34 YEARS OF ISRAELI POLICY HAVE LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR ITS UNHOLY WAR IN THE WEST BANK AND GAZA

I am Jewish. I am a writer. From 1979 to 1989 I reported for THE VILLAGE VOICE, MOTHER JONES, INQUIRY and other US publications from Israel and the West Bank. During those years I witnessed on the ground the rapid growth of Israel's settlements and the seizure of Palestinian land and water for them: today over half the West Bank's resources now are in Israel's hands. (About a third of Gaza's resources have suffered the same fate.)

I conducted in-depth interviews with ultra-right-wing settlers and settler-leaders whose cry was: "Let them bow their heads, or let Israel expel them." I interviewed Palestinian villagers who had suffered settler vigilante actions and read accounts of these by Israeli- Jewish reporters of conscience in HA ARETZ and other Israeli papers. These vigilante actions ran the whole gamut: wanton destruction of property and crops, rampages through villages with cries of "Death to the Arabs" and smashing of car windows, casual in-the- street humiliation of Palestinian civilians, beatings, murder. Within Israel I witnessed the increasing polarization of Israeli society by the occupation; the growing, virulent racism of new generations. Take, for instance, the Moroccan Jews in Kiryat Shemona, members of Menachem Begin's voting base about whom I wrote for THE VILLAGE VOICE in 1982 and who most commonly told me, "The only good Arab is a dead Arab."
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We now arrive at the current nightmare. As I write, collective punishment is ratcheted up a thousand fold in full-blown war atrocities committed throughout the West Bank. Israel's war machine has moved into the northern West Bank as well as in Gaza, from which I received an American relief worker's e-mail this morning. For the past week my computer has delivered to me daily - even hourly - desperate e-mails begging for help from international human rights organizations. They plead with me and others in my list serves to call our congress people and senators, protest to the press. One writer, a university researcher by profession, describes looting by Israeli soldiers invading his home: "I had a little money (about 800 NIS) in the upper drawer of my desk which I got from the bank on Thursday when an invasion was expected . . . I found [the drawer] broken and the money gone." Another passage, from a different letter, reads: "Their 'visits' to our houses are no different from [visits by] gangsters. They went to . . . my very close neighbors' houses, they start by asking all of them to stay in one room with their faces against the wall, then they enter all rooms . . . go to the kitchen, collected all the food . . . and start eating it . . . the rest of the food they take . . . with them, they also take jewels, money and electronic equipment . . . Two of my neighbors have heart problems. The first thing they did when they knew about their sickness was to go and get their medicine and destroy it in front of their eyes." In London's THE INDEPENDENT Robert Fisk confirms, "The Israeli army . . . is proving once more - as it did in Lebanon - that it is not the 'elite' force it's cracked up to be. It is impossible to dismiss the widespread reports of looting from homes in Ramallah (not least because that is exactlywhat Israeli soldiers used to do in southern Lebanon in 1983); and that brave Israeli academic, Avi Schlaim, has himself charged Israel with extra-judicial killings in Ramallah."
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Now Sharon has more radical right wing support in his effort to destoy the Palestinians.

NRP to join government with Effi Eitam as new chairman

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With the NRP to his right

And as if that was not enough, along came Sharon's initiative to take the NRP into the government, as a direct response to Bush's speech and the decisions of the Beirut summit. This step can be seen as an expression of practical political considerations: the desire of the prime minister to guarantee his stay in power in light of the Labor Party's repeated threats to resign from the government.

And there is another way to understand it: It reflects his ideological perspectives. Sharon is declaring his preferences - the NRP to his right, with its new leader, who says that the existence of the two mosques on the Temple Mount is "a blight on the level of the state of the world, a point of chaos within the order of the world, and this point has a remedy, which will come, without a doubt."
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If it should pass that they destroy those mosques, we will be facing a nuclear holocaust.

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Unholy War: The Bethlehem bellringer, the doctor, the mother. The innocent keep on dying
At the end of a week when violence in the Middle East conflict has reached new, horrific heights, President Bush has asked Israel to hold its fire. Here, Robert Fisk explains why the call could in fact increase Israeli resolve to crush the Palestinians, and on the following pages we investigate the conflict's history

The Israeli army, meanwhile, is proving once more – as it did in Lebanon – that it is not the "elite" force it's cracked up to be. It is impossible to dismiss the widespread reports of looting from homes in Ramallah (not least because that is exactly what Israeli soldiers used to do in southern Lebanon in 1983); and that brave Israeli academic, Avi Shlaim, has himself charged Israel with extra-judicial killings in Ramallah.

Watching the Israelis in Ramallah and Bethlehem last week was a disturbing experience. They were undisciplined, firing like militiamen – the degree of fire control (or rather the lack of it) exercised by the average Israeli soldier and Palestinian gunman is almost exactly the same. Three times I watched Israeli tanks jam themselves into narrow streets so hopelessly that their crews had to emerge under fire from their hatches, jump on to the roadside and hand-signal the tank drivers to reverse their vehicle.

And of course, the innocent go on dying. The Bethlehem bell-ringer, the woman doctor in Jenin, the 14-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire in Tubas, the mother and son shot dead by Israeli bullets and left to rot on the floor of their home in Bethlehem beside their still-living relatives for 30 hours. Journalists and unarmed Western "peace" protesters who get in the Israeli army's way are gunned down or battoned or blasted with stun grenades. So much for those gentle souls who say that Gandhi-like peaceful protest is the way to end the Israeli occupation.
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The roots of conflict
The terrible history: how two tribes have fought to the death for land and dignity

The Israelis and Palestinians remain locked in one of history's longest lasting struggles. Bernard Wasserstein explains the complex chain of events that have led to today's blood feud

Zionism and Palestinian nationalism have mimicked each other down the decades. Each regards itself as a victim and draws from that self-image a solipsistic self-righteousness that is used to justify ruthless means. Each has resorted to terrorism and offences against human rights. At the heart of each is an obsessive national vision, born of nearly a century of struggle, and focused on land, security, and dignity. Each is now near the end of its tether.
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'Jews may not want to look at this'
Tuesday is Holocaust Day in Israel: and the anniversary of a 1948 massacre that triggered the Palestinian refugee crisis at the heart of today's conflict. Robert Fisk meets an Auschwitz survivor living at the site of the atrocity

For Givat Shaul used to be called Deir Yassin. And here it was, 54 years ago, that up to 130 Palestinians were massacred by two Jewish militias, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, as the Jews of Palestine fought for the independence of a state called Israel. The slaughter so terrified tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that they fled their homes en masse – 750,000 in all – to create the refugee population whose tragedy lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict today.

Back in 1948, Palestinian women were torn to pieces by grenades around the old houses that still exist in Givat Shaul. Two truckloads of Arab prisoners were taken from the village and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. Later, many of them would be executed in Deir Yassin. Their mass grave is believed to lie beneath a fuel storage depot that now stands at one end of the Jerusalem suburb.
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An alternative to Sharon's policies

The appropriate conclusion is self-evident: after an entire year in which Sharon was given the opportunity to present an executable political plan alongside the use of military force against terror, he has failed to do so. Labor must lead the camp that prefers peace to territories: that is the real dividing line between the peace camp and the right wing.

Labor must present a clear alternative to Sharon's policies, which seek to maintain Israel's grip on the territories, and must challenge those policies in the Knesset and public forums. The alternative must present a vision of a country that wants to live in security inside the 1967 borders, and retain its character as a Jewish and democratic state.
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