[WCUSP] "Defending Israel From Democracy" by Jonathan Cook
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Wed Jun 6 08:49:56 CDT 2007
The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara
Defending Israel from Democracy
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing
the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The
"demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth
rates,
will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule
over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused
through
the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth
anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's
security establishment is quitely satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never
sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing
itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose
legitimacy,
even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the
analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that
cement
its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish
state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create
an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all
Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be
excluded.
That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of
the
wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what
little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves
in
Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million
Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable
to
protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of
Israel's Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy
of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing
campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do
with
them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether
they
should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they
should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured
by the country's first
prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and
how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more
than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the
fortress
-- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as
ruthless
as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion I charted the preparations for this
crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would
force up
to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory)
into
the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will
annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit.
The
Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so
that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers
in
the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the
remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic
state
(that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your
rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public.
Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support
"transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of
legality added to
the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle
has
been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's
gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at
Haifa
University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing
number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine
the
right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew In
another
few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should
continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this "threat"
have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in
2002
by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of
Israel's
10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years,
nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several
occasions,
and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched
25
investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.
All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the
Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority in
the
world".
But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset
members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials offended by
the
presence of legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism
and
privileges for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.
The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian
legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist
parties, as was
the case for many decades, but as representatives of independent
Palestinian
parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some
concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)
The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform: the
demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political parties
have
been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state
of
all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.
The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator Azmi
Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running rings
around
Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade, as well as
exposing to
outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic"
state.
Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly convincing
case
to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than
challenging the hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a
time, they should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the
Jewish state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they
will
never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.
Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill
struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's
creation
living under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and
memories were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over
its
educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting
Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the Shin
Bet,
through a network of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.
Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll
conducted
by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said
they would support the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a
Jewish
and democratic state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly,
however, what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a
third of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to
more than
half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per
cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be
prominently featured in such a constitution.
These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's political
work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most
of
whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of
participating in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is
impossible
for a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing
to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity,
intentionally does not mention equality anywhere in its text.
It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late April
should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced
that
he would face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations
-- renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been in
operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty.
Bishara
so far has chosen not to return.
Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges
against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services have
been trying
to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a gagging order. The first
accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that
Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in
the
north during the war against Lebanon last summer.
The Shin Bet claim this after months of listening in on his phone
conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that allows
the security
services to bug legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they
are being subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General
Mechahem Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on
whether
the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.
Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An
editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's case to
that of
the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up
charges
that she translated a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army
in
the Jenin refugee camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia
Zbeidi,
even though it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.
The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason against
Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone
conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly
also of
his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very
doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he
could
sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified
with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek
and
find an excuse for bringing him to trial."
Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the charge
of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct
"psychological warfare through the media".
The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target
audience. The Shin Bet claim that Bishara laundered money from terrorist
organisations. The implication, though the specifics are unclear, is that
Bishara both
helped fund terror and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly
hundreds of thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is
supposed to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian
citizens.
It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive
searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on
testimony from
a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.
This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only
other
Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of
the
Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was
arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the
armed
wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.
As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for
many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against
him.
Salah spent more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting
the
Shin Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret
evidence was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing
stages, as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the
prosecution announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but
understandably after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial
impropriety
in return for his release.
To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation had
funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the occupied
territories and had submitted its accounts to the security services for
approval.
In a recent interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his
party
had discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows and
students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".
Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly before
his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the
outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning
the
security establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's
interference in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.
Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds for
welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very moment Israel
was
trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's
main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying
Palestinians
inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City
of
Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian state.
Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel to
protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its checkpoints
were
preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from reaching them. Salah
also
suspected that Israel was using the exclusion of Palestinians under
occupation from East Jerusalem to assert its own claims to sovereignty over
the site,
known to Jews as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his
inflammatory visit backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada;
and it was
control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud
Barak,
that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's advisers
later
noted.
Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in
East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised.
The
trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when he might have been
able
to make a difference.
That now is the fate of Bishara.
Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for
Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at
least
the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared
for a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed:
"Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and
he has
crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for
election] has been submitted to the Attorney General." Who expressed that
view? None
other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor
party
and hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.
In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges
later fizzled out); he has been called in for police interrogations on a
regular basis; he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the
laws
concerning Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed
specifically to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.
True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National
Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections
Committee
during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the
Shin
Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the Knesset has
increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of this can also be
found
in the ideological progress from the margins of Arab society (such as a
limited circle of intellectuals who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to
center
stage. Today these ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a
discernible effect on the content of political discourse and on the public
'agenda' of the Arab sector."
But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's
disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the
Supreme Court's
justices.
The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March this
year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting between the
Prime
Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue
of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing
identification with the State and the rise of subversive elements".
Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is
the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of
Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four different visionary documents
sharing the perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a
Jewish
state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites might
determine a direction that will win over the masses."
In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of
Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found in
the four
recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent
groups:
the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by
the Mossawa political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the
traditionally
conservative political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High
Follow-Up Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of
academics
known as Mada.
What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first, that
existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two
states
and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue
living
inside Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if
the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its
Declaration of Independence.
Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not the
view of the Shin Bet.
Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper
wrote
to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not
constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and
its
leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The
secret police had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive
threats",
it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required
to
thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the
State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means
of
democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of 'defensive
democracy'.
Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became public,
the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he
meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the
state's
basic principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish
character". He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges
the Shin
Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage,
subversion".
In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state
is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use
Israel's
supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a
Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.
The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the other
Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community inside
Israel
should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a
former
deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member,
described
Israel's struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of
Independence" -- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80
per
cent of its Palestinians.
The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it is
operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the state's
more
accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a
covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz, the country's most
senior
legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The letter of the Shin Bet director was written
in
coordination with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the
stance
detailed in it is acceptable to the attorney general."
So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been
claiming,
a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No
one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is
the author of the forthcoming "_Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish
and Democratic State_
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga) "
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States
from the University of Michigan Press. His website is _www.jkcook.net_
(http://www.jkcook.net/)
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