Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2001, page 9

Special Report

 

Sharon Dooms Israel—and Perhaps the United States—to Endless War

 

By Rachelle Marshall

“We, as Arabs, condemn what happened to the Jews and would stand with the Jewish people to prevent it from happening again. Yet we want to prevent it not only from happening to them, but from happening to anybody.”

—Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, speaking at the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, Sept. 2.

“The strike is painful, but it may push the American people to ask, ‘Why are the terrorists targeting us?’”

—Faisal Salman, in Al Safir, Sept. 13.

As children all over the world began a new school year this September, two pictures in The New York Times illustrated far better than words the current nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One showed Israeli children riding to school in an armored truck escorted by Israeli soldiers. The other showed Palestinian girls dressed in school uniforms being confronted by an Israeli soldier holding a machine gun. In this picture the Israeli soldier was not protecting the children but stopping them from entering their school. It was one of 24 schools in Hebron closed by the Israeli army because they were close to Israeli settlements or army outposts and therefore regarded as security threats.

The two contrasting but equally sad situations reflect the fact that Israelis now live in constant fear of suicide bombings, while Palestinians are forced to endure the very conditions that breed violence—restrictions on their every movement, impoverishment, house demolitions, and almost nightly aerial bombardment. Even where children are allowed to attend school they face formidable obstacles, according to a Sept. 1 report by the Palestinian Ministry of Education. Like students at West Bank universities, either they are delayed for hours at army checkpoints or, where roads are blocked by trenches and cement barriers, they must climb over mountains of dirt and rocks to get to class. More than two thousand children injured by Israeli gunfire must grapple with crutches or wheelchairs as well. At least 95 schools have been severely damaged by shell fire. In many areas school principals often have to transport books and supplies on donkeys or horses. One of the most serious blows to the school system is Israel’s continued refusal to turn over the $65 million in tax revenues it owes to the Palestinian Authority, money that is needed to pay teachers.

Education Minister Abu El-Humos has called on the Israelis to end the rocketing and other heavy artillery fire that terrifies, injures, and kills children, and to restore Palestinian revenues, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has no intention of doing either. Sharon has made it unmistakeably clear that his object is to nullify the Oslo agreements and undo any gains made by the Palestinians since the accords were signed. In an interview with The New York Times on Sept. 7 Sharon outlined peace terms that call for the Palestinians’ unconditional surrender. “Oslo failed,” he said, and declared that once a truce is reached, the two sides will have to work out a whole new set of guidelines.

Meanwhile he has ordered that any talks between Yasser Arafat and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres must be limited to arranging a cease-fire. Referring to the Palestinian Authority as “a kingdom of terror,” Sharon said Israel would not lift the siege on the Palestinians until there was a total absence of violence for seven days, followed by a six-week “cooling-off period,” and then a series of confidence-building measures. These would include the total disarming of Palestinians, but the expansion of Israeli settlements would continue. “There are soldiers coming back from the army,” he said. “They want to get married. What are they going to do? They have to get a formal agreement from Arafat?”

When he was reminded of a statement by special U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen that Israel’s blockade was having a “devastating” effect on the Palestinian economy, leaving more than 300,000 workers unemployed and 2 million people without an income, Sharon was unmoved. “Once we open the siege we immediately have casualties,” he said, forgetting that Israel has continued to have casualties despite the siege. The futility of Sharon’s unbending harshness was made evident only a day later, when a middle-aged Israeli Palestinian from the Galilee set off a bomb in the town of Nahariya, killing himself and three others and wounding scores of Jews and Arabs. As usual, Israel responded with heavy missile attacks on the West Bank and Gaza, killing five Palestinians.

Although Sharon’s intransigence is prolonging the conflict, he faces no significant pressure to change course. The Labor Party is still hopelessly divided after the defeat of Ehud Barak last February, so much so that in early September when Avraham Burg, the moderate speaker of the Knesset, narrowly defeated Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Sharon’s hawkish defense minister, for party chairman, Ben-Eliezer charged fraud and challenged the election. The outcome has not yet been determined. The Israeli peace movement has no significant representation in the Knesset.

Sharon’s main advantage is that until very recently he enjoyed the obvious support of the Bush administration. The U.S. Arms Export Control Act allows countries to use weapons obtained from the United States only in self-defense. When State Department lawyers were challenged to justify Israel’s use of American-made aircraft and other weapons to assassinate Palestinian militants, shoot stone throwers, and bomb civilian cities, however, they claimed the act is “sufficiently ambiguous” to make it impossible to ban arms shipments to Israel. Sharon’s spokesman Raanan Gissin said Israel had not received a single complaint from Washington about the use of American weapons.

After Israeli helicopters fired missiles into an apartment house in Ramallah on Aug. 27, and killed PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa while he was sitting at his desk, a State Department spokesman criticized Israel for inflaming the conflict. Nevertheless, on the same day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and other senior U.S. officials met for four hours with top Israeli military officers and diplomats to discuss ways Washington could help enhance Israel’s security situation in the region. “Israel knows that the State Department has to say certain things in public,” one military analyst said, “but in a face-to-face dialogue there is a recognition of whose side the U.S. is on.”

During his vacation in Texas last summer, Bush gratuitously offended the Palestinians by saying, “I doubt that Arafat wants to conduct honest negotiations with Israel that will lead to implementation of [former Sen. George] Mitchell’s recommendations.” He called on Arafat to “prove that he really wants to conduct peace talks to end the cycle of violence.”

Arafat responded by again urging Bush to support sending observers to monitor a ceasefire, as the Mitchell commission recommended, and reminded him that only the United States and Israel are opposed to such monitors. Arafat might also have reminded Bush that it is Sharon, not the Palestinians, who is refusing to resume peace talks. Palestinian Minister of Planning Nabil Shaath said Bush’s statement “had given the green light to Israel to continue killing the Palestinian people.”

 

The Durban Walk-Out

The Bush administration’s most conspicuous gift to Israel was its decision on Sept. 3 to walk out of the U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, making the United States the only country besides Israel to leave the conference. Washington’s decision to abandon Durban and stand alone with Israel against most of the rest of the world not only undermined America’s claim to be a champion of freedom and human rights but placed the United States in the position of defending the indefensible. As Israel escalates its attacks with the systematic destruction of refugee camps, the murder of Palestinian activists and the use of helicopters, fighter bombers, and tanks against a civilian population, U.S. support for Israel becomes harder and harder to justify. The catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 suggest that it has also become more dangerous.

No one doubted there was a connection between these attacks and Washington’s all-out support for Israel, along with its punishing sanctions against Libya, Iran and Iraq. Israeli leaders said as much, and all but expressed their satisfaction. “It’s very good,” former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said immediately after the horrendous event, then thought twice and said, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”

Sharon called attention to “our common values” and stressed along with many other Israelis that the United States and Israel shared a common plight. In fact, their two situations were hardly similar. As of mid-September, 172 Israelis had been killed in the previous 12 months. In New York and Washington some 7,000 died in a single day.

Nevertheless Sharon insisted there was no difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden and abruptly cancelled talks between Arafat and Peres that had been scheduled for Sept. 16. Just as Bush was attempting to enlist Arab states in a coalition to fight terrorism, Sharon made his job harder by launching a devastating offensive against Palestinian-held territory. Israeli tanks, helicopters and ground troops shot their way into Jericho, Jenin and Ramallah, shelling houses and destroying offices in a series of rampages that left 20 Palestinians dead and many wounded by shrapnel. Many Palestinians expressed fear that with the world’s attention focused on America, Israel would repeat such assaults.

Except for a few young Palestinians who cheered (and received wide publicity), most Palestinians strongly deplored the killing of innocent people. But some Palestinians fear that Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian activists, combined with the grinding misery of the entire population, is encouraging increasing militancy among Palestinians.

Whether or not Sharon is deliberately inciting Palestinian violence, it is clear he is putting Israeli security at serious risk—not from the Palestinians, but from his own misguided policies. Sharon and his cabinet are seriously contemplating the creation of a buffer zone along the Green Line up to a mile in depth, in order to keep out Palestinians. According to retired Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, it would be “creating an illusion” to think this would keep suicide bombers or terrorist cells from trying to get into Israel, but Palestinians say the army is already digging trenches and building fences around Jerusalem. The buffer zone would completely isolate Palestinian areas from Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, and residents of villages inside the zone would be placed under nightly curfew.

Palestinians charge that the plan violates signed agreements and would further consolidate an apartheid system. But some Israelis are pointing out that the buffer zone would restrict Israeli movement as well, and that once again Jews would be living in a walled ghetto, this time one of their own making. In 1967 and again in 1993 Israelis had a chance to make peace with the Palestinians and with their Arab neighbors by withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza, but lacked the wisdom and foresight to do it. As a result Israel again finds itself surrounded by enemies, dependent on leaders whose chief skill is exercising military force. Israelis will soon have to ask themselves whether their insistence on occupying another people’s land is worth living under constant fear, facing an endless war that neither side can win. With the Sept. 11 terrorist attack to remind us how closely the fate of the United States is tied to Israel’s, Americans may soon be asking themselves the same question.

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

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