Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2002, pages 6-7

Special Report

 

Children Are a Chief Target as the Israelis “De-develop” Palestinian Society

 

By Rachelle Marshall

“It is part of a systematic destruction of the Palestinian entity, the Palestinian infrastructure, the Palestinian political system, the Palestinian economy, the destruction of everything Palestinian.”—Abdul Jawad Saleh, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, commenting on Israel’s demolition of Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and extended siege of his office, New York Times, Sept. 23.

 

“You are leaving behind you a scorched land, a scorched country, and you are mainly leaving behind you a scorched people…”—Yossi Sarid, Israeli opposition leader, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Oct. 14, just before Sharon left for Washington to meet with George W. Bush.

 

The mass protests that erupted in the West Bank and Gaza in September 2000 and soon turned into an unequal battle between the Israeli army and Palestinians armed with stones, guns, and homemade bombs, entered a new and more violent phase this fall as the army embarked on a campaign of unrestrained killing. Moderate Palestinian leaders persistently tried to convince militants to end their attacks against Israelis, arguing they were certain to bring on massive retaliation by Israel, only to have Israel provoke new violence whenever there was a period of quiet.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who enjoys the Bush administration’s unwavering support, has made no secret of the fact that his aim is to subdue the Palestinians, not negotiate peace. Consequently he keeps tension alive by keeping West Bank cities and towns under curfew, preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their fruit, building cement walls and ditches across Palestinian land to protect settlements, and allowing trigger-happy soldiers to enforce curfews with live ammunition. Israel may be the only country in the world that considers violating a curfew, throwing a stone, or even walking to school a capital offense punishable by death. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported that between mid-September and mid-October, 12 Palestinian children were shot to death by soldiers enforcing curfews.

By early October the total number of Palestinian deaths since the intifada began had reached more than 2,000, including more than 260 children. A report by Amnesty International blamed many of these casualties on the Israeli army’s “reckless shooting, shelling and aerial bombardments of residential areas.” On the same day that Amnesty’s report was released, Israeli soldiers shot dead two 10-year-old boys, one in Balata refugee camp and the other in Nablus. On Oct. 6, 40 Israeli tanks backed by helicopters raided the Gaza town of Khan Younis after midnight and killed 10 Palestinians and wounded 115. A few days later at least 21 Palestinians were killed and scores wounded when a helicopter fired a missile into a Gaza street.

Residents of the Washington, DC area were rightly panicked when a sniper began shooting people at random last October. But Palestinians have been living with such fear for more than two years. On Sept. 24 a British volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement in Nablus saw soldiers deliberately shoot 13-year-old Baha Albahsh in the chest as he was standing in the street. A professor living in Ramallah wrote to an American friend on Sept. 22 saying, “Seventy-five Palestinians were killed during the ‘quiet period’ between early August and last week, during which no suicide bombings occurred in Israel...In my neighborhood a 10-year-old (who looks more like seven or eight) was shot dead from an Israeli tank or soldier when he was sent by his mother to get bread from a closed shop during curfew... they found a small rock in his hand when they got to him.”

On Oct. 4 soldiers killed 15-year-old Muhammad Zeid in a village near Jenin, and on the same day in Nablus,12-year-old Ibrahim Madani was shot in the head when soldiers fired at a taxi.

When the Israelis intensified their assaults on Gaza this fall, an editorial in the Sept. 27 Jerusalem Times described their standard procedure. “The bulldozers move in first after the tanks and helicopters have cleared the way for them by firing shells and missiles at their targets,” the paper wrote. “The bulldozers move to level the homes of poor and helpless Palestinians, and innocent people, mainly women and children, end up dead...Small Palestinian businesses are targeted under the pretext that these shops manufacture rockets and weapons.”

What the editorial was describing was Israel’s attempt to “de-develop” an entire society, by destroying its homes, its economy, and its people. But the basis of any society is its educational system, and this is especially true of Palestinian society, since children make up half the population. Knowing this, Israel is targeting schools and universities, making the simple act of going to class hazardous and often impossible. As a result, a million children are being denied the tools they need to build a future Palestinian society.

The Israeli peace organization Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) has reported that 250,000 children and 10,000 teachers are unable to reach their schools at all, and 600 educational institutions have been completely shut down. In cities under curfew, clandestine schools have been set up in homes and shops, but soldiers who catch sight of children on their way to the makeshift classrooms often fire live bullets to frighten them, or throw tear gas and stun grenades. Soldiers may also fire on children and teachers who use footpaths to try to circumvent cement barriers at military checkpoints. Guards at the Surda checkpoint between Ramallah and Birzeit are especially arbitrary, a group of teachers told the Jerusalem Times. Even when curfews are lifted during the day, students and faculty at Birzeit University can never be sure of getting through, so that class and exam schedules are constantly disrupted. The Ministry of Education is considering a plan to let college students teach in village schools if regular teachers can’t reach them. “We have no choice but to educate our children,” Minister of Education Naeem Abu Al-Hummus said. “We will not be helpless in the face of Israeli obstacles.”

 

The Main Enemy?

After backing Israel for months, despite its repeated defiance of U.N. resolutions, the Bush administration finally realized that Arab leaders would have a hard time convincing their citizens that Saddam Hussain was their main enemy when on television every day they saw Palestinian refugee camps devastated by Israeli tanks and bulldozers, and Palestinian children killed by Israeli tank missiles. So while the Pentagon was preparing to ship 17 acres of military supplies (including such essentials as $4,000 worth of beach sand) from a Florida port to the Persian Gulf, Bush made his own preparations for war on Iraq by urging Israel to show restraint.

A series of raids on Gaza refugee camps that caused hundreds of Palestinian casualties in early October elicited a State Department announcement that “We’re deeply troubled.” When the Israelis followed up with another damaging raid and fired bullets and tank shells at a hospital where the wounded had been taken, Bush sent a personal letter to Sharon criticizing the excessive killing of civilians and calling for a loosening of restrictions on Palestinian areas.

But a few days after sending his letter, Bush welcomed Sharon to the White House, and there was no evidence that the two men spent much time discussing its contents. Instead their meeting, and Sharon’s meetings the next day with Bush’s top security advisers, focused primarily on plans for Israel and the United States to cooperate in case of war with Iraq. To persuade Sharon to refrain from taking action against Iraq unless Iraq attacked Israel first, the White House promised that Israel would be given a two-week warning before U.S. forces attacked. The administration also announced that in case of war American ground troops would be sent to Iraq’s western desert to destroy sites that could be used to fire missiles at Israel. According to a report in The Washington Post, Israeli reconnaissance forces were sent to the area last summer to locate the missile sites.

Sharon emerged from his meeting with Bush positively exultant. “We’ve never had such relations with any president…as we have with you,” he told Bush. “And we never had such cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration.”

The next day, as Sharon was leaving Washington, Israeli tanks again fired into a crowded Gaza neighborhood, this time in Rafah, and killed at least six civilians, including children. Israeli machine gunners also fired on four schools, including two run by the United Nations. When reporters mentioned the episode to Sharon, he assured them that the Israeli army “has the highest level of morality in the world.”

Bush announced after the meeting that he was sending Assistant Secretary of State William Burns to the Middle East to promote the same peace plan he proposed last spring. It calls for Israel to freeze settlement building and withdraw from West Bank cities, but stipulates that first the Palestinians must end all attacks on Israelis, centralize their security forces, and carry out the reforms demanded by Israel and Washington. A final peace settlement would be reached in 2005.

Bush said the chief purpose of Burns’s mission was to get the Palestinians to reform their political institutions and minimize the role of Yasser Arafat. Whether Burns will succeed, however, depends entirely on his willingness to confront the Israelis, who have done everything possible to prevent the Palestinians from carrying out much-needed changes. Israel’s destruction of Arafat’s compound in Ramallah in late September and the 10-day siege that followed restored much of the Palestinian leader’s waning popularity. The siege, along with continuing travel restrictions, also prevented the PLO central committee from holding a planned meeting to persuade Arafat to name a new cabinet and appoint Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate, as prime minister. Committee member Abdul Jawad Saleh accused Israel of deliberately sabotaging “a first historical step” toward reform.

The meeting between Bush and Sharon confirmed the fact that, in any case, ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not at the top of Bush’s agenda. Far more important to the White House is the vision of a new Middle East, enforced by an American military presence. A recently released National Security Strategy paper declared that there is “a single sustainable model for national success that is right and true for every person in every society,” and justifies the use of “preemptive self-defense” against potential adversaries. Iraq is the first target of this policy,

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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