by Noam Chomsky
Another standard procedure is for soldiers to break into the home of a family that is in mourning for someone killed by Israeli troops. In one reported incident, a large group of soldiers forced their way into the home of the mourners, smashing furniture and household articles and taking eight people outside, including Aref, the 17-year-old brother of the young man who was killed, forcing them to stand with their hands against a wall. After two hours, Aref fainted and the women were allowed to bring him into the house. The other seven were arrested. A few hours later, troops returned to the house and arrested Aref. In another case, soldiers shot and killed one of the mourners.
“Your soldiers seem to think that we do not suffer pain and do not have to mourn,” the Nablus resident who disclosed these incidents added in an interview in the Hebrew press. “Most of those killed are young people, and the Palestinian mother cries, like every mother. The brothers and sisters cry too, just as in France, England, China, or Israel. We are the only ones forbidden to cry, so I have a small request: if you do not permit us to be happy, at least let us cry.”14
The occupation, always grim, has assumed a particularly ugly cast as Israel devises novel means to suppress the Intifada. Nothing escapes the long arm of the authorities. The arbitrariness of the acts described is by design, perhaps on the advice of Israeli Arabists and psychologists. The point is to teach the Palestinians that every aspect of their lives is controlled by the authorities, and the master will do what he likes, with impunity. They must be taught not to “raise their heads,” a crime that is denounced with particular outrage (in these words). They must understand that they are one of those “insignificant nations” who should not succumb to “delusions of significance,” to adopt proper neoconservative rhetoric.15
The mainstream doves agree with the advice of New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman: give “Ahmed…a seat in the bus, [and] he will limit his demands”; then treat him in the manner of southern Lebanon, which Friedman recommends as a model, where Israeli troops and a network of collaborators terrorize or expel the native population. The hawks want Ahmed to understand that he must walk with head lowered, all the time. The basic method, Israel’s leading civil libertarian Israel Shahak observes, is “the total, indeed the totalitarian control, exercised by the Israeli authorities over all aspects of Palestinian life in the territories and the arbitrariness by which it is imposed,” humiliation as an instrument of policy.16
One might, incidentally, imagine the reaction if a journalist were to advise South Africans to “give Sambo a seat in the bus,” or proposed that Jews be granted “something to lose,” because “if you give Hymie a seat in the bus, he may limit his demands.” And if the model of southern Lebanon were then proposed for Sambo or Hymie. Anti-Arab racism is, however, so widespread as to be unnoticeable; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate.
Dr. Yoel Cohen, an Israeli specialist in mass communications, concludes from his research that from April 1988, “there has been hardly any coverage of the Intifada” in such journals as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Le Monde. The significance of the sharp decline in coverage—to the level of events in Japan and Sri Lanka, he concludes—is particularly rich in significance with regard to the United States, a matter surely understood by those who organize and conduct the repression while the dollars flow.17
2. The Reality of the Occupation*
T
he facts are understood well enough by the victims. West Bank lawyer Raja Shehadeh, founder of Law in the Service of Man, observes that “The failure of all peace initiatives made everybody here think that, ‘We are absolutely desperate, we are exploited,
we are harassed, our houses demolished and nothing is working to change our situation. There is no political solution, nobody [to help] from the outside, and unless we do it ourselves, nobody is going to care’.”18 It is not so much the level of brutality” of the occupying forces that has led to total desperation, he continues, but rather the “blindness and hatred toward Palestinian Arabs,” the endless degradation that is a condition of daily life.
Shehadeh looks back with some nostalgia to the days when Moshe Dayan’s attitude prevailed: “to stay away from peoples’ lives as much as possible” under an occupation intended to be permanent.
From the internal record, we learn more about Dayan’s views. In a September 1967 meeting, he urged that we tell the Arabs: “we have no solution, and you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever prefers— may leave....” To Shimon Peres’s objection that Israel should preserve ‘its moral stand,” Dayan answered: “Ben-Gurion said that anyone who approaches the Zionist problem in a moral aspect is not a Zionist.”19 Contempt for the Arab population is deeply rooted in Zionist thought. Recently released records of the Jewish Agency Executive reveal, for example, the thinking of Chaim Weizmann after the Balfour declaration of 1917: “with regard to the Arab question—the British told me that there are several hundred thousand negroes there but that this matter
*Based on “The Palestinian Uprising: A Turning Point?” Z Magazine, May 1988. has no significance” (quoted by Arthur Ruppin).20 American journalist Vincent Sheean, who arrived in Palestine as an avid Zionist in 1929, left a few months later a harsh critic of the Zionist enterprise largely because of the attitudes among the Jewish settlers towards what they called the “uncivilized race” of “savages” and “Red Indians,” “squatters for thirteen centuries” who, as David Ben-Gurion put it in words that are still commonly echoed, would be “equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of places” which are “as much his country as this is. And as little.”21 The Palestinians, obtuse and recalcitrant, refuse to see the point.
Early settlers, including those regarded as enlightened, saw the issue as “a conflict between culture and wild men”; “there is no race more cowardly, hypocritical and dishonest than this race” (Avshalom Feinberg to Henrietta Szold). They warned of “the Eastern mentality,” with its lack of civilized norms and reliance on violence, a “culture of half-savage peoples.”22 Turning to the present, Minister of Justice Avraham Sharir informs an audience of American Jewish functionaries in February 1988 that “The Arabs are liars from birth,” eliciting no reaction, the Israeli press reports. The head of Israel’s Northern Command, General Avigdor Ben Gal, described the Arabs of Galilee (within Israel proper) as “a cancer in Israel’s body” an attitude echoed in references to the “underpopulated Galilee” (Irving Howe), meaning that the Galilee has too few Jews (but too many Arab citizens, Israel fears). Others fulminate over the Arab “crazed in the distinctive ways of his culture” and committed to “pointless” though “momentarily gratifying” acts of “bloodlust” (New Republic editor Martin Peretz) .23
These persistent attitudes, familiar throughout the history of European colonialism, help us understand what is happening today The Israeli editor Yigal Schwartz, on completing his tour as a reserve officer in the West Bank, described the prevailing attitude among the military as based on the assumption that they are dealing with “primitive people, Indians, whom it is our duty to educate and discipline,” teaching them that “they are children and we are parents who educate them,” with the rod if necessary. “From right to left,” disorder is taken to show that “we are bad teachers,” that “if we had beaten them properly at the beginning they would be properly trained,” so that it is necessary now to beat and humiliate them, even when three soldiers beat a helpless woman, as he describes. Retired General Shlomo Gazit, a former military intelligence chief, explains that “it’s not enough to demolish the home of a terrorist In practice, a person targeted for punishment on the flimsiest grounds]; this fails to act as a deterrent. We should demolish everything within a 300-400 meter radius of his house.” Formerly a senior military official in the West Bank, he takes pride in a recent book on the “success story” of the occupation, with its “absolute prohibition of any political organization” or any participation in “polit
ical affairs,” so that the population would never “be seen as a partner for dealings with Israel.” On similar premises, New York Mayor Edward Koch calls on Israel to “crush the riots in the territories with an iron fist and drastic methods,” to deport stone throwers without being “so sensitive about the media reaction.” Prime Minister Shamir warns that Palestinians who resist the occupation will be crushed “like grasshoppers,” with their heads “smashed against the boulders and walls”; “We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us.” Considering the prevailing attitudes, it is hardly surprising that “relative to us, the British reacted to the Jewish revolt at a peak of delicacy,” military historian Uri Milshtein observes.24
The editors of the New York Times, deploring the current violence, observe that “As Israel suffers, so do its friends.”25 Expressing their admiration for “this tiny nation, symbol of human decency,” and for “the way Israeli society responds” as “brutalities are not covered up or ignored but exposed, investigated, agonized over,” the editors praise those Israelis who “are pressing for more humane methods out of concern for the effects on the young soldiers—and in the belief that brutality inflames unrest. These guardians of humane values believe that Israel…can afford to take risks for peace.” Other possible reasons for concern over brutal beatings, killings, and general terror are unmentioned. We might ask what the reaction would be to a performance of this sort in Pravda if Jews were the victims and Arabs or Poles the perpetrators.
The same attitudes explain the desperation of the population under what has been hailed here as a “benign occupation,” in reality a reign of violence and humiliation, from the outset. In Gaza, with perhaps the world’s highest population density and virtually no economy thanks to Israeli regulations banning competition with Israeli production and export, there are 2500 Jewish settlers, 0.4% of the population, holding 28% of state lands (Ze’ev Schiff). In the West Bank, too, the policy has been to block economic development or competition with Israeli companies, so as to “drive the Palestinians to emigrate” or convert the population into a captive market and cheap labor force for Israel (Danny Rubinstein). “Economically speaking, they provide cheap labor for the ruling class,” Professor Emmanuel Sivan writes, adding that the Israeli “colonialist model” resembles Algeria under French rule and is “headed for South Africa” (as the headline reads). The Arabs are “facing a serious water crisis,” resulting from a division of water resources favoring Jewish settlers by 12 to 1; “the Arab inhabitants, naturally, are forbidden to dig new wells,” while Israel draws extensively from West Bank reserves for its own needs as well (Eyal Ehrlich). Arabs pay three to four times what Jewish settlers do for water, the Jerusalem Post reports. Reviewing “the principal Apartheid laws” that apply within Israel proper, Orit Shohet reports that the Jewish National Fund, a charitable organization devoted by law to serving the needs of Jews alone and now effectively controlling over 90% of the land within Israel (from which non-Jewish citizens are excluded “in perpetuity”), is also purchasing West Bank lands where “no non-Jews…will ever be allowed to live,” through a subsidiary company so as to conceal this “sheer plunder.” Under 1983 orders of the military commander of the West Bank, no one may plant a tree or a vegetable without written authorization, granted only after proof of ownership is provided, a device to facilitate transfer of private land to the state when documents are deemed inadequate, Attorney Avigdor Feldman comments. Punishment for planting an illegal tomato is up to a year in prison.26
Other regular measures include collective punishment, deportation, administrative detention, and summary court martial, under a legal system organized so that “in 98% of the cases, lawyers cannot see Palestinian clients until after they ‘confess,’ and judges will accept the ‘confession’ at face value,” even if it is written in Hebrew, a language the suspect does not know, after long detention with beatings, psychological pressures, and threats, Attorney Jonathan Kuttab of Law in the Service of Man reports.27 The few shreds of legality were abandoned in March 1988, when Israel canceled a promise by Prime Minister Begin to President Carter that administrative detention would be subject to some “legal process.”28 For years, West Bank residents have been subjected to rampaging settlers and violence by the Israeli Border Police and military, as extensively reported in the Hebrew press, rarely here. The purpose, Dov Yermiya wrote after a tour through the Deheisha refugee camp, is “to move the inhabitants away and clear the place for the settlement plans,” while those who suffer under the “brutal force” of the oppressive military rule and settler violence have no recourse but to throw stones. Israeli military retaliation is far harsher than the practice of the British when “our resistance fighters threw bombs, explosives, shot and killed hostages,” this observer of “the realization of Zionism through three generations,” one of the founders of the Israeli army, writes bitterly.29
Not surprisingly, these measures are being extended to Jews as well, though to a far lesser degree. For the first time, a Hebrew weekly (Derech Hanitzotz) has been closed (also its Arab affiliate, but this is standard) under the British Mandate Emergency Regulations, which amount to a permanent State of Siege, terminated before the British withdrew but immediately reinstituted by Israel30; Israel’s harsh repression of free expression regularly passes without notice here. Even mild protest is beginning to elicit a severe government response. Students of the Bezalel Arts School, carrying signs saying “let us not lose our humane image” in a peaceful demonstration, were attacked by police and forcefully dragged away, with 27 arrested, a pattern not exactly unknown here.
3. Scenes from the Uprising*
O
ne of the great themes of modern history is the struggle of subjugated people to gain control over their lives and fate. In April 1988, I visited Israel and the occupied territories, where one of these struggles has reached a level of dramatic intensity, and
had the opportunity to observe the Palestinian Intifada first-hand, at least briefly. The privileged often regard these struggles as an assault on their rights, violent outbursts instigated by evil forces bent on our destruction: world Communism, or crazed terrorists and fanatics. The struggle for freedom seems inexplicable in other terms. After all, living standards are higher in Soweto than they were in the Stone Age, or even elsewhere in Black Africa. And the people in the West Bank and Gaza who survive by doing Israel’s dirty work are improving their lot by standard economic measures. Slave owners offered similar arguments.
Being so evidently irrational, the revolt of the dispossessed must be guided by evil intent or primitive nature. Why should one care about humiliation and degradation if these conditions are accompanied by some measure of economic growth? Why should people sacrifice material welfare and rising expectations in a quixotic search for freedom and self-respect? On the assumption that the basic human emotion and the driving force of a sane society is the desire for material gain, such questions have no simple answer, so we seek something more sophisticated and arcane. Two hundred years ago, Rousseau wrote with withering contempt about his civilized countrymen who have lost the very concept of freedom and “do nothing but boast incessantly of the
*Taken from “Scenes from the Uprising,” Z Magazine, July 1988. peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.”
These words kept coming to my mind as I was traveling through the West Bank, as they have before in similar circumstances. It is a rare privilege to glimpse a moment of a po
pular struggle for freedom and justice. Right now the uprising is just that, wherever it may lead under the conditions imposed by the occupier and the paymaster.
3.1 Repression and Resistance Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment. Nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response. The Palestinian uprising is a remarkable feat of collective self-discipline. It is quite different from the struggle of the Jews of Palestine for a Jewish state, with the murder of British officials, the assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, the hanging of British hostages, and many atrocities against Arab civilians.
Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister at the time of my visit and commander of the group that assassinated Bernadotte, lauded terror as a moral imperative: “Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat,” he wrote. “First and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play…in our war against the occupier.”31
Some would have us believe that such thoughts, and the practices that follow from them, were only the province of extremists, and were abandoned with the establishment of the state that the press describes as the “symbol of human decency,” “a society in which moral sensitivity is a principle of political life” (New York Times), which has been guided by “high moral purpose…through its tumultuous history” (Time).32 There is an extensive record to undermine such delusions. Furthermore, the political leadership was reluctant to condemn terrorist practices. In laudatory reminiscences, Isaiah Berlin observes that Chaim Weizmann “did not think it morally decent to denounce either the acts [of Jewish terror] or their perpetrators in public…he did not propose to speak out against acts, criminal as he thought them, which sprang from the tormented minds of men driven to desperation....” David Ben-Gurion kept secret the confession of a close friend that he was among the assassins of Bernadotte.33 National movements and struggles typically have a record of violence and terror, not least our own, and Israel is no exception to the norm.
