Israel’s Real Friends Are Not Those Who Support Its Policy of Assassination and Continued Occupation

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The escalating violence in the Middle East and, in particular, Israel’s policy of targeted assassination of selected Palestinian leaders, has led to a growing debate in the U.S. about the merits—legal, moral and policy-wise—of such continuing attacks.

Some increasingly vocal self-proclaimed “friends” of Israel embrace such policies and seem to indicate that they are prepared to support whatever policy the government of Israel pursues.

Columnists Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Michael Kelly, for example, not only support the assassination policy but seem to want Israel to launch an all-out war against the Palestinians. Such a war would be brief, they maintain, arguing that the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority should be destroyed.

The Forward, a widely read national Jewish newspaper, provided in its Aug. 31 edition this editorial endorsement of targeted assassination: “The assassination…of Mustafa Zabri, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has injected a new urgency into the international debate over the Israeli practice of so-called targeted killings. The assassinations of suspected terror-masters have been condemned everywhere from Cairo to Capitol Hill as state terrorism, marking individuals for summary execution on the basis of mere suspicion, without the niceties of arrest, indictment and trial. It is, in the view of many persons of goodwill, an immoral policy. Rubbish. The Israeli military is targeting individuals not because they are suspected of criminal activity, but because they are at war with the state of Israel. Wars are not fought by sending out constables armed with handcuffs and arrest warrants. They are nasty affairs in which nations dispatch armies to shoot at one another and wreak suffering on the other side…”

The Hillel Foundation, which supports Jewish religious activities on the nation’s college campuses, seems to have shifted its focus to defending Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

At the Schusterman Hillel International Student Leaders Assembly, a five-day retreat held in August in Honesdale, PA, one full day was devoted to Israel advocacy. Sessions ranged from “Why Are They Saying Those Terrible Things About Israel?” to “The ABCs of Zionist Legitimacy: How to Feel More Secure About Discussing Israel On Campus.” Students received packets from Hillel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Hamagshimim, the university movement sponsored by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist organization. Materials included basic talking points, responses to common charges against Israel and tips for organizing rallies, vigils and other events.

“Not all the students seemed comfortable being cheerleaders for Israel.”

In a keynote speech, Lenny Ben-David, former deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, told students they were “on the front lines” of defending Israel. He urged students to write term papers on the history of Israel’s right to exist and human rights violations in the Arab world, then use the information to write opinion pieces in their campus newspapers or to speak on campus.

Gloria Becher, Israel’s consul general in Philadelphia, told the students, “As much as we are counting on our soldiers back in Israel to protect Israel, we are counting on you. You are our soldiers, you are our commandos in the public campaign we are having here.”

The Hillel students, however, were not uniformly enthusiastic about playing their assigned role as “commandos” in a foreign army. The Aug. 30 Washington Jewish Week reported that, “Not all the students seemed comfortable being cheerleaders for Israel. Some said they weren’t sure whether to trust the advocacy day materials, others stressed that they do not support all Israeli policies…Despite the battering Israel has taken on many campuses this year, few students had much appetite for anti-Palestinian publicity campaigns. When one student asked Ben-David how to spread propaganda about the Palestinians, another student won applause for responding ‘conditions should never be so bad that we have to lower ourselves to that level.’”

While many who proclaim themselves “friends” of Israel find it easy to defend each and every step taken by the Sharon government, there are many respected Jewish voices, both in the U.S. and in Israel, who do not.

A Proper Diagnosis

In fact, the critics of Israeli policy may, in the end, be the real “friends” of Israel since they seek to properly diagnose the problems which have led to the current spate of violence on both sides. Unless a problem is properly diagnosed, after all, it is not likely to be resolved.

The official Israeli position, and that which is echoed by many in the U.S., is that at Camp David Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians “the moon,” and that the Palestinians were still not satisfied. Israel, in this view, went the extra mile and has suffered growing terror and assault in return.

This assessment, however, appears to be far from the truth, as many commentators are now coming to understand. While Barak did break Israeli taboos against any discussion of dividing Jerusalem, and did sketch out an offer that was considered overly generous by many Israelis, it was nevertheless an approach that the Palestinians did not believe would leave them with a viable state.

Robert Malley, who was President Clinton’s special assistant at Camp David, and who is himself Jewish, wrote (together with Hussein Agha, a Palestinian who teaches at Saint Anthony’s College, Oxford) recently in The New York Review of Books that Ehud Barak saw the interim approach established at Oslo as finished and wanted only “a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation…Barak discarded a number of interim steps, even those to which Israel was formally committed by various agreements—including a third partial redeployment of troops from the West Bank, the transfer of Palestinian control of three villages abutting Jerusalem and the release of Palestinians imprisoned for acts committed before the Oslo agreement.

“In addition,” Malley pointed out, “Israel continued its expansion of West Bank settlements, which proceeded at a rapid pace.”

There has been an increase of over 50 percent in the number of housing units as well as settlers since the Oslo agreement of September 1993. There are altogether 145 official settlements and another 50 “unofficial” ones. The length of the roads built for the settlements, used only by the settlers, increased by 160 kilometers between 1997 and 1999. Professor Avishai Margalit of the Hebrew University points out, “That the settlements are illegal under international law is not in doubt to any of the 142 members of the U.N., except for Israel. Nor is it in doubt to most legal experts, for whom Israel is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) which says: ‘The occupying powers shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’…It remains clear that the purpose of Article 49 is to prevent permanent colonization of occupied territories, which is undoubtedly the purpose of the settlements.”

The Barak offer, Malley argues, was never for the necessary viable, contiguous Palestinian state. Under the Barak plan, the West Bank would have been divided into three cantons. Each would have been completely surrounded by Israel, while the Gaza Strip, many miles away, would have been a fourth.

“Seen from Gaza and the West Bank,” writes Malley, “Oslo’s legacy reads like a litany of promises deferred or unfulfilled. Six years after the agreement, there are more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement and worse economic conditions. Powerful Palestinian constituencies—the intellectuals, security establishment, media, business community….whose support was vital for any peace effort were disillusioned…doubtful of Israel’s willingness to implement signed agreements.”

In a similar assessment, Rabbi Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun (Sept.-Oct., 2001): “What was offered was not a contiguous state, but a set of cantons divided by Israeli settlements and roads crisscrossing Palestinian land and guarded by the Israeli army…To understand the picture, imagine that someone takes over your house, lives there for 34 years running your life, and then offers to give you back 90 percent of it. Sounds generous? But then you find that the 10 percent this person wants to still control are the hallways—which means that you can’t go from one room to the other without getting their permission. Does this feel like a generous offer? And how about if they asked you to sign an agreement saying that you’d never raise any other issue after this—would you sign that final agreement?

Amira Haas, the correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in the Palestinian territories, and author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza, reports that, “There is no way to understand the current Palestinian uprising without examining the moral, economic and social reality that the Israeli settlement policy has created in the last 34 years. Since the 1967 war, Israeli governments—both Labor and Likud—have built settlements all over the occupied West Bank and the small Gaza Strip, in the midst of Arab-Palestinian communities that are centuries old…The construction and development of these outposts have essentially allowed Israel to create the infrastructure of one state, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.”

“It is vital that the rule-of-law tradition develop and enter the heart of Israeli society.”

Haas points out that, “While Israelis can at any time move to the West Bank or Gaza, Palestinians are not allowed to live legally in an Israeli city or settlement, even if this settlement is built upon their family land…Alongside the flourishing, green and ever-expanding Israeli-Jewish outposts—well maintained by Israeli policies and laws—is a Palestinian society subject to the rule of military orders and restrictions, its dense communities squeezed into small areas, served by miserably maintained roads and an insufficient water supply system…The Palestinian self-rule enclaves are encircled by vast Israeli-controlled areas and cannot develop without Israeli permits for activities like building water pipelines and new schools, upgrading a road to building a gas station.”

The almost reflexive support of American Jewish groups for Israeli policies which are, in the end, damaging to Israel’s long-term best interests is coming under increasing criticism. Marshall Breger, a professor of law at The Catholic University of America, writing in the August issue of the Jewish magazine Moment, declares that, “For too long, we American Jews have perpetuated the myth that Israel’s political system is much like our own democratic one. And although this theory is partially misguided, there is in fact some truth to it. Take, for instance, the February elections in Israel—in which a new prime minister was chosen with free and fair balloting—a democratic technique pretty much unique in the Middle East…But that said…many aspects of the Israeli political system…differ from the American system…Israelis, more than Americans, are prone to justifying their political stances with ‘national security’ concerns.”

In the U.S., Breger declares, “justifying executive action on the basis of ‘national security’ would simply be the opening gambit. Skeptics would ask for proof. The person who deploys a national security justification would have the burden of persuasion. In Israel, by contrast, ‘national security’ is a readily accepted explanation for any government action…As a result, the Israeli legal system allows administrative detention (a mechanism of punishment used most often in apartheid South Africa), hostage-taking of non-combatants, and interrogation methods classified as torture in international treaties…”

Those in Israel who support a Western-style legal system are often perceived, Breger writes, “as a threat to both Judaism and Zionism.” Court decisions that support the equal treatment of Arabs “they say are universalist and anti-Zionist.” He concludes: “Israel can’t justify disregard for the rule of law because it is located in a ‘rough neighborhood.’ Nor is it sufficient to excuse special benefits for one’s own interest group on grounds that ‘everyone is doing it.’ It is vital that the rule-of-law tradition develop and enter the heart of Israeli society. The challenge is to rescue the concept from becoming a tool for partisan bickering. The tragedy is that Israelis are failing to do so.”

To think that maintaining Israeli settlements and continuing assassinations will move the Middle East toward peace defies common sense. Esther Leah Ritz of Americans for Peace Now states that the parties must, in the end, find a way back to the negotiating table: “The truth of the matter is that neither side is going anywhere…The same complex issues…will still be there after the smoke clears from the current fighting. Jerusalem—Palestinian refugees—settlements—borders—security—make no mistake about it—the peace talks will begin again because the status quo is simply not sustainable.”

Israel’s real friends are those who will help move the Middle East to peace through a realistic compromise, not those who, at a distance, encourage policies which lead only to further strife for those on both sides.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.