Updates from AIJAC

Terror and Israeli responses

May 21, 2001
Number 05/01 #09

As readers are probably aware, following the suicide bombing at Netanya on Friday, Israel struck several buildings in the Gaza strip belonging to Palestinian Security forces, using for the first time, F-16 fixed wing aircraft, as opposed to the helicopters used in previous attacks. The reason, I understand, is both that F-16 attacks are more able to completely level buildings, and also the Palestinians have been illegally importing antiaircraft missiles to which helicopters are vulnerable. In any case, there was considerable condemnation in Europe and from UN Secretary General Kofi Anan about the supposed "escalation" of using planes, and arguments that the Israeli response was "disproportionate". Below, in an important piece, Yosef Goell points that there is very little Israel can do that would be considered "proportionate" by such critics.

Below this, David Bedein asks why the coastal city of Netanya, in particular, has been singled out as the subject of 7 bomb attacks in recent months. He points out that, contrary to what most people think, official Palestinian bodies also classify it as a "settlement" just like those in the West Bank or Gaza even though it is thoroughly inside Israel's pre-1967 border.

Finally, I have included a heartfelt expression of anxiety about the growing wave of pure anti-Jewish hate, as written by Jerusalem Report writer Yossi Klein Halevi in the Los Angeles Times.

Who defines 'proportionate'?

By Yosef Goell

Jerusalem Post, May, 21 2001

Throughout the past eight months of Arafat-instigated violence and terrorism, Israel has come in for persistent knee-jerk foreign criticism that its response to various acts of such Palestinian terrorism has always been "disproportionate."

This raises the obvious question of what a "proportionate" reaction should consist of. Should Israel have retaliated for the outrage of the suicide bombing of the Netanya mall in which five Israelis were killed and well over 100 wounded, with the indiscriminate murder of five Palestinians selected at random, in the expectation that at least another 100 would be wounded in the operation?

Should the response to the barbaric murder of the two teenagers in the wadi outside Tekoa a week earlier have been the snatching at random of two Palestinian teenagers and the subsequent bashing in of their heads and the unspeakable mutilation of their bodies?

Those would have been "proportionate" retaliations; but they would have been too horrible even to contemplate, much less to resort to, for any normal society, even one at war, that prides itself on being light years removed from the barbarism that still underlies so much of Arab civilization.

When the charge comes from Russia and its President Vladimir Putin, who are responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent decades in their war to suppress the breakaway rebellion in Chechnya, it can be dismissed for the rank hypocrisy that it is.

The same short shrift should be given to similar criticism from the Arab world. Arab hypocrisy does not only emanate from Syria's President Bashar Assad, whose father butchered 20,000 Syrian Muslims in the city of Hama, who "merely" threatened his regime. The late King Hussein of Jordan behaved in similar fashion when he ruthlessly put down an Arafat-led threat to his own regime in the "Black September" of 1970 when his forces killed many Palestinians and expelled even more to a new exile in Lebanon.

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak has resorted to legitimate, but even more disproportionate, force to quell an incipient Muslim Brotherhood threat to his own regime. The Egyptians' ferocity is outdone only by Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and by the Algerian military in their own bloody attempt to quash the Muslim fundamentalists in their own country.

Even our friends and allies should be gently reminded of their own hypocrisy in criticizing Israeli actions: the US and Britain for their indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1991 and in Serbia two years ago. Britain, by the way, should be reminded that its forces obliterated entire Arab villages in Palestine with artillery, in quashing the Arab Revolt of 1936-39.

How far should a society go in responding to violent attacks on its civilian population and its collective integrity? The answer should be sought in the effectiveness of the response, rather than in some mathematical concept of proportionality. And effectiveness should be judged by the enemy's goals.

It should have been clear from the beginning of the Palestinian violence last September that it was not a reprise of the popular intifada of 1988.

Rather, the current violence was an intentional decision conceived and orchestrated by Arafat in the aftermath of his own torpedoing of last July's Camp David talks with US president Bill Clinton and prime minister Ehud Barak, with two goals in mind: one was to force the Israeli political leadership to surrender to his full territorial demands and to acquiesce in the return of the Palestinian refugees to Israel itself, by grinding down the Israeli civilian population through escalating terrorist attacks. He has failed in this goal. What he got instead was a Sharon government instead of Barak. When the violence grinds to a halt, as it eventually will, there will no longer be any chance for a meaningful agreement with the Palestinians during the term of this government, or during Arafat's lifetime.

Arafat's second goal was to internationalize the conflict by inviting US and other foreign pressure on Israel in response to "disproportionate" Israeli retaliation. It is clear that we should factor in this danger in choosing our responses. Using the air force to bomb selected targets in Palestinian cities was not the most effective military response, whereas it invited the risk of unwanted international intervention.

Legitimate international - including Arab - concern should address itself to how to prevent the Arafat-instigated violence from spilling over into regional unrest, in Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere and threatening Western interests. The best way to achieve that is to resort to policies which hold out the best prospects of putting an end to the Palestinian violence as quickly as possible.

That means stepping up effective Israeli responses by clearly targeting the top Palestinian military and political leadership who are carrying out Arafat's orders, rather than the Palestinian population, itself.

WHY NETANYA?

David Bedein

(Israel Resource News Agency, May 18, 2001)

On May 18, 2001, the Israeli coastal city of Netanya suffered its seventh bombing in recent months. Netanya, not located in the west bank or Gaza, is demarcated as "Um Khalid" on the official map of Palestine that was distributed this week by the PLO on May 15th, the "Nakba Day" that the PLO mourns the genesis of the modern state of Israel.

This year, the PLO observed Nakba Day by dispatching Arabs from refugee camps to visit their villages from 1948, to prepare for their "return". Hundreds of Arab refugees visited Netanya this year to visit "Um Khalid" in expectation of their "return".

Most recently, I lectured at an IDF retirement home in Netanya, to discuss the PLO demand that all Arab refugees who have been wallowing in UN refugee camps for the past 50 years, waiting to realize what the PLO defines as their "right of return" to villages that they left in 1948.

I showed the retirees the map of a "future Palestinian State" which the PLO Orient House headquarters provides in Jerusalem, which marks the 531 Arab villages that are slated for return, all of which had been overrun in 1948. One of those villages was Um Khalid, which, according to the PLO, had been illegally absorbed by Netanya when Um Khalid's Arab population fled during the 1948 war.

The PLO therefore defines Netanya as one of Israel's "illegal settlements," under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention, enacted in 1949, which forbids a conquering nation from moving its citizens into a conquered area.

The implications: the PLO will justify any attack on any such settlement that it views as "illegal." In January 1995, following Hamas terror bombs that killed 21 people at a bus stop at the Beit Lid/Netanya junction, PLO's secretary general Marwan Barguti calmly told MBC Saudi television why the PLO would justify an attack on Netanya: "This is an area that we have yet to liberate." I have that video on my desk. Moreover, the formalized December 1995 PLO-Hamas accord, signed in Cairo by both Palestinian factions, allows Hamas to carry out operations in areas within Israel proper that had not yet been liberated….

Over the past seven years, the PLO developed a computer database at Orient House that helps Arab refugees locate their homes from before 1948. This is to enable their imminent right of return to places like Um Khalid.

Throughout the summer of 2000, UN Arab refugee camps sponsored tours for Arab refugee children, their parents and their grandparents to visit villages that they had left in 1948. They used Israeli Arab buses to circumvent checkpoints.

HITTING HOME

This presentation made the retirees at the Netanya nursing home quite nervous. They could not believe what they were hearing, that their city was considered to be a target. They became quite emotional, and some of the retirees actually screamed that "all the Palestinians want is the West bank and Gaza." The message that the PLO demanded the "right of return" to Netanya was a hard one for these senior citizens to swallow.

Yet there was one man who made it easy to listen: An Arab male nurse present asked to say something at the end of the lecture. He approached the podium He stared at the map and turned to speak to the retirees. "This is what we want. The right of return. That would bring peace," said the nurse. I asked him if that meant that Israel would have to withdraw from Um Khalid.

The nurse, in a soft voice, said "yes". I then said to the nurse that this would mean that half of the Jews would have to leave their homes in Netanya. The nurse said, "Well, that is the price of peace." The retirees were stunned. The Arab nurse at the Netanya nursing home had conveyed my message--with greater credibility. The bombings that continue in Netanya--or Um Khalid--continue to convey that message.

(David Bedein is the bureau chief of Israel Resource News Agency located at the Beit Agron International Press Center in Jerusalem.)

Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, May 15, 2001

Dance of Death Overtakes the Arab World

By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

JERUSALEM--One night in May 1967, a few weeks before the Six-Day War, I was watching the news with my father, a Holocaust survivor. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had just shut the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, expelled the U.N. peacekeeping force from the Sinai and massed troops on the border. A report from Cairo appeared on the screen, showing thousands of men leaping around banners imprinted with skulls and crossbones and chanting death slogans against Israel. At that moment, my father and I both understood, without exchanging a word, what was about to happen next. History taught: When the death banners take over the streets, war becomes inevitable.

In recent weeks those faded television images from 1967 have assumed renewed clarity. Almost imperceptibly, the dance of death is again overtaking the Arab world.

A new hit song on Egyptian radio stations proclaims, "I hate Israel." State-controlled newspapers vie with each other to spread the most astonishing lies, including the medieval notion that Jews use the blood of murdered Gentile children for matzo--the theme of a popular book written by Syrian Defence Minister Mustafa Talas that is about to be turned into an Egyptian film that is being touted as the Arab response to "Schindler's List."

The Arab world has become obsessed with the Holocaust, and two camps have emerged. One camp, which includes the government-controlled newspapers of Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, argues that the Holocaust never happened; the other camp, which includes at least one government newspaper in Egypt, acknowledges that the Holocaust did happen and is grateful to Hitler for implementing it.

Indeed, nowhere except in the Arab world is both Holocaust denial and admiration for the Final Solution as mainstream, including among intellectuals.

Almost every morning, I find on my computer screen another message of hate, courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based group specializing in translations of the Arab press. MEMRI wisely refrains from attaching commentaries to its translations and allows the articles to speak for themselves.

Here is a small sample of what has recently come across my screen: Ahmad Ragab, in his daily column in the Egyptian government-sponsored newspaper Al Akhbar, April 20: "Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who, on behalf of the Palestinians, revenged in advance against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth. Although we do have a complaint against him for his revenge on them was not enough." And Hiri Manzour, columnist for the Palestinian Authority-controlled newspaper, Al Hayat al Jadida, April 13: "The figure of 6 million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie for propaganda."

Arab heads of state repeat calumnies which, in the West, only neo-Nazis dare to publicly voice. Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi recently accused Israel and the CIA of infecting Libyan children with AIDS. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, speaking in the presence of the pope, revived the deadly accusation of deicide, claiming that the Jews "tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and ... tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad."

Emboldened by the unrestrained Jew-hatred, Saddam Hussein ended his speech at the recent Arab summit in Amman with this prayer: "God damn the Jews."

This astonishing outbreak of hatred would, perhaps, be comprehensible had Israel annexed the West Bank and expelled its Palestinian inhabitants. In fact, the Nazi-like incitement follows Israel's unprecedented offer, under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, to withdraw from practically the entire West Bank, uproot a majority of settlements and create a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

No doubt there are some Jews who find Arab hatred perversely comforting, proof that "the world" hates us and always will. I'm not one of them, and neither, I believe, are most Israelis. We've raised our children to see themselves as free human beings, without victim complexes. That, after all, is Zionism's gift to the Jews.

But a familiar madness is returning to the Middle East, and we can't pretend any longer that it will pass. Armies may not yet be gathering against our borders, but the hatred can lead to only one conclusion. I recognize the signs, and I am afraid.

Yossi Klein Halevi Is the Author of "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: a Jew's Search for God With Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land," to Be Published by William Morrow in September.