by Noam Chomsky
The primary emphasis and concern is organization of community life, with a view towards creating the basis for full independence. The political goal is to end the occupation. When questions turn to the means for achieving this end, the answer is always the same: these matters are to be negotiated with the PLO. There was informed criticism of the PLO for incompetence, corruption, and worse, and thinly veiled contempt for several of the figures in Israel regarded by the media as leaders and official spokesmen, though not all; Faisal Husseini, director of the Arab Studies Society in East Jerusalem, again under administrative detention, was mentioned with particular respect.48 But the Palestinian issue is understood as a national problem, and the PLO is the national leadership, whatever its faults. It is a fair guess that if independence is achieved, conflicts submerged in the unity of resistance will surface, particularly now that local organization has achieved substantial scale and success.
The activities outlined by local organizers corresponded closely to a thoughtful analysis by Bashir Barghouti, an influential West Bank intellectual. His vision, presented with detail and a long-term perspective, is that an independent life will be established, whatever measures Israel takes to prevent it, with eventual political independence after the occupation becomes too costly for Israel to maintain. The network of popular organizations, and their activities to establish selfsufficiency and self-government, will provide the basis for the social and political structure of a West Bank-Gaza state, established alongside of Israel. Whether the plans are realistic and the prospects realizable, I do not know, but the similarity of perception and intent over a wide range is as noteworthy as the spirit of dedication and the ongoing efforts—and the resemblance to earlier Zionist history.
One of the first villages to declare itself liberated was Salfit, which resisted army conquest until three days before my visit. The local committees “had organized municipal services, including sanitation, as an alternative to those provided by the Civil Administration” and had “posted guards and patrols to warn of the arrival of settlers and the army,” the Jerusalem Post reported in its brief notice of the army assault.49 The story of Salfit was recounted to us in the home of Rajeh al-Salfiti, a well-known nationalist figure and folk singer, who had been arrested by the British during the Palestine revolt of 1936-9, by the Jordanians when they ruled the West Bank, and by the Israelis after their conquest. According to his account, related in vivid detail and amplified by several visitors, he was one of 80 people arrested when Israel occupied the town with some 1500 troops in a pre-dawn attack, then released with two others (one seriously ill, one disabled). The town has a dominant Communist Party presence, and was well-organized. Earlier army attempts to break in had been beaten back by rockthrowing demonstrators; quite commonly, the confrontations that are reported, and those that are not, develop in this manner. At first, the army assumed that the attempt at self-rule could be overcome by sporadic terror. One man described how two Israeli sharpshooters in civilian clothes climbed to the roof of a building at the outskirts of the town and shot a person in the streets chosen at random, after which the killer called to his partner that they could now leave. Neither this nor subsequent efforts succeeded. The village remained united in resistance, running its own affairs.
On one occasion, in late March, the army did break into the town on
On one occasion, in late March, the army did break into the town on year-old boy and “rescuing” the bus and its occupants. But this tale was quickly exposed as a fabrication. The travelers were a group of American academics attending a conference organized by Bir Zeit university (closed by the army, as was the entire school and university system). They were visiting the town, where they were welcomed by the local inhabitants. One of those “rescued” (well after the bus had left the town) was Harvard professor Zachary Lockman, who reported that a helicopter had been observing the village during the visit and that he had overheard an army officer tell his commander by radio that the group “had not been under any threat whatsoever.”50
When the town was finally occupied by the army assault, we were told, soldiers entered the mosque and desecrated it, and one climbed the minaret where he called out in Arabic, “Your God is gone, we are in charge here,” a further exercise in humiliation. The same has been reported elsewhere, for example, in Beit Ummar, where more than 100 windows of the mosque were broken, holy books and other property destroyed, and tape recordings of Koran readings stolen during a fivehour army rampage with bulldozers that severely damaged virtually every building along the main street, destroyed cars and tractors, uprooted trees, and caused general havoc.51 In Salfit, union offices were destroyed and other buildings damaged. The army entered houses identified by number to seek people designated for arrest; it was speculated that helicopter flights in the preceding days may have been aimed at providing detailed maps. In prison, those arrested were subjected to beatings in the normal fashion. As we were about to leave the village, we heard boys shouting outside that the soldiers were coming. People were streaming from the houses, including women and children, to confront the soldiers once again. Morale evidently remained unshaken, three days after the army assault. My Arab guides did not want to be apprehended in the town, so we left in another direction. No attack was reported in the press, and what happened, I do not know.
I joined several lawyers from the Ramallah human rights group AlHaq (Law in the Service of Man) on a visit to the village of Beita, closed under military blockade that bars all contact with the outside world; gas, water, and electricity were cut off, and there were shortages of milk, flour, and vegetables.52 We reached Beita over a back road and hills, guided by a man from a neighboring village, and stayed until just before 7PM, when the military closure is extended to curfew, meaning house arrest. As we left, the back road over the hills had been blocked with boulders to protect the village from possible settler or army attack. Beita achieved notoriety when a Jewish teenager, Tirza Porat, was killed on April 6 by an Israeli settler, Romam Aldubi, after a confrontation that took place when 20 hikers from the religious-nationalist settlement of Elon Moreh entered the lands of Beita—“to show who are the masters,” as one hiker later told a TV interviewer. Two villagers, Mousa Saleh Bani Shamseh and Hatem Fayez Ahmad al-Jaber (there are conflicting versions of their names), were also killed, and several were severely wounded by Aldubi, one of two armed guards accompanying the hikers. Aldubi is a well-known extremist barred from entering Nablus, the only Jew ever subjected to an army exclusion order; the second guard and Jew ever subjected to an army exclusion order; the second guard and year-old boy, Issam Abdul Halim Mohammad Said, was killed by soldiers the following day.
The hikers claimed that Tirza Porat had been killed by Arab villagers, setting off virtual hysteria in Israel, including a call by two cabinet ministers to destroy the town and deport its population. Within a day, the army had determined that she was killed by Aldubi, then proceeded to blow up 14 houses while Chief of Staff Dan Shomron reported that “the Arab residents had intended no harm to the Elon Moreh hikers” and had indeed protected them. Many people were arrested (60 remained in prison when we visited), and six were later deported. General Shomron declared that “action had to be immediate. A failure to act could well have led to other action in the area,” that is, more settler violence. The collective punishment and expulsions are “the expected tribute” paid to control the settlers, Nahum Barnea observes, punishment for their violence being out of the question, because they are Jews.53
Beita is—or was—a lovely quiet village, tucked away in the hills not far from Ramallah. A traditional and conservative village, Beita had declared itself liberated shortly after the uprising began, and was attacked several times by the army, leading to stone-throwing confrontations on the road to the village, which the army blockaded. During one army raid on February 14, property was destroyed and three villagers had to be hospitalized with broken limbs: two teenagers and an 80-year-old man with an arm, two fingers, and two ribs b
roken.54 All this being normal, the town remained enveloped in obscurity.
What took place on April 6 is contested. According to villagers, the lands of Beita were under military closure at the time. They were concerned when they saw settlers entering these lands and approaching a well, which they feared the settlers might be planning to poison or destroy; that has happened elsewhere, according to local inhabitants, including Ya’bed, where the well was blown up by Jewish settlers.55 When Mousa Saleh was murdered by Aldubi in the fields, villagers brought the hikers to the village to determine what should be done. Aldubi killed his second victim when he approached with hands raised to ask Aldubi to hand over his weapon and take the hikers on their way. Aldubi killed Tirza Porat after he was hit by stones thrown by Mousa Saleh’s mother and sister. His rifle was then taken from him and destroyed.
Settler tales about shooting by Arabs are denied by the army, which issued an official report of dubious accuracy. Israeli friends in Jerusalem told me that they had no doubt, from the first television interviews, that the hikers were lying. Though the hikers were under the control of the inhabitants for several hours after the killings, none were injured, and they were cared for by villagers, as the army emphasized in an effort to calm the hysteria that followed these events.
The official claim was that the villagers were given ample warning of the house demolitions so that they could remove their possessions. That is plainly false. Ten days later, villagers were still rummaging through the ruins, searching for pieces of broken furniture, clothes, and stored food that had been buried in the explosions. According to several independent accounts, the villagers had been gathered in the mosque and given 15 minutes’ notice of the demolitions. We were told that one man was indeed given time to move his possessions to his father’s home, after which both houses were demolished. These are substantial stone houses; one of those partially destroyed was a two-story building which, we were told, was more than 100 years old. Apart from the 14 houses officially destroyed, 16 others were damaged, many unlivable. I houses officially destroyed, 16 others were damaged, many unlivable. I feet long that had sailed some 50 feet from the nearest demolished structure.
The International Commission of Jurists in Geneva denounced the collective punishments, including the demolitions and expulsions, as yet another violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Polls indicate that 21% of Israeli Jews opposed demolition of the houses and 13% called for the entire village to be “erased.”56 Some commentary condemned the demolition of the house of a man who had aided the hikers, but I saw no general condemnation in the mainstream press, and no call for collective punishment against Elon Moreh after settler provocation led to Aldubi’s killings.
As elsewhere, the villagers described what had happened, and their current plight, with calm and simplicity. They are prepared to endure. Their responses were considered and thoughtful. Asked how they would react if Israelis were to offer to rebuild the houses that had been destroyed (16 of which were damaged or destroyed “illegally” even by the standards of what passes for law in the territories), they responded, after consultation, that it would have to be a political decision: if Jews would come to rebuild in a spirit of friendship and solidarity, they would be welcome; if they intended only to salve their consciences or improve the image of “the beautiful Israel,” the villagers would have none of it. I raised the question of rebuilding the houses “illegally” destroyed with several Peace Now intellectuals in Jerusalem and was told that the matter was under consideration, but I know of no outcome.
It was raining steadily when we visited Beita. Women were trying to cook outdoors in the rain, others in semi-demolished houses. A house may have a dozen or more inhabitants. The number of people left homeless is considerable, apart from the many arrested and deported. Mousa Saleh’s mother and sister, three months pregnant, are in prison, their homes destroyed. The sister has been charged with assault and, according to Israeli reports, may be charged with complicity in the murder of Tirza Porat.57 As for Aldubi, he is not to be charged, because, as the army spokesman said, “I believe the tragic incident and its result are already a penalty”—for the murderer, that is, not the Araboushim who raise their heads.58
Of the victims of the events in Beita, only the name of Tirza Porat is known, and only the circumstances of her killing merit inquiry and comment. This is only to be expected in the reigning climate both here and in Israel. Who would have heard of Intissar al-Atar, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl shot and killed in a schoolyard in Gaza last November 10, or of her killer, Shimon Yifrah of the Jewish settlement of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, arrested a month later and released on bail because, the Supreme Court determined, “the offense is not severe enough to order the arrest of the accused, and in this case there is no fear that Yifrah will repeat the offense or escape from his punishment”?59 Or Jude Abdallah Awad, a shepherd murdered, his companion severely wounded, when a Jewish settler tried to drive them from a field on May 5, an incident meriting 80 words in the New York Times (and none when the settler was released on bail, charged with manslaughter)? Or Iyad Mohammed Aqel, a 15-year-old boy murdered by Israeli soldiers, his head “beaten to a pulp,” according to a witness, after he was dragged from his home in a Gaza refugee camp?60
The reaction here and in Israel to the grossly discriminatory treatment of Arabs and Jews by the courts stands alongside the prevailing double standard on terror and rights. Palestinian artist Fathi Ghaban receives a six-month prison sentence for using the colors of the Palestinian flag in a painting. An Arab worker caught sleeping illegally in Tel Aviv receives the same sentence, with two months’ additional imprisonment if he does not pay a heavy fine. Four young Arabs are sentenced to fines and three months at hard labor for having waved a Palestinian flag in a protest demonstration after the Sabra-Shatila massacres. In contrast, a sergeant who ordered two soldiers to bury four Palestinians alive with a bulldozer receives four months, and two soldiers, whose prolonged beating of captured Palestinians horrified Europe after a CBS filming, received three months probation. Another soldier received a month’s suspended sentence for killing an Arab by firing into a village. A settler found guilty of shooting directly into a crowd of demonstrators was sentenced to a rebuke; another received six months of “public service” outside prison for killing a 13-year-old boy after an incident on a road in which he was under no danger according to testimony of army observers. President Herzog reduced the sentences of Jewish terrorists who murdered three Palestinians and wounded 33 in a gun and grenade attack at Hebron Islamic College from life in prison to 15 years; further reductions are doubtless to come. Three other members of the terrorist underground were released after two years in prison for the attempted murder of two West Bank mayors, one of whom had his legs blown off, while a military court sentenced two Arabs from Kafr Kassem, the scene of one of Israel’s worst massacres in 1956, to 21 years’ imprisonment for allegedly planting two bombs that exploded with no injuries. The ideologist and second-highest leader of the Jewish terrorist underground, Yehuda Etzion, convicted of planning the bombing of the Dome of the Rock, organizing the attack on the mayors and other atrocities, and stealing 600 kilograms of explosives from a military base, was released to a religious school in Afula after serving half of a ten-year sentence, and a presidential pardon is under consideration. Palestinian storekeepers are threatened with the same sentence—five years in prison—“if they failed to wash anti-Israeli graffiti off their buildings and remove Palestinian flags,” wire services report.61
Such practices have been an unrecognized scandal since the founding of the state. One revealing example is the case of Shmuel Lahis, who murdered several dozen Arab civilians he was guarding in a mosque in the undefended Lebanese village of Hula in 1948. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, immediately amnestied, and granted a lawyer’s licence on the grounds that the act carried “no stigma.” Later he was appointed Secretary-General of the Jewish Agency, the highest executive position in the World Z
ionist Organization, with no qualms, since his amnesty “denies the punishment and the charge as well.” The record was exposed when Lahis was appointed Secretary-General, eliciting little interest in Israel, and none here.62
After the assassination of Abu Jihad, curfews were extended to new areas of the West Bank, among them the Kalandia refugee camp near Jerusalem. We were able to enter through a back road, not yet barricaded, and to spend about half an hour there before being apprehended by Israeli troops. The town was silent, with no one in the streets apart from a funeral procession permitted by the army and a few young children who approached us, surely assuming we were Israelis, chanting the common slogan “PLO, Israel No.” In the streets we found signs of recent demonstrations: metal remnants of the firing of “rubber bullets,” a tear gas canister made by Federal Laboratories in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, with the warning, still legible, that it is for use only by “trained personnel” and that fire, death, or injury may result from improper use, a common occurrence. While we were being interrogated, a man who looked perhaps 90 years old hobbled out of a doorway with his hands outstretched, pleading that he was hungry. He was unceremoniously ordered back indoors. No one else was to be seen. The soldiers were primarily concerned that we might be journalists, and expelled us from the camp without incident.
Most of the participants in an international academic conference I was attending in Israel joined a demonstration at the Dahariya prison near Hebron, organized by several of the peace groups, mostly new, that have sprung up in the past several months. These represent the most hopeful development within Israel, and American support for them could make a real difference.* Unlike Peace Now, which remains unwilling to separate itself clearly from Labor Party rejectionism, they are forthright in calling for an end to the occupation, and committed to find ways to protest it. Approach to the prison and the nearby village was blocked by troops, but women and children, later men as well, gathered on hills several hundred yards away and began to call back and forth with the demonstrators. A few children drifted towards us, followed by many others and finally adults as well. At the end, a man from the village took
