Broken Bones And Broken Hopes

For Palestinians, Yitzhak Rabin is remembered first of all as someone who instructed soldiers to break their arms and legs, when they began their popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in 1987.

Before the handshake on the White House lawn, before the Nobel Prize and before the murder, when Palestinians were asked about Rabin, this is what they remember: One thinks of his hands, scarred by soldiers' beatings; another remembers a friend who flitted between life and death in the hospital for 12 days, after he was beaten by soldiers who caught him drawing a slogan on a wall during a curfew. Yet another remembers the Al-Am?ari refugee camp; during the first intifada, all its young men were hopping on crutches or were in casts because they had thrown stones at soldiers, who in turn chased after them and carried out Rabin's order.

Jamal, Bilal, Nadim and Said: All are in their 40s, and all have been jailed for various periods for popular activity during the first intifada. They are from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. They are all university graduates; two are doctoral students, in mathematics and in history, while the third is completing a master's degree in political science and the fourth is an artist and an amateur DJ. They are not activists in any organization, and they don't pretend to represent any group, only to answer the question, "Who is Rabin for you." The question surprised them, because they don't think about him a lot, and they did not recall that this was the 10th anniversary of his assassination.

Bilal ?(the DJ?), who is from a village in the northern West Bank and lives in Ramallah, says: "I don?t tend to make political analyses, but I have never been convinced by Arafat's comments about Yitzhak Rabin as a true partner for peace, and I don't accept the thesis that if Rabin hadn't been murdered, 'there would already have been peace.'"

He thinks the change in Rabin was a shrewd maneuver, not a principled transformation. "In the two years between when he signed the declaration of principles and when he was murdered, we did not feel any genuine change in our lives," says Bilal. "I saw meetings on television, conversations around the table, smiles, but in the field, we remained under Israeli occupation and Rabin continued to represent the occupation for us: settlements and land appropriation and a Civil Administration that gives or doesn't give a permit to move."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=9064

he never gave that order....never came down through the military pipeline to the soldiers in the field.

'January 22, 1988
Israel's New Violent Tactic Takes Toll on Both Sides
By JOHN KIFNER, Special to the New York Times

>snip

The development was reported by the three major Hebrew-language newspapers in front-page articles this morning. Under the new crackdown the army has beaten hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children with clubs, fists and rifle butts over the last few days in a new, officially declared policy of force intended to put a halt to a month and a half of unrest in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

>snip

''The first priority is to use force, might, beatings,'' Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said of the new policy.

Palestinians and foreign relief workers in refugee districts say the policy appears to have been in effect for about a week, resulting in hundreds of beatings, some in street clashes and others in house-to-house searches. But it is only in the last few days that it has been publicly articulated by officials and commented upon in the press.

The newspaper Davar quoted a senior military official in the areas as saying, ''There is much sensitivity in the Israeli Defense Forces to the possibility that the orders given to the soldiers - to use force and even to hit - during the demonstrations may serve as a precedent which can be misunderstood by the soldiers, and it can develop further and cause aggressive tendencies in military people.''

More at;
New York Times

i doubt you really want to understand the choices ones has to make when the options are limited..but thats the reality that some of us have to face...others get to criticizes, never having been in such situations- much more fun.

but i'll try: The IDF wasnt trained for demonstrations..when intifada I started all we had were weapons that shot lethal bullets, nor were we trained in how to face a demonstration...nor were our officers nor did the political element understand what was happening...nor did the palestenains. The whole thing was a surprise to all involved.

in those days many many experiments and changing rules of engagment were taking place..whatever you may read or find on the internet wont be more than a mere fraction of what was actually going on.....

some soliders beat up palestenains, some protected them, some soldiers went to trial, some were tossed out of their units, some demonstrations were spontanous, most were planned around the CNN trucks....

it would be foolish of you to try to describe to me what actually was happening, as it was changing constantly as the IDF searched for ways to control the demonstrations without using violent force, and it woud be foolish of you to take one article or even 10 and believe that "this is how it was"

You can only provide an individual's perspective of what happened;
while useful, it's no match for the archives of the nyt, or for such
books as the 'Iron Wall', which deals with the 1st intifada, & where I
found the 'might, force & beatings' quote from Rabin.

Also, it's not about *you*, it's about Rabin & the other politcians
& leaders, & the decisions they make, & the consequences of those
decisions.

Another article, from '88;


' >snip

No less shocking than the number of casualties is the manner in which they have been inflicted. After several weeks of global condemnation for the use of “excessive lethal force” against protesters, the Israeli cabinet announced in mid-January 1988 a new policy described by Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli’s defense minister, as a policy of “force, might, beatings.”51 Jonathan C. Randall of the Washington Post wrote that, “A Reuter correspondent reported seeing Israeli troops equipped with new baseball bat-sized clubs in action against demonstrators in the Kadurah refugee camp in Ramallah during house-to-house searches.”52 Correspondents’ reports from the occupied territories indicated that the beatings were severe, usually causing serious injuries, that they were widespread, and that they were not always done during confrontations with demonstrators but during searches of homes or in prisons. New York Times correspondent John Kifner quoted a Palestinian doctor saying that the injuries indicated that the beatings took place inside people’s homes during searches, because “we have as many as four or five people from the same family” arriving at the hospital for treatment.53 The New York Times reported that “In many cases, the beatings occurred not when protesters were caught during street clashes, but in nighttime raids on refugee centers. In some cases young men say they have been put aboard buses, beaten by soldiers and then dumped on the roadside.” It added that “The precise extent of the beating is difficult to measure, but it is clear that the practice has become widespread.”54 The Hebrew press reported at the end of January 1988 that “72 young people had been admitted to government hospitals in the last week as a result of beatings, the vast majority for broken bones.” Doctors at one of the Gaza hospitals, however, said that “they had been seeing at least a dozen and sometimes as many as 30 cases a day.”55

Obviously, breaking people’s limbs would incapacitate them. As the Israeli military correspondent Joshua Brilliant put it: “A detainee sent to Far’a Prison will be freed in 18 days unless the authorities have enough evidence to charge him. But if troops break his hand, he won’t be able to throw stones for a month and a half.”56

51. The Washington Post, 21 January 1988, and The New York Times, 22 January 1988.
52. The Washington Post, 21 January 1988.
53. The New York Times,, 22 January 1988.
54. 31 January 1988. The paper reported in its 9 February issue that 50 beating victims were hospitalized in Gaza for injuries sustained the previous day.
55. From Yediot Ahronot, reported in Ibid.
56. Quoted in The New York Times,, 22 January 1988.


http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=155&aid=199&pg=9

How about a tiny female chief - with a Master of Social Work degree?

i can only tell of my individuals perspective..and I also had those batons with me, and smoke grenades and rubber bullets (two kinds) etc

The policies your talking about from the politicians and military echelons came down to the solider in the street who acted upon them.....

and from there the archives are very limited. For instance in my unit i cant even recall seeing a reporter up close during intifada I...so whatever we did or didnt do was never reported...as was the case with hundreds of units.

If you ask any soldier involved in a conflict, he will tell you that what gets in the news is maybe 1% of what actually happens.