Advarsel fra Yonatan Touval i Haaretz 27. oktober 2022:
"Opinion" |
"Pogroms, the IDF and Palestinians: How Israel's Military Is Desecrating Its Moral Code""Settler
attacks against Palestinians are surging, but the IDF's lethargic
response, veering towards acquiescence, is not only a violation of
Israeli and international law. It is also a horrific debasement of
Jewish history"
(Haaretz 27. oktober 2022, HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde)
En historisk gjennomgang fram til dagens situasjon.
Før var det unge israelske "hilltop youths" som var angriperne.
Nå er de voksne med, sammen med barna.
Og nå deltar også IDF-soldater i pogromene på Vestbredden.
Skudeneshavn 28. oktober 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
https://mitvim.org.il/en/team/yonatan-touval/
27. oktober 2022
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-10-27/ty-article-opinion/.premium/pogroms-the-idf-and-palestinians-how-israels-military-is-desecrating-its-moral-code/00000184-14c8-de18-a7df-17fecb4e0000
HELE artikkelen i Haaretz 27. oktober 2022:
Opinion | Pogroms, the IDF and Palestinians: How Israel's Military Is Desecrating Its Moral Code
Settler
attacks against Palestinians are surging, but the IDF's lethargic
response, veering towards acquiescence, is not only a violation of
Israeli and international law. It is also a horrific debasement of
Jewish history
Israeli
settlers fire at Palestinians (unseen) while an Israeli soldier stands
by during clashes in the West Bank town of Huwara this month Credit: OREN ZIV - AFP
Israel's military occupation of the West
Bank is at a perilous juncture. The IDF is not merely under scrutiny for
a growing number of fatalities of Palestinian civilians – most the
result of shootings by Israeli soldiers, but others due to brutal
manhandling or sheer emotional terror, such as the deaths of a
78-year-old Palestinian-American or of a seven-year-old boy last month.
The IDF is also losing its ability, and perhaps its will, to prevent violent attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinians.
Within a period of 10 days alone this past month, settlers have reportedly committed around 100 nationalist crimes
against West Bank Palestinians. The number of attacks is itself
staggering (an average of 10 per day). Yet two additional factors render
this development particularly worrisome.
First, the attacks are no longer perpetrated by the usual suspects – the fringe groups of younger settlers commonly known as "hilltop youth."
While these violent extremists may be the prime instigators of the
attacks, joining them are older adults, women and children. In other
words, provoking and attacking Palestinians has become a popular,
communal, even family, pastime among some settlers in the West Bank.
Second, and no less troubling, the Israeli
security authorities on the ground – both the IDF and the police – are
doing little, often nothing, to prevent these attacks.
Such
inaction reflects multiple realities, including the rising numbers of
settlers within IDF troops – most notoriously embodied in the
ultra-Orthodox battalion known as Netzah Yehuda (“Judea Forever”), whose members are responsible for countless war crimes, including the death of the 78-year-old.
But
there is also the timid, if all-too-often silent, response from the
IDF’s upper echelons, including Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi himself, who
fail to take action, let alone express public interest, in many of
these attacks, thus giving IDF officers on the ground, in spirit if not
in letter, free rein to act as they see fit. Just last week, an Israeli
security guard joined forces with Jewish settlers as they attacked Palestinian civilians.
Netzach Yehuda brigade base outside the West Bank Jewish settlement of Beit ElCredit: Emil Salman
Such conduct raises serious questions about
the orders – or rather, lack thereof – that Israeli soldiers receive
when facing incidents of violent attacks by settlers against
Palestinians. And they challenge the centrality of the issue of “rules
of engagement,” which has long defined the framework through which IDF
actions in the West Bank have been viewed.
Indeed,
only a month ago the Biden administration rattled Israeli nerves when
it announced that it would "press our Israeli partners to closely review
its policies and practices on the rules of engagement." The statement
came a day after the IDF had published the conclusions of its probe into
the May 2022 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and provoked a sharp rebuke from the Israeli leadership.
Rebuffing what he cast as unwelcome foreign
interference, Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared that the army chief
of staff, “and he alone, determines, and will continue to determine, the rules of engagement in accordance with our operational needs and values of the IDF.”
Except
that now, it seems, at issue is not – or not merely – the IDF’s rules
of engagement that should be reviewed; it’s also, and more pressingly,
the growing trend of its soldiers’ disengagement: of disengagement from
the duty, of their dereliction of duty, to act to prevent injury to the
Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
An Israeli soldier walks as masked Jewish settlers hurl stones during clashes with Palestinians.Credit: AP
This dereliction is not only a violation of Israeli and international
law. It constitutes a horrific irony for an army whose ethos lies in the
historical trauma of the Jews at the beginning of the twentieth
century. We need not invoke the Holocaust, for which the cultural and
political reasons for America’s callous indifference is the subject of Ken Burns’ recent documentary.
For if there is one historical moment that marks a radical turning
point in the Jewish relationship to arms, it was actually the pogrom in
the city of Kishinev in April 1903.
The most notorious of a series of pogroms
that took place in the Russian Empire during the first decade of the
twentieth century, the bloodbath of Kishinev sent shockwaves across the
Jewish world and beyond. Yet the shock was not merely at the brutality
of the atrocities; it was also at the helplessness of the Jews in the
hands of the pogromists and the complicit role of the Russian
authorities.
It
was this shock that Haim Nachman Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter"
powerfully captured, an epic poem that was a catalyst for the emergence,
for the first time in the modern era, of organized Jewish policing
groups which went under the name of “self-defense” (in Yiddish, zelbstshuts).
In fact, it is the emergence of these policing groups that lies at the
origins of similar formations in Palestine in the following years –
first, the small Bar Giora group, which operated from 1907 to 1909, and
later HaShomer, which operated from 1909 until 1920. Transplanted into
the political realities of Palestine, they held on to the spirit of
"self-defense," adapting their mission from defending the Jewish shtetls
against the pogromists to defending the newly established Jewish
settlements from, initially at least, Palestinian-Arab pilferers and
looters.
Members of HaShomer, a Jewish self-defense group, in Kfar Giladi. HaShomer was active between 1909 and 1920Credit: UNKNOWN
Throughout
those years, it was clear to the leaders of the Yishuv that, regardless
of whether the Ottomans were in charge or the British, the Jews in
Palestine were on their own. This recognition fueled the ethos of
self-defense of the Haganah (Hebrew for "Defense"), the successor
organization to Hashomer, and the leading armed force in the Yishuv from
1920 until the establishment of the IDF in 1948.
Over the years, the ethos of self-defense
has come to be articulated by the oft-used phrase of “defend itself, by
itself,” a trope that Israeli leaders regularly assert, and that
Israel’s closest ally dutifully echoes.
“Israel's first and foundational security principle is that Israel must
have the means to defend itself by itself. The self-reliance has always
been at the heart of Israel's national identity and the ethos of the
Israel Defense Forces,” a U.S. congressman eloquently put it during a
hearing in the House of Representatives a few years ago. Israeli
lawmakers, who might have read Bialik but certainly not Ralph Waldo
Emerson, could not have expressed it better.
And yet, if Jewish and Israeli military
power has been successful at meeting the challenge of defending Jewish
lives in the Yishuv and, later, the state, it has been less successful
at preventing violence against non-Jews, and specifically Palestinians,
living under its military control.
The
most horrific instance in which the IDF turned a blind eye to attacks
against Palestinians was not in the West Bank or, for that matter, the
Gaza Strip, but in Lebanon. That the September 1982 massacre by
Christian Phalangist militiamen of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut happened under the IDF’s watch is an indelible stain on the moral record of the IDF and, more specifically, the defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon.
Two
Palestinian women weep on the curb of a road in the Sabra Palestinian
refugee camp in West Beirut, Lebanon after finding the bodies of
relatives killed by a Christian Phalangist militia under the IDF's watchCredit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
But that horrific oversight (in either
sense of the term, depending on the version of events) was not unique to
the IDF. The Dutch army, in its role as UN peacekeepers, was
responsible for a comparable calamity in the form of standing by while
the Serbs massacred Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.
To
be sure, what is happening in the West Bank now is not a massacre.
Moreover, the daily attacks against Palestinian civilians do not
reflect, by and large, the spirit of the political leadership. In 1982,
the ethno-nationalist Likud leader and Prime Minister Menachem Begin
famously dismissed the outcry over the IDF’s imputed role in the Sabra
and Shatila massacre with the apothegm, “Goyim killed goyim, and here
they are accusing us.”
Prime
Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Gantz, in contrast, are
perhaps more genuinely distressed by the violence. The only problem is
that they are politically powerless to decry it, let alone act to stop
it.
On some level, none of this is entirely
new. It has been the story of the occupation from the very beginning.
Israel itself has formally acknowledged as much over the years, as, for
instance, in the 1984 Karp Report, in which a panel of Israeli jurists,
headed by the country’s deputy attorney general, outlined the Israeli
police's failure to protect Palestinians against Jewish settler
violations of the law, including explicit violence, in the occupied
territories.
Yet
these failures are no longer merely a pattern, but the make-up of
everyday life in the West Bank. Worse still, in too many instances the
IDF’s blind eye is interpreted by the settlers as a sinister wink.
Willy-nilly, the Israeli army is desecrating the memory of the Jewish
victims in the slaughterhouse of Europe. And it is undermining the
historical and cultural foundations on which modern Jewish military
power came into existence.
Yonatan Touval is a senior foreign policy analyst at Mitvim: The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. Twitter: @Yonatan_Touval
