- It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of
Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in
the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in
piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks
and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing,
laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized,
and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And
it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows,
smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms.
Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred,
but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read
like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness
compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.
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- It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has
to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of
information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people
working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build
a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their
country.
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- These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority
institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry
and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental
organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health
system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation.
These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private
commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly
the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive
Shield.
-
- The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the
destruction. Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into
the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report
on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance,
inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find
time or reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit
of soldiers in one office.
-
- The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted
- money, jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained
by officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers
too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic destruction of
the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers
or soldiers.
-
- Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to
search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking
into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's
office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was
inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it
on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in
the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a
shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document
after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them.
-
- This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or
that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't
dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative,
cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit
order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of
permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order - or wink
- come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier? Was it
from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations?
Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command or from
general headquarters?
-
- Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show
how the IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the
political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions,
sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending
all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think
of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists,
after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social
and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public
can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem
and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived
from the horrors of the occupation.
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- http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml
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