Israel's Sacred Terrorism
excerpted from the book
The Real Terror Network
by Edward S. Herman
South End Press
Among the recipients of U.S. military and economic aid and
diplomatic support, Israel occupies a unique place. Israel is
generally portrayed by the U.S. mass media as the victim of terrorism,
a characterization that is in part correct. Its own role as a
major perpetrator of state terrorism is consistently downplayed
or ignored, in accordance with the general principle, discussed
earlier, that violence employed by ourselves or by our friends
is excluded from the category of terrorism, by definition. The
record of Israeli terrorism, however, is substantial, far too
extensive even to attempt to sample here. A small glimpse into
the reality was given by Prime Minister Menahem Begin in a letter
published in the Israeli press in August 1981, written in response
to what he regarded as hypocritical criticism of the Israeli bombing
of Beirut, which killed hundreds of civilians Begin offered a
"partial list" of military attacks on Arab civilians
under the Labor governments, which included over 30 separate episodes
that left many civilians dead. He concluded that "under the
Alignment government, there were regular retaliatory actions against
civilian Arab populations; the air force operated against them;
the damage was directed against such structures as the canal,
bridges and transport." "The picture that emerges,"
former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote in response,
"is of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure
of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent
of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention
by name." Eban is harshly critical of Begin's letter because
of the support it gives to Arab propaganda; he does not contest
the facts. He even defends the earlier Israeli attacks on civilians
with the exact logic which orthodox analysts of terrorism attribute
to-and use to condemn-retail terrorists namely, that deliberate
attacks may properly be made on innocent parties in order to achieve
higher ends. Eban writes that "there was a rational prospect,
ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations [i.e., innocent
civilians deliberately bombed] would exert pressure for the cessation
of hostilities."
Begin's list is indeed "partial." It is supplemented
by former Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur, who stated that "For
30 years, from the War of Independence until today, we have been
fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities,"
offering as examples the bombardments that cleared the Jordan
Valley of all inhabitants and that drove a million and a half
civilians from the Suez Canal area in 1970, among others. The
Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff summarized General Gur's
comments as follows: "In South Lebanon we struck the civilian
population consciously, because they deserved it...the importance
of Gur's remarks is the admission that the Israeli Army has always
struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army,
he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...
[but] purposely attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements
had not been struck."
There are other examples that might be cited, among them,
the terrorist attacks against civilian targets (including U.S.
installations) in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954 carried out in
an effort to poison relations between the United States and Egypt;
the murderous attacks on the villages of Qibya, Kafr Kassem, and
others; the shooting down of a Libyan airliner in 1973 with 110
killed as it was attempting to return to Cairo after having overflown
the Sinai in a sandstorm; and many others. Lebanon has been a
regular target of Israeli terrorism, including direct invasion
and systematic bombardment of cities, villages and rural areas
that has caused hundreds of thousands of refugees and many thousands
of casualties. Still another dimension of state terrorism is the
brutal treatment of the civilian population in the occupied territories,
and the murder of Palestinians in the interchange of terror that
has been proceeding in Europe for many years. Terrorism in the
pre-state period was also extensive, another story that is largely
unknown in the United States, where commentators like to pretend
that terrorism is an invention of the Palestinians.
The Diary of former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett is
a major source of evidence for a conscious policy of deliberate,
unprovoked cross-border attacks, in which advantage was taken
of superior military power and a servile western propaganda machine,
with the intent of destabilizing neighboring states and provoking
them into military responses. Sharett was a footdragger in these
enterprises, often shaken by the ruthlessness of the military
establishment-"the long chain of false incidents and hostilities
we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked;"
the "narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness of our military
leaders" [who] "seem to presume that the State of Israel
may-or even must-behave in the realm of international relations
according to the laws of the jungle." Sharett himself referred
to this long effort as a "sacred terrorism."
Where Israeli state terrorism is acknowledged in the United
States, it is almost invariably described as "retaliatory,"
hence not criminal even if regrettable. To cite only one example,
consider the laudatory article by Amos Perlmutter on General Ariel
Sharon in the New York Times Magazine. Commenting on Sharon's
exploits as the commander of Unit 101 in the early 1950s, Perlmutter
writes that "Every time terrorists were captured in Israel,
they would be interrogated to determined where they had come from.
Then an Israeli force would return to the terrorists' villages
and retaliate against them, an eye for an eye- or, more often,
two eyes for an eye." Perlmutter is a knowledgeable military
historian, who certainly knows that this is an outrageous falsehood.
The "retaliatory actions" of Unit 101 were characteristically
directed against completely innocent civilians in villages that
had no known relation to terrorist acts, for example, Qibya, where
66 civilians were massacred in October 1953 in the first major
operation of Sharon's Unit 101. There was no known connection
between the villagers of Qibya and any terrorist actions against
Israel. Israel angrily denied charges that its military forces
were responsible for this massacre, pretending that the "retaliation
act" was carried out by "border settlers in Israel,
mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from
the Nazi concentration camps..." Commenting on this fabrication
in his diary, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett observed that "Such
a version will make us appear ridiculous; any child would say
that this was a military operation," as was tacitly conceded
much later. He writes that in the cabinet meeting following the
massacre, "I condemned the Qibya affair that exposed us in
front of the whole world as a gang of bloodsuckers, capable of
mass massacres regardless, it seems, of whether their actions
may lead to war. I warned that this stain will stick to us and
will not be washed away for many years to come." Sharett
was wrong in thinking that "this stain will stick to us."
The typical response is falsification of the sort practiced by
Perlmutter in the New York Times. A critical commentary on Perlmutter's
whitewash of the bloodthirsty General Sharon in The Nation fails
to mention this remarkable suppression and distortion of the historical
record. This single example is, unfortunately, quite typical of
a long and ugly story of atrocities and cover-ups.
Real
Terror Network