I see that Jean luc Godard has just announced that he is boycotting
this year's Tel-Aviv film festival, following an open letter
suggesting he do so from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and
Cultural Boycott of Israel:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&Article_id=92625
I should add that it seems most unlikely that US film-maker John
Sayles, who has also been invited to the Tel-Aviv film festival, will
be boycotting the event. This may appear quite incredible given
Sayles' status as one of America's leading political film-makers of
the past 30 years; indeed, some of his work is often confused with
that of British film-maker Ken Loach, who boycotted Zionist Israel
long ago (many not knowing which of them directed, for instance, Bread
and Roses, Carla's Song, Matewan, Sunshine State, Lone Star, Land and
Freedom etc), their social realist aesthetics often indistinguishable.
But Sayles, unlike Loach, has always funded his independent films from
the proceeds of his scriptwriting for mainstream Hollywood movies, his
latest writing venture being the script for Steven Spielberg's soon-to-
be-released Jurassic Park IV (he also wrote the script that later
became the basis for Spielberg's E.T. in the early 1980s). An obvious
political landmine here, business corruption always trumps enlightened
politics in Hollywood, even on the left, as we know from the legacy of
McCarthyism..
No, sad to say, Sayles won't be joining.
------------------
But to resume the subject at hand:
"The attachment to race theory, for example, was presumably why it
didn't seem odd for Zionist leaders to be inviting Adolf Eichmann to
visit Palestine in 1937; why Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of
Likudism, so admired Mussolini (who was himself pro-Zionist); why
Mossad was working with the Gestapo to arrange Jewish deportation from
Germany at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich in 1939, later a chief
architect of the Nazi holocaust (he gave his name to one of its chief
components, Operation Reinhard); and why the Haganah (the Zionist
paramilitary which formed the core of the IDF) was receiving arms from
the SS. It was, all of it, part of the same murky world of colonial
domination, racist mysticism (the blood and soil kind) and volkish
nationalism."
-------------------------------------------------
The roots of Israeli barbarism
We have heard from people like UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, who
says that the Zionist regime is worse than apartheid. The Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe now argues that Israel is pursuing a genocidal
policy in Gaza. The Israeli government's open threats of ethnic
cleansing and mass violence in civilian areas alongside the repeated
sieges, the imposed starvation, the mass imprisonment and the
killings, coupled with a deep-rooted perception of Palestinians as a
'demographic threat' and, well, everything else, could be seen as
adding weight to this view. But if the Israeli strategy is genocidal,
this is the latest degenerate stage in an ongoing counterinsurgency
war, the character of which is not well understood even by our own
gluttonously free press. Well, this is what can be said about the
ordinary run of the mill war, when there isn't a major theatre attack,
a mass crackdown, a re-invasion, an annexation or another country to
bomb: Israeli troops repeatedly use indiscriminate violence,
deliberate violence against civilians including against minors, they
use civilians as human shields, they detain tens of thousands
illegally, and they torture and rape prisoners. If you're a B'Tselem,
Amnesty, or even Human Rights Watch worker concerned with Israel/
Palestine, you encounter daily, grinding brutality that is rarely if
ever reported. Let me give you only a few examples. Here are some
excerpts from the latest B'Tselem report on human rights in the
'Occupied Territories':
Of those killed in 2007, at least 132 were civilians who were taking
no part in the hostilities at the time they were killed. As for
another 50, we were unable to determine the relevant circumstances.
According to these figures, approximately 35 percent of the
Palestinians killed in 2007 in circumstances known to B'Tselem were
civilians not involved in the fighting. In 2006, 348 civilians
uninvolved in the fighting were killed (54 percent). Illegal behavior
of an individual soldier and his commander is not the only cause for
the high number of Palestinians killed who were not taking part in
hostilities and posed no danger to security forces. The primary reason
for these deaths is Israeli policy, set by the army’s top echelon:
illegal easing of the military's rules of engagement, approval of
operations that constitute disproportionate attacks, and failure to
carry out independent investigations in cases in which innocent
Palestinian civilians are killed.
...
Another example of illegal expansion of the rules of engagement is the
establishment of “death zones” in areas close to the Gaza perimeter
fence. According to testimonies given to B'Tselem, certain units are
ordered to open fire automatically at any person approaching the
fence, without giving prior warning and regardless of the
circumstances or the identity of the person. This practice is
particularly grave because of the lack of demarcation, by signs or
otherwise, of the area in which entry is prohibited. In 2007, security
forces killed 55 Palestinians who tried to cross the Gaza perimeter
fence or were near the fence, in some cases even at a distance greater
than 100 meters. Of these, at least 16 were unarmed and not engaged in
hostilities, including four minors.
...
In 2007, B'Tselem documented in detail 74 cases in which security
forces beat (by punching, kicking, clubbing, or hitting with rifle
butts), humiliated, or threatened Palestinians. The perpetrators were
soldiers (in 41 cases), Border Police officers (27 cases), and members
of the regular police (6 cases) ... B'Tselem’s monitoring of
demonstrations against the Separation Barrier since 2004 indicates
that about 1,000 demonstrators have required medical treatment due to
injury from rubbercoated metal bullets, beatings, or tear gas
inhalation. Over 320 of these people were injured in 2007.
...
More than 6,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were detained in 2007
by Israel’s security forces. A significant majority of them were
subsequently interrogated by the Israel Security Agency on suspicion
of involvement in "hostile terror activity". In these interrogations,
the ISA, together with the Prison Service and Israel Police, routinely
use prison conditions and interrogation methods that individually
constitute forbidden ill-treatment.
...
The phenomenon of soldiers using Palestinians to perform dangerous
military tasks or to protect soldiers from gunfire (in other words,
using them as human shields) continued in 2007. Until mid-December,
B'Tselem documented 10 such cases, although it is likely that this
represents a minority of the cases that occurred.
These are conservative estimates based on documented cases, but they
clearly describe the systematic use of indiscriminate killing,
beatings, mass imprisonment, torture and the use of Palestinians as
human shields. I quoted some other examples of Israel's regular
brutalisation of civilians here. I want also to comment specifically
on the treatment of Palestinian children before moving on, because the
deliberate harming of children in any war is indicative of its
degeneracy - and is used as an indicator of such in most other wars.
The arrest and long-term detention of children is typical. For
example, in the months of February to May 2002, 8,500 Palestinians
were arrested in the West Bank, 10%% of whom were children. The
circumstances were characteristic of an Israeli crackdown: door to
door house searches, with the rounding up of anyone who the soldiers
deemed a threat. The children, like their relatives, were frequently
beaten before being arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded for long periods
of time, denied access to medical treatment which they needed, and
subject to physical and psychological torture. One fifteen year old
boy described being beaten for an hour, his legs trampled on, then
thrown from one corner of the room to another for fifteen minutes,
then sprayed with cold water, then tied to iron steps which caused him
to fall and injure himself, then punched in the face. He also had
cigarettes stubbed out on his body and was struck with a steel ruler.
That's just one example. (See Catherine Cook et al, Stolen Youth: The
Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children, Pluto Press,
2004). The deliberate baiting and shooting of children has also been
reported. Chris Hedges wrote in 2001 of this practise by Israeli
soldiers at an Israeli colony ('settlement') near the Palestinian
refugee camp Faqah:
It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out
of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a
loudspeaker.
"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of
Khan Younis? Come! Come!"
I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew:
"Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"
The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric
fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob
rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted
with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in
anticipation of what is to come.
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or
eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand.
They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are
no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets
from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight
bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the
stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.
Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom
were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they
kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more,
three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other
conflicts I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El
Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and
massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights
and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have
never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap
and murder them for sport. (Chris Hedges, 'A Gaza Diary', Harper's
Magazine, 1 October 2001).
-----
El Salvador, Guatemala, Sarajevo, and Algeria - those are instructive
comparisons. At any rate, this is just to indicate some of the
dimensions of Israel's barbarism that are usually unnoticed or, more
accurately, suppressed. It is a routine grind of racially aggravated
terror and humilitation, increasingly accompanied by various systems
of explicit segregation, including 300 kilometres of roads exclusively
for Israeli colonists in the West Bank. To it can be various forms of
economic blockade, with predictably devastating effects. As to its
roots, I have already argued that the reason for Israel's resemblance
to apartheid South Africa is because of their emergence from a very
similar historical complex of causes - colonialism and race ideology
in particular. The attachment to race theory, for example, was
presumably why it didn't seem odd for Zionist leaders to be inviting
Adolf Eichmann to visit Palestine in 1937; why Vladimir Jabotinsky,
the founder of Likudism, so admired Mussolini (who was himself pro-
Zionist); why Mossad was working with the Gestapo to arrange Jewish
deportation from Germany at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich in 1939,
later a chief architect of the Nazi holocaust (he gave his name to one
of its chief components, Operation Reinhard); and why the Haganah (the
Zionist paramilitary which formed the core of the IDF) was receiving
arms from the SS. It was, all of it, part of the same murky world of
colonial domination, racist mysticism (the blood and soil kind) and
volkish nationalism.
And the techniques of repression that I have described are rooted in,
specifically, the British colonial rule over Palestine, with which the
Zionists periodically collaborated, and in the inheritance by the
Zionist leadership of Britain's counterinsurgency war, which
continues. Some of the key training for Zionist paramilitaries before
1948 was in supporting British colonial repression of the Palestinian
Arab national liberation struggle in 1936-9, just as fascism was
ravaging Europe and the Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS were refining their
own techniques of counterinsurgency. The collaboration in the
repression had started as the revolt began in 1936 with the formation
of the Jewish supernumerary police, which was 1,240-strong, but
expanded over the next two years so that by 1939, it numbered 14,500
men. The training they received was usually passed on to thousands of
others who were not included in the force. The Special Night Squads
were a notoriously brutal manifestation of this collusion. Orde
Wingate, a senior British army officer and Zionist, organised these.
His role in formulating Israeli military doctrine is still
commemorated. He is credited with having inculcated the principles of
surprise, offensive daring, deep penetration and high mobility, and
one of his most notable pupils was Moshe Dayan. He also taught them
torture, on-the-spot executions, mass detention without trial, black
flag operations. All of which was perfectly normal for the British. In
general, British strategy was that any suspicious-looking "Johnny
Arab" who looked suspicious could be shot out of hand, while beatings
were given out routinely during raids. And the British were not shy of
drawing on their extensive history of counterinsurgency in India.
Charles Tegart, who had controlled special branch in the Calcutta
police, was requisitioned to Palestine during the revolt, where he
provided his expert assistance in the formation of Arab Investigation
Centres (forebears of Facility 1391) where Palestinians would be
tortured. However, the Special Night Squads acquired a justified
reputation for brutality of a kind that would be familiar in today's
death squads, including the Special Police Commandos for example.
(What does is it say about the world's military and intelligence
classes, that 'special' for them always means particularly gruesome
murder and torture? For most of us, I suspect, 'special' is a wine-
drenched sunset or a kind of fried rice). Aside from this valuable
tutelage, at any rate, a further 50,000 Haganah troops were trained by
the British army during World War II.
It is useful in that context to consider the Zionists at the height of
their success, with the Arab armies easily defeated, and at least
700,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed through a system of terror,
massacres, the destruction of villages, and dispossession based on a
detailed plan implemented throughout 1948. It had been in these
operations, beginning with Operation Nachson, that the various Zionist
paramilitaries had first bonded together in a single effort. From that
unity, that brothership of blood, was forged the IDF. By 1949, the
plan had been more or less fulfilled. But the techniques which they
had learned during the 1936 revolt and after would continue to be
invaluable. As Ilan Pappe describes it in The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine (2006), there was little let-up in the humiliation of, and
attacks on, Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinian men were held in
pens after systematic search-and-arrest operations, before being moved
to concentrated prison camps. The category of 'suspicious Arab' was
the basis for many of the arrests, as remains the case today: they
closed off cities or towns, started searching the houses, and selected
their victims. They took them off to be brutalised, subject to forced
labour, or summarily executed. Former Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah
troops were employed as camp guards, and they were - despite
occasional formal recriminations - allowed to get away with murder,
including the Kfar Qassim massacre in which 49 Palestinians lost their
lives. In the towns and villages were Palestinians remained, they were
frequently subject to on-the-spot murder, as in Jaffa where Red Cross
discovered a pile of bodies and were told by Israeli authorities that
the people had been shot for not obeying the curfew between 5pm and
6am (during which time Israelis took the opportunity to loot
Palestinian property, thus compounding the earlier waves of
expropriation). They were forced into ghettos, as in Haifa were the
3-5,000 Palestinians who remained after 70,000 Palestinians were
expelled, were driven into tiny living quarters in the city. ID cards
were issued to help restrict and control their movement. They were
also subject to rape. One case describes how soldiers had wanted to
rape a girl, so they killed her father, wounded the mother, and
allowed at least one soldier to assault the girl. Another girl, twelve
years old, was kidnapped by soldiers in the Negev in mid-1949, had her
head shaved, and was raped and tortured for several days by 22
soldiers in the platoon until one of the men killed her. In general,
the Palestinians were subject to martial law, based on the British
Mandate's emergency regulations imposed in 1945, which limited rights
of expression, movement, and organisation, a status that ended only
formally in 1966. And all the while, the theft of the land continued,
as did the expropriation, vandalism and desecration, while the
refugees were prevented from returning.
That was the Zionist movement and state in its moment of triumph, when
the 'threat' of Palestinian self-government had been decisively
defeated. They required no Hamas to goad them into it. It was the
behaviour of self-confident promulgators of the Iron Wall - a doctrine
fit for a Duce - schooled in technique by the most vicious bastards to
have ever enslaved a quarter of the planet.
