by Noam Chomsky
28. There is extensive discussion of these matters in my Peace in the Middle East? (Pantheon, New York, 1974); also TNCW, chapter 9, originally published in 1975.
29. Yoram Peri, “From Coexistence to hegemony,” Davar, Oct. 1, 1982.
30. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, p. 155.
31. Daniel Bloch, Davar, Nov. 13, 1981 (Israeli Mirror); see chapter 3, note 106.
32. Wolf Blitzer, “Opening salvoes in Israel aid battle,” Jerusalem Post, March 4, 1983.
33. Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, Uri Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes Over Baghdad (Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., London, 1982). Most of the book is devoted to the attack on the Iraqi reactor, which the authors consider a highly meritorious achievement.
34. See chapter 2, note 53 and text, note 41, and references cited.
35. October I, 1955; quoted in Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism.
36. Ibid. See chapter 2, p. 20 and note 36, and references cited.
37. Judges, Chapter 16.30.
38. Yaakov Sharett, “A Great Danger is Coming,” Davar, Nov. 3, 1982.
39. “Emil and the murderers,” Davar, Feb. 13, 1983.
40. Yehezkel Dror, Crazy States (Heath Lexington Books, Lexington, MA 1971). The acknowledgments cite, among others, Michael Handel, his former assistant at the Hebrew University, co-author of the work on Israel’s nuclear capacity cited in note 33.
8. The Palestinian Uprising*
A
few weeks before the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in December 1987, a minor event took place in Gaza. A Palestinian girl, Intissar al-Atar, was shot and killed in a schoolyard by a resident of the nearby Jewish settlement of Gush
Katif. The murderer, Shimon Yifrah, was arrested a month later and released on bail because the Supreme Court determined that “the offense is not severe enough” to warrant detention. In September 1989 he was acquitted of all charges except causing death by negligence. The judge noted that he only intended to shock the girl by firing his gun at her in a schoolyard, not to kill her, so “this is not a case of a criminal person who has to be punished, deterred, and taught a lesson by imprisoning him.” Yifrah was given a seven-month suspended sentence, while settlers in the courtroom broke out in song and dance.1
None of this received any notice here, an understandable reaction. It was, after all, just another Arab, and since Israeli repression was still keeping a tight lid on protest, why take notice of what is happening under the “benign occupation”? We do not know, and few seem concerned to discover, what effect this and other such incidents had in preparing the ground for the uprising that finally captured the world’s attention shortly after, though only briefly
*Based on an unpublished chapter intended for, but not included in, Deterring Democracy (Verso, 1991; Hill & Wang, 1992). As Yifrah was freed in September 1989, the Israeli press reported that an army patrol fired into the yard of a school for boys aged 6 to 12 in a West Bank refugee camp, wounding five children, allegedly intending only “to shock them.” There were no charges, and the event again attracted no attention here. It was just another episode in the program of “illiteracy as punishment,” the Israeli press observes, including the closing of schools, use of gas bombs, beating of students with rifle butts, barring of medical aid for victims, soldiers entering the school and shouting that “if I find children outside I will kick their asses and fuck them one by one” and threatening to arrest the teachers, and so on. Those arrested can be placed in the “holding installations” designed when the Intifada began. These “chicken coops,” measuring 28 square meters, sometimes are crammed with over 70 people, many confined for several weeks, two months in the case of two 14-year-old boys. Health care is minimal and sometimes refused, another chapter in the sordid story of the behavior of the Israeli medical profession. The Red Cross was barred for a long period until it made a rare public protest.2
The null reaction to the court decision in the Yifrah case is also understandable. The decision reflects the standard judicial treatment of Arabs. There was scarcely more notice here when, also in September, General Matan Vilnai, the military commander of the Gaza Strip, granted early release from prison to convicted soldiers of the Givati Brigade so that they could spend the High Holidays with their families. They had served six months of the nine-month sentence they had received for savagely beating a Palestinian in his home—but not for murdering him, because, the court judiciously observed, his death might have been caused by the beatings he received a few hours later while under detention at military headquarters, a thought that led to no further inquiry. The centrist Shinui Party charged that the early release “signals to the soldiers in the field that the army reacts with forgiveness to cases of sadism and abuse” and “makes a mockery of the military justice system”—as if anything could do so by now. This outcome of one of the rare cases when soldiers (but not the senior officers responsible) were convicted of vicious crimes “will be understood by many soldiers as permission to murder Arabs,” legal analyst Moshe Negbi observed.3
The Jerusalem Post reports a letter by Knesset Member Dedi Zucker to Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin charging that “of 52 court-martials held for abuses in the territories during the uprising, no officer ranking higher than major has been tried,” despite the fact that illegal orders are readily traceable to higher ranks, all the way up to the Defense Minister. One case is that of Colonel Yehuda Meir, “who ordered soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinians” in West Bank villages, but was never charged. Inquiries are perfunctory, Zucker alleges: “He notes that eyewitness testimony from Palestinians is often not taken by army investigators.”4
Commenting more generally on the participation of the courts in repressive practices, attorney Avigdor Feldman observes that “Supreme Court justices who demolish houses, divide families, uproot trees, pull out the land from under the feet of its inhabitants, and decree for these inhabitants a life of invisibility are no less violent than soldiers who beat and shoot in a blind rage.”5
It is unnecessary to stress that Feldman’s comment generalizes to the wider society, and to the paymasters across the seas who prefer to look the other way.
1. “Let Us Cry”
W
ith the inhabitants of the territories reduced to near invisibility, it is not surprising that the repression of the Intifada rose to new levels of racist brutality. Army killings in the Gaza Strip doubled after General Vilnai took command in
July 1989, later tapering off when the population was considered sufficiently traumatized. In September, Lieutenant-Colonel Elisha Shapira reported an increase in orders to soldiers to break bones and commit other “excessive acts,” relying on his own experience in the reserve service and reports from members of his kibbutz movement (Kibbutz Artzi, associated with the leftist Mapam Party). Some 50,000 Palestinians have been jailed during the Intifada, many held under grotesque conditions, often without trial.6
The army has destroyed the homes of over 3000 people (often destroying or severely damaging others nearby) on the pretext that a family member is suspected of throwing stones or some other crime. This particularly ugly form of collective punishment, the Israeli press reports, is conducted “under a law that also does not permit them to rebuild.” General Amram Mitzna, who left his command to become a visitor at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, was “particularly brutal in this regard” while commander of the West Bank, the report continues, because ‘he had to compensate for his left-wing image.” General Mitzna’s soulful expression was regularly seen on American TV screens, revealing the inner torment of the humanist compelled by Arab violence to resort to force in self-defense—“to shoot and cry,” in the conventional Hebrew phrase. Israeli journalist Tom Segev saw a different picture. Reviewing hospital records of victims of army shootings, with splinters of bullets in the upper part of the body and parts of the brain leaking out of an empty eyehole, he wrote that “the name of General Amram Mitzna was not mentione
d by the doctor, but his face was visible, so to speak, from the X-ray photos he was showing us, and it was disgusting, frightening, a negative of the image of the ‘beautiful Israeli’ that his public relations experts construct for him.”7
Destruction of homes has been a regular method of collective punishment from the early days of the occupation, apart from the period when Menachem Begin (Likud) was Prime Minister. The practice was resumed on the return to power of the Labor Party, much admired here for its moderation and humanity. It escalated rapidly as Defense Minister Rabin of the Labor Party undertook the task of suppressing the Intifada. Much the same was true of torture, expulsion, and administrative detention, common practice under the Labor governments, halted or reduced during the Begin years, resumed when Labor dove Shimon Peres took over as Prime Minister. Under Labor rule from 1967 to 1977, 1180 people were expelled; under Likud from 1978 to 1985, there were 13 expulsions. Israel appears to be the only country in the world that relies on this mode of population control as a regular practice, in violation not only of the Geneva Conventions but also of the very provision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Israel and its apologists appeal with great fervor and self-righteousness when condemning the Soviet Union for restricting emigration of Russian Jews—the very same sentence, in fact. The worst atrocities of the occupation were associated with Ariel Sharon, under the Labor government in the early 1970s when he instituted what the Hebrew press describes as a “regime of indiscriminate terror” in Gaza, and under Likud rule in 1981-2. The oppression has been severe throughout, but the correlations are not what the reader of the American press might be led to expect.8
Cool statistics allow us, in yet another way, to “decree for these inhabitants a life of invisibility” by evading the reality of daily life. To draw an example virtually at random from current Israeli press coverage, take the case of 19-year-old Muhammad Abu-Akar, an inhabitant of the Deheisha refugee camp near Jerusalem who was flown to the U.S. for treatment for severe bullet wounds and “remains attached forever to the artificial feeding apparatus that replaces his lost gut.”9 On November 4, soldiers entered his home and arrested him. When it turned out that they were actually seeking his brother, he was freed, but another patrol “told Muhammad clearly that if his brother will not give himself up before Wednesday, he will be himself arrested”—possibly a quick death. At 8:30PM on Tuesday, while Muhammad was in the hospital, army patrols broke into the house, throwing a smoke grenade into it and beating up his mother, breaking her hand. At 10PM, another patrol came, smashing the windows and pouring all the food onto the floor. A third patrol arrived at midnight “They broke everything that the other had left unbroken, and ordered the mother whose hand had been broken to go outside to erase graffiti on a fence fifty yards away,” telling her that if her son did not give himself up, he would be shot on sight. At lAM, the mother was allowed to go for treatment to the hospital, joining her son.
This is also routine, not approaching the far more grim atrocities that are ignored, so it is again understandable that it passed unnoticed.
Another device employed by Defense Minister Rabin is expulsion of Palestinians whom authorities determine to be living ‘illegally’ in the territories. This program of “invisible transfer” began under the Labor Party shortly after the 1967 conquest as one of the means to deal with the “demographic problem” (the problem of too many Arabs in the Jewish state). The program was accelerated in August 1989, becoming “a plague,” the press reports, particularly in small villages around Ramallah. Over 90% of the victims are women and children, some as young as four days old. Almost all of the deported children were born in their villages. About half are recognized to be residents by the Military Government. Since Israel is a civilized state governed by the rule of law, it is possible for villagers to apply for “legal residence” in their homes for a fee of $100. Ninety-nine percent of the applications are rejected.
Standard procedure is for the army to surround a village before dawn. Helicopters hover overhead and soldiers with loudspeakers order all men to congregate in the village center or they will be shot on sight. Soldiers then enter designated homes and inform the women targeted that they have five or ten minutes to pack and leave. The women are forced to take an Arab taxi to the bridge over the Jordan and to pay a fee to cross, with a fine sometimes added because of their “illegal residence.” If they have no money, they may be forced to stand on the bridge with their children until some method of payment is arranged.
Sometimes the women do not follow orders quickly enough, as in the case of one expelled on September 15; soldiers awakened her two children (aged four and six), forced them into the taxi barefoot without allowing them to eat or drink, and sent them off to Jordan. The fate of their year-old brother and 28-day-old sister is unreported; presumably they left for Jordan with their mother. When the fathers are allowed to return home, they find their wives and children gone.
Sometimes the army shows “extraordinary sensitivity,” as in the case of a brain-damaged child who had undergone surgery a few days earlier; her mother was granted a week’s delay before she and the child were expelled. This child was born in Israel and is registered as a resident on her father’s ID card, the usual situation. Not all deportees are young women with children, however. For example, there is the case of Zafira Mohammad Ahmed, a grandmother with a British Mandatory birth certificate confirming that she was born in Palestine in 1895, who was deported to Jordan on September 1 with only the clothes on her back, wearing house slippers.
In the last few months of 1989, some 200 people were expelled in this manner, according to Palestinian sources, and about 200,000 fall in the threatened category. There are ways to avoid expulsion. Two men report that they were told to become collaborators, but when they refused, their wives were deported (the first in advanced pregnancy with two children, the second with one child).10
The Israeli occupation has relied from the beginning on a network of collaborators, often selected from criminal elements and prisoners, to intimidate the population and to aid in identifying targets for execution, imprisonment, torture, expulsion, and other means of population control. In the early stages of the Intifada, the network was dissolved as collaborators were called upon to “repent,” or driven out of their villages, or occasionally killed. As the military occupation has gradually reimposed a tighter and still more repressive regime over the territories, reconstruction of the collaborator network has been a primary objective. Well-known collaborators who had been expelled from villages have been reintroduced under military guard and provided with weapons (Arabs are, of course, permitted no weapons unless they are agents of the occupying forces). They then return to the assigned practices: “Equipped with Israeli-supplied automatic weapons, they have terrorized the local population, assisting the army in making arrests, manning impromptu roadblocks and beating and kidnapping Palestinian activists,” West Bank human rights activist Joost Hiltermann observes. The reconstructed collaborator network also draws from the huge prison population, “through a proven recipe of privileges, coercion and blackmail, including threats to imprison relatives or deport spouses who lacked proper residence documents.” Such procedures are straightforward under the totalitarian and lawless regime of the occupation, which permits arbitrary imprisonment with no charges, legalized torture, and other devices, virtually at will.11
The Israeli press has regularly reported all of these matters, but propaganda directed to the outside, and relayed by the U.S. media quite uncritically for the most part, tells a different story: one of ‘Intercommunal strife,” “savage episodes of inter-Arab violence,” PLOordered killing of “moderates,” etc. Quoting typical examples of this (standard) service to Israeli propaganda, Hiltermann points out that “the practice of eliminating agents of a colonial or occupying power by an indigenous resistance movement has plenty of precedents,” including the anti-Nazi resistance.
He cites a source quoting an Israeli soldier who says
: “We could not understand how those people were still alive. As Israeli soldiers…we had to work alongside these collaborators, and we could not understand how the people in the village did not beat their brains out.”12
In Israel, the press has repeatedly made the same point. One precedent that it has brought forth is the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Nine months before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,” Leah Enbal reports, “the Jewish underground initiated the systematic extermination of collaborators from the Judenrat and the Jewish police,” sometimes with “collective killings.”13 Enbal quotes the recently published memoirs of Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, one of the founders of the Jewish underground and the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising after its first commander was killed, revealed to a friend before his death in 1981. He described the “bloody war” inside the Ghetto before the uprising, pointing out that “it would have been impossible to fight the Germans without first finishing with the internal treachery.” The killing of collaborators was regarded as legitimate revenge by the ordinary person, he says. Those who were collaborating with the Germans, some as “Gestapo members,” had to be “destroyed to the last one,” including those “whose activities were in contradiction to Jewish interests.” Zuckerman is only sorry that the underground “delayed too long” in killing collaborators. Speaking of the delay, he says:
Today I know that our failure in this regard was historical. Today, for example, I am certain that, wherever there is internal treachery, the war must begin with elimination of the internal treachery. [Delay in doing this] was our great failure, our disgrace.
Such thoughts—whatever one thinks of them—are foreign to U.S. reporting and commentary on the Intifada. They take their place alongside the origins of the 1967 war, the background for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the record of terrorism over the years, the diplomatic record, and other critically important elements of the history of U.S.-Israel-Palestine relations that have been utterly effaced from the record—probably permanently, in the United States—in one of the most stunning propaganda triumphs of the modern era.