Following Sharon’s Re-election, U.S. Must Demand Justice for Palestinians

By Edmund R. Hanauer

Whatever coalition government results from Israel’s Jan. 28 elections, Ariel Sharon will be Israel’s prime minister, and Israeli-Palestinian peace will be impossible unless President George W. Bush takes forceful steps to end Israeli as well as Palestinian violence.

Bush’s double standard on the cycle of Palestinian and Israeli violence and terror is clear: Sharon is called a “man of peace,” while Yasser Arafat should be replaced by a “Palestinian leadership not compromised by terror.” While Bush denounces Palestinian terrorism, his silence on Israeli state terrorism and violations of Palestinian rights is deafening. Whereas three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have died since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, much of the media and most of official Washington have focused almost entirely on Palestinian violence.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands (the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) is violated by numerous Israeli policies: exile; torture and beatings; collective punishment; seizure of land and water resources; the settling of hundreds of thousands of Jews on confiscated land; the destruction of thousands of homes and tens of thousands of olive and citrus trees; denial of access to employment, medical care, education, water and food.

In December 2001, 114 signatories of the Geneva Convention reaffirmed that the Convention applies to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, that Jewish settlements violate the Convention, and that Israel should cease “grave breaches” of the Convention, including “willful killing, torture, collective penalties and unlawful deportation.” (“Grave breaches” are defined as war crimes.) Israel and the United States, both signatories, boycotted the meeting. Israel, alone, denies the applicability of the Convention.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have determined that Israel, under both Labor and Likud parties, has been guilty of war crimes in its treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs. The Palestinians suffer daily under conditions barely imagined by Americans who, unlike Europeans and Middle Easterners, have not experienced the terror of occupation in living memory. For example:

• Veteran foreign correspondent Chris Hedges visited Gaza in 2001 and reported in the October 2001 Harper’s Magazine that Israeli soldiers were killing Palestinian children “for sport.”

• On Jan. 21, Israeli bulldozers destroyed 62 Palestinian shops in the West Bank village of Nazlat Issa. The reason: Shop owners did not have permits to build, permits are seldom given to Palestinians.

• B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights group, reports that Israel’s denial of adequate water supplies to Palestinian villages and towns, in violation of international law, harms the health and livelihood of Palestinians.

• Israel severely punishes Palestinians who commit violence, but Israeli soldiers and settlers guilty of violence seldom go to trial. In rare cases of conviction, sentences are token.

Recognition of the brutality of the occupation has led 520 Israeli army reservists to refuse to serve in the occupied territories; they see the occupation as a war against Palestinians waged to protect and expand illegal Jewish settlements.

Israeli Holocaust survivors and their descendants are circulating a petition deploring Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes, olive trees and orchards, asserting: “Domination of another people against its will contradicts the lessons of the Holocaust, morally, humanely, politically.”

Michael Ben Yair, the attorney general under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, wrote recently that after 1967 Israel chose to become a colonialist society, “ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all of this.”

Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, while both morally wrong and harmful to the Palestinian goal of freedom, is fully predictable: People living under a violent occupation will in turn resort to violence. Palestinian violence will end when Israel ends its violent occupation.

Given U.S. governmental support for Israel of $3 billion yearly, the United States is complicit in Israel’s crimes and violation of international law and scores of U.N. resolutions. The sooner the United States ties aid to Israel to Israel’s respect for human rights, the sooner Israel will withdraw from all the occupied Palestinian lands and allow Palestinians to have a viable independent state alongside Israel. By enabling Israel to flout the will of the international community, Bush ignores the warning by President John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” Only by helping Palestinians achieve freedom and justice can the United States help bring security to Israeli Jews.

Edmund R. Hanauer is an American Jewish human rights activist and the director of Search for Justice and Equality in Palestine/Israel, a Boston-based human rights/peace group.He can be reached at <Search25@aol.com>. This article first appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer Feb. 4, 2003. © 2003 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.