A Time Bomb for Israel

Charges of torture and rising West Bank tensions

In an effort to get the stalled Middle East peace talks moving again, the U.S. last week asked both Egypt and Israel to send representatives to a Camp David summit with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Chances are that both sides will accept, but on Jerusalem's part not without a certain amount of rancor. Reason: in an annual report to Congress on the state of human rights around the world, Vance's State Department alluded guardedly to reports of "systematic" mistreatment of Arab security suspects from the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Although the department declined to endorse the charges, it concluded that "the accumulation of reports, some from credible sources, makes it appear that instances of mistreatment have occurred." Israeli officials vehemently denied the accusations.

Israel in the past has conceded that isolated instances of brutality against Palestinian prisoners have happened. The government has also insisted that the maltreatment was against its policy, and that the culprits were punished. What riled Jerusalem this time were leaked reports, first published in the Washington Post, indicating that cables from a former U.S. consular official in Jerusalem went well beyond the carefully hedged assertions of the State Department report.

The officer in question was Alexandra U. Johnson, 32. An Arabist who had studied in Beirut and Tunis, she was assigned to the Jerusalem consulate two years ago as part of her six-year probationary training period. From interviews with Palestinians seeking visas, Johnson compiled a list of 29 incidents involving such tortures as "refrigeration, use of electricity, hanging by the hands or feet, extreme forms of sexual sadism, interrogation accompanied by starvation, enforced sleeplessness." Details were cabled to Washington last May and November by the consulate, which functions independently of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.*

At the State Department, Johnson's charges were read with considerable interest and alarm, but her conclusions of patterns of torture and systematic abuse were rejected as unproven. Meanwhile, in a breach of diplomatic courtesy, Israel's secret service, Shin Bet, with the approval of the FBI liaison office at the American embassy, put Johnson under surveillance and tapped her telephone. Relayed to Washington were Shin Bet reports that she was intimately involved with Palestinian terrorists, both politically and personally. Following her tour in Jerusalem, she was denied tenure in the foreign service. In Washington last week, she accused the State Department of firing her because of her cables from the consulate.

The timing of the human-rights report was unfortunate. The controversial Washington Post disclosures came at a time of renewed tension on the West Bank. Two weeks ago, in a calculated act of reprisal against the families of suspected terrorists, bulldozers of the Israeli army moved into West Bank villages at dawn and crushed four Arab homes to rubble.

Arab reaction was swift and defiant. In the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Halhul, students stoned Israeli soldiers; the soldiers retaliated with arrests and beatings. Near the village of Sinjil, Arab youths stoned Jewish settlers belonging to the religious nationalist Gush Emunim (group of the faithful). The angry Jews invaded the Arab school in Sinjil, seized the principal and marched him to their settlement for "questioning." In the midst of this unrest, the Israeli government established a new "outpost"--the forerunner of a civilian settlement--at Nueima, northeast of Jericho. The settlement will be the 51st on the West Bank, where some 5,000 Jews are now living among 692,000 increasingly hostile Palestinians.

The tension has begun to seep across the "Green Line" (the pre-1967 western border of the West Bank) into Israel itself, where 575,000 Arabs live as Israeli citizens. More and more, the Israeli Arabs are complaining openly of being second-class citizens and protesting government seizures of their land for Jewish settlements. In Nazareth last week municipal workers were on strike demanding fiscal equality with Jewish communities. Arab Nazareth, with 45,000 residents, received $4.5 million last year while upper Nazareth, populated by 18,000 Jews, was allotted $8 million.

Arab students in Israeli universities, calling themselves the Progressive Nationalist Movement, last month published a statement in favor of the Palestine Liberation Organization and against the "Zionist entity." At Haifa University, firebrand American Rabbi Meir Kahane called the Israeli Arabs "a time bomb in the Jewish state." Right-wing Jewish students then circulated petitions demanding the expulsion of all Arabs from Israeli universities.

Many Israeli Jews are conscientiously aware of the anomalous position of their country's Arab citizens. One of them is Moshe Sharon, who resigned this month as Premier Menachem Begin's adviser on Arab affairs with the warning that Israel "will be making a fateful mistake if it does not act energetically to reduce the level of hostility." Begin's government, fearful that the Islamic revival in Iran might stir up Israel's Arabs, appears to have taken a different approach to the problem. Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan issued an unmistakable warning: "We are not the Shah of Iran nor are we foreign rulers. If [Israeli and West Bank Arabs] try to replace Israel with an Arab-Islamic concept, they will have to realize that they might pay very, very dearly for that."

* The U.S., like 26 other nations, has maintained its embassy in Tel Aviv since 1948, because it does not consider Israel to have clear title to Jerusalem as a capital. To avoid political complications, the embassy deals with Israeli matters, the smaller Jerusalem consulate deals with Arabs.

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