Israel has sought peace with
its Arab neighbor states but has steadfastly refused to
negotiate with Palestinians directly, until the last few years.
Why?
"My friend, take care. When you
recognize the concept of 'Palestine', you demolish your right to
live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of
Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You
are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people
who have lived here before you came. Only if it is the Land of
Israel do you have a right to live in Ein Hahoresh and in
Deganiyah B. If it is not your country, your fatherland, the
country of your ancestors and of your sons, then what are you
doing here? You came to another people's homeland, as they
claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land."
Menahem Begin, quoted in Noam Chomsky's "Peace in the Middle
East?"
More from the horse's mouth
"Why should the Arabs make
peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with
Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God
promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is
not theirs, We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand
years ago, and what is that to them? There has been
anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their
fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their
country. Why should they accept that?" David Ben-Gurion,
quoted in "The Jewish Paradox" by Nathan Goldman, former
president of the World Jewish Congress.
More from the horse's mouth
"Before [the Palestinians] very
eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and
their ancestors, have lived...We are the generation of
colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we
cannot plant a tree and build a home." Israeli leader Moshe
Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "Original Sins:
Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel"
More from the horse's mouth
"The Arabs will be our problem
for a long time," Weizmann said, "It's not going to be
simple.One day they may have to leave and let us have the
country. They're ten to one, but don't we Jews have ten times
their intelligence?" Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1919 at
the Paris peace conference, quoted in Ella Winter, "And Not To
Yield."
The international consensus
on Israel (a very small representative sampling)
"[In the early 1950s] Arab
states regularly complained of the reprisals to the UN Security
Council, which routinely rejected Israel's claims of
self-defense...
"In June 1982 Israel again
invaded Lebanon, and it used aerial bombardment to destroy
entire camps of Palestinian Arab refugees, By these means Israel
killed 20,000 persons, mostly civilians...Israel claimed
self-defense for its invasion, but the lack of PLO attacks into
Israel during the previous year made that claim dubious...The
[UN] Security Council demanded 'that Israel withdraw all its
military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the
internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon'...
"The UN Human Rights
Commission, using the Geneva Convention's provision that certain
violations of humanitarian law are 'grave breaches' meriting
criminal punishment for perpetrators, found a number of Israel's
practices during the uprising [the intifada] to constitute 'war
crimes.' It included physical and psychological torture of
Palestinian detainees and their subjection to improper and
inhuman treatment; the imposition of collective punishment on
towns, villages and camps; the administrative detention of
thousands of Palestinians; the expulsion of Palestinian
citizens; the confiscation of Palestinian property; and the
raiding and demolition of Palestinian houses." John Quigley,
"Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
From the 1970s until the
1999 Israeli High Court decision forbidding torture during
interrogation (theoretically), hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians were subjected to inhuman treatment in Israeli
prisons.
"Israel's two main
interrogation agencies in the occupied territories engage in a
systematic pattern of ill-treatment and torture - according to
internationally recognized definitions of the terms...The
methods used in nearly all interrogations are prolonged sleep
deprivation; prolonged sight deprivation using blindfolds or
tight-fitting hoods; forced, prolonged maintenance of body
positions that grow increasingly painful; and verbal threats and
insults.
"These methods are almost
always combined with some of the following abuses; confinement
in tiny, closet-like spaces; exposure to temperature extremes,
such as deliberately overcooled rooms, prolonged toilet and
hygiene deprivation; and degrading treatment...Beatings are far
more routine in IDF interrogations than in GSS interrogations.
Sixteen of the nineteen detainees we interviewed [detained
between 1992 and 1994] reported having been assaulted in the
interrogation room. Beatings and kicks were directed at the
throat, testicles, and stomach. Some were repeatedly choked;
some had their heads slammed against the walls...
"Israeli interrogations
consistently use methods in combination with one another, over
long periods of time. Thus, a detainee in the custody of the
General Security Service (GSS) may spend weeks during which,
except for brief respites, he shuttles from a tiny chair to
which he is painfully shackled; to a stifling, tiny cubicle in
which he can barely move; to questioning sessions in which he is
beaten or violently manhandled; and then back to the chair.
"The intensive, sustained and
combined use of these methods inflicts the severe mental or
physical suffering that is central to internationally accepted
definitions of torture. Israel's political leadership cannot
claim ignorance that ill-treatment is the norm in interrogation
centers. The number of victims is too large, and the abuses too
systematic," 1994 Human Rights Watch report, "Torture and
Ill-Treatment: Israel's Interrogation of Palestinians from the
Occupied Territories."
The use of "force' -
continued
"Amnesty International also
observed that, when brought to trial, most Palestinian detainees
arrested for 'terrorist' offenses and tortured by the Shin Bet
(General Security Services) 'have been accused of offenses such
as membership in unlawful associations or throwing stones. They
have also included prisoners of conscience such as people
arrested solely for raising a flag.' On a related point, Haaretz
columnist B. Michael noted that there wasn't a single recorded
case in which the Shin Bet's use of torture was prompted by a
'ticking bomb' scenario: 'In every instance of a Palestinian
lodging formal complaint about torture, the Shin Bet justified
its use in order to extract a confession about something that
had already happened, not about something that was about to
happen.'" Norman Finkelstein, "The Rise and Fall of
Palestine."
The 1997 U.N. Commission
Against Torture rules against Israel
"B'Tselem estimates---that the
GSS annually interrogates between 1000-1500 Palestinians [as of
1998]. Some eighty-five percent of them - at least 850 persons a
year - are tortured during interrogation...
"The U.N. Committee Against
Torture,..reached an unequivocal conclusion:...'The methods of
interrogation [used in Israeli prisons]...are in the Committee's
view breaches of article 16 and also constitute torture as
defined in article 1 of the Convention...As a State Party to the
Convention Against Torture, Israel is precluded from raising
before this Committee exceptional circumstances'...The
prohibition on torture is, therefore, absolute, and no
'exceptional' circumstances may justify derogating from it."
1998 Report from B'Teslem, The Israeli Information Center for
Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, "Routine Torture:
Interrogation Methods of the General Security Service."
Some arguments used to
justify Zionism
"There is clearly no need to
justify the Zionist dream, the desire for relief from Jewish
suffering...The trouble with Zionism starts when it lands, so to
speak, in Palestine. What has to be justified is the injustice
to the Palestinians caused by Zionism, the dispossession and
victimization of a whole people. There is clearly a wrong here,
a wrong which creates the need for justification...
[E.g., the inheritance claim]
The aim of Zionism is the restoration of a Jewish sovereignty to
its status 2,000 years ago. Zionism does not advocate an
overhauling of the total world situation in the same way. It
does not advocate the restoration of the Roman empire...[In
addition,] Palestinians have claimed descent from the ancient
inhabitants of Palestine 3,000 years ago!...
[Jewish suffering as
justification] It was easy to make the Palestinians pay for
2,000 years of persecution. The Palestinians, who have felt the
enormous power of this vengeance, were not the historical
oppressors of the Jews.
They did not put Jews into
ghettos and force them to wear yellow stars. They did not plan
holocausts. But they had one fault. They were weak and
defenseless in the face of real military might, so they were the
ideal victims for an abstract revenge....
[Anti-semitism as
justification] Unlike the situation of Jews persecuted for
being Jews, Israelis are at war with the Arab world because they
have committed the sin of colonialism, not because of their
Jewish identity...
[The law of the jungle
justification.] Presenting the world as naturally unjust,
and oppression as nature's way, has always been the first refuge
of those who want to preserve their privileges...The need to
justify Zionism, and the lack of other defenses, has made it
part of the Israeli world view...In Israel, one common outcome
is cynicism, for which Israelis have become famous...
[The effect on Israelis]
Israelis seem to be haunted by a curse. It is the curse of the
original sin against the native Arabs. How can Israel be
discussed without recalling the dispossession and exclusion of
non-Jews? This is the most basic fact about Israel, and no
understanding of Israeli reality is possible without it. The
original sin haunts and torments Israelis; it marks everything
and taints everybody. Its memory poisons the blood and marks
every moment of existence." Israeli author, Benjamin
Beit-Hallahami, "Original Sins: Reflections on the History of
Zionism and Israel."
Zionism's 'historical right'
to Palestine
"Zionism's 'historical right'
to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not
historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish
settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish
settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the
Romantic 'mysticism' of 'blood and soil' and the Romantic 'cult'
of 'death, heroes and graves'... "The claim of Jewish
'homelessness is founded on a cluster of assumptions that both
negates the liberal idea of citizenship and duplicates the
anti-Semitic one that the state belongs to the majority ethnic
nation. In a word, the Zionist case for a Jewish state is as
valid as the anti-Semitic case for an ethnic state that
marginalizes Jews." Professor Norman Finkelstein, "Image and
Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,"
How about the Zionist
argument that Jordan already is the Palestinian state?
"It is often alleged that there
was, in fact, an earlier 'territorial compromise', namely in
1922, when Transjordan was excised from the promised 'national
home for the Jewish people,'...a decision that is difficult to
criticize in light of the fact that 'the number of Jews living
there permanently in 1921 has reliably been estimated at two, or
according to some authorities, three persons.'" Noam Chomsky,
"The Fateful Triangle."
Why doesn't Israel, "the
only democracy in the Middle East," have a constitution?
"The abstention from
formulating a constitution was no accident. The massive
expropriation of lands and other properties from those Arabs who
fled the country as a result of the War of Independence and of
those who remained but were declared absent, as well as the
confiscation of large tracts of land from Arab villages who did
not flee, and the laws passed to legalize those acts - all this
would have necessarily been declared unconstitutional, null and
void, by the Supreme Court, being expressly discriminatory
against one part of the citizenry, whereas a democratic
constitution obliges the state to treat all of its citizens
equally." Israeli author, Boas Evron, "Jewish State or
Israeli Nation?"
"The only democracy in the
Middle East?" - continued
"The 1989 Israel High Court
decision that any political party advocating full equality
between Arab and Jew can be barred from fielding candidates in
an election...[means] that the Israeli state is the state of the
Jews...not their [the Arabs'] state." Professor Norman
Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine
Conflict."