Lies, Damned Lies, & Israeli Propaganda

by Anthony Arnove and Paul D'Amato

International Socialist Review, May-June 2002

Israel's current war in the Occupied Territories is one of conquest, not defense. The West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with the eastern, Arab half of Jerusalem, were seized by Israel in the June 1967 war. It considers these lands to be part of "Eretz Israel" (Greater Israel). Since then, Israel has engaged in a policy of colonization, demolishing Palestinian olive groves, homes and towns and setting up strategic Jewish colonies. Israel then justifies its extension of its military control over the region, as well as its seizure of key water sources, as necessary security measures to defend its settlements. As one historian explains, Israel is the region's most powerful state-not a besieged victim, but a colonial aggressor:

The postwar tactics of the Israeli government in the occupied territories are characterized, in the contemporary euphemism, by the continuous "creation of facts." Among these facts are the expropriation of Arab land, the expulsion of the Arab population and the establishment of Jewish colonies. The overall strategy, again in the popular phrase, is "creeping annexation" of the occupied lands. This strategy is pursued by the dominant military and unique nuclear power in the region; it has been adopted neither from any overpowering force of circumstances nor from a compelling need for greater security. This much has been publicly conceded in Israel by ranking members of the military establishment who claim that at no time before, during or since the June war has Israel been in any danger of defeat.

Today, Israel's massive military power makes its position even more unassailable. Palestinian resistance against the occupation has prompted massive Israeli violence to suppress it, the latest being Sharon's invasion of the West Bank with tanks, F16s, bulldozers and Apache helicopters-all paid for by the United States.

The Israeli state, in fact, was founded in 1948 on the forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Hundreds of emptied Arab villages were renamed and repopulated with Jews. Israeli defense forces and militias committed a number of massacres in order to terrorize Palestinians into fleeing their homes, the most well-known being that of Deir Yassi in April, 1948, where Jewish paramilitary forces-the Ster Gang, the Haganah, and the Irgun-slaughtered 250 men women, and children. But there were many others, including th massacre of October 29, 1948, in which Israeli soldiers murdered 80 -100 men, women, and children from the village Dawaym in the Haifa subdistrict. Th Jenin refugee camp that was as brutally devastated in early April was first created for Palestinians who were forcibly removed from the coastal region of Haifa in 1948. Now thousands of them are refugees yet again.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 and subsequent "peace" agreements did not slow the process of "creeping annexation." Since Oslo, the number of Jewish colonists in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza have almost doubled to over 400,000. Thirty-four new settlements have been approved since Ariel Sharon took office.

Some try to describe the current conflict as a "cycle of violence." But as Haim Bresheeth, writing in the May 2-8 Al Ahram Weekly notes, this assumes "there is a symmetry between the occupier and the occupied-as if the violence of a mighty army destroying all before it is equal to the despair, hopelessness and anger that forces people to kill others by committing suicide."

Ariel Sharon nicknamed the "bulldozer," is a war criminal, responsible for numerous atrocities against Palestinians. He oversaw the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Lebanese fascist militia slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians while Israeli troops surrounded the camps. He has overseen the expansion of Israeli settlements, the brutal Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, and years of repression in the Occupied Territories. Despite his talk of being willing to "make painful compromises," Sharon is committed to a vision of Eretz Israel, in which Israel would take all of the land of historic Palestine for an expanded Jewish state. As he wrote, "We must say very clearly that our concern for our own survival does not permit the establishment of a second Palestinian state on the West Bank" (Jordan being, in Sharon's mind, a Palestinian state).

Sharon recently said he would not withdraw from a single Israeli settlement. "The fate of Neztarim is the fate of Tel Aviv," Sharon told a committee of the Knesset (parliament) in mid-April 2002, indicating that the illegal colonial outpost of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip (an area that the Palestinians supposedly control) is as much a part of Israel as its second major city. Sharon has repeatedly said that he will not allow a withdrawal of Israel to the borders it has established before the June 1967, invasion of its neighbors. According to Sharon, "Israel cannot return to the '67 borders," which he referred to as "Auschwitz borders."

According to Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli transport minister, Sharon is planning to annex half the West Bank to Israel. And one of Israel's leading historians, Martin van Creveld predicts that Sharon is planning to use the cover of a U.S. war against Iraq to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the West Bank.

Sharon, rather than seeking peace of any kind, has deliberately provoked the Palestinian movement in order to justify all-out war in the Occupied Territories. Whenever there has been a lull in the conflict, Israel has upped the ante by carrying out an assassination of a respected Palestinian militant, expecting reprisals, which could then be used as an excuse to "retaliate." Alexander Cockburn, citing a November 25 article in the right-of-center Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, made this observation:

Alex Fishman is the main commentator on security matters for Israel's largest mass circulation paper, Yediot Ahronot, a publication with right-of-center politics. Fishman is known for his excellent contacts in the military. On Sunday, November 25, Fishman issued a prediction based on the recent assassination on November 23 by Israel's security services of the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud....

"Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line, of the kind perpetrated at the Dolphinarium [discotheque in Tel-Aviv]."

Fishman stated flatly that such an agreement did exist, even if neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas would admit to it in public. "It is a fact," he continued, "that, while the security services did accumulate repeated warnings of planned Hamas terrorist attacks within the Green Line, these did not materialize. That cannot be attributed solely to the Shabak's impressive success in intercepting the suicide bombers and their controllers. Rather, the respective leaderships of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas came to the understanding that it would be better not to play into Israel's hands by mass attacks on its population centers."

In other words Arafat had managed to convince Hamas to curb its suicide bombers. This understanding was shattered by the assassination of Abu Hunud. "Whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu Hunud," Fishman continued, "knew in advance that that would be the price. The subject was extensively discussed both by Israel's military echelon and its political one, before it was decided to carry out the liquidation. Now, the security bodies assume that Hamas will embark on a concerted effort to carry out suicide bombings, and preparations are made accordingly"

Sharon has consistently refused to negotiate with Yasser Arafat, who, despite his compromises with Israel, is universally regarded as the main representative of the Palestinian people. In Sharon's words, "with Arafat, no one will be able to make peace." When Bush described Sharon as a man of peace, Israel was in the midst of its most violent and sweeping campaign against the Palestinians since 1967.

Israel's brutal invasion imprisoned Arafat, destroyed the infrastructure not only of Palestinian Authority rule, but of Palestinian life. Israel wants peace, certainly: a peace built upon the homes of expelled Palestinians. They want a solution to the Palestinian problem in which the Palestinians peacefully acquiesce to the dispossession of their land, their homes, and are left, at best, with tiny, isolated, walled enclaves (prisons, really) of poverty and destitution.

Journalist Chris Hedges, in his "Gaza Diary," published in Harpers describes one incident that reveals the attitude Israeli soldiers have toward killing Palestinian children:

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. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. 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.'

The current Israeli offensive has involved indiscriminate killing of men, women and children; the systematic destruction of property; the cutting off of water supply; and the prevention of travel even for ambulances. It is a full-scale war against the entire population. Like the war in Vietnam, Israeli soldiers make war on the whole people, because the vast majority of the Palestinian people oppose Israel's occupation. Thousands of Palestinian men have been rounded up, stripped, blindfolded, detained, and many tortured and beaten. Palestinians have routinely been used by Israeli soldiers as human shields to conduct house-to-house searches.

In its attacks on Palestinian refugee camps and towns from March 1 to April 28, 2002, the Israeli military reportedly killed 345 Palestinians (35 of them under the age of 18) and wounded 1,346. (At least eight more were killed when Israel entered Hebron on April 29.) "The mismatch in force of arms was stark," the New York Times was forced to admit:

The Israeli Army used Vulcan antiaircraft guns, able to shoot 3,000 rounds a minute, inside the camp. It used Cobra helicopters with thermal detection capability to fire TOW missiles -intended for use against tanks on open battlefields- through the walls of houses, some with noncombatants inside. It deployed scores of Merkava tanks and armored vehicles equipped with machine guns. It used bulldozers to raze civilian homes, crushing more and more of them-but with less and less warning, Palestinians said.'

Sharon launched a major offensive into Ramallah and ordered the army to target Arafat's own headquarters, "smashing through walls and battling room to room," cutting off electricity to the building, and firing on his office, leaving him sitting at his desk by candlelight.' As the army went house to house and rounded up all men in Ramallah aged 15 to 45, Israel ordered out foreign reporters and also solidarity activists trying to disrupt the army's operation. Reporters were shot at and tear gassed as they tried to report on Israel's operations in the West Bank. ''Journalists are banned, and [Israeli] government officials have warned that those caught [in Ramallah] could have their press cards revoked. A new list today of dosed military zones includes every city and town the army has entered." Conditions were so grim that even the World Bank protested that "the [Israeli] army had destroyed water and electricity facilities, homes, schools and public buildings" in the towns it had occupied.'

Palestinians are routinely denied necessary health care, as this report from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reported on this incident in Nablus:

On April 29, 2002, at around 7:00 PM, 28-year-old Amal Afaneh who was seven months pregnant, began feeling extreme abdominal pain. 'Afaneh's relatives considered taking her to the hospital in Nablus by car, a distance of only 5 to 6 kilometers from their village of Azmut. They decided against it, as they feared being shot by Israeli soldiers who are positioned at the entrance to the village and along the road between Azmut and Nablus. The family called the Red Crescent and the Red Cross to request that they send an ambulance. The family was told that this could only be done following coordination with the Israeli military.

While the Red Crescent and the Red Cross worked on obtaining the required Israeli approval, the family called a nurse who lives in the village. The nurse gave 'Afaneh preliminary treatment, and herself called the Red Crescent to urge them to hurry, as 'Afaneh needed treatment that she could not provide.

At 9:00 PM, the family was told that approval had been received and an ambulance was on its way In fact, the Red Crescent ambulance had already arrived at the entrance to 'Azmut, but was detained for thirty minutes by an Israeli tank crew. The soldiers ordered the ambulance driver, Samir Abu Seir, and the paramedic, Jamal Abu Hamdeh, to open the doors of the ambulance, and take off all their clothes. The soldiers then took away their identification papers, turned off their walkie-talkies, and made them sit on the ground. After searching the ambulance, the soldiers ordered the two men to return to Nablus. The ambulance was forced to leave without 'Afaneh.

When 'Afaneh's relatives heard that an ambulance had been seen leaving 'Azmut, they called the Red Crescent again, and were told that the IDF denied the ambulance entry into the village, and nothing more could be done.

At 9:30 PM, Amal 'Afaneh gave birth. Her baby did not survive. She remains at home, still unable to reach the hospital for follow-up treatment.'

The Red Cross protested Israel's attacks on its ambulances, and facilities, which limited its ability to "feed and provide medical care to Palestinian civilians," while the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem petitioned Israel's High Court "after receiving reports of torture at the Of her detention center near Ramallah."'

Israeli troops moved into Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin, Salfit, Beit Jala, Nablus, and Tulkarm, and Qalqilya, conducting house-to-house searches. "In each city," the New York Times reported, "the [Israeli] army was proving more intense, ruthless and thorough than in any prior incursion, including the raids month." Israeli army Major General Yitzhak Eitan announced, "This operation will last as long as necessary, without a time limit," as Israel called up 20,000 reservists for duty.

Israel's destruction of the Jenin refugee camp in early April was the most horrific. Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nation's special envoy to the Middle East, said the conditions in the Jenin refugee camp after Israel's massive onslaught there were "horrific and shocking beyond belief . . . No objective can justify producing such suffering for the population."

"The devastation is worse than I expected," said one aid worker who emerged from the camp this afternoon. "I couldn't have imagined anything worse than this." The aid workers see the camp as the equivalent of an earthquake zone, where hundreds of homes have been flattened and thousands are in need of immediate food and housing. An estimated 3,000 people re main in the camp and 10,000 are believed to be scattered across the area. The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg said Jenin "look[ed] more like the scene of an earthquake than combat zone after it was flattened by Israeli army bulldozers."

One eyewitness description of the Jenin "incursion" gives sense of the horror experienced by Jenin's citizens:

Khadra Samara, 33, the wife of the hospital cook [at Razi Hospital], said she was inside her home on Rawabi Street in the Jenin refugee camp about 11:30 Sunday night when an Israeli bulldozer approached and tore through the front gate and began slamming into the house.

"We started screaming and lighting lamps and candles so they'd know someone was inside," she said. "We were 15 women and children.... But as we screamed, a missile was fired at the house, destroying the second and third floors. The whole house shook, there was a flash of light, and all the windows were blown out."

In a panic, Samara called her husband at the hospital and pleaded for help. Inexplicably, the bulldozer backed off. But before dawn Monday it smashed into the house again, shaking the cinder-block walls of the bedroom where the children were sleeping.

"The top of the wall started to give, and I started grabbing the kids and hauling them away from there," she said. "They destroyed the house with everything in it. We didn't even take one T-shirt for one child."

Samara tried to get out the front door, but found it was blocked by rubble. She handed the children through a side window into a neighbor's house.

"I was so furious I wanted to make a suicide bomb and use it on them," she said. "I picked up a cylinder of cooking gas to carry with me so I could blow it up. I was so scared I was screaming. I thought I was going to die.

"When I picked up the cylinder my daughter said, 'Mom, don't do it! For God's sake don't do it!"'

The second house provided little respite. An hour after they took refuge there, the bulldozer came again. They fled to a third house; it came under attack from missiles fired by helicopter gunships.

"From 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. we ran from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, wherever we thought was safest to go. The children became sick from fear and started vomiting," Samara said.

They finally emerged waving white scarves. By that time, with residents of the two other houses having joined the group, they counted nearly 30 women and children. The soldiers held them for three hours, then let them go, Samara said.

An untold number of people were buried by tanks and bulldozers under the rubble of their own homes in Jenin. Reporters and human rights workers reported seeing piles of rubble under which wafted the stench of rotting corpses. Given Israel's closing off of Jenin after its assault and its rebuff, with U.S. acquiescence, of a UN inspection team, we will likely never know the full extent of Israel's war crimes in Jenin.

Defenders of George W. Bush like to talk about how "plain spoken," "honest," and "direct" he is. But apparently the terms "without delay," "now," and "immediately" have eluded the president and his good friend Ariel Sharon. But even when Colin Powell and George Bush were finally pressured on April 4 into calling for an end to Sharon's brutal assault, "Israel's West Bank offensive continued unabated . . . as the government of Ariel Sharon sought to beat what was seen as a warning," the Financial Times reported. "I'm not sure that we have to be concerned," one Israeli official said of the Bush call for Israel to pull back. Indeed, Israel escalated its attacks and entered new Palestinian population centers after Bush's statement. When Bush sent Powell to meet with the Israeli government, Powell communicated the urgency of his visit by flying to Morocco, Egypt, Spain and Jordan, before eventually making his way to Israel on April 11. Israel moved into the largest town in the West Bank, Hebron, on April 29. As of this writing-early May-Israel has not fully withdrawn to its preMarch 2002 positions.

The truth is that the Bush Administration has given the green light to Israel's assault, calling it "self defense." The Boston Globe quoted a defense department official saying that Powell delayed his arrival to Israel for several days in order to allow Israel to complete its offensive.

[New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman, a supporter of Israel and its current war, has no problem with the taking of a few thousand Palestinian lives by Israeli soldiers-in fact he calls for Israel to "deliver a military blow" to crush the Palestinian resistance. Friedman is attempting to paint the Palestinian people as less than fully human. Ran HaCohen dissects Freidman's logic:

Friedman's focus on suicide bombers is intended to dehumanize the Palestinians. By blaming Palestinians of carelessness towards "the sacredness of every human life, starting with your own", Friedman is claiming that they do not care about their own life. He is then patronizingly pretending that he does care about their life (more than they do!), and now, having assumed responsibility for the Palestinians, Friedman has a suggestion: "First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow". Bravo. Look how easily the great moralist Friedman is translating the sacredness of every human life" into "a military blow". All in the name of "the basic truth civilization is built on" - what else?

The Palestinian struggle is morally justified, even though some of its manifestations are unjustifiable. Reducing this struggle to the issue of suicide bombing is just another way of dehumanizing and thus legitimizing the killing of Palestinians, instead of removing the reasons for their horrifying desperation (remember Epictetus). Dehumanizing an entire people in the name of the "sacredness of every human life", as Thomas Friedman has done, is an especially repulsive example of demagoguery.

One need not support the tactic of suicide bombing aimed at killing Israeli citizens-though it isn't clear why it is more reprehensible than blowing up Palestinians with U.S.-made bombs and missiles-in order to make the important distinction between the violence of the oppressor (Israel) and the violence of the oppressed (Palestinians). In fact, Sharon, as argued above, has deliberately provoked the suicide bombings because he sees them as a good cover for Israel's brutal invasion. But it is the purest hypocrisy to attack the Palestinians for using violent means to seek their freedom. If Israel uses tanks and bombs to invade Palestinian land and homes, bulldozing people alive, bombing and strafing their homes, do not Palestinians have a right to use violence in their defense?

Washington is anything but an "honest broker." Palestinian children's lives have never meant anything beside Israeli ones. Regardless of who has been in power in Washington, Israel has been given a blank check by the U.S. government for decades. Every year, the U.S. sends billions of dollars to Israel in the form of grants, low-cost loans, and subsidies. No other country in the world has received as much aid or support. And U.S. manufacturers are always ready to supply Israel with more weapons. When Israel bought nine of Boeing's deadly AH64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters in February 2001, the Jerusalem Post noted that Israel "will be paying for the $500 million deal with U.S. military grant money." As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in May 1999, "Israel has acquired 260 of Lockheed's F-16s over the years, consisting of 210 new planes and 50 used ones from the U.S. armed forces. That's the largest fleet of F-16s anywhere in the world outside the U.S. Air Force." The Post-Dispatch's calculation appeared two months before Israel purchased another 50 F-16s-in a $2.5 billion deal paid for with U.S. funds.

The United States has long committed itself to Israel as a strategic asset in the oil-rich and geostrategically crucial Middle East. It gives more than $3 billion a year to Israel, and provides it with invaluable military, economic, and political backing. (In its fiscal year 2001 budget, the State Department explained "The United States has a significant interest in a stable, democratic, and economically and militarily strong Israel" and is committed to "Maintaining the qualitative edge of the Israeli Defense Forces in the regional balance of power.") As Noam Chomsky has rightly pointed out, "It is highly misleading to use the phrase 'Israel-Palestine conflict'... [I]t should be termed the 'U.S./Israel-Palestine' conflict." That description is not only a more accurate way of understanding the roots of the problem, but it points to the urgency that activists in the United States must have to organize a movement to cut off all support the United States gives to Israel.

Anthony Arnove is the editor of Iraq Under Seige (South End Press) and Terrorism and war (Seven Stories Press). He is a contributing author in The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket Books) and a member of the International Socialist Review editorial board. Paul D'Amato is associate editor of the ISR.

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