April 26, 2004
Balata Refugee Camp Tour

Immanuel Lutheran Church
1021 Spaight Street, Madison

1:00 – 3:30 pm: East High School students
4:00 – 6:00 pm: Benefit Perennial Plant Sale
6:30 – 9:30 pm: Main Program and Bake Sale
8:00 pm: Film and Discussion

WORT’s The Morning Buzz with Linda Jamieson at 8 am will discuss the display with one of the creators.


Background from the creators of the Balata Refugee Camp Installation, Mika and Kelly:

We’re creating an installation composed of pictures, sound, childrens art,
photos, film, stories and interviews from Balata Refugee Camp. The content
is determined by the people of the camp, and will both represent life here
and bring a message to people in the ‘West’. We hope to take the project
on tour around the US, UK and Sweden, aiming to raise awareness about the
complex and desperate situation in the refugee camps, spur viewers into
action and build links between people and organisations in Balata camp and
others outside. This connections will hopefully lead to increased visits
and new projects such as a library and cultural centre.

The installation will be on tour around the US, UK and Sweden from early
March onwards. We hope to show it both in large cities and smaller
communities, in venues such as schools, exhibition halls, churches – the
more imaginative the better.

Why Balata?
Balata Refugee Camp is one of the most hard hit communities in the West
Bank. Refugees from the 1948 expulsion, over 30,000 residents are
crammed into a single, suffocating square kilometre. Unemployment is the
norm, and most families rely on UN handouts for survival. Daily
‘visits’ by Israeli military jeeps and tanks that park at the entrances
and shoot into the camp are taken for granted. It is rare to meet somebody
who hasn’t tasted tear gas; every second boy seems to have been shot at
some stage, and there isn’t a house the soldiers haven’t entered at some
point.

Despite being the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, Balata receives
very limited outside support. Visitors are rare and links to abroad are
practically non-existent.

April 20, 2004
Muli Linder, Israeli Refusenik

The Crossing
1127 University Ave., Madison
7:00 pm

Muli Linder, an Israeli refusenik who is touring the United States as part of the Courage to Refuse movement, will speak to the public on the costs of war and peace in Israel. Dr. Linder, a medical doctor, was an officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Medicine Corps when he became the 67th person to refuse service in occupied Palestine.

In January 2002 a group of 50 Israeli reserve officers and soldiers drafted a letter that became known as the Combatant’s Letter. This group of active reserve combatants has grown to include nearly 600 signatories (known as Refuseniks) from across the IDF.

They call themselves Courage to Refuse (CTR) for refusing to serve militarily in the West Bank and Gaza strip in the interests of peace, Israel’s security and moral character, and the human rights of millions of Palestinians. Almost half of Courage to Refuse have been court-martialed and jailed for their refusal to serve in an unjust occupation.

Dr. Linder is also available during the day on April 20th to speak to the media, schools, and other venues. Please contact Barb or Rae below to schedule an event.

Sponsored by: Refuser Solidarity Network, Madison Area Peace Coalition, Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, WI Network for Peace and Justice, Four Lakes Greens

CONTACTS:
Barb Olson, rafahsistercity at yahoo.com
Rae Vogeler, (608) 835-7501, rae-v at charter.net (before April 5th or after April 9th)

UN has stopped emergency food aid in Gaza

UNRWA Press Release 1 April 2004
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
Headquarters Gaza
website: www.unrwa.org
Press Release No. HQ/G/06/2004

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced Thursday it stopped distributing emergency food aid to some 600,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip.

UNRWA said in a statement that the suspension followed restrictions introduced by Israel on the sole commercial crossing into Gaza through which it is able to bring in humanitarian assistance.

The agency said it had now completely run out of stocks of rice, flour, cooking oil and other essential products.

“Under normal circumstances, UNRWA delivers some 250 tons of food aid per day in Gaza alone as part of a wider program of emergency assistance to refugees, initiated shortly after the outbreak of strife in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000,” the statement said.

Almost two out of three households in Gaza live below the poverty line and more than half its workforce is unemployed.

UNRWA said it urged Israel to loosen its restrictions in Gaza in a joint statement with other UN agencies on March, but thus far without success.

How Israel promotes terror in the occupied territories

Tanya Reinhart, Yediot Ahronot, 31 March 2004

— An extensive discussion has already taken place in Israel regarding the cost-benefit ratio of [Hamas leader Ahmad] Yassin’s assassination. But the question of justice has hardly been raised.

According to international law, the execution of any person in an occupied territory is not allowed. The Geneva convention, born out of the horrifying experience of World War II, sets limitations on the use of force even in times of war. The convention distinguishes between war and a state of occupation. Its fundamentals are, first, that occupied people are “protected”, and that the occupier is responsible for their safety. Second, it determines that the occupied people have the right to fight for their liberation. International conventions are one of the means people have developed for self-preservation. Without them, there is a danger that the human race would annihilate itself – first the strong would wipe out the weak, and then each other.

During its 37 years of occupation, Israel has already violated every article of the Geneva convention. But what it did now is unprecedented. As Robert Fisk stated it in the British Independent, “For years, there has been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government-versus-guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides – government ministers, spiritual leaders – were allowed to survive.” Even when the leader advocates violence and terror, the norm has been that he may be imprisoned, but not killed.

Ahmad Yassin viewed himself as struggling against the occupation. As reported in Yediot Ahronot, his demand was a full withdrawal of the Israeli army from the occupied territories, back to the borders of 1967. In 1993, Hamas agreed to the principles of the Oslo accords, but did not believe that Rabin would translate these principles into action, and urged the Palestinian people to remember that the occupation was not yet over. During the iron-fist period of Barak and Sharon, Yassin proposed a long-term hudna (truce), but he also believed that Israel would never end the occupation of its own will. “The enemy understands only the language of war, bombs and explosives,” he preached to his followers, and declared that “every Israeli is a target for us”.

The Geneva convention recognizes the right of the occupied people to carry out armed struggle against the occupying army, but not to use terror against civilians. Terror has no moral justification, and is not defended by international law. But it is necessary that we Israelis examine ourselves in this regard as well. What other way do we leave open for the Palestinian people to struggle for their liberation? Along the route of the wall in the West Bank, a new form of popular resistance has been formed in the last few months. Palestinian farmers whose land is being robbed sit on the ground in front of the bulldozers, accompanied by the Israeli opponents of the wall – the veterans of the Mas’ha camp. What could be more non-violent than this? But the Israeli army shoots at sitting demonstrators, like in Tiananmen square.

The Israeli army blocks all options of non-violent resistance from the Palestinians. With the arrogant elimination of a leader and a symbol, as he was leaving a mosque, the army knowingly created a new wave of violence and terror. It is hard not to get the impression that terror is convenient for Sharon and the army. It enables them to convince the world that the Geneva protections do not apply to the Palestinians, because they have terrorists in their midst, and that, therefore, it is permitted to do anything to them.

Since September 11th, as part of its “war against terror,” the US has been pushing to destroy all defences provided by international law. But even the US has not yet dared to publicly execute a spiritual-religious leader (of, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan). Now Israel has determined, with the US’s blessing, that even this is permitted. Under the military rule, Israel has become a leading force in the destruction of the very protections that humankind has established, out of World War II, for its own preservation, protections that we too may need one day, as history has already shown us.

*This article was published in Hebrew by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot on 30 March 2004. It has been translated into English by Netta Van Vliet.

**Tanya Reinhart is a professor at Tel Aviv University and the University of Utrecht.

© Tanya Rheinhart

Reflections on the killing of Shaikh Ahmad Yasin

William R. Polk, March 28, 2004
 
 Before a few days ago, few people in the West had ever heard of Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, but among Muslim Arabs he had long been a major figure.  Who was he, why was he important, why was he killed and what can be predicted as the aftermath of his death?  These are the questions I will address in this article.
 
 First, it is important to be clear about the nature of terrorism.  Terrorism is a tactic not a “thing” or movement or group that can be attacked.  It is, moreover, not confined to any race, religion or national group.  It has been employed all over the world throughout history and in recent times has been practiced by the Irish, Basques, French, Italians, Algerians, Libyans, Jewish Zionists, Palestinian Arabs, Sudanese Christians, Tamil Hindus, Tibetan Buddhists and many others.  Americans today forget that, when they began their war of independence against the British, terrorism was their favored tactic.
 
 Why have so many peoples adopted this tactic?  The simple answer is that they are driven to use it because they do not have other means.  When political expression is stifled and when enemies have overwhelming power, it is the tactic of last resort.  In sum, terrorism is the weapon of the weak.
 
 It is, of course, a horrible weapon.  All weapons are.  That has always been the intent of those who make and use them.  A visit to any museum shows the skill with which ancient daggers were designed to inflict the worst possible pain and so to terrify the enemy.   No one who has seen the effects of napalm or land mines or car bombs can believe that modern peoples have become more humane.
 
 What particularly horrifies us about terrorism is its randomness.  Blowing up a train, a bus or a building kills or mutilates many innocent people.  Of course, this is also true of aerial bombing.  But aerial bombing is more abstract – the bomber is often miles away from those he kills – whereas the terrorist is often right among his targets.  Indeed, in a suicide attack, he makes himself also a target.  He often has to do so because, as Shaikh Ahmad Yasin wrote of his own struggle, “The Palestinian people do not have Apache helicopters or F-16s or tanks or missiles…The only thing they have is themselves to die as martyrs.” 
 
 So who was Shaikh Ahmad Yasin?  A less likely militant can scarcely be imagined: he was paralyzed from the neck down, confined to a wheelchair and nearly blind and deaf. Born in Palestine at an uncertain date in the 1930s and made a refugee by the Israeli occupation of his home town, he was the spiritual leader of the most important nationalist religious group in that country, Hamas (Arabic: “bravery” or “determination”).1 Ironically, his movement was originally encouraged, perhaps even financed, by the Israeli intelligence service in an attempt to undercut the Fatah movement of Yasir Arafat.  
 
 Yasir Arafat and Ahmad Yasin were both involved in the uprising (intifada) of the late 1980s, but both their aims and their supporters were different.  Arafat, whose movement was in large part secular, was willing to compromise in return for Israeli recognition of his movement as “The Palestinian Authority.”  He reached an agreement at Oslo in 1993 with the then dominant Israeli Labor Party, led by General Yitzhak Rabin (who was later murdered by Israeli terrorists), to end the fighting. 
 
Meanwhile, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin had been tried in an Israeli court and put into prison. In all, he spent nearly 10 years in Israeli detention where he claimed to have suffered grievously and lost his hearing. Unwilling to compromise, he viewed the ultimate collapse of Israel as a historical inevitability, and he was certainly willing to help the process.
 
When Shaikh Ahmad would not bend, both the Israelis and Arafat decided that Hamas must be broken. Soon, the prisons began to be filled with Hamas figures, and Israel, by then under a Rightist (Likud) government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, embarked upon a policy of assassinating the leaders, and  destroying or seizing property and stifling people in Gaza.  
 
“In Gaza,” as Jennifer Loewenstein recently reported 2, “your livelihood is diminished each day by an impoverishment that is as deliberate as it is merciless.”  In the Gazan town of Rafah, she found 80% of the population refugees “sometimes two and three times over” and, that in the last 4 years, the Israeli army had killed 275 people, including 76 children, and destroyed 1,759 homes, displacing 12,643 people.  The Israelis destroyed even water wells. In Rafah, unemployment hovers around 70% and malnutrition and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are evident among the young.  While few journalists have been allowed to see for themselves, and almost nothing has been reported in the Western press, the inhabitants of course know what life there is like.  That knowledge feeds the hate that Hamas epitomizes. 
 
That is the negative side.  The positive side is that, drawing on Islamic traditions, Hamas is the one local organization that has tried to succor the inhabitants.  Operating in the morass of Gaza, it draws strength from grass roots work in schools, clinics and welfare projects. It has not done much, but the little it has done has given it a legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians beyond that now commanded by Yasir Arafat’s Fatah. 
 
 So, what the Israelis have found is that, despite their draconian measures, they have been unable to break Hamas. The more punitive and oppressive their actions became, the more the Palestinians became convinced that Israel was determined not only to take their land but also their lives.  Rightly or wrongly, they believe they are the objects of genocide.  Thus, in their eyes, Israeli policy justified the position of Shaikh Ahmad Yasin.  His death, apparently under the personal supervision of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon 3, will serve only to confirm that conclusion.
 
Prime Minister Sharon obviously believes that the death of Shaikh Ahmad will convince the Palestinians that they cannot win against Israel and must give up their fight. This is a misreading of history.  The founders of his own party, then the terrorist organization Irgun Zevai Leumi b’Eretz-Israel, told him this would not happen.4 
 
Half a century ago, Irgun proclaimed that “Force will be answered with force…Our comrades, the fighters of the underground, have shown that just as they know how to fight for their people they know how to suffer for it.  They languish for years  in prisons and concentration camps.  They do not ask for mercy.  They guard their dignity.  They suffer proudly…The enslaver must be smitten by every means and wherever possible…war is the hope, the only hope…And this, too, must be remembered: the fate of a people fighting for its freedom is not dependent on this or that attitude of one Power or another…We shall smite the enslaver, and victory will surely come.”
 
Words that Shaikh Ahmad Yasin himself would have approved.
 
So what are the implications for the Israelis and for the rest of us?
 
Israel has found that despite everything it has done, insecurity has grown rather than diminished.  And there is no end in sight.  There are more Palestinians today than ever before and most apparently now  believe that Israel is intent on their destruction.  Those who attempted compromise have been at least temporarily discredited.  Few,  if any, seem to be willing – or indeed able – simply to give up or even to imagine what giving up would entail.  Half a century of war has brutalized Palestinian society.
 
It has also brutalized Israeli society.  It is a sad but undeniable fact that we all learn more from our enemies than from our friends.  In Algeria, the French carried out vicious repressions reminiscent of what they had experienced under the Nazis; then when the Algerians became free, they began to do to one another what the French had done to them.  Israeli torture, casual brutality, racism and murder are constantly reported in the Israeli press and lamented by concerned Israelis. They are an inevitable part of guerrilla war.  To say so is not to be “anti-Semitic.”  Americans in Vietnam were similarly sullied.  The longer such conflicts last, the more difficult it is for societies to recover “normality.” 
 
As Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli Parliament, commented: killing Shaikh Ahmad Yasin was  “worse than a crime, it is an act of stupidity [which will] endanger the future of the State of Israel.”  It will further damage the thin veneer of civility that separates all of us from the bestial.
 
The rest of us may be affected differently from the Palestinians and the Israelis but also in important ways.  As Spain learned from putting troops into Iraq, doing so made it a party to that struggle. 
 
America, which furnished the helicopter that fired the rockets that blew Shaikh Ahmad Yasin out of his wheelchair and into mangled pieces as he returned from prayer as well as the tanks, bulldozers and fighter-bombers that the Palestinians fear and hate, will almost certainly be identified as an “enemy combatant.”  Irgun proclaimed, and al-Qacida demonstrated, that those perceived to be enemies will “be smitten by every means and wherever possible…war is the hope, the only hope…”  
 
“An eye for an eye…” is a policy that lasts as long as there are eyes to gouge out.
 
If even a small part of the world’s 1 billion Muslims conclude that what the Israelis (and we) call “the war on terrorism” is really a war is against them, there can be no end of insecurity, danger, destruction and death ahead of us all.  As we are beginning to learn, al-Qacida is not an organization but a state of mind: through much of the “third world,”  otherwise differing movements have been energized by the residues of a century or more of imperialism — Russian on Çeçens, Chinese on Uigurs, British on many peoples, French on Algerians and Americans on Filipinos.  
 
None of these movements has been defeated by force.  
 
What has been proven to work is, in principle, simple: implementing what President Woodrow Wilson called “the self determination of peoples.”  In the Palestine conflict, that means allowing the Palestinians to form their own state.  Independence will certainly not bring immediate peace; setbacks will be many and painful. But over time
independence is the only practical “road map,” the only way toward a saner, safer more decent future. 
 
Are we likely to take that road?  Prime Minister Sharon, facing a parliamentary no-confidence vote by Israelis even more extreme than he for vaguely suggesting a possible withdrawal from Gaza, has announced his decision to kill all the Hamas leaders.5  President George Bush, catering to American Christian fundamentalists who form his political base, is unlikely to tamper with their espousal of Sharon.  Moreover, the Neoconservative strategists whose program Mr. Bush has adopted agree one hundred percent with Sharon. Not much hope can be placed on either government. 
 
Ironically, for whatever else may be said of him, it was Shaikh Ahmad Yasin who sought to confine the struggle within Palestine; he also issued a statement shortly before his death offering “a new phase of calm” and negotiation in return from the evacuation of Gaza.6  His death has removed whatever restraint there was. 
 
The killing was almost universally condemned, but that is unlikely to offer much satisfaction to Palestinians or much comfort to us. A new and more radical generation is coming to the fore. The cry for vengeance has already sounded and will almost certainly spill over into Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe and America. Attack and reprisal will surely follow in rapid succession, and each escalation of conflict will make taking the road toward peace more difficult and less likely.  
 
The death of Shaikh Ahmad Yasin has made all of us targets.


Notes
1 The translation fails to catch the deep resonance of the word for Arabic speakers.  The most famous “archive” of Arabic culture, a collection of ancient poetry, is known by the same word.
2 In the January 16-31, 2004 issue of CounterPunch. There has been very little reporting from Gaza in the Western press for years although various Western humanitarian organizations and “peace activists” have been active there along with the United Nations Refugee organization.
3 Reported by Arutz Sheva Israel national news on March 22, 2004.
4 Set out in “Fighting Judea,” a mimeographed collection of broadcasts and broadsheets from 1946 and 1947 produced by the Irgun in English.
 
©  William R. Polk, March 24, 2004.
 
William R. Polk is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. After studies at Harvard and Oxford, he taught for several years at Harvard University.  Then, in 1961, President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State.  There, he was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center.  Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.  Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Polk’s Folly, An American Family History; and The Birth of America.  

Victory of Brutality

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Mar 14, 2004

A new species of officer is achieving greatness in the Israel Defense Forces. These people did most of their service as occupation officers, and their excellence is a function of the degree of violence and brutality they exercise against the Palestinians. The most striking example of this trend is Brigadier General Gadi Shamni, a graduate of Lebanon and Hebron, who last week concluded his tour of duty as commander of the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and was promoted to head of the Operations Division in the General Staff, a post which is a major step on the way to becoming a major general. The promotion of an officer of this type speaks volumes about the IDF’s value system and its order of priorities, far more than what it says about Shamni himself.

Perhaps not since the days when Ariel Sharon was a serving major general has the Gaza Strip seen an officer as violent, as boastful and as brutal as General Shamni. If Shamni’s predecessor, Brigadier General Yisrael Ziv, only mounted numerous useless operations against the lathes of Gaza, which also resulted in nothing more than unnecessary bloodshed but didn’t prevent the firing of Qassam rockets at Israeli targets, along came Shamni and initiated a series of showcase operations – totally pointless and only generated even more killing.

In the last of these operations, the one that resulted in the killing of 15 Palestinians last week, Shamni even articulated a new IDF doctrine: “stimulus and response.” The purpose of the operation, it was reported, was “to stimulate the armed individuals to come out and then kill them off.” This method, which led to the killing of innocent people, including children, drew no critical reaction. No one asked why every armed Palestinian is marked for death and why it’s necessary to “stimulate” armed people in Gaza altogether. Shamni decided, executed and was promoted. Some in the IDF also explained that the latest operation was actually meant to be a “farewell party” on the eve of the ceremony of the handover of command.

The widespread death and destruction that Shamni left behind from his 14 months of service in Gaza did not prevent his promotion, and may have even contributed to it.

The new species of officer, of which Shamni is the most prominent example, balks at no means of killing, never expresses sorrow or regret (not for the killing of innocent people and not for pointless operations), articulates clear political positions, and is rarely anything but arrogant in his speech. That’s the recipe for promotion. “We are winning in this confrontation every day, a few times,” Shamni boasted the day after the last operation in an interview to Haaretz.

Winning in Gaza? Winning what? Against whom? It’s hard to believe that in this day and age there are still officers in the IDF who talk like this. We’ve been “winning” in Gaza for 37 years, Shamni even wins a few times a day, but no lesson has been learned. The results of the victory: 1.5 million people imprisoned and destitute, living in subhuman conditions, whose hatred for Israel is only increasing.

To ensure the victory, Shamni introduced an operational routine of an invasion every few weeks using armored forces, straight into the heart of the refugee camps and the slum neighborhoods, on every occasion leaving behind dead Palestinians, many of them innocent passersby. No one is able to explain the point and purpose of this brutal presence, this constant delivering of more and more blows to an already downtrodden population. No one has been called to account for the terrorism that sprouted and will continue to sprout from these futile operations.

In Israel we count only the number of terrorists who are killed, never the terrorists who are born as a result of IDF operations, and the number of the newborn is legion.

The conscience of officers like Shamni is always clean and polished. The blood of the innocent people does not torment them. It’s doubtful whether questions of morality even occur to them. They “do the work” and nothing will stop them. If in 1998 the IDF commander in the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Zvi Poleg, expressed regret for the loss of an eye that a Palestinian baby girl suffered, the new generation of commanders will view any such remark as a sign of weakness. The eye of an infant? Who does that interest? We’re at war. A few months ago, when the IDF demolished the homes of seven families who had done nothing wrong, in Bureij refugee camp, Shamni labeled the action “surgical” without batting an eyelash; and when, among the ruins, a pregnant woman, Noha Makadama, mother of ten children, was killed before the eyes of her husband and children, he coldly said, “The IDF has no proof that the woman was killed.” Similarly, when his troops killed peace activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall and the photographer James Miller, in Rafah, Shamni did not find fault in their actions.

Knowing well which way the wind is blowing and well-versed in the dominant language of force, officers like Shamni do not hesitate to make political statements. None of them is brave enough to speak out against the continuation of the occupation, against the security damage caused by the checkpoints or against the security price of the settlements. “The withdrawal program is putting wind in the sales of the organizations,” Shamni said a few months ago. If the chief of staff can say so, then so can the divisional commander. But maybe it’s precisely Shamni’s operations that have put wind in the sails of the terrorists?

Having withdrawn from Lebanon, this occupation officer will not allow the scenes of the pullout to repeat themselves. “Look who we’re dealing with,” Shamni said in his farewell interview, referring to the terrorists whom he says use children as human shields. And who are we dealing with, at the very top of the IDF?

March 9, 2004
Madison Premiere of The Killing Zone

Tuesday, March 9
The Crossing
1127 University Avenue
(University and Charter)
7:00 pm

Wednesday, March 10
Grainger Hall
Morgridge Auditorium
(University and Park)
7:00 pm

The Madison-Rafah Sister City Project is hosting the Madison premiere of The Killing Zone, a 45-minute British documentary about conditions in Rafah and the murders of International Solidarity Movement workers Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, and British TV journalist James Miller. The film was made soon after Corrie’s death and during the shootings of Hurndall and Miller.

Laura Gordon will speak at both showings. Laura went to Israel with the “Birthright Israel” program, but wound up spending nearly a year in Rafah with the ISM trying to protect Palestinian civilians.

Admission to these benefit showings is free and open to the public, but a collection will be taken for Rafah relief projects. These projects will be guided by our recent delegation to Rafah, and will address education, medical aid, and emergency assistance to orphans and families.

Co-sponsored by WORT 89.9FM and the Madison-Arcatao (El Salvador) Sister City Project

For more information, contact: RafahSisterCity at Yahoo.com

Sharon is not the Problem

Ghadi Karmi, CounterPunch, February 20, 2004

The Sharon government is widely regarded, even by Israel’s friends, as a negative force in the current politics of the Middle East. Its brutal repression of the Palestinians, its intransigence over engaging in the peace process and its defiance of world opinion on such matters as settlement expansion and the separation wall has alarmed everyone concerned with this issue. Seldom before has Israel provoked such criticism from friend and foe alike, and there is a feeling that a different Israeli leadership, drawn perhaps from the Labour party and the Zionist left, would restore the previous status quo. Such a new leadership could be expected to re-start the peace process and offer the Palestinians something more satisfactory and all this would lead to peace and stability.

This widely held view ignores the real problem. As a Zionist, Ariel Sharon is as faithful and committed a servant as the Jewish state could ever have hoped for. He has merely followed the tenets of Zionism to their logical conclusion. It is not he who should be castigated but the ideology he and the state of Israel espouses. For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism was all about, a spate of recently published pieces will make salutary reading.

The most remarkable of these is an interview with the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, that appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz on January 4th 2004, followed by a second article by Morris in the January 14th edition of the London Guardian newspaper. In these he explains with breathtaking candour what the Zionist project entailed.

Few Zionist outside the ranks of the extreme right have been prepared to be so brutally honest and Benny Morris claims to be on the political left. More significantly, it was he who first exposed the true circumstances of Israel’s creation. Using Israel State archive documents for his groundbreaking book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem published in 1987, he was hailed as a courageous ‘revisionist historian’. His work suggested to many that, having learned the facts of the case, he was bound to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. In the last few years, however, he has been expressing ever more hardline views, as if he regretted the pioneering research that helped expose the savage reality of Israel’s establishment. This shift seems to have culminated in his most recent utterances about the nature of Zionism. Unpalatable as these are, we must thank him for saying so bluntly what all Zionists, however ‘liberal’, at bottom really think but do not say.

Right from Israel’s inception Western states have been prepared to swallow this ideology, since they were not its direct target. But for Arabs, it was different. There was a time when they understood Zionism to be the basic cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. From the 1920s onwards, the Palestinians, being the ones most targeted, feared that Zionism would take over their country. They tried to fight it but failed and the Zionist project took hold. As this happened, the other Arabs joined the fight and it was commonplace to hear Israelis being called simply, ‘the Zionists’ and Israel, ‘the Zionist entity’. People wrote tracts, articles and books about Zionism and it seemed a black and white issue.

But after the 1967 war, a new ambiguity appeared. Resolution 242, accepted by the Arab states, introduced the idea that the basis of the conflict was the Israeli occupation of post-1967 territory, without reference to what had gone before. This set the pattern for all subsequent Arab-Israeli peace proposals which aimed to bring about Israeli withdrawal from these territories in exchange for Arab recognition. The first successful application of this principle was the 1979 Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979, trading Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory occupied in 1967 for a peace treaty. By the time of the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the (post-1967) land-for-peace formula was firmly established. Madrid involved the Arab front-line states only, but in the March 2002 Saudi peace proposal, the offer had been upgraded to one of Israeli withdrawal from all the 1967 territories in exchange for normalisation of relations with the whole Arab world.

Meanwhile, the Arab stance towards Israel as an illegitimate body forcibly implanted into the region whose ideology, Zionism, inevitably meant aggression and expansion to the detriment of the Arab world, quietly slipped out of view. Now, it was only Israel’s post-1967 occupation that was the problem and, once rectified, Israeli integration into the region could proceed. The Palestinians had a clearer view of Zionism. In 1969, the PLO propounded a vision of a democratic state replacing Israel that would give equal rights to all its citizens, Muslims, Christians and Jews. This was a direct challenge to the idea of an exclusive Jewish state, but more importantly a refusal to acquiesce in the Zionist theft of 1948 Palestine.

However, the huge power imbalance between the parties forced the PLO to modify its stance and by 1974, a decision was taken to accept much less. The two-state solution was born and in 1988, the PLO formally recognised Israel in its 1948 borders. By 1993, the PLO had signed up to the Oslo Agreement that finally legitimised Zionism. The terms of the agreement excluded any discussion of 1948 Israel and confined themselves to the dispute over the 1967 territories. And by accepting these terms, the PLO signalled its acceptance of the original Zionist claim to Palestine. This process has found its apotheosis in the recent Geneva Accords, which require the Palestinians to recognise Israel as ‘the state of the Jews’. No greater turnabout in history could be imagined.

Accompanying this evolution of attitudes has been a sort of Arab flirtation with Zionism. Following the Israel-Egypt treaty, a number of Arab-Israeli projects and initiatives came into being. These were mirrored in the West during the 1980s, where various Arab-Jewish ‘dialogue groups’ sprang up and the breaking of traditional taboos became enticing. Exchanges between Arab and Israeli scholars and academics became popular and after the Oslo Agreement numerous Israeli-Palestinians joint projects were initiated.

Contacts between several Arab states and Israel were made, either officially or in secret. Even previously hardline anti-Israel states like Libya and Syria have started to make overtures towards Israel, (though admittedly with mixed motives). The majority of these initiatives have involved ‘liberal’ Zionists, not the small minority of radical but marginalised anti-Zionist Jews. It is as if the old antipathy towards Zionism as the root cause of the Palestinian tragedy and the turmoil in the Middle East had been forgotten. Like Marxist terminology in the West today, the anti-Zionist rhetoric so prevalent amongst Arabs in the past, is passé and many believe that Zionists are people you really can do business with.

At this point, Benny Morris’s revelations are like a slap in the face. He reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape and massacre. His recent researches, cited in the new edition of his book, The Birth of the Palestine refugee problem revisited, provide the authentic evidence. The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic cleansing and, he asserts, more may be necessary in future to ensure its survival. Force was always essential to the imposition and maintenance of Israel, he explains; native hostility to the project was inevitable from the start and it had to be countered by overwhelming strength. The Palestinians will always pose a threat and they must therefore be controlled and “caged in”. He recognises that the Jewish state project is an impossible idea and that, logically, it should never have succeeded. Nevertheless, it was worthwhile because it was a moral project justified, despite the damage it caused, by the overriding need for a solution to Jewish suffering. The Arabs in any case have a tribal culture, he says, “with no moral inhibitions” and “they understand only force”. Muslims are no better. “There’s a deep problem in Islamin which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy openness, and creativity are alien.”

These utterances capture the essence of Zionism: that a Jewish state could never have been established without force, coercion and ethnic cleansing; that its survival depended on superior power to crush all opposition; that it was fired by a conviction of its moral rightness which accorded Jews a special place over others; and because of this, viewed everything as instrumental to its goal. Morris regrets the Palestinians suffering entailed in Israel’s creation, but sees it as a necessary evil in pursuit of the greater good. “The right of refugees to return to their homes seems natural and just”, he says. “But this ‘right of return’ needs to be weighed against the right to life and well-being of the five million Jews who currently live in Israel.”

Thus he eloquently shows why Zionism is a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral righteousness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means nuclear weapons, massive military force, alliances with unsavoury regimes, theft and manipulation of other people’s resources, aggression and occupation, the crushing of Palestinian and all other forms of resistance to its survival, however inhuman – then so be it. The truth is of course that the problem for Zionism was always how to keep Palestine without the Palestinians. And hence today’s Israeli anxieties about the so-called Palestinian ‘demographic threat’. As the impasse of ending the intifada, despite draconian suppression, persists, there is a near panic over ‘demographic spill over’ diluting Israel’s ‘Jewish character’. Limor Livnat, Israel’s education minister, put this eloquently in a radio interview. “We’re involved here,” she said, “in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the JewsIsraelis not a state of all its citizens” The Palestinian prime Minster’s recent (tactical) proposal of a binational state has only increased the panic. Opinion polls show that 57 per cent of Israelis support transferring the Arabs (Haaretz, 31.12.03) and government ministers like Avigdor Liebrman advocate this idea quite openly.

It is against this background that the monstrous barrier wall being erected in the West Bank can be understood. Hence also Ariel Sharon’s offer last December of a ‘unilateral’ withdrawal from 40 percent of the West Bank, reversing the classical Likud position on keeping all of the land. A January opinion poll showed that 60 per cent of Israelis supported this. In similar vein, his hardline deputy Ehud Olmert, has proposed a partition of the land, including Jerusalem, into two states “because of demography” But that problem exists inside Israel too which is currently 20 per cent Arab and increasing. It is estimated that by 2010, there will be an Arab majority in the area of Israel/Palestine. How will the Zionists stem the tide and keep the state Jewish?

If Zionism is to remain, there are few choices. As Morris says, only by building an ‘iron wall’, by eternal vigilance and superior force to overcome ‘the barbarians who want to take our lives’. The two-state solution is only a stopgap because he thinks the Palestinians will not be satisfied and sooner or later, they will destroy the Jewish state. Ariel Sharon has done no more than follow these ideals to the letter. His style may be more blatant, but at its basis it is no different to all the other Zionists that have ruled the Jewish state.

The Zionist idea has lost none of its force today; it is deeply implanted in the hearts of most Jews, whether Israelis or not. No one should be under any illusion that it is a spent force, no matter what the currently fashionable discourse about ‘post-Zionism’ or ‘cultural Zionism’ may be. No region on earth should have been required to give this ideology houseroom, let alone the backward and ill-equipped Arab world. Nevertheless, we owe a debt of gratitude to Benny Morris for disabusing us of such notions. But a project that is morally one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no long-term future. The fact that it has got this far is remarkable but that holds out no guarantee of survival. As he himself says, “Destruction could be the end of this process.”

GHADA KARMI is a Palestinian writer and academic living in London. Her latest book is a memoir, “In Search of Fatima” (Verso). She is Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.

Return to Rafah: Journey to a land out of bounds

Jennifer Loewenstein, The Electronic Intifada, 17 February 2004

Pictured, Maha, the wife of Ibrahim Aoda Abu Shatat, sits together with baby Zyad in her house during shooting at 3:30 AM. Their house is 40 meters from the border. (Johannes Abeling)

The border between Gaza and Egypt passes through a city called Rafah. Israeli tanks regularly drive along the border in the middle of the night and shoot randomly at the surrounding houses. Sometimes it is just shooting, sometimes without warning bulldozers come to destroy some houses ‘for security reasons’. The fathers in the area near the border stay up every night until 4:30 AM, in case the tanks come to their street and they have to quickly evacuate their family. The children mostly don’t sleep well because of the shooting. Many children have symptoms of stress.

Said Zoroub drives a white pick-up truck with the words “Rafah Municipality” painted on the driver’s side in Arabic and English, a gift from the Norwegians.[1] Less than an hour after my arrival in Rafah, Zoroub, the mayor, receives an urgent call on his cell phone. An Israeli bulldozer has struck a water main eight feet under the earth in the process of demolishing homes along the border between Rafah and Egypt. This has cut off the water supply to the western half of the city. From the passenger side of the municipality truck I get to survey the latest damage.

Outwardly Zoroub looks unperturbed, but his words belie the appearance. “We live each day here in a state of emergency.” On either side of the road the homes and buildings on the streets of Rafah are dotted with bullet holes as if suffering from a contagious disease. The nearer we get, the more ravaged are the buildings —crumbling from disrepair, caved in where tank shells and mortar fire have hit them during the night, their inhabitants make-shifting roofs, walls and doorways as needed. Lines of drying laundry hang outside the windows and political graffiti and posters of martyrs decorate the walls. Poverty and ruin define the city landscape. The edge of town is a no-man’s-land of rubble torn up and rolled over by the heavy tracks and claws of the armored vehicles that rule this terrain.

Puddles, stones and broken glass adorn the path alongside the homes on the city’s perimeter that the Israeli army has blasted into gaping gray caverns too treacherous to stray into for long. More and more children appear from the alleyways of the neighborhood to our left following us curiously toward the end of the street. Men and women come out to greet the mayor as we pursue the sound of the tank in the distance that is flattening the earth beneath it, its guns pointed toward us. A bulldozer is pushing up mounds of dirt and rubble behind it with a steady roar: more homes gone and no water in western Rafah until the Israeli authorities give clearance for the municipality to send out a repair crew that won’t be shot on sight. A boy points to a hole in a wall from where I can snap pictures without being easily detected. From the same vantage point, children can watch the progress of the demolition. I have only taken two photos when the mayor tells me to “get away now, it’s dangerous.” It is Thursday afternoon the 15th of January 2004.

There are tall IDF watchtowers everywhere along the Egyptian and Israeli borders with Rafah as well as between Rafah and the Gush Katif settlement bloc on the southeastern bend of the Mediterranean Sea. The beaches of Rafah, a short walk away for most of the city’s residents, have been off limits to Rafah residents since the beginning of the second Intifada denying them the only relief they have from the unbearable squalor of the Strip. Driving past the edge of the Tel as-Sultan district, the area exposed to the settlement watchtowers, the mayor picks up speed sensing our vulnerability. Many people have died along this stretch of road hit by bullets fired randomly by soldiers in the towers. The local boys nevertheless still attempt to use open spaces like this one as a soccer field on ‘quiet’ days.

Further on Zoroub points out an orphanage and new, prefabricated homes put up by UNRWA after the IDF incursions of October 2003 that left 1,780 people homeless, 15 civilians dead and dozens wounded.[2] There are people still camped out in tents, and public buildings still converted into emergency shelters.

Northwest of the town are the two fresh water wells rebuilt with emergency funds from Norway after the IDF destroyed them in January 2003.[3] A caretaker shows us fresh bullet holes in the walls of his trailer-like quarters and in the big blue sign along the fence outside announcing the gift of the new wells. He recounts how bullets have of late been ricocheting off the sides of the wells themselves advising us against standing there outside for long.

The day before, in East Jerusalem, a man named Roger from Save the Children told me not to go to Rafah, that it wasn’t safe. “I was there just two weeks ago working on a water project. I was talking to a guy manning a water pump. He was wearing a helmet and a jacket identifying himself as a city worker but he was so exposed, you know —in full view of a watchtower. Two days later he was shot dead.”

On the way back to the mayor’s house we pass fields of multicolored carnations and stop at a primitive flower factory. The flowers are cut and bound together for export to Holland —if the Israeli port authorities allow them to pass. If they dont get out within a few days they wilt and die even in the cold trucks. A man in the factory offers me a bouquet of red carnations. Driving back, Zoroub waves his hands in the direction of the field, “I wanted you to see something romantic in Rafah.”

Confronting the Wall

I left for Rafah on 11 January 2004 as part of a three-person pilot delegation to the city. We represented the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, an organization founded in February 2003 to establish people-to-people ties between our two communities. Sistering projects are well known in Madison, Wisconsin — a Midwestern University town north of Chicago. Madison has official, City Council-approved sister cities with El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, Cuba, Vietnam, and Lithuania among others. It seemed time, some of us thought, to build ties with a city in Palestine though a vote making this official has not yet been taken. Although in our first year we had had a number of highly successful local events and were welcomed by many in the community here, we were unprepared for the obstacles we encountered trying to get into the Gaza Strip.

Since the deaths of Rachel Corrie, Thomas Hurndall, and James Miller at the hands of the Israeli military in Rafah last spring, entrance into the Gaza Strip has been increasingly difficult.[4] What became clearer than ever to me as I struggled to get permission to enter the Strip this January was that internationals are being kept out for two key reasons: to hide as much as possible what is taking place daily and to avoid any further “mishaps” —i.e., the killing or wounding of internationals that might draw unwanted publicity to the area again.

The Israeli military forces kill Palestinians nearly every day in cruel and horrible circumstances. Most of the reports about these deaths and the unending atrocities against both the people and the land never make it into our media. When they do, they are packaged as justifiable violence against “terrorists” and “militants”, as “retaliatory strikes”or as actions of “self-defense”. With the US and Israeli media and foreign policy establishments spotlighting the “War on Terror” few stop to question the reduction of entire groups of people into often grotesquely caricatured national foes bent on destroying “freedom” and “democracy”. One result has been that nearly 3000 Palestinian deaths have had no effect on the majority of Americans —most of whom have no idea what is happening in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or elsewhere in the Middle East— even though their government is directly responsible for them. When an international dies, however, especially a young American girl like Rachel Corrie whose purpose for being in Rafah was to engage in non-violent resistance, damage control becomes necessary —despite concerted attempts by some to portray Corrie as a “terrorist sympathizer”.

On 4 January 2004 Israel issued a new series of restrictions designed to further isolate the Palestinian people and to prevent the situation in the territories from as much formal or informal international monitoring as possible. The restrictions require prior written authorization for all citizens attempting to enter areas technically under the control of the Palestinian Authority (those known as “Area A” under the 1993 Oslo Agreement). Persons wishing to enter Gaza “are required to fill out a form requesting entry and to submit it to the Foreign Relations Office in the Coordination & Liaison Administration in the Gaza Strip, situated at Erez crossing.[5] These requests take a minimum of 5 business days to process, can be rejected at will, and often require repeated and frustrating attempts, as people we spoke to affirmed[6]. Attempting to get into Area A without permission can result in legal action, deportation, and the prevention of future entry into the state of Israel.

The excuse for these restrictions, which have been more or less in place since the spring of 2003 but codified only recently, is to ensure the safety of foreigners entering the Palestinian territories, routinely described as “dangerous”. The real reason, however, is not only to keep out activists such as those belonging to the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) but to keep people in general away from the Gaza Strip. These restrictions follow other, equally unsettling policies such as the requirement issued last spring that all visitors to Gaza sign a waiver absolving Israel of all responsibility for death or injury caused by the Israeli military.[7] International humanitarian aid organizations and foreign journalists have sometimes, but not always been, exempted. Nevertheless, the short-term effect of such policies has been to discourage all but the most determined from going to the Gaza Strip, and sometimes the West Bank. Their long-term effect could be far more devastating.

Internal Checkpoints

We arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday the 11th of January and, after security personnel interrogated two of the three of us, headed for the Jerusalem Hotel in East Jerusalem[8]. We understood that saying we were on our way to Rafah in the Gaza Strip would draw unwanted attention. Nonetheless, we felt reasonably confident we would arrive at our destination if we made it past Tel Aviv because we had a letter of support from US Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), a long-time supporter of Israel but also of Madison’s sister cities.

Before we left, Baldwin’s State Department aide, Andrea Bagley, requested —and received — comprehensive information on the purpose of our visit, our meeting agenda during the week, the names and contact information of the Rafah municipal authorities hosting us, a clear and detailed description of our organization and its goals, and our full names and passport numbers. Her letter requested that the appropriate authorities in Israel honor our desire to visit Rafah and facilitate our entry into the Gaza Strip.[9] In addition to this letter, two of us had valid press cards from local media outlets desiring reports on our experiences in Rafah.

Journalists visiting Israel must have their press cards validated at the Beit Agron [press house] in West Jerusalem especially if they want to enter the Gaza Strip, as I made clear I did. I therefore went to the Beit Agron first thing in the morning only to be told my card was inadequate without 1) a letter of assignment from the organization that had issued it and 2) a fax from the Israeli Consulate in Chicago acknowledging that the media organization for which I was working was legitimate. I followed this up immediately, phoning Norman Stockwell at WORT radio in Madison asking him to fax a letter to Richard Pater at the Beit Agron. Stockwell also agreed to phone the Israeli Consulate to register WORT as a legitimate media source. Because there is an 8-hour time difference between Madison and Jerusalem I knew the process would take another day.

In the meantime, we decided to visit the American Consulate in Jerusalem to move ahead with our letter expecting this would prove more fruitful. As Americans, we got into the consulate relatively easily and were directed into a waiting room. Minutes later we were called up to one of the service windows where I presented our letter — on official Congressional stationery — to the American attendant saying that we hoped to get to Rafah to fulfill the obligations of our delegation asking that he help facilitate this.

The words barely made it out of my mouth before I was cut off by the curt reply, “we have nothing to do with Rafah and nothing to do with Gaza. Gaza is a dangerous place and you shouldn’t be going there. If you want to talk to the relevant personnel at the [US] Embassy in Tel Aviv, go ahead but I’m sure they will tell you the same thing.” He shoved the letter back at us over our naive protestations that this was from a US Congressperson. We were dismissed and went back outside where it was raining. This was our first direct experience with the extent of the collusion between United States and Israel.

I went back to the hotel to e-mail Andrea in Tammy Baldwin’s office. By the next day she had faxed another letter to both the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the US Embassy in Tel Aviv appealing to them yet again to assist us in our project.[10] Meanwhile, I telephoned Richard Pater repeatedly at the Beit Agron to follow up on my press card: the letter of assignment had arrived but not the telex from the Israeli Consulate in Chicago despite Stockwell’s repeated phone calls. Exasperated, I phoned the press division of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv and spoke to division Chief Paul Patin who was both sympathetic and helpful. He phoned Pater to vouch for WORT radio (it turned out Patin’s neighbors in Israel were from Madison, Wisconsin) and he promised to fax a letter on my behalf, which Pater received the next morning. I phoned Pater six times between 8:30 and 11:00am on Wednesday 14 January to inquire about the status of my press card. He kept putting me off saying there were still some “matters” he needed to look into. He refused to elaborate.

For reasons that are unclear to me, I was finally — around 2pm on Wednesday — issued an Israeli press card (valid for one week). Interestingly, this was just hours after a female suicide bomber, Reem Riyashi, blew herself up at the Erez crossing’s Industrial Zone killing three Israeli soldiers and an Israeli border policeman.[11] Word had it that Erez would be closed indefinitely. Hamas took credit for the attack.

On a hunch, I phoned an IDF spokesperson who, contrary to the rumors, said that with my press card I should have no trouble getting into Gaza. I put my suitcase in a cab and we drove off, arriving at the Erez crossing just before dark. There were 5 armored personnel carriers parked outside the visitor’s station but otherwise the crossing was empty. Three young soldiers in the visitor’s station sat huddled together with long faces. I handed them my passport and press card expressing my sadness over the deaths caused by that morning’s suicide bombing. “My friend is dead,” said the young female soldier who handed back my ID with the gate pass that finally allowed me to proceed.

That night the streets of Gaza City were flooded from torrential rains and waters gushing up from the useless, decaying gutters. Cars were stopped in the streets standing in half a foot of water and men were laying wooden planks from the curbs to help them cross shallower areas. The power had gone out in a good part of the city making it look more rundown than ever in the darkness. My taxi driver took a circuitous route around the worst areas and dropped me off at the Deira hotel hoping I would find a vacant room. In fact, the hotel was empty.

The desk clerk explained that all the journalists planning to stay there that night had cancelled their reservations because Erez was closed. To his surprise I explained that I had just come through Erez. Now I had the beautiful villa-style hotel to myself. I phoned my companions in East Jerusalem urging them to follow up with our Congressional letter at the US Embassy and then, at 8pm, gave a half-hour live interview to WORT radio in Madison as agreed. The next morning I left for Rafah passing the north-south checkpoint at Deir al-Balah with relative ease: we waited only 45 minutes before being allowed to proceed —unusual for a place where delays anywhere between 2 hours and four days are common.

The Terrorist Infrastructure

Bullets flew at us like hailstones when we left Naila’s home that first evening in Rafah. For two hours I’d sat together with Sumaiya, the mayor’s wife, and her sisters and their children watching their wide eyes and smiles as, one by one, they stood before me to attempt a sentence in English looking to me for approval and then running away in gleeful embarrassment. The older girls passed around dinner, pastries and coffee and Noof, Said Zoroub’s beautiful 17-year-old daughter, asked me what I thought of Islam and if I would tell her what the bad things were that people in America said about it.

Some of the kids were roughhousing in the background when the power went out leaving us in darkness. The littlest boy, Karim, let out a shriek calling, “mama!” and someone went to look for a battery-operated lamp. Electricity, like water and phone lines, is never taken for granted.

We decided to leave when the lights came back on and Talal, the mayor’s friend, came to pick us up, but we had to cram ourselves back into the doorway when bullets flew at us from the watchtower in the distance hitting the side of the building or shooting past us into the night. I would never have left that doorway had I been alone, but for the others the routine for these episodes of indiscriminate firing was to pause for a moment to wait for quiet, then dart into the car and duck down below the windows while the driver sped away. Up the road two cars had collided racing away from the same scene, their drivers looking dejected standing there in the middle of the dark street surveying the damage.

Back at the mayor’s home, I received a call from Laura Gordon, the last American ISM activist in Rafah[12]. Would I come by the office and meet her friends? They were planning a demonstration for Friday. Had I heard that Tom Hurndall had died? Ten months in a coma and peace finally came. The martyr’s posters had already been printed with his young face looking out at us. Now they would be plastered along the city walls next to all the others. The demonstrators would march up Keer Street the next morning to stand at the place where he’d been shot in the head attempting to pull two children out of the line of fire.

Tanks barrel down Keer Street when major invasions into Rafah begin. It is a wretched slum-like street that dead-ends in a large mound of earth, stone blocks and rubble across from the no-man’s-land between it and the IDF’s positions. On Friday morning I stood on top of that mound gazing across the way at another fortress-like bunker harboring Israeli guards. I couldn’t see them but I sensed their eyes on us. The demonstrators, almost all children, wore bullseye placards on their shirts and carried the banners, “Palestinians and Internationals are Targets for the Israeli Army.” A young girl pointed to a small hole in the wall of the building at the end of Keer Street, the mark of the bullet, I was told, that ultimately killed Hurndall.

I have heard many say that the Gaza Strip is a prison with the sky for a ceiling. Its inhabitants live surrounded by electrified fences, motion censors, barbed wire and metal barriers, except along the sea coast where Israeli gunboats patrol the shores. Israel prevents most Gazans from leaving the territory or traveling freely even between its overcrowded camps and towns since it is controlled by extensive checkpoints that can turn half-an-hour’s travel into a four day journey. Its military can choose to close off sections of Gaza from all contact with the rest of the Strip whenever it pleases, although residents of the 17 illegal settlements, which take up more than a quarter of this tiny area, can travel back and forth to Israel with ease on the Jewish-only roads[13].

The Gaza Strip is far more than a prison, however. One need only spend time in Khan Yunis or Bureij, Jabalia or Nuseirat, Gaza City or Beit Hanoun to recognize the flaw in the prison analogy. In Gaza you are more than an inmate in a giant penitentiary. You are a walking human target, shadowed by hired killers who can destroy you and your surroundings at will. Your home belongs to bulldozers and dynamite, your cities and refugee camps to F-16s and helicopter gun ships. In Gaza your livelihood is diminished each day by an impoverishment that is as deliberate as it is merciless. There is neither escape from desperation nor refuge from terror. Nowhere is this more evident than in Rafah.

Since 29 September 2000, the Israeli army has killed 275 people in Rafah, more than three dozen of them since October 2003. Seventy-six of the dead have been children. It has destroyed a total of 1,759 homes, 430 of them since October 2003 displacing a total of 12,643 residents, 2,894 since October 2003. Unemployment is nearing 70% in Rafah, with a poverty rate of 83.4% as of the end of the third quarter of 2003.[14] Malnutrition affects a large number of Rafah’s children as does Post Traumatic Stress Disorder[15].

Rafah, a city with a population of about 120,000 (smaller than Ramallah, Nablus, Gaza City, and Hebron) has lost more people than any other city in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since the beginning of the second Intifada. It is the poorest of all Palestinian cities, and its Shaboura district is the poorest section of Rafah. There, whole families live together in one-room shacks made of corrugated iron with dirt floors and sheet metal, cardboard and tarpaulin roofs. Children run barefoot in the streets, ill-clad and ill-fed. Nowhere in Palestine will one find conditions as miserable and destitute as they are in Rafah, where approximately 80% of whose citizens are refugees sometimes two and three times over.[16]

When Israeli tanks came rolling through the streets of Rafah in October 2003 the western media reported they were looking for tunnels linking homes in Rafah to Egypt for the purpose of smuggling weapons. The Palestinian leadership was failing to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure” and so it was up to Israel to do the job itself. We are supposed to accept unquestioningly that such tunnels and the trickle of weapons they deliver pose a serious threat to Israel’s massive military arsenal, and that the process of searching for these tunnels necessarily involves the destruction of 2,000 people’s homes and all of their possessions.

To doubt this would jeopardize the logic of continued occupation and of the greater “war on terror” Americans and their Israeli allies must fight together. It could lead to the more likely conclusion that the level of death and destruction routine in Rafah are part of Israel’s plan to clear —at whatever cost to the inhabitants— a wide area in between the Egypt-Rafah border in order to turn it into a closed military zone under direct Israeli control and to terrorize and intimidate the Palestinian population.

Establishing a CMZ (closed military zone) will remove the last international boundary between Palestinian territory and a country other than Israel guaranteeing that the Gaza Strip will become permanently quarantined. It will complete the destruction of the Gazan economy since trade with Egypt will, for all practical purposes, cease. It will advance the process of gradual, internal flight away from Gaza’s border regions into the already overcrowded refugee camps and cities of the interior. Devastation and the implosion of an entire society will be accelerated with the United States’ blessing.

Just after the October incursions, Amnesty International issued a statement labeling Israel’s actions a war crime and calling for a halt to the extensive demolition of family homes. Two weeks of destruction, dispossession and death during which time Israeli forces found three tunnels and no weapons.[17]

“Gaza is a Dangerous Place”

Heavy tank and machine gun fire blast the nights wide open in Rafah. For six hours straight I listen to the continual pounding of bullets and tank shells outside my window. Now and then an unidentifiable explosion interrupts the shooting, a silent pause creeps over the skies, and the routine begins again. But the silence above me is not absolute: in the distance on the ground I can hear the non-stop rumble of machines at work; bulldozers devouring the edges of the town.

On the morning of 17 January, Arij Zoroub knocked on my door to find out if I was all right. She wanted to know if I’d been afraid. I told her I was angry. How could I explain the feeling of being transported away into a nightmare world where you expect the next blast to come through your wall —and that you almost wish for it so you can end your impotent seclusion? that in your mind you stand in the shadowy, cracked-open homes where the ragged partisans shoot back at the army and pray for them to hit their targets.

On the roof of the mayor’s house, Arij points past the homes behind us to survey the night’s damage: The familiar flattened landscape gapes back at me like a dead man’s eyes. More homes gone and part of a mosque destroyed. Dozens more people displaced. Disproportionate force unleashed against pitiful guerrillas determined to fight back and to drag all of Rafah in with them if necessary. What difference will that make? Israel’s message is clear: we will destroy you, if not in death then in life.

In the two weeks following my departure, at least 30 more homes vanished from Rafah and nearly 600 more people were displaced. Seven more people died, including an infant, while two more men were the victims of Israel’s “targeted assassinations” policy. Both were unarmed when they were executed.[18] A photojournalist contact sent me photos from the latest violence. These are the images that best summarize life in Rafah, the kinds of images that clutter my memory when I think back to my brief stay this January, even after the hours of working visits to the municipality, youth centers, women’s organizations, the ministries of health and education, popular refugees’ committees, and a rehabilitation center for the deaf; after days of note-taking and conversation about moving forward and building bridges between communities[19].

Before leaving Gaza City I’d found emailed messages from US Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin’s office waiting for me online. The same friendly aide, so eager to assist us when we started on our journey, had received correspondence from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. Now her tone was official and serious. She was “urging” me to get out of Gaza away from “potentially dangerous areas and situations” and was conveying the State Department’s concern that American Citizens not be “exposed” to such dangers.

She had attached three items: a letter from Alison Dilworth of the American Consulate in Jerusalem informing her that American Citizens should not be traveling to the Gaza Strip; a “Public Announcement: Warden Message” issued by the US Government on 15 October 2003 (just after an official American convoy traveling in the Gaza Strip was hit by a bomb) recommending that all Americans in Gaza leave immediately and that their evacuation be facilitated by the Israelis; and a “Worldwide Caution” issued by the US State Department on 22 December 2003 warning American citizens abroad about the potential threat to their lives from Al Qaida[20]. It seemed the office of our US Congressperson had been made to fall into line with the US policy of sanctioning Israeli actions.

When I tried to leave Gaza through the Erez Crossing on the evening of 17 January, Israeli soldiers ordered me to stop before I passed the last barricade. I was left waiting for more than two hours in the dark surrounded by concrete blocks. If I moved forward, I knew I could be shot. I shouted repeatedly at the soldiers in the Israeli bunker at the checkpoint to please let me through because I had a flight to catch. My shouts were met with sarcastic remarks and threats, “Erez is closed, go back” and “we heard you the first time; you can be quiet now”. Only after continuing to holler that I was an American citizen and needed to leave was I finally instructed to proceed through the electronic security gate. At the window of the bunker, a helmeted young soldier grabbed my passport and stamped it huffily saying that he hadn’t been able to let me through before he’d gotten clearance from a higher authority. A voice behind him echoed guiltily, “We are just little screws in a big machine”. Would this be the justification years hence for the horrors of the Israeli occupation?

The air was cold when my taxi drove me off into the night.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and human rights activist. She lived and worked in the Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in South Beirut, Lebanon during the summers of 2000 and 2001, and worked at the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, Gaza for 5 months in 2002. She has participated in delegations to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and was among the first internationals into the Jenin Refugee camp after its destruction during “Operation Defensive Shield” in April 2002. In February 2003 Jennifer founded the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and visited Rafah in January 2004 for its first delegation to the city. She has written and spoken extensively about her experiences. Jennifer teaches Professional Communications at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Endnotes

[1] Norway has provided development assistance to Palestine since 1993 to “help prevent any further disintegration of the political, social and economic basis for the peace process.” From 1999-2003 Norway pledged NOK 1.3 billion in aid to the Palestinian Territories making these areas one of the single largest recipients of bilateral aid from Norway since 1994. There was evidence of the Norwegian development assistance all over Rafah (indeed it is sobering just how much international aid in general is holding together the infrastructures of Palestinian cities, towns, and refugee camps). The two new fresh water wells on the outskirts of Rafah are one example of emergency Norwegian aid.

[2] The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published a report on 28 January 2004 detailing the consequences of IDF operations in Rafah. It found that “Some of those made homeless by IDF operations moved into smaller units, which in most cases are insufficient for the size of the family. Others have migrated northwards in search of accommodation, or —in exceptional cases— moved into abandoned dwellings adjacent to the buffer zones that were left by other families fearful that their homes would be targeted. An increasing number of families whose homes were destroyed are relying on tents for shelter. Tents are being provided by UNRWA and ICRC.” The homeless figures I quote above are from this report. Others estimated the number of people made homeless during the October 2003 raids at around 2000.

[3] For a report on the destruction of Rafah’s two fresh water wells in January 2003, see “Danger: Rafah’s fresh water wells,” by Amira Hass of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, 5 February 2003. The wells provided about 50% of the drinking and household water to the city of Rafah and Hass suggests they were deliberately destroyed.

[4] Rachel Corrie was an American ISM (International Solidarity Movement) activist who was crushed to death by a bulldozer in Rafah on 16 March 2003. She was standing in a flat, open area wearing a bright orange vest and carrying a bullhorn shouting to the bulldozer driver to stop the demolition of family homes. According to an Israeli investigation, her death was an accident. Tom Hurndall was a British ISM activist shot in the head on 11 April 2003. He died in the UK in January 2004 after lying in a coma for ten months. Like Corrie, Hurndall had been wearing a bright orange vest with reflective stripes. He had been trying to move children away from an area where there was active IDF firing. A Bedouin soldier in Israel has recently been charged with killing him. James Miller was an award-winning cameraman making a film in Rafah on how violence was affecting children. He was shot in the neck by Israeli gunfire on 2 May 2003 while wearing a jacket marked “press” and waving a white flag as he approached Israeli troops. He died while awaiting evacuation.

[5] To view the document on the new, 4 January 2004 Israeli restrictions on travel into the Palestinian Territories go to: www.palsolidarity.org/pressreleases/entryrestrictions.php

[6] While in East Jerusalem, my companions and I spoke to a number of individuals who had faced difficulties getting in and out of Gaza including the acting manager of the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, Peter Huff-Rousselle, and a young man working for the World Bank who asked not to be named. Their experiences were significant in that these two were indirectly or directly (respectively) involved with international aid organizations for which such restrictions might have been more relaxed.

[7] To view a copy of the Gaza Waiver absolving Israel of responsibility for the deaths of internationals at the hands of the Israeli military go to: electronicIntifada.net/v2/article1452.shtml

[8] I was not interrogated but my companions, George Arida and Francis Bradley, were each questioned and searched in an ordeal taking more than two hours. There are many possible reasons for this. It is significant to me, however, that I have yet to be questioned in Tel Aviv although I have been to the West Bank and Gaza Strip on many occasions, have written extensively and critically on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have worked in Gaza City, and have Syrian and Lebanese stamps in my passport. I tend to think the ease with which I pass through security in Tel Aviv is related to my Jewish last name, Loewenstein.

[9] A copy of the Bagley/Baldwin letter and all further correspondence between myself and Congresswoman Baldwin’s office can be found at the MRSCP (Madison-Rafah Sister City Project) website:
www.Madison-Rafah.org

[10] See footnote 9.

[11] There are numerous articles on this Hamas-sponsored suicide bombing focusing on the fact that the bomber, Reem Riyashi, was a 22 year old married mother of two. See, for example, Chris McGreal’s “Palestinians Shocked at Use of Suicide Mother” in The Guardian on 27 January 2004. What has been left out repeatedly is that the victims in this case were all associated with the Israeli military (three soldiers and one border police guard) and the bombing took place on occupied land making the attack arguably wholly legitimate.

[12] Laura has returned to the US and is doing a speaking tour across the country.

[13] Much has been made of the recent development that Ariel Sharon is planning to evacuate the 17 Jewish settlements in Gaza. There are in fact 23 settlements in Gaza, as noted by Amira Hass in “This mortal coil”, Ha’aretz, 13 February 2004. What he said was, “I have given an order to plan for the evacuation of 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip.” An order to plan for the evacuation is not the same as an order to evacuate, which is yet to be given. Nonetheless, many have known for years that Israel does not ‘need’ Gaza and that giving up the settlements there could provide some strategic leverage for Israel, keen to annex more Palestinian land in the West Bank for its settlements there with Washington’s approval. Indeed, some say that Sharon expects the West Bank in return for ‘giving up’ the Gaza Strip. According to Sharon, “It is my intention to carry out an evacuation – sorry, a relocation – of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements,” (“PM: I gave order to plan evacuation of 17 Gaza settlements”, article by Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz, 3 February 2004.) Other analysts, such as Mouin Rabbani and Amira Hass, have suggested that Sharons move is also, in all likelihood, a ploy to look conciliatory during his next visit to Washington, to refocus domestic attention on the Palestinian crisis and away from the scandals now rocking Sharon’s government, and possibly an attempt to explore a unity government with Labor. It may also be another attempt to divide any remaining Palestinian leadership within the enclaves that remain. The likelihood of the circumstances in Gaza being made easier for its Palestinian inhabitants even with the evacuation of all Jewish settlements is slim based on the extent to which Gaza is cordoned off from Israel and Egypt and under heavy IDF military control. In fact, the chances are considerable that the social and economic circumstances in Gaza will continue to worsen and that extremism within the political factions will increase.

[14] The statistics listed here were compiled by the Mezan Center for Human Rights based in Gaza City, Gaza. They do not include statistics on the number of homes destroyed, people killed or displaced between 16 and 22 January 2004. During this time 1 woman was killed and 8 people were injured. Seventy-two more homes have been demolished since the beginning of January 2004 and an additional 684 people have been made homeless. See “Report to the LACC on humanitarian consequences of the Israeli Defence Forces operations in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip,” published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 28 January 2004.

[15] On malnutrition in the Palestinian territories see, for example, “Palestinian malnutrition at African levels under Israeli curbs, say MPs,” by Ben Russell in The Independent, 5 February 2004. British MP’s on a visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories are quoted as saying, “Rates of malnutrition in Gaza and parts of the West Bank are as bad as anything one would find in sub-Saharan Africa. The Palestinian economy has all but collapsed. Unemployment rates are in the region of 60 to 70 percent&.It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deliberate Israeli strategy of putting the lives of ordinary Palestinians under stress as part of a strategy to bring the population under heel.” On the incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among Palestinians, especially Palestinian children see “An Interview with Eyad El-Sarraj”(of the Gaza Community Mental Health Center in Gaza City, Gaza) in Tikkun, by Julie Oxenberg and Dan Burnstein, Nov/Dec 2003.

[16] Information on the situation of Rafah’s refugees was obtained in direct conversation with Zeyad Sarafandi, President of Rafah’s Popular Refugees Committee, on 17 January 2004 in the main Rafah office.

[17] Amnesty International Press Release, 13 October 2003. AI Index: MDE 15/091/2003 (public); News Service No: 234; Israel/Occupied Territories: “Wanton destruction constitutes a war crime”.

[18] See the UN’s OCHA reports for February 2004; also “Israeli Troops Kill Palestinian in Raid,” Al Jazeera, Sunday 8 February 2004. www.english.aljazeera.net

[19] Brent Foster’s photographs can be viewed at: www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=1966 A detailed description of the people met and organizations visited during this trip to Rafah can be found at the MRSCP website: www.Madison-Rafah.org

[20] See attachments with correspondence from US Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin’s office on the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project’s website at MadisonRafah.org

Checking On The Checkpoints

They’re all women, all Israeli and every day they go to West Bank checkpoints to try to stop soldiers harassing Palestinians. Linda Grant went with them.

Linda Grant, The Guardian, 1 February 2004
 
When I came to Tel Aviv last July to find an apartment to rent for a few months, an estate agent introduced me to Yael Boss whom I have come to think of as the DNA of Zionism – one of the tough, fearless women Israel produced in multitudes in the 1950s and who terrified me on my first teenage visit to the country in 1967.
 
Now 65, she married a French non-Jew and lived with him in Paris for 11 years but was so homesick for Israel that she would walk into El Al offices just to hear Hebrew spoken. When one of her sons was doing his military service in Lebanon, and disappeared, she delivered an order to her other son: “Go to Lebanon and find your brother, bring him home on your back if you have to.” He did – I don’t think he would have dared fail.
 
In our many conversations about the country, she spoke sharply of those who try to harm Israel in Europe. “I will not criticise Israel abroad,” she said. “I have enough work of this kind to do at home, without letting people abroad read what they want into what I say.”
 
There is little Yael can do to alter the policies of her government beyond the ballot box. In the autumn she had gone to help Palestinian farmers pick their olive harvest where army road blocks separate them from their land. So I asked her if she would come with me to meet the women of Machsom Watch.
 
Machsom is the Hebrew word for checkpoint; the organisation was set up in January 2001 in response to repeated reports about human rights abuses of Palestinians at the checkpoints which inhibit the movement of Palestinians not only into Israel but between Palestinian towns. The founders were three Israeli women who set out three goals: to monitor the behaviour of soldiers and police, to ensure that the human rights of the Palestinians were protected, and to record their observations and make them known to the widest possible audiences. Unlike international solidarity volunteers, the members are all women, and all Israeli, from a wide range of backgrounds and political opinions.
 
Yael and I met at the Jerusalem house of Hannah Barag, 68, and together with 74-year-old Ora Ardon, we set off in Hannah’s car to Abu Dis where the “separation fence” manifests itself as a massive wall, already covered with political graffiti, slicing through the town.
 
During my time in Israel, my over-riding impression of the current government is of incompetence and corruption which manifests itself in almost every aspect of civil and military life. Hannah and Ora showed us a place where the wall was easily crossed if you were reasonably agile, though difficult if you were old, blind, disabled or carrying a baby. What, Ora asked, was the point of a wall that held up the least likely suspects for suicide bombing and created no difficulty for the fit and determined?
 
We drove on to Qalandia, where the checkpoint divides the town in half. It was a bright, very cold day. A long queue of Palestinians waited with their documents to be checked by a few teenage soldiers. They were of every type: well-dressed businessmen, fashionable young women, hard young men, teenagers, a lot of women carrying babies in their arms. The roads are so rutted round the checkpoints that it is hard to wheel a child in a pushchair. “It’s very quiet today,” Hannah said, though there was a cacophony of noise. She pointed at a fence a few metres away. “Palestinian children throw stones at the soldiers and the soldiers fire back, a number of children have been killed here. It seems quiet now but when it gets dark it is more violent.”
 
“But this is now a different place from what I remember,” Pierre, the photographer said. “Since the women volunteers have been coming it’s much quieter.”
 
Two volunteers, Phyllis and Tamar, were already at the checkpoint. I watched Tamar approach a woman carrying a baby and heavy shopping and escort her to the front of the queue. A female soldier checked her documents and waved her through. They tried to help another young woman who had borrowed her 16-year-old cousin’s identity card and had been caught. Despite the intervention on her behalf she was put into a police van and driven off.
 
The attitude of both the soldiers and the Palestinians to the women varies. “The first time I went to Qalandia a soldier at the checkpoint called me a Palestinian whore,” Hannah said. “I said, ‘Listen, with my looks and my age do you think I still have a future in this profession?’ Then I said, ‘Do you talk to your grandmother like that?’ The next time I saw him he apologised.”
 
But other soldiers are susceptible to the fact that the women have themselves served in the Israeli army and have sons and daughters or grandchildren who are currently serving. “One soldier shouted at me, ‘Is your son in the army?'” said Tamar. “I said to him, ‘Yes he’s a pilot.’ He said, ‘A pilot! What does he think of you?’ I told him, ‘He’s very proud.’ Sometimes the soldiers say to me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I say, ‘Because I am Jewish and my grandparents were in the Holocaust.'”
 
On the Palestinian side, the women of Machsom Watch are often the only Israelis they ever see who are not in uniform, the only Israelis who exhibit human kindness, and sometimes that is enough even though the women often fail to succeed in persuading the soldiers to open a gate in the fence to let children through to school. Other Palestinians vent their anger against them because they are the only unarmed Israelis available. “I tell them, you are at the wrong address,” Hannah said. “But some tell us that we are no different, we are part of the same game.” When Ora told a group of Palestinians she was a peace activist, one cried out that he wanted war and not peace.
 
The contradictions of their position are plenty. Ten days earlier, a woman suicide bomber at the Eerez crossing at Gaza had managed to persuade a soldier that she was disabled and could not pass through the metal detector because of a metal plate in her leg. She killed four people and the Israeli radio phone-in shows were full of furious callers complaining that the Palestinians were abusing the pressure on commanders to treat women and children more humanely. “That woman did a big disservice to her people and her own gender,” Ora said. “It’s the same as when they transported military equipment in ambulances.”
 
I had asked her what she felt about the possibility that she would abet a suicide bomber passing through a checkpoint. “I can’t say I’ve never thought of it,” she replied, “but if you sit on a jury you have the same dilemma.” She pointed to a small hill beyond the checkpoint. “We call it Tora Bora, it is easy to pass across that way.”
 
There is a growing climate of opinion in Israel, including from a former Likud mayor of Tel Aviv, that the checkpoints only exist to harass the Palestinian population and are ineffective at stopping suicide bombers. Ora is not opposed to fences on principle. She wants the Israeli government to end the occupation, withdraw to the Green Line and build a border. “There will still be terror,” she said, “but we will be justified if we hit back.”
 
We drove back to Ora’s house in Jerusalem and I asked her why, at 74, she chooses to stand in freezing conditions at the checkpoints. “My grandparents came here from Odessa in 1905,” she said. “They were idealists, they wanted to create a new Jew who would do moral work. At 13 years old I was a radio operator in the Haganah [the Jewish militias opposing British Mandate rule in Palestine]. I was smuggling radio parts and no one stopped me because I was so small and so young. During the war of independence in 1948 I was a corporal. It was a just war. From the very beginning I was with Peace Now, I was on all the demonstrations, but Ariel Sharon pays no attention to us so one day I went over to a woman whose face I recognised and said, ‘I’m desperate, I want to do something other than demonstrate,’ and she took me to Machsom Watch.
 
“I am an ordinary member of the organisation, not a spokesperson, but I think I am typical. The settlers call themselves Zionists but they are not Zionists as far as the founders of the state were concerned. I am a Zionist, and this is why the checkpoints are a terrible blow to us Israelis as well as the Palestinians. My daughters are very unhappy, they think I am quite right to go to the checkpoints but they want someone else’s mother to go. But I say that only by doing this can we reclaim the humanistic revolution of Zionism. We are calling on the world to help us reclaim our humanistic values.”
 
On the drive home to Tel Aviv I asked Yael what she thought about what she had seen. “I already have a shift organised,” she said with steel in her eyes. “I will bring all my friends.” I thought of Yael multiplied, and wondered if the hard men of Israel could withstand the pressure if thousands of Israeli women created very different facts on the ground.

Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler

Gabriel Ash, The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2004

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the “moral” justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every “ethnically cleansed” village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel’s apologists tried in vain to attack Morris’ professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not “by design,” he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris’ “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949” is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha’aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably “the tip of the iceberg.” Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris’ problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: “The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb,” not fellow citizens. Islam is “a world in which human lives don’t have the same value as in the West.” Arabs are “barbarians” at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is “a serial killer” that ought to be executed, and “a wild animal” that must be caged.

Morris’ disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that “the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces” (from “The Wretched of the Earth”). And further down, “the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms” (let’s not forget to place Morris’ metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin’s “two-legged beasts”, Eitan’s “drugged cockroaches” and Barak’s ultra-delicate “salmon”). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage ? murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: “if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide.”

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an “Arabenrein Palestine,” he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, “within five or ten years,” under “apocalyptic conditions” such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which “is likely to happen within twenty years.” For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for “finishing the job” of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Ha’aretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, “transfer,” and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining “transfer.” We ought to pay attention: with Morris’s statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if “apocalyptic conditions” materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris’ interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris’ racism isn’t limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for “the final good.” But what kind of good is worth the “forced extinction” of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word “Haqkhada” in the published Hebrew version of the interview, a word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren’t extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: “Yes, even the great American democracy couldn’t come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds.” Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris’s supremacist view of “Western Civilization,” that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of “progress.” Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of “human” is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs — one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical — is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris’ double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris’ knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the “civilizational” justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris’ disjointed mind doesn’t see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are “right” assertions of racist supremacy and “wrong” assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim’s identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris’ mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of “superior civilization,” these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of “less advanced” races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism — and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris’ case — cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha’aretz, Morris says that, “when the Palestinians rejected Barak’s proposal of July 2000 and Clinton’s proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything: Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa.”

But in his book “Righteous Victims,” Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: “the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel…keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two…” Morris’ chapter of “Righteous Victims” that deals with the ’90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha’aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and cliches. For example, Morris reminds us that “the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert.” (What is Morris’ point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of “growing soft,” and declares himself “the true metropolis.” That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized — its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing. Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself “the peace camp,” “the Zionist Left,” etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, there is the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) “Arab” is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris’ latest interview in Ha’aretz with Ben Gurion’s first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the “ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism” of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel’s generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn’t, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. Most of what he says hasn’t been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris’ (and much of Israel’s) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a “crusader state,” a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn’t Arafat’s fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn’t Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? “We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders.”

It is Morris — like the greater part of Israel’s elite — who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to rule the Middle East from behind tall walls and barbed wire.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel’s future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel’s successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. “Israel” is brute force. In Morris’ words: “The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us.” But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I’m afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine’s natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. “The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing.”

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed “opssimist.” He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword – and sometimes not. He lives in the United States. Gabriel Ash encourages your comments at gash@YellowTimes.org

In Gaza, Israeli brutality on display daily

Rana El-Khatib, Arizona Republic, January 25, 2004

“Israel good!” were the last words my husband and I heard as we left the final checkpoint within Erez, the border crossing maintained by Israel to control all entries and exits to and from Gaza.

I turned back to get a closer look at the soldier. I saw a petite, attractive blond, her face almost smiling. Her arms rested comfortably on a large-against-her-frame M-16. Her words echoed chillingly in my head – not because I did not want to believe her, but because I had just seen the other side of Israel: the “not-so-good” Israel.

We traveled to Gaza to return 6-year-old twin sisters, Asma and Hiba, to their refugee camp existence. The girls had spent the last five months in our Phoenix home recovering from major surgery. They had grown very fond of their doctors and the dozens of families they met here.

They also grew accustomed to the creature comforts of American life. Here, they had a soft bed. They could sleep the night through without the earsplitting sounds of artillery all around them. They had a television. They showered every day and enjoyed a tub filled with warm suds. They did not have to fear a helicopter. They had electricity all the time. They could be children.

In Gaza, they sleep on mats on the floor. They shower only when they have water. A helicopter sends them into a panic. Their father is not always able to travel to his nursing job. Electricity cuts off regularly. A soldier represents terror and hate. They are denied a childhood as we know it.

Our four disturbing days and three sleepless nights in Gaza were filled with the images and sounds of a society in turmoil. Atrophy infested every aspect of life, and a real sense of isolation hung in the air.

During the daylight, in the company of friends, we tried to overlook the dilapidated conditions. During the nights, it was a different story. Trying to sleep amid the raucous sounds of state-of-the-art Israeli weapons against the pathetic pap, pap, pap of Palestinian Kalashnikov guns was difficult.

At times, only a few rounds could be heard echoing above the city. At other times, my husband and I cringed helplessly at the thought of who was at the receiving end of the hail of bullets. When the shooting began, it silenced the cacophony of roosters crowing out of sync and the sporadic, spine-chilling shrill of hawks that pierced the dark.

And at least once each night, there remained one sound that jolted me back to consciousness – the vociferous brays of one anguished donkey. Every species seemed troubled.

Our ninth-floor room in our empty hotel offered a panoramic view of two very disparate worlds. Immediately below us, we could see the decrepit Palestinian world. In the distance, a settlement that might as well be labeled “Jews Only” nestled up neatly against the seashore, enclosed behind lush greenery and protected by armed soldiers in watchtowers.

When I asked if I could take photos, I was told simply, “The Israelis will see you and you could get shot.” The bullet hole in our hotel window and rear wall facing it reinforced the wisdom of their recommendation.

Bullets also occasionally rain down from dreaded Israeli observation towers. These blots on the landscape protrude menacingly over the densely populated towns. And when the volleys of bullets hail down, for whatever given reason, they often kill or injure innocent people going about their daily lives, such as the life of 9-year old Hani.

We saw his lifeless and bloodied body at a hospital morgue. He had been shot in the head by one such bullet while playing soccer.

Israeli soldiers interfere with the most basic of freedoms, like the choice to leave one’s home. When Palestinians are not jailed in their homes under curfew, their freedom is restricted by notorious checkpoints that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 15 hours to cross.

At these checkpoints, soldiers peer out through small, darkened, rectangular windows from inside unsightly steel structures that overlook pothole-filled roads. Decisions as to who goes in and out of particular areas are often arbitrary and baseless.

Merkava tanks also dominate the society. Concealed inside 3-inch walls of steel, Israeli soldiers barrel forebodingly down small, densely populated streets. The tanks deliberately damage streets, churning the asphalt into crater-filled, sewage-seeping obstacle courses for emaciated donkeys and the relatively few cars to maneuver precariously around.

Soldiers will sometimes park the steel behemoths in one spot, shifting their cannons from side to side, provoking the young and the fearless to throw rocks at them. Consequently, the soldiers open fire into the crowds, leaving both destruction and death in their wake.

F-16 fighter planes serve as yet another notch in the belt of Israeli domination, reinforcing their total control over the Palestinians they rule. They streak sinisterly across the Gazan sky – day and night. Heaps of mangled concrete buildings lay in their wake.

The most spine-chilling face of Israel’s occupation comes in the form of Apache helicopters. The mere sight of one causes pandemonium in the streets. People scramble to take cover. No one feels safe. Apache missions almost always set out to murder individuals who are unilaterally declared to be “threats to Israel’s security.”

In the process of executing people without any due process, innocent bystanders are killed as well. They were either unfortunate enough to be in the area when the assault took place, or were administering aid to the victims of the initial onslaught. These innocent human beings get tacked onto the mounting “collateral damage” pile.

Among Israel’s most provocative actions is its ongoing expansion and development of new government-subsidized Jews-only housing for illegal settlers to live on stolen Palestinian land. These settlers drive on Jews-only roads that lead into lavish Jews-only colonies with manicured lawns and swimming pools. Palestinians, less than one mile away, do not even have enough clean water to drink.

Perhaps the most egregious act of Israel’s occupation that we saw firsthand is its home demolitions and collective punishment policies. Thousands of homes and apartment buildings have been demolished. Entire families are forced into tents set up by the United Nations, making refugees of refugees for a second, third and even fourth time. It is estimated that some 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been left homeless since September 2000.

We returned precious Asma and Hiba to a giant prison cell. Their crime is that they refuse to disappear silently into someone else’s version of history and fact. Palestine may have been erased off the world’s maps, but Palestinians have not. Asma and Hiba have not. At least not yet.

El-Khatib is a Palestinian-American poet and activist living in Phoenix. She is the author of BRANDED, The Poetry of a So-Called “Terrorist,” a collection of poems available from online booksellers beginning in March 2004. She can be contacted at brandedpoetry@yahoo.com.

Moral decay and Benny Morris

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 24 January 2004

Sunset over the Jordan Valley, looking west towards Occupied Jerusalem from Mahis, Jordan (Photo: Ali Abunimah)

When does the banishment of an entire people become morally justified? That such a question can even be posed in today’s Israel is dismal testament to the transformation of Zionism into what it claims to abhor. In two recent, extraordinary documents — a commentary in London’s The Guardian and an interview with Ha’aretz — Israeli historian Benny Morris prepared the ground for Israel to justify any atrocity, no matter how much it transgresses human rights, law and decency.

In a 9 January interview with Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz, Morris went further than he ever did in describing the 1948 exodus of Palestinians as the result of deliberate “transfer” by the Zionist militias. Far from being horrified, however, Morris said: “There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.” He admitted that a “Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads … (and) the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”

Accepting this “necessity” stands on the belief that the Zionists had an absolute, unquestionable right to establish by any means necessary a Jewish state in Palestine, notwithstanding that the land was already inhabited.

Morris recognized this weakness and tried to dispense with it in his 14 January Guardian commentary. “Looking at the big picture,” Morris conceded, “there can be no avoiding the simple Arab argument: ‘No Zionism – no Palestinian refugee problem.’ But adopting such a slogan means accepting the view that a Jewish state should not have been established in Palestine (or, presumably, anywhere else). Neither can one avoid the standard Zionist rebuttal: ‘No war – no Palestinian refugee problem,’ meaning that the problem wasn’t created by the Zionists but by the Arabs themselves, and stemmed directly from their violent assault on Israel.”

Morris knows — because he has written the references on the subject — that this is pure fabrication. Indeed, he told Ha’aretz that he recently found that in “the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.” How could the Zionist forces have reacted both in April and earlier to an intervention by the Arab states that did not occur until after 15 May 1948?

For Morris, Israel made a “serious historical mistake” in 1948, because it did not do a “complete job” of forcing out all the Palestinians. Asked if he would support the transfer and expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza today, Morris’ reply to Shavit was chilling: “I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions.”

Morris is already “a partner in this act” because he lays the ideological groundwork for it in a context where Israeli Cabinet members are already crying for “transfer,” and where, bit by bit, Israel is implementing in the Occupied Territories a process that may lead to it. He makes ethnic cleansing moral and inevitable by constructing an inhuman enemy whose essential disposition is not inspired by any of Israel’s actions.

Morris told Ha’aretz: “There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, and in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game … Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide.”

Morris conflates all Palestinians with a de-historicized, monolithic Muslim culture that is in ceaseless conflict with the West. To mitigate Morris’ anxieties about genocide, Israel — the embodiment of Western values — must destroy the Palestinians. With such logic, Morris the historian repudiates history as the pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

In this context, consider how he addressed the issue of refugees in The Guardian. Ignoring centuries of Muslim-Jewish coexistence and recent post-conflict reconciliations, as in South Africa, Morris premised that the return of the refugees or the creation of a binational state could only result in “widespread anarchy and violence” and the emigration or subjugation of the Jews “in an authoritarian, Muslim-dominated, Arab-ruled state.” Morris then contended: “To many in the West, the right of refugees to return to their homes seems natural and just. But this ‘right of return’ needs to be weighed against the right to life and well-being of the 5 million Jews who live in Israel.” Morris asked: “Wouldn’t the destruction, or at least the forced displacement of these 5 million … constitute a far greater tragedy than what befell the Palestinians in 1948, and, currently, a graver injustice than the perpetuation of the refugeedom of fewer than 4 million Palestinians?”

It is painful to read Morris’ interview, in which he called Palestinians “barbarians” who should be put in a “cage.” But after reading it, I heard an interview with black South African playwright John Kani on National Public Radio. Kani recalled the frequent interrogations he endured from a white intelligence officer: “He used to tell us South Africa would never, ever change. This is a God-created situation. They (white South Africans) were the chosen people, not the Jews, and that South Africa was their country and we didn’t have the brains to become a free people, or even to think we could govern.”

Reflecting upon those experiences today, Kani said: “I am just laughing, because he was stupid. You can’t turn the tide of freedom … A people who fight for freedom will be free. They’ve got God on their side; they’ve got time on their side; they’ve got truth on their side. It doesn’t matter how strong the enemy is, it’s only delaying the inevitable.”

Palestine-Israel will, inevitably, become a democracy for all its people. Inevitable, because through the collective efforts of those who work for justice, we will make it so.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada. This article was first published in The Daily Star.

Where day to day living has had its heart cut out

Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 19 January 2004

Abu Dis — Fatina Zen stayed until the end, peering down her street through the lashing rain as towering concrete slabs were slotted into place one by one across the middle of the road. She wondered if her son might suddenly appear on the other side to wave goodbye but he never came.

The 52-year-old grandmother finally left once the latest section of Israel’s “security fence” – recently renamed the “terror prevention fence” to improve its image abroad – had bisected the street as it worms its way through the Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Abu Dis.

Except that in Abu Dis it is not a fence but an eight metre-high wall (27ft) that has divided families and torn apart a longstanding community.

“I can’t bear it,” said Mrs Zen, who until a few days ago lived a three minute walk from her two adult children and four grandchildren.

“My son came to visit me two or three times a day. Imagine you live in the same street as your son but you cannot see him because they built a wall.”

Even those expecting the new barrier through Abu Dis, a community of about 11,000 under the Mount of Olives, were surprised at the monster in their midst. It is the same size as the wall surrounding the West Bank city of Qalqilya, but the concrete slabs seem to grow to giant proportions when driven down the middle of a narrow street.

There is no room for cars on one side of the wall, and barely enough for one-way traffic on the other. The sun is permanently blocked out from homes and shops facing the concrete.

The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said that the wall will severely disrupt Palestinians access to schools, hospitals and work.

The Israeli government has persistently argued that the route of the 50 mile long barrier through and around East Jerusalem is determined by security not political considerations.

“The terror built the fence,” said Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, last week. “If not for the terror, maybe we would not have done it at all. But I think it’s very important to know that when it comes to security, there will be no compromises: not now, not in the future. Never!”

But the new wall and fence runs close to the greater Jerusalem boundary the Israelis marked out after seizing the east of the city in the 1967 war, confirming Palestinian suspicions that it is more about borders than security.

Palestinians live on both sides of the wall through Abu Dis.

Critics say that if the intent were to limit Arab access to Jewish areas of Jerusalem, then it would be logical to build the barrier between the Palestinian east of the city and the mostly-Jewish west. But that would be to divide a city that Mr Sharon describes as Israel’s eternal and indivisible capital.

Samir Khatib, 46, owns a row of shops facing the new wall on the Jerusalem side, and a petrol station a few yards down the road. But his home and five children are 200 metres on the West Bank side of the barrier.

“In the Jordanian time, in the British time, if you lived here you lived in Jerusalem. Only with the Israelis is it different.

“They are doing it to create a new border for Jerusalem, a new border for the Jewish state,” he said as he watched the concrete slabs lowered by earth diggers under heavy military guard.

“I have to choose between my family and my business. My children go to school on the other side, but this is where I make my money to send them to school.”

Palestinians with passes to live in Jerusalem will still be able to travel to the other side of the wall via an Israeli army checkpoint.

But it is a journey of about 15 miles to travel a distance that could be covered in a couple of minutes a week ago. And it is not always swift.

Many Palestinians do not have cars. If they make the journey by bus, it is almost certain to be stopped at the checkpoint and its passengers subjected to lengthy identity checks by the army.

“If you have a car, and don’t get stopped, you can do it in half-an-hour,” said Mr Khatib. “But the bus is different. With all the checks, it takes two or three hours.”

Mrs Zen says she would consider moving the other side of the wall, but both she and her husband need regular hospital treatment for heart conditions and cannot get that outside of Jerusalem. Her children need to stay put for their work.

But thousands of Palestinians with permits to live in Jerusalem are moving inside the walls. The cost of renting apartments in Arab areas is rising sharply; no new accommodation is being built because the Israeli government refuses planning permission.

There is an added problem because of Israeli racial laws aimed at limiting the number of Arabs living in Jerusalem. Those Palestinians with permission to live in the city lose residency permits if they leave for more than three months.

The new wall replaces a row of concrete blocks that were placed along the street a few months ago, stopping traffic but otherwise routinely clambered over.

The shorter wall, less than two metres high, has been lifted aside. Graffiti foretells the views likely to decorate the new barrier before long: “Welcome to Abu Dis ghetto” and “Wall … peace? Sharon lies to his own people”.

Getting the hell into Gaza

The entire border of Gaza is surrounded by heavily-patrolled walls and fences. A network of Israeli checkpoints tightly controls movement in and out of the Strip, and between population areas within the Strip. (Jamal Wilson)

Laura Gordon, The Electronic Intifada, 15 January 2004

Following the suicide bombing at Erez Crossing that left four Israeli soldiers dead and several Palestinian workers injured, Erez (at the north of the Gaza Strip), and Maabar (the other way in and out of the Gaza Strip, on the border of Egypt), have been under tight closure, with crowds of people waiting for days to be let through.

The Madison-Rafah Sister City Project has managed to get only one of three of their delegation to Rafah. The closure on Gaza has intensified with yet stronger measures. As of January 4, 2004, any internationals wishing to enter must have official Israeli permission.

Israeli permission requires an Israeli press pass, an official invitation from one of a short list of Israeli-accepted organizations, and a five-day background check by the Israeli authorities. Here are excerpts from a letter home from one of the delegation as they were attempting to enter. They are an excellent description of the great extremes Israel will go to keep out international eyes.

Laura Gordon

Excerpts of Monday’s letter from Jennifer, one of the delegation members

Thought you would appreciate knowing what is going on here. The situation is much worse than any of us anticipated. The blockade into Gaza is extreme. None of us can get in right now. I was at the Press House in West Jerusalem today and learned that before they will validate my press card I need a letter of “assignment” (in addition to the valid, wholly legitimate press card I have) from WORT-Radio and a message from the Israeli Consulate in Chicago identifying WORT-Radio as a “legitimate” media outlet. … [George is in a similar situation with the Madison Times.] Cisco did not get a press card so he’s out altogether in this respect.

Our next step after visiting the Press House this morning was to go to the American Consulate — literally a minute from our hotel here in East Jerusalem. We were all carefully searched going in, but were let in relatively easily compared to the line of Palestinians waiting outside in the rain (yes, it was pouring today) to try to get travel visas. Once in, we met with an American official who dismissed us rudely in less than two minutes when we stated our reason for being there (to get the US’ permission to go to Gaza).

We presented our letter from US Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin’s office to him to absolutely no avail: he didn’t even look at it. He pushed it back over to me and said, (I’m quoting very closely) “We have nothing to do with Rafah and nothing to do with Gaza. It is a dangerous place and you have no business going there. You can go to the embassy in Tel Aviv if you want to press this further but you’re wasting your time.” We each tried saying something further but were cut off and led out of the building. We are now considering phoning Baldwin’s office and seeing if they will put pressure on the embassy in Tel Aviv. I am convinced, however, that her endorsement makes no difference whatsoever.

Discouraged, we wandered over to the American Colony Hotel to get information on renting cell phones and finding a camera store (Cisco wanted to get a camera). We ended up in the bookshop there. The store clerk (a Canadian) spoke to us for some time about his experiences with Israeli bureaucracy and trying to get into Gaza. An associate of his was in the store at the time, a young man who had just recently been assigned to work in Gaza.

This man told us he’d [tried to get in] to Gaza twice now in the past two weeks and was still being rejected although he is from the World Bank and this is his formal job. The store clerk then said that since the 4th of January there have been new restrictions put into place for different categories of people. He wasn’t sure which restrictions applied to which people, but said that there is in general a five-day waiting period now even for people whose entry into Gaza has been approved by the Israeli authorities.

If this is true, it is possible — if all of the paperwork shows up in time — that I could get into Gaza on Saturday, i.e. the day before our departure back to the States.

You can probably by now tell what we are up against and how frustrated we all are. There are, however, a few glimmers of optimism in all this. [There are a couple of options left to explore].

In the meantime I have spoken multiple times to Ali Barhoum, Emad Sha’ath, and the mayor, Said Zoroub. All of them have been extremely kind,supportive, and have emphasized again and again how much they had wanted us to come, how important they consider our delegation and that they will continue to do what they can to help us out. …

The best thing to come of the entire day was when I spoke to Deputy Mayor, Emad Sha’ath, who was also very sorry about all we were facing (the Israeli authorities apparently let no one in the PA know anything about their latest regulations). Emad has a permit that allows him to go back and forth from Gaza to the West Bank relatively easily. He said that if nothing else, he could meet us in Ramallah on Thursday to discuss some of the many things Madison and Rafah might consider doing together.

Like the others, he expressed real dismay at our not being able to come in and said how much they had all been looking forward to our visit. They had many things planned for us including a conference to attend tomorrow that was added late to the schedule.

…we are making our back-up plans now — including a tour of the Wall with PENGON and visits to Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah, Hebron and elsewhere. Of course, Nablus [where Kelly B. is now — Barb] remains sealed off and we have been told we won’t get in. We’ll try nonetheless. Our hosts at the hotel are happy to have us staying here extra nights since business is so god-awful. More than half the hotels in East Jerusalem are simply closed down — this has been true for a long time now— and you can feel the oppressiveness of the dying economy in the air.

I am planning to visit Amira Hass on Thursday or Friday and George will be meeting Raja Shehadeh at some point. If you have other requests or suggestions let me know.

Meanwhile, our breakfast host charmed Cisco and me with stories of his time in Prison (he was just recently released), and how now his brother is in.

One has to wonder what on earth it will take to make people object to these outrages.

Yours sincerely,
Jennifer

Second letter from Jennifer: Tuesday

This will be a shorter message: I did go to the Erez crossing today (3 hours of traveling there and back) to be told that yes, in fact there is no way anyone can get in unless they have an Israeli approved press card. All our other efforts are completely in vain. There is a minimum 5 day waiting period (new regulations as of 1/4/04) for anyone connected to any international organization and no chance for anyone else).

I phoned Baldwin’s office last night & spoke to Andrea Bagley who faxed the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to complain of our treatment here at the American Consulate and ask that we please be allowed to proceed into Gaza. They’ve ignored her message, so far as we can tell, and it apparently won’t help us anyway.

The one glimmer this time is that I finally got hold of an incredibly nice person in the Press division of the US Embassy. …he agreed to fax a letter to the Israeli Press House here in Jerusalem saying that WORT is in fact legitimate. [God, it feels so nice to talk to someone human.]

He is allegedly going to do this now (this afternoon) and that means, if no other unexpected glitches occur, I will indeed have an Israeli approved press card by tomorrow morning. The soldiers at Erez told me today this was the only way I’d get in.

So, as things stand now, I may be the only one to get into Gaza. I don’t see any hope for Cisco, though George is still proceeding with the Madison Times (Jonathan Grammling has been terrific) so there is some chance he’ll get in on Thursday or Friday. Honestly, I think even two days would be worth it.

If none of us gets in, which of course is still very possible, we will (starting tomorrow) spend the remainder of our trip in the West Bank. There’s more bad news in Nablus and Qalqilya, where I’d go, and the Wall is now going up around Abu Dis here just outside East Jerusalem. So lots to see and explore. PENGON is giving tours of the Wall starting here and we’re all interested in going with them.

Jennifer

Laura Gordon is a 20-year-old American Jew who came to Israel in December 2002 with the Birthright Israel program and proceeded, three months later, to begin work with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah.