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Tuesday, April 30, 2002 Iyyar 18, 5762    
 
Operation Destroy the Data  
By Amira Hass 
 

It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices 
taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: 
smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown 
into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes 
scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops 
gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper 
files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in 
rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in 
doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and 
there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but 
compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like 
poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness 
compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed 
computers. 

It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The 
loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built 
into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to 
build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private 
sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country. 

These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions 
like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health 
Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations 
and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, 
modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. 
These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private 
commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were 
clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called 
Defensive Shield. 

The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and 
there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. 
But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report on a Palestinian 
woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance, inside their 
homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or reason 
to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in 
one office. 

The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and 
video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak 
to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight 
material temptation. But the systematic destruction of the data banks was 
not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or soldiers. 

Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy 
the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk 
of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, 
thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they 
had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they 
thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and 
the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, 
the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown 
the files on the floor without opening them. 

This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a 
personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. 
There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural 
infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit order 
or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of 
permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order - or wink 
- come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier? Was it 
from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF 
Operations? Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command 
or from general headquarters? 

Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF 
translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political 
echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, 
sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, 
sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting 
to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty 
terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, 
cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the 
Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a 
genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as 
it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.
(BWO the Multitudes-info list/ Emmanuel Videcoq)