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July 13, 2002
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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Weekend
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July 13, 2002
A Process of
Dehumanization
Raping the Palestinians
by M. Junaid Alam
Part Two:
Concerning Violence
We return now to a subject touched upon briefly,
if only by necessity, which has been distorted and manipulated
to no end: the subject of violence. Fanon noted that "the
settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil."
Thus in our press and media, which takes the viewpoint of the
settler, the Palestinian is branded a terrorist from the outset,
intent upon nothing else but the destruction of Israeli democracy,
lurking just beyond it, surrounding it, and waiting to strike.
We can immediately recognize in this image an exact reflection
of the viewpoint on Israel's origins and the circumstances surrounding
it. That viewpoint has been exploded. The mainstream outlook
concerning violence has its underpinnings on the previous set
of myths, but so much nonsense has been said and written about
it that it deserves serious treatment.
We have seen in the examination of the
Israeli occupation that the life of the Palestinian is almost
defined by Israeli violence; his ability to move, to travel,
to live in his home, to give birth, to call an ambulance: all
of this is denied daily by Israel. Indeed, the Palestinian is
given the opportunity to "move" only when Israeli military
forces have either reduced his home to rubble, which has been
done tens of thousands of times since 1967, or if he has been
dispossessed in an ethnic cleansing campaign. The very location
of the Palestinian population is a result of Israeli violence:
he is confined to isolated ghettoes and squalid refugee camps
resting on 1/5th of the land which rightfully belonged to him.
But our "terrorism expert" and his colleagues at the
editorial offices of Wall Street Journal and New York
Times remain unimpressed, and cry out: "this is part
of the 'we must look at the roots' of terror nonsense! The Palestinian
purposely kills innocent civilians and is a terrorist!"
For these gentlemen, to even mention the forced removal of millions,
mass looting, pauperization and imprisonment of an entire population
for decades is heresy. They try to prove that the Palestinian
is a terrorist by defining his violence as terror and by defining
terror as the only true violence, yet they succeed only in proving
that Darwin's theory of human evolution has a fair number of
exceptions, located mainly in certain New York office buildings.
But let us descend to this primitive
level-and what a descent it is-to see who is guilty of intentional
murder of civilians. We are already aware-courtesy of recent
Israeli historians-that deliberate massacres were carried out
by Zionist militia from the outset. In fact, Segev's aforementioned
book contains a telling quotation: in the course of a Knesset
debate in 1949, when Communist Member of Knesset Toubi accused
a fellow MK of "preparing another Deir Yassin", MK
Meridor replied: "Thanks to Deir Yassin we won the war,
sir!" Indeed. But there is hardly any need to travel so
far back: during the first Intifada, twenty-five Palestinian
civilians were killed by Israelis for every one Israeli killed
by Palestinians in the Territories.7 During this whole six-year
period the Palestinians rarely used guns, while naturally the
Israeli forces were equipped with automatic rifles. In the first
three weeks after the second Intifada had begun, 100 Palestinians
had been killed, 30 of them children, and Amnesty International
issued a report citing, "excessive use of lethal force in
circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces
nor others were in imminent danger..." In other words: intentional
murder of civilians.
The framework of intentional murder is,
in fact, too narrow: if we include deliberate, systematic torture,
we gain a finer appreciation for Israel's moral conduct. Until
very recently, torture was officially legal in Israel, and had
its pinnacle year in 1991, during which five thousand
Palestinians were tortured (BTSelem). We are graced with one
example of judicial generosity cited below:
in 1992, a young man named Al-Akawi,
brought to court after 'moderate physical pressure' looked so
badly beaten and unwell that the judge took the 'unusual step'
of giving the Shin Bet only eight more days for interrogation.
But by 5 PM the next day the authorities summoned Al-Akawi's
father to come and remove his son's body.8
The practice of cruel treatment of detainees
has far from ended. After Israel's April onslaught, hundreds
of Palestinians had mysteriously 'disappeared' from the West
Bank. The 'mystery' has been unraveled: Israel had deported them
to torture camps "behind razor wire and lookout posts"
at an Israeli army base. The approximately 1,000 prisoners were
being "regularly beaten with wooden batonsforced to spend
nights sitting in the dirt outside in the cold, in their underwearrefused
food for days at a time". One former inmate recalled the
high level of professionalism displayed by his oppressors: "They
made us stand in a group and drove an armoured personnel carries
at us. It swerved away at the last minute." Independent
Israeli human rights organizations have apparently confirmed
all of this. (The Independent, April 15)
At this point our terrorism expert and
his cohorts appear uncomfortable: it is only temporary. "Palestinians
blow themselves up! They strap bombs around themselves and kill
civilians; I don't see any Israeli blowing himself up."
We must congratulate our most perspicacious friend: after having
overseen the minor details of mass Israeli expropriations, massacres,
killings, and tortures over the course of the last fifty years,
he has at least noticed the difference in the methods of violence.
But even in this remarkable epiphany of his he overlooks all
else. He fails to note that his favorite outpost of civilization
has received over $90 billion dollars from the United States
since its creation, that it still receives billions of dollars
in military aid, including hardware, technology, and expertise
annually-and that he is paying for it. The Palestinian, on the
other hand, is essentially a dispossessed former peasant. What
small arms he has attained here and there include old rifles
and some automatic weapons, nothing which can pierce armor or
challenge air power. So when the Israeli army embarks on the
proud mission of terrorizing the Palestinian people, it does
so in the most modern tanks, the most expensive aircraft, with
the deadliest missiles, and the most powerful bombs. Thus the
Israeli need not "blow himself up"; he is quite content
to blow the Palestinian up and leave himself entirely out of
the equation. The Palestinian, however, is well aware of his
predicament: his entire six-year campaign without the use arms
has brought him only twenty-five martyred brothers for every
dead occupier-and worse-the farce of Oslo. Seeing that he is
no match for the colossal colonial military, he strikes quickly
and fatally at soft targets within Israel.
Yes, after facing at least four decades
of relentless Israeli terror, in 1993 he begins to carry out
suicide bombing campaigns inside Israel. His attacks are scenes
of brutality, but also examples of despair. Malcolm X once said,
"The price of freedom is death"; for the constantly
dehumanized and brutalized native, the benefit of death is freedom.
The attacks are terrible no doubt, but only drops of water in
the vast Israeli ocean of terrorism that is both quantitatively
and historically much more powerful and deadly. In pointing
out the differing methods of violence the pro-Israeli pundits
hopes to discover a hidden 'culture of hate' or 'culture of evil',
but he has only helped us expose the disparity of power between
one of the world's most powerful militaries and the world's last
colonized people. He worries about "bombs strapped around
waists" but should concern himself with removing the restraints
strapped around his mind; perhaps he would then see that it is
the colonizer who has strapped chains around the arms and ankles
of the native and that this lends the conflict its explosive
character.
Yet our expert is not entirely without
weapons of his own. He is always equipped with phrases-marvelous
phrases, no doubt-which wash away the facts of history with a
wave of the hand. Today, he raises his favorite: "there
is no moral equivalency here." We are forced to agree-from
the Palestinian perspective-that there is indeed no "moral
equivalency" between a half-century of all-sided, all-encompassing
criminality and recent acts born of desperation. But he immediately
clarifies his thesis: "there is no moral equivalency between
terror and the democracy of Western civilization". Here
he has introduced three fine terms in just one sentence; when
"moral equivalency" does not suffice to crush dissent
he brings in the bulldozers of "terror" and "democracy".
Permit us to remind him of the content of Israeli democracy
in relation to the native.
If we set aside the fact that Israel
had to expel most of its non-Jewish population and has subjugated
the remaining Arabs in its territory, it is accurate to say that
the Israelis elect their own leaders rather freely. Let us briefly
see whom they have chosen to represent them. Israel's first Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion was the man who headed all Jewish militia
before and throughout the massacre and ethnic cleansing campaigns
of 1947-1949. The two main militia groups involved in the rape,
plunder, and killing of Palestinians were Irgun and Haganah,
led by Menachem Begin and Yitzakh Shamir, respectively. Begin,
who told the Knesset that the Palestinians are "beasts walking
on two legs" was elected PM in 1977, and Shamir's heroism
earned him the same post in 1983. Golda Meir, elected PM in 1969,
is responsible for the famous saying, "There was no such
thing as Palestinians, they never existed." A resounding
round of applause for the Israelis: they have elected to the
highest offices a cohort of racists and war criminals. An May
14, Haaretz piece on the subject of the International
Criminal Court noted that the Israeli elite have become "concerned",
even "alarmed", by "the possibility that prominent
Israelis, members of the security services as well as politicians,
will have to stand trialfor committing war crimes." The
article continues, "The legal and military leadership in
Israel are becoming increasingly concerned that Israel will be
well represented among the first suspects and accused."
In the category of war crimes Israeli leaders will undeniably
take home the gold.
But I almost forgot about the man who
supports mass deportation. I almost forgot the epitome of savagery.
I almost forgot Ariel Sharon. Administrator of the Territories
in the 1970's Sharon designed the settlements so that they would
separate and isolate Palestinian villages from one another. In
the 1980's he called for mass expulsion and destruction of a
Palestinian village for rioting.9 In 1982, the Israeli government
held him "personally responsible" for the horrifying
massacre carried out in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla, which
left 1800 civilians dead. Today, as his list of crimes grows
ever longer, as his own people refer to him as "The Bulldozer",
he officially stands as the elected representative of the Israeli
people.
It turns out that Israeli democracy,
whose existence is meant to shame those who support the Palestinian
struggle for justice and freedom, is in fact an indictment
of Israeli society itself. Those living under a dictatorship
at least have the distinct advantage of not being indirectly
involved in the unjust violence of their government. And what
kind of violence is the present Israeli government exacting upon
the Palestinians today?
April 22, The Times of India:
IDF troops shot and wounded four Palestinian children in the
Gaza Strip for throwing stones at Israeli bulldozers. One of
the aggressors, a 3-year old Palestinian boy, was shot in the
head and died. April 26, The Independent: two 14 and 15
year-old boys who approached Jewish settlements with knives were
killed. Israeli vehicles ran over one of the children several
times and left both bodies to be gnawed at by wild dogs. May
17th, AP: Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 7-year old boy in
a Nablus refugee camp. Soldiers fired from tank-mounted machine
guns in response to stones, injuring six civilians, including
three children. Nevertheless the source informs us it was "accidental."
May 19th, Jerusalem Post: An Arab-Israeli doctor was shot
and killed near Hebron for trying to bypass a checkpoint. An
Arab-Israeli woman was shot dead by the IDF in Shuweikeh for
trying to repair her car. We are informed the fatal bullet was
a "warning shot" which "ricocheted." An Arab-Israeli
was shot and wounded at an IDF roadblock for failing to stop;
he was deaf. May 30th, Haaretz: A 17 year-old Palestinian
boy was killed while in custody. The boy was to undergo brain
surgery when IDF forces beat and detained him, tied his hands
with electrical wire while in custody, and beat him some more.
After shooting him dead, soldiers threw his naked body into the
street. His mother was not notified. Generously, the IDF offered
to open a "special investigation." June 27th, Guardian:
Israeli military forces in the Balata refugee camp shot and killed
a 17-year old Palestinian. He was firing a pistol at an Israeli
tank. June 29th, CNN: A Palestinian woman and her husband
were wounded by IDF bullets at Deir Balah refugee camp. We are
informed that they were "in the crossfire." The woman
died soon after because "an ambulance was delayed from entering
the area." We are not informed if this is also because it
was "in the crossfire". July 2, Haaretz: a
10-year old Palestinian boy was shot dead by either settlers
or soldiers. The army sent its condolences to the family: a bulldozer
tore up their vegetable plot-"All of their livelihood for
the summer and fall months was ruined"-and then destroyed
"three motorized pumps that brought water from the well."
This is the precious content of Israel's
coveted 'democracy': murdering Palestinian men, women, and children
on a daily basis. Palestinians are finding themselves infused
with 'Western civilization' one bullet at a time. As illustrated,
in the past several months Israel's guns have spoken and spoken
loudly. Now let the men who have wielded them speak for themselves:
IDF sergeant first class reservist Asaf
Oron.
[In the Territories] we have created
an entirely hallucinatory reality, in which the true humans,
members of the 'Nation of Masters', can move and settle freely
and safely, while the sub-humans, the 'Nation of Slaves', have
been shoved into the corners and kept invisible and controlled
under our IDF boots.10
IDF staff sergeant reservist Shlomi Segall.
Sharon and his cronies are fighting a
colonial war to keep their pet settlement project in place, to
perpetuate the Israeli occupation and the subjugation of the
Palestinian territories. It is a one-sided war with a not-so-covert
purpose of destroying any hope of a Palestinian homeland and
independent national life.11
IDF soldier Sergio Yahni.
This army does not exist to bring security
to the citizens of Israel, it exists to guarantee the continuation
of the theft of Palestinian land. As a Jew, I am repelled by
the crimes this militia commits against the Palestinian people.12
To survive the checkpoint, you [the soldier]
must become an animal. You become a machine of the checkpoint.13
IDF tank gunner reservist Shamai Lebowitz:
Can you expect a rape victim to negotiate
with her attacker? Can you expect a slave to negotiate with his
master a 'contract of freedom'? 14
These men are among some 470 Israeli
soldiers who have refused to serve in the Territories, citing
their refusal to "dominate, expel, starve and humiliate
an entire people." Their accounts and testimonies speak
to the utter brutality and violence Israel has displayed towards
the Palestinians. No doubt they are the exception, as the vast
majority of Israelis are content to fulfill their national duty
by defecating in Palestinian civilian offices and firing tank
shells at little children on bicycles, incidents which have been
reported in the mainstream Israeli press.15 But the refuseniks
have nevertheless freed themselves from the system and given
us valuable insight into the dialectics of colonialism, confirming
the realities of a system once described with unparalleled precision
by Césaire and Fanon.
By now our terrorism expert, having nothing
left to say, has fled the scene. There is no comparison between
the systematic, powerful, and all-sided violence of the Israeli
colonizer and the desperate reactions of the oppressed native.
The original sin of colonization committed by the settler, compounded
by the terror and brutality which has flowed from it for over
fifty years, is the principal act of aggression. The Palestinian
cannot be one-sidedly faulted for trying to prevent his ethnic
cleansing and possible extermination, as he is fighting for his
very existence. If one can criticize his tactics, which would
be hard not to do given the tragic consequences of suicide bombings,
it must be a complete criticism, that is, it must be made
clear that what the native does out of lack of alternative options
to regain his land cannot be placed on the same plane
as what the robber of his land has always been doing entirely
of his own volition and with incomparably greater force. The
words of Mark Twain concerning the violence of the French Revolution
could hardly find a more appropriate context:
There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if
we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder
in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted
mere months, the other had lasted a thousand yearsbut our shudders
are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary
Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death
by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult,
cruelty, and heartbreak?....that unspeakably bitter and awful
terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness
or pity as it deserves.16
It has been the purpose of this article
to expose the "unspeakably bitter and awful terror",
to grasp it and dig it out from under the stinking pile of racism
and hatred which has smothered and covered up the suffering of
the Palestinian people for so long.
But having peeled away at the many layers
of lies and having exposed the inner workings of Israeli brutality,
the question remains: what is to be done? There are, of course,
certain international laws and norms which have been drawn up.
Israel stands in violation of several articles of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, namely regarding the shifting of demographics
and use of violence, which covers essentially every pertinent
article of the document. Israel stands in violation of certain
UN resolutions as well: 194, which calls for the right of return
for refugees, and 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal to
pre-1967 borders. But in examining these documents in relation
to the question of "what is to be done", a certain
degree of bluntness is required: nothing has been done. These
documents, which were not written up yesterday, were at any rate
written up and codified only with the approval of the world's
five great powers and are disobeyed and discarded at will by
the world's main power. They are a reference point only in that
they illustrate the hypocrisy of its supposed enforcers.
Throughout the history of mankind, liberation
has been achieved not by brandishing this or that document, but
through genuine struggle and solidarity among those who are being
deprived of justice and are not afraid to fight for it. And who
is being deprived of justice today? The Palestinian natives fighting
Israeli colonialism, the unemployed masses of Argentina combating
the system of greed heralded by the IMF, the poor of Venezuela
defending Chavez against reactionary despots, and of course the
American public which finds itself not only robbed by the corporate
presidency, but robbed again for the purpose of funding wars
abroad that will produce its own set of explosive consequences.
Thus the chains burdening the Palestinian native will not be
kindly unlocked by the system which forged them; they must be
broken apart by the great majority of humanity which is bound
and shackled by them through a collective will of resistance.
Notes
1. Cited in Erlich, Guy, 'Not Only
Deir Yassin', Ha'ir, 6 May 1992.
2. Pg. 31. Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2000.
3. See note 1.
4. June 28, Reuters. Quote cited by correspondent Elaine Monaghan.
5. May 31, 2002. Washington Post. "Settlements Expand
Under Sharon."
6. Statistics compiled by Israeli human rights group B'TSelem
7. July 01, 2002. Z Magazine. "A Conversation with
Justin Podur in Gaza."
8. May 1994, 2002. Cited in Z Magazine. "Israeli
Apartheid and Terrorism", by Edward S. Herman, media analyst
and Professor at Univ. of Penn.
9. Pg. 581. Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999.
10. April 10, 2002. Cited in Z Magazine. "Passover
2002: An Open Letter to American Jews", by Asaf Oron
11. July 05, 2002. The Guardian. "Why I Won't Serve
Sharon", Shlomi Segall.
12. March 19, 2002. Cited in World Social Forum. "To:Minister
of Defence Ben-Eliezer", Sergio Yahni.
13. Quote cited in July 05, 2002 Z Magazine article, "Breeding
Points of Terror", Jessica Azulay.
14. July 05, 2002. Cited in Middle East Times. "An
Israeli Officer's Response to Bush", Shamai Leibowitz.
15. May 6, 2002, Haaretz. Amira Hass writes, "[The
soldiers] defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered
in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed
to defecate into a photocopier." There were "two toilets
on every floor".July 2, 2002. Haaretz. Gideon Levy.
(Note: BBC recently acquired clear footage of the incident)
16. Quote cited in Monthly Review, June 2002, "Violence:
A Tool of Order and Change", by Leo Panitich. From Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
M. Junaid Alam's Raping the Palesitians
is continued in Part Three: Concerning
Violence.
M. Junaid Alam is
an undergraduate in political science at Northeastern University.
He can be reached at: alam.m@neu.edu
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