Israel's
Latest Massacre In Qana: Racist Jewish Fundamentalism
A Factor
By Omar Barghouti
31 July 2006
Electronic
Lebanon
Lebanese
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned Israel's massacre in Qana today
as a "heinous crime" and called Israeli leaders "war
criminals." Reacting to an earlier atrocity, he wondered: "Is
the value of human life in Lebanon less than that of the citizens of
other countries?"[1] The answer, at least as far as Israel is concerned,
is an unambiguous "yes!" Israel's latest bloodbath, which
claimed the lives of dozens of children and women hiding from the relentless
bombing in what they hoped was a secure basement in Qana, betrays not
only Israel's criminal disregard for the value of Arab human life, a
typical colonial attitude towards natives, but also its increasingly
fundamentalist perception of Gentiles in general as lesser humans.
Israel apologists who will
try to spin this new massacre as yet another "mistake" must
expect their audience to have an awfully short memory or a very low
IQ. Israel has explicitly indicated in the past few days that it may
resort to such atrocious measures, especially since its armed forces
have failed to achieve any tangible military gains after 19 days of
rolling massacres and wanton destruction across Lebanon. Israeli minister
of justice, Haim Ramon, issued a stern warning only days ago that a
large area in south Lebanon was regarded by his government effectively
as a free-fire zone, advocating indiscriminate bombing of villages inside
it to ease the so-far unsuccessful advance of the Israeli army.[2] "These
places are not villages. They are military bases in which Hizbollah
are hiding and from which they are operating," he said, adding
that, since Israel had ordered Lebanese civilians to leave the area,
"All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related
in some way to Hizbollah."
Israel's biggest-selling
paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, advocated raising the threshold of Israel's
response to Katyusha rockets: "In other words: a village from which
rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire."[3]
It is worth noting that all available evidence points to the fact that
no Katyusha was fired by the Lebanese resistance from Qana before the
bombing.
Among Israel's staunch Zionist
supporters in the West, the same "talking points" were parroted.
Harvard academic Alan Dershowitz recently argued that "Hezbollah
and Hamas militants [...] are difficult to distinguish from those 'civilians'
who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can
women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations
do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important
roles in their attacks."[4] He concluded by saying, "The Israeli
army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas
of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who
voluntarily remain behind have become complicit."
Thus the massacre in Qana.
Qana's name is associated
with an earlier Israeli massacre. In 1996, during its military offensive
codenamed "Grapes of Wrath," Israel's air force bombed a UN
shelter in the village, slaying more than 100 civilians, mostly children,
and inviting almost universal verbal condemnation but no real threats
of sanctions or any other form of effective punitive measures from the
international community. In the current Israeli war on Lebanon this
is only the most recent episode in a series of smaller atrocities deliberately
committed by the Israeli army against Lebanese civilians in an attempt
to collectively "punish" them for the humiliating defeat its
elite military units have so far experienced at the hands of the formidable
Lebanese resistance, most noticeably in the legendary town of Bint Jbeil.
This intentional and coldly
calculated Israeli policy of targeting innocent Lebanese civilians and
civilian infrastructure stems from a time-honoured, but hardly ever
successful, Israeli doctrine of applying intense "pressure"
against a civilian population in order to compel them, in-turn, to pressure
the resistance into submitting to Israeli dictates, thereby doing Israel's
bidding by proxy. It has been consistently used against the Palestinians
ever since the Nakba of 1948, and is still applied now in the ongoing
barbaric offensive and hermetic siege against Gaza. Israel may have
plagiarized this doctrine from the legacies of previous oppressors,
but it has refined it to a degree that it no longer raises any moral
qualms in most of Israeli society, where it is widely accepted by the
public as a right, even a duty in the fight for Israel's "security."
Such blatant racism, which
may have been frowned upon in the past by many Jewish-Israelis as a
pathological anomaly, is now quite popular in the Israeli mainstream,
including among lawmakers, academics, journalists and, of course, military
leaders. While it has become normal to read scathing -- occasionally
valid -- critiques of the hateful and chauvinistic discourse "inherent"
in Islamic and even Christian brands of fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism,
which is among the key factors informing current Israeli apartheid policies
and laws, remains a taboo subject that is rarely discussed or debated
in the West. It is rooted in a long tradition of fanatic, yet popular,
fundamentalist interpretations of Halakhah, or Jewish law, propagated
by influential rabbis and internalized by a widely acquiescent Israeli
society, secular and religious sectors alike. Even before the creation
of Israel, the core concept in this fundamentalist worldview was publicly
espoused by Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi
of Palestine, who said, "The difference between a Jewish soul and
the souls of non-Jews ... is greater and deeper than the difference
between a human soul and the souls of cattle."[5]
The late Israeli academic
and human rights advocate, Israel Shahak, traced the roots of Israeli
public justification for killing Palestinians, for instance, to similar
readings of the tenets of Halakhah. While the murder of a Jew is considered
a capital offence in Jewish law, the murder of a Gentile is treated
quite differently. "A Jew who murders a Gentile," Shahak reveals,
"is guilty only of a sin against the laws of heaven, not punishable
by court." Indirectly, but intentionally, causing the death of
a Gentile is "no sin at all."[6] A booklet published in 1973
by the Central Region Command of the Israeli army subscribes to this
same doctrine. In it, the Command's Chief Chaplain writes:
"When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit
or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians
are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah
they may and even should be killed ... Under no circumstances should
an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized
... In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even
enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians
who are ostensibly good.[7]
In 1996, the same year the first Qana massacre was committed, Rabbi
Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the powerful Lubavitch Hassidic sect,
echoed the same principle, rhetorically asking, "If a Jew needs
a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save [the Jew]?,"
answering, "The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has
an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish
life than about non-Jewish life."[8] Moreover, Ginsburgh coauthored
a book defending the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in Al-Ibrahimi
mosque (Patriarchs' Cave) in Hebron, in which he argued that when a
Jew kills a non-Jew the act does not constitute murder according to
the Halakhah, adding that the killing of innocent Palestinians as an
act of revenge is a Jewish virtue.
During the first months of
the current Palestinian initfada, it was common for Israeli army spokespeople
to justify killing Palestinian children throwing stones by saying that
they "threatened human life." (B'Tselem Report) Not soldiers'
lives, not Israeli lives, but human life. One cannot escape the implication
that the alleged sources of the threat are not exactly eligible to be
called human in the army's common diction.
In this context, it is entirely
justified to see Israel's second massacre in Qana as the rule, not the
exception.
This often ignored menace
of Jewish fundamentalism needs to be addressed as seriously as other
forms of fanatic religious thought which sows racial hatred, animosity
and war mongering. While adhering to moral principles alone will certainly
not bring any of Qana's murdered children back to life or compensate
any bereaved parent or loved one anywhere, perhaps insisting on the
equal worth of all human lives, regardless of ethnicity or religion,
and rejecting racism from any source, including from sanctimonious former
victims, can help diminish the chances of such ruthless crimes recurring
in the future. Irrespective of the Holocaust, or precisely because of
it, Israel should not be allowed to get away with its racist, at-will
flaunting of international law and its state terrorism against defenseless
civilians. It is time to go beyond mere condemnation to properly channel
irrepressible grief and simmering anger into morally sound acts of intervention.
Just as it worked against apartheid South Africa, a comprehensive regime
of boycott against Israel is urgently called for. People of conscience
everywhere share the responsibility of stopping this unrestrained behemoth
before it scorches everything in its blind quest for hegemony and colonial
control.
Omar Barghouti is
an independent political analyst based in Ramallah
Endnotes
[1] Jonathan Steele and Rory
McCarthy. "Strike on bunker failed, says Hizbullah. The Guardian,
July 20, 2006.
[2] Patrick Bishop. "Diplomats
argue as all of south Lebanon is targeted." Telegraph, July 28,
2006.
[3] Harry de Quetteville.
"You're all targets, Israel tells Lebanese in South." Telegraph,
July 28, 2006.
[4] Alan Dershowitz. "'Civilian
Casualty'? It Depends." Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2006.
[5] Israel Shahak and Norton
Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press, London, 1999.
p. ix.
[6] Israel Shahak. Jewish
History, Jewish Religion - The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto
Press. London, 2002. P. 75-76.
[7] Ibid. P. 76.