Al-Aqsa Uprising
By Noam Chomsky, 26 Oct 2000
(this article was also published in Al-Ahram weekly in issue No 506,
2-8 Nov 2000, under the title: "Blinded by the Truth")
After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli occupied territories, Prime
Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of
the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including
30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in
which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent
danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in
a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US. The ratio of
Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of
force available.
Barak's plan was not given in detail, but the outlines are familiar: they
conform to the "final status map" presented by the US-Israel as the basis
for the Camp David negotiations that collapsed in July. This plan, extending
US-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier years, called for cantonization
of the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967, with mechanisms to
ensure that usable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in
Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal
Palestinian authority (PA), playing the role traditionally assigned to
indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the
Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the most
obvious analogue. In the West Bank, a northern canton is to include Nablus
and other Palestinian cities, a central canton is based in Ramallah, and a
southern canton in Bethlehem; Jericho is to remain isolated. Palestinians
would be effectively cut off from Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life.
Similar arrangements are likely in Gaza, with Israel keeping the southern
coastal region and a small settlement at Netzarim (the site of many of the
recent atrocities), which is hardly more than an excuse for a large military
presence and roads splitting the Strip below Gaza City. These proposals
formalize the vast settlement and construction programs that Israel has been
conducting, thanks to munificent US aid, with increasing energy since the US
was able to implement its version of the "peace process" after the Gulf war.
For more on the negotiations and their background, see my July 25
commentary; and for further background, the commentary by Alex and Stephen
Shalom, Oct. 10.
The goal of the negotiations was to secure official PA adherence to this
project. Two months after they collapsed, the current phase of violence
began. Tensions, always high, were raised when the Barak government
authorized a visit by Ariel Sharon with 1000 police to the Muslim religious
sites (Al-Aqsa) on a Thursday (Sept. 28). Sharon is the very symbol of
Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going
back to 1953. Sharon's announced purpose was to demonstrate "Jewish
sovereignty" over the al-Aqsa compound, but as the veteran correspondent
Graham Usher points out, the "al-Aqsa intifada," as Palestinians call it,
was not initiated by Sharon's visit; rather, by the massive and intimidating
police and military presence that Barak introduced the following day, the
day of prayers. Predictably, that led to clashes as thousands of people
streamed out of the mosque, leaving 7 Palestinians dead and 200 wounded.
Whatever Barak's purpose, there could hardly have been a more efficient way
to set the stage for the shocking atrocities of the following weeks.
The same can be said about the failed negotiations, which focused on
Jerusalem, a condition observed strictly by US commentary. Possibly Israeli
sociologist Baruch Kimmerling was exaggerating when he wrote that a solution
to this problem "could have been reached in five minutes," but he is right
to say that "by any diplomatic logic [it] should have been the easiest issue
to solve (Ha'aretz, Oct. 4). It is understandable that Clinton-Barak should
want to suppress what they are doing in the occupied territories, which is
far more important. Why did Arafat agree? Perhaps because he recognizes that
the leadership of the Arab states regard the Palestinians as a nuisance, and
have little problem with the Bantustan-style settlement, but cannot overlook
administration of the religious sites, fearing the reaction of their own
populations. Nothing could be better calculated to set off a confrontation
with religious overtones, the most ominous kind, as centuries of experience
reveal.
The primary innovation of Barak's new plan is that the US-Israeli demands
are to be imposed by direct force instead of coercive diplomacy, and in a
harsher form, to punish the victims who refused to concede politely. The
outlines are in basic accord with policies established informally in 1968
(the Allon Plan), and variants that have been proposed since by both
political groupings (the Sharon Plan, the Labor government plans, and
others). It is important to recall that the policies have not only been
proposed, but implemented, with the support of the US. That support has been
decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic
framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then
pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that
followed, culminating in the "Oslo process." Since all of this has been
effectively vetoed from history in the US, it takes a little work to
discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded.
As noted, Barak's plan is a particularly harsh version of familiar
US-Israeli rejectionism. It calls for terminating electricity, water,
telecommunications, and other services that are doled out in meager rations
to the Palestinian population, who are now under virtual siege. It should be
recalled that independent development was ruthlessly barred by the military
regime from 1967, leaving the people in destitution and dependency, a
process that has worsened considerably during the US-run "Oslo process."
One reason is the "closures" regularly instituted, must brutally by the more
dovish Labor-based governments. As discussed by another outstanding
journalist, Amira Hass, this policy was initiated by the Rabin government
"years before Hamas had planned suicide attacks, [and] has been perfected
over the years, especially since the establishment of the Palestinian
National Authority." An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control,
closure has been accompanied by the importation of an essential commodity to
replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian labor on which much of the
economy relies: hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from around the
world, many of them victims of the "neoliberal reforms" of the recent years
of "globalization." Surviving in misery and without rights, they are
regularly described as a virtual slave labor force in the Israeli press. The
current Barak proposal is to extend this program, reducing still further the
prospects even for mere survival for the Palestinians.
A major barrier to the program is the opposition of the Israeli business
community, which relies on a captive Palestinian market for some $2.5
billion in annual exports, and has "forged links with Palestinian security
officials" and Arafat's "economic adviser, enabling them to carve out
monopolies with official PA consent" (Financial Times, Oct. 22; also NYT,
same day). They have also hoped to set up industrial zones in the
territories, transferring pollution and exploiting a cheap labor force in
maquiladora-style installations owned by Israeli enterprises and the
Palestinian elite, who are enriching themselves in the time-honored fashion.
Barak's new proposals appear to be more of a warning than a plan, though
they are a natural extension of what has come before. Insofar as they are
implemented, they would extend the project of "invisible transfer" that has
been underway for many years, and that makes more sense than outright
"ethnic cleansing" (as we call the process when carried out by official
enemies). People compelled to abandon hope and offered no opportunities for
meaningful existence will drift elsewhere, if they have any chance to do so.
The plans, which have roots in traditional goals of the Zionist movement
from its origins (across the ideological spectrum), were articulated in
internal discussion by Israeli government Arabists in 1948 while outright
ethnic cleansing was underway: their expectation was that the refugees
"would be crushed" and "die," while "most of them would turn into human dust
and the waste of society, and join the most impoverished classes in the Arab
countries." Current plans, whether imposed by coercive diplomacy or outright
force, have similar goals. They are not unrealistic if they can rely on the
world-dominant power and its intellectual classes.
The current situation is described accurately by Amira Hass, in Israel's
most prestigious daily (Ha'aretz, Oct. 18). Seven years after the
Declaration of Principles in September 1993 -- which foretold this outcome
for anyone who chose to see -- "Israel has security and administrative
control" of most of the West Bank and 20% of the Gaza Strip. It has been
able "to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the
settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water
quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in
most of the area of the West Bank, and to seal an entire nation into
restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews
only. During these days of strict internal restriction of movement in the
West Bank, one can see how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000
Jews have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked
into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands. The bloodbath
that has been going on for three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years
of lying and deception, just as the first Intifada was the natural outcome
of direct Israeli occupation."
The settlement and construction programs continue, with US support, whoever
may be in office. On August 18, Ha'aretz noted that two governments -- Rabin
and Barak -- had declared that settlement was "frozen," in accord with the
dovish image preferred in the US and by much of the Israeli left. They made
use of the "freezing" to intensify settlement, including economic
inducements for the secular population, automatic grants for ultra-religious
settlers, and other devices, which can be carried out with little protest
while "the lesser of two evils" happens to be making the decisions, a
pattern hardly unfamiliar elsewhere. "There is freezing and there is
reality," the report observes caustically. The reality is that settlement in
the occupied territories has grown over four times as fast as in Israeli
population centers, continuing -- perhaps accelerating -- under Barak.
Settlement brings with it large infrastructure projects designed to
integrate much of the region within Israel, while leaving Palestinians
isolated, apart from "Palestinian roads" that are travelled at one's peril.
Another journalist with an outstanding record, Danny Rubinstein, points out
that "readers of the Palestinian papers get the impression (and rightly so)
that activity in the settlements never stops. Israeli is constantly
building, expanding and reinforcing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank
and Gaza. Israel is always grabbing homes and lands in areas beyond the 1967
lines - and of course, this is all at the expense of the Palestinians, in
order to limit them, push them into a corner and then out. In other words,
the goal is to eventually dispossess them of their homeland and their
capital, Jerusalem" (Ha'aretz, October 23).
Readers of the Israeli press, Rubinstein continues, are largely shielded
from the unwelcome facts, though not entirely so. In the US, it is far more
important for the population to be kept in ignorance, for obvious reasons:
the economic and military programs rely crucially on US support, which is
domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known.
To illustrate, on October 3, after a week of bitter fighting and killing,
the defense correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest purchase of
military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade," an agreement
with the US to provide Israel with 35 Blackhawk military helicopters and
spare parts at a cost of $525 million, along with jet fuel, following the
purchase shortly before of patrol aircraft and Apache attack helicopters.
These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in
the US inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. It would be unfair to say that
those providing the gifts cannot discover the fact. In a database search,
David Peterson found that they were reported in the Raleigh (North Carolina)
press.
The sale of military helicopters was condemned by Amnesty International
(Oct. 19), because these "US-supplied helicopters have been used to violate
the human rights of Palestinians and Arab Israelis during the recent
conflict in the region." Surely that was anticipated, barring advanced
cretinism.
Israel has been condemned internationally (the US abstaining) for "excessive
use of force," in a "disproportionate reaction" to Palestinian violence.
That includes even rare condemnations by the ICRC, specifically, for attacks
on at least 18 Red Cross ambulances (NYT, Oct 4). Israel's response is that
it is being unfairly singled out for criticism. The response is entirely
accurate. Israel is employing official US doctrine, known here as "the
Powell doctrine," though it is of far more ancient vintage, tracing back
centuries: Use massive force in response to any perceived threat. Official
Israeli doctrine allows "the full use of weapons against anyone who
endangers lives and especially at anyone who shoots at our forces or at
Israelis" (Israeli military legal adviser Daniel Reisner, FT, Oct. 6). Full
use of force by a modern army includes tanks, helicopter gunships,
sharpshooters aiming at civilians (often children), etc. US weapons sales
"do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't be used against
civilians," a Pentagon official said; he "acknowleged however that anti-tank
missiles and attack helicopters are not traditionally considered tools for
crowd control" -- except by those powerful enough to get away with it, under
the protective wings of the reigning superpower. "We cannot second-guess an
Israeli commander who calls in a Cobra (helicopter) gunship because his
troops are under attack," another US official said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur,
October 3). Accordingly, such killing machines must be provided in an
unceasing flow.
It is not surprising that a US client state should adopt standard US
military doctrine, which has left a toll too awesome to record, including
very recent years. The US and Israel are, of course, not alone in adopting
this doctrine, and it is sometimes even condemned: namely, when adopted by
enemies targeted for destruction. A recent example is the response of Serbia
when its territory (as the US insists it is) was attacked by Albanian-based
guerrillas, killing Serb police and civilians and abducting civilians
(including Albanians) with the openly-announced intent of eliciting a
"disproportionate response" that would arouse Western indignation, then NATO
military attack. Very rich documentation from US, NATO, and other Western
sources is now available, most of it produced in an effort to justify the
bombing. Assuming these sources to be credible, we find that the Serbian
response -- while doubtless "disproportionate" and criminal, as alleged
-- does not compare with the standard resort to the same doctrine by the US and
its clients, Israel included.
In the mainstream British press, we can at last read that "If Palestinians
were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions
led by the United States [which is not accurate, unfortunately]. Its
development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of
apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny
fraction of its own country, in self-administered `bantustans', with
`whites' monopolising the supply of water and electricity. And just as the
black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in
disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli
Arabs - flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education
spending - would be recognised as scandalous too" (Observer, Guardian, Oct.
15).
Such conclusions will come as no surprise to those whose vision has not been
constrained by the doctrinal blinders imposed for many years. It remains a
major task to remove them in the most important country. That is a
prerequisite to any constructive reaction to the mounting chaos and
destruction, terrible enough before our eyes, and with long-term
implications that are not pleasant to contemplate.
