Israel’s
Deceptions As A Way Of Life
By Jonathan Cook
01 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
In
a state established on a founding myth -- that the native Palestinian
population left of their own accord rather than that they were ethnically
cleansed -- and in one that seeks its legitimacy through a host of other
lies, such as that the occupation of the West Bank is benign and that
Gaza’s has ended, deception becomes a political way of life.
And so it is in the “relative calm” that has followed Israel’s
month-long pounding of Lebanon, a calm in which Israelis may no longer
be dying but the Lebanese most assuredly are as explosions of US-made
cluster bombs greet the south’s returning refugees and the anonymous
residents of Gaza perish by the dozens each and every week under the
relentless and indiscriminate strikes of the Israeli air force while
the rest slowly starve in their open-air prison.
Israeli leaders deceive as much in “peace” as they do in
war, which is why it is worth examining the slow trickle of disinformation
coming from Tel Aviv and reflecting on where it is leading.
Many of Israel’s war lies have already been deeply implanted in
Western consciousness by the media:
• that Hizbullah “started” the war by capturing two
Israeli soldiers rather than that Israel maintained a hostile and provocative
posture for the previous six years by daily sending its warplanes and
spy drones into Lebanese airspace;
• that Hizbullah’s launching of rockets into Israel was
an act of aggression, even though they were fired after, and in response
to, Israel’s massive bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon;
• that Hizbullah, unlike Israel, used the local civilian populaton
as human shields, even though Israel’s continual and comprehensive
aerial spying on south Lebanon produced almost no evidence of this;
• that Hizbullah, not Israel, targeted civilians, despite a death
toll that suggests the exact opposite;
• and that Hizbullah’s arming by Iran is entirely illegitimate,
even though the weapons were used to defend Lebanon from a long-prepared
Israeli attack, while Israel has an absolute and unchallengeable right
to receive its arsenal from the US, even though those armaments have
been used offensively, mostly against Lebanese and Palestinian civilian
populations.
Similar deceptions are now being sown after the fighting.
For example, it now appears to be accepted wisdom that Hizbullah’s
rocket attacks on Israel led to one million Israelis being made refugees.
The most senior commentator with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Yoel
Marcus, made exactly this point the other day in an op-ed in Britain’s
Guardian newspaper, when he observed that “about a million Israeli
refugees” had been forced to leave the north. Marcus appears to
take an extremely liberal view of the meaning of the word “about”.
In fact, it is impossible that one million Israelis could have been
made refugees, as a quick calculation proves. There are approximately
1.2 million Israelis living in the north, with the population divided
equally between Jewish and Arab citizens. Hardly any Arabs left the
north during the Hizbullah rocket attacks, either through a residual
fear that their homes might be taken by the state, as were those of
Palestinians who fled or were terrorised away during the 1948 war, or
because they had nowhere else to go. Most assumed, probably rightly,
that the Jewish population in the country’s centre would not welcome
them as refugees.
It is also reported that 300,000 Israelis sought sanctuary in bomb shelters.
Such shelters were open only in the north, and do not exist in the country’s
Arab areas, so those using the shelters must have been the north’s
Jewish citizens. Which means that if 300,000 of the 600,000 Jews in
northern Israel were in shelters, there can have been at most -- assuming
all other Israeli Jews fled -- 300,000 refugees.
Why does Marcus want us to believe that one million Israelis were turned
out their homes? Because it helps Israel portray the threat posed by
Hizbullah in a more terrifying light and because it makes more convincing
the claim that Israelis suffered as much as the Lebanese, one million
of whom really did end up as refugees.
It also conveniently glosses over the fact that most of the 300,000
(or fewer) Israeli “refugees” were staying with relatives
or friends 100km or so further south in spare rooms and out of harm’s
way. They were not, as were the Lebanese, fleeing for their lives --
their convoys under fire from warplanes -- and living in the open air
without shelter, food or water and still within range of missile attacks.
Outside of Kiryat Shmona, close to the border with Lebanon, almost all
of Israel’s “refugees” returned to untouched homes,
whereas tens of thousands of Lebanon’s refugees have found their
houses turned to rubble, and amid that rubble cluster bombs that threaten
to kill and maim them.
But again, that is not what the Israeli government wants us to believe,
which is why it published a report this week claiming that 12,000 buildings
had been damaged by Hizbullah rocket attacks. That seems a strangely
large figure given that the Israeli army says only 4,000 rockets were
fired into Israel and that a substantial proportion supposedly landed
in open ground. The same report also says more than 400 bush fires were
started by the rockets.
So how and why did the government reach the figure of 12,000 buildings?
That would mean that each rocket that hit a structure damaged at least
another three buildings. Anyone who has seen the destruction inflicted
by a Katyusha rocket (Hizbullah’s main weapon) will known that
it does little more than punch a hole in whatever surface it hits. The
spray of shrapnel, however, does minor damage to neighbouring structures
(though much worse harm to human beings), such as piercing the rendering
on homes or breaking windows. In other words, most of those 12,000 “structures”
-- and of course none of us can know what Israeli officials are including
as a structure (individual apartments, garages, dog kennels?) -- suffered
minor damage that can be fixed in an afternoon.
So why the need to promote that inflated number? Because Hizbullah is
reporting that 15,000 buildings were destroyed: that is, wrecked beyond
repair by Israel’s missile attacks. As is the tradition in Arab
society, many of those several-storey buildings were home to multiple
families, meaning that probably many more “homes” than 15,000
have been destroyed. Some Lebanese sources estimate that more than 100,000
homes have been ruined. But for Israel the goal is to make it look as
though its own people’s suffering is the same as that of the Lebanese.
Interestingly, the estimates of economic damage inflicted on Lebanon
by Israel’s onslaught stand at about $5 billion, a figure which
again Israel says neatly fits with its own assessments of its losses.
It seems that each time one of those American-supplied munitions was
dropped it did as much harm to Israel’s defence budget as it did
to the place where it exploded. The point presumably is that, if and
when the reparations account is being settled, Israel will claim its
own losses cancel out those of Lebanon’s.
Many of Israel’s deceptions are also being used domestically to
determine who will benefit -- and who will be excluded -- from the government’s
largesse as it plans the north’s “reconstruction”.
No suprises about which way the wind is blowing.
Government ministers, for example, have been claiming in the war’s
aftermath that Arab -- not Jewish -- municipal leaders fled from their
communities to avoid the rocket fire. For example, after a tour of the
north, the interior minister, Ronnie Bar-On, argued that the failings
in some towns and villages to cope with the war stemmed from the fact
that local leaders “ran away, at the highest levels”. Asked
to name the mayors and local councillors who had fled, Bar-On would
only say: “Those people I am referring to … I can say that
in their towns I saw no synagogues.”
Why make this claim, even though all the evidence suggests that the
Arab populations of the north stayed put during the fighting while,
as we have seen, a large number of Jewish citizens did flee? There are
two reasons.
First, the government has been embarrassed by reports that nearly half
of the civilians killed by rockets were Arab, and by suggestions that
the reasons for this were the state’s long-standing failure to
protect Arab communities by building public bomb shelters, providing
air raid sirens and disseminating advice from the civil defence authorities
in Arabic. Better to shift the blame on to their elected leaders.
And second, the government is amassing huge sums of money for the reconstruction
effort from Jewish groups in America and Europe and is looking for an
excuse not to fund work in Arab communities. Another senior politician,
Effi Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party, has accused Arab
authorities of “pretending to be deprived”. The north’s
Arabs will most likely be cut out of tasting the reconstruction pie.
Certainly there is no discussion of building public bomb shelters for
Arab towns, even though few in Israel appear to believe the ceasefire
with Hizbullah will hold long.
Similarly, the environment minister Gideon Ezra has stated that Arab
communities in the north should not receive money to rehabilitate their
separate and grossly deprived education system, on the grounds that
during the war “the residents there behaved as per usual, as if
nothing had happened” -- a reference that sounds like they are
being penalised because they did not flee. His reasoning appears popular,
among the public and in the cabinet, because Arab citizens generally
opposed Israel’s war.
A related deception being promoted by the government is that it is committed
to compensating workers and businesses in the north who lost income
during the war. But the list drawn up by the finance ministry of areas
eligible for compensation reveals that all Arab communities have been
excluded, apart from four Druze villages (the Druze serve in the army
and are treated by Israel as a national group separate from the rest
of the Arab population). Most of the money, millions of dollars, is
being made available only to Jewish citizens, even though Arab citizens
comprise half the population of the north. What a contrast to Hizbullah’s
non-discriminatory policy of compensating all Lebanese harmed by the
fighting, whether from its own Shia community or Christian, Druze and
Sunni Muslims.
(Incidentally, according to Haaretz, in one court case being brought
by an Arab engineer from the village of Fassouta who, unlike his Jewish
colleagues, is being denied compensation for loss of income during the
war, it is noted that he could not leave his home because the Israeli
army was firing artillery batteries stationed on the edge of the village.
So much for Israel’s argument, adopted by the United Nation’s
representative Jan Egeland, that only Hizbullah was using civilians
as human shields!)
Israel’s post-war deceptions, of course, embrace the Palestinians
living under occupation too. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet secret
service, is claiming that, inspired by the success of Hizbullah, Palestinians
in the Gaza Strip are turning Rafah into “the garden of Eden of
weapons smuggling”. Apparently Israel knows about 15,000 guns,
4 million bullets, 38 rockets, 10-15 Katyusha rockets, and dozens of
anti-tank missiles that have entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing
in the past year. Israel believes that just about everything bar tanks
and planes is coming across the short border with Egypt it still controls.
In a few years, says Diskin, Israel will face the same situation in
Gaza as in south Lebanon. We will just have to take his word for that.
But there is a problem. Since November 2005, say human rights groups,
the Rafah crossing has been almost continuously shut. Those weapons
must have been smuggled in a stampede on the day or two when the crossing
was open.
Further doubt is cast on Diskin’s claims by a report in Haaretz
this week that the blanket closure of Rafah crossing has continued since
one of Israel’s soldiers was captured by Palestinian fighters
two months ago. The reason for the crossing’s closure, recommended
by Shin Bet, is also noted by Haaretz -- and it has nothing to do with
weapons smuggling. The blockade was imposed as a way to put pressure
on the Palestinians to release the Israeli soldier, a form of collective
punishment illegal under international law.
Diskin’s comparisons between developments in Gaza and south Lebanon
are at best fanciful. How Gaza’s resistance fighters will be able
to build hundreds of underground bunkers in the Strip’s flat,
sandy terrain unknown to Israel as its planes and tanks freely roam
the area, and as Military Intelligence operates its network of collaborators,
is not explained. But Diskin’s conclusions presumably will be
used to justify Israel’s continuing assaults on Gaza’s civilian
population. Better, the argument will go, not to wait to be caught out
as in Lebanon.
The biggest deception of all, however, relates to the reasons for Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert’s decision this week to reject the establishment
of an independent commission of inquiry, headed by a judge, that would
have been free to investigate all aspects of the war. Instead Olmert
has set up two separate internal committees of investigation, one to
examine government decision-making and the other the army’s conduct.
(A third watchdog body, under the government’s state comptroller,
is supposed to look at failings in civil defence.)
Most Israelis are deeply unhappy about what one commentator has called
Olmert’s “committee of non-inquiry”. Separate investigations
mean that the remit of each committee will be very narrow, focusing
on technical issues and failings, and unable to look at the wider picture.
The members of the committee who will be investigating Olmert have been
handpicked by him. All the judges approached to head the committee turned
down the offer, as did the country’s foremost constitutional law
expert, Amnon Rubinstein, apparently aware that being party to a whitewash
would permanently tarnish his reputation.
It will now be led by a former head of Mossad, Israel’s international
spy agency. Observers have speculated that 77-year-old Nahum Admoni’s
room for criticising the government will be extremely limited, given
that he himself was admonished by the Kahan Commission of Inquiry that
in 1982 investigated Israel’s role in the massacre of Palestinian
civilians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Admoni
failed to give “an unequivocal warning about the danger entailed
in the Phalangists' entry into the camps” that resulted in the
slaughter of more than 1,000 Palestinians. Mossad was keenly involved
with the Christian Phalangists, attempting to install them in power
as a puppet regime.
Kahan took no action against Admoni, however, because he -- like Olmert
now -- had only recently taken up his job. It will be hard for Admoni
to treat Olmert more harshly than Kahan treated him two decades ago.
Why would Olmert want a discredited committee rather than a proper commission
of inquiry, especially if, as he claims, the reason against the latter
is that it will take years to report? By then, he may be out of office
and never have to face the fall-out. The official reason, according
to Olmert, is that such a delay would paralyse the army. But most commissions
of inquiry have produced interim reports, making recommendations for
reforms, within a few months and have then taken their time to produce
a final report.
Other factors are at play, relating to the past and the future. The
obvious one is that a powerful commission would almost certainly investigate
the six-year build-up to the war following Israel’s withdrawal
from south Lebanon. There is a real danger that its investigations might
throw an uncomfortable light on Israel’s motives for continuing
provocative overflights by its war planes in Lebanon; on its refusal
to hand over the maps of the minefields it planted in south Lebanon
during its two decades of occupation; on its refusal to release the
last remaining Lebanese prisoners in its jails, thereby perpetuating
a state of hostilities; and its refusal to negotiate with Lebanon and
Syria about an end to its occupation of the Golan Heights and with it
a resolution of the disputed status of the corridor of land known as
the Shebaa Farms, which Lebanon claims.
But there is an even bigger threat posed by the establishment of a commission.
It might unearth evidence that the war against Lebanon was long planned,
that it had nothing to do with the capture of two soldiers on the border,
that it was coordinated with the United States, and that its ultimate
goal was an attack on Iran.
Olmert, and Israel’s political and military leaders, do not need
another Kahan Commission -- or another embarrassment like its findings
about Israel’s involvement with the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.
Israel needs a free hand to strike unchallenged when the next stage
of the war on terror takes shape. Olmert admitted as much in his coded
observation that a commission of inquiry would distract from the central
goal: “to focus on the future and the Iranian threat”.
A clue where Israel might be heading next emerged this week when Olmert’s
trusted international ambassador, Shimon Peres, “revealed”
that Iran is trying to transfer its nuclear know-how to terrorist organisations.
Peres did not name Hizbullah but it is only time before the link is
made and a new casus belli established.
Jonathan Cook is a writer anf journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and
Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net