ISRAEL, PALESTINE AND THE U.S. WAR
By Richard Becker
The following article was written on Nov. 27, prior to the most recent developments. We thought it would be helpful in understanding the latest crisis. Please stay alert to possible emergency response actions.
Nov. 27, 2001 -- What is the Bush administration really trying to accomplish at this time by sending a retired Marine general and an assistant secretary of state to negotiate between the Palestinians and Israel?
After a decade of intensive but failed talks involving presidents and prime ministers, is it conceivable that a much lower-level delegation could achieve a just peace in the Middle East?
No, a real peace agreement is not the objective here. The goal instead is pacification. What Washington is seeking is diplomatic cover for its war effort. Public opinion throughout the Middle East is highly inflamed over Israel's brutal repression of the Palestinian people, as well as the U.S./UN sanctions on Iraq.
Even among Washington's European allies, there is strong popular opposition to Israel's use of U.S.-supplied helicopters and missiles to assassinate Palestinian leaders and wreak havoc on the people.
Holding together the U.S. war "coalition," especially if the Bush national security team decides to take the war to Iraq, Yemen or anywhere else in the Middle East, requires at least a feigned attempt to calm the struggle in Palestine.
The soldier, retired general Anthony Zinni, and the diplomat, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs William Burns, landed in Israel on Nov. 26, one week after Secretary of State Colin Powell's "major policy speech" on the Palestine-Israel conflict. The level of representation was treated with editorial disdain by Israel's leading newspapers. Instead of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has appointed a retired "hard-line general," Meir Dagan, as his lead negotiator in the talks.
Zinni and Burns arrived 14 months after the start of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising). Since September 2000, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed and 20,000 wounded. Thousands of homes, offices and other buildings in the mere 5 percent of Palestine that is under the tenuous control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) have been destroyed. In the same time period, 190 Israelis have been killed, though Israeli deaths always receive far more attention in the corporate media here.
Secretary Powell's Nov. 20 speech included the usual formulations, calling for the Palestinians to desist from the struggle and the Israelis to "show restraint."
Israel's war criminal prime minister, Sharon, showed his government's "restraint" two days later when the Israeli Army (IDF) assassinated Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, one of the top leaders of the Hamas- Islamic Resistance Movement. Abu Hanoud, along with two associates, was blown to bits by a missile fired at his car from a U.S.-provided helicopter.
Then, on Nov. 24, an Israeli army booby-trap exploded in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, killing five young boys from the same family.
Both of these attacks took place inside Zone A, the tiny part of Palestine that is supposed to be exclusively controlled by the PA. Since September, IDF units have occupied large parts of Zone A. Huge Palestinian marches in the West Bank and Gaza protested these killings. Palestinian urban guerrilla units launched a mortar attack on an Israeli base in Gaza, killing an Israeli soldier, the first reported Israeli death from a mortar.
When Israel struck back with massive firepower, it was called "retaliation" in the U.S. mainstream media, although the same term was not applied to the Palestinian mortar attack. "Retaliation" implies moral justification, something always conferred on the Israelis in the U.S. media and never on the Palestinians.
WHAT BUSH WANTS, WHAT SHARON WANTS
The widely publicized stance of the Sharon regime is that there can be no resumption of negotiations until the Palestinians desist from the struggle.
Sharon specifically says that there must be "seven days of absolute quiet." Of course, the Israeli army doesn't have to end its occupation for the same week.
Sharon restated his position immediately following Powell's speech, demanding again that the Palestinians halt their struggle--in essence, call off the Intifada--as a pre-condition for any further talks.
At the same time, Sharon directed the Israeli Army to assassinate one of the top leaders of the Intifada. Such a high-level hit could only have been carried out with the prime minister's approval.
The assassination of Abu Hanoud and the murder of the five Palestinian children in Khan Younis follow scores of other political murders. In August, U.S.-supplied helicopters and missiles were used by the IDF to assassinate Abu Ali Mustafa, the general secretary of the largest Palestinian leftist party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The following month, the PFLP retaliated by shooting an extreme right-wing member of the Israeli cabinet.
There is nothing more guaranteed to evoke Palestinian anger and action than the systematic campaign of murdering Palestinian leaders carried out by the Israeli military.
The timing of Abu Hanoud's assassination demonstrates conclusively that Sharon has no interest in any kind of real negotiations, even under the onerous and unacceptable conditions he has laid down. But Sharon is more than uninterested--he is, in reality, opposed to any kind of agreement that would limit Israel's domination of all of Palestine.
Sharon's bloody history, though largely concealed in the big media here, is well known to the world. From the massacre at Qibya, Jordan, in 1953, to his murderous reign as IDF commander of Gaza after the 1967 war, to the 1982 mass slaughter of 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Lebanon, Sharon has left behind him a long trail of death and destruction.
What is less known is that, beginning in the early 1950s, Sharon was part of a grouping led by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben- Gurion, that was determined to expand the newly formed state's borders. Avoiding the fetters of an internationally guaranteed peace agreement was regarded as key.
Ben-Gurion's "favorite general" was Moshe Dayan, and Dayan's chief operational henchman was Ariel Sharon.
As the Israeli "New Historian" Benny Morris has shown, using declassified Israeli documents, Dayan directed a policy of massive "retaliation" against the recently dispossessed and exiled Palestinians who attempted to return to their homeland. The aim was to eventually provoke a new war, "the Second Round" as it was referred to by officials. ("Israel's Border Wars, 1949-56," by Benny Morris.)
In 1949, Dayan was quoted by a Tel Aviv-based U.S. diplomat as saying: "Boundaries--Frontier of Israel should be on Jordan [River]. ... Present boundaries ridiculous from all points of view." After the 1948 war, Israel occupied 78 percent of historic Palestine. The aim of Ben-Gurion, Dayan and other Israeli leaders was from the very beginning to conquer the remaining 22 percent--the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israeli ruling class has always regarded its state as being too small to be the world power it desires.
The Ben-Gurion government of the 1950s was dedicated to avoiding any peace agreement that would foreclose its possibility of gaining control over all of Palestine in the future. At the same time, it was politically necessary to make it appear that Israel was seeking peace and also that the Palestinians--along with Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries--were the obstacle to peace.
Border crossings, whether by starving Palestinians trying to pick fruit from their former orchards, or armed attacks by fedayeen guerrillas, were always presented by the Israeli government as unprovoked criminal incidents for which Israel had to "retaliate."
Much as it does today, the Israeli government of that time pursued a strategy of avoiding a peace agreement while simultaneously presenting itself to the world as the victim of aggression. Much as it does today, the U.S. capitalist media cooperated fully.
Now, as the war against Afghanistan deepens, and the U.S. threatens to expand it to the Middle East, Washington is seeking to convey an image of even-handed peacemaker. The real purpose is to help out its dependent regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where the people overwhelmingly support the Palestinian cause.
The masses in those countries, however, are acutely aware of the fact that the high-tech weapons wielded against the Palestinians by the IDF come from the United States, which supplies about $4 billion in aid annually to Israel.
So the Bush/Powell diplomatic mane uver needs some help, if only cosmetic help, from Sharon. But Sharon is not cooperating.
How can a government so dependent on a non-stop flow of U.S weapons and dollars decline to cooperate? If the U.S. ruling class were united, no Israeli government, no matter how "hard-line," could, in the end, resist.
But Sharon knows that the U.S. ruling class is divided over the conduct of the war, such as whether to attack Iraq.
The extreme right-wing militarist wing of the U.S. government now in the driver's seat is pushing for an all-out assault on any forces resisting imperialist domination in the Middle East.
Tactical differences aside, destroying the Palestinian revolution ranks high on the list of objectives for the entire U.S. ruling class, and has for many decades. Liquidating the Palestinian struggle is seen in Washington as central to the pacification of the Middle East as a whole. The real aim is to open the entire region to unlimited plunder by the big oil companies, banks and military contractors who are the core of the U.S. establishment.
For exactly this reason, solidarity with the Palestinian people and their heroic cause remains as critical as ever.
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