Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2002, page 6

Special Report

 

The Palestinians Face a Critical Period As Sharon’s Provocations Increase

 

By Rachelle Marshall

The munitions boat of Arafat has become an ammunition boat for Sharon. He wants to do away with the Oslo peace agreement… He does not want to go to talks. And Sharon will demonize Arafat in the eyes of Israelis and of the world.

—Yaron Ezrahi, political scientist at Hebrew University, New York Times, Jan. 10.

I heard the bulldozers and tanks, and we ran away into the night. My father held me and we were crying.

—Maryam Ghneim, age 8, on Jan. 10, just after Israeli bulldozers demolished her family’s home in Rafah refugee camp. 

As the year 2002 began, the Palestinians’ struggle to be free of Israeli occupation faced daunting obstacles. Their leader Yasser Arafat was under house arrest, the Bush administration was calling for his diplomatic isolation, Palestinian officials were caught trying to smuggle 50 tons of weapons into Gaza, and the Palestinian people remained under siege.

Israel responded to the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 by attempting to make life unendurable for every Palestinian. An Israeli army that had been specially trained to combat a Palestinian uprising retaliated against gunmen and suicide bombers with jet bombers, helicopter gunships, tanks and bulldozers. Palestinian homes, crops, orchards, and schools were destroyed in the onslaught along with offices of the Palestinian Authority. By the end of last December, nearly a thousand Palestinians had been killed. In early January, Israel retaliated for the killing of four Israeli soldiers by demolishing over 70 homes in the Rafah refugee camp, leaving hundreds of people homeless. A columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz called it “an act of undisguised ruthlessness.” In the days following Israel shelled Rafah repeatedly, injuring several women and children, and bombed the Gaza seaport.

Meanwhile Palestinians were locked for a second year inside their villages and towns by Israeli tanks and cement barriers, their movements subject to the whims of soldiers guarding the checkpoints. Under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s effort to subdue the Palestinians was relentless. Even when militants agreed to hold their fire the Israelis provoked renewed violence by assassinating their leaders, launching raids on Palestinian towns and refugee camps, levelling homes and conducting arrests.

By year’s end most Palestinians were sick of violence and it had become clear to many that the militants were playing into Sharon’s hands. Palestinian officials charged that Sharon was deliberately crippling Palestinian security forces to prevent them from clamping down on violent groups and thus eliminating his excuse to avoid peace talks. Nevertheless, with the short memory commonly applied to the Middle East, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians, and especially Arafat, for the ongoing violence. Ignoring the suffering Palestinians had endured under an illegal occupation for 35 years, U.S. officials demanded that Arafat stop the violence so that peace talks could resume. They put no comparable pressure on Sharon.

Yet it was Sharon who repeatedly set conditions and obstacles designed to prevent peace talks from taking place. At the same time, he sought to marginalize Arafat as a negotiating partner and undermine the Palestinian National Authority. The prime minister and his colleagues portrayed Arafat simultaneously as both “irrelevant” and as a terrorist with the power to stop or start violence at will. According to Israeli sources quoted in the December issue of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin, Sharon regards Arafat “as a murderer with whom negotiations should never be conducted,” and the Oslo accords as “the biggest disaster to befall Israel.” The army’s bombing of Arafat’s offices in Gaza, and the systematic destruction of the Gaza airport, Palestinian security and police posts, the studios of the Palestinian Broadcasting Authority, and even of Arafat’s three aging helicopters, were aimed at eliminating all symbols of Palestinian sovereignty and cutting the ground out from under the leadership.

Sharon was also determined to erase Palestinian claims from the international agenda. Secretary of State Colin Powell came to Sharon’s assistance in mid-December by asking European leaders to stop inviting Arafat to visit their capitals and refuse invitations to visit him in Ramallah. “He’s got to know he doesn’t have international support,” a senior Bush administration official said. Arafat could not have accepted invitations in any case, since the Israelis had confined him to his headquarters in Ramallah at the beginning of December and refused to release him until he arrested the killers of Israel’s former minister of tourism Rehavam Ze’evi and turned them over to Israel.

The fact that it made no sense to make such a demand on a prisoner whose security forces were under constant attack by Israel, was not lost on the Europeans. On Dec. 13 the European Union unanimously declared that “The E.U. does not accept attempts to weaken or discredit Mr. Arafat.” And one European diplomat expressed bafflement at the American position, saying, “We believe that the more the Israeli side tries to weaken Arafat, the less he will be able to answer the demands we have collectively asked of him and the more the cycle of violence will continue.”

On Dec. 16 Arafat called unequivocally for an end to all Palestinian attacks on Israel, and this time even militant groups acquiesced. After three weeks the Israelis admitted there had been a sharp drop in Palestinian violence but took no reciprocal action. On the contrary, Arafat’s plea was followed by almost daily Israeli raids into Palestinian territory. During the last three weeks of December and the first week in January, Israeli forces killed 24 Palestinians, including several teenagers and small children. American officials were noticeably silent on Israel’s actions, even when Israeli helicopter missiles dismembered two boys, one 2-years old and the other 13, in a failed assassination attempt near Hebron on Dec. 10.

The lull in Palestinian violence convinced Powell to send U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni back to the Middle East in early January to arrange a ceasefire, but the mission was derailed at the start. Just after Zinni arrived the Israelis announced they had captured a ship in the Red Sea, the Karin A, that was carrying munitions originating in Iran and intended for the Palestinians. For Sharon, eager to convince George Bush that Arafat was another Osama bin Laden, discovery of the arms shipment was a bonanza. On Jan. 6 he and his top military officials escorted a busload of journalists and foreign diplomats to the port of Eilat, where they exhibited an arsenal of grenades, mortar launchers, Katyusha rockets, and other heavy weapons, all clearly labeled in English for the benefit of reporters. Standing on the dock, Sharon declared Arafat “a bitter enemy of Israel.” In Washington Bush dutifully agreed that the arms seized were intended “to promote terror.”

Arafat vigorously denied any personal knowledge of the shipment and offered to cooperate in an investigation of the operation. He claimed it wasn’t necessary to engage in an elaborate subterfuge to obtain weapons, since “it would be easier and cheaper” to buy them from Israeli soldiers. Nevertheless, a few days later his security forces arrested two Palestinian officials, Adel al-Mughrabi and Fuad Shobaki, who allegedly initiated the arms purchase. Powell refused to accept Arafat’s disavowal of personal involvement, and several U.S.Congressmen visiting Israel said they had seen convincing evidence that Arafat was personally involved.

Considering the unlimited ingenuity of Israeli intelligence forces, there may be more to the story of the Karin A than we know now. Meanwhile it is hard to believe that the Palestinian Authority, with its leader under house arrest and many of its administrative offices in ruins, expected to land 50 tons of heavy weapons on a Gaza coastline heavily guarded by Israeli soldiers, then transport them along roads even more heavily guarded by soldiers. At a press conference on Jan. 8 the ship’s captain even expressed surprise that he was not intercepted earlier by Egyptians, Israelis or Americans. Israeli intelligence officials said they had tracked the operation since October 2000, when Mughrabi began seeking weapons from Iran.

Although some Israelis recalled that Jews had smuggled arms into Palestine in preparation for becoming a state, discovery of the Karin A and its lethal cargo undoubtedly set back the peace process, perhaps for years to come. On the other hand, there is no chance the two sides could forge an agreement as long as Sharon remains in power with a government dead set against reconciliation.

When Sari Nusseibeh, the Oxford-educated president of Al-Quds University and the Palestinians’ political representative in Jerusalem, tried to hold a reception for foreign diplomats on Dec. 17 to celebrate the end of Ramadan, Israeli police broke up the party claiming it was “terrorist-related activity,” and arrested the host. Nusseibeh is known to be a moderate and a critic of the intifada, but this makes no difference to hardline Israeli officials. “If he is a moderate he is also dangerous,” parliamentary leader Ze’ev Boim said after Nusseibeh’s arrest.

The following week another prominent Palestinian was treated more brutally. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a distinguished physician and human rights advocate, was a visiting Fellow at the Stanford Business School in the mid-1990s and returned to head Palestinian Medical Relief Services. He was giving a press conference at the American Colony Hotel on Jan. 2 when he was seized by Israeli police and charged with “illegal presence in Jerusalem.” After interrogating him for four hours, police drove him to the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, where border guards beat him, smashed his glasses, and arrested him again, this time for “disrupting traffic.” Dr. Barghouti was eventually released with a broken knee.

The treatment of Dr. Barghouti was cited by Israeli and Palestinian peace activists as an example of the brutality ordinary Palestinians face at check points every day. After his arrest, the International Solidarity Movement, which sponsors peaceful demonstrations at checkpoints in which hundreds of foreigners and Palestinians have taken part, again urged that a United Nations monitoring group be sent to protect Palestinians. The United States vetoed such a resolution when it came before the Security Council on Dec. 15.

Sharon’s opposition to any sort of reconciliation with the Palestinians is so extreme that he was even willing to offend Israel’s president, Moshe Katsav. Katsav accepted an invitation by Arab Knesset member Abdel Wahab Darawsheh to address the Palestinian legislature in late December, only to be forbidden to go by Sharon, who dismissed the invitation as a public relations ploy by Arafat. Katsav’s office called Sharon’s reaction “both unseemly and inappropriate.”

Despite Sharon’s rejection, the joint effort by Darawsheh and Katsav was reassuring evidence that support does exist on both sides for an eventual peace settlement once Sharon is gone from the scene. An even more encouraging sign was a statement drawn up in late December by Sari Nusseibeh and Meretz party member Yossi Sarid, and signed by dozens of prominent Israelis and Palestinians, that called for a Palestinian state next to Israel “along the 1967 boundaries,” “removal of the settlements,” a shared Jerusalem, and “a just and equitable solution to the problem of the refugees.”

The framework contained in the statement was almost identical to proposals that moderate Israelis and Palestinians have been making since the mid-1970s, and that Arafat and the PLO have long accepted. Such a solution remains a distant hope because neither the United States nor the international community has been willing to pressure Israel to accept a peace agreement that is just to both sides. Another problem for peacemakers is that the nature of Israeli electoral politics gives rightwing religious parties undue influence over whatever Israeli government is in power. In the Sharon government, the prime minister and these parties support and reinforce one another. Israeli novelist David Grossman recognized that fact when he signed the agreement drawn up by Nusseibeh and Sarid, saying “we have been taken over by extremists and we shall not collaborate with them.”

Peacemakers still exist on both sides, and if Bush hopes to end the violence between Israel and the Palestinians he should listen to their voices instead of giving Sharon a free hand to wreak havoc on the Palestinian people. On Jan. 10, the day after Israel laid waste to an entire neighborhood in Gaza, it was Arafat, not Sharon, that Bush called on to “renounce terror.” But in waging his war on terrorism Bush needs to recognize that terror comes in different forms, and that a child who is snatched out of bed and into the pouring rain at 1:30 in the morning as bulldozers demolish her home, or a teenager whose spine is shattered by a tank shell, or a woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby because she is stopped at a checkpoint, knows terror as well as any victim of al-Qaeda. No matter how victorious the U. S. military is in Afghanistan, as long as Americans continue to support Israel’s unjust occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and help finance and arm Israel in its efforts to maintain it, we will continue to feed the alienation and resentment that give birth to terrorism.

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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