Ishmael was the other son of the prophet Abraham, Patriarch of the Jews and founder of the monotheistic tradition is continued in Islam. Ishmael was fathered by Abraham with his wife’s servant, Hagar. Abraham’s wife, Sarah — who had been believed to be barren — then gave birth to Isaac. [It is believed that the Jewish tribes are descended from Isaac, while Arabs are descended from Ishmael...]

Fogelman wrote that “Ze’evi’s plan to create the state of Ishmael, in the form of a secret four-page document, has been gathering dust in the archives of the Israel Defense Forces since it was conceived. But anyone who examines the details closely will not likely describe it as a dovish project, reflecting a recognition of the Palestinians’ national rights. Submitted to then-chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin five days after the end of the Six-Day War, the plan was entitled ‘Political Arrangement for the West Bank − A Proposal’. Ze’evi begins by noting, ‘The following proposal follows conversations held recently and in light of the task assigned to me to put forward a proposal on the subject’. It does not, he notes, ‘refer to possible solutions for the Gaza Strip, which need to be considered separately’. Ze’evi’s proposal called for the establishment of ‘an independent Arab state in part of the West Bank, which would be tied to Israel by a contract that would ensure the rights of both sides. The new state will be called the state of Ishmael ‏(and not Palestine, in order not to increase its ‘appetite’ and representation‏)’ …

Fogelman continued: “Ze’evi wrote ‘The speed of the decision, and implementation of this proposal, even if done without administrative and organizational preparation, is important because of the willingness of the local Arab leadership − which is still reeling from the shock of defeat − before it can be turned around and incited by Damascus and Cairo. And before the great powers and the UN have spoken out clearly on the subject’. Ze’evi’s final argument in support of his case was the comment about the abyss of hatred that would develop under the occupation, which was quoted by Olmert and Peres”.

The Fogelman article noted that : “Immediately after the 1967 war, the political leadership said nothing about the future of the occupied territories. Similarly, in the period preceding the war, the country’s leaders had been silent about its goals and about a possible solution to the conflict. There is nothing explicitly mentioned about the future of the territories and their inhabitants in the minutes of the cabinet or of Defense Ministry meetings, which have been declassified. However, the army, in contrast to the political echelon, had contingency plans. In addition to the operational plans, the IDF had over the years compiled a systematic doctrine for the creation of a military government in occupied territory. Besides the experience gleaned from such a government that already ruled Israel’s Arab population from ‏(1948-1966), the army had learned much from its five-month occupation of the Gaza Strip following the Sinai War in 1956. In the early 1960s, the IDF, drawing on those lessons, produced a number of memoranda and orders relating to different aspects of its activity in occupied territory. The last such memo was issued two months before the Six-Day War and was based on previous doctrinal material, particularly a paper called ‘Summary of Military Government in Occupied Territories’, published in 1964 under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office. This document enshrines some of the principles that guided Israeli policy in the occupied territories for decades”…

The story continues:

“The most important means of control is ‘reward and punishment,’” the document states.Under the “reward” rubric the authors include: “Removal of restrictions that were imposed. Granting permits to open and run businesses. Giving work to the unemployed. Appointments to key posts. Priority to returning seized property or giving compensation.”

Recommendations for “punishment” were: “Administrative detention. Exile. Dismissal from job. Searching of homes.”

In this context the document added, “Reward and punishment should be exploited to find a leadership that will collaborate. The reward and punishment measures are intended ‘to persuade’ the leader that it is worthwhile to collaborate; but, more than this, using them vis-a-vis the people under his influence will determine the extent of that influence. Accordingly, benefits should be granted to people who support a cooperative leader.”

As for those who refuse to play ball: “When a decision is made to humiliate a leader who does not collaborate, it is not enough to deny benefits to him and his followers. A rival candidate for leadership should be sought within the clans he represents and cultivated by being made a conduit for the distribution of benefits. He should be shown open preference by means of visits to his home and so forth.”

The document’s authors also recommended “exploiting an offense committed by a particular leader as a means of pressure for collaboration. This refers to offenses which are not known to the public and are not security related. The threat to place him on trial if he does not collaborate is more effective than trying and punishing him.”

The framers of the document cautioned against arresting public leaders and thereby turning them into “martyrs”:
“They should be punished in other purposeful ways, which will hurt then without increasing their public prestige, such as by economic sanctions, undermining their social relations and so forth. It is a mistake to create a single, homogeneous leadership. Ensure that the local leadership is split and that competitive leaderships exist.”

In conclusion, the writers recommended “keeping things on a low burner − preventing extreme mass despair and bitterness.” Even though “in most cases the Arabs themselves are far from carrying out what they say, they appreciate others doing so, particularly if the fulfillment of promises is to their benefit. Accordingly, binding promises should not be made, especially if they are of the type that cannot be kept.”

Apparently, the final written guidelines for the army’s activity in the occupied territories before the war were issued by the then-military advocate general, Meir Shamgar, a future attorney general and Supreme Court president. On the first day of the war he issued a document that was sent to the GOCs and chief of the operations branch in the General Staff. Entitled “Modes of Legislation in Occupied Territory,” the document, which sets forth the operational principles permitted in occupied areas under the international laws and conventions, was drawn up by Shamgar several weeks or even months earlier…
…
About two weeks after the war, defense minister Moshe Dayan told a closed meeting of IDF commanders: “The geographic, military and political achievements of this war have first of all afforded the maximum borders that anyone ever wanted to dream of, the most ideal ones … If someone had taken the broadest brush to demarcate the biggest and widest borders, he could propose for Israel, he would not have gone one kilometer beyond what the IDF reached in this war.”

Dayan knew whereof he spoke: A perusal of minutes of the meetings held by the General Staff on the eve of the war shows that not even the most optimistic of the generals believed the IDF would emerge from just six days of fighting with an achievement on this scale. But the mechanism of rule in the newly conquered territories was quickly set in place.

At Shamgar’s directive, four orders and three proclamations concerning “proper administration, security and public order” were issued already on the second day of the war and disseminated among the inhabitants of the conquered areas. On the same day, three military commanders were appointed for the new regions: Sinai, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Also that day, at the conclusion of a meeting of heads of branches in the Defense Ministry, in the office of the deputy chief of staff, there was a call for discussion on when to implement the military government and arrange the army’s activity in the occupied territories.

For his part, on June 12, 1967, two days after the end of the fighting, the defense minister convened a “consultation on the areas of occupation.” Taking part were chief of staff Rabin, assistant to chief of operations Ze’evi, director of Military Intelligence Aharon Yariv, Maj. Gen. Haim Bar Lev and former chief of staff Zvi Tzur, who was Dayan’s aide.

In the meeting, a six-point blueprint for a political plan, drawn up a few days earlier by MI’s research department, was presented. It stated that Israel supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This state would be barred from maintaining a military force, and the Old City of Jerusalem ‏(within the walls‏) would become an open city.

After the meeting Rabin asked Ze’evi to examine the new conditions that would make a settlement possible. After working for two days, Ze’evi submitted his proposal for the State of Ishmael, under which East Jerusalem, the Mount Hebron area, the Jordan Rift Valley and the Latrun enclave ‏(halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv‏) would be annexed to Israel. The rest of the West Bank was to become part of the state of Ishmael. “The Arab refugees in the Mount Hebron area ‏(and in other annexed regions‏) will be transferred to the State of Ishmael and rehabilitated there,” Ze’evi explained. From the demographic viewpoint, he added, “Although the annexation of the Jerusalem region will bring with it a large Arab population, it is important for other reasons.”

According to Ze’evi’s plan, the state of Ishmael would include “the majority of the Arab population of the West Bank: permanent residents, refugees in Samaria and refugees to be transferred ‏(23,000‏) from Mount Hebron.” The planned state would have a population of 623,000 upon its establishment. The remaining 260,000 inhabitants of the West Bank − most of them in Jerusalem and Hebron − were to be annexed to Israel.

Ze’evi needed only two days to formulate his proposal. Because he had only limited data to work from and was unencumbered by policy dictates, his plan was preliminary only and was missing significant details about the international status and degree of independence of the envisioned political entity. In broad terms, Ze’evi determined that “responsibility for the State of Ishmael’s security and foreign affairs will be in Israel’s hands.

Israel will be permitted to maintain military forces in the abandoned camps of the Jordanian Arab army or in operational deployment as needed.” The state of Ishmael was to have free access to an Israeli port, and residents of both states would have free passage, with one exception: The Ishmaelites would be barred from taking up permanent residence in Israel.

Ze’evi even specified the borders of the new state and included a map. “In northern Jerusalem the border has been moved so that the Qalandiyah airport ‏(henceforth to be called Jerusalem North‏) will remain in Israel’s hands. The Jordan Rift Valley has been left outside the State of Ishmael, with the border to pass 500 meters west of the longitudinal road, with two exceptions: 1. Jericho and its adjoining refugee camps, so that no further population will be absorbed into Israel; 2. the entry to Wadi Fara, where there is also a concentration of refugees ‏(a bypass connecting road can be built in this section‏). The Latrun enclave will be annexed to Israel. There are only four Arab villages in that area.” ‏(The enclave has yet to be annexed, but the residents were expelled during the war and their villages leveled.‏)

In an alternative proposal for borders, which appeared on the attached map in the form of a broken line, Ze’evi recommended expanding the area under Israeli control at the expense of the state of Ishmael. However, he noted, there were two drawbacks to this option: “The addition of an Arab population to Israel” and “the further reduction in size of the Arab state, a fact that potential Arab leaders will find difficult to accept.”

Ze’evi used the occasion to consider the future of Israel’s Arab citizens as well. “A preliminary examination is being made of a proposal to annex most of the villages of the Israeli Triangle to the State of Ishmael,” he wrote, referring to the concentration of Arab towns and villages − notably Baka al-Garbiyeh, Tira and Umm al-Fahm − adjacent to the Green Line. “This proposal has the advantage of ‘sweetening the pill’ for the future leaders of the State of Ishmael, but also has the following limitations: reducing Israel’s size; the need to obtain the agreement of the Arabs in the relevant villages; complications regarding a number of Jewish communities located between and adjacent to the villages in question; a dangerous precedent of reducing the size of the ‘original’ Israel which is liable to stir similar longings with respect to the Arab Galilee. Accordingly, it is suggested not to deal with this matter at this stage.”
…
On June 9, while the war still raged, staff officer Moshe Tadmor issued an urgent order to the military government headquarters created the previous day in Gaza, Sinai and the West Bank, on behalf of the civil security unit of the General Staff Operations Branch: “Maj. Gen. Ben-Gal of the Israel Lands Administration has asked us to obtain and safeguard all land registration records” and transfer them to the agency. Two days later, military commanders in the field received a communique from ILA counsel Maj. Dov Shefi, instructing them to guard the documents until an ILA official arrived to take possession.

Ten days after the war, the deputy director of the Justice Ministry land registration department, Y. Link, met with Maj. Gen. Uzi Narkis, GOC Central Command and commander of the Israeli forces in the West Bank, and submitted a formal request to the same effect, signed by the justice minister. Narkis approved the request and sent a confirmation in writing to military advocate general Meir Shamgar.

The next day, Shamgar wrote to Link: “I would be grateful if in the course of conducting the survey that it has been agreed will be done by your unit, you would pay particular attention to the question of the ownership/leasing of the Jewish settlement known as Kfar Hashiloh. Information on this subject interests us, as we know there was a Jewish settlement in this village for decades. Of course, this is not the only Jewish settlement of this kind, but I request that you instruct your assistants to provide us with information about the above-mentioned settlement as soon as possible.”

The Palestinians know Kfar Hashiloh as Silwan [now a hotspot in East Jerusalem where Israeli settlers and the semi-private guards who protect them, and privatiized archeological activities are threatening Palestinian homes]“.

This is posted on the Haaretz website here.

Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, who suffered a heart attack a few months ago, was admitted to hospital on Friday. He died today of cancer, according to news reports.

He is the man who once said, as Minister of Justice in 2004, that photos of a Palestinian woman trying to salvage something from the ruins of her IDF-razed home in Rafah made him think of his own grandmother who suffered under the Nazis.

Born 77 years ago in the former Yugoslavia, Lapid was a prominent journalist who headed the secular ‘Shinui” (“Change”) party. Israel, Lapid said, should be a Jewish state with freedom of — and from — religion.

“I don’t mind them carrying on their religion but I do mind when they try to impose their views on the secular majority in this country”, Lapid said of the religious-national right. “I think Israel should be a modern, Western civilisation and not a medieval ghetto”.

The current Shinui platform states that Israel should be “Jewish, Democratic, Zionist and Liberal”. It also states that the party will “fight religious coercion”, and believes in “separation of religion and state, without reducing the ‘Jewishness’ of the country. Religious belief will not be legislated nor will it be financed by the state. Our party believes in civil marriages (and divorce) – public transport on festivals and Shabbat and equal rights for the various Jewish religious streams. We will cancel the Tal law which differentiates in the conscription of religious and non religious citizens”.

In this last provision, there appears to be a convergence of aims between Shinui and its religious-national opponents.

Shinui was the largest winner in the 2003 general elections, winning nearly as many Knesset seats as the Labour party — but left the ruling coalition in December 2004 in a dispute over funding of religious institutions. Shinui then spilt in the run-up to 2006 elections, in the aftermath of a major shift of Israeli political alliances that surrounded Israel’s 2005 “Disengagement” from Gaza, and no longer has any representation in the Knesset.

In between, Lapid served as Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, then resigned from political life after Shinui split before the 2006 elections. He then became chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial council. Lapid was himself a Holocaust survivor who had a number of family members, including his father and grandmother, perish in Nazi concentration camps prior to the end of World War II.

As Justice Minister, Lapid made news headlines by opposing, in a May 2004 cabinet meeting, the destruction of Palestinian homes in Rafah during an IDF operation in southern Gaza. After the cabinet session, Lapid told Israel Radio that “I did think, when I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines – I did think, ‘What would I say if it were my grandmother?’ ” In the interview with Israel Radio, Lapid said it made him “sick” that the army was considering demolishing as many as 2,000 Palestinian homes in the Rafah refugee camp to expand an Israeli-patrolled zone along the Egyptian border.

Plans to destroy Palestinian homes in Rafah are still alive, as former IDF commanders have explained to journalists on several recent occasions. Reserve Major-General Yom-Tov Samia, former commander of the Southern front, said at a recent briefing to journalists in Jerusalem that he had even been willing to help Palestinian families living in Rafah, which has grown on both sides of the now-walled Egyptian-Gaza border, to move their furniture if they would be willing to move several hundred meters away from the border to create a sort of supervisable sterile zone that could more easily be monitored by the IDF.

More recently, Lapid said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio in early 2007, after airing of video footage showing a Palestinian woman being viciously verbally attacked through the iron bars on the veranda of her downtown Hebron home by a neighboring Israeli woman settler – who among other things called the Palestinian woman a “Sharmuta”, (“whore”), that what was happening in Hebron reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World War Two. “It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation,
spitting and scorn,” Lapid said in his radio commentary.

After the widespread airing of this footage, Israel’s mainstream politicians, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then also chimed in to denounce the Israeli woman settler’s behavior as “shameful”.

But, Israeli religious-nationalist commentators have accused Lapid of “shamelessly playing on sterotypes similar to those which appear in Nazi and other anti-Semitic press”.

Meanwhile, the religious-national right has been organizing. It has moved away from a preoccupation with religious life and a study of the scriptures, and sent many of a generation of yeshiva students – not a few of whom are American by birth, and for whom a pioneer ethic has a doubly patriotic resonance — out to settle the West Bank, and the same time to serve into the Israeli Defense Forces, where a number have now reached high ranks.

These soldier-settler-scholars appear to have been inspired in part on the transformation in the American military, which formerly chose generals who relied on their charismatic personalities and “seat-of-the-pants” instincts, but which in recent decades has been sending its most promotable (and certainly more compliant) officers off to become more multi-dimensional leaders by doing stints of academic study in post-graduate and doctoral institutions, in American service academies and internationally.

The current stated aim for these soldier-settler-scholars is to take over the government in Israel – and they are gaining in strength and political power.

In his latest article, Blaming the Victim, he explains what happened to a man who had to carry his new washing machine home on his head, because his home is in a closed area of Hebron:

“Ghassam Burqan’s wife was tired of doing all the laundry by hand. With five children at home, the couple decided to buy a washing machine. Now, says Burqan with a bitter smile, had he known what buying a washing machine would get him into, he would have passed on this particular luxury, and his wife could have gone on doing all the laundry by hand forever. Because of that washing machine, Burqan is now holding a plastic bag containing his bloodstained clothes, the result of the night of terror he says he was subjected to after some soldiers, and Border Police officers especially, attacked and abused him for an entire night, while he was bound, blindfolded and bleeding from a blow to the head from a rifle butt … Meanwhile, the upshot is not what one might expect: An indictment was issued against Burqan for assaulting Border Police officers. They also tried to accuse him of attempting to steal their weapons, but this charge was immediately rejected by the judges in the military court. Get the picture? Burqan tried to assault the Border Police officers, with a washing machine on his head, and to steal their weapons while he was at it. And so the victim became the accused. Still, even the military judges had their doubts about the prosecution’s version of events, and the military court, in two different forums, in an exceedingly rare move, decided to release on bail a person accused of assaulting our forces. The trial will begin next month. Not of the Border Police officers – of Burqan. Burqan, 31, is a marble cutter who lives with his family in Hebron’s Old City, which is under the control of the IDF and the settlers. No Palestinian vehicle is permitted to enter, which is why he had to carry the new washing machine home on his head …

On Friday, March 7, the family was visiting the grandparents. In the afternoon, they drove to nearby Beit Awa to buy a new washing machine; prices are lower there. They looked around, chose one and paid for it, loaded the washing machine onto the car and returned to the grandparents’ house. At around 8.30 P.M., after dinner, they prepared to return to their home, not far away, just past the IDF checkpoint that blocks the passage of Palestinian vehicles. Burqan hefted the cardboard box with the washing machine onto his head and the whole family – father, mother and five children (ranging in age from 1 to 12), along with Burqan’s brother, headed out. Tomorrow they would put the first load in the machine.

Six jeeps were parked by the concrete blocks next to the checkpoint, some from the IDF and some from the Border Police.

‘What do you have there on your head?’ the Border Police officer, a Druze apparently, asked in Arabic. ‘A washing machine’,” Burqan replied. ‘I want to check’, said the officer. ‘What is there to check? It’s a new washing machine, still in the package’, said Burqan. The officer (according to Burqan): ‘Then I’ll open it and wreck it’. N ow Burqan was afraid of what might happen to the washing machine, which the family had spent months saving for … The court would find that at most, he struck the Border Police officer on the hand. But other forces immediately poured out of the parked jeeps and started beating the two brothers with clubs and rifle butts, even after they were sprawled on the ground. According to the court hearings, which we will get to shortly, several army officers were present, including a company commander, but no one bothered to collect their testimony. Soon the two brothers had their hands bound behind their backs, and one had a rifle pushed against his throat and his neck stepped on…” and so on…

This Gideon Levy article can be read in full on Haaretz’s website here .