Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 March 2002 Issue No.578
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue | Previous issue | Site map

Keeping reality at bay

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continues to behave like a victorious army general bringing home the spoils of war to his people. Yet the posturing can no longer hide his increasing isolation. Following his failure to deliver on election promises of security, and this despite the most brutal campaign by the Israeli army against the Palestinian population in the occupied territories that many can remember, Sharon's domestic support has been steadily eroding while the exasperation felt by the international community at his endless recourse to violence has grown.

Yet Sharon feels he is in a position to set conditions on what Yasser Arafat can, or cannot, say at next week's Arab Summit in Beirut. Having granted his "permission" for Arafat to attend, permission to return will depend on Arafat's not saying anything Sharon does not like, which is tantamount to demanding that Arafat pretend that the Israeli army is behaving with decorum when in fact it is engaged in a bestial war of repression against the Palestinian people.

Sharon's conditions, though, are just another aspect of his posturing. The only way to break the spiral of violence is for Israel to end its occupation: yet instead of this Sharon is demanding Arafat take part in a farce that involves denying what is taking place is taking place, while the world is asked to close its eyes and ignore images flashed across television screens daily. We are asked to forget the wholesale detention, without charges, of young Palestinians; we are asked to obliterate film footage of Israeli tanks firing on ambulances and targeting medical relief teams; asked to ignore the systematic destruction of the means of support of an entire population, the shooting of children, of pregnant women and infants. More demands from a man whose political career has been based on flying in the face of reality, more demands that the world will find it impossible to swallow.

Reality has an awkward way of surfacing. It will not remain submerged. Sharon's mad war against the Palestinian population looks increasingly like a last-ditch attempt to keep reality at bay. He will fail.

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