False Images and Lies Hide Middle East Realities

By Rachelle Marshall

People come to me and tell me they are frightened, that the world has forgotten them. I tell them they are right.—Rev. Shawki Baterian, priest at the Church of Nativity, Bethlehem, December 24, 2002.

The year 2002 ended with the gap between myth and reality in the Middle East as great as at any time since the Crusaders set out to seek the Holy Grail and ended up slaughtering Muslims and Jews in the name of God. As Christians around the world celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace, the city where he was born was under curfew and surrounded by Israeli tanks. In a sad twist to the Nativity story of a family seeking shelter in a manger, on Christmas eve the army demolished another 20 homes in Gaza, leaving more than a hundred Palestinians homeless.

Meanwhile an American president who claims Jesus as his inspiration prepared to unleash on 22 million Iraqis what a San Francisco Chronicle report of December 16 described as “a relentless, overwhelming onslaught.” As the new year began, a hundred thousand U.S. troops and thousands of aircraft armed with devastating firepower were poised on Iraq’s borders ready to attack. Although civilians would be the first to suffer in the event of a new Gulf war, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that U.S. policy was aimed at “liberating the Iraqi people.”

Powell fudged the truth again when the Bush administration rebuffed a plea by the European Union that the United States join with Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations in officially adopting a three-year timetable for the creation of a Palestinian state. Although the “roadmap to peace” was originally proposed by George Bush, Powell now claimed it was not yet ready for adoption. The reason was clear. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had expressed opposition to the plan and the White House was once again bowing to Israel’s wishes.

Sharon objected to requirements in the proposal that Israel halt settlement construction and agree to a firm schedule leading to the creation of a Palestinian state. In a speech on December 4 he said Israel would make no concessions at all until Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was replaced and “there is proven calm and Palestinian reforms”—an unlikely possibility as long as Israel’s occupation continues.

The euphoria aroused on the left when the Labor party nominated a pro-peace candidate, Amram Mitzna, for prime minister quickly dissipated when the party chose a slate of Knesset candidates led by centrists Shimon Peres, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, and Ephraim Sneh, all of whom served in the recent coalition government. Prominent peace activists Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan ended up so far down on the list that they resigned from Labor and joined the liberal Meretz party.

Heading the Likud party list, just under Sharon, is former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who opposes a Palestinian state under any circumstances. Others on the list are such extreme hawks that a political analyst for Yediot Ahronot wrote, “Unless Sharon gets a strong Labor Party with which he can form a coalition…there is no Palestinian state, no evacuation of settlements, no Bush roadmap.”

After it was revealed that several Likud members had bribed their way onto the candidates’ list, polls showed that the party could lose up to five seats because of the scandal, and might have to join with Labor in a coalition government. But in any case Likud is expected to remain the majority party, with Sharon as prime minister. A predominantly rightwing Knesset was further assured when the Likud-dominated Israeli election commission barred from running again two influential Arab legislators, Azmi Bishara and Ahmed Tibi, but approved Baruch Marzel, a former member of the extremist Kach party.

Whether or not a coalition is necessary, as long as Sharon heads the government and Bush allows Israel to determine U.S. Middle East policy, no serious peace proposal will be allowed to take shape. Even Bush’s roadmap to peace is fast becoming irrelevant. While diplomats quibble over when to adopt a timetable for a future Palestinian state Israel is moving toward making such a state impossible.

The “Seam Project” the Israelis are building at a cost of nearly a billion dollars will surround every major Palestinian community with barriers between 165 and 230 feet wide when it is completed next June. Barriers will consist of high cement walls, moats studded with metal obstacles, and electronic gates. A fence around Jerusalem will extend far enough to encompass parts of Bethlehem, so that some 300,000 Palestinians will find themselves cut off from their West Bank neighbors and in a kind of no-man’s-land. Israel is also seizing more land from Palestinian farmers in order to establish broad security zones around Israeli settlements. Soldiers stationed on watchtowers will be allowed to shoot any Palestinians who try to enter, even if only to tend their crops.

The grim reality of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank has so far had no place on the diplomatic agenda. In an effort to crush Palestinian resistance by brute force, the Israelis launched a reign of killings and arrests in December that left 63 Palestinians dead and an additional 1,200 Palestinians in prison. The Israeli attacks lost none of their intensity as the new year began, with mothers and children, old people and the handicapped, teachers and medical workers, among the victims.

Despite Israel’s increasingly lethal attacks, Palestinians refrained from violence for more than a month.

One of the cruelest of the prevalent myths is that Palestinian terrorists kill innocent Israelis deliberately, while soldiers kill Palestinian civilians only “unintentionally,” when under attack themselves. In fact innocent Palestinians are the victims whenever the Israelis bomb an apartment house or fire tank shells into a crowded marketplace. A 95-year old woman died when soldiers at a checkpoint fired 17 shots into the taxi she was riding in. A 17-year old student was arrested and beaten to death as he left a mosque. A teacher was stopped while driving home with a load of groceries and shot to death. Five unarmed men were killed trying to sneak into Israel for work. Their bodies were found to be shredded by flechettes, inch-long steel darts shaped like fishhooks that are condemned by human rights organizations as especially cruel weapons.

Even U.N. relief agencies, which offer the vital services that Israel refuses to provide in the occupied territories, have become targets of attack. According to UNRWA Commissioner Peter Hansen the Israelis traumatize school children by blowing up buildings next to U.N. schools or by using the schools as operation posts. On December 4 Israeli soldiers dynamited a food storage warehouse run by the U.N.World Food Program that served 41,300 destitute Palestinians in Gaza. Between late November and late December soldiers killed at least four U.N. workers.

After a senior U.N. official, Iain Hook, was shot to death, 62 employees sent a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan complaining that U.N. staff members were being “verbally abused, stripped, beaten, shot at and killed by Israeli soldiers.” But their complaint was fruitless. Twelve members of the Security Council approved a resolution on December 21 condemning Israel for the killing of U.N. workers and the destruction of the U.N. food warehouse, only to have the United States veto it. Cambodia and Bulgaria abstained.

Despite Israel’s increasingly lethal attacks, Palestinians refrained from violence for more than a month until Israeli undercover assassination squads swept through Palestinian towns and refugee camps on Dec. 26 in raids that left at least 9 Palestinians dead and scores injured. The killings took place as Egyptian and Palestinian leaders were working out a truce agreement with Palestinian militants, and just after Hamas promised to refrain from attacks within Israel if Israel stopped assassinating its members. Palestinians immediately accused Sharon of deliberately scuttling the talks in order to assure continued violence and thereby weaken the hand of moderate candidates in the coming election.

If so, Sharon got his wish. Two days later Palestinian gunmen killed four members of a Yeshiva near Hebron. In the week that followed Israeli soldiers killed fifteen more Palestinians, including 10-year old Abdulkarim Salameh and 9-year old Haneen Abu Suleiman. But no matter how many Palestinian children the Israelis kill, how many acres of Palestinian land they seize, or how many Palestinian homes they destroy, the dominant message most Americans receive is that the cause of the conflict is Palestinian terrorism. This is the myth perpetuated by Israeli leaders and backed by a Bush administration that justifies as self-defense every cold-blooded killing by the Israelis. Such justification, the editor of the Jerusalem Times wrote recently, “has given the green light to Israel to continue a policy of gradual yet systematic murder of the Palestinian people.”

Nevertheless, some Israelis have the courage to identify the occupation as the true cause of the conflict. Historian Amos Elon points out in the December 19 issue of the New York Review of Books that the 1947 partition plan forced Palestinians to pay with their land and their homes for the crimes of Europe. He cites evidence that immediately after the 1967 war Palestinian leaders proposed a two-state solution, with a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank but that Israel rejected the offer and instead proceeded to make its occupation of Palestine permanent. Elon quotes former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben Yair’s summary of Israel’s subsequent actions : “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers to the occupied territories, engaging in theft, and finding justification for all this.”

Such statements offer hope that someday the reality of what is happening in the Middle East will overtake myth, and in doing so clear the way for justice.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.