Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2001, page 6

Special Report

 

Sharon’s Bottom Line Is Still a Greater Israel

 

By Rachelle Marshall

Just as Ariel Sharon’s armed intrusion onto Haram Al-Sharif last September was the spark that set off the second intifada, the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that caused the death of 21 Israeli teenagers on June 1 marked the beginning of its end. As the world reacted in horror, Israel once again took on the role of beleaguered victim and the United States offered its full sympathy. Pressure from the Bush administration and threats of massive retaliation by Sharon left Yasser Arafat with no choice but to agree to a cease-fire.

It was in fact a demand for the Palestinians’ surrender. Under terms brokered by CIA director George Tenet, Palestinians were to stop all violence and take steps to prevent terrorist attacks, and in return the Israelis were to begin easing restrictions on Palestinian communities and withdraw their troops to the positions they held before Sept. 28. But the agreement did not call for a freeze on Israeli settlements or for international monitors, as the Palestinians had requested, and it was left up to the Israelis to judge Palestinian compliance with the cease-fire and determine when negotiations would resume. The cease-fire agreement in fact required only minimal concessions from Israel and provided no way of forcing Israel to carry them out. As one Palestinian official, Abdullah Hourani, said, “The whole agreement stresses Israel’s security needs. It has nothing in the way of political achievements.”

The results were predictable. Sharon immediately said that even stone-throwing would be a violation of the cease-fire and warned that the army would respond with live bullets. He also ordered Arafat to arrest all suspected militants regardless of whether there was any evidence against them, saying that otherwise Israel would act on its own. An Israeli death squad carried out Sharon’s threat in late June by blowing up a phone booth in Nablus while Osama Jawabri, a member of the Aksa Martyrs, was inside.

While Arafat’s security forces succeeded in reducing, though not eliminating, attacks from Palestinian areas on Israeli settlements, there was no equivalent response from the Israelis. The army continued to demolish homes and orchards, and the concrete barriers and road blocks that had turned the occupied territories into a giant prison remained in place.

Despite the cease-fire, settlers were allowed to rampage freely through Palestinian villages, smashing windows and setting fire to crops and fruit trees. The expansion of settlements both officially and unofficially continued. During the first two weeks of the cease-fire, Israelis established 15 new settlements on land seized from Palestinian farmers. On June 25, one day before Sharon was to meet with Bush, his government announced plans to build additional housing at Ma’ale Adumin, the largest West Bank settlement.

Sharon’s intentions became clear once and for all after his meeting with President Bush on June 26, when he rejected Bush’s plea that Israel recognize that “progress is being made” and take steps leading to negotiations with the Palestinians. Sharon’s response, that first there had to be an end to all Palestinian violence, indicated that he was giving up even the pretense of seeking an agreement with the Palestinians and is as determined as ever to incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into a Greater Israel.

This wasn’t surprising. When Sharon became minister of agriculture in 1977 he set out to to eliminate any possibility of a Palestinian state on contiguous territory, and he has never renounced that goal. As a cabinet member in the 1970s he oversaw construction of 64 settlements and designed the elaborate highway system that today bypasses Palestinian cities and connects the settlements with Jerusalem.

In 1993 Sharon strenuously opposed the Oslo agreements, and he has now succeeded in nullifying it. While at the White House Sharon showed Bush a map of what his government would accept in a future peace settlement. The Palestinians would have a small “state” on the West Bank, with limited powers, surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory. It is a plan no current Palestinian leader could accept. This may be why Sharon is making a persistent effort to undermine and possibly destroy the Palestinian leadership. Sharon called Arafat “a murderer and pathological liar” on Israeli television, and refers to him as “our Osama bin Laden.” Israel’s defense minister, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, said Arafat “had completed his role in history.” According to a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, the goal of these verbal assaults “is to prepare public opinion in Israel and around the world for a large-scale military operation that will topple the Palestinian Authority and lead to Arafat’s expulsion.”

For the time being at least, Sharon’s insistance that Israel will not meet with the Palestinians or take any confidence-building measures until there is zero violence have effectively killed any chance of reviving peace negotiations. With the entire population suffering under an Israeli stranglehold, the Palestinians could not possibly meet Sharon’s demands. Even as Sharon was being welcomed in Washington, Israeli checkpoint guards were stopping trucks carrying food and water, forcing villagers to carry their contents by hand over steep, rocky paths. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, soldiers frequently harass the drivers and in some cases even smash their water tanks and empty the water into the dirt. Such pointless punishment fuels the feelings of rage and frustration that sooner or later erupt in violence. As the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, pointed out, “The cease-fire cannot continue with people who are hungry and who wake up to see Israeli tanks in front of them and who are then told not to respond.”

Under Sharon’s terms, the cease-fire allows the Israelis to hold three million Palestinians hostage until some desperate individual with a bomb strapped to his body provides the government with an excuse to unleash the Israeli military without provoking international disapproval.

Sharon’s refusal of Bush’s request to ease restrictions on the Palestinians had no noticeable effect on U.S. support. At a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in late June, Brent Scowcroft, former President Bush’s national security adviser and mentor to Condoleezza Rice, who now holds that job, said the United States must change the perception of Arab leaders that the United States is too lenient toward Israel.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s trip to the Middle East, just after Sharon’s visit to Washington, was not likely to do so. After meeting with Sharon and Arafat, Powell appeared to back Arafat’s call for international monitoring of the cease-fire, then backtracked by saying both sides had to agree on who would do the monitoring and under what circumstances. Sharon has strenuously opposed foreign monitors, and earlier this year the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution to send in a U.N. observer force. Powell also recommended a new timetable in which both sides would prevent violence for seven days, then enter a “cooling-off period” followed by confidence-building measures. Powell left it up to Sharon to decide when the violence had subsided, so Israel will continue to have the last word.

Within days of Powell’s visit the Israelis made a final mockery of the cease-fire with the murder of five Palestinians the army claimed were militants. Two of the victims were shot to death and three were killed when an Apache helicopter gunship fired rockets on their car near the town of Kabatiya.

American Jewish leaders have been surprised as well as pleased with Bush’s evident support for Israel. The heads of major Jewish organizations who attended a “working dinner” at the White House on May 31 were quoted in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin as calling it a “magical” and “extraordinary” event. Also at the dinner were Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Israeli President Moshe Katsav. Instead of the formal reception they expected, the guests were invited to express their views at length on key Israeli issues and Bush responded sympathetically. The Jewish leaders said the president was receptive to adding Palestinian militias to the list of terrorist organizations and to offering rewards for the capture of Palestinians responsible for the killing of Americans in Israel. (Israelis who harm Americans apparently have nothing to fear. An article in the June-July issue of The Link by Jerri Bird, co-founder of Partners for Peace and wife of a retired American diplomat, vividly describes the suffering of Arab-Americans who have endured long periods of torture in Israeli prisons but received little or no help from the United States.)

The president had apparently boned up before the dinner. “He led the conversation,” said Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “He had a very hands-on knowledge of the area, its problems and challenges. This administration has said time and time again that Israel is a friend and ally.”

Jack Rosen of the American Jewish Congress was even more enthusiastic. “I walked away from that evening feeling this is a president who knows right from wrong and good guys from bad guys.”

The Jewish leaders received more tangible evidence of U.S. backing on June 19, when the Israeli air force ordered 50 more F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, to be paid for largely by $2 billion in American aid. Israel used F-16s to bomb Palestinian targets in May and has threatened to do so again to combat “terrorism.” Since last October Israel has used an array of other American-made weapons as well, including Apache attack helicopters, TOW rockets and air-to-ground missiles, grenade launchers, high velocity bullets, and anti-personnel bombs. The United States also supplies the armored bulldozers Israelis use to destroy Palestinian homes and crops. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which provides that weapons exported abroad may be used only in self-defense and not against civilians, has never been applied to Israel.

The massive firepower the Israeli military has used against a civilian population gives a surreal quality to Israel’s insistence that Palestinians “stop the violence.” A more realistic approach was taken by U.S. bishops and other senior church leaders when they met with Powell in early June. The delegation presented a letter to Powell that condemned “Israel’s practice of assassination and economic strangulation of the fledgling Palestinian state” and deplored “the destructive impact of Israel’s settlement policy and use of heavy weapons against civilians.” (See “Christianity and the Middle East, p. 66.)

Episcopal Bishop Frank T. Griswold, the church officials’ spokesman at the meeting, said afterwards that although Powell had listened sympathetically, his response was to urge the churches “to invite all people to commit themselves to nonviolence.” The message will seem ironic to the many Palestinian and Israelis whose nonviolent protests go largely unreported. On June 15, more than 200 people, led by a team of Christian Peacemakers and Israeli Rabbis for Peace, tried to hold a nonviolent witness at Al Khader village, where settlers from Efrat had seized land to start a new settlement. After being told to leave the scene the villagers and protesters began walking away. Nevertheless, soldiers and police charged the group, swinging clubs and fists. A Christian Peacemaker was beaten as she tried to help two Palestinian women who were being kicked and punched, and an Israeli woman suffered a broken arm when a policeman twisted it as he dragged her away. The participants ended up spending several hours in jail.

Calls by Israeli and American officials for Palestinians to “stop the violence” will not end the continuing crisis. Nor will “cooling-off periods.” At the heart of the conflict is Israel’s occupation of another people’s land. If President Bush has any desire to see peace come to the Middle East he must first recognize that the occupation itself is an act of violence, perhaps the most terrible of all, then use all the pressure at his command to force Israel to end it. Up to now Israel has been able to remain intransigent, counting on American economic and military aid and unwavering U.S. support in the U.N. Security Council.The coming months will determine whether Palestinians can achieve their freedom or must continue to live as a subjugated colony. Bush, still in his first year in office, is free to change the course of U.S. Middle East policy. He had the courage to publicly disagree with Ariel Sharon and, with the powerful influence at his command, now has the opportunity to secure justice for the Palestinians. In doing so he would help clear America’s conscience of its continued complicity in Israel’s crimes.

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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