Israel “Fights Terrorism” With War on the Palestinian Authority

By Rachelle Marshall

“Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword.”—Joshua, 6:15.

“This is a gang. This is not a government.”—Marwan Barghouti, Fatah leader, after he escaped an Israeli assassination attempt near Ramallah on Aug. 4.

According to the book of Joshua, after Moses led the Jews out of Egypt God authorized them to enter the land west of the Jordan, claim it as their own, slaughter or enslave the inhabitants, destroy their livestock, and assassinate their kings. Enlightened Jews interpret this portion of the Bible as the work of nomadic tribesmen, recorded before the evolution of modern Judaism. They point to later chapters that speak of justice rather than warfare and vengeance. As if the intervening centuries had never taken place, the Israeli zealots who cry “Death to Arabs” and claim Israel is “fighting a war mandated by God” reveal the primitive mentality of an ancient people. The difference is that today their representatives control a country that has a powerful modern army and enjoys the full support of the world’s only superpower.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been careful to avoid the extremist rhetoric of his followers, and succeeded in lulling criticism from abroad by declaring a unilateral cease-fire last June. But the cease-fire was a sham from the beginning. Israel continued to lock down three million Palestinians, confiscate their land, bomb their offices and police stations, flatten their homes, burn their crops, uproot their trees, jail and shoot their children—all the while accusing the Palestinians of fomenting violence. Instead of calming the situation Sharon did everything possible to provoke an act of retaliation that would justify turning the full might of the Israeli army against the Palestinian Authority and so, once and for all, silence the Palestinians’ demand for independence.

The act Sharon was waiting for took place on Aug. 9, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a pizza restaurant in the heart of Jerusalem, killing 15 Israelis and wounding 130, including many children. Although Hamas took credit for the bombing, Israel responded with a sweeping assault on the Palestinian Authority. Israeli F-16s destroyed a police station in Ramallah, tanks rolled into Palestinian-held sections of Gaza, and Israeli police took over nine Palestinian office buildings in East Jerusalem as well as the headquarters of Palestinian intelligence services in Abu Dis. After a second suicide bombing on Aug. 11 Israeli forces invaded Jenin on the West Bank, demolished police stations and occupied city government headquarters. Israel’s most significant blow against Palestinian institutions was to seize Orient House, the majestic home of the late Faisal Husseini that has long served as the Palestinians’ capital in East Jerusalem. In taking over the building and removing documents and other contents the Israelis reasserted their claim to sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, a claim that strikes at the heart of Palestinian aspirations and is denied by most of the world.

The groundwork for Israel’s war on the Palestinians was laid by Sharon’s predecessor Ehud Barak more than a year before the intifada began. This writer’s article in the August/September 2000 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported on Israel’s extensive preparations to put down future Palestinian protests by force, including the use of helicopter gunships and tanks. The army had erected new watchtowers on the West Bank and Gaza, stationed tanks in key areas, increased the number of checkpoints, equipped soldiers with heavier weapons, and armed settlers with tear gas and machine guns. A New York Times report in June 2000 revealed that for a year the army had used a mock Palestinian village to train soldiers for “warfare in a developed area.”

Israel’s threats to use massive force against future demonstrations prompted Somaia Barghouti, Palestinian observer at the U.N., to warn at the time that “the fragile and tense situation in the area could quickly destabilize and words be translated into action.” The “action” followed a few weeks later, when Sharon marched onto Haram al-Sharif accompanied by 1,000 riot police. In response to the protest that followed, the Israelis shot to death seven unarmed Palestinians, causing long-simmering grievances to erupt. Israel’s tanks and helicopter gunships were ready.

Since then the violence has escalated, with the Palestinians suffering more than five times as many deaths as the Israelis, thousands more injuries, and tens of millions of dollars worth of damage. Most of Israel’s violations go unreported, according to Palestinian human rights workers, but enough information does get through to suggest their nature and magnitude. On June 23, 10 days after Sharon proclaimed the cease-fire, Israeli bulldozers and tanks rolled into Rafah refugee camp in Gaza in the middle of the night and in two hours demolished 20 houses, leaving 110 people homeless. On July 10, again with no advance warning, the bulldozers roared back into Rafah at 1 a.m., destroyed 26 homes and 12 shops, and forced residents to flee in their nightclothes. This time more than 150 people were made homeless, joining the thousands of other Palestinians who have endured similar nights of terror. In the first 10 months of the intifada the army demolished 2,000 homes in the West Bank and Gaza. According to the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, in the same period the Israelis burned 2,280 acres of crops and uprooted 26,570 olive trees. At least 80 percent of all Palestinians now rely on food provided by UNRWA.

A news story in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 18 described the scene near one Palestinian community in Gaza: “Surrounding the Israeli checkpoint the land is barren,” correspondent Chris Smith writes. “Churned-up dirt alternates with concrete rubble, tree limbs and wrecked greenhouses. Israeli soldiers have occupied the only house left standing....Many residents say that once the sun goes down Israeli soldiers shoot indiscriminately from a watchtower a few hundred feet away.”

In the West Bank and Gaza Israel routinely claims “security” as the reason for bulldozing houses and crops. In East Jerusalem, where the municipality destroyed 21 Palestinian homes during July and August, the owners “lacked a permit.” When the army moved into a Bedouin community near Hebron and destroyed their cave dwellings, crushed and scattered their belongings, and filled their wells with rubble, the only conceivable motive was revenge for the recent killing of a settler, although none of the Bedouins was suspected of the crime. Members of Rabbis for Peace who tried to bring tents and household supplies to the homeless families were turned away by the army.

Palestinians also had to face spiraling settler violence, highlighted by the killing of a Palestinian couple and their 3-month-old infant by a Jewish gunman near Hebron in late July. According to the Palestine Report of Aug. 1, during the week of July 12 to July 19 alone, 41 Palestinians were injured by settlers and three killed. In addition to shooting attacks, beatings, abductions, and vandalism, settlers systematically set fire to crops, thereby further impoverishing villagers. So far no settler has been punished, or even indicted.

Confident that there would be no serious criticism from the United States, Israel openly pursued its policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders, thus becoming the only country in the world to legalize execution without trial. By early August Israeli death squads had killed more than 60 Palestinians, including several bystanders who were hit by shrapnel. After two widely known and respected Hamas political leaders were killed on July 31 in a rocket attack, along with two small boys and two journalists, there was worldwide condemnation, but Washington’s response was divided. Although the State Department criticized the assassinations as “highly provocative,” President George W. Bush continued to remain aloof from the crisis, and Vice President Dick Cheney said on “Fox Special Report” he believed there was “some justification” in what Israel was doing. “The tactic is working,” an Israeli official in Washington said, “and when we express it to the Americans they understand it.”

Israeli officials justified the assassinations by saying the victims were “walking time bombs” on their way to carry out terrorism. Killing them, one Israeli official said, was like “cutting off the head of a snake.” But both Palestinians and Israelis warned that the assassinations, along with the continuing blockade, were so inflaming Palestinian public opinion that they would only provoke greater violence. “When we assassinate a terrorist,” Labor Party member Yossi Sarid said on Aug. 1, “we create with our very hands 10 new terrorists in his place.”

The bombing of the Jerusalem restaurant took place a week later, and three days after that a suicide bombing in a cafe near Haifa wounded 20 people.

It seems clear in any case that the chief intent of Sharon’s policies, including the assassinations, is not to stop violence but to cripple Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat has repeatedly called for a halt to armed attacks against Israel, and a recent editorial in his official news agency, Wafa, said that “Only by political means shall we be able to achieve our goals.” But as popular Hamas leaders are killed and become martyrs, many Palestinians are turning away from the Palestinian Authority to support more militant groups, leaving Arafat in a precarious position. He cannot pre-emptively arrest militants, as Israel is demanding, without arousing popular outrage, but his failure to do so gives Israeli officials the excuse to blame every act of violence on Arafat and refer to the Palestinian Authority as “a terrorist entity.”

Neither the Israeli government nor its supporters in the United States, who charge Arafat with rejecting peace in favor of violence, explain why, if he prefers violence, the Palestinian leader has ceaselessly pleaded for international observers to monitor a cease-fire. He made this plea again after the Aug. 9 suicide bombing. On July 19 the foreign ministers of the eight major industrialized nations backed Arafat in urging that third-party monitors be sent to help enforce the Mitchell report and stop the conflict. Unfortunately, their final resolution stipulated that such a force must be agreed to by Israel. According to The New York Times, the wording of the foreign ministers’ statement was first checked by the State Department, “apparently to ensure that it did not transgress the policies of the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon.” Sharon adamantly opposes any observer force, even one made up exclusively of Americans.

As Israel continued to punish the Palestinians under the pretense of fighting terrorism, two articles appeared exposing the myth that at Camp David Arafat had opted for violence rather than peace. Deborah Sontag in the July 26 New York Times and Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in the Aug. 9 New York Review of Books revealed that, contrary to what the White House and the press had reported, Barak had not offered the Palestinians nearly all they had asked for, only to be turned down. According to the articles Barak came to talks with nothing in writing but only vague oral proposals which, in view of Barak’s record of going back on his agreements, the Palestinians had no reason to trust.

The Israelis initially insisted on annexing the settlement blocks, retaining most of the Jordan Valley, and granting the Palestinians only “custodianship” over Haram al-Sharif. Arafat agreed to accept Israel’s annexation of the major settlements, Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a limit to the number of refugees returning to Israel proper. But he could not agree to Barak’s offer. As he later described it, “They have to control the air above, the water aquifers below, the sea and the borders. They have to divide the West Bank in three cantons. They keep 10 percent of it for settlements and roads and their forces.”

According to the two articles, Barak added to the atmosphere of mutual suspicion at Camp David by avoiding almost all personal contact with Arafat. In an interview with The New York Times on Aug. 5, Barak expressed the personal animosity that had poisoned his relationship with Arafat from the beginning. He called the Palestinian leader a “thug,” and urged heads of state to refuse all contact with him. The man who had reneged on Israel’s pledges to carry out a third troop withdrawal, release Palestinian political prisoners, and return three villages adjoining Jerusalem, declared that “Arafat has violated almost every agreement he has signed.”

Barak is undoubtedly as aware as Sharon that the downfall of the present moderate Palestinian leadership would result in even greater violence. Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri believes that some Israelis would welcome this outcome. “They believe,” he wrote in the July issue of The Other Israel, “that the hostilities will reach such atrocious levels that it will finally make the mass expulsion of the Palestinians from the whole country possible. The result will be Armageddon.”

Leading Palestinians and an increasing number of Israelis are working actively to prevent such an outcome. They point to the fact that at Taba, Egypt, in the winter of 2000 the two sides were closer than ever before to reaching an agreement—“agonizingly close,” according to participants Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo—when Barak canceled the talks. Many on both sides believe that if agreement could be reached at Taba it could happen again. In late July, 50 Palestinians and Israelis signed a statement entitled “No to Bloodshed, No to Occupation, Yes to Negotiations, Yes to Peace.” It called for “a 2-state solution based on the 1967 borders…with their respective capitals in Jerusalem” and urged the immediate implementation of the Mitchell Committee recommendations, including a settlement freeze, a cessation of violence, the implementation of previous agreements, and a return to negotiations.

The signatories include major officials of the Palestinian Authority, as well as academics, lawyers, businessmen and other prominent figures. On the Israeli side are former government ministers, prominent authors, and a number of academics and other professionals. They came together, the statement said, to “implore all people of good will to return to sanity, to rediscover compassion, humanity, and critical judgment and to reject the unbearable ease of the descent into fear, hatred, and calls for revenge.”

On Aug. 4, Peace Now, Israel’s traditional peace camp, broke its long silence with a demonstration in Tel Aviv that attracted 10,000 Israelis. Speakers said there could be no peace with settlements, and that the 1967 borders must be the basis for a two-state solution.Such events can’t help but bring hope that today’s potentially explosive situation won’t lead to the devastation left by Joshua and his followers, but to a realization among both Israeli and American leaders that in the long run bombs and tank shells can’t silence the call for justice. Meanwhile, the Palestinians show no signs of giving up their struggle.

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.

SIDEBAR 1

An Israeli Lexicon

Disputed Territories: The occupied West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights

Terrorists: Inhabitants of the above

Normal Settlement Expansion: Trailers planted by Israelis on Palestinian land

Defusing a Ticking Time Bomb: Torture

Physical Pressure: Torture

Active Defense: Assassination

Interception: Assassination

Work Accident: Assassination

Engineering Activity: Bulldozing homes, water tanks and wells

Self-restraint: Bombing, shelling, assassinations, crop destruction, and the imprisonment and impoverishing of three millon people

Peace: Unconditional surrender

—R.M.

 

SIDEBAR 2

Urgent Appeal From Friends of Orient House in East Jerusalem

The occupation of the Orient House and the closure of seven other Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem not only has deprived poor and underprivileged people from their humanitarian services, but also put occupied Arab Jerusalem under great political and economic stress.