After Disclaiming Death Squads, Israeli Government Puts Them on TV

By Rachelle Marshall

As allied forces demonstrated in Iraq last January, it is possible to destroy a nation without leaving it in ruins. Relief officials who visited Iraq in March reported that US precision bombing had caused surprisingly little visible damage but had demolished the country's infrastructure—the water, sewage and electrical systems essential to civilized life. One visitor compared Iraq to a human body in which all the bones had been broken and blood vessels ruptured while the flesh and skin remained intact.

Although the context and the means are different, the Israeli government seems bent on inflicting a similar fate on Palestinian society. Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has not only taken over most of the land and water for its own use but has attempted as well to erase the Palestinians as a people, along with their culture, history and claim to nationhood.

There is every reason to believe that many "inter-Arab deaths" are in fact caused by Israeli hit squads.

According to a 1977 UNESCO report, Israeli authorities systematically doctored the textbooks on history, geography, and literature used by Palestinian children to eliminate references to Palestine. Long before the intifada began, Palestinians could be arrested for singing Palestinian songs, writing the word "Palestine" on their t-shirts, or even wearing the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Israel's attempts to erode Palestinian society have included bribing or blackmailing former prisoners into becoming collaborators; the deportation or arrest of potential leaders; the torture of thousands of young Palestinians, including children, to force them to betray their friends; long-term curfews; severe economic hardship; and travel and residence restrictions that cause the break-up of families. Since coming to power in 1977, the Likud government has aimed its most damaging attacks at the institution that Palestinians-like Jews-have traditionally valued most, the education of their children. Throughout the 1980s the Israeli military repeatedly disrupted or shut down West Bank universities, forcing thousands of young Palestinians to either leave or forego a higher education. After the intifada began in 1987 and all Palestinian schools were closed, it became a crime for Palestinians even to teach their children to read and write at home. Israeli authorities have succeeded in reaching into the future to weaken the Palestinians: the independent Tamer Institute reported in June that because the army continues to close schools as collective punishment, tens of thousands of school-age children in the West Bank and Gaza will grow up illiterate.

Now it has come to light that Israel's war on the Palestinians has involved an even more sinister tactic—the use of Israeli soldiers disguised as Palestinians to spread confusion and terror among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. As the intifada continued and the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces mounted to nearly a thousand last year, the press suddenly began reporting a dramatic rise in the number of attacks on Palestinians by other Palestinians. On June 12, The New York Times announced that since April there had been 61 such killings, as opposed to 22 by Israeli soldiers. A West Bank journalist writing in Al Fajr said, "Everyone remains terrified when he hears a knock on his door at night. This fear multiplies when he discovers that the knocker is not a soldier but rather a masked man...swathed completely in black from head to toe and armed with an ax or a sword. " Yasser Arafat and other PLO officials urged an immediate stop to the killings, and prominent West Bank Palestinians joined the plea. The Israeli government, for ' its part, used the killings as an excuse to claim, against all evidence, that Palestinian nationalists were punishing anyone who advocated peace.

Palestinian vigilantes have undoubtedly murdered a number of suspected collaborators, who were warned by intifada leaders in December 1987 to cut their ties with Israel. But there is every reason to believe that many of what the Times calls "inter-Arab deaths" are in fact caused by Israeli hit squads. Time magazine reported on Nov. 7, 1988 that Israeli military teams called "Cherry" and "Samson" were prowling the occupied territories wearing Arab headdress and driving cars with West Bank license plates. Time described two typical incidents in which soldiers jumped from their cars and either clubbed or machine-gunned to death unsuspecting Palestinians. According to Time, Israelis were also thought to be posing as PLO members and beating up rival Palestinians "in attempts to spark internal warfare." On Sept. 8, 1989, the Times reported that Israelis disguised as "Arab militants" were attacking Palestinians with knives and axes. A month earlier, an Israeli settler had mistakenly fired on a group of Israeli soldiers, thinking they were Palestinians. The soldiers fired back, killing the settler's son.

Driving the Point Home

To most Palestinians there was nothing new in the Israeli television documentary aired last June 23 that showed Israeli soldiers wearing keffiyehs and pasted-on moustaches beating and shooting Palestinians. The surprise was that the army had sanctioned the showing of the film. In 1989 the government denied conducting such activity and revoked the press credentials of correspondents who had reported it. Why admit to the truth at this late date? Even though Palestinians were aware of the undercover unit, the army wanted to drive the point home: "This was a good and important message to the Arab population in the territories, " army spokesman Nachman Shai told the press. "Now they will be aware of the fact that nothing is secure. That's exactly what we are trying to create, the atmosphere of knowing very little or even not knowing at all what's going on around them. " In other words, like scientists manipulating rats in a maze, the Israeli government is deliberately using fear and uncertainly to disorient the Palestinians and break down the bonds of trust between them that are vital to the existence of any cohesive society.

The operations of the death squads are entirely in keeping with the government's long term policy. Some Israeli zealots, including several in high government positions, envision the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israeli-held territory as the ultimate fulfillment of the Zionist goal. But more sophisticated hard-liners recognize that such a step could cost Israel heavily in terms of world opinion and possibly in US aid funds as well. On the other hand, if the Palestinians could be made to disappear as a people while remaining physically present as a demoralized, fragmented minority within a greater Israel, few in the outside world would be concerned. All the evidence suggests that this is the aim of the present Israeli leadership.

The Palestinians themselves are aware that they are struggling not only for their land but for their very identity. The only question is, when will the rest of the world and, above all, the Israeli government's supporters in the, US, face up to the enormity of what Israel is doing. Ironically, it may be courageous Israelis who finally succeed in getting the truth across to Americans. Ari Shavit, an Israeli journalist who recently served his reserve duty as a guard in a Gaza prison camp, has reported his experiences in the New York Review of Books (July 18). Shavit described the agonized screams of young Palestinian boys that came from the prison's interrogation center, and the "filthy detention cell" where prisoners were packed in so tightly they were unable to move from morning till night. "Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators are torturers," Shavit writes. "Not only did we exploit [the Palestinians] but when they dared to demand their freedom we put them behind barbed wire. " Shavit suggests that it is not James Baker who will save Israel from "this swamp in which we are sinking," but Israelis themselves—if they will dare to challenge their leaders. He concludes: "It is not, at this hour, a matter of territories in exchange for peace. It is a matter of territories in exchange for our humanity. "

No one who is concerned for Israel's welfare can afford to dismiss Shavit's warning. The Israeli government's crimes against the Palestinian people will eventually make victims of Jews as well as Palestinians. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing level of US aid to Israel makes our own government complicit in these crimes.

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.