34 YEARS OF ISRAELI POLICY HAVE LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR ITS UNHOLY WAR IN THE WEST BANK AND GAZA

Jewish Women for Justice in Israel and Palestine

34 YEARS OF ISRAELI POLICY HAVE LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR ITS UNHOLY WAR IN
THE WEST BANK AND GAZA

by Ellen Cantarow

I am Jewish. I am a writer. From 1979 to 1989 I reported for THE VILLAGE
VOICE, MOTHER JONES, INQUIRY and other US publications from Israel and the West Bank. During those years I witnessed on the ground the rapid growth of Israel's settlements and the seizure of Palestinian land and water for them: today over half the West Bank's resources now are in Israel's hands. (About a third of Gaza's resources have suffered the same fate.)

I conducted in-depth interviews with ultra-right-wing settlers and settler-leaders whose cry was: "Let them bow their heads, or let Israel expel them." I interviewed Palestinian villagers who had suffered settler vigilante actions and read accounts of these by Israeli-Jewish reporters of conscience in HA ARETZ and other Israeli papers. These vigilante actions ran the whole gamut: wanton destruction of property and crops, rampages through villages with cries of “Death to the Arabs” and smashing of car windows, casual in-the-street humiliation of Palestinian civilians, beatings, murder. Within Israel I witnessed the increasing polarization of Israeli society by the occupation; the growing, virulent racism of new generations. Take, for instance, the Moroccan Jews in Kiryat Shemona, members of Menachem Begin's voting base about whom I wrote for THE VILLAGE VOICE in 1982 and who most commonly told me, "The only good Arab is a dead Arab."

When I first arrived in Israel in 1979, a “Master Plan for the Development of Settlements in Judea and Samaria, 1979-1983” had just been drafted. In it Matityahu Drobles, head of the World Zionist Organization’s Department for Rural settlement wrote: “The disposition of the [Israeli] settlements must be carried out not only around the settlements of the minorities” - by settlements Drobles referred to towns and villages centuries old like Bethlehem and Hebron - “but also in between them.” Drobles’s rationale for this was that “over the course of time, with or without peace, we will have to learn to live with the minorities and among them [ by “minorities” Drobles meant the Palestinian people] while fostering good-neighborly relations.” Thus from the start of occupation Israeli policy-makers projected the permanent colonization of the West Bank and, later, Gaza. To single Ariel Sharon out as Israel’s exceptional evil - if only he were gone and polite, decent folks like Shimon Peres could guide the nation - is to be oblivious of history. It wasn’t under Ariel Sharon that the Drobles Plan was drafted, nor under Sharon that Kiryat Arba was established in 1968, but under Labor. Permanent settlement, retention and expansion of the settlements: this has driven Israeli policy under all every government since 1967.

To rule the land into which it has made its incursions Israel from the late 60s has enforced a military legal code completely separate from the laws governing Israel. The army, the military courts and other elements enforce military rule. Under it, for the past 34 years, collective punishment for the alleged acts of individuals has the order of the day - for example, 23-hour-a-day curfews lasting for weeks on end; the bulldozing of homes. During the years I was writing about the situation, stone-throwing and street demonstrations were what most commonly brought collective punishment. Suicide bombing is a post-Oslo phenomenon triggered by the doubling of settlement population after the accords were signed and by the dawning realization that Oslo consolidated a South African-style plan for permanent Bantustanization of the West Bank. On all my stays in the West Bank I witnessed the daily humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints; the casual landscape and social scenery of apartheid (the most obvious and continual manifestations were the checkpoints with differing treatment of Palestinians on the one hand;
Israeli Jews and internationals on the other, and the different color of license plates - blue for Palestinians, yellow for Israelis). I interviewed villagers whose homes had been blown up and/or bulldozed by Israeli soldiers. I heard accounts by men and women jailed, abused, and tortured in Israel's prisons (the practice is an established fact acknowledged by Israel ’s B’tselem and foreign human rights organizations and is ongoing as I write: THE FINANCIAL TIMES April 6 reported, “The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem yesterday petitioned the High Court after receiving reports of torture at the Ofer detention center near Ramallah.”) About all of the foregoing the Hebrew press was quite open while the US press was almost invariably silent.

We now arrive at the current nightmare. As I write, collective punishment is ratcheted up a thousand fold in full-blown war atrocities committed throughout the West Bank. Israel’s war machine has moved into the northern West Bank as well as in Gaza, from which I received an American relief worker’s e-mail this morning. For the past week my computer has delivered to me daily - even hourly - desperate e-mails begging for help from international human rights organizations. They plead with me and others in my list serves to call our congress people and senators, protest to the press. One writer, a university researcher by profession, describes looting by Israeli soldiers invading his home: “I had a little money (about 800 NIS) in the upper drawer of my desk which I got from the bank on Thursday when an invasion was expected . . . I found [the drawer] broken and the money gone.” Another passage, from a different letter, reads: “Their ‘visits’ to our houses are no different from [visits by] gangsters. They went to . . . my very close neighbors’ houses, they start by asking all of them to stay in one room with their faces against the wall, then they enter all rooms . . . go to the kitchen, collected all the food . . . and start eating it . . . the rest of the food they take . . . with them, they also take jewels, money and electronic equipment . . . Two of my neighbors have heart problems. The first thing they did when they knew about their sickness was to go and get their medicine and destroy it in front of their eyes.” In London’s THE INDEPENDENT Robert Fisk confirms, “The Israeli army . . . 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 exactlywhat Israeli soldiers used to do in southern Lebanon in 1983); and that brave Israeli academic, Avi Schlaim, has himself charged Israel with extra-judicial killings in Ramallah.”

Other e-mails describe ambulances shot at and stopped from arriving at their destinations; hospitals invaded and medical personnel prevented at gunpoint from carrying out their responsibilities; people bleeding to death while soldiers block, at gunpoint and in tanks, their safe passage to medical relief; corpses rotting in hospital corridors (numerous e-mails warn of the threat of imminent epidemics); relatives forbidden to carry out decent burials (one group of the slain had to be buried in a Ramallah parking lot); civilians shot if they venture out their doors; massive looting and vandalizing of homes; cultural institutions invaded and files destroyed; electrical systems for water pumps destroyed so that whole urban areas have their water supplies cut off; internationals and Palestinian press members wounded by Israeli gun-fire. As I write this on April 6, the most urgent e-mail of today is entitled, “Deliberately Created Humanitarian Crisis Reaches Intolerable Point April 6th, 2001, 11AM,” and describes six Nablus field hospitals with scores of people in serious-to-critical condition, doctors forced to operate with minimal equipment. In one such improvised center, corpses rot in the operating room while Israeli snipers fire on anyone trying to enter or leave. In Jenin 50 houses are reported seriously damaged by Apache helicopter fire, 20 people injured and bleeding in the street. There is much, much more.

Like Nero, President Bush has fiddled while Rome burns and has issued too little too late. What
is needed is an immediate order for withdrawal and a threat of economic sanction (this is what President Eisenhower did in the Suez Crisis of 1956, resolving it immediately.) What is needed is for Colin Powell to be on the ground now, not a week from now or this coming Sunday. Sharon, the Milosevic twin ordering these atrocities, is the self-same war criminal who commanded the infamous Unit 101 which killed 99 defenseless civilians at Kibyeh in October, 1953; who in August, 1977 ordered the destruction of 2000 Gaza homes and expulsion from them of 16,000 civilians during an Israeli "pacification" onslaught in the strip; who oversaw the IDF while it enabled the Phalangist massacre of over a thousand Palestinian civilians in the Beirut refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in 1982; who triggered the second intifada when, with an escort of 1000 soldiers, he "visited" Al Aksa mosque in September, 2000 - a visit followed next day by the IDF’s shooting of Palestinian demonstrators at the mosque.

I am old enough to remember a childhood just after World War II. I am filled with a mix of grief, helplessness, despair and anger as Israel, pretending
to act in my name and using the Nazi holocaust against the Jews to exonerate its crimes, proceeds with a clear effort to obliterate the economy, the social, political and cultural institutions, and the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian people. Those who do not speak out against the abominations these horrors are complicit by their silence. Those who exonerate or apologize for Israel as it commits them are guilty by association.

Ellen Cantarow, Medford, MA 02155 (address for identification purposes
only.)

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