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Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 Dear Editor, I write in defence of Pat Minor, whose recent letter about the Hamas victory in the Jan 25 Palestinian Legislative Council elections drew predictable fire from some local supporters of Israel. Everyone knows that there are people in this country for whom any criticism of Israel is an absolute taboo. They want us to believe that all critics of Israel have evil motives and should be ostracized. But their personal attacks contribute nothing to dialogue or understanding. Pat Minor does not in any way "identify" with Hamas or "whitewash" its tactics. She was trying to defend the Palestinian people from the inference that if they voted this way they must all be bloodthirsty maniacs. She explains the election result by putting it in the context of the sufferings caused by the Occupation; just as well-informed people seek to understand Israeli brutality by considering the Holocaust and the centuries of Jewish suffering. To seek understanding is not to excuse the crimes of individuals. But the alternative is to say that Palestinians or Israelis behave the way they do because they are just bad people, not like us. In other words, the alternative is to demonize them: which is what Mr. Finkelstein, with his prejudicial talk about flag burning and hostage taking, invites us to do. To say that Minor "identifies" with Hamas is a kind of slander not exactly becoming in a religious leader. If he believes in "tolerance" and "compromise", he could show some better proof of it. Minor's critics misrepresent both history and the present situation. For the truth is, it is not the Palestinians, but Israel that is the "politically-created race of people" (Zeis). For many centuries Judaism taught, following Maimonides et. al, that Jews could not return to the Promised Land until the coming of the Messiah. The Zionists, secular nationalists, created the concept of "auto-emancipation" and the nation-state of Zion only in the 19th Century. It did not exist before then. The modern state of Israel, then, represents a revolt against centuries of Jewish tradition, by people who were imitating European nationalism instead of defining their identity by Torah. Zionism is an originally heretical concept ironically now championed by many rabbis. Palestinians may have called themselves "Syrians" until the early 20th C, but national identity is always somewhat artificial. They had authentic, natural ties to their homeland and native localities: far more relevant to the settlement of title to a territory than the imaginative ties created by pious legends about a country that ended 2000 years ago. The truth is that Israel only came into being because of the expulsion of the Palestinians. This is well documented. Anyone can see copies of Yitzhak Rabin's order in July 1948: "the inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without regard to age." That same Rabin, chief of staff in the 1967 war, did not agree with Mr. Zeis that Israel was under threat of invasion. As he said in a Le Monde interview, 29 Feb. 1968: " I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai ...would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it." In fact, instead of always being willing to make peace, as myth has it, Israel took the initiative in all wars except that of 1973. According to the published diary of Moshe Sharett, former foreign minister, Ben Gurion, the father of the country, deliberately sought expansion through war and through excuses about a "security threat" from the Arabs, who have always been far weaker than Israel. "It would be worth it to pay some Arab leader a million dollars to start a war against us", Ben-Gurion said. Instead of using the Occupied Territories as a bargaining chip, Israel extensively settled them and has made a two-state solution all but impossible. It doubled the settler population in the Oslo period (1993-2000), when it pretended to be getting ready to trade land for peace. Despite the official talk about a two-state solution, Dov Weisglas, Sharon's former chief of staff, admits that the government's strategy in evacuating Gaza was "freezing the political process. When you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state." (interview, Ha'aretz Magazine, 8 Oct. 2004) Israel has often promised America it would freeze settlement activity. It always breaks these promises. It grabs territory, hems in and destroys the native society because it knows that the American government, strongly influenced by AIPAC, ADL and other special interest groups, will never punish it. On the contrary, American taxpayer money, $3 billion and up for one rich little country, will always flow. Is this picture unfair and unbalanced? Palestinian suicide terrorism is indeed deplorable. But it must be remembered that both sides, not just one side, attack innocents. We should not see the Arabs as uniquely nasty just because, in their desperation, they voted for their own equivalents of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon, all known terrorists. Polls indicate they still support a two-state solution, but are fed up with Fatah. Sometimes a true picture has to depict the imbalances in the real world. The fact is that Israel has always been the stronger party, has always got most of what it wanted, and has, under American sponsorship, little incentive to cease its expansionist ways. We cannot effectively fight terrorism with the necessary global alliances and yet continue appeasing Israel, on the basis of false propaganda and special interest lobbying. We've got to end the favoritism now.
Jason Weeks. Iowa City, IA
1. That Zionism is a new, somewhat heretical concept: Ian Lustick, FOR THE LAND AND THE LORD: JEWISH FUNDAMENTALISM IN ISRAEL, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988 pp. 23-27 2. That Palestine has been an Arab country for centuries: Justin McCarthy, POPULATION OF PALESTINE, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 3. That Israel came to be only because of mass expulsion of the native population:
Nur Masalha, EXPULSION OF THE PALESTINIAN, Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992 4. That Israel has been the aggressor in all wars except 1973:
Simha Flapan, THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL: MYTHS AND REALITIES, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987 (about the 1948 war)
Avi Shlaim, THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND THE ARAB WORLD, New York and London, W.W. Norton, 2001
David Hirst, THE GUN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH: THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Third Edition, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, Nation Books, 2003 5. That Ben-Gurion sought expansion by war and by hyping up the "security threat": Livia Rokach, ISRAEL'S SACRED TERRORISM: A STUDY BASED ON MOSHE SHARETT'S PERSONAL DIARY AND OTHER DOCUMENTS, New York, AAUG Press, 1986. "Worthwhile to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war", page 41. 6. That the settler population doubled in the Oslo period: B'Tselem (Israeli Human Rights Organization), LAND GRAB: ISRAEL'S SETTLEMENT POLICY IN THE WEST BANK, May 2002, p. 17. A summary of this report can be found at www.btselem.org. 7. That Israel has repeatedly violated promises to freeze settlement activity, cf the above and Geoffrey Aronson, ISRAEL, THE PALESTINIANS AND THE INTIFADA: CREATING FACTS ON THE WEST BANK, London, Kegan Paul, 1990. esp. pp. 98-99, describing how the Israeli government broke its promise to President Carter to freeze settlement activity. The Dov Weisglas interview in HA'ARETZ MAGAZINE, 8 OCT. 2004, is [ no longer ] available at www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=1433. 8. That Israel has always practiced terrorism against civilians can be found in many respected sources. Hirst, op cit, speaks about Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, the Deir Yassin massacre and others. For Deir Yassin: pp. 248-254 Uzi Benziman, a mainstream Israeli journalist with HA'ARETZ newspaper, in his book SHARON: AN ISRAELI CAESAR, Adama Press, 1985, documents many atrocities against civilians in which Sharon was personally involved: --the ambush killing of two Arab peasant women coming to fetch water (pp 39-40). --"They (his soldiers) witnessed him (Sharon) laughing as a junior officer tormented an old Arab and then shot him at close range. They noted his composure as he planned operations designed to kill as many civilians as possible" (p.56). Sharon is known to have deliberately targetted civilians at al-Burj refugee camp and especially at Qibya, where 69 died. (pp 53-54). cf also Benny Morris, ISRAEL'S BORDER WARS, Oxford, 1993: "The IDF's shoot-to-kill orders, minings, expulsion operations and retaliatory strikes all, to one degree or another, involved state-authorized or, at least, permitted killing of unarmed civilians" (p. 166). "Retaliation" typically was not directed at actual perpetrators of terrorist attacks, but at "collective targets": the clan, village or district (p.176) to terrorize them. In most cases, according to Morris, "infiltrators" were hungry refugees looking to get back to the areas from which they were expelled, but Israel shot them on sight. When Arabs fought back, Israeli "retaliation" often focussed on the innocent, not by accident but for well-calculated strategic reasons: "This enabled the IDF to attain surprise: it could hit villages with no reason to suspect that they had been targeted. Surprise usually meant greater effectiveness". (p. 184) Israeli "retaliation" was a bit like the wars of the Crips and the Bloods. Shoot anyone in the neighborhood, to show 'em who's boss. Morris's book deals with the 1950's. But there is every reason to believe that these practices have continued down to the present day. --UN investigation proved that the Israeli attack on the refugee complex at Qana in Lebanon, 1996, could not have been accidental. --PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, a respected NGO, in a report issued in the fall of 2000 said that the pattern of wounds in corpses examined indicated that the Israeli army was deliberately shooting to death unarmed demonstrators and stone-throwers. There were too many head wounds to be consistent with Israel's declared policy of shooting only at the legs of demonstrators, unless soldiers are in immediate danger. --A policy of deliberately killing youthful street demonstrators and stone-throwers posing no real danger to troops was documented for the first Intifada, by B'Tselem and many other human rights organizations. (cf. reports by year at www.btselem.org.). --A policy of "punitive fire", indiscriminately directed against residential areas: "People say (an IDF reservist comments)that the Palestinians shoot first and we just respond. This is untrue. One officer there told soldiers doing guard duty in the lookout posts, 'If things are too quiet or if you don't feel certain about the situation, just let off a few rounds'...The killing of children who did not endanger and do not endanger the lives of Israeli soldiers...false reports that the Palestinians had initiated the gunfire; Israeli snipers firing from great distances at people identified as 'legal targets' and subsequently 'recognized as terrorists'...all these things are routine. (cf. Amira Hass, "Legal Targets", HA'ARETZ, 1/30/02). As another soldier explains, "In Hebron there's this order they call 'punitive shooting': just open fire on whatever you like. I opened fire not at the sources of fire but on windows where there was just wash hanging to dry. I knew that there were people who would be hit. But at that moment, it was just shoot, shoot, shoot." ("No Exit", in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Apr.2002 p.25) In Nov. 2004 B'Tselem documented the existence of 'zones of destruction' in the Gaza Strip, "where the army receives orders to kill anyone, even if that person does not endanger the lives of soldiers". (HA'ARETZ, 11/28/04) The same organization documents the use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields": sent to open a suspicious package or knock on the door of a wanted suspect. And torture remains commonplace, despite a Supreme Court ruling. It isn't possible for a Palestinian to ensure his safety by innocence. You can't just keep your head down and stay out of trouble. At any time you can be a target. That's what terrorism means. I would encourage readers to check the sources I have listed, as well as pro-Israel sources like Alan Dershowitz, THE CASE FOR ISRAEL, and make up your own minds. A good general guide, fully up to date, is Norman Finkelstein, BEYOND CHUTZPAH, University of California Press, 2005.
Thank you. Jason Weeks |