Frontline Volume 17 - Issue 23, Nov. 11 - 24, 2000

India's National Magazine on indiaserver.com

from the publishers of THE HINDU ESSAY

IT is very difficult to write about Israel now, in the ideological

climate currently prevailing in India. For several decades, when

anti-colonialism was a substantial ingredient in the secular

nationalism that informed even India's foreign policy, distan ce

from Israel as a settler-colonial state and close relationship with

the Palestinian national movement as representing the victims of

that settler-colonialism was taken for granted in the polity. So was

India's solidarity with the anti-imperialist curr ents in the Arab

world in general - be it the war of national liberation in Algeria,

the Nasserist commitments to non-alignment, or some other current of

that kind.

This aspect of Indian foreign policy was noted and admired, I might

add, by Arab diplomats and intellectuals. I remember visiting a

number of the Arab countries and regularly meeting a broad

cross-section of the intellectuals there, in the 1960s and 1970 s. I

was very young then and it was always very striking to me that

Pakistan's support for Palestine was usually seen as shallow and

Islamicist, whereas the Indian solidarity with the Palestinian cause

was regarded as a natural and secular, non-religious response from a

country that had played so seminal a role in the making of the

non-aligned movement.

I was therefore very surprised when I read the statement of Jaswant

Singh, during the course of his recent visit to Israel, that India's

foreign policy in the past decades was held hostage by the Muslim

vote bank and that the government was now going to correct that

error. India's anti-colonialist past was simply being erased, and

what even Arab intellectuals, from their great distance, could see

as an expression of India's secular solidarity with anti-Zionist

forces in Palestine was now being presented , by a suave and

insufferable Foreign Minister, as an error forced by the Muslim

minority in the country upon those whom the Bharatiya Janata Party

is fond of calling "pseudo-secularists". Hindutva was now going to

undo all that and make a strategic alli ance with its natural

counterpart: Zionism.

What, then, about the current uprising in Palestine? It is said that

the uprising, which the Palestinians themselves are calling "Al-Aqsa

Intifada", was triggered by the visit of Ariel Sharon, the Likud

Party leader, to Al-Aqsa, the holiest Muslim shrine in Palestine

(known to the Jewish people as Temple Mount), with the announced

purpose of demonstrating "Jewish sovereignty" over the Al-Aqsa

compound. The visit was clearly authorised by the Ehud Barak

government, which also provided more than 1,000 arm ed policemen to

protect Sharon. It is important to recall, though, that the Palestinian agitation

did not begin with that Thursday visit. Rather, the agitation came

the next day, when Israeli security forces were massed in the

compound at the time of Friday prayers, in a calculated pro vocation

when a large crowd was present and someone or the other could be

trusted to fan the flames. That is when the Israelis started

shooting. It is also worth remarking that during the first couple of

days the Palestinian agitation was restricted to s logan-shouting

and stone-throwing. Palestinian gunmen entered the fray only after

the corpses had begun to mount, at the hands of the Israeli

sharpshooters who were clearly under orders to kill. The ratio of

the Palestinians and Israelis killed is still about 20 to 1.

There was, in other words, a deeper design which seems to have been

prepared many months ago. Saeb Arikaat, a senior Palestinian

negotiator, has said that he and Arafat went personally to Barak's

house to persuade him not to grant permission to Sharon to make the

visit and to warn of the possible consequences; Faisal Husseini,

another senior leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation

(PLO), says that he too appealed personally to Barak. Barak rejected

all such requests, knowing well that among Pale stinians Sharon was

the most hated man. To understand the motivation, we need to

understand something about Sharon and Barak, and then reflect also

on the consequences of the Oslo Accords and on that monstrosity

which is represented in the media as the " peace process".

ON March 23 this year, well before the latest uprising, Professor

Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, wrote in the Israeli

newspaper, Yediot Aharanot: "Barak is the most dangerous Prime

Minister in the history of Israel. Already in 1982 he prop osed to

extend the Lebanon war to a total war on Syria. Then he explained

(in a memorandum to Sharon) that the best way to do that is without

sharing the plans with the government. Today he is consulting only

with the heads of the army and the security s ervices. Never had the

army as much grip on Israeli politics as in the times of Barak."

During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when he wrote that

notorious memorandum, Barak was merely an army general, albeit an

important one, secretly suggesting that Israel create an excuse to

invade Syria and destroy its army, to Ariel Sharon, th e Defence

Minister at that time, who, as Noam Chomsky recently put it, "is the

very symbol of Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich

record of atrocities going back to 1953." In the recent days, Barak,

now the Labour Prime Minister of Israel, a nd Sharon, currently the

head of the Likud Party and himself aspiring to become Prime

Minister, have been negotiating the formation of a government of

national unity.

To the matter of Barak we shall return in a moment, but who is Ariel

Sharon? As the Israeli police and border guards train their guns at

Palestinian demonstrators with orders to "shoot to kill," Uri

Avnery, an authoritative veteran of the peace movement in Israel,

reminds us that the practice itself is not new. It was used first by Ariel Sharon in

the first years of the occupation, when he instituted a reign of

terror in the Gaza Strip. As he told me himself afterwards, he gave

the order "not to take prisoners". Palestinians caug ht bearing arms

were killed on the spot. Later, the practice was employed by the

"Mista'arvim" ("Pretending to be Arabs") undercover units, whose

slogan was "ensure death". This was discovered when the Mista'arvim

killed one of their own men, mistaking h im for a "terrorist". After

wounding him, they dispatched him at very close range with a shot in

the head (A Lost War, October 9, 2000).

Avnery goes on to point out that - quite aside from tanks,

helicopter gunships and other weapons of war of that kind - which

the Israelis have deployed against largely unarmed, stone-throwing

demonstrators, the deadliest introduction in this phase of que lling

the Palestinian uprising is the "sharpshooter" - a particular kind

of soldier with a special kind of training whose task is to zero in

on specific individuals, presumably 'leaders', in the demonstration

and shoot them on the spot. This, he says, is in line with the

policies Sharon framed some 30 years ago; the training for the

latest deployments bagan, according to both Avnery and Reinhart, in

June 2000. Sharon, in fact, was the one who, as Minister for Agriculture, first

planted the "settlements" of armed Israelis in the Palestinian

"territories" occupied after the 1967 war, mostly members of the Far

Right. As Minister for Defence, he pressed Prime Mini ster Menachem

Begin to invade Lebanon, leading to the destruction of Beirut, the

most cosmopolitan city in the Arab world, and the occupation of

southern Lebanon. In all his diverse ministerial assignments, he has

fixed the borders of annexation for whic h the present war is being

fought. And he was the one who ordered the massacres of the Sabra

and Shattila camps in 1982. He fits, in other words, every

conceivable definition of a war criminal. Today he is the head of

Likud, the other major party in Isra eli politics which alternates

with Labour as the ruling party, and he has been invited by Barak,

"the most dangerous Prime Minister in the history of Israel," to

form a government of national unity. How has this situation come

about? For the most recent background, we can take recourse to a

lengthier quotation, also from Avnery:

Just a month ago, Barak was bankrupt; a politician at the end of his

career. He had lost his majority in the Knesset, his partners had

left him, the days of his government were numbered and it only

managed to carry on because of the Knesset recess. The p olls

predicted that he would lose the imminent elections by a large

margin.

Ariel Sharon was in a similar situation. His career was nearing its

end. It was clear that his Likud Party would oust him and replace

him with Netanyahu, who would win the elections.

And then, as if by a miracle, everything changed. Barak started to

talk about the "holy places of the nation", because of which he

could not agree to Palestinian sovereignty over the holy mosques.

Sharon announced that he was going to visit this Muslim c ompound.

Barak took the visit under his wing and sent 1,200 police officers

to accompany Sharon. The visit caused the expected explosion. The

next day seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli policemen near

the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The timing of the Barak-Sharon provocation was thus determined by

their own political compulsions. On the one hand, Barak was expected

to face and lose by a very wide margin a no-confidence motion in a

Knesset session that was due in the last week of Oct ober. On the

other hand, the Attorney-General had on September 27 dropped charges

of corruption and bribery against Netanyahu, the former Likud Prime

Minister and by far the most popular politician in Israel at the

time, who was now free to reclaim the L ikud leadership from Sharon.

The latter appeared in the Al-Aqsa compound the next day and the

killing began the day after that.

Once the methodical killing of Palestinians began, Barak's

popularity ratings rose from 20 to 50 per cent and the very

coalition partners who had deserted him began reassuring him that

they would not press the no-confidence motion for at least a month.

H aving come in the limelight again, meanwhile, Sharon declared that

he would join a government of national unity only if Barak forgoes

the so-called "peace process" altogether. In her latest commentary,

Professor Reinhart says that "in the Sharm El-Sheikh summit...,

Barak got from the U.S. his green light to slaughter... There is

talk about the Palestinian Kosovo, with 2,000 to 3,000 Palestinians

dead. As usual, the blame for this slaughter is put in advance on

Arafat, who, the story goes, wants his peop le to be slaughtered, to

gain international sympathy."

The timing was thus surely determined by the political compulsions

of Barak and Sharon. However, the structural reasons for both the

uprising and the terror run much deeper and are connected, in the

immediate past, with the consequences of the Oslo Accor ds of 1993

and, in the larger perspective, with the very nature of the Israeli

state and the unconditional material and moral support it gets from

the United States. Both these aspects should bear some commentary.

THE basic flaw of the Oslo Accords was simply that, as Robert Fisk,

the award-winning British correspondent, has put it (The

Independent, October 13): "The Palestinians were being forced by

Americans and Israelis to sign a peace that would give th em neither

a state nor an end to Jewish settlements on Arab land, nor a capital

in Arab east Jerusalem... Many outstanding issues have been left to

the final negotiations: water, the fate of the 3.6 million

Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem a nd the Israeli

settlements, and the extent of Palestinian sovereignty. After the

agreed Israeli withdrawals have been completed, 59 per cent of the

West Bank will still remain under Israeli control. Will the

resulting Palestinian state be a "mini-state" with limited

sovereignty?"

In other words, Arafat had written away all the gains of the

1987-1992 intifada for not much more than municipal authority over

little patches of Palestinian land, while all else was left to a

long-drawn process of negotiations in which the final settlement

talks were postponed until six years later. Israel used this

extended time to build so many Jewish settlements and security

highways, dividing the West Bank into many pieces which are isolated

from one another, that the Palestinian entity whic h finally results

from the peace process would not be much more than a scattering of

apartheid-style Bantustans.

Seven years after the Oslo Accords, Israel has security and

administrative control of most of the West Bank and 20 per cent of

the small principality of Gaza. As Amira Hass wrote in the

prestigious Israeli daily Ha'aretz (October 18), Israel has b een

able during this period to double the number of settlers in 10

years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory

policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians,

to prevent Palestinian development in most of the are a of the West

Bank, and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned

in a network of bypass roads meant only for Jews. During these days

of strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can

see how carefully each road was pl anned: so that 200,000 Jews have

freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked

into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands. The

bloodbath that has been going on for weeks is the natural outcome of

seven years of lying an d deception, just as the first Intifada was

the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation.

In speaking of "200,000 Jews" Hass is obviously referring to the

Gaza Strip and the West Bank alone; another 200,000 such settlers

were introduced over the years into Jerusalem itself. We might add

that the whole of the Gaza Strip is ringed by an electri fied fence

and the airport, the strip's main contact with the outside world, is

controlled by the Israelis. A Palestinian uprising there is

basically a prison riot.

Putting an end to the so-called "peace process" at this point is

important for Israel because it has gained from the Oslo Accords

everything it had desired. And the next stage, aimed to bring about

a final solution, would require it to make some basic ch anges in

its historic positions, for which there is no consent in the broad

Israeli population which, barring the small number of anti-Zionists,

is very much in tune with the Baraks and the Sharons.

THIS brings us, then, to the very nature of Israeli society and

state. The first thing to be said here is that Israel is the only

nation-state in the world which derives the legitimacy of its

existence, its claim to territory and nationhood, the sanctity of

its national language, its very identity as a "Jewish state", its

claimed right to evict the Muslim and Christian populations of

historic Palestine and replace them with a Jewish population

imported from the four corners of the globe - in short its v ery

raison d'etre - to a religious text, in this case the Old Testament.

Palestinians have no right to return to homes from which they have

been evicted within the last half century, either because they don't

exist (as Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, once said) or because

they are said to have left by their own accord for greener pastures

(which is the official position of the entire Zionist establishment

and its supporters, inside Israel and the world over). By contrast,

every Jewish person living anywhere in the world has a permanent

"right of return" because these are , after all, "the Biblical

lands"; Palestine must therefore be re-named "Israel", and what the

rest of the world knew simply as "the West Bank" must be re-named

"Judea and Samaria" because those are the names used for these areas

in the Old Testament.

When Pakistanis call their country an Islamic Republic, Indians

consider them - quite rightly - obscurantist and anti-secular. When

the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) claims that India must be

turned into a "Hindu Rashtra" and mobilises its goons to a ttack the

minorities as well as their churches and mosques, Indians call them

- quite rightly - fascist. Israel, by contrast, is free to be, in

letter and spirit, a "Jewish state," with all the racial and

religious meanings that the term implies, without coming in for any

kind of criticism; it must always be considered modern, secular,

democratic, beleagured by anti-semitism, "Islamic fundamentalism"

and so on.

To dissent from this view of Israel is to lay yourself open, if you

are not Jewish, to the charge of being anti-semitic. If you are

Jewish but also anti-Zionist, like Noam Chomsky, you will be

portrayed as a "self-hating Jew". Thanks to the Israeli milit ary

capability which keeps the whole of the middle eastern and north

African oil-producing world at bay, and thanks to the Zionist

success in portraying the state of Israel as the state of the

survivors of Nazi death camps, which then naturally evokes al l

kinds of sympathy for it, Israel commands in the western world, and

increasingly on the global scale, a matchless propaganda machinery.

Israel is quite possibly the most savage of the existing

nation-states, and surely the one where "nation" is so very

thoroughly identified with race and religion; even in Iran "nation"

is not identified with "race". Yet it is very difficult to be

believe d if one says - and documents - that Israel has been doing

to the Palestinians for some half a century what the various ethnic

militias in the former Yugoslavia have learned to do only within the

last decade, after the breakdown of the socialist state th ere, and

that in some respects the Israeli atrocities against the

Palestinians bear a marked resemblance to the Nazi atrocities

against the Jewish people themselves.

But there is more.

Nelson Mandela, the man who heroically led the struggle of the South

African peoples against what is commonly considered the most savage

racist regime in the world, once said that the Israeli treatment of

the Palestinians is "worse than apartheid." Comin g from Mandela,

this is as severe an indictment as one can imagine. Unfortunately,

the assessment is accurate.

Unlike Algeria or South Africa where the indigenous peoples managed

to fight back against eviction and extermination, regaining

sovereignty after heroic wars of liberation, Israel is the only

successful settler colony of the 20th century, evicting the ma

jority of the indigenous population, subjugating the remaining

segment, and transplanting on the Palestinian land populations which

originated elsewhere. The great majority of the Jewish population of

Israel is descended from families that were not resid ent there 50

years ago.

By contrast, the majority of Palestinians were evicted from their

homes in two waves, mainly at the time of the establishment of the

state of Israel in 1948 and then, on a relatively smaller scale, in

the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Estima tes of the

Palestinian diaspora, scattered around the world, vary greatly, from

six million to eight million. Over five million of them are

concentrated in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the states bordering on

the territories of the historic Palestine, or i n the territories

Israel captured in 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza). A million or so

live in Israel proper as internal refugees; Israel is by definition

a "Jewish state," in which the non-Jew can only be a second-class

citizen. In all, Palestinians are ac tually not very numerous. Yet,

according to the United Nations, one in four of the world's refugees

is a Palestinian.

Palestinian losses accruing from those evictions are estimated at

$180 billion. U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948 affirms the right of all

Palestinians either to return to their lost homes or elect to

receive compensation. The same right has been re-affirmed i n

Resolutions 242 and 338, and the U.N. General Assembly has

re-affirmed this resolution over a hundred times. Israel has

steadfastly rejected all these resolutions, however, and no

Palestinian has ever been compensated for loss of ancestral

property. In stead, some 90 per cent of the Israeli territory is

reserved for Jewish settlement and some 70 per cent of the

territories occupied in 1967 are - in addition to pre-1967 Israeli

borders - already taken for establishing Israeli "settlements" or

building r oads, military checkposts and so on. The so-called

Palestinian Authority, to which Israel has assigned mainly municipal

duties in civil affairs and whose police and paramilitary forces

have been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ensure

Israeli security in the face of Palestinian anger, actually controls

something like 12 per cent of the area of West Bank.

This is the arrangement that is sought to be stabilised by the new

plan that Ehud Barak unveiled in late October, which he proposes as

the basis for a final settlement. As Noam Chomsky puts it, "This

plan, extending U.S.-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier

years, called for cantonization of the territories that Israel had

conquered in 1967, with mechanisms to ensure that usable land and

resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while

the population is administered by a corrupt an d brutal Palestinian

Authority, playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous

collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the

Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the

most obvious analogue."

The U.S. underwrites these atrocities militarily, financially,

diplomatically. Thus, on October 3, after a week of bitter fighting

and killing, the defence correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the

largest purchase of military helicopters by the Isr aeli Air Force

in a decade", an agreement with the U.S. to provide Israel with 35

Blackhawk military helicopters and spare parts at a cost of $525

million, along with jet fuel, following the purchase shortly earlier

of patrol aircraft and Apache attack h elicopters. These are "the

newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in the

U.S. inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. When asked whether these

were "tools for crowd control," a Pentagon spokesman said that the

U.S. weapons sales "d o not carry a stipulation that the weapons

can't be used against civilians."

Meanwhile, on October 25, when Israel had settled down to its

killing fields, Aluff Benn, the diplomatic correspondent of

Ha'aretz, reported that Israel had asked the U.S. for an $800

million in emergency military aid, "on top of the usual militar y

aid package, which will total $1.98 billion next year." This is only

the tip of the iceberg, considering that Israel has been the top

U.S. aid recipient for several decades.

The same applies to the arena of diplomatic and moral support, where

too the U.S. defies all pressure from diverse quarters. Gush Shalom

(the Israeli Peace Bloc) declared on October 9: "What is happening

in Nazareth today is a pogrom, bearing all the hal lmarks which were

well known to Jews in Czarist Russia." Already on October 3, Amnesty

International had condemned the indiscriminate killings of

civilians. "The dead civilians, among them young children, include

those uninvolved in the conflict and seek ing safety," it said,

adding "the loss of civilian life is devastating and this is

compounded by the fact that many appear to have been killed or

injured as a result of the use of excessive or indiscriminate

force... We have been saying for years that Is rael is killing

civilians unlawfully by firing at them during demonstrations and

riots." Even Jacques Chirac, the French President, accused Sharon of

"irresponsible provocation." But not the U.S., where Madeleine

Albright declared that Palestinians were the ones "laying siege to

Israel."

On October 7, the U.N. Security Council voted 14 to 0 for a

resolution condemning Israel's "excessive use of force against

Palestinians" and deploring the "provocation" of Sharon's September

28 visit to Temple Mount. The U.S. was the only Security Counci l

member to abstain from the vote. The outcome was generally

interpreted as assigning most of the responsibility for the violence

to Israel. The conservative The Times (of London) called it on the

editorial page a "stinging rebuff" (September 10, 2000). On October

19, when the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution

condemning Israel for "widespread, systematic and gross violation of

human rights" while describing some of the Israeli atrocities as

"war crimes", the U.S. and its principal allies of the North

Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) voted against the resolution.

The saddest part of this mess is that Yasser Arafat, once the symbol

of Palestinian resistance, has settled down to the role of a

quisling, begging the U.S. for largesse and handing over his own

security apparatus to the CIA; Alu Ben reported in Ha'ar etzon

October 18, regarding Arafat's promise at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit

to do what he could for Israeli security: its implementation will be

overseen by CIA chief George Tenet and the CIA representative in Tel

Aviv. This agreement will, for the fi rst time, involve CIA

observers in the field in addition to CIA participation in

Israeli-Palestinian meetings."

Part of the Al-Aqsa Intifada is perhaps against Arafat himself and

his bunch of corrupt cronies - "the Oslo class" as the rebellious

Palestinian youth calls them.