Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  The settlers are quite open about the measures they take towards Arabs and the justification for them, which they find in the religious law and the writings of the sages. In the journal of the religious West Bank settlers we find, for example, an article with the heading “Those among us who call for a humanistic attitude towards our [Arab] neighbors are reading the Halacha [religious law] selectively and are avoiding specific commandments.” The scholarly author cites passages from the Talmud explaining that God is sorry that he created the Ishmaelites, and that Gentiles are “a people like a donkey.” The law concerning “conquered” peoples is explicit, he argues, quoting Maimonides on how they must “serve” their Jewish conquerors and be “degraded and low” and “must not raise their heads in Israel but must be conquered beneath their hand ...with complete submission.” Only then may the conquerors treat them in a “humane manner.” “There is no relation,” he claims, “between the law of Israel [Torat Yisrael] and the atheistic modern humanism,” citing again Maimonides, who holds “that in a divinely-commanded war [milhemet mitzvah] one must destroy, kill and eliminate men, women and children” (the rabbinate has defined the Lebanon war as such a war). “The eternal principles do not change,” and “there is no place for any ‘humanistic’ considerations.”94 We return to a further examination of this phenomenon. which has its counterparts throughout the Middle East region.

  A recent device for protecting settlers who attack Arabs is to transfer all investigation of the illegal use of arms by settlers from police to the military. Settlers simply refuse to cooperate with police, who do not “dare question or arrest Jewish suspects,” even one “seen on television shooting directly into a crowd of demonstrating Arabs while soldiers stood behind him and were holding their fire” (the head of the district council of a Jewish settlement near Ramallah, in this case).95

  When Palestinians are beaten or detained by settlers, Arab policemen are afraid to intervene. “Palestinian lawyers say: the settlements are so formidable that the Arab police and courts never dare to serve a summons or make a search, leaving settlers beyond the law when it comes to conflicts with Arabs.” The general character of the occupation is indicated by an incident in an Arab village in March 1982. Four settlers claimed that a stone was thrown at their car in this village. They fired “into the air,” shooting one boy in the arm. Another boy was kidnapped, beaten, locked in the trunk of the car, taken to a Jewish settlement and locked in a room where he was beaten “on and off during most of the day,” then taken to the military government compound in Ramallah, where the boy was held while the settlers went on their way.96 A standard bit of black humor in the occupied territories is that Arabs should stop flying and begin walking on the ground so they won’t be shot so often when settlers fire into the air.97

  Children and teenagers are often the main victims, since they are generally the ones involved in protests and demonstrations. Danny Tsidkoni reports from Gaza that informants in an Arab village told him that several very young children threw stones at a car driven by armed settlers, who broke the leg of one boy and the hand of one girl in “retaliation.”98 A soldier reports that 30 12-13 year-old children were lined up facing a wall with their hands up for five hours in Hebron one very cold night, kicked if they moved. He justified the punishment because they are not “all innocent lambs as they look now, with their hands up and their eyes asking pity... They burn and they throw stones and participate in demonstrations, and they are not less harmful than their parents.” Afterwards, the children were taken to prison at an Army camp. Parents began to arrive to find out what had happened to their children, including one old man “with the dignity of a Christian saint.” He did not ask to see his son, but only wanted to know whether he was there and to bring him a coat. “The guard at the gate simply looked him up and down, and cursing him, ordered him to leave.” The old man stood all night waiting, in the freezing cold. In another case, a settler suspected of murdering an Arab boy “already had a criminal record for breaking the arm of an eleven-year-old boy who allegedly had thrown a stone at an Israeli vehicle.”99

  The aged are also not spared. “For five days an elderly Arab woman has lain unconscious in a Jerusalem hospital after being brutally beaten in the small flat in which she lives with her husband in the Muslim quarter of the Old City.” She was attacked by religious Jews from a nearby Yeshiva (religious school) while her 85-year-old husband was praying in the Al Aqsa mosque. He heard that Jewish settlers had killed his wife, rushed home, but could not enter his apartment because, he said, “the Jews were on the roof of our building hurling bricks and bottles.” An Arab youth who tried to save the woman was also brutally beaten, and lies next door in the hospital. He “identifies his attackers as the Jewish zealots from the Yeshiva.” They “scarcely bothered to deny the attack.” When questioned about it, “an American zealot blandly talked of the need to cleanse the area of ‘terrorists’.” The group “is known to to the police as ‘the blessing of Abraham,’ a Yeshiva comprised mostly of European and American-born Jews who have returned to their faith with a burning desire to reclaim land lost to the Arabs.” Several years ago they established the Yeshiva in an old Arab area; eighteen Arab families had since moved out, and this couple was the only one remaining as the “Jewish zealots” sought “to ‘redeem’ property that had once been inhabited by Jews as long ago as the 16th century.” The couple had rejected cash offers which were followed by threats of violence; “there is no doubt that those threats were carried out this week.” The police arrested a few of the Jewish extremists but they are to be charged only with “riotous behavior.” “The assault on Mrs Mayalleh and the fact that she and her husband are now homeless seemed to be accepted as a fait accompli by the police,” which is typical of the “indulgent attitude by authorities.” “The vicious attack scarcely rated a mention in the local press.”100

  One not untypical issue of a Palestinian weekly contains two stories on the front page. The first deals with the week-long curfew imposed on the Dheisheh refugee camp after an Israeli observation post was burned and stones were thrown at an Israeli vehicle. It reports that inhabitants lacked food and that Israeli authorities raided houses, confiscating large numbers of books, magazines and tapes with national songs, while the men were forced to stand outside the police station during the cold nights. Soldiers searched the house of a man who had died two months earlier and “burned his private library and the school books of his children.” The second story cites Ha’aretz (Zvi Barel, Oct. 31): “Two Arab youths were injured by an Israeli time bomb in the stands of Hebron’s Hussein School football field... The explosion occurred minutes before the beginning of the game... The Israeli army which searched the area discovered another time bomb.”101 There are no curfews or collective punishment (standard practice for Arab communities) in the neighboring Jewish settlement, which has often been the source of violence and racist gangsterism. One wonders whether there was even an investigation. Other stories are still more grim, for example, the allegation by a Rakah (Communist Party) Knesset Member that there was “confirmed information” of the disappearance, torture and murder of convicts in various prisons,102 or the detailed testimony of prisoners concerning torture under interrogation,* sometimes with the cooperation of medical personnel, for many years.103

  The extensive reports of torture by Arab prisoners have generally been dismissed in the U.S., just as little notice is taken of reports of Palestinian refugees, or in general, of the travail and concerns of the Palestinians. Reports by prisoners or refugees of course have to be carefully evaluated; in particular, the conditions of transmission must be carefully considered, as well as the fact that they may have a stake in exaggerating or falsifying, or in suppressing the truth out of fear of their interrogators or guards. But surely such reports should be taken seriously. These remarks are truisms, characteristically disregarded in

  * This testimony comes primarily from Arab prisoners. MK Shulamit Aloni, one of Israel’s leading civil li
bertarians, reported that Jewish prisoners in military prisons allege that conditions are so severe that some were driven insane. MK Charley Biton, a Sephardi, added that 90% of those in military prisons are from the Oriental Jewish community. Davar, Jan. 24. 1983.

  two cases: where refugees or prisoners have a tale to tell that is useful for ideological or propaganda purposes (e.g., atrocity reports about some enemy), in which case all caution is thrown to the winds; or where their stories reflect badly on some revered state, in which case they are disregarded.104

  In the case of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, particular care has been taken to ensure that little is known here, though it has become more difficult over the years to meet this requirement. One interesting example was the unusually careful study conducted by the London Sunday Times Insight team which, after a lengthy investigation, found evidence of torture so widespread and systematic that “it appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy,” perhaps “to persuade Arabs in occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively.” The study was offered to the New York Times and Washington Post but rejected for publication and barely reported. A study by the Swiss League for the Rights of Man (June 1977), presenting similar material, received no notice here. The same is true of the reports of torture by Israeli journalists.105Various Israeli rebuttals were published though not, to my knowledge, the devastating Sunday Times response.

  More interesting than the attempt at rebuttal, however, was the conclusion that torture of Arabs by Israelis is legitimate, a position expressed, perhaps not surprisingly, in the New Republic, the semiofficial journal of American liberalism, where Seth Kaplan concludes that the question of how a government should treat people under its control “is not susceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture. One may have to use extreme measures—call them ‘torture’—to deal with a terrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life.”106 To my knowledge, this is the first explicit defense of torture to have appeared in the West* apart from the ravings of the ultra-right in France during the Algerian war.

  No less interesting was the response of the Israeli judiciary. Amnesty International raised the question whether the remarkably high level of confessions of Arab prisoners might suggest inhumane treatment. To this, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni responded that “the Arabs in any case—if they are arrested—do not take much time before they confess. It’s part of their nature”—a comment that we may place alongside of Martin Peretz’s “Arabs exaggerate” and others of the same ilk concerning Jews and other oppressed peoples over the years. It is perhaps of some interest to note that the genetic defect of Arabs noted by Justice Etzioni appears to be somehow contagious, since by now Jewish prisoners are confessing to crimes that they did not commit after police interrogation, including cases of interrogation by police

  * See also Michael Levin, “The Case for Torture,” Newsweek, June 7, 1982. A professor of philosophy at City College of New York, Levin plays a game familiar from every Phil. 1 course, constructing an outlandish case where torture might be “morally mandatory” (a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, etc.), then noting that “once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them”; finally, he advocates torture “as an acceptable measure for preventing future evils,” rejecting talk about “terrorists’ ‘rights’,” assuring us that Western democracies will not “lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as one way of preserving order,” etc. This should be understood in the context of the hysteria being whipped up at the time concerning “international terrorism,” defined so as to include “retail terrorism” conducted by enemies but not “wholesale (or retail) terrorism” conducted by friends (or by us). On this matter, see Herman, The Real Terror Network.

  investigators previously identified by Arabs as torturers.107 Amnesty International, incidentally, is not very popular in Israel, at least since it published a rather mild and understated report on treatment of suspects and prisoners in 1979. An editorial in Ha’aretz, entitled “Amnesty is at it again,” commented that the organization had “turned itself into a tool of Arab propaganda by publishing the document,” criticizing among other things its reliance on the “distorted and malicious report” in the London Sunday Times. The left-wing Mapam journal took a different tack. An editorial observed that “Experience tells us that it is extremely difficult to effectively defend oneself against terrorists or even ordinary criminals without bringing great pressure to bear on the suspects, in order to eventually bring them to trial at all,” and recommended that “constant vigilance” be exercised to determine that there are no “excesses” in the use of the required “great pressure.”108

  Quite apart from alleged torture under interrogation, the conditions of Arab political prisoners are horrifying, not a great surprise, perhaps, when we consider the scale of arrests in the occupied territories: some 200,000 security prisoners and detainees have passed through Israeli jails, almost 20% of the population, which has led to “horrendous overcrowding” and “appalling human suffering and corruption.”109

  The occasional trials of military offenders sometimes shed light on practices in the occupied territories. A number of reserve officers connected with the Peace Now movement threatened to make charges against soldiers public unless there was an investigation, leading to a trial that “brought forth evidence of methodically brutal treatment of the local townspeople last spring” (1982), at the peak of the atrocities carried out under the Milson-Sharon administration. Reuters reports that at the trial, Maj. David Mofaz, the deputy military governor of Hebron at the time of the alleged atrocities, testified that “Israeli soldiers were given orders to harass and beat up Palestinian residents” and that they “viciously struck and kicked defenseless young Arab prisoners.” He testified that “he personally was ordered to beat up Arabs by the West Bank military commander,” but he knew that “the orders came from higher up, from the chief of staff.” He said that “the army had orders to harass the West Bank population in general, not just those involved in anti-Israeli demonstrations,” giving examples. An Israeli captain testified that he had personally beaten Palestinian detainees and that “Israeli soldiers routinely beat up Palestinian detainees on the occupied West Bank with the knowledge of senior officers.”110

  On the same day, another brief report in the same American journal describes how Turkish women, “suspected leftists,” are placed in coffinlike boxes “in an attempt to extract information during questioning,” one minor example of a systematic pattern of torture and repression that also evokes little interest here, though perhaps the same report from another military dictatorship (say in Poland), might have elicited some comment.

  According to the Jerusalem Post, “a military court has allegedly heard evidence that Defence Minister Ariel Sharon urged Israeli soldiers to beat Arab schoolchildren in the West Bank,” referring to the same trial of soldiers “accused of brutally mistreating Arab youths in Hebron last March,” a trial that “has attracted almost no publicity in Israel”— though it did shortly after. The source is a major in the reserves who told the court that the military governor had quoted Sharon to this effect. At the trial, soldiers reportedly told the court that they had beaten Arab high school students while the major stood by and watched, hitting them as hard as they could. One said: “Afterwards, I left the shed where this was happening because I couldn’t stand beating up people who couldn’t fight back.”

  The Hebrew press reports the testimony of the vice-commander of the Judea region, who reports that in a meeting with Civilian Administrator Menachem Milson, General Sharon gave instructions as to how to deal with demonstrators: “Cut off their testicles.” The Chief of Staff went a step further, telling soldiers on the northern front that “the only good Arab is a dead Arab,” as reported by Abraham Burg, son o
f the Minister of Interior. The vice-commander reports also that his superior officer General Hartabi led troops into a Hebron school where they beat the students with clubs. In another incident, Hartabi imposed a curfew on the Dheisha camp after a stone was thrown at his car and ordered his troops to fire in the streets and at the rooftop solar water tanks, destroying the hot water supply and also making a terrifying racket. Another curfew was imposed on the Dhahriyeh camp south of Hebron on January 30 after youths stoned Israeli vehicles passing through the town. An Israeli woman was injured, and later died. A report in the U.S. press three weeks later notes that the curfew is still in effect, because “it is necessary for the investigation,” an Israeli military source said, adding: “It prevents people from working and causes financial losses. But it also gives them an incentive to help us find the people who carried out the attack. The sooner we find them, the sooner all this will be over.” Meanwhile the people are allowed out of their homes only two hours a day, schools are closed, and there is no employment. The treatment is somewhat different when Israeli West Bank terrorists go on a rampage. A minor fact, not noted in the press accounts, is that two weeks before the demonstrators unaccountably began to stone passing Israeli vehicles, 20,000 dunams of land used for orchards and grain were expropriated by Israeli military authorities.111

  The trial of the soldiers did receive publicity later on, particularly when the defense established its claim that the orders to brutalize prisoners and impose collective punishments came directly from Chief of Staff Eitan. He was called to testify before the military court and confirmed that he had ordered such punishments as expulsion, harassment of inciters, the establishment of detention or exile camps “even without regular prison conditions” (which are grim enough), and a wide variety of collective punishments against towns where there had been resistance to the conquerors (primarily, stone throwing) and against families of pupils who “caused disturbances” (this device “works well with Arabs,” he testified). The Chief of Staff opposed calling leaders in for warnings. “We demean ourselves,” he said: “Instead of conversations, we should carry out arrests.” He also said that Jewish settlers must travel armed and feel free to open fire when attacked, say, by children throwing stones. The military court sentenced four soldiers to several months imprisonment,* but ruled that Eitan’s orders were legal.