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israeli atrocities
International revulsion at the Israeli army's terrorizing of the West
Bank Palestinian towns, and in particular its destruction of the
Jenin refugee camp, has created a new political situation for the
Zionist state.
The last vestiges of the image of Israel as the refuge of a
persecuted people have been largely blown away by the missile blasts
from U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships hitting defenseless
concentrations of Palestinian refugees. At the same time, the liberal
or even left image of the Zionist state has evaporated as the defense
of Israel is more and more assumed by the right and even the extreme
right in the United States.
The ranking House Republican, Texas right-winger Dick Armey, even
came out on a TV talk show in favor of removing the remaining
Palestinian population from the West Bank and full annexation of the
territory to the state of Israel. Armey was quoted in the May 4 issue
of the British Guardian as saying, "I happen to believe that the
Palestinians should leave."
However, if the most truculent defense of Zionist repression has come
from the right, virtually the entire U.S. political establishment has
lined up behind Israel. Thus, both houses of Congress have voted for
motions declaring that "the U.S. and Israel are now engaged in a
common struggle against terrorism."
On the other hand, the weekend of April 20 was marked by the first
mass demonstrations in U.S. history in support of the Palestinians-
around 30,000 in San Francisco and 100,000 in Washington, D.C. Up
until now, Zionist influence in liberal and labor organizations has
been sufficient to prevent large united-front protests against the
murderous actions of the Israeli settler state.
The damning images and testimonies of Israeli terror against whole
civilian populations have set in motion a mass movement in defense of
human and democratic rights comparable to the movement against the
imperialist war in Vietnam in the 1960s.
In Western Europe the mass protests have been even larger and broader
than in the United States, and in the Arab world they represent a
vast upsurge that is frightening even the corrupt reactionary caste
that rules Saudi Arabia.
The most visible atrocities were in the refugee camp of Jenin, where
Human Rights Watch found and published concrete evidence of war
crimes by the Israeli army. The New York Times attempted to play down
this report by stressing that HRW had found no proof of a "massacre"
of Palestinians but only of some excesses. By contrast, the British
Guardian headlined the accusation of war crimes.
And a more complete report was given in the Italian Il Manifesto of
April 4. The left daily paper noted that the HRW report said the
Israeli troops had completely destroyed 140 houses, most of them
multifamily units, and badly damaged another 200, leaving about 4000
people-a fourth of the population of the camp-without shelter.
HRW was able to confirm 52 dead, a figure the authors of the report
expected to grow as more bodies are found. Nearly half of them, 22,
were civilians-including children, old people, and physically
handicapped. For example, Jamal Fayd, a 37-year-old paralyzed man,
was buried under the ruins of a house by Israeli soldiers who refused
to allow his family time to get him out.
The report detailed many cases where the Israeli forces used
civilians as human shields-for example, forcing a 65-year-old woman
to stay atop a roof in front of an Israeli army unit during a
helicopter bombardment.
The most egregious violation of international law revealed by the
report was that "many of the civilian deaths documented were owing to
deliberate or illegal executions." That is, the Israeli troops
deliberately murdered residents of the camps, obviously for the
purpose of terrorizing the population.
In its May 3 issue, the British daily Independent gave some dramatic
details: "The most serious evidence in the report is the testimony of
a 16-year-old identified as Ibrahim Z., who says he witnessed Israeli
soldiers execute Jamal al-Sabbagh, an unarmed civilian.
"Ibrahim told HRW he was in a group of Palestinian men detained by
Israeli soldiers. The soldiers ordered Mr. al-Sabbagh to put his bag
on the ground. The report quotes Ibrahim: 'He did. They told us to
take off our trousers. While we were taking our trousers off, they
shot him.'
"According to the witness, the soldiers fired two bullets, one at him
and one at Mr. al-Sabbagh. They missed Ibrahim, who says Palestinians
were then ordered to take Mr. al-Sabbagh's body to the hospital."
Moreover, the Israeli forces prevented any medical aid from going to
the the camp residents for 11 days. The report noted that at least
two persons had died as a result. It also noted that if the Israelis
argued that they had to stop Palestinian medical aid from going in
for security reasons, they were obligated by international law to
provide medical aid themselves.
That could certainly be no great problem for such a huge military
machine. But they did not. They simply let people suffer and die,
again obviously to terrorize the entire population.
This spectacle shocked the world. But the British Guardian reported
in its April 27 edition that the sort of outrages that were committed
in Jenin were repeated on a vast scale on the West Bank: "'Jenin is
not so different from any of the other attacks,' said Peter
Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. 'The focus of
the international community has been on events in Jenin, but equally
serious violations took place in Ramallah, particularly, and in
Nablus.'"
The Guardian noted: "Human rights organizations have not even begun
to investigate the raids on the smaller West Bank towns and villages
such as Dura. The scale of the offensive, the biggest since Israel
occupied the West Bank in 1967, is too forbidding, as is its use of a
military curfew to deny international organizations access."
In the case of the village of Dura, the first human rights worker
reached it only after it had been under military curfew for 17 days.
The paper noted four cases of local residents being killed by aerial
bombardment as they walked about in the normal course of their lives.
It reported the callous and brutal treatment of a local wounded man,
Farooq Said Ahmed: "The army allowed an ambulance through 10 hours
later, by which time his jeans were so soaked in his own blood that
he considered wringing them out.
"It took three hours to reach the hospital, he said. Twice soldiers
shot at the ambulance, and twice they stopped it, unloading him on
his stretcher, prodding his injured leg until he yelled in pain, and
flipping him over on his face to check for weapons on both occasions."
The Guardian's report concluded: "Nothing that happened in Dura is
extraordinary in the context of the past month."
In the May 4 issue of The Independent , Robert Fisk pointed out that
the Israeli incursion into Nablus the day before was the first one
that had not been linked propagandistically to retaliation for
Palestinian attacks, indicating that from now on the Zionist forces
will attack Palestinian territory any time they choose under the
vague pretext of averting future terrorist actions.
The Israeli army has not yet attacked the Gaza strip, the Palestinian
territory that the Zionists covet the least. It is a small strip of
desert crowded by more than a million and a quarter Palestinians,
mainly refugees.
There are only 6000 Zionist settlers there, as opposed to 400,000 on
the West Bank (although the settlers occupy most of the desirable
agricultural land and the Israeli premier, Ariel Sharon, recently
referred to a settlement that came under attack as being as much
Israel as Tel Aviv.)
However, the Palestinians fear that an Israeli attack is imminent.
And their situation is increasingly desperate, as even the Zionist
daily Jerusalem Post was obliged to recognize in its May 2
issue: "Over 80 percent of the 1.3 million Gazan Palestinians live
under the poverty level and their per-capita income has returned to
the level it was in 1968, about $400 a year.
"According to the IDF [Israeli Defense Force], the Palestinian
Authority's institutions are in 'complete chaos.'"
The conditions are hardly better on the West Bank. The Palestinian
economy has been ruined. The Palestinian Authority and the state
services it provided have been shattered. The population is desperate.
And yet, the U.S. authorities, which claim to be an arbiter seeking
to accomplish peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, insist
that the onus is on the Palestinian Authority head, Yasir Arafat,
to "stop the terror"-that is, they demand that he attack the fighters
resisting the Israeli assaults. That is something that he physically
and politically cannot do.
At this point, the question arises: What is the real purpose of all
the talk and the initiatives being floated for a diplomatic
settlement, since the Zionists are clearly not prepared to give the
Palestinians any significant concessions and the Palestinians cannot
continue living as they have been.
The only answer is that these moves are essentially a cover-up for an
operation designed to crush the Palestinian nation completely and
perhaps completely drive it from its historic land, as right-wing
politicians in the U.S. like Dick Armey now openly say.
The Palestinians and the Arabs in general find it increasingly
difficult to believe that the Israelis could really be defying the
United States. They know that the Zionist state is a creature of
Washington.
Secretary of State Colin Powell never had any intention of forcing
the Israelis to withdraw from the Palestinian areas. His purpose in
his trip to the Middle East was to play Pontius Pilate, to try to
wash the hands of American imperialism in the eyes of the Arab
people. It seems that he was unsuccessful.
Thus, the political cost of the Israeli offensive against the
Palestinians and the general imperialist assault on the resistance of
the oppressed peoples in the Middle East is proving very high for the
U.S. and its allies.
It is the job of the anti-imperialist movement worldwide, including
in the imperialist countries themselves, to make it even higher until
the murderous system begins to break down-and with it the capitalist
system that spawned it and maintains it.
The following demands are pertinent:
· For a democratic, secular Palestine-with equality for all!
· For the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes!
· Dismantle the settlements!
· End U.S. aid to apartheid Israel!
The article above was written by Gerry Foley, and first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
