B’Tselem: 231 Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered since 2000.

By Stuart Littewood

Some readers will remember the 1969 film The Assassination Bureau, a tongue-in-cheek romp based on Jack London’s unfinished novel. The setting is the turn of the century a hundred years ago, a fanciful time for regime change and the purging of corrupt monarchs and cruel tyrants. The Bureau’s hit team is for hire provided that Ivan Dragomiloff, founder and mastermind, deems the targeted killing “socially justifiable” and there’s proof of the candidate’s misdeeds.

Eventually, however, the moral rectitude of the enterprise gives way to financial greed, and the day comes when the Bureau accepts a mission to eradicate an unnamed but prominent public figure. The fee is paid in advance, proof supplied, job accepted… then the name is revealed. The target is Dragomiloff himself. The Assassination Bureau cannot go back on its word and Dragomiloff finds himself pitted against the killing machine he himself created and perfected…

Assassination is the targeted killing of persons usually for political or ideological (and often insane) motives. This is OK, but not OK.

In 1976, US President Ford issued an Executive Order which was enacted after revelations that the CIA had made several attempts on the life of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Henceforward targeted political killings were outlawed: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Every US president since then has upheld Ford’s prohibition on assassinations… or somehow got round it.

Carter and Reagan reaffirmed the ban, although it didn’t stop the US bombing Gaddafi’s home in 1986 in the hope of rubbing him out, or the Clinton administration firing cruise missiles at suspected guerrilla camps in Afghanistan in 1998, or Bush instructing the CIA to engage in “lethal covert operations” (based on an intelligence ‘finding’) to destroy Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation.

Nice and Legal, Though

White House and CIA lawyers claim that an intelligence ‘finding’ makes a difference because the ban on political assassinations doesn’t apply in wartime. Hey presto! the right sort of finding puts everything on a war footing. They also say that the prohibition won’t prevent the US taking action against terrorists. And in the wake of 9-11 it won’t stop the United States acting in self-defence. So… all the US has to do is invent or manufacture a ‘finding’, label the folk who stand in their way ‘terrorists’ and claim the murder was an act of self-defence in a war situation, and they’re home and dry.

Reports suggest the Bush administration has got together with Israel to establish the legal framework for a new American targeted-assassination policy. The Israelis, of course, are world experts. Annoying pockets of resistance to their land-grabs, ethnic cleansing, abductions, illegal settlements and other criminal activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are answered with the wholesale imposition of specially concocted warfare laws for the benefit of Israel’s ’self-defence’, or ‘homeland security’, but which trample on everyone else’s rights. This is the sort of chicanery that suits Bush admirably as he presses ahead with his war-without-end on terror.

Israel’s liking for assassination and murder goes way back to pre-State days when such atrocities were practised against Arab and British targets by the Irgun, a thoroughly unpleasant organisation that believed political violence and terrorism were legitimate tools for removing obstacles to the Zionist cause and driving the Arabs off their lands. Assassination became official Israeli policy in 1999 when the military planned ‘initiated attacks’ to stop Yasser Arafat’s militia, the Tanzim, from firing on illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Israelis demonstrated rare ingenuity in bumping off bomb maker Yahya Ayyesh. In 1996 this master-technician in the art of suicide bombing had been on Israel’s most-wanted list for 3 years. Shabak (Israel’s secret service) finally tricked a friend into giving Ayyash a booby-trapped cell phone. When Ayyash used it, Shabak detonated it.

Earlier this year they excelled themselves again by terminating Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh, ‘the Fox’, with an exploding headrest in his Mitsubishi.

However, their preferred method of assassination is the airstrike, which is lazy, lacking in finesse and often messy. In 2002 Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed the house of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military commander of Hamas, in Gaza City scandalously killing not just him but at least 11 other Palestinians, including seven children, and wounding 120 others.

In 2004 at the second attempt Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, wheelchair-bound since the age of 12, and nine innocent bystanders were killed in a helicopter gunship attack. Yassin had survived an F16 bomb blast the previous year. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon characterised Yassin as “the mastermind of Palestinian terror” and a “mass murderer”, which was comical coming from the war criminal who ran Israel’s death squad, Unit 101, and was found indirectly responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem 231 Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered and heaven knows how many injured or mutiliated by Israel since the second intifada in 2000. “The use of state assassinations by Israel against Palestinian suspects is undermining the rule of law and fuelling the cycle of violence in the region” warns Amnesty International.

But this systematic extermination is regarded as “legal and legitimate” by Israel’s attorney-general. “If anyone has committed or is planning to carry out terrorist attacks, he has to be hit. It is effective, precise, and just,” said Israeli minister Ephraim Sneh in 2001, careless of the frequent lack of precision, the collateral casualties and the possibility that his information is wrong… and the justice of it?

It’s catching though. The US State Department similarly describes its own hits on Al-Qaeda as “legal and necessary.” But pre-emptive strikes are not America’s only tool. There’s the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of prisoners of ‘war’, from 13 years old upwards, are held long-term under inhuman conditions, without ‘due process’ and in flagrant breach of Geneva Conventions. Many have now been ‘rendered’ to other countries. It’s a living death and many will actually die in unlawful captivity, victims of a quite different form of assassination.

US Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News: “If you’ve got an organisation that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they [the Israelis] have hard evidence of who it is and where they’re located, I think there’s some justification in their trying to protect themselves by pre-empting.”

This endorsement gave a welcome boost to Sharon’s accelerated assassination programme. Arafat claimed the Israeli cabinet had approved a plan to kill a large number of leading Palestinians. Sharon denied it but defended assassinations as a “defensive counter-terrorism measure”. He said he had sent the Palestinians a list of 100 terrorists the Palestinian Authority must arrest, otherwise Israel would continue to “exercise our right of self-defence.”

We’re told Israeli advisers are now training US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency methods in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders. Urban warfare specialists are sharing the skills they have honed against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in order to help the US set up its own hunter-killer teams.

Israeli Death Squads in the UK?

Even more worrying are reports that Israeli death squads have been authorised to enter “friendly” countries and kill those suspected of being a threat to the Jewish state wherever they are hiding. Targeted killings were pretty much restricted to Occupied Palestine but the appointment of a new Mossad director, Meir Dagan, in 2002 changed all that.

Sharon was said to have given his old friend Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad, even at the risk to Israel’s bilateral relations. So our Home Secretary, the fragrant Jacqui Smith, had better tell us truthfully whether Mossad hoodlums are at this moment prowling the streets of London, Bradford, Glasgow and Manchester snuffing out plotters against their regime.

-Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

Seth Freedman

Though my detractors often claim otherwise, I see myself as anything but a “self-hating Jew”, and the more vocal I am in my criticism of the Israeli government’s crimes, the more credence I give that claim. I passionately love my religion, and just as fervently defend its teachings to the hilt when it comes to how to treat our fellow man. That Zionism has come along, hijacked Jewish doctrines, and twisted them to form part of an all-out supremacist movement is not something I can swallow if I want to stay loyal to the true values of Judaism.

Unfortunately, by demanding that the world sees Zionism as a philosophy essentially based on Jewish principles, Zionists have managed to unforgivably drag the religion’s name through the mud for over 60 years. However, I drew some comfort from an unlikely source after talking to a boy in the Deheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem.

I was there as part of a marathon tour that took in Hebron, the village of Al-Nueman, the Machpelah Mosque, the Church of the Nativity and various other stops along the way — including the pitiful, crumbling buildings of Deheisha. Half-way through the trip, my eyes began to glaze over, as I sought to put a barrier between myself and the relentless barrage of proof we were shown of how cruelly the authorities deal with the Palestinians.

Sneering soldiers manning checkpoints, freshly-demolished family homes, welded-shut shop fronts, blood-thirsty settler graffiti crudely daubed on Palestinian houses … the list was endless, and the evidence was overwhelming. While it was clearly an invaluable experience for those on the tour who’d never seen the awful truth of the occupation up close and personal, I’d seen it all before — not that it gets any easier to take, however many times I am exposed to the reality.

But that was before I met Jihad, a young man charged with showing us round the garbage-strewn streets and decrepit homes of Deheisha. The first thing I noticed about him were his eyes, which were as dead as any I’ve seen in all my four years living here. As he sat on a chair facing our 10-man semicircle, his face was utterly devoid of emotion, and he simply went through the motions as he reeled out his clearly well-polished introduction to life in the camp.

I could hardly begrudge him his lack of enthusiasm; we were probably the hundredth group he’d spoken to about his community’s plight, and what difference had all the lip-service made to their situation? He and his people were still here, still caged in their concrete prison, still at the mercy of the Israelis, and still no nearer to achieving their dreams of independence and freedom from the shackles of their overseers.

“I just want to be like you,” he said tiredly as he gazed into the middle distance, and with those seven words summed up the eternal plight of the downtrodden and discriminated against. “I’ve got two arms, two hands … why am I any different from other people?” he went on — and, of course, the answer was staring us in the face from the gun turrets of the guard towers overlooking the camp.

As we wended our way up the narrow alleys where skinny children clad in ill-fitting clothes played among the refuse, I asked Jihad to elaborate on how he could be “like us”. His answer was simple, and — he said — representative of the views of the majority of Palestine’s millions of refugees. “We want to go home”, he said flatly. “There is no other way (that will suffice). A two-state solution will not bring peace — the fight will go on.” He told me that although he’d chosen to use pen rather than sword to get his message across, he had no truck with those who chose to join the armed resistance.

He was vicious in his condemnation of those at the helm of the Israeli government, castigating them for their decades spent keeping his people down and subjugating them with brute force and bloodshed — however, he was adamant that he did not view their actions as emanating from Jewish sources. “Zionism is far, far removed from the Jewish religion,” he assured me. “I have no issue with Jews — just as I have no problem with Christians or Buddhists. I don’t mind Jews living here, just so long as they do it peacefully.”

He echoed the words of another local I’d met earlier, who had asked why Zionists had felt the only way to emigrate to the region was via conquest and control, rather than “the way my brother moved to the United States. He went there not to kill, not to occupy, but just to live there in peace and be a citizen like anyone else.” Both his and Jihad’s ability to clearly distinguish between Zionism and Judaism is a chink of light in an otherwise pitch black situation — and must be capitalized on by those with an interest in bringing this 60-year-old conflict to an end.

The window of opportunity won’t stay open forever. Islamic radicals and fundamentalists are highly adept at conflating the Zionist philosophy with the Jewish faith, and Israel’s hiding behind a façade of acting on behalf of World Jewry only plays into their hands. Which is why it’s essential that those Jews who recoil at the criminal actions of the Israeli government make it quite clear that this is not being done in their names.

The dominant form of Zionism might be a racist, supremacist ideology — but Judaism is most definitely not. And the more Jews who make this distinction, the better — both for the security of their fellow Jews, as well as to prove to the Israeli authorities that they most definitely do not have carte blanche to crush the Palestinians for ever more under the guise of religious values.

The concept of America as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict is obsolete. The US was never an honest broker but it doesn’t even bother pretending any more. Dick Cheney recently told the Israeli premier, the US commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable and warned the Palestinians that violence against Israel would kill their hopes of a state. And while it’s true that the current administration will shortly be emptying their desks, the three presidential hopefuls sound as though they’re singing from the Bush administration’s hymn sheet.

Democratic front-runner Barack Obama had this to say on peace in the Middle East: “That effort begins with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel — our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy. That will always be my starting point”.

His rival Hillary Clinton, who backs a US Embassy in Jerusalem, has said she would cut off aid to Palestinians should they unilaterally declare an independent state, while Republican nominee John McCain has characterized Israel’s enemies as “evil”.

I could list the candidates’ regular junkets to Tel Aviv and pilgrimages to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) but I won’t bore you. You get the point. Everybody with half a brain gets the point. So, in this case, why are Palestinian leaders relying on the good offices of the US to get them a state?

To give this premise context, say, you had a business partner who embezzled your company and left you with nothing but debts. Would you hire his lawyer, who also happened to be his best buddy, to represent you in court? Of course not! And neither would you enlist your mother-in-law to save your crumbling marriage if you had any sense.

Yet this is exactly what the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is doing. It seems that on Washington’s instructions he manipulated a breach with Hamas — as we know from leaked State Department memos — and he’s now asking Washington to become more proactive as a broker. And, let’s face it: They’ve had little success at the job throughout the past decades. Any firm with their record of failure would surely have been sacked an age ago.

Even if by some miracle the Annapolis meet actually produced the required goods in the long run, a US-brokered Palestinian state would consist of nothing more than crumbs from Israel’s table, which I fear the beleaguered Palestinian leadership would be pressured to accept as a better than nothing option.

Where does all this leave the Palestinian people? Precisely nowhere!

When they fight back, which as an occupied people is their right under international law, they are labeled terrorist. When they organize peaceful demonstrations nobody takes any notice. When they invoke a slew of UN resolutions passed in their favor, all they get are yawns from the international community in return. Israel has killed thousands, imprisoned tens of thousands and is incarcerating 1.5 million Palestinians in the world’s largest open-air jail Gaza yet, as far as Washington is concerned, Israel remains the victim/hero.

If there is ever to be a viable Palestinian state, a new paradigm is needed. Instead of one powerful so-called “honest broker”, each side in the conflict should have its own powerful advocate.

The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should negotiate one-on-one, as George W. Bush has suggested on more than one occasion, won’t work in this case simply because one side has military clout and the other hasn’t. This is akin to a deer negotiating with a leopard over the menu of the day when, of course, the deer will end up as lunch.

So who might be up for the job of Palestinian advocate?

Forget the EU for a start. Its major players talk a good talk but when push comes to shove, they’ll fall in behind the US. China has got the muscle and the independence but the Middle East is traditionally outside its geopolitical sphere of influence. Looks hopeless doesn’t it. But wait, there is one candidate itching for the job. Russia. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been canvassing regional support for his country’s potential role as mediator during his visit, last week, to Israel, Syria and the West Bank. Russia has called for an end to Israel’s settlement expansion and also offered to host a peace conference later this year to reinforce Annapolis.

Naturally, Israel is less than enthusiastic. Mahmoud Abbas, on the other hand, has publicly welcomed Russia’s involvement. Provided Moscow is seriously committed to finding a solution rather than posturing for effect, President Abbas should consider the following.

First, he should patch up relations with Hamas in the spirit of last week’s Yemeni-brokered reconciliation agreement. A divided Palestine is a weak Palestine.

Second, he should refuse to negotiate directly with Israel or to show up for smiley photo-ops with visiting American politicians.

Third, as with most disputes, he should simply tell the other side, “Talk to my lawyer”.

If Russia is willing to take on the job, then it should be supported and offered incentives by every single member of the Arab League as well as sympathetic OIC members.

Whatever happens, the Palestinians must quit putting their faith in duplicitous Uncle Sam and seek a new plan with a new partner, one that would have their interests rather than those of their enemy’s at heart.