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‘The world is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.’ Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO’s exit from Beirut in August 1982. ‘Where shall we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky’? Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered by the Israeli Army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little ghettoes, and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours at barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli soldiers. As I write, two hundred Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis because for ‘security reasons’ the Israeli military won’t allow them to travel to medical centres. Have any of the innumerable members of the foreign media covering the conflict done a story about these brutalised young Israeli conscripts trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the main part of their military duty? I think not.

Yasir Arafat was not allowed to leave his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of Islamic Conference foreign ministers on 10 December in Qatar; his speech was read by an aide. The airport fifteen miles away in Gaza and Arafat’s two ageing helicopters had been destroyed the previous week by Israeli planes and bulldozers, with no one and no force to check, much less prevent the daily incursions of which this particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War Two. Since last May Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy or air force to protect the people); Apache attack helicopters (again supplied by the US) have used their missiles to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet and, more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well as civilian. During the night of 5 December, the Israeli Army entered the five-storey offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah, carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982 the same Army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Centre, before flattening the structure. A few days later came the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well they would be when, after a ten-day lull in the fighting in late November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation and thus allow the Israeli Army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians. After eight years of barren peace discussions 50 per cent of Palestinians are unemployed and 70 per cent live on less than 2 dollars a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian land. Although five or six Palestinians have been killed in the last few months for every one Israeli, the obese old warmonger has the gall to keep repeating that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that meted out by Bin Laden.

The crucial point in all this is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is the longest such occupation in history, and the only one anywhere in the world today: this is the original and continuing violence against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. Yesterday (10 December), two children aged 3 and 13 were killed by Israeli bombs in Hebron, yet at the same time an EU delegation was demanding that Palestinians curtail their violence and acts of terrorism. Today five more Palestinians were killed, all of them civilian, victims of helicopter bombings of Gaza’s refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a result of the 11 September attacks, the word ‘terrorism’ is being used to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and thirty plus years of collective punishment is proscribed.

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Letters

Vol. 24 No. 2 · 14 January 2002

Edward Said’s ironic piece (LRB, 3 January) was of course less about Israel’s own security than about its systematic efforts to destroy the basis for a Palestinian state. These efforts are directed not only at Palestinian men and women, their institutions, their homes, their land and their buildings, but perhaps even more crucially, at the very ‘idea’ of Palestine. In this respect, it is worth highlighting the significance of the Israeli Army’s invasion in early December of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) in Ramallah – which Said mentions in passing, recalling a similar assault in 1982 when ‘the same Army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Centre, before flattening the structure.’

This time 25 armed members of the Israel Defence Forces entered the building at night by force, broke doors and sabotaged equipment and computers, emptied filing cabinets, seized or destroyed files and documents, and scrawled in Hebrew across a printout: ‘I want to screw your mother.’ The PCBS, founded in September 1993 and supported largely by European donors, was a major source of data for the Palestinian Authority, for development and aid agencies, and for international and local academics researching a range of economic and social issues. The IDF spokesperson declared that the raid was part of ‘the fight against terror’. But it was really an assault on a unique body of knowledge and information relating to Palestine; an attempt to destroy the basis for the creation of a future, hitherto only imagined community. Perhaps, as an academic, I am particularly outraged at this assault on a centre of information and learning, but I also see it as a misguided, and ultimately futile, attempt to destroy an ‘idea’ and a belief in an alternative future, much as the burning of books was once used as a method of suppressing ‘heresies’.

David Seddon
University of East Anglia

Vol. 24 No. 3 · 7 February 2002

As a non-Israeli anti-Zionist Jew, I am well aware of the need to distinguish between peoples and ideologies. It is J. Behar (Letters, 14 January) who appears to be ‘morally unsavoury’ when he equates Edward Said’s lamenting of a ‘Zionist presence’ at Princeton with the wish of some Jews in Israel to be rid of an Arab presence. To be rid of an Arab presence is to engage in ethnic cleansing. To be rid of a Zionist presence is to be rid of those who would engage in, or excuse, ethnic cleansing.

Mark Elf
Dagenham, Essex

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