One foot in the camp of terror

By Margaret Zaknoen

posted May 26, 2006

Speaking before the American Jewish Committee this month, Pres. George Bush said that democratically elected leaders cannot have “one foot in the camp of democracy and one foot in the camp of terror,” indicating that the campaign to starve the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority will continue.

While the authority teeters on the brink of collapse and a humanitarian crisis deepens, the double standard is not lost on Palestinians. They are required to renounce armed resistance to Israeli occupation, while Israel employs violence daily to entrench itself further in Palestinian lands. They are expected to recognize Israel, without knowing its precise boundaries, while there is no similar expectation of Israel to recognize Palestinian national rights. Perhaps most striking, the Israel that Palestinians are being asked to recognize was born through a systematic campaign to drive the indigenous Palestinians from their land.

This month, Palestinians worldwide commemorated the 58th anniversary of the Nakba or “catastrophe” which refers to the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, likened the Palestinians to “the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” The indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinians, who made up the majority of the population and owned more than 90 percent of the land, stood in the way of the creation of a state that defined itself as Jewish.

Like Weizmann, early Zionist leaders openly advocated “transfer” of the Palestinians. Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Committee, said, “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them … . Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”

Between December 1947 and December 1948, Zionist militias had at least “one foot in the camp of terror.” During that time, 205 documented acts of terror against the Palestinians were committed by groups like the Stern Gang, Irgun, and the Haganah, which would later become the Israeli army. The most notorious of these was the massacre of more than 100 unarmed men, women, and children in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948. As news of that massacre spread, Palestinians fled in fear of facing the same fate, though it is estimated that more than half fled under direct military assault. By year’s end, more than 450 Palestinian villages had been destroyed or depopulated.

For the more than 5 million Palestinians living under Israeli rule today, the Nakba continues in a different form. Today’s tactics may be more sophisticated, but the result is the same: driving as many Palestinians from as much land as possible to make way for Jewish settlement. Since the start of the “peace process” in 1993, Israel has demolished more than 7,000 Palestinian homes, while more than doubling the population of Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plans to unilaterally draw Israel’s borders would mean that Israel will annex between 30 and 58 percent of the West Bank. Israeli-imposed border closures, travel restrictions, and destruction of assets have led to a loss of more than 40 percent in the Palestinians’ personal real incomes over the past two years. Israel also refuses to pay the Palestinian Authority nearly $55 million a month it collects in Palestinian tax revenue in an attempt to put Palestinians on what senior Israeli Cabinet advisor Dov Weissglas calls a “diet.” Land confiscation, economic devastation, and food and medicine shortages are slowly accomplishing today what Deir Yassin quickly accomplished in 1948.

Those responsible for the crimes against the Palestinians in 1948 have never been held accountable. Setting in motion policies that continue to this day, several went on to become prime ministers of Israel. Democratic elections and the trappings of statehood were enough for the world to overlook the fact that they so recently had “one foot in the camp of terror.”

For the past 18 months, Hamas has abided by a unilateral truce and has refrained from attacks on Israelis, despite the fact that during that same time Israel has killed more than 450 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians. Unconditional support of Israel has led our government to try to starve Hamas for not renouncing violence in principle. In the process, the Palestinian people are being starved, and Israel’s daily violence against them goes unchallenged.

U.S. interests and our image in the region will be better served if our government applies its policies evenhandedly. Our support for Israel should be conditioned upon its upholding U.S. principles of equal rights for everyone, regardless of whether they are Jewish or not.

Margaret Zaknoen served as an official U.S. observer to the first Palestinian elections and is currently employed at the Institute for Middle East Understanding.