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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Sharon must be stopped
Mustafa Barghouthi* watches in horror as violence continues to escalate
Sharon's government has finally revealed itself to the world as a government of war. Since his election, we in Palestine have warned of his violent and aggressive behaviour and feared what he would unleash on the Palestinians and Israelis. Now his real intentions are unmasked -- his desire to destroy the peace process he never agreed with.
Sharon is cynically using the current international situation to damage irreparably the work of the past ten years, which had brought the Israeli and Palestinian people closer than ever before to a peaceful solution to their conflict.
Sharon, who declared after the Ze'evi assassination that "starting from today, everything is different," has in the past few days overseen a military invasion of Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour; at the same time, tanks and troops are building up on the borders of other cities including Nablus and Qalqilya.
Thus begins the Israeli military's gradual reoccupation of the Palestinian areas -- a reoccupation aimed at expanding the Israeli occupation into the mere 18 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that is under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
Already four people have died during these Israeli invasions -- including an 11-year-old girl in Jenin. Scores more are wounded.
By reoccupying, Sharon hopes he can wipe out the Palestinian Authority completely, destroy the political entity that represents the Palestinian people, and annihilate the Palestinian people's will to resist the occupation.
These current invasions of Palestinian areas, however, are aimed not only at destroying the PA and the people's will to resist, but also at destroying homes, schools, buildings, roads and the physical infrastructure that has developed since the signing of the Oslo agreements. This physical destruction is symbolic of the destruction of everything Palestinians and Israelis have worked toward for the past ten years. Destroying the physical infrastructure means destroying the potential for a future Palestinian state, and with it the potential for peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis.
Despite Israeli revulsion at the assassination of their tourism minister, the Israeli government is still using assassination as a way of weakening the PA and forcing complete capitulation to a continuation of the illegal occupation. To date, Israel has assassinated 63 Palestinians -- including 22 bystanders, three of them dying within 12 hours of Ze'evi -- as part of its comprehensive policy.
Instead of acting as the international community has demanded and resolving the Palestinian-Israeli problem, Sharon is making the situation ever more perilous.
At this dangerous time, we cannot afford to ignore the parallels. It was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London that led to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when Sharon was minister of defence. The initial invasion of Lebanon left more than 20,000 people dead; by the time the Israeli army withdrew last year, thousands more had lost their lives and the history of Israel was forever tarred with the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can afford Israel's repetition of the mistakes of history.
Nor should Sharon believe he can defeat history; colonialist ventures have always been destroyed when the occupied people struggled for their independence. In Algeria liberation cost a million lives, but independence was eventually achieved. The Israeli government and people need to remember that the acts of revenge and retaliation that pass in the Israeli government as "solutions" to the problem are in fact responsible for increasing the danger we all face. They also obscure the real reason we find ourselves teetering on the abyss of greater violence and death: Israel's occupation of 82 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Only by addressing this fundamental, core concept can we arrive at a place where security, and a future free from the horrors of today, can be achieved.
* The writer is president of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and director of the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute (HDIP) in Ramallah.
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