How the ‘Most Moral Army in the World’ Wages War on Students
A Palestinian girl daydreams at school
By Stuart Littlewood - London
If there's one thing the Israelis are good at it's making war on women and children.
They killed 952 Palestinian children in their homeland between 2000 and the start of the Gaza blitzkrieg in December 2008 (according to B'Tselem statistics). They murdered at least 350 more during their Cast Lead onslaught and have kept Gaza under daily attack ever since. So the brave Israelis must have eliminated nearly 1400 youngsters by now. Would anyone care to guess how many they left bleeding, maimed and crippled?
The "most moral army in the world" also loves waging war against Palestinian university students. Not long ago I wrote about Merna, an honors student in her final year majoring in English. Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through her Bethlehem refugee camp in the middle of the night, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.
Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22 year-old artist, and imprisoned him for 4 years. Then they came back for Merna's 18-year-old brother. Not content with that the military came again, this time to take her youngest brother – the ‘baby’ of the family - just 16. These were the circumstances under which Merna had to study.
Israeli military law treats Palestinians as adults as soon as they reach 16, a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israeli youngsters, of course, are regarded as children until 18. Palestinians are dealt with by Israeli military courts, even when it's a civil matter. These courts ignore international laws and conventions, so there's no legal protection for individuals under Israeli military occupation.
As detention is based on secret information, which neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see, it is impossible to mount a proper defence. Besides, the Security Service always finds a bogus excuse to keep detainees locked up "in the greater interest of the security of Israel". Although detainees have the right to review and appeal, they are unable to challenge the evidence and check facts as all information presented to the Court is classified. So much for Israeli ‘justice’.
Faced with this mounting mental stress Merna, far from giving up, determined to carry on with her studies. The most moral army in the world may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she would still fight for hers.
To get to Bethlehem University, or any other, many students have to run the gauntlet of Israeli checkpoints. "Sometimes they take our ID cards and they spend ages writing down all the details, just to make us late," said one. Students are often made to remove shoes, belt and bags. "It's like an airport. Many times we are kept waiting outside for up to an hour, rain or shine, they don't care." The soldiers attempt to forcibly remove students’ clothes and they swear and shout sexual slurs at female students.
Some tell how they are sexually harassed on their way to university and spend the rest of the day worrying what the Israelis will do to them on their way home. The constant humiliation undermines student motivation and concentration.
Five years ago the Israelis forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and illegally sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year. There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli Army Legal Advisor was bombarded with faxes and letters demanding that the students be allowed to return to their studies.
The world's most moral army agreed that the students might be allowed to return to Birzeit if they signed a guarantee to permanently return to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This effectively exposed Israel's policy to impose a final separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, even though the two are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory, but since when did Israel give a damn about international law? The racist regime makes it virtually impossible for Gaza students to reach the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank. In 1999 some 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit. Today there are almost none.
It was no great surprise, then, to hear from Bethlehem University a few days ago that Berlanty Azzam, a 4th year Business Administration student, was being held in detention by the Israeli military authorities with the intention of deporting her to Gaza "for trying to complete her studies at Bethlehem University.”
Berlanty, a Christian girl, is originally from Gaza but has lived in the West Bank since 2005 after receiving a travel permit from the military to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. She too is being robbed of her degree at the last minute. She was detained at the Container checkpoint between Bethlehem and Ramallah after attending a job interview in Ramallah.
The 21 year-old was due to graduate before Christmas. On Wednesday night the most moral army in the world blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a military jeep and drove her from Bethlehem to Gaza, despite assurances by the Israeli Military Legal Advisor’s office that she would not be deported before an attorney from Gisha (an Israeli NGO working to protect Palestinians’ freedom of movement) had the opportunity to petition the Israeli court for her return to classes in Bethlehem.
When they’d crossed the border the world’s most moral army dumped Berlanty in the darkness late at night and told her: “You are in Gaza.”
"Since 2005, I refrained from visiting my family in Gaza for fear that I would not be permitted to return to my studies in the West Bank," Berlanty told Gisha on her mobile phone before the soldiers confiscated it. "Now, just two months before graduation, I was arrested and taken to Gaza in the middle of the night, with no way to finish my degree."
Bethlehem University wants to mobilize people from around the world to protest. Who better to contact, I thought, than the Palestinian ambassador in London, Professor Manuel Hassassian, who happens to be a former vice-president of that excellent seat of learning? "Have you contacted the Israeli ambassador for an explanation to this outrage?" I emailed him.
Next day, having heard nothing, I emailed again: "Update... She has been removed to Gaza blindfolded and handcuffed! What is the Embassy doing about this please?" Another 24 hours have gone by and the silence is deafening. Still, it's not unusual for the Palestinian embassy to be fast asleep, out to lunch or off on holiday and no-one covering.
I had of course simultaneously emailed the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor asking him, please, to make enquiries. "On the face of it, this seems a senseless outrage. The student concerned has, I believe, just started her final year. I wonder what Mr Prosor or Mr Netanyahu would say if the education of their sons and daughters or grandchildren was disrupted in this manner." And next day, having heard nothing, I sent the same update about Berlanty being blindfolded and handcuffed. Another 24 hours have passed... silence here too; not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement from Israel’s press office, which usually responds like lightning to anything with news value.
If this had been a Jewish girl deprived of her university degree and life chances Israeli embassies around the world would be instantly on the warpath hurling accusations of religious hatred and anti-semitism. But it's the Jewish state screwing up the young life of a Christian, so that's alright then.
Barbara Serra, a London presenter and correspondent, reports from across Europe and beyond.
Photo by Getty Images
Hundreds of women were widowed during Israel’s war on Gaza - left having to support their children on their own. But in this conservative society, these widows often find themselves victimised by cultural and economic discrimination.
At first, Karima Abd-Rabo’s description of her life sounds like the complaints of working mothers all over the world: splitting her time between work and the household chores, with the underlying guilty feeling that she’s not spending enough time with her children.
But Karima is different from other working mothers. She lives in Gaza, and was widowed during Israel’s recent war on the Strip. Her husband Ramzi died in an air raid in January. Suddenly she became the household’s main earner and solely responsible for her 3 youngest children.
On top of the tangible heartache, it’s a dramatic lifestyle change. She was just 15 when she got married. Her husband was her whole life:
"I knew nothing of the outside world. I had never been to the market, I had never been out, and I never left the house, except to visit my parents. I used to depend on my husband for everything. He really was the pillar of the house. But when I lost him, I was forced to go out of the house, and make some money."
Karima now works in her mother-in-law’s shop. She keeps the accounts and deals with customers. It’s not easy for a woman who was not used to socialising outside her immediate family. And Karima’s not alone. Hundreds of women were widowed during Israel’s war on Gaza, and now they’re left having to support their children on their own.
I spoke to Mona Al Shawa from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. They published a report called Through Women’s Eyes which looked at the effects of the war on the women of Gaza. It makes for sobering reading.
Gaza is a conservative society where the woman’s traditional role is at home to take care of the house and children. Mona told me that when widows are thrust into their husband’s role, they’re often victimised by cultural and economic discrimination. With unemployment sky-high in Gaza, jobs are much more likely to go to men, especially considering that many of the women are not highly educated.
For that reason, many of the women, especially if still young, choose to marry again. But that often means losing the children from the previous marriage, who are traditionally raised by the late husband’s family. And for that very reason, some women may also be pressurised into marrying their dead husband’s brother, so that the family can stay together. Not easy decisions to make by women who have few choices.
Karima knows she’s lucky to have a job. But she says life without a husband is very difficult. Where she lives, having a husband is everything.
"A lot has changed in my life since the death of my husband. A married woman is very different to a widow. No one comes to see me, except for my mother in law, because as a widow, no one is allowed to visit me. My daughters come to visit me. The difficulties I face are mostly to do with raising the children. They lost their father - and the role of a mother then becomes really hard."
My husband was everything in my life. I feel so depressed now; my life has no more taste. I lost him so suddenly. When I think of him, I imagine him sitting here, with his children, with us, and it tears me apart that he is no longer around."
She says she has only herself to rely on now. So she gets on with the hard task of raising a family in Gaza ... on her own.
Conformity and us
Aya Kaniuk Mahsanmilim
When Haim Ramon was tried for sexual harassment he was shocked. Not at being tried for something he did not do, but at the fact that what he had done is defined as a crime, as harassment.
Haim Ramon was shocked, and rightly so. Until not that long ago, in Ramon’s younger years, the kind of sexual harassment of which he is now accused, was accepted, normative. Israel, likewise, is shocked and stunned at the Goldstone Report conclusions about its actions in Gaza. It is not shocked at the descriptions that are known to all and sundry, having been filmed by all the world’s cameras. Israel is shocked that its deeds are named war crimes and acts of state terror. As in Ramon’s case, not the actual deeds but rather their names appall and amaze. Like Haim Ramon, Israel refuses to acknowledge the fact that norms in the world have changed. Shocked that what is considered norm in Israel is not accepted as the norm in the parts of the world to which it wishes to belong. That what is accepted in Israel is not what everyone does.
Israel is not unique in its malignant conformity. Whole nations have preceded it in their fall to that void, and will succeed it as well. There were times when the noses of adulterous women were chopped off as an accepted custom. Children were whipped. Pupils’ fingers were struck with rulers. Widows were hurled into the fire, Jews into the ovens, and people kept silent for that is what everyone did. Thus in the First World War, and not only then, thousands of young men charged into cannon fire with no chance of surviving and died like so many flies, for that is what the others did to their right and left, and thus, too, at one time or another, everyone straightened their hair or curled it, and said “cool!” or wove English words into their native Hebrew and harassed a child because its accent was different from theirs, and because that is what all the other kids did. And so, too, not that long ago, Israeli pilots dropped white phosphorus on Palestinian neighborhoods in Gaza and demolished houses with their inhabitants still inside because that is the custom in Israel, because conformism is a human trait long selected in a process of evolution in individuals who survive as a group, along with the xenophobia – hatred of the outsider – which means forever dividing us and them, and territoriality, status and altruism – from whales and chimpanzees to humans.
But how can a trait – conformity – at whose extreme lies hair fashion, and at the other, genocide, how can such a trait be of any survival value?
That is because language and - with it - culture have enabled man to flourish at the expense of another not because of better genes, but because he possesses the knowledge or world view that are worth more than some other knowledge. Thus, scientists argue, mechanisms have emerged slowly, selected through evolution, creating a kind of stimulated openness to social learning. A kind of social ‘obedience’ that enables direct learning from the experience and opinions of others.
Moreover, they add, there is much sense in the fact that this mechanism would be especially stimulated to rely on what everyone does or says or thinks, more than on one’s own perceptions and sensations, for the perceptions of the many represent much accumulate knowledge, while one’s own represent one’s senses alone. And thus mechanisms have selectively evolved in humans, absorbing common cultural heritage as part of their ‘congenital’ social skills. And this pre-disposition, so important and reasonable, is the basis for conformism with all its manifestations. Good and bad.
A African woman in one of the Serengeti tribes who has joined another tribe living on the periphery of the mountain woods, would use her survival wisdom and imitate the other tribe looking for indigenous fruit rather than keep digging for bulbs, as was the custom of her native tribe. Her blessed conformism enabled her to perform this imitation naturally and unthinkingly, by force of her human nature. Namely, be alert to what everyone does, imitate their actions, for that is what everyone does.
This is how a girl learns to speak in the feminine, and a boy in the masculine, thus they learn their different gender manners, dress, conduct, what is womanly, what is manly, what is allowed and what forbidden, that pink is for girls, that boys don’t cry – not because they were taught or instructed necessarily, but because they were easily and readily integrated in the surrounding customs through their inherent tendency to absorb and imitate the common norm.
Thus too an Israeli in Israel pushes in line because that is what everyone does and absorbed as the natural order of things, whereas living in Europe, soon enough the very same Israeli awaits his turn in line just like everyone else - not because his moral values have been transformed, but because this is what everyone does around him. Likewise, the European who has always stood in line will soon enough begin to overtake others soon after settling in Israel – not because he has become less moral, for lining up had never been a moral decision to begin with, but rather absorbed as an environmental norm, part of his natural ability to adapt to the norms surrounding him and conform to them.
And thus Israeli soldiers and policemen know – without having to learn – that they may and should shoot young Palestinians who throw stones, and never ever shoot young ultra-orthodox Jews who throw stones on the Sabbath or when the stone-throwers are young Jewish settlers, although they all commit the same violation, as it were. Just as Israelis know that they may and must blow up a Palestinian neighborhood where the authorities claim a `terrorist` is being sheltered although others totally unsuspected of anything will necessarily die in the process, and they must not and may not do this when the terrorist finds shelter in a Jewish neighborhood.
In the 1950s, American psychologist Solomon Asch performed a series of experiments examining humans’ tendency to conform. The examinee entered a room where nine chairs were placed in a half-circle, and asked to be seated on a chair close to one of the ends. Eight others entered one by one and occupied the remaining chairs. The examinee did not know that the others were experiment-participants. Asch showed the group two cards one after the other. The first showed a single straight line. The second showed three lines differing in length. Each person present was asked to tell which of the three lines was equal in length to the line shown in the first card. The task was not difficult, and the answer was obvious because the lengths differed greatly. But the examinee was already the eighth person answering after the other seven had already voiced their opinion. Much to the examinee’s astonishment, not only did they point out a different line, they all chose the very same one. His own sense perception contradicted the opinion shared by seven others. In most cases the examinee chose to join the crowd and point to the wrong line.
Humans have perpetrated the worst atrocities as well as the silliest actions when these were the norm, and did not perpetrate them when they were unacceptable. As in Nazi Germany, when all citizens actually gave up their own judgment and followed a psychopath, and in wake of ‘everyone’ and the norm carried out inconceivable horrors, thus too humans obeyed McCarthyism and Maoism, and thus everyone at some time all wore bell-bottom jeans just because it was the fashion and stopped doing so at once as they went out of fashion, and pierced and decorated their bodies at all the right places – right for their time, for humans easily and readily and naturally perform what everyone does, and feel uneasy unless they do so, for better or worse.
It is not surprising that so many Israelis responded with indignation to the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of sending its soldiers to commit war crimes against the Palestinian people. For, after all, to starve and oppress and cage-in and discriminate against the Palestinian people is a common custom, a condoned norm that everyone follows, each in his turn. Moreover, enlisting in the army and taking part in these deeds is considered loyal and serving the common good. A contribution and ultimate manliness and evidence of excellence and citizenship and sacrifice. For that is what everyone does. No doubt Israeli soldiers obeying the norms of their tribe and times are no crueler than Christian men of the Middle Ages who by law and norm rightfully whipped women, or chopped off their noses, or locked their bodies in chastity belts. Israeli soldiers are no more racist than a white Anglo-Saxon woman of the nineteenth century who had people with darker skin than her own, dress and serve her without any remuneration, and had the full right to punish them for any insubordination as if that were the natural order of Creation. Israeli soldiers are no more obedient than those who stands patiently in line just because this is what everyone does, or push their way through because that is the norm. And no doubt, if – let us assume – Goldstone had stepped up two hundred years ago and argued that those parents who whip their children are abusive, then they too – just like Israel now – would feel wronged by this strange, detached criticism leveled at them, when they, the good and normative, do the normal, natural and right thing that everyone does.
It is not the actual deed that bears a permanent inherent value. From table manners and accents – to persecution and murder. Nothing is inherently good or bad and observed forever. It all depends on the conceptual space in which the deed is done. On its values. Its norms. Not the deed itself determines whether is it doable. Only its name. Its appellation. And whether everyone does it.
Naturally there are more reasons beside conformism for the collective deeds committed in Israel against the Palestinian people. Like the fictive history that serves dispossession and takeover of historical Palestine at the expense of its Palestinian inhabitants... And victimhood taught and acquired as a congenital trait in collective ‘Jewish DNA’... and the racism intensified through education.
And there is mandatory conscription, of course – an invention of genius in the service of patterning a society to blind and automatic loyalty to the act of state as is. For mandatory military service brands all conscripted with the stamp of belonging to the act of state, by the mere fact that he/she has taken part in its deeds, he/she and his/her children.
And thus, too, even without dictatorship anyone who has done mandatory military service can be made to see the act of state only within the limits of seeing their private responsibility. No longer `the State`s` responsibility but theirs and their children`s. And thus, without any compulsion or danger, (along with the journalists who also did their mandatory military service) collaborate with the ruling power’s action, monstrous as it may be. This programming through mandatory military service creates tribal loyalty of the primal, non-modern sort, according to which ‘we’ are right, ‘they’ are wrong, axiomatically. Loyalty that knows no universal moral standards, only such that are rooted in who we are and who the other is, and militarism that infiltrates all civil ways of society. Like in Israel.
And it is not in order to sacrifice themselves, as the common clichיs have it, not because Palestinians are bad, or to blame, or because Jewish settlement is right, or because they really and truly want to defend, with their own bodies, and not on account of the Holocaust that the youngsters run off, willing and lusty, to maintain the fashion of serving in the army. It is because of the urge to conform that is inherent in their nature which creates in them the tendency to absorb and behave the way everyone does, for this is what everyone does. And if it were not the norm, if this were not what everyone does, even under the same political and historical conditions, they simply would not go to the army, but for a scant few.
But all these added factors would not suffice, unless conformism were etched deep in normal human nature. It is permeated in its walls, hanging on its crannies that Israel’s horrific, herd-like deed continues to be done by all, exactly because everyone does it.
And just as they flock to India and South America after their army time is done, and say it’s terribly interesting and challenging, just as they say they go to the army to defend the homeland, and say about the present jeans fashion that it’s terribly nice – in fact they do what they do because everyone does it, and because of their evolution has programmed them to conform, for better or for worse.
How amazing that nearly 1400 people were slaughtered in Gaza because in Israel this is what you do. Not more nor less than to wear Nike or swoon at the sound of Elvis. That the same mechanisms so deeply ingrained in human nature – enabling man, the social creature, to learn from his environment - determined that normal youngsters would gladly go forth to pulverize a piece of land and its inhabitants, because that is what they were ordered to do. Because this is what everyone does.
And if it ever does stop, this will not be because persecuting and harassing is evil and cruel and racist. And because occupation is wrong even if it is resisted, or because of the Goldstone Report. It will happen only because suddenly the fashion will change, for the same surprising reasons that bell-bottom jeans that were so ‘in’ simply stopped being so ‘in’, and it is very difficult to explain why. Or perhaps because some culture heroes will preach something that will immediately turn into a new norm and sweep along the entire younger generation to say that the army is ‘out’, that refusing enlistment and going to jail is the new manly thing to do and so totally cool. Everyone will then follow the new refusenik fashion and merrily march off to jail, just as they all love to sweat in their stretcher treks and risk treks and to say ‘cool’ and ‘bro’ about everything.
There is something sad and ludicrous and horrific all at once in the fact that only because it will no longer be ‘in’, they will stop harassing and persecuting and butchering Palestinians. Only then. Because it will be ‘out’. Naturally, only if there are any humans left at all to undergo a change of fashion after all that blood will have been spilt.
A Wonderful Hiding Place - Criticism of Israel
By Michael Neumann
Israel`s defenders, increasingly besieged, increasingly proclaim that antisemites hide behind criticism of Zionism or Israel. This is quite true, but what sort of `hiding` is involved? Antisemites do not literally hide out of sight, like a murderer in a dark alley. They`re more like a robbers casing bank and posing as a ordinary customers, or pedophiles posing as child care workers. They disguise themselves, striving to look like respectable critics when in fact they are nothing of the sort. Their racism shrouds itself in criticism.
What does this say about critics of Israel? Why is this such a good disguise? Why have antisemites increasingly flocked to this strategy?
The answer lies partly in how disguise affects us. Bank robbers hiding as customers don`t make us think there`s anything creepy about being a customer. That`s why the pose remains a good disguise. And if pedophiles do, perhaps, cast some suspicion on the role of child care worker, that`s almost tragic. Real child care is a very necessary, honorable and laudable calling. We need such people and they deserve our respect.
Even if every single bank robber masqueraded as a paying customer, and every single pedophile masqueraded as a child care worker, we`d have to keep one vital fact in mind. The more-than-overwhelming majority of bank customers are not robbers and the more-than-overwhelming majority of child care workers are not pedophiles. It is not merely out of fairness, but for the good of everyone that we never forget this.
These obvious truths help explain why criticism of Israel has become such a popular disguise among antisemites.
It didn`t used to be. After all, for a long time there was no Israel. Before its existence, many antisemites didn`t bother to disguise themselves. When they did, it was usually as ethnic nationalists: `I`m not antisemitic, I`m pro-German`. Today, white racists often say something similar: `I`m not anti-black, I`m pro-white`. This is no longer respectable, though, oddly, `I`m not anti-Arab, I`m pro-Jewish` would probably still pass muster. Certainly `I`m not anti-Arab, I`m pro-Israel` would do the trick.
Why the change? It`s partly because, when ethnic nationalisms (except maybe Zionism) lost their respectability, they could no longer protect antisemites. But, for decades, neither would criticism of Israel. `I`m not antisemitic, I`m anti-Israel` (or `anti-Zionist`) wouldn`t have got you very far in, say, 1948 or 1967. Back then, being anti-Israel might sound good to many Middle Eastern people, but not to Americans or Europeans. Israel was plucky, Israel was sacred, Israel was good. Back then, Jewish UN officials like Richard Goldstone didn`t find Israel guilty of war crimes. International heroes like Desmond Tutu didn`t tell us that Israel`s treatment of the Palestinians was worse than apartheid.
These admirable, unimpeachable testimonials were a turning point. Antisemites have flocked to criticism of Israel precisely because criticism of Israel is so amply justified. Criticism of Israel isn`t a great disguise because the critics are sleazebags. Quite the contrary: it`s a great disguise because criticizing Israel is not only correct, it`s the right thing to do. The more-than-overwhelming majority of those who criticize Israel are genuine humanitarians, genuine enemies of oppression and ethnic nationalism, genuine fighters for justice. The more obvious this has become, the more antisemites get on board.
How then, can we unmask these posers? Not, clearly, by attacking the genuine critics. We don`t unmask pedophiles, one dearly hopes, by vilifying child care workers. That would be crazy, a great loss to our society and indeed to the world.
Those who unmask the antisemitism of the white supremacist site Stormfront show us a saner, better approach. It is to provide evidence that for antisemites, concern for the agonies of the Palestinians is not, as it is for the likes of Goldstone or Tutu, a priority. It is an afterthought. Stormfront was founded by a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party. It espoused antisemitism long before it became pro-Palestinian. For Stormfront, championing the Palestinians is like Big Oil wanting to save the whales. It`s the cynical exploitation of what more and more people see as a noble cause.
And so it is with other antisemites. Ernst Zundel, David Irving and their ilk have no track record of horror at Israeli crimes, or of sympathy with the Palestinians. They were blatant antisemites before they criticized Israel. And if we suspect a critic of Israel might be antisemitic, we should ask: did they seem antisemitic before they were critics? Did they rail against Jews in some other context, perhaps with dark references to Jewish ascendancy `in Hollywood`, or `in the banks`? Yes, antisemites very frequently masquerade as critics of Israel. We should take great care to unmask them, so that the genuine critics can continue their valuable work.
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