"I say that every Jew...all the Israelis are to blame for what happened here"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following article is part of the deepening discussion taking place
in Israel over the real character of what is taking place there, what
the Israeli Jews face, and why the only way forward for the Jewish
masses is not to defend themselves against the Palestinians but to
join the Palestinians to get rid of this oppressive robbers' state.

The civil war in Palestine, which has been taking place since world
war II, is a war of conquest by Israeli ruling class and the settlers,
sponsored by imperialism, against the people of Palestine, aimed at
driving the latter from their homes and subjugating them as a
rightless people.

The Palestinian struggle is a national liberation struggle against a
state and ruling class -- like Vietnam, the Black struggle in the
United States, and many other national liberation struggles -- but it
is also takes the form of a war between peoples, which was not and is
not always true of national liberation struggles.  One people is
driven out and suppressed.  The other drives out and gains what the
others have lost.

In that sense, the war bears some resemblance to the clash in Algeria
between the French settlers, often there for a hundred years, and the
Arab liberation movement. I really think that Pontecorvo's The Battle
of Algiers -- one of the all-time great movies, politically and
otherwise, is absolutely must seeing these days.  (Some sections of
the imperialists have already realized that for their forces and they
are right.)

I  think that the attacks on civilians in the Palestine civil war bear
more resemblance to the attacks in Algeria than they do, for instance,
to the attack on the World Trade Center or the bombing of the Shiite
mosque in Iraq. These were (or appear to have been in the case of the
Iraqi bombing)  actions by sects that claim to represent God or the
people or the Arab nation,  but do not arise organically out of the
masses and their struggle.  The bombings in Palestine are PART AND
PARCEL of the mass movement today.

Some of the Israeli critics of Sharon -- and Ha'aretz tends to be an
important and progressive outlet for these views, bourgeois paper
though it is-- are beginning to recognize the reality and
inevitability of the war between peoples, and recognize that the roots
of it lie in the "Zionist project," actually an imperialist project
with the ideologically- as well as plunder-driven Zionists as their
instruments.  They recognize that the bombings really do come from the
people, not from isolated terrorist units, and that they need to get
the message.  Its a Palestinian thing, and you better understand.

I don't believe in the prettification of struggles, frankly.  Part of
me does mourn when "innocent civilians" are killed in Palestine.
Indeed, I don't believe (maybe I'm revealing a streak of pacifism when
I say this) that those who die have to be "innocent" -- whatever that
is -- to be recognized as human losses. Frankly, I get the same
feeling when I think about the losses of Palestinian fighters and
Israeli soldiers.  I am against all the killing that is forced on
humanity by imperialism and its highly-funded Israeli goon squad.

I also look forward to the Palestinian masses finding methods of
struggle that will more effectively and successfully demonstrate their
social and political power, which I believe not only people abroad but
they themselves underestimate.  (I do not believe, for example, that
the Zionist settlements or the apartheid wall are creating facts that
the Palestinians cannot undo, as is often claimed today by their foes
like Safire, but also by critics of Israeli policy. I do not believe
that a Palestinian state on part of the territory is ruled out by
Palestinian weakness today, although I believe it is possible that
this step may be bypassed at some point by a tremendous upsurge of the
Palestinian struggle and a related crisis in Israel.)

But we are not arbiters between the oppressed and oppressors, or
representatives of abstract justice. We know how humane feelings can
be misused by the imperialist representatives of this criminal
"civilization," especially when the struggles of the oppressed take a
savage form, sometimes inevitably and sometimes even NECESSARILY.  The
first book I ever read on the Russian revolution was not Trotsky's
history, but Babel's Red Cavalry and the picture it painted of the
savagery -- to a considerable extent on both sides, although the
counterrevolution was worse -- of the civil war has never left me. As
in Algeria, the current bombings of civilians (I mean of course the
Palestinian bombings -- the Israeli ones have the legitimacy of state
power to place them in a different category in the eyes of the world,
and even in the eyes of the critics of Israel) are an organic and
inevitable outgrowth of the struggle, and the solution is not to moan
over and condemn them but to tell people the truth about what is
happening.

Concessions on this today, in my opinion, build the other side's
movement, not ours. Rather than condemning the Palestinians for waging
war on the Israeli Jews today, we have to recognize the reality of the
war between peoples. This is not a Palestinian fantasy but what they
see in their faces everyday. Our role is to end the US role which has
provided the fuel for Israel's endless war against the Palestinians.
And we should add our voice to the slowly growing sentiment or
suspicion among Jews in Israel, that the only  way out of the conflict
is taking the side of the Palestinians against the Israeli ruling
class and their state.
Fred Feldman


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/349478.html

Haaretz    October 14, 2003

?All Israelis are to blame? for Rafah

By Arnon Regular

"As far as I'm concerned, if they find a tunnel under somebody's
house, they can bury them in it, but how is this our fault? I used to
say that anyone who listened to suicide bombers was crazy, but after
what happened here, I say that every Jew, wherever he is, all the
Israelis, are to blame for what happened here," Jamal Yussuf declared
yesterday. Yussuf, an UNRWA worker, lives in the Yabneh refugee camp,
one of several that make up the large camp at Rafah on the Egyptian
border. As he spoke, he gestured toward his four-story house, taken
over by Israel Defense Forces troops in an operation in the camp from
Friday until yesterday. Almost all the walls of Yussuf's home are
riddled with shrapnel. Its dusty contents have been thrown to the
floor and holes have been drilled in the walls to serve as shooting
slits for IDF snipers.

Dozens of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and bulldozers took part
in the operation. Along with helicopter gunships, they sowed
indescribable destruction. Hundreds of homes along several kilometers,
and within 200 meters of the border, have been destroyed during the
three years of the intifada. At the end of last week, the IDF began a
special operation along To'ameh Street, the camp's main thoroughfare.
There are dozens of houses along this street; some are still standing
and some, several stories high, have been demolished. IDF bulldozers
leveled off the area of what remained of the buildings, creating a
patchwork of open spaces.

Only a few hundred meters divide the street from an IDF lookout post
on the border, above a steel fence constructed over the past few
months. The most notorious of the IDF posts is the one known as
Termit, south of the camp. When night falls, Termit becomes the scene
of most of the exchanges of fire between the IDF and the Palestinians.

Yesterday, the bulldozers were still going about their work. Over the
past four days, a bizarre situation has been created whereby the army
continues its operations in the refugee camps, home to 30,000 people,
while in other areas of Rafah, life goes on as usual.

Jamal Yussuf, whose house is on To'ameh Street, said IDF forces
arrived at the camp after midnight on Friday, and that he gathered his
family members in order to move them out. But in the chaos of the
noise of the tank treads and the shooting, he forgot his son Mohammed
in the house, and had to return to get him.

Practically the only public institutions still functioning in this
camp are premises donated by international bodies. In preparation for
the operation, the IDF commandeered them because of their good view of
the surroundings. Such was the case with a child development center, a
new building. Here, too, furniture was flung on the floor, firing
slits were carved out of the walls, and hundreds of bullet holes
riddled the outside.

Peter Hansen, UNRWA director in the Gaza Strip, said that, according
to the agency's figures, some 120 Palestinian families had lost their
homes as of yesterday morning, and more than 1,300 people had
registered in UNRWA offices as having incurred damage from the IDF
operation.

Hansen said if the tunnels and the smuggling - the reason for the
operation - are a security threat, then Israel "has a case." But he
added that the bigger question is whether the three tunnels the IDF
reported finding justify this much damage.

So far, eight Palestinians have reportedly died during the operation,
and about 80 have been injured, with 15 still hospitalized in moderate
to serious condition. Two of the dead are children who undoubtedly had
no connection to the IDF's struggle against the armed men in the
tunnels.

At the opening stage of the operation, 8-year-old Ibrahim Krinawi was
killed. Ibrahim, whose house was in the first row facing the border,
was the youngest of five children. His father Ahmed said the family
was in the house when the operation began. They were going to leave
but the bulldozer got there before they were able to do so. He said
the bulldozer began tearing down a wall of the house, and he and his
children went outside to stop it. At this point, a single shot hit
Ibrahim in the right side of his chest and he collapsed. His father
called an ambulance. As Ibrahim's brother Ayad told it, "at the
beginning, he was conscious and yelling that it was hurting him
terribly and for us to save him. Then he began to bleed and he begged
us to take the bullet out but we couldn't do anything." The father
said a Palestinian ambulance stopped a few hundred meters from the
house but could not come any closer. Finally, family members carried
Ibrahim to the ambulance. An hour later, he died at a makeshift
clinic.

Twelve-year-old Sami Salah was also killed during the operation in one
of the alleys near Jamal Yussuf's home. Sami's uncle said his nephew
was shot in the head by an IDF sharpshooter about an hour after the
operation began. He died immediately.

Rafah's single high school for the sciences, a new facility, now
serves as a shelter for some 150 residents made homeless by the
operation. Razik Al-Abasi, also from Yabneh, lives in a building that
was home to six brothers and their families, 43 people in all. "We
heard the noise of the tanks and the bulldozers, and saw the
projectors pointed in our direction," he said. "At a certain point, we
understood that half the house had been destroyed and the other half
was going to fall down, so we ran out with all the children. We looked
for a place to rent but we couldn't even find a storeroom." Al-Abasi,
like other residents of the camps who sought shelter at the school,
are able to stay in a classroom during the night but he said "except
for the clothes on our back, we have nothing, no food for the children
and no schoolbags." When he returned home after the operation began he
discovered that the house had been completely demolished.

Other families are being housed in various municipal buildings
throughout Rafah until other quarters can be found. UNRWA sources said
they will try to give $500 to each family that lost their home, but
this will not help much.


Damage has also been done to the city's already failing sewage system.
Phone, electricity, and water lines are totally inoperative.

Residents call the tunnels a "business," an economic endeavor for
those who operate them; use of the tunnel, they say, costs about
$5,000 an hour, and so the IDF operation, known as "Operation Root
Canal" will not put an end to the phenomenon. The "owners" of the
tunnel will try to put new ones into operation at any cost.

A number of weeks ago, Palestinian security forces announced their own
operation in the wake of a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. Palestinian
forces deployed in a widely advertised operation and closed off a
number of tunnels, but residents say that, at any given time, there
are dozens of tunnels in operation along the border with Egypt. IDF
operations, they add, do more damage to the residents than they do to
the tunnels.


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