The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  “Common usage” is a bane to all of us journalists, but it is not sacred. It doesn’t have to stand still. My father, I told my editor, had fought in what he called the “Great War”—but common usage had to be amended after 1945, to the “First World War.” What’s in a name? I asked in my paper. What’s in a capital letter? How many other skulls lie in the sands of northern Syria? Did the Turks not kill enough Armenians? From that day, The Independent printed Holocaust with a capital “H” for both Jewish and Armenian genocides.

  77 Elsewhere, it should be noted, Tahsin Bey does not appear in so favourable a light; but wasn’t Oskar Schindler a member of the Nazi party?

  78 She later wrote to the Aghajanians. “I will do my best to continue working on the recognition of the genocide,” she said in her letter, “and make a difference, even a small one.”

  79 See Chapter Five.

  80 Shortly after it was refused passage through the Bosporus, the ship exploded and 767 of its passengers were drowned.

  81 Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, had engineered several truces. On 17 September 1948, he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, who regarded the Swede as a British agent. One of the three men who sanctioned the murder was Yitzhak Shamir, another future Israeli prime minister.

  82 Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford University Press, 2001)—in the United States, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Nation Books, 2002), especially pp. 12–47, 161–400.

  83 Isaam Sartawi, a PLO official and heart surgeon who successfully urged Arafat to negotiate with moderate Israelis, had been murdered in Portugal in April of 1983—just under two months before my conversation with Arafat—by gunmen paid by Abu Nidal’s “Fatah Revolutionary Council.” The claim of responsibility was made in that “beating heart of Arabism” which was even now besieging Arafat: Syria.

  84 UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” demanded “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” The latter implied an Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Israel, with its continuing colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, repeatedly pointed out that the UN’s demand for withdrawal employed the word “territories” without the definite article—and thus meant that Israel did not have to withdraw from all the territories it had occupied in 1967. It is inconceivable that the framers of 242 intended that Israel should pick and choose which bit of occupied land they would leave and which they would keep. Israel’s claim that it was permitted to keep Arab territory because the 1967 conflict had been an act of aggression by the Arabs and that the territories had been occupied during a defensive war was undermined by the UN resolution’s emphasis on “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Israelis and Arabs continue to nit-pick over the semantics of this short and perfectly succinct resolution.

  85 It was typical of the mood of anger in Madrid that no one pointed out that UN Resolution 181 of 1947, while it called for the partition of Palestine—which the Arabs rejected—laid down borders that Israel ignored once it had expanded its territory after the 1948 war.

  86 Resolution 338 of 1973 was essentially a reiteration of 242. Resolution 425 called for an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Israel retreated from its occupation zone in Lebanon in 2000, twenty-two years after 425 had been voted by the Security Council.

  87 Arafat always carefully arranged his kuffiah in the shape of Mandate Palestine, the “Negev desert” of this cloth map always concealing his right ear.

  88 When I questioned CNN’s Jerusalem bureau chief about this meretricious commentary, he replied that the film was “generic.” I grasped at once what this meant. The film was “generic” because the violence was “generic,” because Palestinians were a “generically” violent people. They protested, threw stones, objected to “peace” and were therefore, I suppose, anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-peace and, of course, “pro-terrorist.”

  89 A Palestinian driver subsequently arrived back in our dust bowl with a handwritten note from Sarah, the kind of message one doesn’t want to receive from colleagues. It read: “It seems you cannot come further so I will stay here. Almost no journalists are here. Sorry guys. Have fun. Love S.”

  90 The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Rabin in September 1995—two months before he was assassinated—promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zones A, B and C. These were to be completed by October 1997. Final status agreements covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 per cent of Hebron, despite Israel’s obligation under Oslo to leave all West Bank towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second redeployment promised at Taba into two phases—but he only honoured the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 per cent to 59 per cent, transferring 41 per cent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting Netanyahu’s two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 per cent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there.

  91 Readers who wanted to test this particular mandate were referred to Genesis 12:17, Leviticus 26:44–45, Deuteronomy 7:7–8, Samuel 7:12–16, I Kings 15:4, Psalms 89:34–37 and 105:8–11. “The battle for Jerusalem has begun,” the ad said, “and it is time for believers in Christ to support our Jewish brethren . . .”

  92 Israeli leaders were not the only ones to try to avoid confronting this physically obvious blockade on the road to peace. In 2000, John Hume, Northern Ireland’s only statesman, advised Palestinians and Israelis that “your challenge is not one of geographical turf, but rather the construction of agreed institutions . . .” The Irish version of the “peace process,” however, does not travel well. A “turf” war—two groups of people arguing over the same piece of real estate—was precisely what this Middle East conflict was about. The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli–Arab struggle would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the seventeenth-century dispossession of the Catholics. Urging the Protestant landlords and the mass of impoverished Irish Catholics to construct “agreed institutions” would not have commended itself to either side.

  93 A Scottish pathologist confirmed in 1995 that a Palestinian who died in Israeli custody, Abed Samed Hreizat from Hebron, suffered fatal brain injuries when his head was forcefully jerked during “shaking” by Israeli Shin Bet agents on 22 April that year. In an Israeli special commission report on interrogation, retired justice Moshe Landau sanctioned the use of “moderate physical pressure” against Palestinians. In 1997, Palestinian military intelligence turned up at Nablus hospital with a detainee called Youssef Baba, who had been burned on the arm and thighs with the electric element used to boil water. His wounds had become gangrenous; he was later returned to prison, where he died on 31 January.

  94 Not least when Netanyahu threw in the release from an American prison of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard—who had been sending Pentagon secrets to Israel—as part of his demands for success at Wye. Pollard, a Jewish American working as a U.S. intelligence analyst, had been sentenced to life in March 1987. In 1995, Ehud Barak even made him an Israeli citizen. Clinton, after cringingly saying that he would “seriously review” Pollard’s case, at least managed to refuse Netanyahu’s demand.

  95 This “th
reat” was thrown into doubt when an Israeli reporter, Rami Tal, revealed to the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 1997 that Moshe Dayan, the defence minister who conquered Golan in 1967, had told him in a series of interviews before his death that many of the Israeli–Syrian firefights were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that the kibbutz residents who pressed the government to take Golan did so less for security than for the farmland.

  96 The video and photographs of the twelve-year-old falling lifeless into his father’s arms became one of the iconic images of the second intifada, and the Israelis quickly erased all trace of the killing by demolishing the wall behind which they had taken cover. An Israeli military investigation then attempted to prove that Palestinians had been responsible for their deaths—and successfully persuaded America’s CBS channel to air their bogus “findings” on its 60 Minutes programme. “One gets the impression,” Israeli Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz bravely pointed out, “that instead of genuinely confronting this incident, the IDF [Israel Defence Force] has chosen to stage a fictitious re-enactment and cover up the incident by means of an enquiry with foregone conclusions and the sole purpose of which is to clear the IDF of responsibility for al-Dura’s death.” Western reporters who investigated the killings concluded that Israelis had shot both the son and the father, who survived, although the Israeli soldiers responsible may not have been able to see them behind the wall.

  97 Less than two weeks later, Ashrawi will write an open letter to President Bill Clinton. “It has been our experience, Mr. President, that most American public officials, once out of office, begin to suffer pangs of conscience and inexplicable urges to express contrition in the form of public confessions pertaining to the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. With an honest desire to spare you the fate of other high officials who develop after-the-fact immaculate hindsight and a drive for justice, I would like to point out that there is still world enough and time to speak out—better yet, to act now.” Ashrawi knew Clinton would not do so. What she could not have known was that, when he did “speak out” once he was no longer president, he would blame the Palestinians.

  98 He certainly took refuge at the London home of Syrian security men. Hindawi signed a statement for police, saying he had been given the bag containing the bomb by an officer working for General Mohamed el-Khouly, the head of Syrian air force intelligence. In court, Hindawi retracted this statement, claiming he had been forced to sign it unread and believed he was part of a conspiracy by Israeli agents to damage Syria. He was convicted and Britain broke off relations with Damascus. Israel condemned “Syria’s central role in terrorism,” though I do remember a strange incident a few days later when I met the outgoing British ambassador to Syria in the VIP lounge at Damascus airport. There was some evidence, he said, that the Israelis “knew the bomb was being brought to Heathrow.” He would say no more. Had the Israelis learned of the bomb by tapping Syrian embassy phones? Had they been tipped off by British security? Had they encouraged the Syrians to involve themselves in a bomb plot? No Israeli government would bomb its own aircraft. But if they knew about it in advance, the Israelis could, once the bomb arrived at Heathrow, arrest Anne-Marie Murphy and end up “proving” that Syria was a “centre of international terror.”

  99 There is a rich seam of information on Israel’s policy of assassinating its opponents inside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. As long ago as 1984, two of four Palestinian bus hijackers were bludgeoned to death by Shin Bet operatives after they had been interrogated, an admission made only when press photographers produced pictures of the two men being led, very much alive, from the bus. The then Israeli defence minister Yitzhak Shamir described the killings as “a mishap.” In 1991, Palestinian lawyers and human rights groups began the re-examination of dozens of cases of Palestinian men shot dead during the first intifada after Israeli television revealed the existence of Israeli army hit squads. In early 1992, Israeli witnesses testified that they had seen Israeli soldiers in civilian clothes opening fire on masked Palestinians who were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in Dura near Hebron. Amnesty International’s 21 February 2001 report on Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and Other Unlawful Killings is a carefully researched account of Israel’s extrajudicial murders which includes the death of forty-nine-year-old Dr. Thabet Thabet, a former Fatah activist who was later named as a PLO representative to the 1991 Madrid peace talks and who developed many friendships with members of the Israeli peace movement. Thabet, a Tulkarem dentist, was shot dead in his car by Israeli troops on 31 December 2000. The Israelis later claimed he was a commander of a Tanzim cell who “instructed people where to carry out attacks,” a highly unconvincing explanation for the murder of a Palestinian who had attended the funeral of an Israeli soldier, the son of an Israeli peace campaigner he had befriended. The killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders then became routine, helped by a ruling from one of Israel’s chief rabbis. “Jewish religious law,” Rabbi Israel Meir Lau claimed on 27 July 2001, “gives its . . . full support to the policy of active killings which the government and security forces maintains today in order to prevent terrorists from planning and carrying out attacks in Israel.” On the same day, the spiritual leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, announced in a sermon broadcast over Israeli army radio that Arabs were reproducing like insects and should go to hell. “In the old city of Jerusalem, they’re swarming like ants,” he said. “They should go to hell—and the Messiah will speed them on their way.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned the “immoral and illegal practice” of killing wanted Palestinians in the occupied territories. In 1993, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch calculated that 120 Palestinians had been killed by covert Israeli units since December 1987. When a Mossad hit squad tried to murder Khaled Mashaal, a Hamas official, in Jordan in 1997—Israelis criticised the attack not because it was illegal but because it had failed—even President Mubarak of Egypt felt constrained to call the tactics “immoral.” Israel had already been shocked by earlier revelations that its security men had murdered dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the 1967 Middle East war. Their mass grave had been discovered in Sinai; Rabin called the war crime an “aberration.” Death always involved double standards. In 1998, for example, Israel’s social security system said it could not compensate the family of a Palestinian killed by a Jewish gunman because under Israeli law an Arab murdered by a Jewish “terrorist” is not considered a victim of terrorism while a Jew killed by an Arab is.

  100 Preferring to avoid the deeply flawed trials which had condemned nine alleged collaborators to death, Arafat’s intelligence operatives were now murdering Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel, killing at least twenty men between December 2000 and August 2001. Palestinian police no longer investigated the killings of men believed to have worked for the Israeli intelligence services and who in some cases helped Israel to murder Palestinian militants. Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat’s special advisers, admitted to me that “these people who were shot, they were killed by intelligence, under orders, because of very certain information and recorded confessions. All these people were shot by Palestinian intelligence in areas not under our security control. All were shot in Area B or Area C where they were protected by Israeli security.” Kassem Khleef, found dead at a checkpoint near al-Ram on 12 November 2000, had been accused of providing Shin Bet with the movements of Hussein Abayat, assassinated three days earlier. Adnan Fathi Sultan was shot in the neck and chest by armed men who dragged him from his Bethlehem home on 17 December 2000 because they believed he had colluded with the Israelis to murder Yousef Abu Sway five days earlier. On 30 July 2001, sixty-eight-year-old Jamal Eid Shahin—the oldest victim so far—received a call at his house in Beit Sahour from men wearing Palestinian police uniforms; they asked him to follow them into the street. There they shot him eleven times and reportedly assaulted his corpse with a hammer. By the summer of 2001, a total of eighteen Palestinians had died in Palestinian priso
ns since 1993, often under torture by interrogators trained by the CIA.

  101 Amira Hass, the Ha’aretz correspondent, told me that although she had visited the houses of suicide bombers in Gaza, she did not, during the first year of the second intifada, choose to do so because “as an Israeli, I can’t be objective.” She only rarely went to the homes of “martyrs.” “I made one story about a child—I really wanted to show how he was killed, that he was not a danger to the soldier who killed him. The family was not happy with an Israeli journalist.”

  102 The most shameful explanation of Palestinian suicide bombing was concocted by Tom Friedman, an old friend but an increasingly messianic columnist for The New York Times. Palestinians, he wrote, had not chosen suicide bombing out of “desperation” but because “all they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy.” They had lost sight of the sacredness of human life, he claimed, because they were blinded by “narcissistic rage.” He advised the Palestinians to adopt “nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi.” But peaceful protests by Palestinians have always been ignored or suppressed. When Palestinians and other Arab nations took their case against Ariel Sharon’s land-grabbing wall to the International Court at The Hague in 2004— surely a “Gandhi-an” technique of seeking justice—Israel simply refused to heed the court’s ruling. Friedman made no comment on this.