Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 6, 99

Special Report

U.S.-Israel Alliance Comes at High Cost to Americans

By Rachelle Marshall

Ever since the June 1967 war, when Israel’s lightning attack on Egypt resulted in its capture of the Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, a chief goal of U.S. Middle East policy has been to assure Israel’s continued military dominance over its Arab neighbors. But the one-sided alliance between the two countries has come at a heavy price to U.S. interests abroad. It has caused friction between the United States and its European allies, forced U.S. oil companies to forgo lucrative opportunities in Iran, which Israel regards as a security threat, and made enemies of people in the Arab world who were once warm friends.

Israel’s expropriation of Arab land and water, and its brutal treatment of the Palestinians, have given rise to extremists who can find no other way to express their rage than through violence, with innocent people invariably the victims. Following their most recent attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed or wounded nearly a thousand people, the United States retaliated by firing 75,000 pounds of explosives at a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum making antibiotics and malaria medicine, and a Pakistani training camp in Afghanistan that the CIA helped establish in the early 1980s. In Western parlance the embassy bombings were “terrorism,” the response “combatting terrorism.”

Moderate Arabs who deplore both kinds of violence are convinced that the only way to stop terrorism is for Israel and the United States to deal with its causes. Abdulrahman Abuzayd, a Muslim scholar in Sudan who was forced from his university job by the National Islamic Front government, opposes radical Muslim groups but was angered by the U.S. attacks. “By its strikes in Afghanistan and here, America did not eliminate terrorism,” he told a New York Times reporter. “You don’t deal with it with cruise missiles, you discuss it. You don’t rub the entire Muslim world’s nose in the dirt and make it kneel.”

He pointed out that the U.S. action contrasted sharply with its attitude toward Israel, where “they kick at Arabs, uproot their homes, and nothing happens.” He blamed American support for what he called Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “ugliest face of arrogance,” and added, “I believe that almost all young Muslims are radicalized by the Israeli behavior.” Another Muslim scholar, Dr. Mansor Mohammed Noor, a university lecturer in Malaysia, said, “Clinton has frightened the world. The United States can bomb anyone anywhere. This is a very dangerous precedent. A frightened world is a dangerous world.”

The Clinton administration’s use of thousands of pounds of bombs to combat elusive individuals who can disappear into the landscape is certain to intensify the cycle of violence that has already embroiled the United States along with Israel. Since its inception Israel repeatedly has demonstrated that massive retaliation discourages reconciliation and provokes more determined resistance.

Prime examples are the Hezbollah fighters who are attempting to end Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. They have become stronger, politically as well as militarily, despite Israeli bombing attacks that have killed thousands of Lebanese civilians and caused hundreds of thousands to flee from their homes.

In late August, after Israeli forces assassinated the military commander of the moderate Amal militia and shelled a Lebanese village, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai warned Hezbollah against retaliating. “I would not advise anyone on the other side to take action,” he said. “We reserve the right and have legitimate cause to act as long as we need to against leaders of terrorism and terrorism itself, wherever it is found.”

Hezbollah responded with a rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona, its first in many months. Mordechai’s threat served no other purpose than to remind the world that Israel and the United States, along with those who bomb embassies or blow up airplanes, have arrogated to themselves the right to attack anyone in any country, regardless of national sovereignty or international law.

Fearing that Americans would lay some of the blame for the embassy bombings on Israel’s stalling of the peace process, Netanyahu indicated in late August that he would accept in some form an American plan requiring Israel to return 13 percent of the West Bank to partial Palestinian control. Meanwhile his undisguised opposition to the peace agreements signed by the Israeli government five years ago has encouraged a wave of lawlessness on the part of militant Jewish settlers.

Their actions include setting off small but frightening bombs in East Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods, stoning and burning Palestinian cars, and illegally expanding their settlements. Knowing the Netanyahu government will support them, Israeli extremists create more “facts on the ground,” by moving mobile homes onto Palestinian land, surrounding them with barbed wire, and threatening to shoot local villagers who try to reclaim their property.

Several months ago, after residents of the West Bank settlement of Itzhar planted a group of trailers on land adjoining their settlement, the Palestinian owners complained that the settlers were stealing their livestock, burning their fields, and uprooting their olive trees. Finally, in early August an assailant shot to death two men from Itzhar as they patrolled the trailer camp late at night in an automobile. Immediately afterward, the Israeli cabinet voted to allow Itzhar’s permanent takeover of the land.

A third settler was stabbed to death two weeks later in Tel Rumeida, a collection of 15 trailers located on a hill overlooking the center of Hebron. In 1984 the Israeli government authorized only a limited Jewish presence on the site, but after the killing Netanyahu visited the settlers and gave them a generous grant to expand the settlement and construct permanent homes.

The 20,000 Palestinians living in the center of Hebron, who face daily harassment and vandalism at the hands of local settlers, were placed under indefinite curfew and prevented from entering or leaving the city. Sadwa Adam was already in labor when she and her husband were prevented by Israeli soldiers from passing through a roadblock on their way to Aliya hospital in Hebron. The couple took a long detour over dirt roads to get to the hospital but by the time they arrived their baby was dead. A spokesman for the Israeli army said the soldiers had made “a mistake in judgment.”

Whenever the curfew was temporarily lifted to allow Palestinians to shop for food, scores of settlers turned out to pelt them with rocks and rotten vegetables and overturn market stalls.

In another provocative act, Jewish settlers have moved into Joseph’s Tomb, in the heart of Nablus, and refused to leave. Since taking back the city, Palestinian authorities have allowed Jews from nearby settlements to pray at the Tomb, which was built on the site of a former mosque, as long as they left at sundown. Israeli military officials gave the settlers permission to remain around the clock in order to mourn the two men killed at Itzhar, but several dozen remained after the mourning period, in an apparent effort to establish a permanent enclave in Nablus.

Palestinians now fear the continuing standoff could become violent, as did a similar confrontation with Jewish extremists two years ago. Abdel Fattah Fayad, a lawyer who lives next door to the Tomb, commented that the fight is purely political, not religious. “It’s just dust and stones,” he said. “But it’s a battle like everything else.”

During what turned out to be a swelteringly hot summer, the Israeli government added to the Palestinians’ misery and provoked their further anger by destroying more of their homes and allowing them less water. The pace of house demolitions is “madly accelerating,” the Israeli peace publication The Other Israel reported in its August issue. “At visits to Palestinian villages one sees pathetic piles of rubble, or hears the stories of families living their daily lives with a demolition order hanging over them, with the knowledge that the soldiers and the bulldozers can arrive with no prior warning, any time of the day or night.”

Deliberate Destruction

Gila Svirsky, a member of the women’s peace organization Bat Shalom, wrote an eye witness account in Ha’aretz of the destruction of “a beautiful home set into the pastoral valley” near the town of Anata. She described the bulldozer operator’s repeated battering of the walls until they crumbled. After the house was in ruins, the bulldozer crashed through the fruit orchard and knocked down the family’s three water tanks, flooding the ground and the uprooted trees.

“I have never seen anyone in the Middle East deliberately waste so much water,” Svirsky wrote. When members of her group asked Israeli soldiers at the scene how they could sleep at night, they all replied, “We’re only following orders,” words that have a chilling resonance in the minds of all Jews.

Palestinians know their homes are being destroyed to make room for Israeli settlers. More than 730 housing units for Jews were built on the West Bank in the first three months of 1998, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians are even more painfully aware that settlers are washing their cars, watering their lawns, and cooling off in sparkling swimming pools, while they have scarcely enough water to drink.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian families in Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jenin were without running water this summer for periods up to three months, and had to rely on tank trucks. The 300,000 Palestinians in the Hebron area have a normal summer demand of 25,000 cubic meters of water but usually receive only 10,000 cm. from Israel. This summer, without explanation, Israel cut their share to 5,000 cm. The Dheisheh refugee camp had no running water for four months.

Israel takes for its own use 80 percent of the water that comes from West Bank acquifers and allows Palestinians only a small share of it, so that while each Jewish settler uses between 650 and 1,700 cm. of water a year, a Palestinian gets only one-sixth of that, or 107 cm. In the course of peace talks three years ago, Israel agreed to supply the Palestinians with an additional 80 million cm. of water every year, but it has not done so. Meanwhile, as one Palestinian commented, “The settlements are drowning in water at the Palestinians’ expense.”

While negotiators haggle over the small percentage of occupied territory Israel might be willing to relinquish to the Palestinian Authority, ordinary Palestinians struggle with curfews, thirst, fear of homelessness, and violence from settlers. Most Americans are unaware of these daily torments but they are known in painful detail to Arabs throughout the Middle East and to millions of Muslims worldwide, many of whom regard the United States as complicit with Israel because of its unwavering support for the Jewish state. Although the huge majority of Arabs and Muslims condemn violence, to a handful of fanatics the United States and its installations abroad now serve as a proxy target in place of a less vulnerable Israel.

The FBI is busy tracking down the sources of the recent embassy bombings by chasing after an elusive Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden, and his accomplices, but if they want to get at the roots of terrorism and prevent the rise of future bin Ladens they would do better to go to the West Bank and look at the rubble of what was once a Palestinian family’s home, or turn on a water tap at a Palestinian refugee camp on a blisteringly hot day only to see nothing come out. And then they should stand near a Palestinian’s dry well and watch Israelis at a nearby settlement splashing in a swimming pool.

Clinton’s bombing of a pharmaceutical factory and a collection of mud huts won’t make the world any safer for Americans. The only way his administration can help end the worsening violence is to abandon a one-sided Middle East policy that allows U.S. officials to call for sanctions against Iraq “in perpetuity” while they ignore Israel’s nuclear arsenal and remain silent when Israel announces it will build thousands of housing units for Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. The world will be a safer place for everyone when the United States exerts as much effort and expense to achieve a just Middle East peace as it does to fight terrorism.