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The Hebron Massacre and the American Connection
By Stephen Zunes
It is wrong to dismiss the February 26 massacre in Hebron
simply as an act by a deranged individual. While it was
probably not part of a broad conspiracy, it was a calculated
move to disrupt the peace process, as has been the many
lesser atrocities committed by both Jewish and Muslim extremists
in Israel and its occupied Palestinian territories in recent months.
This time, however, they may have succeeded.
One aspect which has escaped the attention of the
mainstream media, however, has been the role of the United
States.
Hebron is the only place in the West Bank where Jewish
settlers live in the heart of an Arab city. Their presence is
justified on the grounds that the Arab homes they
expropriated belonged to Jews prior to a 1929 pogrom that
killed or forced out the town's Jewish population. (The
Israelis insist, however, that such a principle does not
follow for the tens of thousands of Jewish homes within what
is now Israel that once belonged to Palestinians.)
Most Israelis who choose to live in rural areas outside of
Israel's internationally-recognized borders do so because of
generous government subsidies designed to encourage the colonization
of Arab lands seized in the 1967 war. By contrast, most of
the settlers in and around Hebron are right-wing ideologies, who--with
the support of the Israeli government--have become vigilantes
against the local population.
Like Baruch Goldstein, the principal assailant of the
attack on the Ibrahim Mosque, as many as one-third to
one-half of these right-wing settlers are from the United
States. For these recent immigrants, it is a chance to live
out childhood fantasies of cowboys and Indians, taming a
frontier through force or arms and a fair amount of racism to
match. Most native Israelis, anxious for peace, see these
American émigrés as an embarrassment at best and, at, worst,
a threat to the long-term security interests of Israel.
I have spent time with these American émigrés, who brag
of their ability to "keep the Arabs in line." They
swagger through the town, pointing their weapons at
passers-by and laugh as their targets scurry out of their
way.
It is as if these Jewish colonists feel a desperate
psychological need to relive the persecution of their people
in an earlier time. Rather than live in the relative security
of Israel proper, they have consciously moved onto
Palestinian land and set up their own ghettos--complete with
high walls and barbed wire--to wait out a perceived siege by
hostile goyim. Rather than recognize that Palestinians'
desire for national freedom is as sincere and legitimate as
that of the early Zionists, they see their Arab neighbors as
the new Nazis who must be destroyed in order for Jews to
survive.
These Jewish extremists are much like the Islamic
extremists in their zealotry, intolerance, and propensity
towards violence. The difference is that the extremist Jewish
groups are legally sanctioned, issued arms by the Israeli
government, and are often directly supported by elements of
the Israeli military.
Israeli Reserve General Matti Peled has accused his
government of connivance at the settlers' "openly declared
war against the pace process. Not only are they allowed to
carry out with impunity pogroms against Palestinian cities
and villages, they are also given free time on the
state-owned media."
Dozens of Israeli soldiers from different units have
written to the Israeli press, to Knesset members, and to
government ministers, complaining that they had been ordered
to stand aside as rampaging settlers dragged Palestinian
motorists out of their cars, beat them up, and torched their
vehicles.
The relationship between the Israeli military, whose
ranks--including commanders--include most of these far right
wing extremists, bear a striking resemblance to those between
the established armed forces and para-military death squads
which terrorized Central American countries during the 1980s. And
again, the U.S. is footing the bill. This time, however, the most
strident supporters of U.S. policy are liberal Democrats, and
the peace movement appears to be letting Congress and the
Clinton administration get away with it.
Most of the direct funding for Gush Emunim, Kach, and
other far right movements come from private contributions
from the United States. Indeed, one could argue that the
generous subsidies these colonists receive from the Israeli
government are, in fact, subsidies form the U.S. government,
since such expenditures would not be possible without the
tens of billions of dollars worth of unconditional aid sent in
foreign aid packages to Israel since its 1967 conquest of the
West Bank and other Arab lands. The American taxpayer has, in
effect, spent millions of dollars for these rightists to
build their communities and then have them protected by
Israeli conscripts.
Despite a long criminal record in both the United States
and Israel and his links to terrorists, the U.S. government
routinely granted visa applications of Kach founder Meir
Kahane to come to the United States to recruit people like
Goldstein to come to colonize Palestinian territory. (Kahane
was assassinated on such a visit to New York in 1990.) At the
same time, the U.S. was consistently denying visas to
Palestine Liberation Organization officials, including those
advocating peace with Israel.
What has been largely ignored by the mainstream media is
that all the Jewish settlements are illegal, according to
international law. No occupying military power can transfer
its own civilian population onto territory seized by force.
However, the Clinton administration has refused to refer to
them as illegal. In a reversal of policy from previous
administrations, Clinton has not opposed the expansion of
existing settlements and has been ambivalent regarding the
large scale construction of massive housing developments in
Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.
UN Security Council resolutions 446 and 465, adopted
unanimously with U.S. support nearly 15 years ago, explicitly
obligates Israel to withdraw from its settlements. However,
the United States--which has been quick to push for sanctions
when Arab states like Iraq and Libya have violated UN
mandates--has thus far blocked effective enforcement of this important
resolution.
Indeed, the Clinton administration insists that the Jewish
settlements should not even be an issue at the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations at this time.
According to U.S. law, the costs of such additional Jewish
development in the occupied territories must be deducted from
the $2 billion annual allocation of the controversial $10 billion
American loan guarantee to Israel passed in 1992. In October,
the U. officially announced to Israel that there would be a $437
million deduction in this year's loan due to settlement
construction during the 1993 fiscal year. However, State
Department Middle East peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross
immediately let the Israeli government know that the U.S.
would find a way to restore the full funding. Within a month,
Clinton announced the U.S. would indeed give Israel an
additional $500 million, ostensibly to pay for the "redeployment"
of Israeli troops which are yet to evacuate from any part of
the occupied territories. The numbers of Israeli occupation
forces in the West Bank and Gaza have actually been
increased.
In the aftermath of the massacre, the U.S. successfully
blocked an effort by the UN Security Council to send in a
multi-national peace keeping force to the occupied
territories, believing that the Israeli military and the
settlers should maintain their monopoly of force. In another reversal
of positions by previous administrations and in contradiction
to several previous UN Security Council resolutions, the U.S.
also blocked a resolution which included Arab East Jerusalem
as an occupied territory, effectively endorsing Israel's
illegal unilateral 1967 annexation.
As a result of the massacre and the intensified repression
of Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces that followed,
the PLO has lost its mandate to continue the negotiations. The
U.S. opposes the only concrete measures which would allow the
PLO to get the talks started again. It is yet another example
that the United States is more interested in a Pax Americana
than real peace in the Middle East, even if it means allowing
the cycle of bloodshed to continue.
Stephen Zunes is director of the Institute for a
Middle East Policy. located on Bainbridge Island,
Washington and a visiting professor of Politics and Government
at the University of Puget Sound.
