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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2002
DELIBERATELY CREATED CRISES
ERNST ABEL
BY ELLEN CANTAROW
I am Jewish. I am a writer. From 1979 to 1989 I reported
for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Inquiry and other U.S. publi
cations from Israel and the West Bank. During those years I
witnessed on the ground the rapid growth of Israel’s settlements
and the seizure of Palestinian land and water for them: today
over half the West Bank’s resources are now in Israel’s hands.
(About of third of Gaza’s resources have suffered the same
fate.)
I conducted indepth interviews with utlra-rightwing
settlers and settler-leaders whose cry was: “Let them bow
their heads, or let Israel expel them." I interviewed Palestinian
villagers who had suffered settler vigilante actions and read
accounts of these by Israeli Jewish reporters of conscience in
Ha Aretz and other Israeli papers.
These vigilante actions ran the whole gamut: wanton
destruction of property and crops, rampages through villages
with cries of "Death to the Arabs" and smashing of car windows,
casual in-the-street humiliation of Palestinian civilians, beatings,
murder. Within Israel I witnessed the increasing polarization of
Israeli society by the occupation; the growing virulent racism of
new generations.
Take for instance Moroccan Jews in Kiryat Shemona,
members of Menachem Begin’s voting base about whom I wrote
for the Village Voice in 1982 and who most commonly told me,
“The only good Arab is a dead Arab."
Throughout Israel’s 35 years of occupation, collective
punishment for the alleged acts of individuals have been the
order of the day — for example, 23 hour a day curfews lasting
for weeks on end; the bulldozing of homes.
During the time I was reporting, stone throwing and
street demonstrations were what brought collective punishment.
Suicide bombing is a post-Oslo phenomenon triggered
by the doubling of settlement population after the Accords were
signed and by the dawning realization that Oslo consolidated a
South African-style plan for permanent Bantustanization of the
West Bank.
On the political front while I was writing, in 1980 a group
of democratically elected Palestinian mayors (Israel allowed this
process a single time) was targeted for assassination by ultra-
rightwing Israeli-Jewish thugs. Two were permanently maimed
when their boobytrapped cars exploded under them. The perpe
trators were found but not punished. Israel's alarm that the
mayors all proved to be Palestine Liberation Front supporters
rather than docile pawns meant, of course, that there was never
again such an election.
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Israel tried desperately, during the time I was reporting,
to circumvent the PLO by installing a Quisling government
apparatus throughout the West Bank, the “Village Leagues."
It also began funding Hamas in the vain belief that a religious
group would not work against colonial subjugation as did the
PLO Both ventures crashed, of course — the latter with the
results we observe today of the extreme polarization of Pales
tinian political life.
On all my stays in the West Bank I personally witnessed
casual daily humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints,
the casual landscape and social scenery of apartheid. The most
obvious and continual manifestations were the checkpoints with
differing treatment of Palestinians on the one hand, Israeli Jews
and internationals on the other; and the different color of license
plates, blue for Palestinians, yellow for Israelis.
I interviewed villagers whose homes had been blown
up and/or bulldozed by Israeli soldiers. I heard accounts by men
and women jailed, abused and tortured in Israel’s prisons. On
the subject of torture, London's Times issued a well-documented
report in the early 1980s: the practice is an established fact
acknowledged by Israel's B’tselem and foreign human rights
organizations.
Torture is ongoing as I write: The Financial Times on
April 6 reported, “The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem
yesterday petitioned the High Court after receiving reports of
torture at the Ofer detention center near Ramallah.”
Throughout the 1980s I spoke with Palestinian officials,
doctors, lawyers and other professionals, all of whom gave
personal testimony about ongoing, deliberate acts that, under
MIDEAST RANT
The solution to the Middle East insanity:
The Palestinians need to do a Gandhi. Lay down their
arms. Do not raise a finger to Israel.
The Arab Brotherhood needs to follow suit. Shut down
their oilfields. Sit and wait it out. No more oil for the world until
the brutalities stop.
The Israeli citizens need to do a Gandhi also Sit down
and refuse war as a solution. No more violence upon brothers
and sisters of the world. Unload their bullets from their guns.
Refuse politics as an answer.
Strapping a bomb to oneself, loading a rifle — both a
vote to continue fighting Fuck both your egos'. The world is
being challenged by much more important problems than your
hatred for each other, and the only way this shit will end is from
you!
Or are you both too chickenshit to drop your egos and
look deep into the eyes of your frightened children? Tomorrow is
for them. Can’t you give it to them without all your memories of
some past? Now is the time to stop the bullshit, the tears, the
sorrows.
How many people have died from AIDS, starvation,
the cold, from viruses, from guns? You two are not the only
fucked over people on this planet. Look around this big planet
and see the,trees dying, the waters polluted, the food chain
being recklessly depleted.
I am sick of your petty hatreds. Grow the fuck up and
show the world that you both want to be a part of its solutions
and not some nationalistic movement towards an illusory
isolation from each other. It ain’t gonna happen! This world has
gotten too fucking small for you to hide behind your thousand
year old belief systems. It is a new millennium A new way of the
world And your bullshit is a big problem in the way of new Join
the march into what can be There is room for all There has to
be.
-CECIL LEE
Cecil Lee is a poet, writer and artist from El Paso, Texas
the 1949 Geneva Convention articles governing occupation,
were clearly illegal.
The Hebrew press was often quite open about all the
foregoing while the U.S. press was almost invariably silent.
We now arrive at the current nightmare. What is under
way is collective punishment of the sort I and other journalists
have documented for decades, ratcheted up a thousand fold in
full-blown war atrocities committed throughout the West Bank
and almost certainly beginning in Gaza, from which I received
an American relief worker’s e-mail recently. My computer has
delivered to me daily — even hourly — accounts of war crimes
from Ramallah and other Palestinian cities by Palestinian
doctors, lawyers, authors and students, and by internationals
The desperate e-mailers plead with me and others to
call our Congress people and Senators, to write letters to the
press, to organize publicly.
They describe ambulances shot at and stopped from
arriving at their destinations; hospitals invaded and medical
personnel prevented at gunpoint from carrying out their
responsibilities; people bleeding to death while soldiers block,
at gunpoint and in tanks, their safe passage to medical relief;
corpses rotting in hospital corridors (numerous e-mails warn of
the threat of imminent epidemics); relatives forbidden to carry
out decent burials (one group of the slain had to be buried in
a Ramallah parking lot); civilians shot if they venture outside
their doors; massive looting and vandalizing of homes; cultural
institutions invaded and files destroyed; electrical systems for
water pumps destroyed so that whole urban areas have their
water supplies cut off; internationals and Palestinian press
members wounded by Israeli gunfire.
As I write, an urgent e-mail describes a spreading
catastrophe: “Deliberately Created Humanitarian Crisis Reaches
Intolerable Point " I read that six field hospitals report scores of
people in serious-to-critical condition, doctors are forced to
operate with minimal equipment.
In one such improvised center, a mosque, corpses rot in
the operating room while Israeli snipers fire on anyone trying to
enter or leave Another section of this particular cry for help tells
me that Apache helicopters in Jenin “attacked and seriously
damaged around 50 houses in the western side of the camp, 20
people are reported injured, bleeding in the street. Reports from
the inhabitants are that there are 15 dead bodies in different
locations, but again ambulances came under attack when trying
to gain access to these bodies, this time with ammunition from
the helicopters."
Still another section reads: “Yatta near Hebron also
came under sustained attack. .. Dozens of tanks surrounded the
town and opened fire on the inhabitants. The hospital reported
two Palestinians were killed while in their homes — Jamal
Hamad Karaysh, 22, live ammunition to his head, and Nader
Jamil Al Khadder, 21, live ammunition to his chest. The hospital
buried them in the cemetery, immediately and without a funeral,
as they were afraid that after the Israeli army completely
invades the town a health crisis could erupt — similar to the
crisis in the other West Bank towns where bodies sit in hospitals
and homes decomposing, as they cannot be buried.”
Like Nero, President Bush has fiddled while Rome bums
and has issued too little too late.What is needed is an immediate
order for withdrawal and threat of economic sanction(this is what
President Eisenhower did in the Suez Crisis of 1956, resolving it
immediately). Ariel Sharon, the Milosevic twin ordering these
atrocities, is the self-same war criminal who commanded the
infamous Unit 101 that killed 99 defenseless civilians at Kibyeh
in October 1953; who in August 1977 ordered the destruction of
2000 Gaza homes and expulsion from them of 16,000 civilians
during an Israeli “pacification” onslaught in the strip; who over
saw the Israeli Defense Force while it enabled the Phalangist
massacre of over a thousand Palestinian civilians in the Beirut
refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in 1982 (for this he was forced
to resign as Defense Minister by his own government).
Sharon, a past-master at Machiavellian provocation,
triggered the second intifada when, with an armed escort of
1000 soldiers, he “visited" Al Aska mosque in September 2000
— the visit was followed next day by the shooting of Palestinian
demonstrators at the mosque by Israeli troops. Sharon's aim
as Housing Minister in the 1970s, as Defense Minister during
Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and now as Israel’s Prime Minister,
is permanent expansion of Israel’s borders, permanent retention
and expansion of the settlements. It is clear that this project not
only destroys Palestinian society, but also Israel’s economy and
its political and moral fabric; as well as the stability of the entire
region
As a Jew old enough to remember a childhood just after
World War 2 I am filled with a mix of grief, helplessness, despair
and anger as Israel, pretending to act in my name and using
the Holocaust to exonerate its crimes, proceeds with a clear
effort to obliterate the economy, the social, political and cultural
institutions, and the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian
people. Those who do not speak out against the abominations
of these horrors are complicit by their silence Those who
exonerate Israel for committing them are guilty by association.