June/July 2002, pages 8-10

Special Report

Bush Gives Up Posing as “Peacemaker” to Emerge as Sharon’s Staunch Ally

By Rachelle Marshall

I am convinced Mr. Sharon is a man of peace.

—George W. Bush, April 18.

It is hard to know whether the best adjective for American policy toward the conflict over the past year is stupid or shameful.

—Anthony Lewis, “Is There a Solution?” New York Review, April 25.

A few weeks before George Bush became the Republican nominee for president, this writer asked Condoleezza Rice, who is now Bush’s national security adviser, what Bush’s position was on the Middle East. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “He’s a fast learner, you’ll see.” Rice was right. But what Bush learned is that no president to date has suffered politically from giving his all-out support to Israel. When it comes to ending the Middle East conflict, however, this is the wrong lesson.

As Israel’s “Operation Defensive Shield” was unleashing a storm of death and destruction on West Bank cities last March and April, television viewers around the world were treated to the image of Bush relaxing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and telling Yasser Arafat to “stop the violence.” Arafat, who had been confined to his headquarters in Ramallah for four weeks, received the message while he was holed up in a room lit only by a single candle, the city around him being shelled by Israeli tanks and gunships, his lights and water cut off, and Israeli bullets battering his walls. The parallel that came to mind was of the siege of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944, but with the beleaguered Polish Jews regarded as terrorists and their Nazi attackers as fighting in “self defense.”

Bush continued his charade as peacemaker for another week by urging Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the West Bank “immediately” and announcing he was sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to broker a cease-fire between the two sides. The meaning of “immediately,” however, turned out to be elastic. Sharon responded to Bush’s message by intensifying the attacks on Palestinian cities and towns while Powell left on a leisurely tour of the Middle East that would not bring him to the scene of the conflict for eight days.

He immediately received a dose of reality by Arab leaders. On his first stop in Morocco, King Mohammad VI told Powell his first stop should have been Jerusalem. In Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where Powell conveyed Bush’s proposal that either Crown Prince Abdullah or King Abdullah of Jordan replace Arafat in negotiations with Israel, the Arab leaders pointed out that only Palestinians could represent the Palestinians. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, angry that Bush was siding with Sharon in equating the Palestinians’ liberation struggle with terrorism, refused to meet with Powell at all.

By the time Powell did arrive in Jerusalem, the West Bank from Bethlehem to Jenin had become what The New York Times called a “landscape of devastation,” as Sharon carried out a promise he made to Israeli settlers a year ago that the army would act “without restriction...beyond any imagination” to crush the Palestinian uprising. The cities of Ramallah, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, and Nablus, as well as Jenin, were under tight siege. In Bethlehem, Israeli troops and tanks surrounded the Church of the Nativity for 39 days in an attempt to starve out more than 200 Palestinians, many of them Christian monks, who had sought sanctuary in the building. Soldiers repeatedly fired into the church compound, a site sacred to Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, and set part of it ablaze.

A week earlier, as Israeli tanks and bulldozers were crushing Palestinian homes and helicopter gunships were spraying fire at anything that moved, Sharon had told Bush over the phone that a pullout could not take place immediately because of Israel’s “policy of preventing harm to civilians.” This whopper encountered no skepticism at the White House. Bush’s National Security Adviser Rice sympathetically agreed that “A military operation of this size cannot be undone in moments.”

But Sharon’s expression of humanitarian concern was belied by gruesome reports from West Bank cities. The exact number of dead and wounded could not be counted because for more than two weeks the Israelis had fired on ambulances to prevent them from reaching the victims. The army refused to let relief convoys bring in food and medicine, and barred entry to rescue teams. Meanwhile the wounded were left to bleed to death in the street, and there were constant reports of people buried alive under the rubble of their homes. In Nablus, where Israeli shelling destroyed much of the old section of the city, 68-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Shobi and his wife, Shamsa, were dug out of the rubble of their home seven days after an Israeli bulldozer had crushed their compound containing three generations of the Shobi family. Eight of their relatives died before the Israelis allowed rescue teams to look for survivors.

The Israelis confiscated the press cards of all but a few reporters to prevent outside observers from learning what was happening. At least 20 journalists came under gunfire, others were chased away by smoke bombs. Mary Robinson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was denied a visa. Enough news did get out to indicate the scale of suffering and destruction. When United Nations special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen surveyed the ruins in Jenin, where the Israelis had turned a large refugee camp into a crater-filled wasteland, he called the scene “horrifying beyond belief.” Amnesty International accused Israel of committing “serious breaches of human rights... including war crimes,” and Human Rights Watch cited “severe violations” of international rules of war.

The reports prompted the U.N. Security Council to order an investigation, but when Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a fact-finding team composed of Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, and Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Red Cross, Israel complained that the team was composed only of “humanitarians.” Annan then appointed Maj. Gen. William Nash to the team but this did not satisfy the Israelis either. After issuing a list of demands, including one that Israeli soldiers be given immunity from war crimes charges, they refused to allow any investigation at all.

Bush, who is seeking to oust Saddam Hussain for refusing to allow U.N. arms inspectors into Iraq, reacted to Sharon’s defiance of the United Nations by assuring him that the United States “will be with you the entire way.” Bush then invited Sharon to visit Washington to discuss a proposed international conference on the Middle East this summer. At their White House meeting on May 7, however, Sharon was again intransigent. He said discussion of Palestinian statehood would be premature, denounced the Palestinian leadership as “a corrupt and terrorist entity,” and insisted he would not meet with Arafat. As if to underscore the futility of his position, two more suicide bombings took place while Sharon was in Washington.

In launching the invasion of the West Bank this spring the Israeli leader claimed its purpose was to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure.” It was clear from the beginning, however, that the army’s true targets were Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. As Israeli troops entered each Palestinian city they ransacked and destroyed government buildings, police headquarters, television stations, electrical grids, water and sewage systems, schools and mosques. The army blew a hole in the offices of the Ministry of Education, smashed furniture and computers, confiscated teachers’ payroll records and even took away students’ school records. In Ramallah they raided an internationally funded learning center and left it in ruins. Everywhere they went, soldiers looted and vandalized homes and businesses, even churches and schools.

By destroying files and data banks that will take years to replace, the Israelis struck at the heart of Palestinian civil society itself, with the obvious intention of creating an anarchic wasteland in which the political voice of the Palestinians is permanently silenced. What Sharon fears most is not Palestinian violence—after all, his policies are specifically designed to provoke it—but being forced to negotiate peace with legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.

On this score he has had nothing to fear from the Bush administration. During Powell’s trip to the Middle East, in fact, a writer for The Economist commented that the secretary’s “leisurely itinerary was widely seen as giving Israel a chance to complete its offensive.” When Powell met first with Sharon, then with Arafat, without any talk of a political solution, it became apparent that his only mandate was to hammer again at Arafat to stop the violence. Former peace negotiator Ghassan Abdullah said, “Powell and Bush promised to stop the war and now they are eating their words and preaching to us. They are ignoring the occupation completely.”

The outcome of Powell’s mission was a victory for administration hawks such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had seen to it that the secretary of state did not have a free hand in the Middle East. They won an even greater victory just after Powell’s return, when Bush dropped all pretense of impartiality and declared Sharon to be “a man of peace.” Bush’s statement, made as Palestinians were burying their dead, and the entire West Bank was under siege, would seem mind-boggling to anyone not familiar with American politics. But three days earlier, on April 15, tens of thousands of pro-Israel demonstrators had rallied in Washington to hear former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Elie Wiesel, and several members of Congress demand that Bush allow Sharon to complete his mission. “If Bush doesn’t get the message we will have lost a great opportunity,” said Morton Klein of the ultranationalist Zionist Organization of America. Bush obviously did get the message, especially after Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s most ardent supporter of Israel, was booed at the rally for mentioning the suffering of innocent Palestinians.

The White House received a contrary but more tactfully delivered message from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who traveled to Bush’s ranch on April 27 to warn him that Arab leaders were finding it hard to defend their relationship with Washington to their people because of the administration’s support for Sharon. The prince offered Bush the chance to become an historic peacemaker by presenting him with an eight-point proposal to end the current violence. Its provisions could hardly have been more modest: Israeli withdrawal from West Bank areas recently occupied, insertion of an international peacekeeping force, a halt to Israeli settlement construction, the immediate start of peace talks based on implementing U.N. Resolution 242, and the renunciation of violence by both sides.

Prince Abdullah suggested that Bush had two options. By applying the necessary pressure on Sharon to lift the siege of the occupied territories and withdraw his forces, the president could end the current fighting and pave the way for negotiations. He warned that the alternative, continued U.S. support for Sharon’s “extremist policies,” would bring on a continuing spiral of violence and undermine security and stability throughout the region.

Abdullah’s proposal was made public only after it was leaked to the New York Times. Bush made no mention of it in his press conference afterward, but passed off his meeting with the Saudi prince as simply the cordial get-together of two farmers. “He’s a man who’s got a farm,” Bush reported, “and I really took great delight in being able to drive him around in a pickup truck and showing him the trees...” The next day Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president considered the Saudi proposal “helpful,” especially in calling for the renunciation of violence, but he believes a final agreement on settlements and borders must be left to the Israelis and Palestinians.

The one concession Bush granted to Abdullah was to pressure Sharon to release Arafat from his confinement in Ramallah, in exchange for Arafat’s agreement to let British and Americans guards take custody of six Palestinians jailed by Arafat for murdering Israeli tourism minister Rehavem Ze’evi last October. Sharon agreed to release Arafat, but the next day sent the army storming into Hebron, where they killed nine civilians, including a doctor, and arrested hundreds of men.

Bush’s stipulation that a final settlement must be left to Israel and the Palestinians, and his warning to Arafat that he must not pass up another opportunity for peace, were in effect a demand for the Palestinians’ surrender. Sharon has repeatedly made clear that he would agree only to a Palestinian “state” consisting of separate cantons scattered through some 42 percent of the occupied territories. During Powell’s April visit Sharon declared that the issue of Jerusalem was not open for negotiation, and that he would not dismantle a single settlement. In fact, he has added 35 more since taking office. To drive the point home, Sharon recently appointed to his cabinet a retired general, Effi Eitam, an extreme right-winger notorious for his brutality, who calls Palestinians “a cancer in the body of the nation” and favors their expulsion.

Israel’s brutal excesses, along with international pressure, finally have forced Bush to take an active role in helping to end the Middle East conflict. So far there have been few signs that his role will be a productive one, so the Palestinians still have only themselves to rely on. But they have learned they can survive the worst blows Israel can inflict, and having done so they are not likely ever again to accept less than a complete end to Israel’s occupation. Meanwhile, the Palestinians’ survival as a people, and as a nation, is itself a victory.

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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