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CounterPunch
October
22, 2002
Excuse Me?
Israel's Justification for Killing
Palestinians
by KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
former
CIA political analyst
Any discussion of violence and non-violence
in the Israeli-Palestinian context encounters a serious problem
of definition of terms. First, each side apparently understands
its use of violence as a reaction to the violence of the other.
In this regard, while Israelis and Palestinians generally agree
on a definition of Palestinian violence--from low level stone
throwing to suicide bombings--Palestinians define Israeli "violence"
in a unique way: occupation, settlement construction, closures,
and curfews are "violence", regardless of how and why
they came about or whether bullets are fired or people injured.
This brings us to the issue of moral equivalency. In Palestinian
eyes, the inadvertent killing by Israeli forces of Palestinian
civilians--usually in the course of shooting at Palestinian terrorists--is
considered no different at the moral and ethical level than the
deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian suicide
bombers. While the shockingly high numbers of Palestinian civilians
killed during the past two years undoubtedly, in some cases,
reflect poor judgment or lax discipline on the part of some Israeli
troops, in Palestinian eyes there is no grey area here: all violence
is equivalent, whatever the motive and backdrop.
Yossi Alpher (former director, Jaffee
Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University), "Violence
and Non-Violence by Palestinians and Israelis: A Question of
Definition," bitterlemons.org,
October 7, 2002
Dear Dr. Alpher:
I have just read your article on non-violence
in the October 7 issue of bitterlemons.org, and I want to express
my dismay at your attempt to exonerate Israel for its actions
since the intifada began, as well as your display of a selective
morality that devises alibis for Israeli violence while condemning
Palestinian violence.
At the start, you label as "unique"
the Palestinian view that the occupation itself and such actions
as settlement construction and closures constitute Israeli violence.
I would argue, on the contrary, that this Palestinian definition
of violence is not at all unique but is entirely appropriate.
Land confiscation by military force is
theft, which is violence. As you well know, Israel has confiscated
approximately 60% of the land area of the West Bank for military
use, for settlement construction, and for road-building. The
theft (violence) has been unprovoked. None of this confiscation
can be explained away as a response to Palestinian terrorism.
Moreover, this violence takes land from Palestinians for the
exclusive use of Jews--a vile form of ethnic/religious discrimination
that compounds the violence.
House demolitions carried out by military
force against civilians who have no recourse to the law clearly
constitute violence. When the demolitions are carried out because
Palestinians have built or expanded homes without a permit, in
a situation  where permits are consistently
denied to Palestinians, the demolitions cannot be explained away
as a response to Palestinian terrorism. When the demolitions
are carried out against the families of suspected Palestinian
terrorists, this violence is unprovoked by the victims of the
Israeli action. This is collective punishment (violence), which
is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The forcible confiscation of natural
resources such as water by a military administration or by armed
settlers is theft, which is violence. The indisputable fact
that Israeli settlers use approximately ten times as much water
per capita as the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and
Gaza are allowed to use, and that Palestinians must often stand
in line to obtain drinking water while Israeli settlers enjoy
lush gardens and swimming pools, constitutes the worst kind of
violence: a violence directed at a civilian population simply
because of its ethnicity and/or its religion, or rather its lack
of the right ethnic or religious identity--because it is not
Jewish. The denial of the basic necessities of life and basic
public services to a people because they are not Jewish is violence
of such immorality that it takes one's breath away.
You then proceed to compare Palestinian
and Israeli violence and declare that there can be no moral equivalence
between Israel's "inadvertent killing" of Palestinian
civilians, "usually in the course of shooting at Palestinian
terrorists," and the Palestinians' "deliberate targeting"
of Israeli civilians. Your construction assumes that all Israeli
killing of civilians is inadvertent, whereas all Palestinian
killing of civilians is deliberate. I wonder how you explain
the following:
On September 29, 2000, seven Palestinian
civilians throwing stones--not lethal weapons--to protest Sharon's
visit the previous day to the al-Aqsa Mosque were shot to death
by Israeli soldiers and police. The shooting was not inadvertent;
nor was it a response to Palestinian terrorism. The protestors
were not terrorists and did not carry arms. Although Orthodox
Jews in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem have for years
thrown stones at anyone they consider a Sabbath violator, Israeli
police and military have never once fired on them.
In the first few days of October 2000,
13 Israeli-Palestinian civilian protesters--some totally unarmed,
some throwing stones, none carrying arms, none terrorists--were
shot to death by Israeli police. The shooting was not inadvertent;
nor was it a response to Palestinian terrorism. It bears repeating
that, although Orthodox Jews have for years thrown stones at
anyone they consider a Sabbath violator, Israeli police have
never ever fired on them.
According to an Israeli journalist, a
check by Israeli army intelligence three weeks into the intifada
revealed that "the IDF had shot, in the first few days of
the Intifada, about 700,000 different shells and bullets in the
West Bank and 300,000 more in Gaza. All together about a million
shells and bullets. Someone in the Central Region Command later
termed the project 'a bullet for every child.' An astronomic
number that provides evidence as to what happened on the ground
. The IDF had been preparing for this Intifada for years, and
when it broke out, it unloaded its prolonged frustration on the
Palestinians . In the [Israeli] political as well as military
systems there is a view that it was perhaps the IDF destructive
reaction and the blow the Palestinians took in the first weeks
that made the situation deteriorate and escalated it . In the
beginning of October, the balance was 75 Palestinians dead with
only four Israeli victims." ["The Intifada's Second
Anniversary," by Ben Kaspit, Maariv, September 6,
2002]
During the first month of the intifada,
through the end of October 2000, 117 Palestinian civilians were
killed, including 32 kids under the age of 18 (18 under the age
of 16). The killing of these 117 Palestinians was not inadvertent,
and it was not a response to Palestinian terrorism. Except for
the horrible lynching of two Israeli soldiers (whose perpetrators
were arrested and were not among the Palestinians killed during
this first month), there was no Palestinian terrorism in this
period.
An American reporter watching a Palestinian
funeral procession in Nablus in October 2000 watched as Palestinian
teenagers broke away from the funeral near an Israeli checkpoint
and took slingshots out of their pockets. "Stones were
fired from slingshots, none coming close to the Israelis sitting
inside a jeep with wire mesh over the windows. ... [After half
an hour] the first shot rang out--a loud crack coming from the
direction of the Israeli checkpoint. Another crack of weapons
fire was heard, then another. Then the scattered pops became
a burst, this time coming from the tree line on the hill. One
young Palestinian went down, blood gushing from behind his ear.
But he was alive, grazed by a ricochet. A young man shouted
and pointed to a rooftop on the hill. Four small figures, Israeli
soldiers, had taken positions behind the parapet and were seen
taking aim. The crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons fire
cut through the air, and two young men went down. One was shot
in the thigh. The other was shot in the forehead, between the
eyes he was the day's first fatality. [Four teenagers made
molotov cocktails, without lighting them, and tried to sneak
up on the Israeli checkpoint.] Suddenly from the far right,
in the hills, came a burst of automatic weapons fire that sent
the young men into temporary retreat. Some pointed to the hilltop,
warning that Israeli sharpshooters were there. Then came a rapid
burst of what sounded like heavy machine-gun fire. One long
burst, then another. Two more young men fell, one shot in the
head. The automatic weapons fire came closer, and from all directions--from
the Israeli checkpoint, from the concrete house on the hill and
from the tree line. No fire had been heard coming from the Palestinian
side. But other reporters said they saw young Palestinians shooting
from behind a wall--and that their shots had started the gunfire.
Then the ambulances brought in a young boy with the back of
his head missing. Behind him, friends ran in, shouting and carrying
a piece of cardboard. On the cardboard were pieces of the boy's
brains they had scooped off a wall. [The 14-year-old boy had
been trying to pry a bullet out of a wall when he was shot.]
'His brains got stuck on the wall. He got stuck on the wall'
[said two witnesses]. The final count in Nablus was at least
five dead, perhaps six, and dozens injured." ["Death
in the Afternoon," by Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post,
October 21, 2000]
An Israeli journalist conducted a lengthy
interview with an Israeli sharpshooter in November 2000, who
described himself as very careful about when he fired and described
IDF orders for opening fire as "moderate"--meaning
"sharpshooters are given precise orders to open fire. On
people who throw firebombs, you aim for the legs, but people
who pull out weapons can be shot straight on." They discussed
the permissible age of Palestinian targets. "You haven't
shot children? All the sharpshooters haven't shot children.
If they were children, they were mistakes. They forbid us to
shoot at children. How do they say this? You don't shoot
a child who is 12 or younger. That is, a child of 12 or older
is allowed? Twelve and up is allowed. He's not a child
any more, he's already after his bar mitzvah. Something like
that. Thirteen is bar mitzvah age. Twelve and up, you're
allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us. Again: twelve
and up you're allowed to shoot children. Because this already
doesn't look to me like a child by definition. So, according
to the IDF, it is 12? According to what the IDF says to
its soldiers. I don't know if this is what the IDF says to the
media. In the 10 seconds that I have, I have to estimate how
old he is. And in what the direction the wind is blowing,
and the deviation here and there, and which way he'll jump the
next moment. Yes, but there are hardly any mistakes by sharpshooters.
The mistakes are made by people who aren't sharpshooters. And
it turns out that they happen to hit the children's heads, and
all this is just by chance? If you say you have seen children
that have been hit in the head a lot, then it is sharpshooters."
["Don't Shoot Till You Can See They're Over the Age of
12," by Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, November 20, 2000]
Another American reporter described the
following incident in Gaza in June 2001: "It is still.
The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of
the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.
'Come on, dogs,' the voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all
the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!' I stand up. I walk outside
the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of a bitch!'
'Son of a whore!' 'Your mother's cunt!' The boys dart in small
packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates
the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two
armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers.
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than
ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the
heavy sand. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot
with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end
over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the
hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out,
the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot
the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the
age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an
eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more,
three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in
other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down
in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined
up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in
their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but
I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice
into a trap and murder them for sport." ["A Gaza Diary:
Scenes from the Palestinian Uprising," by Chris Hedges,
Harper's magazine, October 2001]
On November 22, 2001, five Palestinian
boys, aged six through 13, on the way to school were killed when
they kicked an Israeli bomb deliberately planted at a crossroads.
The boys' bodies were so badly mangled that doctors could not
determine for some time whether four or five children were involved.
This killing was not inadvertent, and it was not a response
to Palestinian terrorism. In fact, there is very little difference
between a bomb deliberately planted at a crossroads used by civilians
and a suicide bombing deliberately aimed at civilians, except
that in the first case the perpetrator survives and gets away
with his crime. (I had occasion to discuss this incident at
the time with an American supporter of Israel who prided himself
on being "a liberal." I was disconcerted to hear him
justify and defend Israel's action in planting a booby trap in
a civilian area. Palestinian parents, he said, shouldn't let
their children out on the streets.)
The number of cases of Israeli tanks,
helicopter gunships, and fighter jets firing into civilian marketplaces
to punish curfew violators, or firing into civilian homes, or
firing into crowds of adults and children known to be unarmed
are myriad-too numerous and frequent to be recounted here. Israeli
and international human rights organizations have remarked repeatedly
on Israel's disproportionate use of firepower against civilians.
The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reports that
fully80% of Palestinians killed by IDF troops enforcing curfew
are children. Need I repeat: this killing is not inadvertent,
and it is not a response to terrorism. Moreover, Israel doesn't
care about the killings. An Israeli correspondent reported in
November 2001 that, despite the fact that 700 Palestinians had
been killed to that point in the intifada, the IDF had conducted
only ten investigations into shootings by soldiers, and only
one had led to a court martial. These 700 killings up to a year
ago, and the nearly 2000 up to the present, cannot possibly all
have been inadvertent, and they were clearly not all a response
to Palestinian terrorism.
None of what I have recounted is, or
is intended to be, an excuse or justification for Palestinian
suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. These acts, which
do indeed deliberately target civilians, are indefensible. The
Israeli actions described above are also instances in which civilians
have been deliberately targeted, and they are also indefensible.
These are not isolated incidents or aberrations or mistakes;
they do not, as you put it, simply represent occasional instances
of "poor judgment or lax discipline"; they are not
inadvertent.
The effort to cast this struggle in moral
terms, painting Israel as always an exemplar of high moral values
and the Palestinians as unable to maintain those values, is extremely
hypocritical and sanctimonious. It leads, moreover, to moral
distortions such as the one described above in which an otherwise
liberal person can be so blinded by his mental image of an ever-moral
Israel populated by ever-moral Jews that he can actually defend
Israel for a clear terrorist action and blame the victims for
being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How the suffering
and death and oppression caused by Israel's month-long siege
of the West Bank in April 2002, or by the round-the-clock curfews
imposed for the last four months on a civilian population--to
name just a few of Israel's actions in the last 35 years of occupation--can
be justified as moral and non-violent beggars the imagination.
The Israeli actions I have recounted
here are the deliberate, calculated, and quite frequent actions
of a military establishment and government that are, all things
considered, no more moral in their wartime conduct--or indeed
in their peacetime conduct--than any other nation or people,
including the Palestinians. The campaign conducted since the
intifada began to demonstrate that Israel is morally superior
to Palestinians is part of the decades-long effort to portray
Israel as superior in all ways to its Arab neighbors. As one
thoughtful Jewish-American scholar has put it, the effort is
meant to demonstrate that ultimately "Palestinian history
and destiny are secondary to Jewish history and destiny."
This moral selectivity impedes justice, justifies Israeli violence,
and ultimately perpetuates the conflict year after year.
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with
the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning
in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer,
dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her
book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,"
was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband Bill,
also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the CounterPunch
website.
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