Acknowledgements
During the Dark Ages in Europe,
Greek science, mathematics and
philosophy were preserved by
Arab scholars. From Avicenna
to al-Kindi, Arab science and
mathematics nurtured the legacy
of Greek natural and moral philosophy.
The Zionist movement subdued
Palestine and assaulted its culture
with a relentless barbarity shocking
even to those familiar with the
cruel annals of colonial conquest.
This history has been suppressed
during the past one hundred years.
It has only been brought to light
through the writings of a relatively
few intrepid scholars.
A profound debt is owed to them – Moslems, Christians,
Jews and non-believers – whose work of preservation and
exegesis has made possible this attempt at synthesis.
Alan Benjamin has devoted hundreds of hours to all
facets of this work. Co-thinker, discussant, editor and
friend, he has sharpened the analysis, economized the
presentation and taken charge of multiple technical
problems inherent in its production. It would not exist
without him.
Mya Shone, my wife and companion, but for her own
reticence would be listed as the co-author of this book.
Her role in writing and shaping the text is equal to my
own. Every sentence has been tested by her insistence
on precision of expression and lucidity. To the extent that
either has been achieved, the energy and will flowed from
her, the writing shared in a labor of love.
To our treasured Palestinian friends and comrades,
I would paraphrase Dylan Thomas: We are alone and
not alone in the unknown world, our bliss and suffering
forever shared and forever all our own.
Preface
The Uprising
With anger, hatred, and sheer ferocity,
thousands of youngsters hurled rocks at
their Israeli occupiers, undaunted by the
gunfire that greeted them. This was more
than civil unrest. ...It was the beginning of a
civil rebellion. [l]
This is how Jerusalem Post correspondent Hirsh
Goodman described the uprising of Palestinian youth
in the West Bank and Gaza in mid-December 1987.
Goodman’s remarks were written the day before
the December 21, 1987, general strike which
engulfed every Palestinian community under
Israeli rule. The strike was described by the
Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, as “writing on our wall
even more serious than the bloody riots of the
last two weeks.” [2]
On that day, – wrote John Kifner in
The New York Times, – the vast army
of Arab laborers who wait on tables, pick
vegetables, haul garbage, lay brick and
perform virtually all Israel’s menial work,
stayed home. [3]
The Israeli response to the uprising was brutal. Defense
Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the use of tanks, armored
vehicles and automatic rifles against an unarmed population.
The San Francisco Examiner cited Rabin as openly
advocating assassination. “They can shoot to hit leaders
of disorder,” Rabin said in defense of the army’s practice
of using marksmen with high-powered .22-caliber rifles
to shoot indiscriminately at Palestinian youth. [4]
Rabin ordered house-to-house searches, first for young
men and later for anyone of whom an example might be
made. By December 27, over 2,500 Palestinians were
seized, many of them as young as twelve; by the end of
January the number reached 4,000 and was rising. [5]
The “militants ”were marked for deportation. Israeli
high-security jails and detention centers were overflowing.
Mass trials of Palestinians were underway.
The act of brutality which most inflamed the Palestinian
population was the army seizure of the wounded from
hospital beds. This practice, standard procedure
throughout the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, made
Shifa Hospital in Gaza a center of resistance. Great
crowds amassed to defend the wounded, whom, they
rightfully feared, would never be seen again.
The youngsters in Gaza and the West Bank where
riots erupted, – wrote Jerusalem Post
correspondent Hirsh Goodman – have not
received any terrorist training, nor are they
members of a terrorist organization. Rather they are
members of that Palestinian generation that grew up
knowing nothing but occupation. [6]
A mother of a Palestinian man shot three times in the head by
Israeli soldiers was asked if she would let her remaining sons
join the demonstrations. “ As long as I am alive, ”she responded,
“I am going to teach the young people to fight ... I don’t care
whatever happens, as long as we get our land.” [7]
Rashad Shawa’a, deposed Mayor of Gaza, expressed
the same sentiment:
The youth have lost hope that Israel will ever give
them their rights. They feel the Arab countries are
unable to accomplish anything. They feel that the
Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) has failed
to achieve a thing. [8]
Los Angeles Times correspondent Dan Fisher’s
account is even more significant:
This new-found sense of unity has been one of the
most striking changes to foreign observers and
non-Gaza Palestinians ... It is a phenomenon that
extends to previous divisions between young and
old and between those who work in Israel and those
who do not. [9]
Force, Might, Beatings
As the uprising intensified, the Israeli cabinet and Defense
Minister Yitzhak Rabin implemented “collective punishment,
”a tactic characteristic of the Nazi occupation of France,
Denmark and Yugoslavia. Food, water and medicine were
prevented from reaching Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza
and the West Bank. The United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.)
personnel reported that children seeking powdered milk at
U.N. depots were shot at and beaten with sticks.
The Casbah, where over half of the 125,000 inhabitants
of Nablus live, has been sealed off by concrete barricades
and iron gates. Qabatiya and the nearby refugee camp at
Jenin were placed under siege. At the time of writing, the
siege, which has cut off all food, water, fuel and electricity,
has lasted fifty-five days.
A Jerusalem Post analyst explained the policies of Rabin:
The first priority is to use force, might, beatings.
[This] is considered more effective than detention ...
[because] he may then resume stoning soldiers.
But if troops break his hand, he won’t be able to
throw stones. [10]
By the next day, the news media were reporting the
most bestial beatings by soldiers throughout the West
Bank and Gaza. The account by John Kifner was
compelling:
NABLUS, Israeli Occupied West Bank,
January 22: Both hands encased in plaster casts,
Imad Omar Abu Rub explained from his bed in the
Rafidiya Hospital what happened when the Israeli
Army came to the Palestinian village of Qabatiya.“They entered the house like animals, shouting,”
the 22-year old student at Bir Zeit University
said. “They took us from the house, kicking
us in the head, beating us, all the soldiers with
their rifle butts.”Then he was taken to the construction site of an
unfinished house where, he said, the soldiers put
an empty bucket over his head. Several of the soldiers
held him down, he said, gripping his arms to force his
hands against a rock. Two others, he said, beat his
hands with lengths of two-by-fours, breaking the bones.The injuries are the product of a new officially
declared policy of the Israeli Army and the police
to beat up Palestinians in hopes of ending the wave
of protests in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip
that began in early December. At least thirty-eight
Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire in
the protests.In the bed next to Mr. Abu Rub’s, Hassan Arif Kemal,
a 17-year old high school student from Qabatiya, told
a nearly identical story. [11]
Labor and Likud leaders responded with one voice to
world-wide outcry over these practices. President Chaim
Herzog declared: “The alternative facing us today ...
is between suppressing these riots or allowing them to
develop into a new Teheran or Beirut.” [12]
John Kifner reported in The New York Times:
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defense Minister
Yitzhak Rabin continued to defend the policy, with both
men saying publicly that the purpose of the beatings
was to instill fear of the Israeli army in Palestinians.
Shamir stated that events had “shattered the barrier of
fear ... Our task is to recreate that barrier and once again
put the fear of death into the Arabs of the areas”
He concluded that the uprising would never have taken place
“had the troops used firearms from the very first moment.” [13]
Palestinian Resistance Grows
The rebellion of the Palestinian people of the West Bank
and Gaza has engulfed every village, town and refugee
camp. Children as young as eight and old people in their
seventies and eighties defy the Israeli army daily. Entire
village populations, waving makeshift Palestinian flags of
bedsheets and cloth, mass defiantly, singing and chanting
and hurling stones at soldiers firing automatic weapons.
The Great Uprising – the “Intifadeh” 𔃉 has become a
symbol of Palestinian nationhood as the brutal repression
that once filled the people with despair now fuels their
determination and will, which encompasses the
readiness to die.
The Israeli reprisals have been barbarous. The repression
has been unleashed with particular savagery against the
refugee camps and the old quarters of the cities inhabited
by the impoverished.
By April 1988 over 150 Palestinians had died. The Israeli
government had admitted to the arrest of 2,000 people,
bringing the acknowledged total to 4,000. The real figure
was far higher.
Sources in the West Bank and Gaza established that the
number detained by the weekend of March 27 had
exceeded 13,000. Bassam Shaka’a, deposed Mayor of
Nablus, placed the total held solely in a hastily
constructed barbed-wire encampment at
Dhariyah at 10,000.
In the Balata camp outside Nablus, and in the Casbah –
the old quarter – l,000 people were arrested in a period
of 48 hours. The discovery of people in ditches in the fields
– shot in the back or with their heads caved in – has been
reported from villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
Bassam Shaka’a described the rampage
of the Israeli armed units:
No matter which house one calls, the anguished
accounts of family members wounded or arrested
pour forth. Convoys of buses cruise the streets of
Nablus followed by vans of the Mossad, Israel’s
secret police. Army units go from house to house
pulling youths from their beds at 3 a.m. As the buses
fill, the soldiers beat the youths viciously around the
head, shins, groin and back. Shrieks fill the air.As the army makes its rounds kidnapping the
young from their homes, people gather at their
windows and on the roofs of houses shouting in
unison, “Falistin Arabia, Thawra Hatta al Nas’r,
Allah Akbar” [Arab Palestine, Revolution Until
Victory, God is Great]. [13a]
Bassam Shaka’a described the attempts by the Israeli
army to spread panic and terror in Nablus and outlying
villages:
Fleets of helicopters fly over Nablus at night
dropping a dense, green toxic gas over the city.
The smell pervades every house. Armed units
fire canisters of the substance into houses at
random. Doctors at Ittihad Hospital reported
several deaths and severe lung injuries from this
as-yet unidentified asphyxiating chemical, totally
distinct from tear gas.
Among the victims were the grandmother of the
Da’as family and the 100-year-old father of noted
Nablus attorney Mohammad Irshaid. Soldiers had
entered the house at 2 a.m., smashing furniture
and firing a canister of the dreaded green gas while
preventing the family from leaving.
Two of the children, ages 9 and 11, were taken by
the soldiers in their night clothes, frog-marched
in the streets and beaten as they were forced by
the jeering soldiers to clear debris.
Simultaneously, the Israeli army targeted the
hospitals. Army trucks rammed ambulances and
blocked them from reaching the homes of those
overcome by the gas. Soldiers entered the Ittihad
Hospital in Nablus numerous times, arresting the
wounded and those waiting to give blood to family
members. Even the operating theater was invaded
while surgeons were operating on patients.
Doctors were beaten and equipment smashed.
Family members were prevented from entering the
hospital and the cars of doctors and nurses were
destroyed by soldiers.
Meanwhile, all of Nablus was paralyzed by a total
strike. All the streets in every quarter of the city
were without open shops or business activity. As gas
permeated the city, cries and chants filled the night.
Gas canisters recovered by Bassam Shaka’a,
Yousef al-Masri [chief of Ittihad Hospital] and
American author Alfred Lilienthal bear the
markings “560 cs. Federal Lab. Saltsburg, Pa.
USA MK2 1988.” Biochemists are studying their
properties as casualties mount.
John Kifner reported on April 4 that “Hundreds of
refugees were treated in United Nations clinics for gas
inhalation.” On April 15, Kifner wrote, “...gas has been
thrown inside homes, clinics and schools where the
effects are particularly severe.” [13b]
His report was the first, after four months of the use
of such chemical weapons, to acknowledge the fact:
Agency doctors have seen symptoms not
normally connected with tear gas, and
U.N.R.W.A. is seeking information on the
contents of the gas ... to provide antidote
... especially for the most vulnerable groups
... pregnant women, the very young and elderly.
Kifner later reported, “Warnings on the canisters
say the contents can be lethal.” Throughout the
West Bank and Gaza, cases of miscarriages, vaginal
bleeding and asphyxiation were occurring after
the use of the gas.
A Glimpse of the Savagery
One of the most vicious incidents occurred in
the town of Qalqiya. Soldiers entered the house
of workers and poured gasoline over them, setting
them alight. Six workers were covered in flames.
Four of the victims managed to rush out of the
building and rolled on the ground, ripping off their
clothes. Two were severely burned and are in
critical condition.
On February 20, two youths were arrested in Khan
Yunis, beaten savagely and taken to the beach where
they were buried alive under the sand. After the
soldiers left, villagers managed to dig them out.
Reports in the establishment press give a glimpse of
the scale of Israeli brutality. A soldier’s account
reported in the Israeli newspaper Hadashot was
cited in Newsweek:
We got orders to knock on every door, enter
and take out all the males. The younger ones
we lined up with their faces against the wall, and
soldiers beat them with billy-clubs. This was no
private initiative. These were the orders from
our company commander. [13c]
The accounts make clear that Israeli protestations
about excesses of individual soldiers are transparent
false. Newsweek revealed:
Armed with 30-inch wooden clubs and urged
by their prime minister to “put the fear back
into the Arabs”, Israeli soldiers have methodically
beaten up Palestinians since early January,
deliberately breaking bones and beating prisoners
into unconsciousness. Casualties included not only
young men ... but also women. Most of the injured
shunned hospitals for fear of arrest.
The avoidance of hospitals by the injured has prevented
accurate reporting of the vast scale of the savage
beatings and of the deaths of those who endured them.
But an indication was provided in the reports of the
medical team inspecting the wounded in the hospitals
in early February 1988. Dr. Jennifer Leaning, a faculty
member of Harvard Medical School and a trauma
specialist, reported her findings: “There is a systematic
pattern of limb injury that is clearly organized to cause
fractures ... a consistent pattern of bonebreaks across
the back of the hand and in the middle of the forearm
that ... come from holding the hand or arm in place and
applying a strong blow to the bone.” [13d]
Dr. Leaning and the team of Physicians for Human
Rights traveled throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
They concluded, “It is a pattern that is controlled.
A systematic pattern over a wide geographical area.
It is as if they have been instructed.”
Dr. Leaning’s account of the new patients brought to
Shifa Hospital in Gaza is compelling:
They looked like they had been mauled. What is
impressive is the number of fractures per patient.
These patients look as if they had been put through
a washing-machine wringer. They would have had
to hold them down and just keep beating them.
Repeated instances of young males shot deliberately
through the testicles were reported in Shifa Hospital in
Gaza and Makassad Hospital in East Jerusalem. Soldiers
poured boiling water over a 2-year-old infant, rendering
her catatonic.
“Quelling the Protests”
New York Times correspondent John Kifner called the
systematic roundups “part of a series of tough new
measures, including economic sanctions and collective
punishment, that the Israeli army and other officials
are imposing in hopes of quelling the protests, which
have grown into an increasingly organized Palestinian
mass movement in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip.” [13e]
The army’s new orders allow detention without
any specific charge or trials, even in military courts.
Moreover, according to the March 23 New York Times,
“the new procedures do away with judicial review of the
administrative detention sentences and allow local
commanders to order the arrests.”
Immediately after the order, people were seized
overnight in more than a dozen refugee districts,
villages and towns in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced
that Israeli civilians have the same authority as
soldiers to shoot. He added that soldiers need not
fire warning shots before shooting Palestinians.
[13f] Newsweek was more explicit: “The decree
meant Israeli soldiers could shoot to kill Palestinian
youths ... Yitzhak Rabin [was] effectively deputizing
settlers.” [13g] The decision, according to Newsweek,
would “open the floodgates of the 60,000 settlers’
pent-up frustration [sic].” It was not long before an
attack occurred. On April 6, settlers engaging in a clear
provocation shot in cold blood a Palestinian working in
his field outside the village of Beita. Attention, however,
focused on the death of Tirza Porat, a 15-year-old settler
girl among the group. The settlers reported Tirza Porat
had been stoned to death by the Palestinian villagers, but
an army autopsy report revealed she had been shot in the
head by the Kahane follower acting as her nominal guard.
[Rabbi Meir Kahane is the founder of the Jewish Defense League.]
Despite the autopsy report, Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir used the occasion to vow that Palestinians “would
be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the
boulders and walls.” [13h]
In Beita village, the scene of the incident, thirty houses
were blown up. The number of houses destroyed was
confirmed by Hamdi Faraj, a noted Palestinian journalist.
Forms of Self-Government Emerge
The recent Palestinian uprising has done more to
challenge Israeli control than had been achieved in
twenty years. The entire infrastructure of Israeli rule
has unraveled. Spies are asking forgiveness, confessing
their deeds and exposing the apparatus of control.
Police are resigning.
The Village Leagues, Israeli organizations of collaborators,
have collapsed. The Los Angeles Times reports that
challenges by the “Unified National Leadership of the
Uprising” have led to resignations by municipal, village,
and town councils.
Before the uprising, 20,000 Palestinians worked under
Israeli army and police control, providing services to the
West Bank and Gaza. They were teachers, clerks and
administrators. Most have resigned.
Increasingly, forms of self-government are emerging in
the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis close the schools;
the resistance organizes classes. The Israelis order shops
to open; the resistance keeps them closed. The Israelis
close the shops; the resistance opens them.
The West Bank and Gaza are trapped in what Newsweek
calls a “colonial setup”. Newsweek cites Israeli demographer
Meron Benvenisti, the former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, as
follows: “The Occupied Territories became a source of cheap
labor and a captive market for Israeli goods.” [13i]
Israel’s trade surplus with the West Bank and Gaza,
Benvenisti reveals, is $500 million a year. The
government takes a further $80 million a year in taxes
above what it provides in meager social services. The
territories import $780 million a year of Israeli goods
at high prices.
But the uprising has changed everything. Newsweek states:
The Palestinians have some economic weapons
of their own. Thousands of Arab workers had long
since walked away from jobs at Israeli farms,
factories and construction sites. Palestinian
shoppers cut back their purchases of Israeli
goods. Arab merchants and self-employed
professionals struck a more direct blow at the
occupation; they refused to pay Israeli income
and commercial taxes.
Thus, as Newsweek acknowledges, the economic
sword cut in two directions. Israel’s construction
industry, which drew 42% of its workforce from the
Occupied Territories “has been hobbled by Arab
walkouts”. Hotels in Jerusalem report a sharp drop
in spring bookings.
Israeli Economic Minister Gad Yaacobi estimated
that the first three months of “rioting” cost Israel’s
economy “at least $300 million ” – 10% of U.S. aid
for a full year.
“Liberated Zones”
No respite can be expected for Israel. The villages
in the West Bank and Gaza have responded defiantly
to Israel’s barbaric onslaught, declaring themselves
“liberated zones”, barricading their streets, and flying
the Palestinian flag.
Newsweek reports: “Their protests are adroitly
coordinated through leaflets issued by the shadowy
Unified National Command of the Uprising. Their leaflets
are the law of the land.” [13j]
Despite the massive repression, Palestinian spirits have
never been higher. This spirit is perhaps the factor of
greatest concern to the Israeli state. Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir told Israeli television:
The people who are throwing stones, the inciters,
the leaders, they are today in a situation of
euphoria, of great enthusiasm. They think that
they are the victors.
Middle East editor of the Jerusalem Post Yehudi
Litani reported that “[Israeli] security forces estimate
the army has now detained the majority of those now
pulling the strings of the uprising” – and yet the uprising
continues, the leaflets continue to appear, and a mood
approaching panic is settling in among Israeli leaders.
On March 30, Land Day – the day Palestinians inside
pre-1967 Israel protest the confiscation of their land –
a general strike of Palestinians inside the pre-1967 borders
was called. This action renewed a general strike in support
of the uprising which was first held on December 21, 1987.
The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising in the
Occupied Territories called for “huge demonstrations
against the army and settlers” to coincide with the
general strike.
For the first time since 1948, Palestinians throughout
Lebanon – joined by Lebanese in Sidon, Beirut and
other cities – also staged their own demonstrations and
general strike in solidarity with the uprising. The
uprising has galvanized not only the Israeli Arabs, but
the Palestinians in the Diaspora. The participation of
the Palestinians of Lebanon and of thousands of Lebanese
themselves was felt throughout the Arab world.
This new phase of the Palestinian revolution was not
lost on the Israeli authorities. In an attempt to counter
coordination between the Palestinians inside the “Green
Line” [pre-1967 borders] and the Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza, the Israelis completely “sealed off’ the West
Bank and Gaza.
“Since Intifadeh [Uprising] is taking place both in the
West Bank and in Israel,” [emphasis added] a senior
military source said, “we decided to separate the two
and to prevent large-scale public disorder.” [13k]“We want to signal very clearly that we are not
going to hesitate to use whatever measures are
necessary,” Defense Minister Rabin said.
Ariel Sharon, former Defense Minister and current
Trade Minister, announced that the uprising “would
lead inevitably to war with the Arab states and the
necessary expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank,
Gaza and the Galilee.” [13l]
But the Palestinians, entering their 40th year of occupation since the founding of the Israeli state, have not been deterred. The “revolutionary war” of the Palestinian people is recruiting the hearts and minds of youth in every Arab country and in capitals across the world.
This spirit was fully captured in a letter written by members of the Palestinian underground resistance in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to a rally in Paris, France, on March 3, 1988, organized by an ad-hoc committee of supporters of Palestinian human rights. Their letter states in part:
Dear friends,
We send you this letter from inside our beloved land –
Our land of honor, of dignity, courage and defiance –
from our Palestine, from Jerusalem, the sacred city.We send you this letter in the name of our people,
a patient people who are today standing tall and are
waging a struggle unparalleled in our entire history.We want you to know that the Palestinian people have
not been defeated. They are alive. They are struggling.
They are saying that they will not accept humiliation
and submission.The confidence of our people in the legitimacy of
their struggle is immense. And our people know that
their victory is certain – whatever the sacrifices,
whatever the price that must be paid.Today, our people are suffering. They are shedding
their blood to win their freedom, dignity, and honor;
their right to determine their own destiny; their right
to live in their homeland and to build a free, democratic,
and sovereign state in all of Palestine.To all free men and women, to all our comrades,
we say the following:The Palestinian people have been the victims
for many decades of an international plot –
of vicious attacks – aimed at exiling them and
chasing them from the lands upon which they
have lived for centuries.We have been expelled from our lands – lands
which have now been settled by foreigners in
accordance with the aims of colonialism and
imperialism. This settlement has been imposed
by the laws of oppression promoted by the
Western nations and the Eastern totalitarian regimes.
These oppressive laws are also those of international Zionism.We have been subject to terror, assassination and
torture. Today, we are deprived of even our most
elementary and legitimate rights. “They have
wanted to make of us an exiled people, destined
permanently to refugee camps. They have wanted
to destroy us physically and eliminate us.Through the wars of 1948 and 1967, they carried out
the occupation of all of Palestine. But they forgot that
by occupying all of Palestine they also unified the
entire Palestinian people in their struggle against
oppression.That is what is happening today as the children, the
elderly, the women and the youth have risen up as
one single person, without arms, to face the military
machine of Zionism and imperialism – to face the
violence of the guns, the clubs, the kidnappings, and
the assassinations.Our weapons come from our homeland. They are
the stones with which our people have built up a
wall to defend their combatants and the Revolution.Dear friends: You should know what is going on in our
homeland. Two weeks ago, the forces of occupation
buried eight young Palestinians alive after having
beaten them savagely and broken their limbs.
Four of them were saved by the people; the other four
were never found.Three days ago, Israeli military forces dropped
three live Palestinian youths from a helicopter flying
at a high altitude. One of the youths was only 13 years old.This is what they are currently doing to our people.
Dear friends: We want you to know that we reject
all so-called solutions and peace projects that some
people would like to impose on us through
international conferences. We want you to know
that we are committed to continuing our
revolution until the total liberation of all of Palestine,
until the establishment of a democratic and free
state in which all free men and women, from wherever
they may be, are welcome to live so long as they
accept to live with us as equals on our land of Palestine.We are no longer on our knees. We are standing tall.
We will not yield. We feel that it is legitimate for us to
demand aid and assistance from people throughout
the world who are struggling for the freedom of all
oppressed peoples.We ask of you not only that you speak out in support of
our struggle in your speeches and protests but that you
demand that your governments take a clear position in
opposition to the repressive and criminal methods of
Zionism. We ask for your moral and material support
for our Palestinian people, who are struggling to obtain
their final victory.
The Palestinian people have risen, their yearnings for
emancipation stirring the pauperized masses in every
country of the Arab East. Reduced to a condition of
penury by corrupt, country-selling regimes, the Egyptian,
Jordanian and Saudi people have begun to respond to the
extraordinary example set for them by the Palestinian people.
Perhaps more significantly, a detailed report by Robert
S. Greenberger in The Wall Street Journal describes
the profound effect of the Intifadeh on the Jewish masses
themselves, notably the Arab Jews, or Sephardim.
Now nearly 70% of the Jewish population of Israel, their
sentiments are shifting. In contrast to rabid Likud [Israel’s
ruling party] figures such as Reuvin Rivlin, who declaim
ominously, “I believe God is Jewish. I believe the
demographic problem will be solved,” the Sephardic Jews
are responding differently:
The riots shattered the myth perpetuated by
Likud founder Menachem Begin and his successor
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir ... The Sephardim
are demanding social services and want to bridge the
gap between ideology and practical solutions to the
Arab-Israeli conflict ... They care more about jobs,
housing and education than keeping faith with a
territorially inviolate Israel. [13m]
Henoch Smith, a U.S. pollster, reflecting on the new
“challenge” from the Sephardim, notes: “This year,
for the first time, they will account for 51% of voters.”
As the letter from the underground attests, the
Palestinian people, self-activated and increasingly
confident of the power of mass struggle, are demanding
“aid and assistance from people throughout the world
who are struggling for the freedom of all oppressed peoples.”
This message is beginning to reach Israeli Jews. The
day is dawning when they too will seek a future free of
a Zionist state which has combined subjugation of the
Palestinian people with the exploitation of the Jewish poor.
This book seeks to uncover the hidden history of
Zionism, a movement rooted in the ideology of racist
oppression of Jews and colonial subjects alike. It has
been written in anticipation of that day when the
dedication and fervor of the Palestinian people, so long
persecuted and oppressed, will speak to the Jews,
recalling to them their own painful history, with a
program for a Palestine in which victims, past and
present, will create together the Intifadeh of the future
and overthrow a state predicated upon oppression, torture,
expulsion, expansion and unending war.
Notes
1. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
2. Ibid.
3. John Kifner, New York Times, December 22, 1987.
4. San Francisco Examiner, December 23, 1987.
5. First hand account to the author from Dheisheh camp.
6. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
7. John Kifner, New York Times, December 21, 1987.
8. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1987.
9. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
10. New York Times, January 21, 1988.
11. John Kifner, New York Times, January 23, 1988.
12. John Kifner, New York Times, January 27, 1988.
13. Ibid.
13a. Bassam Shaka’a: Telephone conversations with
the author from February 5, 1988, through March 13, 1988.
13b. John Kifner, New York Times, April 4 and April 15, 1988.
13c. Newsweek, “A Soldier’s Account”, February 8, 1988.
13d. New York Times, February 14, 1988.
13e. John Kifner, New York Times, February 21, 1988.
13f. Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1988.
13g. Newsweek, April 4, 1988.
13h. New York Times, April 1, 1988.
13i. Newsweek, March 28, 1988.
13j. Ibid.
13k. Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1988.
13l. New York Times, April 1, 1988.
13m. The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1988.
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