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The Untold Stories Of The Israeli-Palestinian ConflictAn essay by Scott Bidstrup
Chapter 4
The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over." Adolf Hitler
State Terror within Israel After the War of Independence, the terror did not end. It had only begun, and it went on for years. Besides forced expropriation of property, bulldozing of houses that were in the way of Israeli settlements, the jailing of innocent Palestinians, often for years without trials, there were still a string of massacres. A list of only the more significant the massacres include: Dawayma, October 29, 1948. Between 80 and 100 men, women and children were killed. The children were killed by simply clubbing them to death with heavy sticks. Sharafat, February 7, 1951. 10 killed, eight wounded, including two elderly men and five children. Kibya, October 14, 1953. 75 killed, no wounded were spared. Every man, woman and child in the village died, without exception. Kafr Qasem, October 29, 1956. At least 48 were known killed; the Israeli Defense Forces didn't stop to do a complete body count. Al Sammou', November 13, 1966. 18 people killed, 54 wounded, 125 houses and the village clinic destroyed, along with 15 houses in a neighboring village. Oyon Qara, May 20, 1990. An IDF soldier lined up and machine-gunned to death seven Palestinian men who were waiting to cross into Israel to go to their jobs. At the demonstrations that followed, IDF troops opened with live fire and killed 13. Al Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, October 8, 1990. IDF soldiers opened with live fire on worshipers in this third-holiest of all Moslem shrines, killing 22. Ibrahimi Mosque, Hebron, February 25, 1994. Three settlers from the nearby Kyrat Arba' settlement invaded this mosque, a place sacred to Muslims and Jews alike, during Friday prayers. Using machine guns, they killed 50, wounding 200. During the demonstrations that followed, IDF forces opened with live fire on the demonstrators, killing 23 and wounding hundreds (the exact casualty figures were never tabulated). Jabalia, March 28, 1994. Israeli secret police opened fire on suspected Palestinian activists, killing 6 and injuring 49. Those injured in their cars were removed from their cars and shot in the head to finish them off. Eretz Checkpoint, July 17, 1994. Israeli settlers opened fire on Palestinians waiting to cross into Israel to go to work. Nearby Palestinians saw what was happening and responded with gunfire; a gun-battle ensued that lasted for six hours. 11 Palestinians were killed, 200 injured, one Israeli soldier was killed and 21 injured, along with one Israeli settler. The Rogue State of Israel And The Wars With Its Neighbors. For six years, from the cessation of hostilities in 1949 until 1955, an uneasy truce reigned in the region. Gamel Abdul Nasser, the dictator of Egypt who was determined to modernize his nation, realized that eventually he'd have to make peace with Israel, whether he liked it or not, and remained determined to do so. Even the Zionists themselves recognized that Nasser was good for Israel. A British Zionist, Richard Grossman, wrote: "not only Egypt, but the whole Middle East must pray that Nasser survives the assassin's bullet. I am certain that he is a man who means what he says, and that so long as he is in power directing his middle-class revolution, Egypt will remain a factor for peace and social development" (Grossman) The Sinai War of 1956 The truce lines following the War of Independence for years were tense, but quiet. But they were not to remain so. David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister had secretly ordered his defense minister, Moshe Dayan, to draw up plans for the invasion of Egypt, as the Ben-Gurion's cabinet felt that they could and ought to occupy the Sinai (it had small oil reserves, which Israel coveted, and was key to control of the Suez Canal), and if possible, seize the Suez Canal. This was because their intelligence told them that the Egyptian government intended to seize the Suez Canal from the British, and this was a situation that Israel was not willing to tolerate, since Egypt would not allow Israeli ships to pass through it. Egypt had no intention of invading Israel. It was badly outgunned and simply couldn't sustain an invasion of Israel and knew it. All it wanted was its canal back from the foreigners who occupied it, the British, who maintained their ownership of it as part of their own imperial fantasy. Knowing that Egypt would not invade without a provocation, Israel launched a raid on Egyptian territory. On February 28, 1955, Israel raided the Gaza Strip, killing 37 Egyptians and wounding 31. The raid was totally unprovoked; Nasser said it "was revenge for nothing. Everything was quiet there" (Love) The raid had the predicted effect of inflaming passions throughout the region. The Arab world was properly outraged. Yet it did not provoke the invasion and war that Ben-Gurion had hoped. Rather, it was a wake-up call to the Arabs that served notice that their defenses were hopelessly inadequate, and that the new Jewish state had imperial ambitions. Egypt in particular realized it badly needed to arm itself. Refused by the U.S., they turned to the Soviet Union for help, and they were obliged through an arms deal arranged through the Czechs (an alliance that blossomed in subsquent years, leading eventually to the construction of the Aswan High Dam). Israel saw this arms deal as a provocation, but did not move. Finally, it was the seizure of the Suez Canal by Egypt, in July of 1956, that caused Israel to act. Since the seizure of the Suez Canal by the Egyptians from the British was in direct defiance of Ben-Gurion's warnings, the Israelis viewed it as a legitimate pretext to invade Egypt, and on the 29th of October, 1956, they crossed the border, swept through the Gaza strip and within days, occupied the entire Sinai. Seeing the Israeli invasion as a possible opportunity to regain control of the Canal, the British, along with France, poured arms into Israel to aid the Israelis in the war. The British-French collusion with Israel caught U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower completely by surprise. He was angry primarily at Israel, however, and said, in an address to the American people, "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of U.N. disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal? If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purpose of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order..." (Eisenhower) The United Nations, acting at the behest of an outraged Eisenhower eventually forced Israel to withdraw. The Israelis reestablished most of the same boundaries they already had with Egypt, with the exception of some areas within the Gaza Strip. But while the Israelis were forced to abandon the Sinai for now, they didn't abandon their designs on it. Far from it. The Six Day War of 1967 Israel learned from its mistakes in 1956. The leadership of Israel realized that it could not hope to occupy the Sinai as well as the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, which they also deeply coveted, without international support, and so it drew up a plan to create the support it needed to justify its occupation. They concluded that the way to do this was to convince the world that 1)Israel was under attack by the Arabs, and 2)Israel was in danger of annihilation. For eleven years, Israel was to bide its time until the circumstances were just right, polishing its plan and carefully cultivating geopolitical influence until it felt it could sway international public opinion to its side. By the summer of 1967, Israel decided that the time was ripe to act. In a surprise raid in the early hours of June 5, 1967, Israeli fighter jets struck the Egyptian air force, wiping out the entire Egyptian air force on the ground before the Egyptians had time to react, and simultaneously invaded the Sinai. In the carefully calculated plan, the Israeli government simultaneously announced that they had been attacked by the Egyptians (a charge that was totally baseless), and that Israel considered itself in mortal danger of extermination. The credulous international press accepted the announcement and passed it on uncritically, and it became the drumbeat of Israel's propaganda campaign. It was not true, as Ezer Weizmann, the Israeli Air Force general later admitted: "there was never any danger of extermination" (Weizmann, Ezer) Some years later, one of the architects of the plan for the war and the accompanying propaganda campaign, General Matityahu Peled, confessed in an interview with El Ha'aretz, an Israeli daily, "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff" (Peled) The propaganda campaign succeeded beyond its creators' wildest dreams. It immediately brought a gullible, unquestioning America to Israel's side, with lots of military help quickly flown in from the United States to bolster rapidly diminishing munitions inventories. To counter the inevitable truth-telling after the war, the Israelis claimed that, well, even if the Egyptians hadn't struck first, at least they'd been threatening an invasion, and so Israel had to act pre-emptively. But the reality was that a third of Egypt's woefully outgunned army was in Yemen at the time, and it was hardly in a position to even prepare for an invasion of Israel, much less carry it off. Additionally, Israel claimed that they had to attack Syria because the Syrians had been bombarding Israeli settlements in the Galilee from the Golan Heights. But this was hardly anything new - the bombardments from the Golan were real enough, but had been going on at roughly the same level of intensity for many years. The outcome of Israel's carefully planned blitzkrieg into Sinai and the West Bank, and propaganda campaign was that Israel occupied the Sinai, its major goal, as well as the West Bank of the Jordan river. But it included another prize long sought by the Israelis: Jerusalem. Israel wasted no time in formally annexing the whole of Jerusalem and proclaiming it as its "eternal capital" as well as a corridor approaching it from the west. The fact that the United Nations, and even the United States warned them not to do so, did not slow them down. The Americans announced that they neither recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (and as of this writing, still don't), nor did they accept the legitimacy of the military occupation of lands seized in the 1967 war. The General Assembly of the United Nations responded with Resolution 242, which demanded the return of the seized lands and forbade any occupation, settlement or annexation of them. The resolution also demanded either a return of all Arab property seized in 1948, or full compensation of its owners. The United States voted in favor of the resolution, and affirmation of it remains official U.S. foreign policy to this day. (Carter) The Yom Kippur War of 1973 Upon becoming the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat sought to regain through diplomacy, the territories lost to Israel in the 1967 war. He launched a charm offensive in which he indicated that he was willing to come to terms with Israel. In February of 1971, he offered a formal peace treaty, on the terms suggested by the United States, but Israel turned it down, in spite of both U.S. support and a general international consensus that it was fair. Plea after plea, offer after offer were turned down, until finally the Egyptians had had enough. The rapidly proliferating Israeli settlements throughout the occupied territories, including Egyptian land in the Sinai were creating facts on the ground that required action.(Kimche) On the 6th of October, 1973, the Egyptians, with the Syrians, launched a coordinated attack on Israel. It caught the Israelis completely by surprise, and almost succeeded. But in the end, superior firepower, greater determination and prompt and massive materiel aid airlifted from the United States won the day - one general commented that bullets being shot by Israel on Wednesday had been sitting in American warehouses the previous Sunday. The Yom Kippur war ended in a few days, and the stalemate resumed, almost unchanged. The Yom Kippur War did have one salutary effect, however. It convinced both sides that the absence of peace is war, and it convinced Sadat that the only way to peace was through diplomacy, no matter how difficult, because the United States would simply not tolerate the conquest of Israel. Israel began to realize that failure to make peace with its neighbors was costly to its security, and it could never live in peace until it made peace. But the hard-core far-right parties in Israel would not allow their governments to conclude peace treaties that didn't include everything the Zionists wanted. Menachem Begin met with Yasser Arafat at the request of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who managed to get the two rivals to talk peace. Finally a peace treaty was concluded with Egypt (though Syria did not participate), and a peace treaty was finally concluded in 1979. It called for surrender of 91% of the Sinai territories to Egypt, which Israel was not very pleased about doing, but finally, by 1988 and after several international court trials, the last of the treaty obligations were complied with, and Egypt resumed sovereignty over all the land surrendered by Israel in the treaty. The Gaza Strip would be formally ceded to a Palestinian state when that state came into being; until then, it was technically Egyptian territory, though remained under Israeli occupation.
More to come |
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