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Our friends in Jenin The US will only exert real pressure on Israel to reach a settlement if it feels its own interests are threatened Seumas Milne The stories of brutality and
destruction filtering out of the Jenin refugee camp have become increasingly
ominous. While independent observers have been kept out - along with ambulances
and UN blood supplies - the Israeli army has rampaged its way through the
hillside shanty town, overwhelming desperate Palestinian resistance. Hundreds
are reported killed, including many civilians. As in other West Bank towns and
camps, reports of beatings and executions of prisoners abound, and Israel
appears to be preparing the ground for evidence of atrocities. Meanwhile, across
the Arab world - where TV news footage of Ariel Sharon's unleashing of state
terror has been a good deal more graphic than what we have seen on our own
screens - millions have demonstrated their fury at what is taking place, while
their western-backed rulers have turned their guns on the streets, killing and
injuring protesters from Bahrain to Alexandria.
This is where wars against terror end, with screaming children forced to
drink sewage and piles of corpses being cleared by bulldozers. Yesterday's
horrific suicide bomb attack on a bus in Haifa (from where many of the Jenin
refugees fled or were expelled in 1948) has cruelly demonstrated the futility of
the strategy pursued by Sharon and his government of national unity. The
largest-scale Israeli offensive for two decades was supposed to root out the
very terror networks that struck with deadly force yesterday. But such acts of
desolate revenge are born of half a century of dispossession and powerlessness,
and a civilian death count far higher than Israel has endured over the past 18
months. What alternative does the government have to defend its citizens in
these circumstances, Israeli politicians demand. The answer is painfully
obvious: withdraw from the territories it has lorded over since 1967 and redress
the ethnic cleansing which underpinned the foundation of the state 19 years
earlier.
Sharon has no intention of doing any such thing. Instead, he has plunged into
a latterday version of France's war against the FLN insurrection in Algeria in
the 1950s. Like Sharon's Israel, France unleashed its full might against bombers
and gunmen, killing, torturing and imprisoning many thousands, crushing
resistance in the casbahs with state terror. Yet after a lull, the rebellion
reignited even more powerfully than before, and the French were forced to quit.
Israelis usually have far fewer illusions about what is going on in their
country than their western supporters. Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney
general in the mid-1990s, recently described the Palestinian intifada as a "war
of national liberation", adding: "We enthusiastically chose to become a
colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands,
transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft
and finding justification for all these activities ... we established an
apartheid regime".
But despite President Bush's much-vaunted public appeals to Sharon to begin a
military pullback from the main Palestinian towns, the US - the one power in the
world with the leverage over Israel to make it withdraw for good - shows no sign
whatever of seriously reining in its long-term client state. On the contrary,
the US administration, with the British government in ever-loyal echo,
repeatedly expressed its "understanding" of Israel's attacks on Palestinian
territory in the first phase of this invasion. Sharon's determination to destroy
not just "terror networks" and the military infrastructure of the Palestinian
Authority, but its civilian infrastructure as well - including educational and
health institutions - has effectively had the green light from the US
government. Both Sharon and Bush want to see the removal of the elected
Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, even though his stature throughout the Arab
world has grown dramatically as Israel has sought to humiliate him. Both appear
to want the wider problem taken out of Palestinian hands and dealt with at a
wider regional level. Nothing could have made the real US attitude clearer than
the secretary of state Colin Powell's leisurely peregrinations across north
Africa while Israeli forces have wreaked devastation in Jenin, Nablus and
Bethlehem. To all intents and purposes, the destruction of the Palestinian
Authority has been a policy signed off in Washington.
It can hardly be a surprise. US military and economic support for Israel -
worth $70bn since 1979 - has after all been the linchpin of its imperial power
in the Middle East since at least the 1960s. There is a widespread mythology,
which at one end of the spectrum shades off into anti-semitic fantasies about
global Jewish conspiracies, that US backing for Israel is largely the result of
the effectiveness of political lobbying in Washington. In reality, it has been
primarily driven by strategic interests in the world's most important oil
region. Unlike the various autocratic Arab potentates the US and other western
states lean on to keep the oil flowing and their populations in check, Israel is
an utterly reliable ally with a proven military record against Arab armies. It
was Israeli military prowess which broke the dangerous spell of Nasserism when
it defeated the Arabs in the six day war. As a settler state in a hostile
region, with a developed western political and economic system and dependent on
US military and financial support, any Israeli move against US interests in the
region is unthinkable. But while it is impossible to imagine Israelis electing
an anti-western government, it would be a one-way bet in many Arab countries if
their people were actually given a choice.
The pattern for the relationship was set by Britain as the dominant imperial
power in the region in the early part of the last century. Sir Ronald Storrs,
the first governor of Jerusalem under British rule in the 1920s, explained it as
"forming for England a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially
hostile Arabism". A lifetime later, that is essentially the role played by
Israel for the US and wider western interests today. It also helps explain the
licence given to the Middle East's only nuclear-armed state to violate UN
security council resolutions at will and why even the EU is unlikely to agree to
the economic or military sanctions demanded yesterday by the European
parliament. The closeness of the alliance does not, however, mean the US will
not bring its client to heel if necessary. When US administrations have felt
that Israeli behaviour was encroaching on vital US interests - as in 1956, when
Israel seized the Suez canal in collusion with Britain and France, for example,
or in the 1980s, when it tried to prevent the sale of Awacs surveillance
aircraft to Saudi Arabia - they have been prepared to slap their ally down,
regardless of its friends on Capitol Hill.
The paradox of Middle East peacemaking has long been that while the US is an
open partisan of one side in the conflict, it is only through US intervention
that a viable long-term settlement can be achieved. Bush's half-hearted attempt
to strike a more even-handed public note over Sharon's onslaught in the West
Bank this week is transparently the product of fears of growing unrest in the
region - and the problems it is creating for US plans to settle accounts with
Iraq. But the US will only move decisively if it feels its own interests are
under threat.
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