No dia 06 de março, uma coalizão de ONGs humanitárias britânicas - Anistia Internacional, CARE, Christian Aid e Oxfam - publicou o relatório A Humanitarian Implosion de 16 páginas nas quais detalhava os problemas graves na Faixa, anteriores ao recente bombardeio. A situação era "man made" e pior do que nunca. Solicitava uma cooperação regional e dizia sem rodeios que o Hamas não podia ser ignorado.
As ONGs abordaram as consequências do bloqueio israelense em todas as linhas e demonstraram o agravamento galopante das condições de vida. Em 2006, 60 por cento dos gazauís viviam de ajuda estrangeira. Em 2008, 80 por cento, e o número não parava de crescer.
Em 1999, o UNRWA, a agência da ONU para refugiados, proporcionava ajuda alimentar a 16 mil famílias no enclave palestino. Em 2008, a 1.1 milhões de pessoas. Não por falta de disposição de trabalho e sim pelos entraves do bloqueio que provocara colapso da economia: “The majority of private businesses have shut down and 95 percent of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended. The restrictions on imports and exports were also the cause of failings in the agricultural sector. As a result of the blockade and collapse of the economy, there is little money to buy food and limited food to buy. Food prices are rising and wheat flour, baby milk and cooking oil are increasingly scarce. The Gaza Strip suffers from power outages due to the Israeli air strike on the power plant in 2006 and the restrictions on fuel imports, affecting the plant’s productivity and vital institutions like hospitals, which lack 60-70 percent of their diesel needs for generators. Power outages are also affecting the water supply to about 30 percent of Gaza’s residents. About 40-50 million liters of sewage are pumped into the sea daily for the same reason." Relevaram também a queda do número de pacientes que recebiam autorização israelense de sair da Faixa para receber o tratamento médico que necessitavam.
Na conclusão do relatório, as ONGs pediram ajuda externa: “We ask that the UK government and EU [European Union] put pressure on the government of Israel to ensure that emergency assistance essential to fulfilling fundamental human rights is never used as a bargaining tool to further political goals.” E fizeram a demanda de uma política inclusiva que implicava um diálogo com o Hamas, que administrava a Faixa mas que era esnobado pela Autoridade Palestina na Cisjordânia, por Israel e o Quarteto para o Oriente Médio.
Humanitarian implosion in Gaza
Foi então que a impotência contra o arsenal da IDF e a crueldade da ocupação levou um jerusalemita de 26 anos a um ato desesperado que, ao contrário da recente operação israelense na Faixa, foi alardeada em todas as televisões do planeta. O ato individual ficou conhecido em Israel como o massacre Mercaz HaRav.
Às 20:36 do dia 06 de março de 2008, Alaa Abu Dhein, morador do bairro Jabel Mukaber em Jerusalém Oriental, entrou na yeshiva (escola religiosa) Mercaz HaRav com uma AKM (versão contemporânea da Kalashnikov AK47) e matou onze alunos e deixou mais onze feridos. O ataque durou 14 minutos. Acabou quando o rapaz foi abatido pelo capitão da IDF David Shapira que estava de folga, e um aluno, Yitzchak Dadon. Ambos com suas armas pessoais.
Alaa era motorista de uma empresa de entrega a domicílio. Entrou no local carregando a AKM em uma caixa com outras de revistas. Era um cidadão comum, sem ligação com nenhum grupo da resistência. Sua reação foi pessoal, consciente de que deixaria sua vida nesta vingança mortífera. Sua irmã, Iman Abu Dhaim, contou que ele ficara profundamente chocado com os cinco dias de destruição e massacre de seus 126 compatriotas na Faixa de Gaza, mas não mais do que os outros palestinos da sua idade. Tanto que nem a família nem os amigos desconfiaram que seu estado de ânimo (geral na Cisjordânia) o levasse a cometer esta violência.
Apesar de ignorar completamente o projeto de Alaa, poucos meses depois sua família sofreria o efeito da punição coletiva. (Após vários recursos na justiça, a casa de seus pais seria demolida no dia 05 de janeiro de 2009, durante a operação israelense Cast lead em Gaza).
Na Cisjordânia, as mortes e agressões quotidianas impediram que o atentado fosse lamentado. Só Mahmoud Abbas que demonstrou pesar, diplomático.
Na Faixa de Gaza, ainda enterrando as dezenas de mortos na recente operação Warm Winter e ainda de luto das outras dezenas assassinadas desde o início do ano, os gazauís regozijaram-se com a notícia. E o Hamas, idem.
Em Israel a condenação foi prolixa na sociedade, no Knesset e na mídia. O Primeiro Ministro de Israel Ehud Olmert qualificou o ataque de "horrible" e enalteceu a yeshiva Mercaz Harav por produzir, "the finest soldiers for many generations; people who have realized the Zionist faith. This yeshiva has educated and nurtured tradition and legacy, as part of Israel's resilience." "Resilience" era sua definição de "violence".
O líder do partido de extrema-direita Avigdor Lieberman aproveitou para atacar os deputados palestino-israelenses do Knesset: "the attack can not be disconnected from the Arab MKs incitement, which we hear daily in the Knesset." Mas só recebeu aplausos de seus correligionários.
O mundo inteiro condenou o massacre e enviou condolências a Israel e às famílias das vítimas.
Os palestinos não haviam recebido nenhuma pelo recente massacre em Gaza nem para os assassinatos 'esporádicos' que a IDF levava a cabo na Cisjordânia e na Faixa.
Por que Alaa escolheu exatamente este lugar e esta yeshiva para cometer seu crime? Não deixou nenhuma explicação, mas a resposta pareceu óbvia a quem conhece a crueldade dos colonos judeus contra os nativos palestinos e o papel que esta yeshiva representa na expansão do número de colônias e da violência que cultiva.
Mercaz HaRav é a yeshiva de referência nacional e internacional do sionismo radical. Foi criada em 1924 por um imigrante russo, o rabino Abraham Isaac Kook. Desde então vem representando e dando forma ao sionismo religioso exacerbado de israelenses e de judeus estrangeiros. É a precursora das yeshivas sionistas e inspirou outras que são parte integrante da cultura colonianista de ocupação da Palestina.
Seu fundador a descrevia como "the central world yeshiva". Seu currículum escolar incluía, além do Talmud, filosofia e história judia, geografia e literatura, embora as três últimas matérias sejam pouco ou não enfocadas. Esta yeshiva não forma rabinos progressistas, "esclarecidos" e sim sionistas bitolados e movidos pela teoria da superioridade religiosa judia e do direito intrínseco e exclusivo dos judeus sobre Jerusalém e toda a Palestina.
Nas primeiras décadas esta escola tinha poucos alunos e corria o risco de ser fechada. Mas quando o rabino Kook morreu em 1935, foi substituído pelo filho, Zvi Yehuda Kook que cultivou suas ideias de exclusão dos nativos da Palestina que estava então sob Mandato Britânico. Na década de 50, com a imigração judia e a Naqba, a ideologia sionista ficou cada vez mais popular entre os imigrantes judeus que queriam justificar com argumentos religiosos a apropriação ilegal da Palestina.
Foi então que escolas religiosas tais Bnei Akiva, outras yeshivas e o proeminente rabino beni akiva Moshe Zvi Neria, ex-aluno do rabino Kook, incentivavam seus formandos a matricular-se em Mercaz HaRav, então já sob a direção do filho do fundador que a dirigiu até a morte em 1982.
Mercaz HaRav Kook foi e é a ideóloga das invasões/colônias/assentamentos judeus na Palestina. Foi um de seus ex-alunos, Hanan Porat, que logo após a Guerra dos Seis Dias fundou Gush Etzion, um "cacho" de colônias judias instaladas entre Jerusalém e Belém para retalhar a Cisjordânia. O primeiro grupo de colonos judeus eram membros do Gush Emunim, movimento político-sionista que incentiva imigrantes judeus a instalar-se na Palestina em vez de Israel a fim de ocupar a terra que tinham como a si prometida.
O rabino Zvi Kook incentivava seus alunos a lutar, literalemente, contra os nativos para surrupiar-lhes bens e recursos, e participou pessoalmente de combate neste sentido. Além disso, impôs às mulheres respeito rigoroso vestimentar - cobrir os cabelos e o corpo.
À morte de Avraham Shapira, seu filho Yaakov (em um sistema de monarquia religiosa) sucedeu na direção da Mercaz HaRav com a mesma ideologia reacionário-colonialista. Ela conta com 500 aprendizes de sionismo radicalo-expansionista que se formam e retornam ou não a seus países para pregar o radicalismo e o direito intrínseco dos judeus sobre a Palestina.
Mercaz HaRav Kook é estreitamente ligada aos grupos extremistas Jewish Settement Movement e Gush Emunim.
É claro que isto não justifica que estes civis (que carregam armas e as usam para intimidar os nativos) sejam atacados em sua escola, mas explica.
No dia 08 de março, o jornalista-ativista israelense Uri Avnery, analisou assim o acontecido: "This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert's statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in [ocupied] Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed...
Alaa era motorista de uma empresa de entrega a domicílio. Entrou no local carregando a AKM em uma caixa com outras de revistas. Era um cidadão comum, sem ligação com nenhum grupo da resistência. Sua reação foi pessoal, consciente de que deixaria sua vida nesta vingança mortífera. Sua irmã, Iman Abu Dhaim, contou que ele ficara profundamente chocado com os cinco dias de destruição e massacre de seus 126 compatriotas na Faixa de Gaza, mas não mais do que os outros palestinos da sua idade. Tanto que nem a família nem os amigos desconfiaram que seu estado de ânimo (geral na Cisjordânia) o levasse a cometer esta violência.
Apesar de ignorar completamente o projeto de Alaa, poucos meses depois sua família sofreria o efeito da punição coletiva. (Após vários recursos na justiça, a casa de seus pais seria demolida no dia 05 de janeiro de 2009, durante a operação israelense Cast lead em Gaza).
Na Cisjordânia, as mortes e agressões quotidianas impediram que o atentado fosse lamentado. Só Mahmoud Abbas que demonstrou pesar, diplomático.
Na Faixa de Gaza, ainda enterrando as dezenas de mortos na recente operação Warm Winter e ainda de luto das outras dezenas assassinadas desde o início do ano, os gazauís regozijaram-se com a notícia. E o Hamas, idem.
Em Israel a condenação foi prolixa na sociedade, no Knesset e na mídia. O Primeiro Ministro de Israel Ehud Olmert qualificou o ataque de "horrible" e enalteceu a yeshiva Mercaz Harav por produzir, "the finest soldiers for many generations; people who have realized the Zionist faith. This yeshiva has educated and nurtured tradition and legacy, as part of Israel's resilience." "Resilience" era sua definição de "violence".
O líder do partido de extrema-direita Avigdor Lieberman aproveitou para atacar os deputados palestino-israelenses do Knesset: "the attack can not be disconnected from the Arab MKs incitement, which we hear daily in the Knesset." Mas só recebeu aplausos de seus correligionários.
O mundo inteiro condenou o massacre e enviou condolências a Israel e às famílias das vítimas.
Os palestinos não haviam recebido nenhuma pelo recente massacre em Gaza nem para os assassinatos 'esporádicos' que a IDF levava a cabo na Cisjordânia e na Faixa.
Por que Alaa escolheu exatamente este lugar e esta yeshiva para cometer seu crime? Não deixou nenhuma explicação, mas a resposta pareceu óbvia a quem conhece a crueldade dos colonos judeus contra os nativos palestinos e o papel que esta yeshiva representa na expansão do número de colônias e da violência que cultiva.
Seu fundador a descrevia como "the central world yeshiva". Seu currículum escolar incluía, além do Talmud, filosofia e história judia, geografia e literatura, embora as três últimas matérias sejam pouco ou não enfocadas. Esta yeshiva não forma rabinos progressistas, "esclarecidos" e sim sionistas bitolados e movidos pela teoria da superioridade religiosa judia e do direito intrínseco e exclusivo dos judeus sobre Jerusalém e toda a Palestina.
Nas primeiras décadas esta escola tinha poucos alunos e corria o risco de ser fechada. Mas quando o rabino Kook morreu em 1935, foi substituído pelo filho, Zvi Yehuda Kook que cultivou suas ideias de exclusão dos nativos da Palestina que estava então sob Mandato Britânico. Na década de 50, com a imigração judia e a Naqba, a ideologia sionista ficou cada vez mais popular entre os imigrantes judeus que queriam justificar com argumentos religiosos a apropriação ilegal da Palestina.
Foi então que escolas religiosas tais Bnei Akiva, outras yeshivas e o proeminente rabino beni akiva Moshe Zvi Neria, ex-aluno do rabino Kook, incentivavam seus formandos a matricular-se em Mercaz HaRav, então já sob a direção do filho do fundador que a dirigiu até a morte em 1982.
Mercaz HaRav Kook foi e é a ideóloga das invasões/colônias/assentamentos judeus na Palestina. Foi um de seus ex-alunos, Hanan Porat, que logo após a Guerra dos Seis Dias fundou Gush Etzion, um "cacho" de colônias judias instaladas entre Jerusalém e Belém para retalhar a Cisjordânia. O primeiro grupo de colonos judeus eram membros do Gush Emunim, movimento político-sionista que incentiva imigrantes judeus a instalar-se na Palestina em vez de Israel a fim de ocupar a terra que tinham como a si prometida.
O rabino Zvi Kook incentivava seus alunos a lutar, literalemente, contra os nativos para surrupiar-lhes bens e recursos, e participou pessoalmente de combate neste sentido. Além disso, impôs às mulheres respeito rigoroso vestimentar - cobrir os cabelos e o corpo.
À morte de Avraham Shapira, seu filho Yaakov (em um sistema de monarquia religiosa) sucedeu na direção da Mercaz HaRav com a mesma ideologia reacionário-colonialista. Ela conta com 500 aprendizes de sionismo radicalo-expansionista que se formam e retornam ou não a seus países para pregar o radicalismo e o direito intrínseco dos judeus sobre a Palestina.
Mercaz HaRav Kook é estreitamente ligada aos grupos extremistas Jewish Settement Movement e Gush Emunim.
É claro que isto não justifica que estes civis (que carregam armas e as usam para intimidar os nativos) sejam atacados em sua escola, mas explica.
John Snow comenta o fato na Channel 4
Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not "kill a Turk and rest". That was "kill a hundred Turks and rest". But Olmert does not understand.
The five-day-war in Gaza (as a Hamas leader called it) was but another short chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This bloody monster is never satisfied, its appetite just grows with the eating.
This chapter started with the "targeted liquidation" of five senior militants inside the Gaza Strip. The "response" was a salvo of rockets, and this time not only on Sderot, but also on Ashkelon and Netivot. The "response" to the "response" was the army's incursion and the wholesale killing.
The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.
As if an example for the folly of the propagators of this concept had been lacking, it was provided on TV by ex-general Matan Vilnai, when he said that the Palestinians are "bringing a Shoah on themselves". The Hebrew word Shoah is known all over the world, where it has one clear meaning: the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Vilnai's utterance spread like a bushfire throughout the Arab world and set off a shock wave. I, too, received dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages from all over the world. How to convince people that in day-to-day Hebrew usage, Shoah means "only" a great disaster, and that General Vilnai, a former candidate for Chief of Staff, is not the most intelligent of people?...
Vilnai does not understand what the word "Shoah" means to others, and Olmert does not understand why there is rejoicing in Gaza after the attack on the yeshiva in Jerusalem. Wise men like these direct the state, the government and the army. Wise men like these control public opinion through the media. What is common to all of them: blunted sensibilities to the feelings of anybody who is not Jewish/Israeli. From this springs their inability to understand the psychology of the other side, and hence the consequences of their own words and actions.
This is also expressed in the inability to understand why the Hamas people claimed victory in the five-Day War. What victory? After all, only two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian were killed, as against 120 Palestinian dead, both fighters and civilians.
But this battle was fought between one of the strongest armies in the world, equipped with the most modern arms on earth, and a few thousand irregulars with primitive arms. If the battle ended in a draw - and such a battle always ends in a draw - this is a great victory for the weak side. In Lebanon War II and in the Gaza war.
(Binyamin Netanyahu made one of the most stupid statement this week, when he demanded that "the Israeli army must move from attrition to decision". In a struggle like this, there never is a decision.)
The real effect of such an operation is not expressed in material and quantitative facts: so-and-so many dead, so-and-so many injured, so-and-so much destroyed. It is expressed in psychological results that cannot be measured, and therefore are inaccessible to the minds of generals: how much hatred has been added to the seething pool, how many new potential suicide bombers were produced, how many people vowed revenge and became ticking bombs - like the Jerusalem youngster, who woke up one bright morning this week, got himself a weapon, went to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the mother of all settlements, and killed as many as he could.
Now the political and military leadership of Israel sits down to discuss what to do, how to "respond". No new idea has come up or will come up, because not one of these politicians and generals is able to bring up a new idea. They can only go back to the hundred things they have already done, and that have failed a hundred times.
The first step on the way out of this madness is the readiness to question all our concepts and methods of the last 60 years and start thinking again, right from the beginning.
That is always hard. That is even harder for us, because our leadership has no freedom of thought - its thinking is very closely tied to the thinking of the American leadership.
This week, a shocking document was published: David Rose's article in Vanity Fair. It describes how US officials have in recent years dictated every single step of the Palestinian leadership, down to the most minute detail. Though the article does not touch the Israeli-American relationship (in itself a surprising omission) it goes without saying that the American course, including the smallest items, is coordinated with the Israeli government.
Why shocking? These things were already known, in general terms. In this respect, that article held no surprises: (a) The Americans ordered Mahmoud Abbas to hold parliamentary elections, in order to present Bush as bringing democracy to the Middle East. (b) Hamas won a surprise victory. (c) The Americans imposed a boycott on the Palestinians, in order to nullify the election results. (d) Abbas diverted for a moment from the policy dictated to him and, under Saudi auspices (and pressure), made an agreement with Hamas, (e) The Americans put an end to this and compelled Abbas to turn over all security services to Muhammad Dahlan, whom they had chosen for the role of strongman in Palestine, (f) The Americans provided plenty of money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (g) The elected Hamas government forestalled the move and itself carried out an armed counter-coup.
All this was known before. What is new is that the mixture of news, rumors and intelligent guesses has now condensed into an authoritative, well substantiated report, based on official US documents. It testifies to the abysmal American ignorance, which trumps even Israeli ignorance, of the internal Palestinian processes.
George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, the Zionist neocon Elliott Abrams and the assortment of American generals innocent of any knowledge are competing with Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and our own assorted generals, whose understanding reaches as far as the end of the gun barrels of their tanks.
The Americans have in the meantime destroyed Dahlan by exposing him publicly as their agent, on the lines of "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch". This week Condoleezza dealt a mortal blow to Abbas, too. He had announced in the morning that he was suspending the (meaningless) peace negotiations with Israel, the very minimum he could do in response to the Gaza atrocities. Rice, who received the news while she was having breakfast in the exciting company of Livni, immediately called Abbas and ordered him to cancel his announcement. Abbas gave in, thus exposing himself to his people in all his nakedness.
LOGIC WAS not given to the People of Israel on Mount Sinai, but handed down from Mount Olympus to the ancient Greeks. In spite of this drawback, let us try to apply it.
What is our government trying to achieve in Gaza? It wants to topple Hamas rule (and incidentally also put an end to the launching of rockets against Israel).
It tried to achieve this by imposing a total blockade on the population, hoping that they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. This failed. The alternative course is to re-occupy the entire Strip. That would carry a high price in lives of soldiers, perhaps more than the Israeli public is ready to pay. Also, it will not help, because Hamas will return the moment the Israeli troops withdraw. (In accordance with Mao Zedong's first rule for guerrillas: "When the enemy advances, withdraw. When the enemy withdraws, advance.")
The only result of the Five-Day War is the strengthening of Hamas and the rallying of the Palestinian people behind it - not just in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, too. Their victory celebration was justified. The launching of rockets did not stop. The range of the rockets is increasing.
But let us assume that this policy had succeeded and that Hamas had been broken. What then? Abbas and Dahlan could return only on top of Israeli tanks, as subcontractors of the occupation. No insurance company would cover their lives. And if they did not come back, there would be chaos, out of which extreme forces would emerge the like of which we cannot even imagine.
Conclusion: Hamas is there. It cannot be ignored. We have to reach a cease-fire with it. Not a sham offer of "if they stop shooting first, then we will stop shooting". A cease-fire, like a tango, needs two participants. It must come out of a detailed agreement that will include the cessation of all hostilities, armed and otherwise, in all the territories.
The cease-fire will not hold if it is not accompanied by speeded-up negotiations for a long-term armistice (hudna) and peace. Such negotiations cannot be held with Fatah and not Hamas, nor with Hamas and not Fatah. Therefore, what is needed is a Palestinian government that includes both movements. It must bring in personalities who enjoy the confidence of the entire Palestinian people, such as Marwan Barghouti.
That is the very opposite of the present Israeli-American policy, which forbids Abbas even to talk with Hamas. In all the Israeli leadership, as in all the American leadership, there is no one who dares to spell this out openly. Therefore, what has been is what will be.
We will kill a hundred Turks and rest. And from time to time, a Turk will come and kill some of us.
Why, for God's sake? What have we done to them?"
Uri Avnery, 08/03/08
The five-day-war in Gaza (as a Hamas leader called it) was but another short chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This bloody monster is never satisfied, its appetite just grows with the eating.
This chapter started with the "targeted liquidation" of five senior militants inside the Gaza Strip. The "response" was a salvo of rockets, and this time not only on Sderot, but also on Ashkelon and Netivot. The "response" to the "response" was the army's incursion and the wholesale killing.
The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.
As if an example for the folly of the propagators of this concept had been lacking, it was provided on TV by ex-general Matan Vilnai, when he said that the Palestinians are "bringing a Shoah on themselves". The Hebrew word Shoah is known all over the world, where it has one clear meaning: the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Vilnai's utterance spread like a bushfire throughout the Arab world and set off a shock wave. I, too, received dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages from all over the world. How to convince people that in day-to-day Hebrew usage, Shoah means "only" a great disaster, and that General Vilnai, a former candidate for Chief of Staff, is not the most intelligent of people?...
Vilnai does not understand what the word "Shoah" means to others, and Olmert does not understand why there is rejoicing in Gaza after the attack on the yeshiva in Jerusalem. Wise men like these direct the state, the government and the army. Wise men like these control public opinion through the media. What is common to all of them: blunted sensibilities to the feelings of anybody who is not Jewish/Israeli. From this springs their inability to understand the psychology of the other side, and hence the consequences of their own words and actions.
This is also expressed in the inability to understand why the Hamas people claimed victory in the five-Day War. What victory? After all, only two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian were killed, as against 120 Palestinian dead, both fighters and civilians.
But this battle was fought between one of the strongest armies in the world, equipped with the most modern arms on earth, and a few thousand irregulars with primitive arms. If the battle ended in a draw - and such a battle always ends in a draw - this is a great victory for the weak side. In Lebanon War II and in the Gaza war.
(Binyamin Netanyahu made one of the most stupid statement this week, when he demanded that "the Israeli army must move from attrition to decision". In a struggle like this, there never is a decision.)
The real effect of such an operation is not expressed in material and quantitative facts: so-and-so many dead, so-and-so many injured, so-and-so much destroyed. It is expressed in psychological results that cannot be measured, and therefore are inaccessible to the minds of generals: how much hatred has been added to the seething pool, how many new potential suicide bombers were produced, how many people vowed revenge and became ticking bombs - like the Jerusalem youngster, who woke up one bright morning this week, got himself a weapon, went to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the mother of all settlements, and killed as many as he could.
Now the political and military leadership of Israel sits down to discuss what to do, how to "respond". No new idea has come up or will come up, because not one of these politicians and generals is able to bring up a new idea. They can only go back to the hundred things they have already done, and that have failed a hundred times.
The first step on the way out of this madness is the readiness to question all our concepts and methods of the last 60 years and start thinking again, right from the beginning.
That is always hard. That is even harder for us, because our leadership has no freedom of thought - its thinking is very closely tied to the thinking of the American leadership.
This week, a shocking document was published: David Rose's article in Vanity Fair. It describes how US officials have in recent years dictated every single step of the Palestinian leadership, down to the most minute detail. Though the article does not touch the Israeli-American relationship (in itself a surprising omission) it goes without saying that the American course, including the smallest items, is coordinated with the Israeli government.
Why shocking? These things were already known, in general terms. In this respect, that article held no surprises: (a) The Americans ordered Mahmoud Abbas to hold parliamentary elections, in order to present Bush as bringing democracy to the Middle East. (b) Hamas won a surprise victory. (c) The Americans imposed a boycott on the Palestinians, in order to nullify the election results. (d) Abbas diverted for a moment from the policy dictated to him and, under Saudi auspices (and pressure), made an agreement with Hamas, (e) The Americans put an end to this and compelled Abbas to turn over all security services to Muhammad Dahlan, whom they had chosen for the role of strongman in Palestine, (f) The Americans provided plenty of money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (g) The elected Hamas government forestalled the move and itself carried out an armed counter-coup.
All this was known before. What is new is that the mixture of news, rumors and intelligent guesses has now condensed into an authoritative, well substantiated report, based on official US documents. It testifies to the abysmal American ignorance, which trumps even Israeli ignorance, of the internal Palestinian processes.
George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, the Zionist neocon Elliott Abrams and the assortment of American generals innocent of any knowledge are competing with Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and our own assorted generals, whose understanding reaches as far as the end of the gun barrels of their tanks.
The Americans have in the meantime destroyed Dahlan by exposing him publicly as their agent, on the lines of "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch". This week Condoleezza dealt a mortal blow to Abbas, too. He had announced in the morning that he was suspending the (meaningless) peace negotiations with Israel, the very minimum he could do in response to the Gaza atrocities. Rice, who received the news while she was having breakfast in the exciting company of Livni, immediately called Abbas and ordered him to cancel his announcement. Abbas gave in, thus exposing himself to his people in all his nakedness.
LOGIC WAS not given to the People of Israel on Mount Sinai, but handed down from Mount Olympus to the ancient Greeks. In spite of this drawback, let us try to apply it.
What is our government trying to achieve in Gaza? It wants to topple Hamas rule (and incidentally also put an end to the launching of rockets against Israel).
It tried to achieve this by imposing a total blockade on the population, hoping that they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. This failed. The alternative course is to re-occupy the entire Strip. That would carry a high price in lives of soldiers, perhaps more than the Israeli public is ready to pay. Also, it will not help, because Hamas will return the moment the Israeli troops withdraw. (In accordance with Mao Zedong's first rule for guerrillas: "When the enemy advances, withdraw. When the enemy withdraws, advance.")
The only result of the Five-Day War is the strengthening of Hamas and the rallying of the Palestinian people behind it - not just in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, too. Their victory celebration was justified. The launching of rockets did not stop. The range of the rockets is increasing.
But let us assume that this policy had succeeded and that Hamas had been broken. What then? Abbas and Dahlan could return only on top of Israeli tanks, as subcontractors of the occupation. No insurance company would cover their lives. And if they did not come back, there would be chaos, out of which extreme forces would emerge the like of which we cannot even imagine.
Conclusion: Hamas is there. It cannot be ignored. We have to reach a cease-fire with it. Not a sham offer of "if they stop shooting first, then we will stop shooting". A cease-fire, like a tango, needs two participants. It must come out of a detailed agreement that will include the cessation of all hostilities, armed and otherwise, in all the territories.
The cease-fire will not hold if it is not accompanied by speeded-up negotiations for a long-term armistice (hudna) and peace. Such negotiations cannot be held with Fatah and not Hamas, nor with Hamas and not Fatah. Therefore, what is needed is a Palestinian government that includes both movements. It must bring in personalities who enjoy the confidence of the entire Palestinian people, such as Marwan Barghouti.
That is the very opposite of the present Israeli-American policy, which forbids Abbas even to talk with Hamas. In all the Israeli leadership, as in all the American leadership, there is no one who dares to spell this out openly. Therefore, what has been is what will be.
We will kill a hundred Turks and rest. And from time to time, a Turk will come and kill some of us.
Why, for God's sake? What have we done to them?"
Uri Avnery, 08/03/08
'Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel’s recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem have been swift.
“I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of Israel,” US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his “condemnation” and “condolences,” as did EU High Representative Javier Solana.
The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu ‘Aser was buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house’s inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces.
But confirming their status in the eyes of the “international community” as less than complete human beings, neither Amira’s killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences.
The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are “terrorism,” while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against “terrorism.” But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades.
Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred-year war caused by the Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda effort — as always — to present Palestinian violence as being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal occupation that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack on religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah?
We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim?
Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students from military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join the army and become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush Emunim settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of Mercaz HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist settlements in the Occupied West Bank, including the notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose inhabitants have made life miserable for Palestinians in the city and forced many of them out of their homes. It is the militant settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994. It is in Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers spray “Arabs to the gas chambers” on Palestinian houses.
It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care about any of this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would have satisfied his desire to exact revenge.
In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” This would be achieved by the massive and constant application of force until they got the message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza “disengagement.”
Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically-sealed pen for unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a single rocket over the fence into Israel, “we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Qassams [rockets], because they will know what’s waiting for them.”
Soffer predicted that in a few years’ time, “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam.” With Palestinians closed in, “The pressure at the border will be awful,” Soffer predicted. “It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: “The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings” (“It’s the demography, stupid,” The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004).
For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality this deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a civilian population in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel’s vexation, the Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty years of expulsions, massacres, assassinations of their leaders, colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, the Palestinians have utterly failed to understand that they are a “defeated people.”
The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without resorting to violence in response, but they maintain an inextinguishable determination to endure until they regain their rights. If the methods the Palestinian resistance has sometimes used are reprehensible, they have also been typical for anti-colonial resistance movements throughout time, as William Polk shows in his book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape demonstrated through his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win.
Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel at last to understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed can finally stop and all the people of the country — Israelis and Palestinians — can begin to imagine a future other than an endless parade of funerals?'
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
"Israeli Deputy Minister Matan Vilnai's much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a "shoah" was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army's plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories....
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large hasbara [propaganda] campaign through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained that the word shoah also meant “disaster”; this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. Shoah — which literally means “burnt offering” — was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic word nakba (catastrophe) is nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai’s use of shoah as “holocaust.”
But this is not the first time that Vilnai has expressed extreme views about Gaza’s future.
Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on behalf of his boss, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, to declare Gaza a “hostile entity” and dramatically reduce the essential services supplied by Israel — as long-time occupier — to its inhabitants, including electricity and fuel. The cuts were finally implemented late last year after the Israeli courts gave their blessing.
Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many other Israeli politicians, have been “selling” this policy — of choking off basic services to Gaza — to Western public opinion ever since.
Under international law, Israel as the occupying power has an obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian population in Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media reported Israel’s decision to declare Gaza a hostile entity. The pair have therefore claimed tendentiously that the humanitarian needs of Gazans are still being safeguarded by the limited supplies being allowed through, and that therefore the measures do not constitute collective punishment.
Last October, after a meeting of defense officials, Vilnai said of Gaza: “Because this is an entity that is hostile to us, there is no reason for us to supply them with electricity beyond the minimum required to prevent a crisis.”
Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that Israel should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza, though, in line with the advice of Israel’s attorney general, he has been careful not to suggest that this would punish ordinary Gazans excessively.
Instead he said disengagement should be taken to its logical conclusion: “We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come from another place.” He suggested that Egypt might be forced to take over responsibility.
Vilnai’s various comments are a reflection of the new thinking inside the defense and political establishments about where next to move Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, a consensus in the Israeli military quickly emerged in favor of maintaining control through a colonial policy of divide and rule, by factionalizing the Palestinians and then keeping them feuding.
As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist the occupation effectively, Israel could carry on with its settlement program and “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories, as the Defense Minister of the time, Moshe Dayan, called it.
Israel experimented with various methods of undermining the secular Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which threatened to galvanize a general resistance to the occupation. In particular Israel established local anti-PLO militias known as the Village Leagues and later backed the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would morph into Hamas.
Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah, has been the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories ever since, and has moved center stage since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Growing antagonism fueled by Israel and the US, as an article in Vanity Fair confirmed this week, culminated in the physical separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer.
The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not only geographically but also by their diametrically opposed strategies for dealing with Israel’s occupation.
Fatah’s control of the West Bank is being shored up by Israel because its leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have made it clear that they are prepared to cooperate with an interminable peace process that will give Israel the time it needs to annex yet more of the territory.
Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the peace process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but Israel’s military control and its economic siege only tighten from arm’s length.
In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to surrender to Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to Israeli and US machinations to topple it. Instead it has begun advancing the only two feasible forms of resistance available: rocket attacks over the fence surrounding Gaza, and popular mass action...
When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration a fortnight ago in which they created a human chain along part of Gaza’s fence with Israel, the Israeli army could hardly contain its panic. Heavy artillery batteries were brought to the perimeter and snipers were ordered to shoot protesters’ legs if they approached the fence.
As Amira Hass, Haaretz’s veteran reporter in the occupied territories, observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorize most ordinary Gazans into a paralyzed inactivity on this front. In the main Palestinians have refused to take the “suicidal” course of directly challenging their imprisonment by Israel, even peacefully: The Palestinians do not need warnings or reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the unarmed as well, and they also kill women and children.”
But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to Gaza.
As a result, Israel’s immediate priorities are: to provoke Hamas regularly into violence to deflect it from the path of organizing mass peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas leadership through regular executions; and to ensure that an effective defense against the rockets is developed, including technology like Barak’s pet project, Iron Dome, to shield the country from attacks.
In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period of “relative calm” in Gaza by initiating the executions of five Hamas members last Wednesday. Predictably, Hamas responded by firing into Israel a barrage of rockets that killed the student in Sderot, in turn justifying the bloodbath in Gaza.
But a longer-term strategy is also required, and is being devised by Vilnai and others. Aware both that the Gaza prison is tiny and its resources scarce and that the Palestinian population is growing at a rapid rate, Israel needs a more permanent solution... This week Barak revealed that his officials were working on the last idea, finding a way to make it lawful for the army to direct artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighborhoods of Gaza in response to rocket fire. They are already doing this covertly, of course, but now they want their hands freed by making it official policy, sanctioned by the international community.
At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of declaring areas of Gaza “combat zones” in which the army would have free rein and from which residents would have little choice but to flee. In practice, this would allow Israel to expel civilians from wide areas of the Strip, herding them into ever smaller spaces, as has been happening in the West Bank for some time.
All these measures — from the intensification of the siege to prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to the concentration of the population into even more confined spaces, as well as new ways of stepping up the violence inflicted on the Strip — are thinly veiled excuses for targeting and punishing the civilian population. They necessarily preclude negotiation and dialogue with Gaza’s political leaders.
Until now, it had appeared, Israel’s plan was eventually to persuade Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a return to its status before the 1967 war. The view was that Cairo would be even more ruthless in cracking down on the Islamic militants than Israel. But increasingly Vilnai and Barak look set on a different course.
Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai’s shoah comment: Gaza’s depopulation, with the Strip squeezed on three sides until the pressure forces Palestinians to break out again into Egypt. This time, it may be assumed, there will be no chance of return."
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His extensive account of the October 2000 deaths and the Or Commission hearings can be found in his book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Contrariando também os dois pesos e duas medidas, uma mãe gazauí, ao ler no Haaretz a nota abaixo de uma mãe israelense que reclamava do "terror" do foguetório do Hamas sobre seu filho, escreveu-lhe a carta abaixo com a seguinte nota precedente do Haaretz:12/03/2008. 'I spoke with him a little, but when he sees me he begins to cry... the situation in Sderot in general is very diffcult, and I do not know how we can continue, how we can stay in the city", said Sderot resident Rima Haimov, whose ten-year-old son Yosso was wounded by a Qassam rocket. (Doctors save hand of Sderot boy hurt by Qassam; 4 Palestinians killed in Gaza, " Haaretz, 26/02/2008)
"Dear Rima Haimov,
When I read your words the only thing I can say is that I feel sorry for your son, and that I can understand you as a mother and the traumatic events that your child is experiencing. I cannot deny the fact that life becomes very difficult in such circumstances when you realize that you and your family are in danger at any moment; I fully understand your worries, your feelings and concerns. I am addressing this letter to you with the hope that you will understand my pain too.
Like I feel sorry for your son, I feel sorry for my Palestinian children who are born and will die in Gaza, unable to have the chance of seeing other worlds, and who have to face F-16s, Apache helicopters and the Israeli army’s brutal invasions into Gaza. However, my children are not fortunate enough to have the excellent medical care that your son has. My children do not have the chance to run to a shelter and there is no ALARM to tell them that there is a strike coming. My children cannot be guaranteed the love and care that your son found because all of their family might be killed in one strike, they might witness the death of their parents, or any of their dear family members as the Palestinians are targeted everywhere, even in their homes and among their children.
My children cannot find the counseling that your child will have to help him deal with his appalling experience. They have to keep their pain inside them, and recall it day after day. Even in their dreams they suffer from remembering the things they have witnessed.
My children are not children anymore; they lost their innocence and are forced to act like adults so they can protect themselves. They no longer cry to their parents because they realize that even adults are scared and also need comfort and security. Instead they swallow their pain and deal with it on their own.
When your child is sick or injured he has the chance to go to the best  hospitals to receive treatment while my children have to live with their pain and injuries because they cannot go to a good hospital like you have in Israel. In Gaza, they can only wait for the pain to pass or count the days waiting for the end. They have learned how to face death fearlessly, because they hope to find justice and a better life in heaven.
While your child enjoys his new schoolbooks, my children have to use old, disreputable books because the borders are closed and even schoolbooks cannot be brought in.
My children have to face the extreme temperatures because of the electricity cuts. They cannot enjoy sitting in front of the electric heater in winter or the fan in summer. Â While you as a mother can plan for your child’s future, I cannot because my child is locked in a prison called Gaza, and he cannot dream of having the chance to receive a better education and work outside of Gaza.
While you as a mother can give your child all the promises of a better life, I can not give my child these guarantees, simply because we are both eligible to die in any moment by an Israeli strike, without any plans, dreams, nothing.
After all of this do you think that my children deserve their pain only because they are born to Palestinian parents? Do you think it is fair that they are treated in this way? Is it fair to be subjected to the sanctions that your government has imposed on us? I hope you can understand my pain too.
Sincerely,"
Najwa Sheikh. Is a Palestinian refugee from al-Majdal located just north of the Gaza Strip. Shiekh has lived in refugee camps in Gaza her entire life where she is married and has three children.
Insatisfeitos com a tensão crescente, Israel realizou mais um atentado em sua campanha de assassinatos. Desta vez foram quatro resistentes em Belém e um em Tulkarm, na Cisjordânia. No dia 15 de março, Uri Avnery relatou este evento.
What happened this week is so infuriating, so impertinent, that it stands out even in our familiar landscape of governmental irresponsibility.
On the near horizon, a de facto suspension of hostilities was taking shape. The Egyptians had made great efforts to turn it into an official cease-fire. The flame was already burning visibly lower. The launching of Qassams and Grads from the Gaza Strip into Israel had fallen from dozens a day to two or three.
And then something happened that turned the flame up high again: undercover soldiers of the Israeli army killed four Palestinians militants in Bethlehem. A fifth was killed in a village near Tulkarm.
The Modus Operandi left no doubt about the intention.
As usual, the official version was mendacious. (When the army spokesman speaks the truth, he is ashamed and immediately hurries on to the next lie.) The four, it was said, drew their weapons and endangered the life of the soldiers, who only wanted to arrest them, so they were compelled to open fire.
Anyone with half a brain knows that this is a lie. The four were in a small car on the main street of Bethlehem, the road that has joined Jerusalem and Hebron since British (or Turkish) times. They were indeed armed, but they had no chance at all of drawing their weapons. The car was simply sprayed with dozens of bullets.
That was not an attempt to make an arrest. That was an execution, pure and simple, one of those summary executions in which the Shin Bet fulfils the roles of prosecutor, judge and executioner.
This time no effort was even made to pretend that the four were about to carry out a murderous attack. It was not claimed, for example, that they had anything to do with last week's attack on the Mercaz Harav seminary, the flagship of the settlers' fleet. Actually, no such pretense could be put forward, because the most important of the four had recently given interviews to the Israeli media and announced that he was availing himself of the Israeli "pardon scheme" - a Shin Bet program under which "wanted" militants give up their arms and undertake to cease resistance to the occupation. He was also a candidate in the last Palestinian elections.
If so, why were they killed? The Shin Bet did not hide the reason: two of the four had participated in attacks in 2001 in which Israelis were killed.
"Our long arm will get them even years later," Ehud Barak boasted on TV, "we shall get everyone with Jewish blood on his hands."
Simply put: The Defense Minister and his men endangered today's cease-fire in order to avenge something that happened seven years ago.
It was obvious to all that the killing of Islamic Jihad militants in Bethlehem would cause the renewal of the Qassam launchings on Sderot. And so it happened.
The effect of a Qassam rocket is completely unpredictable. For the residents of Sderot, this is a kind of Israeli Roulette - the rocket may fall in an empty field, it may fall on a building, sometimes it kills people.
In other words, according to Barak himself, he was ready to risk Jewish lives today in order to take revenge on persons who may perhaps have shed blood years ago and have since given up their armed activity.
The emphasis is on the word "Jewish". In his statement, Barak took care not to speak about persons "with blood on their hands", but about those "with Jewish blood on their hands". Jewish blood, of course, is quite different from any other blood. And indeed, there is no person in the Israeli leadership with so much blood on his hands as him. Not abstract blood, not metaphorical blood, but very real red blood. In the course of his military service, Barak has personally killed quite a number of Arabs. Whoever shakes his hand - from Condoleezza Rice to this week's honored guest, Angela Merkel - is shaking a hand with blood on it.
The Bethlehem killing raises a number of hard questions, but with very few exceptions, the media did not voice them. They shirk their duty, as usual when it concerns "security" problems.
Real journalists in a real democratic state would have asked the following questions:
. Who was it who decided on the executions in Bethlehem - Ehud Olmert? Ehud Barak? The Shin Bet? All of them? None of them?
. Did the decision-makers understand that by condemning the militants in Bethlehem to death, they were also condemning to death any residents of Sderot or Ashkelon who might be killed by the rockets launched in revenge?
. Did they understand that they were also boxing the ears of Mahmoud Abbas, whose security forces, which in theory are in charge of Bethlehem, would be accused of collaborating with the Israeli death-squad?
. Was the real aim of the action to undermine the cease-fire that had come about in practice in the Gaza Strip (and the reality of which was official denied both by Olmert and Barak, even while the number of rockets launched fell from dozens a day to just two or three?)
. Does the Israeli government generally object to a cease-fire that would free Sderot and Ashkelon from the threat of the rockets?
. If so, why?
The media did not demand that Olmert and Barak expose to the public the considerations that led them to adopt this decision, which concerns every person in Israel. And no wonder. These are, after all, the same media that danced for joy when the same government started an ill-considered and superfluous war in Lebanon. They are also the same media that kept silent, this week, when the government decided to hit the freedom of the press and to boycott the Aljazeera TV network, as punishment for showing babies killed during the Israeli army's recent incursion in Gaza.
But for two or three courageous journalists with an independent mind, all our written and broadcast media march in lockstep, like a Prussian regiment on parade, when the word "security" is mentioned.
(This phenomenon was exposed this week in CounterPunch by a journalist named Yonatan Mendel, a former employee of the popular Israeli web-site Walla. He pointed out that all the media, from the Channel 1 news program to the Haaretz news pages, as if by order, voluntarily use exactly the same slanted terminology: the Israeli army confirms and the Palestinians claim, Jews are murdered while Palestinians are killed or find their death, Jews are abducted while Arabs are arrested, the Israeli army always responds while the Palestinians always attack, the Jews are soldiers while Arabs are terrorists or just murderers, the Israeli army always hits high-ranking terrorists and never low-ranking terrorists, men and women suffering from shock are always Jews, never Arabs. And, as we said, people with blood on their hands are always Arabs, never-ever Jews. This, by the way, also goes for much of the foreign coverage of events here.)
When the government does not disclose its intentions, we have no choice but to deduce its intentions from its actions. That is a judicial rule: when a person does something with a foreseeable result, it is assumed that he did it in order to obtain this result.
The government which decided on the killing in Bethlehem undoubtedly intended to torpedo the cease-fire.
Why does it want to do so?
There are several possible kinds of cease-fire. The most simple is the cessation of hostilities on the Gaza Strip border. No Qassams, Grads and mortar shells on the one side, no targeted assassinations, bombardments, shelling and incursion on the other side.
It is known that the army objects to that. They want to be free to "liquidate" from the air and raid on the ground. They want a one-sided cease-fire.
A limited cease-fire is impossible. Hamas cannot agree to it, as long as the blockade cuts the Strip off on all sides and turn life there into hell - not enough medicines, not enough food, the seriously ill cannot reach appropriate hospitals, the movement of cars has come to an almost complete standstill, no imports or exports, no production or commercial activity. The opening of all border crossings for the movement of goods is, therefore, an essential component of a cease-fire.
Our government is not willing to do that, because it would mean the consolidation of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Government sources hint that Abbas and his people in Ramallah also object to the lifting of the blockade - a malicious rumor, because it would mean that Abbas is conducting a war against his own people. President Bush also rejects a cease-fire, even while his people pretend the opposite. Europe, as usual, is trailing along behind the US.
Can Hamas agree to a cease-fire that would apply only to the Gaza Strip but not to the West Bank? That is doubtful. This week it was proven that the Islamic Jihad organization in Gaza cannot stand idly by while its members are killed in Bethlehem. Hamas could not stand by in Gaza and enjoy the fruits of government if the Israeli army were to kill Hamas militants in Nablus or Jenin. And, of course, no Palestinian would agree that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are two separate entities.
A Gaza-only cease-fire would allow Barak to blow it to pieces at any moment by a Bethlehem-style provocation. This is how it could go: Hamas agrees to a Gaza-only cease-fire, the Israeli army kills a dozen Hamas members in Hebron, Hamas responds by launching Grad missiles at Ashkelon, Olmert tells the world: You see? The terrorist Hamas is violating the cease-fire, which proves that we have no partner!
This means that a real and durable cease-fire, which would create the necessary atmosphere for real peace negotiations, must include the West Bank, too. Olmert-Barak would not dream of agreeing to that. And as long as George Bush is around, there will be no effective pressure on our government.
A propos: who is really in charge in Israel at this time?
This week's events point to the answer: the man who makes the decisions is Ehud Barak, the most dangerous person in Israel, the very same Barak who blew up the Camp David conference and persuaded the entire Israeli public that "we have no partner for peace".
2052 years ago today, on the Ides of March, Julius Caesar was assassinated. Ehud Barak sees himself as a latter-day local replica of the Roman general. He, too, would dearly want to report: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
But the reality is rather different: He came, he saw, he destroyed."
Uri Avnery, 15/03/2008.
Jewish-Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinians homes
Colonos judeus aterrorizando casas de palestinos
No dia 18 de março, a chanceler alemã Angela Merkel foi a Israel fazer uma penitência de mea culpa e foi aplaudida universalmente. Menos pelos defensores da causa palestina. Eis extratos de um comentário sobre sua visita: "Having expressed Germans’ “shame” for the Holocaust, she goes on to point out that “while we are speaking here, thousands of people are living in fear and terror of Hamas’s rocket-attacks and terrorism.” Her clumsy choice of words seems to emphasize the failure to mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are living in daily fear and terror of Israeli incursions, home demolitions, assassinations, air-strikes, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture.
However, in fairness, she does in fact mention the Palestinians: “Terror attacks … bring no solutions to the conflict that overshadows the region and the daily lives of people in Israel and the lives of people in the areas of Palestinian self-rule.”
So it is in fact not Israel’s colonization, wall-construction, and violent militarism that are overshadowing the lives of Palestinians, but the actions of Hamas. Note that these Palestinians don’t live in “occupied” or even “disputed” territories, but in “areas of self-rule” (autonomiegebieten), which sounds much more innocuous. This term, which was in universal use in the early days of the Oslo process, is now only used by the Germans as it conceals the uncomfortable fact that the Palestinians live under a cruel EU-backed occupation.
... Finally, marveling at the wonderful relationship between Germany and Israel and speculating about the future of the Middle East, Merkel quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: “Whoever doesn’t believe in miracles is no realist.” One wonders whether Merkel is aware that there was nothing innocent about Ben-Gurion’s choice of words here. He was echoing Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, for whom the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was “a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.” While a miracle is an act of God, unrelated to human agency, the “exodus” of Palestinians was the result of a deliberate military campaign. Ben-Gurion’s belief in miracles amounted to the shrewd certainty that Israel would again and again be able to pull off similar stunts while putting the blame on God, as long as it had powerful backing such as that which Germany is abjectly proud to provide.
... Of course from a German perspective Merkel’s speech had one great virtue: it was simultaneously so penitential and so uncritical of Israel that its enthusiastic reception by the Knesset can henceforth make Germans — or at least German politicians and their stooges in the media — feel good about themselves, as a child feels who has just been absolved of his/her sins by a friendly if stern priest and hasn’t had to perform an unduly painful penance.
However, a penance is being paid for Germany’s past crimes, and it is being paid by the Palestinians to whose plight Merkel is so indifferent. There is a name for someone who bears another person’s sins: a scapegoat... Germany will not have come to terms with its past until it sheds its need for scapegoats, and until it abandons its unconditional support for the Israeli rogue state. Such support entails unconditional participation in the dispossession and politicide of the Palestinian people, hardly a stance consistent with Germany’s professed desire to shrive itself. In turn, because the Palestinians are a proud and stubborn people who will “not go gentle into that good night” of national and cultural oblivion, the violence and bloodshed will continue on all sides (I don’t write “both sides”, because the war against the Palestinian people has ramifications beyond Israel and Palestine). The Israeli politicians and German journalists who laud Angela Merkel to the skies are unwittingly celebrating an enemy of peace and justice, and are playing their part in delaying the advent of a just peace to the Middle East."
Raymond Deane is a composer and activist living living for part of the year in southern Germany.
Nesse ínterim, em Hebron, os colonos judeus continuavam a atormentar os nativos
B'Tselem; The Action of Settlers in Hebron
Nos últimos dias do mês de março, mais de dez palestinos foram mortos aqui e acolá na Cisjordânia e na Faixa de Gaza sem chamar atenção de nenhum dos estrangeiros consternados pelos 11 mortos na yeshiva extremista.
No dia 17 de março, centenas de colonos atacaram o bairro palestino Jebl Mukaber em Jerusalém Oriental - usando o mesmo modus operandis do Hagannah durante a Naqba. Foram três horas de gritos de "Vingança!" "Vingança!" enquanto iam de casa em casa depredando e destruindo as propriedades. Quando a polícia israelense interveio, os bandos já tinham causado muito dano. Nenhum dos participantes da agressão foi parar atrás das grades. Nas faixas que estes vândalos carregavam, lia-se: "Expel the Arab Enemy!" "The Land of Israel for the Jeish people!" 'Kill the Arabs!" e assim por diante.
Esta manifestação de ódio dos ocupantes pelos ocupados mereceu curta menção midiática.
I remember that my heartbeat increased and I felt that I had done something wrong that was about to be exposed. One minute I felt cold, the next warm. I felt like shouting to the soldiers, “Can’t you see what you are doing here?” but instead took some deep breaths while trying not to look at the people around me. I pretended that I could not feel the little boy squeezed between me and the elderly lady next to me. I smiled at the grimace my colleague made as she struggled not to be pushed off-balance by the woman. This was just a normal day. We were just going for a weekend trip to Ramallah, a trip which should take only about 40 minutes if there were no checkpoints. The sun was shining, everyone seemed to know what to do. I remember thinking, “what am I afraid of?” Now as I go though checkpoints, the initial fear I felt the first time has been transformed into a sense of injustice and frustration.
When I ask students who have to pass through checkpoints everyday to get to their university if they feel afraid, most of them will answer that no, they are usually not afraid. Going through the procedures of waiting in line with hundreds of other people in order to be let through to the other side, only a few meters away, has become normal, a necessary routine for many. They have had to go through it so many times. But not being afraid does not mean that you do not feel humiliated, angry, sad and tired. It does not keep you from feeling the biting cold wind or protect you from shivering in your coat. Neither does it make you feel any better as you hand over your shekels to the taxi driver, knowing how little money most families have to spare these days.
As someone who came here hoping to bring clarity to the hazy and media-influenced image I had of the life and people in Palestine, the contrasts visible everywhere still continue to astonish me even after four months. No matter how trivial and shallow some of the traces of the military occupation might seem at first, their marks are everywhere, forcing themselves onto the landscape and people’s lives, hinting to the many layers and the depths of the effects of the occupation.
It is the feeling of sunshine on one’s face and Arabic music on the radio as one waits in line and looks at the long line of cars held up at Za’atara checkpoint on the road from Huwwara to Ramallah. It is in the guitar music played by students at the university, as my friend who is an ambulance driver told me about the night before when he had been covered in blood while carrying a young man who had been killed in the Balata refugee camp. It is in the eyes of the teacher at a school in Huwwara who tells us how he has to protect his students by confronting the Israeli forces who invade the school, interrupting the education of over 500 students, several times a month. It is the beautiful view, spring blossoms from the almond trees and rolling hills, marred by a settlement, illegal under international law, perched strategically on a hill top. It is the taxi-driver who tells you how difficult it is to support his three girls at university. It is the children who lie awake as soldiers invade Nablus every night and the parents who worry about their children going to and from school. It is the mixed feeling of despair and surprise when one finds oneslef on the bus driving next to the imposing West Bank barrier in East Jerusalem, cutting off Jerusalem from the population in the rest of the West Bank. It is the hundreds of men one will find at Gilo checkpoint between Bethlehem from Jerusalem, from 4am in the morning, running and jumping the queue as they are desperate to get to their work in Israel on time. It is one’s friend telling one how their father was arrested last week, another friend explaining her brother’s imprisonment, it is one’s student who apologizes for not being able to come to class because he was held in prison for a month. It is the hairdresser in Ramallah who says he used to love going to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv every night before they built the separation wall.
It is the constant reminder that every aspect of people’s lives here is affected by the occupation. My Palestinian friends who have lived their whole lives in this context tell me that one of the worst things of existing under such conditions is that after a while it becomes normal. One comes to expect everything. One has to endure everything. One has to remain hopeful that life will become easier one day. But when I ask how they understand the situation, they tell me that it is just getting worse; although they want to remain hopeful for future improvements, reality has shown them too many times that hope can be deceiving. Imagine yourself living in conditions of constant oppression, discrimination and insecurity I tell my friends back home, and I know they cannot. I cannot even imagine it myself. My little red passport, always kept in my pocket, feels somehow like a protective shield".
Maria Urkedal York is from Norway and currently lives in Nablus where she works with the Right to Education Campaign at An-Najah University.
DN: Debate sobre a Naqba / Big Debate on the Naqba
I
'Death to the Arabs!'
"Tomorrow will be the 32nd anniversary of the first "Day of the Land" - one of the defining events in the history of Israel.
I remember the day well. I was at Ben Gurion airport, on the way to a secret meeting in London with Said Hamami, Yasser Arafat's emissary, when someone told me: "They have killed a lot of Arab protestors!"
That was not entirely unexpected. A few days before, we - members of the newly formed Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace - had handed the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, an urgent memorandum warning him that the government's intention of expropriating huge chunks of land from Arab villages would cause an explosion. We included a proposal for an alternative solution, worked out by Lova Eliav, a veteran expert on settlements.
When I returned from abroad, the poet Yevi suggested that we make a symbolic gesture of sorrow and regret for the killings. Three of us - Yevi himself, the painter Dan Kedar and I - laid wreaths on the graves of the victims. This aroused a wave of hatred against us. I felt that something profoundly significant had happened, that the relationship between Jews and Arabs within the state had changed fundamentally.
And indeed, the impact of the Day of the Land - as the event was called - was stronger than even the Kafr Kassem massacre of 1956 or the October Events killings of 2000.
The reasons for this go back to the early days of the state.
After the 1948 war, only a small, weak and frightened Arab community was left in the state. Not only had about 750 thousand Arabs been uprooted from the territory that had become the State of Israel, but those who remained were leaderless. The political, intellectual and economic elites had vanished, most of them right at the beginning of the war. The vacuum was somehow filled by the Communist Party, whose leaders had been allowed to return from abroad - mainly in order to please Stalin, who at the time supported Israel.
After an internal debate, the leaders of the new state decided to accord the Arabs in the "Jewish State" citizenship and the right to vote. That was not self-evident. But the government wanted to appear before the world as a democratic state. In my opinion, the main reason was party political: David Ben-Gurion believed that he could coerce the Arabs to vote for his own party.
And indeed: the great majority of the Arab citizens voted for the Labor Party (then called Mapai) and its two Arab satellite parties which had been set up for that very purpose. They had no choice: they were living in a state of fear, under the watchful eyes of the Security Service (then called Shin Bet). Every Arab Hamulah (extended family) was told exactly how to vote, either for Mapai or one of the two subsidiaries. Since every election list has two different ballot papers, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, there were six possibilities for faithful Arabs in every polling station, and it was easy for the Shin Bet to make sure that each Hamula voted exactly as instructed. More than once did Ben Gurion achieve a majority in the Knesset only with the help of these captive votes.
For the sake of "security" (in both senses) the Arabs were subjected to a "military government". Every detail of their lives depended on it. They needed a permit to leave their village and go to town or the next village. Without the permission of the military government they could not buy a tractor, send a daughter to the teachers' college, get a job for a son, obtain an import license. Under the authority of the military government and a whole series of laws, huge chunks of land were expropriated for Jewish towns and kibbutzim.
A story engraved in my memory: my late friend, the poet Rashed Hussein from Musmus village, was summoned to the military governor in Netanya, who told him: Independence Day is approaching and I want you to write a nice poem for the occasion. Rashed, a proud youngster, refused. When he came home, he found his whole family sitting on the floor and weeping. At first he thought that somebody had died, but then his mother cried out: "You have destroyed us! We are finished!" So the poem was written.
Every independent Arab political initiative was choked at birth. The first such group - the nationalist al-Ard ("the land") group - was rigorously suppressed. It was outlawed, its leaders exiled, its paper proscribed - all with the blessing of the Supreme Court. Only the Communist Party was left intact, but its leaders were also persecuted from time to time.
The military government was dismantled only in 1966, after Ben Gurion's exit from power and a short time after my election to the Knesset. After demonstrating against it so many times, I had the pleasure of voting for its abolition. But in practice very little changed - instead of the official military government an unofficial one remained, as did most of the discrimination.
"THE DAY OF THE LAND" changed the situation. A second generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, no longer timidly submissive, a generation that had not experienced the mass expulsions and whose economic position had improved. The order given to the soldiers and policemen to open fire on them caused a shock. Thus a new chapter started.
The percentage of Arab citizens in the state has not changed: from the first days of the state to now, it had hovered around 20%. The much higher natural rate of increase of the Muslim community was balanced by Jewish immigration. But the numbers have grown significantly: from 200 thousand at the beginning of the state to almost 1.3 million - twice the size of the Jewish community that founded the state.
The Day of the Land also dramatically changed the attitude of the Arab world and the Palestinian people towards the Arabs in Israel. Until then, they were considered traitors, collaborators of the "Zionist entity". I remember a scene from the 1965 meeting convened in Firenze by the legendary mayor, Giorgio la Pira, who tried to bring together personalities from Israel and the Arab world. At the time, that was considered a very bold undertaking.
During one of the intermissions, I was chatting with a senior Egyptian diplomat in a sunny piazza outside the conference site, when two young Arabs from Israel, who had heard about the conference, approached us. After embracing, I introduced them to the Egyptian, but he turned his back and exclaimed: "I am ready to talk with you, but not with these traitors!"
The bloody events of the Day of the Land brought the "Israeli Arabs" back into the fold of the Arab nation and the Palestinian people, who now call them "the 1948 Arabs".
In October 2000, policemen again shot and killed Arab citizens, when they tried to express their solidarity with Arabs killed at the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. But in the meantime, a third generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, many of whom, in spite of all the obstacles, had attended universities and become business people, politicians, professors, lawyers and physicians. It is impossible to ignore this community - even if the state tries very hard to do just that.
From time to time, complaints about discrimination are voiced, but everybody shrinks back from the fundamental question: What is the status of the Arab minority growing up in a state that defines itself officially as "Jewish and democratic"?
One leader of the Arab community, the late Knesset member Abd-al-Aziz Zuabi, defined his dilemma this way: "My state is at war with my people". The Arab citizens belong both to the State of Israel and to the Palestinian people.
Their belonging to the Palestinian people is self-evident. The Arab citizens of Israel, who lately tend to call themselves "Palestinians in Israel", are only one part of the stricken Palestinian people, which consists of many branches: the inhabitants of the occupied territories (now themselves split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), the Arabs in East Jerusalem (officially "residents" but not "citizens" of Israel), and the refugees living in many different countries, each with its own particular regime. All these branches have a strong feeling of belonging together, but the consciousness of each is shaped by its own particular situation.
How strong is the Palestinian component in the consciousness of the Arab citizens of Israel? How can it be measured? Palestinians in the occupied territories often complain that it expresses itself mainly in words, not deeds. The support given by the Arab citizens in Israel to the Palestinian struggle for liberation is mainly symbolic. Here and there a citizen is arrested for helping a suicide bomber, but these are rare exceptions.
When the extreme Arab-hater Avigdor Liberman proposed that a string of Arab villages in Israel adjoining the Green Line (called "the Triangle") be turned over to the future Palestinian state in return for the Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank, not a single Arab voice was raised in support. That is a very significant fact.
The Arab community is much more rooted in Israel than appears at first sight. The Arabs play an important part in the Israeli economy, they work in the state, pay taxes to the state. They enjoy the benefits of social security - by right, since they pay for it. Their standard of living is much higher than that of their Palestinian brethren in the occupied territories and beyond. They participate in Israeli democracy and have no desire at all to live under regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan. They have serious and justified complaints - but they live in Israel and will continue to do so.
In recent years, intellectuals of the third Arab generation in Israel have published several proposals for the normalization of the relations between the majority and the minority.
There exist, in principle, two main alternatives:
The first way says: Israel is a Jewish state, but a second people also live here. If Jewish Israelis have defined national rights, Arab Israelis must also have defined national rights. For example, educational, cultural and religious autonomy (as the young Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky demanded a hundred years ago for the Jews in Czarist Russia). They must be allowed to have free and open connections with the Arab world and the Palestinian people, like the connections Jewish citizens have with the Jewish Diaspora. All this must be spelled out in the future constitution of the state.
The second way says: Israel belongs to all its citizens, and only to them. Every citizen is an Israeli, much as every US citizen is an American. As far as the state is concerned, there is no difference between one citizen and another, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Arab or Russian, much as, from the point of view of the American state, there is no difference between white, brown or black citizens, whether of European, African or Asian descent, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim. In Israeli parlance, this is called "a state of all its citizens".
It goes without saying that I favor the second alternative, but I am ready to accept the first. Either of them is preferable to the existing situation, where the state pretends that there is no problem except some traces of discrimination that have to be overcome (without doing anything about it).
If the courage is lacking to treat a wound, it will fester. At football matches, the riffraff shout: "Death-to-the-Arabs!" and in the Knesset far right deputies threaten to expel Arab members from the House, and from the state altogether.
On the 32nd anniversary of the Day of the Land, with the 60th Independence Day approaching, it is time to take this bull by the horns."
Uri Avnery, 29/03/2008
I remember the day well. I was at Ben Gurion airport, on the way to a secret meeting in London with Said Hamami, Yasser Arafat's emissary, when someone told me: "They have killed a lot of Arab protestors!"
That was not entirely unexpected. A few days before, we - members of the newly formed Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace - had handed the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, an urgent memorandum warning him that the government's intention of expropriating huge chunks of land from Arab villages would cause an explosion. We included a proposal for an alternative solution, worked out by Lova Eliav, a veteran expert on settlements.
When I returned from abroad, the poet Yevi suggested that we make a symbolic gesture of sorrow and regret for the killings. Three of us - Yevi himself, the painter Dan Kedar and I - laid wreaths on the graves of the victims. This aroused a wave of hatred against us. I felt that something profoundly significant had happened, that the relationship between Jews and Arabs within the state had changed fundamentally.
And indeed, the impact of the Day of the Land - as the event was called - was stronger than even the Kafr Kassem massacre of 1956 or the October Events killings of 2000.
The reasons for this go back to the early days of the state.
After the 1948 war, only a small, weak and frightened Arab community was left in the state. Not only had about 750 thousand Arabs been uprooted from the territory that had become the State of Israel, but those who remained were leaderless. The political, intellectual and economic elites had vanished, most of them right at the beginning of the war. The vacuum was somehow filled by the Communist Party, whose leaders had been allowed to return from abroad - mainly in order to please Stalin, who at the time supported Israel.
After an internal debate, the leaders of the new state decided to accord the Arabs in the "Jewish State" citizenship and the right to vote. That was not self-evident. But the government wanted to appear before the world as a democratic state. In my opinion, the main reason was party political: David Ben-Gurion believed that he could coerce the Arabs to vote for his own party.
And indeed: the great majority of the Arab citizens voted for the Labor Party (then called Mapai) and its two Arab satellite parties which had been set up for that very purpose. They had no choice: they were living in a state of fear, under the watchful eyes of the Security Service (then called Shin Bet). Every Arab Hamulah (extended family) was told exactly how to vote, either for Mapai or one of the two subsidiaries. Since every election list has two different ballot papers, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, there were six possibilities for faithful Arabs in every polling station, and it was easy for the Shin Bet to make sure that each Hamula voted exactly as instructed. More than once did Ben Gurion achieve a majority in the Knesset only with the help of these captive votes.
For the sake of "security" (in both senses) the Arabs were subjected to a "military government". Every detail of their lives depended on it. They needed a permit to leave their village and go to town or the next village. Without the permission of the military government they could not buy a tractor, send a daughter to the teachers' college, get a job for a son, obtain an import license. Under the authority of the military government and a whole series of laws, huge chunks of land were expropriated for Jewish towns and kibbutzim.
A story engraved in my memory: my late friend, the poet Rashed Hussein from Musmus village, was summoned to the military governor in Netanya, who told him: Independence Day is approaching and I want you to write a nice poem for the occasion. Rashed, a proud youngster, refused. When he came home, he found his whole family sitting on the floor and weeping. At first he thought that somebody had died, but then his mother cried out: "You have destroyed us! We are finished!" So the poem was written.
Every independent Arab political initiative was choked at birth. The first such group - the nationalist al-Ard ("the land") group - was rigorously suppressed. It was outlawed, its leaders exiled, its paper proscribed - all with the blessing of the Supreme Court. Only the Communist Party was left intact, but its leaders were also persecuted from time to time.
The military government was dismantled only in 1966, after Ben Gurion's exit from power and a short time after my election to the Knesset. After demonstrating against it so many times, I had the pleasure of voting for its abolition. But in practice very little changed - instead of the official military government an unofficial one remained, as did most of the discrimination.
"THE DAY OF THE LAND" changed the situation. A second generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, no longer timidly submissive, a generation that had not experienced the mass expulsions and whose economic position had improved. The order given to the soldiers and policemen to open fire on them caused a shock. Thus a new chapter started.
The percentage of Arab citizens in the state has not changed: from the first days of the state to now, it had hovered around 20%. The much higher natural rate of increase of the Muslim community was balanced by Jewish immigration. But the numbers have grown significantly: from 200 thousand at the beginning of the state to almost 1.3 million - twice the size of the Jewish community that founded the state.
The Day of the Land also dramatically changed the attitude of the Arab world and the Palestinian people towards the Arabs in Israel. Until then, they were considered traitors, collaborators of the "Zionist entity". I remember a scene from the 1965 meeting convened in Firenze by the legendary mayor, Giorgio la Pira, who tried to bring together personalities from Israel and the Arab world. At the time, that was considered a very bold undertaking.
During one of the intermissions, I was chatting with a senior Egyptian diplomat in a sunny piazza outside the conference site, when two young Arabs from Israel, who had heard about the conference, approached us. After embracing, I introduced them to the Egyptian, but he turned his back and exclaimed: "I am ready to talk with you, but not with these traitors!"
The bloody events of the Day of the Land brought the "Israeli Arabs" back into the fold of the Arab nation and the Palestinian people, who now call them "the 1948 Arabs".
In October 2000, policemen again shot and killed Arab citizens, when they tried to express their solidarity with Arabs killed at the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. But in the meantime, a third generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, many of whom, in spite of all the obstacles, had attended universities and become business people, politicians, professors, lawyers and physicians. It is impossible to ignore this community - even if the state tries very hard to do just that.
From time to time, complaints about discrimination are voiced, but everybody shrinks back from the fundamental question: What is the status of the Arab minority growing up in a state that defines itself officially as "Jewish and democratic"?
One leader of the Arab community, the late Knesset member Abd-al-Aziz Zuabi, defined his dilemma this way: "My state is at war with my people". The Arab citizens belong both to the State of Israel and to the Palestinian people.
Their belonging to the Palestinian people is self-evident. The Arab citizens of Israel, who lately tend to call themselves "Palestinians in Israel", are only one part of the stricken Palestinian people, which consists of many branches: the inhabitants of the occupied territories (now themselves split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), the Arabs in East Jerusalem (officially "residents" but not "citizens" of Israel), and the refugees living in many different countries, each with its own particular regime. All these branches have a strong feeling of belonging together, but the consciousness of each is shaped by its own particular situation.
How strong is the Palestinian component in the consciousness of the Arab citizens of Israel? How can it be measured? Palestinians in the occupied territories often complain that it expresses itself mainly in words, not deeds. The support given by the Arab citizens in Israel to the Palestinian struggle for liberation is mainly symbolic. Here and there a citizen is arrested for helping a suicide bomber, but these are rare exceptions.
When the extreme Arab-hater Avigdor Liberman proposed that a string of Arab villages in Israel adjoining the Green Line (called "the Triangle") be turned over to the future Palestinian state in return for the Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank, not a single Arab voice was raised in support. That is a very significant fact.
The Arab community is much more rooted in Israel than appears at first sight. The Arabs play an important part in the Israeli economy, they work in the state, pay taxes to the state. They enjoy the benefits of social security - by right, since they pay for it. Their standard of living is much higher than that of their Palestinian brethren in the occupied territories and beyond. They participate in Israeli democracy and have no desire at all to live under regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan. They have serious and justified complaints - but they live in Israel and will continue to do so.
In recent years, intellectuals of the third Arab generation in Israel have published several proposals for the normalization of the relations between the majority and the minority.
There exist, in principle, two main alternatives:
The first way says: Israel is a Jewish state, but a second people also live here. If Jewish Israelis have defined national rights, Arab Israelis must also have defined national rights. For example, educational, cultural and religious autonomy (as the young Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky demanded a hundred years ago for the Jews in Czarist Russia). They must be allowed to have free and open connections with the Arab world and the Palestinian people, like the connections Jewish citizens have with the Jewish Diaspora. All this must be spelled out in the future constitution of the state.
The second way says: Israel belongs to all its citizens, and only to them. Every citizen is an Israeli, much as every US citizen is an American. As far as the state is concerned, there is no difference between one citizen and another, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Arab or Russian, much as, from the point of view of the American state, there is no difference between white, brown or black citizens, whether of European, African or Asian descent, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim. In Israeli parlance, this is called "a state of all its citizens".
It goes without saying that I favor the second alternative, but I am ready to accept the first. Either of them is preferable to the existing situation, where the state pretends that there is no problem except some traces of discrimination that have to be overcome (without doing anything about it).
If the courage is lacking to treat a wound, it will fester. At football matches, the riffraff shout: "Death-to-the-Arabs!" and in the Knesset far right deputies threaten to expel Arab members from the House, and from the state altogether.
On the 32nd anniversary of the Day of the Land, with the 60th Independence Day approaching, it is time to take this bull by the horns."
Uri Avnery, 29/03/2008
Reservistas da IDF, forças israelenses de ocupação,
Shovrim Shtika - Breaking the Silence
We sat in 'pillboxes' on the Hussan bypass road in order to catch stone-throwers and whoever would hurl Molotov-cocktails there.
What's the idea?
The Hussan bypass is a road leading to Beitar Ilit. There's a lot of civilian traffic, many civilian vehicles driving there, lots of settlers, many people who simply take a shortcut through there on their way to Jerusalem. Often there were Palestinians, some children, some older, who led the whole business. They would simply stand on the road. Hussan is built on top of this cliff, and the road passes underneath, so they would simply stand up there and throw stones, sometimes Molotov-cocktails as well, and then disappear into Hussan. The battalion often went on missions on those cliffs. Magellan would be summoned too, as well as other units, but the battalion itself was there on a permanent basis, in the pillboxes, and we, too, patrolled the area. Often, when there were alerts, sharpshooters would be stationed in the pillboxes and wait for a Molotov-cocktail or stone thrower they could catch.
What were the rules of engagement? Catch them bodily?
Not bodily.
Shoot them?
Shoot them. The order is, "Shoot to kill as soon as you see anyone hurling a Molotov-cocktail or stone that jeopardizes you".
Even a stone?
I'm not talking about just any stone, I mean like a brick; something dangerous. This road was defined as a thoroughfare vital and necessary for the State of Israel, and stone-throwing there is considered as serious as an explosive charge placed inside Hebron. I was often summoned to give care at incidents, also to people who had been hurt by stone-throwing. I treated many wounded as a result of stone throwing. There were also many road accidents as a result of stone-throwing, tire-burning, and the like, especially as we were there in winter and it's a difficult road. It would get snowed and iced over, and then people had to drive really slowly because they couldn't see the road and the stone would hit them. There was also a case when marksmen sat in the pillbox and saw a thrower, I think it was stones, I don't recall if there were Molotov cocktails there or not, and they shot him. I think he was hit. It was a boy. The Red Crescent evacuated him into Bethlehem and we didn't manage to reach him and investigate. He vanished into Bethlehem quickly. Although we did place lookouts to try to catch the ambulance, tried to get hold of him and investigate, he somehow got away among all the checkpoints and vanished. But, again, the instruction was shoot to kill.
Sargento da IDF.
Dor II
"In several articles published by The Electronic Intifada, I claimed that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while continuing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. I asserted that the genocidal policies are a result of a lack of strategy. The argument was that since the Israeli political and military elites do not know how to deal with the Gaza Strip, they opted for a knee-jerk reaction in the form of massive killing of citizens whenever the Palestinians in the Strip dared to protest by force their strangulation and imprisonment. The end result so far is the escalation of the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians — more than one hundred in the first days of March 2008, unfortunately validating the adjective “genocidal” I and others attached to these policies. But it was not yet a strategy.
However, in recent weeks a clearer Israeli strategy towards the Gaza Strip’s future has emerged and it is part of the overall new thinking about the fate of the occupied territories in general. It is in essence, a refinement of the unilateralism adopted by Israel ever since the collapse of the Camp David “peace talks” in the summer of 2000. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his party Kadima, and his successor Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, delineated very clearly what unilateralism entailed: Israel would annex about 50 percent of the West Bank, not as a homogeneous chunk of it, but as the total space of the settlement blocs, the apartheid roads, the military bases and the “national park reserves” (which are no-go areas for Palestinians). This was more or less implemented in the last eight years. These purely Jewish entities cut the West Bank into 11 small cantons and sub-cantons. They are all separated from each other by this complex colonial Jewish presence. The most important part of this encroachment is the greater Jerusalem wedge that divides the West Bank into two discrete regions with no land connection for the Palestinians.
The wall thus is stretched and reincarnated in various forms all over the West Bank, encircling at times individual villages, neighborhoods or towns. The cartographic picture of this new edifice gives a clue to the new strategy both towards the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The 21st century Jewish state is about to complete the construction of two mega prisons, the largest of their kind in human history.
They are different in shape: the West Bank is made of small ghettos and the one in Gaza is a huge mega ghetto of its own. There is another difference: the Gaza Strip is now, in the twisted perception of the Israelis, the ward where the “most dangerous inmates” are kept. The West Bank, on the other hand, is still run as a huge complex of open air prisons in the form of normal human habitations such as a village or a town interconnected and supervised by a prison authority of immense military and violent power.
As far as the Israelis are concerned, the mega prison of the West Bank can be called a state. Advisor to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, in the last days of February 2008, threatened the Israelis with a unilateral declaration of independence, inspired by recent events in Kosovo. However, it seemed that nobody on the Israeli side objected to the idea very much. This is more or less the message a bewildered Ahmed Qurei, the Abbas-appointed Palestinian negotiator, received from Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, when he phoned to assureassure her that Abed Rabbo was not speaking in the name of the PA. He got the impression that her main worry was is in fact quite the opposite: that the PA would not agree to call the mega prisons a state in the near future.
This unwillingness, together with Hamas’ insistence of resisting the mega prison system by a war of liberation, forced the Israelis to rethink their strategy towards the Gaza Strip. It transpires that not even the most cooperative members of the PA are willing to accept the mega prison reality as “peace” or even as a “two state settlement.” And Hamas and Islamic Jihad even translate this unwillingness into Qassam attacks on Israel. So the model of the most dangerous ward developed: the leading strategists in the army and the government embrace themselves for a very long-term “management” of the system they have built, while pledging commitment to a vacuous “peace process,” with very little global interest in it, and a continued struggle from within, against it.
The Gaza Strip is now seen as the most dangerous ward in this complex and thus the one against which the most brutal punitive means have to be employed. Killing the “inmates” by aerial or artillery bombing, or by economic strangulation, are not just inevitable results of the punitive action chosen, but also desirable ones. The bombing of Sderot is also the inevitable and in a way desirable consequence of this strategy. Inevitable, as the punitive action cannot destroy the resistance and quite often generates a retaliation. The retaliation in its turn provides the logic and basis for the next punitive action, should someone in domestic public opinion doubt the wisdom of the new strategy.
In the near future, any similar resistance from parts of the West Bank mega prison would be dealt with in a similar way. And these actions are very likely to take place in the very near future. Indeed, the third intifada is on its way and the Israeli response would be a further elaboration of the mega prison system. Downsizing the number of “inmates” in both mega prisons would be still a very high priority in this strategy by means of ethnic cleansing, systematic killings and economic strangulation.
But there are wedges that prevent the destructive machine from rolling. It seems that a growing number of Jews in Israel (a majority according to a recent CNN poll) wish their government to begin negotiations with Hamas. A mega prison is fine, but if the wardens’ residential areas are likely to come under fire in the future then the system fails. Alas, I doubt whether the CNN poll represents accurately the present Israeli mood; but it does indicate a hopeful trend that vindicates the Hamas insistence that Israel only understands the language of force. But it may not be enough and the perfection of the mega prison system in the meantime continues unabated and the punitive measures of its authority are claiming the lives of many more children, women and men in the Gaza Strip.
As always it is important to be reminded that the west can put an end to this unprecedented inhumanity and criminality, tomorrow. But so far this is not happening. Although the efforts to make Israel a pariah state continue with full force, they are still limited to civil society. Hopefully, this energy will one day be translated into governmental policies on the ground. We can only pray it will not be too late for the victims of this horrific Zionist invention: the mega prison of Palestine.
Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter.
