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April
10, 2003
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April 12,
2003
It
Need Not Be This Way
Final
Thoughts from Palestine
by
KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
former
CIA political analysts
As we left East Jerusalem for Amman last week,
on our way back home, we were struck by the cynicism of what
appeared to be a concerted effort by the Israeli press and others
in the media to justify, retrospectively, Israel's siege and
destruction of Jenin a year ago because it is now clear that
U.S. and British forces are doing the same thing in Iraq. Israeli
papers and military columnists say, with evident satisfaction,
that the coalition missile attacks on civilian marketplaces in
Iraq should now make it easier for the U.S. to understand why
Israel did what it did in Jenin. Fighting "terrorism,"
these papers suggest, is a messy business, and U.S. and British
forces must now understand that this fight involves engaging
with a civilian population and "getting your hands dirty,"
as one paper put it. Even a BBC television anchor, interviewing
an Israeli military historian, made the comparison with Jenin,
noting that when coalition forces enter Baghdad they may face
the same kind of fighting that Israel did in Jenin. The Israeli
had the decency to point out that what Israel did in Jenin was
immoral, but the BBC interviewer persisted, discussing the difficulties
of urban warfare and comparing the Jenin and the Baghdad situations
as if the killing of civilians who get in the way of urban fighting
is simply one of those unfortunate obstacles that military forces
must cope with. In the effort to justify the military operations
in each case, no one seems to focus on the dead civilians, the
destroyed homes and buildings, the ruined lives, or the right
of any population to defend itself from invading armies. It's
unsettling, not to say enraging, to see the actions of one murderous
army justified by invoking the murderous tactics of another.
How can this be happening? These commentators must not have seen
Jenin. Maybe you have to have seen the destruction in Jenin to
care about civilians.
***
Some people do understand. The courageous
Israeli commentator Gideon Levy has been writing about former
Israeli "warmongers," now appearing as TV news experts,
who glory in the destructive  capabilities of cluster bombs
and smart missiles that they unabashedly describe as "wreaking
havoc," "pulverizing," and "raining steel."
None of these experts, Levy notes, has bothered to mention the
killing and destruction that weapons like these can cause among
innocent civilians. Nor, he says pointedly, has any of them thought
to wonder "what happens to a society whose spokesmen get
so pathologically excited by weapons and killing." We need
a Gideon Levy in the United States.
***
The similarities between the Iraq war
and the war that's been raging for years in Palestine are growing
by the day. A few days ago, American troops in Iraq shot up a
car carrying seven women and children, killing them all. Or maybe
it was ten or eleven women and children; we're still hearing
varying numbers. This occurred in the area where several U.S.
Marines had been killed a few days earlier by a car bomb, so
of course, by some people's lights, it's understandable that
the Americans would be frightened, on alert, on the defensive,
and over-eager to start shooting--just like the Israeli soldiers
who man checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza and who
shoot up Palestinian civilians with insane regularity. What no
one among the media swarming around these areas, no one at the
Pentagon, no one in the White House seems to notice is that,
if the Americans weren't in Iraq in the first place, and if the
Israelis weren't in the West Bank and Gaza in the first place,
Iraqi civilians and Palestinian civilians could go about their
daily business without always being regarded as terrorists, without
being murdered.
***
Israel is probably the only country in
the world where both the government and popular opinion support
the war in Iraq. One East Jerusalem man whom we came to know
who exercises regularly at a club frequented by both Israelis
and Palestinians told us of overhearing a conversation between
two Israelis in the locker room. One said, "The Americans
and Brits are really doing a good job for us." The other
responded, "We're all children of God." This would
seem to confirm the fears of some of us cynics that the war is,
and has all along been intended to be, the beginning of a Judeo-Christian
war against Islam. Muslims, of course, are not the children of
God.
***
The only souvenir we're bringing home
is an empty Israeli bullet shell found on the street in the old
city of Nablus. Imagine having a foreign army's shell casings
lying in your streets. Imagine your streets torn up by a foreign
army's tank treads. Imagine your houses demolished by a foreign
army's bulldozers and F-16s.
***
A Ramallah man who has a three-year-old
daughter tells us that, in her three-year-old world, Israeli
tanks are the monsters that children elsewhere only imagine.
Tanks destroy and terrorize. When she is angry with her older
sister, she calls her sister "a tank." This is the
worst pejorative she can think of.
***
On our first encounter at an Israeli
checkpoint, driving into Ramallah from Jerusalem, we had a minor
argument with a brash young Israeli soldier. "What do you
think of the IDF?" he asked as he looked over our passports.
Thinking fast--not wanting either to endorse the IDF or so antagonize
him that he wouldn't let us through, we said something feeble
like, "It's all right for an army, but we wish you wouldn't
be so hard on the Palestinians." This ticked him off, and
he started raging about Palestinian suicide bombers: there has
been a bus bombing in early March in Haifa, on a bus route that
he traveled frequently, and didn't we know that he or one of
his friends could have been killed? All Palestinians are dirt,
he said, looking directly at our Palestinian taxi driver, and
they're all alike. Now acutely conscious of his insults to our
driver, we became a little bolder, agreeing that deaths in suicide
bombings were tragic but noting that Israel has been killing
Palestinians too. This really set him off, and he ranted on for
a while with further insults to Palestinians and, when we didn't
respond, handed us back our passports and waved us on. We resisted
the temptation to point out to him that, as American taxpayers,
we help pay his salary and he should stop acting like an arrogant
bastard. We also resisted the temptation to tell him that, just
as suicide bombings lead him to think that all Palestinians are
alike and to treat them all shabbily as a result, his atrocious
behavior might lead us to think that all Israelis are as arrogant
and unpleasant as he is and to treat them accordingly. Palestinians
endure this kind of abuse every day of their lives, and most
of those whom we told of our encounter laughed at our anger because
this kind of disrespect and humiliation is the least serious
aspect by far of what they face under occupation.
There are, incidentally, some very polite
Israeli soldiers at some checkpoints, and we do not regard all
Israelis as arrogant bastards. But, like Gideon Levy, we do wonder
about "a society whose spokesmen get so pathologically excited
by weapons and killing" and whose young soldiers are allowed
to get off on humiliating an entire population.
***
The destruction throughout the West Bank
and Gaza is unspeakable. There are really no words to describe
it adequately. Frequent piles of rubble along city streets testify
to homes demolished because some hapless Palestinian could not
obtain a permit to build or because Israel decided a terrorist
lived there; piles of dirt block through-traffic on city streets
and rural roads because Israel has decided that Palestinians
have no right to travel here or there; some village roads simply
end abruptly where Israel has built a limited access highway
where Palestinians are forbidden to drive; concrete and steel
and ugly cuts in the land have replaced the spectacularly beautiful
terraced, olive-studded hillsides around Jerusalem where Israel
is building vast highways to accommodate a few hundred thousand
Israelis who don't want to have to associate with the few million
Palestinians in whose midst they live; as a further measure to
impede movement around the West Bank, Israel has dug trenches
across some roads and occasionally around villages, where ugly
mounds of earth now mar the landscape; in some areas the digging
has cut sewer lines, encircling some villages around Nablus with
raw sewage that people must somehow cross in order to leave the
village; once beautiful olive groves are filled with trees totally
or partially cut down or burned because angry Israeli settlers
have decided they don't like Palestinians; hilltops are covered
by new Israeli outposts with ugly temporary trailers on cleared
land where olive groves once stood; roads are torn up by Israeli
tank treads, potholed or with deep cuts along their length because
Israel thinks (1) that it's a legitimate tactic of civilian control
to rampage in tanks through city streets and (2) that exercising
military control over another people's civilian population is
legitimate in the first place; in the spring rains, mud is pervasive
because Israel has fully or partially torn up the paved roads,
piled dirt in the roads, dug trenches, ruined sidewalks, torn
up the landscape.
Israel is making a trash heap of the
West Bank and Gaza. During a trip to Jerusalem in 1985, we went
with a group to visit the Israeli settlement of Ofra and met
with one of the early settler leaders, Schifra Blass. Blass,
who had come from the United States to help build a settlement
on Palestinian land, justified the settlement on the basis that
this had been Jewish land millennia before and because, as she
said, Palestinians in the neighboring town of Ramallah had made
the town a trash heap. Ramallah in 1985 may not have been a pretty
town--we don't know, never having seen it in those days--but
what we have just seen in 2003 throughout the West Bank makes
Blass's assignment of blame to the Palestinians a serious misplacement
of responsibility.
***
We have received an immense amount of
support throughout this trip--support that is extremely gratifying
and that in fact sustained us through both difficult and happy
times. On a much smaller scale, we have also been criticized--not
only for meeting with Yasir Arafat, as we reported earlier, but
for not meeting with Hamas, for not going to Bethlehem, for not
seeing Hebron, for agreeing with Jeff Halper's criticisms of
Israeli policies, even by an autistic man for having shown ignorance
of the true nature of autism by conveying Halper's labeling of
Israel as autistic. The most disturbing criticism came in an
email message from a woman in our home town who suggested, even
before we left Amman for Jerusalem, that our only interest in
going to Jerusalem and Palestine was to "stick it to the
Israelis." We didn't have a good understanding, she wrote,
of the ambiguities in Israeli society or the extent of opposition
to Sharon's policies and didn't know the extent of Israeli-Palestinian
cooperation to bring peace.
Not only is it not true that we are unaware
of the existence of "good" Israelis who oppose Sharon:
we are well aware of and have made a point over the years, in
talks and articles, of praising those courageous Israeli journalists,
scholars, and activists who have defied their government's oppressive
policies by working with Palestinians to end the occupation and
ease restrictions on Palestinians; until going to Palestine,
in fact, most of our information on the degree of Israeli oppression
came from precisely these Israelis. But this woman's effort to
exonerate Israeli society because there are some ambiguities
in it, or because a minuscule proportion of that society actively
opposes the government's policies, is a bit of a whitewash. It
is not "sticking it to the Israelis" to report on what
the Israeli government is doing in the occupied territories,
and even to do so without constant reference to those few Israelis
who oppose the government and its policies. Israelis as a society
elected the Sharon government to do their business for them,
and Israelis as a society must therefore share the responsibility
whenever the government's actions arouse criticism. All of Israeli
society lives within no more than a few miles of Jenin and Nablus,
of the Palestinian lands confiscated for Israeli roads and settlements,
of the Palestinian homes demolished, of the Palestinian installations
bombed to rubble, of the checkpoints. Not to know, not to care,
that this is happening is far more than a mere ambiguity. It
is a gross dereliction of responsibility, and all of Israeli
society must be called to account--most particularly because
Israel is a democracy and has a choice. The fact that some Israelis
do know and do criticize does not exonerate "the Israelis"
as a whole. As Gideon Levy has said, one must wonder about "a
society whose spokesmen get so pathologically excited by weapons
and killing."
***
There is ambiguity in Palestinian society
as well, and Palestinians react very differently to Israel's
policies and Israel's domination over them. Some become suicide
bombers; the vast majority do not. The vast majority are willing
to live in peace with Israel, and have been willing for the last
couple of decades, if Israel will give them a decent small state
that's truly independent and sovereign. The vast majority do
not care about vengeance, as long as Israel will leave them alone.
We met Palestinians who are angry, Palestinians who are resigned,
but not many who hate. One woman spoke with anger of what she
and her neighbors endure and after a long disquisition said simply,
"We are down now. But when we have our breath, we will know
our target. We will make them eat what we eat." One man,
on the other hand, more despairing, less angry, said that "God
is very angry with the people here." When asked if he meant
that God was only angry with the Israelis for what they do in
the occupied territories, he said, "No. God must not like
the Palestinians either, or he'd help them."
***
Actually seeing the West Bank and Gaza
was truly eye-opening, despite our having worked on the issue
and the conflict for 30 years. Flying over the West Bank and
seeing the pervasiveness of Israeli settlements, driving its
highways past huge concrete blocs of Israeli apartments that
dot the once pastoral hillsides around Jerusalem, gives one a
different perspective that cannot be gained even from extensive
reading or from seeing films and photographs. We had always wondered
why Israeli settlers wanted to live isolated in what seemed to
be ghettos throughout the West Bank--heavily fortified, to be
sure, but ghettos nonetheless--surrounded by Palestinians: 200,000
Israelis (not counting the equal number who live in Jerusalem)
living among 2,000,000 Palestinians. But when you are there,
it comes home to you with graphic immediacy that it's the Palestinians
who, despite their far greater numbers, live in the ghettos.
Israeli settlements occupy the hilltops and the upper hillsides,
a commanding presence looming over Palestinian cities and villages
in the valleys or on lower hills. Israeli highways bisect Palestinian
areas, cutting one Palestinian town from another, enclosing them,
trapping them. The land allotted to Israeli settlements and military
bases constitutes 42% of the land area of the West Bank; Israeli
highways take up another 17% of the land area. Tanks and checkpoints
enclose Palestinian towns. Walls and barbed wire fences enclose
the entire Gaza Strip; a wall, now being built well inside present
West Bank boundaries, will soon enclose a considerably smaller,
Israeli-defined, new West Bank. When before in history has an
entire nation been caged, fenced in behind walls that function
like a prison or a concentration camp?
***
Palestinians in both Palestine and Amman
made a point of telling us that Arabs like and respect the American
people, have always loved what America stands for, but now hate
the U.S. government and its policies. We heard this so often
that the message almost became a ritual. It's a sincere message
nonetheless; Arabs throughout the Middle East have always been
careful to distinguish between the American people and their
government, have always welcomed and admired Americans despite
always knowing about and deeply resenting U.S. support for Israel.
Things are changing, however. The war in Iraq, the abandon with
which the U.S. military is killing Iraqis, and the unquestioning
support the U.S. gives to everything Israel does in Palestine
are together beginning to blur the distinction between the American
people and the government and to turn all sentiment into hatred,
for people as well as government. It needn't be this way.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit.
Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since
then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The
Wound of Dispossession.
The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's
Features
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
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