6 - 12 December 2001
Issue No.563
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 December 2001 Issue No.563 |
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Two to the trigger
US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld calls Israel's brutal reprisals against the Palestinians acts of self- defence. Yet Israel has been subjecting the Palestinians to forms of aggression that border on genocide. When its policy of assassination, destruction, and closure meets with Palestinian self- defence, the United States blames the Palestinians for initiating violence.
The current turmoil results from policies Sharon initiated and recently escalated, without opposition from the United States. Not until after the attack on Afghanistan was underway did Washington take any active interest in the situation.
On his recent visit to Washington, Sharon demanded once again that the Palestinians prove their compliance by providing seven days of absolute calm. Only then, he iterated, would he consider negotiations on the creation of a (defenceless and fragmented) Palestinian state. Sharon did not promise to stop assaulting the Palestinians; nor did he say he would call off the violence, assassinations, and destruction that he has fostered. On the contrary, he began threatening to eliminate Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
It is quite likely that Sharon will carry out these threats. His policies have succeeded in strengthening the extremists in Jihad and Hamas. Palestinian opposition groups have simply refused to give in to Israeli terrorism, even after 14 months of intense destruction and assassination. In this time Israel's belligerence has led to the death of nearly 1,000 Palestinians and the breakdown of the Palestinian infrastructure. The stifling siege has brought unemployment to 40 per cent, reducing the majority of Palestinians to abject poverty.
With US approval, Israel has escalated the violence in a manner that undermines US peace efforts. This is what Sharon has wanted all along. His policy is to batter and humiliate the Palestinians until Arafat and the Palestinian Authority collapse. Hamas and Jihad have become the last resort of a disenfranchised people. How strange, then, that Israel should demand 100 per cent calm from Arafat as a condition for the resumption of talks. How interesting that it should ask Arafat to stop the Intifada and eliminate the Palestinian opposition. Israel's demands are designed to make Arafat look weak and incapable, and to pave the way for his replacement by a more pliant leadership.
Arafat and the Palestinian people are being asked to maintain 100 per cent calm. Why doesn't the US ask Sharon and the settlers to do the same? Why has Washington refused to allow international observers -- Americans and Europeans included -- into the occupied territories, so that they can tell the world objectively who is causing the violence?
In all sanity, the suicide bombings in Israel cannot be viewed in isolation from the brutal practices to which the Palestinian people are being subjected. Those who condemn the Palestinians must remember that they have been driven to utter despair: of peaceful settlement, of international efforts and of Arab support.
Those who call on Arafat to arrest Hamas and Jihad militants as he did in 1996 are not acknowledging how much the situation in the occupied territories has changed since then. In 1996, the peace process offered hope. Israel was not applying quite the same suffocating pressure it is inflicting on the Palestinians now. Under current conditions, Arafat cannot declare a state of emergency and arrest hundreds of opposition activists without exacerbating his people's anger and frustration.
The United States must insist that both sides observe a complete cease-fire and suspend all acts of hostility. Israel must not be exempted from pressure under the pretext that it is fighting terror. Israeli terrorism, after all, is at the root of the violence that now undermines peace prospects in the Middle East.
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