http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=87616&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Vengeance is mine, says the IDF
By Gideon Levy, 10/28/2001
There is no need to wait for God to avenge the blood of slain minister
Rehavam Ze'evi - the Israel Defense Forces has already done it in His
name. It's doubtful whether the demand of a bereaved son at his
father's grave has ever before been fulfilled as expediently and as
efficiently as was the call by Yiftah-Palmach Ze'evi to the prime
minister at his father's funeral: "Arik, take revenge the way Gandhi
[Rehavam Ze'evi's nickname] would have avenged you." And Arik did
indeed do what Gandhi would have done, and the Ze'evi doctrine was
reprised.
Even the appalling wish by journalist Ronel Fisher on the culture
program of Channel 8, when he called for Israel to kill 50
Palestinians for every Jew who is murdered, was realized. More than 40
Palestinians, about half of them civilians - including four women and
four children, have already been killed in the campaign launched by
the IDF in the wake of the assassination. Dozens have been wounded;
houses have been demolished; cars have been flattened; and tens of
thousands of people have been imprisoned in terror, under a harsh
occupation.
This is the price being exacted from the Palestinians for the
assassination of a cabinet minister - a killing that was carried out
by a small squad of people. The 186 Jewish victims of the current
intifada, prior to the the Ze'evi assassination, including the victims
- among them children - of the large-scale attacks in the centers of
cities, did not induce the government to embark on punitive campaigns
on the scale it has done following the murder of one of its members.
This, too, has to be noted.
Israel's invasion of six cities in the West Bank can be described,
primarily, as a revenge mission, because it is clear that there is no
link between the capture, in Beit Rima and Azariya, of those who
carried out the assassination and the reoccupation of the suburbs of
Jenin and Bethlehem. One need not be a great expert on terrorism
either to understand that assassins are not hunted down with tanks and
that terrorism cannot be eradicated with armored personnel carriers
(APC). In the spirit of another campaign of revenge
- no less cruel - that the United States is conducting in Afghanistan,
and that also has little to do with eliminating terrorism, Israeli
forces penetrated deep into residential neighborhoods, whose
inhabitant have nothing to do with terrorism, and imposed a regime of
tanks and APCs.
The horror that grips residents of Beit Jala and their children when
an Israeli tank or APC rumbles through their streets has to be
witnessed so as to understand the impact. And what blame accrues to
the residents of Ramallah, who are now captives in their own homes,
with many of them lacking food and medicines? They had nothing to do
with the assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi, and there are probably some
among them who are against such actions.
But campaigns of revenge have a dynamic of their own: The "neighbor of
the evil man" is punished too, as Ze'evi himself said in one of the
last interviews he gave, in reply to a question about the killing of
an infant girl by an IDF shell that was fired at her house in Gaza.
Raniya Haroufi, 24, a mother of two children, was killed last week
when she fled from a gun battle. Ayasha Abu Oudeh, a mother of eight
children, was killed on the way to visit her family. They and many
others were innocent victims; and in the eyes of the Palestinians,
they were victims of terrorism.
The government's campaign of revenge was not confined solely to the
depth of the Israeli incursion into Palestinian territories. It was
accompanied this time by particularly brutal acts; for example, the
IDF shot at Al-Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala - the only hospital in
the Bethlehem region. The hospital was compelled to issue an
announcement informing anyone who was hurt in the violence on that day
to keep away from the institution because of the shooting. One young
man was killed and another was wounded, just outside the hospital's
emergency room.
The president of Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Ruhama Martoun, who
visited the hospital, reported that she had clearly seen the damage
caused by the shooting and shelling on the walls of the institution
and the ambulances parked next to it. The IDF also shelled a maternity
hospital in Bethlehem. After the hospital endured a two-day long
barrage, the premature infants ward was evacuated. Even in the darkest
days of the previous intifada, the IDF did not open fire at hospitals.
There were also private, small-scale acts of retribution - for
example, the cars that were parked on Beit Jala streets and were
flattened by the tanks that moved through the village. What did that
have to do with the war against terrorism? The same can be asked about
the telephone poles that were ripped out by the tanks, cutting off
entire neighborhoods from the outside world, in the midst of a time of
fear and anxiety. The poles did not interfere with the tanks - the
streets are wide enough - just as the parked cars did not have to be
ground under the tanks' tracks. Their destruction was intended solely
as punitive revenge, and perhaps to fulfill the soldiers' desire for
retribution. In the meantime, however, such actions are planting more
seeds of hatred in the hearts of the residents.
Look at the infuriating photographs in the Friday edition of the
mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth - the smiling soldier sprawled out
on a bed in a Bethlehem hotel, the chuckling soldiers sitting
contentedly in armchairs in the living room of a Palestinian home next
to Tul Karm.
"The worst part of it is that it's not completely clear what it was
all for," a senior officer told Ha'aretz military correspondent Amos
Harel on Thursday. "Everyone knows that in the end, we will leave with
our tail between our legs... So what did we gain and what exactly do
we hope to achieve thereafter?"
The answer to the senior officer's questions are, in fact, clear
enough: Last week, the IDF launched a campaign of revenge at the order
of the government, and in the spirit of the infamous reprisal raids of
Unit 101 (under the command of Ariel Sharon) during the 1950s. This
time, too, the mission was executed successfully and the goal was
achieved in full. The Israel Defense Forces became, at least last
week, the Israel revenge forces.
