 |
| Israel
Shahak Articles |
| |
| The
Background and Consequences of the Massacre in
Hebron |
| |
| Israel
Shahak |
| |
Dr. Shahak, Holocaust
survivor, and retired professor of chemistry at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli
League for Human and Civil Rights.
It seems
certain that the real story of the February 25, 1994,
events in the Patriarch's Cave of Hebron will not be
known, even in its rough outline, at least until the
secret archives of the Israeli army and Shabak [secret
police] are opened. By destroying evidence, preventing
professional investigation and spreading massive
disinformation, the Israeli army saw to it that nobody,
the newly appointed Inquiry Committee included, would
learn the whole truth. The army's power to destroy
evidence and fabricate stories about the crime itself is
indeed formidable; yet it is much less formidable as far
as the background of the massacre is concerned, which in
my view is no less important than the massacre itself.
Fortunately, the control of the Hebrew press by the
Israeli government is not as tight as the controls the
army exerts in the territories. That is why the Israeli
version of the events can be conclusively contested, but
it still cannot be rectified to the point of yielding
another consistent version. This is also why in this
article I have to confine myself to a disclosure of
reticences of the army and then to proceed to discussing
the background and consequences of the
massacre.
To begin with, the Israeli army first
deliberately destroyed all on-site evidence of the
massacre by cleaning its aftereffects in haste, and only
then proceeded to "investigate" it as unprofessionally
as possible. On February 27, Nahum Barnea (Yediot
Ahronot) informed that the army commanders in Hebron
had first evacuated all the survivors, the wounded
included, from the Patriarch's Cave, then removed the
corpses, and then scoured the hall by cascading water
from the largest fire engine in the Hebron municipality.
The next day Barnea added new information: that the
previous day's cleaning was not considered sufficient
and hence, on Saturday, soldiers were ordered to "scrub"
the entire hall of the Patriarch's Cave meticulously.
But the Israeli army is supposed to observe Sabbath with
due rigor, enforced by military chaplains serving in all
units -- especially in Hebron, where many officers are
religious and the religious settlers can watch how
Sabbath is observed. It can therefore be presumed that
the scrubbing of the hall was elevated to a level of
urgency sufficient to justify the violation of the
Sabbath in the eyes of both the army and its rabbis,
whom the officers are instructed in such cases to
consult.
The "investigation" of the crime was not
carried out by the Investigatory Unit of the Military
Police, which is reputed for its professionalism and
which is routinely called in to investigate serious
crimes whenever the army wants to find the culprits. Nor
was it carried out by the Military Police itself,
routinely called in to solve lesser crimes. It was
carried out instead by officers who were present on the
spot, headed by the commander of the Central Command and
Rabin's military secretary, General Danny Yatom, who is
not known to possess any training, skills or talents as
a detective. The absence of a serious investigation may
be due to the fact that the present chief of staff, Ehud
Barak, is known for his aversion to professional
investigations of the military, even by the
Investigatory Unit of his own army. This aversion is
shared by his boss, Yitzhak Rabin. In matters not
involving the Palestinians, the Hebrew press repeatedly
pointed out that in cases such as the deaths of soldiers
due to negligence or discipline infractions, Barak had
been often said to suppress evidence, disinform and be
otherwise dishonest. He has also often been said to be a
careerist, to mingle in politics, and to mislead both
the government (presumably on Rabin's orders) and the
public. In my own view, he is the most dishonest chief
of staff Israel has ever had, and I am not forgetting
Rafael Bitan, who served as a chief of staff during the
invasion of Lebanon. Suppression of evidence was
accompanied by disinformation. A few hours after the
mass slaughter, General Yatom convened a press
conference at which he stated that "a relative quiet had
reigned in the Territories." The lie about the "relative
quiet" was too blatant to require a rebuttal: by then
everyone already knew that mass demonstrations were
being held all over the territories. Furthermore, the
soldiers stationed in Hebron, who could, even if
indirectly, know something about the circumstances of
the crime, were confined to their army bases, where they
underwent "an investigation by their commanders."
Following a time-honored custom, the army "investigated"
only its own soldiers without bothering to summon Arab
eyewitnesses.
Anyway, the "findings" of General
Yatom's "investigations" seem to surpass all records of
deception and disinformation in the army's
communications during the intifada. Let me just
quote a single such "finding." On February 27 and 28 the
Hebrew press reported that Arab eyewitnesses had said
that on escaping from the Patriarch's Cave after the
slaughter, they were shot at by the soldiers from an
army lookout located on a hillock opposite the Cave, and
that some of them were then wounded. On March 1, the
same papers reported how General Yatom had "explained"
this fact at a government meeting. He said that he had
asked the soldiers involved, "who could be relied upon
to tell me the truth, as the Israeli soldiers generally
can" and that the soldiers he queried told him that all
the shooting had been into the air. (The poor general
has apparently never heard a 26-year-old Israeli joke,
according to which the Palestinians must be capable of
walking in the air, because soldiers shoot only into the
air and yet the Palestinians are being hit.) But "the
truth" as communicated to General Yatom by his soldiers
apparently didn't suffice to convince the ministers,
because he also told them that he himself had inspected
the bloodstains on the way between the Cave and the army
lookout, to find that "the blood clotted on the ground
conclusively proved that it could only have squirted out
from the wounds of those hit at in the Cave during their
evacuation, and not from any wounds inflicted by
shooting from the army lookout opposite [the Cave]." The
press didn't dare to ask about the rules of inference
followed by General Yatom to reach his conclusions on
the basis of inspection of pools of clotted blood. Nor
is it known whether any government minister queried the
general about this matter.
The official
acknowledgments of "shame," "sorrow" and the like were
calculated to deceive international opinion and to shore
up Israel's reputation no less than the official Israeli
version of mass murder. Already a few days after the
massacre some Hebrew press commentators were seeing
through these apologies. Under the sarcastic title "Let
everybody see how nicely Israel professes its shame,"
Gil Hareven (Maariv, March 4, 1994) commented
that "the real message of the Prime Minister was: 'See
Jews, how lovely am I ashamed."' She added that shame
extended only up to a point. When the Israeli TV listed
for the first time the names of the Palestinian victims,
not even in a newscast but in another program, the
public responded to this innovation by "overwhelming the
program editors with protesting phone calls." From that
moment on the TV management decided to provide no
personal data, such as profession, age or appearance of
Goldstein's victims, even though such data are routinely
provided about Israeli victims of Arab violence. Hareven
adds that "while in our schools there are plenty of
students who openly extol the murderer as having done
the right thing, our politicians bask in their own
self-righteousness. They claim that our deeds are not as
important as our ability to make a profound
soul-searching thereafter, and that no other people in
the world would be capable of a soul-searching as
profound as ours." Indeed, within two days walls in West
Jerusalem, especially the religious neighborhoods, were
already covered by posters extolling Goldstein's
"virtues" and deploring that he didn't manage to kill
more Arabs. Children of religious settlers coming to
Jerusalem to demonstrate were sporting a button "Dr.
Goldstein cured Israel's ills." Concerts of religious
music and other entertainment events often spontaneously
turned into demonstrations of tribute to him. Other
forms of public tribute for Goldstein were reported by
the press in copious detail (especially by Yediot
Ahronot, which has the largest circulation), while
no politician uttered a word in protest against such
celebrations. Hareven expects "acknowledging shame" will
soon become a convenient political expedient in Israeli
dealings with the Palestinians. "Whenever the
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship again complain
about how badly discriminated against they are, they
will be told: Don't you see how beautifully are we
ashamed?" Hareven comments that to be ashamed is much
cheaper than to provide money for Arab schools or to
remove the Jewish settlers from Hebron, "regardless of
the fact that shame may nicely go together with
self-aggrandizement and search for
profits.''
There can be no doubt that most, if
not all, "shame," "shock" and "deep sorrow about the
Hebron massacre voiced by the Knesset, by the Israeli
government and government ministers has conformed quite
closely to Hareven's strictures. One can even say more:
that the acknowledgments of "shame" were quite often
deliberately intended to conceal the "business as usual"
of continuing cooperation of the Israeli authorities
with the settlers. Owing to reiterated professions of
"shame," the apartheid regime in the territories and the
Israeli army, within which a Dr. Goldstein could thrive
and murder, grew closer after the
massacre.
President Weizman expressed his
"sorrow" perhaps more extravagantly than anybody else.
After four days of this extravagance, it turned out
that, acting on Rabin's behalf, he was at the same time
busy promoting the entry of Rafael Eitan and his Tzomet
party to the government coalition. When serving as chief
of staff, Rafael Eitan not only became notorious for his
repeated exonerations of soldiers who had murdered
innocent Arabs (in one case after a protracted torture),
but also for referring to the Palestinians as "drugged
cockroaches in a bottle." And nothing indicates that he
has changed his views since. But Uzi Benziman
(Haaretz, March 4) also informs us that while
Weizman was expressing his "shock" at the massacre, he
was engaged in amiable negotiations with Goldstein's
family and his Kach comrades over a suitably honorable
funeral for the murderer. 'The Kiryat Arba settlers,
among whom many declared themselves in favor of the mass
murder in radio and TV interviews, lauding Goldstein as
a "martyr" and "holy man," demanded from General Yatom
that the funeral cortege parade through the city of
Hebron, then under a curfew. Yatom didn't dare to reject
this demand outright, but he opposed it on the ground
that it could cause "disorders." Thereupon Tzvi Katzover
(one of the most extremist among the leaders of the
religious settlers) and mayor of Kiryat Arba, phoned
Weizman with threats that "the settlers were going to
carry out a pogrom" if their demands are not met.
Weizman responded to this outrageous threat with favor,
and "phoned the Chief of Staff to ask him why the army
opposed the demands of the settlers. Barak answered that
the army was afraid that Arabs may desecrate
[Goldstein's] tomb and carry away his corpse. In further
negotiations involving inter alia Barak, Yatom,
Rabin, the Kach leaders and Kiryat Arba settlers,
Weizman took a consistent position that "the army should
pay all the respects to the desires and sensibilities of
the settlers and Goldstein's family." Ultimately a
compromise satisfactory to all sides was reached. A
massively attended funeral cortege would take place in
Jerusalem, and the police would close some of the
busiest streets to the traffic. And so it was. But
following that Jerusalem affair, the murderer was buried
with all due ceremony in Kiryat Arba, on the extension
of "Kahane Avenue." His tomb, with a permanent guard of
honor provided by the army, at once became a site of
pilgrimage, not only for the settlers but also for
delegations from all the Israeli cities, as noted with
revulsion by Nadav Haetzni (Maariv, March 4).
According to Benziman, however, the consent of the Kach
leaders to this compromise was hard to obtain. General
Yatom had to approach them and Katzover in person,
promising that "Goldstein's burial in Kiryat Arba is
only temporary and that eventually he will be reburied
in Hebron." Consent had also to be obtained from the
notorious Kiryat Arba rabbi Dov Lior, who had declared
that "since Goldstein did what he did in God's name, he
is to be regarded as a Righteous Man"
(Yerushalaim, March 4). Benziman quotes an
explanation of this disgraceful conduct by Weizman's
entourage: "After the fact, the officials of the
Presidential Residence justify those goings on by the
need to becalm the mood of the settlers." His comment is
that "one needs to be quite optimistic to expect that,
with such attitudes in high places, the [Israeli]
government may muster enough courage to do something
really significant, like removing the Jewish settlers
from the city of Hebron." A demand to this effect has
indeed been voiced by some commentators, but it was
fiercely opposed not only by the settlers but also by
all the right-wing parties.
It can be conjectured
that Weizman, Rabin and at least some other politicians
expressed their "shock" over Goldstein in order to
conceal the norms of apartheid in the territories (and
in a milder form in Israel as well) as guiding
principles of everything the Israeli authorities did
during the massacre and in its aftermath. I will reserve
for another occasion the description of the racist
manner in which the Israeli police responded to the
protests of Israeli Arabs. Of concern here, however, is
the fact that after the massacre the apartheid in the
territories came to be perceived by some Israelis in a
more glaring light than ever before. Professor Ruth
Gabizon (Shishi, March 4) thus commented on the
difference between the treatment of the Palestinians and
the treatment accorded to Goldstein. "For the Israeli
authorities to order the demolition of the house
inhabited by a Palestinian who killed a single Jew is a
routine matter." Moreover, such demolitions are carried
out summarily, even before a Palestinian concerned is
charged with any crime, or right after he is killed. The
mere suspicion of the man's guilt by the army
authorities or by the Shabak suffices to prompt a
demolition order. In Goldstein's case those very
institutions, with the prime minister's backing,
pronounced him as being guilty of mass murder at once.
Gabizon observes that the interpretation of demolition
of houses after a Palestinian is pronounced a
murderer
as a collective punishment has been
summarily rejected not only by the entire [Israeli]
political system, which is known for its cynicism. The
Supreme Court which is supposed to guard morality and
human rights has also rejected it in principle,
without bothering to discuss in any detail the
question from either the factual or moral points of
view. When some demanded that Goldstein's house be
demolished likewise, it instantly became apparent that
in the State of Israel doing such a thing to a Jew
would be unimaginable. Can we even envisage the
possibility that Goldstein' s innocent widow and
orphans would be punished for his
crime?
Indeed, it is unimaginable. But the same
holds true for any family of a Palestinian murderer.
Yet the fact is that an overwhelming majority of
Israeli Jews have refused to see any analogy between
the two situations. Their refusal has been perfectly
honest and all too natural after the Supreme Court
justices have refused to recognize any correspondence
between demolitions of Arab and Jewish houses either.
Yet the problem is serious. It can be called solved
only if the government formally and openly resolves to
no longer resort to house demolitions as punishment of
the Palestinians, exactly as it refused to resort to
it in Goldstein's case. The problem lies not only in
that this form of punishment is utterly repulsive. It
also lies in the need to transcend our failure to
understand that what in the case of a Jew was
unimaginable could as well be unimaginable in an
analogous case of a Palestinian. Gabizon can
be presumed to insist that the government renounce the
house demolition "formally and openly" since the Israeli
authorities are used to granting favors to the
Palestinians in the territories without any formality,
so as to make it possible to revoke them whenever
needed. For example, neither the Civil nor the Military
Administration has to this very day published any
document authorizing displays of the Palestinian flag as
lawful. All that happened was that the Israeli army
received orders not to respond to such displays.
Tomorrow those orders can change. The demolition of
houses is at present discontinued, but in the same
manner. (In neither case did the PLO insist on any
formal guarantees.) Needless to say, what Gabizon
advocates has not even been mooted by any Israeli
politician. They have been too busy expressing their
"shock."
Gabizon also speaks up about other
aspects of apartheid brought into sharper relief by the
Hebron massacre. For example, "many Palestinians who
murder a single Jew are denied the right to be buried in
the presence of their families. They are being buried by
the army in cemeteries whose location is unknown. In
cases where the victims are Palestinian the army usually
demands that their families bury them at nighttime in
the presence of a limited number of mourners, so as to
preclude incitement." Let me add that such funerals are
guarded by soldiers whose task is to enforce these
conditions with all rigor.
Relying mostly on a
report of Ilana Baum and Tzvi Singer (Yediot
Ahronot, February 28) let me describe the funeral
accorded to Goldstein through the good offices of
Weizman. Its first installment took place in Jerusalem.
Among large numbers of mourners (about 1,000 according
to other correspondents)
only a few were Kiryat Arba settlers.
Without having ever met Goldstein personally, the
mourners, most of them Jerusalemites, were
enthusiastic admirers of his deed. Many were Yeshiva
students. One large group represented the Habad
Hassidic movement, another the [anti-Zionist] Satmar
Hassids. Other Hassidic movements were also
represented at the funeral in force. Incidentally,
Goldstein was at the same time a follower of Kahane and
the Lubavitch Rabbi.
People in the crowd awaiting the arrival
of the corpse could be heard repeating again and
again: "What a hero!" "A righteous person!" "He did it
on behalf of all of us." As is usual in such
encounters between religious Jews, all the
participants turned into a single collective
personality, united by their burning hatred of the
Israeli media, the wicked [Israeli] government and,
above all else, of anyone daring to speak up against
the murder. Before the procession started,
some quite well-known rabbis and Gush Emunim members
eulogized Goldstein, finding words of commendation for
the murder he had committed. Rabbi Israel Ariel
said:
The holy martyr Baruch Goldstein is from
now on our intercessor in the Heavens. Goldstein
didn't act as an individual: He heard the cry of the
Land [of Israel] which is being stolen from us day
after day by the Muslims. He acted in order to relieve
that cry of the Land! And toward the end of
his eulogy Rabbi Ariel said: "The Jews will inherit the
Land not by any peace agreement but only by shedding
blood." Ben-Shoshan Yeshua, a member of the "Jewish
underground" sentenced for murder to life imprisonment,
and amnestied after a few years spent under luxurious
hotel conditions, opened his speech by lauding Goldstein
to the skies, and exclaimed:
"What a shame that even in this holy time
there are Jews who pay other Jews for spying on us!"
The crowd began to grumble, but then two uniformed
police officers appeared in its midst, looking around.
Everybody fell silent. This moment of truth
shows in my view that Kahane's followers are not only
cruel but also cowardly. They are ready to indulge in
the most barbarous cruelties only when they feel strong
and only against the weak and unarmed. But as soon as
they confront real power, they begin to
quake.
The funeral cortege was protected by heavy
reinforcements of security forces- the Border Guards,
the police and the secret police. None of those forces
bothered to hinder the Kahanist goons from assaulting
reporters who could be recognized as such (most used
disguises), or press photographers who were easily
recognizable by their cameras.
An entire unit of Border Guards preceded
the cortege, but it was followed by young Kahanists
from Jerusalem who kept yelling "Death to the Arabs!"
While obviously intending to find an Arab in order to
kill him, they could spot none. Suddenly a Border
Guard noticed an Arab approaching the cortege. He
couldn't be easily seen behind a low fence, but he was
coming dangerously close. The Border Guard at once
jumped over the fence, stopped the Arab and, using
force, led him away to safety before anybody could
notice it. He thus saved him from a lynching which
would undoubtedly have taken place. Behind
the young Kahanists there was the coffin surrounded by
the heads of the Kahanist splinters, some of whom were
by then already wanted by the police. The police later
claimed that "they couldn't be recognized," although
they made no effort to hide themselves in the crowd. On
the contrary, they were visible as they extolled
Goldstein's virtues. Ilana Baum writes that
Tiran Pollak, one of the Kahane
Khai leaders, wanted by the police, granted me an
interview near the coffin. "Goldstein was not only
righteous and holy," he told me, "but also a martyr.
Since he is a martyr, his corpse will be buried
without being washed, not in a shroud but in his
clothes. The honorable Dr. Goldstein has always
refused to provide medical help to Arabs. Even during
the War for the Galilee he refused to treat any Arab.
The Chief Rabbi of the Israeli army, General Gad
Navon, at that time contacted Meir Kahane, asking him
to persuade Baruch Goldstein of blessed memory to
treat the Arabs. But Kahane refused, on the ground
that this would be against the Jewish religion."
Suddenly the crowd began yelling: "Death to the
journalists!" I looked around and realized that I was
the only journalist still inside the crowd of
mourners. I clung to Tiran Pollak, begging him "please
protect me." I was scared to death that the crowd
might recognize me as a journalist. But this
was far from being the end of the story. After
Goldstein's coffin was brought to Kiryat Arba under
heavy military guard, a second run of eulogies was
delivered in the hall of the Hesder Yeshiva Nir, i.e.,
in a military institution. Goldstein was eulogized there
by a whole motley of religious settlers, but also by the
above mentioned rabbi Dov Lior. Lior said: "Goldstein
was full of love for fellow human beings. He dedicated
himself to helping others." It should be explained here
that terms like "human being" refer in Jewish Orthodox
Law [Halacha] only to Jewish human beings. When
used in Hebrew by rabbis they must have that meaning.
The same holds true for Yiddish. Although the word
"Mensch" is supposed to mean a man, it is actually used
only in reference to a Jewish man. This linguistic habit
is never mentioned in the United States, least so by
Jewish "liberals" or by The New York Times. But,
continued Lior in his eulogy, "Goldstein couldn't bear
any more the humiliation and shame nowadays inflicted on
us, and this was why he took action, for no other reason
than glorifying the Jews and sanctifying the Holy Name
[of God]." This refers in Orthodox Judaism to Jews
killed for their faith, who refused to renounce it even
to save their own lives.
Yohay Hakak
(Yerushalaim, March 4), tells about another
eulogy for Goldstein delivered by Lior a few days later.
He recalls that Lior "was several years ago excoriated
in the press for recommending that captured Arab
terrorists could be used for the purpose of medical
experimentation on their bodies." Following the outcry
over this recommendation "the attorney general prevented
his otherwise guaranteed election to the Supreme
Rabbinical Council of the State of Israel." The attorney
general refused, however, to "interfere with Lior's
current rabbinical duties." Quite a few other eulogies
were also reported in the press (and even on radio and
TV during the days immediately following the slaughter),
but I am not going to cover them here, except to note
that they were delivered not only in religious
settlements but also in all the religious neighborhoods
of Jewish towns in Israel. The Hebrew press reports of
these eulogies warrant the conclusion that the bigger
and more homogeneous a given religious community was,
the more virulent were the terms used in lauding
Goldstein and in calling for further massacres of the
Arabs.
The approval of Goldstein and his mass
murder could also be heard in secular Israeli milieus,
especially from the youth, but I will confine myself to
covering the adult population. According to Yuval Katz
(Yerushalaim, March 4) it is simply not true that
"with the sole exception of a few psychopaths, the
entire nation, all its politicians included, have been
resolutely condemning Dr. Goldstein: even though,
luckily for us, all major TV networks in the world were
last week still deluded by this untruth." Katz tells us
how a popular TV entertainer, Rafi Reshef, "could this
week announce the findings of some reliable polls. It is
least important that according to one poll about 50
percent of Kiryat Arba inhabitants approve of the
massacre. More important is another poll which showed
that about 50 percent of Israeli Jews are now more
sympathetic toward the settlers than before the
massacre. But the most important was the third poll,
which established that at least 50 percent of Israeli
Jews would approve of the massacre, provided it is
referred to not as such, but as a 'Patriarch's Cave
Operation':" a better-sounding term already in use by
many religious settlers.
Katz reports that the
politicians and academics interviewed by Reshef failed
to grasp the significance of those findings. Attributing
them to some chance occurrence, they refused to comment
on them. He tends to excuse them.
I presume that those busy public figures,
along with everybody else who this week exerted
himself to speak in the name of the entire nation,
simply didn't have time to walk the streets in the
last days. Yet, with the possible exception of the
wealthiest neighborhoods, people could be seen smiling
merrily when talking about the massacre. The stock
popular comment was: "Sure, Goldstein is to be blamed.
He could escape with ease and do the same in four
other mosques, but he didn't."
I can only say
that my subjective impressions and those of my
friends, scattered around Israel, who communicated to
me their anguish in their phone calls, corresponded to
poll findings reported by Reshef. It appears that
people were pretty evenly divided into two categories:
one vociferous in cheering the slaughter, and the
other keeping silence and condemning the massacre only
if encouraged to do so.
Therefore, this was the
right time to finally draw the obvious conclusion that
we, the Jews, are not any more sensitive or merciful
than the Gentiles. Lots of Jews have been programmed
by the same racist computer program shaping the
majority of the world's nations. We have to
acknowledge that our supposed advancement in
progressive beliefs and democracy has failed to affect
the archaic forms of Jewish tribalism. Those who still
delude themselves that Jews might be different than
other nations should now know better. The spree of
bullets from Goldstein's gun was for them an occasion
to learn something. Katz's views may be the
most honest and straightforward among the responses to
the massacre, but they were by no means isolated. Some
responses voiced in the press with all firmness can be
said to articulate those 50 percent of the nation who
were shocked by seeing how the other 50 percent rejoiced
at the massacre of innocents, and by politicians and
"public figures" hiding their heads in the sand like
ostriches. Such people appeared to finally realize that
Jewish Nazism was very much alive and prospering, even
if in the past they would fiercely deny its existence,
rebutting those who, like Yeshayahu Leibovitz or myself,
had used this term. And they began to ponder openly the
implications of their belated
discovery.
Curiously, as far as I could notice,
this discovery didn't originate from any milieu of
Zionist doves, but rather from those who can be said to
have been "moderate hawks" who now concluded that some
Jewish individuals and organizations fully merited to be
labelled likewise. Let me just quote a few sentences
from an article written by a veteran and rather hawkish
journalist, Teddy Preuss (Davar, March
4):
Certainly, compared to the giant-scale
mass murderers of Auschwitz, Goldstein was a quite
petty mass murderer. But the recorded statements of
him and his comrades prove that they were perfectly
willing to exterminate at least two million
Palestinians at an opportune moment. This makes Dr.
Goldstein quite comparable with Dr. Mengele, and the
same holds true for anyone saying that he would
welcome more of such Purim holiday celebrations. [The
massacre occurred on that holiday.] And let us not
devalue Goldstein by comparing him with an Inquisitor
or a Muslim Jihad fighter. Whenever an infidel was
ready to convert to, respectively, Christianity or
Islam, an Inquisitor or a Muslim Jihad fighter would
as a rule spare his life. But Goldstein and his
admirers are not interested in converting the Arabs to
Judaism. As their statements testify, they see the
Arabs as nothing more than disease-spreading rats, or
lepers, or lice, or other loathsome creatures: which
is exactly how the Nazis depicted the Jews. The Nazis
believed that the Aryan race alone had laudable
qualities which were inheritable, but which could get
polluted by sheer contact with the dirty and morbid
Jews. Kahane, who found nothing in the Nuremberg Laws
to learn from, had exactly the same notions about the
Arabs. Undeniably, Preuss is
right.
Needless to say, such views as Preuss's
are liable to spoil the official Israeli propaganda line
that Goldstein had no, or hardly any, supporters. This
is why no Knesset member would utter a squeak against
such lies, nor would some press commentators. Like the
cover-ups of the circumstances of the slaughter, this
cover-up is attributable to the fact that Israel
perceives itself as threatened by the consequences of
the massacre. The Inquiry Committee, appointed after
much resistance, can be expected to turn into another
cover-up attempt. If not, too many officers and other
security system figures would apparently have to be
implicated as Goldstein's accomplices. One can learn
about the existence of rumors to this effect obliquely,
from a Davar editorial of March 8, which comments
with perspicacity on the real aim of the Inquiry
Committee. The editorial flatly says,
The Inquiry Committee, headed by the
Supreme Court President and comprising his four
associates, which begins its public sessions today,
cannot be expected to terminate its proceedings except
by concluding that Baruch Goldstein had no accomplices
in the government or the security system, who either
knew his intentions but passed them in silence, or
even helped to maximize the number of his victims.
Such a conclusion could be pronounced already today,
[i.e., before the hearing had
begun!] The editorial commends the
Supreme Court president, Judge Meir Shamgar, for "legal
skills he displayed already before 1967, when as the
Army's attorney general he was drafting plans of how the
Territories to be conquered should be governed, and then
helped implement those plans after the Six-Day War." The
editorial continues, however, by warning Shamgar
that
under normal circumstances, the Israeli
refusal to accept the legal arguments of foreigners
that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to [the
Occupied] Territories has its utility. But this
utility becomes problematic when the credibility of
Israel in exercising sovereignty in the Territories
and protecting their population also becomes
problematic. This means that the massacre in Hebron
may be exploited as a basis for suing Israel in the
International Court in The Hague. This is why we may
expect that the report of the Inquiry Committee would
be construed so as not to provide ammunition to those
willing to file such a suit. On the other hand,
however, we also expect that the report would be
phrased prudently enough to preclude its easy
refutation by international lawyers. In all
probability, the committee's report will indeed
faithfully conform to Davar's
recommendations.
A political correspondent of
Haaretz, Hanna Kim also wrote (March 4) about "Shamgar's
attitude toward the Palestinians in the Territories,"
opining that it "can be inferred from his past
verdicts." She deserves to be quoted at length.
Advocate Feldman argued [before Shamgar]
that transfers of state-owned land in the Territories
to Jewish settlements were illegal because they
contradicted international law, which lays down that a
conquering state could use such land only either for
bona fide security purposes or for the benefit of
local population. Feldman concluded that a transfer of
land to Jewish settlements constituted a case of
illegal expropriation. Shamgar denied the validity of
Feldman's claim on the ground that "it lacks
topicality" and requested the plaintiffs to refrain
from mingling the Court into politics. In the "Sawir
Aref case" Shamgar was even blunter. Mr. Aref
complained that his land, confiscated on the grounds
of security, was then handed over to a neighboring
Jewish settlement. Shamgar ruled that Aref was not "an
interested party" entitled to file a lawsuit because
once his land had been confiscated, its subsequent
uses were no longer his business. It became a matter
for the politicians.
Shamgar also consistently
displayed his leniency toward the settlers, including
those convicted of crimes against the Palestinians,
but especially toward the soldiers who had fired at
the Palestinians. A good case in point is the
"Antonina case." It concerned a sergeant called
Antonina posted at an Israeli army roadblock in the
Gaza Strip which brought the traffic to a standstill.
An Arab driver at the very end of the line lost
patience and tried to move ahead of other cars, not in
order to break through the roadblock but only in order
to get nearer to it. The sergeant fired and killed
him. He was court-martialed, but acquitted. The army
prosecution then appealed to a District Military
Court, which convicted him of manslaughter. The
sergeant appealed to the Military Court of Appeals
which upheld the conviction. Finally the sergeant
appealed to the Supreme Court. It was Shamgar who
wrote the verdict of Antonina's acquittal. Rebutting
the argument of the army prosecution, Shamgar wrote
that a soldier cannot be responsible for assessing the
scale of danger. If Antonina thought that the driver
was a saboteur, he was entitled to kill him on the
spot. In other words, an Arab driver who refuses to
put up with a traffic jam deserves to be
killed. Quite apart from the Shamgar Inquiry
Committee, however, indirect evidence abounds that
Goldstein was indeed helped for years by accomplices in
the government and the army. Those accomplices had
actively supported him during those years, when
Goldstein had been repeatedly breaching the basic norms
of army discipline. Although the unsupported statements
of the Kahanist Tiran Pollak would not have been
trustworthy, his already quoted claim that as an army
physician Goldstein was consistently and with impunity
refusing to treat Arabs, happens to be corroborated. It
turns out that Goldstein did so both in the conscript
army and the reserves, and that he refused to treat even
the Arabs serving in the Israeli army and even under
orders from superior officers to provide treatment. The
case has been discussed at length by Hebrew papers even
though it has not yet been mentioned by a single
politician. The first to broach the affair was Nahum
Barnea (Yediot Ahronot, February 27), who wrote
that
a senior Israeli army officer in the
[Hebron] area told me about his two encounters with
Baruch Goldstein. The second time he saw him in the
company of Kach goons, abusing the President Ezer
Weizman during the latter's official visit to Kiryat
Arba. But the first time he encountered Goldstein
after an Israeli soldier had wounded a local Arab in
the legs. The Arab was brought to an army clinic for
treatment, but Goldstein refused to treat him. Another
army physician had to be summoned to substitute for
Goldstein. The officer didn't explain why Goldstein
was thereafter not demoted in rank, and allowed to
keep performing his duties in the reserves.
Incidentally, his misconduct also constituted a
violation of the oath he had taken on becoming a
doctor, except that for this the Israeli army cannot
be blamed. Barnea makes it clear that the
leniency toward Goldstein's misdeeds was not just the
army's but that of the entire Israeli establishment, and
that it lasted until the massacre. Only from then on the
"line" changed: to expressions of "shock" coupled with
assertions that Goldstein had acted all alone. Thus,
during the first three hours after the slaughter, Rabin
and his retinue insisted either that Goldstein was "a
psychopath" or else that he had been a good man and a
devoted doctor who once happened to act out of a
momentary derangement. Interpreting the latter version,
Barnea says, with justice, that
within hours a whole edifice of
rationalizations was built, according to which
Goldstein had been operating under unbearable mental
pressures because he had to attend so many wounded and
dead, including Arabs. Thus the Arabs were made guilty
for what he couldn't avoid to do. The implication ran
that the Arabs assaulted him rather than the other way
around, and that he really acted for the benefit of
the Arabs, by letting them finally realize that Jewish
blood could not be shed with impunity. Let
me add two comments to Barnea's factual rendition of the
initial Israeli propaganda line. In the first place,
insofar as I know, the foreign correspondents who duly
repeated the official Israeli version couldn't (or were
not allowed to) grasp its implications as
perspicaciously as Barnea and other Israeli
correspondents did. My second comment is that
simultaneously with public expressions of "shock,"
Israeli dignitaries kept spouting apologetics of
Goldstein at restricted-entry meetings. Yoram Nimrod
(Davar, March 11) reports that "this week,"
(i.e., after March 6, which means at least 10 days after
the massacre) Rabin said at a closed meeting of "senior
officials that 'when Arabs are killing the Jews they
always do it deliberately, inter alia in order to
kill the peace process. Baruch Goldstein, by contrast,
just suffered from a mental derangement.'" Nimrod
belongs to the "left" wing of Mapam, which now is a
Meretz component. His affiliation nevertheless did not
prevent him from cooperating in 1981-82 with Ariel
Sharon in promoting the "Village Leagues." Thus his
faith in the veracity of "Rabin's Knesset speech, which
reiterated the central message of the Zionist movement"
can come as no surprise.
Barnea compares
Goldstein's attitude toward the Gentiles with that of
Rabbi Levinger, whom he interviewed on the day of the
massacre. "Levinger was in a good mood, as his arguments
about how the religious settlers respond to the massacre
had won the day after a three-hour debate at a session
of the 'Kiryat Arba municipality' shortly before. The
secretary of the 'Council of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza
District,' Uri Ariel, proposed to condemn the massacre.
Levinger staked his authority behind the proposal that
the [Israeli] government should be condemned instead,"
for putting Goldstein "under an unbearable mental
pressure," which propelled him to action. (Terms like
"murder," "massacre" or even "killing" have been
carefully avoided in all such pronouncements. The terms
used instead were "deed," "event" or "occurrence.")
Levinger told Barnea, however, that "the resolution does
express in passing the sorrow" about the dead Arabs,
"even if it emphasizes the responsibility of the
government." When Barnea asked Levinger whether he felt
sorry, the latter answered: "I am sorry not only about
dead Arabs but also about dead flies." So far I have not
heard of any rabbi, including those few who after
several days did condemn the murder explicitly,
dissociating himself from Rabbi Levinger's comparison of
Arabs with flies, which vividly resembles Himmler's
"Posen speech" to S.S. officers exterminating the
Jews.
But let me return to Goldstein's refusals
to treat the Gentiles. It turns out that he did it in
principle, starting years before the massacre, but
already in the capacity of an army physician and an
officer. Aryeh Kizel in Yediot Ahronot, and "a
correspondent" in Davar reported on March 1 that
Goldstein, while still a conscript soon after his
immigration to Israel, had been assigned as an artillery
battalion doctor in Lebanon and flatly refused to treat
the Gentiles. According to Kizel, he then declared
straight out: "I am not willing to treat any non-Jew. I
recognize as legitimate only two [religious]
authorities: Maimonides and Kahane." This declaration
was made after a "refusal to treat a wounded Arab" who
had to be referred to another military doctor as a
result. The "Davar correspondent" reports
that
three Druze soldiers who served in
Goldstein's battalion approached their commander,
requesting him to have another doctor in the battalion
because they were afraid that Goldstein would refuse
to treat them in case they were wounded. Their request
was passed on to the Israeli Army's surgeon general,
as a result of which Goldstein was reassigned to
another battalion. But he continued to serve as a
military doctor both in the conscript army and in the
reserves. After some years he was reassigned to the
Regional Hebron Brigade of the Central Command, where
he began to do his reserve stints about two years ago.
Right after receiving this assignment, he told his
commanders that his religious faith would make it
nearly impossible for him to treat wounded or ill
Arabs, and he asked to be reassigned elsewhere. His
request was granted, and he was reassigned to a
reserve unit serving in South Lebanon. Of
course, the likelihood of causing Arabs to die by
criminal negligence was even higher there than in the
Hebron area, except that the Israeli media are denied
access to South Lebanon. He continued, however, to work
as the municipal doctor of Kiryat Arba, treating Arabs
only when he absolutely couldn't avoid it.
A colleague of Goldstein from Kiryat
Arba's clinic recalled that whenever Goldstein would
arrive at a traffic accident and would recognize some
of the injured as Arabs, he would attend to them, but
only until another doctor arrived. Then he would stop
working at once. "This was his personal compromise
between his doctor's oath and his ideology," said the
colleague. Kizel adds that the Israeli army
found Goldstein's conduct as not requiring any
disciplinary measures, whereas a "Maariv
correspondent" (March 8) reports that Goldstein's
military service record was found to be distinguished
enough to select him for a ceremonial promotion from the
rank of captain to that of major by the president of the
state on the coming Independence Day (April
14).
The best story of Goldstein's relations with
the Israeli army and the Israeli political establishment
has been provided by Amir Oren (Davar, March 4).
According to Oren, the mentioned declaration Goldstein
made while serving in Lebanon reached the notice of
Yitzhak Rabin as defense minister and of the then-chief
of staff, General (Reserves) Moshe Levy, who now serves
as one of the five members of the Inquiry Committee. It
was the time after the 1984 elections and the subsequent
formation of the "National Unity" government in which
the Defense portfolio was assigned to Rabin.
When Goldstein's refusal to treat
non-Jewish patients became evident to his commanders,
both the Artillery Corps and the Medical Corps quite
naturally wanted to court-martial him and thus to let
the army get rid of him. They took it for granted that
this could be easily done, because Goldstein had
graduated only from the army's course for medical
officers. This means that Goldstein had no
officer training, which normally is a prerequisite for
admission to the course for medical officers. "The two
Corps also knew that while attending the army's course
for medical officers Goldstein let himself become
notorious as an anti-Arab extremist." According to other
correspondents, some of his fellow trainees then
demanded that he be dismissed from the course, but their
demand was turned down. Oren says that Goldstein "was
already then protected by some highly placed persons in
'senior ministries,' whose identity the Shamgar Inquiry
Committee would be well-advised to check. Those patrons
also requested that Goldstein be allowed to serve in
Kiryat Arba rather than in a combat battalion." Then,
however, the case turned into "a bone of contention
between the commander of the army's Medical Corps and
its chief rabbi," the same who, as noted above, had
conducted negotiations with Meir Kahane.
In the end the issue of what to do with an
officer who openly refuses to obey orders by invoking
Halacha has never been resolved, even if he refused to
provide medical help to Israeli soldiers and POWs. But
can we avoid being stunned by the army's failure to
court-martial Goldstein right off? Why was no order to
court-martial him ever issued by the entire chain of
command? That chain of command then included the
commander of the Northern Command, General (reserves)
Orri Or [now a Labor MK and chairman of the Knesset
Committee for Foreign and Defense Affairs], and
General Amos Yaron, now the commander of the Manpower
Department [in the General Staff]. Why did they all
refuse to decide anything without first humbly
consulting the [chief] rabbi? The already embarrassed
Medical Corps now admits that they were then scared by
"publicity" which might have propelled the religious
parties and religious settlers' lobbies to mess up
things even more. It was that fear of publicity which
time after time prompted the commanders [of the army]
to give in to all kinds of Goldsteins, instead of
denouncing their views and court-martialing
them. Oren's story only proves that the
influence of religious parties in the Israeli army is
very pervasive. The laws of Orthodoxy in the Jewish
religion against the Gentiles, as advocated by Kahane
vociferously and by the religious parties and religious
settlers only a little more diffidently, do have an
impact upon the Israeli army. But one can say even more
than that. Had Rabin and the army commanders mentioned
by Oren felt no affinity whatsoever with Kahane's and
Goldstein's views, they would not have given in to the
religious parties so readily, sacrificing considerations
of military discipline. To say more still, Israeli
policies not only toward the Palestinians but also
toward all Middle East Gentiles would be neither
intelligible nor explainable without the assumption that
they are guided by anti-Gentile prejudice. This
prejudice is shared by nearly all religious Jews, but
both in Israel and in the diaspora it spreads to Jewish
secular milieus as well. Rabin's quoted refusal to
compare Goldstein to Arabs who kill the Jews has in my
view its roots in this obscurantist Jewish tradition.
This is why his support for Goldstein in 1984-85 has had
its sequel in his excuses for the slaughter, thinly
disguised by his hypocritical expressions of
"shock."
In contrast to expressions of shock,
however, the discussions of the respects in which
Goldstein caused injury to Israel could be quite
serious. A case in point was the lament of the
Haaretz Economic Supplement of February 28,
headlined "Goldstein's massacre caused distress on the
[Tel Aviv] stock market." Other papers voiced similar
sentiments. More interesting, however, were the opinions
of Shimon Peres and other senior politicians, speaking
not at a Knesset plenum but in the Committee for Foreign
and Defense Affairs (Haaretz, March 8). There
Peres wasted no time for "shock" over the murdered
Palestinians, but perorated instead about "how harmful
to Israel were the pictures of the corpses which the
entire world could watch." Far from condemning the
"armed religious settlers publicly rejoicing and
shooting," he only deplored "the harm which pictures of
them cause." Here he didn't mean the harm to Israel
alone. "The events in Hebron also adversely affected the
interests of President Mubarak and King Hussein, and
even more of the PLO and its leadership." Then Peres
went on to say that "we have had Jewish kibbutzim
located in the midst of Arab-inhabited areas for 80
years, and I cannot recall a single instance of such a
slaughter, nor of firing at Arab buses nor of maiming
Arab mayors."
At this point senior Likud
politicians rushed to interpellate Peres. I will quote
their interpellations almost verbatim.
The first to interrupt Peres's speech was
Sharon. "Kibbutzim are dear to me no less than to you,
but there have been plenty of instances when somebody
from a kibbutz would go out to murder Arabs." Answered
Peres: "The two cases are not comparable, because in
the case under discussion the murderer was supported
by a whole group of followers." Benny Begin: "Why are
you always talking in generalities?" Peres: "I am not.
I only maintain that in order to pursue the peace
process we need the PLO as a partner, and now this
partnership is in straits. Therefore we need to help
the PLO." Sharon: "Then you mean that we should help
that murderer." Peres (angrily banging at the table):
"And what about the Egyptians with whom you people
made a peace? Didn't the Egyptians murder any Jews?
Really, what's the difference between war and
terrorism? Does it make any difference how were the
16,000 of our soldiers killed? Everywhere states are
making deals with terror organizations!" Netanyahu:
"There exists no state which has made a deal with an
organization still committed to its destruction. The
PLO has not rescinded the Palestinian Covenant. You
are dwelling upon the crime committed in Hebron not in
order to reassure people living there, but in order to
advance your plan to establish a Palestinian state."
Peres: "It is you and your plans which will lead to
the formation of a Palestinian state, because it is
you, the Likud, who created the PLO in Madrid. It is
you who conceived the autonomy in the first place,
contrary to all our [previously pursued] aims."
Netanyahu: "Autonomy is not the same thing as a
state." Peres: "But it is Sharon who is the first to
say that autonomy is bound to lead to a Palestinian
state.. . . I am not less steadfast than you are, and
this is why I have elaborated the most restrictive of
possible interpretations of autonomy, in relation to
its territory, its powers and its authorities. This is
why we are against the international observers and
consent only to temporary presence of representatives
from the countries contributing money. And as to the
Palestinian Covenant, they have renounced it publicly,
except that they find it difficult to convene their
representative bodies to ratify this renunciation."
Begin: "Let me remind you that the PLO has not
undertaken publicly to rescind the Palestinian
Covenant." Peres (angrily): "I don't give a damn for
you and your legalistic verbiage! Arafat said that he
renounced the Palestinian Covenant and for me Arafat
is the PLO." Those who still expect the
Rabin-Peres government to change its policies under the
impact of the massacre would be well-advised to acquaint
themselves with this exchange. |
| | |
