‘J’Accuse’: Needed Context Before Jenin Inquiry Morphs into an International Witchhunt against Israel

(Washington, D.C.): As international media and UN investigators gain access to the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Jenin and refugee camp following the end of Israel’s anti-terrorist search-and-destroy incursion there, one thing is certain: There will be continuing reports of loss of life — including that of innocent civilians — and property that will tug at the heartstrings of peace-loving people all over the world.

Unfortunately, the well-established hostility of many journalists covering the story and the preponderance of the United Nation’s bureaucracy (and, for that matter, its membership) make it likely that these press and international inquiries will rapidly translate into a bill of particulars in a damning indictment of the Jewish State. Amidst the ghoulish and often sensationalized depictions of buildings bulldozed, official Palestinian Authority offices raided, deadly fire-fights catching innocents in the cross-fire, disruption and destruction of public services and associated infrastructure, etc., Israel will be widely vilified — and perhaps sanctioned.

Without excusing or minimizing the unintended deaths of innocents and collateral damage to civilian property that almost always accompanies military operations, particularly in urban settings, it would be a grievous mistake to ignore the context in which Israel conducted its most recent counter-terrorism campaign in Jenin and other parts of the West Bank. Some such context is helpfully provided by two recent essays.

The first by Paul Greenberg, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Times, describes the Israeli incursion as an action that was the direct (and predicted) result of the failure of the so-called “peace process” launched in Oslo in 1993. Since Yasser Arafat proved to be part of the problem — not the solution since he has been wholly unwilling to fulfill his end of the bargain (by which he was supposed to assume responsibility for preventing terror against Israel in exchange for gaining control of 95% of the Palestinian populace) — the Israelis had no choice but to do it themselves.

The second article by Rafael Medoff, which appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 18 April 2002, is a reminder that even civilized nations like Great Britain — to say nothing of murderous regimes like those that rule Syria, Sudan, China, Russia and Iraq — are in no position to cast stones at Israel over Jenin. Had Israel wanted to destroy that city and its refugee camp, it could easily have done so, without the losses its forces sustained trying to make selective, effective attacks on specific terrorist targets and supporting infrastructure. The United States government certainly understands the difference and must reflect that understanding as what promises to be the most highly publicized and outrageous exercise in anti-semitism since France conducted the Dreyfus show-trial gets underway.

Amid the rubble and confusion of war, the stench of the dead and wails of the living, war offers a terrible clarity.

Delusions crumble, propaganda can be seen for what it is, and diplomatic gestures are only that a cover for what war will decide.

The commentators scurry, wring their hands, agonize and attitudinize every hour on the hour, when what has happened is plain enough: After 18 months during which the fabled peace process was shown to be a war process, Israel has finally made it a two-way conflict.

Of course there must always be a flurry of diplomatic activity around the edges of reality. For appearance’s sake, and to prepare the postwar ground, an American secretary of state hops, skips and jumps from one capital to another, meeting solemnly with duplicitous types while the mobs march and howl outside. They know the game that is being played and hate it, as they hate their own impotence, and just hate.

All know the fighting will continue until the Israelis have cleared out as many of the terrorists’ hideouts as they can, and killed or captured as many of the gunmen as they can, and unearthed as many documents as they can detailing the obvious: Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority hasn’t been fighting terrorism but sponsoring it, coordinating it and generally using it. Which wasn’t exactly a state secret.

After all, what did Mr. Arafat have to lose? Terrorism had become a strategic asset. The Israelis were reeling and squabbling, and all the world did was wring its hands and issue pious pronouncements. He could do the same, too, terrorizing all the while. At last, after decades of experimenting with various forms of his art, Mr. Arafat had found a kind of arm’s-distance terrorism one he could denounce when necessary, and use regularly. And it was working. At least till a few weeks ago.

Then the Israelis awakened from the ensnaring dream-turned-nightmare that began with the Oslo Accords in 1993, and has progressively paralyzed them since. Hope can be a deadening sedative. Soon the leaders of the Jewish state had been reduced to a collection of ditherers while cafes, markets, buses, hotels and the occasional minister of tourism went up in a cloud of smoke and body parts.

First the Israelis tried a series of targeted attacks on just the most prominent of the plotters, but they soon realized they were having no effect on the whole, deep-seated apparatus of terror, which was indistinguishable from Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, with its Force 17, Tanzim, Al Aksa Brigades .

Mr. Arafat’s was a brilliant, decentralized version of Murder Inc., designed to leave the political leaders immune from punishment but heroes to the Street, which instinctively knew who was behind the carnage, and loved it. Candies flew in the air, as they had September 11. The killers were on a roll.

In a perverse way, the Oslo Accords have finally been enforced by the Israelis. Under its terms, Yasser Arafat was going to assume responsibility “over all PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violence and discipline violators.” He didn’t. Now the Israelis are doing it for him.

There always comes that moment when a democratic society, full of differing impulses and quarrelsome factions, suddenly says: Enough. We can do it. And proceeds to do it. Because there is no alternative but to fight. And to win. Indeed, that was the unofficial motto of Israel’s first war of independence, and the unofficial explanation of its astounding outcome. “Eyn Brera,” the Israelis say. There was no alternative.

The Israelis haven’t quite finished the job yet, any more than Americans have in Afghanistan. But they are well on their relentless way. And again innocent victims have suffered.

Yasser Arafat miscalculated: The Israelis were not content just to retaliate; they have struck at the heart of his whole, murderous enterprise. In short, the Israelis have reacted much as Americans did after September 11.

No one pretends this will be the last of Israel’s wars, or any nation’s, but a surcease from terror may be won in which diplomats can do something other than posture. For now it is clear only that this war will end only when the terror does. And not before.

In each of its wars, Israel has been united and galvanized by charismatic leaders who came to the fore David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir . This time, in the terrible clarity that war brings, one can see that Israel has been united by yet another Yasser Arafat.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.

‘Demolishing the homes of Arab civilians… Shooting handcuffed prisoners… Forcing local Arabs to test areas where mines may have been planted…”

These sound like the sort of accusations made by British and other European officials concerning Israel’s recent actions in Jenin. In fact, they are descriptions from official British documents concerning the methods used by the British authorities to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in Jenin and elsewhere in 1938.

The documents were declassified by London in 1989. They provide details of the British Mandatory government’s response to the assassination of a British district commissioner by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jenin in the summer of 1938.

Even after the suspected assassin was captured (and then shot dead while allegedly trying to escape), the British authorities decided that “a large portion of the town should be blown up” as punishment. On August 25 of that year, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose.

In the Jenin operation and on other occasions, local Arabs were forced to drive “mine-sweeping taxis” ahead of British vehicles in areas where Palestinian Arab terrorists were believed to have planted mines, in order “to reduce [British] landmine casualties.”
The British authorities frequently used these and similar methods to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in the late 1930s.

BRITISH forces responded to the presence of terrorists in the Arab village of Miar, north of Haifa, by blowing up house after house in October 1938.

“When the troops left, there was little else remaining of the once-busy village except a pile of mangled masonry,” The New York Times reported.

The declassified documents refer to an incident in Jaffa in which a handcuffed prisoner was shot by the British police.

Under Emergency Regulation 19b, the British Mandate government could demolish any house located in a village where terrorists resided, even if that particular house had no direct connection to terrorist activity. Mandate official Hugh Foot later recalled: “When we thought that a village was harboring rebels, we’d go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we’d blow up the house we’d marked.”

The High Commissioner for Palestine, Harold MacMichael, defended the practice: “The provision is drastic, but the situation has demanded drastic powers.”

MacMichael was furious over what he called the “grossly exaggerated accusations” that England’s critics were circulating concerning British anti-terror tactics in Palestine. Arab allegations that British soldiers gouged out the eyes of Arab prisoners were quoted prominently in the Nazi German press and elsewhere.

The declassified documents also record discussions among officials of the Colonial Office concerning the rightness or wrongness of the anti-terror methods used in Palestine. Lord Dufferin remarked: “British lives are being lost and I don’t think that we, from the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the men in the frontline.”
Sir John Shuckburgh defended the tactics on the grounds that the British were confronted “not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers.”

There were many differences between British policy in the 1930s and Israeli policy today, but one stands out – the British, faced with a level of Palestinian Arab terrorism considerably less lethal than that which Israel faces today, utilized anti-terror methods considerably harsher than those used by Israeli forces.

The writer is visiting scholar in the Jewish Studies Program at SUNY-Purchase. His most recent book is Baksheesh Diplomacy: Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab Officials on the Eve of World War II (Lexington Books, 2001)