This is a two-part diary, the first diary is: Palestine/Israel: From the UN "vote" on partition to "Apartheid" today. Once again, I want to note that this would not be possible on any other site, the DKos community is somewhat unique online in offering a venue for passionate but reasoned debate on I/P from both sides.
BTW, "pro-Israel" is in quotes because of the very perceptive comment by Tamar below.
The earlier diary has a more complete introduction. My goal here is to list common points/claims made by supporters of Israeli policies and examine/refute them in a format that serves as a reference of sorts.
This is intended for an American audience, both our public sympathies and official policy have been with Israel, we are not even-handed in this conflict. It's also important to recognize that about 15% of West Bank settlers are immigrants from the US, and this includes some of the most radical, violent elements.
My sympathies lie with ordinary people who want to live their lives in peace in a land they feel connected to. These people exist on both sides of the many fences. In the context of the I/P debate within the US, I'd be considered pro-Palestinian.
Well meaning people will sometimes say "Palestinians deserve a state of their own". Whether you are a believer in a one-state solution, or believe a two-state solution is best, the appropriate terms are "have a right to". Using the word deserve implies there are cases where certain people are "undeserving" of universal human rights. Palestinians have a right to govern themselves, determine their own future, pick their own leaders and equality, which may mean a state of their own if they so decide.
Feigned concern for Palestinians, in the form of statements like "they deserve better leaders" are systematically used by Israeli spokespersons to obscure the fact that any leaders (good or bad) Palestinians choose do not have the ability to improve their lot since Israel controls what happens in Palestine. Palestinians do deserve leaders and government better than the ones Israelis elect, but this will not come without freedom from Israeli rule or the ability to vote in Israeli elections.
Such statements are also meant to suggest that Palestinians are somehow "not ready" to govern themselves. This is an offensive, paternalistic, prejudicial argument, it has also been utilized by virtually every colonial power seeking to maintain control over a colony. It was used by Britain in India (and in North America), it was used by the apartheid-era South African government, it was employed by France in Africa and South-East Asia.
In general, many pro-Israel talking points should be examined critically by translating them to similar struggles for self-determination and equal rights. Examples from the US Civil Rights movement, US policies towards American Indians, the ANC's struggle for equality in South Africa, French rule in Algeria, the Indian National Congress and Muslim League's struggle for Indian independence are the most representative, but there are numerous others.
The following topics were covered in an earlier diary, which focused on history and context.
- Appeals to Diplomacy and two-state process
- Expulsions and Everyone Else Did The Same Thing
- Appeals to empathy
- Settler Colonialism and undermining Palestinian identity
- Settlements
- Apartheid, Discrimination and Equal Rights
This diary focuses on the arguments concerning the conduct of armed Palestinian factions and the IDF. A couple of preliminary notes on applicable law are necessary.
People under military occupation in general have the right to resist occupying forces with arms, this principle is part of Additional Protocol I of the Fourth Geneva Conventions. This Protocol has been ratified by 174 countries, including Palestine. The US, Iran and Pakistan signed it in 1977, but have not ratified it. Israel, India and Turkey have neither ratified nor signed this protocol. Guerrilla forces are protected under the protocol as combatants, provided there is central command authority and they are clearly identified (i.e. wear uniforms etc). This is not always the case for Palestinian resistance forces.
Both Israel and Palestine are signatories to the Fourth Geneva Conventions which contain many other provisions governing the actions of an occupying army, and its responsibilities towards the occupied population.
Some arguments presented to further a pro-Israel viewpoint are a form of victim-blaming. These contentions seek to shift agency exclusively onto the shoulders of Palestinians and paint Israel and its western allies as uninterested bystanders who reluctantly interceede when forced to do so and solely in a defensive manner. The fact is that both the Israeli army and certain armed Palestinian groups are willing to kill civilians to achieve their "objectives" in direct contravention of international laws. This is wholly illegal and morally wrong. This is part of the reason the Palestinian authority has filed a case alleging Israel has committed war crimes at the ICC. Hamas has publicly stated they will submit to the ICC's jurisdiction. Israel is not a member of the ICC, though it has opened a dialog with the court to rebutt the Palestinian suit. Israel is among 73 other countries have not ratified the Rome statute on the ICC, including India, China, USA, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia (some have signed the statute but not ratified it).
This diary will evaluate the following claims/contentions made by pro-Israel spokespersons:
Palestinian Resistance: Violence and Non-Violence
- Palestinians elect terrorists
- Where is the Palestinian Gandhi/Nelson Mandela? Or it's all Pallywood Propaganda.
- BDS has double standards
- Why don't Palestinians adopt non-violent resistance?
- Hundreds of Israeli civilians died in bombings by Palestinian terrorists
- Palestinians are not poor, Arafat had billions
- Palestinians are radical Islamist Jihadists and cannot be trusted
- We'll have peace when Arabs love their children more than they hate Israelis
- But the Arab states attacked Israel in 1948, 1957, 1967, 1973
Methods used by IDF and armed Palestinian factions (Fatah, Hamas, etc.)
Some of these arguments seek to conflate Hamas (or another faction) with all Palestinians, or all Palestinian leaders. Hamas is one faction within the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
- The IDF is the most moral army in the world
- Israeli forces fought valiantly and justly in 1948
- The Israeli army does not knowingly target children
- Gaza bombings are a response to rockets
- Israel's nuclear program & military industry
- Palestinian forces use human shields
- Hamas killed 160 children to build tunnels
- Gaza is not occuppied
Palestinians and their leaders are dastardly and/or untrustworthy
These arguments identify specific statements or failings of individual Palestinians or their leaders as flawed. The same can be said of Israeli leaders. Of course, all humans are flawed, and perhaps men in positions of power are especially flawed. Nelson Mandela engaged in terrorism, Thomas Jefferson had coercive sex with Sally Hemings starting when she was 15 or 16, MLK was an adulterer, Churchill was a racist imperialist and Gandhi's "tests of celibacy" were rather weird.
We can play a tit for tat game and point to numerous failings of Israeli leaders. For example, when they found themselves in the same position as Palestinians do today (trying to remove a military power from the territory they wished to claim as a state), various Zionist factions resorted to terrorism. They planted bombs at hotels, beaches, markets, bus-stops, threw grenades into homes, kidnapped and killed soldiers/policemen and hundreds of civilians in the 1930s and 1940s. They led incidents of international terrorism, attacking trains and hotels in Europe after the war. The leaders of two Jewish terror organizations (Irgun and Lehi, which were absorbed into the IDF) went on to become Israeli Prime Ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir as co-head of Lehi ordered the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, UN mediator for the partition of Palestine, because of fears Bernadotte would recommend the partition plan be shelved since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled in violation of the terms (Israeli officials had denounced Bernadotte's reports). A third future prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led troops in attacks where they dynamited homes and schools, killing dozens of civilians. The mainstream Haganah itself carried out attacks that can only be described as terrorism, including an attack on an orange grove on August 15, 1947 which killed 11, including an entire family of seven (four of them children) who died asleep as their house was blown up with dynamite. In an echo of that operation, today's IDF uses US made bombs to destroy houses and entire families.
The appropriate response to all claims about vile leaders is to ask whether they have any bearing on the rights of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis.
- Palestinians celebrate and bake cakes when Israelis are killed
- Palestinians (or Muslims) teach their children to hate
- The Palestinians are turning this into a holy war, using religion to spur hatred
- Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar) was a terrorist
- Palestinian grand-mufti al-Husseini allied with Hitler in WW-2
- Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of Israel
- Palestinian schools teach hatred of Jews
- XYZ Palestinian (or other Middle Eastern figure) has called for an end to Israel or said Jews are ...
Sources and Further Reading
A lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of Palestine. I've listed some sources that I find valuable.
Palestinian Resistance: Violence and Non-Violence
Palestinians elect terrorists
Yasser Arafat did indeed order or condone attacks on civilians. So does Hamas today. But that is not the complete story, to understand the relationship between terrorism and politics in the region, we have to examine Jewish examples of terrorism as well.
Menachem Begin (Irgun) and Yitzhak Shamir (Lehi) ordered the bombings of markets, hotels, buses during the 1940s in an effort to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Militia under their command were responsible for mass murders of Palestinian civilians during the 1947/48 war, and they routinely threw grenades into Palestinian homes with inhabitants inside. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others were so distressed at their methods they wrote a letter to the Times in 1948 expressing their disgust during Begin's 1948 visit to NYC.
Begin went on to found Likud and was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1977. Shamir also ascended to the Prime Minister's office under Likud. Likud is the ruling party in Israel today (with Benjamin Netanyahu servind as its head).
Related:
- She shouldn't have flirted, he shouldn't have worn a hoodie, they shouldn't have voted for Hamas...
Where is the Palestinian Gandhi/Nelson Mandela? Or it's all Pallywood Propaganda
Probably in an Israeli jail, under administrative detention
without trial. Gandhi too spent numerous years in and out of British jails, sometimes without trial.
Israel has held hundreds of political prisoners under administrative detention for the past few decades. Charges (rarely brought to trial) range from membership in a "banned" organization to ordering attacks on civilians or Israeli military forces. This is done under the aegis of a "temporary" military occupation which has lasted almost 50 years.
There are numerous, regular, non-violent protests (occassionally devolving into stone-throwing) across the West Bank against settler encroachment and the separation wall. The protests are met with tear-gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and occassional live fire which sometimes injures reporters. Many Palestinians have been killed by IDF soldiers as have Westerners protesting alongside them.
Supporters of Israeli policies sometimes deride protests as "Pallywood propaganda". Of course they are propaganda. The protests are about raising consciousness of the occupation and using direct actions to accomplish those ends. Gandhi's Salt march and numerous fasts unto death were as much about propaganda as mining salt from the sea. In the Israel/Palestine context, they are meant to illustrate the disparity between the two groups.
The intention behind non-violent direct action is to demonstrate the injustice of the policies being protested in a way that garners publicity and illustrates the injustice. That was the intent behind the Indian civil disobedience movement. That was the intent behind lunch counter sit-ins and marches in Selma during our own Civil Rights movement. And that is the intent behind many Palestinian protests.
Claims that Palestinian protests are "Pallywood propaganda" is akin to saying John Lewis' march in Selma was staged SNCC/NCAA propaganda by a known "troublemaker".
It’s no longer a tactical mistake, it’s a national headlock in which an entire army, and behind it a nation, remains in a state of denial that there are military solutions to the conflict.
[...]
Whatever you think of the Palestinian national struggle, you don’t get to choose the other side’s weapons. The people of Nabi Saleh, with the help of foreign volunteers, put on the weekly show for the media because it’s compelling, it works. Anyway, if the only issue here was one of appearances, then why is the IDF providing extras every week for the show?
-- A Picture of a Headlock That's Worth a Thousand Words - Haaretz, August 31, 2015
When someone asks "where is the Palestinian Gandhi/Nelson Mandela" what they are implicitly saying is that the Palestinian cause is just, but it should not be fulfilled till an exceptional leader comes along. This is the "deserve" idea, and it is a profoundly immoral position. It implies that there are some people who do not deserve the right to self-determination. They should be ruled by others, presumably more enlightened than them and better at meeting their needs.
Such a view condemns millions to subjugation under an unjust regime because a leader with the "right" attributes (as defined by whom?) has not appeared. Neither Gandhi nor Mandela were without controversy (nor was MLK). Mandela's ANC had engaged in terrorism, and Gandhi had rather peculiar views on sex. Even if such a leader were to appear, we cannot say with cerainty he/she would survive. Israel has enaged in a policy of targeted assassination and detention to remove specific Palestinian leaders from the public sphere. Again, this is similar to the tactics used in apartheid South Africa and colonial India to delay the eventual devolution of power and equality under law.
The poet Nizar Qabbani found it difficult to believe when he saw a destitute Palestinian boy armed only with a stone defeat a fully-armed Israeli soldier: "The world's eyes have been blinded," he wrote, "and they have nothing in their hands except stones … as tidings they appeared."
-- Goliath Doesn't Get to Throw Stones, Haaretz, April 15, 2013
Related Diaries:
-
Gandhi and the "Pallywood" propagandists in the West Bank
- Comments
here.
BDS has double standards
There is no double-standard. BDS is a movement led by Palestinian activists, it focuses on Palestinian issues including the military occupation. People who believe other oppressive regimes (Tibet, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine, Morocco etc.) are more significant are perfectly free to start their own movements to boycott, divest or sanction those regimes. Palestinian activists have a long-tradition of acting in solidarity with other freedom and enfranchisement movements, including the movement against South African apartheid. See the section on apartheid in the
earlier diary.
There were a number of reasons for solidarity between the ANC and the PLO. One of them was the manner in which the South African and Israeli governments collaborated (on nuclear technology, conventional weapons and a host of other things) and saw each other as kindred spirits.
During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem.
[...]
Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".
Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
-- Brothers in arms, Israels secret pact with Preatoria - The Guardian, February 7, 2006
Lest we think all of this ended with the ANC coming to power in South Africa, Ariel Sharon was
fond of describing his solution to the conflict as "Bantustans", well into 2000.
The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.
The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said."
D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister."
[...]
An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister. He said that whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length about the history of the protectorates and their structures.
Related Diaries:
-
House GOP committee chair blows dog-whistles for Israeli settlers, says West Bank is "Judea/Samaria"
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Israel's Justice Minister admires Ayn Rand, wants BDS to be illegal but led boycott of Palestinians
-
Israel Supreme Court: Boycott/Divest is "Political Terrorism". Publishers can be sued for speech.
-
"BDS" movement demands policy statement from Jewish singer, then kicks him off the schedule.
Why don't Palestinians adopt non-violent resistance?
The Palestinian resistance movement has a long tradition of non-violent resistance inspired by Gandhian principles. Numerous villages hold weekly demonstrations to protest Israeli restrictions on movement and access to their land. These demonstrationss are almost always countered by violent force utilized by IDF forces. This includes tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition and "skunk guns". The
protests over Israel's separation barrier in one village, Bil'in were documented in a film titled
5 Broken Cameras.
Numerous unarmed activists have been killed by IDF forces during demonstrations. Poorly organized demonstrations also routinely degenerate into rock-throwing. An illuminating incident occured during the Ferguson protests, when numerous Palestinian activists shared tactics, including on dealing with tear gas, with those in Ferguson. Commentators also noted that the militarization of police responses to protests in the US may be influenced by training they receive on free trips to Israel. Pro-Israel organizations have made explicit attempts to counter any association between Palestinian and American social justice movements.
The heavy handed approach of Israeli authorities in dealing with Palestinian protest movements became difficult to ignore during the first intifada, with an official policy encouraging Israeli police and soldiers to "break the bones" of protestors.
In general, the noviolent aspect of the resistance gets overshadowed by more violent factions. In part to correct this, we have been running a weekly feature on Palestine/Israel news which seeks to highlight the non-violent resistance movement.
See: Filastin VI): 6 year old child arrested in Jerusalem; The Death of Compassion
Filastin VII): "Palestinians are beasts, they are not human" - new head of West Bank civil administration
Filastin XII): Soldiers remove Palestinians from pool in Area A so Settlers can bathe undisturbed
Hundreds of Israeli civilians died in bombings by Palestinian terrorists
The claim is likely about the second intifada, though it could cover earlier periods. It is true. However, a fuller picture reveals that thousands of Palestinians have died at the hands of Israeli forces over the same period.
There are other aspects to the death tolls which are not well understood or known. For instance, Hamas claims they did not target civilians till after Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron (Camera notes that Hamas had conducted suicide bombings prior to Goldstein's attack. However, this is not the claim the Hamas people made, they said they did not target civilians. Reviewing the list of six specific attacks Camera provide, the targets appear to be buses transporting soldiers, soldiers in jeeps, cafes catering to soldiers, and cases where the bombers themselves up. There were a number of reprisal attacks around this time in the West Bank.)
Throughout the conflict, Palestinian deaths have been far higher than Israeli ones. This is partly due to the heavy militarization of the Israeli forces (the Palestinians have never had an army, or tanks or bombers or naval ships) and equally due to the disproportionate response employed by Israeli forces and sanctioned by Israeli leaders.
Palestinians are not poor, Arafat had billions
Per capita income in the West Bank is $2000, in Gaza it's under $900. Israel's in contrast, is over $36,000 a year. Palestinian income would jump about 30% right away if travel restrictions,
blockades, checkpoints etc were lifted. Despite having 25 times the annual income and roughly the same population, Israel receives far more aid than Palestinians do, primarily from the US.
That Arafat commingled Palestinian Authority funds with personal funds and that the PA may be systematically corrupt is well-known, but a distraction. Numerous senior Israeli politicians have also been accused of corruption. Netanyahu's wife was embroigled in a particularly embarassing scandal concerning deposits for bottles.
Palestinians are radical Islamist Jihadists and cannot be trusted
The Palestinian resistance movement has historically been secular. The PLO was almost militantly secular. The PLO (now Fatah) has always had Christian members (Chris Bandak for instance). As an example of relations under tense conditions, you could read the pastor of the Bethlehem
describing his relations with armed Palestinian factions during the seige of the Church of the Nativity.
There are Islamist elements within the resistance, most notably Hamas. The Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet tacitly supported the rise of Islamists as part of a strategy to erode support for the secular PLO and split Palestinian resistance. This may also have played a role in Israeli support for Christian Phalangist militia in Lebanon.
We'll have peace when Arabs love their children more than they hate Israelis
This is a rather famous quote ostensibly by Golda Meir regularly trotted out by pro-Israel supporters whenever the IDF is killing Palestinians en masse. The quote has no primary source as I explained in a
lengthy diary on it, and the best sourced version reads "sons" (as in soldiers), not "children".
But the Arab states attacked Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982
At best, this is a generous reading of the events preceeding these wars, at worst it is a deliberate fabrication. For some of the conflicts, it also conflates the Palestinians with all "Arabs".
Non-Palestinian Arab forces did take part in the 1948 war, but so did Jewish forces that were not resident in Palestine prior to 1948. In fact, "lone soldiers" (the term Israel prefers for individuals generally called "foreign fighters") continue to fight alongside Israeli citizens in the IDF. The partition of mandate Palestine was enormously controversial, with much of the Palestinian population opposed to the partition. Israeli forces both outnumbered and were significantly better equipped than the Palestinian and Arab forces arrayed against them (with the exception of Jordan).
The Suez crisis of 1956 was an outright attempt to conquer land and the Suez canal by Israel, France and the United Kingdom after the nationalization of the Suez by the Egyptian government. Egypt had been a British colony and the British/French attacked though the Egyptian government had offered full compensation for the nationalisation of the canal. The forces eventually withdrew under US/Soviet/UN pressure.
The Six-Day war's first major action was the Israeli bombing of Egyptian air-force fields. Various casus belli were proposed, including the blockade of the Straits of Tiran and Egyptian troop movements in the Sinai. Israeli military assessments prior to the attack agreed the Egyptian forces were not preparing to attack. The USS Liberty (an intelligence vessel) was attacked by Israeli aircraft off the coast of Egypt during this conflict, leading to the death of 34 US naval personnel.
The Yom-Kippur war was the one instance where we can unequivocally say Arab forces unexpectedly attacked Israel.
The 1982 Lebanon war had a complicated genesis. The ultimate roots of the conflict lay in the 1948 expulsions and the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. The more immediate cause was the swollen Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon, including large numebrs of PLO and other Palestinian resistance forces expelled from Jordan after their failed attempt at a coup (Black September). There was a secondary motive to install a pliant regime in Lebanon.
Subsequent military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza have also been escalated or initiated by Israel.
I will explain why: We had three wars which we fought without an alternative. The first was the war of independence, which began on Nov. 30, 1947, and lasted until January 1949.
The second war of no alternative was the Yom Kippur War and the war of attrition that preceded it. [...]
Our other wars were not without an alternative. In November 1956 we had a choice. The reason for going to war then was the need to destroy the fedayeen, who did not represent a danger to the existence of the state. [...]
After 1957, Israel had to wait 10 full years for its flag to fly again over that liberated portion of the homeland. In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. [...]
As for Operation Peace for Galilee [the 1982 Lebanon war], it does not really belong to the category of wars of no alternative. [...]
I - we - can already look beyond the fighting. It will soon be over, we hope, and then I believe, indeed I know, we will have a long period of peace. There is no other country around us that is capable of attacking us.
-- Excerpts from Begin Speech at National Defense College, NY Times, August 21, 1982
" ... we should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Trans-jordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established... When we smash the [Arab] Legions strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo."
-- David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. [As quoted in Ben-Gurion, A Biography by Michael Ben-Zohar and in Chomsky]
"All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agreed to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place."
--Moshe Dayan, Commander in Chief of the IDF [as quoted in Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, pp 154]
Methods used by IDF and armed Palestinian factions
The IDF is the most moral army in the world
This claim has been repeatedly made by Israeli spokesmen,
in particular, Benjamin Netanyahu. It has never been even remotely true. The first question that should come to mind is whether any army can be moral. The next is whether an army raised by
mandatory conscription could be moral. The next is whether an army engaged in the
conquest of another people's lands (or "re-conquest" after 2,000 years if you prefer) and a
military occupation that has lasted almost 50 years could ever be moral.
And then we get to the IDF's history. Jewish militia (Irgun/Lehi/Stern Gang) which had engaged in violent terrorism against civilians were absorbed into the IDF in 1948. These individuals and their leadership did not always change their ways. Some individuals, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were sidelined for a couple of decades, but others exercised significant influence. For example, Ben-Zion Cohen who participated in the attack at Deir Yassin, became a major in the IDF; Eliahu Lankin was an MK in the first Knesset and rose to the rank of battalion commander and was appointed ambassador to South Africa; Aryeh Ben-Eliezer was elected to the Knesset five times; Elie Weisel, the author and activist, tried to join Irgun and engaged in propaganda for Irgun in Europe during 1948, such activity would be labelled "providing material support" to a terrorist organization today. Irgunist elements eventually took control of the Israeli state in 1977, after the election which brought Likud to power.
In 1953 in the town of Qibya, 69 Palestinians (including over 40 women and children) were killed by IDF troops under Ariel Sharon's command. 1n 1956, in the town of Khan Yunis, IDF troops went house to house and killed between 140 and 275 people. The same year, over a hundred people were killed in the town of Rafah by the IDF during a "screening operation". In 1956, Israeli border police fired upon civilians, killing 48 in Kafr Qasim. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, bombing heavily populated areas of Beirut killing 4-5,000 civilians. On September 15-16 1982 a day after the Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel had been assassinated, Phalangist militia were ordered to enter the Sabra/Shatila refugee camps by IDF chief Rafael Eitan. Israeli special forces had conducted operations in the camps earlier in the day. IDF troops surrounded the camps, closed exits and provided cover and flares for their allies. 1,300-2,000 people (including women and children) were killed over two days. Two Phalangist miltiamen died during the operation. Numerous bodies were found with their hands and legs tied. IDF command posts with unobstructed views of the camps surrounded it on all sides during the massacre. An Israeli investigation commission found defense minister Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility for the massacre and recommended his dismissal along with that of other senior officers. Ariel Sharon went on to be elected Prime Minsiter of Israel. In 1996, Naftali Bennett (now a cabinet minister in the Israeli government) ordered artillery to fire upon a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, killing 106 civilians sheltering there. In 2006, the Israeli air-force struck a building in Qana, killing 28 civilians, including 16 children.
Today, the IDF chooses to precision bomb homes (usually with the intention of assassinating one individual), with the full knowledge that there are children inside. This is almost certainly a war crime. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, IDF soldiers look on with disinterest as Jewish settlers destroy Palestinian property or assault Palestinians, and troops fire routinely and with impunity on unarmed Palestinians.
In 1948 and 1949 the IDF along with librarians from the nascent Israeli National Library, went into abandoned numerous home whose Palestinian owners had fled or been expelled. The soldiers removed tens of thousands of books from these homes and from organizational libraries, sometimes forcing Palestinians to carry them from homes they knew. These books were then cataloged and kept in the National Library. The Library claims they were abandoned property and they were only preserving the books.
The story falls apart though, when you start asking other questions. Why didn't the Israeli government attempt to contact the owners? Why did the library remove identifying information (including book-plates and stamps) from books? The bigger question of course, is why Israel did not permit Palestinians to return to their homes, and why it turned these homes (and possessions) over to others (and this was well before Jewish immigrants from other Arab countries arrived). Why did the library sell off many volumes if it was preserving "abandoned property"? Why does the library still have no plan to return such property to its owners, after all this is many decades into systematic attempts to recover art and property looted during World War II. An effort in which many Israeli institutions and leaders have been vocal. And finally, why did it take a graduate student who stumbled upon them to make this story public?
These are only questions you would ask if you believed the IDF was the "most moral army in the world". They're futile because we know widespread looting of Palestinian homes by soldiers occurred in 1948. It was no secret. Nor is it a secret that in 1982, the IDF systematically looted Palestinian libraries in Lebanon as well.
This may seem like a small thing amid mass murders and expulsions of hundreds of thousands of people. But I have a strong attachment to my books. I cannot imagine what a refugee who has lost their land and home would feel about losing their books as well. Taking someone's home is a violation of property and memories. Taking their books, especially when it wouldn't take much to package and ship them. Taking them in an organized fashion, cataloging them and hiding them from view, well that is theft on a grand, institutional scale.
Perhaps Israeli spokesmen and politicians have a very different definition of morals than we do.
The IDF has had radical, insurgent elements within it for decades and depending on the government in charge, Irgunist factions have been ascendant decades within the command structure, and more lately the religious-nationalist settler movement has gained power. These trends accelerated after Likud first won election and Rafael Eitan was appointed Chief of Staff of the IDF (prior the 1982 Lebanon war).
If we keep these lands, popular resistance to the occupation is sure to arise, and Israel's army will be used to quell that resistance, with disastrous and demoralizing results.
-- General Mattityahu Peled, 1969 (as quoted in Miko Peled: Six days in Israel, 45 years ago)
Related Diaries:
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"I will never call IDF the most moral army" - top Army lawyer. Hamas will hand over officials to ICC
Filastin: Soldier pays the price for criticizing the Israel army
Israeli forces fought valiantly and justly in 1948
In 1948, it was clear to observers that Israeli forces had expelled Palestinians from their homes en masse. Israel's Censor Board
refused to allow Yitzhak Rabin to publish his account of the expulsions of Palestinians from Lod and Ramle. For many years, Israeli government spokespersons claimed Palestinians had abandoned their homes in response to instructions from Arab leaders to clear out ahead of advancing Arab armies. There is no evidence there were any such instructions. These claims were challenged soon after by Erskine Childers who noted:
Examining every official Israeli statement about the Arab exodus, I was struck by the fact that no primary evidence of evacuation orders was ever produced. The charge, Israel claimed, was "documented"; but where were the documents? There had allegedly been Arab radio broadcasts ordering the evacuation; but no dates, names of stations, or texts of messages were ever cited. In Israel in 1958, as a guest of the Foreign Office and therefore doubly hopeful of serious assistance, I asked to be shown the proofs, I was assured they existed, and was promised them. None had been offered when I left, but I was again assured. I asked to have the material sent on to me. I am still waiting.
-- Erskine Childers, The Other Exodus. The Spectator, 12 May, 1961.
Benny Morris
confirmed that a contemporaneous IDF account of the Palestinian exodus:
'thoroughly undermines the traditional official Israeli "explanation" of a mass flight ordered or "incited" by the Arab leadership for political-strategic purposes.'
There is no record of either Arab radio stations (which were recorded/transcribed by the BBC) or Arab newspapers relaying any such call. There was extensive discussion and rumors about massacres by Israeli forces and this definitely
caused much of the flight. Various Palestinians
called for the evacuation of children, women and the elderly from villages. Many villagers evacuated to cities like Lod/Ramle from which they were expelled. In Nazareth the IDF officer in charge
refused to follow an order to expell all Palestinians.
Fear for their lives likely played a big role in the flight of many Palestinians, who fully expected to return to their homes when the violence died down. This fear was well founded, since indiscriminate violence by Israeli militia was extensive and included incidences of rape and murder. I'm going to discuss the evolving view of Benny Morris, whose "Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" is very highly recommended and whose work (also with Avi Shlaim's) did much to change the Israeli/Western understanding of the conflict. Chomsky and many others had questioned Israeli hagiography of 1947/48, but Morris's book is the one that breached the dam of denial. Benny Morris in a 2004 interview in Haaretz with Ari Shavit:
According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg."
According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
To an extent, this is the nature of all war. The war of 1947/48 also needs to be understood in the context of numerous riots and pogroms between the two communities which had occured prior. The point here, is that people who try to paint the war of 1947/48 in heroic terms, are sweeping a lot under the rug. Morris's view today is that Ben-Gurion personally issued expulsion orders and was careful not to leave a record of them. But Morris also believes such expulsions were justified.
Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?
"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."
Morris goes on in the interview to say he thinks Ben-Gurion made a mistake and should have "cleansed" the country of all Palestinians:
"If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."
Part of the reason Ben-Gurion could not "cleanse" the whole country was the presence of Jordanian troops in the West Bank who repelled offensives by Israeli forces. Avi Shlaim believes a
tacit agreement existed between Ben-Gurion and the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan which ceded the West Bank to Jordan. This (along with the
promise of monetary aid from Britain) kept the Jordanian forces (which were formidable), out of the conflict.
Morris used some particularly incendiary rhetoric in the 2004 interview, saying Palestinian society was like a "serial killer" who should be locked up in a cage". He walked back some of this rhetoric in 2009 saying he was affected by the suicide attacks in the early 2000s. I find it curious that Morris gives himself a pass for using such words when faced with the murder of hundreds of Israelis by suicide bombers, but his magnanimity doesn't extend to Palestinians who may use inflammatory rhetoric. After all, they've faced the deaths of hundreds of children and thousands of civilians over decades, not to mention the loss of their homes, lands and continued abrogation of their rights to free movement and self-determination. In any event, this observation should lead us to pay closer attention to the actions of the parties involved, and less to their words.
The Israeli army does not knowingly target children
In 2002, IDF planes
dropped a bomb (likely an American-made bomb) on a home in the Gaza strip, killing a Hamas commander. The bomb was dropped though the IDF knew there were children and other civilians in the home. 8 children and 6 other civilians were killed.
Since then, Israel has bombed numerous homes to assassinate a visitor or resident, knowingly killing hundreds of children in the process. The Israeli NGO B'Tselem issued a comprehensive report on the home bombings during the 2014 Gaza war: Black Flag: The legal and moral implications of the policy of attacking residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. But in a real sense, home bombings started in August 1947, when Haganah troops dynamited a home in an orange grove, killing a family of seven.
Numerous conspiracy theorists have suggested Palestinian factions (Hamas in particular) intentionally kill Palestinian children and frame the IDF. One such CT has been thoroughly debunked, and a prominent US based pro-Israel political operative (David Frum) was forced to apologize for it.
It is indeed true that Hamas mortar fire during conflicts has resulted in the unintentional death of Palestinian children.
Once my driver got out, and without blinking, just grabbed some kid and beat him to a pulp. And that kid was just sitting in the street and looked like some other kid, or wore another kid’s shirt, or perhaps he was that kid but that's not the point. He beat him to a pulp. Didn’t detain him. Just beat him.
-- IDF soldier with the rank of First Sergeant describing an incident in Nablus 2005
IDF occupation forces subject children 12 and older to
harsh military detention and interrogation, it is one of
very few nations to do this. The IDF has arrested children as
young as 5 years of age. A significant portion of children arrested are subjected to
verbal and physical abuse by soldiers and military interrogators. Needless to say, Jewish children (even those suspected of violent attacks) are treated differently. In a number of countries, children 16 & 17 years of age are
tried as adults.
"In the past, one or two or three Hamas battalion commanders would travel to a meeting with a Hamas division commander — they would put a woman on the left-side window and a young girl on the right-side window as they traveled, in order to guarantee their safety. You don’t open fire, right? Today, we fire. The woman and the kid – gone. That was the surprise of Cast Lead."
-- Avi Benayahu, IDF Spokesperson, quoted in +972mag: 'For the first time in history, Jews can take part in war from home'
The underlying story here is of violence towards children by IDF forces, coupled with impunity for such actions.
See:
- 547 children killed, 1,000+ permanently disabled: Gaza report
- B'Tselem reports on Israeli precision bombs that destroyed 70 homes in Gaza, killing entire families
- Breaking the Silence: Children and Youth - Soldiers' Testimonies 2005-2011
- Comments here, here
Gaza bombings are a response to rockets
IDF spokespersons will often invoke
counts of rockets or mortars fired from Gaza as a justification for IDF bombardment. The relative destructiveness or lethality of the response is never discussed. Timelines are a constant contention, with both the IDF and Hamas claiming provocation from the other side. Whoever fires first, it is quite clear that the Israeli response is disproportionate. This is ascribed to many different factors, but the Israeli policy of "
searing their consciousness" does play some role.
Israeli forces fired 14,500 tank shells and 35,000 other unguided artillery shells into Gaza over the course of the 2014 war. The UN reported Israeli forces had also fired 5,830 missiles from aircraft. Hamas fired roughly 5,000 rockets and 2,000 mortar rounds at Israel, statistical estimates suggest Israel's "Iron Dome" destroyed about 5% of the rockets many of the rest were partially intercepted but likely went on to explode on impact.
66 Israeli soldiers were killed during the conflict. One Israeli Bedouin civilian was killed in a rocket attack (bomb shelters don't get built for Israeli Bedouin). One child and four other civilians (including one Thai agricultural worker) were killed by mortar fire.
Palestinian deaths totaled 2,251 persons. Of these, 551 were children. 229 women were among the 1,462 civilians killed. Thousands were injured or rendered permanently disabled. THe vast majority of the deaths were caused by Israeli fire, with some deaths being caused by Hamas extra-judicial killings, or rockets/mortars falling short.
Low Israeli casualties were the result of an early warning system which prompted timely evacuation to shelters or interior spaces, coupled with the small size of Hamas rocket warheads (most are 10-20 lbs) and their unguided nature (many fall outside major population centers). In contrast, Israeli missiles (made in the US) often carry 1,000 or 2,000 lb warheads which are capable of damaging most shelters and often destroy entire apartment complexes. The IDF's standard artillery shell has a 15 lbs explosive charge and is designed to detonate into 2,000 fragments on impact.
The disproportionate response is in keeping with past conflicts where the vast majority of deaths and casualties have been Palestinian.
Related:
- 547 children killed, 1,000+ permanently disabled: Gaza report
- "we do not spare ammo – we unload, we use as much as possible" - Breaking the Silence on Gaza
- "2,000 dead, 11,000 wounded, half a million refugees" = Mission Accomplished - Breaking the Silence
- "His wife and kid are in the car too? Not the end of the world" - Breaking The Silence on Gaza
- B'Tselem reports on Israeli precision bombs that destroyed 70 homes in Gaza, killing entire families
- Comments here
Israel's nuclear program & military industry
Israel is
widely believed to have between a few dozen to hundreds of nuclear weapons. The Israeli nuclear program received critical assistance from the French in the 1950s, and Israeli scientists played major roles in the development of France's own nuclear industry. French support was essential for the development and construction of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona (Shimon Peres played a key role). In that sense, it is not fully home-grown, this collaboration
began as early as 1949. Dimona went critical in 1962 and it is believed Israel had developed a nuclear weapon by the late 60s. President Kennedy
pressed Ben-Gurion to halt the nuclear weapons program, but the Israeli government did not. Israel engaged in a series of deceptions to hide their enrichment facility from American visitors and inspectors
Israel has long had a policy of opacity towards its nuclear arsenal and has refused to confirm or deny its existence. At various times, US officials have made public references to Israel's nuclear weapons. Israelis who disclose details of the nuclear arsenal are aggressively persued and prosecuted, which can include abduction.
On 8 October, 1973, at the most critical juncture of the Yom Kippur war, Israel reportedly armed thirteen nuclear devices in preparation for a last-ditch counter-attack. This was reportedly disclosed to the US and the Soviets and may have led to the replenishment of Israeli conventional weapon stockpiles and pressure on Arab states. The incident is considered the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis.
During the first Gulf War, Israeli commentators alluded to a nuclear attack if Iraq initiated a chemical weapons attack on Israel. One was quoted as urging then PM Shamir to warn Saddam that "any Iraqi action against Israeli civilian populations, with or without gas, may leave Iraq without Baghdad". Iraqi SCUD missiles are reported to have landed close to the Israeli reactor at Dimona. The rumored Israeli policy of massive nuclear retaliation if faced with an imminent existential threat is referred to as the Samson Option.
Israel's nuclear weapons were developed concurrently or prior to the negotiation and adoption of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty which recognizes five "nuclear powers" (US, Russia, China, UK and France), prohibits the transfer of weapons technology, and offers support for civilian nuclear programs in return for a promise not to weaponize. India, Pakistan and Israel have not signed the NPT and each posseses nuclear weapons. North Korea exited the treaty and South Sudan has not signed either. India and China have repeatedly and publicly stated they have a "no first-use policy" and would not under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Paksitan and Israel have refused to issue such a policy.
Israel is reported to have collaborated with the apartheid South African regime on its nuclear weapons program. South Africa was Israel's primary supplier of uraniumin the 70s and 80s. The South African arsenal (of possibly six weapons) was destroyed along with all records prior to the handover to the ANC. The Vela incident has often been cited as a joint test of an Israeli-South African nuclear device.
The Israeli nuclear program has been controversial within Israel for a long time.
Israel is also a major manufacturer and supplier of conventional weapons. In common with other military industries, Israeli firms have been accused of corruption and bribery. Israeli military firms are accused of opportunistically using conflicts in Gaza to promote the field-testing of new weapons which are then advertised as battle tested.
Israel is also believed to have an extensive chemical and biological weapons program which the science minister suggested could be used against Saddam's Iraq. Israeli forces are said to have poisoned wells during the 1948 war to prevent the return of Palestinian villagers.
For the last word on the predicament Israel faces with the Palestinians, and the options they consider acceptable, we will leave it to Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the 'transfer' of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing 'more probable' with each passing day. Sharon 'wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed'.
But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing? 'That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.'
Related:
-
Iran brings up Israeli/P5 nukes at annual Nuclear Proliferation Treaty meeting
- Comments
here,
here
-
Israeli Nuclear History: the National Security Archives, GWU
Palestinian forces use human shields
Israeli spokespersons
routinely make the claim that Hamas uses human shields. This is generally utilized as a mechanism to deflect criticism after the deaths of civilians in Israeli bombing raids. Hamas forces do not always follow standard military conventions (wearing uniforms) and often operate from highly populated areas.
However, a close look at various examples suggests IDF spokespersons routinely misapply or conflate the term "human shield". For instance, it is used to justify the killing of children with bombs when they are travelling with a person the IDF has targeted for assassination (often relatives), or the bombing of homes as a punitive measure or to assassinate a family member or visitor.
The law of war has very specific protections for civilian populations, and for off-duty combatants. In numerous cases over the past decade or more, the IDF has knowingly killed entire families, in order to assassinate an off-duty suspected Hamas operative. To bring this into perspective, this is equivalent to Hamas bombing the home of an off-duty IDF major at home with his family during Passover and claiming the general was using his family as a "human shield". Applying the IDF logic on legitimate targets would turn virtually all Israeli homes into valid targets since Israelis are subject to universal conscription into the IDF and many are in the reserves. In any case, the IDF does not seem to care about the fate of such "human shields" if they are Palestinian.
What makes IDF statements even more suspect is that Israeli soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields on multiple occassions in Gaza and the West Bank. This includes instances involving young children including one where an 11 year old was forced to walk in front of Israeli troops, a nine-year old was forced to open packages that might be booby trapped, children were forced to stand in between IDF vehicles and Palestinian protestors and entire families were forced to remain in house the IDF was using as bases.
The use of Palestinians as human shields was once codified as an official procedure by the IDF. In 2005, the Israeli High Court issued an injunction forcing the IDF to stop forcing Palestinians to deliver messages and enter homes ahead of troops. The case was brought by the human-rights group Adalah and others. The IDF fought the ruling, and its rare investigations into such incidents have resulted in relatively minor punishment, suspended sentences, demotions etc..
The "neighbor procedure" is a practice in which Israeli soldiers use Palestinian civilians to perform military operations. For example, neighbors of target homes or buildings are called upon to knock on doors, check suspicious objects, and to walk in front of soldiers as the army surrounds its targets.
On 14 August 2002, Nidal Abu Mohsen, 19, was killed while being used as a human shield during the course of a military operation in Tubas, West Bank. Mr. Abu Mohsen was compelled by the army to stand in front of soldiers and knock on a neighbor's door.
-- Adalah Press Release: 18 August 2002
Israeli forces operate also from civilian kibbutz during Gaza incursions (the equivalent of Hamas operating from civilian areas) and the Israeli defense ministry is
located within an urban, civilian area (the equivalent of Hamas' "command centers"). Research on military weapons is conducted at virtually every Israeli university (the equivalent of Hamas' bomb labs).
What of warnings to people before dropping bombs on their homes you might ask? The IDF has a long history of emptying residential areas before destroying them, beginning in 1948 when Haganah propaganda units drove around Palestinian villages and towns warning Palestinians of cholera and smallpox outbreaks, that "the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate" (where grenades and bombs were thrown into occupied homes, killing entire families), or that chemical attacks were imminent. Palestinians whose parents and grandparents might have seen their houses razed find such warnings and the ensuing destruction of their homes and property understandably distressing. In many cases, the Israeli policy of destroying homes (and lately entire residential neighborhoods) is punitive. It is also likely illegal since there is a high bar to treating residences with civilians in them as military targets.
- Comments here
Hamas killed 160 children to build tunnels
This claim was made by Benjamin Netanyahu and echoed by many others, including writers in Tablet magazine. The claims were supposedly based on a report issued by the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut:
Gaza's Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel's Siege.
IPS clarified in their response to the statements by Netanyahu that the 160 deaths were total deaths estimated in tunnel activity, not children, and they included deaths in commercial tunnels built by people other than Hamas.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during a press conference on 6 August 2014 cited the Journal of Palestine Studies as the authoritative source documenting the claim that Hamas puts children to work in “terror” tunnels, sending them to their death. This naked fabrication has been repeated by numerous pro-Israeli media outlets, starting initially with a July 2014 article in the Anglo-Jewish Tablet Magazine and subsequent articles in the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel and the Huffington Post.
The tunnels in question are largely commercial in nature and used to smuggle goods into Gaza that Israel prevents. Israel uses a caloric formula to determine how much food Gazans can import. The restrictions can be arbitrary and punitive,
chocolate for instance, has been restricted at times. Almost half of Gaza's residents are children.
The same report also notes that:
55. According to the World Health Organization, sixty-three people including twenty-two children died waiting to access medical care outside of Gaza between February 2008 and June 2010.
Related:
- This
comment.
Gaza is not occuppied
This claim is often
advanced by
defenders of Israel's policies towards Palestinians fond of legalese. The issue is
contentious, but the
United Nations,
US State Department and international courts consider
Gaza to be occupied territory.
Israel occupied the Gaza strip in 1967, during the six-day war. For the next 38 years, the strip was under Israeli control with settlements and an IDF presence. In 2005, Israel evacuated 8,000 settlers from isolated settlements within the Gaza strip and withdrew troops from the strip. However, Israel maintains tight control over the land border with Gaza and controls Gaza's access to the Mediterranean sea (which would be international waters). Israel also encourages the military regime in Egypt (which receives significant US aid), to implement similar controls on its border with Gaza. Blockades are considered acts of war and the Egyptian blockade of the straits of Tiran (which is a more complex case since they are narrow enough to be territorial waters) is sometimes presented as a casus belli for the 1967, Six-Day war.
To an extent, this debate is an exercise in obfuscatory symatics. It is somewhat irrelevant as to what term is used for the Israeli policies towards Gaza. It could be called occupation, siege, collective punishment, blockade, apartheid, tribal retribution or another term. What matters is the reality, Israeli suppression of the civil and human rights of Gaza's citizens for five decades and the regular bombing of the territory wihich together cause enormous casualties.
Israel controls its border crossings with Gaza. There is a land crossing with Egypt at Rafah which the Egyptian regime allows foreigners and medical patients to use but otherwise keeps closed since it considers Israel responsible for Gaza and the current regime wishes to weaken Hamas. The Morsi regime (Muslim Brotherhood) adopted a more liberal policy towards Gaza, but this was reversed after the Egyptian military's coup d'etat in 2013. The Egyptian military establishment is closely allied with the US. Israel enjoys a close relationship with the Egyptian military regime and they are united in their opposition to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In effect, all Palestinians leaving and entering Gaza require Israeli approval, this includes Palestinians in the West Bank, a policy that has effectively separated families living a few miles apart. The Oslo Accords contained an explicit agreement on free movement between Gaza and the West Bank and commitments to treat them as a single territorial unit, Israel has unilaterally abrogated this. Israel engages in both collective punishment and arbitrary prohibitions infringing on Gazans right to free movement. Imports of goods are controlled by Israel with allegations of profiteering by Israeli firms. Israeli officials have consistently presented their controls over trade into Gaza as "security measures", yet at various times, the import of chocolate and cumin have been prohibited. Israel controls food supplies to Gaza and has controversially used a calorie count to determine food import levels. Israeli officials have stated a policy of keeping Gaza's economy on the "brink of collapse". Gaza's fishing fleet is restricted to 3-6 miles from the shore (a violation of the Oslo accords) and often shot dead by the Israeli navy. Gaza's airport was bombed by Israel in 2001.
Israeli human rights groups have argued that even if the blockade and border controls do not constitute "effective control", Israel has a responsibility towards the population.
Palestinian Leaders are dastardly and untrustworthy
Palestinians celebrate and bake cakes when Israelis are killed
First off, every place has its share of unthinking assholes, some have more than other places. The correct response is whether it is ever appropriate to punish, oppress or otherwise infringe on the rights of a population in retribution for the words of a few. Or whether words alone can ever justify punishment.
The argument is specious since (some) Israelis are also guilty of indulging in celebrations at the suffering of Palestinians. This started in 1948 with celebrations over the creation of Israel, painfully impervious to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been displaced to create the new state, and they were prevented by the entire Israeli state apparatus from returning to their homes and property. This is why Palestinians characterize Israel's "independence" as the Nakba (catastrophe).
Israelis have been gathering at hilltops in Sderot to watch and celebrate bombs being dropped on Gaza, fully aware of the death toll these bombs cause. This has been going on, at least since 2009. Young Israelis took to social media to text and post statements like "Death to Arabs" while Gaza was being bombed. The ire is not reserved for "Arabs", far-right rallies in Israel are peppered with chants of "Death to Leftists".
Very senior Israeli leaders are also on record as saying and doing vile things, Naftali Bennett has been in the government for years. He's responsible for killing 106 civilians sheltering in a UN facility and boasts about it saying “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.” Avigdor Lieberman (as Foreign Minister) said Arab citizens of Israel should be beheaded. Ayelet Shaked, the current Justice Minister has approvingly quoted statements describing Palestinian children as "little snakes". And then you have Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, terrorists both, who set bombs in markets/buses/hotels to kill civilians, who both became Prim Ministers of Israel. And to round out the trinity, we have another Israeli PM, Ariel Sharon, a mass murderer several times over.
Palestinians (or Muslims) teach their children to hate and name streets for terrorists
You may see a picture of a Palestinian child holding a gun, or an image of a young boys in a "Hamas training camp". This is sometimes followed by "I dare you to find any other religion that does this". Sadly, a lot of people are willing to let young children handle lethal weapons. A google image search for "Israeli toddlers with guns" will demonstrate that.
Some militant Israelis actively venerate Jewish terrorists, in particular Baruch Goldstein. This includes incidents where children's songs are sung extolling Baruch Goldstein or dressing children as Goldstein, handing them toy rifles and marching them down the streets of Hebron on Purim. Goldstein killed 29 people praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque on Purim/Ramadan in February 1994.
You may hear the counter-argument that this is just a small minority of radical settlers. Yet monuments to terrorists abound in Israel. Numerous streets and parks are named for Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon, who were all terrorists or mass-murderers. Numerous other streets are named after the members of the Irgun/Lehi terrorist groups. Some Israelis are well aware of how Palestinians see such names.
Israel has issued postage stamps for Sharon, Shamir, Begin, and for Avraham Stern, the leader of the Stern Gang (Lehi), whose philosophy was so radical he broke away from Irgun (among other things, he wanted to ally with Nazi Germany against the British occupation of Palestine). He openly advocated terrorism, yet hundreds of Israelis flock to his grave every year and there's a town named for him. Lehi's views towards terrorism were articulated in their newsletter:
Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man." But 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: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all.
Our country also has arguments over symbols. Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, George Armstrong Custer and Andrew Jackson have many places named after them and yet they all engaged in deplorable acts. Many of these monuments deserve to be removed. Yet, this has no bearing on the rights of Americans, and it should not have any bearing on the rights of Palestinians either.
Related:
- Who Persuaded The Palestinians That Terrorism Works? These Men
- Comments here,
The Palestinians are turning this into a holy war, using religion to spur hatred
The Palestinian movement is essentially an nationalist, anti-colonial movement. It has had relgious elements at various times. Most prominently, Hamas is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and is an Islamist movement with nationalist characteristics. Virtually all Palestinians are Muslim or Christian and both have used their faiths to rally support. In particular, there are repeated calls to "defend al-Aqsa".
Israelis have done much the same, quite explicitly, and publicly. Advocacy for a "Jewish state" or "state for the Jews" is a rather clear call to employ relgion to further political ends. The use of religion as a motivation has been a feature of rhetoric within Israel during every conflict from the very earliest days. It is widely used today and a number of Israeli politicians rally supporters by advocating a takeover of al-Aqsa.
I fell into conversation with an acquaintance of mine, a woman named Ayelet, who is in her late teens, pregnant, the daughter of a former assistant professor of history at City College. She is a resident of an outpost in the radical settler heartland near Nablus. We were interrupted by the newborn's father, a goat farmer, as he began giving a d'var Torah, an interpretation of a Bible passage. He turned, rather quickly, to the threat posed by the Amalekites, the eternal enemy of the Jews, a tribe that, according to the Bible, attacked Moses and the Children of Egypt on the exodus from Egypt.
"Amalek," in the language of the settler hardcore today, often stands for the Arabs, the existential enemy of the Jews. "I am looking at our life today, and what Amalek wants to do is swallow up the people of Israel," the father said. "This is the snake. This is the snake."
I turned to Ayelet. She wore a long skirt, her hair was covered, and she carried an M-16. I asked her if she thought Amalek was alive today. "Of course," she said, and pointed out the door, toward an Arab village in the distance. "The Amalekite spirit is everywhere. It's not just the Arabs."
Who else, then? "Sharon isn't Amalek," she said, "but he works for Amalek.
-- Protect Sharon from the Right, NY Times, August 5, 2004
Moshe Feiglin, the Likud activist, told me, “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.” When I asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements-the umbrella group of all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza-if he thought the Amalekites existed today, he said, “The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”
-- Among the Settlers, New Yorker, May 2004
There was
enormous controversy over the role of official IDF rabbis and booklets distributed to soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, in addition to talks/sermons which framed the conflict as a
religious war:
in January 2009, when the chief education officer complained directly to the army chief of staff about rabbinic behavior during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week incursion into Gaza. According to the education chief, Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister, combat troops were receiving pamphlets and lectures “of a political nature” from military rabbis and various “unauthorized lecturers” who circulated freely among front-line units.
[...]
The comptroller’s report doesn’t detail the substance of the disagreements between the rabbinate and the Education Corps, but it drops enough hints to let informed readers connect the dots. The rabbinic pamphlets Shermeister cited were described in news reports shortly after the Gaza incursion. And while the comptroller doesn’t detail their content, the news reports did: The documents urged troops to “show no mercy” to the enemy, to view civilians as “not innocent” and to “ignore any foreign doctrines” that “confuse the logical way of fighting the enemy” — referring to international law and the IDF ethical code. Rabbis reportedly also told soldiers in morale-building talks that they were fighting a holy war for promised land and that Jews were forbidden to surrender even an inch of territory.
-- When Rabbis Start Educating the Soldiers, The Forward, May 22, 2012
Breaking the Silence covered the religious rhetoric within the IDF in their
testimonies from IDF soldiers on Operation Cast Lead and these received widespread coverage, including
in the New York Times and
The Guardian. Here's one soldiers testimony about a talk given by a major and an unidentified rabbi who arrived in an IDF rabbinate vehicle:
You were on maneuvers at the time?
Yes, various exercises. There were certain stations for different kinds of practice. So they came and there were soldiers who were really against this. I mean, they were using such images as 'what are we, crusaders being prepared for the battle with Salah al Din?' They really disliked the religious tone of war. On the other hand, there were others who loved it and easily connected to it, coming up and hungrily swallowing this sort of talk. I didn't listen to the entire talk that lasted about 15 to 25 minutes.
[...]
What else came up in this talk?
Lots of pathos, the kind of religious discourse I'm a bit familiar with: war of choice, holy war – differing rules. He spoke less in religious terminology, even of the kind I know, and was much more into militant faith. He aimed at inspiring the men with courage, cruelty, aggressiveness, expressions such as 'no pity, God protects you, everything you do is sanctified.' The gist of these statements was perhaps to bring things into agreement with religion, with God and whoever this man was supposed to represent, that everything or nearly everything is permissible. There were no specific scenarios discussed, for example – whether everything goes if there's a pregnant woman standing there. But from the context it was pretty obvious he came to tell us how aggressive and determined we needed to be, that we must win because this is a holy war.
He spoke about the Palestinians?
I can't recall. Often these surreal analogies are made, equating the Palestinians with the Amalekites, for example. The Palestinians are the enemy, whether they are Israeli citizens or subjects of the Palestinian Authority makes no difference. This covers everyone.
Some soldiers were saying they were being treated like 'crusaders.' What was that?
Yes, secular guys, or those who are distant from (Jewish) tradition and religion, stood there rather amused or horrified at this talk. What is this thing? Here comes a guy we don't know, with some rank or other, and explains to us about holy war and the enemy which is the Arabs in Israel and that we mustn't show any mercy, and have to attack in proper fighting spirit. What has all this to do with me? You can imagine, even in films you don't see that any more, it's out, like heroes. You can imagine a priest preaching on fighting spirit and explaining the importance of reaching the Via Dolorosa or the Holy Sites. As far as I know these were not holy sites.
The official IDF rabbinate also issued pamphlets and rabbis accompanied soldiers into the field to
fill them with a "fighting spirit". One of the IDF booklets "Daily Torah studies for the soldier and the commander in Operation Cast Lead" quoted Rabbi Shlomo Aviner:
"[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it."
The booklet
continues:
"Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land ... They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country ... Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence."
These pamphlets were excerpted in Haaretz (links above) and the
New York Times among other outlets. Such
apocalyptic calls to arms have been a feature of the political conflict for decades.
During the operation, right-wing groups brought even more extreme leaflets onto IDF bases including one from the "pupils of Ginsburg" which read:
"soldiers of Israel to spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us. We call on you ... to function according to the law 'kill the one who comes to kill you.' As for the population, it is not innocent ... We call on you to ignore any strange doctrines and orders that confuse the logical way of fighting the enemy."
Yasser Arafat was a terrorist
This is true. Troops under
Arafat's command carried out numerous bombings and killings of civilians.
The very same thing can be said about many Israeli leaders, including Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who both eventually became Prime Ministers in Israel. Ariel Sharon was a mass murderer in uniform, a couple of times over, and he too was elected PM of Israel. Naftali Bennett ordered the shelling of a UN compound in 1996, killing 106 civilians. He has boasted: "I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that". Bennett has been a minister in the past two governments. Troops under Benjamin Netanyahu's command have knowingly killing hundreds of children and civilians by bombing their homes, this is almost certainly a war crime.
In the end, the actions of Palestinian factions, or freely elected Israeli leaders, have no real bearing on the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to freedom and self-determination.
There are numerous comment threads delving into this argument, including here, here, .
Palestinian grand-mufti al-Husseini allied with Hitler in WW-2
This is true. Al-Husseini spent 1941-1945 in Germany. There are some suggestions he knew the Holocaust was underway and toured a concentration camp. His wikipedia page contains an extensive discussion of his
ties with the Nazis.
However, there are many things to consider here:
- Husseini was appointed to his post by the colonial British administration, overruling the results of an election.
- He was a leader of Palestinians, not the leader (other factions among Palestinians enjoyed more support at times).
- His alliance with the Axis powers was driven by a desire to see Palestine liberated from British colonial rule (it has a parallel in the Indian freedom-fighter, Shubash Chandra Bose's relations with the Axis)
- The Lehi, a Jewish extremist/terrorist organization, made multiple overtures to the Nazis in 1941/42, proposing an alliance to drive the British Army from Palestine and make it a homeland for German and Eastern European Jews. It is important to note that this happened before the Nazis had begun mass killings in earnest. Yitzhak Shamir who joined Lehi in 1940 and became one of its heads in 1943, went on to become prime minister of Israel.
Finally, the Palestinian people do not bear responsibility for the alliances or actions of al-Husseini who has been dead for over 40 years.
Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of Palestine
Hamas' charter is a 30 year old document, and yes it does call for the destruction of Israel. Here's a hypothetical. If your homeland had been stolen, your parents or grandparents pushed off it and another country established there, would you be rooting for that country's survival? That is the context to keep in mind here.
Hamas has made repeated offers of a binding truce (hudna) of 10 years or more contingent on Israeli withdrawal from territory seized in 1967, with a intent that a more permanent resolution to be achieved within that period.
It is also important to note that the same allegation or worse can be leveled against various Israeli politicians and policy documents. From Ben-Gurion on down, virtually every Israeli politicians have worked tirelessly to ensure Palestinians did not create a state, were restricted to as little territory as possible, or were pushed into the river Jordan and past it. This has been quite systematic at the very highest levels of Israeli government and has gone on for decades. Israel also struggles to respond to systematic encouragement for right-wing Jewish terrorists with similar objectives.
The Likud charter for instance (about 10 years older than Hamas') states that no other state but Israel shall exist between the river and the sea. That is effectively a declaration of principles that demands the eradication, or stillbirth of a Palestinian state. And it is not as if the Labor leadership emphatically denied this goal.
"The debate has not been for or against the indivisibility of Eretz Israel. No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of Eretz Israel. The Debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937 as quoted in Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (pp 189)
One might read this as Ben-Gurion's attempt to isolate the more extreme factions, but in light of a fifty year occupation under Israeli governments on both the left and right, that cannot be said with complete certainty. At the very least, the Israeli center-left is conflicted about the West Bank. Ben-Gurion himself made contradictory statements. There are many apt comparisons to
Thomas Jefferson,
Andrew Jackson and other American leaders who supported the policy of
Indian Removal which was
ethnic cleansing on a continental scale.
Related Diaries:
- The Moral Equivalence between Hamas and Likud
Palestinian schools teach hatred of Jews
This claim has been widely repeated, including by American politicians
such as Newt Gingrich. The claims first began to widely disseminated when Israeli spokesman made them.
A state department study in 2013 found that Israeli and Palestinian textbooks rarely engaged in vilification or demonization of the other. However, the study did note that many textbooks present one-sided histories of the Palestinian-Israeli relations.
Israel's education ministry issued a sharp denounciation of the report, calling its conclusions "predetermined". The authors (who included both Jewish and Palestinian educators) protested. The study did find that maps in most Israeli and Palestinian textbooks do not outline the other country.
“Israeli school maps feed into the Palestinian narrative that Israel wants to grab more and more land, and Palestinian school maps feed an Israeli narrative that Palestinians want to throw them into the sea,” says Bruce Wexler, the Yale professor who oversaw the project.
Since that study, Hamas has issued
separate textbooks which dimish Jewish historical claims to the Temple Mount/Western Wall and Israeli territory. There are reported instances of the
militarized drills with
children on both sides.
XYZ Palestinian (or other Middle Eastern figure) has called for an end to Israel or said Jews are ...
Rhetoric has been inflamed on both sides for some time and it's generally advisable to look more closely at what people have done rather than said. We should also ask ourselves a few questions before reacting to quotes.
First, do we want to condone the oppression of an entire population based on a statement that a particular leader may have made. This is collective punishment for speech.
Second, do we believe Palestinians are unreasonable to call for an end to the state that dispossessed them and their ancestors of their lands and property? The state that imposes military rule over millions of them?
Third, how do whatever statement Palestinians might have made compare with the deeds and words of Israeli leaders.
The death toll from the last couple of decades of conflict is heavily skewed towards Palestinian deaths. And keep in mind that these deaths have occurred during a 48 year long military occupation that every country apart from Israel considers illegal. Israeli response to Palestinian protest against the military occupation and mis-treatment of Palestinians has been disproportionate from the beginning.
Yitzhak Rabin is often reported to have told soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protestors in the First Intifada. The Israeli Parliament refused to investigate this at the time, but the Times reported him saying Israeli soldiers would use ''force, might and beatings'' to quash the Palestinian revolt.
At the height of the last election campaign, Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party and then foreign minister, came as close as any Israeli leader to advocating physical violence against the country’s Arab minority. "Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done – we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head,"
In Their Own Words: What Some Israeli Politicians Really Think About Arabs and LGBTs
''Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head 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.''
-- Yitzhak Shamir, Shamir Promises to Crush Rioters New York Times April 1, 1988
"The Arabs will never win over us by throwing stones. Our response must be a nationalist Zionist response. For every stone that’s thrown–we will build ten settlements. If 100 settlements will exist–and they will–between Nablus and Jerusalem, stones will not be thrown. If this will be the situation, then the Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle."
-- Rafael Eitan, Commander in Chief of IDF [Yedioth Ahronoth April 13, 1983 as quoted at camera.org also partially quoted in New York Times Israel's Military Chief Retires and Is Replaced by His Deputy, April 20, 1983]
"when we come upon a non-Jew who is not keeping the seven [Noahide] laws, and we kill him out of concern for the keeping of the seven laws, it is not prohibited."
As
reported by Haaretz, this is a quote from the "Torat Hamelech" (
King's Torah), written in 2009 by Rabbi
Yitzhak Shapira (Yitzhar) and Rabbi
Yosef Elitzur. The book was endorsed by other extremist settler rabbis, including
Yitzhak Ginzburg (Yitzhar),
Yaakov Yosef, Zalman Melamed (Beit El) and Dov Lior. The former chief rabbi of the IDF, Avichai Rontzki, was
linked to Dov Lior and is now a rabbi in the Itamar settlement.
At one point it suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat.
-- BBC: King's Torah splits Israel's religious and secular Jews
The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew," write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."
-- The Forward: Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?
''Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice,''
-- Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg as quoted in An Israeli Mayor is Under Scrutiny an article about a West Bank settlement mayor who made all Palestinian workers wear badges reading "Foreign Worker".
This statement is not theoretical, Ginsburg made it in the context of a
trial of seven of his students for the murder of a Palestinian girl. He also
called Baruch Goldstein's massacare at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron a mitzvah. In a 1996 interview with the Jewish Week,
he said:
"If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non- Jewish life."
Ginsburg is a
prominent orthodox rabbi and his
support was critical in Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996 election victory. Netanyahu has continued to
extol the teachings of hardline rabbis. An organization dedicated to publishing Ginsburg's writings
received state support from Israel.
All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings. The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides' commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision. According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets. The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.
-- Eliyahu advocates carpet bombing Gaza, Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2007
"The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years."
-- Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai, November 17, 2012 quoted in Haaretz
"Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."
-- Israeli Justice Minister Ayalet Shaked, quoting Uri Elitzur, a former advisor to Nejamin Netanyahu Israel’s new justice minister considers all Palestinians to be ‘the enemy’
"Terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them — the only thing that deters them is if they know that their sister or their mother will be raped in the event that they are caught. What can you do, that’s the culture in which we live."
-- Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University as quoted in Haaretz: Israeli Professor's 'Rape as Terror Deterrent' Statement Draws Ire. Dr. Kedar clarified that this is his
"Therefore, in a time of war, the attacked nation is permitted to punish the enemy population with whatever measures it deems proper, like blocking supplies or electricity. It may bomb the entire area based on the judgment of the war minister and not wantonly put soldiers at risk [...] deterrent measures to exterminate the enemy [...] The defense minister may even order the destruction of Gaza so that the south should no longer suffer, and to prevent harm to members of our people who have long been suffering from the enemies surrounding us."
-- Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba as quoted in Right-wing rabbi’s ruling: Israel may totally destroy Gaza if necessary
"Baruch Goldstein is a holier martyr than all the holy martyrs of the Holocaust."
-- Rabbi Dov Lior, after Goldstein had killed 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron, quoted in Haaretz: The Extremist Rabbi Who Reigns Unobstructed
"According to true Jewish values, your lives come before those of the enemy, whether he is a soldier or a civilian under protection. Therefore, you are forbidden from endangering your own life for the sake of the enemy, not even for a civilian,"
-- as quoted in Haaretz: Leading Rabbi Encourages IDF Soldiers to Use Palestinian Human Shields
"Listen, Abu Mazen, you aren’t a people and therefore there’s no genocide. To annihilate you as a rabble is a mitzvah, and it will ultimately be carried out, even though the Israeli government still doesn’t recognize its own guilt for kindling your fraudulent national recognition, starting from [former Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and ending with [Meretz party leader Zahava] Gal-On, and for everything it has contributed to the deception of the entire world and the flourishing of all the monsters that arose because of its weakness and lack of faith. The faster you admit that you aren’t a people and don’t belong anywhere within the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the better it will be for you – the faster you voluntarily vacate this land."
--Professor Hillel Weiss, Bar-Ilan University as quoted in University blasts professor who called for annihilation of Palestinians
"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
-- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin [N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994]
"It is forbidden to be merciful to them [Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."
-- Rabbi Ovadia Yosef [BBC News,]
"all the nasty people who hate Israel, like Abu Mazen (Abbas), vanish from our world"... "May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel."
-- Ovadia Yosef [BBC News, Aug. 30, 2010]
That should be enough.
Sources and Further Reading
Palestinian Voices
- Walid Khalidi:
The Question of Palestine
- Nur Masalha:
Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948
- Rashid Khalidi:
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
- Mourid Barghouti:
I Saw Ramallah
- Ghassan Kanafani:
Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories
- Sari Nussabieh:
Once Upon a Country a deeply personal account of Palestine over the author's existence. Nussabieh comes from a prominent Jerusalemite family and has been part of diplomatic efforts to achieve peace for decades.
-
Institute for Palestine Studies: Beirut based research center focused on the history of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
- Omar Barghouti: One of the founders of the BDS movement, his article
Relative Humanity and the Conflict is a good read.
Israeli Voices
- Benny Morris:
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 - Morris is one of the Israeli "New Historians", who in the 1980s began to re-evaluate the events surrounding and preceding the founding of Israel.
First chapter available at NY Times.
- Shlaim, Avi:
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World - Shlaim is also one of the New Historians. His work focuses more broadly on Israel's relations with the Palestinians and other neighboring Arab states, his earlier works detailed agreements between Israel and the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in 1948.
First chapter available at the NY Times.
- S. Yizhar:
Khirbet Khizeh a novella which relates the events of one day, as a company of Israeli soldiers arrive at a Palestinian village and expell its residents. Is generally considered a fictionalized first person account.
- Hillel Cohen:
Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict - 1929 which makes a
compelling case that the widespread riots of 1929 marked the beginning of the conflict (I haven't read it yet).
- Ari Shavit:
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel - Shavit is a reporter at Haaretz and would be considered center left. This book is a personal memoir which weaves interviews and reportage with the history of Israel.
- Ilan Pappe:
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Pappe is a historian, but this is written in a forceful,
activist style to make the case that the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 followed a pre-meditated plan and meets the definition of ethnic cleansing.
- Miko Peled:
The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine - Peled's 13 year old niece Smadar was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem. This book is a
personal memoir relating his attempts to reconcile this event with the context of the conflict and his decision to become a prominent
activist for a one state solution. Some of his
book tour presentations are on Youtube.
- Yossi Klein Halevi:
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation
- Ari Folman:
Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story
-
Peace Now: an activist movement commited to achieving peace with Palestinians. Considered far-left in Israel.
-
Gush Shalom: an activist movement commited to achieving peace with Palestinians. Considered far-left in Israel.
- Gideon Levy:
The Punishment of Gaza - Levy is a reporter at Haaretz whose work focuses on Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.
- Leon Uris:
Exodus. This is a fictional work, but one which has had an outsized impact on an entire American generation's view of the conflict.
Note that some of the authors above no longer reside in Israel.
Joint Voices
-
+972mag: A blog-based web magazine run in collaboration by Israelis and Palestinians. This is the single most engaging source I would recommend.
- Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Eyal Naveh:
Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine
-
The Great Book Robbery: A documentary covering the systematic looting of libraries from homes abandoned by Jerusalemite Palestinians.
American Voices
- Noam Chomsky:
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians
- Jimmy Carter:
Palestine: Peace not Apartheid
- James L. Gelvin:
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War
- Peter Beinart:
The Crisis of Zionism
- Norman Finkelstein:
The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years - Finkelstein is the provocative author of a number of books that contain aggressive retorts to pro-Israeli authors. This book is an account of time he spent in the occupied territories prior during the first intifada. Some of this later work can be a bit over the top.
-
Electronic Intifada: This is an electronic blog founded by Ali Abunimah, an American with Palestinian ancestry.
Current Events
-
Haaretz: Major Israeli newspaper (leans left) has the best English language coverage of I/P news. Haaretz used to be the largest newspaper in Israel but this has changed as the population has moved rightward and free newspapers have claimed readers.
-
Ma'an News: Palestinian news agency
-
Jerusalem Post: Major Israeli newspaper (centerist)
-
Yedioth Ahronoth: Major Israeli newspaper (center-right)
-
B'Tselem: Israeli Human Rights Organization
-
Yesh Din: Israeli Human Rights Organization focused on the occupied territories and Israel's responsibilities as an occupying power.
-
Breaking the Silence: Israeli Human Rights Organization focused on testimonies from Israelis serving in the armed forces. Have done extensive reports on the
occupation and IDF incursions into Gaza during
2009 (Cast Lead) and
2014 (Protective Edge).
- UN OCHA: The UN agency publishes regular reports on humanitarian disasters across the world and reports on issues impacting
Palestine.
-
Zochrot: An Israeli human rights organization which publishes the interactive map to razed Palestinian villages, the
iNakba App
As a final note on sources, you SHOULD NOT use Mondoweiss on DKos, explanation is here.
PS. Please feel free to point me to other threads, correct information/facts or otherwise comment on this diary, I'd love to expand and improve on it. Some the pro-Israeli voices on DKos have informed my views in significant ways and I always welcome their participation.
PPS. Please don't ask me to split up this diary further. I am fully aware of its length, it's in two parts because I hit the DKos word limit. It is meant to serve as a reference.
PPPS. This diary is on DKos for a reason. I have found no other venue on-line that allows one to have a reasoned (yet passionate) discussion of this issue.
This diary is a continuation, the first is at: Palestine/Israel: From the UN "vote" on partition to "Apartheid" today.