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Media
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Occupied Palestine and the Politics of Terrorism
Post-Modern Colonialism, Suicidal Rage and the Propaganda System
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Colonial Power in the Middle East and its
Ideological Base-
- Israel is under
terror. As long as the terror continues,
there cannot be any negotiations for
peace. The biggest single obstacle to
negotiations is the escalating spate of
Palestinian suicide bombings against
Israeli civilian targets. The suicide
bombers are under Arafat’s control. Arafat
refuses to reign in his fanatical suicide
bombers, illustrating the insincerity of
his calls for a peace settlement. Hence,
it is Palestinians who are fundamentally
responsible for the ongoing war, for the
violence, for the killing of innocents,
and for the failure to come to a peaceful
and equitable resolution of the conflict.
Until Palestinian terror ceases, Israel
must continue to defend itself against the
violence through targeted military action.
-
- These are the basic
terms of almost all discussion of the
Middle East conflict as framed by the
mainstream media, promulgated by the Bush
administration, and ultimately advocated
by the Zionist State of Israel. The harsh
reality of the matter is that these terms
have been fabricated by the dominant
powers in this conflict, in the pursuit of
their own regional interests. The losers
in this unconscionable process of
deception, have invariably been primarily
the Palestinian people as a whole, and
secondarily, Israeli civilians.
-
- According to the
Orthodox Jewish institution the Central
Rabbinical Congress in the U.S. and
Canada, and its affiliate group Neturei
Karta, the American media, “make it look
like all Jewry and their rabbis are
Zionists, but this is false propaganda.
The most important rabbis, and the
majority of religious Jewry are opposed to
Zionism, but their voice is not heard
because of Zionist control of the American
news media.” Neturei Karta blames
“relentless Zionist pressure” for
“stifling” the larger Jewish community
into silence. “The rabbis who have stood
fast against the onslaught of Zionism are
not consulted by the press, they have no
public relations departments to give out
news releases, they do not have the
pompous commentators of the airwaves or
the partisan editorial writers at their
disposal.”
-
- The respected
journal, the Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs, observes that:
“Were it not coming from a Jewish group,
this statement undoubtedly would evoke
charges of anti-Semitism from the
Zionists, and perhaps from the media as
well…
-
-
“Precisely on
target, their observation serves as an
unambiguous indictment of the one-sided
and severely biased American media when it
comes to Israel and the Middle East.
Despite almost three decades of making
known their contrarian interpretations in
both English and Hebrew, Neturei Karta and
the Rabbinical Congress, both serious and
weighty institutions, remain virtually
unknown in the United States.”[1]
-
- Also virtually
unknown, not only in the U.S., but also in
the United Kingdom and the other Western
countries, are the basic facts
about the Middle East conflict, behind the
veil of Zionist propaganda. These facts
will be documented here, in an effort to
dissect and demolish the official
propaganda line of the Israeli regime
indicated above.
-
- Before doing so, however, the motives
behind the pro-Israeli agenda of the
United States government and media must be
understood. They can in fact be easily
understood once we take into account the
strategic role that the State of Israel
plays in U.S. - and British - regional
planning for the control of Middle East
resources. Retired Israeli General Shlomo
Gazit, former head of Military
Intelligence and West Bank Administrator,
explicitly described Israel’s role as
protector of U.S. interests, by playing
the role of watchdog over the Arab client
regimes:
-
-
“[After the
Cold War] Israel’s main task has not
changed at all, and it remains of crucial
importance. Its location at the center of
the Arab Muslim Middle East predestines
Israel to be a devoted guardian of the
existing regimes: to prevent or halt the
processes of radicalization and to block
the expansion of fundamentalist religious
zealotry.”
-
- According to Gazit, Israel asserts its
right to intervene militarily in any Arab
state facing “threats of revolt, whether
military or popular, which may end up by
bringing fanatical and extremist elements
to power in the states concerned…
-
-
“The
existence of such threats has no
connection with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
They exist because the regimes find it
difficult to offer solutions to their
socio-economic ills. But any development
of the described kind is apt to subvert
the existing relations between Israel and
this or that from among its neighbors.”
-
- He thus elaborates on the implications
in relation to regional U.S. and Western
interests: “In the aftermath of the
disappearance of the USSR as a political
power with interests of its own in the
region a number of Middle Eastern states
lost a patron…
-
-
“A vacuum
was thus created, leading to the region’s
instability. Under such conditions the
Israeli role as a strategic asset
guaranteeing a modicum of stability in the
entire Middle East did not dwindle or
disappear but was elevated to the first
order of magnitude. Without Israel, the
West would have to perform this role by
itself, when none of the existing
superpowers really could perform it,
because of various domestic and
international constraints. For Israel, by
contrast, the need to intervene is a
matter of survival.”[2]
-
- The ramifications
of this policy can be discerned from the
admission in May 1973 by the Senate’s
ranking oil expert, Senator Henry Jackson.
Jackson stressed the necessity of “the
strength and Western orientation of Israel
on the Mediterranean and Iran [under the
Shah] on the Persian Gulf”. Israel and
Iran were “reliable friends of the United
States” who, along with Saudi Arabia “have
served to inhibit and contain those
irresponsible and radical elements in
certain Arab states... who, were they free
to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed
to our principle sources of petroleum in
the Persian Gulf”, which are needed
primarily as a reserve and a lever for
control of the global economy.[3]
-
- In other words,
Israel is to play the role of a regional
proxy force serving to “inhibit” and
“contain” the other Middle East regimes by
posing a constant military threat.
Consequently, the entire region remains
under the hegemony of the Western powers
under U.S. leadership in accordance with
their interests in the unimpeded control
of regional resources.
-
-
That U.S. support
of Israel is intrinsically bound up with
the desire to consolidate a global system
of politico-economic relations under U.S.
control - geared to meet primarily U.S.,
and secondarily Western, interests (at the
expense of the people of non-Western
countries) – is clear from strategic
planning for the Middle East by the
Western powers after the Second World War.
For instance, the leader of the colonial
Empire of that era, the United Kingdom,
noted that the Middle East is “a vital
prize for any power interested in world
influence or domination”, since control of
the world’s oil reserves also means
control of the world economy.[4]
By 1953, a fledgling superpower-to-be –
the United States - had its own designs
for world domination. A declassified
secret documents records that: “United
States policy is to keep the sources of
oil in the Middle East in American hands.”[5]
Clearly, the United States aimed to
dominate and control Middle East affairs
to ensure its monopoly over regional
resources, namely, oil, thus ensuring its
leverage over the world economy, and thus
consolidating its global hegemony. Britain
and the other Western powers would be
drawn in as collaborators in this process,
with the former playing the role of a
junior partner with the U.S.
-
- U.S.-Western policy
in the Middle East entailed that any
movement threatening Western domination of
the region had to be put down. In 1958, a
secret British document articulated this
policy and its ramifications, which
included the demolition of “Arab
nationalism”, meaning the indigenous
population’s desire for
self-determination:
-
-
“The major British
and other Western interests in the Persian
Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for
Britain and other Western countries to oil
produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b)
to ensure the continued availability of
that oil on favourable terms and for
surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the
spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism
in the area and subsequently to defend the
area against the brand of Arab
nationalism.”[6]
-
- The antipathy to
“Arab nationalism” is a relic of colonial
policy after the First World War. The
British Empire aimed to dismantle Ottoman
Turkey, which had been the Muslim
caliphate for four centuries. The region
encompassed by the Ottoman caliphate
included and integrated the areas of
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan
and much of Saudi Arabia. Islam was
naturally the basis of unity of the
caliphate, and to counteract this unity
the Western powers perpetuated local
divisions among the Arabs. This was
achieved by relying on pro-West Arab
leaders with local tribal or religious
followings to promote the division of the
Ottoman Empire. None of these leaders,
however, had a claim to popular
leadership. The plans of how to sponsor
uprisings were improvised by British
officers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo.
According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the
India Office, British aims were to divide
Arabs not unify them.
-
- The Western powers
eventually succeeded in breaking up the
Arab world into several impotent client
regimes, an exceedingly chaotic and bloody
programme that included the literal
creation of twelve previously non-existent
nations. The arbitrary creation of borders
within what was formerly a single empire,
defined the fledgling nation-states and
successfully carved the region into
several divided segments. In all of these
fictional nation-states, pro-West leaders
were forcefully installed to execute
Western instructions. Since the objective
of this programme included unimpeded
access to regional resources (oil) in
opposition to the wishes of the
populations, it necessarily involved the
provocation of force to manipulate the
political environment and ensure the
establishment of impotent client-regimes
whose social and economic administration
was subservient to Western interests. This
inevitably resulted in the impoverishment
and repression of the Arab people under
their newly formed illegitimate
governments. Due to this programme which
involved a series of political, economic
and cultural manipulations, these regimes
became dependent on the West for their
sheer survival in all significant
respects.
[7] After the Second World War,
the United States replaced the United
Kingdom as the dominant power in the
Middle East. By the 1970s, the CIA
successfully established close political
and economic ties with these repressive
Arab regimes.[8]
-
- It is these same
illegitimate Arab client-regimes referred
to by the former Director of Israeli
Military Intelligence, General Gazit, over
which the State of Israel has been placed
as a regional watchdog or “guardian”. In
this context, Israel is an essential
military-strategic pivot in the
subordination of the Middle East to
U.S.-Western interests – an extension of
the colonial system, and of the colonial
policies that originally contributed to
the fragmentation of the Arab region at
the beginning of the 20th
Century.
-
- It is because of
this broad, overriding strategy, designed
to secure U.S. and Western interests in
the Middle East, that the U.S. and Western
media most often systematically toe the
Zionist line. The corporate-dominated
structure of the Western mass media means
that the media as an institution is
thoroughly inseparable from the
profit-orientated considerations of the
power elite. As a consequence, the Western
governments’ agenda in the Middle East -
which results in their staunch support of
the State of Israel as a regional watchdog
for U.S.-led Western interests - is
motivated by economic interests that are
linked directly to the U.S. desire to
consolidate its global hegemonic power,
interests secured through the activities
of U.S./Western transnational
corporations: the same corporations that
hold dominant sway over the tendencies in
reporting of the mass media. As noted by
Ben Bagdikian - former Dean at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, and a winner of
almost every top award in U.S. journalism,
including the Pulitzer Prize:
-
-
“In an
authoritarian society there is a ministry,
or a commissar, or a directorate that
controls what everybody will see and hear.
We call that a dictatorship. Here we have
a handful of very powerful corporations
led by a handful of very powerful men and
women who control everything we see and
hear beyond the natural environment and
our own families. That’s something which
surrounds us every day and night. If it
were one person we’d call that a
dictatorship, a ministry of information.”[9]
-
-
Lie No. 1: Israel is under terror. As long
as the terror continues, there cannot be
any negotiations for peace
-
- The myth of
Israel’s victim-hood is consistently
propagated by the regime to justify its
illegal and increasingly brutal occupation
of Palestine. The myth is achieved by the
constant repetition, and distortion, of
the following: the State of Israel is
under siege from Palestinian terrorists
embarking on incessant suicide missions,
resulting in the mass terrorisation of
Israeli civilians.
-
- The picture of
Israel as a victim, rather than a
perpetrator of terrorism, can only emerge
from a presupposed pro-Israeli agenda,
which focuses principally on the killing
of Israelis by Palestinian suicide
bombers, while completely blocking out all
consciousness of the killing of
Palestinians by the Israeli Army (Israeli
Defence Force [IDF]). This attempt to
comprehensively block out the facts from
public awareness is actively undertaken by
the Israeli government and its Western
supporters. The philosophy here is quite
simple: Out of Sight = Out of Mind. Hence,
the historical record, along with the
factual context of contemporary
developments, is almost entirely erased
from public consciousness.
-
- To understand the
reality, it is essential to look at and
compare the entire spectrum of violence
committed by all actors within the
conflict. Only in this way can the reality
and scale of terrorism on both sides be
clarified, and responsibility for the
violence be thus proportionally assigned.
This should be done comprehensively -
drawing together the historical and
contemporary record of conflict between
Israeli and Palestinian actors.
-
- We may begin with
the current crisis. The Israeli human
rights group B’Tselem, which is based in
Jerusalem, reports that: “Since Israel
began its invasions into Palestinian
refugee camps on February 27, dozens of
unarmed Palestinian civilians have been
killed, including children and medical
personnel…
-
-
“In every city and
refugee camp that they have entered, IDF
soldiers have repeated the same pattern:
indiscriminate firing and the killing of
innocent civilians, intentional harm to
water, electricity and telephone
infrastructure, taking over civilian
houses, extensive damage to civilian
property, shooting at ambulances and
prevention of medical care to the injured.
-
-
“The grave results
have not caused the IDF to change its
course of action. Israeli policymakers
knew the grave price to the civilian
population after the incursion into the
first refugee camp. Yet they continue to
engage in actions that constitute grave
breaches of international humanitarian
law.”[10]
-
- According to
authoritative statistical data on the
number of fatalities for both Israelis and
Palestinians published and endorsed by
B’Tselem, between the beginning of the
Intifada (9th December 1987)
and the end of January 2002, a total of
2,166 Palestinian civilians were killed by
Israeli security forces and settlers. In
the same period, a total of 454 Israeli
civilians were killed by Palestinians.
[11]-
- Thus, the
approximate ratio of fatalities between
Palestinians and Israelis for this period
is 5:1. In other words, Israeli violence
resulting in death against Palestinians is
approximately 5 times that of Palestinian
violence resulting in death against
Israelis.
-
- Statistical data on
the number of injuries on both sides is an
even more damning indictment of the
Israeli role. According to data produced
by the Palestine Red Crescent Society for
the period between 29th
September 2002 and 6th April
2002 – and endorsed as reliable by
B’Tselem – the total number of
Palestinians (mostly civilians) seriously
injured by Israeli use of live ammunition,
rubber/plastic bullets, tear gas, shrapnel
and bomb fragments amounts to 18,761.
[12]
In the same period, the total number of
Israeli casualties (again, mostly
civilians) amounts to 427. Thus, the ratio
of casualties between Palestinians and
Israelis is a shocking 44:1. In other
words, Israeli violence against
Palestinians resulting in civilian
casualties is 44 times that of Palestinian
violence against Israelis.[13]
-
- The only logical
conclusion one can draw from this analysis
is that the statistical data proves very
clearly that Israel bears overwhelming
responsibility for violence and terrorism
in this conflict, as a matter of record.
The implications have been duly noted by
respected observers, such as the Israeli
Political Sociologist Dr. Lev Grinberg,
Director of the Humphrey Institute for
Social Research at Ben Gurion University (Beersheva).
He describes how Israeli State terrorism
in the Occupied Territories is condoned by
the international community, and
repackaged through the media as “self-defence”:
-
-
“What is the
difference between State terrorism and
individual terrorist acts? If we
understand this difference we’ll
understand also the evilness of the U.S.
policies in the Middle East and the
forthcoming disasters. When Yassir Arafat
was put under siege in his offices and
kept hostage by the Israeli occupation
forces, he was constantly pressed into
condemning terror and combatting
terrorism. Israel’s State-terrorism is
defined by U.S. officials as
‘self-defense’, while individual suicide
bombers are called terrorists.
-
-
“The only small
difference is that Israeli aggression is
the direct responsibility of Ariel Sharon,
Benjamin Ben Eliezer, Shimon Peres and
Shaul Mofaz, while the individual
terrorist acts are done by individuals in
despair, usually against Arafat’s will.
One hour after Arafat declared his support
of a cease fire and wished the Jews a
Happy Passover feast, a suicide bomber
exploded himself in an hotel in Netanya,
killing 22 innocent Jews celebrating
Passover. Arafat was blamed as responsible
for this act, and the present IDF
offensive has been justified through this
accusation.
-
-
“At the same time,
Sharon’s responsibility for Israeli war
crimes is being completely ignored. Who
should be arrested for the targeted
killing of almost 100 Palestinians? Who
will be sent to jail for the killing of
more than 120 Palestinian paramedics? Who
will be sentenced for the killing of more
than 1,200 Palestinians and for the
collective punishment of more than
3,000,000 civilians during the last 18
months? And who will face the
International Tribunal for the illegal
settlement of occupied Palestinian Lands,
and the disobedience of UN decisions for
more than 35 years?”[14]
-
-
Lie No. 2: The biggest single obstacle to
negotiations is the escalating spate of
Palestinian suicide bombings against
Israeli civilian targets
-
- Having undertaken a
comparative analysis of the violence by
all actors in the conflict, it is clear
that this statement obfuscates the nature
of the crisis. The vast majority of acts
of terrorism are committed by the State of
Israel against Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories. The mass
terrorisation of the Palestinian people by
the Israeli Defence Force far outweighs in
scale and impact Palestinian suicide
bombings in Israel. As Ben Gurion
University Sociologist Dr. Grinberg notes:
“Suicide bombs killing innocent citizens
must be unequivocally condemned; they are
immoral acts, and their perpetrators
should be sent to jail. But they cannot be
compared to State terrorism carried out by
the Israeli Government…
-
-
“The former are
individual acts of despair of a people
that sees no future, vastly ignored by an
unfair and distorted international public
opinion. The latter are cold and
‘rational’ decisions of a State and a
military apparatus of occupation, well
equipped, financed and backed by the only
superpower in the world.
-
-
“Yet in the public
debate, State terrorism and individual
suicide bombs are not even considered as
comparable cases of terrorism. The State
terror and war crimes perpetrated by the
Israeli Government are legitimized as
‘self-defense’, while Arafat, even under
siege, is demanded to arrest ‘terrorists’.
-
-
“I want to ask:
Who will arrest Sharon, the person
directly responsible for the orders to
kill Palestinians? When is he going to be
defined a terrorist too? How long will the
world ignore the Palestinian cry that all
they want is freedom and independence?
When will it stop neglecting the fact that
the goal of the Israeli Government is not
security, but the continued occupation and
subjugation of the Palestinian people?”[15]
-
- It is absurd to
imagine that such a grueling and brutal
occupation that consists not only of
military violence, but also of
socio-economic repression, can continue
without the indigenous population
resisting that occupation with military
force. Violence breeds violence, and
terrorism against a civilian population
under occupation will elicit a military
response as a matter of that population’s
legitimate attempt to defend itself and
repel the occupying invader. The leading
American Jewish journalist Ellen Cantarow
- who between 1979 and 1989 reported for
the Village Voice, Inquiry,
Mother Jones, and other U.S.
newspapers from Israel and the West Bank –
describes how during those years she
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 now
are in Israel’s hands. (About a third of
Gaza’s resources have suffered the same
fate.) …
-
-
“I conducted
in-depth interviews with ultra-right-wing
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, the 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 34 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.”
-
- Most shocking of
all, Cantarow reports that the IDF is
administrating a system of
institutionalised racial discrimination –
an apartheid system – in the Occupied
Territories:
-
-
“On all my stays
in the West Bank I personally witnessed
the 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.”[16]
-
- It is this brutal
and repressive system of apartheid
occupation, continuing and intensifying
for decades, which has increasingly
aggravated and provoked tensions among a
suppressed people – the Palestinians –
whose last, most devastating available
means of responding to the massive
technological violence of the Israeli
military onslaught is the simple suicide
bomber. It is a matter of record that
Palestinian military resistance has
intensified in direct response to the
escalation of Israeli State terrorism
against Palestinian civilians. As numerous
respected commentators have observed, the
intensifying resistance to Israel’s
illegal apartheid occupation is a direct
consequence of the continuation and
intensification of that occupation, and
the consolidation of apartheid. Cantarow
observes:
-
-
“During the time I
was reporting, stone-throwing and street
demonstrations were what brought
collective punishment [by the IDF].
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.”[17]
-
- In other words, the
rise of militancy among Palestinian
resistance groups is a direct consequence
of the provocation provided by daily
Israeli terrorism – and the scale of such
militancy is barely enough to rival the
scale of Israeli terrorism. New York
Times correspondent Chris Hedges,
former Jerusalem-based Middle East Bureau
Chief for the Dallas Morning News
from 1988-1990 and former Cairo-based
Middle East Bureau Chief for the New
York Times from 1991-1995, noted that:
-
-
“If Oslo had
led, as many had hoped, to a two state
solution, and thereby given Palestinians
some glimmer of a better life, it is a
fair bet that Hamas would be a marginal
force in Gaza. But Israel’s occupation and
Arafat’s mismanagement have made it only a
matter of time before the militants come
to power… Hamas is primarily known outside
Israel for its suicide bomb attacks
against Israeli civilians. The Sheikh
tells me that Hamas orders suicide
bombers, under its military wing, Iz
al-Din al-Qassam, to attack Israeli
civilians targets because Israeli troops
and armed settlers routinely attack
Palestinian civilians. ‘As long as they
target our civilians we will target their
civilians,’ he says. ‘When they stop we
will stop’.”
-
- Hedges further notes that this policy
of targeting Israeli civilians within the
recognised borders of the State, did not
exist for over a decade during the
occupation. In fact, this policy emerged
in the aftermath of consistent Israeli
terror attacks on Palestinian civilians.
“From 1987 to 1993, during the first
intifada, Hamas targeted only Israeli
soldiers and settlements. It began to
attack individual Israeli civilians after
a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldsrein, gunned
down twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in the
Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.”[18]
Of course, the suicide terror attacks must
be condemned in the strongest terms. But
it is clear these attacks essentially
amount to the Zionist State reaping the
very terror that its own IDF military
machine has ruthlessly sown in the
Occupied Territories.
-
-
Lie No.
3: The suicide bombers are under Arafat’s
control
-
- The idea that
Arafat has all militant Palestinian
factions in the Occupied Territories under
his full control is not only completely
unfounded, it is blatantly absurd. The
simple reason why Arafat cannot reign in
Palestinian suicide bombers, is because he
is not in control. Indeed, Hamas, for
instance, was originally promoted by
Israeli officials to weaken the PLO
(Palestinian Liberation Organisation),
which has now become the PA (Palestinian
Authority).
[19]
-
- Additionally, there
are credible reports that the current
crisis has been significantly engineered
by the State of Israel to justify a
permanently aggressive posture of
overwhelming military force in the
Occupied Territories. A report by the
Israeli Insider in mid-July 2001 noted
Israeli plans to launch a massive invasion
of Palestine – it was envisaged that the
invasion would be triggered by “the next
high-casualty suicide bombing”, which
would provide the pretext for Israeli
actions:
-
-
“Chief of Staff
Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz presented the
government on Sunday with an updated plan
for an all-out attack on the Palestinian
Authority. The London-based [Jane’s]
Foreign Report reported that the plan
calls for an invasion of
Palestinian-controlled territory by some
30,000 Israeli soldiers, with the clearly
defined mission of destroying the
infrastructure of the Palestinian
leadership and collecting weaponry
currently possessed by the various
Palestinian forces, and expelling or
killing its military leadership…
-
-
“PA Chairman
Yasser Arafat would no longer be in
control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip at
the end of the military action, the IDF
assumes, according to the London weekly.
The report also discloses the assumption
that the massive Israeli military action
would result in the stationing of an
international peacekeeping force in the
territories, but by the time that such a
force would arrive, facts on the ground
would be quite different, with improved
security conditions for Israel.”
[20]
-
- The Washington
Times also noted that: “A contingency
plan, codenamed Operation Justified
Vengeance, was drawn up last June to
reoccupy all of the West Bank and possibly
the Gaza Strip at a likely cost of
‘hundreds’ of Israeli casualties. While
that plan has never been fully implemented
[sic], elements of it were employed during
the past two weeks in an effort to show
the Palestinians that Israel can still
control these territories at will.”
[21]
-
- The Israeli
Insider, however, further notes that
Israel hoped for a massive suicide bomb
attack resulting in a high Israeli
civilian death toll, to provide a trigger
and pretext to implement these military
plans:
-
-
“As reported in
the Foreign Report this week and disclosed
locally by Maariv, Israel’s invasion plan
- reportedly dubbed Justified Vengeance -
would be launched immediately following
the next high-casualty suicide bombing,
would last about a month and is expected
to result in the death of hundreds of
Israelis and thousands of Palestinians.”[22]
-
- Israeli military
strategists had already anticipated that
the destruction of the Arafat regime would
create a political vacuum that would have
to be swiftly filled by other prominent
Palestinian factions – the most probable
candidate being Hamas. Israel, however,
which originally funded the rise of Hamas
from behind-the-scenes to undermine the
Arafat regime and foster discord between
Palestinian groups, is well aware that
Hamas now promotes suicide bombing against
Israeli civilian targets. But since the
year 2001, Israel has seen the rise of the
militant faction Hamas as a boon,
because of its terrorist atrocities
against Israeli civilians – a high
civilian death toll among Israeli
civilians is considered good publicity to
justify Israel’s planned military
invasions and operations in the Occupied
Territories. The Israeli Insider
continues to note in its July report that:
-
-
“MK
Michael Kleiner [Chairman of the Herut
Party in the Israeli Knesset] called on
Israel to either assassinate or topple
Arafat… Kleiner suggested replacing
Arafat, even if it meant the Hamas would
take his place. According to Kleiner, the
entire world recognizes the Hamas as a
terrorist organization so Israel’s
continued efforts against a radical
Palestinian leadership would not be
condemned.”[23]
-
-
Senior commentator
for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz,
Akiva Eldar, reported that at an Israeli
Cabinet meeting, Minister Silvan Shalom
criticised Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
for advocating “negotiations” with Arafat.
“Between Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas,”
he declared, explaining that Arafat is a
“terrorist in a diplomat’s suit, while
Hamas can be hit unmercifully… there won’t
be any international protests.”[24]
-
- Indeed, this
ruthless line of thought seems to explain
why Israel has targeted Arafat while
leaving Hamas untouched. As the Russian
journal Pravda observes in an
insightful article titled ‘Hamas and
Israel Unite Against Arafat’:
-
-
“What is the power
that the Israeli prime minister stakes on?
No matter how strange it may seem, he has
chosen Hamas... Sharon is leveling
Arafat’s influence, at the same time
getting rid of a peace plan that is
unfavorable for Israel. The Hamas leader
assumes command over the Palestinian
opposition, while Arafat is isolated to
his Ramallah residence. Political and
financial support will be automatically
switched from the PLO to Hamas. It is not
a delirium, which is confirmed by the
following: Israel, which has already
declared its intention to liquidate
centers of terrorism, does not disturb
Hamas, which claims responsibility for
several recent acts of terrorism. This is
rather strange. The previous connection
between Israel and Hamas confirms the
statement.”[25]
-
-
There is an
interesting context here. In November
2001, there was a week-long lull in the
fighting. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
suddenly ordered the assassination of
Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud – but it
had been predicted by almost all observers
that this provocative order would result
in a sequence of Hamas-directed terror
suicide bombings. There can be little
doubt that Israeli military planners did
not forsee this consequence.
Unsurprisingly then, having provoked the
spate of unconscionable suicide bombings
in the first place, Sharon exploited the
predictable Israeli civilian fatalities
and casualties as justification for a new
series of massive military offensives in
the Occupied Territories.[26]
American Jewish political scientist
Stephen R. Shalom further observes the
following revealing facts:
-
-
“Hanoud’s case is
interesting in another respect: despite
Israeli claims that Arafat refused to
arrest terrorists, or else arrested them
only to release them shortly thereafter,
Hanoud had been in a Palestinian jail. He
was not released. Instead, in August 2001,
an Israeli F-16 tried to assassinate him
in the jail. The building was destroyed,
11 police officers killed, and Hanoud
escaped.”[27]
-
- In any case, the
result was an emboldened Hamas, and a
series of devastating suicide bombings
against Israeli civilian targets, exactly
as Israel had required to implement its
longstanding war plans.
-
-
Lie No. 4: Arafat refuses to reign in his
fanatical suicide bombers, illustrating
the insincerity of his calls for a peace
settlement
-
- If it is agreed
that one cannot proceed with negotiations
for a peace settlement when under terror,
then it must be accepted that the single
biggest obstacle to negotiations comes
from the actor principally responsible for
terrorism: Israel. The Zionist regime is
not only responsible for massive State
terrorism against the Palestinian people,
but appears to be tacitly condoning
suicide bomb attacks against Israeli
civilians to justify expansionist military
objectives in the Occupied Territories.
-
- Palestinian
Authority President Yasir Arafat commented
in detail on the genesis of Hamas and the
Israeli connection in interviews with
leading Italian publications:
-
-
“We are doing
everything possible to stop the violence.
But Hamas is a creature of Israel which,
at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak]
Shamir [the late 1980s, when Hamas arose],
gave them money and more than 700
institutions, among them schools,
universities and mosques. Even [former
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin
ended up admitting it, when I charged him
with it, in the presence of [Egyptian
President Hosni] Mubarak.”[28]
-
-
“Hamas was constituted
with the support of Israel. The aim was to
create an organization antagonistic to the
PLO. They [Hamas] received financing and
training from Israel. They have continued
to benefit from permits and
authorizations, while we have been
limited, even [for permits] to build a
tomato factory. Rabin himself defined it
as a fatal error. Some collaborationists
of Israel are involved in these
[terrorist] attacks. We have the proof,
and we are placing it at the disposal of
the Italian gove
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