Atelier No.10, article 12
 
 

Noam Chomsky :
© FATEFUL TRIANGLE, THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, & THE PALESTINIANS (South End Press, Updated Edition, 1999), by Noam Chomsky, pages 123-143, including footnotes 93-145.

 

 

 

Excerpt for Chapter 4 : Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds

 

5. The Ways of the Conqueror

 

5.1    The West Bank

The religious settlers in the West Bank, operating freely with army support, take pride in creating a pogrom-like atmosphere among the Arabs, who must be trained not to ''raise their heads,'' this being the only way to treat Arabs, who "adore power" and will live in peace with the Jews only when "we show him that we are strong." How? "We enter a village, shoot a bit at windows, warn the villagers and return to the settlement. We don't kidnap people, but it can happen that we catch a boy who had been throwing stones, take him back with us, beat him a bit and give him over to the Army to finish the job." The same West Bank settler also explains how official investigators act to protect Jews who shoot to hit and to kill (including firing at children). This particular interview ended because the settler-a friend of the journalist-"was in a hurry to get back home before the Sabbath."93

 

The settlers are quite open about the measures they take towards Arabs and the justification for them, which they find in the religious law and the writings of the sages. In the journal of the religious West Bank settlers we find, for example, an article with the heading "Those among us who call for a humanistic attitude towards our (Arab] neighbors are reading the Halacha [religious law] selectively and are avoiding specific commandments." The scholarly author cites passages from the Talmud explaining that God is sorry that he created the Ishmaelites, and that Gentiles are "a people like a donkey." The law concerning "conquered" peoples is explicit, he argues, quoting Maimonides on how they must "serve" their Jewish conquerors and be "degraded and low" and "must not raise their heads in Israel but must be conquered beneath their hand

…with complete submission." Only then may the conquerors treat them in a "humane manner." "There is no relation," he claims, "between the law of Israel [Torat Yisrael and the atheistic modern humanism," citing again Maimonides, who holds "that in a divinely-commanded war [milhemet mitzvah] one must destroy, kill and eliminate men, women and children" (the rabbinate has defined the Lebanon war as such a war). "The eternal principles do not change," and "there is no place for any 'humanistic' considerations."94 We return to a further examination of this pheno­menon, which has its counterparts throughout the Middle East region.

 

A recent device for protecting settlers who attack Arabs is to transfer all investigation of the illegal use of arms by settlers from police to the military. Settlers simply refuse to cooperate with police, who do not "dare question or arrest Jewish suspects," even one "seen on television shooting directly into a crowd of demonstrating Arabs while soldiers stood behind him and were holding their fire" (the head of the district council of a Jewish settlement near Ramallah, in this case).95

 

When Palestinians are beaten or detained by settlers, Arab police­men are afraid to intervene. "Palestinian lawyers say; the settlements are so formidable that the Arab police and courts never dare to serve a Summons or make a search, leaving settlers beyond the law when it comes to conflicts with Arabs." The general character of the occupation is indicated by an incident in an Arab village in March 1982. Four settlers claimed that a stone was thrown at their car in this village. They fired "into the air," shooting one boy in the arm. Another boy was kidnapped, beaten, locked in the trunk of the car, taken to a Jewish settlement and locked in a room where he was beaten "on and off during most of the day," then taken to the military government compound in Ramallah, where the boy was held while the settlers went on their way.96 A standard bit of black humor in the occupied territories is that Arabs should stop flying and begin walking on the ground so they won't be shot so often when settlers fire into the air.97

 

Children and teen-agers are often the main victims, since they are generally the ones involved in protests and demonstrations. Danny Tsid­koni reports from Gaza that informants in an Arab village told him that several very young children threw stones at a car driven by armed settlers,

who broke the leg of one boy and the hand of one girl in "retaliation."98 A soldier reports that 30 12-13 year-old children were lined up facing a wall with their hands up for five hours in Hebron one very cold night, kicked if they moved. He justified the punishment because they are not "all inno­cent lambs as they look now, with their hands up and their eyes asking pity... They burn and they throw stones and participate in demonstra­tions, and they are not less harmful than their parents." Afterwards, the children were taken to prison at an Army camp. Parents began to arrive to find out what had happened to their children, including one old man "with the dignity of a Christian saint." He did not ask to see his son, but only wanted to know whether he was there and to bring him a coat. "The guard at the gate simply looked him up and down, and cursing him, ordered him to leave." The old man stood all night waiting, in the freezing cold. In another case, a settler suspected of murdering an Arab boy "already had a criminal record for breaking the arm of an eleven-year-old boy who allegedly had thrown a stone at an Israeli vehicle."99

 

The aged are also not spared. "For five days an elderly Arab woman has lain unconscious in a Jerusalem hospital after being brutally beaten in the small flat in which she lives with her husband in the Muslim quarter of the Old City." She was attacked by religious Jews from a nearby Yeshiva (religious school) while her 85-year-old husband was praying in the Al Aqsa mosque. He heard that Jewish settlers had killed his wife, rushed home, but could not enter his apartment because, he said, "the Jews were on the roof of our building hurling bricks and bottles." An Arab youth who tried to save the woman was also brutally beaten, and lies next door in the hospital. He "identifies his attackers as the Jewish zealots from the Yeshiva." They "scarcely bothered to deny the attack." When questioned about it, "an American zealot blandly talked of the need to cleanse the area of 'terrorists'." The group "is known to to the police as 'the blessing of    1:191 Abraham,' a Yeshiva comprised mostly of European and American-born Jews who have returned to their faith with a burning desire to reclaim land lost to the Arabs." Several years ago they established the Yeshiva in an old Arab area; eighteen Arab families had since moved out, and this couple was the only one remaining as the ''Jewish zealots'' sought ''to 'redeem' property that had once been inhabited by Jews as long ago as the 16th century." The couple had rejected cash offers which were followed by threats of violence; "there is no doubt that those threats were carried out this week." The police arrested a few of the Jewish extremists but they are to be charged only with "riotous behavior." "The assault on Mrs Mayalleh and the fact that she and her husband are now homeless seemed to be accepted as afait accompli by the police," which is typical of the "indul­gent attitude by authorities." "The vicious attack scarcely rated a mention in the local press."100

 

One not untypical issue of a Palestinian weekly contains two stories on the front page. The first deals with the week-long curfew imposed on the Dheisheh refugee camp after an Israeli observation post was burned and stones were thrown at an Israeli vehicle. It reports that inhabitants lacked food and that Israeli authorities raided houses, confiscating large numbers of books, magazines and tapes with national songs, while the men were forced to stand outside the police station during the cold nights. Soldiers searched the house of a man who had died two months earlier and "burned his private library and the school books of his children." The second story cites Ha'aretz (Zvi Barel, Oct.31): "Two Arab youths were injured by an Israeli time bomb in the stands of Hebron's Hussein School football field... The explosion occurred minutes before the beginning of the game... The Israeli army which searched the area discovered another Lime bomb. "101 There are no curfews or collective punishment (standard practice for Arab communities) in the neighboring Jewish settlement, which has often been the source of violence and racist gangsterism. One wonders whether there was even an investigation. Other stories are still more grim, for example, the allegation by a Rakah (Communist Party) Knesset Member that there was "confirmed information" of the disap­pearance, torture and murder of convicts in various prisons,102 or the detailed testimony of prisoners concerning torture under interrogation,(*) sometimes with the cooperation of medical personnel, for many years.103

 

___________

(*) This testimony comes primarily from Arab prisoners. MK Shulamit Aloni, one of irael's leading civil libertarians, reported that Jewish prisoners in military prisons allege lat condition', are so severe that some were driven insane. M K Charley Biton, a Sephardi, added that 90% of those in military prisons are from the Oriental Jewish community. Davar, Jan. 24, 1983.

 

 

The extensive reports of torture by Arab prisoners have generally been dismissed in the U.S., just as little notice is taken of reports of Palestinian refugees, or in general, of the travail and concerns of the Palestinians. Reports by prisoners or refugees of course have to be care­fully evaluated; in particular, the conditions of transmission must be carefully considered, as well as the fact that they may have a stake in exaggerating or falsifying, or in suppressing the truth out of fear of their interrogators or guards. But surely such reports should be taken seriously. These remarks are truisms, characteristically disregarded in two cases: where refugees or prisoners have a tale to tell that is useful for ideological or propaganda purposes (e.g., atrocity reports about some enemy), in which case all caution is thrown to the winds; or where their stories reflect Badly on some revered state, in which case they are disregarded.104

 

In the case of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, particular care has been taken to ensure that little is known here, though it has become more difficult over the years to meet this requirement. One interesting example was the unusually careful study conducted by the London Sunday Times

Insight team which, after a lengthy investigation, found evidence of torture so widespread and systematic that "it appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy," perhaps "to persuade Arabs in occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively."105 The study was offered to the New York Times and Washington Post but rejected for publication and barely reported. A study by the Swiss League for the Rights of Man (June 1977), presenting similar material, received no notice here. The same is true of the reports of torture by Israeli journalists.'105 Various Israeli rebuttals were published though not, to my knowledge, the devastating Sunday Times response.

 

More interesting than the attempt at rebuttal, however, was the conclusion that torture of Arabs by Israelis is legitimate, a position expressed, perhaps not surprisingly, in the New Republic, the semi-official journal of American liberalism, where Seth Kaplan concludes that the question of how a government should treat people under its control "is not susceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture. One may have to use extreme measures-call them 'torture'-to deal with a terrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life."106 To my knowledge, this is the first explicit defense of torture to have appeared in the West(*) apart from the ravings of the ultra-right in France during the Algerian war.

 

 

__________________

(*) See also Michael Levin, "The Case for Torture," Newsweek. June 7,1982. A professor of philosophy at City College of New York, Levin plays a game familiar from every Phil. I course, constructing an outlandish case where torture might be "morally mandatory" (a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, etc.), then noting that "once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them"; finally. he advocates torture "as an acceptable measure for preventing future evils," rejecting talk about "terrorists' 'rights'," assuring us that Western democracies will not "lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as one way of preserving order," etc. This should be understood in the context of the hysteria being whipped up at the time concerning "international terrorism," defined so as to include "retail terrorism" conducted by enemies but not "wholesale (or retail) terrorism" conducted by friends (or by us). On this matter, see Herman. The Real Terror Network.

 

 

No less interesting was the response of the Israeli judiciary. Amnesty International raised the question whether the remarkably high level of confessions of Arab prisoners might suggest inhumane treatment. To this, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni responded that "the Arabs in any case -if they are arrested- do not take much time before they confess. It's part of their nature” -a comment that we may place along-side of Martin Peretz's "Arabs exaggerate" and others of the same ilk concerning Jews and other oppressed peoples over the years. It is perhaps of some interest to note that the genetic defect of Arabs noted by Justice Etzioni appears to be somehow contagious, since by now Jewish prisoners are confessing to crimes that they did not commit after police interroga­tion, including cases of interrogation by police investigators previously identified by Arabs as torturers. 107

 

Amnesty International, incidentally, is not very popular in Israel, at least since it published a rather mild and understated report on treatment of suspects and prisoners in 1979. An editorial in Ha'aretz, entitled "Amnesty is at it again," commented that the organization had "turned itself into a tool of Arab propaganda by publishing the document," criticizing among other things its reliance on the "distorted and malicious report" in the London Sunday Times. The left-wing Mapam journal took a different tack. An editorial observed that "Experience tells us that it is extremely difficult to effectively defend oneself against terrorists or even ordinary criminals without bringing great pressure to bear on the sus­pects, in order to eventually bring them to trial at all," and recommended that "constant vigilance" be exercised to determine that there are no "excesses" in the use of the required "great pressure."108

 

Quite apart from alleged torture under interrogation, the conditions of Arab political prisoners are horrifying, not a great surprise, perhaps, when we consider the scale of arrests in the occupied territories: some 200,000 security prisoners and detainees have passed through Israeli jails, almost 20% of the population, which has led to "horrendous overcrowd­ing" and "appalling human suffering and corruption."109

 

The occasional trials of military offenders sometimes shed light on practices in the occupied territories. A number of reserve officers con­nected with the Peace Now movement threatened to make charges against soldiers public unless there was an investigation, leading to a trial that "brought forth evidence of methodically brutal treatment of the local townspeople last spring" (1982), at the peak of the atrocities carried out under the Milson-Sharon administration. Reuters reports that at the trial, Maj. David Mofaz, the deputy military governor of Hebron at the time of the alleged atrocities, testified that "Israeli soldiers were given orders to harass and beat up Palestinian residents" and that they "viciously struck and kicked defenseless young Arab prisoners." He testified that "he personally was ordered to beat up Arabs by the West Bank military commander," but he knew that "the orders came from higher up, from the chief of staff" He said that "the army had orders to harass the West Bank population in general, not just those involved in anti-Israeli demonstra­tions," giving examples. An Israeli captain testified that he had personally beaten Palestinian detainees and that "Israeli soldiers routinely beat up Palestinian detainees on the occupied West Bank with the knowledge of senior officers." 110

 

On the same day, another brief report in the same American journal describes how Turkish women, "suspected leftists," are placed in coffin-like boxes "in an attempt to extract information during questioning," One minor example of a systematic pattern of torture and repression that also evokes little interest here, though perhaps the same report from another military dictatorship (say in Poland), might have elicited some comment.

 

According to the Jerusalem Post, "a military court has allegedly heard evidence that Defence Minister Ariel Sharon urged Israeli soldiers to beat Arab schoolchildren in the West Bank," referring to the same trial of soldiers "accused of brutally mistreating Arab youths in Hebron last March," a trial that "has attracted almost no publicity in Israel"-though it did shortly after. The source is a major in the reserves who told the court that the military governor had quoted Sharon to this effect. At the trial, soldiers reportedly told the court that they had beaten Arab high school students while the major stood by and watched, hitting them as hard as they could. One said: "Afterwards, I left the shed where this was happen­ing because I couldn't stand beating up people who couldn't fight back."

 

The Hebrew press reports the testimony of the vice-commander of the Judea region, who reports that in a meeting with Civilian Administra­tor Menachem Milson, General Sharon gave instructions as to how to deal with demonstrators: "Cut off their testicles." The Chief of Staff went a step further, telling soldiers on the northern front that "the only good Arab is a dead Arab," as reported by Abraham Burg, son of the Minister of Interior. The vice-commander reports also that his superior officer General Hartabi led troops into a Hebron school where they beat the students with clubs. In another incident, Hartabi imposed a curfew on the Dheisha camp after a stone was thrown at his car and ordered his troops to fire in the streets and at the rooftop solar water tanks, destroying the hot water supply and also making a terrifying racket. Another curfew was imposed on the Dhahriyeh camp south of Hebron on January 30 after youths stoned Israeli vehicles passing through the town. An Israeli woman was injured, and later died. A report in the U.S. press three weeks later notes that the curfew is still in effect, because "it is necessary for the investigation," an Israeli military source said, adding: "It prevents people from working and causes financial losses. But it also gives them an Incentive to help us find the people who carried out the attack. The sooner we find them, the sooner all this will be over." Meanwhile the people are allowed out of their homes only two hours a day, schools are closed, and there is no employment. The treatment is somewhat different when Israeli West Bank terrorists go on a rampage. A minor fact, not noted in the press accounts, is that two weeks before the demonstrators unaccountably began to stone passing Israeli vehicles, 20,000 dunams of land used for orchards and grain were expropriated by Israeli military authorities."'

 

The trial of the soldiers did receive publicity later on, particularly when the defense established its claim that the orders to brutalize prison­ers and impose collective punishments came directly from Chief of Staff Eitan. He was called to testify before the military court and confirmed that he had ordered such punishments as expulsion, harassment of inci­ters, the establishment of detention or exile camps "even without regular prison conditions" (which are grim enough), and a wide variety of collec­tive punishments against towns where there had been resistance to the conquerors (primarily, stone throwing) and against families of pupils who "caused disturbances" (this device "works well with Arabs," he testified). The Chief of Staff opposed calling leaders in for warnings. "We demean ourselves," he said: "Instead of conversations, we should carry out arrests." He also said that Jewish settlers must travel armed and feel free to open fire when attacked, say, by children throwing stones. The military court sentenced four soldiers to several months imprisonment,(*) but ruled that Eitan's orders were legal.

 

___________________

(*) For comparison, "An Israeli military court sentenced seven West Bank Arab teenagers to jail terms ranging from six to nine months and fined them 1650 each yesterday for stoning an Israel'. police chief in his car in the occupied territory" (Washington Post-Boston Globe, March 18.1983). Later, Chief of Staff Eitan expressed his views on proper punish­ment again, this time to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense and Committee. For every incident of stone-throwing by Arab youths, he said, ten settlements should be built: "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle." Defense Minister Moshe Arens was asked by opposition Knesset members to reprimand Eitan for this remark, but declined because Eitan "has great achievements to his credit" during his tenure as Chief of Staff-in fact, two great achievements, intensification of the repression in the conquered territories and destruction of the virtually defenseless Palestinian society in Lebanon. Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983; David K. Shipler, New York Times, April 14, 20, 1983.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Writing identification numbers on the arms of prisoners is a practice that many have naturally found particularly shocking. It is apparently common, and the circumstances just described are not unique. Peace Now military officers describing the daily "brutality and violence" of the IDF and the settlers in the territories, the "repression, humiliation, maltreat­ment and collective punishment," report that soldiers regularly write the numbers of Arab IDs on the wrists of Arab prisoners, and one recalls a particularly "appalling incident" of this sort that he witnessed-again, on the Day of the Holocaust. Another describes an incident in which a group of fresh recruits were issued clubs and told: "Boys, off you go to assault the locals." He describes the treatment of Arab prisoners, who are required to clean the soldiers' rooms, mess halls and latrines. "At night, they are put into a small room and beaten up" so badly that "many of them cannot even stand up" -"youngsters, . . most of whom have not been tried, people who will be released due to lack of evidence." Aharon Geva writes in Davar that "Some of us Israelis behave like the worst kind of anti-Semites, whose name cannot be mentioned here, like the very people who painted a picture of the Jew as a sub-human creature..."115 In fact, what has been happening in the occupied territories for many years is all too familiar from Jewish history.

 

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

 

 

5.2    The Golan Heights

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

5.3    The Attack on Palestinian Culture

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

 

More recently, much of the foreign faculty has been expelled for refusing to sign a statement that they will not offer support for the PLO (as does the overwhelming majority of the West Bank population), elicit­ing a protest from the State Department.124 Secretary of State George Shultz condemned the Israeli loyalty oath as "an abridgment of academic freedom" and as "totally unnecessary" for Israel's security, a clear infringement "of freedom, freedom of thought," and called upon "people in the intellectual community particularly... to speak up" in protest. That American intellectuals should suddenly become exercised over violation' of academic freedom under Israeli occupation seems unlikely, given their dismal record of "support for Israel." There was, however, a statement of protest by two hundred Israeli academics, organized before the Shultz statement.'125 The expulsion of foreign faculty (by November, 22 had beet' expelled, including the President of al-Najah University in Nablus, and many more had been banned from teaching and were facing expulsion) is particularly harmful, since "many talented West Bankers educated abroad are unable to get Israeli work permits." 126

 

One aspect of the problem, noted by David Richardson, is illustrate126 by the case of Mohammad Shad id, an American-trained political scientist at al-Najah University, one of those banned from teaching and facing expulsion. He lost the right to return to the West Bank, where he was born, because he happened to be out of the country studying when a census was taken in 1967; requests by his family to allow him to return under a "family reunion scheme" were simply ignored, and he is now an American citizen. Richardson observes that what the civil administration is trying to do is to suppress the local intelligentsia, and to "make political use" of the signed statements as part of the effort to undermine support for the PLO in the occupied territories. Furthermore, a degree for a West Bank student is a "passport to emigration," since "most of the young graduates cannot hope to find employment in their own society"-as Israel is reconstructing it.127 In fact, Israeli policy in the occupied territo­ries has clearly been designed to remove elite groups, either by direct expulsion ("moderates" have been a particular target) or by eliminating the possibility of meaningful employment, in the hope that no nationalist or cultural leadership will remain.128 After Shulti's protests, the anti-PLO pledge was technically "withdrawn," in fact transferred in virtually the same terms to the general work permit.129

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The former acting president of al-Najab University, W. F. Abboushi (a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati), faced continual harassment, he reports, alleging that his protest over similar practices on an earlier occasion at Bir Zeit University had led to beating by Israeli soldiers. From his experience. he believes that "it is impossible to run a Palestinian university under Israeli occupation" and that "generally, life in the West Bank has become almost unbearable, particularly for the students who are constantly subjected to harassment, including arbitrary search and arrest, imprisonment, beating, and sometimes even severe physical abuse." The worst has been since the takeover of the "civil administration" by Professor Menachem Milson, the "Mideast maverick" praised here for his advocacy of a Palestinian role in the affairs of the West flank (see p.58). Abboushi says that "perhaps over one-third of our student body had been in Israeli jails," where they were "routinely beaten." Like much of the faculty and administration, most of the so-called "foreign students" at al-Najah were in fact Palestinian Arabs who had lost their right of residence because they were out of the area when the 1967 census was taken. The situation worsened after the invasion of Lebanon. when Israeli soldiers "attacked the university using real bullets" to disperse a demonstration protesting the invasion.132

 

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

 

The treatment of the editors of the Jerusalem journal Al Fajr illus­trates what Arab intellectuals may expect if they "raise their heads," in the terminology of the West Bank settlers-if they try to act with a measure of intellectual independence.(*) One was picked up by the police and kept in

solitary confinement for 17 days. He was made to stand for 24 hours with a bag over his head and his arms bound, until he fainted. He was then charged with possessing two copies of a PLO journal. A second has been prevented for a year from visiting the occupied territories, where his family and friends live and where his professional responsibilities are focused. A third was kept in jail for a week for failure to change the license on a new car. A fourth was confined for two and a half years in Ramallab. The journal is subjected to heavy censorship, often not permitted to republish materiM from the Hebrew or more conformist Arabic press. It is even prevented from publishing factual information about such matters as the opening of a school that had been closed, or events in the occupied territories. Journalists from Al Fajr are continually taken for interroga­tion, degraded, threatened, arrested. "lf things like this happened to your journalists," one editor said to an Israeli reporter, "all the world would respond with great anger. You shout about the suppression of intellectu­als in the USSR, but you close your eyes to what is happening to the intellectuals in the West Bank, right under your noses."134

 

 

______________

(*) For an account of harassment and arbitrary arrest, detention and alleged beatings of journalists from Al Fqjr, harassment of other Arab journals, and the forms taken by Israeli censorship. See Robert I. Friedman, "No Peace for West Bank Press  CPJ Update, Committee to Protect Journalists, January 1983 Israeli officials defend the censorship on the grounds that "It's no secret that Palestinians in general and the Arab press support the PLO" (it is kept a secret in some circles in the U S where the fact is constantly denied e.g., in the New Republic; see p.63), and Israel is “in a state of war with the PLO.”  Israeli journalists who have investigated the censorship allege however that it is politically motivated, and often entirely arbitrary (e. g., love poems have been censored though they had no reference to the national question) Words are censored that Israeli officials find objectionable. e.g., the word "sumud," referring to the steadfastness of the samid who chooses the "third way," neither resistance nor capitulation; see below, section 6.

 

 

Michal Meron, who reports these facts, writes that Al Fajr  "is not an example of what it is possible to call free journalism." The reason is that those who participate in the journal "see in their task a national mission, and their pen is ready to serve only the Palestinian interest." The editors, in fact, are outspoken about their political commitments. One states to Meron that "we see in the PLO our sole representative and therefore we support its point of view. We are in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside of the State of Israel." Perhaps some might see in this a justification for the constant harassment of a journal that does not really merit the appellation "free press." One might ask how such a stand differs in principle from that of Soviet authorities with regard to Zionist publications within the USSR. Or we might ask just what 0ne should expect of honest journalists working under military occupation and living in what they-and virtually the entire world, including the U.S. government-regard as occupied East Jerusalem.

 

Other questions arise as well. While Meron was disparaging Al Fajr because of its commitment to "the Palestinian interest," the Jerusalem Post, highly regarded within Israel and elsewhere, was celebrating its Jubilee. Editor Erwin Frenkel published an article in the Jubilee issuejust a week before Meron's article on Al Fair appeared, in which he explained that the goal of the paper today is "the same as it was from the start" 50 years ago: "the fulfillment of Zionism." Its predecessor, the Palestine Post, was founded under the British Mandate "for a purpose that was political'; and under conditions far less onerous than those faced by the Arabs under Israeli occupation, it maintained this purpose, even after the state was founded. The journal also exercised self-censorship. Readers of the Israeli press can hardly fail to notice that the English-language Post is more cautious in what it publishes than is the Hebrew press. The reasons are obvious, and editor Frenkel states them clearly: "Both within the news­paper and without, it was generally presumed that Hebrew was a private language of the Jews, in which they addressed only each other... English, on the other hand, was public. It enabled access from the outside, the Gentile world, the Arab foe. In short, what could be written in Hebrew could not necessarily be exposed in English." Frenkel claims that this posture was modified in the 1960s, that "the old constraints of English" were abandoned and "English would no longer inhibit expression."135 I do not believe that this is true, judging by my own limited exposure to the Hebrew and English-language press, and I would guess that a systematic investigation would support this conclusion. But even if the earlier con­straints were dropped, the journal by its own admission remains subject to the critique that Meron applies to Al Fajr, and surely did even more so before the alleged abandonment of "the old constraints," without the justification that it is attempting to survive with extremely limited resour­ces under a harsh military regime where it attempts to express the aspira­tions of a conquered and oppressed people.

 

A few days earlier, the Congress of Jewish Journalists from the Diaspora opened, with 60 journalists from 14 countries. The deputy chairman of the Zionist Congress in Israel, Yitzhak Koren, informed the gathering "that anti-Semites today blamed every Jew, wherever he might live, for Israel's actions, and that it was therefore extremely impor­tant for the Jewish press to show Israeli policies in a positive light."136

 

The constant and sometimes almost fanatic harassment of West Bank intellectuals and educational institutions, along with the general fear of permitting independent cultural expression, suggests that Israel's leaders may be recalling some lessons from their own history, to which they frequently appeal. Every Israeli schoolchild knows the story of Rabbi Jochanan Ben Zakkai, who foresaw the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD when Jerusalem was under Roman siege. He opposed the final resistance and sought a way to save his people from destruction by an appeal to the Roman commander. Not being permitted to leave Jerusalem by its defenders, he had his disciples pretend that he was dead and carry him out in a coffin for burial. He reached the Roman camp and was granted his request to open a school in the small town of Yavneh. The famous Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz relates that the Roman com­mander "had nothing to urge against the harmless wish of Jochanan, for he could not foresee that by this unimportant concession he was enabling Judaism, feeble as it then appeared, to outlive Rome, which was in all its vigor, by thousands of years."137 Most of the scholars of the next genera­tion were his pupils. According to the tradition, he consoled them for the destruction of the Temple with a quote from the Prophet Hosea: "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice." Both the appeal to the prophetic tradition and the significance of maintaining a school to keep the culture alive may well have a certain resonance today.

 

Israeli Arab citizens are, incidentally, also frequently denied the right of cultural expression. To cite one recent example, the High Court of Justice upheld the government's refusal to permit Najwa Makhoul, a lecturer at the Hebrew University with a Ph.D. degree from MIT, to publish an Arabic political-literary journal, citing undisclosed "security reasons." "The security of the state has silenced yet another Arab," B. Michael observes, adding that Israeli intellectuals, professors, writers and poets have nothing to say. The journal was "envisioned as a forum for serious analyses of Palestinian-Israeli society, as well as more general articles written [in] a Third World context. . [with] a scientific, Marxist and feminist perspective." It would have been the only publication based in the Galilee, where most Israeli Arabs live, and not connected with a political party, and would have provided jobs for Arab university gradu­ates, no small problem in Israel.'38 This scandal was not reported in the U.S. to my knowledge, and at the time of writing has evoked no protest, though the facts have been known for many months to individuals and organizations devoted to intellectual freedom throughout the world. The "security reasons" are no doubt comparable to those used by other states to prevent groups that are "marginal to the nation" (in Michael Walzer's phrase) from having an independent cultural and political life.

 

As for the lack of interest here, that should be no more surprising than the fact that there is no protest when the well-known Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, invited to take part in a UNICEF poetry reading, is denied a visa under a section of immigration law that allows the State Department to bar people for certain ideological reasons"-as the State Department confirmed. If an Israeli poet were denied entry to the United States for "ideological reasons"-assuming this to be possible-there would be no limits to the outrage and indignation, the charges of a return of Nazism, etc. In this case, there is no response at all. Similarly, when Israeli censors banned the play "The Patriot" by the Hebrew writer Hanoch Levin, there was considerable protest in Israel, widely reported here as further proof of the deep commitment to democratic principles in Israel. A few months before, the police banned a play by a Druze writer, Salman Natour, describing the life and opinions of a young Israeli Arab, and arrested the director. There was virtually no protest in Israel, and nothing was reported here. The same was true in early 1983 when an Arab from Nazareth was arrested "for publishing a newspaper without permission"-four information leaflets. He appealed to the responsible Israeli government authority in the Galilee, Israel Koenig, but his petition was rejected.139 Examples are numerous; the silence here is unbroken.

 

 

 

5.4    "The Opportunity to Work in Israel"

 

As one might expect, the experiences of those who enjoy "the oppor­tunity given to them to work in Israel" (Sasson Levi; see p. 114) are also not entirely delightful. One problem that they face is that they are not permitted to spend the night within Israel. Since employers do not want to pay the costs of shipping workers back and forth, some have adopted the idea of locking them into factories at night, a practice that became public knowledge when several were found burned to death in a locked room after a fire in a small Tel Aviv factory. Others have been kept under armed guard behind barbed wire in factory detention camps, including one owned by Histadrut, the socialist trade union. These practices aroused some protest in Israel where, for example, Natan Dunvitz wrote in Ha­'aretz that "it is unacceptable to treat Arab workers as Black slaves were treated in American cotton fields." There was no mention here, to my knowledge, apart from a letter of mine,140 and the facts were not consi­dered worthy of notice by those who were celebrating Israel's advance towards democratic socialism. One might ask, incidentally, what the reaction would be if it were learned that Jewish workers were burned to death in a locked room in a Moscow factory or kept in factory detention camps because they are not permitted to spend the night in Russian areas. Praise for Russia's march toward democratic socialism and its high moral purpose, perhaps?

 

The same regulation leads to other problems. Two moshavim (semi-collective settlements) were recently condemned by the Moshav move­ment for arranging "decent housing" for seasonal agricultural workers, instead of bringing them from their homes in the Gaza Strip 200 km away every morning and returning them there in the evening, as required by law. Their work day thus ran from 3AM to 8PM, and they were found to be tired, strangely. The phrase "decent housing" appears in the English-language press account. The Hebrew press tells a different story, with pictures to illustrate: the "decent housing" consisted of barns, store­houses, abandoned buildings where they are crammed into rooms, old buses; the headline in Haolam Haze reads: "Too far away for any eye to see, hidden in the orchards, there are the sheep pens for the servants, of a sort that even a state like South Africa would be ashamed ofl" Amos Radar, Secretary General of the Moshav movement, strongly opposes providing housing for the workers, which is in any event illegal. If they are given housing, he says, "after a short while the workers from the territories will bring their families and house them in camps. That would be Arab settlement on land of the Jewish National Fund. That cannot be." Jour­nalist Aryeh Rubinstein adds sarcastically: "his children will help with the picking and his wife will clean the 'master's' house." Radar is asked whether he agrees to the use of Arab labor, "but only on condition that they will live in subhuman conditions, degraded, and not under human conditions, more or less." "Correct," he answers, conceding that "really, there is a difficult question here," "There is no choice but to employ Arabs," he says. They must be brought from Gaza in the morning and returned there in the evening. "It is hard, it is costly, it is problematic from an economic standpoint-but there is no other solution, if Jews in the State of Israel are unable to pick the oranges and grapes."

 

Another officer of the Moshav movement concedes that hired labor troubles him; "But I am troubled far more by the fact that we, with our own hands, are establishing settlements for Arabs within the Green Line [the pre-June 1967 borders]." As for the problem of bringing in workers from such a distance, he asks: "What are 200 kilometers in comparison with the loss of the justice of our struggle for the land?"-especially when others are doing the traveling, with a work day from 3AM to 8PM. But the problem will apparently soon be resolved, since the Border Guards have been ordered to evacuate the Arab workers from the camps set up for them.'41 Further steps towards "the democratic socialist hope."

 

This only skims the surface. There is also, for example, the issue of child labor, of children aged six or seven trucked in by labor contractors at 4 AM to work on private or collective farms for "a meager subsistence wage," though "often they are cheated on that." Again, the matter has not been discussed in the United States, to my knowledge. And there is the matter of Arab trade unions, long a target of repression, again with little notice here from democratic socialist supporters of Israel, American union leaders who tell us how much they "love" Israel (see p. 13*), or others. To cite only one recent case, the club of the Ramallah trade union was closed by orders of the military governor in December 1982, all written materials were seized, and its secretary, Bassem Barguti, was arrested, held for a month and then sentenced to two months in prison on charges of possessing forbidden material of political significance, includ­ing, according to the charges, some that was literally "obscene" (a publica­tion that included the colors of the PLO flag) and some that was defama­tory of the Israeli army (a calendar with a demand for release of prisoners in the Ansar concentration camp in Lebanon). 142

 

 

5.5    Israeli Inquiries and American Suppression

 

Coverage of events in the occupied territories is far more comprehen sive in Israel than in the U.S., but it too is impeded, in part by censorship, in part by "internal censorship." See p. 12. TV journalists (including Rafik Halabi; see note 48) complain that they are kept away from 90% of the serious demonstrations in the territories and that they are not permitted to film much of what is happening, including soldiers firing at demonstra­tors, etc.143 "Only a small part of the actions of the settlers, in or out of uniform, reaches the Israeli press," Amnon Kapeliouk reports: "facts about harassment and maltreatment of Palestinians are not published,” sometimes, because editors feel that they are "too hard to bear," as one decided when "settlers caught an old man who had protested when his lands were taken and shaved off his beard -just what Polish anti-Semites did to Jews."144

 

A great deal of information about human rights violations, particu­larly in the occupied territories, has been made available by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. Its Chairman from 1970, Dr. Israel Shahak, has compiled a personal record of courage and commitment to human rights that few people anywhere can equal, and has been untiring in exposing the facts about the occupation and circulating information, much of it from the Hebrew press, where several outstanding journalists (frequently cited above) have attempted to provide an honest record-sometimes, some say, using material provided by Arab journalists who hope to be able to reprint the stories from the Hebrew press. The work of the League is little known here, in part, because human rights organiza­tions prefer not to know the facts. The League had been an affiliate of the New York-based International League for Human Rights, but was sus­pended in 1973 on the interesting grounds that the governing Labor Party had attempted to take over and destroy the League by methods so crude that they were quickly blocked by the Israeli Courts; on similar grounds, it would be proper for Amnesty International to suspend a Moscow chapter attacked by the government. One professed civil libertarian, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School (who had already distinguished himself by defending preventive detention in Israel and denouncing political prisoners in jail(*) -a particularly despicable practice, as would be at once recognized in any other context)- attempted to cover ~p the disgraceful Labor government takeover attempt with gross misre­presentation of the facts and slanderous accusations directed against Shahak, who has, in fact, been bitterly attacked by American Zionists who are horrified at his belief that Palestinians are human; see his entry in the Anti-Defamation League "enemies list," for example.145 Again, these facts fall under the ideological aspect of the "special relationship," as discussed earlier.

 

__________________

(*) The particular target of Dershowiti's slanders was the Israeli Arab writer Fouzi el­As mar, held for 15 months without charges under administrative detention. On the basis of information provided to him by the Israeli secret police, Dershowitz arrived at the "per­sonal conviction" that he was a terrorist "commander," as he proceeds to assert without qualification, so that the detention was legitimate. There is, by now, little pretense in Israel or elsewhere that there was any substance to these charges, but it is interesting that in the U.S. it is not considered that Dershowitz's stand represents any departure from civil … standards. The attitude within the American Communist Party to Soviet judicial proceedings is similar. See Alan Dershowitz, "Civil liberties in Israel," in Howe and Gershman, eds., Israel, the Arabs & the Middle East. and the responses in Commentary, July 1971, to the original article. See also note 107.

 

 

 

Footnotes

 

92. See Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War [henceforth, TNCW, Pantheon Press , New York,

         1982], pp. 287f., for some examples.

 

93. Zvi Bard, "Talking to a settler," Ha'aretz, April20, 1982. On the settlers, see TNCW, p.279.

 

94. Yedidia Segal, Nekudah, Sept. 3, 1982.

 

95. Amnon Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, April 5, 1982; Ha'aretz, April 4, Rubinstein, Davar, April 9,

         1982, who observes that with the civilian authorities removed, the settlers "can act as

         they wish in giving many examples.

 

96. David Shipler, New York Times, March 22, 211982.

 

97. Bard, "Talking to a settler."

 

98. Danny Tsidkoni, Davar, May 18, 1982.

 

99. Michal Meron, Yediot Ahronot, March 29, 1982; Amnon Hamishmar, March 26, 1982.

 

100. James McManus, Guardian (London), April 7, 1983.

 

101. The Dawn (Al Fajr), Nov. 5, 1982.

 

102. MK Tawfiq Toubi, reported in The Dawn, Dec. 3, 1982.

 

103. For one recent example, seethe report by Felicia Langer, the lawyer who defends many

         Arabs, quoting an Arab prisoner who    recounts in detail what he says happened to him

         under interrogation in the “Sarafand” interrogation center, leaving him in such a

         condition that the Nablus prison authorities refused to admit him without a doctor's report

         from a military hospital.  He specifically implicates Israeli doctors. The Dawn (Al Fajr),

         Dec.31, 1982. See Langer's book With My Own Eyes (Ithaca, London, 1974), and the

         more extensive Hebrew original Bemo Eynay for many examples. There is ample further

         evidence. For a few examples, see TNCW, p.447.

 

104. For extensive evidence concerning both categories, see Chomsky and Herman Political

         Economy of Human Rights. Predictably, our insistence that refuge reports be taken

         seriously and considered with the same caution and concern whatever their origin has

         repeatedly been interpreted as apologetics for some official enemy, a matter that merits

         little comment apart from an inquiry, which might be illuminating, into some of the

         techniques typically adopted by those whom Bakunin aptly called the "state worshipping"

         intellectuals; in the West, those who pretend to be anti-Communist while mimicking

         Stalinist practice.

 

105. London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977. There is considerable further evidence in

         the testimony of Paul Eddy and Peter Gill man of the Sunday Times before the

         UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human

         Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories (Al SPC/ 32/ L. 12, 11 Nov.

         1977), including also interesting analysis of the efforts at rebuttal on the part of

         David Krivine of the Jerusalem Post and the Israeli government. See TNC W, p.447

 

106. Seth Kaplan, New Republic, July 23, 1977.

 

107. Amnesty International Newsletter, Sept. 1977; Martin Peretz, New Republic, Aug. 2, 1982;

         Amnon Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, Feb.27, 1981; TNCW, p.454. For another remarkable

         example of a "confession," regarded by the Washington Post as a "vindication of Israel's

         system of justice" and given a stamp of approval also by "civil libertarians" Monroe

         Freedman and Alan Dershowitz, see Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human

         Rights, vol.1, p.381.

 

108. Report and Recommendations of an Amnesty International Mission to the Government of

         Israel, including the Government's response and Amnesty Inter­national's comments

         (London, 1980); Ha'aretz, Sept. 3, 1980; Al Hamishmar, Sept. 3, 1980 (Israeli Mirror).

 

109. Mattityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, Aug. 8, 1980; see references to the U.S., British and Israeli

         press on conditions in the prisons in TNCW, pp.446-7.

 

110. Jerusalem Post, Dec.24, 1982; Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Dec.

         29, 1982; Boston Globe, Jan. 5, 1983.

 

111. Jerusalem Post, Dec.12, 1982; "'Cut off their testicles,' Sharon said with regard to

         demonstrators in the West Bank" Yediot Ahronot, Dec.29, 1982; Ma'ariv, Feb. 18, 1983,

         quoting Avraham Burg; The Dawn (Al Fair), Jan21, Feb. 4, 1983, on the expropriation

         and the curfew; Michael Precker, Dallas Morning News-Boston Globe, Feb.17, 1983. The

         expropriation was noted by Trudy Rubin, Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1983.

 

112. Zvi Barel, Ha'aretz, Jan.20, 1983 (Israleft News Service; Barel, Ha'aretz Weekly, Feb. 6-11,

         1983; Edward Walsh, Washington Post-Boston Globe, Feb.18; David Richardson,

         Jerusalem Post, Feb.18; Bard, Ha'aretz, Jan.30 (translated in The Dawn (Al Fajr),

         Feb.11); Eitan Mor, Yediot Ahronot, Feb.18, 1983; Reuven Padhatzur, Ha'aretz, March

         11, 1983, explaining how the defense "broke the rules of the game" by building its case

         on the demonstration that IDF policy is responsible for the atrocities; the defense was

         successful, since higher officers, who gave the orders, could not be (and were not) tried.

         See also Marcus Eliason, AP, Boston Globe, Jan.22, 1983, reviewing Eitan's orders and

         also his statement, which is correct, that the practice of demolishing houses in collective

         punishment and deportation was practiced much more extensively by his Labor

         predecessors. Also New York Times, Feb.10, 18. The sanitized New York Times accounts

         may usefully be compared to those cited from other American journals, particularly the

         detailed account of Eitan's testimony by Norman Kempster, Los Angeles Times, Feb.10,

         1983.

 

113. Aharon Bachar, "Do not say: We did not know, we did not hear'," Yediot

         Ahronot, Dec. 3, 1982.

 

114. Aharon Bachar, Yediot Ahronot, Nov. 5, 3982.

 

115. Yoram Peri, Davar, Dec.10, 1982.

 

116. "Peace Now officers recount atrocities," Al Hamishmar, May 11, 1982; Aharon Dava,

         Davar, April 4, 1982 (Israeli Mirror).

 

117. "Human Rights Violations on the Golan Heights: February-May, 1982," Report of the

         Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Israel Office of the American Jewish Committee

         (1982). The following account and quotes are from this study. The events discussed were

         reported by some of the Israeli press, despite efforts by the authorities to prevent

         journalists from discovering the facts or even entering the area.

 

118. Ha'arejz, April 16; David Richardson, Jerusalem Post, April 16; Emmanuel Elnekaveh,

         Yediot Ahronot, Feb.25; Yoram  Hamizrahi, Feb.25; Nahum Bar­nea, Davar, April 13,

         1982.

 

119. Ha'aretz, March 15, 1982.

 

120. Ha'aretz, Jerusalem Post, April 16; see also editorial, "Shame on the Golan," Jerusalem

         Post, April 16, 1982.

 

121. Amos Elon, Ha'aretz, April 13, 1982.

 

122. Danny Rubinstein, Davar, April 12, 1982. See TNCW, pp.277-S, for some examples,

         including even the closing of art exhibits.

 

123. Jerusalem Post, July13, 1982; Israleft News Service. The harassment of Bir Zeit apparently

         began with the Likud takeover in 1977. For some early discussion, see Manfred

         Ropschitz, ed., Volunteers for Palestine Papers /977-1980 (Miftah, Kfar Shemaryahu,

         1981).

 

124. UPI, Boston Globe, Nov.17, 1982.

 

125. New York Times, Nov.20, 23, 1982; Benny Morris, Jerusalem Post, Nov.21, 1982. Israleft

         News Service, Dec. 1, 1982, contains a detailed chronology and material from the Israeli

         press. Seethe advertisement of the Ad Hoc Committee for Academic Freedom, New York

         Times, Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 1983.

 

126. Christian Science Monitor, Nov.16, 1982.

 

127. David Richardson, "A threat to freedom," Jerusalem Post, Nov. 19, 1982; Norman

         Kempster, Los Angeles Times, Nov.20, 1982.

 

128. See, among others, Danny Rubinstein, Davar, May 16, 1980; TNCW, p.274.

 

129. Boston Globe, Nov.22; New York Times, Nov.23, 1982.

 

130. New York Times, Oct.21; The Dawn (Al Fajr), Nov.12, 1982.

 

131. Danny Rubinstein, Davar, Nov.19, 1982.

 

132. W.F. Abboushi. Christian Science Monitor, Nov.30, 1982.

 

133. Boaz Evron, Yediot Ahronot, Dec. 3, 1982. Shortly after, the restrictions on one of the

         editors (and several other people) were lifted; Jerusalem Post, Dec.21, 1982 (Israleft

         News Service).

 

134. Michal Meron, Yediot Ahronot (supplement), Dec.10, 1982.

 

135. Erwin Frenkel, "A newspaper's loyalties," Jerusalem Post Jubilee Supplement, Dec. I, 1982.

 

136. Ha'aretz, Nov.29, 1982.

 

137. H. Graetz, History of the Jews (Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1893, vol. II,

         p.324). See The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia(New York, 1942, vol.6).

 

138. Press Release, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Oct.27, 1982; Ha'aretz, Oct.

         28, 1982 (Israleft News Service, Nov.15). B. Michael, Ha'aretz, Nov. 7, 1982. The Dawn

         (Al Fajr), Dec.10, 1982.

 

139. Boston Globe, Nov.27, 1982, under "Names and Faces," where brief odd items involving

         various personalities are presented; Al Hamishmar, Nov.16, 1982; Ha'aretz, March 8,

         1983.

 

140. Letter, New York Review of Books, March 17,1977. See TNCW, p.283, for references from

         the Israeli, British and Swedish press.

 

141. Aharon Dolav, Ma'ariv', Dec.10, 1982; Ben-Tsion Tsitriv, Haolam Haze, Dec.

         22, 1982; Yigal Bichkov, Ha'aretz, Dec. 9, 1982. There is a watered-down version in the

         English-language press: Aryeh Rubinstein, "Sleeping scandal," Yitzha1; Oked, "Arab

         labourers' housing to be probed," Jerusalem Post, Dec.26, 1982.

 

142. Ian Black, New Statesman, Sept. 29, 1978 (for further references from the Hebrew press,

         see Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Right:, vol.11, p.360; TNCW,

         p.283); Felicia Langer, Report of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, Jan.19,

         1983 (Langer was the lawyer representing Barguti).

 

143. Hotam, Feb.19, 2982.

 

144. "The Gangrene of the Occupation." Al Hamishmar, Feb.19, 1982.

 

145. For details, see Peace in the Middle East?, pp.196-7, and references cited, and Adnan

         Amad, ed., Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights (The Shahak Papers) (Palestine

         Research Center, Beirut, 1973); the latter also contains docu­mentation provided by the

         League on a wide range of serious human rights violations under the Labor government.

         See also Shahak, The Non-Jew in the Jewish State (a collection of documents, mostly

         from the Israeli press; privately printed, Jerusalem, 1975), and much else. See Pro-Arab

         Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith

         (New York, Janu­ary 1983). This book (including this entry) contain numerous falsehoods

         and slanders, as one would expect in the "enemies list" of an organization now largely

         dedicated to defamation. See p.14.