Security Reasons

Cordelia Edvardson, Jerusalem

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“Jerusalem. IT WAS one of those days when what is sometimes called ‘the Israeli reality’ hit me with the full impact of its desperation. As a foreign correspondent I am among the first to be notified whenever an Israeli soldier is killed or wounded in southern Lebanon. Notification is a service of the government press office.

But I am never the very first; the first to know is always the bereaved family. So I shouldn’t have been so panicky when the routine message from the military spokesman came over the telephone: ‘RPG fired against an Israeli patrol. One soldier killed.’ No name was given. It usually isn’t to correspondents.

My son, who chose to be an Israeli citizen, is a conscript in the Army and is doing his stint in southern Lebanon. Like thousands of other parents in this country I jump every time the doorbell rings unexpectedly. What will I find when I open the door? Three people in uniform: the commander of my son’s unit, an Army doctor and a girl soldier?

I have been told that this is the procedure when parents are notified. The angels of death are three. Later that day I heard that Moshe Zar would be released on bail. Moshe Zar is one of the defendants in the Jewish terror trial. He is accused of attempted murder.

He is also known as one of the biggest land dealers on the occupied West Bank and his name has been linked not only to several cases of fraudulent land transactions, but also to many cases of harassment of West Bank Palestinians in order to force them to sell privately owned land. Please, the Palestinian Arabs his name is mentioned with fear and hate. Mr.

Zar lost an arm during one of Israel’s wars and his release on bail was motivated by ‘health reasons.’ There is a connection between the situation in southern Lebanon, with bitter irony also called the ‘North Bank,’ and the Jewish terror gang on the West Bank. An occupation is an occupation is an occupation.

Occupations breed bitterness and hatred among the occupied and violence and moral rot among the occupiers. Stones are thrown on the West Bank and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) are fired on the North Bank. In retaliation, houses are blown up and orchards are uprooted on the West Bank and on the North Bank (though not always for the same reasons).

Israeli families whose sons are serving in southern Lebanon fear the knock on the door that heralds the message of death or injury to one of their loved ones. Palestinians on the West Bank and Shi’ites on the North Bank dread the sound in the middle of the night when a nailed boot kicks the door and the butt of a rifle simultaneously bangs on it.

Israeli soldiers are searching for ‘terrorists.’ Maybe they will take away the father, the husband, the son or brother. He will be taken for ‘interrogation’ and for a long time there will be neither trial nor sentence. Maybe he will come back, and maybe not.

In a village on the West Bank or the North Bank a hand grenade is thrown, a rifle fired, and a curfew is clamped down. Israeli soldiers patrol the empty lanes, and from behind windowpanes eyes watch them, eyes filled with fear and hatred. This is the climate that fosters and nourishes terrorism — on both sides.

This is the climate created by the mistaken belief in force instead of political compromise. The belief of the present Israeli leadership which tells the people that they have to live and act like a garrison state for the next hundred years.

The root of this dreadful situation is the government’s conviction that the Israeli Army has to stay put on the North Bank for ‘security reasons,’ and that the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, protected by the Army, should settle all over the place, both for security and ideological reasons.

‘Judea and Samaria are an inseparable part of the Land of Israel,’ as the slogan goes… Security means not only military might and force; security is also, and more so, the result of national consensus about life and death issues like war and peace. In Israel this consensus doesn’t exist any more.

Furthermore, security is contained in the moral fabric of a nation. But military occupation, however moral it tries to be, is based, ultimately, on the immoral idea that might is right.

There is no such thing as a benevolent occupation, and the brutal force and disregard of basic human rights now used to ‘pacify’ the population in the occupied territories will not stop at the Green Line, Israel’s border before 1967.

The moral cancer of the occupation has grown deep inside the body of Israeli society, and the present government doesn’t seem to know that only a healthy society can, in the long run, be secure… I firmly believe in the message of my dream.

I am convinced that the forces which are now trying to destroy the Zionist dream of justice for all and peace with Israel’s neighbors will not succeed. I know that their weapons, the blunt instrument of brutal force, will be overcome in the end by the voice of reason.

The day will come when Israel has left both the West Bank and the North Bank, and what the popular movement, Peace Now, calls ‘sane Zionism’ will be victorious over messianic fantasies, false prophets and wildly nationalistic aspirations. The Jewish people in its own independent state will live peacefully side by side with the Palestinian people in their state.

Both peoples will enjoy the security of peace, the only true security there is.”

Context added by this archive

A foreign correspondent for a Swedish newspaper, writing from Jerusalem, whose own son is an Israeli conscript in Lebanon. She uses the phrase the archive is named for in its official sense — “security reasons” — and turns it around.

Cite this clipping

"Security Reasons," The Baltimore Sun, 30 August 1994, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1994-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1994-006

This clipping is read closely in the section below

Security reasons, and what they were given for