WHITE HOUSE DEEPENS ANTI-PALESTINIAN POLICY: U.S. BLOCKS JENIN PROBE
By Richard Becker
May 2, 2002--President George W. Bush announced on April 29 that an agreement had been reached to release Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat from his month-long captivity inside the destroyed PA compound in Ramallah.
More photos from AL-AWDA-News PHOTO EVIDENCE OF U.S. SUPPORTED ISRAELI WAR CRIMES IN JENIN--WARNING: The photos are not suitable for viewing by minors, or those easily shaken.
The terms--official and unofficial--of the U.S.-brokered deal shed light on the relationship between the U.S., Israel and the PA, as well as U.S. strategy for suppressing the Palestinian struggle.
Arafat has been surrounded by Israeli troops and armor since Israel began its massive assault on the West Bank on March 29 with an attack on Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin and other West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps. The PA president has held out under very difficult conditions and against the arrogant and colonialist demands of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As a result, Arafat's prestige, along with demands for his freedom, have risen throughout the Arab world and beyond. News of his imminent release was widely welcomed.
The conditions for ending his imprisonment, however, pose a danger to the unity of the Palestinian resistance movement, and may presage a wider direct U.S. intervention in the conflict.
Israel's offensive, the largest since the June 1967 war when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza, has left unprecedented destruction and a still-uncounted number of dead in its wake.
The Israeli attack, carried out by 100,000 troops, hundreds of tanks and the heavy use of attack helicopters, deliberately destroyed much of the Palestinian urban infrastructure, including water, power, sewage, phone and other systems.
Israeli army troops systematically wrecked and looted PA offices, among them the health and education ministries.
The offensive was clearly aimed at destroying not only the Palestinian resistance organizations but the entire structure of the PA, from top to bottom, and to humiliate and demoralize the Palestinian people.
PALESTINIANS STRUGGLE AGAINST COLONIALISM
Isolating and confining the elected Palestinian president, after leveling most of his compound and killing many PA officials, illustrated once again in dramatic fashion the colonial character of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Most appalling was the utter destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, which Israeli military officials, in their typical racist language, had described as "a hornets' nest." That kind of racism is employed to justify the most terrible atrocities, like those carried out against this impoverished camp housing 13,000 people in one square mile of the northern West Bank.
The entire central area of Jenin camp was reduced to rubble. The Palestinian resistance fought heroically. It took Israel more than a week, with all their high-tech weaponry, to subdue Jenin and cost Israel at least 23 soldiers killed and more than 100 wounded. The Palestinian toll is not confirmed, because many of the bodies are buried under destroyed homes.
The U.S. corporate media commonly presents the struggle in Palestine as one between two peoples, and depicts the Israelis as the victims and the Palestinians as the aggressors.
The developments of the past month show how thoroughly false that presentation is.
It is not the Israeli leader who is held captive by the Palestinians; it is not Israelis who are forced to live under 24-hour, shoot-to-kill curfews; and it is not Israeli cities that are occupied and destroyed by Palestinian soldiers.
THE U.S.-ISRAELI OCCUPATION
But it is not just Israeli colonialism and occupation either, and that too was proven once again in the past month. The F-16 fighters, "Apache" and Cobra attack helicopters and much of the other weaponry in the Israeli arsenal are not produced in Israel. It is all delivered, usually free--or more accurately paid for out of U.S. workers' taxes--by the United States government.
Without the enormous assistance Israel receives from the U.S., the occupation could not continue, nor could it have started. Israel gets more than $300,000 per hour in military and economic aid from Washington, far more than any other country in the world.
U.S. military aid has turned Israel into the nuclear-armed, fifth-ranking military power in the world, despite the fact that Israel has a population of less than six million people.
The reason for such massive support is simple, and it has nothing to do with sympathy for Jewish people. Sentiment is not a category of imperialist foreign policy. Israel earns its keep by playing a key role in defending the interests of Corporate America in the Middle East.
From an objective viewpoint, what is going on today must be called the U.S.-Israeli war against the Palestinian people. The support of the U.S. leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, for the Israeli offensive was unmistakable.
The role of the U.S. was more than apparent to the survivors of Jenin, who turned away a shipment of U.S. aid after their homes were destroyed. Residents refused to even unpack the food, tents and toys delivered by trucks of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A spokesperson at the camp told the Voice of America that they "would not accept U.S. aid because their homes had been destroyed by the Israeli army using American-made weapons."
PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE AN OBSTACLE TO WAR ON IRAQ
The problem for Washington was that as Israel escalated its attack to new heights in early April, protests of a size and militancy not seen in two decades broke out all over the Arab world. These massive demonstrations posed a serious problem for pro-U.S. regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and elsewhere. The anger of the masses was clearly directed against their "own" subservient regimes as well as the U.S. and Israel.
The mass protests came at a time when the U.S. leaders were trying to line up Arab support or acquiescence for a new war of conquest against Iraq. Iraq is a huge prize for the oil, banking and military-industrial interests who predominate in the Bush administration and every U.S. government.
The Palestinian struggle and the mass militant support for it throughout the Middle East emerged as a new and formidable obstacle to Washington's war plans in the oil- rich Gulf.
The argument in Washington centered on how to remove that obstacle in order to get on with the wider Middle East agenda. One side, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, advocated a renewal of negotiations. Powell was clearly behind the Saudi plan passed by the Arab League. The idea was that the Palestinians would call a halt to the struggle, and talks would then resume, possibly leading to the creation of a Palestinian mini-state on part of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza.
Powell's aim is to liquidate the struggle by splitting the Palestinians and making the Palestinian Authority beholden to the U.S.
Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others held a different perspective. Their view is that the Palestinian movement as a whole must be simply crushed and destroyed as a necessary step in subjugating the entire region.
That outlook coincided with Sharon's view, although for different reasons. Sharon wants to annex all of historic Palestine, or as much as is politically possible. The remainder, in Sharon's plan, might be called a state, but would be in reality a bantustan-like dependency, completely subordinated to Israel.
Bantustans were the phony "independent states" set up by the South African apartheid regime as "homelands" for African people. The bantustans were entirely surrounded by South African territory and ruled by puppet leaders appointed by the apartheid government. They went unrecognized by the world and disappeared with the end of the apartheid system.
Sharon's entire political and military career spanning more than 50 years has been dedicated to the elimination of the Palestinians as a people and the absorption of all of Palestine into Israel.
Sharon's favored tactics have been the most brutal repression and massive destruction, with the aim of driving out the Palestinian population by means of terror.
To the astonishment of most of the world, Bush recently called Sharon "a man of peace," a statement revealing more about the president than it did about the prime minister.
Sharon could much more accurately be called "a man of massacres." Since 1953, when he led the Unit 101 force of the paratroopers that massacred the population of the village of Qibya, Jordan, mass killings have been Sharon's specialty. It could not have been a coincidence that the same unit was sent to carry out the horrendous destruction of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.
After the June 1967 war when Israel conquered the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and Gaza, Sharon became military governor of Gaza. His job was to crush the formidable Palestinian resistance to the new occupation. Just like in Jenin, Sharon ordered the bulldozers in to widen the streets in the densely populated Gaza refugee camps so that Israeli battle tanks could do their deadly work.
Sharon is most infamous for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. As then-defense minister, Sharon ordered the Israeli army occupying Lebanon to allow a Lebanese fascist militia to enter the two undefended Palestinian refugee camps. For three days the fascists rampaged through the camps under the watchful eye of the Israeli army, slaughtering as many as 2,000 Palestinians, mostly children, women and elderly men.
Now, the same Sharon has ordered the destruction of Jenin. Rather than a "man of peace," Sharon should be seen for what he is: a serial killer. Having executed so many poor people himself when he was governor of Texas, Bush may truly see in Sharon a kindred spirit.
U.S. DEAL TERMINATES UN MISSION TO JENIN, ENDANGERS UNITY
The hard cops in the Bush administration support the Sharon approach, not because they share his desire that Israel annex all of the West Bank, but because they want to crush all resistance to imperialism in the region.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on one side, and soft-cop Powell on the other, are carrying out a concerted and coordinated policy against the Palestinians.
Their strategy has apparently begun to produce some results. On April 29, it was announced that a U.S.-brokered agreement had been reached for Arafat to be released from his captivity. In exchange, the PA leader agreed to place six men who are inside the compound under U.S.-British supervision.
The six include a high-ranking member of the PA, Fuad Shubaki, who was accused by Israel of the "crime" of attempting to arrange for an arms shipment to the PA security forces. Of course it's not crime for Israel to get hundreds of times as much weaponry.
Four of the men are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who are said to have assassinated former Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam Ze'evi last October. The PFLP is the largest Palestinian Marxist party.
Ze'evi, a former general and crony of Sharon's, was an extreme right-winger and racist. He publicly referred to Palestinians as "lice," and advocated that all Palestinians should be driven out of Palestine. Ze'evi was assassinated in retaliation for the August 2001 murder of PFLP General Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa, who was killed by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter into his office in Ramallah. The assassination of such a high-ranking Palestinian leader could only have taken place at the behest of Sharon himself.
The four PFLP members and Shubaki were arrested by the PA and have been held inside the Ramallah compound throughout the siege. So, too, has a sixth individual, Ahmed Saadat, who replaced Abu Ali Mustafa as PFLP leader.
Sharon, in true colonialist fashion, has been demanding that all six be turned over to Israel for trial as the price for Arafat to be released. No Israelis, of course, are to be tried for the murder of Abu Ali Mustafa or any of the hundreds of Palestinians assassinated over the past 18 months by the Israeli army and secret police.
The U.S.-engineered "compromise" calls for U.S. and British wardens to supervise the imprisonment of the six in a PA prison in Jericho.
This development raises the question of whether this is the first step in a wider direct intervention by U.S. forces in Palestine.
To "sweeten" the deal for the Israelis, the U.S. agreed to support Israelis rejection of the UN investigation into the atrocities and war crimes committed by the Israeli army in Jenin. The UN's Jenin fact-finding team, it was announced on April 30 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has now been disbanded.
The Politburo--leadership body--of the PFLP responded to the announced agreement by stating that "it is a continuation of a series of major mistakes . . . that began with the arrest of Comrade Ahmad Saadat, General Secretary of the PFLP."
The PFLP statement maintained that this concession by the PA will "further the appetite of the enemies of the Palestinian People in Washington and Tel Aviv to demand more and more." Such concessions, the statement continued, will inevitably lead to "the termination of the isolation" imposed on Israel and its prime minister by the international community as a result of "its continued occupation of all of the Palestinian lands, and its progression with new massacres and crimes that have been condemned by the international community."
The statement expressed the PFLP's view that the PA position is a "direct and dangerous attack against the national unity of the Palestinian movement."
AL-AWDA-News: Take a look... Pictures talk for themselves!
PHOTO EVIDENCE OF U.S. SUPPORTED ISRAELI WAR CRIMES IN JENIN--WARNING: The photos are not suitable for viewing by minors, or those easily shaken.
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