Silence in Exchange for Killing

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Israel wants to indulge itself in killing the Palestinian people, and to have the Palestinian people in particular, and the Arabs in general, respond with silence. This is the security policy Israel has relied on through the various stages of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It regards itself as the party in the right, and regards security as its own right alone, because others, in its view, are innately disposed to aggression and bloodshed. It is not waging a struggle over disputed land, but defending land that belongs exclusively to it by an ancient divine bequest; it is not fighting human beings, but savage animals whom the Lord created in the shape of men.

The Torah that the Jews hold in their hands writes, in the voice of the Lord commanding Moses: “Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: but ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: for thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; and thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.” (Exodus, Chapter 24, 11–16, as cited by the author)

And the Lord said to them: “Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. But I have said unto you, ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people…” (Leviticus 20, 22–24)

There is a great deal said on this in the Torah, and the other books, such as the Talmud and the Mishnah, are replete with it. As far as they are concerned, the Lord’s promise and act of driving out the nations and subjugating them as servants to the Children of Israel comes in exchange for nothing but keeping the commandments He asked of them. But should the Jews decide not to keep the commandments, the Lord will inflict punishment upon them — though He too will suffer harm, in that He will remain a lord without a people. They are the one holy people whom the Lord chose out of all the peoples. For this reason they are keen to carry out the oppressive commandments that call, in many scriptural passages, for killing other peoples, expelling them, or enslaving them.

[These are treaties that] bind the Arab parties to defend Israel’s security. No Arab party has to this day derived any real benefit from these agreements, and Arab forces have remained occupied with monitoring the borders to pursue resistance fighters or infiltrators heading toward Israeli targets.

Israel says that it has the absolute right to defend itself and to provide security for its population, and that it accordingly has the right to keep the field open before it to pursue its suspicions regarding any source from which it senses danger. As for the Arabs, they too must be careful to safeguard Israeli security, while Israel retains the right to carry out whatever military actions are necessary wherever the Arabs fail to do so. For this reason, a truce or a period of calm means very little unless every thought of resisting Israel is cut off at the root. Calm is a test for the Arabs, to see whether they are capable of preserving Israeli security — it is not a sign of any Israeli desire for peace.

Israel is not content with calm alone; it demands, as does the United States, that the Palestinian Authority take the necessary measures to dismantle the infrastructure of what is called terrorism. As far as Israel is concerned, a period of calm might be a golden opportunity for the Palestinian factions to reorganize their affairs and improve their tools and methods in confronting Israel, which means that calm itself amounts to harming Israeli security. And because the Palestinian Authority does not do what is required of it, for one reason or another, Israel continues its military operations against the Palestinian people. By Israeli logic, this is self-defense. Israel has managed to convince many states, and many Palestinians, of this logic, until it has become one of those unquestionable premises that must not even be discussed. The reader may have noticed that Palestinian officials, including Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, have said that Palestinians must not give Israel pretexts to continue its aggression — meaning that Palestinians must not offer any response at all to Israel’s repeated assaults.

This is certainly what Israel wants: to kill Palestinians without any response whatsoever, not even so much as a verbal condemnation. This logic is not foreign to Jewish religious and security convictions, but it becomes nauseating when it turns into a security doctrine held by Arabs and Muslims. Weakness and recklessness have reached the point of conceding that aggression is a right, and that Palestinian silence in the face of it is a duty and a supreme national interest. Is this not exactly what official Arab and Palestinian reactions conceded in the recent confrontation between Israel and Islamic Jihad?

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الصمت مقابل القتل” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.