Palestinian Suffering and the "Nuremberg Defense"

By Robert B. Ashmore

"They beat us whether you are here or not. So, we prefer to tell our story and hope that you will go back to tell other Americans about our situation." That was one family's response in Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to my concern about possible Israeli retaliation after we left the camp. Many Americans had joined Europeans, Israeli Jews and some Palestinians in demonstrations for peace in Jerusalem on Dec. 29 and 30. But the West Bank and Gaza, including the refugee camps, had been sealed off to prevent the participation of Palestinians from the Israeli -occupied territories.

Hiding the Horrors

Visits to refugee camps have become increasingly difficult and hazardous. Curfews and area closures are a constant feature of the intifada. The Palestinian Human Rights Information Center has documented 6,237 curfew days in the last two years. During the worst of these, all utilities are cut off and Palestinians are confined to their dwellings for several days or even weeks. Israeli checkpoints on the road and barricaded entrances to refugee camps are designed in part to prevent the outside world from seeing the horrors of life under military occupation.

Sneaking into Dheisheh requires assistance. High fences, barbed wire and barriers of sheet metal give it the appearance of a concentration camp. Two families we visited had children killed during 1989. In each case soldiers had fired rubber bullets, a euphemism for steel balls thinly coated with rubber. The first family had pictures on the wall of three "martyr" children, the most recent a 16-year-old shot in the back. When others in the camp had come to mourn with them, the family told us, Israeli soldiers surrounded the home and fired tear gas. The father must spend 12 hours each day at the jail and is deprived of his identity card because he cannot pay a $700 fine imposed because one of his little sons threw stones.

The second family had on its walls the picture of their 13-year-old daughter shot in the forehead and killed as she was returning from the funeral of the other family's son. One of her surviving brothers is in prison, and another just released showed us scars from a bullet, many fragments of which remain in his body.

Ze'ev Schiff, Israel's foremost military correspondent, wrote last June that the intifada has witnessed "the brutalization of an entire generation of soldiers." Few among the troops are bothered, Schiff says, by the hundreds of killings, "among them dozens of children and even infants. Only a few care. This dulling of the senses is, however, shared by all Israelis, including the media."

I tried to engage the conscience of one young soldier as we were led at gunpoint out of Dheisheh camp after being detected there. This soldier earnestly argued that he didn't like being there, but "the army is not a democracy. You have a job to do and you do it." I heard a similar "Nuremberg defense" when another young soldier talked to me in Hebron at the Tomb of Abraham. He wanted to blame Israeli politicians, and reacted with obvious discomfort to my claim that a degree of responsibility must be shared by those who execute immoral orders.

For good reason Israeli tour guides never take tourists to Gaza. There, some 600,000 Palestinians are packed into one of the most densely populated strips of land on this planet. We visited two refugee camps, Jabalya and Rafah. Pouring rains had turned Jabalya into a nearly impassable tangle of mud-filled corridors. A visit to one family produced the increasingly familiar story of another youth shot and killed, this one last August. By now Israelis themselves do not believe army reports about such incidents. Airing of a videotape by ABC-TV on Jan. 13 of this year forced the army to reverse its earlier claim than an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot in the head on Dec. 28 only after shouted warnings and firing into the air.

In Rafah we attended the wake for a boy who had died from a bullet to his head, fired as he was leaving the mosque. The family expressed its fear, now commonplace in the territories, that the Israeli delay in releasing the body for burial was for sinister reasons. It is widely alleged that organs and tissues are removed surreptitiously by the Israelis for transplant purposes.

A mother in another family that we visited in Rafah refugee camp that same day, tearfully holding pictures of two sons killed by Israeli soldiers, explained that the body of one of them was withheld for three days after he died. She anguished over the huge incision the family discovered when her son was finally released for burial.

The sheer volume of deaths and serious injuries inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians approaches comprehension when one calculates that in two years Palestinian losses are comparable to 112,000 Americans dead and 10,588,000 wounded. While this suffering exceeds the imagination, one positive feature of life there is cause for amazement. The Palestinians are so resolute in their determination not to be intimidated by Israeli brutality that they constantly engage in life threatening acts of defiance.

Defiant Resistance

Palestinian flags fly from telephone wires and are hoisted even at funerals for youths killed for similar displays of nationalism. Pictures of Yasser Arafat are pasted on the outside walls of Ahli Hospital in Gaza, where soldiers have dragged patients from their beds and have beaten doctors and nurses. And repeatedly we were caught up in spontaneous demonstrations by the inhabitants as we entered a camp or village. Everywhere, it seems, the Palestinians are saying to each other and to all who would listen, "We shall struggle until we have our freedom."

These oppressed people know that the United States shares enormous responsibility for their plight. So often in the refugee camps, we heard, "We don't hate the American people, but we hate what your government is doing to us." This fact should prompt US citizens to write their congressional representatives in support of Sen. Bob Dole's proposal that would cut aid to Israel. A government that massively violates human rights and that stalls the peace process merits no subsidy.

Dr. Robert B. Ashmore is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He is past chairman of the board of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and currently serves on the national board of Arab-American University Graduates.