| Torture in Israeli Prisons
Another intimidation tactic consists of arresting
Palestinians for no reason or without an arrest warrant, and then taking
them into custody and deliberately postponing their court dates. These
periods of arrest sometimes last for weeks. An Amnesty International report
dated June 14, 2000 provides a striking example. According to the report,
a 15-year-old girl named Suad Hilme Gazal was arrested in December 1998
for suspicion of attacking an Israeli, but as of the date of the report's
publication, she had yet to be brought before an Israeli court.72
As of August 1999, more than 3,000 Palestinians
were being held in Israeli prisons; 1,400 had been sentenced to death.
In addition to these prisoners, new people frequently are taken into custody
on the pretext of participating in various events. They are kept in very
poor conditions, and sometimes spend years in custody without their cases
being adjudicated. This happened to Ahmad Qatamesh who, although he still
had not been found guilty after 6 years, was held without bail for the
entire 6 years before being released.73
Aside from these prisoners, between 1989 and 1998 another 20,000 Palestinians
were held in custody as so-called "administrative detainees." This term
designates those individuals who have been arrested by an authorized administrative
body without being issued a trial date. Thanks to this practice, Israel
is able to arrest Palestinians without just cause and keep them in jail
for years without informing them of the charge or bringing them before
a judge. During this period, detainees have no right of access to their
attornies or their families.
The table below provides details of the
numbers of Palestinians taken into custody during the al-Aqsa Intifada
and the length of incarceration.
| Month |
Day |
Total number of
prisoners and detainees |
Serving Sentence |
Detained for Interrogation |
Detained until end
of legal process |
Administrative detainees |
| January 2001 |
3
4 |
737
719 |
571
202 |
37
5 |
131
496 |
-
16 |
| February2001 |
8
15 |
747
761 |
557
223 |
41
8 |
129
514 |
-
16 |
| March 2001 |
5
15 |
751
787 |
74
248 |
44
12 |
132
513 |
1
14 |
| April 2001 |
4
11 |
757
812 |
572
279 |
42
16 |
142
506 |
1
11 |
| May 2001 |
8
8 |
725
820 |
574
302 |
44
12 |
151
495 |
1
11 |
| June 2001 |
10
14 |
748
823 |
574
291 |
39
16 |
174
504 |
1
12 |
| July 2001 |
11
17 |
813
849 |
582
284 |
45
21 |
184
535 |
1
9 |
Minors in Israel Prisons Service Facilities, 2001
| Date |
Prisoners
and detainees |
Serving sentencer |
Detained
until the end of legal process |
| 3 January |
16 |
6 |
10 |
| 8 February |
15 |
6 |
9 |
| 5 March |
10 |
3 |
7 |
| 4 April |
10 |
3 |
7 |
| 8 May |
9 |
3 |
6 |
| 10 June |
16 |
4 |
12 |
| 11 July |
16 |
7 |
9 |
These figures were prepared by
the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem using data obtained
from the Red Cross, the UN, and other organizations operating in
the region. |
 |
Palestinians are generally kept in inhumane
conditions in desert tent prisons. One of these is the Nagev desert prison,
where hundreds of Palestinians are detained on such trumped-up charges
as "keeping secret files" or "forming private relationships." All of them,
even elderly and gravely ill men, are subjected to physical and mental
torture. The prison's location and the concomitant transportation difficulties
make living conditions worse and also make it exceedingly difficult for
the prisoners to receive regular family visits. The tents cannot protect
them from either the summer's scorching heat or the winter's freezing
cold. Moreover, even after they have served their prison sentences, prisoners
are sometimes unable to leave due to a practice known as "repeat of punishment."
A person who has completed his sentence and is preparing to leave the
prison receives a summons at the last minute, indicating that he now will
begin serving a sentence for some past offense.74
Whether during the interrogation period or while in prison, torture is
one of the Israeli government's most-used techniques. Israel's horrible
torture techniques first came to light as the result of a long study published
in London's Sunday Times in 1977. This study provided the first documented
cases of torture practiced by the Israeli government.
According to the report, unbelievable types
of torture were practiced in the prisons of Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron,
and Gaza, in an interrogation center in Jerusalem known as Moscobiya,
and in such special army prisons as Kfar Yonah, al-Ramle, Sarafand, and
Nafha. Aside from systematic beatings, other forms of torture involve
applying electricity to sexual organs, plunging the naked prisoner into
ice water, attacking the blindfolded prisoner with specially trained dogs,
putting out cigarettes on various parts of the body, and pulling out nails
and healthy teeth. Some prisoners' daughters were arrested and raped in
front of their fathers. Some fathers then were forced to have sex with
their own daughters.75
 
The inside view of the Khiam prison (below)
is strikingly different from the outside view. |
Middle East expert Robert Fisk describes the famous Khiam prison and
various torture techniques in an article about Israeli prisons:
Khiam is an awful place. Electrical wires
attached to the penis and feet, constant whipping, cold nights attached
to a pole while pails of freezing water are thrown over near-naked bodies…
I met one inmate just 10 days after his release, a man who had spent more
than a year in Khiam. "When they interrogated me, they hit me on the head,
then on the back with a Kalashnikov rifle. I fell down. The man put his
boot in my face and broke part of my jaw. I have lost the hearing in part
of my right ear. The ear-drum is broken… Now I have bad breathing problems
and the doctor says there is no medicine for it. That this problem will
stay with me all my life."76
|
Israeli solders have no compunction
about beating and killing Palestinians in the middle of the street
or in front of cameras, and torturing those taken into custody.
Human rights organizations report on these practices in graphic
detail. |
Places known as death camps, where Palestinians are taken after being
arrested en masse and before being presented to a judge, have become true
torture centers. Author Norman Finkelstein quotes Israeli journalist Ari
Shavit's description of a death camp in which many Palestinians are awaiting
trial:
Among them, here and there, are some boys
who are small and appear to be very young... The prison has twelve guard
towers… The Shin Bet [an Israeli investigative agency] delivers to the
[soldiers] a list with the names of friends of the young men... Then the
soldiers ... go out almost every night to the city and ... come back with
children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth.
Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already
been beaten ... a young man, barefoot, wounded, who looks as if he's having
an epileptic fit, who tells you that they beat him just now on the back
and stomach and over the heart. There are ugly red marks all over his
body. The doctor turns to the young man and shouts at him. In a loud,
raging voice he says: "May you die!" And then he
turns to me with a laugh: "May they all die!"77
One of the reasons why torture is so frequent and common is that Shin
Bet, the internal security agency, until recently was permitted by Israeli
law to torture during interrogations. Thus Shin Bet officials could treat
prisoners however they liked, and could force them to confess to imaginary
crimes under the pretense of obtaining confessions. Following these torture-assisted
interrogations, long prison sentences awaited those who "confessed" to
crimes. Gideon Levy, an anti-Zionist Israeli author, wrote the following
after visiting a Palestinian who had been tortured by Shin Bet and spent
years in prison:
Omar Ranimat has trouble sitting down. He
also finds it difficult to stand, walk or climb stairs. When I met him
just a few weeks ago, two and a half years after his interrogation by
the Shin Bet, which lasted 45 days and nights, he was a wreck… Ranimat
and Ahmed, like thousands of other Palestinians, underwent routine Shin
Bet treatment - the "shabah," the "gift," the "frog," sleep deprivation,
ear-splitting non-stop music, a stinking sack over the head, a foot on
the testicles and abrasive handcuffs on the writs and ankles. Most had
no connection whatever with ticking bombs.78
Economic Siege
One technique used to intimidate the Palestinians, particularly in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is to keep them under pressure and economically
dependent so that they cannot stand on their own two feet and live decently.
Zionist ideology asserts that the Palestinians are a people sentenced
to live in poverty and primitive conditions, and thus their needs mean
nothing to Israel. The fact that no money has been spent on their behalf
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Jewish settlers in those
areas have been provided with the means to live luxuriously, is just one
sign of this situation.
For example, the settlements in Gaza occupy
a large strip of the coast and cover the most valuable land. These settlements,
surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences, are covered with trees
and vegetation, and benefit from public buildings and commercial activities.
On the other hand, the scenes at the nearby Palestinian refugee camps
are heartbreaking. Some 4,000 Jewish settlers use most of this desert
region's restricted water for agriculture and for such beneits as as a
huge artificial lake in front of a luxury hotel, while the Palestinians
are permitted only to scavenge what water they can from the nearly dry
wells.79
  
Israel closed off Palestinian water reserves
in al-Khalil (Hebron), claiming them for itself. By bulldozing the
water reservoirs of Palestinian farmers, Israel has brought them
to the verge of economic collapse. At right is a Palestinian farmer
who was subjected to this practice. |
Israeli journalist and military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff described
Israel's Gaza Strip policy in March 1993:
We have continued to steal the Strip's water,
even though its quality deteriorated from year to year, to steal the Strip's
tiny land resources, in order to found there more and more [Jewish] settlements,
as if we deliberately wanted to make the inhabitants despair, and in their
despair think in terms of having nothing to lose.80
Another Israeli strategy to force the Palestinians
into a corner is to take away their agricultural capabilities by building
settlements on the most fertile land. In this way, the Israeli government
hampers Palestinian efforts to continue their already-difficult agricultural
activities, thus depriving them of their livelihood. An example of this
is the prohibition on fishing, which represented the only source of income
for many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, widespread attacks
by Israeli soldiers and settlers on Palestinian farms contribute to lower
rates of production and income. New regulatory measures, such as mandating
the use of Israeli middlemen to sell all produce in Israel or only allowing
Israeli firms to export produce, also create enormous economic strains.
For example, Palestinian producers can no longer sell their products directly
to consumers. In Gaza, for example, the severe restrictions placed on
the export of oranges, a main source of income, means that more than half
of the producers' crops now simply rots and must be destroyed. As Danny
Rubinstein, a veteran Israeli journalist who writes for Ha'aretz, reports,
"With fishing barred and Arab fruit and citrus cultivation dwindling,
the population of the Gaza Strip was compelled to rely on work under intolerable
conditions at miserable pay in Israel or subcontracting for Israeli industries
by women and children at home, as in the early days of the industrial
revolution."81
 
Once again, innocent civilians are
paying the price for Israel's economic siege. |
Quoting from Sara Roy, a Gaza researcher, Noam Chomsky describes the
main purpose of Israel's policy:
The goal, Roy and other observers conclude,
is to turn parts of Gaza into a "branch plant" economy designed "to serve
Israeli interests . . . primarily," with Israel retaining control over
land, zoning, water, and any development that may take place in the areas
released to local self-administration.82
 
While the amount of arable land under
Israeli control increases daily, Palestinian farmland is occupied
by the Israeli government and turned into roads. |
ISRAELI COMFORT
 
 
Areas inhabited by Israelis feature
the prosperity and modernity of any European city. Their skyscrapers,
ports, luxury hotels, wide boulevards, and department stores have
been built upon stolen Palestinian land. |
PALESTINIAN POVERTY
 
 
Palestinians are confined by Israeli
forces to a hermitic lifestyle on arid lands devoid of infrastructure,
where no investment or development is allowed. |
ISRAEL
 
 
 
On one hand are Israelis, who live
a peaceful life in luxurious comfort. On the other hand are Palestinians,
trying to survive, struggling with hunger, thirst, unsanitary living
conditions, and Israeli attacks. |
Given that factories in the Gaza Strip and cantons in the West Bank offer
an easily exploitable and very cheap labor force, keeping these areas
economically dependent on Israel is an important component of Israel's
policy. The Palestinian economy has suffered greatly due to the curfews
and blockades in the camps imposed by the Israelis since the earliest
days of the al-Aqsa Intifada. According to a UN report published on December
5, 2000, Israel's prohibition on the movement of Palestinian workers and
goods did more than $500 million of damage to the Palestinian economy.
Another fact not cited in the report is that Palestine's agricultural
sector lost an additional $120 million because Israeli soldiers would
not allow Palestinian farmers to harvest and sell their crops. The Palestinians
are being oppressed by military force on the one hand, while being refused
the right to live by economic pressure on the other.
The Burning of Olive Groves
For many centuries, olive groves have comprised one of the Palestinians'
principal sources of income. But just as they have had to leave behind
their homes and everything else they own, they also have been forced to
leave their olive groves behind and migrate elsewhere. Many of these groves,
which contain trees dating from the nineteenth century, and some even
much earlier, have been ruined. The few small farms that the Palestinians
still own are subjected to frequent attacks by settlers, who burn and
cut down all the trees they can find. The situation was described in The
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine:
Thousands of olive trees were also destroyed.
Palestinians who relied for their livelihood on orchards their families
had tended for many generations saw them cut down in an afternoon by Israeli
soldiers and settlers armed with chain saws.83
 
Palestinian olive groves get a little
smaller every day as a result of Israeli occupations. |
During the first Intifada, between 1988 and
1992, the Israeli army cut down 90,000 olive trees on the pretext that
stone-throwing children were hiding in them. Between 1993 and August 2001,
the State of Israel has uprooted 280,000 fruit and olive trees belonging
to Palestinians in the West Bank alone. In 2001 alone, the State of Israel
uprooted 23,551 fruit and olive trees.84
The world turns a blind eye to the
Palestinians, whose only desire is to live a life in which they
can worship freely, live peacefully in their homes, send their children
to school, and conduct their business in safety. |
Moreover, olive groves workers, who are usually women and children, often
are fired upon by Israeli helicopter gunships. Most Palestinians who have
been beaten while trying to harvest olives no longer visit their groves.
The soldiers who fired upon these workers had no valid reason to do so,
for they were neither throwing stones at Israeli soldiers nor participating
in a demonstration. They were simply trying to make a living by working
the small plots of land that they still owned. For some reason, the Israeli
administration will not allow even this. Just as they do in every aspect
of their social lives, Palestinians face almost insurmountable obstacles
in their economic lives as well - they are not permitted even to raise
their own crops.
If one thinks about the broader picture, it becomes clear that destroying
olive groves or other agricultural areas is not a random affair, but rather
part of a comprehensive Israeli strategy, for it takes 6 to 7 years for
a new tree to bear olives. And, many Palestinians derive their families'
livelihoods through olives or other crops. Those whose crops are constantly
being destroyed, however, eventually will be unable to make a living and,
rather than dealing with agriculture, will begin to look for work as day
laborers. In this way, Palestinian villages are being transformed from
productive agricultural units into a source of cheap labor for Israeli
industry.
Throughout history, authoritarian and oppressive leaders have practiced
such types of oppression and cruelty on other peoples. Just like today's
cruel dictators, oppressive despots, and racist leaders, those people
practiced violence, torture, and oppression on those under their command.
And as God states, once these "sowers of discord" are in power, they continue
to inflict physical violence upon their subjects and make a special effort
to wipe out their "animals and crops." In other words, just as the current
Israeli administration has done, they systematically used every technique
in their attempt to destroy a people. This method is described in the
Qur'an:
Whenever he holds the upper hand, he goes about
the Earth corrupting it, destroying (people's) crops and animals. God
does not love corruption. (Qur'an, 2:205)
These very techniques are seen today in the most profound way in Palestine.
The Israeli administration is conducting a systematic program of ethnic
cleansing and, at the same time, undermining all of the Palestinians'
agricultural activities. In such an environment, where peace and security
cannot exist, barrenness can only become more widespread. However, God
does not love corruption and He invites all people to "enter
absolutely into peace" (Qur'an, 2:208).
Demolition of Houses
Now 58 years old, Mohana lives alone in a
broken bus surrounded by a mesh of barbed wire, among new neighbors who
still don't know his name. In 1984, when Gilo extension called Metzpe
Bethlehem was underway, Mohana returned from the Bethlehem market with
his father, a tailor named Salman, to find a bulldozer on its way to remove
his two story stone house. By that time most of Mohana's land was in the
process of being mysteriously expropriated by the Israeli Municipality
even while he still maintained ownership by showing his Ottoman and Jordanian
land documents in Israeli courts. The Israeli Municipality later apologized
for the demolition saying it was a mistake, but compensated Mohana only
with a broken bus and prohibited him from building anything more than
a wooden shed which he currently uses for storage and an outdoor bathroom.85
The excerpt quoted above is just one of the possibly hundreds of incidents
experienced on Palestinian lands. For that matter, most of the hundreds
of Palestinians who return home from the markets to discover that their
homes and all of their possessions have been destroyed are not lucky enough
to acquire a broken-down bus. The Israeli government does not stop at
merely demolishing houses through an expropriation order while its residents
are not at home. Many Palestinians' houses are bombed and razed to the
ground with their residents still inside.
  
 
Israeli police give Palestinians only
15 minutes to vacate their houses, where they have lived for many
years, before they are demolished. Palestinians have suffered this
cruel policy for 50 years. In the past 10 years alone, almost 3,000
homes have been demolished. |
  
The Palestinians have no right to object
when Israeli soldiers arrive to demolish their homes. All they can
do is collect as much as they can and save themselves. |
| AKIT-Turkish
Daily, 10.7.01
JEWS ON A RAMPAGE OF DESTRUCTION
Backed by hundreds of troops, the terrorist state of Israel
has bulldozed eight homes belonging to Palestinians. It
is reported that the Zionist administration carries out
such operations in order to keep down the numbers of Palestinians
in Jerusalem.
|
MILLI GAZETE-Turkish
Daily, 12.7.01
ZIONIST VIOLENCE CONTINUES FULL SPEED AHEAD
Deaf to the protests from the rest of the world, the Sharon
administration continues to spread terror.
|
| RADIKAL-Turkish
Daily, 11.7.01
SYSTEMATIC DESTRUCTION
As Israel continues with its policy of destruction, it yesterday
tore down 26 houses and 12 shops in the Rafah refugee camp.
The fiercest fighting since the ceasefire erupted.
|
| YENI
ASYA-Turkish Daily, 10.7.01
PALESTINIAN HOMES RAZED TO THE GROUND
|
| SABAH-Turkish
Daily, 3.5.01
BULLDOZERS ATTACK HOMES IN GAZA
|
YENI MESAJ-Turkish Daily, 10.7.01
AS THE ISRAELI ARMY'S ATTACKS ON PALESTINIANS CONTINUE,
ISRAELI TROOPS HAVE DEMOLISHED PALESTINIAN HOMES IN JERUSALEM.
YENI MESAJ-Turkish Daily, 10.7.01
ISRAEL DEMOLISHES PALESTINIAN HOMES
|
 |
|
|
|
The periodical Borneo Bulletin addresses
the Israeli practice of demolishing Palestinian houses in its article
"Israel Bares its Teeth" (above). An article published in the the
magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 1998 reports
on Israeli forces' opening fire on Arab protesters (below). |
According to an Amnesty International report
published on June 14, 2000, during early 1987 to January 1999, 2,650 houses
belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem were destroyed,
rendering 16,800 people (7,300 of them children) homeless. According to
this report, this practice was not curtailed even after the Oslo Accords
were signed by the Palestinian Authority and Israel.86
It is worth noting that Israel gives no advance warning before demolishing
a Palestinian family's home. First, the home to be destroyed is surrounded
by bulldozers and Israeli soldiers equipped with modern weapons. Then,
the homeowners are given 15 minutes to collect their belongings. After
this, the soldiers go inside and throw all of the remaining things into
the street and then destroy the house with bulldozers. If the homeowners
offer any resistance, they are beaten severely and sometimes even fired
upon by Israeli soldiers.
For example, in January 1999, when some Palestinians in Eizriya, a village
near Jerusalem, protested the demolition of their home, Israeli soldiers
fired upon them. Zaki Ubeyd, a 28-year-old man, was killed. According
to Amnesty International's report, he was killed by a shot to the back
of the head at close range. This shows that this killing was no accident;
rather, it was done deliberately and consciously.
Another Israeli practice is to grant temporary
settlement papers to Palestinians, especially those living in East Jerusalem,
and then making it difficult for them to renew their papers once they
expire. In this way, Palestinians are removed from their property one
section at a time. Those who lose their settlement rights also lose their
social security, and thus are sentenced to a type of exile. Information
obtained from Israel's Interior Ministry shows that in 1996 alone, 1,641
Palestinians and their families lost the right to live in Jerusalem.87
In 2001, Israel's activities designed to remove Palestinians from their
homes and lands continued at a rapid pace. In his article "Easter in the
Holy Land: Families Watch as Their Homes are Destroyed," Robert Fisk describes
developments that occurred during April 2001:
On one of the holiest days in the Middle
East, how does one write about this wanton Israeli destruction of homes
in Gaza?.. Not to mention the 35 wounded, the boy with his leg chopped
off by an Israeli shell, the teenager with sharpnel nudging at his shoulder
bone and no feeling in his left hand, flapping it uselessly towards me
from his hospital bed. Is this a tragedy or a war crime, this deliberate
attack on the homes of civilians?…
The first big lie of the weekend, however, came from the Israeli
army, which blandly announced that the destruction of the Palestinian
homes in Rafah was no more than "engineering activity" and that in any
case the houses that their tanks and bulldozers turned into rubble were
unoccupied. This was totally untrue as the Israelis, who inhabit a massive
block-house above the shacks, knew very well. When the first tanks burst
through the dividing wall before dusk on Saturday, firing anti-armour
missiles into the nearest apartment blocks even though a small market
was open 300 metres away where hundreds of men, women and children ran
screaming into the neighbouring streets… The Western media were hard at
work belittling the event… All of this, according to the Israelis like
the destruction of more than 30 homes in Khan Younis last week, was in
the name of "security."88
All of the above incidents and information point to one clear fact: The
main target of all of this cruelty is the Palestinian people. And the
vast majority of Palestinians are being driven from their homes merely
because they are of another faith or ethnicity. And again for this reason,
Israel is trying to destroy them. All that the Palestinians have done
in the face of this is to try and protect the holy lands that have belonged
to them for thousands of years, and which have been bequeathed to the
entire Muslim world. Moreover, all Muslims are obliged to shoulder this
task. All people of conscience who see what is happening here, but in
particular Muslims who know and follow the Qur'an's ethics, have great
responsibilities. This systematic cruelty, although taking place before
the eyes of the world, only can be ended by sincere Muslims and the spiritual
values that bind them to this place.
The Bias Among the Western Media
Why can't the Israeli policies of occupation and depopulation be stopped?
Why doesn't the international community use its power to persuade Israel
to adopt a humane and just policy? The answer has several dimensions,
one of which is the bias in some parts of the Western media against the
Palestinian cause. As Edward Said explained well in Covering Islam, most
of the Western journalists and commentators see the Middle East through
streotypes in which "terrorism" is always associated with the Arab Muslim
world and never linked with Israel.
This misconception is so obvious that some news agencies reporting on
events in Palestine have adopted a style and vocabulary favorable to Israel.
For example, when following news reports about Palestine, you seldom encounter
the phrases "the territories occupied by Israel" or "the Occupied Territories."
Likewise, in news reports that mention Israeli attacks, the words "Israel's
retaliation" are used as a matter of course. This gives readers the following
message: "First the Palestinians attacked; Israel counterattacked only
to defend itself."
One of the most frequently encountered sentences
in the Western media describes instances of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian
children: "A Palestinian child died during an exchange of gunfire." This
carries the message: "If Palestinians had not engaged in aggressive conduct,
these children would not have died." In fact, The Independent newspaper's
Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk emphasizes what is meant by "crossfire"
where Israel is concerned: "When I read the word 'crossfire', I reach
for my pen. In the Middle East, it almost always means that the Israelis
have killed an innocent person."89 As far as the Western
media is concerned, Palestinians always die in "crossfire." The intention
here is to hide the fact that Israeli sharpshooters take aim at Palestinians
and shoot with the intention to kill.
This influence is described today by many political scientists and Middle
East experts. This attitude, which ignores Palestinian suffering and Israeli
brutality and tries to make Israel look innocent, prevails in almost every
country, particularly in America. Fisk discusses this in his article "I
Am Being Vilified for Telling the Truth About Palestinians":
But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at any
one academic, analyst, reporter who dares to criticise Israel (or dares
to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite
proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who
is a professor at Columbia University.
  
Palestinian streets are besieged with the
message "Kill All Arabs." |
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from
the Zionist Organisation of America, which last year demanded that he
be fired from the Modern Language Association and which now demands on
an almost daily basis his dismissal from his professorship at Columbia
solely because he points out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy,
the historical tragedy of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of
Israel's continued occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement…
Too true. Noam Chomsky, himself Jewish, is one of the most profound philosophers
of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and America's
blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever more ruthless
abuse... Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the
US that only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's
point of view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put
very well by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel,
note the boondocks location, when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get
their independence until Americans get theirs". But the attempt to force
the media to obey Israel's rules is now international. We must say that
Israel is under siege by Palestinians (rather than occupying Palestinian
land), that Palestinians are responsible for the violence (even though
Palestinians are the principal victims), that Arafat turned down a good
deal at Camp David (though he was offered just over 60 per cent of his
land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice
(rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian
children).90
As Fisk describes, most Western media outlets do not hesitate to report
false news when the subject is Israel. The facts are carefully hidden.
Israel's operations, murders, slaughters, bombings, occupations, exilings,
and hundreds of other types of cruelty either are ignored in Western media
outlets or reported in such a way as to make Israel appear blameless.
Israel is still an aggressor state occupying lands that do not belong
to it, in direct contravention of UN mandates. Yet it is presented to
the world as the "representative of peace and stability in the Middle
East."
When faced with the false news reports and
misinformation of the al-Aqsa Intifada's early days, Fisk could not help
asking: "Why do we always get taken in by the same
lies? Don't reporters carry history books, even a cuttings file, to remind
them of what they wrote in the last Arab-Israeli war? Even the quotes
- the meretricious, cliché-soaked statements - are the same."91
Even when Israel intensifies its use of violence and terror, the Western
press takes a clear pro-Israel stance, failing to find the inhumane slaughters
of civilians newsworthy. In fact, some newspapers even act as spokesman
for Israel, offering those who personally perpetrated the massacres to
write columns, hence publishing a purely slanted version of events. Noam
Chomsky describes how, in 1986, The New York Times presented Ariel Sharon,
a future Prime Minister of Israel and known as "The Butcher of Lebanon,"
as its "terror expert":
The New York Times called upon an expert
on terrorism to offer his thoughts on how to counter the plague… The Times
editors gave his [the expert's] article the title: "It's Past Time to
Crush The Terrorist Monster," and they highlighted the words: "Stop the
slaughter of innocents [Israelis]." They identify the author solely as
"Israel's Minister of Trade and Industry." His name is Ariel Sharon. His
terrorist career, dating back to the early 1950s, includes the slaughter
of 69 villagers in Qibya and 20 at the al-Bureig refugee camp in 1953;
terrorist operations in the Gaza region and northeastern Sinai in the
early 1970s including the expulsion of some ten thousand farmers into
the desert, their homes bulldozed and farmlands destroyed in preparation
for Jewish settlement; the invasion of Lebanon undertaken in an effort
- as now widely conceded - to overcome the threat of PLO diplomacy; the
subsequent massacre at Sabra and Shatilla; and others… In a moral and
intellectual climate such as this, it may well be appropriate for the
world's greatest newspaper to select Ariel Sharon as our tutor on the
evils of terrorism and how to combat it.92
Most Western media outlets apply a very simple technique when reporting
on Palestine: They take Israel's official statement, make room for the
Prime Minister's comments, and dress up the piece with footage from Israeli
news sources. Grace Halsell, President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary
for almost 3 years, was an internationally recognized columnist and Middle
East expert. In one article, she describes how the Western media report
on events in Israel:
Police, said the Israelis, used live ammunition on the Palestinians only
after the Palestinians began an assault on Jewish worshippers. Without
exception, the Western media initially reported this "official" Israeli
explanation.
Now, however, eyewitness accounts, reports from four Palestinian and
Jewish human rights groups, as well as three videotapes, reveal the Israeli
version is false. All available evidence supports Arab charges that Israeli
police initiated the conflict and then shot Palestinians in cold blood.
On Nov. 9, after UN Security Council representatives viewed one of the
videotapes, the Soviet ambassador, Yuli M. Vorontsov, said the filmed
document undermines Israel's claim that Palestinians incited the violence…
A three-man Israeli commission then issued a report upholding the "official"
Israeli line that Palestinians had started the conflict…
Among others, the commission criticized Aryeh Bibi, in charge at the
scene of the killings… Shortly thereafter, Israeli officials called in
Bibi and said he was being promoted to full commander of the Israeli Police
Manpower Division. Whatever the motivation, his promotion, carrying not
only an increase in rank but also in pay, will signal other police that,
officially, it "pays" to shoot Palestinians…
Moreover, the US media, which has several
dozen writers stationed in Israel, makes little or no attempt to understand
and report on the meaning of these assaults. They do little or no investigative
reporting, but rather too readily accept "official" explanations of events
provided them by the Israelis.93
But we must remember that the responsibility for the cruelty occuring
in Palestine is not reserved only for those who actually inflict it, but
also for those who endorse it with their silence and support it indirectly.
As we read, "... (Those who) cause corruption in
the Earth, the curse will be upon them. They will have the Evil Abode."
(Qur'an, 13:25), God warns us that those who sow discord will be
condemned on Judgment Day. |
