AAARGH
This fiile contains:
Tanya Reinhart: Don't say you
did not know
ArIeh O'Sullivan: Nahshon
battalion ready for urban warfare
Israel accused, a BBC programme
Amira Hass: The mirror does
not lie
Nov. 2000
==============================
As the media keeps us busy with reports on cease-fire, peace initiatives, and 'reduction of violence', Israeli crimes in the occupied territories continue undisturbed. To understand the extent of these daily crimes we should look at the injuries, not just at the rapidly growing number of dead. On Friday, November 3rd, CNN reported a 'relative calm' in the territories. By afternoon that day there were 276 people injured (LAW report, Nov 3), and by the final count "Up to 452 Palestinians were hurt on Friday across the territories, according to the Red Crescent" ('ha'aretz', Nov 5). On Saturday, October 4th, as the the media covers in great length of Barak's "plea to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to return to the negotiating table and stop the Palestinian-Israeli bloodshed for the sake of peace" (AP), "another 153 were treated for injuries sustained in clashes with Israeli troops" ('ha'aretz', there), including "5 school children from Sa'ir (near Hebron) who are in extremely critical condition" (ADDAMEER - Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, Nov 4.). More than 7000 Palestinians are reported injured so far. Several Palestinian medical sources report that an alarming number of them are injured in the head or legs (knees), with carefully aimed shots, and, increasingly, live ammunition. (Dr. Jumana Odeh, Director, Palestinian Happy Child Center, Oct 24 report; LAW, November 2 report.) Many will not recover, or will be disabled for life. This pattern of injuries cannot be accidental. Dan Ephron, Boston Globe correspondent in Jerusalem reports (Nov 4) on the findings of the Physicians for Human Rights delegation: "American doctors who examined Israel's use of force in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have concluded that Israeli soldiers appeared to be deliberately targeting the heads and legs of Palestinian protestors, even in non-life-threatening situations." Medical School doctors in the delegation explained that law enforcement officials worldwide are trained to aim at the chest in dangerous situations (since it is the largest target), and the fact that Palestinians were hit in the head and legs suggests that there was no life-threatening situation, soldiers had ample time, and were deliberately trying to harm unarmed people. In fact, the Israelis are not even trying to conceal their shooting strategies. Interviews like the following can be easily found in the Israeli media:
JERUSALEM (October 27) - "I
shot two people... in their knees. It's supposed to break their
bones and neutralize them but not kill them," says Sgt. Raz,
a sharpshooter from the Nahshon battalion. A common practice is
shooting a rubber coated metal bullet straight in the eye -- a
little game of well-trained soldiers, which requires maximum precision.
Reports on eye injuries keep coming daily. "On October 11,
El Mizan Diagnostic Hospital in Hebron reported treating 11 Palestinians
for eye injuries, including 3 children. El Nasir Ophthalmic Hospital
in Gaza has treated 16 people for eye injuries, including 13 children.
Nine of them lost one of their eyes". (LAW report, Oct 19).
"From 29 September to 25 October 2000, Jerusalem's St. John
Eye Hospital has treated 50 patients for eye-injuries". (LAW,
Nov 2, '...Eye Injuries'). Contrary to the standard 'clashes'
reports the victims are not just demonstrators. Here is just one
story, investigated by LAW (there). Maha Awad, a 36 years old
woman lives with her family in Al Bireh (near Ramallah) in a flat
that faces the Jewish settlement of Psagot. "On Wednesday
night, 4 October 2000, she was at home... She recalls that: 'At
about 9 pm, we heard shooting in our neighborhood; it was intensive
random shooting. We did not know what was going on but we were
very scared.I closed my room and went to the balcony in order
to shut the door. At that moment I was hit in my right eye by
a bullet, which entered through the glass door of the balcony'."
"Maha was, however, not the only person of the family to
be seriously injured that night. After taking her to hospital,
her 54-year-old brother, who was visiting from the United States,
went back to their home to get some clothes for Maha. When he
went to see the spot where Maha had been shot, he himself was
shot in the stomach." It is hard to avoid the feeling of
some sort of a hunting game, played cold bloodily, by well trained
sharpshooters with advanced equipment. Stray bullets do not hit
so many people precisely in the eye head, or knee. The Israeli
army prepared carefully for the present events: "Established
just over a year ago specifically to deal with unrest in the West
Bank...The IDF has trained four battalions for low-intensity conflict,
and Nahshon is the one specializing in urban warfare. Its troops
train in mock Palestinian villages constructed in two IDF bases."
(Jerusalem Post, Arieh O'Sullivan,Oct 27.00). Specially trained
Israeli units, then, aim, shoot and hit the target in a calculated
manner: Cripple, but keep the statistics of dead low. This is
reported openly (and quite proudly) in the Israeli media. The
same Jerusalem Post article explains that "the overall IDF
strategy is to deprive the Palestinians of the massive number
of casualties the army maintains Palestinians want in order to
win world support and consolidate their fight for independence.
'We are very much trying not to kill them...' says Lt.-Col. Yoram
Loredo, commander and founder of the Nahshon battalion."
The reason is clear enough: Massive numbers of dead Palestinians
every day cannot go unnoticed even by the most cooperative Western
media and governments. Barak was explicit about this. "The
prime minister said that, were there not 140 Palestinian casualties
at this point, but rather 400 or 1,000, this... would perhaps
damage Israel a great deal." (Jerusalem Post, Oct 30). With
a stable average of five casualties a day, they believe that Israel
can continue 'undamaged' for many more months. In a world so used
to horrors, many feel that 180 dead in a month is sad and upsetting,
but it is not yet an atrocity that the world should unite to stop.
The 'injured' are hardly reported; they 'do not count' in the
dry statistics of tragedy. Who will pay attention to their fate
after the injury, in overcrowded and under equipped hospitals?
Who will stop to think how many of them will die slowly, from
their wounds, or remain disabled, blind or maimed for life? Or
to think about their chances to survive the siege and starvation
inflicted on their people?. Never did Israel dare to respond daily
with such brutal massive force to demonstrators throwing stones.
In the whole six years of the previous Intifada (1987-1993), there
were 18.000 Palestinian injuries. Now in one month we are already
at 7000. What we witness is a new phase. Israel started launching
a systematic and preplanned destruction of the Palestinian infra-structure,
towns, and life The Israeli army provoked and enlarged the escalation
into firearms, by its massive offensive against angry demonstrators.
Under the circumstances of fire (and often with no fire pretext
at all), residential neighborhoods are bombarded almost every
night from helicopters and tanks, using missiles, machine guns
and 'precision' weapons, while the army calls on residents to
evacuate "for their own protection". The settlers are
given free hand to attack, shoot people and destroy property.
In Hebron, a particularly massive Israeli attack has been launched
in what looks like an attempt to enlarge the Jewish quarters.
All combined, there is an enormous pressure on residents of many
areas bordering with Israeli settlements to evacuate, enabling
enlargement of the land seized already by Israel. Indeed, appropriation
of land takes place every day, bit by bit (See Katriel, Indymedia/Israel
Oct 30). Desperate Palestinian reports on all this and much more
keep coming every day. It is up to us to choose to know. Not long
ago, the Western world was shocked and angered at Milosevic atrocities
against the Kosovo Albanians, which were described as ethnic cleansing.
But What Israel has started executing is incomparably worse. When
faced with terrorist attacks (by KLA) on Serbian institutes and
civilians in Kosovo, Milosevic did retaliate brutally, using,
no doubt, 'excessive force'. His acts were criminal. But he did
not send Apache helicopters to bombard residential areas, as does
Israel. He did not put the Kosovar towns under siege; he did not
use missiles from tanks, and he did not send snipers to wound
and kill en-mass. Israel should be sanctioned.
Znet, Mercredi 8 novembre 2000.
++++++++++++++++++++
Israel Accused is a BBC Correspondent programme, and will
be shown at 1850 GMT on Saturday 4th November on BBC Two.
Khiam prison was a detention and interrogation centre during the
years of the Israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon. From 1985
until the Israeli withdrawal this May, thousands of Lebanese were
held in Khiam without trial. Most of them were brutally tortured
- some of them died.
Israel has always sought to escape responsibility for what was
done in Khiam; Israel Accused asks where the blame for what Amnesty
International calls war crimes really lies.
To help secure its hold on Southern Lebanon, Israel armed and
financed a local Lebanese militia, the South Lebanon Army or SLA.
In theory the SLA was there to protect the interests of the Lebanese
community - in practice it did Israel's work by proxy. The SLA
provided Khiam's guards and interrogators.
Children tortured
Ali Kashmar was fourteen when arrested and detained in 1988. Although
he had voiced anti-Israeli opinions in school (his own father
was killed fighting the Israeli invasion ten years earlier) there
is no evidence to suggest that he was guilty of any crime.
Ali was tortured for eleven days and says he started making up
stories to please his interrogators. Ali Kashmar was kept in Khiam
for ten years. He grew up from a boy to a man within the prison
walls - without even a mirror to use as his appearance changed,
and spent time in solitary confinement. Ali was eventually released
after a decade as part of a hostage exchange -- fifty-five Khiam
prisoners and the bodies of 44 Lebanese were traded for the remains
of three Israeli soliders in 1998. Terribly damaged by his years
in Khiam, he is still fighting severe psychological difficulties
-- and there is nowhere in Lebanon that provides treatment for
this kind of trauma.
Ryadh Kalakesh was 17 when he was detained in Khiam. He comes
from a family that was deeply involved with the Islamic group
Hezbollah -- one of his brothers was a suicide bomber -- and he
was picked up by Israeli troops on a sweep through his village
in 1986.
Ryadh was tortured for eleven months, and gives a graphic account
of what it was like; the use of electric shocks administered through
wires attached to the finger tips or the genitals, the beatings,
the dousings with hot then cold water, and what was known as "the
pole", where prisoners - often after being striped naked
- were handcuffed and suspended for hours at a time.
Ryadh's brother Adel was detained in Khiam too; when Adel refused
to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear they hauled
in his wife Mona and tortured her so that he could hear her screams.
Mona suffered electric shocks -- through wires attached to her
nipples -- spent three months in solitary confinement and lost
her baby while she was in the prison.
There is a compelling body of evidence about Israel's involvement
in Khiam. [On se souviendra que le grand humaniste Bernard
Kouchner est venu visiter cette prison dans les années
80 et a déclaré que tout était normal, que
c'était une prison comme une autre.] Former detainees
all say that in the early days of Khiam's time as a detention
centre Israeli interrogators worked alongside their SLA counterparts,
and their evidence is corroborated by that of those guards who
worked in the prison.
In 1988 the Israel seems to have decided on a change of policy
in Khiam, and the Israeli presence in the gaol became less obvious.
But in a court case brought by Isreali human rights lawyers, the
Defence Ministry has admitted paying all the staff at the gaol,
training the interrogators and guards, and providing assistance
with lie detector tests.
Israel denied war crimes in Khiam
In May, when Israel withdrew from Lebanon, many of Khiam's guards
and interrogators fled across the border among the six thousand
members of the SLA and their families who took refuge in Israel,
living under Israeli government protection at the expense of the
Israeli taxpayer.
No one from the Israeli government was willing to agree to an
interview. When pressed to admit Israeli responsibility for the
gaol, a man who commanded Israeli forces during the late 1980s
finally concedes, "maybe".
Broadcast in the midst of one of the gravest Middle East crises
of the past decade, Israel Accused is a timely reminder that there
is still unfinished business from Israel's recent past.
This week, military prosecutor, Riad Talih demanded the death
penalty for 11 former SLA officials who worked at the Khiam camp,
and who will be tried in absentina.
Reporter: Edward Stourton
BBC News | Friday, 3 November, 2000, 18:04 GMT
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 22:23:17 -0600
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/audiovideo/programmes/correspondent/newsid_1002000/1002463.stm
=====================
Haaretz Op Ed Wednesday, November 1, 2000
How perfectly natural that 40,000
persons should be subject to a total curfew for more than a month
in the Old City of Hebron in order to protect the lives and well-being
of 500 Jews. How perfectly natural that almost no Israeli mentions
this fact or, for that matter, even knows about it. How perfectly
natural that 34 schools attended by thousands of Palestinian children
should be closed down for more than a month and their pupils imprisoned
and suffocating day and night in their crowded homes, while the
children of their neighbors their Jewish neighbors, that is are
free to frolic as usual in the street among and with the Israeli
soldiers stationed there.How perfectly natural that a Palestinian
mother must beg and plead so that an Israeli soldier will allow
her to sneak through the alleyways of the open-stall marketplace
and obtain medication for her asthmatic children, or bread for
her family. (Sometimes Israeli soldiers do have the guts to disobey
orders, although, generally speaking, when encountering such situations,
they order the woman to return to her home.)
How perfectly understandable that the Israel Defense Forces is
seizing control of an ever-increasing number of rooftops atop
the homes of Palestinians in the Old City of Hebron and that Israeli
soldiers positioned on those rooftops from time to time open fire
on other Palestinians, while, down below, at street level, the
Jewish settlers are free to show over and over again at the expense
of the windshields, windows and tires of the parked cars of Palestinians
who's really the boss. How perfectly natural that a Muslim house
of prayer like the Ibrahim mosque should be shut down and declared
"off limits" to thousands of Muslim worshipers.
The ease with which a curfew has now been imposed on Hebron and
the perception of that curfew as a completely natural occurrence
are not the products of the past few weeks. (Incidentally, the
residents of the village of Hawara, in whose vicinity and on whose
lands the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar was built, have also been
placed under curfew; their curfew was imposed more than three
weeks ago.)
After the massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein in the Ibrahim
mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the ones who
were punished were the Palestinians, with the punishment taking
the form of curfews, closures, "disengagement," the
shutting-down of entire streets and the continual, hostile supervision
by Israeli soldiers and police officers. And there was an additional
punishment that was meted out to the Palestinians: economic disaster.
However, Hebron is only a microcosm, an illustration of the general
picture. The protracted curfew imposed on Hebron and the way that
this curfew has been accepted in Israeli eyes as such a natural
event convey, in a nutshell, both the entire story of the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian land in general and the essence of the
kind of Israeli thinking that has developed in the shadow of obvious
military superiority. The curfew in Hebron and the ease with which
it has been imposed only illustrate the entire story of discrimination
and uprooting that the Palestinians have suffered at the hands
of the Israelis a never-ending story that unfolded as far back
as the Oslo era and the period of the so-called "peace process."
Jews live in Hebron today either because of "ancestral rights"
or because they can show proof of Jewish ownership of a given
property in the not-too-distant past. It is so perfectly natural
that Jews should be able to live wherever they want in the Land
of Israel on both sides of the Green Line. It is so perfectly
natural that a Jew who was born in Tel Aviv should be able to
move to Hebron or to Yitzhar. And it is so perfectly natural that
Palestinians cannot enjoy that right and cannot move to Tel Aviv
or to Haifa even if their families own lands and houses there.
It is so perfectly natural that, to this very day, Israel is developing
and expanding the Jewish community in Hebron, just as Israel is
developing all the Jewish settlements in the territories. And
it is so perfectly natural that, to this very day, the Palestinians
must deal with various limitations imposed on any planned development
for their own communities, because most of the lands on the West
Bank which is their primary land reserve are under Israeli administrative
control. No, the Palestinians do not need the kind of leg-room
that Israelis do.
It is so perfectly natural that Palestinians have to obtain a
travel permit from the Israeli authorities (only a minority of
the applicants are granted the permit) in order to enter East
Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip, within the context of Israel's closure
policy, which was launched in 1991 and which continues until this
very day. On the other hand, Jews are free to travel from the
West Bank to Israel and back, using well-built highways that have
been constructed on lands that have been expropriated from Palestinian
villages.
During the summers in Hebron, sometimes days, even weeks go by
without running water in the faucets of Palestinian homes. On
the other hand, the Jewish neighbors of Palestinian Hebronites
in the Old City of Hebron or in the nearby Jewish quarter of Kiryat
Arba experience no problems or shortages as far as their water
supply is concerned.
The same situation prevails in many Palestinian communities throughout
the West Bank: Whereas the Palestinians have no water, the residents
of the Jewish settlements enjoy green lawns. The reason is that
Israel has, in effect, imposed a quota on the water that the Palestinians
are allowed to consume that is, on the right to use water resources
that are supposed to be jointly accessible for both Israelis and
Palestinians in the single land they share.
This is a tale that must be recounted over and over again almost
to the point of exhaustion because it depicts a situation that
is so self-understood in the eyes of Israelis that they cannot
even see that there is any problem whatsoever. How perfectly easy
to regard the Palestinians as a violent and cruel people and to
ignore the cruelty that has accumulated day after day for 33 long
years and which has been directed during that long period toward
an entire community. This is the kind of cruelty that is characteristic
of every occupation regime. This is a cruelty that intensified
during the Oslo years because of the gap between the fine talk
about a "peace process" and the reality.
The curfew in Hebron and the fact that this curfew is regarded
as a completely natural phenomenon in the eyes of Israeli society
reflects the twisted sort of thinking that developed in the minds
of Israelis during the Oslo years. According to this warped thinking,
the Palestinians would accept a situation of coexistence in which
they were on an unequal footing vis-a-vis the Israelis and in
which they were ranked as persons who were entitled to less, much
less, than the Jews. However, in the end, the Palestinians were
not willing to live with this arrangement.
The new Intifada, which displays the characteristics of both a
popular uprising and a quasi-military one, is a final attempt
to thrust a mirror in the face of Israelis and to tell them: "Take
a good look at yourselves and see how racist you have become.
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/htmls/kat11_4.htm
L'adresse électronique de ce document est:http://aaargh-international.org/fran/actu/actu00/doc2000/tireurs.html
Ce texte a été
affiché sur Internet à des fins purement éducatives,
pour encourager la recherche, sur une base non-commerciale et
pour une utilisation mesurée par le Secrétariat
international de l'Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits
de Guerre et d'Holocauste (AAARGH). L'adresse électronique
du Secrétariat est <[email protected]>.
L'adresse postale est: PO Box 81475, Chicago, IL 60681-0475, USA.
Afficher un texte sur le Web équivaut à mettre un document sur le rayonnage d'une bibliothèque publique. Cela nous coûte un peu d'argent et de travail. Nous pensons que c'est le lecteur volontaire qui en profite et nous le supposons capable de penser par lui-même. Un lecteur qui va chercher un document sur le Web le fait toujours à ses risques et périls. Quant à l'auteur, il n'y a pas lieu de supposer qu'il partage la responsabilité des autres textes consultables sur ce site. En raison des lois qui instituent une censure spécifique dans certains pays (Allemagne, France, Israël, Suisse, Canada, et d'autres), nous ne demandons pas l'agrément des auteurs qui y vivent car ils ne sont pas libres de consentir.
Nous nous plaçons sous
la protection de l'article 19 de la Déclaration des Droits
de l'homme, qui stipule:
ARTICLE 19
<Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion
et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être
inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher,
de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de
frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque
moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme,
adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de
l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.