Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001, pages 8-16, 80

Reports From Palestine

A Letter From Palestine

By Marina Barham

Dear Friends,

I know it has been a long time since I have written to you all, but believe me that my energy failed to handle the anger I have felt for the last few weeks. I could not write.

The last few weeks have been a nightmare for children in Palestine. It seems that babies and children are the favorite victims for Israel.

Maybe because they are weak and harmless. The death of the baby Iman Hajjo, four months old in Gaza from the Israeli shelling, the death of so many children under the age of 15 has caused panic for Palestinian parents. There is no safe place for anyone. Not at home, not in the street, not at school or anywhere else.

The last few weeks have made me paranoid. Jesica, the four-year-old who lost her eye to an Israeli bullet, and over 500 children who lost their eyes in the last eight months have depressed me. It made me really scared for the lives of my two nieces. Renata and Cilina have been deprived of even going outside the house because I am so scared they might lose an eye or get shot if they do. Since Jesica lost her eye, she started removing the eyes of her dolls. One night she even tried to get her grandfather’s eye out. The little girl cannot understand what happened to her, nor can her parents.

Last week the Israeli tanks heavily shelled Beit Jala. We thought that our house was located in a protected area. Well, we soon lost our false sense of security, because for a couple of nights we could see and hear the bullets hitting our walls. Usually when the shelling of Beit Jala starts, we run to get my nieces and bring them to our house because it is more protected. That night we could not, because the bullets were everywhere.

I started calling my brother at 1 a.m. to make sure he moved the girls into the inner room. Ramzi told me he had to carry the girls while they were asleep, and put them on a mattress on the floor of the inner room. He took down all the suitcases full of summer clothes and put them around the two girls to try and protect them. My brother Ramzi sounded so scared and frightened for his daughters’ lives and I was trying to assure him they would be OK. I was lying, because deep inside me I, too, was so frightened. My brother-in-law, who is British, was so frightened this time that he also moved his mattress, and his family spent the night sitting in the inside corner of the wooden staircase.

By 3 a.m. the shelling stopped. We heard that a little boy who is three years old lost an arm because he was hit and badly wounded by shrapnel from the shells. The boy, an only child, was in very serious condition.

Several houses got destroyed that night, too. One of those houses was the house of one of our drama students, Nidal. Nidal’s parents have been working so hard to build their house. The first night they moved into it, three shells hit the new house. With God’s help they were rescued. Damages to the house amounted to over $50,000.

I do not know anymore what to say or do. I am strong. I am not giving up. But remember I am human, after all. Or maybe it is the wrong word to use, because all people are human—but no one really is concerned. I am confused about what is going on around me. I am not sure how to handle seeing babies like Iman Hajjo from Gaza, killed by a shell. Iman was four months old, an angel still. Unless you are made of stone, you would weep for Iman, one of so many children who were killed.

The other day my sister and her husband were driving back from Ramallah. Near Kalandia they saw some kids not more than 11 years old hiding behind a large garbage container. They were teasing the Israeli soldiers by showing and then hiding their faces. The kids were not throwing stones or anything else. At the junction there the Israeli soldiers, who were a few meters away, shot at the car. Dan, who is British, got out of the car after driving to the other side of the road, to check where the bullet had hit. He found a rubber-coated metal bullet which had hit the side of the car.

The soldiers, seeing that he was foreign, came to him and asked him what had happened. He told them that they had shot at the car. One of the soldiers looked toward the kids and said to Dan, “Well, you were not the target, they were.”

Pointing at the kids and using his hand to show their height, Dan stared at the soldier in shock and told him that the kids were not throwing stones, and they are only children. Showing no remorse, the soldiers gestured for Dan to leave and continued firing at the children.

Children are the target? Children’s eyes are also the target. Children’s arms and legs are their targets. Why?

Because they are life-threatening to armed Israeli soldiers!

Please do not tell me to continue to be strong. Please do not tell me to get over my depression, because it is extremely hard.

I know that life goes on, but what kind of life is this? Marina Barham

Marina Barham is the founder of INAD Center for Theater and Arts, a children’s theater in Beit Jala, Palestine.

Israel’s Or Commission Finds Evidence of “Shoot-to-Kill” Policy Against Palestinian Citizens of Israel

By Jonathan Cook

Dominating the front pages of Israeli newspapers this past spring has been evidence that, as the second intifada heated up in early October 2000, Israeli police snipers carried out execution-style killings of 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel. The evidence has emerged in hearings before a judicial inquiry, the Or Commission sitting at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, which has been examining the deaths, as well as severe injuries to hundreds more demonstrators. The testimony of police witnesses shows that the force lied for many months about the fact that it used live ammunition against Arab demonstrators in the country’s north. Individual officers also have admitted that they were ordered to use entirely different tactics when dealing with Israeli Jews who staged similar violent protests.

Most controversially, the Or Commission has heard that the northern police commander Alik Ron, whose outspoken views on the Arab minority are often described as racist, personally directed the shooting. One of Ron’s senior officers has told the inquiry that it was the first time he had ever known of a policeman being told to open fire on Israeli citizens. Critics now accuse Ron of implementing a shoot-to-kill policy.

Evidence not yet presented to the inquiry is equally damning. Ballistics experts have confirmed that the police used high-velocity rifles firing small-caliber bullets that can inflict wounds particularly difficult to treat. A riot control expert who conducted an Amnesty International investigation has also concluded that, even though the Arabs were not armed, the police treated them as though they were a military foe, using tactics and weaponry more suited to putting down an armed insurrection. Indeed, the cover of a hospital report on 17-year-old Asil Asleh’s death is stamped with the words “Enemy Operation.”

Each year on March 30—in a ritual of confrontation with the authorities known as Land Day—Israel’s Palestinians go on strike, often burning tires and throwing stones in demonstrations protesting five decades of discrimination and the confiscation of their lands by the Jewish state. But last October’s protests—which were demonstrations both of solidarity with the intifada and against discrimination within Israel—were marked by a much harsher police response than usual. In Arrabe an unmarked convoy of policemen abandoned their position several hundred yards away, out of range of the stone-throwers, to drive directly at the demonstration. Asil Asleh, one of the slowest to react, ran for cover into an olive grove but stumbled and fell. Witnesses say that, as he lay face down on the ground, a policeman stood over him and shot at close range. Doctors later found a bullet wound in the back of his neck.

In the aftermath of the Galilee clashes, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his interior minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, praised the police. They claimed that Arab rioters were on the point of storming Jewish residential areas and that the death toll would have been much higher had the police not shown restraint. The official verdict was accepted by almost every Jew in Israel. Commentators in the media routinely denounced Israel’s one million Palestinian citizens as a “fifth column,” finally unmasked as collaborators with the enemy.

Then Barak, worried by the Palestinian citizens’ threat to boycott the Feb. 6 elections en masse, promised to establish an inquiry to rake over the ashes of October’s events. Ironically, the inquiry under Justice Theodor Or began its hearings just days after Barak’s defeat at the polls.

Testimony of police officers called to the town of Umm al-Fahm, where three protesters were killed, has exposed glaring failures of normal police procedures. Unit commanders have admitted that they did not try to address demonstrators through loudspeakers, or equip officers with protective gear such as riot shields. Instead, from the outset they fired rubber-coated steel bullets. According to an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, even these bullets were of a type normally reserved by Israel for use against “terrorists.”

For five months, everyone from Barak on down had insisted that no live ammunition was used. As soon as police officers gave their testimony, however, the official line crumbled. Surprised by the inconsistencies, Justice Or forced the release of postmortem reports, which confirmed that two of the three killed in Umm al-Fahm had been hit by live fire. The police defense for using live ammunition is far from reassuring. Commanders say officers were forced to resort to live rounds when they ran out of tear gas and “rubber” bullets.

The most embarrassing admission soon followed. A unit commander in Umm al-Fahm, who gave his testimony anonymously from behind a screen, said he had been taking orders from Alik Ron, directly by radio, to shoot individual protesters. He added that during the course of Oct. 2 Ron had changed the instruction that only demonstrators carrying firearms and “endangering life” were to be targeted, and included anyone with a slingshot.

Other snipers said they had selected their targets and then waited for authorization from Ron before firing. Marwan Dalal, one of the lawyers representing the families, said: “It is central to the police case that the snipers only shot at demonstrators who were putting their lives in immediate danger. But if they were waiting for an order from Ron then that cannot be true. And what was Alik Ron doing giving orders by radio to shoot particular individuals anyway? How can he have known over the radio whether his officers were in immediate danger?”

The police are hoping that the inquiry will eventually slip from the front pages of Israeli newspapers. On the orders of the national police commander, Yehuda Wilk, all officers now receive legal advice before testifying. Critics accuse the force of coaching its officers to try to halt the flow of damaging evidence. Still, the revelations continue. Guy Reif, commander of the force that entered the village of Sakhnin, where two protesters died, denied to the inquiry that he shot at demonstrators. But he was subsequently arrested after it emerged that, following his testimony, he fired bullets at his own station and threw a grenade. Prosecutors suspect Reif was trying to reinforce impressions among Jews in the Galilee region that Arab residents pose a threat to their safety.

Azmi Bishara, a leading Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, says that the police killings are evidence of a widespread racism within Israeli society. “For 30 years or more the police and army in this country have been trained to treat all Arabs—including those inside Israel—as the enemy. We may be citizens, we are supposed to have equal rights, but in reality we know that we are not treated the same.”

Bishara and others point to the police response to riots by Jews in the Galilee that occurred at the same time as the Arab protests. In dozens of incidents, the inhabitants of Jewish towns and villages turned on their Arab neighbors, throwing stones at cars and individuals and burning properties. But police officers who responded to those riots have confirmed to the inquiry that no live rounds were fired at Jewish demonstrators, and only rarely were “rubber” bullets used. In Tiberias—where a policeman was killed in the riots—police were ordered to leave behind their guns and use only batons to control the crowd.

Some Palestinians in Israel believe culpability for the shootings may reach higher than Ron, who has described the inquiry as a “slap in the face” to the police. Although the full facts have yet to emerge, it is clear that Ron and other police commanders were invited to a security meeting with Barak and Ben-Ami on the evening of Oct. 1, the night before most of the shootings. The next morning Barak gave an interview to Israeli radio in which he said he had given “the green light” to the police to use whatever force was necessary to control the riots. Lawyers representing the families of the dead believe that either the police were given instructions by Barak and Ben-Ami to use deadly force against the protesters, or the police interpreted their orders in this way.

Still to be examined are the events in Nazareth, where some of the worst incidents occurred. The lawyers representing the Arab families have video footage of two police snipers on a rooftop in the center of town firing into the crowds of demonstrators below. At one point, presumably when someone is hit by their fire, they stop to slap hands in a celebratory “high-five” gesture. Photographic evidence compiled by the lawyers will also require explanations from the police. Lampposts and buildings in Nazareth are riddled with bullet holes almost uniformly at head height, despite police claims that officers were ordered to shoot only at demonstrators’ legs. Local children collect and trade like marbles spent live rounds fired from high-velocity weapons.

Israeli authorities will also come under scrutiny for what some critics claim is an attempted cover-up. In the weeks following the October clashes no effort was made by the police or independent officials to collect evidence of what happened at any of the locations where demonstrators were killed or injured. No postmortems were carried out on the victims except at Umm al-Fahm, and then only at the insistence of Arab lawyers who accompanied the bodies to the hospital. Even these reports were withheld until the inquiry ordered their release.

Azmi Bishara’s home near Nazareth was attacked by a Jewish mob on Oct. 8, in a backlash against the Arab protests earlier that week. Among the rioters was Ophir Elbaz, a policeman who had been on duty in Umm al-Fahm during the demonstrations. Although Elbaz has admitted to the inquiry that he attacked Bishara’s and other Arab homes and that at the time he was carrying his police gun, he has yet to be disciplined or suspended from the force. Many liberal Jewish commentators believe that the Or Commission may eventually heal the huge fracture in relations between Israeli Jews and Israel’s Palestinian citizens. As Bishara said, however: “How can we believe the Or Commission will begin to change the racism inside Israel when the authorities can’t even take action against this single officer?”

Jonathan Cook is a journalist with the Observer newspaper in London who recently returned from Nazareth.

Impressions of a People Under Siege

By Lois Gode

I expected to see and hear a lot of activity upon arrival in Israel.

After hearing about all the violence there, I expected to see evidence of all the Palestinian “terrorism” Israel has endured. After all, isn’t that what our media have been telling us in the States? This trip certainly demonstrated how misleading our media really are.

The roads, which allow only Israeli vehicles with yellow license plates, were clogged with heavy traffic, producing choking exhaust fumes. I wondered how Ariel Sharon could possibly consider bring in an additional one million Jews, as he has proposed.

Once we were out of the Tel Aviv area, all was quiet, and we saw neat rows of crops and people going about their daily lives as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Only the occasional military presence belied the peaceful scenes of settlement houses with their bright orange-tiled roofs dotting the hilltops. The settlements with their well cared-for green lawns gave no hint of the scarcity of water. The surrounding fields and olive orchards presented a calm pastoral scene.

One would never have guessed the misery endured by the Palestinians only a short distance away, and to be shared by us in our coming journey. Several times we traveled on the “road to hell”—a road that Palestinians must use when traveling from the Bethlehem area to all points north Entering Jerusalem is forbidden to them. Instead of tranquil agricultural fields we saw mine fields, barricaded roads, trenches, ruined buildings, and the stunned faces of people in shock after their homes have been demolished by Israeli bombardment.

We heard from youth who desperately want a future, and who want the American people to hear their story and understand they are not terrorists. They want only the opportunity to go to school and have a normal life without continually facing the persecution and harassments of occupation and an oppressive military rule.

On our first night in the West Bank the Israelis, with absolutely no provocation, shelled and machine-gunned the Christian town of Beit Sahour for four long hours. The following morning we went and looked at the homes destroyed nearby and realized how very close we had been to the shelling. One beautiful stone house, owned by a Palestinian Christian, had been in the making for 20 years. Along with a lifetime of dreams and hard work, it had been destroyed by American-made bombs and missiles. The owner walked around the remains of his home in shock, saying to himself more than anyone else, “But I don’t want my children to learn to hate.”

“How can you be so forgiving when these people do such things to you?” we asked him.

He looked at us with a slight smile and said, “But isn’t that what Jesus would do?”

Hardly the words of a terrorist.

The day before our arrival a 16-year-old-boy had been killed in his bedroom. His home in Bethlehem had been bombed and his bedroom took a direct hit.

I heard the terrified, screaming cries of a child that could not be stilled—a sound unlike anything I have ever heard, and one I will never forget. A cat hearing the child joined in, seemingly to express the same terror the child was feeling. Hearing this, a knot began to form in my stomach, and it stays with me all the time now. It is not fear for myself, but rather a fear for these people in such desperate need of international protection, yet who instead receive only condemnation.

We would be going home to peace and abundance, but they were trapped in the most awful of circumstances, enforced by a nation seemingly devoid of any conscience or compassion.

We talked to devastated people who were so loving and caring and desperate for their families. They had been out of work for many months, with nothing to do but wait in their homes. They had no money, and could not afford an education for their children. There was little water, and what was available was often unsafe to drink. Yet these dear people baked Easter cookies for us, and wanted our time with them to be safe. They overfed us, took wonderful care of us, and always had a smile for us. In our honor they planted a little Norfolk pine as a symbol of their hope for peace.

We found all the Palestinians we met to be incredibly warm, hospitable people. Despite the conflict with the Israelis, they are a peaceful people forced to live under unbearable circumstances not of their own making. They do not hate the Jews, even though they are taking the brunt of a cycle of revenge and punishment. In fact, they have the most forgiving nature of any people I have ever met. They don’t seem to understand the Zionist mentality, because it is so foreign to their way of thinking.

We saw young Israeli soldiers (they looked like mere kids) with grim faces board our buses, acting as though they were “protecting” us, or standing around on street corners with their fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. We saw them hitching a ride or grabbing a bus home after a day on duty.

We also saw our Palestinian guide, Wisam, put his life on the line to take us places he was not allowed to be. We heard the love in his voice as he talked about his people. This young Christian Palestinian was involved in the first intifada when he was just 13 years old. Israeli soldiers arrested him for throwing stones, and tortured and beat him, breaking his nose, arm and ribs. Wisam invited all 23 of us into his home, where we met his lovely parents. They were overjoyed to see their son safely home again and treated his new American friends like part of the family.

We saw what was once a beautiful tree-covered mountain, scraped down to bare rock and covered with a huge illegal settlement—a virtual fortress reaching high into the sky. Ugly, sterile and barren, it came complete with low ground-hugging launching pads from which missiles could be fired onto Palestinian homes, on the pretext of “guarding” the settlements.

We saw the blank frightened eyes of children who had experienced the horrors of their neighbors’ homes being bombed, shelled, or attacked with missiles, never knowing if their own home might be next. It is the children who feel the effects of this relentless brutality the most. Smiling no longer comes easily to them, and some stop talking altogether. Bedwetting is common.

One family had just removed their young twins from their crib, when their home was shelled. Later, going back to inspect the damage to their destroyed home, they found a spent missile shell in what was left of the twins’ crib.

I saw a little boy in the occupied Golan Heights playing on his balcony, where a caged bird was fastened to the edge. The Israelis had mined the child’s yard—a common practice in the area. So, like the bird in the cage, the child too was a prisoner, able to breath the air yet not free, unable to fly away or play in his own yard. The same is true of Palestinians who are sealed in their own towns, even in their own homes, unable to make a living for their family or get an education for their children, slowly having the life strangled out of them.

We walked with refugee children, introduced to us as the enemies of Israel. When we asked where they were from, not one child said Deheishe Refugee Camp—although most were born there. They always told us the names of the villages where the family had their roots—for many, the name of a village destroyed in 1948.

Someone suggested an interesting analogy. In the Old Testament, David killed Goliath with a stone in his eye. Israel now feels it is the Goliath, and the Palestinian child is David with the stone. That, my friend theorized, is why they are killing Palestinian children. It is the children who could take no more, starting the first intifada when they could no longer accept the injustice, and began to call world attention to the plight of their people. Truth hurts, and Israelis are afraid the child will throw the stone of truth that will kill them. Thus, when Israeli soldiers fired the shots that killed Mohammed al-Durra as his father tried to shelter his son in his arms, they were aiming at the child, not the father.

Lois Gode is a Midwesterner whose third and most recent trip to Palestine was as a member of United Methodist Volunteers in Missions team.

Report From Jerusalem

By Sam Cahnman

The Israeli who claims to have spent more hours with the Mitchell Commission than anyone else in Israel commented the day after the release of the Commission’s report that “it would be a clever move for [President George W.] Bush to assign [George] Mitchell” as special Middle East envoy. Alon Liel, director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry under the Barak and transition governments, said that U.S. Ambassador to Jordan William J. Burns, whom Secretary of State Colin L. Powell designated as special Mideast envoy, would have to start from scratch. Former U.S. Senator Mitchell, on the other hand, the Israeli said, has a reputation as a peacemaker in Ireland, and has the opportunity to operate on behalf of the whole international community—the U.S., U.N., and Europe. The Mitchell Report was tough on Israel on settlements, Liel noted, and tough on the Palestinians on violence.

Meanwhile, on the ground in the Middle East, while news reports convey the image of Israelis and Palestinians living in a state of siege, the hustle and bustle of everyday life for the most part goes on unimpeded—with the exception of the long lines in which Palestinians must wait at Israeli checkpoints to enter Jerusalem and Israeli-controlled areas. The heavy traffic on the modern expressways on the outskirts of Tel Aviv resembles busy metropolitan expressways in the United States. The frequent honking of horns and close calls of cars maneuvering the narrow streets of the Palestinian Authority (PA)-controlled cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem resemble Arab cities in other Middle Eastern countries.

Nonetheless, there is an air of despair in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, the territories it occupied after the 1967 Six-Days War. Although on the surface things may appear normal—and most of the time, in most places, bombs are not exploding, shots are not fired, bulldozers are not destroying, and rockets and artillery are not being launched—nevertheless, these hostilities are occurring in exponentially greater numbers than they were prior to Sept. 28, 2000.

From 1993 to September 2000, there were 700 shootings recorded; since October there have been more than 10,000, according to an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman. As of June 4, the death toll since the start of what the Palestinians call the second intifada has been 484 Palestinians and 108 Israelis, according to the Associated Press.

The economic toll has been devastating, and hits the Palestinians harder because they are more dependent on Israel than vice versa. Prior to last October, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinians worked in Israel. Their wages supported 1 million Palestinians in the occupied territories. Now, according to the IDF spokesman, there are fewer than 50,000 Palestinians working in the Jewish state. Trade between Israel and the PA dropped from an average of $2.5 billion per year to close to $1.5 billion per year. Mohammed Zriam, a Gaza taxi driver, used to earn 4,000 Israeli shekels ($1,000) monthly driving passengers to Israel. Now, confined to the 25-mile-long, 5-mile-wide Gaza Strip, he is lucky to eke out 1,000 shekels ($250) a month.

Beginning in 1994, when Israel began ceding control of parts of the occupied territories to the PA, Israeli and Palestinian security personnel worked together out of District Coordinating Offices (DCOs) set up throughout the territories and at the entrance to Palestinian cities. Joint Palestinian-Israeli patrols of one Israeli and one Palestinian jeep operated out of the DCOs. “For six or seven years we [Palestinians and Israelis] were working [together] beautifully,” said Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian human rights lawyer based in East Jerusalem.

“For six or seven years there were no shootings—but there was violence by bulldozers,” said Kuttab, a member of the New York bar who headed the Palestinian negotiating team’s legal committee which hammered out the 1994 Cairo Agreement, detailing how the PA would move into Gaza and the West Bank city of Jericho. “The Israelis were continuing to expand settlements and wanted to legitimize the [remaining] occupation,” Kuttab said.

Although Kuttab has always argued that armed resistance is futile and counterproductive, he pointed out that legally the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed resistance of the Israeli occupation—including the shooting of settlers—but not the killing of innocent civilians inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

“I am a pacifist and don’t believe in violence,” the easy-going, likeable Kuttab said, “but I don’t blame the victims for resisting.”

Former Foreign Ministry director general Liel, conceding he was not a lawyer, did not think it was legal to kill anyone: “If they say they’re entitled to kill us and we say we’re entitled to kill them,” he said, “what will be left is we’ll all be dead.”

Kuttab suggested that the Palestinians might agree to end their uprising if Israel stopped expanding settlements. Liel, however, said he did not think the current Israeli government would agree to such a freeze, as the Mitchell Report recommended, but thought it might agree to the compromise suggested by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, of Israel’s Labor Party, that any future construction take place only on land already occupied by existing settlements.

During our interview, Kuttab placed a call to find out if he would to be able to drive home to Bethlehem. “If they are shooting missiles at the Paradise Hotel, I don’t think I can get home,” he said as we sat in his East Jerusalem office, a few blocks from one of the two U.S. consulates in Jerusalem. Israel claimed to be responding to sniper fire from the Bethlehem hotel, so that night Kuttab stayed with friends in Ramallah.

The Israelis don’t view the current intifada as a legitimate resistance to occupation. According to the IDF spokesman, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat is trying to duplicate the expulsion of the Israelis from southern Lebanon. After years of armed resistance by Hezbollah forces, Israel unilaterally withdrew last year. So, the IDF spokesman argued, Arafat hopes similarly to win unilateral concessions through violence.

Liel’s analysis was somewhat different. He speculated that, by resorting to violence, Arafat expected to attract the international community to pressure Israel to make more concessions.

Israelis believe former Prime Minister Ehud Barak made extremely generous offers at Camp David and later at talks in Taba, Egypt, that ended in mid-January. According to Liel, Barak offered to return 97 percent of occupied Palestinian territory. Barak’s last offer also included giving the Palestinians sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Liel said, and control, but not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif.

“We already compromised in giving up 78 percent of Palestine,” said Raji Sourani, a Palestinian lawyer who heads the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, and who has been imprisoned first by Israel and then by the PA. Sourani was referring to the fact that by entering into the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, Palestinians renounced their claim to the territory within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

In exchange, Palestinians say, Israel should withdraw from all the territory it occupied in 1967. Kuttab and other Palestinians also point out that what Israel claimed was an offer of 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza was actually less, because Israel excluded from the equation Jerusalem, which Kuttab notes is 20 percent of the land area of the West Bank.

“The Palestinians got a bum rap by being blamed for rejecting Israel’s last idea,” Kuttab said. “Neither side was given enough time to explore those ideas. It was too little too late, and done in the context of [U.S. and Israeli] elections.” However, Kuttab said, constructive ideas were put forth during the post-Camp David talks.

The West Bank and Gaza currently are divided into three sections: Area A, under PA civil and military control, comprises 3 to 4 percent of the area of the occupied territories and 97 percent of its population; Area B, under PA civil administration but Israeli military control, represents 40 percent of the land; and Area C, the remaining 56 percent, remains under total Israeli control.

Israel thus retains military control over at least 96 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, enabling Israeli soldiers and tanks to surround PA-controlled municipalities or to impede movement within and between the areas it controls. Israelis justify such measures as necessary for their security. Palestinians discount this, however, claiming that the measures are taken to harass and make life difficult for West Bank and Gaza residents.

Although the parties have engaged in security talks, no political negotiations have been conducted since January, and new Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he won’t engage in such talks until the violence stops. Since, in this writer’s opinion, negotiations are in the interest of both parties, it is inevitable that the talks will resume.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a lawyer who was a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team at the Camp David and post-Camp David talks, described the talks as not that different from negotiating a multi-issue divorce case.

“First each side stated its opening position,” he said. “Then we worked toward an understanding of the actual needs of each side. The final stage was trade-offs and compromises, and that is where we left off at Taba.”

On the issue of territory, the legal adviser said the Palestinian attitude was that the West Bank is Palestinian, but “if the Israelis have needs [there], tell us what they are and if we can accommodate them, we will. We need geographic continuity.”

The Palestinians, he suggested, could accept some Israeli West Bank settlements in the final agreement.

On the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the attorney said a compromise could be hammered out that ensured Israel wouldn’t be swamped with 4 million refugees. Regarding Jerusalem, he thought the Palestinians could accept limited sovereignty of the Temple Mount, with international observers and with Israel getting sovereignty over the Western Wall.

“It is not difficult to find the right formula for Jerusalem; it is difficult to find the will to accept the right formula,” according to Kuttab, co-author of Jerusalem: Points of Friction—And Beyond.

Jabr M. Wishah, who spent 15 years in an Israeli jail and now lives in an elegantly furnished house in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, said, “Both of us [Palestinians and Israelis] must make a sincere effort to bring up our children in a peaceful climate.”

While he was still in prison, Wishah’s daughter was admitted to the Seeds of Peace summer camp in Maine for Israeli and Palestinian children.

“How can I be a Seed of Peace member when you’re inside jail?” she asked her dad.

“I convinced her for this special reason you have to show we are for a just peace,” said Wishah, now a caseworker for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Sam Cahnman is an attorney and free-lance writer based in Illinois who frequently writes on the Middle East.

The Iron Wall of Jenin

By Samah Jabr With Betsy Mayfield

Keeping some people in and others out is nothing new. The crumbling Great Wall of China, built in 215 BCE evokes invading hordes sweeping down the hilly terrain which created the need for this 1,400-mile structure More recently, the Berlin wall was demolished in 1989, signaling the approaching age of globalization.

These are only two striking examples of humankind’s wall-building, “keep ’em in, keep ’em out” mentality, which was and continues to be taught to schoolchildren from Beijing to Berlin and all places betwixt and between.

This mentality is evidenced in the violence being used in the Holy Land to imprison and isolate the people of Palestine because Israeli colonizers wish to take whatever land they want. This newest catastrophe confronting us morally harms not only Palestinian Christians, Muslims and Jews, but violates the rights of the many Israeli citizens who value justice. It is they who live “safely” in Tel Aviv, but in fear of retribution they know their own government imposes on them, because of Israel’s stance against Palestinians.

Today, the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon is acting out a plan initiated early in the last century by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist revisionist planner, racist, colonialist, militarist, and father of the Zionist Revisionist legacy. The ideals proposed by Jabotinsky and perpetuated by Sharon are as old, as violent and as exclusionist as any manifestation of the wish to keep the “other” out, on the other side of a fence or wall, whether in a shanty town, reservation, or concentration camp.

Jabotinsky’s article “The Iron Wall, We and the Arabs” first appeared Nov. 4, 1923 in the magazine Rasswyet. Among other things, Jabotinsky wrote:

Any native people—it’s all the same whether they are civilized or savage - views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains.

I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs…They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie…This childish fantasy of our ‘Arabo-philes’ comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He continued,

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can…continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through…All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes…they are not a rabble, but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left…the only path to agreement is the iron wall…a government without any kind of Arab influence. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This by-now-familiar philosophy has been passed from Jabotinsky to Begin to Shamir right on down to Sharon. Those of us who live in Palestine have seen that, regardless of how receptive to us an Israeli government purports to be, the Jabotinsky strategy remains the internal party line. Zion as a Hebrew homeland has been levied without regard to us Palestinians and with little concern for Israeli citizens who came to escape persecution and discrimination, not to inflict them on others.

I cannot speak of how Israeli citizens feel, but I know how I feel. The current catastrophe in Palestine is about political power, not about religion. Israeli government propagandists may impute religious motives to the conflict, but the immorality of their actions insults Jewish religious principles and all the greatness the earliest of the great Abrahamic ethical traditions represents.

Were he alive today, Vladimir Jabotinsky would be proud. As an initiator of the Zionist political philosophy of Revisionism, he took pleasure in training Menachem Begin and the dreaded terrorist group, the Irgun. Begin himself was so fearful that Zionism might lose its magnetism among the Jewish people, as well as western Gentiles and wealthy expatriated Jews, that he once led a Zionist political contingent to plead with the Polish government to initiate a more stringent anti-Semitic policy than Poland “dared or cared to implement.” Begin was much more eager to see Zionism succeed than to protect his fellow Jews from the Poles or the Germans.

Such behavior does not come out of Jewish morality, or any morality that I’m aware of. To me, it smacks of one man’s selfish need for political power, a power only possible through the securing of property over which to rule.

Jabotinsky’s mentality permeated the Shamir regime and served as justification for formation of the infamous Stern Gang and, later, the Sharon-encouraged massacres at Sabra and Shatila. While Jabotinsky spoke the truth in saying that “all indigenous people will resist,” his is a truth used for evil, not grounded in Jewish religious morality. Instead, Jabotinsky—a lover of all things Italian including Garibaldi and, to some extent, Mussolini—challenged politically motivated Zionists to follow Machiavellian techniques to achieve their goals.

I and my family and my neighbors and my countrymen are paying the price of the Revisionist tradition.

If this makes me sound anti-Jewish, consider that this is not my idea, but comes from the work of Jewish historian and journalist Lenni Brenner, who wrote fiery words about Jabotinsky: “When his [Jabotinsky’s] present-day followers tell us that he was a Zionist hero, a nation-builder required to use the powers-that-be for his purpose [Great Britain and Gentile Zionists], all they are doing, in actuality, is giving us advance warning that they, like him, are prepared to betray humanity for the sake of their Zionist state.”

Jabotinsky was a man who willingly collaborated with one Russian government after another, from the czarist regime to socialist and communist reactionary powers, to secure support for Zionism—even when these same governments were initiating pogroms and hanging other Jews. He capitulated to the British to gain their political support and money against the wishes of more civilized, moderate, morally grounded Zionists. Now, however, the Zionists who live around me have taken Jabotinsky’s metaphoric idea, the iron wall, and made it real.

As if to honor Jabotinsky, in late April Israel made its contribution to the list of history’s infamous walls: an iron wall was erected in the narrow space that separates the West Bank town of Jenin from land confiscated by Israel on one side and the Palestinian town, Qabatia, on the other. The Jenin wall is the first structure of this kind constructed on Palestinian land. It is not, however, the first built by Israel. The Jenin Wall mimics the huge iron gate that separates south Lebanon from land once considered the Palestinian motherland, now an Israeli farm.

From checkpoints to piles of dirt that totally obstruct roadways to ditches that circle our towns to the “new” iron gate, the Israeli government seems determined to put all Palestinians under village-house arrest. We are in prison.

The Israeli action confirms Jabotinsky’s philosophy, that “a voluntary agreement is unattainable.” Death or life in prison for those we displace is the only solution. Does this sound like a basis for peace accords? Is doing good for one group of people worth the price of doing ill to another?

A colleague in America sent me a letter from his father-in-law, who wrote that he was surprised that I could not seem to understand the perspective of the Israelis and only write about myself and my people.

“I do understand,” I want to reply. “I understand the invasion of Palestine, the occupation, the endless repression and harassment, the death of my people, the emotional pain of countless Jews who disavow violence against us. I have learned that the Zionist wall was constructed in the minds of politicians long before I was born or the population of the world reacted to the message of the Nuremberg Trials saying ‘Yes, the suffering Jewish people needed a place to call home.’ I understand all too well.”

To many fundamentalist Zionists, assimilation, even integration, is a sin. Yet many integrated and non-assimilated Jews choose to find Zion in America today, rather than in Israel. Mr. Sharon and company, who need a war economy to keep Israel on board the game they’re in, simply refuse to act on the humane awareness that all people, regardless of faith, must feed and house and clothe their families.

I’m sorry to say that I am living through a time when the Zionists around me are willing to murder and jail all of us to realize not the dream of spiritual Zionism, but of political Zionism. I am a living witness to the results of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s evil philosophy.

I read and reread the Mitchell Report, urging us to “end the violence, rebuild confidence, resume security cooperation, go to the conference table and talk things out.”

Then, as I lay awake listening to the sounds of gunfire and bombs, I ponder what Jabotinsky said:

…a voluntary agreement is just not possible. As long as the [Palestinians] preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers.

As Lenni Brenner wrote, “There is only one word that can be accurately used to describe Jabotinsky…that is traitor…to the Jews of Russia, to the Jews of Britain, to democracy, to liberty, to humanity.”

Samah Jabr is a medical student who writes from her home in Jerusalem. Betsy Mayfield is an American writer living in Iowa.

Authors’ note: This article is based on material from The Iron Wall, Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, by Lenni Brenner, Zed Press, London, 1984.

SIDEBAR 1

The Boy in the Picture

It took 24 calls to Palestine and Israel to learn the story of the terrified Palestinian boy in the Reuters picture on the cover of the May/June issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Reuters couldn’t tell me much, because the Israelis took the boy away before reporters could even learn his name. So I started calling Israeli and Palestinian human-rights organizations. Eventually, by the luck of reaching the right people,* I learned the boy’s name, Kamal Ali Sa’idah, and his family’s phone number.

It was then easy to reach Ali Sa’idah, Kamal’s father, by phone. He speaks English fairly well, but is more comfortable in Arabic. So I called back the following day with the help of an Arabic-speaking friend.

Kamal Ali Sa’idah is 10 years old and lives with his parents and his four sisters in Wadi el Joz in Jerusalem. On April 6 near Bab el-Haram—the entrance to Al-Aqsa shrine—Kamal saw some young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli police and decided to join in. He was closer to the Israeli position than the others and so he was the only one arrested. Kamal was taken to a police station, then prison for two to three hours, then to Al-Qishla detention center.

During the eight hours he was in custody, beatings by the border police left Kamal with a broken arm and bruises on his head and leg. Kamal was released when his father arrived and signed papers assuring that Kamal would not attack Israelis again.

Kamal’s father seemed surprised that anyone was interested in his son’s experience because it is so commonplace. In fact, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem recently issued a 47-page report titled Standard routine, beatings and abuse of Palestinians by Israeli security forces during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (available at <www.btselem.org>). The report cites an article from the July 30, 1999 edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in which an officer in the border police said that many join the border police “to beat up Arabs.”

Being a child gives no protection from the brutality. On April 1, a few days before Kamal’s beating, border police broke the hand of Muhammad Ali ‘Odeh, only three years old, for the crime of being outdoors with his father at 8 p.m. Muhammad’s father could not take his son to the hospital that night because of fear of further confrontations with soldiers. The next morning, x-rays at Rafidiyeh Hospital confirmed that the child’s hand was broken.

I asked Kamal’s father if there had been any further repercussions after Kamal’s beating. The answer is apparently “yes.” Mr. Sa’idah had been unemployed for many months due to the Israeli closures. Then he recently got a job with an Israeli tour-bus company. But after his son’s “crime and punishment” became known, Sa’idah was fired from the job.

Mr. Sa’idah said that Arab residents in Jerusalem are immobile because Jerusalem is closed off from the West Bank—and, of course, travel to Israel is very difficult for Arabs. “We just want independence,” he said, “and to be left alone.”

—Rod Driver

*Kamal’s name and phone number were obtained from Mahmoud Jeddah at the Nidal Center and Lulu Sahoum at the Arab Studies Society via Mike Lotze at al-Haq and Anne Kindrachuk at the Palestinian Businesswomen’s Association. My thanks also to Hazem Biqaeen for interpreting phone conversations with Ali Sa’idah.

SIDEBAR 2

American Cardiac Team Saves Lives in Gaza

By Stephen J. Sosebee

As Israeli tanks rolled into Beit Hanoun and reoccupied part of the Gaza Strip under Palestinian control in late April, a six-member team of American doctors and nurses arrived in Gaza to start saving the lives of sick patients in need of cardiac surgery. Dr. Imad Tabry, who was born in Haifa in 1946, raised in Lebanon and has been a prominent cardiac surgeon in Florida for the past 30 years, led a hard-working team that included anesthesiologist Dr. Jim Calabrese, perfusionist Nester Megano, and nurses Lanya Harper, Mari Noel Araya and Teresa Miller. The team was sent by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), an American non-profit humanitarian relief group that arranges for sick and injured Arab children free surgery not available locally. Over the past few years, PCRF has sent over two dozen medical teams from the U.S. and Europe to Palestine.

Working closely with the local staff at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Tabry’s team put in 16-hour days, typically performing three cardiac operations under very difficult circumstances. It was the team’s second trip to Gaza since the al-Aqsa intifada began late last September. On their first visit, the team arrived on the very day the uprising erupted, and worked in Gaza for two weeks. Due to the high number of injury cases flooding the hospital and the intensive care unit (ICU) at the time, the team was able to perform only 10 cardiac procedures. Although the need for cardiac surgery in Gaza is paramount, Dr. Tabry operated on gunshot injuries as well during his initial visit.

No cardiac surgery had been performed in Gaza in the six months between the team’s visits. Considering that there are 1.2 million people living in Gaza, the need for a cardiac surgery program there is critical.

“It is during difficult times like these that we find out who our real friends are,” Palestinian Minister of Health Dr. Riyad Zannoun told the team during a meeting in his office in early May. “We are truly grateful for your courage and dedication to helping our people, and hope that you will continue to work with us in building a good cardiac program in Gaza.”

It is particularly important that Dr. Tabry’s team came to Gaza at this time, said PCRF chairman Bishara Bahbah. “The image of Palestine outside is one of terrible violence and instability, especially in the U.S.,” he noted. “This scares many doctors from going there to help. This team set an example for others to see that it is safe to work and live among the Palestinian people. The media in the U.S. try to scare Americans away from Palestine, but the threat is from the Israeli army and settlers, not the Palestinians.”

Others in Gaza sang the praises of the American team to anyone who would listen. “They are the bravest, kindest and most humane people I know,” said Dr. Hani Alquin, an anesthetist recently sent by the PCRF to Holy Cross Hospital for training. “We hope to show the doctors and nurses who come here and work that the local population will support and welcome them as friends, even if their government blindly supports Israel.”

“We are not politicians, and there are millions of people like us who are against our government’s policy toward Palestine,” noted Dr. Tabry. “Everyone who comes here leaves loving Palestine and supporting peace, freedom and justice for the Palestinian people. I feel honored to be able to work here and help them, especially now.”

In addition to leaving their homes and families to travel to a war zone, the team brought with them thousands of dollars worth of donated surgery supplies for Shifa Hospital. “They worked so hard; everyone here loves and respects them so much, not just for coming here now when foreigners are staying away, but because they are so kind and considerate to everyone,” said PCRF Gaza field worker Suheil Flaifl. “One day, the team performed three difficult operations and then Dr. Tabry stayed all night in the ICU with a sick patient, only to do another three operations the next day with almost no sleep. He and his team are really great people.”

No Hesitation

“We never hesitated to come back when Dr. Tabry asked us,” said Mari Noel Araya, an ICU nurse. “The people in Gaza are so nice and kind, we really feel very honored to be able to support them and help them during these very difficult days. They deserve more than even we could give.”

The team plans to return in September under the auspices of the PCRF and the Ministry of Health. “We look forward to seeing our friends at the guest house in Gaza, and the many doctors and nurses at Shifa who worked so hard and did a great job in helping save so many lives,” said Dr. Calabrese. “We hope our trip will open the door for other teams to come and work here as well.”

Doctors or nurses willing to volunteer in Palestine are invited to contact the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at <ThePCRF@aol.com>.

Steven J. Sosebee is the founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.