Death Squads, Confiscatory Taxes and Exile in Lieu of Prison Time

By Rachelle Marshall

During Israel's recent election campaign, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir pledged that if his Likud party won, "There will no longer be the possibility of founding a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Jews will be living. The notion of territorial compromise will fade away like a dream." Shamir's campaign promise was only a restatement of his long-known intention to flood the West Bank and Gaza with Jewish settlers in order to make Israel's occupation irreversible. What has gone virtually unpublicized, however, is his government's effort to reduce the Palestinian population.

Inducing the Palestinians to leave Israeli-controlled territory had been a policy of Israeli governments from the beginning. Between the November 1947 U.N. vote to partition Palestine and the May 15, 1948 proclamation of the State of Israel, attacks by Jewish militias caused tens of thousands of Arabs to flee their homes. Menachem Begin later boasted in his autobiography, The Revolt, that after his Irgun guerrillas carried out a particularly bloody massacre at the unarmed village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, "Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel...They began to flee in terror even before they clashed with Jewish forces."

By the end of the fighting in 1949, the number of Arab refugees from Israel had reached an estimated 750,000. In 1967 Israel's capture of the West Bank and Gaza sent thousands more into exile. Today some 2 1/2 million Palestinians, most of them descendants of refugees, live outside the boundaries of the old British mandate of Palestine.

Early Zionist leaders were fully aware that creating a Jewish state in territory where Arabs were the overwhelming majority would pose serious problems. The movement's founder, Theodor Herzl, had a solution: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us," he wrote in his diary. "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country."

Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, told writer Ella Winter in 1919, "The Arabs will be our problem for a long time...One day they may have to leave and let us have the country." At the time, Arabs in Palestine outnumbered Jews by more than 10 to 1.

Both Herzl and Weizmann were correct in predicting that getting rid of the Palestinians would be a principal goal of the future state of Israel. In recent months, the Israeli government has pursued the goal with a vengeance.

The phrase "expulsion of the Arabs" conjures up images of soldiers forcing terrified men, women and children into trucks at gunpoint and dumping them over the border. During the past 25 years, Israel has accorded such treatment to 1,241 Palestinians, with 11 more scheduled to be exiled. But because the U.N. has repeatedly declared these deportations to be in violation of international law, Israeli authorities know better than to use such tactics on a large scale. Instead they use other means.

"The notion of territorial compromise will fade away like a dream."

Curfews, school closings, arbitrary arrests, and other forms of harassment have for many years made life difficult and dangerous for Palestinians under occupation. Now, for at least two segments of the population, Israel is attempting to make it all but impossible: Young Palestinians face constant danger of assassination by roving death squads. Older Palestinians are being systematically milked of their earnings, their property, and their savings by Israeli tax collectors and courts.

The recent doubling of undercover squads—Israelis disguised as Arabs—combined with new military rules that allow Israeli troops and civilians greater freedom to shoot "suspects," have resulted in the killing of at least 20 Palestinians in the past four months. According to the State Department's most recent report on human rights, in 1991 "non-uniformed" Israeli soldiers killed 27 Palestinians, most of whom were unarmed. The April-May issue of The Other Israel, newsletter of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, reported that "more and more often, the ominous phrase 'shot while trying to escape' occurs in official army communiques."

One such incident was the killing on March 22 of Jamal Rashid Ghanem after soldiers arrived on the scene of a football game in the West Bank village of Shweika. Ghanem, who was playing center forward, was shot to death as he tried to leave the field. On April 20 an Israeli couple, Aviva and David Elimelech, were visiting the town of Dura on business when they saw three young men in jeans get out of a car and shoot two young Palestinians without warning. When the Elimelechs complained to members of a nearby army patrol, the officer in charge shoved them away with his rifle butt and called the husband a "son of a whore."

On April 27, The New York Times reported that the army had dismissed the couple's complaint as "exaggerated." On April 29, the Elimelechs, who are members of the Likud party, were arrested and charged with interfering with an army operation.

Targets of the death squads are young Palestinians whom the Israeli army considers "activists," a term that could include any supporter of the intifada. According to a recent Jewish Telegraph Agency release, "activists are turning themselves in to the authorities rather than risk death in confrontations with security forces. In some cases they are given a chance to leave the country for a prescribed period in lieu of serving jail time." What this means is that for many young Palestinians who resist the occupation the choice is now between leaving their country or being killed. Among them are undoubtedly some potential leaders of a Palestinian state.

No Way to Survive

It is clear that the purpose of the Israeli government is not simply to discourage resistance but to leave the Palestinians no way even to survive. According to Robert Weissman, writing in the December 1991 issue of the International Monitor, since the occupation began a quarter century ago, Palestinian farmers have been denied permission to drill a single new irrigation well. Other ways of making a living have been blocked by "punitive tax policies, bureaucratic delays, inaccessibility of basic communications facilities including telephones, and a bewildering array of required permits." Until the intifada, low-paying jobs in Israel were the only recourse for most Palestinians. In recent years, however, curfews and mass firings have resulted in unemployment rates for Palestinians as high as 65 percent in some areas.

Since the Gulf war, those who still have jobs in Israel have had to endure a new form of harassment—arbitrary arrest followed by crippling fines. The New York-based American-Israeli Civil Liberties Coalition currently is supporting a suit before the Israeli Supreme Court based on the government's requirement that Palestinians must obtain special permits to work in Israel. According to the coalition, since the inauguration of this policy, thousands of Palestinian workers have been arrested at transportation junctions and charged with failing to carry a permit. They are detained in crowded jail cells and then either fined $150 for "illegal presence in Israel" or obliged to pay $200 in bail. Since a sizable number of those arrested have valid work permits, the coalition concludes that the arrests are "an attempt to undermine their economic status and remove them from the labor force in Israel."

Another case was brought before the Israeli high court last March by 90 Palestinian businessmen. They are challenging the confiscatory tax system in the occupied territories. Their petition asks why Palestinian pay higher taxes than Israelis and requests information on how their tax money is spent.

In 1989, residents of the town of Beit Sahour refused to pay taxes, declaring they should not have to pay the costs of their own oppression. The Israeli army responded by seizing millions of dollars worth of property in Beit Sahour, far more than was owed.

According to the plaintiffs in the current suit, even Palestinians who keep records and pay taxes are abused. They claim that tax collectors with army escorts regularly raid stores and seize property at gunpoint. In addition, tax officials often set arbitrarily high assessment figures, forcing people to try to bargain them down.

Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman, who is representing the Palestinians, submitted a statement pointing out that a Palestinian father of five earning $1,000 a month pays a 16 percent income tax, while an Israeli in the same circumstances would pay nothing. One petitioner, Elias Reshmawi, complained, "They ask us to pay even more than Israeli pay, yet we do not see anything in return."

Israel's heavy and often arbitrary taxation of Palestinians, combined with a system of punitive fines as high as several thousand dollars for such offenses as writing poetry or wearing a T-shirt that the authorities consider "subversive," amounts to extortion. Undoubtedly Israel's ailing economy benefits from the revenue that comes from milking the already impoverished inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. But the process has an even crueler purpose.

Palestinians have shown the Israelis and the world that they can endure an oppressive occupation and never lose the spirit to resist. Now, however, they are being denied the chance to provide even a minimal subsistence for themselves and their families if they remain in their own land. With Washington hesitant to derail the snail-paced peace talks and most of the world's attention focused on trouble spots in Eastern Europe, the Shamir government is quietly pursuing the dream of Israel's founder by attempting to eliminate the "Palestinian problem" altogether. As time runs out for many Palestinians, only increased U.S. pressure can put a stop to what will someday be recognized as crimes against humanity.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. She is a member of New Jewish Agenda and writes frequently on the Middle East.