[Reader-list] re: about wars and checkposts

[avinash kumar]

sorry for cross-posting in case its already been read.. two pieces on a 
violinist's encounter with the check-post in a so-called warzone. One 
from an Israeli columnist, while the other from a Palestinian.

avinash

December 3, 2004

The Face Seems Familiar

By MEIR SHALEV

So, what did we have in the past weeks? We had an officer who
"confirmed" the killing of a 13-year old girl. We had soldiers
mutilating the dead body of an enemy and posing for photos with a
cut-off head and a cigarette placed between the dead lips. We had
soldiers at a checkpoint demanding that a passing Palestinian play the
violin for them. And we had several members of the naval commandos
pose naked for a photo on top of Mount Hermon. This is what our armed
forces issue in the course of one or two weeks.

About the "confirming kill" of the girl, the army conducted a flawed
and lying investigation. The mutilation of bodies is still under
investigation, please be patient. About the soldiers before whom the
Palestinian had to play his violin, the army spokesman said that they
were insensitive. But the commandos who posed naked were cashiered
forthwith, for the IDF is a moral army which cuts off abominations
from its midst. When it is really necessary, the IDF knows how to to
take a swift and decisive action.

I look at the photo of the Palestinian playing the violin to our
soldiers. The face seems very familiar. It seems very familiar because
this deliberately expressionless look on the face, this intentionally
unfocused gaze, is very common at thousands of checkpoint encounters,
and even at ID checks conducted by our fighters right here in the
center of the city. But it is also familiar because we know this sight
from the not too distant past, we know it very well from the other
side of the violin, and the other side of the checkpoint, and the
other side of the gun barrel.

"Such severe incidents make clear the imperative need for continuing
our efforts to make our troops understand the message" said the army
spokesman in response to the checkpoint recital. But the message was
already long ago delivered and well understood. It was understood when
the army not only allowed the settlers to mistreat Palestinian
civilians, but often itself acted on the settlers' behalf. The message
was well understood when the commander of the air force said that he
feels nothing when dropping a one-ton bomb on a Gaza neighborhood -
and was rewarded for that statement by a promotion to deputy
chief-of-staff. The message was understood when a division commander
was cashiered for leaking information to a journalist, after having
been praised for an operation in which civilians were indiscriminately
killed and their homes razed to the ground. The message is well
understood indeed, the understanding of it and its implementation have
long ago spread from the army and into the behavior of drivers on the
road, and the violence of pupils at school, and the economic policy
which is trampling over the poor.

And the army spokesman also said that the soldiers' conduct towards
the violinist was "An insensitive conduct by soldiers who are facing a
complicated and dangerous situation". This automatic-modular answer
clearly shows that the army spokesman does not understand the true
complexity and the true danger of the situation. For once, we were the
people who played the violin. The Jewish violin played in weddings,
and at concert halls, and before the thugs in the camps. We played and
joked: the violin is our instrument because it is so small, so easy to
carry when you need to run away...

Zionism asked of us to lay the violin aside for some time, to pick up
the rifle instead "until things get better". The Territories and all
that is involved in holding them have made this into a permanent
situation. And here is the real danger. For in the end, it is the
violin which wins.

Meir Shalev is a columnist for the Israeli paper, Yediot Aharonot.

============================================================
============================================================
Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint
"The Pianist" of Palestine
By OMAR BARGHOUTI

When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct,
uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a
purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film's depiction of the
dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German
occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall
with Israel's much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for
them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: "that's one thing Israeli
soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians." I spoke too soon, it
seems. Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz reported last week that an
Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military
roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a
Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization
confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another
checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army
spokesperson as little more that "insensitivity," with no malicious
intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual
mantra about soldiers having to "contend with a complex and dangerous
reality" was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I
wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the
original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940's.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not
stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual
"punishment" meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young,
racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the
hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories
are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a
visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a
Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing:
"The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine
the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust,
they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature
- though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto."

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel's justice minister and a Holocaust survivor
himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio
that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris
for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at
Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army's wanton and
indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms
in Gaza at the time, saying: "[I]f we carry on like this, we will be
expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand
trial at The Hague."

Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately
revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no
longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity
in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent
civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as
acceptable, even necessary, acts of "disciplining" the untamed
natives, as a measure to maintain "security."

According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander
was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious
Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented
against him was a videotape filmed by the army's education branch. In
that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing
that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any
provocation, beat a Palestinian "flanked by his wife and children,"
punching him in the face, and "even kicked[him] in the lower part of
his body," the report said.

A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence," organized in Tel Aviv
by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied
Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence
towrds defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers' graffiti
that included: "Arabs to the gas chambers"; "Arabs = an inferior
race"; "Spill Arab blood"; and, of course, the ever so popular "Death
to the Arabs," soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of
average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper
sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such
abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs." The
exhibit's main curator described a particularly shocking policy of
randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like
Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on
end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house
in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.

The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army
units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha'aretz in
November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant
(res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described
the gradual transformation of every soldier to an "animal" when
staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring
with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected
with what he calls "checkpoint syndrome," a glaring symptom of which
is acting violently towards Palestinians in "the most primal and
impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ." "At the checkpoint,"
he explains, "young people have the chance to be masters and using
force and violence becomes legitimate ."

Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a
Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a "souvenir picture"
taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they'd thrashed; how one
soldier pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had
"the nerve to smile" at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced
to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier
asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused "broke
someone's hand" and "slashed their tires."

The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal
confession. "I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an
Arab right in the face," he admitted. "Blood was trickling from his
lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his
knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside." He then goes on
to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the
tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed "the Arab;" how they hit him until
"he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;" how
he "grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side," until he
cried aloud, and how the soldiers then "stepped harder and harder on
his back," to make him stop crying.

Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: "Good
work, tigers." And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse
continued in different forms. "All the other soldiers were waiting
there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the
Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One of the soldiers, Furer
said, "went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled
over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him
really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They
shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a
16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It
fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the
Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity
and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel's
massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example,
soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of
a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting
pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels
and eventually exposed on the internet.

In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of
Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops
inscribed identification numbers "on the foreheads and forearms of
Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation." The late Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at
concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee
from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable." Nonetheless,
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon,
was worried only about Israel's image being tarnished: "clearly it
conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message," he
told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in
Israel, too, were far too concerned about the "public relations
disaster" to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality
of the act and the irony of it all.

Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University,
sees PR as "a fundamental issue in Israeli life." "We do not think we
do anything wrong," he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian,
"but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international
media is anti-Semitic." Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than
with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly
worried that "we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the
horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the
issue but about how it will be seen."

Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among
the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the
Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a
recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that "gross
insensitivity" was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli
society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, "I
am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: 'We did
not know.'"

I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning
director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation
tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity
by making a Palestinian version of "The Pianist."

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. His
article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the
"Best of 2002" by the Guardian. He can be reached at: jenna at palnet.com