Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004, pages 6-8

Special Report

 

Sharon Offers the Palestinians a Prison Camp and Calls It Peace

 

	Israeli soldiers scuffle with unarmed Palestinian women trying to stop a bulldozer (not in picture) from entering onto their land in the West Bank city of Hebron Dec. 18, 2003. That evening Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced he will impose a unilateral settlement if progress toward peace is not made (photo credit AFP Photo/Hossam Abu Alan).

 

By Rachelle Marshall

IT SEEMS LIKELY that Mr. Sharon hopes only to move some isolated settlements alongside others still within occupied areas, rapidly complete a physical barrier and, in effect, tell the Palestinians that he has nothing further to say to them.

—New York Times editorial, Dec. 19, 2003.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei is a veteran politician with long experience in diplomacy. Like his predecessor Mohammed Abbas, however, he so far has proved no match for Ariel Sharon, whose chief bargaining tools are machine guns, tanks, and helicopter gunships. Qurei took office last November with the avowed intent of ending the violence by both sides and pledging to take action against any Palestinians who violate a cease-fire agreement. Public opinion polls showed that the vast majority of Palestinians would support government action to enforce a cease-fire.

Qurei may have hoped that a mutual ceasefire and an end to Palestinian violence would satisfy the first requirement of George Bush’s roadmap to peace and thereby obligate Israel to fulfill its side of the bargain. If so, he underestimated Sharon’s determination to impose his own peace terms and overestimated the Bush administration’s willingness to prevent him from doing so. At Qurei’s request, representatives of 13 Palestinian factions met in Cairo in early December to discuss an Egyptian proposal for a one-year cease-fire that would pave the way for resumed talks with Israel. After several days of talks the Palestinians ended the meetings without agreeing to a cease-fire. “This was not the end of the dialogue,” delegates told the Jerusalem Times, but they would make no deal as long as Israel continued its attacks on Palestinians.

The failure of the talks was inevitable. For nearly three months the Palestinian militants had observed an undeclared cease-fire without a similar response from Israel, which refused to be party to a truce. As the representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and similar groups were meeting in Cairo, Israeli forces continued to storm into Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps in search of suspected militants. Two successive raids by the Israelis on Rafah refugee camp in December killed 14 Palestinians and wounded more than 50, including 10 children. The second attack took place one day after Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher met with Sharon in an attempt to work out a cease-fire.

Israeli forces repeatedly invaded the West Bank city of Nablus, setting up roadblocks that cut the city in half and searching houses for suspects as tanks and soldiers fired at boys throwing stones. After one raid in which a teenager was shot in the back and killed, and several were wounded, an Israeli spokesman said such operations were “pretty routine.” They were “routine,” however, only where Palestinian were concerned.

During the 11 weeks in which militants refrained from major violence, soldiers killed dozens of innocent Palestinians, including six children. The army’s reckless use of lethal firepower came to public attention only after soldiers fired at a group of unarmed demonstrators protesting the separation barrier in late December and wounded a young Israeli, Gil Namaati. The shooting of unarmed Palestinians is an almost daily occurrence, but because Namaati had just spent three years in the army, the episode immediately prompted criticism from Israelis and the army promised a full investigation. There was no public outcry a week later when Israeli troops shot and wounded 10 Palestinians who were demonstrating at the wall.

Israel’s continuing attacks on Palestinian towns finally brought retaliation. On Dec. 25, a few hours after an Israeli Apache helicopter killed five people in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian blew himself up at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, killing four bystanders and wounding 15. The Bush administration, which had dismissed Palestinian calls for a cease-fire as an inadequate substitute for dismantling militant groups, immediately condemned the bombing. “The United States reiterates the absolute need for urgent action by the Palestinian Authority to confront terror and violence,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. Boucher was seemingly oblivious to the fact that at least 14 Palestinians had been killed within the previous 10 days and that Israeli attacks were continuing.

The suicide bombing was a cue for Sharon to lay down his ultimatum. Having done everything possible to prevent the resumption of peace talks, Sharon announced on Dec. 19 that if there is no progress toward a negotiated peace in the next few months he will move unilaterally to impose his own peace plan. Sharon had been facing pressure from several sources to resolve the ongoing conflict, including an Israeli public impatient with the continuing violence and a sinking economy. Thirteen reserve officers in Israel’s elite commando unit, the Sayeret Matkal, recently announced that “We will no longer be a party to an oppressive rule in the territories and the disregard for the human rights of millions of Palestinians.“ Reserve officers from other branches of the military had already made similar statements. From the far right came a warning by Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that a Greater Israel no longer was feasible because the higher Arab birth rate would eventually threaten Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.

Sharon’s proposed solution is a Palestinian state with boundaries to be determined by Israel. For the Palestinians, his peace offer is a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition. If they stop all resistance to the occupation Sharon will agree to negotiate, but—as he demonstrated in meetings with former Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas—he will insist on his own terms either with or without negotiations.

Sharon said his plan would “reduce friction” between the two sides by separating Jewish and Arab populations in the West Bank. He promised to eliminate a number of roadblocks and remove the settlement outposts that have sprung up in the past two years. The Palestinians would have a “state” on territory that would be made contiguous by means of bridges and tunnels.

What Sharon is actually proposing is not an independent state but a prison camp in which 90 percent of the Palestinian population is crowded into 50 percent of the territory—with Israel controlling the gates and the keys. It is no coincidence that Israel has decided to speed up work on the giant “separation fence” snaking through the West Bank before its legality can be challenged before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Once the wall is completed it will be a de facto border between Israel and the Palestinian areas, with Palestinians allowed to enter and leave only with Israel’s permission.

Because the barrier follows a route several miles west of the Green Line and also extends along the Jordan Valley in the west, Israel will end up with nearly half of the West Bank. With broad ditches on each side, the wall swallows up Palestinian land, separates farmers from their fields, children from their schools, shopkeepers from their businesses, and workers from their jobs. As it cuts through villages, relatives are divided by an impassable barrier. A United Nations report released in November estimated that the lives of at least 400,000 Palestinians are being disrupted.

The Bush administration had a mixed reaction to Sharon’s threat to declare new borders unilaterally. White House spokesman Scott McClellan at first said, “We would oppose any unilateral steps that block the road toward negotiations under the road map...” But an official announcement later said the administration was “very pleased” with Sharon’s speech because of his offer to ease conditions for the Palestinians. Sharon, of course, has made similar offers in the past without following through. He has lifted roadblocks only to quickly reinstate them, and dismantled a few uninhabited outposts while allowing scores of recently established settlements to remain. In the past three years the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza has increased by 16 percent.

Not long after introducing his new “peace” plan, Sharon added fuel to Israel’s long-simmering conflict with Syria over the Golan Heights, a rich agricultural area that Israel seized from Syria in 1967. Instead of replying to President Bashar Al-Assad’s recent offer to resume peace talks on returning the Golan in exchange for security guarantees for Israel, the Israelis announced plans to increase the number of settlers on the former Syrian territory by some 900 families—a 25 percent increase.

If Sharon did try to remove any settlements he would have to contend with a monster of his own making. Before and after he became prime minister he encouraged right-wing nationalists to seize as many hilltops as possible to keep them from being returned to the Palestinians. Many of the once-makeshift trailer camps are now established settlements, equipped with utilities provided by the government, and inhabited by heavily armed religious extremists ready to resist any effort to evict them.

Sharon may not have to face this problem, however, since he is under no serious pressure from Washington either to remove the settlements or stop new construction. Although the road map specifically called for a freeze on all settlement activity, a senior U.S. official said following Sharon’s speech that “We have not taken the position that there has to be an end to natural growth in settlements.” Middle East scholar Shibley Telhami immediately pointed out that “This is not the way a settlement freeze is defined by the road map or the president. This is new language....”

 

The Military Connection

Bush clearly feels obliged to be flexible where Israel is concerned. Not only must he avoid offending Israel’s right-wing Jewish and Christian supporters in an election year, he also has to take into account his administration’s increasingly close military ties to Israel. Although Israel is not officially part of the coalition force in Iraq, it has played a significant role in the war from the beginning. This magazine has previously reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans headed by the pro-Israel neoconservative Abram Shulsky was receiving intelligence on Iraq’s supposed weapons program directly from a rump intelligence unit in Sharon’s office (September 2003 Washington Report, p. 57). Shlomo Brom, a former Israeli intelligence officer now at the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, has confirmed that Israeli intelligence played a major role in bolstering the administration’s case for attacking Iraq. The problem, Brom maintains, is that the information was not reliable.

“Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s nonconventional capabilities,” Brom wrote in a report published by the Jaffee Center, but the Israelis “badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons existed.” Israel exaggerated the potential danger of a chemical or biological attack by Saddam Hussain, according to Brom, and had suggested without sufficient evidence that the Iraqis were hiding their weapons of mass destruction by moving them to Syria. Such charges were frequently cited as facts by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials as justifications for going to war.

The Pentagon also has made extensive use of Israel’s experience in suppressing Palestinian resistance by hiring Israeli military experts to train U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. In his article “Moving Targets” in the Dec. 15 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh wrote that Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been instructing members of U.S. Special Forces, both at Fort Bragg and in Israel, in tactics that include assassination and other undercover actions. One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive against Iraqi insurgents is Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who has equated the Muslim world with Satan in his talks to church groups, and was quoted in the British Guardian as saying that Satan “wants to destroy us as a Christian army.”

Using methods made all too familiar by the Israelis, American soldiers are wrapping Iraqi villages in barbed wire and requiring residents to show I.D. cards (printed in English) at the single openings. Like their Israeli counterparts, U.S. occupation forces break into Iraqi homes at night, demolish buildings, flatten fruit orchards, and imprison relatives of suspected resistance fighters. On Dec. 8 The New York Times quoted an Iraqi villager as saying, “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians. We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.”

An American officer who defended his unit’s tactics explained, “You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force....”

Tactics that have miserably failed in Israel are having no more success in Iraq, where people who welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussain now increasingly resent the continued presence in their country of American and other foreign troops. Israel’s involvement in the U.S. occupation of Iraq is especially damaging because it reinforces suspicions in the Middle East that the two countries are allied in an attempt to dominate the Arab world.

Bush could do much to allay these suspicions and reduce widespread hostility to America by abandoning its vague and open-ended road map and pressing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. He could start by endorsing the Geneva Accord. The unofficial agreement drawn up by prominent Israelis and Palestinians offers Israel everything it could ask for in the way of security. Israel would retain its identity as a Jewish state, the Palestinians would give up the right of return for most of the four million refugees, and all but a few West Bank settlements would remain under Israeli control. Palestinians would have a demilitarized state composed of Gaza and parts of the adjoining Negev, most of the West Bank, and the site of Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem. In giving his approval to the plan Palestinian President Yasser Arafat specifically acknowledged “the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine.”

In early December, 32 prominent Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders announced a National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the Middle East with a statement urging that the Geneva Accord serve as the model for a comprehensive solution to the Middle East conflict. The group included evangelical Christian leaders, Catholic bishops, the primate of the Greek Othodox church in America, officials of Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative rabbinical associations, and representatives of the two largest Muslim religious organizations in America.

One of their key recommendations was that a presidential envoy be “consistently and visibly active in the region”—a polite way of urging more positive intervention from Bush. So far Bush has conspicuously avoided either endorsing the Geneva Accord, or insisting on Israel’s compliance with the road map. But time is running out on the possibility of effective U.S. intervention. Ardent Zionists once argued for the expansion to Jewish settlements by saying that as “facts on the ground” they would deter future Israeli governments from withdrawing from the occupied territories. When the apartheid wall is completed Sharon will have his final “fact on the ground.” If he is allowed to turn segments of the West Bank into a prison camp and call it a state, only the certainty of continued bloodshed will remain. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, together with volunteers from abroad, are risking their lives every day in an effort to stop completion of the wall. The Bush administration could make a major contribution to peace by helping them succeed.

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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