Israeli 'restraint' still means terror for the Palestinians Curfews, shootings and house demolitions happen daily
The Guardian
August 9, 2002
By Jonathan Steele in JeninIt is hard to know which is more shocking: the mound of rubble in the centre of Jenin, which local residents call "ground zero", or the hole in Gaza city where an aircraft dropped a one-tonne bomb and flattened a house. The aftermath of the two most heavily debated episodes in Israel's latest war has been captured on scores of video clips but no preparation can prevent a wave of awe and anger from flooding over you at the scene - awe at the destructive power of modern weapons, anger at the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.
The Jenin havoc took place over 15 days in April. Homes were first hit at random from helicopters and tanks with fire that, by the nature of its heaviness, could not be targeted accurately. After 13 Israeli soldiers died in an ambush, army bulldozers systematically levelled the area, crushing around 250 buildings, in some cases with their occupants inside. In Gaza last month the destruction took less than 15 seconds. Learning that Salah Shehada, the military leader of the militant Hamas group, was inside a building, an Israeli air force commander dispatched an F-16 to demolish it, even though it must have been clear that a one-tonne bomb on an apartment block at night was likely to kill everyone asleep. Nine children and five adults died, as well as Shehadeh.
After the recent UN report on Jenin and other West Bank cities the Israeli government's defenders have made great play of the word "massacre". They leapt on the fact that the report did not use the word and cited a total of 22 dead civilians rather than 500, as some Palestinian leaders had claimed. The notion of massacre is relative. In Kosovo and Chechnya the deaths of two dozen innocent people in a single military operation were often described as massacres. But the key criticism of Israel in the UN report on Jenin was not a matter of semantics nor the issue of how many civilians died. It was Israel's comprehensive violation of the laws of war.
The report pointed out that Israel is a contracting party to the Geneva convention, under which the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are "protected persons". They may not be subjected to "humiliating or degrading treatment or acts of collective punishment or reprisals". Their property may not be destroyed unless it is "rendered absolutely necessary by military operations".
The UN criticised the protracted curfews and, in Gaza's case, the border closures imposed by Israel on Palestinian cities which have blocked medical supplies, ruined the Palestinian economy and exacerbated poverty. It condemned the vandalisation of schools and government buildings by Israeli troops. It pointed out that, although Jenin was the focus of its inquiry, Nablus suffered more hardship and death during Israel's offensive. In 18 days of fighting, around 50 civilians died in Nablus while Israel lost four soldiers. More homes were wrecked in Nablus, although the area of destruction was not so compact as in Jenin.
Israeli leaders seem to have modified their strategy in the light of the international criticism of their behaviour in Jenin in April and the bombing of the house in Gaza city. In the newspaper Ha'aretz, the analyst Amir Oren wrote this week that the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the top brass are adopting a new policy of "restraint" in place of their previous tactic of immediate, costly and escalated responses to suicide attacks.
They are said to be waiting for the coming American war to remove Saddam Hussein, a new and more moderate leadership to replace Yasser Arafat and the completion of a security fence between Israel and the central part of the West Bank. In the meantime they will hold back from massive actions, provided the level of Palestinian terror attacks remains "tolerable". This is an undefinable and volatile concept, Oren conceded, and although the Israeli public's tolerance level today is much higher than it was a year ago, it could change suddenly. Another massive suicide bomb could produce demands for heavy reprisals again.
If this is the latest Israeli military spin, the reality for Palestinians is that even "restraint" by the Israeli army is enough to make their lives miserable. The army may no longer be destroying vast chunks of Palestinian cities, but it continues to terrify Palestinian civilians by indiscriminate shooting. One night last week I sat in a Palestinian home in Khan Yunis in the Gaza strip, while Israeli tanks lit up the night sky with flares. Prolonged bursts of machine-gun fire sent bullets flying only a few feet above the roofs of the city. Terrified women and children hurried into the dark streets to seek shelter with relatives or neighbours further away from the source of the firing.
The army still sends tanks and troops into Palestinian towns for forays of several days, as it did in Jenin last week, or for a single night as it did twice in the northern part of the Gaza strip. Curfews are slapped on or lifted without notice, making life for all Palestinians unpredictable and humiliating. All except "humanitarian" movement between Palestinian towns on the West Bank is banned.
House demolitions as a collective punishment are being stepped up. While UN-funded bulldozers slowly cart away the rubble of Jenin's city centre, cautiously searching for the unexploded munitions which still lurk there, Israeli dynamite teams are at work in other parts of Jenin. We saw a three-storey building which had been blown up a few hours before the UN report was published. The army said troops had found explosives and other evidence that the building was "a bomb factory". The troops' dynamiting wrecked several nearby shops and flats. "We are tired and exhausted", said one desperate trader as he showed us the ruins of his shop. "This is the worst time in 35 years of the occupation." In other parts of the West Bank more than 20 homes have been blown up in the last seven days because they belonged to suicide bombers or their families.
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, took the Bush administration further into Sharon's grip this week by talking about the "so-called occupied territories". He seemed to justify Israel's tenure by arguing that Israel's neighbours jumped into war and "lost a lot of real estate because Israel prevailed". He used the outdated David and Goliath metaphor, describing Israel as a "toothpick that you can see three sides of from a high hotel". What he meant presumably was the Israel of 1967. The area which Israel occupies beyond the 1967 borders is illegally held and illegally treated. As long as the occupation continues, resistance in one form or another is bound to go on.