ISRAEL VERSUS ISLAM?
Guilty because innocent
International Viewpoint # 242 February 1993
INTRODUCTION - On the night of December 17, 1992, the Israeli government under Itzhak Rabin deported 417 Palestinians accused of belonging to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas (the name is the Arab acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) to southern Lebanon. Rabin may have thought he was exe cuting a master-stroke but in fact he has only succeeded in gratifying his predecessors in the Likud govemment. He has carried out an action which only makes sense if it is seen in the light of an option that Likud cherished but never dared to implement - the annexation of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and the expulsion of much of their population in the framework of a go for break game with the rest of the "international community" including Israel's godfather, the United
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However, this is not the option of Rabin and co. who are supporters of a "negotiated solution" - meaning the move towards the formation of a Palestinian bantustan with the blessing of the US and its Arab acolytes. It thus seems that the deportations are simply a huge blunder on Rabin's part. The effect of the deportations, furthermore, is quite the opposite to that intended - the weakening and isolation of the Palestinian fundamentalist movement. Thrust onto the front page by Rabin's action, Hamas finds its ability to cloak itself in the legitimacy of the Palestinian national movement and to force others - including the PLO - to show their solidarity with it - enhanced The following dossier is devoted to the Palestinian fundamentalist movement. By pure coincidence our three contributors are all women -apt, given that lists, even when they themselves suffer repression, remain oppressors of women. Lea Tsemel, interviewed here, is known to everybody who has taken an interest in the Israel-Palestine question. A lawyer who has defended the Palestinians oppressed by her own nation, she has for many years stood up to the chauvinist and sexist exaspe ration of Israeli society and its political and judicial establishments. The well-known Israeli writer, David Grossman has devoted an entire chapter to Lea in his fine account of Palestinian life, The Yellow Wind, which appeared on the eve of the eruption of the intifada. Dalal Bizri is a teacher at the Lebanese University. A sociologist by educa tion and a feminist by conviction, she has specialized in the study of islamic fundamentalism. The article published here is a shortened version of a longer
States.
LEA TSEMEL is the Israeli lawyer who succeeded in holding up for 20 hours the convoy of 417 Palestinians that the Israelis were hoping to discreetly deport to Lebanon. The delay completely changed the impact of the Israeli government's act.
Subsequently, confronted with international disapproval, the refusal of the Lebanese state to accept this new violation of its sovereignty and the determination of the deportees to leave the no man's land in which the Israeli state has dumped them, despite cold and sickness, the Israeli government has started to try to find a way out of the corner it has backed itself into. We spoke to Lea Tsemel on January 15, 1993, two days before the Supreme Court hearing on the case.
HAT precisely
W is the legal issue that the
Supreme Court will be dealing with tomorrow?
When it authorized the deportations a month ago, the Supreme Court told the government that it had thirty days in which to provide a legal justification and in particular to demonstrate the legality of the new military decree that allowed the deportations to take place.
In our view, there is no doubt that the decree allowing the deportations is not only against international law and respect for the most elementary human rights, but is also all varieties of religious fundamentaillegal in terms of established procedures in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
What were the Israeli government's aims when it ordered the deportations on December
16 last year?
Firstly, we must remember that this is not the first wave of deportations. Since 1967, hundreds of Palestinians have been banished from their homeland. Under pressure of public opinion the volume of deportations has declined in recent years - from hundreds to dozens.
Apart from its repressive aspect, deportation expresses the often unconscious dream of the great majority of the Israeli population text sent us by the author.
The Arab original, which deals with the whole of the Palestinian fundamentalist movement will be published in full in the forthcoming issue of our Arab language sister publication Al-Mitraqa
Manar Hassan is a Palestinian feminist militant from the State of Israel and a founder of the Al-Fanar movement.
Her contribution is the text of a presentation to a feminist conference in Bologna last September. Large parts of this text, which we are publishing in full, have appeared in News from Within
(Jerusalem) — Salah Jaber * — the dream of waking up one fine morning to find the Palestinians no longer a part of our reality.
What is known in Israel as the Transfer is not a plan; it is a fantasy, which is perhaps even worse.
Furthermore, there is a notion that the Palestinians are not legitimate residents in this land but tenants with limited and always provisional rights. If, for example, a Palestinian leaves the Occupied Territories for a few years, the Israeli authorities can withdraw their right of residence. I deal with dozens of cases of this kind.
To return to the decision to deport 417 alleged members of Islamic fundamentalist organizations; here the aim was first of all to satisfy a section of public opinion that wants
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International Viewpoint# 242 February 1993 drastic repression in retaliation for the wave of attacks in recent months.
For Rabin the worst insult is to be considered "soft". So he decided to be hard, even harder than his "rightwing" predecessors, Sharon or Shamir.
And apart from that?
That's all there was to it. Yitzhak Rabin's political thinking is not terribly sophisticated, to put it mildly. Like many other politicians here he was educated in the Palmash school [the shock units of the Zionist Hagannah militia in 1947-48] and he thinks in terms of lashing out.
If you look at the decision to deport alleged Hamas militants, you see a total lack of foresight. Domestic public opinion, the reaction of the international community, the legal angle, the reaction of the Lebanese government, the response of the deportees themselves — nothing had been seriously taken into consideration.
However the Supreme Court ratified the deportations.
Does this mean that legality is being observed?
The Supreme Court applies the laws passed by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Since there is no constitution in Israel, the Court cannot rule laws unconstitutional. Existing emergency legislation allows banishment, even though the Geneva Convention quite explicitly prohibits any form of banishment or deportation of individuals and groups. The Supreme Court has for a long time claimed that the Convention does not apply to the occupied Palestinian territories.
Thus, from the point of view of international law, these deportations and those that preceded it are war crimes. However, even under existing Israeli law, the new military decree that authorized the deportations is highly problematic, in particular in that the deportees were not allowed to appeal against the decision before it was carried out. Furthermore, there were a whole series of omissions that make this decree and its application wholly illegal.
Who are the deportees?
Nobody knows, not even the authorities. Until now, and without any of them being able to appeal, the authorities have admitted to having deported 16 by accident, including a 16 year old boy. The estimate in the Occupied Territories is that more than a hundred of the deportees have had nothing to do with Hamas or the Islamic Jihad. 20
This is the first reason why we are demanding the right to appeal before deportation; especially when there are large numbers of people there are inevitably going to be mistakes.
As for the militants of the Islamic fundamentalist organizations, the authorities have no precise or concrete charges against them. The best proof of this came last week when a Hamas commando was arrested and admitted under interrogation that three or four of the deportees had been involved in attacks. The authorities then stated that they would do their utmost to bring them back to Israel and put them on trial. That is to say, they were deported by mistake, since they are suspected of a crime meaning that to be deported they had first to be presumed innocent of any crime!
Why Hamas? There are two main reasons. The first is because Hamas has recently carried out some very effective operations above all against military objectives. Neither the government nor public opinion can accept seeing the army outwitted. Secondly because a new bugbear has to be invented and Islamic fundamentalism fits the bill splendidly. For two decades the PLO was the bugbear used to frighten domestic and international public opinion. The Palestinian national movement was portrayed as a gang of terrorists motivated solely by a desire to massacre Jews wherever they might be. But this doesn't work any more. The PLO's legitimacy and image have rendered efforts to demonize it useless. Now Islamic fundamentalism will take the place of Palestinian nationalism.
But isn't it the case that
Hamas was created by the
Israeli occupation forces?
No, Hamas is the expression of a revolt by the youth inside the Muslim Brothers movement after the start of the intifada. The young Muslim Brothers responded to the challenge of the popular mobilization that launched the intifada in 1988 and rejected their movement's traditional anti-nationalism and opposition to militancy. Thus was born Hamas.
The Israeli ruling class felt a strong temptation to use Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. This was Shamir and Rabin's position. However the security services were opposed to such a policy, claiming that it would backfire. For a time the authorities left Hamas alone and allowed it to increase its influence, until they came to the conclusion that they were building up an enemy that could become a real danger. This was when the decision was taken to arrest Hamas leader Sheikh Yasin and sentence him to life imprisonment.
How do you explain the line of the left ministers in the government, who have given total support to the deportations?
The notion of "left" is strictly relative in the Israeli context. Let us quote Amiram Goldblum, the spokesperson for Peace Now a few days ago on the radio: "There are in our movement leftists for whom human rights are absolute values. But not for us! Human rights are important, but the peace process is even more important."
The notion of the "peace process" is an excuse for everything as the notion of security once was. It is an alibi for every revolting act. It is on this basis that people like Shulamit Aloni and Dedi Zuker (members of the Civil Rights Movement) were won round; they argue that the Rabin government wants peace and must therefore be supported at all costs. Hamas is opposed to the "peace process" and must be destroyed whatever the cost.
What will happen now?
Everything depends on the resolve of the Palestinians, both the deportees and the PLO leadership. What happens at the Supreme Court is quite secondary. The deportations are a political act and the future of its victims will be determined by the balance of political forces. If the Palestinians are sufficiently firm and refuse to negotiate until the deportees are allowed home they can win over a substantial segment of Arab and international public opinion and force the hands of the Arab and US governments so that they compel the Israeli government to back down.
The fundamentalists will come out of this stronger.
They will be strengthened yet further if the PLO agrees to resume negotiations before the deportees are back with their families.
Will the Supreme Court cancel the deportation orders?
I have represented almost all the Palestinians deported since the end of the 1970s — that is more than 50 people -and the Supreme Court has never overruled a deportation order. *