"Is this the dream of the return to Zion, that we should pollute its soil with the spilling of innocent blood?" —Ahad Ha’am, Jewish scholar and writer, in a letter to the editor of Ha’aretz, 1922.
“A Jewish home in Palestine built upon bayonets and oppression is not worth having .”—Rabbi Judah Magnes, letter to Chaim Weizmann, 1929.
“Our purpose is to punish the population.”—Unnamed Israeli army officer to the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 2000.
The protests that began in Jerusalem on Sept. 28 with Ariel Sharon’s provocative appearance at Haram al-Sharif and intensified after Israeli soldiers killed seven of the unarmed protesters, grew into full-scale warfare in October and November. It was not a war between two well-matched adversaries, however, but an assault by the Israeli army on a civilian population fighting for its freedom with stones and rifles.
From the beginning, Israeli snipers used deadly fire against stone-throwers and unarmed demonstrators, according to the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights. Their examinations showed that most of the Israelis’ shots were aimed at the victim’s head and chest and therefore designed to kill. By late November more than 280 Palestinians had been killed, at least 70 of them children, and nearly 10,000 Palestinians seriously wounded, many of them blinded. Thirty-five Israelis were dead.
Arabs within Israel also came under attack. On Nov. 6 Amnesty International reported that in the aftermath of protests in several Israeli cities, hundreds of Israeli Arab teenagers and adults were being arrested in the middle of the night, subjected to high-pressure interrogation including beatings, and held in prison for long periods without seeing a lawyer. Three weeks later U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson reported, after a visit to Israel and the occupied territories, that life for Palestinians was one of “grinding, petty humiliations, discriminations and petty inequalities.” She concluded that the treatment they endured was “ultimately dehumanizing.”
Along with Amnesty International, Robinson urged that international monitors be sent to the area, but Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had earlier made the same request to the U.N. only to be turned down because of Israel’s opposition.
On Nov. 9, as Arafat was meeting with President Clinton in Washington, Israel escalated the violence by sending four helicopter gunships to Beit Sahour to assassinate Hussein Abbayat, an official in Arafat’s Fatah organization whom the Israelis accused of masterminding the protests. Two middle-aged women who happened by also were killed in the missile attack, and 15 wounded. Israeli Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh was not apologetic. “We are playing on this ground with our rules, and no one is immune from punishment,” he said afterward.
The killing of four and five Palestinians by Israeli soldiers became an almost daily occurrence, with many of the killings taking place at roadblocks. The Israelis invariably claimed the victims were “terrorists,” even if they were unarmed. As the deaths mounted, so did the Palestinians’ anger. Roving bands of Palestinians began firing into Israeli settlements and two car bombs were set off that killed three Israelis and wounded several, including children.
With each Israeli death the Israeli army escalated its attacks, raining rockets and tank shells on entire neighborhoods, usually long after the Palestinian rifleman had fled. The shells damaged homes, shops, churches, mosques, even graveyards, and most often the injured and dead were women and children. An elementary school near Deir El Balah in Gaza was hit by three tank shells. After unknown assailants bombed a settler school bus in Gaza, Israeli helicopters flying at night carried out a three-hour missile barrage that destroyed offices of the Palestinian Authority, police stations, and other buildings throughout Gaza and severely injured at least 125 people, including several young children who suffered shrapnel wounds. “The noise was horrible, and all the children were screaming,” said one resident whose windows were shattered by the explosions. It was the second Israeli missile attack on Gaza within a month.
Early the next day Israeli soldiers shot to death four unarmed Palestinian students at a roadblock in Gaza, and killed five more Palestinians in what the press refers to as “clashes.” Almost inevitably, these killings were followed by a car bombing in the Israeli town of Hadera that killed two Israelis and wounded scores more. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak again promised “to get even.” So, by late November, the deadly cycle of revenge and retaliation seemed certain to go on indefinitely.
Although the stoning and shooting of Israelis brought only fiercer retaliation by Israel, many Palestinians seemed willing to pay the price. It is not unreasonable to suppose that when an entire population has been stripped of its property, deprived of its land and water, imprisoned behind barbed wire and subjected to constant abuse and humiliation, a few will become desperate enough to attack their abusers and others will be reluctant to condemn them. Nevertheless, Israeli officials persisted in blaming the Palestinian leaders for orchestrating the violence.
Calling the actions of Palestinian militants official Palestinian policy provided Israel with an excuse to punish the entire population. The government closed the Gaza airport indefinitely and banned all fishing, one of Gaza’s major industries. Palestinians were confined to their towns and villages and unable to get to their jobs or to school. A ban on imports, including raw materials, medical supplies, and food products forced factories to shut down and caused severe shortages of staples such as flour and powdered milk. “This resolute response has one purpose,” Barak said on a visit to an Israeli army base on Nov. 21, “to clarify that violence has a price.”
Part of that “price” is the devastation of the Palestinian economy. According to a U.N. report released Dec. 5, Israel’s restrictions on the movement of Palestinian goods and workers had by late fall cost the Palestinian economy more than $500 million in lost wages and sales. Israel also was withholding payment to the Palestinian Authority of millions of dollars in tax money owed to the Palestinians but collected by Israel. By the end of November a third of all Palestinians were without regular household income and nearly half were living on $2 a day or less. In addition to these losses were the tens of millions of dollars in damage to Palestinian property done by Israel’s “heavy weapons, including rockets, tank shells and high-caliber automatic weapons.”
The U.N. said Israeli attacks had destroyed 431 private homes, 13 public buildings, 10 factories, and 14 religious buildings. Not included in the report was the $120 million loss to agriculture this fall because the Israeli army prevented growers from picking their crops or taking them to market. Thousands of olive trees were also destroyed. Palestinians who relied for their livelihood on orchards their families had tended for many generations saw them cut down in an afternoon by Israeli soldiers and settlers armed with chain saws.
An Economic Catastrophe
What has happened to the Palestinian economy since October is “catastrophic,” according to Salam Fayyad of the International Monetary Fund. His statement was especially disturbing because before the recent siege the economy had shown signs of growing. “Investment was on the rise,” according to an editorial in the Nov. 10 Jerusalem Times, “industrial areas were constructed, Palestinian products were gradually filling the market and competing against Israeli and foreign products, banks were everywhere, a stock market was functioning normally, and utility companies were gradually liberating Palestine from dependence on Israel.”
The future seemed especially bright earlier this year when a natural gas deposit was discovered off the coast of Gaza. The BG Group of London, which won a concession from the Palestinian Authority to explore the deposit, announced last September that a test well was flowing at a rate of 37 million cubic feet a day, more than from any gas well in nearby Israeli waters. BG executives predicted that the deposit would more than satisfy Palestinian electric power needs for 10 to 20 years, with enough left over to sell abroad. They estimated the value of the strike at from $2 to $6 billion once the necessary equipment was in operation.
With their own source of natural gas, the Palestinians no longer would have to buy electricity and other fuel from Israel, a fact that caused concern to some Israelis. Although Barak allowed the tests to go forward, an Israeli consortium immediately brought suit to block the drillings, on grounds that the Palestinian Authority lacked the legal right to grant the permits to the BG Group. Meanwhile, Israel’s crackdown on Gaza has delayed operations indefinitely.
American Weapons
As the siege continued through November, Arafat finally lashed out at the United States, charging that “The weapons used are…American helicopters, American armored cars, American missiles, American shells, American bombs.” He might also have pointed out that in 1999 Clinton had denounced Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal for using excessive force to repel attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army, and called for the bombing of Yugoslavia to force the Serb army to leave Kosovo. Only a year and a half later, however, as Israel bombarded Palestinian cities and shot at Palestinian children with what human rights organizations condemned as excessive force, Clinton continued to praise Barak and asked Congress to give the Israelis an additional $450 million in aid.
It was not surprising, therefore, that a Birzeit University poll released on Nov. 12 showed that only 3 percent of Palestinians surveyed support continued sponsorship of peace talks by Americans. A majority now regard the uprising as a war of independence and want the U.N. or other international body to broker future talks. Even as far back as 1977 the Palestinians favored peace talks under international sponsorship. In October of that year U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko jointly proposed that the two countries preside over a meeting in Geneva among all parties to the Middle East conflict to decide such key issues as: “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 conflict; ensuring the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people; and establishment of normal peaceful relations on the basis of mutual recognition of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence.”
The Palestinians and other Arabs welcomed the proposal as a positive step toward peace, despite its call for the recognition of Israel. But the plan was dropped when Israel objected that such a meeting could lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel’s rejections consigned to oblivion a plan that might have brought peace to the Middle East and spared tens of thousands of lives—most of them Arab—that subsequently have been lost.
In view of recent events, the one certainty is that the Palestinians never again will put their trust in the United States as an impartial mediator or come back to the peace process as it was in the past, marked, in Erekat’s words, by “procrastination, dishonored agreements, and continued settlement building.” Erekat has called instead for an international effort to ensure that Israel abide by U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and withdraw to its 1967 borders.
On the Palestinians’ side is a solid body of international law, contained in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and in dozens of U.N. resolutions, that not only requires Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories but also declares the settlements to be illegal. Built with the aim of staking a permanent claim to the West Bank and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, Israeli settlements now house the Zionist vigilantes who attack Palestinian homes and holy sites and beat and kill Palestinians with impunity. Even many Israelis agree there can be no permanent peace as long as the settlers remain. A petition signed by 50 Israeli scholars and community leaders and published in Ha’aretz last October demanded “an immediate and unilateral Israeli commitment to evacuating the provocative settlements that are to be included in the Palestinian state—including those in the Gaza Strip, Hebron, and the Jordan Valley.”
David Grossman, a prominent Israeli writer, pointed out in a Nov. 8 New York Times op-ed column that “No state in the world would accept the presence of fortified, heavily armed enclaves in its midst, defended by the soldiers of another country and bound to that country in dozens of mutually exclusive ways.”
The election scheduled for to take place by Feb. 10 will not change a fundamental fact: The next Israeli prime minister, whether it is Barak or Binyamin Netanyahu or Ariel Sharon, will have a choice between accepting a just peace or dooming both sides to endless conflict fueled by mutual hatred. Israel is adept at using its superior firepower to kill Palestinians and destroy their homes and orchards. In the long run, however, the security of the Israeli people depends, as it always has, on ending their occupation of another people’s land..
