based on the June
. , .... borders, living alongside Israel’,
yet also ‘accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory
to accommodate settlements, though [he] insisted on a one for one swap
of land of "equal size and value"’ – that is, the ‘minor’ and ‘mutual’
border adjustments of the original US position on Resolution
... .
Malley’s rendering of the Palestinian proposal at Camp David – an offer
that was widely dismissed but rarely reported – deserves full quotation: ‘a
state of Israel incorporating some land captured in
.... and including a
very large majority of its settlers, the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city’s
history, preservation of Israel’s demographic balance between Jews and
Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence.’ On the
other hand, contrary to the myth spun by Barak–Clinton as well as a
compliant media, ‘Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty’,
a special adviser at the British Foreign Office observed, ‘while perpetuating
the subjugation of the Palestinians.’ Although accounts of the Barak
proposal significantly differ, all knowledgeable observers concur that it
‘would have meant that territory annexed by Israel would encroach deep
inside the Palestinian state’ (Malley), dividing the West Bank into multiple,
disconnected enclaves, and offering land swaps that were of neither equal
size nor equal value.
43
Consider in this regard Israel’s reaction to the March
.... Saudi peace
plan. Crown Prince Abdullah proposed, and all twenty-one other members
of the Arab League approved, a plan making concessions that actually
went beyond the international consensus. In exchange for a full Israeli
withdrawal, it offered not only full recognition but ‘normal relations with
Israel’, and called not for the ‘right of return’ of Palestinian refugees but
rather only a ‘just solution’ to the refugee problem. A
Haaretz commentator
noted that the Saudi plan was ‘surprisingly similar to what Barak
claims to have proposed two years ago’ at Camp David. Were Israel truly
committed to a comprehensive withdrawal in exchange for normalization
with the Arab world, the Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement by
the Arab League summit ought to have been met with euphoria. In fact,
after an ephemeral interlude of evasion and silence, it was quickly deposited
in Orwell’s memory hole. When the Bush administration subsequently
made passing reference to the Saudi plan in a draft ‘road map’ for settling
the Israel–Palestine conflict, Israeli officials loudly protested.
44 Nonetheless,
Barak’s – and Clinton’s – fraud that Palestinians at Camp David
rejected a maximally generous Israeli offer provided crucial moral cover
for the horrors that ensued.
xxii
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict Learning from the Nazi Holocaust
In September
.... , Palestinians embarked on a second
intifada against
Israeli rule. In the ‘warped thinking’ of Israelis since Oslo,
Haaretz journalist Amira Hass wrote soon after the renewed resistance,
the Palestinians would accept a situation of coexistence in which they were on
an unequal footing vis-à-vis the Israelis and in which they were ranked as
persons who were entitled to less, much less, than the Jews. However, in the
end the Palestinians were not willing to live with this arrangement. The new
intifada
… is a final attempt to thrust a mirror in the face of Israelis and to tell
them: ‘Take a good look at yourselves and see how racist you have become.’
Meanwhile, Israel, having failed in the carrot policy it initiated at Oslo,
reached for the big stick. Two preconditions had to be met, however,
before Israel could bring to bear its overwhelming military superiority:
a ‘green light’ from the US and a sufficient pretext. Already in summer
....
, the authoritative
Jane’s Information Group reported that Israel had
completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of the Occupied
Territories. But the US vetoed the plan and Europe made equally plain
its opposition. After
.. September, however, the US came on board.
Sharon’s goal of crushing the Palestinians basically fit in with the US
administration’s goal of exploiting the World Trade Center atrocity to
eliminate the last remnants of Arab resistance to total US domination –
or, in Robert Fisk’s succinct formulation, ‘to bring the Arabs back
under our firm control, to ensure their loyalty’. Through sheer exertion
of will and despite a monumentally incompetent leadership, Palestinians
have proven to be the most resilient and recalcitrant popular force in
the Arab world. Bringing them to their knees would deal a devastating
psychological blow throughout the region.
45
With a green light from the US, all Israel now needed was the pretext.
Predictably, it escalated the assassinations of Palestinian leaders following
each lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks. ‘After the destruction of
the houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued to act with
restraint’, Shulamit Aloni of Israel’s Meretz party observed. ‘Sharon and
his army minister, apparently fearing that they would have to return to
the negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated Raed
Karmi. They knew that there would be a response, and that we would
pay the price in the blood of citizens.’
46 In fact, it was plainly the case
that Israel desperately sought this sanguinary response. Once the Palestinian
terrorist attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to
declare war and proceed to beat the basically defenseless civilian Palestinian
population into submission.
xxiii
Introduction to the Second Edition Only the willfully blind could miss noticing that Israel’s March–April
invasion of the West Bank, ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, was largely a
replay of the June
.... invasion of Lebanon. To crush the Palestinians’
goal of an independent state alongside Israel – the PLO’s ‘peace offensive’
– Israel laid plans in September
.... to invade Lebanon. In order
to launch the invasion, however, it needed the green light from the
Reagan administration and a pretext. Much to its chagrin and despite
multiple provocations, Israel was unable to elicit a Palestinian attack on
its northern border. It accordingly escalated the air assaults on southern
Lebanon and after a particularly murderous attack that left two hundred
civilians dead (including sixty occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital),
the PLO finally retaliated, killing one Israeli. With this key pretext
in hand and a green light now forthcoming from the Reagan administration,
Israel invaded. Using the same slogan of ‘rooting out Palestinian
terror’, Israel proceeded to massacre a defenseless population, killing
some
.. , ... Palestinians and Lebanese between June and September
....
, almost all civilians. One might note by comparison that, as of
May
.... , the official Israeli figure for Jews ‘who gave their lives for the
creation and security of the Jewish State’ – that is, the total number of
Jews who perished in (mostly) wartime combat or in terrorist attacks
from the dawn of the Zionist movement
... years ago until the present
day – comes to
.. , ... . 47
To repress Palestinian resistance, a senior Israeli officer in early
....
urged the army to ‘analyze and internalize the lessons of … how the
German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto’. Judging by Israeli carnage in
the West Bank culminating in Operation Defensive Shield – the targeting
of Palestinian ambulances
48 and medical personnel, the targeting of
journalists, the killing of Palestinian children ‘for sport’ (Chris Hedges,
New York Times
former Cairo bureau chief), the rounding up, handcuffing
and blindfolding of Palestinian males between the ages of fifteen and fifty,
and affixing of numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of
Palestinian detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity, medical treatment
and burial to the Palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate
air assaults on some Palestinian neighborhoods, the systematic use of Palestinian
civilians as human shields, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes
with the occupants huddled inside – it appears that the Israeli army followed
the officer’s advice. When the offensive, supported by fully
.. per
cent of Israelis, was finally over,
... Palestinians were dead (including
more than seventy children) and
. , ... wounded, more than . , ... Palestinians
detained in mass round-ups had been subjected to ill-treatment
(and sometimes torture), more than
. , ... dwellings were demolished
(sometimes with the residents still inside) leaving over
.. , ... Palestinians
xxiv
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict homeless, while the already devastated Palestinian economy suffered more
than $
... million in direct property losses. 49
The climax of Operation Defensive Shield was the Israeli siege in
early April of Jenin refugee camp. A Palestinian militant told Amnesty
International that the decision to resist was ‘made by the community’
against the background of an Israeli incursion the month before that had
met little resistance: ‘And otherwise, where would we go? The Israelis
had put a cordon around the town; we had no choice. We had nowhere
else to fight.’ Human rights organizations consistently found that in the
course of the siege ‘Israeli forces committed serious violations of humanitarian
law, some amounting
prima facie to war crimes’ (Human Rights
Watch) and ‘the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] carried out actions which
violate international human rights and humanitarian law; some of these
actions amount to … war crimes’ (Amnesty International). Some
. , ...
Palestinians, nearly a third of the camp’s population, were rendered homeless
in ‘destruction [that] extended well beyond any conceivable purpose
of gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the military
objectives pursued’ (HRW); indeed, ‘in one appalling and extensive operation,
the IDF demolished, destroyed by explosives, or flattened by
army bulldozers, a large residential area of Jenin refugee camp, much of it
after the fighting had apparently ended’ (Amnesty). Some fifty-four
Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians.
50 Typical of the documented Israeli
atrocities in Jenin were these: a ‘thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man was
killed when the IDF bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to
allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home’; a ‘fifty-sevenyear-
old wheelchair-bound man … was shot and run over by a tank on
a major road outside the camp … even though he had a white flag
attached to his wheelchair’; ‘IDF soldiers forced a sixty-five-year-old
woman to stand on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle
of a helicopter battle’ (HRW). Israeli authorities apparently didn’t initiate
‘proper investigations’ in any of the ‘unlawful killings’, giving rise to fears
that the IDF has been given ‘a
carte blanche to continue’ (Amnesty).
‘Though the IDF offensive against Nablus in April
.... has not received
the attention of Jenin’, Amnesty further found, ‘there were more Palestinians
casualties (
.. ) and fewer Israeli soldiers killed (four)’, and a comparable
pattern of human rights violations and war crimes as well as the
complete or partial razing of ‘religious and historical sites … in what
frequently appeared to be wanton destruction without military necessity’.
In one grisly case, IDF soldiers repeatedly beat with their rifles, pummeled
and flipped, and shoved off a truck and down stairs, a ‘twenty-five yearold
… paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair’
(Amnesty). The IDF would later explain that the killing of a ‘large number’
xxv
Introduction to the Second Edition of civilians has ‘deterrent value’ (senior IDF officer), and allowed for the
killing of unarmed teenage boys on the grounds that they are ‘people of
an age to be fighters’. It’s only a flea’s hop to the Nazi justification for
killing Jewish children on the grounds that otherwise ‘a generation of
avengers filled with hatred [will] grow up’.
51
Recalling that Israel, ‘frequently supported by the United States’, has
‘blocked all attempts to end human rights violations and install a system
of international protection in Israel and the Occupied Territories’, Amnesty
International called on ‘the international community and, in particular,
the United States government to immediately stop the sale or transfer of
weaponry that are used to commit human rights violations to Israeli
forces’.
It wasn’t only human rights organizations that criticized Operation
Defensive Shield. Ehud Barak, for example, registered dissent: according
to the former Prime Minister, Sharon should have acted ‘more forcefully’.
In the meantime, dismissing criticism of Israeli atrocities as driven by
anti-Semitism, Holocaust Industry CEO Elie Wiesel lent unconditional
support to Israel – ‘Israel didn’t do anything except it reacted … . Whatever
Israel has done is the only thing that Israel could have done. … I
don’t think Israel is violating the human rights charter. … War has its
own rules’ – and went on to stress the ‘great pain and anguish’ endured
by Israeli soldiers as they did what ‘they have to do’.
52 Boasting that he
‘left them a football stadium’, one of Wiesel’s agonized Israeli soldiers
operating a bulldozer in Jenin later recounted in an interview: ‘I wanted
to destroy everything. I begged the officers … to let me knock it all
down, from top to bottom. To level everything. … For three days, I just
destroyed and destroyed. … I found joy with every house that came
down, because I knew that they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for
their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried forty or fifty
people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing
the whole camp down. … I had plenty of satisfaction. I really enjoyed it.’
A B’Tselem investigation in Ramallah found that, typically, at ‘the Ministry
of Education, not only was the computer network taken, so were
overhead projectors and video players. Other equipment, including televisions
and file cabinets full of records, such as student transcripts, were
simply destroyed. … Hard disks were taken from civil society organizations
that had invested years of work and millions of dollars to compile this
material.’ ‘It was simply unbelievable’, one young conscript recalled,
‘people simply made an effort to both destroy and rob. … The sergeant
major would bring a truck and load up. It was done openly.’ ‘The total
picture’, B’Tselem concluded, ‘is one of a vengeful assault on all symbols
of Palestinian society and Palestinian identity. This is combined with what
xxvi
Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict can only be described as hooliganism: the result of thousands of teenage
boys and young men in uniform allowed to run wild in Palestinian cities
with no accountability for their actions.’
Haaretz reported that Israeli soldiers
occupying Ramallah ‘destroyed children’s paintings’ in the Palestinian
Ministry of Culture, and ‘urinated and defecated everywhere’ in the
building, even ‘managing to defecate into a photocopier’ – no doubt
with ‘great pain and anguish’. It seems that this has become an IDF rite
of passage: during Israel’s occupation of Beirut in
.... , soldiers similarly
defecated in Palestinian cultural and medical institutions.
53
In July
.... , Israel moved quickly to avert yet another political
catastrophe. With assistance from European diplomats, militant Palestinian
organizations, including Hamas, reached a preliminary accord to suspend
all attacks inside Israel, perhaps paving the way for a return to the negotiating
table. Just ninety minutes before it was to be announced, however,
Israeli leaders – fully apprised of the imminent declaration – ordered an
F-
.. to drop a one-tonne bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood
in Gaza, killing, alongside a Hamas leader, eleven children and five
others, and injuring
... . Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and
Palestinian terrorist attacks resumed with a vengeance. ‘What is the
wisdom here?’ a Meretz party leader asked the Knesset. ‘At the very
moment that it appeared that we were on the brink of a chance for
reaching something of a cease-fire, or diplomatic activity, we always go
back to this experience – just when there is a period of calm, we
liquidate.’ Yet, having headed off another dastardly Palestinian ‘peace offensive’,
the murderous assault made perfect sense. Small wonder Sharon
hailed it as ‘one of our greatest successes’. And ‘once again’ in October
....
‘an outburst of violence’ ended ‘a period of relative calm in the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, the
Christian Science Monitor reported, as Israel
killed fourteen Palestinians and wounded more than a hundred (mostly
civilians) in Gaza. ‘The main Palestinian political faction, Fatah, was
abstaining from terrorist attacks inside Israel and … officials of the Palestinian
authority were attempting to persuade militant Palestinian groups
to do the same’, it continued. The Israeli attack ‘appeared to extinguish
this initiative’s chances for success’ and ‘may add credibility to assertions
by Palestinians and others that Israel intentionally stokes the conflict’.
European Union representative Javier Solana rued that the assault would
undermine the Palestinians’ new undertaking to ‘distance themselves from
violence’ – which is presumably why the Israeli army commander in
Gaza concluded that ‘The operation was definitely successful from our
point of view.’
54 Scoring a major victory on a related front, the Israeli
government blocked Israeli peace activists in August
.... from linking up
with
... of their Palestinian counterparts in Bethlehem. Reporting from
