19 - 25 April 2001
Issue No.530
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 April 2001 Issue No.530 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Sharon redefines excessive force
Under the rubric of stopping "violence and terror," the Sharon government has stepped up Israel's nearly seven-month-old war against Palestinians. Khaled Amayreh reports from Jerusalem
The latest escalation of Israeli violence has taken the excessive use of firepower to new heights. Blanket bombardments of Palestinian neighbourhoods and refugee camps, as well as wholesale demolition of residential homes, are now being carried out. On 16 and 17 April, the occupation forces launched a new spate of attacks on Palestinian civilian and police targets throughout the Gaza Strip, using tanks, warships and helicopter gunships.
Moreover, for the fourth time in a few days, Israeli soldiers made an incursion into Palestinian-controlled territory, namely the Beit Lahya and Beit Hanoon suburbs of Gaza City, destroying several buildings allegedly used by Palestinian Authority (PA) security personnel. The incursion and the bombardment, said the Israeli army, were in response to the firing of a few mortar shells on a Jewish settlement east of Gaza.
The primitively made shells have caused no casualties among settlers and virtually no damage to property, which suggests that the Israeli army is only seeking pretexts to strike at Palestinians.
Palestinian sources described the bombardment as the fiercest and most far-reaching since the outbreak of the Intifada. Hospital sources spoke of at least one Palestinian killed, another critically wounded, and as many as 30 others injured, many suffering from serious burns.
In the meantime, the Israeli army again divided the Gaza Strip into four small enclaves, cutting them off from each other and virtually isolating them from the outside world. Roads were closed with concrete slabs and huge mounds of earth, guarded by Israeli soldiers, a continuation of the recent draconian measures against Palestinian civilians which have brought strong international criticism.
The re-adoption of the siege policy against Palestinians, which was never completely abandoned, reflects some confusion on the part of the Sharon government. Sharon and his many spokesmen, including no less a figure than Nobel laureate Shimon Peres, have repeatedly said that Israel was not interested in hurting innocent Palestinians. But the latest and mostly indiscriminate bombardment of Palestinian towns and the wholesale destruction of Palestinian civilians' homes starkly contradict official Israeli statements.
"They are targeting every baby, every child, every man and woman. Their real aim is to decimate and exterminate the Palestinian people in order to achieve the fulfilment of Zionism," said PA official Ahmed Abdel-Rahman.
"He who is not assassinated is killed by random bombardment. This is a Nazi government. It thinks like the Nazis and it acts like the Nazis," said Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Al-Shami, whose organisation lost two members this week to Israeli death squads.
Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip in the course of the past fortnight give credence to these statements.
In the West Bank, the often random and indiscriminate bombardment and strafing of Palestinian towns and villages continued, with the Israeli army using more firepower and more lethal types of munitions, including standard artillery shells similar to those used in Lebanon against Hizbullah.
In Hebron, for example, Israeli troops have been carrying out virtually daily bombardments of neighbourhoods, especially the Abu Sneinah quarter overlooking the small settler enclave in the centre of Hebron. The Israelis deployed Merkava tanks in the city centre last month, allegedly to protect the 300 messianic settlers living in the heart of the city who aspire to get rid by all possible means of all Palestinians from what they call "Eretz Yisrael," or Greater Israel.
The result has been devastating. Numerous buildings and homes, the construction of which consumed the lifetime savings of many Palestinians, have been reduced to rubble.
The destruction in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank, however, pales in comparison to the Israeli-perpetrated "massacre of homes" taking place in Khan Younis and Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
So far, over 80 residential homes have been destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers escorted by tanks on the ground and helicopter gunships hovering above, all to make sure that mission "Enjoyable Song," as the Israelis called it, is carried out without a hitch. On 12 April more than 30 homes were destroyed in the middle of the night, rendering homeless 400 Palestinians. All of them are either refugees or descendants of refugees from what is now the Israeli town of Beer Sheva, 40 miles northeast of Gaza.
The same wanton brutality was repeated at the Rafah refugee camp two days later, when 16 more homes and 12 businesses were razed to the ground as part of Ariel Sharon's "get tough policy" towards the Intifada. Once again, terror-stricken children and women were seen retrieving whatever they could from the rubble. The scene, said one foreign journalist, transcended reality and defied all linguistic description.
Peter Hansen, commissioner of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) condemned the wholesale demolition, calling it "brutal and harsh." The deliberate destruction of civilian homes is more than that, however. It is a war crime according to international law, the fourth Geneva Convention and all human rights standards.
To explain the recent escalation, a Sharon spokesman said simply, "This is it. The Palestinians ought to understand that there is a new government in Israel." Israel's exaggerated repression of Palestinians seems aimed at achieving two interconnected goals. The first is to push the Palestinians to the edge of exhaustion and despair in order to force them to end the Intifada without any conditions and without achieving any political gains.
The other long-term goal is to force the Palestinian leadership to come to terms with Sharon's vision of an open-ended interim agreement in the West Bank, whereby Israel annexes up to 58 per cent of the occupied territories, while the Palestinians would be allowed to have a "state" on the remaining 42 per cent.
However, it seems utterly unlikely that Sharon will succeed in achieving either goal, given the Palestinian commitment, on both the official and the popular levels, to continuing the Intifada and rejecting anything less than full Israeli withdrawal to the 4 June 1967 lines and the return of Palestinian refugees to their former towns and villages in what is now Israel.
Israeli repression will, therefore, continue, as will Palestinian resistance to it, but with the ever-growing prospect of the bloody showdown evolving into a full-fledged regional war. Perhaps this is Sharon's true wish.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page