NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Editorial
Sharon's brutal invasion defers peace for a generation
Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is "a man of peace," the reactionary Christian fundamentalist who occupies the White House told reporters April 19, even as Sharon was finishing up Israel's most aggressive military campaign since the 1982 Lebanon War. Sharon's three-week invasion of Palestinian-ruled areas of the West Bank left hundreds of civilians dead, thousands wounded or displaced, and the entire infrastructure of an embryonic Palestinian state in ruins. While Sharon's coalition government, which includes the Labor Party, termed these actions a "war on terror," they constituted a war crime.
As the dust cleared, all eyes turned to the Jenin refugee camp, where Sharon's forces had gone on a rampage after encountering stiff Palestinian resistance that claimed 13 Israeli soldiers. For its part, Human Rights Watch estimated that 50 to 80 Palestinians out of the 10,000 originally inhabiting the camp were killed.
Human Rights Watch also charged the Israelis with four extremely serious violations of "the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war": (1) the use of snipers to kill civilians; (2) the killing or burying by bulldozers of wounded or disarmed combatants, including resistance leader Abu Djendal; (3) preventing rescue workers from entering, even after hostilities ceased, which forced residents to dig with their bare hands for survivors buried in the rubble; (4) totally disproportionate use of force against a lightly armed enemy in a civilian area.
Throughout the West Bank, there were also charges that Israeli forces had used civilians as human shields and had abused thousands of Palestinian men who were detained by its military forces. As we go to press, Israel is refusing to allow United Nations investigators into Jenin.
Until April, that town boasted a semi-independent public television station funded by liberal U.S. and European foundations that had promoted democratic values. Soldiers also destroyed the computer files at the Ministry of Education.
The whole world knows that Israel's overwhelming military superiority over the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab regimes is possible only because of lavish U.S. funding. That is why the most massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations ever have targeted the U.S. as well as Israel in scores of cities in the Arab world, Europe, and even in Washington, D.C. The fact that some expressions of support for the Palestinians have exhibited a crude and alarming anti-Semitism does not remove the fact that it is Israel that today is the aggressor and the prime destroyer of peace in the region.
THE REAL TARGET: PEACE
Sharon's invasion was not, as he stated, a response to Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, which have been going on for over a year. The reason he picked April 2002 to launch his invasion was that he wanted to obliterate from memory the most serious Arab peace initiative in a decade, the Saudi proposals unveiled at the Arab League Summit in Beirut on March 27.
Saudi Arabia, itself a reactionary, theocratic, and anti-Semitic state, had nonetheless made an unprecedented offer of "normal relations" with Israel on reasonable conditions: withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967, creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, and the return of refugees.
The latter point was left vague, but clearly did not mean the return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, a demand that would end the Jewish state and that had derailed the July 2000 Camp David negotiations. The Palestinian Authority and most Arab regimes signed on to this proposal.
This was terrible news for Sharon, a longtime advocate of a "Greater Israel" where Jewish fundamentalist settlers would dominate the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. That very night of March 27, which by no coincidence was also Passover Eve, another force unalterably opposed to peace, the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, sent a suicide bomber to an Israeli hotel in Netanya, killing almost 30 celebrants.
This gift from the reactionaries of Hamas allowed Sharon to do what he had been itching to do all along, declare war on the Palestinians, launching his invasion. What few have noted, however, is that Sharon's April "war on terrorism" did not focus on Hamas, which together with Islamic Jihad has been responsible for most of the terror attacks against Israeli civilians. These groups, headquartered in the Gaza Strip, were left alone, even as Sharon attacked the more secular Palestinian Authority.
Could the reason be that if Arafat could be dislodged, Hamas, which had been gaining strength, might take his place? Since Hamas rejects the very existence of a Jewish state or even a Jewish community anywhere in the Middle East, then the U.S. might allow Sharon to end even the appearance of negotiations and to keep to his plan of a Greater Israel.
Two moments in Sharon's career have made him utterly unacceptable to the Arab side. 1) From 1977 to 1981, Sharon was in charge of building large numbers of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories-the chief obstacle to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. 2) In September 1982, Israeli forces under Sharon allowed their Lebanese Christian allies to murder over 800 Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. International efforts to prosecute him for war crimes continue.
In the retrogressive climate in Israel today, polls indicate that his April invasion of the West Bank is supported by 88% of Israeli Jews. This suggests that his election by a two-thirds majority in 2001 was no mere aberration.
PUT SHARON ON TRIAL
In this extremely bleak and retrogressive climate, we need to call for the cutoff of U.S. military aid to Israel. We also need to support critically the Palestinian resistance, especially those forces represented by people like Sari Nusseibeh, who have clearly called for a two-state solution without the usual obfuscation of return of all refugees.
In addition, we need to support calls by Hanan Ashrawi and others to end the suicide bombings, in statements she made in the wake of the deaths of three boys on April 25 in Gaza, one of them only 14 years old.
We also need to support those forces within Israel that have campaigned for a just peace, especially groups like Women in Black or the over 900 Israeli "refuseniks," soldiers who have had the moral courage to court arrest by refusing to serve in the occupation forces. But most of all, we must demand the removal from power and the arrest and trial of the war criminal Ariel Sharon. As long as he remains in power, only war is possible.
--April 26, 2002
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