After Arafat, Israel's Civil War? and 100,000 Iraqis Killed

[JPN Commentary: The prominent Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery issues a warning in the article below against what he sees as a coming civil war in Israel.

Whether the actual violence Avnery anticipates materializes or not, the power of the settler movement that Avnery describes needs to be addressed. Some 20 years ago, there were similar fears when Israel was dismantling its settlements in the Sinai and returning that territory to Egypt. In the 1990s, growing tensions between religious and secular Jews in Israel also raised these concerns, although the outbreak of the intifada put those on the back burner.

The ideology of religious Zionism has many adherents in Israel, in the Israeli armed forces and, of course, in the settlements. Avnery estimates the support of this extremist ideology at about 500,000 people. This makes it a small minority in Israel, but one that holds as much power over Israeli policy as any other group. This condition, as much as any other, prevents Israel from making any moves toward progress with the Palestinians.

In the long run, a confrontation between the Israeli mainstream and the settler movement has to happen, although one must hope that this confrontation is political rather than violent. But if Israel, and indeed the Jewish people, are to have a future that is relatively free of conflict, the ideology of religious Zionism and its goal of a theocratic state based on Halakha needs to be confronted once and for all. – MP]

On the Road to Civil War

For over a quarter of a century Israeli society has allowed a cancer to grow unchecked. Only now has it begun to wake up to the danger, but it may be already too late. by Uri Avnery

http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=11369

Everybody in Israel is talking about the Next War. The most popular TV channel is running a whole series about it. Not another war with the Arabs. Not the nuclear threat from Iran. Not the ongoing bloody confrontation with the Palestinians. The talk is about the coming civil war.

Only a few months ago, that would have sounded preposterous. Now, suddenly, is has become a possibility, and a very real one. Not another blown-up media sensation. Not yet another of Sharon's political manipulations. Not just a new blackmail attempt by the settlers, but the real thing, in the flesh.

They talk about it at cabinet meetings and in the Knesset, on TV talk-shows, in editorials and the news pages. The Chief-of-Staff has publicly warned that the army may fall apart. One of the ministers says that the very existence of the State of Israel is in danger. Another minister prophesies a bloodbath like the Spanish civil war.

Quietly and not so quietly, the Shin Bet is taking precautions. The prison service has been ordered to prepare facilities for mass detentions. The army leadership is planning the call-up of 10 thousand reserve soldiers and starting to think about the steps they must take in the case of...

No, it's a very real threat. On the face of it, it may seem to have appeared from nowhere. But whoever has eyes to see knew that it is going to happen, sooner or later.

The seeds of the civil war were sown when the first settlement was put up in the occupied territories. At the time, I told the Prime Minister in the Knesset: "You are laying a land mine. Some day you will have to dismantle it. As a former soldier, let me warn you that the dismantling of land mines is a very unpleasant job." Since then, hundreds of mines have been laid. The minefields are being extended even now.

The process has been led by religious fundamentalists. Their declared aim, as they said then and never tire of repeating, is to drive all the Arabs out of the country that God promised us. And the land God promised us, as one of them reminded us on TV the other day, is not the "Palestine" of the British mandate, but the Promised Land - including Jordan, Lebanon and parts of Syria and Sinai. Quoting the Bible, another one declared that we have come to this country not only to inherit, but also to disinherit the others, to drive them out and take their place.

Since the then Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres, implanted the first settlement, Kedumim, in the middle of the Palestinian population on the West Bank, the settlements have spread like locusts. Every settlement has gradually stolen the lands and water of the neighboring Palestinian villages, uprooted their trees, blocked their roads and built new roads, barred to Palestinians. Almost all the settlements have spawned satellite outposts on the nearby hills.

This has never ceased, even after Sharon solemnly promised President Bush to dismantle the "outposts". On the contrary, since then dozens of new one have sprung up, and not one has been dismantled. A recently published finding by the State Comptroller details how several government ministries actively and knowingly subverted the law in order to ensure continued clandestine government funding for settlement activities.

When we warned of the danger, we were told to relax. Only a small minority of the settlers, we were comforted, are fanatical kooks. These are indeed crazy and will forcibly resist any attempt to remove them. But that will not be a big problem, because the vast majority of Israeli citizens detest them and consider them nuttier than fruitcakes.

Most of the settlers, we were told, are not fanatics. They went there because the government presented them with expensive villas, which they could not even dream about in Israel proper. They were looking for "quality of life". When the government tells them to move, they will take the compensation and move on.

This was a dangerous delusion. As Karl Marx observed, people's consciousness is determined by their situation. The good Laborites who were implanted by the Labor government on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip now talk and behave like the worst followers of the late fascist rabbi Meir Kahane.

Moreover, we were told, even the weirdos recognize Israeli democracy. Nobody will raise his hands against soldiers of the Israeli army. When the government and the Knesset decide to evacuate settlements, they will obey. They may raise a ruckus and put up a show of resistance, as they did during the evacuation of the North Sinai settlements in 1982, but at the end of the day they will give in. After all, even in North Sinai not one single settler refused, in the end, to accept their compensation.

But this disdain for the settlers is no less dangerous than the disdain for the Arabs. What had been hidden all the time is now becoming clear: the settlers don't give a damn for democracy and the institutions of the state. Their hard core spells it out: when the resolutions of the Knesset contradict the Halakha (Jewish religious law), the Halakha has priority. After all, the Knesset is just a gang of corrupt politicians. And what value have the secular laws, copied from the Goyim (Gentiles), compared to the word of God, blessed be his name?

Many settlers do not yet say so openly and pretend to be insulted when such attitudes are attributed to them, but in fact they are dragged along by the hard core that has already thrown off all the masks. They challenge not only the policy of the government, but Israeli democracy as such. They declare openly that their aim is to transform Israel from a democratic republic into a Halakhic one.

A State of Law is subject to the will of the majority, which enacts the laws and amends them as necessary. The State of the Halakha is subject to the Torah, revealed once and for all on Mount Sinai and unchangeable. Only a very small number of eminent rabbis have the authority to interpret the Halakha. That is, of course, the opposite of democracy. In any other country, these people would be called fascists. The religious coloration makes no difference.

The religious-rightist rebels are powerfully motivated. Many of them believe in most xenophobic interpretations of the Kabbala, which state that secular Jews are really Amalekites who succeeded in infiltrating the People of Israel at the time of the exodus from Egypt. God Himself has commanded, as everyone knows, the eradication of Amalek from the face of the earth. Can there be a more perfect ideological basis for civil war?

Why has this become a threat at this point in time? It is not yet clear whether Sharon really intends to dismantle the few settlements in the Gaza Strip. But as the settlers see it, even the idea of removing one single settlement is a casus belli. It attacks everything that is holy to them. Sharon tried to convince them that it is only a ploy – to sacrifice a few small settlements in order to save all the others. In vain.

In preparation for the Great Rebellion, the settlers have unveiled their potential. The most eminent rabbis of the "Religious Zionist movement" have declared that the evacuation of a settlement is a sin against God and have called upon the soldiers to refuse orders. Hundreds of rabbis, including the rabbis of the settlements and the rabbis of the religious units in the army have joined the call.

The voice of the few opponents is being drowned out. They quote the Talmudic saying "the law of the kingdom is law", meaning that every government has to be obeyed, much as Christians are required to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, etc. But who listens to these "moderate rabbis" now?

The conquest of the army from the inside began long ago. The "arrangement" with the "yeshivot hesder", that serve in the army as separate units, has allowed the entry of a stable of Trojan horses into the IDF, including its officer corps. In any confrontation between their rabbis and their army commanders, the majority of the soldiers of the yeshivas will obey the rabbis.

The fact that the settlers and the Hesder Yeshiva have systematically penetrated the ranks of the officers' corps means that they can attempt barratry, potentially even more dangerous than mutiny.

The right-wing refusal to obey orders is unlike the left-wing conscientious objection. The leftist refusal is a personal stand, the rightist refusal a collective mutiny. On the left, a few hundred refused to serve the occupation, on the right, many thousands, even tens of thousands, will obey their rabbis' orders to refuse. As the Chief-of-Staff has warned, the army may disintegrate.

Altogether, the settlers, together with their close allies in Israel including the yeshiva students, may amount to something like half a million people, a mighty phalanx for rebellion.

As of now, the settlers are only using this threat as an instrument for blackmail and deterrence, in order to choke off any thought of evacuating settlements and territories. But if the blackmail does not do the job, the Great Rebellion is just a matter of time.

[JPN Commentary: The war on Iraq has caused the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a study conducted by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has concluded.

Most of those killed have been women and children, and it should be noted that researchers have called this a "conservative estimate". This count is confined to violent deaths, mostly due to the great many air strikes on civilian targets that have been a constant and brutal feature of the American war on Iraq.

The report is sure to be challenged, as most estimates of civilian deaths to date have put the number somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000. These numbers would be appalling enough, but these numbers, gathered mostly from mainstream media with no official tracking and no scientific study, have appeared very low to many observers for some time. Further, this continues to leave out deaths due to illness and lack of services that are the natural outgrowth of intense military operations.

Israel has killed some 2,950 Palestinians in four years of the intifada. Many of us have rightly raged at this appalling total. The population of Iraq is some 7 times that of the occupied territories, so the rate of death in Iraq at American hands completely dwarfs what we have seen by Israel. In just one and one half years, America has shown it is far more capable of mass murder than Israel. With both presidential candidates indicating tat they will only escalate the violence, we are already looking at death on a grotesque and horrifying scale that will only get worse, until we Americans put a stop to it. – MP]

Study Puts Iraqi Deaths of Civilians at 100,000

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, International Herald Tribune

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/europe/29casualties.html

PARIS, Oct. 28 - An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion, according to a new study by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Coming just five days before the presidential election the finding is certain to generate intense controversy, since it is far higher than previous mortality estimates for the Iraq conflict.

Editors of The Lancet, the London-based medical publication, where an article describing the study is scheduled to appear, decided not to wait for the normal publication date next week, but to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the election.

The Bush administration has not estimated civilian casualties from the conflict, and independent groups have put the number at most in the tens of thousands.

In the study, teams of researchers led by Dr. Les Roberts fanned out across Iraq in mid-September to interview nearly 1,000 families in 33 locations. Families were interviewed about births and deaths in the household before and after the invasion.

Although the authors acknowledge that data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect is extensive. Using what they described as the best sampling methods that could be applied under the circumstances, they found that Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it.

Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes.

"We were shocked at the magnitude but we're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate," said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins team. Dr. Burnham said the team excluded data about deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, because that city was the site of unusually intense violence.

In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in their families since the conflict started. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by American-led forces, mostly airstrikes, and most of those killed were women and children. The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers reported.

The team included researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies and included doctors from Al Mustansiriya University Medical School in Baghdad.

There is bound to be skepticism about the estimate of 100,000 excess deaths, since that translates into an average of 166 deaths a day since the invasion. But some people were not surprised. "I am emotionally shocked but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed," said Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, who works on the www.iraqbodycount.net project.

That project, which collates only deaths reported in the news media, currently put the maximum civilian death toll at just under 17,000. "We've always maintained that the actual count must be much higher," Mr. Lipscomb said.

The researchers said they were highly technical in their selection of interview sites and data analysis, although interview locations were limited by the decision to cut down on driving time when possible in order to reduce the risk to the interviewers. Each team included an Iraqi health worker, generally a physician.

Although the teams relied primarily on interviews with local residents, they also requested to see at least two death certificates at the end of interviews in each area, to try to ensure that people had remembered and responded honestly. The research team decided that asking for death certificates in each case, during the interviews, might cause hostility and could put the research team in danger.

Some of those killed may have been insurgents, not civilians, the authors noted. Also, the rise in deaths included a rise in murders and some deaths were caused by the decline of medical care. "But the majority of excess mortality is clearly due to violence," Dr. Burnham said.

The study is scientific, reserving judgment on the politics of the Iraq conflict. But Dr. Roberts and his colleagues are critical of the Bush administration and the Army for not releasing estimates of civilian deaths.

"This study shows that with moderate funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained," the authors wrote.