From: Francis Feeley <Francis.Feeley@u-grenoble3.fr>
Subject: A NEW HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE ISRAELI MASSACRES IN
PALESTINE.
18 April 2002
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues :
The Grenoble Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions
and
Social Movements has just received this essay by Norman G. Finkelstein,
forwarded to us from Belgium by Jean Bricmont, an Associate Research
Director at our Center.
This summary of historical events leading up to the current civilian
massacres by the Israeli armed forces should be useful for future legal
and
historical research on this tragic international event now under way....
Sincerely,
Professor Francis Feeley
Director of Research
Université Stendhal
Grenoble, France
============================================
Francis, Sorry if you have already received this, but it is an excellent
summary by Norman G. Finkelstein.
Jean Bricmont
_________________________________________________
First the Carrot, Then the Stick:
Behind the Carnage in Palestine
by Norman G. Finkelstein
14 April 2002
During the June 1967 war, Israel
occupied the West Bank and Gaza,
completing the Zionist conquest
of British-mandated
Palestine. In the war's aftermath,
the United Nations debated the
modalities for settling the Arab-Israeli
conflict. At the Fifth
Emergency Session of the General
Assembly convening in the war's immediate
aftermath, there was "near unanimity"
on "the
withdrawal of the armed forces from
the territory of neighboring Arab
states occupied during the recent
war" since "everyone
agrees that there should be no territorial
gains by military conquest."
(Secretary-General U Thant, summarizing
the G.A.
debate) In subsequent Security
Council deliberations, the same demand for
a full Israeli withdrawal in accordance
with the
principle of "the inadmissibility
of the acquisition of territory by war"
was inscribed in United Nations
Resolution 242, alongside
the right of "every state in the
region" to have its sovereignty respected.
A still-classified State Department
study concludes
that the US supported the "inadmissibility"
clause of 242, making allowance
for only "minor " and "mutual" border
adjustments. (Nina J. Noring and
Walter B. Smith II, "The Withdrawal
Clause in UN Security Council Resolution
242 of 1967")
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan
later warned Cabinet ministers not
to endorse 242 because "it means
withdrawal to
the 4 June boundaries, and because
we are in conflict with the Security
Council on that resolution."
Beginning in the mid-1970s a modification
of UN Resolution 242 to resolve
the Israel-Palestine conflict provided
for the
creation of a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza once Israel
withdrew to its pre-June 1967 borders.
Except for the
United States and Israel (and occasionally
a US client state), an
international consensus has backed,
for the past quarter
century, the full-withdrawal/full
recognition formula or what is called the
"two-state" settlement. The
United States cast the
lone veto of Security Council resolutions
in 1976 and 1980 calling for a
two-state settlement that was endorsed
by the
Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) and front-line Arab states. A
December 1989 General Assembly resolution
along
similar lines passed 151-3 (no abstentions),
the three negative votes cast
by Israel, the United States, and
Dominica.
From early on, Israel consistently
opposed full withdrawal from the
Occupied Territories, offering the
Palestinians instead a
South African-style Bantustan.
The PLO., having endorsed the international
consensus, couldn't be dismissed,
however, as
"rejectionist" and pressure mounted
on Israel to accept the two-state
settlement. Accordingly, in
June 1982 Israel invaded
Lebanon, where the PLO was headquartered,
to fend off what an Israeli
strategic analyst called the PLO's
"peace offensive."
(Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security)
In December 1987 Palestinians in
the West Bank and Gaza rose up in a
basically non-violent civil revolt
(intifada) against the
Israeli occupation. Israel's
brutal repression (extra-judicial killings,
mass detentions, house demolitions,
indiscriminate torture,
deportations, and so on ) eventually
crushed the uprising. Compounding the
defeat of the intifada, the PLO
suffered yet a
further decline in its fortunes
with the destruction of Iraq, the implosion
of the Soviet Union, and the suspension
of funding
from the Gulf states. The
US and Israel seized this occasion to recruit
the already venal and now desperate
PLO leadership
as surrogates of Israeli power.
This is the real meaning of the "peace
process" inaugurated at Oslo in
September 1993: to
create a Palestinian Bantustan by
dangling before the PLO the perquisites
of power and privilege.
"The occupation continued" after
Oslo, a seasoned Israeli commentator
observed, "albeit by remote control,
and with the
consent of the Palestinian people,
represented by their `sole
representative,' the PLO."
And again: "It goes without saying
that `cooperation' based on
the current power relationship is no more than
permanent Israeli domination in
disguise, and that
Palestinian self-rule is merely
a euphemism for Bantustanization." (Meron
Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies)
After seven years of on-again, off-again
negotiations and a succession of
new agreements that managed to rob
the
Palestinians of the few crumbs thrown
from the master's table at Oslo (the
population of Jewish settlers in
the Occupied
Territories had fully doubled in
the meanwhile), the moment of truth
arrived at Camp David in July 2000.
President Clinton
and Prime Minister Barak delivered
Arafat the ultimatum of formally
acquiescing in a Bantustan or bearing
full responsibility for
the collapse of the "peace process."
As it happened, Arafat refused.
Contrary to the myth spun by Barak-Clinton
as well as
a compliant media, in fact "Barak
offered the trappings of Palestinian
sovereignty," a special adviser
at the British Foreign
Office reports, "while perpetuating
the subjugation of the Palestinians."
(The Guardian, 10 April l 2002;
for details and the
critical background, see Roane Carey,
ed., The New Intifada)
Consider in this regard Israel's
response to the recent Saudi peace plan.
An Israeli commentator writing in
Haaretz observes
that the Saudi plan is "surprisingly
similar to what Barak claims to have
proposed two years ago." Were
Israel really intent on
a full withdrawal in exchange for
normalization with the Arab world, the
Saudi plan and its unanimous endorsement
by the
Arab League summit should have been
met with euphoria. In fact, it
elicited a deafening silence in
Israel. (Aviv Lavie, 5 April
2002) Nonetheless, Barak's
- and Clinton's - fraud that Palestinians at
Camp David rejected a maximally
generous Israeli
offer provided crucial moral cover
for the horrors that ensued.
Having failed in its carrot policy,
Israel now reached for the big stick.
Two preconditions had to be met,
however, before Israel
could bring to bear its overwhelming
military superiority: a "green light"
from the U.S. and a sufficient pretext.
Already in
summer 2000, the authoritative Jane's
Information Group reported that
Israel had completed planning for
a massive and
bloody invasion of the Occupied
Territories. But the US vetoed the plan
and Europe made equally plain its
opposition. After
11 September, however, the US came
on board. Indeed, Sharon's goal of
crushing the Palestinians basically
fit in with the
US administration's goal of exploiting
the World Trade Center atrocity to
eliminate the last remnants of Arab
resistance to total
US domination. Through sheer
exertion of will and despite a monumentally
corrupt leadership, Palestinians
have proven to
e the most resilient and recalcitrant
popular force in the Arab world.
Bringing them to their knees would
deal a devastating
psychological blow throughout the
region.
With a green light from the US, all
Israel now needed was the pretext.
Predictably it escalated the assassinations
of
Palestinian leaders following each
lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks.
"After the destruction of the houses
in Rafah and
Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued
to act with restraint," Shulamith
Aloni of Israel's Meretz party observed.
"Sharon and
his army minister, apparently fearing
that they would have to return to the
negotiating table, decided to do
something and
they liquidated Raad Karmi.
They knew that there would be a response, and
that we would pay the price in the
blood of our
citizens." (Yediot Aharonot,
18 January 2002) Indeed, Israel desperately
sought this sanguinary response.
Once the
Palestinian terrorist attacks crossed
the desired threshold, Sharon was
able to declare war and proceed
to annihilate the
basically defenseless civilian Palestinian
population.
Only the willfully blind can miss
noticing that Israel's current invasion
of the West Bank is an exact replay
of the June 1982
invasion of Lebanon. To crush
the Palestinians' goal of an independent
state alongside Israel - the PLO's
"peace offensive"
- Israel laid plans in August 1981
to invade Lebanon. In order to launch
the invasion, however, it needed
the green light
from the Reagan administration and
a pretext. Much to its chagrin and
despite multiple provocations, Israel
was unable to
elicit a Palestinian attack on its
northern border. It accordingly
escalated the air assaults on southern
Lebanon and after a
particularly murderous attack that
left two hundred civilians dead
(including 60 occupants of a Palestinian
children's hospital),
the PLO finally retaliated killing
one Israeli. With the pretext in hand
and a green light now forthcoming
from the Reagan
administration, Israel invaded.
Using the same slogan of "rooting out
Palestinian terror," Israel proceeded
to massacre a
defenseless population, killing
some 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese,
almost all civilians.
The problem with the Bush administration,
we are repeatedly told, is that
it has been insufficiently engaged
with the Middle
East, a diplomatic void Colin Powell's
mission is supposed to fill. But
who gave the green light for Israel
to commit the
massacres? Who supplied the
F-16s and Apache helicopters to Israel? Who
vetoed the Security Council resolutions
calling
for international monitors to supervise
the reduction of violence? And who
just blocked the proposal of the
United Nation's
top human rights official, Mary
Robinson, to merely send a fact-finding
team to the Palestinian territories?
(IPS, 3 April 2002)
Consider this scenario. A and
B stand accused of murder. The evidence
shows that A provided B with the
murder weapon,
A gave B the "all-clear" signal,
and A prevented onlookers from answering
the victim's screams. Would
the verdict be that A
was insufficiently engaged or that
A was every bit as guilty as B of
murder?
To repress Palestinian resistance,
a senior Israeli officer earlier this
year urged the army to "analyze
and internalize the
lessons ofShow the German army fought
in the Warsaw ghetto." (Haaretz, 25
January 2002, 1 February 2002)
Judging by
the recent Israeli carnage in the
West Bank - the targeting of Palestinian
ambulances and medical personnel,
the targeting of
journalists, the killing of Palestinian
children "for sport" (Chris Hedges,
New York Times former Cairo bureau
chief), the
rounding up, handcuffing and blindfolding
of all Palestinian males between
the ages 15 and 50, and affixing
of numbers on
their wrists, the indiscriminate
torture of Palestinian detainees, the
denial of food, water, electricity,
and medical assistance to
the Palestinian civilian population,
the indiscriminate air assaults on
Palestinian neighborhoods, the use
of Palestinian
civilians as human shields, the
bulldozing of Palestinian homes with the
occupants huddled inside - it appears
that the Israeli
army is following the officer's
advice. Dismissing all criticism as
motivated by anti-Semitism, Elie
Wiesel - chief spokesman for
the Holocaust Industry - lent unconditional
support to Israel, stressing
the "great pain and anguish" endured
by its rampaging
army. (Reuters, 11 April; CNN, 14
April)
Meanwhile, the Portuguese Nobel laureate
in literature, Jose Saramago,
invoked the "spirit of Auschwitz"
in depicting the
horrors inflicted by Israel, while
a Belgian parliamentarian avowed that
Israel was "making a concentration
camp out of the
West Bank." (The Observer, 7 April
2002) Israelis across the political
spectrum recoil in outrage at such
comparisons. Yet, if
Israelis don't want to stand accused
of being Nazis they should simply stop
acting like Nazis.