-Caveat Lector- Crisis looms for Sharon http://www.guardian.co.uk/Distribution/Redirect_Artifact/0,4678,0-643685,00. html More army reservists refuse to serve
Graham Usher Saturday February 2, 2002 The Guardian The public consensus that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has marshalled behind his policies cracked yesterday. Polls showed him receiving his lowest public approval rating in months, and 50 more combat reservist officers added their names to a petition calling on soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. There are now 104 signatories to the petition, which is the most serious domestic challenge to his policies on the Palestinians since he came to power one year ago. "We will not take part in the war for the peace of the settlements," said the petition, originally published in the press on January 25. "We will not fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's 1967 border with the West Bank] in order to rule, expel, destroy, blockade, assassinate, starve and humiliate an entire people." The protest has rattled Mr Sharon and the army, which was swift to attribute "political" rather than moral motives to its conscientious objectors. "This is incitement to rebellion," the army's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, said yesterday. Four petitioners have been suspended from officer duties; the others are to face disciplinary measures, the army said. The punishments follow prison terms imposed on 49 reservists for refusing to serve in the occupied territories since the intifada erupted 16 months ago. The difference with the latest protest is its public character, and the sympathetic hearing it has received. Even the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, Ami Ayalon, told Israeli television that he felt "a lot of empathy for the reserve officers" when they were asked to execute "blatantly illegal" orders. "As far as I'm concerned, too few soldiers are refusing such orders. To shoot an unarmed youth is a blatantly illegal order. I am very worried by the number of Palestinian children shot in the last year." The protest also resonates with the predominant public mood of despair in Israel at the continuing violent confrontation with the Palestinians. This has seen Mr Sharon's popularity ratings drop from 57% in December to 48%, the daily newspaper Maariv said. Writing in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper last week, the columnist Nahum Barnea said the latest Palestinian attack in west Jerusalem had made people more pessimistic about Mr Sharon. "They knew their prime minister was no better than they were: neither they nor he have an answer." Avraham Burg, the Labour Speaker of the Israeli parliament, insisted this week that he would address the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah, despite Mr Sharon's campaign to ostracise the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. "The occupation corrupts, or, more accurately, the occupation has already corrupted," Mr Burg told the knesset. · Ariel Sharon held secret talks with three senior members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's inner circle this week, the first such meeting since he became prime minister, a Palestinian official said. Despite his recent tough public statements, he met on Wedneday with Mr Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, the parliament's speaker, Ahmed Qureia, and a Palestinian economic adviser, Khaled Salam, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. Mr Sharon's adviser, Raanan Gissin, declined to comment. AP, Jerusalem Special reports Israel and the Middle East War in Afghanistan The issue explained 05.12.2001: Sharon vs Arafat http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,643724,00.html Israel thrusts Iran in line of US fire As Bush weighs up the 'axis of evil', one country is bringing its full influence to bear David Hirst Saturday February 2, 2002 The Guardian America's campaign in Afghanistan is winding down, but who will be its next big target in the "war on terror" remains in the realm of conjecture. Of the three chief members of the "axis of evil" that George Bush identified in his state of the union address - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - he dedicated most of his wrath and spoke most threateningly of that hardiest of Washington's villains, Saddam Hussein. Yet, if Israel gets its way, the next target could be Iran. President Bush was forthright in his address: he told Tehran to stop harbouring al-Qaida terrorists and added the heavyhanded threat that if it did not, he would deal with Iran "in diplomatic ways, initially". Israel has long portrayed the Islamic republic as its gravest long-term threat, the "rogue state" at its most menacing, combining sponsorship of international terror, nuclear ambition, ideological objection to the existence of the Jewish state and unflagging determination to sabotage the Middle East peace process. Israel classifies Iran as one of those "far" threats - Iraq being another - that distinguish it from the "near" ones: the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states. As the peace process progressed, the near threats were steadily being eroded.A vital benefit of the 1993 Oslo accord was said to be that it would fortify Israel for its eventual showdown with its far enemies. The closer their weapons of mass destruction programmes come to completion, the more compelling the need for Israel - determined to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the region - to eliminate them. For a long time, the strategy of enlisting the growing Arab peace camp against Iran and Islamically-inspired extremism from afar seemed to be working. Committed, under Oslo, to fight all forms of Palestinian violence against Israel, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, came to blows with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the anathemas he hurled at Iran, their ideological mentor, were all but indistinguishable from Israel's. But now both threats have converged, malignantly, as never before. This, for Israel, was the deeper meaning of the Karine-A affair, the 50-ton shipment of Iranian-supplied weaponry destined for Gaza, which it seized last month. It was a "most dangerous axis", said the Israeli chief of staff, that threatened to "change the face" of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. As well as supplying arms and finance, Iran, the Israelis say, is developing a supervisory role over the Palestinian "terror" through the exploitation of its existing assets in the arena, mainly the Lebanese Hizbullah, and its new ones, a direct link with Mr Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and a recently created Palestinian Hizbullah of its own. Had the Karine-A cargo made it to Gaza, and thence to the West Bank, it could have made at least a dent in Israel's enormous military superiority. The Palestinians would no longer have been entirely helpless in the face of Israeli armoured incursions into their self-rule areas. The weapons would also have brought whole population centres within range. Though Mr Arafat and Iran denied any part in the arms shipment, there were compelling reasons why these former friends-turned-enemies should have resumed their collaboration of old. Mr Arafat's desperate need is obvious. The ever-growing violence of the conflict and the complete failure of any country to come to the Palestinians' aid present a golden opportunity for the Islamic republic, at least for the conservative, clerical wing of its leadership, which has exclusive, unaccountable control over underground aspects of foreign policy, such as support for Islamist "revolutionaries" like Hizbullah and Hamas. Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, and most of the reformist camp may seek to dilute the extreme anti-Israeli orthodoxy, but Tehran's foreign policy is very much an area of competition between the country's rival political wings. The simplest way to thwart the growth of such a Palestinian-Iranian alliance would be to deny it its essential raison d'être by restoring a peace process that has some prospect of success. But it has become clear that peace is just what the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, does not want: Palestinian violence serves him much better. Persuasion For him, the Karine-A incident provided further, dramatic justification for the undeclared but ill-disguised agenda he is pursuing in the name of retaliation and self-defence - to destroy the whole notion of self-determination on any portion of Palestinian territory. But the Israelis took particular alarm at the words of the former Iranian president, Hashimi Rafsanjani, who said recently that if Israel continues "its hellish policy of expanding its nuclear arsenal, it will eventually draw the Islamic world into the race. Then it will be Israel, a small and illegitimate country, which will lose out and be destroyed." Impressing on the US the gravity of the Iranian threat is a continuous Israeli preoccupation. It "must understand", said the Israeli defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, "that this is not only a threat to Israel, but to the whole world". Tehran would have a nuclear bomb within three years and was also developing missiles which could target any point in Europe. There is no issue on which the Israelis, through their extraordinary influence in Congress and elsewhere, have proved better able to shape US policies than this one. Quite simply, said one analyst, James Bill, the US "views Iran through spectacles manufactured in Israel". For Mr Bush, judging by his state of the union address, the weapons of mass destruction-cum-missile peril is regaining ground on that of the post-September 11 terrorist one. And in that department, Iran clearly outweighs President Saddam. It has long been a built-in, unquestioned US assumption that Israel has a right to preserve its nuclear monopoly, and to pre-empt any regional power's efforts to challenge it. This is a unique indulgence by a superpower of its favourite protege. Yet Israel often hints that the US is not indulgent enough. And a touch of blackmail about what might happen if Israel does not get its way is apt to come with the hint. Thus a leading columnist, Nahum Barnea, wrote in Yediot Aharanot that ona visit to Washington this month, Mr Ben-Elizier will try to persuade the administration that, Iran being "the real strategic threat", they must "deal with it diplomatically or militarily, or both. If they don't, Israel will have to do it alone." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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