Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May - June 2001, page 6

Special Report

 

Palestinians Are Told to Stop Violence, as Israel Wages Full-Scale War

 

By Rachelle Marshall

The signal I’m sending to the Palestinians is stop the violence. I can’t make it any more clear. And I hope that Chairman Arafat hears it loud and clear.

—President George W. Bush, March 29.

The Bush administration has adopted a world view in which the Palestinian people living under occupation are the aggressors while the occupying military power is the victim.

—Yasser Abed Rabbo, Palestinian minister of information, April 2.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won a double victory on his visit to Washington in late March. As Congress and the White House suffered apparent amnesia regarding his bloodstained record, Sharon came away believing he had their tacit support for any degree of force he might use against the Palestinians, and with President Bush’s explicit agreement that there could be no resumption of negotiations until the violence ends.

Sharon was also assured of even closer ties between the United States and Israel. On the day he arrived, Secretary of State Colin Powell told members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that America’s bond with Israel “is both deep and wide, one based on history, on interests, on values, and on principle,” and pledged that the United States would help maintain Israel’s military edge over its neighbors. After Sharon’s visit, another senior U.S. official declared that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security was as “unshakable as ever.”

The discussion between Sharon and President Bush signaled that the relationship between the two countries will, however, have a different focus than in the past. After the 1990-91 Gulf war the elder George Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker recognized that ending the Arab-Israeli conflict was necessary if the United States was to maintain both its alliance with Israel and the support of Arab nations. They thus initiated the process in Madrid that eventually led to the Oslo Agreement.

Under the present administration, according to Secretary of State Powell, “our nation will not try to force peace...the pace and scope and content of any negotiations” will be up to the parties themselves. (Powell took an entirely different approach to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan a few weeks later, when he agreed to mediate peace talks between the two countries and met with the two presidents in Key West. The U.S. oil industry, which has close ties to the Bush administration, hopes to build a pipeline between Azerbaijan and a Turkish port on the Mediterranean.)

Sharon and Bush concentrated almost entirely on plans for strategic cooperation between the United States and Israel. Unlike almost all of our European allies, the Israelis are eager to be a partner in Bush’s plan to build an elaborate missile defense system. Military experts in both countries predict that Israel’s U.S.-financed Arrow missiles could play a major role in the worldwide network Bush envisions, including the defense of U.S. troops if they should be deployed in the Mediterranean area. Arrow missiles, so the thinking goes, could be coupled with the U.S. Aegis missile-tracking system and used aboard U.S. naval ships operating out of Israeli ports to counter any new weapons that either Iran or Iraq might employ.

 

A Quick Response

Israel was quick to take advantage of the Bush administration’s decision to back off from the Middle East peace process. While Sharon was still in Washington the Israeli government announced plans to build 3,000 more homes on Abu Ghneim, a site near Jerusalem that Israel annexed in 1967 and that Israelis call Har Homa. Israel also began construction of a new 6,000-unit settlement south of Jerusalem intended to house religious Jews. A State Department spokesman commented only that such construction did not “contribute to peace or stability.”

Bush administration officials so far appear to accept Sharon’s claim that the Palestinians are responsible for the current violence. A Jewish leader who met with Powell just before Sharon’s visit reported that “the secretary of state showed great understanding of the situation in Israel and placed the onus on the Palestinian Authority to stop the violence.” In Israel’s lexicon, “violence” is what Palestinians perpetrate—whether the offender is a small boy throwing stones at helmeted soldiers or a suicide bomber. To Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, violence is an ever-present fact of life, with daily humiliations, stifling restrictions, round-the-clock curfews, random beatings, and the constant danger of arbitrary arrest and torture. Violence to Palestinians means seeing their homes demolished and hundred-year old fruit trees destroyed. The new intifada erupted because the peace talks that began in 1993 failed to end such Israeli violence.

Israel’s increasing use of military force and collective punishment in response to what began as protests against Sharon’s armed intrusion onto the Haram al-Sharif has only fueled Palestinian frustration and anger. As Sharon was enjoying his warm welcome in Washington, most of the Palestinian population was imprisoned behind trenches and cement barriers. Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships were battering cities, towns, and refugee camps with sustained shelling. By the end of March, 63 Israelis and more than 400 Palestinians had been killed, and 12,000 Palestinians wounded, including some 2,000 children. Nearly a thousand homes had been damaged by Israeli shelling. With ambulances not allowed to pass, severely ill people had to be carried over rocky paths to reach help, and several died on the way. The health crisis became even worse in late March, when Israel ordered International Red Cross trucks bringing medical supplies from Jordan to unload at the border and transfer their supplies to Israeli trucks. Although the time-consuming process will cost the IRC tens of thousands of dollars, an Israeli official claimed it was necessary to prevent the smuggling of arms from Jordan.

Israel justifies the use of collective punishment as necessary for its own security but, as Knesset member Naomi Chazan has pointed out, the punishment of innocent people only leads to more violence. “For every terrorist caught, 10 are bred in the morass of hunger, anger and frustration evoked by these persistent restrictions,” she wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

Even nonviolent protest is harshly suppressed by the army. Two days before Sharon’s visit to Washington a peaceful march by women artists and writers to the checkpoint at Qalandia ended when Israeli police attacked the marchers with tear gas and stun grenades, wounding several of the marchers, including educator and former peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi. A week later, thousands of Palestinians, including doctors, nurses, women’s groups, teachers, Israeli peace activists, and Arab members of the Knesset, held a series of peaceful marches throughout Gaza and the West Bank. In every case the clearly unarmed participants were attacked by soldiers firing sound bombs, tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets.

After Sharon returned home claiming he had a green light from the United States to “contain” Palestinian violence, his hard-line government announced that it was abandoning its “policy of restraint.” The result, according to Dr. Ashrawi, was that Israel “escalated beyond all sanity.”

After two suicide bombings in Israel during the last week of March, for which radical Islamic groups claimed credit, and the killing of a settler’s baby in Hebron, Israel’s retaliation was swift and massive. While Israeli tanks shelled Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron and nearby villages, Israeli helicopter gunships bombarded the headquarters of Palestinian security forces in Gaza and Ramallah. The first raids left several buildings in flames, damaged Arafat’s home in Gaza, and killed three people. At least 65 were wounded. Two weeks later a second attack on Palestinian offices and police headquarters in Gaza and the West Bank wounded at least 70 people, and Sharon vowed such attacks would continue. Meanwhile Israeli commandos assassinated a suspected member of the Islamic Jihad and abducted several Fatah officials from Palestinian-controlled territory. The army is said to have targeted as many as a hundred high-ranking Palestinian officials for assassination.

Right-wing Israelis who continue to cry for even more blood are finding ample support within the government. Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman has talked of bombing Iran, Egypt and Lebanon. Minister of Antiquities Rehavem Ze’evi openly supports the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Education Minister Limor Livnat has called for the assassination of Yasser Arafat. Minister of Public Security Uzi Landau refers to all Palestinians as “terrorists,” and as one of his first official acts allowed celebrations to be held in memory of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who in 1994 shot to death 29 Palestinians as they knelt in prayer at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Since Sharon took office the heavily armed settlers in Hebron who regard Goldstein as a hero have rampaged at will through Palestinian neighborhoods, firing guns and wrecking cars and shops.

Sharon no longer talks openly of expelling the Palestinians, but he may intend to accomplish the same goal by keeping them penned inside their towns and villages, unable to go to work or till their land. Unless the siege is lifted many Palestinians will be forced either to starve or go elsewhere, if they can.

Palestinian leaders have pleaded for international protection, but because of Israel’s opposition to any outside interference the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution, supported by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, to send a U.N. observer force to the occupied territories. The Bush administration apparently believes the world’s fifth most heavily armed nation is under siege from the defenseless population it holds captive, since a spokeswoman explained that the resolution failed to address Israel’s need for protection or call on the Palestinians to end the violence. The veto was the sixth the United States has used since 1990 to kill U.N. resolutions aimed at Israel.

In the absence of outside observers, Palestinians can only hope that an international fact-finding committee, appointed by Bill Clinton and headed by former Sen. George Mitchell, will effectively expose Israel’s own excessive violence. Palestinian leaders, including Hanan Ashrawi and Minister of Information Abed Rabbo, testified before the committee in Ramallah on March 23 along with the mothers of children who had been killed by Israeli forces and several residents of Hebron. Abed Rabbo listed Israel’s numerous violations of the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements, and several witnesses testified to Israel’s human rights violations.

The report, which is scheduled to appear in June, will sink like a stone if Israeli propaganda experts and their American colleagues have their way. Sharon immediately reacted to the committee’s visit by declaring that “No one has the right, no one, to put Israel on trial before the world. On the contrary,” he said, “Israel may have the right to put others on trial.” Israeli leaders are keeping up a steady drumbeat of charges that Arafat and his security forces are entirely to blame for the ongoing violence, and Bush, while urging Israel to curb its responses, has pointedly refused to invite Arafat to the White House.

Bush said he will work instead through the Egyptians, the Saudis, and the Jordanians “to lay the foundations of peace.” He may have trouble convincing even moderate Arab leaders, however, to cooperate with an administration that gives wholehearted support to an Israeli government headed by a man Arabs regard as a war criminal, and ignores Israel’s violations of U.N. resolutions while continuing to punish Iraq.

Demonizing Arafat and destroying the central Palestinian authority, which Sharon seems bent on doing, could have disastrous consequences for both Israel and the Palestinians by leaving a vacuum in which factional rivalries would be certain to emerge, and extremism flourish. Arafat’s leadership has been tainted by corruption and ineptness, but he was able to unite the Palestinian people behind him as long as there was a chance of a just peace. It was only when Israel refused to comply with its agreements and insisted that the Palestinians give up even more than the 22 percent of the original Palestine they were willing to settle for that the Palestinians turned to protest. They are asking for no more than their rights under international law, Israel’s compliance with past agreements, return of the West Bank and Gaza, and the end of an illegal occupation.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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