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 But Is It Good for the Jews?Posted on Dec 29, 2005
By Sheerly Avni On Christmas day Steven Spielberg picked up the phone and called critic Roger Ebert, breaking a near-total no-comment policy on his controversial new movie, “Munich.” Spielberg’s fictionalized, beautifully shot account of an Israeli hit squad sent to destroy the Black September plotters of the 1972 Munich massacre has been drawing heat--as well as press--for weeks now. Top film critics Kenneth Turan, David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis and Ebert himself all gave it raves. But despite the praise, Spielberg has also been attacked from all sides of the political spectrum --by Palestinians who complain that he leaves out the Palestinian point of view, by Jews who now think he’s “no friend to Israel,” and also by many critics who claim that the film’s critique of a cycle of revenge and retaliation is at best ahistorical and at worst dangerously nave. Spielberg called Ebert to remind the world that his movie was intended to open a dialogue, to make us think, to provoke a reaction, you know, all those things directors say. But he also offered up a quote that will give his most cynical critics even more fodder for their next round of Spielberg-slamming: “What I believe is that there will be peace between Israelis and Palestinians in our lifetimes.” If a reaction is what he wants, he’s getting it. “The prayer for peace,” as Spielberg has described “Munich,” opened Christmas weekend, and most of the critical community is calling for Oscars, most of the conservative Jewish community is calling for blood, and the few Arabs who have commented in the Arab press are accusing Spielberg of sticking with the Israeli point of view. So which is it? Is “Munich” biased against Israel? Biased against the Palestinians? Or just oversimplified and nave? I saw the movie on Christmas eve, in a theater full of Jews and one or two very pissed-off-looking Arabs. I’m an American Jew of Israeli parents, one who grew up on summer trips to the kibbutz back home, on dreams of fighting for The Cause like the rest of my family and on far too many young readings of Leon Uris’ “Exodus” to count. As such, I can only answer: Yes. And Yes. And Yes. Sort of. But, finally, no. First we must remember Spielberg’s limitations as a filmmaker: A great entertainer, he has not been known for nuanced presentations of political history. “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” his two most successful “serious” films, used historical events as backdrop for character dramas. In “Schindler’s List,” the villain was a sadistic concentration camp leader, an evil man whose evil, being personal rather than political, was easy to digest. In “Saving Private Ryan,” the hard questions about the value of human life during wartime gave way to a rousing celebration of brotherhood. Emotions, after all, fill a multiplex better than historical complexities, and they go better with popcorn ("Shoah" was a much sharper representation of the Holocaust than “Schindler’s List,” as the 14 people who saw it in theatrical release know well). Spielberg is a popularizer--in the best and worst senses of the word--and so it should come as no surprise that “Munich,” for all its cinematic grandeur and gripping action, does not offer much to satisfy those seeking a historical context or a clear sense of the political realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, “Munich” is just a pretty good thriller, though a thriller that frequently collapses under the weight of its message. This message is threefold: (1) systematic revenge murders might not be a good idea; (2) the men who plotted Black September were human beings; and (3) killing other human beings can take a heavy psychological toll, on an individual as well as on a nation. Taken on its own terms, it just doesn’t seem too radical. But nothing in the Middle East gets taken on its own terms, as one can see from the polarized responses to the film. The verdict from the Arab press is not yet in--"Munich" won’t open in the Middle East until next month, but so far the response has been far from adulatory. Mohammad Daoud, one of the original masterminds of the Munich massacre, blasted the film and complained about not being called as a consultant. As galling as it may be to see the mastermind of a devastating multiple murder giving press conferences, Muhammad does have a point: He might have been a useful consultant. As for putting a human face on the Palestinians, what would be the alternative? When American critics praised Hany Abu-Assad’s film “Paradise Now,” about two suicide bomber recruits, for “humanizing” Palestinian suffering, Abu-Assad retorted: “I did not intend to humanize. It’s obvious that they are humans.” That humanizing the enemy in a thriller should be considered controversial at all is just one indicator of the polarizing nature of the subject matter, even among Jews. Or rather, especially among Jews. And that leads directly to the “Spielberg is selling out his people” argument, best articulated in David Brooks’ much-quoted New York Times piece last week. Brooks argued that setting the film in 1972 provided Spielberg with a convenient escape from today’s political context. “In Spielberg`s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad,” he wrote. “There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.” True. But in Spielberg’s Middle East there is also no Deir Yassin, no Stern Gang, no Sabra and Shatilla, no new illegal settlements. You could say both sides got off easy, as Spielberg avoids the kind of over-close scrutiny of motives and actions that might undercut the essential nobility of character he is aiming for. Instead, we get sympathetic characters across the board: The Palestinian murderers are fathers, intellectuals--one has even translated the “Arabian Nights” into Italian. The Israeli military commanders are dry, urbane sphinx figures like Geoffrey Rush’s Ephraim, the boss who understands all too well what kind of price his officers will pay for their actions. Even Spielberg’s Golda Meir is pretty and soft-spoken, murmuring in dulcet tones to Avner Kauffman, Eric Bana’s dark-eyed hero-assassin: “I like having strong, durable men around.” As for the deadly team of remorseless agents, sent to leave a blood trail across Europe, they may as well be a Northern California men’s group. When not planning bombings, the ruthless Mossad assassins cook for each other, talk about their children, process each other’s meltdowns, endlessly debate the ethics of their actions, and, in classic Spielberg fashion, compromise their mission to save the life of an innocent little girl. Bana plays Kauffman as a man so torn with self-doubt that we could call him a Hamlet figure if he weren’t so good at getting things done. Even Steve, the blond, blue-eyed South African getaway driver and the only truly convincing Mossad tough (played by Daniel Craig, the next James Bond), spends too much time talking through his point of view, though he’s a bit more succinct than the others: “You don’t fuck with the Jews!” he gloats, after rejoicing over their first successful hit, and I was one of several people in the movie theater who cheered when he said it. To alleviate any guilt feelings, we are also given a kindhearted explosives expert, who cracks from all the killing, crying, “I was trained to dismantle bombs, not build them!” It’s great conscience-soothing, but not great cinema: Every time the men stop for moral struggle, the action stops too. It wouldn’t be the first time the man behind “E.T.” has given in to sentimentality, but in this case, Spielberg is up against something new--a well-founded fear of the great Zionist wrist slap: Bad Jew! Bad Jew! How dare you criticize Israel? “I am as truly pro-Israeli as you can possibly imagine,” he assures Ebert. “Criticism is a form of love. I love America, and I’m critical of this administration. I love Israel, and I ask questions. Those who ask no questions may not be a country’s best friends.” This love of Israel shines through every frame of the movie. From the moving photos of the slain athletes, accompanied by the haunting minor key of the Israeli national anthem, to the characters’ wry humor and blunt arguments ("You have to stop chasing the mice in own brain,” shouts Kauffman at one point, in a touch that is both pure sabra and pure Kushner), “Munich” reflects the peculiar tenderness that many American Jews feel for our brutish brother. We may not like his methods, but we do love knowing that if the schoolyard bully ever tries anything with us again, David Ben-Politically-Suspect-but-Tough-as-Hell will come and kick some royal gentile ass. Or Palestinian ass. It doesn’t matter whose, so long as we know there is someone out there who will say, like the remorseless Steve, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood.” So in Spielberg’s troubled love letter to the beloved homeland, the assassins are glamorous and macho, but also reflective and remorseful--the Jews so many Jews wish they were. This is perhaps the most moving truth of the film, not a fact or an event but a mood, one which acknowledges the gauzy admiration that makes it so hard for the majority of American Jews to think clearly about Israeli actions. The problem is not only Israel’s actions but also her troubled and contested history. In Monday’s New York Times Edward Rothstein took issue with “Munich’s” approach to dealings with the issue of Israeli terrorism and counter-terrorism, arguing that the movie’s interpretation of events lies on a faulty premise. “[Spielberg] ends up treating the Munich massacre almost as if it were the original act of Palestinian terror,” wrote Rothstein. “The elimination of context makes the Israeli response seem intemperate, while all future acts of Palestinian terror are treated as if they were responses to the Israeli assassinations.” The call for context is valid and necessary. Easy terms like “cycle of violence,” “terrorism” and “counter-terrorism” are all abstractions, one which both Zionists and anti-Zionists take offense to for very different reasons. One act of terror is another man’s act of war: Take the classic “Battle of Algiers,” a film that Americans have no problem admiring, in part because its players are Frenchmen and North Africans, and so the conflict belongs to someone else. In that film, one of the revolutionaries blasts a journalist for suggesting that his tactics--such as putting bombs in baskets and handbags--are cowardly. “If we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us,” he snaps. “Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.” The Algerians were terrorists in the eyes of the French, as were the first Jewish freedom fighters in the eyes of the British. Palestinians have also said, over and over, give us your tanks and you can have our suicide bombers. Rothstein is correct; context is everything. The mechanisms for the current crisis in Israel were not set by the Munich killings. But neither did the Munich killings erupt out of a vacuum, or out of some black caldron of fanatical, maniacal hatred: The men of Black September wove a nasty and brutal basket, and they managed to turn that basket into one of the most effective acts of political theater of the last century, one which was just one bloody stage in a series of battles that have taken far more civilian than military lives ever since Jews and Arabs first started fighting over the same miserable stretch of British-ruled land. I am not suggesting that there was anything morally excusable about the massacre of the Jewish athletes in Munich, but war is ugly, and most of the Israelis I know are much less squeamish than the therapeutically inclined hit team of Spielberg’s imagination. They are not afraid to call a war a war. But whose war? Critics like Rothstein demand historical context, but the history of Israel is not exactly clear. Should we turn to the myth of Israel’s birth as we know it through “Exodus”? Or the history of Israel as it has been rewritten by revisionist Israeli historians like Tom Segev and Benny Morris? Or even that same history as remembered by the Palestinians themselves? Spielberg wisely chooses to keep his attention on these questions to a minimum, despite several poignant conversations between Avner Kauffman and his ultra-Zionist mother, who tells him she does not want to know the grisly details of his fight for their country, and also between Kauffman and a young Palestinian, who reminds him that he and his people will wait as long as it takes to get their land back. The question of “Munich” is very specific: What is the final cost of retaliation and revenge? The only answer Spielberg can give us is Kauffman’s own anguished non-answer: “There is no peace at the end of this.” And he is not wrong. As for the American war on terror, is there peace at the end of this? The most effective act of political theater of this century was of course the horrifying destruction of the World Trade Center. For this reason, Spielberg’s final shot, an image of the Twin Towers, is the film’s greatest cipher, and how one reads that image is a good indicator of how one reads the movie. Many of the critics who praised the film see it as a perfect close to the cycle-of-violence argument. Others make the dubious claim that the image of the towers should remind us how important it is to mete out swift and terrible justice to those who would hurt us.
Still other critics praise the film but question the appropriateness of the final image, for good reason: Munich and Sept. 11 have nothing whatsoever in common. The Palestinian fight for a homeland is very different from Al Qaeda’s war on America, and the two merit no comparison on the level of historical realities, even if Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations of the Arab world have become such sinister manipulators of the plight of the Palestinian people for their own ends.
But in a post-Sept. 11, post-intifada world, no Israeli, or American, can feel that his life is safe. Geographical distance and open borders will not keep us safe. That’s a lesson America has not learned. Heavily patrolled borders and shamefully enforced occupation will not keep a country safe either, a lesson Israel has not learned. There is no hope but peace. And Spielberg’s cinematic plea for that peace is naﯯve, yes, historically inaccurate, yes, too concerned with its own nobility, certainly. But even more nave, in 2005, is the belief that survival can be bought by violence. W.H. Auden’s “September 1st, 1939” was one of the most circulated poems following Sept. 11. With the closing image of “Munich,” Steven Spielberg brings home the poem’s last line with a new urgency: We must love one another or die.
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By SonicEmpire, February 23, 2006 at 2:24 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Why is it that people can never just watch a film about an event that took place without arguing over the politics of it. Sure there every producer and director has their own point of view and perspective, but I think that the important thing to remember and what Spielberg was trying to show us is that there are victims on both sides and that even though there may be a cause for some of it due to people’s personal experiences with people different than them or due to actriocities throughout history that have been inflicted on their people that although people’s feelings toward others of the group they feel have been unjust to them can be understand both emotionally and pscychologically, but can never really be justified rationally. The point being that hatred and slaughter of others can never be justified no matter the excuse or the number of excuses that people give or their personal feelings toward that group pf people. There is no justification for slaughter of innocent people. I’ve heard many people say that that people need to understand the reasons why people do what they do and my answer is that what the reasons are not as important as people’s actions. Sure people have a reason, most people generally do, but that still doesn’t justify their actions. Serial Killers and Rapists all have reasons, they had reasons during the Crusades, during The Black Plague, during The Spanish Inquisition, During Slavery, during The Pogroms in Russia, during The Salem Witch Trials, during the Holocaust, during the Jim Crow Period in America, during the struggle for women’s rights, during the struggle for the freedom of India, during the struggle for the freedom of Africa, during the masscres in Bosnia, the persecution of Jews and Non-Muslims in the Arab World, the Occupation of the Palestinians, Palestinian Suicide Bombers In Israel, and 9.11, but none of their reasons were or could ever be good enough to justify the afct that their hatred led to murder, because once they killed they crossed the line and became murderers. There are both good and bad people and people who are both, which is the majority of us in every religion, country and ethnicity in the world. So why is then that when one member of a group or a few do something wrong that suddenely many of us blame all members of that group. This blaming tends to be higher when the group of people are Non-White, Non-Christian and are not the so-called Norm in the society which we live in. Society these days is too political and that’s a huge problem, everything is always about being for or against rather than just seeing the rational side of things.
Europe, European and American, 26, Female, Biracial, Jewish
Report thisBy Tony N, February 5, 2006 at 1:10 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Israeli Uri Avnery reviews the movies Munich and Paradise Now: “…Shall We Not Revenge?”
“A few days later, I saw another film that was nominated for Oscars, the much-praised film of Steven Spielberg, “Munich”. As it so happens, I saw it in Germany, not so far from Munich itself.
On leaving the cinema, my German host wanted to know what I thought of it. Spontaneously, without thinking, I said what I had felt throughout: “Disgusting!”
Only later did I have time to sort out the impressions that I had accumulated during this very long film. What had disgusted me so much?
First of all, the Spielberg style, a combination of the highest cinematic technique and the lowest cultural content. It has pretensions to profundity, with new and revealing insights, but basically it is nothing but another American Western, where the good guys slaughter the bad guys and the blood flows like water.
Some Jewish politicians protested against the film for equating the “terrorists” with the “avengers”. And indeed, in several places in the film the “terrorists” were allowed to declaim some sentences in their defense, about the injustice done to them by the Jews and their right to a homeland. But that is only lip-service, a pretense, in order to give an impression of balance. But in the portrayal of the Munich attack - fragments of which are dispersed throughout the film - the Arabs appear as miserable, ugly, unkempt, cowardly creatures, the very opposite of Avner, the Israeli avenger, who is handsome and decent, brave and well turned-out - in short, the younger brother of Ari Ben Canaan, the superman of “Exodus”.
The Arabs have no qualms of conscience, but the Israelis have scruples in every interval between murders. They hesitate every time when they blow up / shoot / cut down one of their “targets"- which they do, of course, only after ensuring the safety of the wife and children of the victim. They are not just killers, they are Jewish killers. As an Israeli satirical slogan goes: “Shoot and weep.”
The presentation of the affair itself is highly manipulative. It withholds from the viewer some very relevant facts. For example:
- That the post-mortems showed that nine of the 11 Israeli athletes were killed by the bullets of the pathetically untrained German policemen. (The post-mortem reports are kept secret until this very day, both in Israel and Germany. But a powerful person like Spielberg should know about them.)
- That it was Golda Meir and her German colleagues - great heroes, every one of them - who sealed the fate of the hostages, when they rejected the kidnappers’ demand to take them to an Arab country, where they would have surely been traded for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
- That the Palestinians, who were killed in revenge for Munich, had nothing to do with the affair. The Mossad was looking for easy targets and chose PLO diplomats posted to European capitals, who were quite unprotected.
But most of all I was repulsed by the Spielbergian vulgarity that runs through the whole film, including explicit sex scenes that are both gratuitous and particularly unaesthetic.
The film contributes nothing to an understanding of the conflict. It is basically a routine gangster film, which Spielberg centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to garner the longed-for Oscars that have eluded him until now.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/11 39098502/
Report thisBy Tony N, January 22, 2006 at 10:02 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Robert Fisk’s comments on Munich: “My challenge for Steven Spielberg”. Fisk was ‘described by the The New York Times as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain”...(and)...is the world’s most-decorated foreign correspondent.’
Report thishttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11632.htm
By Tony N, January 18, 2006 at 10:43 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Back to the movie for a moment. Here’s a review in a pro-Palestinian site titled “Munich: Spielberg’s Thrilling Crisis Of Conscience” by Maureen Clare Murphy, and is the lead story on the homepage of The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4393.shtml
Other links relating to Munich, the movie and the event:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=li feAndLeisureNews&storyID=2005-12-28T141422Z_01_EIC84871 8_RTRUKOC_0_US-LEISURE-SPIELBERG-SPOOKS.xml
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/661465.html
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/656341.html
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/971129/19971 12917.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051227/wl_nm/arts_spielbe rg_palestinian_dc
_________________________________________
The following is an e-mail exchange on Israel/Palestine between Benny Morris (the well-known Israeli historian)and Kathleen and Bill Christison (both former CIA political analysts), initiated when Morris wrote to criticize an article written by the Christisons.
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison10022004.html
Other interesting articles are:
Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony
http://www.counterpunch.org/said09252003.html
Israel’s Justification for Killing Palestinians
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison1022.html
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk02122005.html
The Big Lie: Palestine, Palestinians and International Law
http://www.counterpunch.org/boylebiglie.html
Before There Was Terrorism
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison0502.html
Optimism vs. Reality: Struggling for Justice in Palestine
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02192005.html
Dealing with Jewish Self-Absorption
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02072004.html
US Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02162005.html
_________________________________________
This is my final response to comments by Tribalism and Universalism and by James (see above). I believe I’ve addressed their points.
How this exchange progressed was not unexpected – the pro-Israel supportes thrive in environments where their facts and arguments are not rigorously held up against truth and logic. Their comments are mostly misleading or false impressions, and have little or questionable substance. Much of it comes from the misleading Israeli version of history and propaganda, which can be debunked. Not unexpectedly, T v U and James choose to “leave”, rather than stand their ground, in a huff and puff of flimsy excuses. The exchange here is just a tiny example of the intellectual dishonesty, moral hypocrisy, manipulation and cowardice that underlies the one-sided discussion on the Israel-Palestinian issue in the mainstream.
________________________________________
T v U: “The bottom line here is not that if we aggregate all of these historical events we can net a balance of which side is worse (read: less liberal).”
There’s that “liberal” word again. Confusing crime and violence with “less liberal” (or “more conservative”) is a poor excuse to avoid looking closely at what was done by both sides (Israel and Palestinians). Using your logic, would you say that the Nazi Germans were “less liberal” and that their involvement in historical events, including their crimes, against the European Jews cannot be aggregated and accounted? That’s the kind of argument the Nazis would have used to defend the actions of their “tribe” “doing whatever it takes to win.” If pro-Israel supporters are not willing to account for the Palestinian holocaust, no wonder the Iranian president and many Arabs seem to question the Nazi Holocaust.
The Israel-Palestinian historical events, the crimes and the responsibilities can be aggregated and accounted, once we cut through the fog of revised history, cover-ups, lies, half-truths and suppressed facts (examples above are Damour, Sabra & Shatila, Deir Yassin, Israeli-Arab wars, etc.). Historical facts are available to show that, in the big picture, the Israelis/Zionists are the aggressors and Palestinians are the victims in the same way a Mafia family (“tribe”) is the aggressor when it schemes and acts to take over a neighborhood, and the innocent victims fight back. G-d , or even a Martian, could easily see the truth:
(a) the Zionist Jews started this conflict when, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, they implemented their plans and started colonizing Palestine with British help against the wishes of the Palestinians.
(b) the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian people in 1947-1948, and the Palestinians are entitled to an independent nation state of their own.
(c) the relative scale and frequency of Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians is far worse and greater than Palestinian aggression against the Israelis. In fact, Palestinian violence against Israelis is small compared to Israeli violence, and is often a response to Israeli violence and colonization.
(d) there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice against the Palestinians was somehow rectified.
(e) Israel could have solved the problem any time over the last 58 years, but chose not to. It can end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians tommorrow, if it wanted to. The actions of the Israeli government indicate their desire for power and resources, not peace and security.
The Palestinian side of the story, and the truth, is being written out of history by pro-Israel writers. The powerful get to write history. What if Hitler’s Nazis had been victorious? The Nazi historians would not have described the Holocaust and Jewish suffering, just like Israel does not mention the holocaust (Nakba or catastrophe) it inflicted on Palestinians in 1948. There would be vulgar descriptions of “courageous Nazis purifying Europe of dirty Jews”; in the video (link below) we see an Israeli soldier, after killing an innocent Palestinian mother in front of her children, talking about “purification” as the reason “a good Hebrew boy” is in the “dirty” Palestinian refugee camp. The Nazi historians would have portrayed the Warsaw ghetto uprising of imprisoned Polish Jews in terms similar to the way Israel has portrayed the civilian uprising of the Palestinian people. They would have described the ZOB and ZZW Jewish resistance fighters as “terrorists”, not different from how Israelis describe many Palestinian groups. Didn’t the Nazis build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto? That Nazi ghetto wall and the Berlin wall are not as high as parts of the wall Israel has built around the West Bankto confine Palestinians into densely-populated reservations.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/tears_death_i sraeli_terror_video.htm
If you dig deep enough for the truth—and put aside the Israeli propaganda—you can usually determine “which side was worse”, and which side is the aggressor and the victim. The truth can sometimes be found in Israeli newspapers. For example, let’s partially account for what caused the current violence since September 2000 (al Aqsa Intifada). Why do you think the Palestinians have resorted to suicide bomb attacks since March 2001?
- For two years before September 2000, there was “Palestinian calm”(i.e., only three Israelis were killed by Palestinians, even though over two dozen Palestinians were killed by Israelis during those two years).
- On September 28, Ariel Sharon provocatively visited Haram al-Sharif, a holy site sacred to Muslims located in Arab East Jerusalem. It is the third holiest site in the Islamic world (holiest site in Palestine), and contains two major Muslim shrines (Al Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock). The site is also known as the Temple Mount, sacred to the Jews. Accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police, Sharon declared his “message of peace”: “The Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands.” (Israeli demands for sovereignty over the Haram al Sharif / Temple Mount, which Palestinians say belongs to the Muslim Waqf, was a key reason the Camp David talks broke down)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,37477 0,00.html
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Ar ea=middleeast&ID=SP15700
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb85256 07d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument
- The visit of Sharon, long considered a war criminal by the Palestinians, triggered protests and demonstrations by unarmed Palestinians (and also partly motivated al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack a year later). According to former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison: “On September 29, 2000, seven Palestinian civilians throwing stones – not lethal weapons – to protest Sharon’s visit the previous day to the al-Aqsa Mosque were shot to death by Israeli soldiers and police.” At least 200 were injured. The Palestinian protestors were not terrorists and did not carry or use guns in the arms in the first two days according to independent journalists and observers, including U.S. Senator Mitchell’s report. There were no terrorist attacks yet (and the first suicide bombing only happened six months later).
- And what was the Israeli violence? Major General Amos Malka (former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence) admitted to an Israeli newspaper that Israeli soldiers fired 1.3 MILLION M-16 bullets at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza during the first few days of the Al-Aqsa Intifada! Israel’s military unleashed this massive firepower because military leaders wanted to “fan the flames” and intensify the levels of violence during the uprising’s first weeks, thinking that this would lead to war and, ultimately, military victory against the weak Palestinians. In other words, Israel, the world’s fourth most powerful military, would be able to “finally ‘beat’ the Palestinians, to ‘vanquish’ them and lead them to negotiations in a weakened and exhausted state.” Israeli soldiers were given a free hand to shoot without limit, and they were just “shooting and shooting and shooting”. “The intent was to score a winning blow against the Palestinians, and especially against their consciousness. This was not a war on terror, but on the Palestinian people. Maj. Gen. Malka states that the policy of use of military force caused a flare-up of the fire. In other words, the IDF contributed to the escalation.”
http://www.fmep.org/analysis/articles/more_than_millio n_bullets.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison1022.html
- But 1,300,000 bullets were not violent enough. Israel soon used US-made helicopter gunships, tanks and F-16 fighter planes against the protesting Palestinians. Eventually Israeli attacks escalated into incursions and invasions in densely-populated residential areas involving indiscriminate shelling and shooting, aerial bombardment, mass arbitrary detentions, mass house demolitions, use of civilians as human shields, assassinations of Palestinian political and militant leaders. Israeli snipers even shot dead unarmed Palestinian children, according to eye witness reports from Western journalists. Most of Israel’s military plans in the coming months had already been conceived right at the start, in October 2000. This included the destruction of the Palestinian political, security and other infrastructure ("Field of Thorns” plan). After six months fighting a losing battle against Israeli military terrorism (about 400 Palestinians had been killed and thousands wounded), the defenseless Palestinians retaliated with suicide bomb terrorism, from March 2001 onwards. We repeatedly hear about Palestinian suicide bombings, but did the mainstream press report Israel firing 1.3 million bullets at the Palestinians?
Israel’s violence fits with T v U’s belief that the Israeli “tribe” should do “whatever it takes to win.” However, most rational people – you don’t need to be liberal – would say that something is wrong with what the “Israel tribe” did. More civilized societies would have used conventional riot police methods. Kathleen Christison noted: “Although Orthodox Jews in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem have for years thrown stones at anyone they consider a Sabbath violator, Israeli police and military have never once fired on them.”
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T v U: “Halper denies the historical narrative which I affirm, as such he disagrees with my ontology of victim and aggressor. The mere fact that he disagrees does not negate the argument that defense of tribes often runs contrary to universalist mores, or that it is better to fight for ethno-nationalism than for recondite, hypocrtical universalism…Also, mentioning Halper qua anthropologist and not qua activist is seriously damaging to your credibility as someone who is rigorous about sourcing and data collection (as you say, you like to quote ‘authoritative evidence’ . Halper cites no empirical data in this article. He evidences no statistical method or blinding of a study. Rather, he states his personal beliefs about the Israeli worldview. Granted that he is entitled to his opinion, this article is NOT anthropology. In fact, there is no evidence on your link to suggest that any of what is said reflects the core values of Israelis in any remote way.”
Your comments were in response to what I wrote: “The link below contains an Israeli anthropologist’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis. Read it and then read post #21 again to get perspective and context on #21’s arguments and premises. Don’t get trapped by the simplistic thinking of “Tribalism vs. Universalism.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html
Nice try at trying to “damage my credibility” with some dubious but spirited comments. But I sensed some defensiveness. If Halper’s expert opinion is right, then an “Israeli tribe” that’s “autistic with power” is an obstacle to peace.
- Haven’t you heard of expert opinion? Prof. Halper is obviously an authority giving an expert opinion, as opposed to “authoritative evidence”, if you can distinguish between the two. Prof. Halper is uniquely qualifies to make this opinion. He’s an anthropologist, an Israeli, is American and, in addition, he has field experience in what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians. He’s not some ivory-towered academic from an Israeli think tank.
- It’s not an article; it is an interview. Halper was giving an interview with interviewers who happen to be ex-CIA political analysts. He wasn’t writing in an anthropological journal, where empirical data, statistical method or blinding of a study may be required (you don’t want me to get into the limitations of this approach).
- I’m surprised you were not happy I did not mention Halper was also an activist. I did not attempt to create any false impression – I directed you to read the linked information. Anyone who can read, and who is not autististic with power, would realize that the words “activist” and “activism” appeared at least six times by the end of the first paragraph! Although it is obvious Halper is also an activist, my primary interest was in Halper’s expert opinion as an Israeli anthropologist.
- Given the information I’ve provided in earlier paragraphs on Israeli aggression and violence, the Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis against Palestinians is right on.
What do you mean “Halper denies the historical narrative which (you) affirm”? Do you mean Halper’s comments about Israel’s “ “so ferocious a reaction to the intifada?” …It cannot be explained by what the Palestinians did, he says, since in the early days after the intifada began, the Palestinians used no arms and no Israelis were killed, while large numbers of Palestinians were shot to death by Israeli soldiers. But, he says, “they had the chutzpah to call into question our right to have the whole country,” and Israel could not let this stand.” If so, then Halper’s historical narrative is right (for example, see my comments about 1.3 million bullets in an earlier part of this post) and you are affirming misinformation probably created by Israeli propaganda
Halper is also right when he mentions other historical facts such as “Israelis refer to the Palestinians as Arabs, not Palestinians”, “(Israelis) say this is our country, there’s a bunch of Arabs here, they should go live with other Arabs”, “the “roadmap”… actually uses the word “occupation,” which Israel itself refuses to use”, etc. I could substantiate any of these.
I’m not sure what’s your “ontology of victim and aggressor” but it’s pretty clear that the Palestinians are the victims and Israelis are the aggressors, when Israelis fire 1, 300, 000 bullets at initially unarmed Palestinians protesting a provocative visit by a war criminal who massacred thousands of Palestinians since the 1950s. Imagine how Israeli Jews would react if Hitler visited Jerusalem with 1,000 storm troopers and SS officers and declared that Jerusalem would forever be a Nazi outpost.
In this context, Halper makes sense when he said Israelis “ “just don’t give a damn. They make everyone else a non-issue. They see themselves as the victim, and if you’re the victim, you’re not responsible for anything you do.” Anything goes if you are the victim, he explains: you don’t care about the consequences of your actions for other people, you need not take any responsibility for the effect of your policies on others, you don’t care about how others feel. Israelis always think they’re right, he says. They believe everything they do is right because the Jewish nation is “right,” because they are only responding to what others do to them, only retaliating. “If you combine three elements: the idea that we are right, with the notion that we’re the victim, and with our great military power,” he says, you have a lethal combination. “It’s like being autistic with power. You don’t care about other people because you’ve cast the others as the aggressors. You create a situation where Israel is off the hook.” Israel can act with brutality, but the responsibility, the fault, lies elsewhere.”
Finally, your comment that “defense of tribes often runs contrary to universalist mores” has some validity. It often does in practice. But defense of tribes can also be effectively done within a framework of “universalist mores.” Of course, it requires a leader with a broader mindset to see the possibilities. Unfortunately, most of Israel’s leaders since 1948 have a tribalist mentality and history of aggression and even terrorism that prevents them from seeing other, better, smarter ways of doing things.
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In closing, former CIA political analyst notes: “there is no reason at all for optimism. Despite all the nice talk, there will be no real Palestinian state, and there will be no peace, anytime in the foreseeable future, and the responsibility for this will lie with Israel and the United States. The reason there will be no Palestinian independence, and therefore no peace and no justice, anytime soon is purely and simply because the Israeli government does not want it, and the United States does not want what Israel doesn’t want… many people, out of a false sense of solidarity and sympathy with Israel, have erected a wall around themselves that keeps them from knowing what’s happening in Palestine and that blinds them to the human rights and justice issues there. This issue is not a Jewish issue. It’s a universal issue; it’s a political issue of a state’s behavior toward another people. It’s an issue, most of all, of justice. And justice, we all know, is blind to color and to religion and to ethnicity. Justice shuns the tendency to view this conflict or any other from only one perspective… I think we need to be aware that Israel’s occupation… came before Palestinian terrorism… And in the end, justice demands that we force Israel to stop oppressing another people.”
Report thishttp://www.counterpunch.org/christison02192005.html
By Tony N, January 16, 2006 at 11:59 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Further responses to Comment #23 by Tribalism vs. Universalism
T v U: “It’s clear after the rise of the suicide bomber, the wall, children being brainwashed into become Shaheeds via ‘Voice of Palestine’ radio and other major social currents in Palestinian life, and in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that neither side is taking a liberal stance here. Both will do whatever it takes to win”
A bully stabs an innocent boy, provoking the victim to defend himself or retaliate with a pen-knife. Later the bully declares: “neither side is taking a liberal stance here. Both will do whatever it takes to win”. So the bully has justified his need stabbing the boy until the bully scores a “win for his tribe.”
“(T)he rise of the suicide bomber… children being brainwashed into become Shaheeds” (i.e., “martyrs”)” are tied to Israel’s occupation, land theft and repression. Remove Israeli interference in Palestinian lives and you remove the causal factor. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has compiled a database of every suicide terrorist attack (315 in all) in the world between 1980 and 2003. “The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think… What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause… First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns… Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination. Before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event.”
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/3 8/11187
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9453.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/niva08272003.html
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29430
http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=628
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4798.htm
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T v U: “I am interested in defense of the tribe…. (if Palestinians get to rule) it means that Israel will be the same land, with the same measures taken to defend its political institutions and people, but the particular nationality, culture and religion will be change. That is, the only thing that changes is that Jews lose, Palestinians win… Both will do whatever it takes to win… It is rather that both sides have in the past been willing to do whatever it takes to have their tribe win out. The Palestinians have become increasingly willing to sacrifice the quality and quantity of their lives to win, while the Israelis have become less so.”
Actually, Israelis and their government have always been willing to sacrifice Israeli security and lives to win, while Palestinians have been less so (given Palestinian dispossession and Israel’s oppression, you’d think there would be far more Palestinian suicide bombers among 3 million occupied Palestinians). The fact is that Israel has voluntarily chosen to continue the conflict and occupation in order to eventually annex more Palestinian land. Since 1948, Israeli society has chosen governments which pursue this policy. Israelis have, in defiance of international law, deliberately built illegal settlement colonies next to resentful Palestinians on occupied Palestinian land, but cry fould whenever their illegal settlers are attacked. Israelis have no one but themselves to blame.
According to Israeli Ran HaCohen: “ “The Arab states and the Palestinians have in fact acknowledged Israel’s right to exist in peace, if it withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories taken in 1967; whereas Israel wants to keep these territories, though it doesn’t quite know how.” It is indeed impressive how successful Israeli propaganda and the Western media are in obscuring the simple fact that ongoing conflict is the result of a voluntary Israeli policy, in which Arabs and Palestinians play a subsidiary role.”
http://antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=3660
As well, you’re stuck on the win-lose, zero sum mindset (I think an illegal Israeli settler said something similar in John Pilger’s film Palestine Is Still The Issue in link below). You’re interested in “(defending your) tribe” and “(doing) whatever it takes to have (your) tribe win out”. Prof. Halpers expert assessment makes sense given this tribalist mindset.
http://independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=871& fcategory_desc=Under Reported
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html
You don’t know whether or not your worst case scenario will happen if the roles were changed or reversed so that Palestinians share or dominate power. You are assuming how Palestinians will behave, based on the limitations of your tribal mindset and given what Israelis have done to them (probably because that’s how you think a tribe would react).
- After the US left Vietnam in the mid 1970s, many doomsday scenarios were predicted about what the Vietnamese communists would do next . Most of those scenarios were never realized, and today Vietnamese and Americans have a better rekationship, despite what the US did during the war (the US war killed 3 to 4 million Vietnamese) and crippling US sanctions after the war.
- Before Israel was founded, a number of Zionists leaders were leaders or members of terrorist groups that committed acts of terror far worse than anything Hamas or Islamic Jihad has done. These terrorist groups were only dismantled after Israel’s founding (e.g., Altalena), not before. This was also the experience of many former colonies of the Western powers. Two Israeli terrorist leaders – Menachem Begin (Irgun) and Yitzak Shamir (Stern Gang or LEHI) – went on to become Israeli prime ministers. Arguably, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was also linked to acts of terrorism. The Israeli journalist I have quoted, Uri Avnery, was a former member of the Irgun.
What we know for certain?
- The Palestinians (even militants like Hamas) are not Zionist Jews. Once freed of Israel, they may – or may not – behave better than the Zionists. Even Hamas is willing to sit down and speak with reasonable Jews (see first link below – an American Jew interviews a Hamas leader, who was a pediatrician and was later assassinated by Israel). An orthodox Jewish rabbi was minister for Jewish affairs in Yasser Arafat’s cabinet.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID= 22&ItemID=4175
- For centuries before the Zionists started arriving in Palestine in the early 20th century, the Muslim rulers of Palestine as well as its Arab inhabitants generally treated the Jews better than the Europeans did. Before the First World War, the Palestinians treated the Jews far better than the Zionists and Israel have treated the Palestinians since 1948.
- Before the 1980s, many Palestinians were generally interested in a one state democracy – a Palestine for all people, cultures and religions, for both Arabs and Jews. This was unlike the Zionists, who were always focused on a Jewish state with as few Arabs and non-Jews as possible.
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T v U: “It is rather that both sides have in the past been willing to do whatever it takes to have their tribe win out.”
The Zionist Jews have gone to far greater lengths than the Palestinians. If the Palestinians really did what it takes, the three million occupied Palestinians would rise up in a massive resistance against the Israeli occupation instead of being subjugated by it. There would be chaos on a scale far worse than Iraq. In the big picture, the Palestinians have been relatively submissive, considering they have endured Israel’s actions for 58 years.
But let’s speculate, using your tribal mindset. What if the “Palestinian tribe” did what the “Zionist tribe” did “whatever it takes”. What might the “Palestinian tribe” have done? Imagine if all American Jews lived only in Massachusetts, their ancestral homeland for centuries. (America and Israel each has just over 5 million Jews, and Massachusetts is about the size of Israel.) The conniving Palestinians make a secret deal with the US government to allow the former to colonize Massachusetts. The Palestinians leave the Middle East, take a cruise ship across the Atlantic and mass migrate into Massachusetts, telling the world that their ancestors once lived on Massachusetts 5,000 years ago until the Native Indians expelled them. Of course, the Jewish inhabitants resent the new Palestinian immigrants because the poor Jews are being dispossessed off their homeland. Jewish resistance is brutally repressed by the US military but the US government pays lip service to their peaceful protests. Menwhile, the Palestinians grow in number and armed power. Eventually, millions of well-armed Palestinians take control of Massachusetts, terrorize and ethnically cleanse 80% of the Jewish population off the state. One million Jewish victims are refugees in neighboring states, and their camps are subjected to frequent Palestinian attacks for 55 years. Another three million Jewish victims are crowded into refugee camps and other dwellings on tiny Rhode Island, where they are subjected to a brutal and humiliating occupation by the Palestinians. The Palestinians build hundreds of “Palestinian only” colonies, thousands of checkpoints and miles of “Palestinian only” roads all over Rhode Island, and send in over 400,000 Palestinian settlers in defiance of UN objections. The Palestinians also build high walls cutting through Rhode Island to imprison the Jews and to wall off the 58% of Rhode Island they intend to annex to expand Massachusetts (which they’ve renamed Palestine). The Palestinians brutally repress any Jewish resistance, often killing Jewish kids for sport. They force Jewish women to give birth on roadsides. When Palestinian settlers murder Jewish schoolgirls, the Palestinian courts let them off or give them light sentences. Whenever the Jews or other conscionable people complain about what the Palestinians are doing to the Jews, the Palestinians accuse them of anti-Semitism, since Palestinian Arabs are Semites.
Of course, this will not happen. But what the Zionists and Israel have actually done to Palestinians is, in many ways, worse than this scenario.
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T v U: “Given time, I don’t doubt that the Palestinians will prevail. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that it is because the Palestinians are more ‘liberal’ than Israelis. It is because the Israelis will disappear in a wash of universalism.”
Now that’s a delusion. The opposite is far more probable. It is highly unlikely that, in your win-lose worldview, either the Palestinians “will prevail” or Israel “will disappear”. Zionist Jews in Israel, America and Europe have too much political power, information power and zealousness to allow this victim’s paranoia to become reality. Israel has been growing and getting stronger, at the expense of a betrayed, victimized and powerless Palestinian people. Israel has been deliberately destroying the Palestinians as a nation, and Palestine is disappearing (a “Palestinian state”, if it ever “happens”, will likely be a set of fragmented “Indian reservations” under Israel’s practical dominion). Given the context of history, the best chance the Palestinians had to overcome the Zionist-British conspiracy was before the mid-1930s. Today the forces reinforcing Israel’s existence are far too powerful while the forces seeking justice and a fair resolution for the Palestinians are too weak. In any case, Israel is the world’s fourth most powerful conventional and nuclear-armed military, and the leaders of most of Israel’s Arab neighbors are unpublicized allies (especially Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey) of Israel’s government.
Another powerful advantage that Israel has is the one-sided media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that biases most people to Israel’s story, and against the Palestinians. According to Alsion Weir: “The most monumental cover-up in media history may be the one I’m about to describe. In my entire experience with American journalism, I have never found anything as extreme, sustained, and omnipresent… I was hearing a great deal about Israelis and very little about Palestinians…I discovered international reports about Palestinian children being killed daily, often shot in the head, hundreds being injured, eyes being shot out. And yet little of all this was appearing in NPR reports, the New York Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle. There was also little historic background and context in the stories… The more I looked into all this, the more it seemed that I had stumbled onto a cover-up that quite possibly dwarfed anything I had seen before… Nevertheless, the duration and violence of the injustice I was discovering, and the extent of its omission and misrepresentation – even in Project Censored itself, seemed unparalleled.”
Report thishttp://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/index.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/net-report.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/bias.html
By Tony N, January 15, 2006 at 11:39 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
This post addresses ‘Tribalism vs. Universalism’s’ comments (#23) to me about Damour, Shabra and Shatila, and Deir Yassin. I can appreciate that T v U feels that I use the word “ ‘truth’ as if certain of the intellectual rigor and integrity” and feels my “tirades are hackneyed and dishonest”. But this is, after all, a truth dig. Getting at the truth requires some shoveling by both sides. If T v U or James has valid facts and arguments to debunk the truths in my posts, I would welcome being proved wrong or dishonest. So far, as can be seen below, I do not appear to be the party who is creating false and misleading impressions and/or fuzzing up the facts.
The mainstream reporting and discussion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict is similarly one-sided and dishonest.
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T v U: “Regarding your comments on Israel’s association with the Phalangists who massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla, I wonder if any of your sources mention the wanton murder, by Palestinian forces (directly, rather than through some proxy), of hundreds of Christian civilians at Damour on January 20th, 1976? Does this reflect a chance of better (read: more liberal) rule by the Palestinians?… You can continue to cite your Sabra and Shatillas, and I’ll have my Damours.”
Truth check: Are you sure the Damour massacre was “wanton” murder? Israeli reporting on the Damour massacre, MIT Prof Noam Chomsky observes, is done “in the typical Israeli propaganda style, omitting the facts that this massacre was in retaliation for Christian massacres in Karantina and elsewhere” (pg 407, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Updated Edition). In summary, by January 1976, there was civil strife in Lebanon. Lebanese Christian militia had attacked and laid siege on Palestinian refugee camps, and massacred Palestinian civilians as well as Lebanese Muslims. For example, on January 18th, 1976, the Lebanese Christian Phalange had massacred an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Palestinian and other civilians of Karantina (near Beirut). Avenging the Karantina massacre by Christian forces two days before, Palestinian and Lebanese National Movement (leftist Lebanese Muslims) forces attacked the Christian city of Damour, south of Beirut, and massacred about 250 civilians and Phalange militiamen. Note: According to Chomsky, “The figure of thousands murdered in Damour appears to be an invention of Israeli propaganda…Colonel Yirmiah gives the figure of 250 killed, in his War Diary” (p 372)
For more details, Noam Chomsky: “In 1970, many Palestinians were driven from Jordan… In Lebanon, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees from the 1948 war. The PLO at first attempted to keep clear of Lebanon’s internal strife… The PLO was, however, drawn into the civil war, initially, by an April 1975 (Christian Maronite) Phalange attack on a bus killing 27 Palestinians and Lebanese who were traveling to Tel al-Zataar from the Sabra and Shatila camps—a grim portent. At first, the PLO role was largely limited to arming some Muslim and leftist groups and helping to defend Muslim districts that were under Christian (largely Maronite Phalange) attack. The PLO took a more active role in January 1976, when Christian militias blockaded Palestinian camps. “By this time,” Cooley writes, “such events as ‘Black Saturday’ on December 6, 1975, when over 200 Muslim hostages were taken and murdered by the Phalange in reprisals for murders of four Phalangist militiamen… The Muslim Karantina slum was overrun by Christian forces with large numbers massacred, then “burned and razed… with bulldozers.” The Christian (Chamounist) town of Damour was then taken by the leftist-Palestinian coalition and…occupied, looted, and destroyed.” The propaganda of Israel and its American supporters regularly refers to the last of these atrocities as proof that the PLO was conducting a murderous war against the Lebanese; what preceded is regularly omitted.” (pp. 184 to 185)
In any case, what was the original sin? Why were Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in the first place? Because, since 1948, Israel had ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the latter’s ancestral homeland and refused to allow these refugees to return home. This was and is a violation of international law and UN resolutions. If Palestinians did not have to be refugees in Lebanon, none of this would have happened. The innocent Palestinians, who became victims because of Israeli aggression and crimes, were forced into a situation they should not have been. (In many ways, this is not dissimilar to the situation the European Jews were put into because of the actions of the Nazi Germans. In that situation, the fault is entirely on Nazi Germany and their collaborators, not their Jewish victims).
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T v U: “Regarding your comments on Israel’s association with the Phalangists who massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla… (through some proxy)”
The official Israeli cover story, after being changed many times, is that the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 were the fault and direct responsibility of the (Lebanese Christian Maronite) Phalangists. Supposedly, these militias were merely associated with the Israelis, or at worse proxies, who were merely avenging past Palestinian atrocities against Lebanese Christians. Ariel Sharon argued that Israel cannot “choose our neighbors in the Middle East”, i.e., if the Lebanese Christians are savages, it is not Israel’s fault. Menachem Begin said: “Goyim kill goyim, and they immediately come to hang the Jews”, i.e., if you criticize Israel for the massacres, you are an “anti-Semite”. (Begin, who was the Israeli Prime Minister in 1982 and received a Nobel Prize for Peace, was once commander of the Irgun terrorist group in the 1940s.)
In reality, those Lebanese Christian militiamen who committed the massacre were incited by Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon the day before the massacre; were under Israeli orders and were strong Israeli allies; were trained, assisted and supplied by Israel’s military; and were virtually an extension of the Israeli military during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Prof Noam Chomsky debunks Israel’s propaganda in his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Updated Edition (read the chapters Aftermath, as well as Peace in Galilee and Limited War in Lebanon.). Chomsky also assesses the near-whitewashing provided by Israel’s Kahan Commission inquiry into the massacre (which the UN General Assembly called a genocide). What Chomsky’s book does not include is new information that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original camp massacre were later interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the Phalangist murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks (see Robert Fisk’s comments below).
The following excerpts from Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle book and Fisk’s article explain Israel’s responsibility and possible motivation for the massacres.
- Noam Chomsky: “What is clear is that the atrocities were carried out by militiamen brought in by Israel who, furthermore, had “a well-documented history of atrocities against Palestinians civilians”…the exact constitution of the forces is hardly of crucial significance. As David Bernstein comments in the Jerusalem Post, “In the final analysis, the question is largely irrelevant as both Haddad and Phalange are Israel’s creatures, having been armed and trained over the past eight years by the IDF.” That they were under IDF control as they were organized to enter the camps, and under its observation as the operation was carried out, is hardly in serious doubt… the efforts of the Israeli government to disassociate itself from the work of its hired guns…” (p 374)
- Noam Chomsky: “An excellent analysis by Uri Avneri (Haolam Haze, Feb 16, 23 1983)… reviewing the evidence surveyed above, reaches the only plausible conclusions: no one believed the “fable of the ‘2000 terrorists’ “; The Phalangist units were organized and sent into the camps with the expectation that they would commit murderous acts in order to cause a mass flight of Palestinians (recall that the international response was surely unanticipated); the IDF, intelligence , and the political echelons cooperated in the massacre throughout, at the command post and elsewhere. Repeating Amos Elon’s image, Avneri observes: “When someone places a poisonous snake in the bed of a child, and the child dies after it is bitten – there is no need to prove that whoever put the snake there wanted the child to die. The burden of proof is on someone who denies this intention.” (Israel’s Kahan) Commission did not accept this burden of proof, but simply adopted unquestioningly the hypothesis that those who put the snake in the child’s bed were “insensitive” and failed to give adequate attention to what they should have known. Those who accept this reasoning, or regard it as “sublime,” reveal a good deal about themselves.” (pp. 408 – 409)
- Robert Fisk: “In the end, Sharon got away with it (Sabra and Shatila massacres), even when it was proved that he had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the civilians of the camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder of their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told these ruthless men that the Palestinians had killed their beloved “chief”. Then he sent them in among the civilian sheep - and claimed later he could never have imagined what they would do in Chatila. Only years later was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks. There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon’s responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists” who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, President-elect Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians….But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel’s death….An AP report of 15 September 1982. “Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying: “It symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters.” ”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11479.htm
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=200209 12210826592
- Noam Chomsky: “(Israeli journalist) Ze’ev Schiff reports an “authorized investigation” after the massacres showed that they were… “a premeditated attack which was designed to cause a mass flight of Palestinians from Beirut and from the whole of Lebanon” (Tony: like the Deir Yassin massacre, which was also under Menachem Begin’s leadership). David Shipler reports that as early as mid-June, “Israeli officials were speaking privately of a plan, being considered by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, to allow the Phalangists to go into west Beirut and to the camps against the Palestine Liberation Organization. The calculation was that the Phalangists, with old scores to settle… would be more ruthless than the Israelis and probably more effective.”… “The ABC News investigation reported that three Phalange leaders “bear direct responsibility for the massacre”: Fady Frem, Phalange military commander; (Elie) Hobeika, Phalange chief of security and military intelligence; and Joseph Edde… Frem and Hobeika are reputed to be the leaders of the most strongly pro-Israel section of the Phalange…” (pp. 370 – 371)
If you want more details, here are Chomsky’s review of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the official Israeli inquiry (Kahan Commission) and of Israel’s initial public relations campaign to deny its involvement. If not interested, skip to the next section on Deir Yassin:
- Noam Chomsky: “Israeli armor also surrounded the Sabra and Shatila (Palestinian refugee) camps, where the population was now completely defenseless. These two camps, along with the third major Palestinian camp (Bourj el-Brajneh), had been mercilessly bombarded from June 4 (1982)…with many casualties… Sabra and Shatila… were “sealed off” by the IDF (Israeli army) so that “no one could move in or out” and under direct observation from nearby (Israeli) command posts…On Thursday September 16, truckloads of Phalange and Haddad troops entered the camps, coming from behind Israeli lines to a staging area that Israel had established and following carefully prearranged and marked routes. The Phalangists appear to have been drawn largely from the Damouri Brigade, which had been operating behind Israeli lines since June. These units consisted of “some of the more extreme elements in the Christian militia,” “with a well-documented record of atrocities against Palestinian civilians,”… The Haddad militia is “virtually integrated into the Israeli Army and operates entirely under its command.”… The forces that Israel had mobilized were sent in to the now defenseless camps for “mopping up” and “to clear out terrorist nests” (Sharon). For anyone with a minimal acquaintance with these circumstances, it was clear that these expectations were being fulfilled, with ample evidence that a massacre was in progress. Throughout Thursday night, Israeli flares lighted the camps while the militias went about their work, methodically slaughtering the inhabitants. The massacre continued until Saturday, under the observation of the Israeli military a few hundred yards away. Bulldozers were used to scoop up bodies and cart them away or bury them under rubble. One “mass grave that has been specially bulldozed” was directly below an Israeli command center, with a view from an Israeli rooftop position “directly onto the grave and the camp beyond.”… On Friday afternoon (Israel’s) Chief of Staff Eitan and Generals Drori and Yaron met with the Phalangist command. Eitan congratulated them on having “carried out good work,” offered them a bulldozer with IDF markings removed, and authorized them to remain in the camps for another 12 hours. The killings continued. At 5AM Saturday morning the murderers began to leave the camps, and after 36 hours, the slaughter ended. On Saturday morning, “reporters entered the camp long before any Israeli soldiers,” and the full story began to reach the outside world…. It is obvious from the circumstances and the troop deployments that the IDF was well aware of what was happening in the camps to which it had dispatched the gangs of murderers it had organized, just as the Czar’s police and army could not have failed to know what was happening in the Jewish quarter of Kishinev.” (Tony: read about the Kishinev pogrom that killed over 40 Jews) …The senior command of the IDF knew on Thursday night that civilians were being killed…”They did nothing to stop the carnage”… U.S. Special envoy Morris Draper demanded that “You must stop the massacre. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies… They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area and therefore responsible for that area.”… After many falsehoods and evasions which we may omit, the government of Israel finally conceded that it had sent Phalangists into the camps, settling on a figure of 100-150… The final official story was that they were sent in for the purpose of “cleansing” the camps of 2000 heavily-armed terrorists left there by the PLO (Tony: this was a lie as journalists and other witnesses said the camps did not contain “armed terrorists” but women, children and old/infirm people)… And once this claim is dismissed as the nonsense that it is… (because if this nonsense is true, then) The 2000 heavily armed Palestinian terrorists seem to have been singularly inept. The 150 Phalangists sent in (by the Israelis) to overcome them reported (two Phalangists) killed.” (pp 362 – 370). Although the Israel claims only 800 Palestinians were killed, the Lebanese government reported about 2,000 and the Palestinians claim up to 3,500 dead.
- Noam Chomsky: “The picture that emerges from the (Israeli inquiry) Kahan Commission Report is therefore quite clear. The higher political and military echelons, in their entirety, expected that Phalangists would carry out massacres if they were admitted into Palestinian camps. Furthermore, they knew that these camps were undefended, so they were willing to send in approximately 150 Phalangists known for their unwillingness to engage in any conflict with armed men. Within 1 - 2 hours after the Phalangists had entered on Thursday at 6PM, clear evidence reached the (Israeli) command post 200 meters away from the camps and overlooking them that massacres were taking place, and that there was no serious resistance. At the command post, the IDF and Phalange commanders and their staffs, including intelligence and liaison, were present and in constant contact. The IDF then provided illumination, and the next day, after receiving further corroboratory evidence that massacres were in process and that there was no resistance, sent the Phalange back into the camps, with tractors, which the IDF knew were being used to bury the bodies in the mass grave which they could observe (the latter fact is ignored by the Commission). The Phalange were selected for this operation because, as the Chief of Staff stated, “we could give them orders whereas it was impossible to give orders to the Lebanese army.” And in fact, the IDF did give the Phalange orders, from the moment they sent them into the camps to conduct their murderous operations, to the time when they were sent back in on Friday afternoon to complete them, to Saturday morning when they were withdrawn because of American pressure, at which time the IDF began rounding up those (Palestinian refugees) who had escaped and sending them to Israeli concentration camps (again, this fact is not discussed by the Commission). That is the story as it emerges from the Commission Report (with the exceptions noted). What will a rational person deduce from this record?” (p. 404)
- Noam Chomsky: “When the reports of the massacre reached the outside world, Israel denied any knowledge of what had happened. This pretense was quickly dropped in favor of outraged denial of any responsibility. The official reaction of the government was announced on September 19 (1982), and appeared in a full page advertisement in several American newspapers. The heading was “BLOOD LIBEL,” a reference to traditional anti-Semitic incitement. It is a reflex reaction to accuse critics of Israel of anti-Semitism, a device of proven effectiveness to deflect any rational discussion of the issues. The official government statement then went on to assert that “there was no position of the Israeli army” in the area where “a Lebanese unit entered a refugee camp in order to apprehend terrorists hiding there.”… These shameful lies were silently abandoned later on.” (p. 375)
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T v U: “You can cite Deir Yassine, and I’ll cite the literally thousands terror attacks originating from that town before the Irgun attacked it (and the efforts the Irgun made to alert the civilian population and enable them to leave...).”
You’ll cite thousands of terror attacks originating from Deir Yassin? From which sources? From an Irgun propaganda website? Or from Emanuel Winston or Abba Eban?
Deir Yassin was a slaughter of innocents in April 1948. I’ll cite the observations of Haganah officers. The Haganah, precursor to the Israeli army, was the main Jewish paramilitary force at the time and involved in the Deir Yassin attack.
- Yoma Ben-Sasson, Haganah commander in Givat Shaul, stated that “there was not even one incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews”.
- According to Yitzhak Levi, 1948 Jerusalem Haganah intelligence chief, Deir Yassin was different from al-Qastel (Kastel had recently been attacked by the Haganah) in that it did not participate directly in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The villagers reportedly wanted to remain neutral in the war and they had repeatedly resisted help and alliances with the Palestinian fighters. Instead they had made a pact with Haganah to not help the Palestinian fighters as long as they were not the target of Jewish military operations. ("Nine Measures”, pp 340-341).
- Haganah intelligence confirmed after the village had been captured that it in fact had stayed “faithful allies of the western [Jerusalem] sector.” Palestinian and Arab fighters had repeatedly urged the villagers to let soldiers enter the village but they were denied or resisted by the villagers. For example, according to IDF Archives, on April 7, 1948 the Haganah intelligence reported that three days earlier the elders of Deir Yassin and Ein Kareem had met Kemal Erikat (Abdel Kader’s deputy) who proposed to bring foreign troops into the villages. The elders of Deir Yassin rejected the proposal.
More information on Deir Yassin:
- Noam Chomsky writes that Irgun’s leader Menachem Begin took pride in the Deir Yassin operation. 100 to 250 defenseless Palestinian people were slaughtered in April 9 to 10, 1948, including a large number of women and children. (Tony: The terrorists also dynamited houses, looted and raped Palestinians in the attack. British official Richard Catling noted “Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Many infants were also butchered and killed.") Chomsky: “Recently discovered personal testimonies of the Zionist terrorist leaders reveal that the majority favored eliminating whoever stood in their way, including women and children, and proceeded to do so, murdering captured and wounded. Begin praised his murderers for their humanity, for “acting in a way no other fighting force had ever done.” The Irgun command sent an internal message of congratulations on the “wonderful operation of conquest,” saying “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere… Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.” The Haganah command condemned the operation, including the looting and plunder that appear to have been the objective according to the recently discovered documents, NOTING THAT THE VILLAGE WAS ONE OF THOSE THAT HAD AVOIDED ANY COOPERATION WITH THE ARAB FORCES” (Deir Yassin village had previously entered into a non-aggression pact with the Jews). In 1949, according to Haaretz, there was a settlement festival for religious settlers in “the former village of Deir Yassin” (now part of Jerusalem). In 1980, the remaining ruins were bulldozed to make a settlement, and streets were named after units of the Irgun which perpetrated the massacre and of the Palmach (Haganah strike force). (pp 95 – 96, Fateful Triangle)
- Albert Einstein and a number of Jewish-American intellectuals publicly protested against Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States in 1948. In their protest letter (published in the New York Times), they wrote: “A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands which wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (Zionist) TERRORIST BANDS ATTACKED THIS PEACEFUL VILLAGE, killed most of its inhabitants--240 men, women and children--and kept a few of them alive to parade them as captives through the streets of Jerusalem… But the terrorists far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”
- According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: “… in the 1948 war, the mere reference to what the Israelis had done to put Palestinians to flight stands in stark contrast to the mainstream Zionist version of the war’s history. The official version, reiterated lately by mainstream historians in Israel in their debate with the new historians, is that the Palestinian leadership called upon its community to leave so that they would not impede the invading Arab armies. No recognition of atrocities beyond Deir Yassin is given in this version, and even this atrocity is attributed to renegade right wing terrorists, not to the Haganah, the main military force of the Jewish community. The new historians, on the other hand, attribute other massacres to the Haganah and some have even discovered a link between the Haganah and the Deir Yassin massacre…This chapter in the new history shattered more then any other the founding myths of the state of Israel. A state founded in a dirty war ending in the expulsion of the local population was a historical version that was only heard before in Palestinian and Arab propaganda. But no less important was the new historians’ erosion of the Israeli self image of their state as being peace-loving and peace-seeking in comparison to an intransigent Arab world.”
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf
In addition, are you saying those thoughtful, murdering Irgun made efforts to alert the Deir Yassin villagers to leave before they massacred them? Just like they did before they bombed King David Hotel? The Irgun terrorists bombed Jerusalem’s King David hotel in 1946, which murdered over 90 people. Israeli propaganda has also tried to soften that massacre by stating that Irgun made an effort to warn people to leave. Apparently Irgun did send a warning a few minutes before the bombing. But if Osama bin Laden warned Americans to leave the World Trade Centre 20 minutes before the first plane hit, does it lessen the crime?
Report thisBy Tony N, January 14, 2006 at 12:02 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Before I respond to T v U’s comments in #21 and part of #23, I have to make an observation to put things in context.
Be patient and check the facts. I know the truth hurts James and T v U, but it’s easier for them to make excuses and hide rather than refute with facts and sound arguments. In comment #28, I’ve proven that—contrary to T v U and James’ accusations (#26 and #27)—I am not the one who was intellectually dishonest about the Google search. In additon, what I did not mention, T v U’s link http://icssa.org/toynbee.html does not show up in a Google search of either “fossilized religion” or “fossilised religion”. Did it come from T v U’s private collection on “scholars to attack using the anti-Semitism label”? If anyone else can find that link on Google, let me know.
And here is a “spectacular” example of intellectual dishonesty: James: “(Tony N) spends paragraphs trying to prove that Gilbert is the most devious, hateful, and all around nasty brute historian one could possibly imagine – a kind of pro-Israeli Goebbels.” That’s nonsense. In comment #22, all I wrote was: “Perhaps James can convince me that Martin Gilbert is an objective authority who can be trusted. To me, Gilbert is an academic supportive of Zionism who is pro-Zionist/Israel in his chauvinism, interpretation and bias, and exaggerations” and gave valid examples. Even James later wrote “I would acknowledge that Gilbert is pro-Israeli, and does not give full balance to the Arab side of the story.” In other words, James agres with me even though he proceeds to distort the meaning of what I wrote. Once again, I have proven that I am not the one who is intellectually dishonest.
Even the great Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky has found that when his pro-Israel detractors lack facts and arguments, they sometimes resort to shooting the messenger to divert from his message. Take a look at Alan Dershowitz doing it to Chomsky in their Harvard debate: “Israel And Palestine After Disengagement: Where Do We Go From Here?”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11190.htm
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID= 107&ItemID=9458
http://www.counterpunch.org/ryan12072005.html
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T v U: “Firstly, I am not interested in Israel behaving in an idyllic, liberal fashion.”
It was T v U’s conjecture, not interests, that led me to write “…Sabra and Shatila… let’s understand this example of the righteous, idyllic and universalist suzerainty enacted by Israel” in response to T v U’s misleading comment “Tony N, Hanan Ashrawi, Hussein Ibish et al. would have us believe that the Palestinians would enact a more idyllic, universalist suzerainty if they were to replace the existing Zionist (read: racist) entity.”
First, T v U’s comment misleads. T v U made stuff up – I did not attempt “have you believe” how Palestinians would behave in the future. Where did I write anything to this effect? I presented reality about what Israel, as current political rulers with military power, actually did in Sabra and Shatila as an example. Second, T v U reflexively ridiculed the possibility that Palestinians could behave better than the “Zionist entity”. Is T v U’s mindset limited by narrow tribalist beliefs and assumptions or is T v U speculating about an unknown future? T v U does not take into account that Arabs and Muslims had been tolerant to Jews and Christians for many centuries before the Zionist Jews mass immigrated into Palestine in theearly 20th century, but appears to assume that Palestinians, if they obtain political and military power, will behave in future as the Zionists have been doing. That’s limiting, at minimum.
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T v U bandies the word “liberal” and makes unfounded assumptions and specious comments about me such as “Here again we have the story of the reflexive universalist” (reflexive?) or “I am certain that Tony N…derive great strength and satisfaction from the fact that Jews have preponderantly supplanted their Jewish identities with liberal-democrat ones” (I really don’t care what values Jews or Muslims want to supplant, as long as their actions do not potentially affect me) or “One ridiculous aspect to note about this Western contrition over its past is that those tribal zealots who are most effective at milking the guilt are those who portray their cause as an essentially liberal one. Hence, Tony N…would have us believe…” (there’s that liberal word again… I’m not interested in milking guilt, and would be equally incompetent in milking a cow… T v U appears to be a Zealot – that’s with a capital Z as in those Jewish Zealots in the first century AD who fought to the death against the Romans and who killed or persecuted Jews who collaborated with the Romans).
Terms such as liberal can be meaningless when used in the political sense because they are too often misused to discredit the messenger. So if you don’t like someone’s valid views and have no facts or arguments, just call him a liberal. The values underlying my message are quite conservative (as in opposing change and opposing lack of adherence to international laws, civilized norms and G-d’s laws [the Ten Commandments] such as You Shall Not Murder, You Shall Not Steal, You Shall Not Covet Your Neighbor’s House And Field, and You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor). The Israel-Palestine conflict, which impacts us all, was caused by the Zionists policy and actions which dispossessed the Palestinians off their ancestral homeland and were crimes against the Palestinian people that violated international laws and conventions as well as G-d’s laws. I’m for law and order, and the history and facts do show which party was the original wrongdoer in this conflict. The Palestinians were originally innocents until the Zionists started doing what they did in the early 20th century. On the other hand, Zionists may be tribalists, but they actually act liberally – they do not follow established laws and traditions, including Judaic, when it gets in the way of whatever they want to do. See Uri Avnery’s comments in the next section.
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T v U: “Jews who see Israel as a stain on Jewish history, who want Jews there to give up house and home, who want to to give up the only independent power that stands up for Jewish values (even if they are only the nationalistic aspects of those values) are essentially those who want Judaism to die via tribal heart-block.”… least likely to be knowledgable about Jewish values as distinct from post-enlightment values. There are, of course, some exceptions, like the Niturei Karta group. Yet,these exceptions are often only waiting for the Messiah. Once that happens (or once they believe it happens), they may advocate the biblical approach to ruling Israel: kill every last man, woman and child in groups who oppose your reign. Are Jews better off righte