A
Very Special Kind Of War
By Uri Avnery
25 August, 2004
Gush Shalom
"For all I care, they can starve
to death!" announced Tzahi Hanegbi, after Palestinian prisoners
declared an open-ended hunger strike against prison conditions. Thus
the Minister for Internal Security added another memorable phrase to
the lexicon of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanegbi became famous
(or infamous) for the first time when, as a student activist, he was
caught on camera with his friends hunting Arab students with bicycle
chains. At the time I published a photo of him that would not have shamed
German or Polish students in the 1930s. With a small difference: in
the 30s the Jews were the pursued, now they were the pursuers.
In the meantime,
Hanegbi has changed like many young radicals - he has turned into an
unrestrained careerist. He has become a minister, wearing elegant suits
even on hot summer days and walking with the typical, self-important
gait of a cabinet minister. Now he even supports Ariel Sharon's disengagement
plan, much to the distress of his mother, Geula Cohen, an extreme-right
militant who has not changed her spots.
But beneath the
minister's suit and the statesman's robe, Tzahi has remained Tzahi,
as evidenced by the total inhumanity of his statement about the prisoners
for whose well-being he is officially responsible. His influence is
not limited to words: the current prison crisis was caused by his appointment
of a new Director of Prisons, who immediately proceeded to create intolerable
conditions for the Palestinian prisoners.
Let's not dwell
too much on the personality of the honorable minister. It is much more
important to turn our thoughts to the strike itself.
Its basic cause
is a particularly Israeli invention: the one-sided war.
The IDF generals
declare again and again that we are at war. The state of war permits
them to commit acts like "targeted eliminations", which, in
any other situation, would be called murder. But in a war, one kills
the enemy without court proceedings. And in general, the killing and
wounding of people, demolition of homes, uprooting of plantations and
all the other acts of the occupiers that have become daily occurrences
are being justified by the state of war.
But this is a very
special war, because it confers rights only on the fighters of one side.
On the other side, there is no war, no fighters, and no rights of fighters,
but only criminals, terrorists, murderers. Why?
Once there was a
clear distinction: one was a soldier if one wore a uniform; if one did
not wear a uniform, one was a criminal. Soldiers of an invading army
were allowed to execute local inhabitants who fired at them on the spot.
But in the middle of the 20th century, things changed. A worldwide consensus
accepted that the members of the French resistance and the Russian and
Yugoslav partisans and their like were fighters and therefore entitled
to the international protection accorded to legitimate fighters. International
conventions and the rules of war were amended accordingly.
So what is the difference
between soldiers and terrorists? Well, the occupiers say, there is a
tremendous difference: Soldiers fight soldiers, terrorists hurt innocent
civilians. Really? The pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
and killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians - was he a soldier
or just a criminal, a terrorist? And what were the pilots who destroyed
whole cities, like Hamburg and Dresden, when there was no valid military
necessity anymore? The declared aim was to break the will of the German
civilian population and compel them to capitulate. Were the commanders
of the British and American air forces terrorists (as the Nazis indeed
called them, inventing the term "Terrorflieger")?
What is the difference
between an American pilot who drops a bomb on a Baghdad market and the
Iraqi terrorist, who lays a bomb in the same market? The fact that the
pilot has a uniform? Or that he drops his bomb from a distance and does
not see the children he is killing?
I am not saying
this, of course, to justify the killing of civilians. Indeed, I strongly
condemn it, whoever the perpetrators may be - soldiers, guerrillas,
pilots above or terrorists below. One law for all. Soldiers who are
captured become prisoners-of-war, entitled to many rights guaranteed
by international conventions. A particular international organization
- the Red Cross - oversees this. P0Ws are not held for punishment or
revenge, but solely in order to prevent them from returning to the battlefield.
They are released when peace comes.
Underground fighters
captured by their enemies are often tried as criminals. Not only are
they not entitled to the rights of POWs, but in Israel their prison
conditions are even worse than the inhuman conditions inflicted on Israeli
criminals. The American have learned from us, and President George W.
Bush has been sending Afghan fighters to an infamous prison set up for
them in Guantanamo, where they are deprived of all human rights, both
the rights of POWs and the rights of ordinary criminal prisoners.
Years ago, when
the Hebrew underground organizations were fighting the British regime
in Palestine, we demanded that our prisoners be accorded the rights
of POWs. The British did not accept this, but in practice prisoners
were generally treated as if they were POWs. The captured underground
fighters could enrol for correspondence courses, and in fact, many of
them completed their studies in law and other professions in British
prison camps.
One of the prisoners
at that time was Geula Cohen, Tzahi Hanegbi's mother. It would be interesting
to know how she and her Stern Group comrades would have reacted if a
British police commander had declared that he didn't give a damn if
she died in prison. Probably they would have tried to assassinate him.
Fortunately, the British behaved otherwise. They even brought her to
a hospital for treatment (where she promptly escaped with the help of
Arab villagers.)
Towards the Irish
underground fighters, the British took a different line. When they declared
a hunger strike, Margaret Thatcher let them starve to death. This episode,
on top of her attitude towards workers and the needy, contributed to
her image as an inhuman person. A humane treatment of political prisoners
is preferable even for purely pragmatic reasons. Ex-prisoners are now
filling the upper ranks of the Palestinian Authority. Men who have spent
10, 15 and even 20 years in Israeli jails have become political leaders,
ministers and mayors. They speak fluent Hebrew and know Israel well.
Almost all of them now belong to the moderate Palestinian camp, advocating
co-existence between Israel and a Palestinian state. They also head
the forces seeking democracy and reforms in the Palestinian Authority.
The fair treatment they got at the time by the prison personnel must
have contributed to this. But for me, the main thing is that the State
of Israel should not look like Tzahi Hanegbi and his ilk. It is important
for me that human beings - Palestinians as much as Israelis - should
not starve to death in Israeli prisons. It is important for me that
prisoners - whether Israelis or Palestinians - should be accorded humane
conditions. If Tzahi Hanegbi were in prison, I would be demanding the
same even for him.