The Pain Grows

The government of Israel has given its solemn approval to Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s sanctioning of “might, power and beatings” to try to stop the rioting in the occupied territories. In the first three days during which this order was in force more than 200 Palestinian Arabs were treated in hospitals for broken bones and other serious injuries. Israeli spokesmen have defended the beatings of alleged rock-throwers as being more “humane” than the earlier use of deadly rifle fire to try to control anti-Israel demonstrations. No doubt the young men who have had their hands crushed by Israeli troops are grateful for this display of humanitarianism.

Torture is defined as the inflicting of intense pain to punish or coerce. Call the beatings, then, what in fact they are--a form of torture intended to be at least as coercive as punitive. There is substantial evidence now that the beatings have been inflicted not only to summarily punish young men caught throwing rocks. That would be bad in any case, not least in a society where the rule of law is supposed to prevail. What’s far worse is that many of the beatings appear to have been carried out randomly and indiscriminately as a means of collective punishment and crude deterrence. Break a man’s hand or leg, and it will be a while before he is able to go into the streets to throw stones.

As the casualty lists grow, Israeli officials have indicated an increasing concern over what the beatings are doing to Israel’s “image” abroad. The word is theirs; the emphasis is disturbing. For what it suggests is that, at least at the government level, there is more worry over show than substance, more anxiety over what a brutally inept policy may be doing to foreign perceptions than what it is doing to Israel’s own political principles and moral standards.

Anxiety about negative world public opinion certainly is justified. Israel’s long-time claim to be administering a beneficent occupation with a minimum of force has collapsed under the bullets and clubs of troops trying to restore what Israeli officials choose to call calm, but what at best has been only sullen acquiescence. Of course the events in the occupied territories have cost Israel respect throughout the world. Of greater concern to thoughtful Israelis is what has been happening to self-respect at home.

In the occupied territories Israel’s citizen soldiers--proud saviors of the nation in the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973--have been forced under humiliating orders to become bone-breaking goons. The Middle East’s most politically sophisticated and only democratic state has fallen back in desperation onto primitive and extralegal means to try to reassert its control. Beat them into submission! Those who approved this unworthy order were not stating a policy. They were issuing a shameful confession of political bankruptcy.