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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
Powell ends Mideast trip: a US cover for Israeli war crimes
By Patrick Martin
18 April 2002
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US Secretary of State Colin Powell ended his week-long visit to the Middle East and
returned to Washington Wednesday with Israel firmly entrenched in its military
occupation of nearly every major Palestinian city and town on the West Bank. Israeli
military forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians since the invasion began March
29. They have destroyed homes, water and electricity systems, and the infrastructure
that sustains other public services.
While Powell’s trip had the ostensible purpose of reasserting the US role as a
mediator in the Mideast conflict, his performance was anything but even-handed. He
placed no demands on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt the indiscriminate
killing and destruction on the West Bank.
President Bush’s April 6 declaration that Israel must pull its troops out “immediately”
was downgraded to a mere “request” by the time Powell arrived in Jerusalem April
11. When Powell left, six days later, the US representative claimed to be satisfied
with a vague promise from Sharon that military operations in most West Bank towns
would be concluded in “a week or so.” Even this promise excluded Ramallah, where
Yasser Arafat and his immediate entourage remain under siege, and Bethlehem,
where 250 Palestinians, including the town’s governor and much of its police force,
are inside the Church of the Nativity surrounded by Israeli troops.
Instead of pressuring Sharon, Powell spent the bulk of his efforts extracting
statements from Arafat pledging the Palestinian Authority—which has been virtually
shattered by the Israeli invasion—to conduct a crackdown on suicide bombings. This
insistence on a Palestinian pledge of non-violence comes under conditions where
more Palestinians have been killed in the two- week Israeli invasion than all the
victims of suicide bombings in the past two years.
Arafat himself protested the conditions of his final meeting with Powell, held in the
portion of his Ramallah compound still controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but
with water, electricity and other supplies dictated by his Israeli captors. He said
bitterly, “I have to ask the whole international world, I have to ask his excellency
President Bush, I have to ask the United Nations, is this acceptable that I cannot go
outside from this door? Do you think this will not reflect on the whole stability and
peace in the Middle East?”
Palestinian Authority Information Minister Yassir Abed Rabbo said, “The meeting was
a catastrophe. It ended with no concrete result. There is no intention to stage an
Israeli withdrawal. Powell transmitted to the Palestinian side false promises about a
withdrawal.” Chief peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said, “Secretary Powell leaves the
situation much worse than when he came.”
During his pre-departure press conference Powell was asked why he did not go to
Jenin, the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting. He claimed that he did not have
time to view the city where as many as 500 Palestinians have been killed in the past
two weeks. But he found time to view the damage of a Jerusalem suicide bombing in
which six Israelis were killed, as well as to travel to Lebanon and Syria, at the
urging
of Sharon, to pressure those countries to curb the activities of the Islamic
fundamentalist militia group Hezbollah.
The Bush administration has barely disguised the cynicism of its diplomatic
intervention. Bush himself has had no contact with the press throughout Powell’s trip,
contrary to his normal practice, in order to avoid any questions about Sharon’s
alleged “defiance” of the US demand for a pullout from the West Bank.
White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer, in remarks that were widely noted in
the American press and by Democratic and Republican politicians, distinguished
between Bush’s position and that of his secretary of state, saying that Powell “has
gone with maximum flexibility from the president to use his discretion to do what can
be done to achieve peace.”
While Powell was meeting with Arafat, the Bush administration dispatched its leading
war hawk, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to address a pro-Israel rally
in Washington where speaker after speaker denounced the US call for an Israeli
withdrawal and equated Arafat with Osama bin Laden.
The meaning of Jenin
Conditions in the Palestinian refugee camp outside the city of Jenin demonstrate the
real purpose of the Israeli invasion. The camp was the site of the fiercest Palestinian
resistance to the Israeli Defense Forces—of the 27 IDF soldiers killed in West Bank
fighting, 23 died in Jenin. The toll on the Palestinian side was much higher—at least
100, according to the Israelis, as many as 500 according to Palestinian survivors,
who called the Israeli attack a “massacre.”
The IDF has provided only limited access to Jenin for journalists and humanitarian
aid workers, and a definitive death toll has not yet been established, although there
is
evidence of Palestinian families being buried alive as their homes were hit by Israeli
bulldozers and armored cars. But Israeli censorship cannot conceal the scale of the
devastation.
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday, “Nearly two weeks after the Israeli army
launched the bloodiest battle in the West Bank since the 1967 Middle East War,
there is growing testimony that its victory at the Jenin refugee camp was marred by
human rights violations. Israeli soldiers shot unarmed civilians, bulldozed people
alive and blocked access to medical care, according to more than a dozen witnesses
who spoke Sunday in a temporary shelter just outside the smoldering camp.”
The Washington Post reported Tuesday, “The heart of this battered Palestinian
shantytown of 13,000 has been erased from the face of the earth, its maze of
apartment houses and twisting streets bulldozed by the Israeli military into a vast
crater of broken concrete.” The two-square-block crater in the middle of the camp
resembles nothing so much as “Ground Zero” at the World Trade Center in New
York City—yet it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, whom the American media
demonizes as “terrorists.”
Rene Kosirnik, head of the Red Cross delegation in Israel, said the IDF was
subjecting the Palestinian people to “collective punishment”—a charge that the Israeli
military is guilty of war crimes. “The whole population should not suffer so much,” he
told reporters after a meeting with Colin Powell.
Throughout the West Bank, Israeli troops have smashed up government offices of
the Palestinian Authority, destroying computer hard drives, burning papers,
ransacking filing cabinets and seizing office and technical equipment. Press
accounts have noted such actions at the Education Ministry, the Ministry of Finance,
the Land Registry, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Central Bureau of Statistics,
municipal buildings and libraries.
Payroll records, university records, even test results and report cards for elementary
school students have been destroyed. Minister of Information Rabbo said, “What
they are doing, and what is not being noticed enough, is that they are destroying all
the records, all the archives, all the files, of the Palestinian Authority. This is an
administrative massacre, and this will lead to chaos.”
The destruction goes beyond wanton violence and has a definite political
significance. The Sharon government seeks to eliminate the embryonic emergence
of a Palestinian state and make the West Bank uninhabitable for the Palestinian
population. The aim is to create the conditions where a large proportion of this
population will be forced to emigrate, to be replaced by further Zionist colonization
of
formerly Arab territories.
The Sharon government is guilty of a form of ethnic cleansing—the use of violence,
intimidation and deprivation to shift the ethnic balance on the West Bank and pave
the wave for annexation of part or all of the region by Israel.
As the Washington Post noted April 14, in one of the few references to this subject in
the American press: “the recent wave of suicide bombings has rekindled among
Israelis a search for drastic solutions. On the right, there is new support for
‘transfer,’
a euphemism for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan
or other parts of the Arab World.”
The next stage of this process is the permanent military occupation of “buffer zones”
on the West Bank. The Israeli cabinet gave the go-ahead April 14 for the first three
zones, near Jerusalem and between the West Bank city of Tulkarm and the Israeli
town of Umm al Fahm.
The American media has repeatedly claimed that most of the 5,000 Palestinians
arrested in the past two weeks have been released after questioning. Israeli sources
now contradict these claims, suggesting that as many as 4,000 of those detained are
still in custody. Sharon has ordered the reopening of Ketziot, the detention center in
the southern Negev desert that became notorious for the barbaric conditions in which
Palestinian prisoners were held.
Particularly ominous is the arrest of Marwan Barghouti, the secretary of Arafat’s
Fatah party on the West Bank. Even the Israeli press concedes that Barghouti is a
political leader rather than the commander of a military organization or terrorist
network. Yet he has been jailed in Jerusalem and Sharon is demanding his
prosecution for “horrendous acts of murder of hundreds of Israelis.”
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
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