BRIEFING ON PALESTINIAN INCITEMENT BEFORE AND DURING CURRENT WAVE OF PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE

BY PALESTINIAN MEDIA WATCH DIRECTOR ITAMAR MARCUS

(Communicated by the GPO)

Jerusalem Tuesday, September 25, 2001

The Government Press Office today (Tuesday), 25.9.2001, sponsored a briefing by Palestinian Media Watch () Director Itamar Marcus on Palestinian incitement before and during the current wave of Palestinian violence. Following is a transcript of his remarks.

"We're trying to understand the events of the last year. It is impossible to start with 29.9.2000, the day the violence began. The only way to understand what happened is to understand the atmosphere that existed within the Palestinian Authority, both in a number of years previous to it and in the weeks and months immediately preceding it. Only in this context is it possible to understand exactly what happened, and why it happened, and why it was not so much something changing but almost a natural outcome based on the environment that had been created over many, many years.

I want to divide the period that we talk about.into the period before the violence began, we're talking about 1996 when the main theme in the Palestinian media was ideological incitement. Just before the violence began, in July-September 2000, it changed from ideological incitement literally to incitement to violence. In the period after the violence began, it was no longer just general violence, there were literal examples of incitement to kill; in many, many examples this was seen as an ideal. Finally, at the end, we'll talk about not what they're telling their people to do to the Israelis , but an internal message that they were giving amongst themselves, and this was one of the key and most significant messages the Palestinians were giving to their people, as the glorification of death, including the deaths of children. At the end, we'll see a short film which will demonstrate again exactly how the Palestinians educated their children in this way, specifically on the issue of the glorification of death.

Now, in the first period which we'll discuss, and everything will be discussed with just one or two examples that will move along quickly, and each of the examples is representative of a much larger and consistent theme that appears regularly in the Palestinian media.

Regarding violence during all the period of negotiations, during all the period of Oslo, there was never a statement, there was never a message to the Palestinian people that violence has ceased, that violence is over. The message was violence is on hold right now but all the options are open.

About two years before, this was consistent from all the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. There was an interview with Muhammad Dahlan, for example, when the interviewer challenged him why aren't you allowing Hamas to have suicide-bombings. His answer was right now, it is not in our interests; right now, the interest is negotiations. We have to see what we can get for this. Probably the most explicit statement of this from a Palestinian leader was from Nabil Sha'ath. In January 1996, Sha'ath said this. And this was the tone that continued throughout. We have a film of him actually saying this on television so it's not even a text that could have been mistaken.

And he said as follows: "When Israel says, 'Enough, this is the limit. I'm not talking about Jerusalem. I won't talk about refugees. I won't disband the settlements. I won't concede the borders , i.e. the 1967 borders,' then we will naturally return to violence. But this time with 30,000 armed Palestinian soldiers in the cities, where there is a great deal of freedom. I am the first to say this. If we reach a dead-end, we'll return to the battle and struggle as we have been struggling for more than 40 years and no one will stop us." This is Nabil Sha'ath. This is, and this was, the attitude of the Palestinian Authority toward violence.

The message to the people that violence is behind us and we're only negotiating. The message to the people was right now we're negotiating. If we can get everything, we'll see, if not, then violence is around the corner. The key phrase that we probably found tens of times a week in the various media outlets was 'all the options are open.' It wasn't usually as explicit as this from Nabil Sha'ath, the expression was 'All the options are open.'

The second key message of the years preceding the violence was a general ideological message which had basically two points. This was drummed home virtually daily in the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians, not the Israelis, have the right to the land. The Jews have no right to be in Palestine. It is not theirs. It belongs completely to the Palestinians. The second message is that Israel is a danger. Now here again, I'll just give you a number of examples and they're representative of a total ideology. And this is to exemplify how it is done.

This is an interview from back in 1999, and again the person being interviewed here is Dr. Issam Sasalem [?], he has a weekly program on history and tradition and this type of message, of which I'm giving you just one example from a few years ago, continues until this very day.

And this the way they teach, one of the ways they teach, that the Jews have no connection to the land. "This is because the Hebrews of the Bible were an Arab tribe. We have the right to Abraham, Solomon and David and all those Muslims.

This is the land of the islamic prophets and we are the inheritors of this land. This is our land. No one besides us has any historical connection to the land. As an historian, I challenge any of their historians who claim that they have a remnant here. We are the owners of this land." This message is given over and over and over again, the only message that is given.

Just to show in a fascinating way what they did with Jewish history, they erased the word 'Jew' from Jewish history and they put the word 'Palestinian' and then they told their people that that is what the Jews have done with Palestinian history.

So, for example, in an article that actually appeared twice in a Palestinian newspaper, they write as follows: "They created a history tied to the land which, in the final analysis, is the history of the Arab nation of Palestine in its homeland Palestine." They talk about a 3,000-year-old Palestinian history. IT appears in their schoolbooks. It appears regularly on historical programs. Jewish history and everything about it is considered to be a lie.

Here, for example, again, Dr. Issam Sasalem, in another one of his programs on television: "In 1927, they named the region "The Land of Israel."

They're teaching their people here that the Jews never had a history here and only created the name in 1927 in order to create a false history to pretend that they had a history in the land. They've brought in archaeologists who say that they've never found a Hebrew coin ever once in Palestine because the Jews weren't here and that it's a lie to say that there ever found Hebrew coins here. This type of statement appeared regularly.

Now again, just to see how this appears in the schoolbooks, just some examples, the only maps that you ever see in a school book is the map you see over here. These school books were published last year by the PA. There are tens of these maps throughout the school books. These are just two examples.

When they show pictures of cities within Israel, they also define them as Palestine. For example, here is a picture of Jaffa in the new Palestinian school book. It says: "Jaffa is a port and city in Palestine." On the same page it says: "Jaffa, after the occupation." So this message, this first message.the message that was drummed home to the people is that Jews have no historical connection, they have no right to exist as a nation. Everything belongs to us. They have no coins here. They had no remnants here. We are the only people with a 3,000 year-old history.

The second message that was a consistent ongoing message all the years we've been following Palestinian media is that the Jews are a danger to the Palestinians in every which way. Now, when I say every which way, I mean "every", not just in terms of screwing around. Everything that is wrong in Palestinian society is blamed on the Jews. Palestinians are having a very, very bad drug problem for a number of years, so they portrayed it as Israel was intentionally sending drugs into the PA to damage, to hurt, to cause the Palestinians to have a drug problem. So you have, for example, this caricature which they put in their newspaper, Al Hayat al Jedida, their official newspaper, depicting a menorah with syringe, depicting the Jews intentionally trying to hurt them. Just a verbal expression of this, the Minister of Social Affairs Intisar Al-Wazir said in her office that her office provides all the help fighting the drugs, however the Israeli authorities are working hard bringing drugs into the Palestinian society. Another example here is that they have a problem with chemical fertilizers. What they're saying is that the Israeli government is taking chemical fertilizers which are prohibited around the world and is selling them specifically to the PA. There was an entire article which appeared in Al Hayat al Jedida which talked about how Israel is trying to cause cancer among the PA. This was an interview with the head of the Consumer protection Association: "Israel floods our markets with hundreds of thousands of tons of food products unfit for human consumption. Their goal is the proliferation of disease, weakness and slow deaths for the Palestinian body." This was a full article that went on and on enumerating how many different ways the Israelis try to poison the Palestinians, including sending milk which was intended for calves and packaging it for babies, and giving this to Palestinian babies in order to cause problems with the Palestinians genetically. This was the atmosphere. What you're seeing now are texts, graphics and caricatures in which the Jews are depicted as sub-human. So you have it here, for example, a caricature that appeared two days before the end of the previous century. And the message was here is the old Palestinian talking to the young Palestinian and he points to the Jew and he says, "This was the disease of the century." Another graphic description of this message of the Jew as sub-human is when the Pope was visiting in Israel and the Pope says, "Peace on earth," and the Jew says, "Colonies on earth," but of course the Jew is a total depiction of Satan. Zionism is compared to Nazism. Again, I'm talking about things that have been on-going. Here you see David Levy and Barak holding a Star of David with a swastika inside. The general message that came across is depicted in this caricature which appeared in the Palestinian newspaper, the distorted Jew is being kicked off the earth and the caption is 'withdrawal'. And the message here is that when we say 'withdrawal' we don't mean the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and we don't mean all of Palestine, this is what we mean. And again, this is in Al Hayat al Jedida, the official paper owned by the PA.

This is the formal, basic ideological atmosphere in which the PA was working. On the one hand, the Jews don't belong here and are a danger. On the other hand, violence is now held up for the meantime. Violence is not done away with. When we need violence, we are going to go back to violence, as Nabil Sha'ath said.

In the period just before the violence started, from about last summer, we noticed a significant change in what was happening in the Palestinian media. The talks in the US at Camp David had failed. The Palestinians immediately went into a switch. We noticed this right away.

The intensity of the hatred and the calls to violence reached such a level that I'm just going to read you now the introduction to a report that we published on 11.9.2000, 2.5 weeks before the violence started, entitled Rape, Murder, Violence and War for Allah Against the Jews: Summer 2000 on Palestinian Television. "Palestinian Authority television broadcasting of violence and hate has reached unprecedented levels this summer and has created an atmosphere of the eve of outbreak of war." We wrote this before anything happened. It was clear to us for many, many different reasons. (See for a copy of the aforementioned report.).

During the violence itself, it immediately changed from general incitement to violence to repeated calls to kill Jews, kill Americans, in the strictest and strongest of language. A Friday, 13.10.2001, two weeks after the violence began, religious sermon on Palestinian television said as follows: "The Jews are the Jews. They are terrorists, therefore, it is necessary to slaughter them and murder them according to Allah's words. It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for Jews in any place and any land. Make war on them in any place that you find yourself, any place that you encounter them. Kill the Jews and those Americans that are like them. The Jews only understand might. Have no mercy on them, kill them everywhere."

This was one example. This next source is a fascinating example that appears regularly on Palestinian television. The Muslims have the written Koran and an oral tradition, now written down, known as hadith. One hadith says as follows: "The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslim makes war against the Jews and kills them. If a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, the rock and tree will say 'O Muslim! O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!"

This is 1,000-year-old text that has been quoted at least six times that we have heard it on Palestinian television or read it in the Palestinian newspapers as the way Jews are supposed to be treated. I don't come here with any critique of Islam and I'm not looking in the Koran for sources that might be offensive to anyone. What I'm saying here is that the Palestinian leadership has decided to make this a message that they're giving to their people, over and over again, as the way Palestinians and Islam should look at Jews.

Just to show you how this is continuing until today, here are excerpts from the Friday, 31.8.2001, sermon on official PA TV (see < http://www.pmw.org.il/sitem-080801.html>):

"All weapons must be aimed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the cursed nation in the Koran, whom the Koran describes as monkeys and pigs, worshippers of the calf and idol worshippers."

In that same speech: "We will enter Jerusalem as conquerors, and Jaffa as conquerors, and Haifa as conquerors and Ashkelon as conquerors, we are certain that the victory is quickly coming."

In the internal Palestinian world, the focus is never on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The focus in the Palestinian world is, as we have it here, on entering Haifa, Ashkelon and Jerusalem as conquerors. In the internal Palestinian world, they know that they almost had all of that. They had basically all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because Barak offered it to them. The message that they're telling their people is the same ideological message that has been played all along, that we will enter all of the cities of Israel as conquerors.Every message, every ideological message that appeared during the years, appears also today but with greater intensity and in a language that is much, much stronger than we had in all the previous years. So, for example here if before, they said that Israel was causing drug problems, look at the extent that they're describing Israel today:

"In a new step aimed to kill more children, the occupation forces threw large quantities of poisoned candies in front of two schools last night. Salem Ahmed, a medic, said that when he collected pieces of these unwrapped candies, he felt the rubber gloves on his hands melting, in addition to experiencing breathing difficulties, headaches and dizziness."

This appeared in the Palestinian newspaper; it appeared on Palestinian radio as well. The week before this, they had an article in the newspaper which described a certain belt, a leather belt that Israel was producing, that had metal pieces on it. They said they didn't know why these metal pieces were there and they said that they also found out that Israel exported this belt only to the Arab world and the PA. Then they discovered that the metal on this belt was actually radioactive, and that's why it was only being sold - cheaply - in the Arab world. It said that the Israeli government was subsidizing their production with $10 million. Very often, this demonization of the Jews was connected to Jewish tradition. One example is: "The commandment of their Torah or the Talmud is that we are goyim, i.e. non-Jews. They view all non-Jews as barbarians or as their servants devoid of human rights and that one may destroy them and kill them." This was said by Arafat's education adviser on television.

On 14.6.2001, Lt.-Col. Yehuda Edri was killed by a Palestinian informant for Israeli intelligence in a shooting attack on the Bethlehem bypass tunnel road connecting Gush Etzion with Jerusalem. The Palestinian informant was shot and killed by one of Lt.-Col. Edri's guards. The informant's body was handed over to the PA two weeks later.

A newspaper account said detailed, "the most recent murder of a prisoner.whose body was returned by the occupation authorities after he was imprisoned for 12 days and brutally tortured. They pulled out his eyes, cut off his fingers, tore out his nails, stole his internal organs and burned him with electricity." This type of thing sounds absurd, but within the overall atmosphere of poisoned candies and poisoned belts, this is the same message which had been given a little more weakly in the previous years that the Jews were poisoning them with all sorts of drugs.Here again is Dr. Issam Sasalem. Just look at the language he uses on 17.4.2001, a few months ago: ".They, the Israelis, remind us of the parasitic worms that live in the ocean and eat a species of snail and then live in its shell. We will not let any of them in our shell." This is the type and style of language that comes across to the people today. This is the message and the atmosphere over the last three years.

One of the dominant messages in the PA has been the glorification of death, not only of suicide-bombers but anyone who dies. This is not coming from Hamas, but from the PA, a tremendous glorification of death. [Mr. Marcus quoted extensively from Palestinian Media Watch Special report #32, from 30.11.2000, entitled Wajdi, a 14 year old: "When I become a Shahid [Martyr], give out cake" - Palestinian Children Yearning Martyrdom, Encouraged by Parents

()].