25 - 31 October 2001
Issue No.557
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 |
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The other terrorists
Over the past week, Israel's occupation army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has killed an average of five to eight Palestinians a day, including women and children. Israeli tanks have re-occupied most of Palestinian cities it handed over the Palestinian Authority according to the 1993 Oslo deal.Ariel Sharon has ignored the appeals of the international community, including the US, to avoid escalation in the occupied Palestinian territories and to withdraw his army immediately. The right-wing Israeli leader is claiming that he is doing in Palestine what the US is doing in Afghanistan. But even US officials see no similarities between the two situations. If there are terrorists in the occupied territories, they are the Israeli soldiers who arbitrarily shoot innocent Palestinian civilians.
Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation, and the world supports their right to self-determination and to establish a sovereign state.
By claiming that he is conducting his military rampage to force Yasser Arafat to hand over the suspected killers of Israel's extremist minister of tourism, Rehavam Zeevi, Sharon is burying the Oslo deal once and for all. If Arafat hands over Zeevi's killers -- assuming he knows who they are, and assuming they are under his jurisdiction, in PA-controlled areas -- Sharon must reciprocate, by handing over the assassin of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa, killed in his West Bank office by Israeli missiles two months ago.
Since the Al-Aqsa uprising began over a year ago, Sharon and his predecessor, Ehud Barak, have ordered the extrajudicial murder of 70 Palestinian activists and political figures. Palestinian lives are no cheaper than Israeli ones, but someone like Sharon seems incapable of grasping this fact.
If the United States wants Arabs and Muslims to support its current campaign against those it has defined as "terrorists" in Afghanistan, it must be consistent, and force the terrorists ruling Israel to stop massacring the Palestinian people.
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