Israeli pressure on Palestinians was stepped up even further in the days following the dreadful events of September 11th. Predawn raids were launched on the West Bank towns of Jenin, Jericho and Ramallah, destroying security outposts, government buildings and family homes. In the Beituniya district of Ramallah, shells hit a coffee shop, a mosque and a kindergarten—all perfectly acceptable ‘collateral damage’, and scarcely worth a mention in the Western media. Such Israeli aggression has, after all, been the norm for nearly a year now. Over 600 Palestinians have been killed since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began—four times the number of Israeli deaths; and 15,000 wounded—twelve times more than on the other side. Regular IDF assassinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. In August, fourteen Palestinians were openly murdered by Israeli troops using helicopter gunships and missiles, to ‘prevent’ them killing Israelis, although at least two children and five bystanders were also slaughtered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians.
Equipped with the latest in American-donated fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, a superb navy and a state-of-the-art intelligence service, not to speak of its own nuclear weapons, Israel has been grinding down a dispossessed people without any armour or artillery, no air force—its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel—army or navy, or any of the protective institutions of a modern state. Israel’s cruel confinement of 1.3 million people in the Gaza Strip, jammed like so many human sardines into a tiny pale surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and of nearly two million in the West Bank—all of whose entrances and exits are controlled by the IDF—has few parallels in the annals of colonialism. Even under apartheid, F-16 jets were never used to bomb African homelands, as they are now sent against Palestinian towns and villages.
Behind this ruthless military pounding lies a longer-term logic. The destruction of Palestinian society which began in 1948, with the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native inhabitants—of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today—has continued through the thirty-four years of occupation since 1967. Decades of daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happen to be there, in Israel’s way, have sought to make life impossible for Palestinians, forcing them to give up any resistance, or to leave—as 150,000 have done for Jordan since last year. Community leaders have been jailed and deported by the occupation regime, small businesses crippled by confiscation, farms subject to demolition, universities closed down, students barred from classrooms. No Palestinian farmer or entrepreneur can export their goods directly to any Arab country—their products must pass through Israel, just as taxes are paid to Israel. In a word, the aim has been, as the American researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society.
Today, divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, punctuated by 140 Jewish settlements with their own road network banned to Arabs, Palestinians have been reduced to mass unemployment—60 per cent are jobless—and penury. Half the population of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than $2 a day. They cannot travel freely from one place to the next within the occupied territories but must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints, which regularly detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student and the cleric for hours on end. Some 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted; 2,000 of their houses demolished; wide swathes of their land either expropriated for the implantation of more settlers—there are currently about 400,000—or destroyed for military purposes.
As for the Oslo ‘peace process’ that began in 1993, it has simply re-packaged the occupation, offering a token 18 per cent of the lands seized in 1967 to the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of Arafat, whose mandate has essentially been to police and tax his people on Israel’s behalf. After eight fruitless, immiserating years of further ‘negotiations’, orchestrated by a team of US functionaries which has included such former lobby staffers for Israel as Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more suffering have been inflicted on the Palestinians—including, since August 2001, a ‘Judaized’ East Jerusalem, with Orient House grabbed and its contents carted off: invaluable records, land deeds, maps, which Israel has simply stolen, as it did PLO archives from Beirut in 1982. Such has been the upshot to date of Ariel Sharon’s gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem’s Haram Al-Sharif on 28 September 2000, surrounded by 1,000 soldiers and guards supplied by Ehud Barak—an action unanimously condemned even by the Security Council. Within a few hours, as the merest child could have predicted, anti-colonial rebellion broke out—with eight Palestinians shot dead as its first victims.
A few months later Sharon was swept to power essentially to ‘subdue’ the Palestinians—to teach them a lesson, or get rid of them. His record as an Arab-killer goes back 30 years, before the Sabra and Shatila massacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been indicted in a Belgian court. But he is no fool. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege, taking more land, cutting off further supplies, launching deeper incursions into Palestinian towns like Jenin and Ramallah, making life more intolerable for the victims of the occupation—while with each turn of the ratchet, his propaganda machine explains that Israel is merely ‘defending’ itself, ‘securing’ areas and ‘re-establishing control’, with the sole aim of ‘preventing terrorism’. Sharon and his minions even attack Arafat as an ‘arch-terrorist’, although he literally cannot move without Israeli permission, in the same breath that they explain ‘we’ have no quarrel with the Palestinian people. What a boon for that people! With such ‘restraint’, why should a full-scale invasion, carefully bruited about to intimidate the Palestinians, be necessary?
In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid since 1967, Palestinian victims remain nameless and faceless, barely rating a mention on national news programmes. Matters are different with the Jewish dead. The terrible human cost of the suicide bombings in Haifa or Jerusalem settled quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hadn’t done enough to control his terrorists; their hatred threatens incalculable harm to ‘us’ and our strongest ally; Israel must firmly defend its security. Thoughtful observers will add: these people have been fighting tiresomely for thousands of years anyway; there has been too much suffering on both sides, and the violence must be stopped; although the way Palestinians send their children into battle is yet another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. So, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invaded unfortified Jenin with bulldozers and tanks. In America, Israel has so far won the public relations war that it might seem scarcely necessary for it to put several more million dollars into a media campaign—using ‘stars’ like Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman and Amos Oz—to further improve its image.