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The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians - Part Two: Oct. 28-November 10, 2000
News and Analysis
CONTENTS
1. UN High Commissioner Visits Children Shot and Maimed by Israelis
2. Zionist Totalitarianism in America by Palestinian Prof. Edward Said
3. The Israeli Concentration Camp at Khiam and Atrocities Committed There
4 Anatomy of an Israeli Shooting of Boys Who Threw Stones
5. "The Al-Aqsa Intifada" by Jewish Prof. Avram Noam Chomsky
6. Latest Developments 1 November 2000 Ramallah, West Bank
UN High Commissioner Visits Children Shot and Maimed by Israelis
GAZA CITY(AP) -- Visiting the Gaza Strip's main hospital Friday, Nov. 10, U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson blasted Israel's ''excessive and disproportionate use of force'' against Palestinian protesters. Robinson's visit was fast becoming controversial after her commission earlier presented Israel with similar charges. Israel's foreign minister refused to meet with her and she also failed to meet with Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Robinson toured Gaza City's Shifa Hospital in the company of Palestinian Health Minister Riyad Zanoun and was briefed by doctors. She met Palestinians wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers. She said it was especially moving and difficult to see young patients, ''a 15-year-old who is now paraplegic, whose whole life is devastated in a few moments.''
Robinson also noted that although most of the victims were shot during protests, they included some passers-by. ''It was valuable, particularly because I had been speaking out about excessive and disproportionate use of force, and I was able to see for myself the effect of this on individuals and their families,'' she said.
Robinson's commission has accused Israel of ''widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights,'' and excessive use of force against the Palestinians. More than 180 people have been killed in six weeks of fighting, the vast majority of them Palestinians.
Israel rejected the commission's resolution, as well as Palestinian demands for an international protection force.
Associated Press Nov. 10, 2000
Zionist Totalitarianism in America
By Edward Said
The events of the past four weeks in Palestine have been a near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States for the first time since the modern re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1960s. Political as well as public discourse has so definitively transformed Israel into the victim during the recent clashes, that even though 140 Palestinian lives were lost and close to 5,000 casualties have been reported, it is still something called "Palestinian violence" that has disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the "peace process."
There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an unspoken assumption: these have been engraved in ears, minds, and memories as a guide for the perplexed, a manual or machine for turning out phrases that have clogged the air for at least a month. I can recite most of them by heart: Barak offered more concessions at Camp David than any Israeli prime minister before him (90 per cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary courage to accept Israeli offers to end the conflict; Palestinian violence, directed by Arafat, has threatened Israel (all sorts of variations on this, including the wish to eliminate Israel, anti-Semitism, suicidal rage in order to get on television, putting children in the front lines so that they would become martyrs) and proved that an ancient "hatred" of the Jews motivates Palestinians; Arafat is a weak leader who allows his people to attack Jews and incite against them by releasing terrorists and producing schoolbooks that deny Israel's existence.
There are probably one or two more formulae that I have not cited, but the general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by rock-throwing barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships that have been used to "defend" Israelis from the violence are simply warding off a terrible force. Bill Clinton's injunctions (dutifully parroted by his secretary of state) for Palestinians to "pull back" goes a long way to suggest that it is Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way round.
It is also worth mentioning that so successful has this Zionisation of the media been that not a single map has been published or shown on television to remind American viewers and readers -- notoriously ignorant of both geography and history -- that Israeli encampments, settlements, roads and barricades crisscross Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank. Moreover, as happened in Beirut in 1982, there is a veritable Israeli siege of Palestinians, including of Arafat and his men. Completely forgotten, if it was ever at all understood, is the system of Areas A, B, and C by which the military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank continues, and which the Oslo peace process was never really designed to end, much less totally modify.
As suggested by the absence of geography in this most geographical of conflicts, the resulting void is a vitally important point since the pictures that are either shown or described are without context at all. I think the omission by the Zionised media was a deliberate one at the outset and has now become automatic. It has allowed phony commentators like Thomas Friedman to peddle his wares shamelessly, droning on about American even-handedness, Israeli flexibility and generosity and his own perspicacious pragmatism with which he berates Arab leaders and stuns his bored readers. It has the result not only of permitting the completely preposterous notion of a "Palestinian attack on Israel" to prevail, but it also further dehumanises Palestinians as being beasts without sentience or motive.
Thus little wonder that when the figures of the dead and wounded are recited no nationalities are given: this lets Americans assume that the suffering is equally divided between the "warring parties," and in fact elevates Jewish suffering and reduces or eliminates Arab feelings entirely, except of course for rage. Rage and its cognates remain as the only and certainly the defining Palestinian emotion. It explains the violence, and indeed, it reifies it so that Israel has come to represent a decency and democracy that is forever surrounded by rage and violence. No other process can logically explain the stone throwers and the stalwart Israeli "defence."
Little is said about demolitions of Palestinian homes, expropriations of Palestinian lands, illegal arrests, torture and the like. Nothing is cited about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which is --with the exception of the Japanese occupation of Korea -- the longest military occupation in modern times; nothing about UN resolutions; nothing about Israeli contraventions of all the Geneva Conventions; nothing about the sufferings of one entire people and the obduracy ofanother. Forgotten are the catastrophe of 1948, ethnic cleansing and massacres, the devastation of Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila, the long years of military government for Arab citizens of Israel proper, to say nothing of their continued oppression as a persecuted 20 per cent minority within the Jewish state. Ariel Sharon at best is a provocation, never a war criminal, Ehud Barak a statesman, never the assassin of Beirut. Terrorism is always on the Palestinian side of the ledger, defence on the Israeli.
What Friedman and pro-Israeli "peaceniks" fail to mention when they extol Barak's unprecedented generosity is the real substance of it. We are not reminded that his commitment to a third withdrawal (of about 12 per cent) made at Wye 18 months ago has never occurred. Of what value then are more such "concessions?" We are told that he was willing to give back 90 per cent of the territory. What gets left out is that the 90 per cent is of what Israel has no intention of giving back. Greater Jerusalem is well over 30 per cent of the West Bank; large settlements to be annexed are another 15 per cent; military roads of areas have yet to be determined. So after all this is deducted, 90 per cent of the balance isn't so much after all.
As for Jerusalem: the Israeli concession was principally in being willing to discuss and maybe, just maybe, to offer shared authority over the Haram Al-Sharif. The breathtaking dishonesty of the matter is that all of West Jerusalem (principally Arab in 1948) was already conceded by Arafat, plus most of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem. One detail further: Palestinians' firing by small arms on Gilo is routinely made to seem like gratuitous violence, whereas no one mentions that Gilo itself sits on land confiscated from Beit Jala, the place from which the firing emanates. Besides, Beit Jala was disproportionately shelled by Israeli helicopters using missiles to destroy civilian houses.
I have made a survey of the major newspapers. Ever since 28 September, there have been anywhere between one and three opinion articles per average day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception of perhaps three articles written from a pro-Palestinian point of view in the Los Angeles Times, and two (one by an Israeli lawyer, Alegra Pacheco, the other by a pro-Oslo liberal Jordanian journalist, Rami Khoury) in the New York Times, all the articles -- (including those by regular columnists like Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer and others like them), have been in support of Israel, the US-sponsored "peace process," and the idea that Palestinian violence, Arafat's lack of cooperation, and Islamic fundamentalism are to blame. The writers have been former US military as well as civilian officials, Israeli apologists and officials, think tank specialists and experts, officials of pro-Israeli lobbies and organisations. In other words, the total blanketing of the mainstream has taken place on the assumption that no Palestinian or Arab or Islamic position on such matters as Israeli terror tactics against civilians, settler-colonialism, or military occupation exists at all, or is worth hearing from. This is simply without precedent in the annals of US journalism.
It is a direct reflection of a Zionist mind-set that makes Israel the norm in human behaviour, thereby excluding from equal consideration the existence of 300 million Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims. In the long run this is of course a suicidal position for Zionists to be in, but such is the arrogance of power that the thought seems not to have occurred to anyone.The mind-set I have described is truly staggering in its recklessness and, were it not very much a practical as well as actual distortion of reality, one could quite easily be talking about a form of private mental derangement. But it corresponds very closely to the official Israeli policy of dealing with Palestinians not as a people with a history of dispossession for which in large measure Israel is directly responsible, but as a periodic nuisance for whom force, and neither understanding nor full accommodation, is the only possible response. Everything else is literally unthinkable. This astonishing blindness is compounded in the United States since Arabs and Muslims are scarcely paid attention to except as (I have said in an earlier article) the butt of every aspiring politician.
A few days ago Hillary Clinton announced in a gesture of the most revolting hypocrisy that she was returning a $50,000 donation from an American-Muslim group because, she said, they supported terrorism; this in fact was an outright lie, since the group in question had only said that it supported Palestinian resistance against Israel during the current crisis, not in itself an untoward position but criminalised in the American system only because a totalitarian Zionism requires that any -- and I mean literally any -- criticism of what Israel does is simply intolerable and the rankest anti-Semitism. And this despite the fact that (again literally) much of the rest of the world has criticised Israel's policies of military occupation, disproportionate violence, and the siege of the Palestinians. In America you must refrain from any criticism, otherwise you are hounded as an anti-Semite requiring the severest opprobrium.
The further peculiarity of American Zionism, which is a system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion, is that it is impermissible to speak of Jewish violence, or Jewish actions when it comes to Israel, even though everything done by Israel is done in the name of the Jewish people, for and by a Jewish state. That such a state is a misnomer, since almost 20 per cent of the population is not Jewish, is never mentioned and this too accounts for the amazing, entirely deliberate discrepancy between what the media calls "Israeli Arabs" and "the Palestinians:" no reader or viewer could possibly know that they are the same people in fact divided by Zionist policy, or that both communities represent the result of Israeli policy -- apartheid in one case, military occupation and ethnic cleansing in the other.
American Zionism has made any serious public discussion of Israel, by far the largest ever recipient of US foreign aid, its past and its future, a taboo not be broken in any circumstance. To call this literally the last taboo in American discourse is by no means an exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with some freedom (although always within limits). The American flag can be burned in public, whereas the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old treatment of the Palestinians is virtually unimaginable, a narrative with no permission to appear.
This consensus might be somehow tolerable were it not for the fact that it makes the continuing punishment and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people an actual virtue. There is simply no people in the world today whose killing on television screens seems to be considered by most American viewers to be acceptable as well-deserved punishment. This is the case with Palestinians whose daily loss of life in the past month is herded under the rubric "the violence on both sides," as if the stones and slings of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression were a major offence rather than the courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted out to them not just by Israeli soldiers armed by America, but by a "peace process" designed to coop them up in Bantustans and reservations fit for animals.
That the US supporters of Israel could have plotted for seven years to produce a document designed essentially to cage people like inmates in an asylum or prison -- that is the real crime. And that this could be passed off as peace instead of the desolation that it really has been all along, that surpasses my powers to understand or adequately describe as anything less than untrammelled immorality. The worst thing of all is that so iron-like is the wall protecting American discourse about Israel that no questions can be put to the minds that produced Oslo and that for seven years have been passing off their scheme to the world as peace. One scarcely knows which is more pernicious, the mentality that thinks of Palestinians as not entitled even to express a sense of injustice (they are too low a form for that) or the one that continues to plot their further enslavement.
Were this the whole it would be bad enough. But our miserable status as far as US Zionism is concerned is compounded by the absence of any institution here or in the Arab world ready and able to produce an alternative. I fear that the coverage of those stone-throwing protesters in Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron may not be adequately reflected in the dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either to retire or to go forward. That is the ultimate pity of it.
Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 November 2000 Issue No. 506 (emphasis supplied)
The Israeli Concentration Camp at Khiam and Atrocities Committed There
Khiam was a concentration camp and torture center during the years of the Israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon. From 1985 until the Israeli withdrawal in May of 2000, thousands of Lebanese were shipped to the dreaded Khiam. Most of them were brutally tortured, some of them died.
Israelis have always sought to escape responsibility for what was done in Khiam. To help secure its hold on Southern Lebanon, Israelis armed and financed a local Lebanese militia, the South Lebanon Army or SLA. The SLA did the Israelis work by proxy. The SLA provided Khiam's camp guards and some of its torturers. Israelis provided others.
Ali Kashmar was fourteen when arrested and interned in 1988. Although he had voiced anti-Israeli opinions in school (his father was killed fighting the Israeli invasion ten years earlier) there is no evidence to suggest that he was guilty of any crime. 14 year old Ali was tortured for eleven days. Ali Kashmar was kept in the Khiam concentration camp for ten years. He grew from a boy to a man within the camp's walls. He spent time in solitary confinement. He was eventually released after a decade as part of a hostage exchange - fifty-five Khiam inmates and the bodies of 44 Lebanese were traded for the remains of three Israeli soliders in 1998. Damaged by his years in Khiam, he is still fighting severe psychological difficulties - and there is nowhere in Lebanon that provides treatment for this kind of trauma.
Ryadh Kalakesh was 17 when he was shipped to the Israeli concentration camp at Khiam. He comes from a family that was deeply involved with the Islamic guerrilla group, Hezbollah - one of his brothers was a Hezbollah soldier. Ryadh Kalakesh was kidnapped by Israeli troops on a sweep through his village in 1986. Ryadh was tortured for eleven months, and gives a graphic account of what it was like; the use of electric shocks administered through wires attached to the finger tips or the genitals, the beatings, the dousings with scalding hot then freezing cold water, and what was known as "the pole," where inmates - often after being striped naked - were handcuffed and suspended for hours at a time.
Ryadh's brother Adel was in the camp too; when Adel refused to tell the torturers what they wanted to hear they hauled in his wife Mona and tortured her so that he could hear her screams. Mona suffered electric burns fromwires attached to her nipples. She spent three months in solitary and lost her baby while in the concentration camp.
There is a compelling body of evidence about Israeli involvement in Khiam. Former inmates all say that in the early days of Khiam's time as a cncentration camp, Israeli torturers worked alongside their SLA counterparts. This evidence is corroborated by those guards who worked in the camp.
In 1988 the Israelis seems to have decided on a change of policy in Khiam, and the Israeli presence in the camp became less obvious. But in a court case brought by human rights lawyers, the Israeli Defence Ministry has admitted paying all the staff at the concentration camp and training the "interrogators" and guards.
In May of 2000, when the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, many of Khiam's guards and torturers fled across the border to the Israeli state. Six thousand members of the SLA and their families took up residency among the Israelis, living under Israeli government protection at the expense of the Israelis.
In early November of 2000, Lebanon's chief prosecutor, Riad Talih demanded the death penalty for 11 former SLA commandants who directed the Khiam camp, and who will be tried in absentina and are being sought on war crimes' warrants. However, the US and Canada are not cooperating in the hunt for these men.
The Israeli continue to operate another concentration camp, at Ayalon, in Israeli territority. Torture is also used at Ayalon.
Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II, Nov. 5, 2000
The murder of Palestinian boys for the apparently capital crime of stone-throwing has been a regular occurrence this autumn, 2000. Here is a case in point.
The little village of Hizma is no hotbed of radicalism. Its stone houses are set high on hills just outside Jerusalem in a biblical landscape of grey-green olive trees. Unlike the larger Palestinian towns, Hizma is still under Israeli control. There are no Palestinian gunmen here.
Yet in two days last week, Israeli soldiers shot and killed three of Hizma's teenagers. Two appear to have been gunned down in cold blood.
The men of Hizma have the big, calloused hands of workers and the older women wear traditional embroidered dresses. They are a world away from clashes that have become almost ritual in Gaza or in big West Bank towns such as Ramallah, ruled by the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat. There, armed Palestinian police and militia sometimes fire back at Israeli soldiers and the threat they constitute obscures the fact that most of the 168 dead in five weeks of violence are young stone-throwers.
According to the Geneva Convention, the inhabitants of Hizma, on the West Bank, are entitled to Israeli protection. But the stories of the boys who died there give the lie to any claim that Israeli soldiers fire only when their own lives are threatened.
Khaled Abu Khalid was the first to perish in Hizma since what Palestinians call the "al-Aqsa intifada" began on September 28. That was the day Ariel Sharon, the Israeli right-wing leader, and hundreds of bodyguards provoked the first Palestinian riot when they strode into the Haram al-Sharif compound in the old city of Jerusalem, home to the al-Aqsa mosque. The mosque is holy to Muslims as the place from which the prophet Muhammed leapt astride his steed to heaven.
Abu Khalid looked younger than his 17 years, but was relatively mature. He left school at 16 to earn money to help his mother and pay for his brother's studies. When he died last week, he had two jobs, as a house painter in the morning and, in the afternoon, as a clerk in the local sweet shop. His money was more important than ever to his family because his father, like 300,000 Palestinian workers, has been unemployed since Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza at the beginning of the latest conflict.
Abu Khalid had renovated his mother's single-storey stone house, and started building a floor above it because he wanted to get married and live there with his wife. Yesterday his brother Shadi was kicking Khaled's half-built floor to pieces in a fury over his death as his mother sat in her room below. "I look at him and I remember how beautiful his eyes are," said Intissar Abu Khalid. She can speak only in a hoarse whisper; her throat is raw from crying. She is curled against the wall of her sitting room, surrounded by women of the village. "He made sure to dress well and he oiled his hair in the morning. How can they take this boy I raised for 17 years?"
Abu Khalid rose early on Thursday and told his mother he was off to work. Just before 8 am, he joined a crowd of other teenagers at the entrance to the village, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers on the highway below. The soldiers fired tear gas, then rubber-coated steel bullets, then live ammunition, a deadly escalation that took half an hour. One bullet hit Abu Khalid in the neck. He bled to death by 9 am.
The deaths of the next two boys in Hizma were far more sinister. According to friends, relatives and three medical workers who were witnesses, they were defenceless when shot. Neither was a total innocent; they had been throwing stones. But even if there could be any justification for shooting teenage stone-throwers, there can be none here. The clash between boys and Israeli soldiers had ended an hour earlier, and the nearest Israeli post was a mile away, across a deep "wadi," (water channel), far out of reach of the most optimistic teenager. The clash that led to the deaths of Rami Amtaweh, 15, and Mahmoud Sayeed, 19, started because they were good friends of Abu Khalid.
After midday prayers and his funeral, they threw stones at the Israelis at the entrance to their village. There is no denying the teenage stone-throwers can be terrifying. When I arrived in Hizma, they were in full cry, whipping stones into the air with muscular arcs of their arms, sweating, hyped-up, oblivious to grenades of tear gas and the hard "pang" of rubber-coated steel bullets. They whirled on my car coming up behind them, stones poised, then relaxed when a lookout on the street made a hand sign as if he was snapping a camera to show the car held a journalist.
The "battle" went on all afternoon. The Israelis, swathed in protective gear and behind a fortified post, pushed the kids back with tear gas whenever they surged forward. Three ambulances from the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Arab version of the Red Cross, treated injured youths for gas inhalation and a few rubber-coated steel bullet hits. By about 3.30 pm, the rage of the boys was exhausted and they drifted away.
About 20 teenagers wandered up the street to a hill at the north end of the village, away from the Israelis, and gathered at a flat rocky open space that looks out over the hills. The boys boasted to each other, joking and shouting about who had thrown the best stones. An ambulance had followed the boys up the hill, thinking there might be trouble, and had parked nearby, but given the distance from the nearest Israeli position, the three emergency medical workers relaxed.
As dusk fell the boys decided to roll a tire up the hill onto the open space and light it. It would look like a beacon across the hills. Maher Asiya, one of the medics in the ambulance, recalls that he and his two colleagues decided to leave after about half an hour. There were no Israelis nearby, nothing the youths would get excited about.
"They were talking and joking to each other, kids, you know," Asiya said. It was over for the day. As Asiya walked back to the ambulance and his colleagues climbed in, he was shaken out of his exhaustion. "I heard the sound of bullets, a burst of shots, for just a minute, maybe two minutes. I turned around, and three of the boys were on the ground," Asiya said. The teenagers scattered in panic, then ran back to help carry their friends to the ambulance. The teenager he was later to know as Sayeed had been shot in the chest. Amtaweh, 15, who had been talking to Sayeed, was shot in the lower back and was bleeding horribly from the bullet's exit wound in his stomach.
Sayeed died in the ambulance; Amtaweh died on the operating table. The third boy, Abdul Karim Kana'an, 16, was shot in the leg. He lived. Yesterday morning there were two large splashes of blood on the ground where the boys died. The Israeli army refused to comment, except to say that its soldiers adhered to the rules of engagement and did not fire unless their lives were endangered.
"I am so angry today," said Asiya as he sat in the Red Crescent offices. "There was nothing, nothing, happening. These boys were executed. They were killed in cold blood."
Marie Colvin, The London Sunday Times | November 5, 2000
The Al-Aqsa Intifada
By Prof. Avram Noam Chomsky, M.I.T.
After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli occupied territories, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including 30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of force available.
Barak's plan was not given in detail, but the outlines are familiar: they conform to the "final status map" presented by the US-Israel as the basis for the Camp David negotiations that collapsed in July. This plan, extending US-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 (PA), 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.
In the West Bank, a northern canton is to include Nablus and other Palestinian cities, a central canton is based in Ramallah, and a southern canton in Bethlehem; Jericho is to remain isolated. Palestinians would be effectively cut off from Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life. Similar arrangements are likely in Gaza, with Israel keeping the southern coastal region and a small settlement at Netzarim (the site of many of the recent atrocities), which is hardly more than an excuse for a large military presence and roads splitting the Strip below Gaza City. These proposals formalize the vast settlement and construction programs that Israel has been conducting, thanks to munificent US aid, with increasing energy since the US was able to implement its version of the "peace process" after the Gulf war. For more on the negotiations and their background, see my July 25 commentary; and for further background, the commentary by Alex and Stephen Shalom, Oct. 10.
The goal of the negotiations was to secure official PA adherence to this project. Two months after they collapsed, the current phase of violence began. Tensions, always high, were raised when the Barak government authorized a visit by Ariel Sharon with 1000 police to the Muslim religious sites (Al-Aqsa) on a Thursday (Sept. 28). Sharon is the very symbol of Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going back to 1953. Sharon's announced purpose was to demonstrate "Jewish sovereignty" over the al-Aqsa compound, but as the veteran correspondent Graham Usher points out, the "al-Aqsa intifada," as Palestinians call it, was not initiated by Sharon's visit; rather, by the massive and intimidating police and military presence that Barak introduced the following day, the day of prayers. Predictably, that led to clashes as thousands of people streamed out of the mosque, leaving 7 Palestinians dead and 200 wounded. Whatever Barak's purpose, there could hardly have been a more efficient way to set the stage for the shocking atrocities of the following weeks.
The same can be said about the failed negotiations, which focused on Jerusalem, a condition observed strictly by US commentary. Possibly Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling was exaggerating when he wrote that a solution to this problem "could have been reached in five minutes," but he is right to say that "by any diplomatic logic [it] should have been the easiest issue to solve (Ha'aretz, Oct. 4). It is understandable that Clinton-Barak should want to suppress what they are doing in the occupied territories, which is far more important. Why did Arafat agree? Perhaps because he recognizes that the leadership of the Arab states regard the Palestinians as a nuisance, and have little problem with the Bantustan-style settlement, but cannot overlook administration of the religious sites, fearing the reaction of their own populations. Nothing could be better calculated to set off a confrontation with religious overtones, the most ominous kind, as centuries of experience reveal.
The primary innovation of Barak's new plan is that the US-Israeli demands are to be imposed by direct force instead of coercive diplomacy, and in a harsher form, to punish the victims who refused to concede politely. The outlines are in basic accord with policies established informally in 1968 (the Allon Plan), and variants that have been proposed since by both political groupings (the Sharon Plan, the Labor government plans, and others). It is important to recall that the policies have not only been proposed, but implemented, with the support of the US. That support has been decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that followed, culminating in the "Oslo process." Since all of this has been effectively vetoed from history in the US, it takes a little work to discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded.
As noted, Barak's plan is a particularly harsh version of familiar US-Israeli rejectionism. It calls for terminating electricity, water, telecommunications, and other services that are doled out in meager rations to the Palestinian population, who are now under virtual siege. It should be recalled that independent development was ruthlessly barred by the Israeli military regime from 1967, leaving the Palestinian people in destitution and dependency, a process that has worsened considerably during the US-run "Oslo process." One reason is the "closures" regularly instituted, must brutally by the more dovish Labor-based governments. As discussed by another outstanding journalist, Amira Hass, this policy was initiated by the Rabin government "years before Hamas had planned suicide attacks, [and] has been perfected over the years, especially since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority." An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control, closure has been accompanied by the importation of an essential commodity to replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian labor on which much of the Israeli economy relies: hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from around the world, many of them victims of the "neoliberal reforms" of the recent years of "globalization." Surviving in misery and without rights, they are regularly described as a virtual slave labor force in the Israeli press. The current Barak proposal is to extend this program, reducing still further the prospects even for mere survival for the Palestinians.
A major barrier to the program is the opposition of the Israeli business community, which relies on a captive Palestinian market for some $2.5 billion in annual exports, and has "forged links withPalestinian security officials" and Arafat's "economic adviser, enabling them to carve out monopolies with official PA consent" (Financial Times, Oct. 22; also NYT, same day). They have also hoped to set up industrial zones in the territories, transferring pollution and exploiting a cheap labor force in maquiladora-style installations owned by Israeli enterprises and the Palestinian elite, who are enriching themselves in the time-honored fashion.
Barak's new proposals appear to be more of a warning than a plan, though they are a natural extension of what has come before. Insofar as they are implemented, they would extend the project of "invisible transfer" that has been underway for many years, and that makes more sense than outright "ethnic cleansing" (as we call the process when carried out by official enemies). People compelled to abandon hope and offered no opportunities for meaningful existence will drift elsewhere, if they have any chance to do so. The plans, which have roots in traditional goals of the Zionist movement from its origins (across the ideological spectrum), were articulated in internal discussion by Israeli government Arabists in 1948, while outright ethnic cleansing was underway: their expectation was that the Palestinian refugees "would be crushed" and "die," while "most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab countries."
Current plans, whether imposed by coercive diplomacy or outright force, have similar goals. They are not unrealistic if they can rely on the world-dominant power and its intellectual classes. The current situation is described accurately by Amira Hass, in Israel's most prestigious daily (Ha'aretz, Oct. 18). Seven years after the Declaration of Principles in September 1993 -- which foretold this outcome for anyone who chose to see -- "Israel has security an administrative control" of most of the West Bank and 20% of the Gaza Strip. It has been able "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 for Jews only. 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 three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of Israeli lying and deception, just as the first Intifada was the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation."
These 'settlement and construction' programs continue, with US support, whoever may be in the White House. On August 18, Ha'aretz noted that two governments -- Rabin and Barak -- had declared that settlement was "frozen," in accord with the dovish image preferred in the US and by much of the Israeli left. They made use of the "freezing" to intensify settlement, including economic inducements for the secular population, automatic grants for ultra-religious settlers, and other devices, which can be carried out with little protest while "the lesser of two evils" happens to be making the decisions, a pattern hardly unfamiliar elsewhere. "There is freezing and there is reality," the report observes caustically. The reality is that Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories has grown over four times as fast as in Israeli population centers, continuing -- perhaps accelerating -- under Barak. Settlement brings with it large infrastructure projects designed to integrate much of the region within Israel, while leaving Palestinians isolated, apart from "Palestinian roads" that are travelled at one's peril.
Another journalist with an outstanding record, Danny Rubinstein, points out that "readers of the Palestinian papers get the impression (and rightly so) that activity in the settlements never stops. Israelis are constantly building, expanding and reinforcing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is always grabbing homes and lands in areas beyond the 1967 lines - and of course, this is all at the expense of the Palestinians, in order to limit them, push them into a corner and then out. In other words, the goal is to eventually dispossess them of their homeland and their capital, Jerusalem" (Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, October 23).
Readers of the Israeli press, Rubinstein continues, are largely shielded from the unwelcome facts, though not entirely so. In the US, it is far more important for the population to be kept in ignorance, for obvious reasons: the economic and military programs rely crucially on US support, which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known.
To illustrate, on October 3, after a week of bitter fighting and killing, the defense correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade," an agreement with the US 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 before of patrol aircraft and Apache attack helicopters. These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in the US inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. It would be unfair to say that those providing the gifts cannot discover the fact. In a database search, David Peterson found that they were reported in the Raleigh (North Carolina) press.
The sale of military helicopters was condemned by Amnesty International (Oct. 19), because these "US-supplied helicopters have been used to violate the human rights of Palestinians and Arab Israelis during the recent conflict in the region." Surely that was anticipated, barring advanced cretinism. Israel has been condemned internationally (the US abstaining) for "excessive use of force," in a "disproportionate reaction" to Palestinian violence. That includes even rare condemnations by the ICRC, specifically, for attacks on at least 18 Red Cross ambulances (NYT, Oct 4). Israel's response is that it is being unfairly singled out for criticism. The response is entirely accurate. Israel is employing official US doctrine, known here as "the Powell doctrine," though it is of far more ancient vintage, tracing back centuries: Use massive force in response to any perceived threat. Official Israeli doctrine allows "the full use of weapons against anyone who endangers lives and especially at anyone who shoots at our forces or at Israelis" (Israeli military legal adviser Daniel Reisner, FT, Oct. 6). Full use of force by a modern army includes tanks, helicopter gunships, sharpshooters aiming at civilians (often children), etc. US weapons sales "do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't be used against civilians," a Pentagon official said; he "acknowleged however that anti-tank missiles and attack helicopters are not traditionally considered tools for crowd control" -- except by those powerful enough to get away with it, under the protective wings of the reigning superpower. "We cannot second-guess an Israeli commander who calls in a Cobra (helicopter) gunship because his troops are under attack," another US official said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, October 3). Accordingly, such killing machines must be provided in an unceasing flow.
It is not surprising that a US client state should adopt standard US military doctrine, which has left a toll too awesome to record, including very recent years. The US and Israel are, of course, not alone in adopting this doctrine, and it is sometimes even condemned: namely, when adopted by enemies targeted for destruction. A recent example is the response of Serbia when its territory (as the US insists it is) was attacked by Albanian-based guerrillas, killing Serb police and civilians and abducting civilians (including Albanians) with the openly-announced intent of eliciting a "disproportionate response" that would arouse Western indignation, then NATO military attack.
Very rich documentation from US, NATO, and other Western sources is now available, most of it produced in an effort to justify the bombing. Assuming these sources to be credible, we find that the Serbian response -- while doubtless "disproportionate" and criminal, as alleged -- does not compare with the standard resort to the same doctrine by the US and its clients, Israel included.
In the mainstream British press, we can at last read that "If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States [which is not accurate,unfortunately]. Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-administered `bantustans', with `whites' monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs - flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education spending - would be recognised as scandalous too" (Observer, Guardian, Oct. 15).
Such conclusions will come as no surprise to those whose vision has not been constrained by the doctrinal blinders imposed for many years. It remains a major task to remove them in the most important country. That is a prerequisite to any constructive reaction to the mounting chaos and destruction, terrible enough before our eyes, and with long-term implications that are not pleasant to contemplate. (Emphasis supplied)
Latest Developments 1 November 2000 Ramallah, West Bank
Late this evening, the Israeli military attacked with tanks, heavy machine gun fire and linked automatic 40mm 'launched' grenades residential areas in Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, Al Khader, Tulkarem, Mentar Crossing in Gaza, Jericho, Al Bireh and Betunia. Israeli attack helicopters also attacked the cities of Jericho, Al Khader. and Beit Jala with LAW rockets.
A strict Israeli imposed closure remains in place throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Pal;estinian protests were held in a number of areas this afternoon, with 6 Palestinians killed and 170 injured . Intensified Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian residents either travelling on major roads, attempting to harvest olive orchards, or in residential areas have become a daily and nightly occurrence. Israeli settlers shooting at protesters alongside Israeli soldiers has become a common phenomena.
Ahmad Salman Tayeh, 15 years old from Shate' (Beach) Refugee Camp, was shot and killed today by live ammunition to his head at Mentar Crossing, Gaza.
Ibrahim Riziq Marzouk Omar, 15 years old from Shate' (Beach) Refugee Camp, was shot and killed today by live ammunition to his chest at Mentar Crossing, Gaza.
Mohammad Ibrahim Hajaj, 17 years old from Shuja'iyeh, Gaza City, was shot and killed today by 50mm ammunition to his face at Mentar Crossing, Gaza.
Wa'el Mohammad Shu'aib Ghneim, 28 years old from Al Khader, was killed today after being shot in the chest by an Israeli attack helicopter while standing in front of his home.
Marwan Tay'eh Joum'a Assaf, 21 years old from Wadi Kofin, Bethlehem, was killed this evening in Al Khader.
Protests were also held this afternoon at the northern entrance of Al Bireh, at the entrance of Jalazoune Refugee Camp and in the village of Deir Nitham, after the funeral of 17 year old Tha'er Ibrahim Zaid from Jalazoune Refugee Camp, who was shot and killed yesterday as a result of live ammunition to his abdomen. At least 40 Palestinians were injured in the protest. Late this evening, heavy machine gun fire and grenades were randomly directed at residential areas of Al Bire.
At the time of writing, Israeli attacks from the nearby military base of Ofra on residential areas of Betunia continue from heavy machine gun fire and 40mm 'launched' grenades. I
At approximately 8:30 PM, Israeli settlers from Bet El and soldiers surrounded the Jalazoune Refugee Camp and attacked residents.
Brief exchange of fire occurred at Mentar Crossing, followed by tank and artillery shelling of the area by the Israeli military.
In Rafah, cprotests erupted during the day, with several Palestinians injured, including 13 year old Abdel Aziz Ali Shaheen, who was shot twice by rubber coated steel bullets to his chest. After being shot, Abdel Aziz was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers and held for several hours. No medical care was administered while he was in the custody of Israeli authorities, leaving him bleeding in critical condition.
In Deir Al Balah, near the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom, a Palestinian pedestrian was shot by Israeli soldiers with live ammunition and remains in critical condition. No protests occurred in the area.
Protests occurred this evening at the Tufah Junction in Khan Younis, with at least 8 Palestinians injured from live ammunition, and 8 from rubber coated steel bullets.
Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers in the villages of Orif, Deir Al Hattab, Salem and Huwarra, which remains under Israeli imposed closure for the 25th day. In Huwarra, 18 year old Sa'id Al Safadi and 37 year old Saleh Al Safadi were shot by Israeli settlers, and both are listed in critical condition. Sa'id was shot in the neck by live ammunition and Saleh was shot in the chest by live ammunition. At least 8 Palestinians were injured while driving in their cars as a result of Israeli settler attacks outside of the village of Huwarra, on the main Ramallah-Nablus road.
In the villages of Orif, Deir Al Hattab and Salem, Israeli settlers chased and shot at Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in their olive orchards. The farmers were subsequently prevented from entering their orchards. Residents in the area report that the settlers gathered the olives picked by the farmers and then proceeded to destroy all the olive trees.
Protests erupted this afternoon near Al Bilal Mosque in Bethlehem, resulting in the injury of 5 Palestinians. Four schools were closed as Israeli settlers prevented cPalestinian hildren from reaching their schools.
Mohammad Mahmoud Al Hroub, 27 years old and an officer in the Palestinian Force 17, was killed this afternoon in Al Khader, and 12 Palestinians injured, after which exchange of fire was reported between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers. An Israeli officer and a soldier were killed in the confrontation, with four Israeli soldiers wounded. The Israeli military then used tanks and heavy artillery fire in random attacks against the village, destroying at least 10 homes and injuring 20 Palestinian civilians. Later in the afternoon, at least 2 Israeli attack helicopters randomly shelled residential areas in the village, killing Wa'el Mohammad Shu'aib Ghneim, 26 years old from Al Khader, who was shot in the chest by an Israeli attack helicopter while standing in front of his home. At least 10 other homes were damaged, and 2 homes burnt completely. Attacks continued for several hours.
Ambulances were also subjected to direct heavy machine gun fire, preventing them from reaching the village to reach those injured, forcing residents to use private vehicles to transport the injured. At least 7 Palestinians are reported to be in extremely critical condition.
Early in the evening, heavy artillery, tanks and attack helicopters were used by the Israeli military to shell the towns of Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Aida Refugee Camp. Several homes were damaged and many residents reported injured. Attacks continued late into the evening.
Beginning at 3AM this morning, the villages of Silt Al Thaher and Al Fandoukomiyeh were raided by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, with tanks, armored cars and heavy artillery deployed throughout the area. An Israeli imposed closure was placed on the area, houses were raided, and tens of residents were arrested and transferred by bus to the nearby settlement of Hormish. Later on in the day, the Israeli military ordered residents over the age of 30 to gather at the schools in the area. The Girl's school of Silt Al Thaher was converted into an Israeli military base, with tanks and armored cars deployed in the area, along with bulldozers which placed cement blocks throughout the road, closing off all streets in the area of both villages. Palestinian residents refused to abide by the orders to gather in the schools and the curfew imposed on the area, with a number of Palestinian youths attempting to flee the area to avoid internment.
Residents of Al Fandoukomiyeh made emergency calls to Jenin for ambulances to be sent to the area as there are no ambulances in the village. However, any ambulance attempting to approach the two villages was subjected to Israeli military fire, and prevented from reaching either of the villages.
At approximately 11:30 PM this evening, the Israeli military called on residents of the Sheikh and Abu Sneineh neighborhoods to evacuate the area immediately. At least 13 Palestinians were injured earlier this evening, with one in critical condition.
Protests erupted in Salfit late this evening, with Israeli soldiers and settlers shooting at Palestinian residents.
Israeli settlers attacked this afternoon the villages of Qabalan and Nazlit Issa, causing damage to property and shooting at residents. Later, the Israeli military raided the two villages, launching an mass arrest campaign, searching homes and vandalizing property. Outside the city of Tulkarem, near Khadoureh College, the Israeli military shot from a nearby military post with heavy machine gun fire into the area and in the direction of the college, which only resumed classes two days ago after previous Israeli attacks. Fires started around the college as a result of the assault. Heavy artillery and tanks also shelled residential areas in the city of Tulkarem, causing damage to tens of houses and one school, with electricity and phone lines subsequently cut. Fires were also reported at the Fadliyeh School and the office of the Regional Agricultural Affairs, affiliated to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, after being subjected to direct heavy machine gun fire. Tawfik Hassan Abu Thareef, a Palestinian in his late 40s, was directly hit by heavy machine gun fire while attempting to evacuate a family from their nearby home. He is reported to be in extremely critical condition and is presently undergoing surgery. The total number of Palestinians injured in Tulkarem is not known as of yet.
Armed confrontations took place this afternoon in Jericho, with one Israeli officer killed. The Israeli military shelled late in the evening Aqbat Jaber Refugee Camp with heavy artillery, tanks and at least two LAW missiles from attack helicopters. No information on injuries and damage is available.
Protests occurred this afternoon in Qalandia Refugee Camp, Al Ram and Shufat. An intense internment campaign by the Israeli authorities continues throughout areas in Jerusalem.
news & analysis part one: Sept.28-Oct. 27 2000
news & analysis part three: Nov. 11-14, 2000
israeli army shoots muslim worshippers
israeli army fires on medical personnel and ambulances
israeli child murder documented
israeli holocaust against palestinians / archives / bookstore / news bureau