Israel and Censorship at Harvard

Israel and Censorship at Harvard

Published On Friday, September 14, 2007 1:29 AM

By J. LORAND MATORY

Since Vietnam, Israel has become the heartbeat of U.S. foreign policy and a litmus test of what can be debated—and even of who will be allowed to speak—on university campuses. This year, the Congress of the University and College Union—the British lecturers’ union—proposed a boycott of Israeli universities and academics for what it regards as their complicity in 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. This boycott has its counterpart in a decades-old U.S. practice of threatening, defaming, or censoring scholars who dare to criticize Israel.

Two years ago at Harvard, a social scientist who was the most widely cited in his area of study but who had, in a popular book, criticized the U.S.-Israel alliance, became the subject of insinuations that he was anti-Semitic—insinuations that were likely fatal to his candidacy.In recent years, at least three professors—Oxford’s Tom Paulin, DePaul’s Norman Finkelstein, and Rutgers’ Robert Trivers—have been invited to speak at Harvard and then disinvited after complaints that they had spoken critically of Israel or disagreed sharply with Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz regarding Israel’s military conduct.

In a 2006 faculty meeting, Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse vocalized the underlying rationale of such censorship as few other professors have dared. Denying that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are separate phenomena, she declared anti-Zionism—that is, the rejection of the racially-based claim that Jewish people have a collective right to Palestine—the worst kind of anti-Semitism. For such defenders of Israel, any acknowledgement that Zionism in principle and in practice violates Palestinian rights is tantamount to an endorsement of the Holocaust.

• But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans?
  
• Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty?
  
• In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections.
  
• Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on European bank accounts, property, and compensation for labor expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s?
  
• As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defense of slavery in the mid-19th.
  

However, what follows is the most important question for the health of the academic and moral community that we share here at Harvard: How can one engage in a critical and nonetheless loving conversation about Zionism with a community as gravely traumatized as the Jewish people? The question has become particularly difficult to answer since Harvard’s previous president publicly declared that petitions against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza were a form of anti-Semitism, comparable to vandalizing Jewish gravestones.

My aim here is not to preach but to insist upon my right, and others’, to a conversation full of respect and free of intimidation, one that presumes no monopolies on suffering, one in which all racism and anti-Semitism—whether against Semitic Jews, Semitic Christians, Semitic Druzes or Semitic Muslims—is equally impermissible. I am troubled that Dershowitz escaped former University President Lawrence H. Summers’ criticism when he endorsed Israel’s torture of Palestinian prisoners. And Wisse’s ghastly 1988 description of Palestinian refugees as “people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery” elicited no demand for retraction.

• In my country, people tremble in the fear of losing their friends, jobs, advertising revenues, campaign contributions, and alumni donations if they question Zionism or Israeli policy—despite the billions of our tax dollars paid annually for Israel’s defense and sustenance.
  
• Even the Israeli military hosts freer debates about this issue than any U.S. university does.
  
• One result: Israel has now withdrawn from Gaza, an action that Summers slammed Harvard and MIT professors as anti-Semitic for even contemplating.

My position is difficult not just because I have colleagues and friends who disagree but because I have no Palestinian friends. For every five Jewish people I have loved, I hardly know one Arab. Indeed, I am troubled by the insouciance of the Arab and Muslim world in the face of unjust suffering by people who look like me. A region so publicly committed to its anti-racist religious tradition remains mute over the atrocities of the Arab and Islamic government of Sudan against Africans in Darfur and the south. Osama bin Laden and his cheerleaders treat as insignificant the deaths of hundreds of non-partisan Africans in the bombings of the U.S. embassies at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Thus, my concerns about Zionism are motivated by neither pro-Arab nor anti-Jewish bias, but by the fear that those who dismiss all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism—or, equally often, as Jewish self-hatred—risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Israel’s defenders convince the world that all legitimately Jewish people are Zionists and that Jewish people are uniform in their opinions about Israel and its policies, then the convinced will conclude that condemning Israel or its policies requires them to hate Jewish people.

Moreover, by intimidating those who are reasonable enough to separate their criticism of Israel from the criticism of Jewish people as a whole—as we must—discourses like Summers’ risk leaving the conversation to the people least able to engage tête-à-tête rather than gun-to-gun, bomb-to-bomb, and plane-to-tower. For that reason, I fear that the pronouncements of Summers—and our many colleagues who would stifle debate about Israel—are themselves “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”

J. Lorand Matory ’82 is professor of anthropology and of African and African-American studies.

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The occupation within

The occupation within
By James Brooks
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 10, 2007, 01:19

How were the terms of US political and economic debate severed from basic standards of evidence and common sense? Why does the word “hypocrisy” seem inadequate to describe the pretzel logic of the neoconservatives? Why do the people of the United States remain inert as the madness at the top claims the authority to haemorrhage its execution of Iraq into a nuclear war on Iran?

John McMurtry is a decorated professor of philosophy who has pursued questions like these to the ideological foundations of today’s US-centric global empire. [1] His analysis offers insights that can help us identify and think our way out of this now ubiquitous “mind-lock.” McMurtry’s approach also turns out to be useful for illuminating core ideological contradictions in Israel’s US-supported ethnic cleansing regime, which has been forcing Palestinians off their lands for the last 60 years.

McMurtry narrates the ascendance of a “fanatic mind-set” in the West following the demise of the Soviet Union, when “a strange ideological inversion occurred.” Marxism’s ‘economic determinism,’ “abhorred by liberal theory,” was swiftly replaced with the west’s own brand of imposed economic determinism. “Inevitable globalization” was framed as a product of unaccountable and unstoppable forces unleashed by a veritable law of nature, the ultimate “wisdom of the market” that benefits all.

McMurtry demonstrates the destruction of value and meaning inherent in the adoption of this absolutist dogma, which claims to encompass all human activity and reflexively rules out of order any other explanation or concern. He also traces the use of this irrationality to justify brutal economic and military predation under the twin deceptions of “free trade” and “democracy.” The nakedness of this nonsense is revealed by McMurtry’s observation that it glorifies its “no alternative” market theory and bullying imperial trade policies as the ultimate in economic freedom.

Noting the ways in which similar inversions of meaning have been used in totalitarian ideologies, he concludes that inversion is one of the fundamental processes involved in the development of today’s “fanatic mind-set”:

“Throughout the world re-engineering by the global apparatchiks, there has been a transformative principle of representation across phenomena and crises: to invert social values and general facts into their contrary so that no bearings remain for intelligibility of resistance.” [emphasis in original]

Observers of Israel and its influence within the United States see a long trend toward ideological convergence between the two nations, especially in foreign policy, war, economics, and propaganda. One of the little-noted fundamentals of this growing affinity is a mutual and increasing need and desire to justify unjustifiable acts and obscure incriminating truths.

So it is not surprising that Israel is awash in the same intellectual process of inversion that McMurtry finds so pervasive in the US. Indeed, one could argue that many of Israel’s ideological contradictions are at least as old as the state. Using McMurtry’s style of formulation and taking broad liberties with his method, here are a few of the more obvious inversions of meanings and values underlying the Israeli government’s proclamations and practices. US readers may note the obvious parallels.

• Israel’s “right to defend itself” assumes the “harsh necessity” of its military and civilian occupation of Palestinian land, which is an illegal act of war. Self-defense = Aggression

• Israel’s security depends upon the continual provocation of forces that will threaten Israel’s security when provoked. Security = Promotion of insecurity

• Israelis’ freedom depends upon the imprisonment of another people. [2] Freedom = Denial of freedom

• Israel’s democracy depends upon the racist exclusion of its indigenous citizens and the empowerment of the most intolerant of its privileged citizens. [3-5] Democracy = Apartheid

• Israel is a “bastion of religious freedom” in which civil law is based on an “orthodox” version of a single religion. [6] Religious freedom = Religious exclusivity

• Israel’s continued prosperity requires “market liberalization” that dramatically increases poverty and consolidates wealth at the top. [7,8] Prosperity = Poverty

• Israel’s commitment to the rule of law and sound economic policy (which promises to earn it a seat at the OECD next year) is reflected in its continuing slide down international corruption indexes, an unending string of serious political scandals, and thriving organized crime. [9-11] Legality = Lawlessness

Peace for Israel requires its negotiating partners to accept terms that fall far short of their people’s minimum standards for peace. Whether or not these terms are met, the formula is: Peace = Continual war

Prospects for peace are enhanced when negotiating partners collaborate in banning, imprisoning, and isolating their constituents who oppose Israel’s terms. Such actions also signal the negotiating partners’ “commitment to democracy.” [12-14] Peacemaking = Democracy = Unconstitutional oligarchy, collective punishment, and civil strife = Illegitimacy and probable failure of any agreements reached between Israel and its partners = Continual (land-grabbing) war

The public’s acceptance of these inversions creates what McMurtry calls an “occupation of consciousness” that makes it very difficult for the citizen thus “occupied” to understand her predicament, much less anyone else’s.

However, just as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, the ideological contortions that befuddle and disempower the public simultaneously comfort the powerful with an automatic self-justifying narrative. While there is no gainsaying the cynicism of today’s leaders, the “fanatic mind-set” must be an irresistibly attractive narcotic to those driven to acquire the power to give the orders to drop the bombs.

One of the implicit subtexts of the mind-set is that cynicism is reality; the ends always justify the means if the means can be kept largely hidden from public view and the ends are framed as unassailable indispensables: freedom, democracy, “growth,” rule of law, etc. The negative side of the equation is always “more than” balanced by its positive equivalent.

The powerful are the anointed agents of the world’s “best hope.” To advance its interests (and their own), they ought to do anything “the market will bear.” It’s not just what the powerful want us to believe. At least to some degree, it’s what most of them need to believe, to do what they do.

McMurtry argues that the fanatic mind-set is “closed” and “self-referential.” From within the delusion, it would be logical to conclude that increasing the negative side of the equation can increase the positive. More denial of freedom to others equals more freedom for us, and (as an afterthought) all the other “good” people of the world.

We hear that ‘a greater readiness to use military force will better protect our democracy and freedoms at home,’ and we hardly notice. But if this mind-set is closed in its circularity, it will increasingly diverge from reality. And, being self-referential, chronically ambitious, and uniquely powerful, it can only seek to outdo itself. If such a dominant mind-set persistently follows its inverted logic, it may rapidly auto-escalate with disastrous results.

What’s next? Rather than simply “protecting” our freedoms by creating, torturing, and slaughtering “terrorists” in Iraq, why not be “pro-active” and eradicate an “evil source of terrorism” that threatens everyone’s freedoms? Wouldn’t bombing Tehran -- a supposed “existential threat” to nuclear-tipped Israel -- produce more freedom and prosperity for all?

Ideologies create the authoritative psychic space within which the unthinkable can become possible. At one time, few could have imagined that the West’s Christian democracies would support a concrete wall splitting the little town of Bethlehem in two, or that the United States would pay for decades of bloody ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land. Israel’s ideology (to some extent crafted to appeal to Western powers) supplied the framework of justification that made it possible.

In the US, we face a threat to our national sanity that is similar to the physical danger bearing down on the caged and impoverished Palestinian people: the destruction of what we have left. Our common foe is an irrational ideology that inverts fundamental values and legitimizes crimes against humanity. For us, the struggle to overcome the threat begins in the mind.

Notes

1. John McMurtry, Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (London and Sterling Va.: Pluto Press, 2002), 277 pages.

2. Prison within a Prison, Gideon Levy, MIFTAH, 8/27/2007

3. GDP per capita of Arab Israelis third of that of Jews, YNetNews, 1/18/2007

4. IRIN reports on the devastation caused to Bedouins by the Israeli forces in the Negev Ma'an News Agency, 6/27/2007

5. Mr. Lieberman Comes to Washington, Will Youmans, CounterPunch, 12/8/2006

6. Only Orthodox conversions accepted in Israel, Boim stresses, YNetNews, 5/23/2007

7. NII report: 100,000 newly poor, half of them children, Ha'aretz, 9/1/2006

8. Netanyahu: Cut taxes for rich to help poor, Dalia Tal, Globes Online, 6/26/2007

9. A supreme effort is required, Ze'ev Segal, Ha'aretz, 5/27/2007

10. Poll: 85% of public believe the leadership is corrupt, Ha'aretz, 1/11/2007

11. Dichter: Police trying to block mafia's bottle recycling takeover, Ha'aretz, 1/9/2007

12. Hamas members arrested by the Palestinian Authority, Ma'an News Agency, 8/22/2007

13. U.S.-Backed Campaign Against Hamas Expands to Charities, Adam Entous, MIFTAH, 8/22/2007

14. Abbas urges Socialist leaders to help isolate Hamas
By Aude Marcovitch, Middle East Online, 6/29/200

James Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. He can be contacted at jamiedb@wildblue.net.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
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HRW: Israeli Policies Contributing to the Civilian Death Toll

Israeli Policies Contributing to the Civilian Death Toll

In the vast majority of cases documented in this report, Israeli air strikes hit near or on civilian objects, killing numerous civilians in their homes or vehicles. While there were instances in which civilian deaths were “collateral damage” from legitimate attacks on military targets, during the vast majority of the deadly air strikes we investigated, we found no evidence of Hezbollah military presence, weaponry or any other military objective that would have justified the strike. Human Rights Watch visits to the graveyards in the villages found that the victims of these strikes were buried as civilians, and not honored as “fighters” or “martyrs” by Hezbollah or other militant groups, despite the pride that Hezbollah takes in these labels. Women and children account for a large majority of the victims of Israeli air strikes that we documented. Out of the 499 Lebanese civilian casualties of whom Human Rights Watch was able to confirm the age and gender, 302 were women or children.

This repeated failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants cannot be explained as mere mismanagement of the war or a collection of mistakes. Our case studies show that Israeli policy was primarily responsible for this deadly failure. Israel assumed that all Lebanese civilians had observed its warnings to evacuate villages south of the Litani River, and thus that anyone who remained was a combatant. Reflecting that assumption, it labeled any visible person, or movement of persons or vehicles south of the Litani River or in the Beka` Valley as a Hezbollah military operation which could be targeted. Similarly, it carried out widespread bombardment of southern Lebanon, including the massive use of cluster munitions prior to the expected ceasefire, in a manner that did not discriminate between military objectives and civilians.

.....

Compounding the problem, Israel targeted people or structures associated in any way with Hezbollah’s military, political, or social structures—regardless of whether they constituted valid military objectives in accordance with international humanitarian law—and failed to take all necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties when attacking suspected Hezbollah targets.

............

Hezbollah Conduct During the War

Our research in Lebanon documented a number of cases in which Hezbollah fighters placed weapons or ammunition inside civilian homes or villages, as well as some cases in which Hezbollah fighters fired rockets from densely populated areas.¹³ (Illustrative examples are detailed below.) Such conduct violates at minimum the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Where Hezbollah combatants intended to use civilians to shield military assets from attack, the requisite criminal intent would be present for the war crime of shielding. However, as already noted, such practices were not nearly as widespread as official Israeli government accounts and some independent press accounts have suggested, and our research found that in all but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population or taken other actions to contribute to the targeting of a particular home or vehicle by Israeli forces.

.........

Summary of Methodology and Errors Corrected

This report builds on Human Rights Watch’s August 2006 report, Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon. It represents the most comprehensive study of civilian deaths in Lebanon to date, based on extensive on-the-ground research. During the course of five months of continuous research in Lebanon and Israel, Human Rights Watch investigated the deaths of more than 561 persons during Israeli air and groundstrikes and collected additional summary information about an additional 548 deaths, thus accounting for a total number of 1,109 deaths (civilians and combatants) from the 34-day conflict. Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 355 victims and witnesses of attacks in one-on-one settings and collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups, journalists, military experts, and government agencies. We visited more than fifty villages and conducted on-site inspections. Human Rights Watch also conducted research in Israel, inspecting the IDF’s use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials.

HRW, Foreign Ministry clash over Lebanon civilian deaths

Sep 6, 2007 2:21 | Updated Sep 6, 2007 2:21
HRW, Foreign Ministry clash over Lebanon civilian deaths
By DAN IZENBERG

Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth on Thursday sharply rejected a Foreign Ministry response to the organization's new 267-page report on Israel's alleged responsibility for the deaths of some 1,000 Lebanese civilians and the wounding of thousands more.

The rubble of a demolished building in Qana, Lebanon, that was struck by the IAF, killing at least 50 people.

An armed Hizbullah operative follows IDF troop movements in southern Lebanon through binoculars during the Second Lebanon War last year.

Responding to the HRW report, entitled, "

Why they Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War,"

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev maintained that

"Hizbullah adopted a deliberate strategy of shielding itself behind the civilian population and turning the civilians in Lebanon into a human shield."

"He is making that up," Roth retorted during a press conference. "That is in no sense the major reason why civilians died. This is a cover story put forward in this case by the Foreign Ministry, other times by the IDF, which bears no relationship to reality."

Following five months of field research, said Roth, HRW

"did not find a systematic practice of shielding in civilian villages. Indeed, we find very rare instances of that. Most Hizbullah military activity was conducted from prepared positions in the hills and valleys outside Lebanese villages... In the vast majority of cases in which civilians died as a result of Israeli air attacks, there was no Hizbullah military presence nearby."

Israel repeatedly warned the Lebanese civilian population of southern Lebanon to leave their homes and escape north of the Litani River, he continued.

"It then acted as if all the civilians had left, when that was not true," said Roth. "Many did flee but many others stayed for a variety of reasons. Some were too old, some were too infirm, some were too impoverished to afford the exorbitant taxi fares being charged, and many were too scared to death to get on the roads and risk attack by Israeli bombers. So, for this variety of reasons, many civilians remained in Lebanon throughout much of the war, and Israel knew that... Israel, was too ready to pull the trigger."

• Roth noted that HRW examined 94 separate instances of Israeli air force or missile attacks, accounting for the deaths of 510 civilians and 51 combatants.

In a response to the report, the IDF stated that

"it is clear at the outset that the report contains many inaccuracies resulting chiefly from the fact that the organization is not privy to classified intelligence information possessed by the IDF necessary to evaluate the legitimacy of each attack. Moreover, the report relies heavily on interviews with Lebanese sources of limited reliability."

The IDF also rejected HRW's claim that after warning the civilian population in southern Lebanon to leave, the IDF too easily viewed anyone who remained in the area as combatants.

"The IDF distinguishes at all times between civilians and combatants and rejects outright the contention that Israel fired indiscriminately on civilians," it said. "The IDF also adheres carefully to the proportionality requirement, refraining from attacks where the anticipated collateral damage would be out of proportion to the military benefit expected to ensue from the attack."

In another response, the head of NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg, charged that

"Human Rights Watch's latest attack on Israel's actions during the Second Lebanon War follows a clear pattern which has sought to create a moral equivalence between the deliberate targeting of civilians by a terrorist organization and the efforts of a democratic country to defend itself.

"Despite their own admission in this report that Hizbullah fired from the vicinity of UN outposts on an almost daily basis, HRW has defied logic in failing to condemn this systematic use of human shields,"

wrote Steinberg.

History Erased

History Erased
By Meron Rapoport

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. Butafter July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

A member of the establishment is responsible for the documentation: Shmuel Yeivin, then the director of the Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the present-day Antiquities Authority. Yeivin, as noted by Raz Kletter, an archaeologist who has studied the first two decades of archaeology in Israel, was neither a political activist nor a champion for Arab rights. As Kletter explains, he was simply a scientist, a disciple of the British school and a member of the Mandate government's Department of Antiquities who believed that ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved, whether they were sacred to Jews, Christians or Muslims. In line with his convictions, he fired off letters of protest and was considered a nudnik by the IDF.

"I received a report that not long ago, the army blew up the big building in the ruins of Ashkelon, which is known by the name of Maqam al-Nabi Hussein and is a holy site for the Muslim community," Yeivin wrote on July 24, 1950, to Lieutenant Colonel Yaakov Patt, the head of the department for special missions in the Defense Ministry, and sent a copy to chief of staff Yigael Yadin and other senior officers. "That building was still standing during my last visit to the site, on June 10 - in other words, the army authorities found no reason to demolish it from the conquest until the middle of 1950. I find it hard to imagine the site was blown up due to infiltrators, as they have not stopped infiltrating the area during this entire period."

The detonation, by the way, was extremely successful. Of the ancient and holy site, not so much as a stone remained.

Yeivin's complaint was seemingly related to procedural matters, but only seemingly. The army, he wrote, needed to understand that there were "sanctified buildings," and if it wanted to touch them, "it is proper, honest and courteous first to talk to the institutions that supervise these areas and buildings, and to consult with them in order to find ways to avoid destruction." But that is not happening, Yeivin stated. "I was told that simultaneously, the mosque in the abandoned village of Ashdod was blown up," Yeivin added. "This is not the first case. I already have had many occasions to draw your attention to similar cases elsewhere, and the chief of staff issued explicit directives with regard to the preservation of such buildings and places, but apparently none of this avails commanders of a certain type ... I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because in this case there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation."

A perusal of the IDF Archives shows that Lieutenant Colonel Patt forwarded Yeivin's complaint to Yadin. However, Yadin, who would later become Israel's preeminent archaeologist and whose father, Eliezer Sukenik, was an archaeologist of repute in his own right and Yeivin's colleague in the Mandate Department of Antiquities, was not unduly upset. Below Patt's letter addressing Yeivin's complaint are handwritten remarks: "1. Confirm receipt of letter and inform that the matter is being dealt with; 2. Add to Dayan's material for my meeting with B.-G." - referring to then prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion.

It stands to reason that the handwriting is Yadin's, as it is unlikely that anyone else could have met with Ben-Gurion concerning "Dayan's material." And Yadin, as is clear from another note written on the letter, did not attribute any great importance to the complaint. "Teven la'afarayim," it says, roughly the equivalent of "coals to Newcastle" - in short, there is nothing new in Yeivin's complaint.

Nor was Dayan unduly upset. In a response he sent to the chief of staff's bureau, apparently on August 10 under the heading "Destruction of a holy place," Dayan wrote: "The detonation was carried out by the Coastal Plain District, at my instruction." The first words of the sentence have been struck out, but a letter dated August 30 removes all doubt. Dayan replied to a letter concerning "damage to antiquities in the Ashkelon area": "The chief of staff approached me and I gave him my explanations; the action was carried out at my instructions."

That reply was so embarrassing that Yaakov Prolov, the head of the Operations Department in the General Staff, sent a letter to the chief of staff's bureau asking for guidelines on how to reply to Yeivin. "A mistake was made here and it can be assumed it will not happen again," someone instructed him in script that looks like that attributed to Yadin in the previous letter. Whitewashing, it turns out, is not a new invention.

Blots on the landscape

Not surprisingly, it did in fact happen again. At the end of October, Yeivin sent another letter, this time directly to Yadin, to complain about "the blowing-up of the ancient mosque at Yavneh," a 1,000-year-old structure whose minaret is still standing on a hill south of Yavneh, close to the train station. Yeivin reminded Yadin that he had been promised that those responsible would be punished this time. But it turned out there was an unexplained disparity between the explicit orders prohibiting damage to mosques and the actual policy in the field.

"I have just received an official reply from your bureau chief [Michael Avitzur], and after reading it I am totally at a loss," Yeivin wrote to Yadin. "On the one hand, I have in front of me your explicit order, which speaks unequivocally about preserving places of archaeological or historical value ... On the other hand, I read in the letter of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Avitzur that the mosque at Yavneh 'was exploded on July 9, 1950, before the date on which the cessation of blowing up mosques was announced.' How can these two things be reconciled?"

Yeivin's quotation from Avitzur's letter makes it clear that blowing up mosques was widespread enough that it required a special order to stop it. Yeivin himself wrote later in the letter, "I am extremely concerned following my talks with a number of people involved in the policy on this question." Yeivin did not specify whom he spoke to, but noted, "I do not see myself as being able to write explicitly about everything."

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

Kletter reveals in his book that Yeivin and his staff occasionally tried to stop the destruction - not always, not consistently, and not for moral reasons or out of any special respect for the people (the Arabs) who lived for centuries in these towns and quarters. Their grounds were scientific, and Kletter believes this approach stemmed from their background. Before 1948 they worked for the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate government under British management, alongside Arab employees. Kletter relates that in the department they fought for the "Judaization" of the names of ancient sites, but nevertheless remained loyal to the department - so much so that after the United Nations passed the partition plan, in November 1947, Yeivin proposed that the department remain unified even after the country's division into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Eliezer Sukenik went one step farther: "I do not believe the Jewish state will preserve its antiquities," he said in a December 1947 discussion. "We must place scientific sovereignty above political sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land, and the only way [to ensure this] is a unified department."

Perjury at Megiddo

"Yeivin was not the greatest archaeologist in the world, but he had personal integrity, which is the most important trait of the British heritage," Kletter says. "But that heritage did not suit the nationalism of the 1950s, because Ben-Gurion wanted to erase everything that had been, to erase the Islamic past."

Ben-Gurion saw everything that existed here before the revival of the Jewish community as wasteland. "Foreign conquerors have turned our land into a desert," he said at a meeting of the Society for Land of Israel Studies in 1950. Thus the failure of Yeivin and his colleagues was a foregone conclusion. In the 1950s, when archaeology was a fad and archaeologists like Yadin were cultural heroes, people of science were nudged out of management positions. Yeivin was forced to resign and "technocrats" like Teddy Kollek were effectively put in charge of managing Israel's major archaeological sites.

The Department of Antiquities was formally established in July 1948, as a unit of the Public Works Department in the Ministry of Labor. Even before this, the veterans of its Mandatory predecessor tried to preserve antiquities, and in particular to prevent looting, but did not always succeed. The museum in Caesarea was emptied out by thieves, and the same fate befell the findings and documents at Tel Megiddo, which were concentrated in the offices of the University of Chicago archaeological expedition, which had been digging there since the 1920s. Rare collections, such as the one at Notre Dame Monastery in Jerusalem, disappeared almost completely, and private collections and antique shops in Jaffa and Jerusalem were also targeted by thieves. "All the objects have disappeared from the government museum [more than 100 fragments of inscriptions and parts of pillars]," reported Emanuel Ben-Dor, who would later become Yeivin's deputy director, after visiting Caesarea. "The collection in the office of the Greek patriarch was destroyed." The Megiddo incident was particularly embarrassing, as the dig was carried out by American archaeologists and the U.S. consulate wanted to know who was responsible for the devastation. An investigation was launched under Yeivin's supervision, and the local commanders said that Arab units had wrecked the site. Yeivin discovered that this was untrue, and that Israeli soldiers had looted the site and then burned the archaeological expedition's offices.

In a confidential report, Yeivin quoted from an internal letter of the local unit: "In consultation with the battalion commander and with the brigade's operations officer, we agreed that in the event of an investigation by the U.S. consul general ... we will (shamefully) lie and say the place was found in this condition when it was captured and that the crime was committed by the Arabs before they fled."

But the theft of antiquities was only a small part of the problem. The major problem was the destruction. In August 1948, the army started to demolish ancient Tiberias, apparently in the wake of a local decision. The attempts to salvage some of the town's archaeological gems were to no avail. In September the site was visited by Jacob Pinkerfeld, from the Department of Antiquities' monument conservation unit.

"In ancient Tiberias the army began to blow up a hefty strip of buildings in the Old City," Pinkerfeld wrote in his report. "In talks with all the responsible parties at the site, we emphasized the special importance of the ancient stone with the relief of the lions on it, which was built into one of the walls. We were promised that this antiquity dating back 3,000 years would be specially guarded, but in my last visit I found precisely this stone blown to bits." So sweeping was the destruction of Tiberias that even Ben-Gurion was taken aback when he visited the city in early 1949.

The list for destruction sometimes assumed ludicrous proportions. During a visit to Haifa in August 1948, Yeivin discovered the army was laying waste to large sections of the Arab city around Hamra Square (now Paris Square) under the direction of the city engineer. In his restrained language, Yeivin expressed his astonishment at the destruction: "With our own eyes we saw the ruins of half of a building that had served as a synagogue on the Street of the Jews ... According to Jews who live there and wandered about among the ruins, another two or three synagogues were also destroyed there ... It would appear that with attentiveness, the damage inflicted to these holy buildings could have been avoided."

Depressing impression

The leveling of the villages began as soon as the fighting ended. During his visit to the North, Yeivin saw the army blowing up villages near Tiberias and Mount Tabor. He asked that before villages were demolished, consultations be held with representatives of the Department of Antiquities, because "in many villages, ancient building stones are embedded in the houses." At Zir'in (now Kibbutz Yizrael) a Crusader tower was blown up, and the fortress at Umm Khaled, near Netanya, was reduced to rubble.

But there were successes, too. An order was issued to raze the fortress at Shfaram, but Antiquities Department staff arrived at the last minute and blocked the demolition. And at Al-Muzeirra, a village south of Rosh Ha'ayin, a miracle occurred: the army used a handsome building of pillars in the middle of the abandoned village for target practice, apparently without knowing it was "the only mausoleum that survived in our country from the Roman period," according to Yeivin. When, nonetheless, the decision came to blow up the mausoleum in July 1949, an antiquities inspector arrived at the site and prevented the blast. The site is now known as "Hirbat Manor" (the Manor Ruin) and is recommended in all sightseeing guides for the area.

Kletter relates that in February 1950, at the initiative of Yeivin and others, who grasped that without government intervention, the country's urban past would simply disappear, Ben-Gurion agreed to establish a government committee "for sacred and historic sites and monuments." The committee was staffed by senior government and military personnel. The report, which was submitted in October 1951, stated that certain sites had to be preserved as "whole units" - "Acre, a few quarters in Safed, small sections of Jaffa and Tiberias, small sections of Ramle and Lod, a few sections of Tarshiha." The rest of the towns, and hundreds of villages, were already lost.

However, the state institutions failed to honor even these conclusions. According to Kletter, Yeivin was one of the first to fight the August 1950 decision to demolish all of Jaffa. Afterward, artists who had moved into the abandoned city joined the struggle, as did Development Authority personnel, and thus a few sections were spared total annihilation. Yeivin was less successful in Lod. In June 1954, he wrote a protest letter to the education minister, in the wake of a decision on "the destruction of the ancient quarter in the city of Lod." Israeli law, pursuant to British law, stipulated that only what was built before 1700 was considered an "antiquity," but Yeivin wrote that the other sites should also be preserved - both for tourism and because they are "cultural and educational assets and living historical testimonies that every enlightened state is obliged to preserve."

Kletter's book leaves the impression that the destruction was not accidental and that its perpetrators were aware of its significance. The ideological foundation of the devastation is set forth in the August 1957 Foreign Ministry letter sent at the behest of Golda Meir. After the author of the document, A. Dotan, requested the Ministry of Labor to "clear the ruins," he specified "four types" of "ruins" and the grounds for their destruction:

"First, it is necessary to get rid of the ruins in the heart of Jewish communities, in important centers or on central transportation arteries; rapid treatment must be given to the ruins of villages whose residents are in the country, such as Birwe, north of Shfaram, and the ruins of Zippori; in areas where there is no development, such as along the rail line from Jerusalem to Bar Giora, one receives a depressing impression of a once-living civilized land; attention must also be directed to ruins in distinctly tourist areas, such as the ruins of the Circassian village in Caesarea, which is intact but empty ... Accordingly, the Ministry of Labor should assume the mission of clearing the ruins ... It should be taken into account that the participation of nongovernmental elements requires caution, as politically it is desirable for the operation to be executed without anyone grasping its political meaning."

Kletter says he was surprised to discover the scale of the destruction, but that to some extent he understands those who were behind the operation. The decision not to allow the Palestinian refugees to return was unavoidable, he believes, if the idea was to establish a Jewish state here. Those were the rules of the game in that period, he says, and if the Jewish community had lost in 1948, the Arab victors would likely have treated the Jews in the same way. And because it was impossible to preserve hundreds of abandoned Palestinian towns and villages, there was no choice but to demolish most of them, Kletter maintains.

He also has nothing against the archaeologists who in the early years of the state were concerned almost exclusively with Jewish sites, or in the best case with Christian or Roman sites, and ignored Muslim sites almost completely. It is natural for researchers to be interested first and foremost in their own culture, Kletter says; and besides, relative to the political pressure exerted on them by people like Ben-Gurion, who declaredly wanted to erase the Arab past of this country, they behaved honorably. "Early Israeli archaeology has something to be ashamed of and much to be proud of," Kletter writes.

Still, Kletter says, his book is "about loss, about what could have been but was not. The loss of archaeology that began with a scientific tradition and did not continue, the loss of vast historical information, the loss of the village landscape. I don't think this village landscape belongs to us - it belongs to the people who lived here - but still, there is longing for that lost landscape. We cannot bring it back, but at least we should be aware of the truth and not lie to ourselves."

Kletter says this country's great good fortune lies in the fact that it contains so many monuments that it was impossible to destroy all of them. But even those that were destroyed somehow continue to live a different life. Mash'had Nabi Hussein, the holy site in Ashkelon, was leveled in 1950, but the Muslim believers did not forgo it. A few years ago, the Shi'ite Ismaili sect, which is based in central India, established a kind of small marble platform at the site, on the grounds of Barzilai Hospital, and since then thousands of believers have come there every year. In Yavneh, only the minaret remains of the razed ancient mosque, standing alongside heaps of rubble and one fig tree, but in a visit to the site a week ago I saw a group of elderly Ethiopians there on the hill, praying ardently under the fig tree. It was as if the place had remained holy even if its inhabitants had changed.

Salah's incitement

Salah's incitement
Aug 19, 2007 0:47 | Updated Aug 19, 2007 0:47

"The hands that slew shahid [martyr] Ahmed are criminal, terrorist and bloodthirsty hands. The shahid's spilled blood will haunt and curse them wherever they go."

The above wasn't quoted from a Hamas funeral in Gaza or a Hizbullah eulogy in Lebanon. These words were proclaimed within sovereign Israel by an Israeli citizen in memory of another Israeli who, on August 10, tried to shoot two security guards and passersby in the Old City of Jerusalem, an attempt in the course of which he was shot dead himself.

For Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of Israel's Islamic Movement (Northern Branch), Ahmed Mahmoud el-Khatib from the Galilee village of Kafr Manda wasn't a dangerous criminal and terrorist. Salah portrayed his disciple as a martyred hero and an exalted model to be emulated by his peers, all Israeli citizens, residing within Green-Line Israel.

Representatives of Israel's Arab sector - otherwise hardly microphone-shy - failed to distance themselves from Salah's invective. Their silence can only lead to disheartening conclusions; They don't condemn Khatib's act and perhaps subscribe to Salah's diatribe.

Salah could not have been more provocative. His demagoguery mobilized "martyrs" from a host of past purported injustices, most of them brazenly trumped-up. "Shahid Ahmed joins the long procession of shahids who preceded him at the carnages of Deir Yassin, Kafr Kassem, Land Day and the Aksa intifada," asserted Salah, who reveled in religious imagery about sainted Ahmed's reward of meeting Allah face-to-face.

Nor did the leader of the Islamic Movement bother to hide his affiliation with the terrorist. On the contrary, he boasted of it. Speaking of the guard who finally overcame Khatib, Salah said:

"If that murderer and those who stand behind him intended to dispatch an intimidating message via this crime, then we tell them: 'We trample your message under our feet.' If they present the shahid's affiliation with the Islamic Movement as an offense, we declare our pride in it. Our nation, if coerced to choose between martyrdom for Allah and relinquishing al-Aksa, will opt for death for Allah. The occupation of al-Aksa will be terminated soon, as were previous conquests."

The implication cannot be clearer: Israel must be expelled from Jerusalem as were the Crusaders. This tirade failed to elicit expressions of discomfort or public criticism in Israel's entire Arab community. No opposition was voiced to the description of the perpetrator of an unprovoked terror attack as a hallowed martyr, to the analogy between his comeuppance and victims of fabricated massacres, or to the defiance of Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the threat to terminate it before long.

This thundering silence cannot be divorced from the widespread initial depiction of Khatib as an innocent victim of homicidal guards who, according to pervasive Arab myth, chased down an innocent for no reason and then "verified their kill" by shooting him again when he was already down. Even after closed-circuit cameras incontrovertibly refuted these allegations, there was not even a wan statement of retraction from the defamers.

Kafr Manda possesses a particularly troubling history. During the October 2000 riots some of its inhabitants ambushed Jewish drivers with stones, metal scraps and incendiary devices. They downed electric pylons to create obstacles on Highway 784 and violently hindered traffic on this vital thoroughfare for days. The abductors and murderers of soldier Oleg Shaikhet of Upper Nazareth hailed from there, as did three Islamic Jihad firebrands who planned a large-scale bombing at the massive Kiryon shopping mall in Kiryat Bialik, near Haifa. Two Manda dentists were arrested in 2005 because of ties to Hamas.

The village is one of Salah's prime strongholds and Khatib was one of Salah's adherents.

In any normal society Salah's harangues would be treated as high treason. Salah has already served time for financing Hamas. He agitates at giant rallies against fictitious Israeli designs to destroy al-Aksa and was prominent in fomenting the recent disturbances against a new walkway at the Mughrabi Gate to the Temple Mount.

The longer Israel allows Salah to spread sedition with impunity, the greater his spiritual-mentor authority will grow and the more young Israeli-Arabs, like Khatib, will be swayed by his exhortations to join the procession of shahids to paradise. Turning a blind eye to Salah's incitement won't make it go away and directly weakens moderates who work to advance Jewish-Arab coexistence.

Queries over Katz

Queries over Katz
Sep 1, 2007 22:26 | Updated Sep 1, 2007 22:26

Last week, after he had commuted the life sentences of five Israeli Arabs who were twice convicted for the 1983 murder of 14-year-old Danny Katz, President Shimon Peres issued an official statement expressing "understanding for the family's pain" but stressing that his decision was mandated by the recommendations of a statutory committee reviewing life sentences and by the justice minister.

Three of the convicts had their sentences cut to 30 years and two to 45 years. The latter two are also serving life-terms for the rape and homicide of soldier Daphna Carmon. She was 19 at the time.

The double-murderers could be out in some five years. Their three co-conspirators could be released in the coming months, with a third of their sentence slashed for "good behavior."

Katz's disappearance from his Haifa neighborhood on the afternoon of December 12, 1983, and the discovery three days later of his stripped, battered, molested and hideously mutilated body in a cave outside the Galilee village of Sakhnin, evoked emotional aftershocks throughout the country. The malice unleashed on the child suggested to investigators murder of a nationalist/terrorist nature. The assumption was that Danny had been randomly chosen as a victim because he was Jewish.

The arrests were made several months later and the convictions centered on confessions. Several appeals followed the Haifa District Court trial, and the case was reviewed by then-Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar. Critics from the Israeli Arab community, nevertheless, insisted the five had been framed and their admissions forcibly extracted. Then-justice minister David Liba'i ordered another prosecutorial review.

Eventually, Shamgar's successor, Aharon Barak, granted a retrial, during which three of the convicts were released on bail. In a meticulous 400-page verdict, the Tel Aviv District Court again convicted all five. Again they resorted to all appeal procedures and ultimately won another Supreme Court hearing. Their conviction was again upheld two years ago, when Justice Ayala Procaccia wrote: "The judicial system made extreme attempts to remove the least cloud from this episode. No effort was spared to respect the defendants' civil rights and to determine the truth."

How, then, could the sentences be commuted so soon thereafter? Peres has cited "classified information."

But if exculpatory evidence had surfaced, why not make it public? And if such evidence was so acutely sensitive, why not at least inform the affected victims' families, who only heard about the commuting of the sentences from the media.

It wouldn't be the first time convictions were exposed as flawed - from Amos Baranes's conviction for Rachel Heller's 1974 murder to the arrests of several Kafr Manda residents for the 2003 abduction/murder of soldier Oleg Shaikhet of Upper Nazareth. (The capture of the real murderers, also from Kafr Manda, let the initial suspects off the hook.)

Furthermore, excessive reliance on confessions and reenactments has repeatedly generated misgivings about the quality of police investigations. In the Ma'atz arson case of the 1970s, apologies and restitutions were made to the wrongly incarcerated.

Yet here all legal process had failed to persuade many different judges to overthrow the original conviction. Reducing the sentences of convicts in so heinous a crime - especially of two recidivists who had murdered and savagely violated another victim - seems to remove any modicum of deterrent.

The handling of the matter also makes a mockery of recent moves to confer legal standing on victims and their families. Is the anguish of the Katzes and Carmons of no consequence? In other democracies, victims are heard at all phases of sentencing and/or parole deliberations.

Finally, the dependence on "undisclosed evidence" is particularly problematic. It can be countenanced in the framework of the war on terror and the need to safeguard intelligence sources, but civilian courts must operate transparently. Whispers behind closed doors are as potentially detrimental to the rights of defendants as of victims.

So experienced a public figure as Peres should be cognizant of all the above. Moreover, he is entitled by rank to question, delve deeper and evince extra sensitivity. No one can force him to sign on the dotted line until he is satisfied. If only because of the absent sensitivity to the victims' families in this case, he should not have been.