Fateful Triangle

Peace for Galilee403Palestinian hospital in Sidon, reports that he was arrested by the IDFwhile operating on a 12-year-old Palestinian boy with severe internalshrapnel injuries. He was not permitted to complete the operation, butwas arrested, beaten mercilessly, forbidden to ask for food or water for 4days, denied drugs or dressings for other prisoners on the grounds thatthey were “all terrorists,” and so on. 145The treatment of prisoners gives a certain insight into the nature ofthe conquering army and the political leadership that guides it, as doesthe very fact that it was considered legitimate to round up all teen-ageand adult males and to ship them off to concentration camps after theywere identified as “terrorists” by hooded informants. Similarly, the factthat all of this was generally regarded as quite unremarkable here—search New York Times editorials, for example, for a protest—gives acertain insight into the society that was funding this operation, thepaymasters and coterie of apologists.Little is known about the fate of those who were imprisoned, in part,because Israel has blocked access to the camps. For over a month,Israel refused even to permit the Red Cross to visit the camps,prompting unaccustomed protest by the ICRC, which later suspended itsvisits in apparent protest against what it had found within (as a matterof policy, the ICRC refrains from public criticisms). Five months after thewar’s end, Israel was still refusing to permit reporters to visit the Ansarcamp in Lebanon, as was discovered by one of the rare journalists(William Farrell) who tried to do so on the strength of the statement inan official IDF publication that “the camp is open to visiting journaliststhroughout the day and newsmen may interview detainees on campgrounds.” 146 He was told (“politely”): “You may not enter.” * More than*Possibly in response to Farrell’s article, Israel then allowed two reporters toenter the camps. Edward Walsh reports that prisoners continue to be brought toClassics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky