Changes

An epochal event took place in Israel in January and February: hundreds of reservists refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks are not simply 'pacifists': in their public proclamations, they are at pains to emphasise that they have done their duty in fighting for Israel in the wars against the Arab states, in which some of them were highly decorated. What they claim is that they cannot accept to fight 'in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people'. Their claims are documented by detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Israel Defence Forces, from the killing of children to the destruction of Palestinian property. Here is how an IDF sergeant, Gil Nemesh, reports on the 'nightmare reality in the territories' at the protesters' website (www.seruv.org.il):

Palestinians, and even Israeli Arabs (officially full citizens of Israel), are discriminated against in the allocation of water, in the ownership of land and countless other aspects of daily life. More important is the systematic micro-politics of psychological humiliation: Palestinians are treated, essentially, as evil children who have to be brought back to an honest life by stern discipline and punishment. Arafat, holed up and isolated in three rooms in his Ramallah compound, was requested to stop the terror as if he had full power over all Palestinians. There is a pragmatic paradox in the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian Authority (attacking it militarily, while at the same time requiring it to crack down on the terrorists in its own midst) by which the explicit message (the injunction to stop the terror) is subverted by the very mode of delivery of that message. Would it not be more honest to say that what is untenable about the Palestinian situation is that the PA is being asked by the Israelis to 'resist us, so that we can crush you'? In other words, what if the true aim of the present Israeli intrusion into Palestinian territory is not to prevent future terrorist attacks, but effectively to rule out any peaceful solution for the foreseeable " future?