Israel has sought peace with
its Arab neighbor states but has steadfastly refused to negotiate
with Palestinians directly, until the last few years. Why?
"My friend, take care. When
you recognize the concept of 'Palestine', you demolish your
right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not
the Land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers
of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it
belongs to a people who have lived here before you came. Only
if it is the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in
Ein Hahoresh and in Deganiyah B. If it is not your country,
your fatherland, the country of your ancestors and of your
sons, then what are you doing here? You came to another people's
homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken
their land." Menahem Begin, quoted in Noam Chomsky's "Peace
in the Middle East?"
More from the horse's mouth
"Why should the Arabs make
peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with
Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure,
God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our
God is not theirs, We come from Israel, it's true, but two
thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been
anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their
fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their
country. Why should they accept that?" David Ben-Gurion,
quoted in "The Jewish Paradox" by Nathan Goldman,
former president of the World Jewish Congress.
More from the horse's mouth
"Before [the Palestinians]
very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where
they, and their ancestors, have lived...We are the generation
of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel
we cannot plant a tree and build a home." Israeli leader
Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "Original
Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel"
More from the horse's mouth
"The Arabs will be our problem
for a long time," Weizmann said, "It's not going
to be simple. One day they may have to leave and let us have
the country. They're ten to one, but don't we Jews have ten
times their intelligence?" Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann
in 1919 at the Paris peace conference, quoted in Ella Winter, "And
Not To Yield."
The international consensus
on Israel (a very small representative sampling)
"[In the early 1950s] Arab
states regularly complained of the reprisals to the UN Security
Council, which routinely rejected Israel's claims of self-defense...
"In June 1982 Israel again
invaded Lebanon, and it used aerial bombardment to destroy
entire camps of Palestinian Arab refugees, By these means Israel
killed 20,000 persons, mostly civilians...Israel claimed self-defense
for its invasion, but the lack of PLO attacks into Israel during
the previous year made that claim dubious...The [UN] Security
Council demanded 'that Israel withdraw all its military forces
forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized
boundaries of Lebanon'...
"The UN Human Rights Commission,
using the Geneva Convention's provision that certain violations
of humanitarian law are 'grave breaches' meriting criminal
punishment for perpetrators, found a number of Israel's practices
during the uprising [the intifada] to constitute 'war crimes.'
It included physical and psychological torture of Palestinian
detainees and their subjection to improper and inhuman treatment;
the imposition of collective punishment on towns, villages
and camps; the administrative detention of thousands of Palestinians;
the expulsion of Palestinian citizens; the confiscation of
Palestinian property; and the raiding and demolition of Palestinian
houses." John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel:
A Challenge to Justice."
From the 1970s until the 1999
Israeli High Court decision forbidding torture during interrogation
(theoretically), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were
subjected to inhuman treatment in Israeli prisons.
"Israel's two main interrogation
agencies in the occupied territories engage in a systematic
pattern of ill-treatment and torture—according to internationally
recognized definitions of the terms...The methods used in nearly
all interrogations are prolonged sleep deprivation; prolonged
sight deprivation using blindfolds or tight-fitting hoods;
forced, prolonged maintenance of body positions that grow increasingly
painful; and verbal threats and insults.
"These methods are almost
always combined with some of the following abuses; confinement
in tiny, closet-like spaces; exposure to temperature extremes,
such as deliberately overcooled rooms, prolonged toilet and
hygiene deprivation; and degrading treatment...Beatings are
far more routine in IDF interrogations than in GSS interrogations.
Sixteen of the nineteen detainees we interviewed [detained
between 1992 and 1994] reported having been assaulted in the
interrogation room. Beatings and kicks were directed at the
throat, testicles, and stomach. Some were repeatedly choked;
some had their heads slammed against the walls...
"Israeli interrogations consistently
use methods in combination with one another, over long periods
of time. Thus, a detainee in the custody of the General Security
Service (GSS) may spend weeks during which, except for brief
respites, he shuttles from a tiny chair to which he is painfully
shackled; to a stifling, tiny cubicle in which he can barely
move; to questioning sessions in which he is beaten or violently
manhandled; and then back to the chair.
"The intensive, sustained
and combined use of these methods inflicts the severe mental
or physical suffering that is central to internationally accepted
definitions of torture. Israel's political leadership cannot
claim ignorance that ill-treatment is the norm in interrogation
centers. The number of victims is too large, and the abuses
too systematic," 1994 Human Rights Watch report, "Torture
and Ill-Treatment: Israel's Interrogation of Palestinians from
the Occupied Territories."
The use of "force' - continued
"Amnesty International also
observed that, when brought to trial, most Palestinian detainees
arrested for 'terrorist' offenses and tortured by the Shin
Bet (General Security Services) 'have been accused of offenses
such as membership in unlawful associations or throwing stones.
They have also included prisoners of conscience such as people
arrested solely for raising a flag.' On a related point, Haaretz
columnist B. Michael noted that there wasn't a single recorded
case in which the Shin Bet's use of torture was prompted by
a 'ticking bomb' scenario: 'In every instance of a Palestinian
lodging formal complaint about torture, the Shin Bet justified
its use in order to extract a confession about something that
had already happened, not about something that was about to
happen.'" Norman Finkelstein, "The Rise and Fall
of Palestine."
The 1997 U.N. Commission Against
Torture rules against Israel
"B'Tselem estimates—that
the GSS annually interrogates between 1000-1500 Palestinians
[as of 1998]. Some eighty-five percent of them—at least 850
persons a year—are tortured during interrogation...
"The U.N. Committee Against
Torture,..reached an unequivocal conclusion:...'The methods
of interrogation [used in Israeli prisons]...are in the Committee's
view breaches of article 16 and also constitute torture as
defined in article 1 of the Convention...As a State Party to
the Convention Against Torture, Israel is precluded from raising
before this Committee exceptional circumstances'...The prohibition
on torture is, therefore, absolute, and no 'exceptional' circumstances
may justify derogating from it." 1998 Report from B'Teslem,
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories, "Routine Torture: Interrogation Methods of
the General Security Service."
Some arguments used to justify
Zionism
"There is clearly no need
to justify the Zionist dream, the desire for relief from Jewish
suffering...The trouble with Zionism starts when it lands,
so to speak, in Palestine. What has to be justified is the
injustice to the Palestinians caused by Zionism, the dispossession
and victimization of a whole people. There is clearly a wrong
here, a wrong which creates the need for justification...
[E.g., the inheritance claim]
The aim of Zionism is the restoration of a Jewish sovereignty
to its status 2,000 years ago. Zionism does not advocate an
overhauling of the total world situation in the same way. It
does not advocate the restoration of the Roman empire...[In
addition,] Palestinians have claimed descent from the ancient
inhabitants of Palestine 3,000 years ago!...
[Jewish suffering as justification]
It was easy to make the Palestinians pay for 2,000 years of
persecution. The Palestinians, who have felt the enormous power
of this vengeance, were not the historical oppressors of the
Jews.
They did not put Jews into ghettos
and force them to wear yellow stars. They did not plan holocausts.
But they had one fault. They were weak and defenseless in the
face of real military might, so they were the ideal victims
for an abstract revenge....
[Anti-semitism as justification]
Unlike the situation of Jews persecuted for being Jews, Israelis
are at war with the Arab world because they have committed
the sin of colonialism, not because of their Jewish identity...
[The law of the jungle justification.]
Presenting the world as naturally unjust, and oppression as
nature's way, has always been the first refuge of those who
want to preserve their privileges...The need to justify Zionism,
and the lack of other defenses, has made it part of the Israeli
world view...In Israel, one common outcome is cynicism, for
which Israelis have become famous...
[The effect on Israelis]
Israelis seem to be haunted by a curse. It is the curse of
the original sin against the native Arabs. How can Israel be
discussed without recalling the dispossession and exclusion
of non-Jews? This is the most basic fact about Israel, and
no understanding of Israeli reality is possible without it.
The original sin haunts and torments Israelis; it marks everything
and taints everybody. Its memory poisons the blood and marks
every moment of existence." Israeli author, Benjamin
Beit-Hallahami, "Original Sins: Reflections on the History
of Zionism and Israel."
Zionism's 'historical right'
to Palestine
"Zionism's 'historical right'
to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not
historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish
settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement
outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic 'mysticism'
of 'blood and soil' and the Romantic 'cult' of 'death, heroes
and graves'... "The claim of Jewish 'homelessness is founded
on a cluster of assumptions that both negates the liberal idea
of citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the
state belongs to the majority ethnic nation. In a word, the
Zionist case for a Jewish state is as valid as the anti-Semitic
case for an ethnic state that marginalizes Jews." Professor
Norman Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine
Conflict,"
How about the Zionist argument
that Jordan already is the Palestinian state?
"It is often alleged that
there was, in fact, an earlier 'territorial compromise', namely
in 1922, when Transjordan was excised from the promised 'national
home for the Jewish people,'...a decision that is difficult
to criticize in light of the fact that 'the number of Jews
living there permanently in 1921 has reliably been estimated
at two, or according to some authorities, three persons.'" Noam
Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."
Why doesn't Israel, "the
only democracy in the Middle East," have a constitution?
"The abstention from formulating
a constitution was no accident. The massive expropriation of
lands and other properties from those Arabs who fled the country
as a result of the War of Independence and of those who remained
but were declared absent, as well as the confiscation of large
tracts of land from Arab villages who did not flee, and the
laws passed to legalize those acts—all this would have necessarily
been declared unconstitutional, null and void, by the Supreme
Court, being expressly discriminatory against one part of the
citizenry, whereas a democratic constitution obliges the state
to treat all of its citizens equally." Israeli author,
Boas Evron, "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?"
"The only democracy in
the Middle East?" - continued
"The 1989 Israel High Court
decision that any political party advocating full equality
between Arab and Jew can be barred from fielding candidates
in an election...[means] that the Israeli state is the state
of the Jews...not their [the Arabs'] state." Professor
Norman Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine
Conflict."
