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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
Chronology of a pogrom: How Sharon, US prepared assault on Palestinians
By the Editorial Board
4 April 2002
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Israeli troops continue to fan out across the West Bank, invading one Palestinian city
after another—Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Salfeet—killing and
wounding hundreds, arresting and beating thousands. Contrary to the claims of the
Israeli and US governments and the American media, this assault is not a sudden
reaction to the latest series of suicide bombings, but rather the implementation by the
Sharon government of a long-planned strategy.
The tragic death toll in the suicide attacks—tragic in the loss of life both of
innocent
Israeli citizens, and of the most self-sacrificing sections of Palestinian youth—is the
occasion for the Sharon government to carry out measures which have been in
preparation for several years, if not the entire period since the signing of the
initial
Israeli-PLO accord in 1993.
Just as George W. Bush seized on the September 11 terrorist attacks as the pretext
for projecting American military power in oil-rich Central Asia and preparing a new
war against Iraq, Sharon is using the bombings in Haifa and Netanya as the signal to
reimpose Israeli rule on the West Bank and dismantle the infrastructure of the
Palestinian Authority.
As Israeli military commander Shaul Mofaz was overheard telling Sharon at a press
briefing Tuesday, “We’ve got the opportunity right now,” to deal blows to the
Palestinian Authority and its president, Yasser Arafat. “I know,” Sharon replied. “Be
careful.”
The actions taken by the Israeli forces directly contradict the avowed purpose of their
attack. At one and the same time Sharon denounces Arafat for failing to suppress
terrorism, while smashing the instruments of power which would be required for that
task. Arafat, trapped in his headquarters without electricity, water or direct contact
with the outside world, is supposed to prevent desperate Palestinian teenagers from
using the only method of resistance to oppression which has been left them.
The claims of Sharon and Bush are absurd on their face. In the conflict which has
erupted since September 2000, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed,
compared to about 400 Israelis. Yet the US posture is to present the side which has
lost three times as many men, women and children as the aggressor, while the side
which has done the bulk of the killing—and possesses a virtual monopoly of
weapons such as tanks, jet fighters, missiles, all supplied by America—is portrayed
as acting in “self-defense.”
US Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that the Israeli actions would lead to
more, not less terrorism. “No matter how many tanks go through how many villages,
at the end of this process you will still have suicide bombers,” he said. “Ultimately,
the Israeli Defense Forces will ... have to leave the occupied territories ... and
we’ll be
right back to the need for a political process.”
The actions of the Israeli government can be understood only in light of the politics
of
the extreme-right elements represented by Sharon and his political rival, former
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which are based on unyielding opposition to the
establishment of a Palestinian state. The American media, in line with its role as
mouthpiece for US government policy, omits any explanation of history or political
background in its depiction of the events now taking place on the West Bank.
The longstanding aim of the Israeli right wing has been to render the establishment
of a Palestinian state politically impossible, through the systematic destruction of
the
social and political infrastructure of the Palestinian national movement. Their method
is the “making of new facts” through the use of military force to change the political
environment.
Sharon and Netanyahu opposed the 1993 Oslo Accord, and it was a political
supporter of their intransigent line, a fascist-minded student, who carried out the
1995 assassination of Yitzak Rabin, the prime minister who signed the agreement
with Arafat and the PLO.
Netanyahu was the political beneficiary of that assassination, coming to power the
following year. His government, with Sharon as housing and development minister,
heavily promoted Jewish settlement on the West Bank. It is an indictment of the Oslo
process itself—and the bankruptcy of Arafat’s own policy—that more Jewish settlers
came to the West Bank in the eight years after 1993 than in the 26 years of Israeli
control that preceded the agreement.
The wave of suicide bombings is an inevitable result of the failure of the Palestinian
Authority. This regime has been unable either to effectively resist the expansion of
the settlements and the seizure of Palestinian land, or to develop the economic and
social life of the territories, which are held in a stranglehold by Israel.
The Sharon government has deliberately provoked these acts of desperation, as the
record shows, in order to confuse and intimidate public opinion within Israel and
internationally, and to provide a suitable basis for never-ending demands on the
Arafat regime. Now this process is coming to a head, with the demonization of the
72-year-old Palestinian leader and open discussion of his expulsion or murder.
The demands issued from Sharon and Bush would make a Palestinian state
impossible except in the form of a quisling regime, policing the Palestinian population
at the behest of the Zionist regime. They want to make sure that any successor to
Arafat is a puppet, if not a direct agent of the Israeli Mossad.
Calculated provocations
The reoccupation of the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces is the culmination
of a campaign of provocation and violence which has unfolded over the past two
years, since the failure of the US-brokered Camp David talks between Arafat and
then prime minister Ehud Barak. The talks collapsed in July 2000, and Barak lost his
parliamentary majority the same month, the beginning of the end of his government.
Throughout the entire period from the beginning of the Palestinian intifada in
September 2000 to the present, three factors have interacted continuously:
provocations by the Israeli military and fascistic elements, Palestinian resistance to
oppression, and the influence of the United States.
September 28, 2000—Ariel Sharon made his notorious visit to the Temple Mount,
accompanied by dozens of heavily armed bodyguards, and protected by hundreds of
Israeli troops. Although Sharon was then out of government, the leader of the Likud
Party was treated as the de facto representative of the Zionist regime. When riots
broke out throughout the West Bank and Gaza in response to this provocation,
Barak declared his solidarity with Sharon and denounced Arafat for not suppressing
the protests, setting the pattern for the subsequent 18 months.
Sharon made his move, carefully planned for maximum disruptive effect, when
Palestinian nationalist feeling had been inflamed by the decision of Arafat to delay
again the formal declaration of an independent Palestinian state. The Likud leader
also calculated that US intervention against him was unlikely, given the ongoing US
presidential election in which the Republican candidate, then leading in the polls, was
criticizing the administration for excessive involvement with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
The timing of the Temple Mount visit was also determined by the need to sabotage
back- channel talks between the Palestinian Authority, Barak and the Clinton
administration, which had resumed in secret after the Camp David failure. According
to a subsequent report in the New York Times, a fervently pro-Israeli newspaper, the
secret talks had made significant progress, and on September 27 Clinton invited
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to return to Washington. Sharon would certainly
have been aware of these maneuvers through his contacts in the Israeli military and
intelligence service. The next day his trip to the Temple Mount touched off rioting
that
was answered by brutal police-military repression. The intifada had begun, and the
US-mediated talks did not resume until December, with Clinton a lame duck and
Barak little better.
Sharon in power
February 6, 2001—In a special election for prime minister, called by Barak two years
before the end of his term, Sharon won easily and formed a coalition government of
his Likud bloc, several right-wing religious parties, and a major section of the Labor
Party, including Shimon Peres as foreign minister. Sharon’s victory represented, not
so much a growth of right-wing sentiment in Israel, as the collapse of the so-called
“left,” after the failure of the Camp David talks and the upsurge of Palestinian
resistance on the West Bank and Gaza, with a death toll, after four months, already
mounting to the hundreds. The coming to power of the former general identified
throughout the Middle East with the massacres of Palestinian refugees during the
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the leading advocate of stepped-up Zionist
settlement and land seizures on the West Bank, was a clear sign that the Israeli
regime would opt for the most brutal methods against the Palestinians.
March 20, 2001—Sharon visited Bush in the White House, where he emphasized
Israel’s usefulness to the US, and stressed his willingness to combat terrorism and
support a hard-line stance against Iraq and Iran. Bush responded by declaring he
would not “try to force peace,” while a White House spokesman said, “We do have a
special relationship with Israel.” The nature of this relationship was quickly
demonstrated, as the Bush administration sided with Israel in blocking the dispatch
of a United Nations observer force to the West Bank and Gaza and permitted Israel
to use US-supplied fighter jets to attack Palestinian targets. Bush himself declared
that resumption of peace talks depended on Arafat halting all Palestinian resistance
to Israeli occupation. Three weeks later came the first major Israeli ground assault of
the intifada, the April 13 invasion of the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
July 12, 2001—A British foreign policy journal published an executive summary of an
Israeli military plan called “Justified Vengeance,” which called for invasion of the
West Bank in response to terrorist attacks such as the suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv
discotheque. The assault would be launched after the next such suicide attack. It
would last up to a month, cause thousands of Palestinian casualties, and end with
the disarming or detention of 40,000 Palestinian military and police personnel,
virtually the entire apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. The principal method for
ensuring the necessary pretext, according to press reports, was continuing the
systematic assassination of Palestinian leaders which had begun the previous fall.
The repetitive pattern of events was: Israeli assassination, suicide bombing, Israeli
military response. This is a continuation of a longstanding policy of the Israeli
state,
which has for decades sought to destroy the Palestinian national movement by
disrupting its leadership, killing nearly every outstanding PLO leader except Arafat
himself.
Assassination policy affirmed
August 1, 2001—A five-hour meeting of the Israeli war cabinet reaffirmed the policy
of systematically targeting Palestinian leaders and militants for assassination, the
day
after Israeli missiles destroyed a building in Nablus used by the Islamic militant
organization Hamas, killing eight people, two of them small boys, two of them senior
political leaders of Hamas. The assassinations sparked the largest political protest of
the intifada, with more than 100,000 people marching in the funeral amid cries for
revenge. The assassination not only provoked more Palestinian terrorist attacks, it
served to torpedo a new round of diplomatic activity aimed at imposing a settlement
on the conflict. At the G-8 summit in Genoa July 21-22, the European powers pushed
through a resolution, with reluctant agreement from the US, for the deployment of
international monitors to separate the Israeli military and the Palestinians on the
West Bank and Gaza. The Sharon government’s brazen, public adoption of murder
as state policy effectively halted this European initiative. Six days after the cabinet
meeting, the Israeli Defense Force announced it was abandoning any “restraint” and
would allow soldiers to open fire on Palestinians without themselves first coming
under attack. Sharon gave the policy the Orwellian title of “active self-defense.”
August 28, 2001—Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP), was assassinated by Israeli military forces in the West Bank
town of Ramallah. One of the top five officials of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), Mustafa was the highest-ranking Palestinian to have been
murdered under the Israeli policy of killing Arab leaders. The assassination came a
few days after US Vice President Richard Cheney publicly defended and supported
the Israeli policy of murdering political opponents. In a commentary published
September 7—four days before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center—the
World Socialist Web Site said that the assassination policy was aimed at destroying
“the political infrastructure of the Palestinian national movement.” The article
concluded, “By such means Israel seeks to render impossible any organized and
politically directed struggle against its occupation of Palestinian lands.... The
message from the Israeli authorities is clear: no one will survive who does not secure
the approval of the Israeli state.”
The impact of September 11
September 21, 2001—A US-imposed cease-fire took effect between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority. After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center there was a temporary divergence in US and Israeli policy. Israeli officials
denounced Arafat as the equivalent of Osama bin Laden and Sharon moved toward
open war, only to be pulled back abruptly by the Bush administration, which wished
to ensure the support of Arab states for the impending US military assault against
Afghanistan. The US accordingly sided with Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, who
publicly accused senior Israeli army officers of plotting the assassination of Arafat,
warning that in that event even more radical nationalists and Islamists would replace
the Palestinian president. On October 4, Bush traveled to New York City for a speech
at the United Nations where he called for the eventual establishment of an
independent Palestinian state, the first US president to do so. Sharon replied with a
diatribe comparing Arafat to Hitler and accusing the US and Bush personally of
Munich-style “appeasement.” After Sharon was compelled to apologize and restrict
military operations on the West Bank, General Shaul Mofaz, the army chief of staff,
publicly criticized the decision and two extreme Zionist parties pulled out of Sharon’s
coalition government.
October 19, 2001—Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi was assassinated in his hotel
room in Jerusalem, allegedly by a Palestinian gunman retaliating for the murder of
PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa. Given that Ze’evi had just recently turned against the
Sharon government and sought to bring it down, his sudden elimination from the
political scene served to kill two birds with one stone—providing a pretext for further
Israeli military aggression, while removing a thorn in the government’s side. Ze’evi’s
National Union party was also something of an embarrassment diplomatically, since
it openly called for the expulsion of all three million Palestinians from the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. The demand that Arafat order the arrest of all those responsible for
Ze’evi’s killing has been Sharon’s principal demand on the Palestinian Authority ever
since.
December 5, 2001—The Israeli war cabinet formally designated the Palestinian
Authority a terror-supporting entity that “must be dealt with accordingly.” The cabinet
statement also declared the Tanzim militia and Arafat’s elite Force 17 personal
protection unit were terrorist organizations. Labor ministers walked out before the
vote on the resolution was taken. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres accused the
government of attempting to “destroy the Palestinian Authority.” The pretext for this
action was a series of suicide bombings, claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in
retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hamas leader, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud.
The real reason was the initial military success of the American war against
Afghanistan. The Bush administration and its Israeli clients now felt it possible to
move more openly against the Palestinians, since the Arab regimes of the Middle
East were no longer needed as bases for the bombing campaign, and since these
regimes were presumably intimidated by the fate of the Taliban regime. In a
television address to the nation, Sharon repeatedly compared Israel’s conflict with
the Palestinians and the US “war on terrorism.” A day later the Bush administration
signaled its support by seizing the assets of the Holy Land Foundation and several
other charities that aid war victims on the West Bank.
War without end or limit
December 13, 2001—Sharon publicly declared that Israel would no longer recognize
or negotiate with Arafat, a formal repudiation of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the
perspective of achieving a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Again a
suicide attack, a bus bombing the previous day that killed 10 Israelis, was the pretext
for an action which Sharon has repeatedly advocated from the day the Oslo Accords
were signed. “From our point of view, Arafat no longer exists. Period,” Sharon told his
security cabinet. Arafat was effectively placed under house arrest, not allowed to
leave his headquarters compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Three weeks
later, on January 3, 2002, Israel claimed to have captured a ship bringing arms
supplies from Iran to the Palestinian Authority. Even if true—and there is
considerable doubt—the weaponry on board the Karine-A hardly compares to the
billions in high-tech equipment supplied by the United States to Israel each year.
January 22, 2002—Israeli tanks and armored vehicles encircled Arafat’s
headquarters in Ramallah, the first of a series of occupations of the largest
Palestinian city this year. Israeli troops entered the Voice of Palestine radio
station,
where they used explosives to blow it up. Other West Bank towns were placed under
blockade, including Qalqilyah, Jenin and Nablus, and fighter jets attacked Palestinian
government buildings in Tulkarem. The official pretext was a terrorist attack that
killed six people at a Jewish coming-of-age party in Hadera. This followed the
assassination of Raed al-Karmi, a leader of the al-Aqsa Brigade, a militia linked to
Arafat’s Fatah party. The Sharon government denied it had carried out the
assassination, but the New York Times quoted a senior political official who
“acknowledged that Israel had had a role in the death.”
February 5, 2002—Speaking to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Sharon complained,
“In Lebanon, there was an agreement not to liquidate Yasser Arafat.... In principle,
I’m sorry that we didn’t liquidate him.” In 1982, as Israeli defense minister, Sharon
orchestrated Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the expulsion of the Palestine
Liberation Organization from the country. The interview coincided with the Israeli
government announcing a plan to seal off Jerusalem from the West Bank, including
the setting up of lookout towers, electronic cameras, trenches and further military
checkpoints, aimed at cordoning off the city from what one cabinet minister called
“the Arab congestion” around it. Sharon’s brazen talk of murder came in response to
Bush’s January 29 State of the Union speech, where he denounced the “axis of evil,”
and made clear that the US was moving inexorably towards war in the Middle East.
March 8, 2002—This was the worst day of violence in the past 17 months of conflict,
as the Israeli army raided Palestinian towns and refugee camps, killing around 40
people. Tanks prevented ambulances from coming to the aid of the injured and
dying. There were 108 Palestinians and 36 Israelis killed in a single week, as the
Israeli Defense Force made almost constant incursions into the refugee camps. The
escalation of the conflict was Sharon’s response to the publication of a proposal by
Saudi Arabia to exchange Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories for Arab
recognition of Israel. Sharon proclaimed a policy of applying “continuous military
pressure” on the Palestinian leadership, insisting, “Only after they are beaten will we
be able to hold talks.... The Palestinian Authority will not fight terror because they
are
the terror.”
March 28, 2002—The Israeli Army invades Ramallah and surrounds Arafat’s
headquarters. In subsequent days, more West Bank cities and towns are occupied in
a military operation with no apparent end or limit. More than a thousand Palestinians
have been arrested in the first week of the invasion; dozens have been killed and
hundreds wounded. Sharon called for Arafat to be expelled from the West Bank and
exiled for life. In the right-wing press and from politicians in the Knesset come calls
for even more drastic measures: expulsion of all relatives of suicide bombers; the
killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in order to drown the resistance in blood;
the deportation of the entire population of the West Bank, several million people; and
a crackdown on political dissent and opposition to the military atrocities among
Israeli
Arabs and in the Jewish population itself.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
End<{{{
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