[News] The Nakba, Intel, and Kiryat Gat

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Nakba, Intel, and Kiryat Gat

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9705.shtml
Henry Norr, The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2008

In an extravagant ceremony that featured acrobats, drummers, a 
children's choir, and speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert 
(in person) and the two top executives of chipmaker Intel Corp. (on 
giant video screens), the company this month dedicated a new, 
state-of-the-art chip-manufacturing plant in the south-central 
Israeli town of Kiryat Gat.

The hoopla is understandable, from the Intel and Israeli 
perspectives. The new facility, known as Fab 28, is the largest 
private-sector investment ever made in Israel: the company has sunk 
$3 billion into it, and the Israeli government kicked in another $525 
million. Since the groundbreaking 28 months ago, it's been the 
biggest construction project in Israel -- this side of the apartheid 
wall, that is.

Together with another multi-billion-dollar facility Intel built a 
decade ago on an adjoining site, the work has transformed Kiryat Gat, 
a drab and previously obscure industrial town on the northern edge of 
the Negev desert, into one of the crown jewels of Israel's booming 
high-tech economy. Once the plant reaches full production next year, 
it's expected to produce $10 million worth of Intel's most advanced 
microprocessors every day -- by itself enough to boost Israel's gross 
domestic product by nearly two percent.

The atmosphere at the 1 July dedication ceremony was strictly upbeat, 
to judge by the press reports. Behind the scenes, however, the 
picture wasn't so rosy. The immediate concern is the sharp decline of 
the dollar, which has undermined the economic assumptions the new 
project was based on. After telling reporters that the problem "could 
put the flow of future investment in jeopardy" and even warning "the 
possibility of [Intel] moving its Israeli operations to the Far East 
now looms closer than ever before," company executives hurried off to 
discuss the problem with Israel's central bankers, the Israeli daily 
Haaretz reported.

Of course, the alarmist talk may just be Intel's way of squeezing 
additional subsidies or other concessions out of the Israeli 
government, but the authorities will no doubt listen closely: with 
some 6,100 employees in Israel -- more than in Silicon Valley -- 
Intel is the country's largest private employer.

Though the press doesn't mention it, Intel's leaders probably also 
worry about the security situation. At least they ought to: Kiryat 
Gat happens to be only about 15 miles from the northern Gaza Strip, 
and the Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security apparatus) claims that 
Palestinian resistance forces in the Strip now have some rockets 
capable of traveling that distance. Unless the shaky "calm" currently 
prevailing in Gaza is somehow, to everyone's surprise, solidified and 
extended, Intel's multi-billion-dollar complex could be in range of 
new, longer-range rockets.

Meanwhile, the local authorities in Kiryat Gat are focused on 
preventing yet another kind of "disaster," as they put it: Jewish 
girls taking up with Bedouin boys. So common has this phenomenon 
become that the municipality last year convened an "emergency" 
conference to address it. The upshot: a program run by the municipal 
welfare department, with support from the police, that sends speakers 
into public school classrooms to warn girls about the dangers they 
face from Arab boys. The curriculum even includes a 10-minute video 
entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy."

Nakba inside

These recent developments have brought unaccustomed attention to 
Kiryat Gat, at least within Israel. But even the Israeli press 
doesn't discuss what's most interesting about the town: its origins.

Sixty years ago, there was no Kiryat Gat. The land it now occupies 
was divided between two Palestinian villages, al-Faluja and 'Iraq 
al-Manshiya. While the area is well within the Green Line, Israel's 
1949-67 border, its history is in one way unique: Israeli forces 
never captured it during the 1948-49 war. Egyptian forces occupied it 
in late May 1948, and although later Israeli counter-offensives broke 
up their front and laid siege to the two villages -- known at the 
time as the "Faluja pocket" -- the 4,000 Egyptian troops deployed 
there (including a young officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, soon to 
become president of his country) held out until Egypt and Israel 
agreed to an armistice on 24 February 1949.

That's when the Nakba befell al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya.*

Stranded and surrounded, the Egyptians were in no position to stay in 
the area. To their credit, however, they insisted as a condition of 
their withdrawal that Israel guarantee the safety of the civilians in 
the area -- about 2,000 locals and some 1,100 refugees from other 
parts of Palestine.

In principle, Israel accepted the Egyptians' demand. In an exchange 
of letters that were filed with the United Nations and appended to 
the main armistice agreement, the two governments agreed that 
civilians who wished to remain in al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya 
would be permitted to do so, and that "All of these civilians shall 
be fully secure in their persons, abodes, property and personal effects."

Within days, however, it was clear that the agreement wasn't worth 
the paper it was written on. Under the direction of Yitzhak Rabin 
(later Prime Minister of Israel), and probably with the direct 
approval of founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to 
historian Benny Morris, Israeli troops promptly mounted "a short, 
sharp, well-orchestrated campaign of low-key violence and 
psychological warfare designed to intimidate the inhabitants into flight."

What Morris labels "low-key," however, probably didn't seem so to the 
victims. He himself quotes a survivor's testimony that the Israeli 
army "created a situation of terror, entered the houses and beat the 
people with rifle butts."

Members of an American Quaker relief mission who were in the area at 
the time kept a diary detailing the violence they observed, such as 
the case of a man brought to them with "two bloody eyes, a torn ear, 
and a face pounded until it was blue." And UN observers reporting to 
Ralph Bunche, the distinguished African-American diplomat then 
serving as chief UN mediator in Palestine, noted not only beatings 
and robberies, but also cases of attempted rape and "promiscuous 
firing" on civilians by Israeli soldiers. (Bunche, who won the 1950 
Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, had assumed the chief mediator's 
post a few months earlier, after the assassination of his 
predecessor, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, by a Jewish 
terrorist organization led by Yitzhak Shamir, also a later prime 
minister of Israel.)

Israel supporters, of course, are quick to dismiss even such 
eyewitness accounts as exaggerations if not outright fabrications. 
But even the most ardent Zionist can't easily dismiss one other 
source who documented what happened in the Faluja pocket: Israel's 
own foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett. Observing the 
blatant contradiction between the solemn diplomatic commitment his 
government had just undertaken and the behavior of its forces on the 
ground, he worried that it might jeopardize Israel's campaign to gain 
UN membership. On 6 March 1949, just ten days after the agreement 
with the Egyptians, he fired off an angry memo to the Israeli army, 
charging that its actions in al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya were 
throwing into question "our sincerity as a party to an international 
agreement." Noting that Israel was trying to argue at the UN that it 
was not responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem, he wrote, 
"From this perspective, the sincerity of our professions is tested by 
our behavior in these villages. ... Every intentional pressure aimed 
at uprooting [the local population] is tantamount to a planned act of 
eviction on our part."

Sharett objected not only to the overt violence, but also to what he 
said was a "whispering propaganda campaign" conducted covertly by the 
Israeli army, threatening the civilians with "attacks and acts of 
vengeance by the army" if they didn't leave the area. "This 
whispering propaganda is not being done of itself," Sharett 
continued. "There is no doubt that here there is a calculated action 
aimed at increasing the number of those going to the Hebron Hills 
[then controlled by Jordan] as if of their own free will, and, if 
possible, to bring about the evacuation of the whole civilian 
population" of the Faluja pocket.

Whether Sharett's concerns had any moderating influence on the army's 
behavior isn't clear, but they certainly didn't change the outcome. 
By mid-March all of al-Faluja's residents had abandoned their homes; 
the residents of 'Iraq al-Manshiya held out longer, but after several 
shootings by Israeli sentries, the last of them -- some 1,160 people 
-- left in Red Cross-organized convoys on 21 and 22 April.

Five days later, Rabin ordered the demolition of both villages.

In sum, they fell victim to the same tactics Israeli forces had 
perfected during the ethnic cleansing of the rest of their new state 
over the previous year. The only thing unusual about al-Faluja and 
'Iraq al-Manshiya was that Israel had formally promised not to do 
what it did, that so many Westerners were on hand to document the 
process, and that even a top Israeli official provided confirmation 
of their accounts.

Rise of a high-tech center

In 1955 Israel established a "development town" -- a settlement for 
new immigrants, originally mainly from North Africa, later also from 
Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union -- on the site of the destroyed 
villages of al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya. It was called Kiryat Gat 
(Gat City) in the mistaken belief that it was the site of the ancient 
Philistine town of Gath, home of the biblical Goliath; the actual 
site of Gath was later discovered 13 kilometers away.

Initially, Kiryat Gat's major industries were agriculture and 
textiles. But in the mid-1990s Intel, which had established other 
facilities in Israel beginning in 1974, chose Kiryat Gat -- a section 
that was once part of 'Iraq al-Manshiya -- as the site for a huge new 
plant it called Fab 18. ("Fab" is chip-industry lingo for a facility 
where semiconductors are fabricated.) Intel put in $1 billion -- at 
the time the largest foreign investment ever in Israel -- and it 
persuaded the Israeli government to contribute another $600 million 
to build and equip the plant. Surrounded by a seven-meter-high 
concrete wall topped by a tall fence of green metal bars, it opened 
in 1999 and was soon cranking out Pentium processors worth more than 
$1 billion a year. In the early years of this decade, it was often 
described in the semiconductor-industry trade press as Intel's most 
profitable plant.

In the fast-moving chip industry, however, production facilities age 
rapidly, and by now Fab 18 is well behind the cutting edge, despite a 
$600 million update. So this year Intel turned it over to a Numonyx, 
a new joint venture with STMicroelectronics and other investors, 
which will use it to produce flash memory, a product that doesn't 
require state-of-the-art technology.

Meanwhile, Fab 28 has been going up next door. The new complex 
consists of four buildings occupying more than 70 acres and 
incorporating, among other things, 45,000 light fixtures and more 
than 770,000 meters of cable -- 1.7 times the entire length of the 
state of Israel. It is only the third Intel fab equipped to use the 
company's most advanced production techniques, making chips with 
45-nanometer circuitry on 300-millimeter silicon wafers. (A nanometer 
is a billionth of a meter.)

For the future, an Intel executive last year told reporters that the 
company was already planning a third Fab plant in Kiryat Gat. In his 
speech at the 1 July dedication, Olmert said that his government was 
prepared to offer Intel Israel another $1 billion in grants. At this 
point, however, when or whether additional construction takes place 
probably depends on what happens with exchange rates -- and possibly 
the risk of further instability in nearby Gaza.

What have Palestinians gotten out of all this? A spokesman for Intel 
told me its payroll in Israel includes "several hundred Palestinian 
employees," but company policies precluded him from offering further 
details. In addition, he sent the author a press release about a 
corporate vice president's participation in the Fatah-promoted 
Palestine Investment Conference held in Bethlehem in May. "As part of 
its ongoing commitment to Palestine," the release said, the company 
is helping Birzeit University establish a new computer lab, 
sponsoring a business-plan competition for budding Palestinian 
entrepreneurs, providing up-to-date computers for an after-school 
program in Ramallah called the Intel Computer Club, and starting work 
on a multi-year plan that will include donating 900 low-end 
"classmate PCs." There was no mention of the "Intel Information 
Technology Center of Excellence" the company once announced it would 
establish near Gaza City.

As for the rightful owners of the land Intel now occupies, one recent 
analysis reported that 14,345 refugees from 'Iraq al-Manshiya 
(including the descendants of those expelled in 1949) were registered 
with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees; of these more 
than 9,000 were living in Jordan, more than 5,000 in the West Bank, 
several dozen in the US, and others scattered around the world. From 
al-Faluja, a 1998 estimate put the total number of refugees at 33,267.

Future challenges

Given Intel's importance to the Israeli economy, the scandalous 
history of the land on which its Fab facilities are built, and the 
pervasiveness of its products, it might seem a natural target for 
activists seeking to use economic pressure to support Palestinian 
rights. Indeed, Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, has 
been calling for a boycott of Intel since at least 2001. The group 
renewed its call in 2005, after Intel announced plans for the new Fab 
28, and later reported that it had generated some 2,000 letters of 
protest to the company. The call is still posted on many web sites, 
especially in Europe, that promote boycotts, divestment, and 
sanctions against Israel.

It appears, though, that there's little active organizing around the 
issue. Frankly, it's tough to get even sympathizers to stop buying 
Intel-based PCs, especially now that the one major alternative chip 
supplier, Advanced Micro Devices, has once again fallen behind its 
rival. In addition, Apple's adoption of Intel as the sole supplier of 
processors for its Macintosh computers in 2006 has compounded the 
problem, because so many activists are committed to the Mac platform.

What about legal recourse -- could the refugees from al-Faluja and 
'Iraq al-Manshiya and their descendants at least seek some kind of 
compensation for their dispossession from Intel through the courts? 
Realistically, it's obvious that such a case wouldn't get far, at 
least in American or Israeli courts, but in legal terms the 
Palestinians appear to have a solid claim. Five years ago, when I 
first wrote about Kiryat Gat, I posed the issue to two noted 
attorneys from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Francis 
Boyle, professor of international law at University of Illinois 
College of Law and a longtime supporter of Palestinian rights, and 
Abraham Sofaer, George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior 
Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a former 
federal judge who served as legal adviser to the US State Department 
(and occasional Middle East negotiator) from 1985 to 1990.

Neither of them was familiar with the facts of the Kiryat Gat story, 
but in response to my summary, they agreed that the Palestinians 
might well have a case. Boyle suggested that they could file a type 
of action known as an in rem proceeding, which seeks the return of 
property to its rightful owner -- a legal strategy, he noted, that 
had been used successfully not only in cases involving the former 
British colony of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), but also by Jewish survivors 
of the Holocaust.

As for Sofaer, he expressed doubt that any court would get involved 
in the absence of a treaty resolving the overall conflict between the 
Israelis and the Palestinians and establishing legal structures for 
settling property claims. But if peace ever comes, he said, "I'd be 
very happy to represent the Palestinians. It sounds as if there's 
potential in the long run for recovery here."

The question facing activists and all those working for justice in 
Palestine, is should they wait for the ever-elusive peace deal before 
taking Intel to court? Or begin preparing the legal groundwork for a 
case combined with reinvigorating the boycott against the company in 
earnest now?

*This historical account is based on Benny Morris' book, The Birth of 
the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited.

Henry Norr covered Intel as a technology reporter and columnist for 
the San Francisco Chronicle until he was fired in 2003, after writing 
a column about Kiryat Gat and getting arrested in a demonstration the 
day the US invaded Iraq. In recent years he has spent six months in 
occupied Palestine as a volunteer for the International Solidarity 
Movement and the International Middle East Media Center. He can be 
reached at henry AT norr DOT com.



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