EDITOR: The right wing ‘think tank’ Reut, more to do with tanks than with thinking, and an arm of government, is discovering the new Elders of Anti-Zion:
Think tank: Israel faces global delegitimization campaign: Haaretz
Israel is facing a global campaign of delegitimization, according to a report by the Reut Institute, made available to the cabinet on Thursday. The Tel Aviv-based security and socioeconomic think tank called on ministers to treat the matter as a strategic threat. The report cites anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses, protests when Israeli athletes compete abroad, moves in Europe to boycott Israeli products, and threats of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders visiting London.
Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist. Reut lists the network’s major hubs – London, Brussels, Madrid, Toronto, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley.
The network’s activists – “delegitimizers” the report dubs them – are relatively marginal: young people, anarchists, migrants and radical political activists. Although they are not many, they raise their profile using public campaigns and media coverage, the report says. The “delegitimizers” cooperate with organizations engaging in legitimate criticism of Israel’s policy in the territories such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, blurring the line between legitimate censure and delegitimization. They also promote pro-Palestinian activities in Europe as “trendy,” the report says.
The network’s activists are not mostly Palestinian, Arab or Muslim. Many of them are European and North American left-wing activists. The Western left has changed its approach to Israel and now sees it as an occupation state, the report says. To those left-wing groups, if in the 1960s Israel was seen as a model for an egalitarian, socialist society, today it epitomizes Western evil. The delegitimization network sees the fight against the former regime in South Africa as a success model. It believes that like the apartheid regime, the Zionist-Israeli model can be toppled and a one-state model can be established.
The Reut team says the network’s groups share symbols and heroes such as the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, American peace activist Rachel Corrie and joint events like the Durban Conference. Israel’s diplomats overseas, meanwhile, must counter the attempts to delegitimize the country. “The combination of a large Muslim community, a radical left, influential, English-language media and an international university center make London fertile ground for Israel’s delegitimization,” says Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador in London. Prosor gives many interviews to the British media and lectures at university campuses throughout the country.
Although he says he has encountered anti-Israel demonstrations on almost every campus, Prosor has told his people to increase their campus activity. “What is now happening in London universities will happen, at most, in five years at all the large universities in the United States,” he says. The Reut report says Israel is not prepared at all to deal with the threat of delegitimization. The cabinet has not defined the issue as a threat and sees the diplomatic arena as marginal compared to the military one. “The Foreign Ministry is built for the challenges of the ’60s, not the 2000s,” the report says. “There are no budgets, not enough diplomats and no appropriate diplomatic doctrine.” Reut recommends setting up a counter-network, in which Israel’s embassies in centers of delegitimization activity would serve as “front positions.”
The report says the intelligence service should monitor the organizations’ activities and study their methods. The cabinet should also confront groups trying to delegitimize Israel but embrace those engaged in legitimate criticism. The report adds that Israel should not boycott these groups, as Israel’s embassy in Washington does with the left-wing lobby J Street. Boycotting critics merely pushes them toward joining the delegitimizers, Reut says.
EDITOR: Destroying Gaza – fishing and agriculture made impossible
The Gaza Strip used to export large amount of fish, vegetables, fruit and other food products, and this has played a crucial role in feeding the almost two million people living within its boundaries, in what is the densest human habitation on earth. Fishermen and farmers were proudly contributing to the economy, and to the sense of community so prevalent in Gaza, despite all the privations and carnage Israeli has inflicted ever since 1947. Israel has been fighting to limit the Gazan food production for decades, and quite successfully; the fishermen have been stopped from fishing by a blockade, thousands of fruit trees were uprooted under the pretence of ‘security’, and the very limited amount of bitter, salty water was further hurt by the destruction of wells. It suits Israel to have the Gazan population totally dependent on food and other imports, and makes the illegal blockade since 2006 more painful and ‘effective’. Israel is thus moving the costs, as well as the responsibility of supporting Gaza directly onto the international community. This illagal aspects of the continued occpation are not less damaging than the mass killing by force of arms. In the long run they are even more frightening, as they will maker a total starvation possible in the near future. The report below uncovers some of the aspects of this continuing war crime.
Israel bombs Gaza’s agricultural sector to the brink: The Electronic Intifada
Eva Bartlett, 15 February 2010
“If we didn’t get the wheat planted today, we would not have had crops this year,” says Abu Saleh Abu Taima, eyeing the two Israeli military jeeps parked along the border fence east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip. Although his land is more than 300 meters away, technically outside of the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone,” Abu Taima has reason to be wary.
“They shot at us yesterday. I was here with my wife and nephews.”
Like many farmers along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders, Abu Taima has been delayed planting by the absence of water and the threat from Israeli soldiers along the border.
With most of Gaza’s border region wells, cisterns and water lines destroyed by Israeli forces during last winter’s attacks, farmers have been largely left with no option but to wait for heavier rains.
“Israeli soldiers started intensively bulldozing the land in 2003. But they finished the job in the last war on Gaza,” says Hamdan Abu Taima, owner of 30 dunams (1 dunam is approximate to 1,000 square meters) dangerously close to the buffer zone.
Nasser Abu Taima has 15 dunams of land nearby. Another 15 dunams lie inaccessibly close to the border, rendered off-limits by the Israeli military. “My well was destroyed in the last Israeli war on Gaza. Five years ago I had hothouses for tomatoes, a house here, many trees. It’s all gone. Now I just plant wheat if I can. It’s the simplest.”
Nasser points out the rubble of his home, harvests some ripe cactus fruit and shakes his head. “Such a shame. Such a waste. I knew every inch of this area. Now, I feel sick much of the time because I cannot access my land. And I’ve got 23 in my family to provide for.”
Israel imposed the “buffer zone” along Gaza’s side of the internationally-recognized “Green Line” boundary nearly ten years ago. Israeli bulldozers continue to raze decades-old olive and fruit trees, farmland and irrigation piping, and demolish homes, greenhouses, water wells and cisterns, farm machinery and animal shelters.
Extending from Gaza’s most northwestern to southeastern points, the unclearly-marked buffer zone annexes more land than the 300 meters flanking the border. Israeli authorities say anyone found within risks being shot at by Israeli soldiers. At least 13 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 39 injured in border regions in and outside of the buffer zone since the 18 January end of Israel’s attacks last year, among them children and women.
A sector destroyed
Farmers in southeastern Gaza take shelter from bullets fired by Israeli soldiers at the border nearly one kilometer away. The United Nations agency OCHA reports that roughly one-third of Gaza’s agricultural land lies within the buffer zone, its width varying from half a kilometer to two kilometers.
Ahmed Sourani, of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC), told the Guardian newspaper: “It is indirect confiscation by fear. My fear is that, if it remains, it will become de facto.”
According to PARC, the fertile farmland in and next to the buffer zone was not long ago Gaza’s food basket and half of Gaza’s food needs were produced within the territory.
In 2008, the agricultural sector employed approximately 70,000 farmers, says PARC, including 30,000 farm laborers earning approximately five dollars per day.
One of the most productive industries some years ago, farming now yields the least and has become one of the most dangerous sectors in Gaza, due to Israeli firing, shelling and aggression against people in the border regions.
Of the 175,000 dunams of cultivable land, PARC reports 60 to 75,000 dunams have been destroyed during Israeli invasions and operations. The level of destruction from the last Israeli war on Gaza alone is vast, with 35 to 60 percent of the agricultural industry destroyed, according to the UN and World Health Organization. Gaza’s sole agricultural college, in Beit Hanoun, was also destroyed.
Oxfam notes that the combination of the Israeli war on Gaza and the buffer zone renders around 46 percent of agricultural land useless or unreachable.
More than 35,000 cattle, sheep and goats were killed during the last Israeli attacks, as well as 1 million birds and chickens, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) September 2009 report.
Even before Israel’s last assault, PARC reported on the grave shortage of agricultural needs due to the Israeli siege on Gaza: “saplings, pesticides and fertilizers, plastic sheets for greenhouses and hoses for irrigation are no longer available,” reads its 2008 report.
A March 2009 OCHA report lists nylon, seeds, olive and fruit tree seedlings, plastic piping and valves, fertilizers, animal feed, livestock and many other items as scarce, many of which are “urgently” needed.
The dearth of agricultural goods, combined with Israel’s policies of destruction and aggression in the buffer zone, has meant that farmers have changed practice completely, planting low-maintenance wheat and rye where vegetables and orchards once flourished, or not planting at all.
Water sources were particularly hard hit during Israel’s attack on Gaza last winter.
A UNDP survey following the attacks found that nearly 14,000 dunums of irrigation networks and pipelines have been destroyed, along with 250 wells and 327 water pumps completely damaged, and another 53 wells partially damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozing. This is excluding the many destroyed cisterns and irrigation ponds.
Farmers now either hand deliver water via plastic jugs or wait for the heavy rains in order to salvage some of their crops. Many others have given up working their land.
Farming under fire
Mohammed al-Ibrim, 20, of Benesuhela village near Khan Younis was injured by Israeli shooting in the border region.
“On 18 February 2009, I was working with other farm laborers on land about 500 meters from the border. We’d been working for a couple of hours without problems, and the Israelis had been watching us. Israeli soldiers began shooting from the border as we pushed our pickup truck which had broken down. I was shot in the ankle.”
His injury came just weeks after cousin Anwar al-Ibrim was martyred by an Israeli soldier’s bullet to the neck. Anwar al-Ibrim leaves behind a wife and two infants.
Meanwhile, in Gaza’s north, Ali Hamad, 52, has 18 dunams of land roughly 500 meters from the border east of Beit Hanoun.
“The Israelis bulldozed my citrus trees, water pump, well and irrigation piping in the last war. No one can come here to move the rubble of my well — everyone is afraid of the Israeli soldiers at the border. So now we are just waiting for the winter rains.
All but one well and pump have been destroyed in this region.
“I haven’t watered my few remaining trees since the war. I used to water them once a week, three to four hours per session. Now, they are dehydrated, the lemons and oranges are miniature.”
Mohammed Musleh, 70, lives east of Beit Hanoun, roughly 1.5 kilometers from the border, and owns the only working well and pump in his region.
“There used to be many birds in this area, because it was so fertile, until the Israelis started bulldozing all of the trees, including mine. When people replanted them, the Israelis began destroying the water sources instead.”
Ahmed al-Basiouni, 53, owned the first well established in the east Beit Hanoun area, built in 1961.
“My brothers and I have 60 dunams of land. Many people took water from our well. It was destroyed in 2003, and again in the last Israeli war. Now when I water my remaining trees, I do it by hand, tree by tree.”
In its September 2009 report, the UNEP warned that Gaza’s aquifer is in “serious danger of collapse,” noting that the problem has roots in the “rise in salt water intrusion from the sea caused by over-extraction of ground water.” According to the report, the salinity and nitrate levels of water are far above WHO-accepted levels. Between 90 and 95 percent of the water available to Palestinians in Gaza is contaminated and hence “unfit for human consumption,” according to WHO standards.
Water has been further contaminated by chemical agents used by the Israeli army during its war on Gaza. More contamination from destroyed asbestos roofing, the toxins produced by the bodies of thousands of animal carcasses, and waste sites which were inaccessible and damaged during and after the attacks on Gaza exacerbates the situation.
Further up the lane, Hassan al-Basiouni, 54, says he has lost a quarter of a million dollars to the Israeli land and well destruction.
“My brothers and I have 41 dunams. Our well was destroyed once before this last war. The materials to make a new well aren’t available in Gaza. The 180 people who earned a living off this land are out of work.”
According to Bassiouni, it costs $200 to raise just one fruit tree to fruit bearing maturity.
“We had 1,500 citrus trees, some destroyed in random Israeli shelling and the rest destroyed during the last Israeli war on Gaza. The few remaining trees are only one year old and produce nothing.”
“This water we’re using,” says Basiouni, referring to the contamination, “actually dehydrates the trees.”
Weathering the storm
In eastern Gaza’s Shejaiye area, Sena, 74, and Amar Mhayssy, 78, are devastated. “Our land has been bulldozed four times. We have nine dunams of land in the buffer zone which we can’t access because the Israelis will shoot at us. We have 10 dunams of land over 500 meters from the border fence. Our olive trees, over 60 years old, were all bulldozed by the Israeli army.”
They persevere in the face of danger and futility.
“Now we’re growing okra and have replanted 40 olive trees. But they will take years before they produce many olives. We need to water the new trees every three days, but our water source was destroyed. So we bring containers to water them. There are 13 people in our family, with four in university. Aside from farming, we have no work.”
In al-Faraheen village, east of Khan Younis, Jaber Abu Rjila now can only work his land on a small scale.
“My chicken farm — over 500 meters from the border — as well as 500 fruit and olive trees and 100 dunams of wheat and peas of my and my neighbors’ land were destroyed in May 2008 by Israeli bulldozers. My cistern, the pump and motor and one of my tractors were destroyed. The side of our house facing the border is filled with bullet holes from the Israeli soldiers. Now, because of the danger we rent a home half a kilometer away. I’ve lost my income, how can I pay for rent?”
Since the first constraints of the siege on Gaza were imposed nearly four years ago, the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural sector and potential to provide produce and economy to a severely undernourished Strip has dramatically worsened.
With Palestinians in Gaza now largely dependent on the expensive Israeli produce that is inconsistently allowed into Gaza, the plight of the farmers reverberates throughout the population.
All images by Eva Bartlett.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Jonathan Cook: Israeli court frees non-violent protesters: IOA
JERUSALEM — The Israeli courts ordered the release this week of two foreign women arrested by the army in the West Bank in what human-rights lawyers warn has become a wide-ranging clampdown by Israel on non-violent protest from international, Israeli and Palestinian activists.
The arrest of the two women during a nighttime raid on the Palestinian city of Ramallah has highlighted a new tactic by Israeli officials: using immigration police to try to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian cause.
A Czech woman was deported last month after she was seized from Ramallah by a special unit known as Oz, originally established to arrest migrant labourers working illegally inside Israel.
Human rights lawyers say Israel’s new offensive is intended to undermine a joint non-violent struggle by international activists and Palestinian villagers challenging a land grab by Israel as it builds the separation wall on farmland in the West Bank.
In what Israel’s daily Haaretz newspaper recently called a “war on protest”, Israeli security forces have launched a series of raids in the West Bank over the past two months to detain Palestinian community leaders organising protests against the wall.
“Israel knows that the non-violence struggle is spreading and that it’s a powerful weapon against the occupation,” said Neta Golan, an Israeli activist based in Ramallah.
“Israel has no answer to it, which is why the security forces are panicking and have started making lots of arrests.”
The detention this week of Ariadna Marti, 25, of Spain, and Bridgette Chappell, 22, of Australia, suggests a revival of a long-running cat-and-mouse struggle between Israel and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group of activists who have joined Palestinians in non-violently opposing the Israeli occupation. The last major confrontation, a few years into the second intifada, resulted in a brief surge of deaths and injuries of international activists at the hands of the Israeli army. Most controversially, Rachel Corrie, from the US, was run down and killed by an army bulldozer in 2003 as she stood by a home in Gaza threatened with demolition.
Ms Golan, a co-founder of the ISM, said Israel had sought to demonise the group’s activists in the Israeli and international media. “Instead of representing our struggle as one of non-violence, we are portrayed as ‘accomplices to terror’.”
The first entry of Israeli immigration police into a Palestinian-controlled area of the West Bank, the so-called “Area A”, occurred last month when a Czech woman was arrested in Ramallah. Eva Novakova, 28, who had recently been appointed the ISM’s media co-ordinator, was accused of overstaying her visa and was deported before she could appeal to the courts.
Human rights lawyers say such actions are illegal.
Omer Shatz, the lawyer representing Ms Marti and Ms Chappell, said a military operation into an area like Ramallah could not be justified to round up activists with expired visas.
“The activists are not breaking any laws in Ramallah,” he said. “The army and immigration police are effectively criminalising them by bringing them into Israel, where they need such a visa.”
Officials in the Palestinian Authority (PA) has grown increasingly unhappy at Israeli abuses of security arrangements dating from the Oslo era. The PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, recently described the Israeli operations into Area A as “incursions and provocations”.
Although the supreme court released the two women on bail on Monday, while their deportation was considered, it banned them from entering the West Bank and ordered each pay a US$800 (Dh2,939) bond.
The judges questioned the right of the army to hand over the women to immigration police from a military prison in the West Bank, but left open the issue of whether the operation would have been legal had the transfer occurred in Israeli territory.
The Spanish government is reported to have asked the Israeli ambassador in Spain to promise that Ms Marti would not be deported.
Ms Marti said they had been woken at 3am on Sunday by “15 to 20 soldiers who aimed their guns at us”. The pair were asked for their passports and then handcuffed. Later, she said, they had been offered the choice that “either we agree to immediate expulsion or that we will be jailed for six months”.
On Wednesday, shortly after the court ruling, the army raided the ISM’s office in Ramallah again, seizing computers, T-shirts and bracelets inscribed with “Palestine”.
“Israel has managed to stop most international activists from getting here by denying them entry at the borders,” said Ms Golan. “But those who do get in then face deportation if they are arrested or try to renew their visa.”
The ISM has been working closely with a number of local Palestinian popular committees in organising weekly demonstrations against Israel’s theft of Palestinian land under cover of the building of the wall.
The protests have made headlines only intermittently, usually when international or Israeli activists have been hurt or killed by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian injuries have mostly gone unnoticed.
In one incident that threatened to embarrass Israel, Tristan Anderson, 38, an American ISM member, was left brain-damaged last March after a soldier fired a tear-gas cannister at his head during a demonstration against the wall in the Palestinian village of Nilin.
In addition to regular arrests of Palestinian protesters, Israel has recently adopted a new tactic of rounding up community leaders and holding them in long-term administrative detention. A Haaretz editorial has called these practices “familiar from the darkest regimes”.
Abdallah Abu Rahman, a schoolteacher and head of the popular committee in the village of Bilin, has been in jail since December for arms possession. The charge refers to a display he created at his home of used tear gas cannisters fired by the Israeli army at demonstrators.
On Monday, the offices of Stop the Wall, an umbrella organisation for the popular committees, was raided, and its computers and documents taken. Two co-ordinators of the group, Jamal Juma and Mohammed Othman, were released from jail last month after mounting international pressure.
The Israeli police also have been harshly criticised by the courts for beating and jailing dozens of Israeli and Palestinian activists protesting against the takeover of homes by settlers in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Last month, Hagai Elad, the head of Israel’s largest human rights law centre, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was among 17 freed by a judge after demonstrators were detained for two days by police, who accused them of being “dangerous”.
EDITOR: Apartheid goes by other names, too. The item below is an example of the unhindered march of Israeli anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Moslem apartheid, now also supported legally. That this is happening in the Arab city of Jaffa is just icing on the racist cake:
Israel upholds legality of Jews-only housing complex in Jaffa: Haaretz
The Tel Aviv District Court rejected a petition this week against a decision to lease land in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood for the exclusive use of members of the religious Zionist community. The petition, filed by Jaffa residents and human rights groups, challenged a decision by the Israel Lands Administration and the Tel Aviv municipality to lease the land in question to B’Emuna, a company specializing in housing complexes for the religious Zionist community.
Its plan is to build three apartment buildings at the site. The petitioners said the decision was discriminatory, because it would exclude anyone other than members of the religious Zionist community from purchasing an apartment in the complex, which is situated in a neighborhood where a majority of the residents are Arab.
This is especially unfair given the shortage of available housing in the neighborhood, they argued. But in his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Yehuda Zefet said the ILA had acted properly in deciding that the only consideration for selecting the winner of the tender would be financial, thereby ensuring that the lease would go to the highest bidder.
Attorney Gil Gan-Mor of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said afterward that the petitioners will appeal to the Supreme Court. Kemal Agbariya, who heads the Ajami neighborhood council, said that activists and elected officials in the city also intend to organize protests. The ruling was harshly criticized in Jaffa yesterday.
Omar Siksik, a neighborhood resident and city council member, said, “this is a group of people who publicly say they do not want coexistence. Many outsiders came to Jaffa and bought apartments. We complained about that a bit and said that the locals’ housing shortage must be addressed first, but they knew they were coming to live next to Arabs. What bothers us is that they are bringing in extremists – and in the end, it will result in friction and in a blow-up of relations between Jews and Arabs.”
Israel Zeira, director of B’Emuna, responded, “our ideology is not to enter an Arab neighborhood, but to go to Jaffa in order to bolster Jewish identity.” The property in Ajami, he explained, was selected because it was the least expensive in the greater Tel Aviv region. “We are going to blend into the city,” vowed Zeira, who is also acting director of Rosh Yehudi, a group that aims to strengthen Jewish identity. He rejected criticism that the move would encourage segregation.
An unacceptable fight against protest: Haaretz Editorial
Israeli security forces have recently intensified their fight against peace activists from here and abroad who seek to protest against the occupation and identify with the Palestinian inhabitants. This week, Israeli soldiers raided the Ramallah offices of the International Solidarity Movement a number of times. They arrested two activists – one a Spanish citizen and the other an Australian. They confiscated office equipment, T-shirts and bracelets bearing the word “Palestine.” They also raided the offices of Stop the Wall and the Palestinian Communist Party in Ramallah. According to data provided by the activists, since December, Israeli forces have undertaken more than 20 nighttime raids on the villages of Na’alin and Bil’in and have arrested more than 30 people.
They are all suspected of taking part in protests against the separation fence, which invades these villages and very severely harms the inhabitants’ welfare. None of them were charged with involvement in terror operations or criminal activities to justify persecuting, arresting and deporting them. At the same time, the Israel Police used force to suppress protests identifying with the Palestinians in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood; these Palestinians had been forced to vacate their homes. Dozens of protesters are arrested every week and brought to court. All these steps were taken to deter human rights activists from implementing their right to free speech – the life’s breath of a democratic society. Out of a passion to root out protest, the Israel Defense Forces was sent into parts of Area A, which is under full control of the Palestinian Authority.
Entering these areas breaches the Oslo Accords and damages the prestige of the moderate Palestinian leadership, that same leadership that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continually offers “good neighborliness.” More serious is that members of the Interior Ministry’s Oz unit joined the “assault” on Ramallah. Oz repeated the trick of arresting foreign activists on the pretext that they were illegal labor immigrants. Although a Jerusalem court ordered them freed, we needed a ruling by the High Court of Justice and the intervention of the governments of the two detained activists to redress the distortion and release them.
It could be expected that a country that has ruled another nation for many years would show tolerance toward manifestations of unarmed protest against the occupation and its ills. The state should also respect the right of other countries’ citizens to show solidarity with the local people and join protests alongside Israeli and Palestinian activists. The harassment of individuals who do not toe the line and posters in the streets that incite against human rights groups should arouse concern in the heart of every Israeli. The suppression of public protest under the transparent guise of protecting state security does not augment Israel’s international standing. Such a policy gives a bad name to “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Officials at the top of government must instruct the security forces and the Interior Ministry to immediately stop these heavy-handed attacks on nonviolent protest.
EDITOR: Following is a crucial article by Amira Hass, about another Gaza attack, one of many, this one in 1956:
A thin black line: Haaretz
By Amira Hass
“It is quite evident that the Israelis do not wish to have United Nations observers circulating in the Strip and reporting upon the actions they are taking against the civilian populace. From the reports we receive from UNRWA personnel and from the very few incidents that have been witnessed by observers, I have come to the conclusion that the treatment of civilians is unwarrantedly rough and that a good number of persons have been shot down in cold blood for no apparent reason.” These words were written not in the 2009 Goldstone report, but in a letter dated November 13, 1956 – eight days after the end of the Sinai Campaign and five days after Israel, under pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union, announced its readiness to retreat. The letter was sent by Lt. Col. (U.S. Army) R.F. Bayard, chairman of the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (UN observers), to Col. Lear of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO).
“Of course, we hear many rumors of atrocities, much of which we can discount, but a small percentage are probably factual,” he added. The “small percentage” was detailed in a special report by the local UNRWA director, covering the period from November 1 through mid-December, and submitted to the UN General Assembly on January 11, 1957. According to this report, on November 3, during the conquest of Khan Yunis, Israeli forces killed 275 Palestinians: 140 refugees and 135 local residents. On November 12 (after the fighting was over), Israeli military forces killed 110 Palestinians in Rafah: 103 refugees, seven local residents, plus one Egyptian. Official and other sources are quoted in full in a graphic novel published in New York late last year by Henry Holt and Company.
“Footnotes in Gaza,” by cartoonist-journalist Joe Sacco, is a hefty, album-sized tome whose hard-cover version is 418 pages long – 388 of which are covered with meticulous and highly detailed black-and-white illustrations depicting Sacco’s journeys to Khan Yunis and Rafah (and Jerusalem) to investigate this unknown “small percentage” of atrocities, and his interpretation in graphic-novel form of the testimonies he collected from dozens of people. To judge from the reviews, the speed with which the book is being translated into other languages, and the surge of renewed interest in Sacco’s earlier works, this piece of the past will not remain unknown for very long.
The comic-strip form, and Sacco’s style in particular, is a good match for the Gazan temperament. Like Gazans themselves, the author-illustrator extracts comical and ludicrous moments from intolerable situations, which are the norm in the Strip. In one respite from illustrating interviewees’ memories of 1956, Sacco and his companions are drawn returning from Gaza to Rafah some years later, just prior to the disengagement. Of course, on the way they are stopped and stuck in a long line of cars at the Abu Holi junction, so that – thanks to Israeli fortifications and observation towers and tanks – the traffic generated by the 7,000 settlers in Gush Katif can proceed unhindered.
No still photos could rival the illustrations and texts depicting the aggravation and wasted time at the blocked checkpoint. “It’s closed again,” their taxi driver tells them morosely when they are stopped by (unseen) soldiers. “Who closed it?” asks a small boy in the taxi. The driver, who looks about to explode with irritation at the innocent question, keeps his cool and replies: “Shlomo.” In Gaza, “Shlomo” is a general name for Israelis. A lot of people use it, and for some reason it always makes people there smile. To a large degree, the book owes its existence to an editor’s censorship. In June 2001, Harper’s magazine sent Sacco, a Malta-born American citizen, and his journalist friend Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to Gaza.
They chose to concentrate on Khan Yunis, and in the report that Hedges wrote, which appeared in October of that year, “for whatever reason” – as Sacco puts it – the paragraphs relating to the mass killing of local residents perpetrated by Israel Defense Forces troops there in 1956 were omitted. This deletion made Sacco feel hurt and angry. And he writes in the introduction to his new book: “This episode – seemingly the greatest massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, if the UN figures of 275 dead are to be believed – hardly deserved to be thrown back on the pile of obscurity.” He resolved to go back and research the past. Perhaps it never really happened and that’s why it’s unknown? For, as some MKs complained and then-chief of staff Moshe Dayan concurred, much superfluous information leaked out about the battles in Sinai.
Perhaps the talk of a massacre is just propaganda, exaggeration, typical lies that the Palestinians were unable to disseminate? It is expected that Israeli skepticism will be automatically aroused by any mention of Palestinian dead at the hands of Israel soldiers – especially when terms like “without a battle” and “mass killing” are used, and most certainly in regard to “civilians.” Prof. Benny Morris thinks that something did happen back in 1956, however. The Israeli historian has devoted several paragraphs in his books to the events in Khan Yunis and Rafah – one paragraph in his panoramic work “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001” and five in his book “Israel’s Border Wars: 1949-1956.” In the latter book, he relies on UNRWA reports.
Many fedayeen (members of Palestinian or Arab militias) and approximately 4,000 Egyptian and Palestinian regular troops, he writes, were captured in Gaza, and “dozens of these fedayeen appear to have been summarily executed, without trial.” Some, he theorizes, were “probably killed during two massacres by IDF troops soon after the occupation of the Strip.” He cites UN data on Khan Yunis and says the number of casualties in Rafah ranged from 48 (the number cited by Israeli spokesmen) to 100, plus a number of local residents. “Another 66 Palestinians, apparently fedayeen, were executed in several other incidents that occurred in the course of the searches carried out in the Strip between November 2-20. The Israeli authorities claimed that there had been resistance to the screening in a number of places,” Morris writes. In the pertinent paragraph in “Righteous Victims,” Morris writes that “the Israeli conquest and its aftermath were characterized by a great deal of unwarranted killing, especially of retreating or captured Egyptian soldiers.” Altogether, Israeli forces killed about 500 Palestinian civilians during and after the conquest of the Gaza Strip.
But the six paragraphs in two books by this Israeli historian were not enough to make the hundreds of casualties and the methods by which the civilians were killed part of any Israeli discussion, written or otherwise, of the history of hostilities between the two peoples. Interviewed by phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, Sacco was asked if he was surprised to find that no Israeli had tried to investigate these events further. “No, I’m not that surprised,” he answers. “People focus on ’48, on ’67. This fell between the cracks. I imagine that now Israelis will start to give it more attention.”
Bodies in the street
On November 7, 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the Sinai Campaign, prime minister Ehud Olmert gave a speech in the Knesset in which he sought to distinguish between two components of that war: on the one hand, the Israeli alliance with two superpowers (France and England), “trying, against the tide of history, to preserve their assets in lands that are not theirs,” and Ben-Gurion’s declaration about the Third Kingdom of Israel which “lasted just 31 hours,” and, on the other hand, the justified causes for launching a war that “was imposed upon the side that started it” – referring to the fedayeen raids by which Egypt sought to disrupt life in Israel, plus other Egyptian moves such as tightening the naval blockade, increasing armament and the establishment of a joint military command with Jordan and Syria.
The quiet on the borders that was attained following the war, and the courting of Israel by Third World countries, were proof of the war’s achievements, Olmert said. In his speech, the premier did not neglect to mention “the tragic event that occurred on the first day of the operation (October 29), the Kafr Qassem massacre.” And he continued: “As we remember today the 170 IDF soldiers who fell in the Sinai Campaign, we must also remember the 49 peaceful villagers who were killed for violating the curfew of which they were unaware.”
But he made no mention of the massacres that took place in the Gaza Strip. Sacco spoke with dozens of people in Khan Yunis and Rafah, and based on their accounts, described in comic-strip form the modus operandi of the army units that conquered them. In Khan Yunis, his inquiries yielded the following events: On November 3, the day after the conquest of the city and refugee camp was complete, the forces went from house to house. In some houses, they instructed the women, children and older men to leave and then shot the younger men who remained inside. Elsewhere, they instructed the males aged 15 and up to go out to the street, where they saw bodies lying about. In his drawings, Sacco also depicts memories recalled by the bereaved women who were young at the time and are now elderly: They had searched for their loved ones among the heaps of corpses.
Some of the interviewees gave their full names; others were afraid. Sacco’s illustrated journey into the past at Rafah is continually punctuated by IDF attacks – mainly to raze houses in an ever-widening area along the border with Egypt. He depicts the day that activist Rachel Corrie was killed (March 16, 2003), and also shares with readers moments of laughter, tension and affection with his friends. But readers can also rest easy: Throughout the book, Sacco does not cut the Palestinians any slack either. In digressions from the main storyline (when tracking down survivors), he puts his finger on many vulnerable points, asks tough questions (about the killing of Israeli civilians, for instance), and documents arguments with armed Palestinian militants. And in the historic background that he depicts via meticulous illustrations, he does not forget the Israelis killed by the fedayeen and other infiltrators in the years that preceded the Sinai Campaign.
The soldiers with sticks
The mass killing at Rafah (November 12) was perpetrated about a week after the battles ended. In Rafah, IDF troops went through the streets, calling with megaphones for men over 15 (up to age 50 or 60; different people recollected different ages) to assemble at a local public school. Sacco draws the men preparing to go out to the street. Warily, but without panic. On the street they encounter the soldiers who shout at them and fire into the air, telling them to hurry up. One interviewee recalled that a soldier fired his weapon in his direction and ordered him to put his hands up. Everyone began to run with their hands in the air. Strip after strip of illustrations show, from different angles, in different sizes, men running with their hands in the air while lots of soldiers along the street aim their rifles at them. Nothing specifically identifies the soldiers as Israelis – no Star of David or other symbol on their uniform. Was this intentional? Sacco: “I drew them as I saw them in photographs from the period.”
Next to the UNRWA distribution center, soldiers fired upon a group of people who collapsed on the spot. One of them was Mohammed El Najeeli, who recalls how other people, who’d been sent running toward the school, stepped on bodies. Najeeli told Sacco that he pleaded with a soldier to kill him, and claims that the soldier fired 36 bullets at his head. Sacco decided to include his testimony in the book despite deep skepticism about Najeeli’s claim of being shot in the head 36 times. Clearly, the man, who is now elderly, had been wounded in the head, whatever the actual number of bullets. Sacco tells readers of his doubts about some of the testimonies (e.g., that the accounts are exaggerated, illogical or “adopted” by someone who wasn’t actually there). He also depicts his consultations with friends as to what is credible and what isn’t. How can one be sure that people haven’t added invented details over the years? Sacco, by phone: “That’s why I tried to talk to as many people as possible and to address the problems, the contradictions. I agree that there is a problem with oral testimony. But there is also a problem with written sources: Archives are controlled by states and the written sources also do not give the whole picture.
But when you speak with dozens of people, a certain overall arc emerges. Some people may exaggerate, but enough people say the same thing.” For example, regarding the entrance to the gathering place at the school in Rafah, Sacco explains: “Though some of the men do not remember the barbed wire and others don’t remember the ditch, almost to a man they remember something else at the school entrance: the soldiers with the heavy sticks.” Groups of men in Rafah were herded toward the school and at its entrance were soldiers who beat them with truncheons. Again, entire pages are filled with strip upon strip of illustrations, depicting the beatings from numerous angles. Hundreds of people were made to assemble in the school during those hours – on the ground, heads down, hands on their heads. A whole day without food or water; injured people, too. Talking was prohibited and anyone who moved was beaten.
Sacco asks Mohammed Shakar a “stupid question”: Were people permitted to use the bathroom? The answer is no, of course: People had to go in their pants, close to the noses of the people bending down in the row behind them. A screening process was used as well; anyone suspected or marked by others as a soldier (in the Egyptian army) was taken away. Many men were forced to pass by military jeeps, in which were riding people whose heads were covered by blankets – collaborators. Those marked as enemy soldiers were paraded in a long line before soldiers and officers who sat behind tables and asked questions. “‘What’s your work?’ [I said:] ‘Teacher,’ so they left me,” one man recalled. “‘Where do you live? What’s the nature of your work?’ ‘I’m a policeman,'” recalled another. Someone else remembered that the soldiers sorted the men without asking questions: “They selected the handsome guys, the well-built guys.” Those suspected of being soldiers were put on buses and taken to detention facilities in Gaza and later to a POW camp in Atlit.
Did the Arabs shoot?
Journalist Meron Rapoport helped Sacco with his research. “At first it sounded strange to me that two massacres occurred without us knowing about it,” he says. “It seemed a little unrealistic.” To judge by the written evidence he found, information about what transpired in Khan Yunis did not reach the Israeli public at the time. With Rafah it was a different story. A week after the incident there, there were several reports about it in the communist daily Kol Ha’am.
Reports also appeared in Ha’olam Hazeh and in The Times of London. Communist MK Esther Vilenska sought to bring the matter up for discussion in the Knesset. Ben-Gurion announced that a hearing had already been held in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and that a report had been sent to the UN secretary general. Rapoport tried to locate Israelis who had firsthand knowledge of the events. What he found is that the IDF’s 11th Infantry Brigade conquered the Gaza Strip on November 2-3, and that the 12th Infantry Brigade was tasked with “combing” the area. This was evidently the Golani Brigade, at least in Khan Yunis. But Rapoport was unable to find the names of any of the actual commanders. In an IDF archive, he did find a secret document dated November 19, saying that Haim Laskov, the GOC Southern Command, was appointing a committee of inquiry for the events at Rafah. Two investigators were appointed: Lt. Col. Aryeh Reis, chairman, and Capt. Herzl Golan, member; they were supposed to submit their findings no later than November 25, 1956.
Rapoport did not find any documents indicating what became of the inquiry. Nor was he able to find Golan. Reis was already dead. His son, journalist Menashe Raz, didn’t know anything about it. “There’s a problem with the IDF archive,” says Rapoport. “It’s computerized so it’s easy to search, but it’s censored. Someone sits there and decides what is allowed to be made public.” But Rapoport did unearth the records of a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee from November 23, 1956, which was originally classified as “secret.” At the meeting, chief of staff Dayan went into a lengthy and candid analysis of the military activities. The committee members asked a lot of questions that indicate they had heard something: They asked about cruel treatment of prisoners, abuse and even about cases of rape. Dayan listened and replied (though not to all the questions).
In regard to prisoners: “I know about certain units that encountered captives at a certain place or fleeing Egyptians. I do not know of any instance where captives were lined up and killed, where instead of taking them prisoner, they shot them.” On the situation in the Gaza Strip, Dayan said: “I think that there is apathy and total calm. And I include Rafah in this, aside from the one incident … What happened was this: Our unit cleared the area as part of an exchange of units. The second unit had not entered yet. At the time there was the prime minister’s speech here about our acceptance of the UN demand for a withdrawal, while there, there was confidence that we had left without the intention of returning.
The second unit entered the next day, imposed a curfew and was supposed to search for the weapons arsenals and the Egyptian soldiers who were left in the area … [They announced] that all the men had to show up in a certain location for inspection. The curfew was ignored and no one came. The [men with] loudspeakers went around announcing the curfew and inspection, and not only did they not come, they did not heed the curfew orders at all. “Within a large group of Arabs that did not want to listen to the orders, there were many Egyptian soldiers and many weapons … Then the unit opened fire. I do not know where they fired or if the Arabs fired, I only know the general picture. After they opened fire in several places, the Arabs went into the houses and afterward responded to the order to come for identification; then 200 Egyptian soldiers were found. About 40 people were killed … If inside the houses 200 soldiers are found who do not want to turn themselves in and incite others not to identify themselves – then the commander of the unit acted perfectly fine by opening fire.
You can’t have the army declare a curfew and then have people wandering the streets.” In Ben-Gurion’s version, Dayan’s comment about “I don’t know if the Arabs fired” was interpreted as a few people firing upon Israeli forces. After the forces fired into the air, they were forced to fire upon the unruly men, said the prime minister at the Knesset hearing, and 48 were killed. The November 21 edition of Kol Ha’am quoted the military commander of the Gaza Strip, Lt. Col. Haim Gaon, who spoke with journalists in the area on November 18. Gaon recounted that on November 10: “They started plundering the UNRWA storehouses … and shooting at the office of the military administration in the city and at the traffic on the roads … On November 12, a curfew was declared and searches were carried out in the city. Rafah residents were commanded to identify themselves. They displayed passive resistance, and some actively resisted.
From shots that were fired, one sergeant was wounded. Orders were given to the army forces to forcibly remove the men from their houses. Some started fleeing toward the dunes, but steps were taken to prevent their escape. After the actions, there were about 30 dead and wounded.” The people Sacco interviewed told him that there was no resistance, because anyone who was armed (soldiers or fedayeen) realized they stood no chance against the Israeli army. Sacco also spent several months in Bosnia, in late 1995 and early 1996. “I spoke there with people who committed atrocities,” he tells Haaretz. “I understood that fear and dehumanization are responsible for this. I think that people can do to you whatever they think you can do to them. In the 1950s, it was easy to manufacture this propaganda (that this is what the Arabs were capable of doing). I came to see that what’s needed most is an understanding of human psychology, more than an analysis of the political events.”
Twilight Zone / All that remains By Gideon Levy: Haaretz
I was supposed to be a conqueror of Nazareth. I wanted quite badly to be a conqueror of Nazareth, but I didn’t pass the audition. And so I became a junior officer in the Haganah. Okay, not so junior, but I still got a line or two in the movie, eight words in Arabic in total. The man in the Haganah uniform in the dim right corner of the scene is me, taking part in the humiliating surrender of the leaders of the holy city. Hooray, I’m an occupier, too! Worse than Danny Ayalon and the low chair, the Haganah people – in real life and in the movie – wanted to film the city’s surrender so that its humiliation would be permanently documented. They had a sense of history, these first occupiers, which is how I ended up being the one who translates for the humiliated mayor the word “picture” into Arabic – sur’a. On the appointed day, I drove to Nazareth and the production’s hairdresser gave me a haircut appropriate for the period. I donned my uniform – baggy khaki shorts and knee socks; they even gave me an antique watch to wear. Actor Nati Ravitz played the Haganah commander, the role I’d coveted, and I was positioned behind him. I was the one who dictated to the abject mayor the date of Nazareth’s surrender – July 16, 1948, which in Arabic is sittash Tammuz, alf watis’a mi’a watamaniya wa’arba’in, if I memorized it correctly, as I say in the movie. A character actor.
My film history to date: a fleeting appearance as a doctor in Shira Gefen and Etgar Keret’s “Meduzot” (“Jellyfish”) and a bit as a television interviewer in Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” – a rich cinematic career, in other words. If only Rafael Zvi, my drama teacher at Ironi Aleph High School, who once tossed a chair at me in exasperation, could see me now. All his hard work paid off. But that, as they say, is not the story. This week I watched the film whose full title is: “The Time that Remains: Chronicles of a Present Absentee,” a name that recalls, perhaps unintentionally, “All That Remains,” the monumental work by historian Walid Khalidi about the 418 lost Palestinian villages. It is a very sad movie, despite being full of humor, bitter as that humor may be. It is also a very beautiful film, a careful aesthetic evident in every image and detail; a magnificent dance of occupation, a captivating dance of death, a feast for the eyes that are supposed to shed a tear. Nor is it a film that arouses anger, except perhaps in the McCarthyite Israelis who haven’t (and probably will not) see it and have already issued calls this week for it not to be screened at the cinematheques. It is an incredibly restrained film, almost the polar opposite of Mohammed Bakri’s seething “Jenin, Jenin.” Bakri’s son Saleh stars in Suleiman’s movie. The beatings are not quite beatings, the wounds are not quite wounds, the war is a little ridiculous, the occupation is kind of amusing and everything is unhurried, yet deliberate; the great tragedy unfolds with reserve, style and even humor. And there are moments of tremendous power.
The director, Elia Suleiman, observes everything from a distance – a geographical distance – from his diaspora home in Paris – and an even greater psychological distance from what goes on here. He presents the national tragedy with style, gives us a national (and very personal) disaster with a smile. Even the scene of the looting of people’s homes in Nazareth, a scene that incurred the wrath of the IDF, which refused on account of it to supply a tank for the production, is done with stylized dance steps. One step forward, one step back; the soldiers of the “Israeli Army” (as it was still called then), fold the stolen silk tablecloth taken from an abandoned house. Have we ever seen the plunder of 1948 in a movie? I don’t think so. Now we get it complete with dance steps, a choreography of plunder. Suleiman, perhaps the most stylish Palestinian director, presents: a political autobiography. A native of Nazareth, he based the screenplay on his father’s diaries and the letters his mother wrote to her relatives who were forced to flee from here. The tale in a nutshell: The father tried to fight against the Israeli occupation and his son decided to go into exile and observe the whole thing from afar. Does this mean that Suleiman decided to give up? To surrender?
That not only is despair more comfortable in Paris, it also derives from a conscious and rational choice? It seems to me the answer is yes. Children pay for their parents’ mistakes. Suleiman is not alone. The writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh, whose first book was an intellectual political work, has now published a guide to hiking in Palestine. The serial administrative detainee Imad Saba, a keen intellectual warrior, has lived in exile in Holland for years. And there are others like them. Zionism has been victorious: Their finest people have given up. When I say this on the phone to Suleiman, at his home in Paris, he laughs, and the laughter also sounds a little bitter to me, but he hastens to deny it: “I always cling to the hope that lies in the cinema. Making a movie is a step that signifies hope, not despair.” It is still a melancholy film, but one can’t help laughing at times: Such as when the starchy Israeli education minister (producer Avi Kleinberger in a guest role) visits an Arab school in Nazareth, where he is greeted by kids waving mini Israeli flags and singing Israeli Independence Day songs. One can’t help but smile when the school principal catches the small boy Suleiman and angrily asks him: “Who told you that America is colonialist?”
One can’t help but smile at the unforgettable scene in which a tank turret dancingly follows Suleiman as he enters a hotel in Ramallah; or when the Israeli policeman brings Suleiman, who has returned from exile, a plate of tabbouleh; or at the Arab prisoner who yanks the Israeli policeman to whom he is handcuffed hither and thither; or at the armed and grotesque soldier from the Arab “Salvation Army” who has no idea where Jenin or Nablus are and where he is supposed to fight; or at the white flag of surrender that covers the windshield of an old Mercedes, blocking the view of its Arab occupants, who are simultaneously trying to evade an Israeli plane flying overhead; or at the hero’s mother, who sits quietly on her balcony as the sky behind her fills with Christmas fireworks, which to an Israeli viewer immediately call to mind Independence Day celebrations; or at the pole vaulter who easily vaults over the separation fence. And it is also impossible not to laugh most bitterly at the fact that nothing has changed: In 1948, we blindfolded the Arab detainees and coarsely shouted at them: “iftah al-bab” (“Open the door!”), just as we do in 2010. There is nothing new under the sun of Palestine and Israel. And the hero of the film, Suleiman, observes it all with his handsome and melancholy gaze – and is silent.
He does not utter a single word in the whole film. Neither the boy Suleiman nor the adult Suleiman, who plays himself. The continuous silence of a cinematic poet. There is nothing to say, nothing to do, except to look and be saddened – and to make a movie about it. “I think the situation speaks for itself. There’s no need to say that it’s not very successful and promising,” says Suleiman. He says he does not want to become a cliche of a Palestinian. He wants to give his film another dimension, the human dimension. He says the film also speaks of building a family, getting old, losing one’s parents, changing priorities and taking a different view of life, while the political drama of Israeli Arabs, as we call them, continually plays out in the background. “The family I depict is not political. This is also a way to defend the homeland. It is also a movie about growing up, about getting old and losing your loved ones.” The movie ends with the death of his mother in Nazareth. Her sister, Suleiman’s aunt, plays the part, wearing his mother’s original eyeglass frames.
Upon his mother’s death, Israel became a more paradoxical place for Suleiman, who holds an Israeli passport, and the confrontation between the country and his identity became more complex. “How do I feel now toward this country, now that my loved ones are gone? I don’t have an answer to that. Now when I go back to Nazareth it’s even harder: The apartment where my parents lived and where I filmed this movie is empty. I have very little to go back for.” Lots of Israelis will surely be happy to hear that sentiment and think to themselves: May there be many more like him. Still, this is bad news.
The false sacredness of the 1967 border: The Electronic Intifada
Hasan Abu Nimah, 10 February 2010
When the United States abandoned its demand that Israel freeze settlement construction as a prelude to restarting stalled Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, the Obama administration urged both sides to move straight into discussions about a future Palestinian state “based on the 1967 borders.”
Setting the border first, it was hoped, would automatically “resolve” the issue of the settlements, and this is now the focus of the “indirect talks” that US envoy for the Middle East peace process George Mitchell is trying to broker.
Of course the settlements, built on occupied West Bank land in flagrant violation of international law, would not be removed. Rather, the border would simply be redrawn to annex the vast majority of settlers and their homes to Israel, and as if by magic, the whole issue of the settlements would disappear just like that. This charade would be covered up with a so-called “land swap” of which Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority often speak as a way to soften up the Palestinian public for a great surrender to Israeli diktat.
All this is based on the common, but false notion that the 4 June 1967 demarcation line separating Israel from the West Bank (then administered as part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), is the legitimate border of Israel and should therefore be the one along which the conflict is settled.
This assumption is wrong; the 1967 border has no legitimacy and should not be taken for granted.
UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 called for the partition of Palestine into two entities: a state for the Jewish minority on 57 percent of the land, and a state for the overwhelming Arab majority on less than half the land. According to the 1947 partition, the population of the Jewish state would still have been 40 percent Arab. Jerusalem would have remained a separate international zone.
Rather than “resolve” the question of Palestine, partition made it worse: Palestinians rejected a partition they viewed as fundamentally unjust in principle and in practice, and the Zionist movement grudgingly accepted it but as a first step in an ongoing program of expansion and colonization.
Resolution 181, called for the two states to strictly guarantee equal rights for all their citizens, and to have a currency and customs union, joint railways and other aspects of shared sovereignty, and set out a specific mechanism for the states to come into being.
The resolution was never implemented, however. Immediately after it was passed, Zionist militias began their campaign to conquer territory beyond that which was allocated by the partition plan. Vastly outgunned Palestinian militias resisted as best as they could, until the belated intervention of Arab armies some six months after the war began. By that time it was too late — as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes. Israel, contrary to myth, was not brought into being by the UN, but by war and conquest.
The 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement, which ended the first ever Arab-Israeli war left Israel in control of 78 percent of historic Palestine and established a ceasefire with its neighbors Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Until the second round — in June 1967 — Arabs had been calling for the abolition of the “illegal Zionist entity” planted by colonial powers like a dagger in the heart of the Arab nation. They also waitied for the United Nations to implement its many resolutions redressing the gross injustices inflicted hitherto. The UN never tried to enforce the law or to exert serious efforts to resolve the conflict, which kept escalating.
Israel’s June 1967 blitzkrieg surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan led to the devastating Arab defeat and to Israel tripling the area of the land it controlled. The parts of Palestine still controlled by Arabs — the West Bank including eastern Jerusalem and Gaza — as well as Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai fell into Israeli hands.
Defeated, demoralized and humiliated, the Arab states involved in the “setback”, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser called it, accepted the painful compromise spelled out by Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967.
It ruled that the 4 June 1967 border would have to be the recognized border of Israel provided the latter evacuated the Arab lands it had occupied that year. In other words if the Arabs wanted to recover their lands lost in that war they had to end the “state of belligerency” with Israel — a small step short of recognition — and accept Israel’s actual existence within the pre-June 1967 borders. This eventually became the so-called “land for peace” formula.
Instead of withdrawing from land in exchange for recognition and peace, Israel proceeded to colonize all the newly occupied territories; it continues to do so 43 years later in the West Bank and Golan Heights. Meanwhile it has also become uncontested that Israel has a “right” to everything to the west of the 1967 border. The only question is how much more land will it get to keep to the east.
Astonishingly, Palestinian leaders, Arab states and the so-called international community have all submitted to the lopsided concept that Israel should have this right unconditionally without evacuating the illegally occupied Arab lands. The legitimacy of the 1967 border was tightly linked to Israeli withdrawal and should remain so.
An inherent contradiction in resolution 242 is that while it affirmed “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of the territory by war” it in fact legitimized Israel’s conquest of 1948, including the 21 percent of Palestine that was supposed to be part of the Arab state under the partition plan.
In other words, the UN granted Israel legitimate title to its previous conquests if it would give up its later conquests. This has set a disastrous precedent that aggression can lead to irreversible facts. Encouraged by this, Israel began its settlement project with the express intention of “creating facts” that would make withdrawal impossible and force international recognition of Israeli claims to the land.
It worked; in April 2004 the United States offered Israel a written guarantee that any peace agreement would have to recognize and accept the settlements as part of Israel. The rest of the “international community” as they always do, quietly followed the American line.
The Palestinian submission to the common demand that the large settlement blocs be annexed to Israel against a fictitious land swap is another vindication of the Israeli belief that facts created are facts accepted.
If and only if Israel adheres to all aspects of UN Security Council resolution 242 and others, could the 1967 line have any legitimacy. Until then, if Israel tells the Arabs that the West Bank settlements of Ariel and Maale Adumim are part of Israel, then the Arab position can be that Haifa, Jaffa and Acre are still part of Palestine.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.