Israel's Approved Ethnic Cleansing

Back at the time of the first Intifada, U.S. Ambassador Robert Pelletreau was explicit that the “riots” in the occupied territories “we view as terrorist acts against Israel.” Correspondingly, U.S. policy was to put no pressure on Israel to curb its repression or alter its policies, essentially giving Israel carte blanche to use “harsh military and economic pressure” till “in the end, they will be broken” (Yitzak Rabin). In the second Intifada, once again there is absolutely no U.S. pressure on Israel to change its policies. Arms aid and training programs to Israel have been stepped up—35 Black Hawk military helicopters supplied in October 2000 and nine Apache attack helicopters bought from Boeing in February 2001; U.S. training in urban counter-insurgency tactics that would help Israel to take control of Palestinian urban centers, provided in mid-September 2000; and joint U.S.-Israeli military exercises along with the redeployment of Patriot missiles from Germany to Israel in February 2001—and as in the past all UN resolutions of condemnation and calls for an international presence in the occupied territories have been ignored or vetoed by the United States on behalf of its ethnic-cleansing client.

This of course makes the process self-fulfilling. A people under continuous oppression and a long process of “redemption of the land” at their expense is given no peaceful recourse by Israel and its patron—Oslo was an agreement confirming all Palestinian losses, with no right of return or compensation promised, no ending of expropriations and expulsions in the occupied territories, and with any benefits to the victims dependent on future negotiations. But that future never came: since 1993 the Palestinians have been ground down further, and Israel has continued its steady encroachment and increased its brutalization (the more recent Barak-Clinton Bantustan offer is discussed in Part 3 under “Apologetic Frames”). In consequence, the Palestinians periodically burst forth with bombings involving the self-immolation of desperate men, and with mass upheavals, as in the two Intifadas.

But in the definitional system of oppressor and patron this is terrorism, horrifying and intolerable. What Israel has done making this people desperate is not terror. As State Department PR person James Rubin explained after another spate of Israeli demolitions of Palestinian houses, this was “a wrong signal” for a delicate stage in peace talks (NYT, June 23, 1998). Not bad in themselves and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, just a wrong signal. Madeleine Albright called on the Israelis to refrain from “what Palestinians see as the provocative expansion of settlements, land confiscation, house demolitions and confiscation of IDs” (NYT, October 15, 1997). Only “the Palestinians” see these actions as “provocative;” Albright did not find them objectionable in themselves or illegal. In fact, under Clinton the United States finally rejected the international law and almost universal consensus on the occupation, declaring the territories not “occupied Palestinian lands” but “disputed territories” (Albright). By U.S. fiat Palestinian lands became open to settlement by force by the ethnic cleanser who the United States has armed to the teeth, and who has aggressively brutalized while creating “facts on the ground” during the “dispute,” which will not be settled until the victims end their terrorism.

Albright has stressed that there is “No moral equivalency between suicide bombers and bulldozers” (Newsweek, August 18, 1997). Clinton, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres as the latter defended a blockade of the Palestinians that was adding to their misery, put the blame on Hamas who were allegedly “trying to make the Palestinians as miserable as possible” (Philadelphia Inquirer, March 15, 1996). There was not the slightest hint that Israel was contributing to Palestinian misery despite massive expropriations and 300 devastating “closures” after 1993.

So it is not Israeli policy, which amounts to a continuous and illegal assault on and displacement of the Palestinians, that is ultimately at fault and that must be changed to resolve this conflict. Albright can't recognize that decades of “bulldozers” necessarily produce suicide bombers, although she was quick to find that much less repression in Kosovo produced “freedom fighters;” nor can she distinguish between systematic policy (i.e., bull-dozers) and uncontrollable outbursts from victims that do not constitute policy. The inability of these U.S. officials to see Israel's hugely discriminatory and brutal expulsions, demolitions, mistreatment and plain exploitation as seriously wrong in themselves, illegal, or causal manifests a complete identification with and apologetic for the ethnic cleansers. Five years ago a senior Clinton White House official declared that “We are not going to second-guess Israel” (PI, March 15, 1996), and on March 19, 2001, Colin Powell assured the Jewish lobbying group AIPAC that, “We are dedicated to preserving this special relationship with Israel and the Israeli people...[and] a secure Israel with internationally-recognized borders remains a cornerstone of the United States foreign policy.” Now as in the past, and with only rare exceptions, as in the case of the unauthorized Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel will get strong U.S. support for whatever it does, and the ethnic cleansing of its unworthy victims can proceed as required.

One of the triumphs of Oslo was its buying off of Arafat, making him into a second class client and an enforcer of the pathetic “settlement,” with U.S. and Israeli funds and training exchanged for his commitment to keep his people in line and control “terrorism.” (For a compelling account, with full background, Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, 1994.) The formula for the wholesale terrorists (Israel) has always been: whatever violence we perpetrate is “retaliation” and it is up to the retail terrorists (Palestinians) to stop terrorizing and then we might “negotiate” with them in a “peace process.” Israeli leaders say “You can't ask us to stop expanding existing settlements, which are living organisms” (Netanyahu), as if this were not in violation of UN resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and even the 1993 Oslo agreement.

U.S. officials can never bring themselves to say that what Israel is doing is wrong—at worst it may send “a wrong signal,” etc. And they follow closely the Israeli party line that “terrorism” (Palestinian, not Israeli) must be stopped first, so that the “peace process” can be put back on track. For Albright, “security” was primary, and she told Arafat that “she needed a commitment and action on the subject of security” before she could make a credible approach to Israel on other issues (WP, September 12, 1997). “Security” always means Israeli security, not Palestinian, for Albright—or for Colin Powell—just as for Israeli officials. Here as elsewhere these high U.S. officials internalize the Israeli perspective and the idea of “security” for the unworthy victims doesn't arise, any more than the notion that Israeli insecurity arises from the much greater Palestinian insecurity that inevitably results from Israeli policies. In his visit to Jerusalem in March 1996, Clinton spoke of “the awful persistence of fear”—but only in reference to Israelis, not to Palestinians (PI, March 15, 1996). This is an internalized racist bias that has characterized U.S. official statements and media and expert opinion here for decades.

Reasons For and Modalities of Support

Why does the United States support Israel's ethnic cleansing? Broadly speaking, the reasons boil down to two factors. One is Israel's role as a U.S. proxy in the Middle East and its integration into the U.S. security system, which encompasses not only keeping the Arab world in line, but also providing services like supplying arms to the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the Pinochet government of Chile, Mobutu, Idi Amin, apartheid South Africa, and the Guatemalan and Argentinian terror states. Because of these services, Israel's victims are not merely unworthy, they also become “terrorists” and part of the “Islamic threat” for the U.S. political elite and mainstream media.

The second factor is the exceptional power of the pro-Israel lobby, which for many years has bought and bullied politicians and the media, so that they all vie with one another in genuflections to the holy state. This bullying is especially strong and effective in Canada and the United States, but it applies widely, and the distinguished British reporter Robert Fisk, describing the abuse he has suffered in reporting on the Middle East, says that “the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now international” (“I Am Being Vilified For Telling the Truth About Palestinians,” The Independent, December 13, 2000).

These factors feed into the intellectual and media culture in complex ways that institutionalize the huge bias, with pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian perspectives internalized and/or made obligatory by potential flak and pressure from above and without. This is extremely important, as there is no reason to believe that the U.S. public would support a massive and brutal ethnic cleansing program if they were given even a modest quantum of the ugly facts, if the main victims rather than the ethnic cleansers were humanized, and if the media's frames of reference were not designed to apologize for Israeli expropriation and violence. However, the ongoing media and intellectual biases do very effectively complement the national policy of support for the ethnic cleansing state, just as they helped cover up national policy supporting Indonesia's murderous occupation of East Timor and roused the public to a pitch of frenzy over the unapproved Yugoslav violence in Kosovo. Z

Part 3 will review the modalities by which Israel's more than half-century long, massive, and ongoing ethnic cleansing is made palatable.