The Great War for Civilisation (216 page)

91
Readers who wanted to test this particular mandate were referred to Genesis 12:17, Leviticus 26:44–45, Deuteronomy 7:7–8, Samuel 7:12–16, I Kings 15:4, Psalms 89:34–37 and 105:8–11. “The battle for Jerusalem has begun,” the ad said, “and it is time for believers in Christ to support our Jewish brethren . . .”

92
Israeli leaders were not the only ones to try to avoid confronting this physically obvious blockade on the road to peace. In 2000, John Hume, Northern Ireland's only statesman, advised Palestinians and Israelis that “your challenge is not one of geographical turf, but rather the construction of agreed institutions . . .” The Irish version of the “peace process,” however, does not travel well. A “turf” war—two groups of people arguing over the same piece of real estate—was precisely what this Middle East conflict
was
about. The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli–Arab struggle would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the seventeenth-century dispossession of the Catholics. Urging the Protestant landlords and the mass of impoverished Irish Catholics to construct “agreed institutions” would not have commended itself to either side.

93
A Scottish pathologist confirmed in 1995 that a Palestinian who died in Israeli custody, Abed Samed Hreizat from Hebron, suffered fatal brain injuries when his head was forcefully jerked during “shaking” by Israeli Shin Bet agents on 22 April that year. In an Israeli special commission report on interrogation, retired justice Moshe Landau sanctioned the use of “moderate physical pressure” against Palestinians. In 1997, Palestinian military intelligence turned up at Nablus hospital with a detainee called Youssef Baba, who had been burned on the arm and thighs with the electric element used to boil water. His wounds had become gangrenous; he was later returned to prison, where he died on 31 January.

94
Not least when Netanyahu threw in the release from an American prison of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard—who had been sending Pentagon secrets to Israel—as part of his demands for success at Wye. Pollard, a Jewish American working as a U.S. intelligence analyst, had been sentenced to life in March 1987. In 1995, Ehud Barak even made him an Israeli citizen. Clinton, after cringingly saying that he would “seriously review” Pollard's case, at least managed to refuse Netanyahu's demand.

95
This “threat” was thrown into doubt when an Israeli reporter, Rami Tal, revealed to the newspaper
Yediot Ahronoth
in 1997 that Moshe Dayan, the defence minister who conquered Golan in 1967, had told him in a series of interviews before his death that many of the Israeli–Syrian firefights were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that the kibbutz residents who pressed the government to take Golan did so less for security than for the farmland.

96
The video and photographs of the twelve-year-old falling lifeless into his father's arms became one of the iconic images of the second intifada, and the Israelis quickly erased all trace of the killing by demolishing the wall behind which they had taken cover. An Israeli military investigation then attempted to prove that Palestinians had been responsible for their deaths—and successfully persuaded America's CBS channel to air their bogus “findings” on its
60 Minutes
programme. “One gets the impression,” Israeli Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz bravely pointed out, “that instead of genuinely confronting this incident, the IDF [Israel Defence Force] has chosen to stage a fictitious re-enactment and cover up the incident by means of an enquiry with foregone conclusions and the sole purpose of which is to clear the IDF of responsibility for al-Dura's death.” Western reporters who investigated the killings concluded that Israelis had shot both the son and the father, who survived, although the Israeli soldiers responsible may not have been able to see them behind the wall.

97
Less than two weeks later, Ashrawi will write an open letter to President Bill Clinton. “It has been our experience, Mr. President, that most American public officials, once out of office, begin to suffer pangs of conscience and inexplicable urges to express contrition in the form of public confessions pertaining to the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. With an honest desire to spare you the fate of other high officials who develop after-the-fact immaculate hindsight and a drive for justice, I would like to point out that there is still world enough and time to speak out—better yet, to
act
now.” Ashrawi knew Clinton would not do so. What she could not have known was that, when he did “speak out” once he was no longer president, he would blame the Palestinians.

98
He certainly took refuge at the London home of Syrian security men. Hindawi signed a statement for police, saying he had been given the bag containing the bomb by an officer working for General Mohamed el-Khouly, the head of Syrian air force intelligence. In court, Hindawi retracted this statement, claiming he had been forced to sign it unread and believed he was part of a conspiracy by Israeli agents to damage Syria. He was convicted and Britain broke off relations with Damascus. Israel condemned “Syria's central role in terrorism,” though I do remember a strange incident a few days later when I met the outgoing British ambassador to Syria in the VIP lounge at Damascus airport. There was some evidence, he said, that the Israelis “knew the bomb was being brought to Heathrow.” He would say no more. Had the Israelis learned of the bomb by tapping Syrian embassy phones? Had they been tipped off by British security? Had they encouraged the Syrians to involve themselves in a bomb plot? No Israeli government would bomb its own aircraft. But if they knew about it in advance, the Israelis could, once the bomb arrived at Heathrow, arrest Anne-Marie Murphy and end up “proving” that Syria was a “centre of international terror.”

99
There is a rich seam of information on Israel's policy of assassinating its opponents inside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. As long ago as 1984, two of four Palestinian bus hijackers were bludgeoned to death by Shin Bet operatives after they had been interrogated, an admission made only when press photographers produced pictures of the two men being led, very much alive, from the bus. The then Israeli defence minister Yitzhak Shamir described the killings as “a mishap.” In 1991, Palestinian lawyers and human rights groups began the re-examination of dozens of cases of Palestinian men shot dead during the first intifada after Israeli television revealed the existence of Israeli army hit squads. In early 1992, Israeli witnesses testified that they had seen Israeli soldiers in civilian clothes opening fire on masked Palestinians who were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in Dura near Hebron. Amnesty International's 21 February 2001 report on
Israel and the Occupied Territories:
State Assassinations and Other Unlawful Killings
is a carefully researched account of Israel's extrajudicial murders which includes the death of forty-nine-year-old Dr. Thabet Thabet, a former Fatah activist who was later named as a PLO representative to the 1991 Madrid peace talks and who developed many friendships with members of the Israeli peace movement. Thabet, a Tulkarem dentist, was shot dead in his car by Israeli troops on 31 December 2000. The Israelis later claimed he was a commander of a Tanzim cell who “instructed people where to carry out attacks,” a highly unconvincing explanation for the murder of a Palestinian who had attended the funeral of an Israeli soldier, the son of an Israeli peace campaigner he had befriended. The killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders then became routine, helped by a ruling from one of Israel's chief rabbis. “Jewish religious law,” Rabbi Israel Meir Lau claimed on 27 July 2001, “gives its . . . full support to the policy of active killings which the government and security forces maintains today in order to prevent terrorists from planning and carrying out attacks in Israel.” On the same day, the spiritual leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, announced in a sermon broadcast over Israeli army radio that Arabs were reproducing like insects and should go to hell. “In the old city of Jerusalem, they're swarming like ants,” he said. “They should go to hell—and the Messiah will speed them on their way.” The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem condemned the “immoral and illegal practice” of killing wanted Palestinians in the occupied territories. In 1993, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch calculated that 120 Palestinians had been killed by covert Israeli units since December 1987. When a Mossad hit squad tried to murder Khaled Mashaal, a Hamas official, in Jordan in 1997—Israelis criticised the attack not because it was illegal but because it had failed—even President Mubarak of Egypt felt constrained to call the tactics “immoral.” Israel had already been shocked by earlier revelations that its security men had murdered dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the 1967 Middle East war. Their mass grave had been discovered in Sinai; Rabin called the war crime an “aberration.” Death always involved double standards. In 1998, for example, Israel's social security system said it could not compensate the family of a Palestinian killed by a Jewish gunman because under Israeli law an Arab murdered by a Jewish “terrorist” is not considered a victim of terrorism while a Jew killed by an Arab is.

100
Preferring to avoid the deeply flawed trials which had condemned nine alleged collaborators to death, Arafat's intelligence operatives were now murdering Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel, killing at least twenty men between December 2000 and August 2001. Palestinian police no longer investigated the killings of men believed to have worked for the Israeli intelligence services and who in some cases helped Israel to murder Palestinian militants. Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat's special advisers, admitted to me that “these people who were shot, they were killed by intelligence, under orders, because of very certain information and recorded confessions. All these people were shot by Palestinian intelligence in areas not under our security control. All were shot in Area B or Area C where they were protected by Israeli security.” Kassem Khleef, found dead at a checkpoint near al-Ram on 12 November 2000, had been accused of providing Shin Bet with the movements of Hussein Abayat, assassinated three days earlier. Adnan Fathi Sultan was shot in the neck and chest by armed men who dragged him from his Bethlehem home on 17 December 2000 because they believed he had colluded with the Israelis to murder Yousef Abu Sway five days earlier. On 30 July 2001, sixty-eight-year-old Jamal Eid Shahin—the oldest victim so far—received a call at his house in Beit Sahour from men wearing Palestinian police uniforms; they asked him to follow them into the street. There they shot him eleven times and reportedly assaulted his corpse with a hammer. By the summer of 2001, a total of eighteen Palestinians had died in Palestinian prisons since 1993, often under torture by interrogators trained by the CIA.

101
Amira Hass, the
Ha'aretz
correspondent, told me that although she had visited the houses of suicide bombers in Gaza, she did not, during the first year of the second intifada, choose to do so because “as an Israeli, I can't be objective.” She only rarely went to the homes of “martyrs.” “I made one story about a child—I really wanted to show how he was killed, that he was not a danger to the soldier who killed him. The family was not happy with an Israeli journalist.”

102
The most shameful explanation of Palestinian suicide bombing was concocted by Tom Friedman, an old friend but an increasingly messianic columnist for
The New York Times
. Palestinians, he wrote, had not chosen suicide bombing out of “desperation” but because “all they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy.” They had lost sight of the sacredness of human life, he claimed, because they were blinded by “narcissistic rage.” He advised the Palestinians to adopt “nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi.” But peaceful protests by Palestinians have always been ignored or suppressed. When Palestinians and other Arab nations took their case against Ariel Sharon's land-grabbing wall to the International Court at The Hague in 2004— surely a “Gandhi-an” technique of seeking justice—Israel simply refused to heed the court's ruling. Friedman made no comment on this.

103
Recording these details, a Quaker magazine, reporting the work of an international Quaker working party on the Israeli–“Palestine” conflict, notes that “we have been disturbed to find that within Israel the option of ‘transfer'—that is, the ethnic cleansing of large numbers of Palestinians from the occupied territories, or even of Palestinian citizens from inside Israel itself—is now discussed openly by politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders and many other segments of society . . . we condemn this idea and any other proposal that fails to respect the equal worth of all of God's children.”

104
If Hizballah helped to construct that gateway, then the Palestinians surely passed it on to the Iraqi insurgents of 2003 and 2004. Suicide bombers were to appear daily on the streets of the major cities of Iraq, a country which had hitherto had no record of self-annihilation in its various insurgencies against foreign rule. In Iraq, too, civilian lives lost their sanctity for both sides. If the bombers or their controllers felt any compassion for the hundreds of innocent men and women torn apart by their attacks on American and British convoys, police stations, barracks, hotels and occupation headquarters, they never expressed any sorrow. The Sunni resistance, in the words of one of its progenitors, was not “overly worried” about civilian casualties because the insurgents were prepared to “pay any price” to destroy the occupation. But revolutions in guerrilla warfare, however brutal, do not cross frontiers unless the people who wish to adopt them have a cause.