THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PALESTINIAN INFRASTRUCTURE
"The cities are completely wasted. Most of the roads have been completely destroyed."
- Unidentified Israeli Defence Forces source, Ha'aretz, April 5th 2002
"I don't know. This is a special situation today. It's a curfew. I can't do anything about it, no one here can do anything about it; the orders come from high up."
- Unidentified Israeli officer, quoted in Halhoul, 2nd July 2002 [Translation: "I am only following orders"]
From: "Habitat International Coalition"
<hic@mweb.co.za>
Subject: Special Rapporteur Report on Housing Rights Violations in Palestine(second time)
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 12:16:58 +0200
HABITAT INTERNATIONAL COALITION (HIC)
Dear HIC friends,
Mr. Miloon Kothari, the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, told reporters about
the Report on his recent visit to the occupied Palestinian territories. The Special
Rapporteur visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories from 5 to 10 January
2002, at the invitation of Ben Gurion University and the Legal Center for Arab Minority
Rights in Israel (Adalah). He availed himself of the opportunity to meet with a group of
non-governmental organizations, United Nations and intergovernmental agencies and
Palestinian authorities, in order to collect information necessary for reporting to the
Commission during its fifty-eighth session in response to the resolution S-5/1 adopted on
19 October 2000, in which the Special Rapporteur was requested to "carry out
immediate missions to the occupied Palestinian territories and to report the findings to
the Commission at its fifty-seventh session and, on an interim basis, to the General
Assembly at its fifty-fifth session".
In a 27-page report, Kothari said Israel claimed that settlement expansion was necessary
because of "natural" population growth. But while settler numbers have risen by
12 percent a year, the Israeli population has been growing by just 2 percent a year, he
said. "Israel has used the current crisis to consolidate its occupation" of
Palestinian areas, said Kothari. The building of new Jewish settlements is
"incendiary and provocative" and settlers are "free to indulge in violence
and confiscate land," he said. Israel has built more than 100 Jewish settlements -
home to about 200,000 Israelis - on land conquered in the 1967 Six Day War and is
continuing construction. It claims the territory it seized is disputed, rather than
occupied and that the Geneva Conventions do not apply. Kothari cited international accords
like the Geneva Conventions on warfare, which govern the behavior of occupying powers. The
1949 agreements bar the colonization of occupied land, but lack legal measures to ensure
compliance. "The active and sustained implantation of Jewish settler colonies serves
the... purpose of acquiring territory and natural resources and limiting the living space
of the Palestinian host population," he said. Thousands of homes had been bulldozed
and thousands more are threatened with demolition, he said, citing studies by Israeli
human rights groups with which he had been in contact since his visit.
Kothari criticized the destruction of homes during Israeli military incursions like the
battle in Jenin refugee camp. Kothari said that "the serial and deliberate
destruction of homes and property constitutes a war crime under international law."
Kothari said the widely publicized destruction of homes during military operations, meant
to "cause optimum material and psychological harm," was just a small part of an
ongoing takeover of Palestinian areas. Israel is intentionally destroying olive groves,
orange orchards and other Palestinian agricultural land and is responsible for severe
"misuse of and hoarding of water resources," including cutting off pipelines to
Palestinian villages, he said.
You will find the Report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing in www.habitants.org (Human and Habitat Rights Without
Boundaries and Globalisation).
CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/
May 11, 2002
"Nobody Should Preach to Us Ethics, Nobody!"
Israel, a Light unto Nations?
By
Kathleen Christison
Former CIA political analyst
In the never-ending propaganda show designed to depict Israel as a moral nation victimized
by immoral terrorists and anti-Semites, CNN recently ran a film clip of the late Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin declaiming, as only he could, "Nobody should preach to
us ethics, nobody!" And, of course, few do.
It's the general assumption among the vast majority of Americans that no on can preach
ethics to Israel, that light unto nations. No nation is more ethical or more innocent--or
so we are told.
But I can't get something I recently saw off my mind. Every so often in the midst of a
deluge of information something leaps out at you as unique--utterly electrifying, utterly
horrifying, almost mind-altering in a way. One's senses become dulled after months, years,
of reading about and seeing images on television of innocents dead from Palestinian
terrorist attacks, of other innocents dead from Israeli tank or sniper fire, of cities and
refugee camps devastated, in recent weeks of the entire civilian infrastructure of
Palestinian society destroyed. But one searing article leapt out the other day that has
stuck in my craw, and I cannot let go of it.
In an article in the May 6 issue of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz entitled "Someone
Even Managed to Defecate into the photocopier," Amira Hass--an honest, courageous
Israeli woman who has spent years living among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza--described the scenes of destruction at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture left
behind after Israeli military forces lifted their siege of the towns of Ramallah and its
suburb al-Birah, where the ministry is located.
Entering the building after its month-long occupation by an Israeli military unit,
ministry officials, foreign cultural attaches, and reporters found a scene of grotesque
vandalism. Equipment from the local radio and television station had been hurled from
windows in the multi-story building, electronic equipment was destroyed or had been
stolen, furniture was broken and piled up on heaps of papers, books, computer disks, and
broken glass. Children's paintings had been destroyed.
And then there was this, as described by Hass: "There are two toilets on every floor,
but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms
of which they had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in
emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks. They defecated into
plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone
even managed to defecate into a photocopier. The soldiers urinated into empty mineral
water bottles. These were scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in
cardboard boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks, next to the
furniture the soldiers had smashed, among the children's books that had been thrown down.
Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid had spilled and left its stain.
"It was especially difficult to enter two floors of the building because of the
pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also scattered everywhere. In
some of the rooms, not far from the heaps of feces and the toilet paper, remains of
rotting food were scattered. In one corner, in the room in which someone had defecated
into a drawer, full cartons of fruits and vegetables had been left behind. The toilets
were left overflowing with bottles filled with urine, feces and toilet paper. Relative to
other places, the soldiers did not leave behind them many sayings scrawled on the walls.
Here and there were the candelabrum symbols of Israel, stars of David, praises for the
Jerusalem Betar soccer team."
This is not a tale we are ever likely to see in the American press, so the vast majority
of Americans who think with Menachem Begin that nobody can preach to Israel about ethics,
that Israel's army is the only moral army in the world and always employs the doctrine of
"purity of arms," will go on thinking that way.
But I cannot.
I am forced to ask some questions that that American majority will no doubt never hear:
Can it, for instance, be called terrorism if an entire unit of the Israeli army forsakes
purity of arms and spends a month crapping on floors, on piles of children's artwork, in
desk drawers, on photocopiers? Is this self-defense, or "rooting out the terrorist
infrastructure"? Is it anti-Semitic to wonder what happened to the moral compass of a
society that spawns a group of young men who will intermingle their own religious and
national symbols with feces and urine, as if the drawings and the excrement both
constitute valued autographs?
Do they think Israeli shit is cleaner, holier than anyone else's?
Why are my taxes paying for this army?
How can Palestinians ever make peace in the face of filth and disrespect like this?
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first
with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before
resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing
primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine:
Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the University of
California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book,
"The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story," was published in
March 2002.
Both Kathy and her husband Bill, also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to
the CounterPunch website.
An economy in ruins
Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue No.583, 25
April - 1 May 2002 http://www.ahram.org.eg
/weekly/2002/583/ec1.htm
An economy in ruins
Israel's latest assault on the occupied territories has flattened an economy that was
already stumbling. But Israel itself is in trouble, as the costs of trying to contain the
Intifada mount. John Sfakianakis* writes
The Palestinian economy has all but collapsed. A prolonged policy of closure, and the
latest Israeli offensive, have destroyed important segments of the Palestinian economy and
many of its institutions in the past few weeks. Although Oslo never permitted for anything
more than Palestinian dependency on the economic structures put in place by Israel, the
recent assaults have inflamed economic misery and retarded development of any sort. And it
hardly needs saying that economic suffering and social degradation are no ingredients for
peace.
Restrictions on the movement of goods, labour and people -- a result of Israel's policy of
closure (a permanent administrative measure since 1993) -- have plagued the Palestinian
economy throughout the 1990s and never more so than during the past few months.
Notwithstanding the recent Israeli raids and their concomitant restrictions on people's
movement, by early 1998, less than four per cent of Palestinians living in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip had permission to enter Israel. The economic effects of closure have been
devastating. A recent World Bank study detailed how closure affected the economy during
the first 15 months of the Intifada. Its most dramatic effect has been to heighten
joblessness and shrink real per capita income among Palestinians. Between 1992 and 1996,
average unemployment increased from about three per cent to a staggering 30 per cent. It
grew quickest during times of stiffer closure policies. By January 2002, unemployment had
risen to between 40 and 50 per cent, according to the World Bank. Currently, three in
every four Palestinian workers, according to various international organisations, are
unemployed. Underemployment, which also besets most countries in the Middle East, is
another constant affliction debilitating the Palestinian economy.
All this leads to declining real per capita income, and the host of problems that comes in
its wake. The share of the Palestinian population living below the poverty line ($2 per
person per day) was estimated, before January 2002, as standing at between 50 per cent
(according to World Bank data) and more than 64 per cent (according to the United
Nations). Undoubtedly, poverty levels must have risen precipitously following the
devastating Israeli raids of the past month. Human losses to death and injury defy
economic estimation. However, direct physical destruction of the public infrastructure is
conservatively estimated at costing somewhere in the region of $600-800 million, according
to a restricted report compiled by international agencies working in the Palestinian
territories, and including the European Commission's humanitarian aid office.
The destruction of productive capital stock (damaged buildings, road and soil degradation,
destroyed well and irrigation systems etc.) in the Palestinian territories will lead to
tremendous capital stock losses. The damage Israel inflicted on all PA-related
institutions will definitely affect the economy. The destruction of important sections of
the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has rendered the statistical arm of the PA
temporarily out of service. And the damage done at the municipal level has debilitated the
economically relevant institutional connections between the PA and the rest of the
territories.
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have suffered, too. In Ramallah, the offices of the
MATTIN Group -- a voluntary partnership specialising in international human rights
enforcement -- were looted and pillaged by the Israeli army. An irreplaceable collection
of unpublished documents concerning International Humanitarian Law, accumulated over a
19-year period, are believed to have been destroyed by the Israeli army. It is worth
noting that the MATTIN Group has been the single most important NGO campaigning to
prohibit the European Union from granting preferential treatment to goods produced in
Israel's illegal settlements. For decades, the EU has not enforced the exclusion of
settlement products from preferential treatment, although it has been called upon by the
European Parliament to do so. More alarmingly, farming, whose produce is an important
export component of the Palestinian economy, has sustained the most serious damage.
Agricultural losses have not been confined merely to building and irrigation systems; they
also run to the uprooting of fruit and olive trees. A freshly-planted olive tree takes
seven years, under the best conditions, before it starts to bear fruit. Recovering these
lost yields will be far from easy.
World Bank officials believe most of the $5 billion-worth of investments made possible by
international donor aid over the past eight years has been destroyed. The loss to gross
domestic product (GDP) alone is about $5 billion. On the revenue side, the Palestinian
Authority (PA) is effectively bankrupt: tax revenues have dwindled, as of February 2002,
to a fifth of previous levels. Revenue collected by the PA since the start of the Intifada
and until March 2002 averaged less than $20 million per month (compared with an average of
$88 million per month in the third quarter of 2000). During periods of relative peace,
about two- thirds of Palestinian revenue comes from taxes collected by Israel on the PA's
behalf. In the past, these taxes were regularly remitted to the PA; Israel has withheld
all such payments since December 2000. Total gross revenues withheld by Israel are
estimated, as of end-December 2001, to stand at about $0.5 billion.
As closure and violence have intensified over the past few months, household incomes and
savings have shrunk, as has the capacity of Palestinians to borrow. Closure has forced
people to spend their savings, and in order to maintain current levels of food consumption
they have had to sell personal items. Fiscal discipline is not sustainable in the PA and
deficit spending is becoming endemic. Until now, the PA has managed to finance its deficit
by borrowing from commercial banks, cutting salaries, delaying payments and cutting costs.
Even before the disasters brought by Israel's latest incursions, the PA's finances were
teetering. By the end of 2001, the authority's arrears amounted to $430 million. Fear of
damage from fighting has led the private sector to cease investments in the past few
months. As a result, the number of new company registrations fell by the end of 2000 by 80
per cent and has now been completely halted. The continuous decline of the stock market in
Palestine, which collapsed by more than 40 per cent in the past year, is another
depressing index of dwindling private sector confidence in the economy. More importantly,
Palestine's private sector growth remains circumspect at best. It is estimated that 90 per
cent of private sector business units are small/ medium enterprises (SMEs), comprising
fewer than 10 employees in total. The debt-to-asset ratios of the SMEs are low, due to
reliance on informal bank lending practices and the use of personal savings. Closure and
unemployment has forced saving to fall to new lows and, logically, informal lending has
nearly disappeared due to the uncertain times.
It is also worth mentioning that the Israeli economy has not been immune from declining
growth rates either; though its suffering pales next to that of Palestine's. Some of this
is a direct result of the Intifada.
Israel's economy has been hit from two directions. First, the overall global slowdown has
been disproportionately painful to technology companies, which drove Israel to growth of
5.9 per cent in 2000. Last year's economic growth, in contrast, was a stagnant 0.5 per
cent, with industrial output falling by four per cent. GDP growth is not expected to rise
above 1.5 per cent this year at best. The other difficulty, of course, is the Intifada.
The Ministry of Finance blames the Intifada for the large deviation in the government's
deficit and its growth as a percentage of GDP. Recently, Ministry of Finance officials
admitted for the first time that the government's deficit in 2001 had surged to 4.6 per
cent of GDP: a corollary of the security situation. The sector to suffer most
conspicuously has been tourism, a major foreign currency earner. Israel's thriving
biotechnology sector is also facing a severe crisis as escalating violence has stopped US
regulators from conducting crucial manufacturing inspection visits. Israel has about 150
biotech companies, ranking the sector fifth in Europe.
Nevertheless, the suffering inflicted on the two economies differs in kind, as well as
scale. Whereas the security situation and a world slowdown have held back Israeli growth,
Israel's losses can be remedied in the medium term. The Palestinian economy, by contrast,
has been blighted by the devastation wrought on its very structure. And to its woe, there
is no end in sight.
The writer is a research fellow at Harvard University's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
IDF admits `ugly vandalism' against Palestinian
property
By Amos Harel
Israel Defense Forces sources have admitted that Palestinian claims of the systematic
destruction of property, particularly computers, during the recent military operations in
Ramallah are, for the most part, true. "There were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena
of vandalism," a senior military sources told Ha'aretz yesterday.
And while another military source said that the army had yet to undertake a full
investigation into the matter, there are already many individual cases that are being
prosecuted through the military justice system.
Within the context of Operation Defensive Shield, an intelligence unit specialized in
systematically going through public institutions of the Palestinian Authority and
collecting hard disks from computers in offices, for the purposes of examining them based
on the assumption that some would contain information on terrorist activity.
The IDF sources explained that because various PA institutions, including civil
authorities, were involved in terror, some of the computers had indeed included valuable
intelligence. However, the sources admitted that in many cases the searches had turned
into systematic vandalism, without any justification.
"It was not an order from above," said a senior source, "but that's how it
was understood in the field. The infantry, both the conscripts and the reservists who
accompanied the intelligence teams, understood that they were allowed - or indeed expected
- to destroy the property in the offices."
"The result," the source continued, "was damage running into hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Soldiers smashed computer monitors and destroyed keyboards. There
were places in which bank branches were destroyed and automatic tellers were raided. In
some cases, theft accompanied the vandalism. It was significant damage, widespread and
totally illogical."
The source said that while the extent of the damage was clear, the IDF had yet to
undertake a serious investigation into what had taken place.
A reserve officer who played a senior role in the Ramallah area said that he believed most
of the damage had been done during hunts for wanted men and munitions. "We found
weapons and sabotage equipment in what were seemingly civil institutions," the
officer said. "There were instances in which soldiers broke open doors because nobody
was inside. Clearly there was looting, but most of the damage was done during the hunt for
people and weapons. This was war, not a lab operation."
A veteran intelligence officer said the explanation for the IDF's behavior was to be found
in the difference between the fighting in the territories and previous wars in Lebanon and
the Sinai. "Those were clear-cut enemy territories; and it was clear to the
intelligence units that they would take everything because everything was military
equipment. In the Palestinian Authority, everything was mixed up - civilian, security,
terrorist. It is very difficult to make the distinction. Some of the damage was done by
the unit, and some by other soldiers, at their own initiative."
Reservists who served in the Ramallah and Bethlehem areas said they had witnessed many
instances of deliberate damage caused by soldiers to Palestinian property. Some also spoke
of cases of looting. "The extent of the looting is much greater than could have been
expected in advance," a senior legal source told Ha'aretz. "This is an ugly and
serious phenomenon."
Some cases involved two or three soldiers who had worked together, the source said, noting
that reservists as well as conscripts had been involved. Some of the suspects were combat
troops, the source added; and in certain cases, military defenders had reservations about
representing suspects due to the nature of the crimes.
Most of the incidents are expected to end in plea bargains, with the convicted serving
prison sentences. The majority of the looting took place in Ramallah, though there were
reports of instances in Bethlehem as well. Most of the cases are in Central Command's JAG
unit.
A scarred Nablus
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org
by
Mohammed Daraghmeh
April 24, 2002
"WATER, WATER.we only want a little water for the thirsty children at home,"
said Hajja Badriya Sufyan to a number of journalists able to get to her house on Nablus'
Jerusalem Street. That was on April 11, the eighth day of the Israeli invasion of the city
and the strictly imposed curfew.
"We are 23 people in this house and the water has run out. There isn't even enough to
wet our throats," she went on. Her eyes pled.
Hajja Badriya had prepared for the expected invasion. She had stored extra water in every
available container in the house. But she hadn't counted on the demolition of a nearby
apartment building and its 15 homes on the fourth day of the invasion. When the residents
fled the Israeli demolition, Hajja Badriya took in three more families. The additional
people in her house quickly finished her carefully reserved water. They then resorted to
searching the streets for pipes broken by passing Israeli tanks.
Fifty-five-year-old Sukayna Hindiya, owner of the apartment building, said the soldiers
held guns to the residents to get them to leave their homes. They were held more than 200
meters away as missiles were fired at the building, then explosives set to complete the
destruction. Despite watching the walls cave in on top of their furniture and personal
belongings, the residents said they felt lucky compared to other Palestinians whose homes
were demolished over their heads.
Three families from the Shuabi clan were nearly wiped out when Israeli forces bulldozed
their house without warning. Among the mangled steel and broken concrete, 49-year-old
Sameer Shuabi, his wife Nabila, who was seven months pregnant, and their three children
Abdallah, 8, Azzam, 6, and Anas, 4, all lost their lives. Also among those buried alive
were his aging 85-year-old father, Omar, and his sisters Fatemah, 55, and Abeer, 36.
The Shabi family lived in the Qasbah area of Nablus, in the western end of the
neighborhood that saw the fiercest fighting. Due to the curfew, no search for the family
commenced until eight days after their home lay in ruins. Two elderly Palestinians,
Sameer's uncle and his wife, were found and pulled barely alive from the rubble.
Omar Shuabi's son, Mahmoud, lives in another Nablus neighborhood. He was told of the
demolition of his family home, but was unable to get to the area until eight days later
when the curfew was lifted for three hours for the first time.
"I was not able to call my family or their neighbors, either, because the phone lines
were cut," says Mahmoud. "People were telling me that the soldiers were taking
people out of their homes before demolishing them, so I was confident that they were all
right." But when he began searching in vain for his family, it slowly dawned on him
that they likely were still inside.
Mahmoud began a race against time to save the family of 10. He called everyone he knew who
might be able to help him in the rescue work. For 16 hours, the search went on, despite a
renewed Israeli curfew in the city. Only two members of the family were miraculously
pulled out alive.
It was during the rescue work, as Palestinians pulled the bodies of women, children and
elderly people out of the Shuabi home, that United States Secretary of State Colin Powell
announced the postponement of a scheduled Ramallah meeting with Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat, after a bombing operation in Jerusalem on April 13. This family, in
particular, took the news bitterly.
"The murder of my family under the rubble of their home and the way that the world
handled this ugly crime only proves once again that only God will help us," says
Mahmoud.
"If Jews had been killed in this fashion, the world would have been turned upside
down. But because the victims are Palestinian, the world is silent."
Although most of the houses slated for demolition by Israeli forces were evacuated
beforehand, the Shuabi family was given no warning. The neighbors believe that the
Israelis had begun to demolish one part of the building, when the second half collapsed on
its own.
"But this does not free the soldiers from their murder - it only reinforces it,"
says Mahmoud, emphatically. "Why didn't the [Israeli] authorities inform the
Palestinian side that the building had collapsed so a search for survivors could
begin?"
Some homes that were dynamited also took surrounding homes with them. The collapse of the
seven-story Hindiya building overlooking the Balata Refugee Camp sent tremors throughout
the entire neighborhood, evacuated by soldiers prior to the demolition. The building
collapsed over a local car dealership, damaging 24 shiny new Subaru automobiles set out
for display.
Initial findings show that the occupying Israeli soldiers demolished dozens of homes and
buildings in Nablus City and its refugee camps, expelling the residents that had sought
shelter inside during the invasion that began on April 3. Schools, shops, archeological
sites, courtyards and markets were also targeted in the seemingly systematic Israeli
campaign.
The Hadadin market - one of Nablus' most famous souqs - has been erased from existence and
the majority of stores and facilities in the commercial district have also been ruined.
The Fatimiya preparatory school for girls, the Ras Al Ein kindergarten and the Khadra'
mosque were also demolished by rampaging Israeli troops.
But bulldozers were not the only menace to life and livelihood during the Israeli
invasion. A number of people were killed in buildings and homes that collapsed over their
heads after they were hit by missiles or shells fired from helicopters and tanks.
Fifty-six-year-old Sidqiya Okasha was killed and three members of her family injured when
a missile from a helicopter overhead hit their home in the Old City of Nablus on the very
first day of the invasion. Reports continue to circulate of people under the rubble of
houses rocketed in the first six days of the Israeli attack.
One man in the Ras Al Ein neighborhood says he and his family ran terrified from their
home when they saw parts of it collapsing inwards under the weight of an encroaching
Israeli bulldozer. Adnan Qassem, 45, and his wife and children fled.
"When the driver of the bulldozer saw us running out, he reversed a few meters so we
could pass. Then he finished his mission," remembers Qassem. The entire front wall of
the house was torn down and its furniture and belongings sit exposed to the skies, now
covered in dirt and dust.
Those who lost their homes were then forced to find refuge elsewhere. On the fifth day of
the invasion - the fourth in the full-scale attack on the Old City - dozens of bodies had
accumulated in a mosque turned into an impromptu emergency center. Other corpses lay
strewn in the Old City streets and alleys as the Israeli army occupying the area denied
access to medical teams from the Red Crescent and International Red Cross. Tens of wounded
went untended, some 20 of these described as critically injured.
Only on that day was a group of foreign journalists allowed to enter the Old City, where
they were met by the smell of bodies decaying in the mosque and in the streets, images
reminiscent of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon's refugee camps 20 years ago.
Four men in the early throes of death writhed in one part of the mosque. Tens of others
were wounded with injuries ranging from light to critical, said doctor Zuhra Al Wawi, who
was supervising the center.
Inside the mosque, renamed the "field hospital" during the siege, the wounded
told reporters how they had been subjected to fierce shelling and firing from helicopters
and tanks.
"They were spraying down death from their heavy weaponry," said one young man
who had lost his left hand. Abed Taqtuq said he was hit while with friends in the Old
City. The bullet tore into his hand right above the wrist, severing it completely from his
body.
Those inside the mosque said that Israeli soldiers had just raided it only hours before
the reporters' arrival. The soldiers interrogated the wounded, beating them and
threatening them in the process. One injured man said a soldier placed his heavy boot on
his chest. "You will die here. We will not let you get to a hospital for
treatment," the soldier told him.
The 15 reporters were so moved by the horrendous tales told by the men, that they agreed
to escort them out of the mosque. Dying men were then carried out of the Old City on
stretchers and vegetable carts and on the shoulders of rescue workers. Decomposing bodies
were also removed from the area. The day before, 14 people killed in the fighting had been
buried in the only resting place available - a nearby garden.
Published 24/4/02
© 2002 Palestine Report
Operation Destroy the Data
By
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz
April 24, 2002
It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF
troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer
terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing,
disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops
gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned,
torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed
furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy
floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters
full of hatred, but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read
like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the
organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.
It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is
immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent
thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or
trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their
country.
These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the
Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the
data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to
developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water
conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private
commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets
for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.
The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and there, a photo
of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find
a few seconds to report on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a
distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or
reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one
office.
The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and video cameras -
private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak to impose discipline on their
soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic
destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or
soldiers.
Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist
infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic,
commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted
men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the
Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and
the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers
would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without
opening them.
This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic
urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to
vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian
society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the
result of permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order - or wink -
come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier? Was it from the headquarters
of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the general in
command of the Central Command or from general headquarters?
Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the
field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy
Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for
independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to
think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the
raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has
been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing
that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific
as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.
(c) Copyright 2002 Ha'aretz Daily
The Real Aim
by
Uri Avnery
27.4.02
The real aim of "Operation Defensive Shield" was not to "destroy the
infrastructure of terrorism".
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid
after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on
the bandwagon of President Busch's "war against international terrorism". Under
the umbrella of "destroying the infrastructure of terrorism" one can do
practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism", he
would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of
achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position
of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the
Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian
territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon's aim. His program is
far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their
governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as
he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out
of the country altogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the
real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews.
It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of
"ethnic cleansing".
When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured
as a man determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism
as a means to achieve quite different aims.
No more.
Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the
military commander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for
myself. I visited the Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed. Take for example,
the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposing building, probably
going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European and oriental styles. In
front of it there was a rose garden - "was", because a tank has crisscrossed it,
for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To
teach them a lesson.
On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was
total. The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the
papers strewn around, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just
plain vandalism. The money in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers
dispersed. But when one looked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the
hard disks were taken from the computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty
shells remained. All the important contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of
pupils, examination results, lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian
school system.
The Ministry of Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all the
information, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics
of the hospitals had been taken.
Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these two
ministries - Education and Health - had been functioning well. They have been utterly
destroyed. This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the
information pertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure,
car tests and drivers' licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.
The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of
bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is
obvious: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to
push it back with one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the
primitive society of Turkish times. This is true for the civil society, and even more so
for the security system. The headquarters of the security services were destroyed, files
burned, computers crushed, the information concerning armed underground organizations and
all other details pertaining to the war against terrorism were obliterated. There is no
better evidence of the aims of this operation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of
organized Palestinian society.
By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the
center of Ramallah - from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged
headquarters of Yasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and
not a single sign of hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference
between the Israeli peace camp and those who are responsible for this brutal attack. Here,
perhaps, lies the only glimmer of hope.
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