Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Maj. Mofaz, the highest ranking officer charged, was released; his lawyers had held—accurately it appears—that he and others were * For comparison, “An Israeli military court sentenced seven West Bank Arab teenagers to jail terms ranging from six to nine months and fined them $650 each yesterday for stoning an Israeli police chief in his car in the occupied territory” (Washington Post—Boston Globe, March 18, 1983). Later, Chief of Staff Eitan expressed his views on proper punishment again, this time to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense and Committee. For every incident of stone-throwing by Arab youths, he said, ten settlements should be built: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.” Defense Minister Moshe Arens was asked by opposition Knesset members to reprimand Eitan for this remark, but declined because Eitan “has great achievements to his credit” during his tenure as Chief of Staff—in fact, two great achievements, intensification of the repression in the conquered territories and destruction of the virtually defenseless Palestinian society in Lebanon. Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983; David K. Shipler, New York Times, April 14, 20, 1983.

  “merely following the orders and guidelines laid down by their superiors,” Edward Walsh reports. Apart from beating of Arab detainees and civilians, charges included forcing people to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs, laud Begin and Border Guards (who were allegedly responsible, though not punished), slap one another (children were ordered to slap their parents), along with other punishments that work well with Arabs. Maj. Mofaz ordered soldiers to write numbers on the arms of prisoners on the Day of the Holocaust, but the military court accepted his defense that this order was only given in jest (though it was carried out).112 The New Republic, democratic socialists, Elie Wiesel and others have not yet rendered their judgment as to whether these practices fall within the range of those that are acceptable for dealing with terrorists; the same silence has held for many years in similar circumstances, though there has been no shortage of praise for Israel’s remarkably high moral values and sympathy for its travail under the burdens of occupation imposed upon it by Arab intransigence.

  Aharon Bachar writes of “the things that are being done in my name and in yours”: “we will never be able to escape the responsibility and to say that we did not know and we did not hear.” He describes a meeting between Labor Alignment leaders (including some of the most noted hawks, such as Golda Meir’s adviser Israel Galili) and Menachem Begin, where they presented to Begin “detailed accounts of terrorist acts [against Arabs] in the conquered territories.” They described the “collective punishment in the town of Halhul,” in these words:

  The men were taken from their houses beginning at midnight, in pajamas, in the cold. The notables and other men were concentrated in the square of the mosque and held there until morning. Meanwhile men of the Border Guards [noted for their cruelty] broke into houses; beating people with shouts and curses. During the many hours that hundreds of people were kept in the mosque square, they were ordered to urinate and excrete on one another and also to sing Hatikva [“The Hope,” the national anthem of Israel] and to call out “Long Live the State of Israel.” Several times people were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered to lick the earth. At the same time four trucks were commandeered and at daybreak, the inhabitants were loaded on the trucks, about 100 in each truck, and taken like sheep to the Administration headquarters in Hebron.

  On Holocaust Day, the 27 of Nissan [the date in the Jewish calendar], the people who were arrested were ordered to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the Jews in the extermination camps.

  The report continues, detailing how prisoners are beaten, tortured and humiliated, how settlers are permitted into the prisons to take part in the beating of prisoners, how the settlers brutalize the local inhabitants with impunity, even in the case of a settler who killed an Arab, whose identity is known, but who is not arrested.113 All legitimate, presumably, by the standards of the New Republic, as quoted above. The same correspondent reports similar stories a few weeks earlier, presented to top government officials who did not even take the trouble to check the information, provided by an Israeli soldier.114

  A week later, Yoram Peri again published sections of the report transmitted to Begin by the Labor Party delegation. There had been no question raised in the Knesset concerning it, he noted, and the matter had been passed over silently elsewhere. But, he added bitterly, why be surprised? “After all, who are they [the victims]? Araboushim, twolegged beasts” (the latter a reference to Prime Minister Begin’s characterization of “terrorists”). He writes that the “frightening metamorphosis that is coming over us...places in question the justice of the Zionist movement, the basis for the existence of the state,” but it receives no attention in the Knesset, the World Zionist Congress (then in session in Jerusalem), or elsewhere. It is time to recognize, he concludes, that “there is no such thing as an enlightened occupation, there cannot be a liberal military administration.” The pretenses of the past 15 years are simply lies. By now, 3/4 of a million young Israelis who have served in the IDF “know that the task of the army is not only to defend the state in the battlefield against a foreign army, but to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us.”115

  Writing identification numbers on the arms of prisoners is a practice that many have naturally found particularly shocking. It is apparently common, and the circumstances just described are not unique. Peace Now military officers describing the daily “brutality and violence” of the IDF and the settlers in the territories, the “repression, humiliation, maltreatment and collective punishment,” report that soldiers regularly write the numbers of Arab IDs on the wrists of Arab prisoners, and one recalls a particularly “appalling incident” of this sort that he witnessed— again, on the Day of the Holocaust. Another describes an incident in which a group of fresh recruits were issued clubs and told: “Boys, off you go to assault the locals.” He describes the treatment of Arab prisoners, who are required to clean the soldiers’ rooms, mess halls and latrines. “At night, they are put into a small room and beaten up” so badly that “many of them cannot even stand up”—“youngsters,…most of whom have not been tried, people who will be released due to lack of evidence.” Aharon Geva writes in Davar that “Some of us Israelis behave like the worst kind of anti-Semites, whose name cannot be mentioned here, like the very people who painted a picture of the Jew as a subhuman creature…”116 In fact, what has been happening in the occupied territories for many years is all too familiar from Jewish history.

  Stories such as these, which abound, have constituted the daily lives of those subjected to Israeli rule for many years. Outright murders by Israeli soldiers or settlers are sometimes reported in the U.S., but the regular terror, harassment and degradation pass unnoticed among those who are paying the bills. It is, for example, most unlikely that an American newspaper would print the report by Aharon Bachar, which appeared in a mass-circulation Israeli journal, on the atrocities reported to the Prime Minister by a high-level (and generally hawkish) Labor Alignment delegation. The few people who have tried to transmit some of the facts reported in the mainstream Hebrew press have either been ignored, or subjected to a campaign of lies and vilification that is reminiscent of Stalinist practices.

  5.2 The Golan Heights Until December 1981, the Golan Heights had been spared this treatment. Over 90% of the population had fled or were expelled at the time of the Israeli conquest of the Heights in 1967. Israeli settlements were then established, but the Druze population generally “accepted the authority and jurisdiction of the military government,” according to a report by a leading Israeli civil rights association.117 On December 14, the day after martial law was declared in Poland, the Knesset passed a law extending civilian law and administration to the Golan Heights—in effect, annexation. In January
, new regulations were imposed requiring that the inhabitants carry Israeli IDs. There was overwhelming opposition to this integration into Israel. On February 13, four leading members of the Druze community were placed under administrative arrest and a general strike was called, supported by “the overwhelming majority” of the population. The Israeli military command closed the area, forbidding villagers to move between villages and preventing journalists, lawyers and medical staff from entering. Expressions of solidarity in the Israeli Galilee and the West Bank were suppressed and organizers were placed under house arrest. No supplies were allowed to enter. All telephones were disconnected (reports of a similar policy in Poland at the same time caused great outrage here). Residents who were imprisoned after a “summary trial” were denied legal aid. For three days before the closure was lifted in April, “all villagers were restricted to their homes (they were even forbidden to visit the toilets which are in outhouses),” and “allegedly, forbidden to go out on balconies or to open windows.” A woman who was sent to a hospital by a local doctor after the closure was lifted was refused exit by the military when—like most others—she refused to accept an Israeli ID. Inhabitants reported shooting and other physical violence; one was hospitalized with bullet wounds and others still carried scars or fresh wounds when the Israeli civil rights delegation visited after the closure was lifted, having previously been denied entry.

  The press reported many more details, for example, the case of a three-year-old boy who was beaten with a club by a soldier after he threw an Israeli ID card to the floor; his mother was shot when she came to his aid. The national water company reduced water supplies. Jewish settlements (including kibbutzim) complained because they were deprived of their normal workforce of Golan Druze.118 A lead article in Ha’aretz observed that there was no protest in the Knesset apart from Rakah (Communist) and that editors did not protest the prohibition of entry of journalists. “In the general Israeli Jewish public the indifference is shocking. Only some few hundreds of meters away from the besieged Druze village, young Israelis enjoy the sun, take photos in the snow, eat and gossip. On one side, barbed wire and human beings in a cage, on the other, people skiing, going up and down in lifts. In the middle, the Israeli Army.”119 Subsequently, former Supreme Court Justice Chaim Cohen described the Golan Law as “the law of the barbarians.”120 One reason for objections of the Druze to the Golan Law was “the great fear of expropriation of their lands.” They “know well that most of the lands of the Druze in Israel [whose loyalty to the state is so unquestioned that they regularly serve in the armed forces] were expropriated in the last 30 years and handed over to Jews.”121

  All of this, and much more, care of the American taxpayer, who must be kept uninformed, and generally has been, quite successfully.

  5.3 The Attack on Palestinian Culture Throughout this period, the Arab intelligentsia have been a particular target of attack, in accordance with “the clear plan of Sharon to drive out and destroy any sign or element with an Arab national character, to bring about full Israeli control in the territories.”122 Bir Zeit university in the West Bank has been one of the favorite targets, with “night raids on women’s and men’s dormitories, and on student and faculty apartments,” disruption of classes by military checkpoints, confiscation of students’ ID cards making it illegal for them to travel, and in general, “daily humiliation inflicted on students [which] placed them under psychological pressure that made the normal functioning of the University difficult”123—an understatement, as more detailed reporting shows.

  More recently, much of the foreign faculty has been expelled for refusing to sign a statement that they will not offer support for the PLO (as does the overwhelming majority of the West Bank population), eliciting a protest from the State Department.124 Secretary of State George Shultz condemned the Israeli loyalty oath as “an abridgment of academic freedom” and as “totally unnecessary” for Israel’s security, a clear infringement “of freedom, freedom of thought,” and called upon “people in the intellectual community particularly…to speak up” in protest. That American intellectuals should suddenly become exercised over violations of academic freedom under Israeli occupation seems unlikely, given their dismal record of “support for Israel.” There was, however, a statement of protest by two hundred Israeli academics, organized before the Shultz statement.125 The expulsion of foreign faculty (by November, 22 had been expelled, including the President of al-Najah University in Nablus, and many more had been banned from teaching and were facing expulsion) is particularly harmful, since “many talented West Bankers educated abroad are unable to get Israeli work permits.”126 One aspect of the problem, noted by David Richardson, is illustrated by the case of Mohammad Shadid, an American-trained political scientist at al-Najah university, one of those banned from teaching and facing expulsion. He lost the right to return to the West Bank, where he was born, because he happened to be out of the country studying when a census was taken in 1967; requests by his family to allow him to return under a “family reunion scheme” were simply ignored, and he is now an American citizen. Richardson observes that what the civil administration is trying to do is to suppress the local intelligentsia, and to “make political use” of the signed statements as part of the effort to undermine support for the PLO in the occupied territories. Furthermore, a degree for a West Bank student is a “passport to emigration,” since “most of the young graduates cannot hope to find employment in their own society”—as Israel is reconstructing it.127 In fact, Israeli policy in the occupied territories has clearly been designed to remove elite groups, either by direct expulsion (“moderates” have been a particular target) or by eliminating the possibility of meaningful employment, in the hope that no nationalist or cultural leadership will remain.128 After Shultz’s protests, the anti-PLO pledge was technically “withdrawn,” in fact transferred in virtually the same terms to the general work permit.129

  Mohammad Shadid is no unique case. President Salah of al-Najah University, who was expelled in October, is also a native of the West Bank, born in Nablus, who was studying abroad in 1967 and is therefore considered a “foreigner” by the Israeli government; in its brief story on the expulsion, the New York Times refers to him as “a Jordanian national,” technically correct but missing a rather important point. In a press conference on the morning of his expulsion, unreported here to my knowledge, Dr. Salah stated that Israel’s

  strategy is to destroy the infrastructure of the universities, as it is to destroy the infrastructure of Palestinian society. This started with the municipalities. Now they’ve come to a second attempt after the first one failed. Their ultimate aim is to destroy any Palestinian infrastructure in the homeland.130

  Danny Rubinstein reports that most of the “foreign lecturers” at the University “are not really ‘foreigners,’ but rather Palestinians, natives of the West Bank, who do not have Israeli identity cards (from the military administration) so that the authorities can revoke their residence permits and expel them from the country.” He also notes that the harassment of the West Bank universities, of which the latest expulsions are only a part, elicits little interest in the Israeli academic community. The same is true of lsraeli journalists with regard to restrictions on Arab colleagues, publishers with regard to censorship, lawyers with regard to legal issues, and so on. At a time when the academic community in Israel went on strike over wages, no academic organization raised any question about the regular harassment of the West Bank universities. Those who have been concerned are “very few and without influence on the course of events.”131

  The former acting president of al-Najah University, W. F. Abboushi (a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati), faced continual harassment, he reports, alleging that his protest over similar practices on an earlier occasion at Bir Zeit university had led to beating by Israeli soldiers. From his experience, he believes that “it is impossible to run a Palestinian university under Israeli occupation” and that “gene
rally, life in the West Bank has become almost unbearable, particularly for the students who are constantly subjected to harassment, including arbitrary search and arrest, imprisonment, beating, and sometimes even severe physical abuse.” The worst has been since the takeover of the “civil administration” by Professor Menachem Milson, the “Mideast maverick” praised here for his advocacy of a Palestinian role in the affairs of the West Bank (see chapter 3, section 2.3.2). Abboushi says that “perhaps over one-third of our student body had been in Israeli jails,” where they were “routinely beaten.” Like much of the faculty and administration, most of the so-called “foreign students” at al-Najah were in fact Palestinian Arabs who had lost their right of residence because they were out of the area when the 1967 census was taken. The situation worsened after the invasion of Lebanon, when Israeli soldiers “attacked the university using real bullets” to disperse a demonstration protesting the invasion.132

  In his article “A threat to freedom” (note 127), David Richardson observes that just as the Israeli academic community has by and large showed “indifference” to the treatment of their Arab colleagues under the military occupation, so Israeli journalists have for the most part remained (purposefully) “ignorant of the fact that three West Bank editors have been confined to their places of residence for almost two years and thereby prevented from pursuing their professions properly.” Boaz Evron investigated this matter, visiting the three editors in violation of his resolve not to enter the occupied territories. The three editors were confined to their West Bank villages three years ago, he reports. No reason was given. None of them had ever been accused of any crime, and the security services refused to provide their lawyers with any charges. As editors, they are responsible for what appears in their journals, published in Jerusalem, but they are unable to see these journals, since distribution is forbidden in the West Bank areas where they are confined: “the Kingdom of the Absurd.” “If this were happening to Jewish journalists, we would be raising a cry to the heavens,” he observes, “but here we accept it all peacefully. What is so terrible? Is anyone being killed?” The technique of the occupation, in this case, is “to keep them on a short leash,” not to act brutally, but to make sure that they recognize always “that the whip is held over their heads.”133