Free Palestine
1st October 2005, 11:06
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=59
Judge Deeds, Not Words
Editor's note: Finkelstein comments below the op-ed.
By Norman G. Finkelstein
On the night of August 24, 2005, Israeli troops shot dead three teenage boys and two adults in a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp. An army communiqué claimed the five were terrorists, killed after opening fire on the soldiers. An investigation by Israel's leading human rights organization, B'Tselem, and its leading newspaper, Haaretz, found, however, that the teenagers were unarmed and had no connection with any terrorist organizations, while neither of the two adults was armed or wanted by the Israelis.[1]
In Israel, as elsewhere, it's prudent to treat official pronouncements with skepticism.
This is especially so when it comes to the "peace process."
Israel's announcement that it would withdraw from the Gaza Strip won high praise in the American media as a major step toward ending the occupation of Palestinian land. Human rights organizations and academic specialists were less sanguine, however.
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B'Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza's land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. "So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands," it concludes, "Israel's claim of an 'end of the occupation' is questionable."[2]
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: "Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control."[3]
The world's leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain "an imprisoned enclave," while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza's borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will "create worse hardship than is seen today."[5]
Matters are scarcely better in the West Bank. Although Israel has announced its intention to dismantle four of the 120 settlements there, this decision pales beside its relentless annexation of wide swaths of the West Bank.
A recent UN report finds that the wall Israel is constructing encroaches deeply into Palestinian territory, resulting in the isolation of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the confiscation of fully ten percent of West Bank land, "including the most fertile areas in the West Bank."[6]
According to Roy, Palestinians will have access to only half the West Bank once the wall is complete, "deepening the dispossession and isolation of Palestinian communities."[7]
Israel proclaims that it is building the wall for "security" reasons, but human rights organizations disagree. Its real purpose, they suggest, is "to make contiguous with Israel illegal civilian settlements" (HRW) and "to facilitate their future annexation into Israel" (B'Tselem).[8]
In a landmark July 2004 decision on the wall, the International Court of Justice unanimously agreed that establishment of these Jewish settlements "violates" (U.S. Judge Buergenthal) the Geneva Convention, and overwhelmingly ruled that construction of the wall was "contrary to international law."[9]
Yet, nowhere have official Israeli words about peace been more dramatically belied by bitter deeds than in Jerusalem.
In a recent report entitled The Jerusalem Powder Keg, the authoritative International Crisis Group finds that Prime Minister Sharon "risks choking off Arab East Jerusalem by further fragmenting it and surrounding it with Jewish neighborhoods/settlements." Hundreds of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites will be isolated from the West Bank and placed under stricter Israeli control inside the city's new borders, while tens of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites will be stranded on the outside and cut off from their city.
In the meantime Israeli plans, well underway, to incorporate far-flung illegal Jewish settlements into Jerusalem "would go close to cutting the West Bank into two."
Israeli annexationist policies in and around Jerusalem, according to Crisis Group, will have "arguably devastating consequences," not least because "it remains virtually impossible to conceive of a Palestinian state without its capital in Jerusalem."
Although Prime Minister Sharon gives lip-service to a two-state settlement, the actions of the Israeli government, Crisis Group concludes, "are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel's security; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists,… and sowing the seeds of growing radicalization."[10]
Those committed to a just and lasting peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict would do well to pay closer attention to Israeli deeds than to the official words accompanying them.
17 September 2005
Norman G. Finkelstein teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. His latest book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history.
________________________________
These references are for fact-checking only.
1. Arnon Regular, "IDF chief to probe Tul Karm raid that killed five Palestinians," Haaretz (7 September 2005).
2. B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), One Big Prison: Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the eve of the Disengagement Plan (March 2005).
3. Human Rights Watch, "'Disengagement' Will Not End Gaza Occupation" (19 August 2005).
4. Sara Roy, "Praying with Their Eyes Closed: Reflections on the Disengagement from Gaza," Journal of Palestine Studies (Summer 2005).
5. World Bank, Disengagement, the Palestinian Economy and the Settlements (23 June 2004).
6. Report on UNCTAD's Assistance to the Palestinian People, prepared by the UNCTAD secretariat (21 July 2005).
7. Op. cit.
8. Human Rights Watch, Israel's "Separation Barrier" in the Occupied Territories: Human rights and international humanitarian law consequences (February 2004); B'Tselem, Behind the Barrier: Human rights violations as a result of Israel's separation barrier (2003).
9. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (July 2004).
10. International Crisis Group, The Jerusalem Powder Keg (2 August 2005).
Finkelstein comments: It is a convention that the author of a newly-published book on a topical issue receives special consideration from the op-ed page editor. I submitted this op-ed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. They all rejected it. I then followed up on the rejection from the Chicago Tribune, since Chicago is where I teach and the Tribune had earlier published an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz on this topic. The op-ed page editor, Marcia Lythcott ([email protected]) just kept repeating, "I will not publish that op-ed." Readers might want to ask her and her editor, R. Bruce Dold ([email protected]), why the Tribune is so vehement about not publishing an alternative viewpoint based on mainstream human rights sources.
Judge Deeds, Not Words
Editor's note: Finkelstein comments below the op-ed.
By Norman G. Finkelstein
On the night of August 24, 2005, Israeli troops shot dead three teenage boys and two adults in a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp. An army communiqué claimed the five were terrorists, killed after opening fire on the soldiers. An investigation by Israel's leading human rights organization, B'Tselem, and its leading newspaper, Haaretz, found, however, that the teenagers were unarmed and had no connection with any terrorist organizations, while neither of the two adults was armed or wanted by the Israelis.[1]
In Israel, as elsewhere, it's prudent to treat official pronouncements with skepticism.
This is especially so when it comes to the "peace process."
Israel's announcement that it would withdraw from the Gaza Strip won high praise in the American media as a major step toward ending the occupation of Palestinian land. Human rights organizations and academic specialists were less sanguine, however.
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B'Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza's land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. "So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands," it concludes, "Israel's claim of an 'end of the occupation' is questionable."[2]
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: "Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control."[3]
The world's leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain "an imprisoned enclave," while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza's borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will "create worse hardship than is seen today."[5]
Matters are scarcely better in the West Bank. Although Israel has announced its intention to dismantle four of the 120 settlements there, this decision pales beside its relentless annexation of wide swaths of the West Bank.
A recent UN report finds that the wall Israel is constructing encroaches deeply into Palestinian territory, resulting in the isolation of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the confiscation of fully ten percent of West Bank land, "including the most fertile areas in the West Bank."[6]
According to Roy, Palestinians will have access to only half the West Bank once the wall is complete, "deepening the dispossession and isolation of Palestinian communities."[7]
Israel proclaims that it is building the wall for "security" reasons, but human rights organizations disagree. Its real purpose, they suggest, is "to make contiguous with Israel illegal civilian settlements" (HRW) and "to facilitate their future annexation into Israel" (B'Tselem).[8]
In a landmark July 2004 decision on the wall, the International Court of Justice unanimously agreed that establishment of these Jewish settlements "violates" (U.S. Judge Buergenthal) the Geneva Convention, and overwhelmingly ruled that construction of the wall was "contrary to international law."[9]
Yet, nowhere have official Israeli words about peace been more dramatically belied by bitter deeds than in Jerusalem.
In a recent report entitled The Jerusalem Powder Keg, the authoritative International Crisis Group finds that Prime Minister Sharon "risks choking off Arab East Jerusalem by further fragmenting it and surrounding it with Jewish neighborhoods/settlements." Hundreds of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites will be isolated from the West Bank and placed under stricter Israeli control inside the city's new borders, while tens of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites will be stranded on the outside and cut off from their city.
In the meantime Israeli plans, well underway, to incorporate far-flung illegal Jewish settlements into Jerusalem "would go close to cutting the West Bank into two."
Israeli annexationist policies in and around Jerusalem, according to Crisis Group, will have "arguably devastating consequences," not least because "it remains virtually impossible to conceive of a Palestinian state without its capital in Jerusalem."
Although Prime Minister Sharon gives lip-service to a two-state settlement, the actions of the Israeli government, Crisis Group concludes, "are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel's security; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists,… and sowing the seeds of growing radicalization."[10]
Those committed to a just and lasting peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict would do well to pay closer attention to Israeli deeds than to the official words accompanying them.
17 September 2005
Norman G. Finkelstein teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. His latest book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history.
________________________________
These references are for fact-checking only.
1. Arnon Regular, "IDF chief to probe Tul Karm raid that killed five Palestinians," Haaretz (7 September 2005).
2. B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), One Big Prison: Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the eve of the Disengagement Plan (March 2005).
3. Human Rights Watch, "'Disengagement' Will Not End Gaza Occupation" (19 August 2005).
4. Sara Roy, "Praying with Their Eyes Closed: Reflections on the Disengagement from Gaza," Journal of Palestine Studies (Summer 2005).
5. World Bank, Disengagement, the Palestinian Economy and the Settlements (23 June 2004).
6. Report on UNCTAD's Assistance to the Palestinian People, prepared by the UNCTAD secretariat (21 July 2005).
7. Op. cit.
8. Human Rights Watch, Israel's "Separation Barrier" in the Occupied Territories: Human rights and international humanitarian law consequences (February 2004); B'Tselem, Behind the Barrier: Human rights violations as a result of Israel's separation barrier (2003).
9. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (July 2004).
10. International Crisis Group, The Jerusalem Powder Keg (2 August 2005).
Finkelstein comments: It is a convention that the author of a newly-published book on a topical issue receives special consideration from the op-ed page editor. I submitted this op-ed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. They all rejected it. I then followed up on the rejection from the Chicago Tribune, since Chicago is where I teach and the Tribune had earlier published an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz on this topic. The op-ed page editor, Marcia Lythcott ([email protected]) just kept repeating, "I will not publish that op-ed." Readers might want to ask her and her editor, R. Bruce Dold ([email protected]), why the Tribune is so vehement about not publishing an alternative viewpoint based on mainstream human rights sources.