Antony Loewenstein

The following article, which appeared in Israel’s right-wing paper Maariv, was translated by Keren Rubinstein and distributed by the Middle East News Service. The author is the editor of the arts and culture supplement:

With baton in hand: that’s us

Shai Lahav

The wide public debate about violence has ignored one of the most basic and self-evident causes for this blow: military service

I remember the first time I shattered someone’s bones with a baton. February 1988, Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza. As usual, we were in a rank laneway, chasing a boy who’d thrown stones at us. But unusually, we also caught him. And he paid for all the others.

I could tell you with satisfaction that I was one of the last soldiers who ran towards him to “teach him a lesson”. That I raised the baton only after I sensed my platoon commander’s fierce gaze. That I gave the weakest blows I could deliver. All true. But the fact is that a month later I was one of the first ones to hit. And I don’t really remember feeling bad about it. In fact, I didn’t feel anything.

There’s something amazing to me in the way that the wide public debate about violence has ignored one of the most basic and accepted causes for this blow. For over twenty years now, hundreds of thousands of Israeli men have been made to use physical force against civilians as part of their military service. They hit, curse, handcuff and humiliate. All according to orders. At the age of 21 they dispose of their kitbag at the reception base, but not of the evil genie that’s now been released from the bottle.

Because that is the nature of violence. The moment it can break free, only Aladdin – or Allah – can get it back. When you hand a baton over to an 18 year old kid, one who until that moment witnessed beatings only on “Starsky and Hutch”, and tell him that using it is not only legitimate but essential, you’ve opened up – for the rest of his life – the option of using violence as a way to solve problems. It probably won’t turn him to a serial killer, but it will increase the likelihood that he will serve the bastard who dared cut ahead of him in line, with a ringing slap to the face.

IDF platoon at a Peruvian market

Here’s a sample of my last claim. In 1995 I travelled through South America. Among the hordes of Israelis moving along the continent, one group, numbering 15 friends, stood out. It was called “the platoon”, and was indeed a genuine paratroopers’ unit, whose members flew to Argentina a second after their discharge. They took with them their commander, their discipline, and their memories from the Nablus Casbah.

One spring day, in a farmers market near the city of Cusco in Peru, I encountered them in action. They were haggling with the local vendors over the price of various souvenirs, ridiculously cheap in Israeli terms. At a certain point, one of them “caught” one of the hawkers telling a lie. Instinctively, he grabbed the Peruvian’s collar, pinning him to his own body, and started shouting in a tone I was quite familiar with.

As far as he was concerned, in that moment he was in the Territories, and the hawker was a Palestinian trouble maker. It took exactly a minute for all his fellow platoon members to pulverise most of the stalls, in a brief, efficient and spine-tingling display of violence. They were salt of the earth. Paratroopers, with their beautiful locks and looks. True to the stereotype, some of them were also kibbutz members. But their released genies turned them into animals.

I am not saying that the occupation is the only cause of violence in Israeli society. I’m also not claiming that this use of power, as part of military service, was always unjustified. After all, it was the Palestinian leadership that instigated an Israeli confrontation with their civilians. But nevertheless this is a central parameter in our society becoming violent .

Anyone wondering “what have we come to?” should recall 8 December 1987, the first day of the first Intifada, and be rewarded with a blunt and painful clue. Like an IDF baton.

Here’s what the global media has reported over the last days:

Argentina expressed outrage Friday over Iran’s nomination of a man wanted in connection to a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing that killed 85 people as the next defense minister.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tapping Ahmad Vahidi for the post is “an affront to Argentine justice and the victims of the terrorist attack” on the Jewish community center, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

News of the nomination was received “with grave concern and deserves the most energetic condemnation of the Argentine government,” it said.

In 2007, Interpol issued what it calls a Red Notice on Vahidi, a former head of Al Quds, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Interpol under the notice distributed Argentina’s arrest warrant for Vahidi to member countries.

The July 9, 1994 bombing leveled the seven-floor Argentine Jewish Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding 300. No single individual has ever been convicted for the bombing.

Here’s Gareth Porter in the Nation in 2008 questioning the ongoing allegations:

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration’s pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush’s latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city’s Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina “serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies.”

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization’s “red list” for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration’s manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.

Uri Avnery on the increasingly fascist rumblings of the Israeli political elite. This is what Zionists the world over are supporting when they refuse to criticise the obvious signs: Israel in 2009 is a state largely run by criminals, racists and quasi-fascists:

My first thought was: Good God, this man was responsible for the lives of our soldiers!

The second thought was: What’s the big surprise? You always knew what kind of person he was! After all, during his years as the army’s Chief of Staff he quietly supported the setting up of “illegal” settlement outposts all over the West Bank!

The third thought: And this person is now Vice Prime Minister and a member of the “Sextet” – the six ministers who constitute the real government of Israel.

THE OCCASION for these frightening thoughts was the participation of Moshe (“Bogie”) Ya’alon in a gathering of the Jewish Leadership Faction. “Peace Now is a virus,” he said there. And not only they. “All the media” are also a virus. They influence the public discourse “in a distorted manner, a lying manner”. The virus also includes “the elite” in general.

In addition, the “politicians” are to blame. “Every time the politicians bring in the dove of peace, we, the army, have to clean up after it.”

His summing up: “The Jews have a right to settle in any place throughout Eretz Israel.” And if this upsets the Americans, Ya’alon has a ready answer: “I am not afraid of the Americans!”

All this was said a few days after Ya’alon paid a well publicized visit to the occupied territories, accompanied by Shas leader Eli Yishai and several other ministers of the extreme Right. This band visited the settlement outposts, which the Israeli government long ago promised the Americans to dismantle, and expressed total opposition to their evacuation. They concluded their visit in Homesh, the West Bank settlement evacuated by Ariel Sharon in the course of the “disengagement”. Ya’alon demanded the resettlement of the place.

THESE TONES come together in a frightening melody, a tune we know all too well. It is anthem of fascism.

The New York Times continues its investigations of the rogue military contractor Blackwater, loved by the American establishment:

Despite publicly breaking with an American private security company in Iraq, the State Department continues to award the company, formerly known as Blackwater, more than $400 million in contracts to fly its diplomats around Iraq, guard them in Afghanistan, and train security forces in antiterrorism tactics at its remote camp in North Carolina.

As somebody who visits the West Bank weekly with Israeli peace group Ta’ayush to protect Palestinians from Israeli soldiers and mad settlers, American-Israeli Joseph Dana knows what he’s talking about:

I do not think that one can act morally as a soldier in Israel’s occupation. One is forced to do too many immoral acts day in day out.

The National reports on the ways in which Gazans struggle to maintain a sense of normality:

There’s an unexpected expanse of green a little up a side street in the Tel al-Hawa district of Gaza City that provides welcome relief to the eyes amid the concrete buildings, the grey rubble and the potholed streets that otherwise form Gaza’s streetscape.

The Al Shams Sports Club’s first team was being put through its paces on this green, the club’s football pitch, on a hot, sticky afternoon in early August. Around the pitch several younger boys were either watching or chatting among themselves near the clubhouse.

Many of them are students in the club’s private football school, the first of its kind in Gaza, which was launched in May. About 140 boys from 6 to 16 have now joined the school that is an attempt, in the words of Eyad Si-Salem, one of the coaches and a club administrator, to offer some options for Gaza’s youth.

“There is a lack of everything in Gaza,” said Mr Si-Salem, a former football player. “Sport and football is important. It’s the most popular sport in Palestine, it is thrilling and it teaches leadership, discipline and teamwork.”

The reality of Jewish fascism in Israel isn’t a fringe mentality; it’s a growing minority of Jews who despise Arabs and believe Israel is given to us by God. Fat chance.

I spent a great deal of time observing these people during my recent visit to Israel and the West Bank. It is a reality that most Diaspora Jews prefer to ignore. This is Israel in 2009; not democracy, but hatred and bigotry.

Yesterday’s Australian newspaper featured this essay on Jewish fascists illegally throwing Palestinians out of their homes in Jerusalem and a military and judicial elite that supports it:

It’s four o’clock on Sunday afternoon in April and Nasser Jaber is standing in an Israeli courtroom.  His task, on the face of it, is straightforward: to prove to the judge that the house he was born in 38 years ago – the house his grandparents moved into in the 1930s – is his.  But there are more recent claimants to the house in Jerusalem’s Old City, and they believe they answer to a higher authority than title deeds or tenure.

Jaber had moved in with his parents while his house was being renovated, but made the mistake of leaving the property unattended.  At 2.30am on April 2, four days after he’d left, Jaber’s next-door neighbours decided to take advantage of the Palestinian travel agent’s absence.  They were armed Jewish settlers, hard-liners who rely on the Old Testament rather than documents of state to argue their right to live in certain sacred parts of Israel.  They forced open his front door, changed the locks. and are now refusing to leave.

When alerted to the break in, Jaber contacted the Israeli police, expecting they would evict the settlers.  Instead, the police took them food and supplies, and later that day helped another settler to move in. Jaber and some other neighbours had formed a blockade to try and deny the settlers access, but when the police called Jaber over to talk to them, other officers helped the newcomer enter.

A reader sent me this June report on Hamas from the United States Institute of Peace. It’s the kind nuanced understanding of political realities in the region that is sorely lacking from the vast bulk of the establishment:

Discussion in the United States regarding Hamas is usually framed by two somewhat contradictory assumptions: (1) that Hamas is ideologically incapable of evolving to accept the existence of Israel and (2) that isolation and strong pressure are the only tools that may force it to recognize Israel. This controversial report challenges both assumptions. On the one hand, the authors make a case for recognizing that Hamas has already, in certain respects, changed and has sent signals regarding its possible coexistence with Israel. On the other hand, they conclude that Hamas might never “recognize” Israel in the conventional sense and that, since Hamas apparently cannot be eliminated, attempts to engage it must take into account its commitment to the strictures of shari’a.

In other words, the report attempts to inject some gray areas into an issue that is often framed only in black and white terms. In a unique approach, the authors do not ask us to necessarily change our conclusions about the value of such engagement. Instead, they invite us to reevaluate our assumptions by providing a new prism through which to analyze Hamas. The authors themselves–one Jewish and the other Muslim–have very different lenses on this conflict. They disagree on the definition of the conflict and have differing views of how it can be resolved, but they share the goal of providing a framework for understanding Hamas, its motivations, and its selfconcept, and of presenting alternative criteria for interpreting the signals that it sends. The authors neither endorse Hamas’s actions or positions nor advocate taking Hamas’s claims at face value, and they certainly do not argue that Israel, the United States, and the West should drop demands for changes by Hamas. On the contrary, they offer a framework to help policymakers develop and deliver such demands more effectively, a framework that takes into account how Hamas views itself and how many in the Muslim world understand the movement. With U.S. allies such as Egypt and Jordan pressing for a Palestinian unity government inclusive of Hamas, it is imperative to consider what kinds of conditions and safeguards would contribute to a successful peace process rather than derail it.

Hamas recently premiered its first film in Gaza. Blogger Lina Al Sharif attended the screening and wrote the following observations:

It’s not the best movie I have seen, but it’s a movie from Gaza. Putting in consideration all the circumstances, the resources and facilities that are needed to produce a movie with such plot; the outcome is relatively good given the situation and the siege which has been imposed on Gaza for almost two and a half years now. The actors and the actresses are all from Gaza. Sadly, the same Resala report mentioned that four of the actors were actually killed in the recent war on Gaza. There were some troubles in the sound mixing; some of the dialogue was not audible along with the sound effect. Moreover, the performance of the actors was not that good.  Yet, the whole outcome must be appreciated as it came amid hard times Gaza is going through.

Barack Obama films a Ramadan message and tells the Muslim world that he cares deeply about Pakistan, Afghanistan and a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet again, this is effective PR dressed up as policy. Muslims across the globel aren’t going to be seduced by pretty words from the US President when Israel continues expanding settlements in the West Bank and killing innocents in Afghanistan with pilot-less drones.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong:

Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after Obama in a tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.

Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan – which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world – since the Islamic Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month’s sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.

In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales – giving a little reflection of the political mood.

Obama’s vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale marks a shift in the public mood in Egypt since the reign of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.

“We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him,” said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.

When I recently visited some of the major hospitals in Gaza I was told that life-saving medicines and equipment were not allowed into the Strip due to the Israeli and Egyptian led blockade. These are the results:

Arafat Hamdona, 20, has been confined to the cancer unit of al-Shifa, Gaza’s primary hospital, since he was diagnosed with maxillary skin tumors in June 2008. Red lesions protrude from his face, his features are distorted and his eyes swollen shut.

In April, Arafat was permitted to travel to Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem where he received three series of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. He was scheduled to return for further treatment, but has not been granted permission by the Israeli authorities to leave Gaza.

“He is only given pain killers,” said Arafat’s father, Faraj Hamdona, explaining that it is all al-Shifa has to offer.

According to a July 2009 report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Jerusalem, Gaza doctors and nurses do not have the medical equipment to respond to the health needs of the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip.

Medical equipment is often broken, lacking spare parts, or outdated.

WHO attributes the dismal state of Gaza’s healthcare system to the Israeli blockade of the territory, tightened in June 2007 after Hamas seized control. The poor organization of maintenance services in Gaza compounds the problem, reports WHO.

Who says the Israeli army isn’t the most moral, compassionate, cuddly and kindest outfit in the world?

Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi have decided to ease a series of restrictions on the Palestinian population during the month of Muslim month Ramadan, which begins Saturday. The soldiers were instructed to act respectfully towards the residents and refrain as much as possible from eating, drinking and smoking in public in front of the Palestinian population, particularly at crossings, during the fasting hours. According to the IDF, the ease of restrictions is part of a policy aimed at improving the fabric of life of West Bank’s population. During the month of Ramadan, the activity hours of crossings leading to the cities of Jenin and Ramallah will be extended until midnight every day. The rest of the checkpoints will operate as usual, for 24 hours a day.

Palestinians should really be grateful for being occupied.