http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/043084/840430002.html
Israel and "State Terrorism"
April 30, 1984, Page 2, Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs
During recent months, "state
terrorism" has become a new
watchword within the
Administration, and the need to
fight it more effectively has
developed into a major goal of
U.S. foreign policy.
This fact became clearer than
ever in mid-April, when the White
House confirmed that President
Reagan had issued a secret
directive on April 3 which laid
the basis for "taking the
offensive" against state
terrorism.
Speaking about the directive,
White House spokesman Larry
Speakes declared on April 18 that
"the states that practice
terrorism or actively support it
cannot be allowed to do so
without consequences." The next
day, Secretary of State Shultz
warned that some of the U.S.'s
counter-actions might be
preemptive.
The emphasis on this issue has
been building up since last fall,
after 241 American marines were
killed in Beirut by truck-bombers
that the Administration believed
were linked to Iran.
After the massacre, officials
began talking of state terrorism
as though it were a new
development. As recently as last
December 27, President Reagan
said that state-sponsored
terrorism was "a fundamentally
new phenomenon." On January 22,
Mr. Shultz talked of "the
emergence of terror as a kind of
weapon of war by states," and
named not only Iran but also
Syria, Libya and the Soviet Union
as countries that use this
weapon. In a later speech, he
added North Korea.
Many longtime observers of Middle
East affairs fault the assessment
of these Administration leaders
on two counts. Firstly, state
terrorism is not new-it has been
practiced in the Middle East for
years. Secondly, one country that
has used terrorism to very great
effect over the past 36 years-the
state of Israel-has not been put
on their list of practitioners.
In 1980, the CIA, in a report
issued publicly, defined
terrorism as "the threat or use
of violence for political
purposes by individuals or
groups, whether acting for, or in
opposition to, established
governmental authority, when such
actions are intended to shock or
intimidate a target group wider
than the immediate victims."
In the columns which follow, we
list a small sample of actions by
Israel that meet the criteria
laid down by the CIA:
*On September 17, 1948, four
months after the official
establishment of Israel, U.N.
Palestine Mediator Count Folke
Bernadotte was assassinated by
members of an Israeli terrorist
group, the so-called Stern Gang,
while driving in the
Israeli-controlled sector of
Jerusalem. The U.S. government,
at the time, believed the
identity of the perpetrators was
known to Israel's Prime Minister
David Ben Gurion, butthe
perpetrators were never
prosecuted. Thirty years later
one of them, Yehoshva
Zeitler-known to be a close
friend of Ben Gurion's-
acknowledged that he was one of
the assassins and explained that
"we executed Bernadotte because
he was a one-man institution who
endangered the status of
Jerusalem by his declared
intention of turning her into an
international city. He was
hostile to Israel from the moment
the statewas established and
actually laid the foundation for
the present U.N. policy of
supporting the Arabs." The
message to other potential
pro-Arab sympathizers was clear.
*In early October, 1953, three
people in an Israeli border
village were found
murdered-presumably by attackers
who had crossed from Jordan.
Later, on the night of October
14-15, an Israeli military force
crossed into the small Jordan
border village of Qibya and
demolished 30 to 40 buildings,
including the village school, the
water pumping station, the police
station and the telephone office.
But the soldiers did much, much
more. According to the official
report by the Chief of Staff of
the U.N. Truce Supervisory
Organization, whose officers went
to the scene immediately after
the raid: "Bullet- riddled bodies
near the doorways, and multiple
bullet hits on the doors of the
demolished houses indicated that
the inhabitants had been forced
to remain inside until their
homes were blown up over them.
Witnesses were uniform in
describing their experience as a
night of horror, during which
Israeli soldiers moved about in
their village, blowing up
buildings, firing into doorways
and windows with automatic
weapons, and throwing hand
grenades." More than 50 men,
women and children died. It was
later acknowledged by Israel that
the raid had been carried out by
Force 101, a special unit set up
for just this kind of operation
under the command of Major Ariel
Sharon.
*During July, 1954, several bombs
went off in Cairo and Alexandria,
including two which set fire to
the U.S. Information Service
offices in both those cities and
one which went off in a
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theater.
Members of what the Egyptian
authorities described as a ring
of "Israeli spies" and who were,
in fact, Jewish-were tracked down
and put on trial. Two of them
were executed and the rest
jailed. The Egyptian action
raised a furor among Israelis,
who accused Egypt's
president,Gamal Abdul Nasser, of
"trumping up" charges against
Jews. A few months later,
however, a political scandal
erupted in Israel-later known as
the "Lavon affair"-and forced out
the admission from Israeli
government officials that the
members of the Cairo spy ring
were indeed Israeli spies highly
trained members of Israel's
military intelligence service. A
primary purpose of the bombing
operation, it turned out, was to
try to put a halt to what the
Israeli government saw as an
alarming trend towards better
Egypt-U.S. relations-by creating
the impression through the
bombings that Egypt was basically
unstable and anti-American.
*On December 12, 1955, Israel
carried out a three-pronged,
meticulously planned attack by
land and sea against Syria, on
the northeastern shore of Lake
Tiberias. More than 50 Syrians
were killed. Israel told the U.S.
Security Council, which condemned
the raid, that the attack was a
reprisal for Syrian hindrance of
Israeli fishermen on Lake
Tiberias, but U.S. truce
observers declared there had been
no such hindrance. In the opinion
of American truce observer
Commander E.H. Hutchison, "it was
a premeditated raid of
intimidation, motivated by
Israel's desire to test the
strength of the Egyptian-Syrian
mutual defense pact, to disrupt
Arab unity further, to bait the
Arab states into some overt act
of aggression that would afford
it the opportunity to overrun
additional territory..."
*On October 29,1956, in the
Israeli Arab village of Kafr
Kasem, Israeli border guards shot
and killed 43 Israeli Arabs,
including seven children and ten
women. The victims were farm
workers who were returning home
on foot unaware that while they
were laboring in the fields a
daily curfew-imposed because of
the Suez war-had been moved
forward from 9 p.m. to 5 p.m. The
government kept the massacre
secret for two months, but was
forced to hold a trial after word
of it was leaked. At the trial it
was revealed that the border
police had been given orders to
enforce the new curfew in a way
that would impress the
inhabitants of the local Arab
villages: violators were to be
shot, not arrested, even if they
had not heard about the change in
the curfew. Several of the
defendants testified that the
police officer in charge had said
that if some Arabs were killed it
would make the task of enforcing
the curfew that much easier. The
officer told the court that he
was obeying the orders of the
military. A number of the
defendants were given sentences,
but less than a year later all of
them were freed.
*On July 18,1981, Israeli planes
bombed Beirut, killing more than
300 civilians. The Israeli army's
chief of intelligence told
reporters that the motive behind
Israel's massive raid on a
densely populated quarter was to
generate Lebanese civilian
resentment against the presence
of Palestinian guerrillas there.
"I would say at least they have
something to think about now," he
said. A few days later,
Israelijets again dropped bombs
over Lebanon. According to The
New York Times, "Witnesses,
including Western reporters
caught in the attacks, said
nearly all of the casualties
appeared to be civilians, most of
them burned alive in their cars,
trapped in clogged traffic."
*In October, 1982, an Israeli
court began the trial of seven
Israeli soldiers on charges of
beating up West Bank
Palestinians. The soldiers had
said they were just following
standing orders. Documents
introduced at the trial included
some issued by the then Israeli
chief of staff Lt. Gen. Rafael
Eitan, which called for the
punishment of the parents of
students who participate in
demonstrations, expulsion from
the West Bank of Arabs considered
troublemakers by the Israelis,
and "economic punishment" of
whole villages. Eitan said Arabs
should be imprisoned for
investigation, without formal
charges, for up to 18 days as
allowed by Israeli law in the
occupied territory, released for
a few days and then reimprisoned.
"Harrass them," Gen. Eitan said,
according to the documents. He
also urged the creation of a
special "detention exile" camp in
the West Bank and said that the
Arab population should be
informed that "the inhabitants of
Jewish settlements (in the West
Bank) must carry arms and open
fire when attacked." After the
documents were introduced at the
trial, Gen. Eitan commented:
"None of these methods were
illegal." The court agreed, but
convicted four of the soldiers,
on February 17,1983, for having
gone beyond Eitan's
recommendations. They were given
token sentences.
Space limitations do not allow us
to provide a fuller list of
similar Israeli terrorist
actions, which could fill many
more pages. We have not, for
example, included the many acts
of terrorism that were carried
out in Lebanon during and after
the invasion of Lebanon in June,
1982-including the illegal use of
the U.S.-supplied cluster and
phosphorus bombs which cause such
painful injury to individuals. We
can also make only passing
mention of the frequent and
devastating attacks on refugee
camps in Lebanon which took place
at various other times during the
1970s; and of the random and
murderous shelling and
bombardments during 1969 and 1970
of Egyptian villages, towns and
cities-which Israelis hoped would
humiliate Nasser enough to cause
his downfall. Nor was there space
to provide examples of the
government-encouraged vigilantism
that has caused so many deaths of
Arabs in the West Bank.
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