After massive destruction by Israel
U.S. maneuvers to cover up Jenin massacre
By Sara Flounders
Flounders, a co-director of the International Action
Center, was part of a delegation organized by the International
ANSWER coalition that visited Gaza, Bethlehem, East Jerusalem,
Ramallah and Jenin in occupied Palestine from May 17-24. She is
currently helping organize an inquiry into U.S.-backed Israeli
occupation crimes.
President George W. Bush has been busy, meeting with
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on June 8 and Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon on June 10. A whole new round of phony
diplomacy is underway. At the same time, Israeli troops, tanks
and helicopter gunships are again occupying Ramallah,
Bethlehem, Jenin and every Palestinian city on the West
Bank.
Anyone calling on Washington to broker a deal or help
negotiate a cease-fire or an agreement should first consider
the fate of a simple, U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution
on Jenin.
Just two months ago the U.S. wrote and proposed a resolution
in the Security Council calling for a "fact-finding" report on
the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian refugee camp named
Jenin. It passed unanimously on April 19.
It was the mildest possible wording, introduced to obstruct
a much stronger resolution put forward by the Arab members of
the Security Council.
The tougher resolution called for sending a multinational
force to defend the Palestinians from the Israeli onslaught in
the occupied West Bank. And it proposed organizing an inquiry
into Israeli occupation crimes.
Pressure on the UN to act was especially strong because
Israeli forces were shelling refugee camps that the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency had administered for 54 years.
UNRWA, a UN agency, was issuing almost daily press releases
describing the horror in the refugee camps as its schools and
health clinics were destroyed and its ambulances and food
trucks were fired on and turned away from West Bank camps. Even
members of its staff were rounded up.
By April 7, UNRWA Commissioner General Peter Hansen said the
Israeli Defense Forces had made the Jenin and Balata refugee
camps a "hellish battleground ... we are getting reports of
pure horror-helicopters are strafing civilian residential
areas, systematic shelling by tanks has wounded hundreds,
bulldozers are razing refugee homes ... food and medicine are
running out, ambulances don't have passage ... a humanitarian
disaster is in the making."
By April 10, UNRWA described "catastrophic conditions" in
Jenin. Its April 16 report to the UN used the term "monumental
destruction."
It is important to recall that the most damning reports came
not only from Palestinians but from the UN's own agencies.
And, by Israel's own admission, thousands of Palestinian men
had been rounded up.
Major media coverage about the overwhelming destruction and
scale of the onslaught in the West Bank described reports of an
Israeli massacre in Jenin.
An international outcry rose up against the brutal invasion,
targeting of civilians and calculated destruction of the entire
infrastructure. In April, millions of angry people in militant
demonstrations worldwide denounced Israel and, increasingly,
the U.S. role in financing and equipping the settler military
machine.
Even watered-down resolution dies
The U.S. government financially, militarily, politically and
diplomatically supports Israel and its continuing attacks on
the Palestinian people. That's because Israel is considered the
best defense of U.S. corporate interests in the region.
But Washington did not want to be in the position of
publicly vetoing an Arab resolution in the UN Security Council
at a time of international outrage.
On April 4, the U.S. had pushed through UN Security Council
Resolution #1403, "welcoming the mission of the U.S. Secretary
of State to the region as well as efforts by others ... to
bring about a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the
Middle East." Washington had claimed it was brokering a deal to
end the Israeli siege.
So a backroom deal was made to avoid a U.S. veto and yet
ensure that no significant action was taken. The stronger
Security Council resolution of the Arab Group was withdrawn and
the U.S. crafted the watered-down resolution that would pass
with unanimous support.
The U.S.-authored resolution shifted attention away from the
real issues. It did not deal with the Israeli onslaught. Nor
did it take up the crime of illegal Israeli occupation. The
resolution didn't even suggest an inquiry into the destruction
of the 3,000-year-old "Old City" in the center of Nablus. It
made no mention of the siege against Ramallah, Bethlehem,
Qalqilya, Tulkarm or Hebron. It only dealt with the much
smaller issue of what Israeli forces did in Jenin refugee
camp.
The mild U.S. resolution "emphasized the urgency of access
of medical and humanitarian organizations to the Palestinian
population." The only action it called for was to "welcome the
initiative of the Secretary General to develop accurate
information regarding recent events in the Jenin refugee camp
through a fact-finding team and requests him to keep the
Security Council informed."
Israeli leaders claimed they welcomed the U.S.-worded
resolution because their hands were clean and they had only
acted in self-defense.
But immediately after its passage, the Israelis began a
series of demands: change the composition of the delegation,
add military personnel, not allow interrogation of Israeli
troops. Finally they decreed that the report could reach no
conclusions or call for any specific action.
To each new demand, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
acquiesced. Yet Israel still denied the UN team entry into the
refugee camp. Israel could not have taken any of these actions
without the full support of Washington.
Finally, on May 3, at U.S. urging, Annan officially
disbanded the "fact-finding" team.
Tunisian representative to the UN Noureddine Mejdoub stated
in a special Security Council session, "Let us imagine that an
Arab state had committed an act many times less grave than
those perpetrated by Israel. Immediately a coalition force
would have been formed, the rule of law would have been
invoked, the binding nature of council resolutions would have
been reaffirmed and sanctions would have been imposed."
The Bush administration, which scripted and then dropped its
mild resolution after just two weeks, is nevertheless still
demanding full enforcement of sanctions resolutions imposed on
Iraq--12 years after Iraqi troops left Kuwait.
Buckets of whitewash
But even after the UN dropped any implementation of its
resolution, the U.S. was faced with a political problem.
It was beyond dispute that the Palestinian refugees in the
densely populated cinder-block housing in the center of Jenin
had been attacked with tanks and missiles and their homes then
bulldozed into rubble. And there was still the stench of the
charge that Israeli troops had committed massacres in Jenin and
in other camps.
This is where another arm of U.S. policy comes in.
On the very same day that the UN secretary general moved to
disband the fact-finding team, all the corporate media were
conveniently running banner headlines claiming no massacre had
taken place in Jenin. They gave as the authority for this the
organization Human Rights Watch.
This let the Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S.--as author
of the resolution and primary support of Israell--off the
hook.
In fact, the Human Rights Watch report identifies 52
Palestinians killed during the Israeli operation and devotes 42
pages to describing a whole series of "possible" war crimes and
violations of international law that the Israeli forces
committed. But all this is buried in its report.
The story that CNN, BBC, AP and all the other big-business
media reported globally in headlines was that Human Rights
Watch confirmed "No Jenin massacre." As CNN reported on May 3,
"Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Israeli troops
massacred Palestinian civilians in Jenin ... said Peter
Bouckaert, senior researcher for the group and a member of the
investigative team."
Who is Human Rights Watch and how were they able to gain
access to Jenin for an inquiry at the very time that Israel was
denying entry to a delegation chosen by the UN Security
Council?
Human Rights Watch, founded by multi-billionaire George
Soros, was created to monitor "human rights abuses" worldwide.
In reality, it is an institution that has acted at every turn
to reinforce the policies of the United States and justify its
"humanitarian interventions." Its board includes
multi-millionaires and former U.S. government officials.
Human Rights Watch claims its reports are objective,
balanced and evenhanded. When it comes to Palestine this has
meant equating the violence of the Israeli occupation with the
resistance of Palestinians to overwhelming military force.
Once Human Rights Watch declared that "no massacre" had
occurred in Jenin, the demand for an inquiry and international
action against Israeli crimes virtually disappeared.
Massacre at Jenin
The use of the term "massacre" is not an argument over
semantics. The decision to reject the apparent evidence of a
massacre at Jenin is a political decision to immunize Ariel
Sharon, the Israeli government and its U.S. backer from
responsibility for this unconscionable and indiscriminate
military attack against Palestinian civilians.
The dictionary definition of massacre is "killing with
indiscriminate violence, killing a number of people where much
resistance can not be made and reckless murders."
During this 18-month Intifada, or uprising, IDF forces have
killed more than 1,500 Palestinians. It is beyond dispute that
Israel, using overwhelming force against an unarmed population
resisting occupation, has committed many hundreds of "reckless
and indiscriminate murders where much resistance can not be
made"--many massacres.
That is the truth that Human Rights Watch, Israel and the
U.S. government were so anxious to dispel.
It is hard to find another example where even the use of the
term massacre has been so disputed.
Some of the best-known massacres in history involved similar
numbers of people killed, or even fewer, than the number that
Human Rights Watch attributed to Jenin.
In the 1770 Boston Massacre, British troops shot into a
crowd of protesters, killing five.
In the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, the National Guard
killed 20 coal miners and family members during a United Mine
Workers strike.
In the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, apartheid troops in South
Africa fired into a crowd of Black demonstrators, killing 69.
The demonstrators were protesting pass laws that restricted the
movement of Africans, not unlike the restrictions now imposed
by Israel on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
In 1953, Ariel Sharon carried out the "Qibya Massacre." That
Israeli military operation killed 67 people, mainly women and
children.
There has been no dispute among historians that these
indiscriminate killings were massacres.
Ariel Sharon, who directed the Jenin massacre, is also
guilty of far larger massacres. Even a commission set up by the
Israeli government found him guilty of orchestrating the 1982
massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern
Lebanon, in which up to 2,000 civilians were killed.
The abandoned UN resolution--and hundreds more passed on
Palestine and then ignored--along with the Human Rights Watch
whitewash confirm the importance of an independent peoples'
inquiry into the crimes of the U.S.-backed Israeli
occupation.
The most important lesson is that the world movement
standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people can't rely
on Washington or the United Nations or any other political
institution that has a stake in defending U.S. corporate rule
in the Middle East.
In the months ahead it is important to record and document
the crimes of the U.S.-financed and supported Israeli
occupation. But it is essential to make this a political
struggle so that the full impact of the occupation and the U.S.
role is understood.
Reprinted from the June 20, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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