by Noam Chomsky
* In retrospect, writing in 1999, one can only say that American support might have made a real difference. Support was slight, and internal resources did not suffice to sustain them in a society that relies very heavily on what takes place in the U.S.
the microphone and thanked us for having come. A young man wanted to speak as well, but was persuaded not to. A few days before, he had carried away the body of his brother, killed by soldiers, and he showed us scars from beatings he had received the preceding day. There was concern over the consequences for him after we left, a problem elsewhere as well. While foreigners were present, soldiers were wellbehaved, but there was a good deal of concern, on all sides, about what would happen later to Arabs they found us visiting or speaking to. As we left Dahariya, children were carrying our signs, waving and shouting. What happened afterwards, I do not know.
Four days later, according to the signed affidavit of an army reservist, young Palestinians were kicked and beaten with plastic pipes and handcuffs while their commander looked on as they were brought, bound and blindfolded, to Dahariya prison. One boy 12 to 15 years old who had been crying was raked along barbed wire, thrown against a wall, kicked, and beaten with a club by a soldier and jailer while he screamed with pain.63
The Dahariya prison, known as “the slaughterhouse” among prisoners, is a way station to the new prison camp Ansar III in the Negev desert close to the Egyptian border. Ansar I was a hideous torture chamber established by Israel during the Lebanon war for Lebanese and Palestinians taken hostage. Ansar II is a prison camp established in Gaza, with a similar reputation.64 Ansar III follows suit. Prisoners include “a significant segment of the Palestinian elite,” the Washington Post reports: doctors, lawyers, trade union officials, students, and university officials, at least 20 journalists, and others. They are denied water, edible food, medical attention, even an opportunity to wash for many weeks. They are subjected to such collective punishments as lying with hands bound behind the back for long periods in the scorching desert sun, being forced to walk in single file with heads lowered, being denied newspapers, books, mail or stationery, or the opportunity to walk about freely or change clothes, sometimes for over a month. They have no names, only numbers, part of an effort to create a “sense of isolation,” according to prisoners, perhaps on the advice of psychologists. There are no charges or judicial review. Families are not informed of where they are, why they were imprisoned, or for how long. Journalists, even lawyers, have been denied entry.65
All of this again falls under the category of humiliation, a pedagogic device to ensure that they do not raise their heads.
According to Knesset Member Dedi Zucker of the Citizens’ Rights Party, confidential government documents report that there are 10,000 Arabs in jail, half arrested during the uprising; close to 2000 are under six-month (renewable) preventive detention.66 Moderates are particularly vulnerable. They are always the most dangerous, because they raise the threat of political settlement.
At Dahariya, each demonstrator asked to see a particular prisoner. In my case, the prisoner was Gaza attorney Muhammed Abu-Sha’ban, placed under administrative detention for six months immediately after he spoke at Tel Aviv University, where he called for dialogue and political settlement. There are many similar cases. Five Jewish editors of the Israeli journal Derech Hanitzotz were arrested and the journal banned, the first time that Israel’s draconian censorship laws have been applied to ban a Hebrew Israeli journal; they were denied access to lawyers, police raided the office of one attorney to confiscate files, and two face charges of association with hostile elements that carry up to 40 years in prison.67 The sister journal in Arabic was also banned. In an affidavit circulated by Amnesty International, its editor, Ribhi al-Aruri, reports that he was taken to the interrogation center in Jerusalem, beaten and kicked for an hour, handcuffed with a sack over his head, interrogated for days while deprived of sleep and food, placed finally in a “cupboard” that permits only standing and kept there for an entire day then again for two full days without food. He was allowed to see a lawyer only 10 days after his arrest, then placed under six-month detention without trial. This case, far from the worst, is known only because he was adopted as an AI Prisoner of Conscience on grounds that his detention appears to be “on account of the non-violent exercise of his right to freedom of expression and association.”68 If the editor of the pro-contra journal La Prensa had been subjected to a fraction of the same treatment in a country under attack by the superpower that funds the journal, the story might have made the press.69
3.3 Elsewhere under Occupation Other areas under curfew were only visible from the road, over barriers erected by the army. When I visited, the refugee camp of Jalazoun had been under 24-hour curfew for over a month. Jalazoun was a ghost town.
No men were to be seen. A few older women, presumably less vulnerable, were working in gardens near the houses, and there were several children out of doors. Otherwise, silence. All entrances were barricaded and under military guard. The inhabitants were not permitted to leave their houses except for a brief period every few days to purchase food with what meager resources they still have. There was reported to be very little medical care and a shortage of medicines. The UN relief official in charge of the camp, Mogens Fokdal, reports that “people have gone without electricity for a month. They have no oil or fuel to cook. They are starting to burn old shoes and furniture to make fires. The situation is deteriorating every day.” UN garbage trucks had been barred by the army from entering the camp since the curfew was declared on March 16. UN officials had urged the people in the camp to burn garbage to prevent disease, “but they fear the soldiers will see the fires as a demonstration,” Fokdal explained, a risk they cannot take. Inhabitants said they had no food except bread and what is left from supplies stored before the curfew. On April 17, Israeli soldiers turned back a UN convoy carrying food and other supplies to the camp. Soldiers at the camp entrance deny that there are shortages.70
According to Attorney Raja Shehadeh of Al-Haq, the curfew was imposed after an alleged threat to an Israeli collaborator. Israel takes such threats very seriously Typically, the “threat” consists of calls on the collaborators, who are well-known because of their flaunting of privileges afforded for their services, to come to the mosque, repent, and promise to refrain from serving as Shin Bet informers. One result of the uprising is that Israel appears to have lost its network of collaborators and informers.
The village of Biddu was placed under curfew on March 7 after a collaborator was approached to ask him to repent. In retaliation, the army cut off water and electricity for two weeks in this town of 15,000 people and demolished four houses.71
On April 24 and May 14, the New York Times mentioned the killing by soldiers of two more nameless victims in Qabatiya, without, however, recalling the recent history of this village. Qabatiya was under military control, with all entry and exit blocked, from February 24 to April 1. Water, electricity, food supplies, and medicines were cut off in this village of about 15,000 people. There was still no electricity when the village was visited by a North American delegation on April 25. On February 24, villagers had marched to the house of a collaborator, Mohammad Al-Ayed, to call upon him to repent. Al-Ayed, who like other Israeli collaborators was permitted to bear arms, began shooting wildly and continued for several hours, killing a four-year-old boy and wounding 15 people. He then either killed himself (as villagers allege), or was killed by villagers. His body was hung on an electric pole.
The army then invaded the village, killing a 20-day-old child and a 70-year-old man with tear gas. Dozens of people had bones broken from beatings. Many were arrested; 500 remained under arrest when the curfew was lifted six weeks later. Four houses were demolished and others heavily damaged. During the curfew, villagers report, soldiers entered the village daily arresting and beating people, breaking into homes, smashing furniture, and destroying food supplies. When journalist Oren Cohen entered by back roads in late March,
the smell of tear gas made it difficult to breathe. A house where he stayed had signs of a fire, caused a week earlier by gas grenades dropped from a helicopter, the family reported. Food and medicines were in short supply, the one clinic and pharmacy had been closed, and the town’s only doctor could not handle the many patients.
The visiting delegation were told by villagers that morale improved as the curfew was extended and the community organized in response. One said: “If you want to balance the situation—on the one hand put all the Israeli practices: torture, hunger, beating, imprisonment. We are ready to accept them, but not to accept occupation. We would rather continue if that is the way to get rid of the occupation.” Having heard the same things said with obvious sincerity and simplicity, I do not find it hard to believe that the sentiment is genuine. The villagers returned to the subsistence economy of earlier generations, reopening old wells, eating bread and wild greens, finding wood for cooking in place of kerosene. What most impressed the delegation was “the consistently buoyant and determined spirit” in Qabatiya, as elsewhere in the territories (my observation as well).
Journalists who managed to enter Qabatiya agreed. Joel Greenberg of the Jerusalem Post, visiting just hours before the press was banned from the territories completely found the people “surprisingly resilient” and “defiant” after a month of the curfew, and without remorse over the fate of the collaborator, who “was morally degenerate, hated by everyone, and was only attacked after he fired on what was a peaceful march, they said.” They are prepared to survive on herbs from the hills if necessary. Hugh Schofield reported in the Canadian press that soldiers manning roadblocks at the town entrances were turning away supplies of food and fuel; much of the town’s agricultural land had been placed off limits; the town was forbidden to export to Jordan from its stone quarry, employing half the workforce; and, of course, workers were forbidden to travel to jobs in Israel, leaving the town without economic resources. “The residents’ spirits are strangely high,” he reported: “If the aim of the Israeli measures is to cow the locals, the effect is, if anything, the opposite.”72
On May 11, 47 villagers were charged with the killing of Al-Ayed, including one man carried to court by his neighbors, paralyzed from the waist down as a result of Al-Ayed’s shooting into the crowd.73
Few people in Israel seemed aware of these and many similar events in the territories. The killings and dreadful beatings, sometimes reported, do not give an accurate picture of Israeli repression or the goals and achievements of the uprising.
Despite everything, Israel remains, in many ways, a very appealing and attractive place, particularly—as elsewhere—in its community of dissidents, who are by no means marginal, and could become a significant force with American support. Alone, Palestinian courage and determination will not suffice; with the solidarity of others, it can lead the way to a better future.
3.4 Israel’s Peace Movement Let us turn next to what is considered here to be the peace movement in Israel. One of its leading spokesmen is Abba Eban, who complains that Israel lacks a “grand vision.” He agrees with the consensus rejection of an independent Palestinian state, but argues that “most objections would be alleviated if there were an integrative atmosphere in a peace accord involving Israel, Jordan and some densely-populated Arab areas of the West Bank and Gaza” (my emphasis), with a demilitarization agreement “monitored by a vigilant Israel and Jordan.” As an authentic dove, he would doubtless be willing to have this third entity called a ‘Palestinian state.”74
Eban is outlining the basic terms of the 1968 Allon Plan of the Labor government. Its basic logic is that Israel would keep what it wants in the occupied territories while avoiding any responsibility for the population, which can remain either stateless or under Jordanian administration (with, perhaps, arrangements to run their own local affairs). This is the prescription of the doves for solving the demographic problem; the hawks lean towards the traditional goal of “transfer,” that is, expulsion of the indigenous population to the “already existing Palestinian state,” if not beyond. From another perspective, Eban is endorsing the traditional Labor Party position that Israel and the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan have a joint interest in suppressing Palestinian nationalism. It was the recognition of this joint interest that led Israel and King Abdullah of Transjordan to their tacit arrangements in 1947-8 to divide between them the area designated for a Palestinian state in the United Nations partition agreement.75
Amplifying his current thinking for his American audience, Eban praised the broad-based effort in Israel in “reflecting deeply on new possibilities, including confederative and community structures that could accommodate Palestinian freedom without risk to Israeli security.” The only example he gives is the proposal he advocates: “territorial compromise,” which will maintain Israel’s security “without physical control over all the territories and all of the Palestinian inhabitants” (quoting a study of leading strategic analysts; my emphasis). The basic issue, Eban emphasizes, is not elections, but “the distribution of sovereignty or control” within the occupied territories.76
The “deep reflection,” then, reduces to traditional Labor Party rejectionism: one or another variety of the Allon Plan. Nowhere is there even a hint of a willingness to accord the right of self-determination to the indigenous population. Eban is a skilled diplomat and knows how to choose his words. One should attend carefully to the formulations of this leading dissident dove.
Eban is associated with Peace Now, by far the largest segment of the Israeli peace movement, and the best known. Some members of Peace Now have advocated withdrawal from the occupied territories, as have a number of hawks and military analysts, among others. The organization itself seems to have taken no stand, though it has dropped hints that it might accept such an outcome. By late 1988, Peace Now had finally abandoned its extreme rejectionist position, expressing for the first time its willingness to allow Palestinians to select their own representatives for eventual negotiations.
For years, it has been a doctrine of Israeli propaganda, and thus a common refrain of U.S. news reporting and commentary, that the way to peace is barred by the lack of a “peace movement among the Arab people” such as “we have among the Jewish people” (Shimon Peres), by “the absence of any Arab negotiating partner” that might be a counterpart to Peace Now and other Israeli doves (Thomas Friedman, denounced by many American Zionists as an inveterate Israel basher). The same claim has often been advanced by the well-known Israeli novelist Amos Oz and others identified with Peace Now. All of this is carefully cultivated illusion. The documentary record that is virtually unknown in the United States reveals that in reality, with all its evasiveness, unclarities, incompetence, and deceit, the PLO has for years been a more unambiguous advocate of a non-rejectionist peace settlement than any organized group in Israel or the United States, apart from the margins. The Newspaper of Record, and its correspondent Thomas Friedman, have been particularly rigorous in protecting doctrinal purity from the factual record. Editors have not only denied news coverage for Arafat’s initiatives, but have even banned letters referring to them (for example, offers of negotiations with Israel leading to mutual recognition). Small wonder that American intellectuals who choose to restrict themselves to the narrow lens permitted by the ideological institutions can urge Israel “to negotiate with any Palestinians willing to recognize Israel,” adding that if the Arabs reject this offer (which, in the real world, the PLO had put forth for years), “Israel would be the clear gainer in terms of its standing in the international community” (Irving Howe).77
The position of Peace Now is outlined by its supporting organization in the United States. In early 1989, adopting the standard myth propagated by the State Department and the media, Friends of Peace Now announced falsely that the PLO had “publicly and officially recited the ‘Three R’s’,” the State Department’s “magic words,” thus capitulating to the U.S. demands. But while acknowledging that the PLO is progressing, Fri
ends of Peace Now warned that “the PLO has only begun to walk the painful path of clarification.”
In reality, 13 years earlier (and often since) the PLO reached a point on this path that remains well beyond Peace Now or its American support group. The facts are clear, and have frequently been presented, but they are not acceptable, therefore barred. No less remote from consciousness is the analysis of Israeli journalist Pinhas Inbari, who writes: ‘Whether speaking about a confederation with Jordan, or a confederative solution with Israel, we should pay attention to the fact that the political thinking of the Palestinians is far more advanced than our own, i.e., their search for a political solution featuring open borders, trust, and cooperation. Whoever followed the segregated ‘vision of peace’ presented by the Labor Party in the recent [1988] election campaign—in which Israel/Palestine was to be divided into ghettos closed off by electronic fences—cannot but be impressed by the courage of the Palestinians in presenting the challenge of open borders and economic cooperation.”78
The accuracy of Inbari’s perception is illustrated by the formulation of “What Friends of Peace Now Wants.” It calls on the U.S., Israel, the Arab states, and the PLO to accept six principles. The first is “Unequivocal recognition of the state of Israel by the Arab states and the Palestinian people”—clear and forthright. The reciprocal obligation of Israel and the U.S., in contrast, remains vague: “Unequivocal recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to national selfdetermination,” with no indication of where this right is to be exercised, or in what form. The Hebrew original stating Peace Now’s actual position adds further qualifications: Palestinian rights are to be recognized only “insofar as they are compatible with Israel’s security”— an elastic concept. Principle three calls for “Exchange of territories [crucially, not the territories] occupied in the 1967 war for peace.” The difference between “territories” and “the territories” is familiar in Middle East diplomacy; the former version, adopted here, is consistent with the Allon Plan, “territorial compromise,” barring any meaningful form of Palestinian self-determination. Principle four calls for “Palestinian exercise of self-determination within the territory from which Israel will withdraw,” again suitably vague to satisfy a wide spectrum of Israeli rejectionism. The other two principles call for “protection of Israel’s security needs” (but not those of the Palestinians) and negotiations with all parties, including the PLO.
