Part two - 'Hillel Cohen (Kol Hair, November 12) reports how in Hebron,
A group of settlers went to the Patriarchs' Cave for Sabbath prayers. On their
way there the settlers damaged 14 cars belonging to Arab residents of the
neighborhood. They smashed their windows or punctured their tires, and then
proceeded on to the Cave, where they greeted the arrival of the Sabbath by
singing melodious songs . . . .
On Sunday, after a settler was killed by Hamas guerrillas,
Hebron was announced a military zone closed to the media. A curfew was
imposed on the city's Palestinian residents. The army had good reason to deny
the media access to the place, because evidence of the settlers' rampage was
plentiful. Many houses and dozens of cars parked on the city's major streets had
windows broken. It was an ideal testimony of the army's impotence vis-à-vis the
settlers.
Cohen comments that "breaking the windows of an Arab car is in Hebron an everyday
occurrence which long ago stopped attracting any attention." After the army did not let Cohen
enter Hebron, he simply, together with his photographer, boarded the religious settlers' bus in
Jerusalem. In this way he could enter the city undisturbed:
On the way, the religious youths from Kiryat Arba kept themselves busy slinging
stones at Arab passersby, while summarily explaining their behavior by saying:
"We are the settlers, aren't we?" At the entrance to Kiryat Arba, old grafitti --
"Only a sucker doesn't kill an Arab" -- was still visible.
Like any Jew, settler or visitor, Cohen could walk freely through "the city of Hebron even
under curfew, when its streets were deserted" with none of its Arab inhabitants in sight. He
noticed "evidence of the settlers' rampages from previous days" everywhere: shattered
windows, overturned cars and traces of arson. Grafitti in Hebrew, noticed by other reporters,
like Gideon Levy (Haaretz Supplement, November 26) were in full view. Religious settlers
threatened the locals with dire consequences if they dared wipe out those grafitti. According to
Levy, the most frequent among them was the beginning of verse 7 of Psalm 149: "To execute
vengeance upon the Gentiles"; whereas the next in frequency was "Death to the Arabs."
Apartheid manifests itself in the territories also in that the Israeli army orders the local
Palestinians to wipe out any grafitti in Arabic, even those which express longing for peace; but
grafitti in Hebrew spraypainted by the settlers are left untouched.
Another story by Nahum Barnea (Yediot Ahronot, November 26) concerns Muhammad Lutfi
Darwish al-Raouf al-Zaru and his pregnant wife Rima. Al-Zaru was driving his car on the way
to his sister. Due to a beating, Rima al-Zaru miscarried her twin children. Barnea stresses that
al-Zaru had in his youth worked for ten years in factories owned by Jews and learned to speak
fluent Hebrew.
Here is a part of Barnea's story. Al-Zaru, 33, now supports himself by driving Palestinian
workers to work in a rented Peugeot 504 car. On November 6, at 9:40 a.m., he was with his
wife driving his car on a highway to the east of Hebron. Their destination was the home of his
sister. The assault on him was thus described to Barnea in his own words:
"A group of religious settlers were walking on the road linking Kiryat Arba with
the neighboring settlement of Givat Ha'Harsma. One of them, a large, bearded
man wearing a prayer shawl, signaled by hand the car to stop. I shifted gears and
stopped the car slowly. Without saying a word, he knocked me in the eye. I saw
red. I moved over to the other seat, but he kept hitting me. I got infuriated. I said:
'Damn you, what did I do to you?' He put the barrel of his M-16 [gun] against my
chest and cocked it. My wife grabbed the barrel so as to shift it aside. 'What did
he do to you?' she shouted at him in Arabic. He twisted her arm, with the effect
of pulling her abdomen forward, toward the back of the seat, and then he
abruptly pushed her back. She screamed and cried.
"When I saw my wife getting hit, I said to myself that my life didn't matter. If I die,
so be it. I opened the door of the car in order to grab him. But other settlers
came to his help and started beating me. My wife said that they were three or
four, one of them a woman, but I saw no one else but him. They knocked me
onto the ground. To protect myself, I curled myself up. They kicked me, turning
me over. I touched my eye and found it was bleeding. I wanted to grab a stone.
But, aiming his gun at my head, he said: 'Get up.' Then he said: 'Get into your car
and get lost.' I drove some distance down the highway, towards Jerusalem. I
noticed an army jeep. I signaled to them with my lights. They stopped, coming out
of the jeep with their guns drawn. They relaxed only when they saw my gory face.
I asked them to 'drive with me to catch the settlers.' 'We can't,' they answered,
'We are on an assignement. Drive the other way, toward the roadblock. They will
help you.'
"On Saturdays the army sets up roadblocks between Kiryat Arba and Hebron, to
protect the religious settlers on their way to pray in the Patriarchs' Cave. I drove
there to tell the soldiers everything. 'Never mind,' a soldier said. 'Go to the
hospital for treatment, and then come back and wait with us until the settlers
return from the prayers. We will catch the fellow, don't worry.' I parted with my
wife, leaving her with her father. I received first aid and returned to the
roadblock. The soldier made a phonecall and a jeep arrived from the Civil
Administration. 'I will take care of it,' said the man from the Civil Administration. I
told him, 'Everyone keeps telling me, don't worry, I want to do something, but no
one is doing anything.' He laughed. 'If you wait for the soldiers to do something,'
he said, 'then you can forget it.' He turned on a communication set. 'I spoke to the
military governor himself,' he said. 'He instructed me to make you stay here until
the settler returns. You will identify him, and we will take care of him.'
"At 12:30 the settlers returned. I approached a soldier and said, 'There he is.' 'Sit
where you are and say nothing,' the soldier answered. He went over to him and
said, 'Give me your name, you beat up this man.' The settler just kept going, as if
he didn't hear a word. When the soldier asked his name for the second time, the
settler said: 'Who are you to demand that I identify myself?' And he kept walking
on, without stopping...
"The roadblock officer came over. The soldiers told him what happened. I was
told by the officer to 'get into the jeep.' We pursued the settler up to the entrance
to Kiryat Arba. I pointed him out. The officer told him: 'Give me your particulars.'
'Are you crazy?,' yelled the settler. 'Do you bring an Arab to arrest me, a Jew, on
the ground of what he says? We refuse to answer any questions until you hand
the Arab over to us. We need him.' 'The Arab is in my custody,' answered the
officer. And he went over to his driver telling him in a soft voice: 'Take the Arab
at once back to the roadblock.' He told the settlers: 'Move 20 meters away, then
I will hand him over to you.' When the settlers did so, the soldiers started the car
and just fled. I remained at the roadblock. Ten minutes later some military
vehicles arrived. I asked the soldiers what happened. 'Can't you see?' a soldier
said, 'a real war is going on over you.'"
I am omitting the rest of the story, which recounts the unavailing attempts of al-Zaru even to
submit a complaint, but in another incident on Saturday, December 4, a border guard who
happened to be a Druze called upon a religious settler of Hebron to identify himself. The latter
answered: "A Jew who identifies himself to a Gentile on Sabbath desecrates Sabbath and
commits a religious sin." The Border Guard didn't insist. The incident was reported by the
Police minister, Shahal, at the next day's government meeting. Some junior ministers
denounced that religious settler as a "racist" (Haaretz and other Hebrew papers, December 5).
Rabin and the two senior ministers, Peres and Shohat (Finance), however, refrained from
making any comment. And the government didn't issue any instructions to the effect that settlers
refusing to identify themselves, on Sabbath or at any other time, were to be detained, charged
and brought to court.
A minority of religious settlers belonging to various splinters of the Kahane ("Kach") movement
are in a class by themselves. Many of them are American Jews, particularly from New York
City, and their plentiful supplies of money come mostly from the United States. All the
bickering between the splinters notwithstanding, for the purpose of assaulting the Palestinians
most Kach progeny in the territories are organizationally united in the so-called Committee for
Safety on Highways, an organization which began its career as far back as January 1988. The
committee and its leaders have been openly admitting their involvement in assaults on the Arabs
and their property for almost six years, during which the Israeli government has done nothing to
stop them. The last time they did it in an interview granted "by a veteran member of the
Committee, who requested to remain anonymous," in which "he spoke about the Committee's
character and activities" to Haaretz correspondent Naday Shragai (November 23). Of
particular concern is the fact that this committee takes full advantage of the rules restricting the
options of the Israeli army in dealing with the Jews, as Gurevitz described them (November
17). Presumably as a quid pro quo for their following the rules, "the Committee members could
have carried out hundreds of actions, but the Israeli army, police, security forces [i.e. the
Shabak] and the judiciary have hardly ever responded" (a quote from Shragai).
The openness with which the Committee professes its aims and acts is truly remarkable. Says
the "veteran member":
After Ayubi's murder we used our loudspeakers in the streets of Kiryat Arba to
call upon the Committee activists to assemble at the southern gate. About 60
people came in about 15 cars. We planned in advance. We divided ourselves
into groups. Each group was assigned an area. We were equipped with our
personal weapons, crowbars to fracture doors, iron rods, plenty of stones and
many gallons of gasoline.
None of this could have been done except under the very noses of the Israeli army.
Our method was simple, and already proven effective. We drive with searchlights
lit so as to blind the Arab drivers approaching us. The driver gets confused and
slows down. This gives us two options: he either gets into an accident, or waits
until we pass him by. In the latter case we throw a large stone at his windshield.
The stone may hit him or cause an accident. Last week we were helped by dense
fog over the Hebron area. The blinding lights and the stones had quite potent an
effect on the Arab drivers. At Beit Kakhil junction alone we precipitated six
accidents I know of. One Arab vehicle crashed into a police car. In some
accidents the Arabs were wounded.
Shragai then asked: "Have firearms been used?" The veteran answered:
As a rule they aren't. We use knives to puncture the tires. Usually, we try to
puncture two tires of each car so as to make the reserve tire useless. The
crowbars are used to break the door locks. The Arabs recently learned to
protect their water heaters on the roofs from all sides by iron bars, but crowbars
are the answer to that. Stones are thrown at house and car windows. In the
summer we also set fire to every pile of hay we see and spray insecticides on
vineyards of the Hallioul area. After the Ayubi murder we uprooted two dunums
of Arab-owned grapevines near the site of the murder and set fire to fifteen Arab
cars. We arrived at an Arab building site near Hebron. We vandalized it as much
as we could. There was a huge crane there. In the foreseeable future that crane
won't work.
Question: "What happens to those who defy you?" The veteran's answer:
We concentrate on damaging property. If there are locals who dare defy us, they
get beaten badly. This happened at the Hebron market, where we follow a
standard retaliatory procedure. The procedure is to overturn as many market
carts as possible. Several Arab peddlers were cheeky enough to put up
resistance. They got beaten exactly as they deserved.
Such atrocities are perpetrated not only in Hebron and the adjoining area. The veteran informs
that the Committee
is active not only in the Hebron area, but also in Ariel, Yitzhar, Beit-El, Shilo and
in [the Haredi town of Immanuel. We have a handful of members in almost every
one of the 140 settlements [of the West Bank]. Three or four people are enough
to carry out simple unsophisticated operations. For that we don't need more
people. Such minimal manpower is always available to us.
To all appearances this is true. The veteran also provides the already well-known information
about the Committee's members such as
Baruch Marzel, the first chairman of the Committee for Safety on Highways, who
is now a member of the Kiryat Arba [Municipal] Council, which proves
something. And we also have our representatives coordinating work in the Local
Action Committee, which is the Council's informal vigilante outfit for retaliations
against the terrorists.
The same is in my view the case in all religious settlements, but not in the secular ones, because
all major Israeli secular parties abhor Kach, Likud even more than Labor.
An example of the committee's performance which occurred far away from Hebron was
reported by Haaretz on November 21. The above-mentioned Baruch Marzel together with
another well-known Kach militant, Noam Federman, were detained a day before for having
gone on a rampage during the visit of the president of Israel, Ezer Weizmann, to Kiryat Arba.
Weizmann's intention was to encourage the settlers, but Marzel and Federman nevertheless
abused him violently. When they were brought before the magistrate in Western Jerusalem (as
settlers they have the privilege of standing trial in Israel), the police asked to remand them on
the ground that "they could not be found while being pursued since November 4 for an offense
they were suspected of committing on that day." Let me parenthetically comment that at the
time the two "could not be found" they were engaged in public activities. The police told the
magistrate, Yehudit Tzur, that it suspects Marzel and Federman of "arriving in a rented taxi in
the Arab village of Al-Hadar in the district of Bethlehem, in the company of some armed
settlers. Upon arriving there, they went to a local grocery. One of them aimed his gun at the
grocer, while others burned the Palestinian flags on sale." Thereupon, the whole group
crisscrossed the village, burning all the flags that could be found, and forcing the inhabitants to
watch the fires under threats of shooting and actually shooting into the air. According to my
sources, incidents of this type are quite common in many West Bank villages, though not in the
Gaza Strip. The assaulters are hardly ever apprehended, and the Israeli army dismisses the
complaints of the villagers with contempt. In this particular case, however, the assaulters were
watched from a nearby Israeli army lookout and telescopically photographed, presumably by
soldiers uninformed of what the army really wanted. The photographs, which were clear
enough to identify the assaulters, were handed over to the police. The latter, which then had
Marzel and Federman under detetion for insulting the president, asked that they be remanded
for seven more days. The sequel of the story is instructive. Marzel and Federman wanted to be
freed on bail in view of the "petty" nature of offenses they were charged with. Marzel argued
that charging him "with such petty offenses proves that the police are biased against" him.
Accepting such "arguments," Ms. Tzur freed the two on a minuscule bail, in addition to
instructing Marzel to spend the next four days in Jerusalem in some place where he could be
located by the police.
Such kindness toward the Kach members and other religious settlers is typical of, if not all
Jewish judges of Jerusalem, then of a large majority of them. Their leniency is so well-known
that, in the rare cases when the Israeli police or the attorney general's office really want to
prosecute Kach members from the territories, they assign them to magistrates and judges in
other Israeli cities, which is perfectly legal.
The most important conclusion warranted by evidence presented here is analogous to that
made at the beginning of the article. I argued there that Rabin's real policy is to support the
settlements in order to guarantee continuing Israeli domination over the territories under the
cover of pretended concessions to the Palestinians. To pursue that policy, Rabin needs to
bestow particular favors upon religious settlers, because they alone are willing to settle in
places like Netzarim and even Hebron, for that matter. For the same reason Rabin must
condone the violence of the religious settlers against the Palestinians. Ruling a population which
refuses to accord to its rulers any legitimacy requires a continuous recourse to violence,
however limited in its scope, for the purpose of cowing the people and keeping them
intimidated.
This is exactly what the religious settlers are doing, and it is also the reason why the Israeli
army does nothing to restrain them although it easily could. The religious settlers (including
Kach, as long as it sticks to the rules of the game) should be regarded as a vital segment of the
Israeli security system, on a par with the army, the Shabak and the police, which are inhibited
by the constraints of their roles as official arms of the Israeli government. It is therefore
delusory to expect any segment of that security system to take meaningful action against
another.
Another conclusion to be drawn is that in social and political terms, systematic violence such as
described here, even if purposefully limited, is much more important than the murders (even of
children) or tortures inflicted only on relatively few Palestinians. On the contrary, the present
report shows that, with the exception of the "wanted," the Israeli Security System is not
interested in having too many Palestinians murdered or even wounded. It is interested in having
them continually harassed, humiliated and, therefore, feeling vulnerable. I do not mean to
minimize the significance of murder and torture. For years on end, I have done my best to
struggle against the murders of Palestinians committed by the state of Israel, and I was one of
the first Israelis to openly protest after 1967 against torture of Palestinians. I merely say that
socially and politically what matters most is what has the strongest impact upon the everyday
life of the greatest numbers of people -- in this case upon everybody, at least potentially. Such
an impact cannot avoid affecting and ultimately shaping people's consciousness, though not
necessarily to the oppressors' liking. In this case, mass violence of the kind described will, in
my view, contribute to stepping up Palestinian resistance, regardless of what the fate of the
agreement between Israel and the PLO may yet be.'
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