Iran’s proud but discreet Jews

Although Iran and Israel are bitter enemies, few know that Iran is home to the largest number of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside Israel. About 25,000 Jews live in Iran and most are determined to remain no matter what the pressures – as proud of their Iranian culture as of their Jewish roots.

It is dawn in the Yusufabad synagogue in Tehran and Iranian Jews bring out the Torah and read the ancient text before making their way to work. It is not a sight you would expect in a revolutionary Islamic state, but there are synagogues dotted all over Iran where Jews discreetly practise their religion.

“Because of our long history here we are tolerated,” says Jewish community leader Unees Hammami, who organised the prayers.

He says the father of Iran’s revolution, Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected. As a result Jews have one representative in the Iranian parliament.

“Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us,” says Mr Hammami.

‘Anti-Jewish feeling’

In the Yusufabad synagogue the announcements are made in Persian – most Iranian Jews don’t really speak Hebrew well.

• Jews have lived in Persia for nearly 3,000 years – the descendants of slaves from Babylon saved by Cyrus the Great.
• Over the centuries there have been sporadic purges, pogroms and forced conversions to Islam as well as periods of peaceful co-existence.
• These days anti-Jewish feeling is periodically stirred by the media.

Mr Hammami says state-run television confuses Zionism and Judaism so that “ordinary people may think that whatever the Israelis do is supported by all Jews”.

During the fighting in Lebanon a hardline weekly newspaper, Yalesarat, published two photographs of synagogues on its front page full of people waving Israeli flags celebrating Israeli independence day.

The paper falsely said the synagogues were in Iran – even describing one as the Yusufabad synagogue in Tehran and locating another in Shiraz.

“This provoked a number of opportunists in Shiraz,” explains Iran’s Jewish MP, Maurice Mohtamed, “and there was an assault on two synagogues.”

Mr Mohtamed says the incident was defused by the Iranian security forces, who explained to people that the news was not true.

And with the coming to power of an ultra-conservative like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there has been increased concern internationally about the fate of Iranian Jews.

‘Holocaust denial’

Mr Ahmedinejad has repeatedly used rabid anti-Israeli rhetoric – slogans like “wipe Israel off the map” - and most controversially he has questioned the number killed in the Holocaust during World War II.

Mr Mohtamed has been outspoken in his condemnation of the president’s views – in itself a sign that there is some space for Jews in Iran to express themselves.

“It’s very regrettable to see a horrible tragedy so far reaching as the Holocaust being denied … it was a very big insult to Jews all around the world,” says Mr Mohtamed, who has also strongly condemned the exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust organised by an Iranian newspaper owned by the Tehran municipality.

Despite the offence Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has caused to Jews around the world, his office recently donated money for Tehran’s Jewish hospital.

It is one of only four Jewish charity hospitals worldwide and is funded with money from the Jewish diaspora – something remarkable in Iran where even local aid organisations have difficulty receiving funds from abroad for fear of being accused of being foreign agents.

Most of the patients and staff are Muslim these days, but director Ciamak Morsathegh is Jewish.

“Anti-Semitism is not an eastern phenomenon, it’s not an Islamic or Iranian phenomenon – anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon,”

he says, arguing that Jews in Iran even in their worst days never suffered as much as they did in Europe.

Israeli family ties

• But there are legal problems for Jews in Iran – if one member of a Jewish family converts to Islam he can inherit all the family’s property.
• Jews cannot become army officers and the headmasters of the Jewish schools in Tehran are all Muslim, though there is no law that says this should be so.
• But their greatest vulnerability is their links to Israel – where many Jews have relatives.

Seven years ago a group of Jews in the southern city of Shiraz was accused of spying for Israel – eventually they were all released. But today many Iranian Jews travel to and from Iran’s enemy Israel.

In one of Tehran’s six remaining kosher butcher’s shops, everyone has relatives in Israel. In between chopping up meat, butcher Hersel Gabriel tells me how he expected problems when he came back from Israel, but in fact the immigration officer didn’t say anything to him.

“Whatever they say abroad is lies – we are comfortable in Iran – if you’re not political and don’t bother them then they won’t bother you,” he explains.

His customer, middle-aged housewife Giti agrees, saying she can easily talk to her two sons in Tel Aviv on the telephone and visit them.

“It’s not a problem coming and going; I went to Israel once through Turkey and once through Cyprus and it was not problem at all,” she says.

Gone are the early days of the Iranian revolution when Jews – and many Muslims – found it hard to get passports to travel abroad.

“In the last five years the government has allowed Iranian Jews to go to Israel freely, meet their families and when they come back they face no problems,” says Mr Mohtamed.

He says there is also a way for Iranian Jews who emigrated to Israel decades ago to return to Iran and see their families.

“They can now go to the Iranian consul general in Istanbul and get Iranian identity documents and freely come to Iran,” he says.

• The exodus of Jews from Iran seems to have slowed down -
• the first wave was in the 1950s and
• the second was in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.
• Those Jews who remain in Iran seem to have made a conscious decision to stay put.

“We are Iranian and we have been living in Iran for more than 3,000 years,” says the Jewish hospital director Ciamak Morsathegh.

“I am not going to leave – I will stay in Iran under any conditions,” he declares.

An anti-Israeli ‘Holocaust cartoon contest’ was held in Tehran

President Ahmedinejad has repeatedly used anti-Israeli rhetoric

The Jewish presence dates back nearly 3,000 years.

By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran

Friday, 22 September 2006, 06:46

Jerusalem mayor spied on terrorists for MI5

Teddy Kollek, famous as Jerusalem’s mayor for almost 25 years, actively helped the British crack down on right-wing Jewish underground groups in the 1940s, recently released MI5 documents reveal.

Mr Kollek, who died three months ago, supplied British intelligence with vital information about the Irgun, led by the future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the documents show.

The revelation that the mayor was among those assisting the British to contain the right-wing groups - described by their Jewish opponents as well as the British authorities at the time as “terrorists” – came in yesterday’s issue of the daily Yedhiot Ahronot.

The documents show that Mr Kollek, who was an intelligence officer in the Jewish Agency, part of the apparatus of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, gave the British vital information which enabled them to identify and raid a secret training camp near Binyamina in which they arrested 27 Irgun members including a handful of the most wanted underground commanders.

• According to the documents the raid followed a meeting which took place on 10 August 1945.
• While it was known that the Jewish Agency had given Irgun names to the British, this is the first time that Mr Kollek’s name has been disclosed as being directly involved.
• The documents relate to a period often known as the saison in which conflict erupted between Haganah and the more extreme right-wing groups.
• It began after the assassination of Churchill’s Middle East minister, Lord Moyne, by the Stern Gang.

One of the documents quotes Mr Kollek as telling his British contacts that “terrorism is fatal to Zionism” and that the Jewish Agency did not agree with its methods.

Ronen Bergman, the journalist and intelligence specialist who broke the story, unearthed the documents from the National Archive in Kew, London in co-operation with Calder Walton, a Cambridge intelligence expert

• Mr Bergman says that Mr Kollek tried – in vain – to help the British capture Menachem Begin, one of their most wanted men, who would sweep to political power in the spectacular Likud election victory of 1977.
• Mr Bergman said the father of the Israeli minister Zeev Boim was among those arrested in the raid and that the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who was also an Irgun activist, had almost been arrested.
• It was Mr Olmert who finally beat Mr Kollek in a Likud-Labour fight for the mayoralty of Jerusalem in 1993.

The Yedhiot report said Mr Kollek was

“instrumental in leading to the arrests of dozens of Irgun and Stern Gang members, the confiscation of arms, and the thwarting of numerous attacks against British interests.”

It points out that mainstream Jewish leaders were still keen at the time to build bridges with the British Government to secure its approval for the transfer of European refugees to Palestine.

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Friday, 30 March 2007

An Invention called “the Jewish People”

AntiWar:  Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian

The heading, “an invention called the Jewish people” is taken from an article recently published in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. It’s about a book by Professor Zand of the Tel Aviv University. The article concludes with:

His book, “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” (published by Resling in Hebrew), is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a “state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others – in contrast to its declared identity as a “Jewish and democratic” state. Personal stories, a prolonged theoretical discussion and abundant sarcastic quips do not help the book, but its historical chapters are well-written and cite numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time.

Some of those facts:

1. “There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion”, and the exile of 70 c.e. also never happened. At the most, tens of thousands were exiled. Most were permitted, and most did, stay in the land. It follows, if exile is a myth, that the idea that Jews since the twentieth century are “returning” to “their land” is a myth.
2. When the Arabs conquered the land, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that many Palestinian Arabs today are descendants of the original Jews.

Tom Segev, author of this article, writes:

Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others. . . . . Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse.

So how did the Jewish Diaspora originate?

From Tom Segev’s article on Prof. Zand’s book in the Haaretz:

1. emigration of their own accord
2. many Jews in Babylon had simply remained of their own will
3. members of other faiths were forced to become Jews (c.f. the Book of Esther which says narrates just such an event — many converting because of fear of the Jews.)

Specific case-studies discussed by Zand:

1. the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula
2. the Jewish Berbers in North Africa
3. the Jews in Spain — these originated from Arabs who became Jews and who arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians; these mingled with European individuals who had become Jews.
   
4. the first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) . . . became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus.

Segev notes:

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers. According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.

The original Haaretz article is worth the full read, not least for the same page’s other interesting news of the sort that does not normally see light of day in the English speaking Western media.

The story will not be news to those who already appreciate the fictional nature of the Bible’s Exodus and genocidal Conquest narratives. Nor to those familiar with some of the racist fictions that were concocted in the latter nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Focus on Nazi racist myths has obscured from much public memory the fact that such racist ideologies and cults of physical ideals inflicted many races, nations and peoples then, many Jews included.

One day the world will look back on the current myths underpinning Zionism as with no more factual foundation than their nineteenth century and early twentieth century counterparts — and that were likewise used to rationalize ethnic cleansing and expansion of “living space”.

This entry was posted on March 1, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Israel-Palestine, POLITICS & SOCIETY.

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Israeli crimes against humanity: Gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following Israeli air strikes

Israeli aggression on Lebanon July 2006

A body killed by a burning object lies in a Beirut suburb July 17- Reuters

A Lebanese firefighter extinguishes the charred body of a Lebanese truck driver who was killed when Israeli planes attacked the port in Beirut July 17 – AP

A member of the Lebanese Red Cross walks past a badly burnt body in Beirut’s port, which was targeted by Israeli warplanes, July 17 – Reuters

A member of the Lebanese Red Cross walks past a badly burnt body in Beirut’s port, which was targeted by Israeli warplanes

A member of the Lebanese Red Cross walks past a badly burnt body in Beirut’s port, which was targeted by Israeli warplanes-2.

Lebanese firefighters try to extinguish the fire while the dismembered and burnt corpses of two Lebanese civilians killed in an Israeli air raid lie on the ground at the port in Beirut

Lebanese men remove a recovered body of a man from the back of a vehicle in Beirut July 17- Reuters.jpg

Lebanese Red Cross members remove the dismembered and burnt corpses of two Lebanese civilians killed in an Israeli air raid at the port in Beirut 17 July

Lebanese Red Cross members remove the dismembered and burnt corpses of two Lebanese civilians killed in an Israeli air raid at the port in Beirut.

look at his right eye – Lebanese citizens gather around a man who was killed by shrapnel from an explosion in Kfarshima, near Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, July 17 -AP

look at the foot – beirut prot july 17 – Reuter

A Lebanese medic carries the body of a young girl, in a refrigerated truck used as a makeshift morgue, in the port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Monday, July 17 – AP

A Medic inspects burned bodies of Lebanese civilians who were attacked as they passed by a bridge that was targeted in north Saida, southern Lebanon, July 17 – Reuters

A Lebanese rescue worker gathers the remains of a woman from the rubble of residential buildings hit by the Israeli bombardement in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, 18 July – AFP

An 18-month-old Lebanese child lies dead 17 July on a hospital bed in Saida eight hours after being injured yesterday in an Israeli air attack in Tyre – AFP

The corpse of a dead man lies admist the rubble from devastating Israeli air strikes in Tyre, south Lebanon, 16 July – AFP

Argentine Jewry’s dark secret

New book reveals story of Jewish association of pimps that operated in country in late 19th and early 20th century, and was involved in women trade and rape.

‘This is a silenced story, ‘ author says, ‘The Jewish community in Argentina remembers it well, but badly wants to keep it under wraps’

Superintendent Julio Elsogray was a strange kind of Buenos Aires cop because he would not take bribes from the pimps who dominated the city in the early 20th century. Eventually, therefore, he was the man who managed to stop them. He did that thanks to a brave whore named Rachel Lieberman, who dared file a complaint against the Zwi Migdal Organization – an association of Jewish women traders.

Thus, in 1930 the two managed to shut down the only association of Jewish panders in the world after 60 years of activity. The Zwi Migdal group was an organization that traded in women while its members wore tefillin and built themselves a synagogue, and their story is both embarrassing and exciting. It involved loads of money, corrupt politicians, violent sex, international women trade, hard brutality, rape, and cheating, all lightly spiced with yiddishkeit and God-fearing traditions.

“This is a silenced story,” said writer and poet Ilan Sheinfeld, whose book “The Tale of a Ring” relates the story of that dark period. “The Jewish community in Argentina remembers it well, but badly wants to keep it under wraps because it is a disgrace. There is very little material in Hebrew about this affair.”

Intermittently researching his book for 11 years, Sheinfeld travelled to Buenos Aires twice, learned Spanish, and “established ties with Argentinian Jews who knew about the story. I had to peel off layer after layer, convince people to talk, and obtain materials. When you closely examine the affair, you can tell why it was kept secret so far.”

Remonta – Fresh flesh shipment

Argentina of the second half of the 19th century was an attractive destination for Jews who fled Russian and Polish pogroms and poverty, headed for the New World. In those decades, Buenos Aires grew rapidly and with it, the Jewish community.

A Hevra Kadisha was established and a newspaper named Mundo Israelita was published as the Jewish community members strove to settle down and become part of the new place. They wished to establish themselves as law-abiding and moral people.

This, however, did not apply to all of the Jews. Hundreds of Jewish immigrants chose a different path and became rufianos - pimps, prostitution peddles. Given that at the time, there was one woman for 10 men, sexual services were in high demand. The temptation to make a profit in this area was plain to see. So the Jewish rufianos stepped in, supplied the demand, and soon enough seized control over the entire prostitution business in Argentina.

“Jews were very prominent among women traders, both as dealers and as employers of prostitutes, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and Galicia (Russia),” wrote Yehuda Rimerman in “Prostitution and the Deviant Girl,” a book that reviews the history of Jewish prostitution in the modern era. The Argentinian pimps created a total, most effective world, with predefined codewords, rules, and methods of operation. For example, a trip abroad to bring a new shipload of fresh girls was called remonta, a term taken from the horse market.

Here is how it worked: A well-mannered and elegant man would appear one day in a Jewish shtetl in Poland or Russia. He notified the local community and posted an ad in the shul saying he was looking for nice young women to work in the houses of rich Jews in Argentina or even marry them. Despairing with the pogroms and dreadful economic situation, the girls’ parents would respond favourably and give their daughters away, hoping to give them a new start.

The girls, mostly aged 13 to 16, packed a small bag, bid their families a sobbing farewell, and boarded the ships to Argentina accompanied by a stranger, certain they are off to a better future. Their training period often started on the way there, on the ship, and was always a cruel and brutal affair. The young virgins were broken in – raped, beaten, starved, and locked in cages. Some of them were married off to local men so that they could obtain entry visas. Far from their families, without friends or knowledge of the language, they started serving men, their bodies belonging to the Jewish rufianos.

A cemetery fit for pimps

The largest bordellos of Buenos Aires housed 60 to 80 sex slaves. There were bordellos all over Argentina, but most of them were in the big city, in the Jewish quarter, on Junin Street.

Yet, as the whorehouses and pimps prospered, the Jewish community rejected them. Articles in the local press condemned them and, in 1885, the community established a Jewish Association for the Protection of Women and Girls. Ads posted on the walls in the Jewish quarter called on the locals not to rent their shops to the rufianos. On their part, the pimps very much wanted to be part of the community. The wealthiest among them used to pick a new girl every night and take her out to the theater, “which was the centre of cultural life in the city. Jewish theatre was very successful then,” Sheinfeld said.

“The Jewish communities used to throw fund-raising parties, importing European star performers. The pimps would show up every night because they intended to show off their merchandise, wished to maintain their status, and also wanted be like everybody else. This is why they made donations, which made the community deliberate whether it wanted their money. On the one hand, the community needed money to build public buildings, but on the other hand, it was ‘dirty’ money and by taking it they feared they would be legitimizing or tacitly accepting the criminals’ exploitation of women. This ended one night when Nahum Sorkin, a well-known Zionist activist, stood outside the theater and physically stopped the rufianos from entering. Next, they were banned from the synagogues, and to top it all, they were refused burial in the Jewish cemetery.

This was too much for the rufianos. It is one thing to be banned from the theatre or community balls, but eternal rest is a different story. They formed an association of charity among its members. On 7 May 1906, when there were already half a million Jews in Argentina, the Jewish pimps registered legally as the Zwi Migdal Association, named after one of its greatest contributors. Naturally, the group later split and the splinter, led by Simon Rubinstein, established its own society named Ashkenazum. Once officially recognized, both associations bought plots of land on the outskirt of Buenos Aires and established their own cemeteries there.

The Zwi Migdal Organization reached its peak in the 1920’s, when some 430 rufianos controlled 2,000 whorehouses with 4,000 women. The network was well organized and its members cooperated closely to protect their interests. Prostitutes that failed to satisfy their clients were beaten, fined, or taken to work in provincial houses. Every business transaction was logged. The rufianos even held a meat market where newly arrived girls were paraded naked in front of traders in places such as Hotel Palestina or Cafe Parisienne. These activities went on undisturbed because they were frequented by government officials, judges, and reporters. City officials, politicians, and police officers were paid off. The pimps had powerful connections everywhere.

The hijo de puta judge

The rufianos’ audacity eventually led to their demise. It happened when they refused to forgo their income from the work of one woman, Rachel Lieberman from Lódž, Poland. She, like so many others, was tempted to travel to Buenos Aires answering a matrimonial ad, but was taken to Jonin Street where she was forced to prostitute. In desperation, she contacted Superintendent Julio Elsogray. She heard his name mentioned on the street as one who would not take Zwi Migdal’s money and was actually looking for ways to destroy the organization. She slipped into his office one day and gave a detailed account of the connections among the various pimps in the organization management. Her testimony was reason enough to launch an extensive investigation. This time, unlike on previous occasions that led to nothing, the findings reached Dr. Rodriguez Ocampo, a judge who would not take Zwi Migdal bribes either.

The lengthy trial ended in September 1930, with 108 detainees. “The very existence of the Zwi Migdal Organization directly threatens our society,” the judge wrote in his verdict, handing down long prison terms. Nevertheless, while in prison, the pimps pulled some old strings, appealed their sentences in January 1931, and senior Justice Ministry officials left only three of the convicts in jail, discharging the rest. When the media reported this, the public was very upset and pressured the authorities to reverse the discharge decision. Thereafter, hundred of pimps were deported to Uruguay. “Over the years, they slowly returned one by one, but the era of the huge brothels ended,” Sheinfeld summed up this story.

Rona Kupferboim

Birth of Hamas.

Sharon’s Terror Child: How the Likud Bloc Mid-wifed the Birth of Hamas

Hamas is considered one of Israel’s greatest threats, but the Islamic terrorist organization found its beginnings in the misguided Israeli effort to encourage the rise of a religious alternative that would undermine the popularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasir Arafat.

The strategy resulted in the birth of Hamas which rose from these Islamic roots. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a member of the government when the policy was developed in the late 1970s.

• Although Sharon and his Likud (formerly Herut Party) government colleagues could not anticipate that the Islamic leaders they backed would eventually evolve into Hamas and suicide bombings,
  
• the two have benefited from each other’s extremism over the years.

The Likud strategy to promote an Islamic alternative evolved in response to Arafat’s transformation from a revolutionary leader to the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. Arafat was anointed as the only person who could negotiate for the return of the Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem at the Rabat Arab Summit in October 1974.

In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel’s control over the occupied territories. At the time, the Islamicization of the Palestinian leadership was still very much in its infancy.

• But the Islamic Palestinian leaders viewed the relationship with Israel differently. They were eager to accept Israel’s financial backing and an easing on their activities,
  
• but only because they feared that Arafat would sign away Palestinian land captured by Israel in 1948.

If Arafat’s weakness was the lack of a long term vision and an inability to resist short term achievements, his Islamic foes always believed that the struggle to liberate Palestine was a long term, slow process.

Violence was always a part of that picture. The Palestinian Islamic groups turned to violence during the first Intifada in 1987. The Intifada (1987- 1993) literally began as an uncontrolled, unplanned explosion of Palestinian frustrations and it gave the Islamicists their first opportunity to attract popular support.

Although Arafat remained the most popular Palestinian leader, he was still in Tunisia when the first Intifada exploded in 1987. As Palestinians fought back against Israel’s occupation, Sheik Yassin decided it was time to launch an armed wing, Hamas, to seek to lead that armed struggle against Israel’s military.

Eventually, though, Hamas evolved into a much more extremists movement, not only targeting Israeli military. Hamas initially turned to the more extreme form of violence, suicide bombings, as a means of retribution for egregious Israeli attacks against Palestinians.

• The first Hamas suicide bombing occurred in April 1994 in response to the massacre of 29 Muslims months earlier who were praying at the Hebron Mosque.
  
• The number of Hamas suicide bombings only steadily increased since, bringing the Middle East today to its worst crisis in decades.

Later, in the second Intifada, suicide bombings became the weapon of choice as more and more Palestinians turned away from Arafat’s secular solution through compromise with Israel and toward faith-based religious fanaticism.

The failure of the peace process to achieve a workable compromise, the new Intifada or “Palestinian rebellion,” the increased terrorism and suicide bombings, and changes in how the world views political violence and terrorism since Sept. 11th have all given Likud and the Sharon government a new mandate.

• Angered by the suicide bombings, the Israeli public has given Sharon wide latitude to forcefully respond to Hamas violence and the intifada.
  
• He has eagerly pursued this mandate as a front to achieve his real political agenda to undermine Arafat and
  
• to prevent Israel from accepting a peace accord that results in the establishment of an independent Palestinian State.

• Ironically, this is Sharon’s second try to destroy Arafat.
  
• He led the Israeli army assault on the PLO in Lebanon and Beirut in 1982, but that ended in embarrassment for Israel when
• the army unilaterally retreated.
  
• Sharon left with his reputation tarnished, blamed for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

As the peace process collapsed and as Hamas terrorism increased, Sharon’s agenda found new life.

• In September 2000 Sharon went to the Haram al-Ash Sharif (Temple Mount).
  
• Although events had been set in motion by the collapse of peace, Sharon’s visit and
  
• his declaration that Jerusalem will forever be the capitol of Israel sealed the fate of the unavoidable violence that consumes Palestinians and Israelis today.

Likud and Islamicists make strange bedfellows

In 1977, newly elected prime minister and Likud (Herut) founder Menachem Begin decided drastic steps were needed to block Arafat’s return.

A year later, seeking to undermine Arafat’s popularity in the Occupied Territories, Begin’s government approved an application from a 42-year old quadriplegic religious leader in the Gaza Strip, Sheik Ahmad Yassin, to license his humanitarian organization, the Islamic Association. Later, with the explosion of the first Intifada, the Islamic Association launched a military arm called Hamas.

• Begin’s successor was Yitzhak Shamir.
  
• Both Begin and Shamir were leaders of the first terrorist organizations that operated in Palestine in the 1940s.

Under Begin and later Shamir, Israel created, funded and controlled the “Village Leagues,” a system of local councils managed by Palestinians who were hand-picked by Israel to run local city and village administrations.

The plan was devised by Sharon, who was Israel’s Defense Minister. Sharon appointed Menahem Milson, a professor of Arabic literature and former Hebrew University Dean, as its first Civil Administration leader in November 1981. Less than one year later, the two broke over Sharon’s role in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres and Milson resigned.

Over the objections of many Palestinian Islamic leaders including the Commissioner of the Muslim Waqf in the Gaza Strip, Rafat Abu Shaban, Israel registered the newly formed “Islamic Association” which Yassin founded.

Yassin was willing to cooperate with the Likud government because he, too, shared the goal of undermining Arafat’s secular influence over the Palestinians. More importantly, and in line with Likud policies, he sought to block the creation of a Palestinian State based on land-for-peace.

Israel’s Likud government permitted Yassin to launch a newspaper and to set up charitable fundraising organizations. With funding Yassin raised and with Israeli funds directed through the Village Leagues, the Islamic Association built new mosques, new schools, hospitals and medical clinics. The group established social service and humanitarian agencies and even job creation venues. Despite its later turn to armed struggle and suicide bombings, Hamas meticulously directed nearly 95 percent of the funds it raised to these worthy humanitarian projects.

Yassin’s followers won significant influence over the Village Leagues system, another Israeli supported scheme intended to undermine the PLO’s influence and strengthen the hand of “local leaders” that Likud believed could be co-opted politically.

Yassin was not initially involved with violence. Most of the violence was directed either by Arafat’s Al-Fatah organization, based in Lebanon, or by the other PLO umbrella partners like the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Inside the occupied territories, another Islamic group called Islamic Jihad was struggling to gain support among Palestinians living under occupation.

The “Islamic Association,” was a shadow organization and prodigy of the more radical Moslem Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Bana. The group created a Palestinian branch in the 1930s but waged a mainly rhetorical battle against oppression in the Arab World.

Initially, the Moslem Brotherhood and Sheik Yassin’s Islamic Association were not supportive of armed struggle against Israel. Yassin adopted the Moslem Brotherhoods approach toward a slow Islamicization of the region.

In 1984, Shamir was forced into a coalition government with Labor Party’s Shimon Peres. Under a shared-leadership agreement, Peres held the office for two years until 1986 before returning it to Shamir. During those two years, the Likud party leaders saw firsthand the seriousness of behind-the-scenes negotiations between Labor Party leaders and Arafat, who was exiled in Tunisia.

Yassin and the Islamic Association benefited from a system of Israeli controlled “Village Leagues,” sometimes called Village Councils. The Village Leagues where largely funded by Israel. But the Islamic Association was allowed to raise tens of millions more each year from supportive Arab regimes angry with Arafat. The creation of the Village Leagues was Israel’s first effort to encourage an alternative to the PLO.

Sheik Yassin used the money to operate a network of schools, medical clinics, social service agencies, religious institutions and provide direct services to the poverty stricken Palestinian population.

Israel saw benefits in the leagues which became a breeding ground for Palestinian collaborators who were blackmailed or bribed into reporting on the activities of other Palestinians. Many of them held positions of leadership in the Village Leagues and were friendly to Israel.

The Israeli military gave the League members protection and widespread powers. As many as 200 of the league members were given weapons training by Israel. Israel’s Shin Bet recruited paid informers from this network and Israeli sources estimated the number of informants were in the thousands.

Israel Military Government employed as many as 19,000 Palestinians, with 11,000 of them working as teachers, clerks and administrators.

Always the survivor, Arafat and the PLO agreed in 1988 to accept the “two state” solution based on “land for peace” negotiations. While Likud responded by trying to sell “autonomy” to the Islamicist movement, the response of the Islamic Association was unexpected. Reacting angrily to Arafat’s decision to recognize Israel, and seeking to play to Palestinian emotions during the Intifadah, the new organization, Hamas, openly embraced armed struggle against Israel.

Arafat’s first act was to impose controls on Hamas, while Israel moved to more aggressive policies expelling, jailing and even assassinating Hamas leaders.

As secret talks with Labor Party leaders advanced, Arafat ordered his loyalists to force Village League members to resign in 1988 sparking violence between Hamas and Arafat’s Al-Fatah supporters. The gap between Hamas and Al-Fatah widened when Al-Fatah commemorated the 20th anniversary of the March 21, 1968 battle of Karameh.

Karameh was a village in Jordan at the border with the West Bank that consisted mainly of Palestinian refugees. There, Arafat and his Al-Fatah faction set up headquarters and directed their armed struggle against Israel.

Israeli troops invaded Karameh but confronted fierce resistance from the Arafat-led guerrilla defenders. It was particularly important because of the humiliation Arabs shared for the defeat to Israel in June 1967. The battle successes added to Arafat’s growing charisma among Palestinians.

During the commemoration, Palestinian leaders of the Village Leagues began their mass resignations. The Palestinian Mayor of Beitunia, Abdallah Rezaq, was the first to dissolve his municipality’s council.

The only thing that stopped Hamas from growing further was the return of the Labor Party to power in 1992 and the return of Yasir Arafat to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hamas is born

Strengthened by Village League funding and a vast network of charitable institutions that were popular among the Palestinian masses, Yassin authorized the establishment of a military arm of the Islamic Association in 1987 that he called Hamas. It launched its first attacks in January 1998, both against Israeli military targets and even against Arafat’s Fataha loyalists in the Gaza Strip.

The acronym Hamas comes from the Arabic name, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya). In English, the word Hamas translates into “zeal.” It is appropriate to Yassin’s goals. The Moslem Brotherhood and its sister organizations pursued a policy of gradual Islamicization of the Arab World and Palestine. It was a policy that Hamas rejected as being too slow.

There is a real irony in the transformation of Yassin’s organization from a benevolent religious foundation to a guerrilla movement. Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, had both headed the first two terrorist organizations to operate in Palestine during the 1940s. Shamir had led the Stern Gang while Begin led the larger Irgun Zvi Leuhmi. The two groups worked in tandem and were responsible for introduction of terrorist techniques into Palestine including car bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings of military vehicles and the lynching of British soldiers in the olive groves outside of Jerusalem. They were responsible for the near destruction of the car-bombed King David Hotel and for the massacre of civilians at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem.

Begin and Shamir understood exactly what they had created. Knesset Member Avraham Poraz (Shinui) was among a litany of Israeli leaders who blamed Likud for Hamas. “The Likud has got Hamas on its hands because it refused to talk to the PLO,” he said.

Hamas quickly found itself in competition with another religious group banned by Israel, Islamic Jihad. Both sought to disrupt the occupation and seize Palestinian leadership from Arafat.

Islamic Jihad distributed a leaflet claiming responsibility for the killing of restaurateur, Ya’acov Shalom, in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood on May 20, and a fatal bomb attack in the Mahane Yehuda market the week before. It also labeled Jordan’s King Hussein, a Hamas backer at the time, as a “butcher.” That was an apparent reference to the King’s suppression of unrest in Palestinian refugee camps following another attack at Rishon Lezion, an Israeli settlement outside of Tel Aviv.

But the real rivalry for Hamas was with Arafat’s Fatah loyalist.

During the first Intifadah, Hamas enforced business closures and boycotts as a means of protesting Israeli policies and as a way to control the Palestinian population. Hamas constantly challenged PLO political positions and thwarted PLO efforts to direct the Intifadah from abroad.

For example, in January 1990, Arafat deputy Abu Iyad publicly complained that Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel was undermining the peace process because new immigrants went directly to settlements, and settlements were created to accommodate this immigration. In response, Hamas issued an order closing all businesses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to protest Soviet Jewish immigration, not simply to join in the protest but to also steal the thunder from the distant PLO leaders.

Shamir was surprised by the Islamic violence. He quickly ordered the arrest of Hamas political leader Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi and then a full scale crackdown on Hamas and the arrest of Sheikh Yassin. But it was too late. Hamas was now permanently entrenched among a hard core and growing cadre of Palestinian religious zealots.

By February 1990, Israeli officials estimated that Hamas enjoyed solid backing during the Intifadah from 30 percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip where it was based. This increased popularity only hastened Arafat’s decision to accept a compromise with Israel in the hopes of returning and taking charge and prompted Shamir’s Labor Party successors to accept an Arafat deal.

Under Labor Party pressure and a “shared government” arrangement with Likud, Israel agreed to participate in peace talks with the Palestinians and Jordanians in Cairo. Still, Shamir tried to reduce the role of the PLO by insisting on vetoing the appointment of the Faisal al-Husseini, an Arafat confidant and the PLO’s Jerusalem representative, to lead the the Palestinian delegation.

Arafat immediately tried to control Hamas, partly to demonstrate his authority and partly to show his Labor Party partners that he could deliver. But initial offers of compromise and alliance from PLO officials were consistently rejected and Hamas remained dedicated to its hardline, Islamicist ideology which rejected any form of compromise with Israel.

The more the Labor-Arafat peace process advanced, the more Hamas turned to violence. When Husseini and other PLO officials denounced the murder of Jewish tourists in Egypt in February 1990, Hamas countered by sending vehicles with loudspeakers through the streets of major Palestinian cities praising the attacks and denouncing the PLO for its criticism. They argued against peace with Israel and more violence.

The Likud desire to undermine Arafat remained strong even after Hamas had been declared a “terrorist organization” and the Labor peace initiative with Arafat was at its height. In the months after the White House peace signing, some leaders of the Israel’s security forces pursued contacts with Hamas leaders who were in Israeli jails in the hopes of getting them to embrace peace at the expense of Arafat’s leadership. The Israelis wanted to use Hamas as a means of pressuring Arafat into making more concessions.

It didn’t work.

Hamas and Likud benefit from violence

There is a natural affinity that exists in a limited way between the policies and goals of Hamas and the political objectives of the Likud Bloc that has brought them together.

Every time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to take a major step toward achieving peace, an act of Hamas terrorism has scuttled the peace process and has pushed the two sides apart.

The startling ease with which terrorism has undermined peace is a testament to the fragility of the peace process and the political weakness of both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Two specific acts of Likud-inspired violence derailed the momentum of the peace process, too.

Terrorism has been the primary common denominator that exists in the up and down relationship between the leadership of Israel’s Likud and the Palestinian Hamas movement. It’s not that they are working together, but that their goals are the same.

Acts of terrorism can be directly associated with changes in the political leadership of Israel — influencing the defeat of Labor Party government and the rise of the Likud.

In the last quarter century, Likud Party candidates have served as Israel’s prime ministers for 17 years, more than double the eight years served by Labor Party candidates.

Since 1977, four Likud candidates have served five times as prime minister, while three Labor candidates served four times. (Likud’s Menachem Begin, 77-83; Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir, 83-84; Labor’s Shimon Peres, 84-86; Likud’s Shamir, 86-92; Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin, 92-95; Labor’s Peres, 95-96; Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, 96-99; Labor’s Ehud Barak, 99-01; Likud’s Ariel Sharon, 01-present.)

Efforts to achieve peace between Arafat and Labor were marred by the violence on both sides with Hamas attacking Israeli targets and Likud loyalists and members of the pro-Likud settler movement attacking Palestinians.

One of those likud-inspired settler fanatics was Dr. Baruch Goldstein. In February 1994, Goldstein strolled through Israeli security with an automatic weapon and opened fire on Muslims praying at the Heborn Mosque. He killed 29 Muslims. Goldstein took a page out of the Likud ideology and hoped the massacre would derail the peace process with Arafat.

The Goldstein attack so outraged Hamas leaders that they retaliated in April 1994 with a Hamas bomber who drove an explosive laden car into a civilian bus in the Israeli city of Afula. Eight people died and 50 were wounded.

Likud-inspired violence was not reserved for Palestinian targets. Less than a year later, an Israeli fanatic inspired by Likud rhetoric assassinated Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah Rabin, directly placed the blame for her husband’s assassination on the Likud party and its anti-peace rhetoric. Leah Rabin declared that the assassin was incited to violence by the vicious language of Likud’s silver-tongued leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rabin’s murder undermined the Labor Party’s future and sabotaged the Israeli-Palestinian peace process pushing all sides back to violence.

In otherwords, violence did for the Likud what violence had achieved for Hamas in terms of stopping the peace process.

Politically, Hamas and Israel’s Likud Bloc share several common goals, each for different reasons. They both oppose the Land-for-Peace formula and object to the creation of an independent Palestinian State. Hamas seeks to establish an Islamic State in Palestine while the Likud seeks the formal expansion of Israel into the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. Likud seeks to annex the territories providing the Palestinians with administrative autonomy but not independence or sovereignty.

In contrast, the PLO and the Labor Party also share several goals and oppose the policies of Likud and Hamas. Both accepted in formal written agreements in September 1993 at the White House a peace accord that recognized Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinian right to statehood.

While Likud and Labor battle over ideology and politics, Hamas differs with the PLO on issues of religion and it rejects compromise.

Hamas views the PLO as an important organization but much like a “wayward brother.” It’s stated goal is the creation of an Islamic State in Palestine, one that subjugates not only Jews but Christians and other religions, too. The PLO has recognized Israel and, like the Labor Party, has accepted the Land-for-Peace principle.

While Hamas views all Israeli politics as identical, its violence twice helped elect Likud candidates to the office of Prime Minister.

It is this politics of opposition that drives Likud and Hamas to share similar goals.

Arab regimes flipflop on Hamas

As peace moved forward, the Arab World also shifted from supporting the Islamic militant movement to opposing it.

The Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas enjoyed the backing, for example, of King Hussein of Jordan and several other Arab government leaders not just during its rise, but even years later.

In Jan. 1991, the new Jordanian Government included members of the Moslem Brotherhood, insuring that Jordanian funds would continue to Hamas.

In a show of how important King Hussein viewed the religious organization, King Hussein pressured Israel to release Yassin from his Israeli prison in 1997. It was a price demanded by the monarch for his freeing of Israeli Mossad agents who were arrested after bungling the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan.

After his release, Yassin devoted his energies to repairing damage to Hamas’ educational and charitable institutions inflicted during Israel’s sweeping 1996 crackdown. Hamas’ military wing directed attacks from its safe haven in Amman, Jordan.

Like many Arab leaders who viewed Arafat as a threat, King Hussein was willing to live with Hamas militancy as a counter-balance to Arafat. Jordan viewed Hamas as a natural rival to Arafat’s leadership. Despite his public rhetoric, the Jordanian Monarch could never forgive Arafat for his efforts to destabilize his government. Half of Jordan’s population consisted of Palestinians, most of them refugees from the 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli wars.

As Hamas stepped up attacks against Israel and was denounced by Israelis as a terrorist organization, Hamas enjoyed growing support among the Arab regimes. Ironically, it was easier to show lipservice to Hamas than to lead their own wars against Israel.

Arafat’s misunderstood support of Iraq during the Gulf War did much to strengthen Arab support of Hamas. Hamas received more financial support from Kuwait after Hamas leaders publicly denounced Saddam Hussein and likened the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Other Arab Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia continued to channel funds to both the PLO and Hamas, but favored Hamas’ religious militancy and its Islamic charitable foundations and social service agencies.

Arafat was publicly humiliated by Kuwait at the 1990 “Baghdad summit” when he demanded to know why Kuwait had paid less than one-eighth of the money it had promised the Palestinians. The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jabber al-Ahmed al-Sabah responded by producing data that showed in fact Kuwait had continued to support the Palestinian cause, but through Hamas instead of through the PLO.

As the Arab government’s slowly supported the Arafat-Rabin peace accords, support for Hamas began to wane. Hamas turned elsewhere, to Iran’s Islamic government. In August 1999, Jordan closed the group’s political bureau, arrested its leaders and prohibited Hamas from operating out of Jordan.

As the peace process progressed, Hamas influence continued to fall. Hamas struggled to sustain its network of charitable and social agency service agencies in the West Bank (notably Tulkarm) and also in Gaza where they had more support. Hamas shifted most of its military and political leadership from Amman, Jordan to a more sympathetic Damascus, Syria.

Still, the network that Shamir and the Likud helped create for Hamas preserved its funding resources. Even after breaking with Jordan and other Arab countries, sources estimated the Hamas budget at between $40-70 million a year.

The peace process teeters on the brink of Hamas attacks

In early April 1990, Palestine National Council Chairman Sheikh Abdel Hamid a-Sayeh invited Hamas to join a committee preparing the next Palestine National Council meeting. (The PNC was the umbrella group that included representatives of most Palestinian organizations and mainly the PLO.) Hamas circulated a memorandum in the territories on April 6, 1990 setting for the conditions the PLO would have to meet: Hamas would only join the Palestine National Council if the PLO withdrew its “acceptance of partition,” rejects territorial concessions, and refuses to recognize Israel. The statement also demanded that Hamas be given up to 50 percent of the PNC seats, and a modification of the Palestinian National Covenant “in accordance with the faith of the Moslem Palestinian people and its glorious heritage.”

Even President Clinton recognized the ability of Hamas to disrupt the peace process. On January 24, 1995, Clinton signed an Executive Order prohibiting transactions with Hamas due to their potential for disrupting the Middle East peace process. This included all of Hamas’ subgroups including the Izzedin Al-Qassem Brigades. Even with the change in attitudes of the Arab governments, pressure from the Clinton Administration and a reversal in Israel’s policies toward Yassin, the road to undermining Hamas’ extensive funding network was difficult.

Eventually, Hamas was forced to consider, at least briefly, a possible compromise with Arafat in order to survive. By 1998, Yassin publicly broke from the Hamas Charter and participated at a meeting of the PNC. His presence prevented the PNA from declaring Palestinian statehood, but it brought a harsh rebuke from the Hamas leadership outside of the territories. Hamas political head Khaled Meshal and treasurer Musa Abu Marzook, both in Jordan, and Hamas’ Damascus representative Imad Alami all urged Yassin to resign.

As peace falters Hamas influence rises

Support for Hamas declines as the peace process moves ahead and increases as the peace process falters. Prior to the peace process, support among the Palestinians for Hamas was estimated by the Israelis at 20-40 percent in the West Bank and 60-80 percent in the Gaza Strip. This fell to 15-25 percent during the peace process.

And undermining the peace process has always been the real target of Hamas and has played into the political ambitions of the Likud. Continued Hamas suicide bombings and violence has played a significant role in undermining and bringing the peace process to a grinding halt, and set the stage for Sharon’s election over Labor Party leader Ehud Barak in 2001.

As the peace accords lumbered ahead, Hamas stepped up its terrorist suicide attacks. About a dozen suicide bombings were attempted in the months after the PLO-Israel accord was signed at the White House in September, 1993.

Initially, the peace process persisted in the face of these heinous terrorist attacks. But it couldn’t stand the pressure of the gut-wrenching images of suicide bomb attacks. In February and March 1996, Hamas launched a series of suicide bombings in retaliation for the Israeli assassination of alleged Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Aiyash the month prior. These attacks contributed mightily to bringing down the Peres government and helped return the Likud back to power electing the more hardline but silver-tongued young Turk, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The wave of deadly Hamas bombings took 60 Israeli lives in eight days, prompting Arafat to clamp down on Hamas even more – some 1,000 Palestinians were arrested and Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority government, established under Labor, even ousted Hamas from some of its mosques. The suicide attacks continued through 1997 giving Netanyahu public support to halt the peace process and reverse agreements made by the murdered Rabin.

Netanyahu ignored Arafat’s efforts to crackdown on Hamas and the peace process came to a grinding halt.

Similarly, Hamas suicide bombings during the Barak administration coupled with the failure to reach a peace accord on President Clinton’s timetable, and Sharon’s provocative incursion to the “Temple Mount” on September 28th, 2000 provoked the second Intifadah.

Although the Israelis insist that second Intifadah was responsible for a wave of Israeli killings, during the first week of the conflict, 50 Palestinians had been killed and five Israelis had died. Among the dead were nine Palestinian protesters whose deaths sparked the Intifadah’s start. The Israeli response was repressive and heightened Palestinian response. And, when two Israeli reservists (suspected of being undercover government assassins) were captured and murdered viciously in Ramallah on October 12th, 2000, the slide to total Palestinian-Israeli conflict was already set in stone.

Barak declared his decision to resign to give himself a 60-day window before elections to controlt he conflict and authorized secret meetings at Taba where Palestinian and Israeli negotiators desperately tried to reach an accord.

But, it was too late, Sharon had achieved his objectives. Sharon did not need a major Hamas suicide bombing to win his election against Barak. The Sharon inspired Intifadah and the violence it caused on both sides swung Israeli voters to the hard right, giving him a landslide victory against Barak on Feb. 7, 2001.

Clearly recognizing that their violent strategy was bringing down the Arafat government, halting the peace process and playing into the emotions of the Palestinians, Hamas launched another wave of suicide bombings in the week after Sharon’s election. Sharon used these attacks as the pretext to launch a massive invasion of PNA controlled areas of the West Bank and decimating Arafat’s government infrastructure.

Hamas terrorism played into the rage and the frustrations of the Palestinian people, who helplessly watched as the promise of peace evaporated before their eyes. They had never tasted its fruits but only heard its empty promises. The were a people on the edge and easy victims for Sharon’s political manipulations.

The conflict continues its escalation. The number of Palestinian and Israeli dead continues to climb. The terrorist attacks on September 11th by madman Osama Bin Laden in the name of Islam only served to further build a barrier that prevents reasonable people to achieve a peace.

And, once again, the real benefactor of the violence and conflict is Israel’s right wing Likud Bloc and its new leader, Ariel Sharon, the man that his fanatic supporters affectionately call “Bulldozer.”

January 18 / 19, 2003

By RAY HANANIA

Ray Hanania is a Palestinian American author and veteran award winning journalist. Based on Chicago, he is a columnist on Middle East affairs for Creators Syndicate. He can be reached at www.hanania.com

Israel’s bloodiest day yet as Hizbullah hits troops and Haifa. Strike on northern kibbutz of Kfar Giladi results in biggest death toll. [Lebanon second War]

Monday August 7 2006

Israel yesterday endured the bloodiest day of the war so far when at least 15 people, among them 12 soldiers, were killed in a series of Hizbullah rocket strikes on the north of the country.

The soldiers, all recently called-up reservists, were gathered around two parked cars under a row of fir trees at the edge of an historic cemetery next to the kibbutz of Kfar Giladi, when a barrage of rockets rained down on the northern hills. One landed just in front of one of the cars, gouging a shallow crater in the road. Both cars were left blackened and burnt out.

Hours later, another barrage of Hizbullah rockets hit Haifa – Israel’s third biggest city – killing at least three people and wounding more than 120, medics said. A police commander told Israel Radio that a rocket had hit two adjacent houses, causing their partial collapse. Rescuers and relatives were last night trying to pull survivors out from the burning rubble.

The most heavily bombarded areas were Haifa’s Arab neighbourhoods.

“The deadly missile doesn’t differentiate blood from blood, and this we saw tonight,” said the city’s mayor, Yona Yahav.

The greatest loss of Israeli life came after sirens sounded at the Kfar Giladi kibbutz at midday yesterday, warning of an imminent rocket attack. The few residents left on site took shelter in a strong room, but the reservists remained where they stood. A heavy barrage of rockets followed, with about 100 Katyushas thundering into the hills around them in 15 minutes.

“I heard the sirens too. I know the sirens in the kibbutz were working,” said Major Zvika Golan. “The people here were just relaxing, just resting. Some had been here overnight, others were just coming and going.”

He said the rocket had been filled with ball-bearings, which spread around an area of 20 to 30 metres. Soldiers spent several hours removing the bodies on stretchers and then studying the scene, looking for information about the rocket.

“They were all wounded and scattered in every direction, some of them were in very bad condition,” said Eli Peretz of the Magen David Adom rescue service. “It was a very, very difficult scene. I have never seen anything like it.”

Rescue workers at the scene laid the dead on stretchers on a grassy patch by the roadside, their boots stuck out from underneath the blankets laid over them. Army helicopters evacuated the injured to hospital.

The soldiers appeared to be part of a larger number of troops, with trucks, tanks and armoured cars, deployed in the kibbutz and nearby. There are several artillery and logistics positions along the length of Israel’s northern border, hidden in forests and against the hillside.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” one resident in the kibbutz told Ha’aretz newspaper. “We sounded the alert several minutes before the rocket hit.” Another witness said: “I was sitting with my friends in a parking lot and got up to get a cigarette. I heard a big boom and came back running to see the bodies of my friends.”

A pair of blood-stained boots stood against the wall at the scene of the attack.

After the attack, a group of ultra-religious Jewish volunteers from the Zaka organisation arrived and proceeded to remove the body parts of the dead. Wearing white surgical gloves, they hosed down the road and swept the area. One stood on the shoulders of a colleague to clear body parts from a nearby tree.

The cemetery is the burial place of Josef Trumpeldor, a Zionist who was killed in 1920 fighting against the Palestinians and is famed in Israeli history for his dying words: “It is good to die for our country.”

———

• Israel’s military responded quickly with a heavy artillery barrage directed at southern Lebanon and an air strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.
• Israel said later that its warplanes had attacked the town of Qana and destroyed the launchers that fired the rockets on Haifa. Qana was the scene of an Israeli attack last Friday in which 28 civilians died. Israel acknowledged that last week’s attack was a mistake, but insisted Hizbullah was hiding its launching sites among the town’s civilians.
• In southern Lebanon yesterday at least 19 people were killed, most in air strikes on buildings near the border.
• Two civilians died when an Israeli air strike targeted a pickup truck that was driving 40 metres from a UN aid convoy heading to the southern city of Tyre.
• In a separate incident a Lebanese soldier and another civilian were killed near Tyre.

———-

More than 250,000 Israelis have fled the north in recent weeks, and, though there are many public shelters for those who remain, civilians continue to die.

Three were killed and five injured in rocket strikes on Saturday. In the conflict,

• so far 90 Israelis have died, most of them soldiers.
• In Lebanon more than 700 people are confirmed as having been killed.

Thousands of Israeli troops were still fighting their way through southern Lebanon, in villages close to the border yesterday.

Israel’s justice minister, Haim Ramon, said the fighting would continue despite work on a UN ceasefire resolution.

The Israeli military said it had captured one of the Hizbullah fighters who took part in the capture of two Israeli soldiers last month, an act which triggered the conflict.

Rory McCarthy

Kfar Giladi kibbutz

My TAGS:-

*8 IDF death Lebanon.2nd.War killing Hizbollah missiles kibbutz civilians :Guardian 2006 aircraft Lebanon Israel UN Qana

A Case of Courage. Exclusive Book Excerpt: Truman and the birth of Israel.

By Michael Beschloss | Newsweek Web Exclusive

As the Wednesday afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows of the Oval Office, Gen. George Marshall, Harry Truman’s secretary of State and the architect of victory in World War II, took a chair beside the president’s. Sitting in front of the president’s desk, befitting his more junior position, was Truman’s White House counsel, Clark Clifford. On Friday, May 14, 1948, at midnight, two days from now, the British would withdraw from Palestine. The United Nations had resolved to divide the region into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with ancient, holy Jerusalem as an international city. Despite the U.N. plan, five Arab armies were ready to kill the fledgling Jewish state.

Clifford implored Truman to recognize the new nation as soon as it was declared. If the U.S. granted legitimacy, so would its allies, allowing the Jewish state to survive. But Marshall advised Truman to keep his distance, warning that the Jews could never stave off Arab legions who far outnumbered them. If they came “running to us for help,” the U.S. would have to say no. In what Clifford called “a righteous Goddamned Baptist tone,” Marshall said, “If you follow Clifford’s advice … I would vote against you.” Shaken to be condemned by the national hero he called “the great one of the age,” Truman later warned Clifford, “I can’t afford to lose General Marshall!”

Truman’s ultimate decision about a Jewish state—one of the most significant foreign-policy decisions in U.S. history—emerged from a storm of cross-pressures and motives. He was besieged by Zionists, anti-Zionists, Democratic politicians eager to court the Jewish vote in an election year and diplomats afraid to rile the Arabs. He felt compassion for the Holocaust survivors still in European camps and reverence for Biblical history. But he feared as well that the new state might require defence by U.S. troops and dreaded that respected leaders like Marshall would accuse him of warping American diplomacy to his own cheap political needs. Truman also had to rise above his own lingering small-town parlor anti-Semitism. Even as president, he privately said malicious things about American Jews to his wife, his friends and his diary that were unworthy of the towering leader he had become.

In April 1945, as Harry Truman became president and Allied soldiers liberated the death camps of Europe, Americans were learning about the terrible reach of the Holocaust. For many American Jews, the Holocaust showed that they must never again depend on the kindness of strangers: only a Jewish state could protect their people from another Hitler. They feared that the small-town Missouri Baptist in the White House could not possibly understand their predicament. They did not know that Truman had grown up knowing Jews or that he had studied their history since boyhood.

For two years in Independence, a Jewish family called the Viners lived next door to Truman’s family. As Sarah Viner much later recalled, her brother Abe was “very close friends” with the future president:

“Harry was always over at our house … I think this was his first contact with Jewish people.” On the Sabbath, when observant Jews could not do household chores, Harry served as the Viners’ “Shabbos goy.”

While a 16-year-old student at Independence High School, young Truman was assigned to write about Shylock, Shakespeare’s Jewish villain in “The Merchant of Venice,” in an essay discovered in 2000. Given vast potential for indulging in anti-Semitism when writing of Shylock, Truman viewed the Jewish people with unexpected sympathy:

“We cannot blame Shylock for getting money as a means for revenge upon those who persecuted him. He was not a miser, and if one of his own nation had been in trouble, he would have helped him as quickly as a Christian would help a Christian … I never saw Jew, Christian or any other man who, if he had the chance, wouldn’t take revenge.”

Truman went on to insist that no one “except the Hebrews” had “ruled” the world, then “when they fell,” remained “a distinct people.” He wrote that after 2,000 years, the Jews were “a nation apart from nations … persecuted for their religion,” still “waiting for a leader” to gather their “scattered people.”

In the wake of the holocaust, many American Jewish leaders blamed themselves for not having demanded that their government do more to stop it. Believing now that the survival of the European detainees and their entire people was at stake, they cast off the polite deference that leaders now derided as “court Jews” had once used around Franklin Roosevelt. In July 1946, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver pounded on Truman’s desk and bellowed at him about an Anglo-American committee report that let Holocaust survivors into Palestine, but not with U.S. military support to protect them.

That same month, the two Democratic senators from New York and a pro-Zionist ex-diplomat, James McDonald, came to complain about the report. His back up, Truman told them he thought it was “marvellous.” McDonald warned the president he was “scrapping” the Jewish cause in Palestine and would “go down in history as anathema.”

• Truman erupted:

“You cannot satisfy the Jews anyway … They are not interested in the United States. They are interested in Palestine and the Jews … The Jews aren’t going to write the history of the United States—or my history!”

Tactlessly, McDonald noted that FDR had understood the “imponderables” of the issue.

“I am not Roosevelt!” cried Truman. “I am not from New York. I am from the Middle West. I must do what I think is right.”

Truman had always been hypersensitive to any efforts to bulldoze him—and he was determined to show that it couldn’t be done. With an eternal chip on his shoulder against the arrogant and powerful, Truman thus bridled at the intense, well-financed Zionist apparatus. He complained to Eleanor Roosevelt that

“Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.”

• He banned Zionist leaders from the Oval Office. In a passage of his diary discovered in 2003, Truman wrote,

“The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs … The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.”

Truman consulted his wife, Bess, almost every night about the issues he was dealing with. She was unlikely to have urged him to support a Jewish homeland. After Truman left office, the talk-show host David Susskind spent some time in Independence to interview the ex-president for a TV series. Susskind asked Truman why he never asked him inside his home. By Susskind’s account, Truman replied,

“You’re a Jew, David, and no Jew has ever been in the house. Bess runs it, and there’s never been a Jew inside the house in her or her mother’s lifetime.” (As late as 1957, long after his cardinal role in creating a Jewish homeland, Truman would still write to Bess that New York City was “the U.S. capital of Israel.“)

Anxious about their exclusion, Jewish leaders searched for some new way to reach the president. A Kansas City attorney named A. J. Granoff got a call from a national official of the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith:

“Do you know a man by the name of Jacobstein … who is supposed to be a very close friend of President Truman?”

“You mean Eddie Jacobson,” said Granoff. “Sure, I ought to! I’m his friend and lawyer.”

In 1917, the genial, quiet Private Jacobson clerked in an Army canteen at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, under Lieutenant Harry Truman. Truman wrote his girlfriend, Bess Wallace, back in Independence, that he had a “Jew clerk” running his canteen and that Jacobson was “a crackerjack.” After fighting the Germans in France, the two friends opened a men’s store in Kansas City, with Harry as salesman-bookkeeper, Eddie as buyer and many old Battery D pals as customers. Then came the postwar depression.

“I lost all I had and all I could borrow,” said Truman. “Our creditors drove Eddie into bankruptcy, but I became a public official, and they couldn’t do that to me.”

The friendship survived. during senator Truman’s visits to Kansas City, the ex-partners drank bourbon, played poker, told off-color stories and joked about “losing our asses in that store.” But the friendship did not include their wives and families. Jacobson’s wife, Bluma, recalled that Bess Truman’s Wallace relatives were “aristocracy in those parts” and that “the Trumans couldn’t afford to have Jews at their house.”

In the summer of 1947, Jacobson sat down at Kansas City’s Hotel Muehlebach with Granoff and Frank Goldman, the national president of B’nai B’rith. He told them he would never ask Truman for a personal favor, but would “always be glad” to discuss with him “my suffering people across the seas.” He had endless faith in Harry’s “kindly heart.” Granoff said the problem was getting more Jewish refugees into Palestine. Eddie said,

“Harry Truman will do what’s right if he knows all the facts … But I’m no Zionist, so first I need the facts from you.”

Arriving in Washington, Eddie called the president’s appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, who gibed, “What the hell are you doing here without his permission?” When Jacobson and Granoff were ushered into the Oval Office, Truman said, “Sit down, you bastards!” As Eddie recalled, after Truman signed dollar bills for their children and asked about business in Kansas City, he and the president talked “takhles”—a Yiddish term that means “with serious purpose.”

Making their case for a Jewish homeland, Granoff and Jacobson insisted they would never ask Truman to act against America’s best interests. “You guys wouldn’t get to the front gate if I thought any differently,” said Truman. “You bastards are the only ones that never tried to embarrass me in any way.”

Before retiring at night, Truman donned a green eyeshade and put his hawklike nose in a history book. He had “tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading”—especially biography and history, insisting, “There’s nothing new in human nature … The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” As a nearsighted boy in Independence, Harry devoured a gold-trimmed, four-volume history called “Great Men and Famous Women—from Nebuchadnezzar to Sarah Bernhardt.” From the tales he read, he always remembered Cyrus the Great, the Persian king of the sixth century B.C., who enabled the Jewish people to leave their exile and go back to Palestine.

In October 1947, Jacobson implored the president to back a U.N. committee’s proposal for Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. He wrote, “Harry, my people need help and I am appealing on you to help them.” Loy Henderson, assistant secretary of State, warned that if the U.S. had anything to do with founding a Jewish state, it would jeopardize oil supplies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the “whole Arab world” would become the “enemy” of the United States.

The president endorsed Palestine’s partition, but warned that the U.S. would not give money to a Jewish state, and that it lacked deployable forces to defend it from the Arab armies. Furious that Truman had overruled him, Henderson tried to whittle down the territory allotted for the Jews. He argued that the town of Jaffa was “essentially Arab” and that Arab herdsmen required the Negev desert for “seasonal grazing.” But after making it into the Oval Office, Chaim Weizmann, chief of the World Zionist Organization, unfolded maps and persuaded Truman that losing the Negev would undermine a Jewish state by blocking vital access to the Red Sea.

In late November 1947, at the U.N.’s temporary quarters in a converted skating rink at Flushing Meadows, Queens, Palestine’s partition came up for a vote by the General Assembly. Arguing that U.S. prestige would suffer if allies like the Philippines and Haiti were seen voting against it, Clark Clifford persuaded Truman to let his aides lobby for partition. As Clifford recalled, “I kept the ramrod up the State Department’s butt.”

In January 1948, Truman’s secretary of Defence, James Forrestal, told him that enforcing partition might require as many as 160,000 American ground troops. Loy Henderson proposed that since partition could not be imposed without a military commitment that Truman would not make, the U.N. should govern Palestine as a trustee when Britain withdrew in May. Horrified that Truman seemed to be wavering on a Jewish state, Chaim Weizmann rushed to New York, hoping to see the president. But Truman told his aides he had seen enough Zionists: “The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done.” B’nai B’rith’s Frank Goldman called Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City. The president was “washing his hands” of Palestine: “You must help us, Eddie.”

Jacobson wired Truman, “I have asked very little in the way of favors during all our years of friendship, but I am begging you to see Dr. Weizmann as soon as possible.” Tired of what he called Zionist “badgering,” the president wired Eddie that the Palestine problem was probably “not solvable.” Refusing to give up, Jacobson flew to Washington in hopes of changing his mind, and when Matt Connelly let Jacobson into the Oval Office, Connelly warned him not to mention Palestine. Truman told his friend, “Eddie, I know what you are here for, and the answer is no.”

Surprised at his own “nerve,” Jacobson asked the president to reconsider, which touched off an explosion. Truman bellowed that the “Eastern Jews” had “slandered and libeled” him since the moment he became president. He didn’t want to discuss “Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British.” Let the United Nations handle it. Tears rolled down Eddie’s face. He felt “shocked” and “crushed” that his “dear friend” was “as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be.”

Jacobson’s eye caught a replica of the courthouse statue in Jackson County, Missouri, that Truman had worked so hard to build. Improvising, he said, “Harry, all your life, you have had a hero. You are probably the best-read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson.” He recalled Truman sitting in a corner of their failed store, “reading books and papers and pamphlets” on Old Hickory. “Well, Harry, I too have a hero—a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived … Chaim Weizmann. He is a very sick man … but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you … Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders—even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults … It doesn’t sound like you, Harry … I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out.”

Deep in thought, Truman drummed his desktop, then swiveled in his chair to gaze at the South Grounds, turning green with spring. For what seemed “like centuries,” Eddie held his breath. Then the president spun back around and uttered the most “endearing” words Jacobson had ever heard him speak: “You win, you bald-headed son-of-a-bitch! I will see him.”

On Thursday, March 18, after dark, Chaim Weizmann was slipped into the Oval Office. The president could never pronounce Weizmann’s first name, so he called him “Cham.” Truman pledged to “press forward with partition.” Worried about leaks, he did not even tell his secretary of State about Weizmann’s visit.

The next day, Truman’s U.N. ambassador, Warren Austin, seemed to reverse U.S. policy when he told the Security Council that since peaceful partition into Jewish and Arab states seemed impossible, the United States now believed that the U.N. should rule Palestine as the world’s trustee. Informed that Austin had just trampled the president’s private promise to Weizmann, Eddie Jacobson couldn’t believe it: “I was as dazed as a man could be.” Feeling “physically sick,” he collapsed into bed for two days.

Unfolding his Saturday morning newspapers, Truman was incensed to read about his administration’s “badly bungled” somersault on partition. “This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy,” Truman told his diary. “The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so in my life.” Truman inveighed against the “people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat.” The president called in Clark Clifford: “How could this have happened? I assured Chaim Weizmann I would stick to it. He must think I am a s–t-ass … My God, how can I ever face Weizmann again?”

Recovering in kansas City from what he called “Black Friday,” Eddie Jacobson took a call from Chaim Weizmann, who told him not to “feel badly.” Privately, Weizmann had been reassured that the president hadn’t known of Ambassador Austin’s speech in advance and that his commitment to partition still stood. Weizmann told Eddie he was now “the most important single man in the world. You have a job to do, so keep the White House doors open.” Jacobson felt “encouraged” to “go on with the work which Fate put on my shoulders.”

In April 1948, he eluded reporters by entering the White House through the East Gate, “something I had never done before.” Briefed in advance by Weizmann, he informed Truman that a Jewish state would be declared as soon as the British left Palestine. It was “vital” for the U.S. to recognize it. As Eddie recalled, Truman “agreed with a whole heart,” saying that “Henderson or a thousand Hendersons won’t stop me.” But he asked his friend not to mention this private pledge to anyone else.

By then, Truman had decided that the “striped-pants boys” at the State Department who put Jews “in the same category as Chinamen and Negroes” were trying to “put it over on me about Palestine.” He wrote his brother he would now “do what I think is right and let them all go to hell.”

On Friday, May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, the Jews were poised to declare their new nation at 6:00 p.m., Washington time. Truman and Clifford expected the new state to be called “Judea.”

At 4 o’clock, Marshall’s deputy, Robert Lovett, informed Clifford that the secretary of State would not publicly oppose recognition. Marshall had decided that he should not quit “when the man who has the Constitutional authority to make a decision makes one.” Clifford told Lovett, “God, that’s good news!”

In a heavily guarded art museum in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion declared that after 20 centuries of wandering, there was now “a Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.” At 6:11 p.m. in the White House, Truman signed a document recognizing the Jewish state’s “de facto authority,” and scrawled the word “Approved.” Thinking of Weizmann, he said, “The old doctor will believe me now!” Marshall kept his promised public silence about Truman’s decision, but he never spoke to Clark Clifford again.

Chosen as first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann invited Jacobson to New York, where the good doctor asked him to be “temporary spokesman for the baby state.” Eddie wrote, “What a thrill that was! The Lord is sure good to me when He gives me these honors.” Eddie flew to New York. When his airport limousine approached the Waldorf, he saw a huge crowd staring up at the new blue and white Star of David flag, flying “beside the stars and stripes of my own country.” He wrote, “That was the payoff!” As Jacobson later recalled, “I stood on the sidewalk like a fool, and cried and cried and cried.”

In late May, President Weizmann came to Washington, feeling like a “happy man” with a “light heart.” Crowds sang the Israeli anthem “Hatikvah.” In the White House Rose Garden, Weizmann gave the president a Torah. “Thanks,” said Truman. “I’ve always wanted one of these!”

The presidential campaign of September 1948 found Truman running well behind Thomas Dewey, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond siphoning normally Democratic votes from the left and the right. Clifford had expected that if the president recognized Israel, Jewish donors would pony up for his campaign. But Truman had warned him that by fall, the Jews would say “we’ve done nothing for them recently.” They would be “off and on” him “sixteen times by then.”

When Truman won his surprise election victory in November 1948, he lost New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all abundant with Jewish voters. Much of the blame went to Wallace, who complained that Truman wasn’t sufficiently pro-Israel. After his victory, Truman wrote Chaim Weizmann that his “elation” on being reelected must resemble Weizmann’s when the Jews had proclaimed their state. The man who had once castigated what he called Jewish “underdogs” for being “intolerant” and “cruel” now told Weizmann that he and Israel were clearly both underdogs: “We had both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts on our supposedly forlorn lost causes. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right—and we were both proven to be right.”

In the end, Truman recognized Israel for many different reasons. The Jews’ display of military strength in Palestine had convinced him that U.S. troops would not be needed to defend them. He feared that letting the Russians recognize Israel first would give them a foothold in Palestine. Truman was also motivated by sheer politics. With a tough campaign ahead, he felt that if he did not recognize Israel, the backers of a Jewish state would make his life a living hell. For the hard-bitten Marshall, who operated from cold facts on the ground, Israel was chiefly a potential burden for an overstretched U.S. military. But Truman realized helping to found a Jewish state was a historic act that might qualify him for some future edition of “Great Men and Famous Women.”

His favorite psalm had always been, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” By recognizing Israel, Truman knew he would be forever damned by people who did not want the Jews to have their own state—or who did not want it in Palestine. But as Truman always told himself, the ultimate test of any presidential decision was “not whether it’s popular at the time, but whether it’s right … If it’s right, make it, and let the popular part take care of itself.”

In 1949, wearing a lucky hat inscribed by Truman, Eddie Jacobson made a pilgrimage to Israel, where he was feted by President Weizmann and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. A Kansas City rabbi told reporters that Jacobson should be president of Israel. Truman wrote his old friend that Israel “couldn’t nominate a better man, but I sincerely hope you won’t take it.” Jacobson explained that it was just “a silly dream of a very emotional rabbi.” He was “too proud of my American citizenship to trade it for any office in the world.”

When Truman retired in 1953, Eddie wanted to be escort for the ex-president’s first visit to the nation whose birth they had both midwived: “I sincerely hope my dream comes true.” But in 1955, Eddie died of a massive heart attack. As a daughter remembered, when Truman called on the mourning family, he “put his head in his hands and started to sob,” exclaiming, “I’ve lost my brother!”

In 1965, an Eddie Jacobson Auditorium was built in Tel Aviv. Truman hoped “at long last” to “make my journey” to Israel, but a bruising fall in the shower had made him old almost overnight. Instead he wrote a tribute to “my great and irreplaceable friend,” saying that Eddie’s name “should be forever enshrined in the history of the Jewish people.” Interviewed by an Israeli reporter in Independence, Truman said, “Now remind me, how did Eddie use to say ‘congratulations’ in Hebrew—Mazel something? … Yeah, tov. Mazel tov!”

Truman once said that “a weeping man is an abomination.” But with his reverence for the Bible and ancient history, Truman was profoundly moved to know he had helped regather the Jews in the Holy Land. Told that an Israeli village had been renamed “Kfar Truman,” the stricken president had to cover his face with a handkerchief. Soon the president was proudly comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who had enabled the Jews to return to Zion. During a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York just after Truman left office, Eddie Jacobson introduced his old friend by saying, “This is the man who helped to create the state of Israel.” The ex-president brought Eddie up short: “What do you mean ‘helped create’? I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!”

From Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss. Copyright 2007 by Michael Beschloss. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

© 2007

Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong

The assault on Lebanon was premeditated – the soldiers’ capture simply provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary

Tuesday August 8 2006

Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hizbullah fired the first shots”. This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.

• Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been hundreds of violations of the “blue line” between the two countries.
• The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that
• Israeli aircraft crossed the line “on an almost daily basis” between 2001 and 2003, and
• “persistently” until 2006.
• These incursions “caused great concern to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas”.
• On some occasions, Hizbullah tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft guns.

• In October 2000, the Israel Defence Forces shot at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators on the border, killing three and wounding 20.
• In response, Hizbullah crossed the line and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers.
• On several occasions, Hizbullah fired missiles and mortar rounds at IDF positions, and the IDF responded with heavy artillery and sometimes aerial bombardment.
• Incidents like this killed three Israelis and three Lebanese in 2003;
• one Israeli soldier and two Hizbullah fighters in 2005;
• and two Lebanese people and three Israeli soldiers in February 2006.
• Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel several times in 2004, 2005 and 2006, on some occasions by Hizbullah.
• But, the UN records, “none of the incidents resulted in a military escalation”.

• On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad - Nidal and Mahmoud Majzoub – were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of Sidon. This was widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
• In June, a man named Mahmoud Rafeh confessed to the killings and admitted that he had been working for Mossad since 1994.
• Militants in southern Lebanon responded, on the day of the bombing, by launching eight rockets into Israel. One soldier was lightly wounded. There was a major bust-up on the border, during which one member of Hizbullah was killed and several wounded, and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the border region “remained tense and volatile”, Unifil says it was “generally quiet” until July 12.

There has been a heated debate on the internet about whether the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah that day were captured in Israel or in Lebanon, but it now seems pretty clear that they were seized in Israel. This is what the UN says, and even Hizbullah seems to have forgotten that they were supposed to have been found sneaking around the outskirts of the Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab. Now it simply states that “the Islamic resistance captured two Israeli soldiers at the border with occupied Palestine”. Three other Israeli soldiers were killed by the militants. There is also some dispute about when, on July 12, Hizbullah first fired its rockets; but Unifil makes it clear that the firing took place at the same time as the raid – 9am. Its purpose seems to have been to create a diversion. No one was hit.

But there is no serious debate about why the two soldiers were captured:

• Hizbullah was seeking to exchange them for the 15 prisoners of war taken by the Israelis during the occupation of Lebanon and (in breach of article 118 of the third Geneva convention) never released. It seems clear that if Israel had handed over the prisoners, it would – without the spillage of any more blood – have retrieved its men and reduced the likelihood of further kidnappings.
• But the Israeli government refused to negotiate. Instead – well, we all know what happened instead.
• Almost 1,000 Lebanese and 33 Israeli civilians have been killed so far, and a million Lebanese displaced from their homes.

On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that

“more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail”.

The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that

“of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared … By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board”.

A “senior Israeli official“ told the Washington Post that the raid by Hizbullah provided Israel with a “unique moment” for wiping out the organisation. The New Statesman’s editor, John Kampfner, says he was told by more than one official source that the US government knew in advance of Israel’s intention to take military action in Lebanon. The Bush administration told the British government.

• Israel’s assault, then, was premeditated: it was simply waiting for an appropriate excuse. It was also unnecessary.
• It is true that Hizbullah had been building up munitions close to the border, as its current rocket attacks show.
• But so had Israel. Just as Israel could assert that it was seeking to deter incursions by Hizbullah, Hizbullah could claim – also with justification – that it was trying to deter incursions by Israel.
• The Lebanese army is certainly incapable of doing so.
• Yes, Hizbullah should have been pulled back from the Israeli border by the Lebanese government and disarmed.
• Yes, the raid and the rocket attack on July 12 were unjustified, stupid and provocative, like just about everything that has taken place around the border for the past six years.
• But the suggestion that Hizbullah could launch an invasion of Israel or that it constitutes an existential threat to the state is preposterous.
• Since the occupation ended, all its acts of war have been minor ones, and nearly all of them reactive.

So it is not hard to answer the question of what we would have done.

• First, stop recruiting enemies, by withdrawing from the occupied territories in Palestine and Syria.
• Second, stop provoking the armed groups in Lebanon with violations of the blue line – in particular the persistent flights across the border.
• Third, release the prisoners of war who remain unlawfully incarcerated in Israel.
• Fourth, continue to defend the border, while maintaining the diplomatic pressure on Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah (as anyone can see, this would be much more feasible if the occupations were to end).

Here then is my challenge to the supporters of the Israeli government: do you dare to contend that this programme would have caused more death and destruction than the current adventure has done?

George Monbiot

www.monbiot.com

My Tags:-

*9 Israel withdraw 2000 Lebanon Unifil report aircraft incidents Hizbollah fire missiles border demonstrations civilians death IDF military :Guardian 2006 war disproportionate death army aggression assault Mossad Syria Palestine POW

article 118 of the third Geneva convention