Teach Them to Hate:
The Use of Palestinian Children - A Legal and Political Analysis (I)
Justus Reid Weiner
Watching the television coverage of the daily
Palestinian riots, known as the Al-Aqsa intifada, one is
immediately struck by the near total absence of adults. Indeed, most of
those hurling Molotov cocktails and stones are teenagers; many are even
younger. Intoxicated by the challenge of becoming a hero, lacking the
maturity to calculate the dangers they are assuming, these young people
are easily motivated to place themselves in harm’s way.
Media reports highlighting the instances in which
Palestinian children have been killed or injured by Israeli troops or
policemen have generated much criticism of Israeli policies. The
Palestinian leadership has attempted to convince the international
community of the need to dispatch a contingent of international
observers to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ostensibly to protect the
Palestinians from the depredations of the IDF.
The presence of rioting Palestinian children is not
accidental. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has intentionally mobilized
Palestinian children to man the front line in its struggle against
Israel, frequently using them as shields to protect Palestinian gunmen.
This mobilization of Palestinian youth has, moreover, been facilitated
by the long-term impact of PA curricula, government-controlled media,
and summer camp programs, which indoctrinated the youth for armed
confrontation with Israel even prior to the current crisis.
The utilization of children in armed conflicts has
been increasingly condemned by the international community. It is barred
by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and recent UN Security
Council Resolution 1261, which specifically described the use of
children as soldiers as a “violation of international law”.
International law broadly attempts to protect children from the horrors
of armed conflict. Jean Pictet, in the official Red Cross commentary on
article 28, notes that the use of civilians (of any age) as shields has
been condemned as cruel and barbaric.
Moreover, the Palestinian leadership, in a classic
case of bad faith, accuses Israel of committing human rights violations
for the fatalities, while evading its own responsibility for the
orchestrated appearance of children in the front lines of the conflict.
This constitutes a cynical exploitation of human rights concerns. While
the PA is not formally bound by international human rights conventions,
it nonetheless is required by the Oslo agreements, which PA Chairman
Yasser Arafat signed, to honor “internationally accepted norms of human
rights and the rule of law”.
The new Palestinian violence undermines not only
the spirit of the Oslo peace process but its raison d’être – to
resolve differences through negotiation rather than violence. The
problem of incitement to violence has been repeatedly addressed in the
interim peace agreements. However, none of the anti-incitement
provisions in the interim peace agreements, each one signed by Arafat,
has been honored in practice.
The message from the top, from PA Chairman Arafat,
is unequivocal. Arafat ruthlessly encourages the involvement of
Palestinian children in violence, referring to them as “the generals of
the rocks” and boasting after the IDF attack on Fateh offices, “[the
attack] cannot shake one eyelash of a Palestinian child holding a stone
to defend holy Jerusalem.” Arafat plays to their pride; he would have
them believe they are “generals” and heroes when they function as
cannon-fodder in the media campaign to discredit Israel.
According to international law, in particular
Article 43 of the Hague Regulations of 1907, Israel is obliged to ensure
public order and safety in the areas it occupied in self-defense in the
Six-Day War of 1967. This means that Israel must carry out necessary
security measures in response to the widespread shooting and stoning
that has characterized the Al-Aqsa intifada. The force employed
by the IDF in response to these complex and dangerous confrontations is
not indiscriminate. Nor is it intended to harm the Palestinian youths.
Rather the goal is to restore safety on the highways and other locations
where violence has been instigated. IDF regulations make every effort to
avoid incurring unnecessary casualties. Any soldiers who violate the
rules of engagement are subject to investigation, disciplinary trial
and, in serious cases, court-martial, as well they should be.
It is unquestionably a tragedy when children fall
victim to the Al-Aqsa intifada, but the blame does not rest with
the IDF. The tragic reality is that children, often of primary school
age, man the intifada’s first line of offense. Thus, it is not
the IDF, but rather the Palestinian leadership, which should ultimately
be held responsible for the injury and death among their rioting
children.
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Total Terror in the Name of Allah:
New Islamic Anarchist Terror Groups
David Bukay
The terror strike of September 11, 2001 generated
an international earthquake which shocked the world, and “suddenly”
gave concrete form to Islamic threats.
This article claims that since February 1998,
when Osama bin Laden formed “The International Front of Jihad
against Jews and Crusaders” with other leaders of Islamic movements,
the world has witnessed “new Islamic anarchistic terror groups”.
Paradoxically, these groups grew up as a result of two developments:
first, the defeat of the fundamental Islamic movements in their revolt
against Arab states, which forced some of them to escape to
Afghanistan; second, the Afghans’ triumph over the Soviet Union, with
the enthusiastic assistance of the United States.
The
new Islamic anarchistic Terror groups changed the Islamic fundamental
ideology upside down. They are prepared to act with total terror
against the infidel West, “the new crusaders” in Dar al-Harb,
and drive it away from the Islamic lands of Dar al-Islam, and
are then prepared to overthrow the secular Arab systems “the new
Jahiliyah”, and to establish radical Islamic systems, which will
endanger western civilization.
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International Relations
Theory and the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East
Shawn Pine
Since its inception, international relations theory
has been the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism as its
proponents have attempted to have international relations accepted in
the same manner as hard sciences or at least social sciences.
Unfortunately, one of the most enduring
criticisms of international relations theory, as a science, has been
its inability to formulate any definitive laws that make international
relations theory a quantifiable science that can be used to predict
interstate behavior with any reliability.
After all, how can a theory of behavior, when
confronted with all the components and complexities of international
behavior be able to predict with any regularity a particular outcome?
However, while international relations theory may not take it as an
exact science, the development and refining of state behavior does
lend itself to predicting the likelihood of state behavior given a
certain set of circumstances.
This paper sought to strengthen the utility of
the international relations theory by examining the prospects for
peace in the Middle East by reviewing relevant international relations
theories on the causes and amelioration of conflict, and what these
theories might predict for future regional stability and the peace
process. Examination of relevant theories assists in deducing the
likelihood of any future agreement between Israel and its neighbors in
bringing lasting peace to the region. The theories were evaluated as
to whether they predict exacerbation, amelioration, or neutrality with
regard to the development of Arab-Israeli conflict.
The theories selected for review were:
1. Arms race as a cause of war.
2. Contiguous territory as a cause of war.
3. Alliances as a cause of war.
4. Democratic peace theory in ameliorating war.
5. Collective security arrangements.
Unfortunately, most of the theories examined did
not support the contention that Israeli withdrawal from territories
captured in the 1967 Six Day War would resolve the fundamental issues
involved. Indeed, dispute over the territories is only one segment of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, and is of tertiary importance in resolving
the underlying core issues of the conflict.
The
regional arms race, contiguous borders, historical rivalry, and
regional alliances theories have negative ramifications for peaceful
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While collective security and
the regional proliferation of democracy have the potential to
alleviate security concerns caused by the other factors, there is not
much optimism that specific regional features are propitious for their
development. Western concepts of democracy have failed to garner the
popular support of the Arab masses and regimes in the region.
Moreover, short term trends militate against the proliferation of
regional democracy as existing Arab regimes confront rising Islamic
fundamentalism. Additionally, divergent economic and political
interests have precluded Western governments from forming an effective
collective response to those elements that currently pose a danger to
regional and global security.
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The Collapse of
Israeliness
Steven Plaut
The collapse of Olso raises questions not only
about the absence of intelligent life on Knesset Hill and among Israel's
political leadership, but also about matters far more ominous. It raises
serious questions about the nature of “Israeliness” and – in particular
– whether secular Zionism was in fact a success in terms of resolving
the “modernism dilemma” of the Jewish people. The Jews have been
searching for some means of bridging Jewish identity with modernism for
at least 200 years. None were successful other than secular Zionism,
which was regarded as an unqualified success until about ten years ago.
Until the beginnings of the Oslo process, few would
have questioned the idea that secular Zionism had successfully created a
new stable form of modern Jewish identity, not threatened by modernity,
by self-contempt nor by assimilationism.
Oslo however has revealed that the attempt to
create an “Israeliness” largely detached from Jewishness has failed.
Secular Zionism, it turns out, served as the petri dish for the bizarre
form of self-hatred, self-debasement and assimilationism that has
captured the Israeli elites, including the media, the universities, and
the rest of the “chattering classes”. Without this contempt-of-self,
Oslo could never have been imposed upon the country. No Israeliness
founded on Jewish identity could have aquiesced in the adoption of
policies based on the presumption that hatred of Jews and anti-Semitic
atrocities are caused by Jews being insensitive, intransigent and
failing to understand the “other”. No true Israeliness based on Jewish
identity could have agreed to a situation where deniers of the Holocaust
and those declaring the Jews drink gentile blood for Passover are “peace
partners”. No bona fide Israeliness could have sought to achieve peace
through the importation of anti-Semitic fascist hordes into the suburbs
of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, nor believed that anti-Semites could be
“bought off” through public gestures of Jewish niceness.
Oslo is
not simply a reflection of ignorance and stupidity. It is a reflection
of the loss of the will to survive of large portions the Jewish people.
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German
Anti-Semitism in the Year 2000
Susanne Urban-Fahr
Helplessness, headless activism
and well-known rituals were the pillars on which the discussion in
Summer 2000 stood after the bombings, murdering and
cases of arson against ethnic minorities and even Jews in Germany.
There was no difference between
the past ten years and the last summer in the behavior of racists and
neo-Nazis – and the many bystanders acting against those minorities. The
community of mankind is living 55 years after the Second World War and the
end of the Shoah, but the history of Germany in connection to the
“Third Reich” does not allow looking at these
clashes against Jews and others in the same manner one does in France or
Great Britain. In July 2000, a terrorist bombing
in a bus station in Duesseldorf was like the wake-up call for many people.
The “target” was a group of mostly Jewish
immigrants from the former Soviet Union, waiting for the bus following
language lessons. Then there was a wave of other bombings, cases of arson,
threatening foreigners and asylum-seekers, Jews, homosexuals and homeless
people. The public reactions on the rising anti-Semitism were fluctuating
between worries about the image of Germany and wishful thinking that there
is no more anti-Semitism than in other countries. Those Jews –
representatives, journalists, immigrants – who said in public that there
is now once again a doubt whether it was right for Jews to start a new
life in Germany after 1945, faced attempts to
calm them down. One can state that Jews in Germany are somehow, as it
were, by their existence there, legitimizing for Germany that there is a
safe democratic basis to society.
This article questions the tension
between staying in and leaving Germany, the hopes and the disappointments
with which the Jews in Germany had to live in the Year 2000 – after a
period of feeling securely established.
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The Palestinian Security Forces:
Capabilities and Effects on the Arab-Israeli Military Balance (I)
Gal Luft
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993,
under the guise of an innocent police force, the Palestinian Authority (PA)
has created a military organization with noteworthy fighting capabilities
which could pose a significant military challenge to Israel in the event of a
full-scale military confrontation. The army of the PA is presently a complex,
multifaceted apparatus consisting of at least a dozen different branches with
overlapping responsibilities. The proliferation of security apparatuses was a
manifestation of Yasser Arafat’s style of leadership during the peace process
period, but with the outbreak of the second intifada, the PA has
confronted many problems in the application of military force due to the
cumbersome nature of its security apparatus.
The intifada has also created a false
perception in Israel and the world about the PA’s real military capabilities,
since the forefront units of the Palestinian military, the National Security
Forces have, so far, been excluded from the fighting. These units, the most
capable part of the PA’s military apparatus, should be counted on to confront
Israel if the conflict escalates.
This paper examines the milestones in the
buildup of the Palestinian armed forces, their structure and organization,
weapons, capabilities and tactics. It describes the peculiar nature of the
relations between Arafat and his lieutenants and the complex relations between
the Palestinian security services and the plethora of paramilitary forces that
have emerged during the second intifada such as Tanzim, the Popular
Resistance Committees and the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades.
The
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has met the Palestinian security services in
battle in at least three major rounds of violence since 1994. In all of these
engagements, the PA’s security services, despite their rudimentary image,
proved that they have sufficient capacity to become one of Israel’s most
challenging adversaries. What remains unclear is what would be their role in
the context of a wider regional conflict between Israel and an Arab coalition.
The paper concludes that in such an event, the presence of a Palestinian army
west of the Jordan River would change the existing Arab-Israeli military
balance and introduce new operational as well as psychological challenges
which deserve serious care.
Published in English as ACPR's Policy Paper No. 131, 2001
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The Settlements
and Their Fight for Legitimization
Yitzhak Dahan
In a period of continual conflict, integrated with the
significant rise in power of the mass media, there is a great importance
in focusing attention on the deep well-springs that shape consciousness
and attitudes in the Israeli social-political field. In that context, this
article is trying to analyze and discuss two issues:
-
The interaction between two distinctive
social-cultural groups, who have a contribution in creating the image of
the Judea and Samaria inhabitants (“Mitnahalim”). The first group is the
mass media, (or information producers); the second is the “mass” of people
(information consumers).
-
The inadequacy between the Israeli Post-Zionist
practices (that identify with “information producers”) as against
Post-Zionist ethics.
The fact that the mass media channels are being more
and more controlled by people that in their life style and their spirit
are tending to connect with “Post-Zionist” ideas, is deeply contradictory
to post-Zionist ethics. That is because the main base of the
post-modernism attitude (the “spiritual father” of post-Zionist thought),
relies on undermining the modern social hierarchy, thus “constructing”
social groups as minorities. Similarly, Post-Zionist criticism blames
Israeli Zionist “nature” as an efficient instrument for constructing
minorities (like Arabs, oriental Jews etc.) and pushing them to the bottom
of Israeli social status. Such claims were found as a paradox if not a
hypocritical one in the Israeli realty of the last decade.
A consideration of internal social change, shows that
the 1990s decade was characterized by a basic reshuffle in the academic
and the media institutions (the main sources for information and
knowledge). In this process, more and more young Israelis (freed from the
‘big’ Zionist ideological obligation) take the place of the old
generation. Henceforth, those institutions were monolithic (in terms of
ideas, persons, agenda, etc.) and powerful. Therefore, they have an
enormous influence potential on public attitudes, namely, to reshape the
social hierarchy.
In fact, the old hierarchies were replaced by another
one. The religious groups, especially the Mitnahalim, were
excluded and proscribed as a dangerous people.
In respect of the relationship between the media and
the “mass” of the people (“Ha’am”), indeed there is a significant gap
between the basic conceptions of the Israeli media (values, conceptions,
etc.) toward the consumers. This gap represents the core of identity of
most Israeli’s Jewish citizens. At first sight, such a gap appears
impossible under a democratic society’s conditions. However, such an
anomaly is possible if we turn to the cultural system of both
sides: the suppliers (“core”) and the consumers (“periphery”) of
information. It seems to me, that the fact that the Jewish identity is
quite assimilated in most Israeli People, – this maintains the
Zionist base among the consumers, and does not allow “full” automatic
(re)construction. This fact is not contradicting (in interpretive terms)
the relatively passive position toward political action, which
characterizes the consumers. These passive orientations will be also
analyzed in a future cultural study.
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Myth: Cultural Asset or Anti-Zionist Weapon
Shlomo Sharan
Serious students of mythology, including Ernst
Cassirer and Henry Tudor among others, agree that myths, along with art,
language, religion, music and science, provide the symbols needed for
expressing humanity’s interpretation of the world. By contrast,
Post-Zionist sociologists employ the term myth in its pejorative sense
of fraud and deception.. They even accuse Zionism of systematically
“commissioning” great writers and scholars to disseminate Zionist
ideology to justify its immoral act of occupying Arab territory in
Palestine-Israel.
Zionism, it is asserted, sought to establish a
“mythical” continuity between bygone eras of Jewry and contemporary
Israel, and thereby to brain-wash Israel-born generations of Jewish
youth into believing that they were the descendants of earlier
generations of Jews since Biblical antiquity who cherished a love of
Zion. According to the Post-Zionists, the Jews who came to
Palestine-Israel were merely a random collection of immigrants, not
“olim”, and their Sabra offspring were no more than second generation
immigrants. The notion that they belong to an ancient Jewish people that
returned to claim sovereignty over its historic homeland, is, in their
eyes, a Zionist myth.
This conception of Zionist “mythology” reflects
the influence of post-modernist deconstructionism that views “historical
continuity” as mythical falsehood. History is an arbitrary
concantination of separate events whose continuity is a figment of
mythical thinking stemming from political ideology. There is no
continuity in Jewish history, and contemporary Jews are not heir to any
historical tradition. Those ideas merely serve the purpose of Zionist
political propaganda, claim Post-Zionists.
However, allegations made about the “commissioning”
of famous writers and scholars to work for some Zionist “propaganda
machine” is a fabrication for which no Post-Zionist author ever produces
evidence. Numerous documents dating from 1920 to 1960 from archives are
remarkable for their outspoken devotion to, and support of, Zionist
ideals. Post-modern individualism denies any meaning to people’s
collective responsibility for their communities or nations. The Sabras’
devotion to Zionism is “explained” by Post-Zionists as the product of
Zionist brainwashing by its commissioned agents. Post-Zionists have
adopted a deconstructionist view of human events that atomizes history
into disconnected units. Deconstructionist Post-Zionists denounce
Zionism for attributing meaning to Jewish historical continuity, for
“brainwashing” Jewish youth to think that they are walking in the
footsteps of their forebears from ancient times, and for calling upon
Jewry to assume collective responsibility for its historical fate.
In
addition to eradicating the meaning humanity attributes to its
historical experience, these accusations share the distinguishing
features of classical anti-Semitism, to wit: Jewry and Zionism allegedly
commit a crime by transmitting their “myths” to the next generation,
while all the nations of the world consider that task to be their moral
obligation in order to preserve and enhance the meaning of their human
and national existence. For the Post- Zionists, the accepted norms of
human and national behavior are to be denied to the Jewish people. The
Post-Zionists are unequivocally anti-Zionist. These ideas express an
anti-Jewish nihilism stemming from Jewish self hatred, regrettably
rampant in Israel’s universities and colleges.
An expanded version of this article was published as ACPR's
Policy Paper No. 134, 2001
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Huntington's Scenario is Not Out of Date
Harald Vocke
At the outbreak of the Six Day War of June 1967,
Ahmed Shukairy, leading the so-called “Palestine Liberation
Organization” (PLO) proclaimed: “Israel must be thrown into the sea.”
Observing Arab politics over the last half century,
Harald Vocke is firmly convinced that in spite of all assurances to the
contrary, the present leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Yasser Arafat,
and his collaborators have never negotiated with Israel in the hope of a
durable peace. The real intention of Arafat, in the erroneously
nominated “peace process’, was always, by cunning and deceit, to gain
better military positions in favor of the Arabs of Palestine, ready for
future wars with Israel .
Tolerance and human rights are late fruits of
European thought, but unknown to the Middle Ages and even now to
contemporary Islam. In throwing stones on Israeli soldiers, young Arabs
are trained to believe that Jews are devils, as their throwing of stones
reminds these Arabs that during the pilgrimage to Mecca, all Muslims
must stone symbols of the devil in the valley of Muna. The true meaning
of the Arabic intifada is not “revolt” as foreigners are told. In
classical Arabic the verb intifada means “to shake dust or dirt
from a garment”, in the dialects of Syria and Palestine, intifada
may mean as well “to shudder in disgust when seeing a person”.
Such choice of words reveals the deadly aggressive
mentality of Arafat and his companions in their relations with Jews.
Therefore, for long-term analysis, the scenario of Huntington’s “Clash
of Civilizations” still has to be accepted as valid.
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Nuclear Deterrence Now - To the Attention of a Busy PM (II)
Louis René Beres
During the past year, the ACPR has expertly examined
problems of Israeli deterrence. Aharon Levran’s “The Decline of Israeli
Deterrence” (ACPR policy paper no. 113) is an especially important and
informed assessment. The article below by Professor Louis René Beres –
cast in the form of a Memorandum to the Prime Minister – looks more
specifically at the conditions and limitations of Israeli nuclear
deterrence. Based upon the assumption that Israel’s survival depends
entirely upon self reliance, this memorandum urges PM Sharon
immediately to strengthen the country’s nuclear deterrence posture, and to
take critical steps to ensure that a failure of Israeli nuclear deterrence
will not bring about nuclear warfare. These steps will require: (1) a
multifaceted nuclear strategy involving deterrence, preemption and
warfighting capabilities; and (2) a corollary conventional strategy that
can function in spite of serious security weaknesses created by the Oslo
“peace process”.
Israel needs a strong nuclear deterrent – and the
complex conditions of such a deterrent are identified and evaluated
carefully in the Memorandum – but it cannot rely upon this one base of
national security any more than it can rely only upon conventional
deterrence. Israel’s survival now requires complementary nuclear and
conventional forces, and the continuing and associated availability of
certain preemption options. Taken together, these multiple bases of
national security could endow Israel with at least tolerable measures of
safety.
Specific issues addressed in the Beres Memorandum
are: convincing prospective attackers that Israel maintains both the
willingness and the capacity to retaliate in certain situations
with nuclear weapons; the risks and benefits to Israel of intentionally
detectable measures to reduce Israeli nuclear force vulnerabilities; the
associated risks and benefits to Israel of active and passive defenses;
the precise nature of Israeli nuclear weapons; the issue of disclosure vs.
“deliberate ambiguity” (the “Bomb in the Basement”); the types and
openness of nuclear targeting doctrine; the problem of enemy irrationality
for Israeli nuclear deterrence; the interrelatedness of Israeli
conventional and nuclear deterrence; and (should Israeli nuclear
deterrence fail), the expected consequences of regional nuclear war.
Finally, the Beres Memorandum imaginatively considers different scenarios
of how a nuclear attack upon Israel might take place and the particular
place for a “Samson Option”.
Professor Louis René Beres is the author of some of
the earliest published writings on Israeli nuclear deterrence. This
Memorandum looks soberly and in considerable detail at today’s urgent
strategic challenges to Israel. Taken as a whole, the Memorandum points
toward a comprehensive and coherent nuclear “master plan” from which
specific policy options might be suitably extrapolated.
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