August 31, 2006
Nazareth.
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 and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State"
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States
from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net