Tuesday is Holocaust Day in Israel: and the anniversary of a 1948 massacre that triggered the Palestinian refugee crisis at the heart of today's conflict. Robert Fisk meets an Auschwitz survivor living at the site of the atrocity
By Robert Fisk
"I will show you my museum," Josef Kleinman says, and scampers into a back room. He returns with a faded old khaki knapsack. "This is the shirt the Americans gave me after I was freed from Landsberg on 27 April 1945." It is a crumpled, cheap check shirt whose label is now illegible. Then he takes out a smock of blue and white stripes and a hat with the same stripes running front to back. "This is my uniform as a prisoner of Dachau."
Familiar from every newsreel and from Schindler's List and 100 other Holocaust movies, it is a shock to touch " to hold " this symbol of a people's destruction. Josef Kleinman watches me as I hold the smock. He understands the shock. On the front of the smock is the number 114986.
Down in the entrance to his block of flats, there are flyers reminding tenants of the forthcoming Holocaust Day. Givat Shaul is a friendly, bright neighbourhood of retired couples, small shops, flats, trees and some elegant old houses of yellow stone. Some of these are in a state of dilapidation, a few are homes. But one or two bear the scars of bullets fired long ago, on 9 April 1948, when another people faced their own catastrophe.
For Givat Shaul used to be called Deir Yassin. And here it was, 54 years ago, that up to 130 Palestinians were massacred by two Jewish militias, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, as the Jews of Palestine fought for the independence of a state called Israel. The slaughter so terrified tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that they fled their homes en masse " 750,000 in all " to create the refugee population whose tragedy lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict today.
Back in 1948, Palestinian women were torn to pieces by grenades around the old houses that still exist in Givat Shaul. Two truckloads of Arab prisoners were taken from the village and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. Later, many of them would be executed in Deir Yassin. Their mass grave is believed to lie beneath a fuel storage depot that now stands at one end of the Jerusalem suburb.
So a visit to Mr Kleinman's home raises a serious moral question. Can one listen to his personal testimony of the greatest crime in modern history and then ask about the tragedy which overwhelmed the Palestinians at this very spot -- when the eviction of the Arabs of Palestine, terrible though it was, an act of ethnic cleansing in our terms, comes no- where near, statistically or morally, the murder of six million Jews? Does he even know that this year, by an awful irony of history, Holocaust Day and Deir Yassin Day fall on the same date?
Mr Kleinman is no ordinary Holocaust survivor. He was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz and he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the head of Hitler's programme to murder the Jews of Europe. Indeed, Mr Kleinman saw Dr Mengele, the "Angel of Death", who chose children, women, the old and the sick for the gas chambers. At the age of just 14, he watched one day as Mengele arrived on a bicycle and ordered a boy to hammer a plank of wood to a post. Here, for the record, is part of Kleinman's testimony at the Eichmann trial:
"We weren't told what was to happen. We knew. The boys who couldn't pass under the plank would be spared. Those boys whose heads did not reach the plank would be sent to the gas chambers. We all tried to stretch ourselves upwards, to make ourselves taller. But I gave up. I saw that taller boys than me failed to touch the plank with their heads. My brother told me, 'Do you want to live? Yes? Then do something.' My head began to work. I saw some stones. I put them in my shoes, and this made me taller. But I couldn't stand at attention on the stones, they were killing me."
Mr Kleinman's brother, Shlomo, tore his hat in half and Josef stuffed part of it into his shoes. He was still too short. But he managed to "infiltrate" into the group who had passed the test. The remainder of the boys " a thousand in all " were gassed. Mengele, Josef Kleinman remembers, chose Jewish holidays for the mass killing of Jewish children. Mr Kleinman's parents, Meir and Rachel, and his sister had been sent directly to the gas chambers when the family arrived at Auschwitz from the Carpathian mountains, in what is now Ukraine. He survived, along with his brother -- who today, a carpenter like Josef, lives a few hundred yards away in the same suburb of Givat Shaul/Deir Yassin. Josef survived Dachau and the gruelling labour of building a massive bunker for Hitler's secret factory, constructed for the production of Germany's new Messerschmitt ME262 jet fighter aircraft.
After his liberation by the Americans, Josef Kleinman made his way to Italy and then to a small boat which put him aboard a ship for Palestine, carrying illegal Jewish immigrants who were to try to enter the territory of the dying British mandate. He could carry only a few possessions. He chose to put his Dachau uniform in his bag -- he would not forget what happened to him.
Turned back by the British, he spent six months in the Famagusta camp on Cyprus, eventually ending up in the immigrants' camp at Atlit in Palestine. He arrived in Jerusalem on 15 March 1947, and was there when Israel's war of independence broke out. He fought in that war -- but not at Deir Yassin. I gently mention the name. Both Josef Kleinman and his wife Haya nod at once.
"There are things which have been written that were wrong about Deir Yassin," he said. "I was in Jerusalem and I saw the two truckloads of prisoners that came from here. Some reports say Arabs were killed, others that they were not. Not all the people were killed. There is much propaganda. I do not know. The Arabs killed their Jewish prisoners. There didn't have to be much fighting for the Arabs to leave."
But when he saw those Arabs leaving, did they not, for Mr Kleinman, provide any kind of parallel " however faint, given the numerically far greater and infinitely bloodier disaster that overtook the Jews " of his own life? He thinks about this for a while. He did not see many Arab refugees, he said. It was his wife Haya who replied. "I think that after what happened to him " which was so dreadful " that everything else in the world seemed less important. You have to understand that Josef lives in that time, in the time of the Shoah (Holocaust). Of the 29,000 Jews brought to Dachau from other camps, most of them from Auschwitz, 15,000 died."
But is it just about the enormity of one crime and its statistical comparison to the exodus of Palestinians in 1948? A group of Jews, Muslims and Christians are campaigning for Deir Yassin to be remembered -- even now, at the height of the latest war in what was Palestine. In London today, the killings at Deir Yassin will be remembered at St John's Wood Church at 6pm. They will be commemorated, too, in Washington and Melbourne and in Jerusalem. As the organisers say, "many Jews may not want to look at this, fearing that the magnitude of their tragedy may be diminished. For Palestinians there is always the fear that, as often before, the Holocaust may be used to justify their own suffering".
The Kleinmans do not know of this commemoration -- nor of the organisation's plans for a memorial to the Palestinian dead in their little suburb of Givat Shaul. Josef Kleinman won't talk about the bloodbath in Israel/Palestine today. But he admits he's "on the right" and voted for Ariel Sharon. "Is there any other man?" he asks
Unholy War: The Bethlehem bellringer, the doctor, the mother. The innocent keep on dying
At the end of a week when violence in the Middle East conflict has reached new, horrific heights, President Bush has asked Israel to hold its fire. Here, Robert Fisk explains why the call could in fact increase Israeli resolve to crush the Palestinians, and on the following pages we investigate the conflict's history
By Robert Fisk
I had just crossed the northern bridge from Israel over the Jordan river for a brief visit to Amman when my driver swerved to the right next to a group of soldiers and headed down a track beside a canal. "We have to avoid the first village," he said without comment. A few minutes later, I could see why.
Black smoke rose from burning tyres on the main road and crowds of young Jordanian men were stopping cars on the highway. "They are throwing stones at foreigners and looking for Israelis," said the driver. You bet they were. And, two hours later, I saw black smoke cowling into the air over Amman as more demonstrators screamed their hatred of America and Israel.
And this, remember, is friendly, pro-Western Jordan, whose young king moves members of the British Parliament to tears, whose peace treaty with Israel was hailed ? preposterously, of course ? as the start of an economic boom, a new freedom and security for a nation of whom more than half the population are Palestinian.
All across the Arab world, local dictators are suppressing their people's anger. In Jordan, you can even find people who ask not only why the late King Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel. Some of them are asking another question: what is the point of his son, King Abdullah? No wonder that the Arab leaders told US Vice-President Dick Cheney last month that he should forget America's forthcoming screen epic in Iraq and deal with the Palestinian-Israeli war. Valuable days were lost while Mr Cheney toured the region in a desperate search for an Arab who would support an Iraqi blitz. And as happens so often nowadays ? incredible though it seems ? the Arabs got it right while the Americans fantasised about the "axis of evil".
Perhaps the only man who now has time to work out the logic of this appalling conflict is the Palestinian leader sitting in his ill-lit broken office in Ramallah. The one characteristic Yasser Arafat shares with the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ? apart from old age and decrepitude ? is his refusal ever to plan ahead. What he says, what he does, what he proposes, is decided only at the moment he is forced to act. This is partly his old guerrilla training. If you don't know what you are going to do tomorrow, you can be sure that your enemies don't know either. By contrast, the Israeli army obligingly boasts of its attacks long in advance, allowing Palestinians ? and, of course, journalists ? to be ready for them.
What the world has so far witnessed ? and the Palestinians spotted this from the start ? is that the Israelis are meeting resistance they never expected. The "few days" they needed to "root out the network of terror" will now have to extend, according to Israeli officers, to a month. President George Bush gave Mr Sharon just days to end his campaign against the Palestinians ? the delay before the Secretary of State leaves for his "urgent" Middle East mission ? and everyone now knows that the Americans will expect Israel to wrap up its assault by the time Mr Powell arrives later this week.
So the military logic is simple. This weekend, the Israeli army has got to batter the Palestinians into submission. And somehow, the Palestinian forces have got to hang on and keep fighting. If they succeed, and the Israelis withdraw their tanks without subduing them, Mr Sharon is forced into a bitter humiliation. If the Israelis do not withdraw at Mr Powell's demand, then the first serious crack appears in the Sharon-Bush alliance. In which case, Mr Arafat will win yet again.
The Israeli army, meanwhile, is proving once more ? as it did in Lebanon ? that it is not the "elite" force it's cracked up to be. It is impossible to dismiss the widespread reports of looting from homes in Ramallah (not least because that is exactly what Israeli soldiers used to do in southern Lebanon in 1983); and that brave Israeli academic, Avi Shlaim, has himself charged Israel with extra-judicial killings in Ramallah.
Watching the Israelis in Ramallah and Bethlehem last week was a disturbing experience. They were undisciplined, firing like militiamen ? the degree of fire control (or rather the lack of it) exercised by the average Israeli soldier and Palestinian gunman is almost exactly the same. Three times I watched Israeli tanks jam themselves into narrow streets so hopelessly that their crews had to emerge under fire from their hatches, jump on to the roadside and hand-signal the tank drivers to reverse their vehicle.
And of course, the innocent go on dying. The Bethlehem bell-ringer, the woman doctor in Jenin, the 14-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire in Tubas, the mother and son shot dead by Israeli bullets and left to rot on the floor of their home in Bethlehem beside their still-living relatives for 30 hours. Journalists and unarmed Western "peace" protesters who get in the Israeli army's way are gunned down or battoned or blasted with stun grenades. So much for those gentle souls who say that Gandhi-like peaceful protest is the way to end the Israeli occupation.
And what does the Israeli government do when the guns and grenades don't shut journalists up? Why, last week it threatened legal action against CNN and the American NBC television chain for not leaving "closed military areas" of the West Bank. No matter that Israeli law possesses no legitimacy in the Palestinian areas it occupies ? the world still accepts the Oslo agreements even if Mr Sharon is destroying them ? CNN and NBC meekly refused to make any comment. What happened, one wonders, to that great American journalist's principle of refusing to tolerate censorship?
But there is another question which has been quietly forgotten by the world ever since the Israeli assault. If Israel fails militarily ? as it will ? then how are the vicious Palestinian suicide bombers to be stopped? True, there has been a lull after the massacres of Israelis last month. But even if the suiciders have been temporarily unbalanced by the Israeli offensive, Israel has created many more potential "martyrs" for the Palestinians in the bloodbath of the past week.
The Israelis still refuse to contemplate the arrival of a foreign protection force ? the dream of every Palestinian ? but the time may come when a Nato-American force will have to be contemplated, to protect Israelis as well as Palestinians. It would not be called a foreign protectorate, but that is what Israel/Palestine would become, an updated version of the old, hopeless British mandate.
In the meantime, be sure the Americans will go on over-arming the Israelis. Just under two weeks ago, for example, the Americans rolled out their first S-70A-55 troop-carrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the Israelis. Israel has purchased 24 of the new machines costing $211m (�150m) ? most of which, of course, will be paid for by the United States. The logbook of the first of the new Black Hawks was handed over to the Israeli defence ministry by none other than the former secretary of state, Alexander Haig ? the man who gave Israel's then prime minister, Menachem Begin, the green light to invade Lebanon in 1982.
So, coming soon to the Middle East, a new breed of Black Hawk in the skies over your local West Bank town. Funny, though, that we haven't heard a thing about all this.
The roots of conflict
The terrible history: how two tribes have fought to the death for land and dignity
By Bernard Wasserstein
The Israelis and Palestinians remain locked in one of history's longest lasting struggles. Bernard Wasserstein explains the complex chain of events that have led to today's blood feud
Zionism and Palestinian nationalism have mimicked each other down the decades. Each regards itself as a victim and draws from that self-image a solipsistic self-righteousness that is used to justify ruthless means. Each has resorted to terrorism and offences against human rights. At the heart of each is an obsessive national vision, born of nearly a century of struggle, and focused on land, security, and dignity. Each is now near the end of its tether.
The first shots in the longest-running conflict of modern times were fired in 1920 in anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem, then under British rule. Arab nationalists protested against the policy, first enunciated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, of support for a Jewish National Home. In 1921 more serious disturbances broke out at Jaffa. But the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, refused to be deflected from the pro-Zionist line.
Mass immigration of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and anti-Semitic Poland aroused renewed Arab opposition in the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1939 a full-scale revolt erupted. The British resorted to ruthless repression. By 1939 most Palestinian nationalist leaders had been hanged, imprisoned or exiled. Facing world war, Britain then decided to appease the Arab Middle East. Jewish immigration was severely limited and Palestine was ruled out of bounds to Jews desperately seeking refuge from Hitler's Europe.
Towards the end of the Second World War, a new revolt broke out in Palestine. This time the rebels were Jews, not Arabs. At one point 100,000 British troops were engaged, but an impoverished, war-weary Britain could not maintain such a commitment. She threw in the towel and announced that the mandate would be handed back to the United Nations.
In November 1947 the UN General Assembly called for partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. Jerusalem was to belong to neither but would be internationalised. The Arabs rejected partition; the Zionists accepted it. In the chaotic last stages of British rule, civil war turned into regional war as the surrounding Arab states mobilised their armies.
When the last British High Commissioner withdrew on 14 May 1948, the Zionists, led by David Ben Gurion, proclaimed the State of Israel. He led the country to victory over the Arab armies. The Palestinians, divided and disorganised, failed to establish their state, and 700,000 fled their homes, many expelled by the Israeli army. They and their descendants ended up in camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, dreaming of return. Israel expanded beyond the boundaries allotted to her by the UN, while Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. The area now known as the West Bank was absorbed into what became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Israel and Jordan divided Jerusalem.
Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of survivors of Hitler's camps and Jewish refugees from Arab lands. But she failed to secure acceptance by her neighbours who prepared for a "second round". Border skirmishes punctuated the early 1950s and Mr Ben Gurion and his gung-ho army chief, Moshe Dayan, decided on a pre-emptive strike. In October 1956, following a secret agreement with Britain and France, Israel invaded Egypt. While her allies were humiliated, Israel scored a smashing victory and occupied the Sinai peninsula and Gaza. But under strong US pressure Mr Ben Gurion decided to withdraw.
Over the next decade Israel consolidated her institutions but Arab hostility did not abate. In 1967, after President Nasser blockaded Israel's Red Sea port of Eilat, Israel launched a lightning strike on Egypt. Within six days, Israel trounced Jordan and Syria as well. Israel now occupied Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. But these fruits of victory, with their large Arab populations, soon turned into a curse. UN Security Council resolution 242, in November 1967, called for Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognised boundaries but no negotiations ensued.
In October 1973, Israel was caught unawares by a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. Israel retreated in Sinai and the Golan Heights. But helped by an American arms airlift, Israel turned back the Arab armies and an Israeli force under Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt proper. At the end of October the US brokered a truce. An energetic series of diplomatic shuttles by the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, eventually yielded disengagement agreements between Israel and both Egypt and Syria.
A major diplomatic turning point came in November 1977 when President Sadat of Egypt visited Jerusalem and proclaimed readiness for peace. After difficult talks at Camp David in 1978 a peace treaty was signed in 1979.
By the spring of 1982 Israel had withdrawn from nearly the whole of Sinai. But negotiations over Palestinian autonomy collapsed over Israeli refusal to end Jewish settlement building or remove her army from the West Bank and Gaza.
In June 1982, Ariel Sharon, now Israeli Defence Minister, initiated a massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He hoped, in alliance with Christian Lebanese forces, to destroy Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation which was masterminding anti-Israeli terrorist operations from its headquarters in Beirut. Mr Arafat was compelled to leave for Tunis but the Israelis were drawn into the murderous thickets of Lebanese politics. After a massacre of Palestinians by Israel's Christian Lebanese allies, Mr Sharon fell from power. Israel eventually withdrew to a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
In 1987 the conflict returned to Palestine itself. A rebellion, known as the intifada, broke out in the occupied territories. It continued for seven years in spite of increasingly ferocious Israeli efforts to crush it.
A door towards peacemaking opened in 1992 with the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli Prime Minister. The Palestinians, weakened by the fall of their superpower patron, the Soviet Union, turned to diplomacy. In September 1993 Mr Rabin and Mr Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. Israel assented to a Palestinian Authority that would rule the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians renounced violence. Israel forces left Arab-populated towns and Yasser Arafat was elected to head the Palestinian Authority.
Over the next few years negotiations for a permanent settlement spluttered along and Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel. But extremists dealt the peace process a series of death blows. In 1995 a Jewish fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Terrorist bus bombings by Palestinians destroyed the government of Mr Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, and paved the way for the hard-line Binyamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Palestinian impatience grew as Israel expanded the settlements.
In 1999 Ehud Barak was elected narrowly as head of a Labour-dominated coalition government. Negotiations quickened as President Clinton took a direct hand. At Camp David in the summer of 2000 he failed to persuade Mr Arafat to accept a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza. Talks collapsed over Jerusalem and the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees.
On 28 September 2000 Ariel Sharon made his fateful visit to the Temple Mount. This provocative gesture furnished the pretext that Palestinian militants had craved. A second intifada broke out, much more violent than the first. Palestinian terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, elicited devastating Israeli reprisals. In February 2001 Mr Barak, discredited by his diplomatic failure, suffered electoral eclipse. His nemesis, Ariel Sharon, opted for a military solution. His response to terrorism was to ratchet up the level of reprisals. By January 2002 more than a thousand people had been killed in the second intifada, 800 of them Palestinians.
This March, terrorism reached its apogee when 127 Israelis were killed by snipers and suicide bombers. For Israeli public opinion, demoralised and desperate, the Passover massacre in Netanya on 27 March was the final straw. On Good Friday Ariel Sharon launched his campaign to eliminate "the infrastructure of terror", sending Israeli tanks back into the major towns of the West Bank.
History offers scant encouragement to Colin Powell in his venture into the quagmire this week. But if the prospects for peacemaking seem tenuous, the probable consequences of continued warfare are grim. Against this background, the last superpower may at last be ready to use real muscle to call a halt to the conflict between the sons of Abraham.
Bernard Wasserstein is professor of modern history at the University of Glasgow and the author of 'Divided Jerusalem' (Profile Books, paperback �9.99)
British woman tells of Bethlehem shootings
By Robert Mendick
A Jewish woman from Manchester spoke last night of her terror after fleeing Israeli soldiers firing live ammunition into a crowd of peace protesters.
Jo Bird, 31, a manager with the Co-operative Bank, watched as three of her friends were shot during the peace demonstration in Bethlehem on Easter Monday.
Her friend Kate Edwards, an Australian living in Manchester, is still in hospital in the West Bank after being hit in the stomach. She underwent surgery to remove four bullet fragments, which ruptured her stomach and caused severe internal injuries. Ms Bird was holed up in a hotel in Bethlehem for three days until the British consulate stepped in to evacuate her and six fellow peace activists, including the comedian Jeremy Hardy. She finally flew home on Thursday evening.
Ms Bird, whose Jewish parents support her activities, told The Independent on Sunday: "We were peacefully marching in Bethlehem and then, without warning, two Israeli soldiers began firing live ammunition out of an armoured personnel carrier.
"Some of the shots were aimed at the floor, some at the walls but others were aimed at people. I was about five metres from the soldiers when they started firing at us.
"I was terrified. It was completely outrageous. My main concern was for my friends who were injured. I was close by when they were hit.
"I feared for my life, for sure. The soldiers carried on firing at us for 10 minutes."
The demonstrators, under the umbrella of the International Solidarity Movement, then began, Ms Bird said, an orderly retreat.
She added."I am angry that our lives and our human rights were treated with such disrespect by the Israeli Defence Force. It opened my eyes to the brutality of the Israeli occupation."
'We're terrified - but what can I do against this?'
Israeli West Bank onslaught shows no sign of easing
Peter Beaumont in Jenin
The Guardian
You see them as you come down the last mountain before the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a swarm of Apache helicopters hanging low over the city. Then you hear it: the dull intermittent roar of the Apaches' heavy machine guns firing directly into the houses of Jenin camp.
We looked over the warren of alleys that forms Jenin camp from the roof of the house of Naila Dhaher, situated a few hundred metres from the first buildings of the camp of 15,000. A white pall of smoke hung over houses built across a broad ridge that opens to the flat plain of the valley.
We count four helicopters. Residents say there have been as many as six firing at once. And as we speak they make low passes over the city firing their cannon every five or so minutes.
A little later we hear two dull thuds echoing across the valley as one of the Apaches fires its missiles. A column of thick black smoke rises above the rooftops of the camp. A few seconds later, orange flames burst high above the nearest roof.
President George Bush may have ordered the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, but in Jenin, despite Israeli promises that it was "wrapping up the combat in the city", there was no sign yesterday that the assault was coming to an end as Israeli armour still poured into the city, and helicopters continued their ferocious assault.
Naila, a former tourist guide in Jerusalem, brings us sweet Arabic coffee as we stand watching the fighting from her roof. "My whole family is absolutely terrified," she tells us. "The bombing began on Wednesday morning." She suddenly jumps, startled by the missiles hitting a building near the elegant white tower of the camp's largest mosque.
"What can I do?' she asks. "What can any Palestinian do against this?"
A friend of Naila's walks across the roofs. He introduces himself as a local merchant with business interests in China. He will not give his name, but he points out his warehouse visible at the edge of the plain a mile or so away.
As we watch, two tanks and an armoured personnel carrier move into the city from the farmland on the plain.
"All my wealth is in that warehouse," he says softly. "If it is hit I will be ruined. What can I say," he adds with the same fatalism as Naila. "Sharon [the Israeli prime minister] does not want us here."
The fighting in the northern West Bank city of Jenin has been the fiercest of the 10-day-old Israeli offensive. In the past day and a half, say Palestinian sources inside the city, upwards of 30 people have been killed in Jenin camp. Israeli commanders, while unable to confirm those figures, have said simply that there has been substantial loss of life on the "other side", as gunmen in the city have fought with a suicidal ferocity.
Suicide bombs
Israeli officers have also claimed that groups of their soldiers in the city have been charged by Palestinian suicide bombers in their determination to kill them. It is impossible to confirm.
What is clear is that Israel's campaign against the cities of the West Bank will not be finished until Ariel Sharon feels he has dealt with Jenin and its neighbour Nablus. These cities, say the men around Mr Sharon, are the "cobra's head" of Pales tinian terror. Their camps, they tell you, send out the bombers and the gunmen on their most audacious raids across the Green Line into Israel itself.
We walk down the hill 100 metres or so to the last buildings before the camp and Jenin proper. "What has taken you so long to come?" asks a middle-aged man, referring to the fact that no international journalists had yet reached the city. A tall, gaunt man tugs at my sleeve. He cannot speak English but he dials a number on his mobile phone and hands it to me.
On the other end of the line is Abul Labed, a businessman who lives on the edge of the camp. He says he has been trapped in a house with his four brothers and 25 children, a family group of 40 in all. "The Israelis have been destroying buildings on the east side of the camp," he says. "They have put men, women and children from their homes. They keep bombing us from helicopters. There is no water and there is no milk to give the children.
"There are many dead here. I don't know how many. They will not allow the ambulances to come." He adds that yesterday he tried to leave his house for the first time to fetch water but was scared by Israeli snipers. "We have not been able to sleep for more than an hour a night for five days. The noise and fear are just too terrible."
An hour or so earlier we had been stopped on another route into the city by Israeli soldiers preparing to go and fight at Jenin camp. They told us they had come from fighting in the city of Tulkaram and had been at the Qabatiya junction, close to the city, fighting for the past two days.
Had they seen the reported suicide bombers charging Israeli positions?
"We saw it in Tulkaram," said a young soldier. "But we have not seen it here. In the fighting yesterday they tried to throw homemade grenades at us."
So, we ask, why is he here. He thinks for a moment. "The problem," he says, "is that there is not enough room in this small country for two peoples. It is a trial of strength that we are winning. They would like to throw us into the sea. We may have to do the same to them."
"In Jenin, we are on the verge of ending the fighting in the refugee camp," an army spokesman, Brigadier-General Ron Kitrey, told Associated Press. "The resistance there was very tough, perhaps tougher than estimated."
Gen Kitrey made clear, however, that troops won't pull out of the Jenin camp even if the fighting ends. "We will try to search for the wanted militants, their homes, their bases, the armouries and explosives' stores. The operation will take time - as long as needed."
Elsewhere yesterday, despite Gen Kitrey's optimism, the crisis showed little signs of abating. On the border with Lebanon, Israeli warplanes blasted suspected Hizbullah positions as troops traded fire with Lebanese guerrillas for the fifth day running. And in Nablus, Israeli military spokesmen said continuing fighting in the "casbah" area of the old city continued to be "complicated". Palestinian medical workers confirmed that nine people were killed yesterday, bringing the total dead there to at least 30.
In Bethlehem, a standoff between Israeli forces and scores of Palestinian gunmen holed up with Palestinian police officers and clerics in the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional birthplace of Jesus, entered a sixth day.
Gen Kitrey may really believe the heaviest fighting is over. Last night, the residents of the West Bank had good reason not to believe him.
U.S. Security Assistance to Israel
By Joseph Yackley
Key Points
-- With influence comes responsibility. The U.S. should not undermine the peace process it has helped design by arming Israel in preparation for further conflict.
-- Increases in U.S. military assistance are based on the unreasonable claim that Israel grows less secure with each peace treaty it signs.
-- The U.S. should adjust its approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by seeking innovative ways of addressing the causes of conflict.
The violence of the past eight months between Israelis and Palestinians has left 500 people dead, torpedoed the peace process, and turned the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into battlefields. As the U.S. reconsiders its role in promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace, the prospects for a final settlement?described last year as better than ever?seem worse than ever. In reference to the ambitious approach taken by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Bush administration has emphasized ?assistance? over ?insistence.? Unfortunately, rather than focusing on addressing the issues that have derailed the peace process, American assistance is emerging as a disjointed policy that urges a peaceful resolution to the conflict while boosting military aid to Israel.
The increases in military aid grow out of a central pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East: strengthening America?s ?strategic cooperation? with Israel. This cooperation currently centers around two categories of U.S. military-related assistance to Israel, Economic Support Funds (ESF) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The larger of these two, FMF, is intended to help Israel finance its acquisition of U.S. military equipment, services, and training and will total $1.98 billion in 2001. FMF is scheduled to increase by $60 million each year as part of an ongoing plan to phase out ESF support by 2008. If Israel would conclude peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians, this increased FMF support combined with U.S. pledges to satisfy Israel?s stated financial requirements for withdrawing from the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip will total more than $50 billion in U.S. military aid by 2008.
Already the strongest military power in the region and the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, Israel does not need additional military assistance. It has one of the most sophisticated, well-equipped, and best-trained armies in the world, and its armed forces are growing faster than that of its neighbors, whose military expenditures decreased during the 1990s. Israel?s annual military expenditures are consistently two to three times as high as those of other countries involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Israel leads the region in the number of heavy weapons holdings, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, and heavy tanks. Israel outpaces Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon in every major category of arms spending.
The world?s fifth-largest importer of major weapons in 1999, Israel is also the region?s largest and the world?s sixth-largest exporter of arms and military technology, with billions of dollars of sales to 61 different states, including potential U.S. adversaries like China. Israel is the only country in the Middle East to both develop and produce its own surface-to-surface missiles, combat aircraft, and tanks. Finally, beyond its overwhelming advantage in weaponry, Israel?s military boasts superior technology and capabilities in communications, intelligence gathering, logistics, training, organization, maintenance, and mobility.
A careful review of FMF assistance reveals that this program has actually hindered the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, made the Middle East more volatile, and undermined U.S. regional interests. If the purpose of the FMF program is to improve Israel?s security, the U.S. should reverse its increasing emphasis on military assistance and replace outdated, one-dimensional ideas about Israel?s security with a more extensive definition. Taking into account important nonmilitary aspects of Israel?s security would enable the U.S. to complement its current policy with a variety of alternative strategies designed to identify and address the causes of conflict before they explode into violence.
Although a conclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace accord must rest on a long-term political resolution to the conflict, the causes of the current violence are not strictly political and must be addressed before final-status negotiations can begin. One of the primary grievances of the current Palestinian uprising is the worsening economic situation in the Occupied Territories, due in large part to Israel?s prolonged exploitation of Palestinian water sources. Given the Palestinian economy?s heavy reliance on agriculture, Israel?s water policies have aggravated already-desperate Palestinian living conditions, undermining Palestinian support for the peace process and damaging the Palestinian Authority?s ability to quell popular uprisings.
A more comprehensive definition of Israel?s security would bear in mind the detrimental effects that Israel?s water policies have on regional security, allowing the U.S. to designate a small amount of FMF assistance for the development of water projects designed to reduce Israel?s reliance on Palestinian water resources. Greater access to water sources would improve Palestinian economic prospects and diminish the likelihood of water being a source of future conflict, providing an example of how U.S. security assistance could be applied to improve Israeli security without increasing military transfers or threatening Israel?s neighbors.
Problems with Current U.S. Policy
Key Problems
-- By ignoring the security ramifications of its Foreign Military Financing program, Washington is undermining both regional security and the overall personal security of most Israelis.
-- U.S. military assistance to Israel fails to address the causes of conflict and subverts the peace process by both enabling and rewarding Israeli defiance of international law.
-- With the FMF program, the United States is spending an enormous amount of diplomatic, political, and strategic capital on a policy that is bearing the opposite of its intended effects.
The violence that erupted last September highlights some important points about Israel?s security. First, the challenge for Israel has not been to protect its existence but rather to restrain its considerable military might in order to avoid international criticism. Second, despite the heightened sense of vulnerability stirred by the Palestinian uprising, by attacks on Israeli settlers, and by Arab condemnation of Israel?s policies, Israel?s neighbors have not threatened Israeli territory. Finally, despite their country?s clear advantage in the size and quality of its military arsenal, Israelis still do not feel secure on a personal, individual level.
This paradox of personal insecurity in the face of overpowering military strength stems from an important distinction within Israeli security that is not being addressed in Washington?s FMF assistance program to Israel. There are two levels of Israeli security?the macro, or national, level and the micro, or personal, level. The state of Israel is extremely secure in this first sense. Since its declaration of statehood and overwhelming military victory in 1948, Israel has not been attacked within its internationally recognized borders. Peace agreements with Arab neighbors, cooperation with regional powers such as Turkey, and decades of U.S. military assistance have combined to create a secure Israel. At the same time, Israeli citizens continue to be the target of terrorist attacks and violent uprisings, inducing a sense of personal insecurity.
Billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to Israel are spent each year addressing the wrong type of security. What?s worse, FMF assistance has undermined personal security in Israel by diluting the incentives for seeking peace and by emboldening Israel to avoid making the concessions necessary for peace. Until the underlying causes of the conflict and the current uprising are addressed, Israelis will continue searching for the sense of personal security that eludes them today.
The current violence grows out of Palestinian frustrations with the peace process. During years of waiting for promised benefits, Palestinians have seen their standard of living steadily decline. Because of Israeli policies?including border controls, retention of Palestinian funds, and restrictions on trade, investment, and access to water resources?Palestinians face growing trade and budget deficits. The anger and despair that have ignited the recent violence stem from these policies and their effect on daily Palestinian life. Unemployment hovers at 50%, poverty rates have increased, health standards have deteriorated, and any sense of opportunity among Palestinian youth has faded. The longer these dire conditions persist, the more popular support extremist groups like Hamas enjoy and the less secure Israelis feel.
For years, the majority of Palestinians have viewed negotiated peace as the most reasonable means to achieve their aspirations for an independent state. Still, Palestinians blame the failure of the Oslo peace process on provocative Israeli policies, including the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the expansion of settlements, and the building of exclusive roads and security checkpoints to establish permanent control over Palestinian territory. Washington has thus far been unwilling to pressure Israel to curtail these illegal activities. This unwillingness, coupled with increased U.S. military aid, supports and enables Israel?s violations of international law and leads many Palestinians to question the wisdom of pursuing a peace framed and sponsored by the United States. Many Palestinians see negotiation as empty promises and have begun seeking other means?some violent?of obtaining a homeland. As a result, a sense of insecurity grows within the Israeli population and is fostered by the very policies that the U.S. and Israel pursue in the name of promoting Israeli security.
In addition to weakening U.S. credibility as a neutral mediator, massive increases in military assistance to Israel undermine U.S. attempts to limit the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the region. This can be seen in a commendable?yet ultimately damaging?initiative in the early 1990s, when Jordan downsized its military and proposed linking further military cutbacks in the region to debt reduction. The U.S. resisted the suggestion and continued arms transfers to Israel at record levels. Following the 1994 peace deal between Jordan and Israel, Jordan?s relative military weakness was cited by other Arab states as the major reason for its inability to extract more concessions from Israel. The lesson was clear: The American-Israeli military relationship makes unilateral disarmament in the Middle East fruitless, even counterproductive.
Washington has yet to recognize the hypocrisy of promoting an ever-stronger Israel while citing Iraq?s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its failure to adhere to UN resolutions?charges of which Israel is also guilty?as reasons for subjecting the Iraqi population to more than a decade of sanctions. In fact, states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria view the development and acquisition of chemical and biological weapons as a counterbalance to Israeli weapons acquisitions. They see in Israel an aggressive, expansionist power that has occupied a piece of every country it borders. Furthermore, Israel?s refusal to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its maintenance of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, its disregard for international law, and its emphasis on preemptive military strikes, mobile weaponry, and quick-strike capabilities all reinforce this sentiment in a region with a historical tendency to solve disputes through violence.
Toward a New Foreign Policy
Key Recommendations
-- Rather than spending billions of dollars preparing Israel for conflict, the U.S. should focus on addressing thel causes of conflict.
-- To restore confidence in negotiated peace, Washington must emphasize regional security and reject both Israel?s illegal land occupations and the economic interests of the U.S. arms industry.
-- As part of a new approach to Israeli security issues, Congress should earmark a small amount of FMF assistance to finance Israeli water projects, with an eye toward increasing Palestinian access and supply.
Israel?s overwhelming military strength ensures its national security and affords the U.S. the luxury of exploring new strategies to address Israeli personal security concerns. One scenario involves designating a small portion of current FMF monies as nonmilitary security assistance to address the underlying causes of rancor rather than preparing for armed conflict.
The worsening economic conditions in the Occupied Territories can in part be traced to restrictive Israeli water policies. Israeli expropriation of Palestinian ground water (and continued restrictions on Palestinian access to it) guarantees sufficient water for Jewish settlers, who consume five to six times as much water per capita as Palestinians. The meager amount of water left for Palestinians has a higher salt content, increasing soil salinity and reducing Palestinian crop yields, despite improvements in agricultural technology.
Given the importance of water to a Palestinian economy heavily dependent on agricultural production, the insufficient quantity and poor quality of water available to Palestinians represents a potentially dangerous source of conflict. Without an increase in water quotas, Palestinian economic development is severely hampered. Hydrologists estimate that 1,000 cubic meters per person per year is the lowest level at which agricultural and industrial development is still viable. Per capita water consumption for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is a mere 137 cubic meters per person per year. Without more equitable water distribution policies, high Palestinian birth and immigration rates will further lower Palestinian living standards, already among the worst in the world. In such an event, popular Palestinian support?critical for a negotiated final peace with Israel?will quickly evaporate.
Both Israel and the Palestinians have long understood water?s security importance, designating it as a final-status issue on a par with Jerusalem, borders, settlements, and refugee rights. The geographical extent of Israeli occupation in Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank was in part determined by access to water resources. As recently as March, three Israeli officials?Israel?s minister for infrastructure, a former military chief, and an aide to Israeli President Ariel Sharon?mentioned the prospect of ?a water war? in connection with a Lebanese village?s decision to extract water from a local river.
Fortunately, water availability, unlike other final-status issues, can be addressed through U.S. assistance. Earmarking $250 million annually in FMF assistance to finance Israeli water projects?such as the development of the recently identified Negev aquifer, wastewater recycling and desalination plants, and new irrigation technology?would release an additional 400 million cubic meters per year of water for Israeli use. Congressional approval of this money should be linked to an equal reduction of Israeli water extraction from nonindigenous sources, providing Palestinians with an additional 170 cubic meters per person per year and greatly expanding the prospects for Palestinian agricultural and industrial growth.
Over the next six years this water initiative would cost $1.5 billion, less than 3% of projected levels of U.S. assistance to Israel. Projects to promote regional cooperation could also be financed through this shift, including a planned wastewater recycling and desalination plant in the Eilat/Aqaba/Taba region and the development of the Jordan River Valley, Dead Sea, and Arawa regions.
These types of projects would bolster Israel?s security and enable the U.S. to realign its policies with its stated foreign aid objectives, which include poverty reduction, promoting sustainable economic growth, increasing agricultural productivity, and contributing to a higher quality of life through environmental health. Future uses of U.S. security assistance could include promoting economic interaction in the region through increased trade, joint development projects, and integrated energy generation and distribution projects, thus encouraging peaceful cooperation by increasing interdependence among the states in the region and thereby heightening the costs of conflict.
Originally designed to promote Israel?s security, the FMF assistance program has become antiquated and counterproductive, based on an overly narrow view of Israeli security. A modest, FMF-financed water initiative is one way that the U.S. could refocus its efforts toward a more comprehensive and effective security strategy while avoiding the pitfalls of armament and helping to secure a stable and prosperous peace.
Joseph Yackley <[email protected]> is a recent graduate from the University of Chicago, with master?s degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy Studies. He is currently preparing for a year in Germany as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow with a focus on economic development issues in the Middle East.