------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 15, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
WON'T ACCEPT BANTUSTANS OR APARTHEID WALL: PALESTINIANS CONTINUE TO RESIST SHARON PLANS
By G. Dunkel
The leaders of the Israeli state, and their U.S. financiers, are quietly congratulating themselves over a "victory." In the past four months the Palestinians have not mounted any military operations inside Israel. At the same time, the Israeli military has killed 205 Palestinians. All of the original leadership of Hamas has been assassinated.
But for all their boasting, they have not crushed the Palestinians' will to resist.
In Gaza, the Palestinians have been putting up stiff resistance. In the last week of June, they blew up an Israeli military outpost after digging a 1,000-foot tunnel to it. The explosion damaged the outpost and killed one Israeli soldier. The attack was quite a shock to the Israeli commanders.
Another shock came when the Pales tinians started using new and improved rockets in late June to attack Sderot, a town in southern Israel. While they had used rockets before, the new ones carry a heavier payload, are much more accurate--and did far more damage. They even hit Sderot while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was visiting.
The Israeli Army has been occupying the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, the source of the rocket launching, since June 27. On July 3 Israeli troops shot to death two Palestinian boys, aged 9 and 15, for throwing rocks, according to Pales tinian medics.
Outside Jenin, a town in the northern part of the West Bank, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which are allied politically to Yasser Arafat's Fatah Movement, shot an Israeli settler dead. Their statement said the shooting was a response to the killing of their West Bank commander in a raid in Nablus on June 26.
The Israeli military has not been able to completely crush the Palestinian economy, which is the real objective of setting up checkpoints. When the Israeli Army recently prohibited taxis and trucks from crossing at the checkpoints, members of nearby Palestinian communities started providing pushcarts and dollies to transport heavy goods and people who couldn't walk. Wherever possible, they replaced pushcarts with horse-drawn carriages.
Moving goods through checkpoints became a growth industry, absorbing a lot of the jobless youths. The practical problems over prices and competition generally are settled collectively. This widespread activity shows the Intifidah's practice of getting through anything to anywhere, by any means possible.
It is not only an economic necessity. Strategically it is part of the mass resistance to the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine.
RESISTANCE CONTINUES
Palestinians have endured two years of army assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders, mass arrests, harsh and arbitrary restrictions on movement, and construction of the apartheid wall. Progressives in the Middle East see these measures as part of a plan by Sharon, with full support from the Bush administration, to force Pales tinians to accept a separate state on the West Bank consisting of some scattered, discontinuous and impoverished Bantu stans, and a Gaza Strip under the fist of Egypt.
Sami Abu Zuhri, the Hamas spokes person in Gaza, told the British newspaper the Guardian: "Israel's security measures are very tight. ... It is very difficult to launch operations." (July 12)
Khader Habib, a founder of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, said similarly, "The number of operations has decreased, but that is for the time being, and the struggle is still alive."
Two years ago, at the beginning of Israel's counteroffensive against the Inti fada, Jenin was almost completely des troyed in a thoroughgoing, vicious attack. Palestinians reported that hundreds of innocent civilians were killed. On May 3, 2002, the group Human Rights Watch had to call for an investigation of the Israeli military's war crimes--even though HRW arose as a joint venture between billionaire George Soros and the U.S. state department, and even though HRW's executive director is a former U.S. prosecutor.
However, Tel Aviv, with the firm support of its Washington paymaster, was able to stifle an investigation.
Yet Jenin fights on. The Palestinian people are still fighting, on many different levels. While their resistance lives, while the Pentagon finds itself in a quagmire in Iraq, U.S. imperialism's aim to dominate the Middle East, which depends on Israel's stability, remains thwarted.
- END -
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