Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 19)
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- Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 19)
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commando unit set up by cabinet
degree. Such commandos report
directly to the Army Chief of Staff,
rather than functioning via the normal
chain of command. They typically
move in cars with West Bank and Gaza
license plates, as do the Black Scor-
pions. Such units have previously been
used to assassinate PLO cadres abroad;
with the intifada, they are operating
more in Palestine itself. As if to prove
their existence, «unknown assailants»
in November violently attacked the two
Reuters correspondents who had writ-
ten about the hit squads. Such methods
are obviously part of the Israeli com-
mand’s_ thinking: Chief of Staff
Shomron was a member of the
IDF/Mossad unit, the General Staff
Headquarters’ Reconnaissance Patrol,
when he led the attack on Entebbe air-
port in 1976; chief of army operations,
Major General Ehud Barak, com-
manded the 1973 raid on Beirut in
which three PLO leaders were killed,
and was also involved in the assassina-
tion of Abu Jihad (Israel and Palestine,
October-November 1988).
The Israeli government has denied
the existence of such units. Yet in early
December, Rabin thanked the Shin Bet
for «solving» over 600 attacks on
Israeli targets and arresting over 600
Palestinians in the past two months.
The most substantive proof of the
existence of death squads, in one form
or another, is events themselves. From
November through January, over ten
Palestinians died in circumstances
which point to the existence of hit
teams or the army acting as such. Here
we are not speaking about martyrs who
fell when the army opened fire on
demonstrations, but about local ac-
tivists singled out for death or beating
in ambushes, kidnappings, house raids,
shooting from civilian cars, etc. In most
cases, the assassins seemed to know
who they were looking for; in several
cases, eyewitnesses and/or members of
the victim’s family were arrested,
beaten or otherwise harassed to silence
them.
SHOOTING TO KILL
Such events make us view Rabin’s
recent measures more as a routinization
of existing lawlessness by the occupa-
tion army and intelligence services,
Democratic Palestine, March 1989
rather than a new policy. The other in-
dication of the murderous intent of
Israeli policy is the rising casualty rates:
From November Ist to 27th, 250
Palestinians were hospitalized in the
Gaza Strip alone, according to UNR-
WA counts, the bulk of them after
November 15th as the occupation army
punished Palestinians for celebrating
the Declaration of Independence.
Palestinian doctors noted an increase in
head injuries. December recorded one
of the highest death tolls from shooting
to date, including Black Friday in
Nablus, December 16th, when nine
people died and over 40 were injured as
a result of the occupation troops firing
on a peaceful funeral procession for a
martyr. In mid-January, Palestinians
were being martyred at a rate of two
daily. According to Palestinian sources,
half the deaths were from «rubber
bullets» - actually a metal ball thinly
coated with rubber, which came into
use in late 1988.
THE ARMY’S DILEMMA
Aside from obvious failure to halt or
even lessen the intifada, the new Israeli
measures appear to be doubly doomed,
since they were announced amidst
plaintive cries from the army itself
about the impossibility of suppressing
the uprising by brute force, and the
consequences of this for the military’s
integrity.
On January 13th, Major General
Menachem Einan, the army’s logistics
chief, resigned. Though the army
spokesman claimed his resignation was
simply to take a civilian job, Einan told
the Israeli daily Maariv: «I am very
worried about the level of morality of
Israel’s soldiers in the territories. We
are making them face provocations that
inspire maliciousness all too quickly»
(AP, January 12th). Einan traced his
uneasiness about this question back to
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
In February, the 56th Israeli soldier
was sentenced to prison for refusing to
serve in the occupied territories during
the uprising. In addition, it is estimated
that 500 soldiers have requested and
received transfers out of the territories
without disciplinary measures being
taken.
Perhaps the most significant state-
ment came from the army chief of
staff, Shomron, who on January 10th
told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and
Defense Committee that «there is no
such thing as eradicating the intifada
because in its essence it expresses the
struggle of nationalism... Elsewhere in
the world, the ruling power relinguish-
ed occupied territory when civilian
participation went beyond a certain
degree, but our position is not the same
since the confrontation is happening
tight here at home.» Shomron, of
course, didn’t draw the obvious con-
clusion of his own realization, but
rather pledged that the army would
continue in its duties to «enable the
political echelons to operate from a
position of strength, so that the
violence cannot force the government
to take decisions under pressure.»
Shamir was highly critical of
Shomron’s admissions, but he was
subsequently confronted by even
stronger expressions of doubt when he
visited reserve paratroopers deployed in
occupied Nablus, on January 18th.
Below are examples of what he heard as
reported by the Israeli paper Hadashot,
January 20th:
«Here, in this place, a people is being
born. Among us, in contrast, our unity
is disintegrating. I think that a solution
can be found only through diplomacy.»
«We’re people who grew up on
universal values, on human values. But
in order to impose order in the casbah,
we’re obliged to behave violently and
brutally against innocent people. I am
conscious of the fact that I break the
law of the army in order to force people
to be frightened of me... I fell
humiliated before the man I have to
beat, because these aren’t the values I
was raised on. These aren’t the values
of dignity. I feel that he (the Palesti-
nian) is getting stronger and I’m getting
weaker. Whoever comes and says, then
don’t beat (people) simply doesn’t
understand the reality on the ground.
An oppressive regime must oppress.
That’s what it is all about. That’s why
this situation is catastrophic.»
The rising discontent in the army is
only one of several conflicting internal
pressures on the Zionist government.
On the one hand, the settler movement
in the West Bank has staged a series of
protests against the government and
army failure to quell the intifada; >»
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