Category: Israel 2003-08

I cannot believe George W. Bush. His administration’s policy in Iraq is a bloody and dangerous shambles. Afghanistan is slipping back into anarchy. He needs every iota of support he can get from Muslims and Arabs worldwide if any of them are ever to help him survive all this. And at this very point, he suddenly decides to give away the whole store regarding the West Bank, to Ariel Sharon.
How on earth can he be so tone-deaf, cretinous, or just plain traitorous to the worldwide interests of the U.S. people?
Well, the fact that Elliott Abrams is the main advisor whispering into his ear on matters Israeli-Palestinian doubtless has a lot to do with it.
Here’s the deal Sharon got. He pulls his troops and a few thousand Israeli settlers out of Gaza. (Sometime. Maybe.) Okay, it’s not in Israel’s interests to have the troops there at all, getting constantly sucked into the Gaza quagmire. And the vast majority of Israelis don’t give a hoot about the settlements there.
He makes a big show of “dismantling” something like four “settlement outposts” in the West Bank. Well, we’ve seen him go through that charade before. The outposts just get put up the next day; or, they move a few yards one way or the other.
And in return for these amazing “concessions” he gets unprecedented bennies from the President of the most powerful state in the world! He gets Bush’s agreement to the following three key points, as stated in Bush’s letter to him today:
(1) “The United States understands that after Israel withdraws from Gaza and/or parts of the West Bank, and pending agreements on other arrangements, existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue.”

So, no real attributes of sovereignty at all for whatever “entity” takes over Gaza… It gets fewer powers even than Soputh-Africa’s ill-fated Bantustans. ~HC

(2)”The United States is strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”

Continue reading “The timing of it!”

B’tselem’s server is up again today. If you go here, you can find the following information, which covers the period from the beginning of the current intifada (September 29, 2000) through 10 March 2004:

At least 135 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel, 76 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 59 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces. In the course of these assasinations 90 additional Palestinians were killed, 28 of them minors. 80 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 10 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces..

So the number of “collateral” fatalities did not, as I had mistakenly written yesterday, exceed the number of those “targeted” for murder.
The number of extrajudicial killings is higher than I had estimated yesterday. Significantly, too, as you can learn if you go here, the policy was pursued under Barak and not solely under Sharon.
The first assassination that B’tselem lists there, during this intifada, was that of Hussein Muhammad Salim ‘Abayat, age 34, from Taamera, Bethlehem, who was killed by Israeli security forces helicopter missilefire aimed at his car, in Beit Sahur, on 9 November 2000. Two 52-year-old women were killed as “collateral” damage in that attack.
The word “B’tselem”, by the way, is Hebrew for “in the image”, and is a reminder that all human beings are created in the image of G-d.

Israel’s killing of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is by no means the first act of “targeted killing” (= extra-judicial execution, = assassination) that the Israeli government has carried out in recent years. This is a practice whose sheer barbarism has been recognized by nearly all other governments of the world. Even repressive governments that have in fact carried out similar acts in the past (including Israel, until a couple of years ago) made some effort to “hide” their responsibility for these killings.
The apartheid government in South Africa did, we all know, carry out extrajudicial executions, including of many people known to be in the custody of its security forces. In those cases, the killings were never described as deliberate acts of killing, but excuses were given that the deceased had “slipped on a piece of soap and fallen through the window”, or “had been shot while trying to escape.”
The terror regime in Argentina deliberately killed thousands of opponents in the most heinous way. But it always tried to hide the fact and the details of those deaths: hence the large-scale phenomenon of the “disappeared”.
Israel itself carried out many acts of assassination prior to the current intifada. Most notable were the killings of three PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973 and then the killing of Abu Jihad in Tunis in January 1988. But on all those earlier occasions, the Israeli government was happy to keep the same kind of (translucent) “veil of possible deniability” over its involvement that it has for years wielded with regard to its huge nuclear-weapons program.
Everyone in the international community in those (post-Frank Church) days recognized that it was just not “appropriate” for governments openly to admit to their involvement in extrajudicial killings. Engagement in such acts did, after all, seriously undercut the most basic foundations of any idea of the “rule of law”.
That dissociation of governments from openly admitted involvement in assassinations lasted until the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli PM in 2001. Then, as part of his well-known tendency toward defiance of longheld international norms, he announced that “targeted killings” of accused terrorist leaders would henceforth be an open part of his government’s policy.
Btselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has a good list of the number of openly admitted assassinations the government has carried out since that announcement. I think it is more than 80– but their website is not currently responding, so I can’t check that. The site also notes that a large number of people–far more than the 80-plus actual “targets”, and many of them innocent bystanders– have also been killed as “collateral damage” in these operations.
Many of those earlier assassinations, like Shaikh Yassin’s, were carried out by helicopter gunships. Not exactly known as mechanisms for fine discrimination of targets.
In response to today’s news, European Union foreign ministers have gone on the record to condemn the whole concept of extrajudicial killings:

“Not only are extra-judicial killings contrary to international law, they undermine the concept of the rule of law, which is a key element in the fight against terrorism,” they said at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels.

Nearly every other other government in the world has also expressed the same view.
Not so the Bush administration.
Condi Rice’s only comments were twofold: (1) to voice a totally milquetoaste and content-less appeal for “calm” in the aftermath of the killing, and (2) to deny vociferously that the Bush administration had known in advance about Sharon’s plans to do this.
Methinks the lady perhaps protested a little too much on the latter score?? Why on earth would anyone even imagine that Sharon might have given his American friends a helpful heads-up before he undertook an act that quite foreseeably escalates tensions worldwide??
The reason for the Bush administration’s non-condemnation of the Yassin assassination is quite clear: Washington itself also these days reserves the right to engage in extrajudicial executions of those accused of involvement with terrorism. We have seen at least one clear episode– that one in Yemen four or five months back– where US forces have done just that.
In asserting the “right” to undertake such actions, the Bushies were following the lead of their master in so many tactical aspects of the “war on terrorism”: Ariel Sharon. That’s why they don’t condemn his use of acts of deliberate, extrajudicial killing today.
Welcome to the Dark Ages of the collapse of the rule of law.

The courageous, visionary Israeli peace organizer Gila Svirsky delivered a moving address/homily at an event the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions held to mark this week’s one-year anniversary of the killing of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. A friend sent it to me today, and I’m very happy to share it here with you:

I was not present in Rafah that terrible day, but I have frequently replayed in my mind the events leading up to the moment when a bulldozer rolled over Rachel Corrie. I think to myself: What compelled this young woman, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, to travel 10,000 miles from home, to throw in her lot with a family not her own, a people not her own, and ultimately meet a death that came suddenly, swiftly, in an instant of shocked comprehension.
In the biblical book of Ruth, we read of Naomi whose two sons have died, leaving two young widows. Naomi chooses to depart from the land of Moab and return to her home in Judah. She encourages her daughters-in-law to remain in Moab, their own land. One daughter-in-law kisses Naomi and bids her farewell. The other, Ruth, chooses to accompany Naomi to the distant climes of Judah. Why does Ruth go? “Entreat me not to leave thee,” says Ruth, “for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God.” And she continues, “Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: if the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me”.
The biblical figure of Ruth journeys to her new people, expecting never to return, but to be buried in foreign soil.
The modern figure of Rachel journeyed to her new people, expecting to return for the start of the school year, and never to be buried, or to be buried at some vastly distant unimaginable future, but never to find her death in the soil of her chosen destination…

Continue reading “Remembering Rachel Corrie”

So here I am, trying to work through the whole complex subject of Palestinian suicide bombings (and the nature of Israel’s reactions to them)… But Ze’ev Boim, Israel’s deputy Defense Minister, thinks he might have the answer.
Tuesday, he made a statement in public in which he asked: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.”
According to this story by Yair Ettinger in today’s Ha’Aretz, Boim’s statement created “a firestorm of outrage” in Israel. Ettinger reported on a number of outraged comments made by Members of Knesset from the Labor-and-to-the-left and Arab parties. (Go read them.)
But here’s my question: Where’s the outrage from political or cultural figures in the United States?
Imagine how great, and how rapidly organized, the outrage would be if a deputy minister in an Arab country (or anywhere else) had gone on the record with exactly parallel comments about the Jews! But here is a clear example of hate-speech… And where, oh where, is the outrage– or even, any expression of mild criticism– from pols and other public personalities in the US?
In addition to the various criticisms of Boim’s speech that various political figures inside Israel voiced publicly, Ettinger also reported the following significant reactions from Israeli personalities:

Continue reading “Palestinian suicide bombings: another explanation”

I’ve been hanging around here in Israel/Palestine for the past few days,
for reasons that will become clear to you if you read one third or so of
the way down in the present post.

This post is made up of some descriptive fragments that I have written over
the past couple of days as one way of dealing with this Kafka-esque limbo
situation I’ve been in. They are not well organized; but that’s for
later.

Nightfall in West Jerusalem

Monday night I decided to spend a little time in Israel. So I left the
charming little hotel I was staying in in occupied East Jerusalem, the Christmas
Hotel, and walked around 200 yards westward before dashing across the hectic
eight-lane highway built some years ago along this section of the Green Line
that divides the occupied and unoccupied halves of this ancient city. Immediately
I was plunged into the late-19th-century world of a quarter of extremely religious
Jewish Israelis called Mea Shearim.

For a long time, most of the people of Mea Shearim were so fundamental in
their religious beliefs that they did not believe any “slvation” of any value
could be brought by the establishment at human hands of a Jewish state, and
some of them were staunchly anti-Zionist. But that’s another story.
Today, as the shadows of dusk gathered in the narrow streets, I walked
through quickly, not wanting to attract attention to my “immodest” dress of
long pants and long-sleeved shirt. Large notices exhorted “Women and
girls” not to offend the quarter’s residents with any immodest garb. Pants
were expressly included in that. I wasn’t sure wherther the notice
applied to the street I was walking along, or only the smaller side-alleys.
But I walked fast, just in case.

Continue reading “Great experiences; limbo nonetheless”

My old friend Ze’ev Svhiff, the crusty doyen of the Israeli defense correspondents, has an interesting column in Ha’Aretz today in which he seems to be expressing considerable doubts about the effectiveness or perhaps the probability of any unilateral disengegament from parts of the occupied territories, such as has been talked about by Sharon and people close to him in recent week.
Schiff, who is extremely close to numerous current and former high-ups in the IDF General Staff, writes:

Since Sharon delivered his speech in Herzliya two weeks ago, the IDF has not received even fragments of orders, and the prime minister’s intention remains vague… . So the decision in the army is to wait and do nothing, not even preliminary staff work. Another internal decision is that in any event the IDF must not be involved in recommendations or decisions about which settlements to move or to evacuate.

He also reports that, despite this latter decision, “In the meantime … the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon, has taken a step of his own by stating that the evacuation of the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip, will be a prize to terrorism.”

Continue reading “Z. Schiff dubious of disengagement talk”

Remember the grainy black&white footage the Israeli Air Force rolled out to “prove” that the urban area of Gaza where they dropped two munitions on October 20 had been almost deserted at the time?
Turns out they lied. Read this.
Israeli parliamentarian Yossi Sarid managed to worm an admission to that effect (but notably NO apology) out of IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon– but only after Sarid had threatened to reveal the whole truth about the incident, in which apparently some nasty, sneaky, new kind of Israeli munition was used that Yaalon and his friends don’t want the rest of us to know about.
Ten Palestinians, most of them civilians, died in the raid.

Every year, Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies conducts and then reports on a wide-ranging study of public attitudes in Israel on peace and security issues.
(Not wide-ranging enough for my humble tastes, since they like many other public opinion surveyors in Israel poll only Jewish Israelis, and not the 20 percent or so of Israeli citizens who are ethnically Palestinian/Arab… I mean, can you imagine someone in the US conducting a poll that charted only the attitudes of “white” Americans, and then presenting that as the views of “Americans” in general?)
Well anyway, dropped into my mailbox today the little report on this year’s Jaffee Center survey, which was conducted mainly in April this year. According the Exec Summary of the report,

Israelis were more optimistic regarding prospects for peace and supportive of the measures required to move the peace process forward compared to the respondents of the 2002 survey. For example, 59% of respondents in 2003 supported the establishment of a Palestinian state … in the framework of a peace agreement, up from 49% in 2002… Those who agreed to abandon all but the large settlement blocs [i.e. blocs of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank] increased from 50% in 2002 to 59% in 2003.

So, perhaps some modestly good news there.
Also good news: the survey has annually, since 1986, asked the general question as to whether respondents would choose peace talks or increasing military strength as the most effective way to avoid another war with Arabs. Between 1986 and 2001, the percentage who chose “peace talks” dipped beneath 50% only once– that was in early 1995. But the responses to both the 2001 and 2002 surveys on this question showed “peace talks” chosen by significantly fewer than 50%. This year, it was back up again– to 56%. Still well short of the high levels of 1991 and 1992, which look to my eye to be in the low 70s. But still, the trend line is up.
What a pity, though, if Israelis are “feeling” a little more secure and accommodationist only because they think their army has succeeded in penning the Palestinians inside the razor-wire fences that ring every West Bank city except Jericho, and that cut Gaza up into segments, or behind that monstrous wall that is now snaking its way through the heart of the West Bank.
(Have you noticed that the US Army has decided to put a fence all around Saddam’s home town of Auja, near Tikrit? Wonder where they got that idea from… )
Anyway, another thing I wanted to write here about the latest Jaffee Center report is something that appears only near the back of the report. It appears that since as long ago as 1987, this survey has routinely asked respondents if they think the Israeli government should “encourage the emigration of Arabs from Israel”. And in at least three of the surveys they have now explicitly asked respondents if they favor “transfer”, that is, the forcible ethnic cleansing, of, firstly, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, and secondly, of the Palestinians of the occupied territories.
The results on this question are disquieting–no, I would say almost literally sickening. Support expressed for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel out of their ancestral homeplace (and present state of citizenship) was at 24% in 1991, at 31% and 33% in April this year.
I guess that’s why they don’t administer the survey the survey to Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you think the government should ethnically cleanse you out of this country?” It could seem a little tasteless.
Views of respondents on ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out of the occupied territories are even more upsetting: 38% of support in 1991; 46% in 2002, and 46% again this year. (How’s that again about favoring peacemaking over military strength? Who do these respondents think they’re going to make peace with?)
So, disquieting, yes. Sickening, yes. But here’s something else. If a “reputable”, “mainstream” Israeli research organization can go around the streets of (Jewish) Israel asking such questions as these as part of a calm, objective survey of people’s attitudes, does this asking in itself actually help to normalize the whole sick idea of transfer in people’s minds? (“I mean, if even the Jaffee Center people with their clipboards are proposing this as one discussable option, that must mean it’s kosher to talk about it don’t you think?”)
Kosher? Talking about ethnic cleansing in the modern day and age (and after everything the Jewish people themselves have gone through in their history)? I wonder if the survey-askers got any expressions of sheer outrage and horror at the idea of “transfer” from any of the people they talked to?
Actually, I don’t know how quite how I feel about this asking. (“Good evening, sir, I’m from a prestigious research center in Washington DC and we’re conducting a survey on people’s views on the reintroduction of lynching?”) I suppose I’m glad to know the sick truth about how extremist the attitudes of many Jewish Israelis are.
And definitely now that this survey has been done, its results should be widely publicized.
You cannot, alas, link directly to the text of this year’s survey report yet. But if you click here, you can find, on pp.27-31 of last year’s survey, a lengthy discussion of the views that those respondents expressed on both the “encouraging emigration” question and that of forcible “transfer.” You can also, of course, read the whole of last year’s report right there, too.
Tell me what you think about the Jaffee Center folks even asking these questions.

Four retired chiefs of Israel’s fearsome and ultra-repressive Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency have now added their voices to those in Israel calling for more reliance on realistic diplomacy with the Palestinians, and less reliance on brute force.
This speak-out is very important, since the Shin Bet plays a major role in administering the harsh control system that the Israeli authorities maintain over the three million Palestinian residents of the occupied West bank and Gaza. It also comes just two weeks after Israel’s highest-ranking military officer, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, also publicly urged the government to ease up on the harsh administrative violence (my term, that) that it imposes on the Palestinians.
It seems the four Shin Bet veterans spoke together to one or more reporters for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. One key quote picked up and highlighted by the WaPo in its front-page story today was this, from Avraham Shalom (SB head, 1980-86):

We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully… Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully.

The group spoke out forcefully against the Sharon government’s long-sustained attempt to marginalize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
(Arafat, it should be noted was democratically elected by the Palestinians of the occupied territories in 1996 in the only territories-wide elections the Palestinians there have ever been allowed to hold under Israel’s now 37-year-long military occupation. Those elections were deemed free and fair by US and other election monitors. If they were repeated today, he would once again win. Sharon, of course, would prefer a Quisling figure to “negotiate” with, but hasn’t found one yet.)
The WaPo piece, by Mollly Moore, reported of the SB veterans as follows:

The group was particularly critical of Sharon’s attempt to sideline Arafat and declare him “irrelevant” — also a key tenet of President Bush’s Middle East policy.
“It was the mother of all errors with regard to Arafat,” said Shalom, who has worked as an international business consultant since leaving the government. “We cannot determine who will have the greatest influence over there. So let us look at the Palestinians’ political map, and it is a fact that nothing can happen without Arafat.”

The group also criticized Sharon’s insistence that all Palestinian violence should stop before the Israelis even consider moving toward a negotited settlement. They called for Israel to make the “painful concessions” needed for a permanent peace– and to do so unilaterally, if necessary.
Those concessions, they said, should include evacuating at least some of the Jews-only settlements Israel has (quite illegally) planted inside the occupied territories. They did not specify how many of the roughly 400,000 settlers should be taken back to Israel’s own land.
Moore reported that “several” of the former chiefs also criticized the massive barrier that israel is building in and around several key areas of the West Bank. Once again, Shalom seemed notably outspoken on this, saying:

It creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel. The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended.

In addition to Shalom, those who participated were Yaakov Peri (SB chief 1988-95), Carmi Gillon (1995-96), and Ami Ayalon (1996-2000).
To me, the participation of Ayalon is not at all surprising. He has also been publicly engaged in a very forward-looking joint project with Al-Quds University President sari Nuseibeh to gather signatures from both Israelis and Palestinians in support of a statement calling for “two states for two peoples” with a shared Jerusalem, etc etc.
Nor is the participation of Peri totally surprising, since I think I’ve seen his name associated with some previous faintly pro-peace moves.
That of Carmi Gillon surprised me a lot, however. Isn’t he the person behind the creation of “Memri”, a very intelligent but very skewed attempt to “explain” to westerners that most Arabs are anti-Semites and can’t be trusted? If that is the same person, then perhaps he should look to changing the basically inflammatory and blood-libellous slant of “Memri”. On the other hand, if it IS the same person, it is also really great to see people changing their minds and their public positions in the light of overwhelming physicial and moral facts.
What bugs me, as a taxpaying US citizen is why our President and Members of Congress are still so far from speaking these same kind of home truths (and, let me add, backing such words with a smart reallocation of US economic incentives.)
Since when did one side in a conflict get to veto the leader legally elected by members of the “other” side? Where would we be if the Palestinians and Arabs all went from saying “We don’t like Sharon” (which is probably true) to saying “Because we don’t like him we refuse to negotiate with him”?
Sharon’s insistence on marginalizing Arafat has been outrageous, all along. But instead of simply telling him that, and reminding him of the old home truth that “You don’t make peace with your friends– you make peace with your enemies!”– the US administration and nearly every single member of Congress has just indulged Sharon and gone along with his bullying attempt to tell the Palestinians who can and who cannot represent them.
Well, at least now Prez Bush has said he’s for full democracy in the Middle East. That’s a relief! Now, maybe, he can “persuade” Sharon to let the Palestinians make their own choice about who gets to lead and represent them?
What do you think? Is it about to happen? Hey, I’m sitting on the edge of my chair here…
Actually, what all of us who are US citizens can and should do is write our representatives, enclose a copy of Moore’s article, and tell our representatives that democracy and true representativity for the Palestinians, fair and balanced negotiations on the Palestinians’ many claims, and the committed use of US aid dollars to promote a just and sustainable outcome, is the only way forward.