HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 6, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
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ISRAEL, PALESTINE AND THE U.S. WAR
By Richard Becker
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 maneuver 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.
- END -
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