The New York Times · 29 October 1989

CP-1989-037

It Can Happen There

Anthony Lewis

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Transcribed from the clipping

BOSTON — Suppose the people of some small American town decided to protest Federal Government policy by withholding their taxes. The Government responded by sending in the Army. Soldiers cut all telephone lines to the town. They stopped food from coming in and barred all visitors. They imposed a curfew from 6:30 every evening to 4:30 in the morning.

They went into homes and took furniture and other belongings worth many times a family’s unpaid taxes. They broke into shops and dumped goods in the streets. They arrested people and held them for days without charge. Unthinkable? Of course it is, in this country. But it is happening in another, right now.

And the Government responsible is not some remote totalitarian regime. It is the Government of an American ally, one that we have admired as an outpost of democracy and law: Israel. Israeli soldiers have sealed off the town of Beit Sahour, in the occupied West Bank, since Sept. 22. Telephone lines have been cut.

The town has been declared a “closed military zone” and everyone from the outside world kept out — sympathetic Israelis, journalists, Western diplomats. Christian bishops who tried to bring three truckloads of food in the other day were turned back. Beit Sahour is a town of 15,000, almost all Christians, near Bethlehem. It is a middle-class place.

This summer its business and other leaders decided, as their part in the Palestinian protest against occupation, to withhold payment of Israeli taxes. Taxation without representation is a grievance in any case. Despite the blockade, quite a lot has been reported about what has happened in Beit Sahour since Sept. 22. The army has seized property worth many times the tax claims.

It has ransacked shops. And according to the residents, it has systematically harassed and humiliated the people of Beit Sahour. I telephoned an Israeli who knows the town well, Hillel Bardin, a computer programmer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

For the last 18 months he has been part of a group of Israelis carrying on a dialogue with a group from Beit Sahour, exchanging visits and talking about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Mr. Bardin began by saying that, apart from the tax protest, those in Beit Sahour who have spoken out for peace with Israel have been punished.

He mentioned two men in his dialogue group, Jamal Hilal and Ghassan Antoni. “Both have been arrested repeatedly since July,” he said. “They are never questioned or charged with anything, just held for 18 days as Israel’s law allows. “The last time, Oct.

25, they were beaten so badly by soldiers on the way to headquarters that Jamal still cannot walk properly. They are in prison again.” As to the tax protest, Mr. Bardin said the reports of harassment and force in the Government’s response were true. He said he had seen one man who was bloodied when soldiers came and took his furniture.

At Elias Rishmawi’s pharmacy, he said, “they put all the medicines in a large shipping container and left it in the sun until the drugs spoiled.”

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Oppression in Beit Sahour unwarrantedAnn Arbor News31 October 1989CP-1989-039

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.