Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2004, pages 8-9, 12

Special Report

Military Power Wins Battles for the U.S. And Israel, But Not the War

By Rachelle Marshall

Schoolchildren walk past a pile of debris outside the UNRWA elementary school in the Jabalya refugee camp Oct. 12, in the midst of “Operation Penitence.” Israel invaded the northern Gaza Strip on Sept. 28 and remained for 17 days, killing 128 Palestinians and wounding 431 (AFP photo/Odd Andersen).

“YOU CAN DESTROY their lives and their houses, but they are staying put. Their spirit is strong.”—Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, on Oct. 3, during an Israeli invasion of Gaza that killed 110 Palestinians in two weeks.

“The hospitals are full of bodies, children are buried in the gardens and there are bodies filling the streets. These policies will increase the anger of the Iraqi people and if the government insists on resolving the crisis in this horrible American way...the Iraqi people will not cooperate.”

—Muhammad Bashar al-Faidhi of the Iraqi Association of Muslim Scholars, on Oct. 3, after U.S. troops wrested control of Samarra from resistance forces.

Were it not for the huge cost in human suffering, there would be something ludicrous about the conflicts now raging in the Middle East. In Israel a nuclear power armed with helicopter gunships and tanks nearly the length of a city block is unable to end mortar attacks by Palestinians who carry homemade missiles around on donkey carts. In Iraq the world’s only superpower is unable to protect its soldiers from roadside ambushes or prevent police stations from being blown up by car bombs. No matter how much firepower the Israelis and the Americans bring to bear, resistance to the two armies of occupation continues.

In Israel, the government fuels resistance with increasingly harsh repression. After taking office in 2001 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon scrapped the Oslo agreements, reoccupied the West Bank and Gaza, and continued to seize Palestinian territory. Meanwhile he refused to negotiate with the Palestinians and confined President Yasser Arafat to his crumbling headquarters in Ramallah. George W. Bush, whose support for Sharon is unwavering, has steadfastly maintained that the Israelis are adhering to the internationally sponsored road map to Middle East peace. Bush held to this position even when Sharon scrapped the road map entirely last spring and announced that Israel would unilaterally withdraw from Gaza but retain most of the West Bank. Palestinians are now being crowded into enclaves surrounded by high walls.

Sharon’s senior adviser and former chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, recently declared unequivocally what Bush refuses to admit, that the road map has long been a fiction and that, as far as Israel is concerned, the peace process is dead. In an interview with Haaretz on Oct. 8 Weisglass called Sharon’s unilateral plan for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza “a freezing of the peace process” and added, “When you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion of the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. The Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

With obvious satisfaction Weisglass noted, “And all this with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Congress voted 400 to 9 last June to approve the Sharon plan; Bush endorsed it last April. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the former President Bush, said the current president is “mesmerized” by the Israeli leader, adding that “Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger.” Washington’s response to Weisglass’ statement confirmed Scowcroft’s remark. “Our understanding is that Israel is committed to the road map and to the president’s two-state vision,” said a State Department spokesman. “Based on Israel’s declared policy, we see no cause to doubt it.”

The wholehearted support Sharon gets from the White House is lacking within his own Likud party. In response to a campaign by right-wing settlers and rabbis, the Knesset rejected his withdrawal plan by a nonbinding vote of 53 to 44. Sharon says he will proceed with the withdrawal, but in fact it will be only a partial one. Israel will retain control of Gaza’s airport and seaport as well as the wide strip of land bordering Egypt, and will dismantle much of the settlement infrastructure to keep it from being used by the Palestinians. Most of the Israeli army will remain. Each Israeli family that leaves Gaza will get from $250,000 to $500,000.The 130,000 Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli bulldozers during the past four years will get nothing.

Palestinians are paying for the withdrawal plan with their blood. To convince right-wing Israelis he is not giving in to terrorists by retreating from Gaza, Sharon ordered an intensified drive against suspected militants. By early September the army was carrying out almost daily assassinations, firing missiles that often killed others as well as the intended victim. Militant groups responded by firing homemade mortars at Israeli towns just over the border.

During the first nine months of 2004, Israeli forces killed nearly 300 Palestinians, and this fall the violence increased. On Sept. 29, after a week in which at least 14 Palestinians were killed, Palestinians fired a mortar that killed two small Israeli children in the town of Sederot. The next day hundreds of Israeli troops, accompanied by tanks, bulldozers and armored vehicles, swarmed into northern Gaza in an offensive named, without apparent irony, “Days of Repentance.” Over the next several days soldiers used schools for command posts and fired cluster bombs and tank shells into densely crowded residential streets. Israeli bulldozers flattened houses, factories, even a kindergarten, and destroyed utility lines. Residents were left without water or electricity, and hospitals ran out of supplies.

More than 110 Palestinians were killed in the first two weeks of the offensive, and at least 80 houses were demolished. Some 25 of the victims were children, including 13-year-old Iman al-Hams, who was shot repeatedly by an Israeli officer as she was walking to school, and 11-year-old Ghadir Mokheimer, who was shot as she sat at her desk in an UNRWA school in Khan Younis.

Operation Days of Repentance left Hamas stronger, Israeli experts concluded.

Palestinians in Gaza predicted that the invasion would not end the cycle of violence. Israel has effectively eliminated Palestinian security forces in Gaza, along with resistance leaders, so there is no one with the authority to control the militias that compete with one another to prove they are fighting the Israelis harder than the others. An elderly Gaza resident interviewed on National Public Radio on Oct. 14 admitted that Palestinian mortar attacks led only to greater suffering of the population. “But give us a just settlement,” he said, “and the violence will end.”

Some Israeli analysts said the Israeli offensive not only would fail to stop the mortar attacks, but was counterproductive. Haaretz’s military expert, Ze’ev Schiff, predicted that it was only a matter of time before Hamas developed rockets that could penetrate more deeply into Israel. Leslie Susser, in J., the Jewish News Weekly, reported that punishing the population in Gaza did not lead to civilian pressure on Hamas to stop its attacks, as the Israelis had hoped, but to growing support for the militants. Operation Days of Repentance had left Hamas stronger, the Israeli experts concluded.

When powerful bombs destroyed part of a Hilton hotel frequented by Israelis and two holiday camps in the Egyptian resort town of Taba on Oct. 8, Hamas and other Palestinian groups denied responsibility. But the horrendous attack was undoubtedly in revenge for Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinians. The more than 30 Israelis and Egyptians who were killed in Taba were victims not only of unnamed militants, but also of the failure of the peace process. It was at Taba in January 2001 that Palestinian and Israeli negotiators came close to agreement on a workable peace plan, only to have their efforts rejected by Sharon and ignored by Bush.

The Taba bombing, following so closely on Israel’s heaviest assault on northern Gaza in three years, was another example of a fact the Bush administration chooses to ignore, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major grievance in the Arab and Muslim world and the most effective recruiting tool for extremists. That conflict is also a factor in the administration’s attempt to shape Iraq into a dependable U.S. ally. The people of the Middle East can’t help but see parallells between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Reports from both battlegrounds reinforce that impression. On Oct. 1, the day after the Israelis moved into Gaza, thousands of U.S. troops attacked the Iraqi city of Samarra from three sides, while warplanes fired missiles from overhead. Military officials said they killed 100 Iraqi insurgents and arrested 37 others in the first day of fighting, but hospitals reported that many of the dead were civilians. In the days that followed soldiers went from house to house kicking or shooting down doors and dragging men away under arrest.

U.S. Attack on Samarra Denounced

The attack on Samarra succeeded in forcing the rebels to withdraw, at least temporarily. But the operation was denounced by Iraq’s influential Muslim Scholars Association, which complained of numerous civilians’ deaths and accused the troops of widespread atrocities. Iraqis were even more angered by the months of air and artillery strikes on Fallujah that have sent thousands of residents fleeing from the city. U.S. military officials claimed the nightly bombing attacks were aimed at the hideouts of a violent organization called One God and Jihad, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but the bombs destroyed wide areas around the supposed targets as well and killed numbers of civilians.

Although local leaders insisted in late October that Zarqawi was no longer in Fallujah and asked for more time to negotiate with the rebels, occupation forces closed in on the city and prepared for a full-scale offensive. A man whose car had been shot up by soldiers as he tried to leave the city said bitterly, “The end of America will be in Fallujah.”

The escalated attacks by U.S. forces were designed to clear Iraqi cities of insurgents before elections to choose a National Assembly are held on Jan. 31, but on Oct. 20 a group of clerics representing more than 3,000 Sunni mosques called for a boycott of the vote and a campaign of civil disobedience against U.S. forces and their Iraqi collaborators if the bombing didn’t stop. Sheikh Qasim al-Hanafi of the Association of Muslim Scholars said it was the Iraqi people’s “religious duty and an international right to resist the U.S. occupation.” Even Iraq’s interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar warned, “We learn one thing in Iraq: that blood causes more blood.”

American military commanders who thought the raids on Iraqi cities would persuade the inhabitants to oust the insurgents learned, as Israel did in Gaza, that they had the opposite effect. Instead of arousing hostility to the resistance forces, the anger provoked by the bombing served to strengthen their popular support. This fact appeared to have no effect on military policy, however.

As a result the number of resistance fighters and their accomplices has grown to an estimated 20,000, and attacks against U.S. troops and installations are increasing. Not only have buildings in central Baghdad been hit by rockets, but even the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi interim government are located, has proved vulnerable. On Oct. 14 members of Zarqawi’s One God and Jihad managed to get inside the Green Zone and set off bombs that killed five people.

The continuing violence is raising questions of whether elections can be held as scheduled in January and, if they are, whether the results will be accepted. Many Iraqis suspect that an election administered by U.S.-appointed officials will be rigged, and some have become so angered at the actions of U.S. forces fighting in their areas that they may refuse to vote. “I’ve lost my entire family,” said a man whose wife and children were killed by American gunfire. “Why should I trust this government? Why should I vote?”

“Why Should I Vote?”

The Sunni leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement, Wamid Omar Nadhmi, said, “A lot of people want democracy here, but they are just not comfortable with elections under American supervision.” Nadhmi suggested that more people would vote if the army pulled back to its bases during the elections, but military commanders said they have no plans do so.

Shi’i leaders express equally serious concerns. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani is said to be so worried that Shi’i will be underrepresented that he may withdraw support for the elections if he perceives them to be unfair. The rebellious but increasingly popular Shi’i cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his followers have organized a new party, the Patriotic Front, which Sistani hopes will be allowed to join with other Shi’i groups to form a unified slate in the coming elections. If all Shi’i factions are included they could win at least 55 percent of the vote. If al-Sadr is excluded, Sistani is expected to distance himself from the elections. Sistani’s chief concern is that the six major parties that have cooperated closely with the Americans will unite into a single slate and dominate the elections.

All six parties originated in exile groups and are heavily represented in the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council. Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, is so closely allied with the Bush administration that members of Bush’s campaign staff helped to write the optimistic speech he delivered to Congress in late September. After this fact was reported in The Washington Post, an angry Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote to Bush saying that Allawi’s speech originally had given her hope that reconstruction efforts were proceeding in most of Iraq. She then added, “To learn that this was not an independent view but one that was massaged by your campaign operatives jaundices the speech and reduces the credibility of his remarks.”

The credibility of Allawi’s speech was further reduced by news that only $1 billion of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction aid approved by Congress last year has been spent. Of a list of 100 water and sewage projects to be undertaken, only four have been scheduled even to start. Aid funds that were supposed to be spent on restoring electricity and other infrastructure now are being diverted to training police and national guardsmen.

The danger of this approach is that the longer the Iraqis are forced to go without essential services and a working economy, the more inclined they will be to support the resistance. To prepare for this possibility the U.S. army recently changed its basic training program to include training for urban warfare. Recruits preparing for missions in Iraq are now learning how to enter buildings held by hostile forces and how to fight when civilians are in the line of fire. Similar techniques are undoubtedly being taught to Israeli recruits before they are sent to raid Palestinian towns and refugee camps. These tactics may prove effective in capturing a city or subduing civilians, but they are not enough to win a war. As events in Israel and Iraq have shown, superior firepower in the hands of an occupying army almost invariably leads to new forms of resistance. Only the willingness to accept a just peace can end a war.

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.