Rules of war for one side only

Uri Avnery

"For all I care, they can starve to death!", announced Tzahi 
Hanegbi, after Palestinian prisoners declared an open-ended 
hunger strike against prison conditions. Thus the Minister for 
Internal Security added another memorable phrase to the lexicon 
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hanegbi became famous (or infamous) for the first time when, as a 
student activist, he was caught on camera with his friends 
hunting Arab students with bicycle chains. At the time I 
published a photo of him that would not have shamed German or 
Polish students in the 1930s. With a small difference: in the 30s 
the Jews were the pursued, now they were the pursuers.

In the meantime, Hanegbi has changed like many young radicals — 
he has turned into an unrestrained careerist. He has become a 
minister, wearing elegant suits even on hot summer days and 
walking with the typical, self-important gait of a cabinet 
minister. Now he even supports Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, 
much to the distress of his mother, Geula Cohen, an extreme-right 
militant who has not changed her spots.

But beneath the minister's suit and the statesman's robe, Tzahi 
has remained Tzahi, as evidenced by the total inhumanity of his 
statement about the prisoners for whose well-being he is 
officially responsible. His influence is not limited to words: 
the current prison crisis was caused by his appointment of a new 
Director of Prisons, who immediately proceeded to create 
intolerable conditions for the Palestinian prisoners.

Let's not dwell too much on the personality of the honourable 
minister. It is much more important to turn our thoughts to the 
hunger strike itself.

Its basic cause is a particularly Israeli invention: the one-
sided war.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) generals declare again and again 
that we are at war. The state of war permits them to commit acts 
like "targeted eliminations", which, in any other situation, 
would be called murder. But in a war, one kills the enemy without 
court proceedings. And in general, the killing and wounding of 
people, demolition of homes, uprooting of plantations and all the 
other acts of the occupiers that have become daily occurrences 
are being justified by the state of war.

But this is a very special war, because it confers rights only on 
the fighters of one side. On the other side, there is no war, no 
fighters, and no rights of fighters, but only criminals, 
terrorists, murderers.

Why?

Once there was a clear distinction: one was a soldier if one wore 
a uniform; if one did not wear a uniform, one was a criminal. 
Soldiers of an invading army were allowed to execute local 
inhabitants who fired at them on the spot. But in the middle of 
the 20th century, things changed. A worldwide consensus accepted 
that the members of the French resistance and the Russian and 
Yugoslav partisans and their like were fighters and therefore 
entitled to the international protection accorded to legitimate 
fighters. International conventions and the rules of war were 
amended accordingly.

So what is the difference between soldiers and terrorists? Well, 
the occupiers say, there is a tremendous difference: Soldiers 
fight soldiers, terrorists hurt innocent civilians.

Really? The pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and 
killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians — was he a 
soldier or just a criminal, a terrorist? And what were the pilots 
who destroyed whole cities, like Hamburg and Dresden, when there 
was no valid military necessity anymore? The declared aim was to 
break the will of the German civilian population and compel them 
to capitulate. Were the commanders of the British and American 
air forces terrorists (as the Nazis indeed called them, inventing 
the term "Terrorflieger")?

What is the difference between an American pilot who drops a bomb 
on a Baghdad market and the Iraqi terrorist, who lays a bomb in 
the same market? The fact that the pilot has a uniform? Or that 
he drops his bomb from a distance and does not see the children 
he is killing?

I am not saying this, of course, to justify the killing of 
civilians. Indeed, I strongly condemn it, whoever the 
perpetrators may be — soldiers, guerrillas, pilots above or 
terrorists below. One law for all.

Soldiers who are captured become prisoners-of-war, entitled to 
many rights guaranteed by international conventions. A particular 
international organisation — the Red Cross — oversees this. 
P0Ws are not held for punishment or revenge, but solely in order 
to prevent them from returning to the battlefield. They are 
released when peace comes.

Underground fighters captured by their enemies are often tried as 
criminals. Not only are they not entitled to the rights of POWs, 
but in Israel their prison conditions are even worse than the 
inhuman conditions inflicted on Israeli criminals. The Americans 
have learned from us, and President George W Bush has been 
sending Afghan fighters to an infamous prison set up for them in 
Guantanamo, where they are deprived of all human rights, both the 
rights of POWs and the rights of ordinary criminal prisoners.

Years ago, when the Hebrew underground organisations were 
fighting the British regime in Palestine, we demanded that our 
prisoners be accorded the rights of POWs. The British did not 
accept this, but in practice prisoners were generally treated as 
if they were POWs. The captured underground fighters could enrol 
for correspondence courses, and in fact, many of them completed 
their studies in law and other professions in British prison 
camps.

One of the prisoners at that time was Geula Cohen, Tzahi 
Hanegbi's mother. It would be interesting to know how she and her 
Stern Group comrades would have reacted if a British police 
commander had declared that he didn't give a damn if she died in 
prison. Probably they would have tried to assassinate him. 
Fortunately, the British behaved otherwise. They even brought her 
to a hospital for treatment (where she promptly escaped with the 
help of Arab villagers.).

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Article from the Gush Shalom peace organisation in Israel (Abridged)