ISRAEL'S ROUTINE TERRORISM
JOHN PILGER | 22.09.2002 04:19
the hypocrisy of an occupying force
TONIGHT ITV1 screens John Pilger's powerful documentary, "Palestine is still the Issue." In this special report, Pilger reveals the tragedy of an epic injustice that is at the root of Bush's and Blair's threats of war.
LAST October, in the early hours of the morning, a young expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains; and she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend's car for the hospital in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.
The couple had been trying for a second child for three years and had undergone fertility treatment. "The news of the pregnancy had made us so happy," said Nasser, "that we celebrated by replacing the tin sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."
The couple were stopped at the Israeli military roadblock just outside their village. The soldiers turned them back, even though Fatima was now haemorrhaging. They got a taxi, hoping that would be allowed through. Again, they were turned back. No explanation was given; one soldier mimicked Fatima's moans.
Fatima gave birth to her baby in the taxi. She remembers the soldiers hurling her husband's ID into the blood on the floor.
"We cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade," she said. "My husband wrapped the tiny boy in his jacket, and eventually one of his relatives found a back route."
Barely three pounds in weight, blue and in a critical condition, the baby was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.
We don't know why they did this to us," she told me in my film on ITV tonight. "It wasn't personal. This is how they treat all Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this, but they would rather help an animal than an Arab."
STORIES like Fatima's are rarely news in Britain, yet they are typical of the everyday treatment of the Palestinians. Human rights groups run by Israelis have recorded hundreds of instances of pregnant and seriously ill Palestinians being turned back at Israeli checkpoints, including ambulances.
"We don't know how many have died like this," said a spokeswoman for the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, "because many people don't even bother to set out for hospital, knowing the soldiers will stop them. "These people offer no threat to Israel. Those who do, like the suicide bombers, of course never go through roadblocks, which exist only to control, subjugate and humiliate ordinary people. It is like a routine terrorism."
Fatima's remark about being treated worse than an animal is apposite. It is always easier to harm or kill people who, in the eyes of the powerful, do not matter: be it in Afghanistan or occupied Palestine.
Israeli soldiers enforcing the illegal occupation of Palestinian land can cause the death of babies and other innocents, or kill them outright, and words such as murder and terrorism are almost never used. The same immunity has been enjoyed by those politicians who design and permit this "routine terrorism," which is the product of a form of colonialism.
Indeed, to understand both the roots and the double standards of Bush's "war on terror," whose propaganda the Israeli regime of Ariel Sharon has adopted almost word for word, you need to come to Palestine, where one of the longest military occupations in modern times is now in its 36th year.
When I was passing through Israeli checkpoints last May, there were several of these routine murders. A nurse was one of them. Nine-tenths of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 per cent are teenagers and children. In Gaza, five years ago, an amusement park opened beside the sea. It was the only one in a deeply impoverished place populated mainly by refugees whose families were forced off their land or out of their villages by the Israelis.
"At first, it was very successful," said Walid Al Dirawi, who looks after the deserted ruin of rusting rides and dodgem cars. "Then the shooting started from across the road. The Israeli settlers and soldiers shot it up every weekend, and of course people stayed away." Behind the dodgems is a wall pock-marked with bullet holes, like a shooting gallery.
THE "settlers" are mostly religious Israelis or immigrants from Russia, America and elsewhere, who are subsidised by the government to live in what are colonial fortresses in the midst of Palestinian communities, guarded by the Israeli army.
They have no right to be there under international law, and the United Nations says they should get out. Their justification is usually Biblical.
For the Israeli state, they serve a practical purpose; they occupy and encroach upon more and more Palestinian land, while allowing the military to control the Palestinians with more and more roadblocks and restrictions. Many Palestinian villages are surrounded by barbed wire, and people require a special permit even to travel to the next one. Gaza, where 800,000 are trapped, is surrounded by an electrified fence.
When Archbishop Desmond Tutu came here recently, he said: "The way the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in apartheid South Africa."
Trapped by checkpoints and arbitrary curfews the Palestinian economy is in ruins. According to a US government survey, more than half of all Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition, including chronic malnutrition defined as stunted growth.
People struggle to live on less than £1 a day. One of the most moving sights I have seen are the kites that reach for the sky every dusk, displaying the colours of the Palestinian flag, flown by terribly thin children from their open prison in refugee camps.
Cutting a swathe through this poverty and despair are the Israeli "settlements": surreal, middle class suburbs that are armed fortresses with watchtowers. From here, the "settlers" shot up the amusement park. I visited one of these fortresses. What struck me was the lushness: the constant sound of running water: sprinklers nourishing hothouse crops and manicured gardens. On the other side of what looks like the Berlin Wall, in impoverished Gaza, standpipes trickle and often run dry.
These illegal, provocative enclaves, and their surrounding security areas, control almost 42 per cent of occupied Palestine - a fact that, on its own, makes mockery of the popular myth that two years ago the Israelis made a "generous" offer to return 90 per cent of the occupied territories, which the Palestinian Authority rejected.
The truth is very different. Following peace negotiations in America in 2000, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Robert Malley, who was there with Clinton, revealed that, although the Palestinians rejected certain Israeli proposals, "it could also be said that Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians, including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history (and) security guaranteed by a US-led international presence."
Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled, mostly as a result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a total of 78 per cent of historic Palestine. The Palestinians, who were the majority, fled in an orchestrated campaign of fear and terror, or they were expelled. These days, this would be known as "ethnic cleansing".
When he retired, General Moshe Dayan, Israel's military hero, said: "Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population."
DURING the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis occupied the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine. Today, the Palestinians, seeking to form their own independent state, want only that 22 per cent back.
Little of this background is known or understood widely in Britain, even though the region is constantly in the news. Last May, the Glasgow University Media Group, famous for its pioneering media analysis, published a study that found TV viewers in particular were rarely told that Palestinians were the victims of an illegal and brutal military occupation. Only nine per cent of those interviewed were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers. For years, representing the Israelis as oppressors has been a taboo with always the threat of slurs of anti-Semitism (a bleak irony, as Palestinians are Semites, too).
This has been manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign lobbies, especially in the United States where the lobby commands most of the Congress and the White House.
Many Israelis, like many Jews in Britain and other counties, condemn this intimidation, just as they condemn the occupation and are fearful of its deeply corrupting effect on Israeli society. Recently, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, said he had long believed that Israel should give back the Occupied Territories. When I was in Israel in May, some 50,000 Israelis crowded central Tel Aviv, demanding that the government of Ariel Sharon made peace.
They are still a minority. The Palestinian suicide bombers and their mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion, but what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.
For much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought back courageously with slingshots - against a modern army, equipped with tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships.
Britain has a historic responsibility towards the Palestinians. The 1917 "Balfour Declaration" promised Jews a homeland provided it would not prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. The British famously reneged on this. Britain administered the League of Nations" Mandate for Palestine until the partition that created Israel in 1948, which the Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe."
AS a permanent member of the UN Security Council, successive British governments have pledged to support the resolutions that have called upon Israel to end its occupation.
In the General Assembly, there have been an estimated 450 resolutions calling, in one form or another, for justice for the Palestinians. This is a world record. No country has incurred the opprobrium of the world community as often as Israel and no country has been excused its "rogue" behaviour so consistently, thanks to its backer, America.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was ordered to withdraw by the United Nations Security Council. When the Iraqis failed to comply, they were attacked with such force that tens of thousands were slaughtered. When Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, it was ordered to withdraw by the same UN Security council. That was 35 years ago, and the occupation goes on.
On the contrary, Israel has since been rewarded with billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called weapons of mass destruction.
Britain has nurtured the hypocrisy that reached its apogee in the United Nations General Assembly last week when George Bush, speaking and postulating like a Mafia don, and with the full support of Tony Blair, threatened the very existence of the UN unless it provided him with a figleaf from behind which he could attack Iraq.
But it was Israel's flouting of UN resolutions on Palestine that was the spectre in the General Assembly. Every delegate knew it, especially the British who are fully aware of the enduring destabilising effect of the illegal occupation.
They also know that it is being intensified by Ariel Sharon, a man whom a commission of his own parliament found indirectly but "personally responsible" for the massacre of more than 800 Palestinians in 1982 and who once boasted: "They (the Arabs) have the numbers. We have the matches."
With Bush and Blair about to ignite another war in the Middle East, justice for the Palestinians remains key to peace.
JOHN PILGER
Comments
Hide the following 5 comments
BBC On the six weeks of calm
22.09.2002 08:08
BBC reviews the six weeks of
apparent calm before the latest eruption.
BUT THEY EVEN DON'T MENTION THE PALESTINIAN CASUALTIES
DURING THE PERIOD, IT IS AS IF THE PALESTINIANS DON'T SUFFER AND DIE. THIS IS ARTICLE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY
SHARON HIMSELF : DISGUST !!!!!
Israeli press ponders bombings
Thursday's suicide bombing killed six people
Newspapers in Israel have been responding with a
mixture of war-weariness and tough talk to the
resumption of suicide bomb attacks this week.
"Phoney lull" is how one paper describes six weeks of
apparent calm before the latest eruption.
Left-of-centre Haaretz
says it was only a relative
peace, because during
the period seven Israelis
were killed.
And all along, Palestinian
groups "bubbled beneath
the surface" with plans to
strike Israel's home front.
The paper points to failures on both sides. "Israel
did not offer any real hope to the Palestinians".
But nor did the Palestinians take any "concrete
steps against terrorist groups".
As to what next, "terror must not be allowed to
drag Israel into action it does not want", the
paper warns, adding that the "real key" is the
creation of new political channels.
No truce
There is gloom over Palestinian reaction to the
attacks, with a Haaretz editorial claiming that
"one could discern a sense of satisfaction" among
ordinary people.
"The (Palestinian) man in the street continues to
support terror attacks that will cause Israel as
much pain as possible. In such an atmosphere it
is difficult to talk of a truce," the editorial
concludes.
Another article in the same paper argues that
Israel's "only possible response" is to get tough.
"Thus the screws of military occupation in the
territories will apparently be tightened further," it
says. All other options such as talks or plans
"appear academic".
So Israel must continue
the arrests, hit
Palestinian groups, track
down the families of the
bombers and even
perhaps revisit the "old
idea of expelling Arafat".
But, the paper warns, there should be a limit. A
situation where Israel "sets the territories on
fire" must be avoided.
"A major upheaval in the territories would serve
Iraq's interests," it says.
The English-language Jerusalem Post takes a
particularly hard line.
'Bring them to their knees'
It says there was no lull in the violence anyway,
with as many as 393 Palestinian "terror attacks"
in August alone. Hence Sharon's "softening over
the past several weeks has proved demonstrably
unsuccessful".
This leaves just one
choice, the paper
suggests: a military
campaign to force the
Palestinians to surrender
unconditionally.
"No negotiations, no talk
of partial ceasefires... All
that has been tried, and
it has failed," the paper
says.
"Israel must now do what it has thus far
refrained from doing. It must, once and for all,
bring Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority
to their knees."
The centrist mass-circulation Yedi'ot Aharonot
likewise focuses on the role - or rather what it
sees as the irrelevance - of the Palestinian
leader.
"The president is in a coma, kept alive by oxygen
and fluid tubes. He has no impact on anything
that goes on around him," the paper says.
It suggests he could not stop
Hamas militants even if he
wanted to.
Any Israeli decision to
oust him or harm him
would play into Hamas'
hands.
"Therefore, Israel
should put pressure on
Hamas headquarters in
the Gaza Strip, and not
on Arafat. It's time Gaza
is dealt a blow."
Only option
Comment in the mass circulation Ma'ariv shares
the view that the impending US campaign against
Iraq is bound to curtail Sharon's military options.
"The US offensive against
Iraq is casting a giant
shadow on politicians'
reasoning processes,
including Sharon's," it
says.
Despite US solidarity with
Israel, right now Washington does not need any
dramatic moves that would "stir up the Arab
world against Israel and the United States".
Sharon will nevertheless make every effort in the
coming days to "nip the rising wave of terrorism
in the bud", the paper adds, without saying how.
However, the right-of-centre Hatzofe has no
doubts as to what Israel should do next.
Headlined "Three bombings and a bombing", the
paper's editorial says the only reaction to the
attacks should be a military strike.
"Israel cannot sit idly by while events such as
those of the past days take place," the paper
says.
"The Israel Defence Force can no longer remain
silent."
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern
England, selects and translates information from
radio, television, press, news agencies and the
Internet from 150 countries in more than 70
languages
OJ
not Tonite Jo
22.09.2002 11:14
This post is a waste of time ...
ex pat
JOHN PILGER
22.09.2002 14:34
Saddam's Muslim supporters. Ismail Kamandar, Kurdish Observer, September 13, 02
The Speech of George Bush before the General Assembly September 12, which was mainly dedicated to the behavior of the Iraqi regime and the crimes it has commited in the past and is still commiting, gives a clear picture of America going after Saddam Hussein.
In response to this, the moderate King Abdullah warns President Bush not to remove the dictator Saddam Hussein, because it will open a pandora's box. "His Majesty is dead right. If Saddam was replaced by a federated democracy, then these Arab kings, Emirs, and corrupt undemocratic goverments, together with there state controlled media will be thrown into the ashes of history.
The fact that the Arabs are now more vociferous in there opposition to Bush's plan to attack Iraq, is because they want Saddam Hussein to remain in power. There are happy with dictators because they themselves are dictators like Saddam. They are afraid that any regime change which is sponsored by the U.S and Britain, will inevitably lead to a stable Iraqi democratic regime, exactly as America did with Japan after WW2. The Arab rulers do not want this to happen, especially the billionaire Sheikh rulers. Given the autocratic, dictatorial and often fascist and anti democratic nature all of Arab regimes, that are afraid of the domino effect, which will be triggered by the democratic regime change in Iraq.
Astonishingly almost all Arab media - from TV to press to websites - are variously owned by Arab dictators, desports, medieval Kings/ Sheikhs or corrupt undemocratic goverments. They feed there populations with half truths and upsurd conspiracy theories, like the Jews were behind the World Trade Center bombing on Sep 11th, or the Jews were behind the Egyptian plane crash in Oct 1999
How often have we heard Arafat and other Arab leaders complain, that the few million Palestinians are the only nation without a country, blithely ignoring the 30 million Kurds who've been for the last century wanting there own homeland. The Palestinians were offered a state by Barak with Jerusalem as there Capital. Barak offered the Palestinians a state, something no Arab country ever did. Arafat responds to this offer, by starting a terrorist war against civilians. Since the war Arafat started in September 2000, 2000 Palestinians have been killed and 650 Israelis killed. But in Halabja Kurdistan, 5000 Kurds were gassed to death within 5 minutes - A Shocking crime by Iraq.
In Saddam's Anfal mass killing against the Kurds, 5000 villages were destroyed and 200,000 Kurdish civilians were murdered. The Whole Kurdish area was turned into shrines of mass graves, which stands as a witness to one the most horrific acts in human history. What was the Arab and Islamic world's reaction to this? Silence! Not a word of protest! These same hypocrits who whine about the Palestinians, were no where to be found, when Saddam gassed the Kurds.
The present American leadership and Saddam Hussein are in agreement over two things. They are both against a Kurdish state and both favor a Palestinian state.
If George Orwell were alive, I supposed he would have told the Hapless Kurds, "The Palestinians are more equal then you. So what is the trick? How could we Kurds become more equal like the Palestinians Should we start blowing up pizzeria's, disco's, school buses and Passover observations to gain world attention. Thank God, the Kurds haven't taken this route. And personally, I pray they never chose the route of deliberately killing civilians. The Palestinians could have a state tommorow if they stop killing Israeli civilians. When did Iraq, Turkey or Iran ever offer the Kurds a state? Never.
Most people know about the Kurdish oppression in Turkey and Iraq, but people dont know about the Kurds in Syria.
Over 2 million Kurds have lived for centuries in Syria. The Kurds of Syria compose 8 to 14 percent of Syria's population. The Kurds of Syria are subjected to horrible oppression by the Assad regime. The Kurds are not allowed to be citizens and there barred from traveling outside of Syria. In a 1996 report, Human Rights Watch said that Syria had a policy in Northwestern Syria, to identify people who were not Arabs. The group is divided into 175,000 people, classified as "foreigners" and 75,000 termed maktoumeen, meaning "unregistered." The former are issued red identity documents, which prevent them from owning land, practicing certain professions, receiving food subsidies, being admitted to public hospitals, or having legally recognized marriages to Syrian citizens. The latter are issued no documents at all. Maktoumeen are the children (grandchildren, etc.) of "foreigners," including foreigners who marry women who are Syrian citizens. Their ethnic identity is denied and there has been an ongoing Arabization campaign of Kurdish areas within Syria, in which Kurdish families are expelled from there land and Arab families are given this land. If your saying this sounds like Aparthied, your right" Yet where is the Islamic world's outrage over this! It is tragic that the people of the world have not been more aware of the situation in all portions of Kurdistan, and of the ordeal suffered by the Kurdish people, as well as the steps of progress for Kurdish culture taken in spite of all this oppression.
Dave
Facts
22.09.2002 14:42
a 5 year old Israeli girl who along with her Grandmother were massacred by Arab Nazis terrorists on a bus. Please see the pic of Gal and there are great commentaries below.
Joel
Remove antisemite image?
24.09.2002 14:08
And here we go again, on indymedia, with a resurrection of the old stereotype. Isn't Sharon's politics in itself bad enough? He isn't ritually murdering babies, people are killed by his occupation politics.
Indymedia is there to give a place to voices that are otherwise silenced, but not to offensive racism, sexism, antisemitism. These can go to their own sites, I don't want to have this picture here.
bent