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BARAK, SHARON, ARAFAT ALL MANEUVER FOR POWER
GALLUP POLL WED SHOWS BARAK 27%, NETANYAHU 48%
MID-EAST REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 11/24:
Barak keeps courting Sharon. Arafat keeps courting Hamas. Both leaders are
in a fight for personal survival as well as the fate of their peoples. The Children
of Abraham have never been so killing and hateful of each other. What should
have been a land of both has become an unending battlefield ever-more dividing
each from the other. What was to be a land of milk and honey, has become a land
of blood and bombs, fear and revenge. What was to be a future of mutual understanding
may be leading instead to one of mutual annihilation.
Like in the American presidential election, all the maneuvering by both sides
has in the end produced a crisis situation from which there seems to be no good
solution in the foreseeable future. Both Barak and Arafat are clearly maneuvering
first to retain power and second for world opinion, all the while attempting
to reconfigure the region to the designs of long-standing ideological convictions.
The Israelis long ago decided to vanquish and control the Palestinians, essentially
taking their country and dominating the region. In recent years the Palestinian
elite attempted a minimal and contorted "compromise" with the U.S. and "liberal"
Israelis, one the Arab "client regimes" supported for their own craven purposes
after considerable pressuring and threatening from the Americans.
It was always a "solution" not grounded in principle and legitimacy, but rather
in power and corruption. It was always an approach chosen by the Israelis and
based on rhetorical deception and political quicksand.
And now the result is that the Palestinians are suffering terribly, worse
than since '48 and '67. At best the Israelis have boxed themselves in because
of past policies of settlements, militarism, self-deception, and an extraordinarily
powerful lobby in the U.S. that has twisted perceptions and expectations for
so many years now.
As for the Americans who are fully complicitous in creating this whole situation,
they lack the vision, not to mention the political skills and determination,
to extricate everyone from the mess they have helped the Israelis bring about.
Funny as it may sound, they also lack the political independence to do so, even
while their own Arab "client regimes" cry out to Washington fearing their own
demise.
And as for those Arab regimes... Well, they are quite pitiful, continually
relying on verbal slights of hand and ongoing domestic repression. All combined,
some 200 million weak, they are still no match for little Israel which in the
end continues to dominate their affairs in what once was "the Arab world".
The weeks and months immediately ahead may well determine if and how the entire
region will be "restabilized" by the U.S., with the help of the U.N., for the
years ahead.
ANOTHER MISTAKEN BOMBING PUTS ISRAELI MILITARY'S REPUTATION ON LINE
By Phil Reeves in Jerusalem
"At heart, Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated
soldier, is a commando; in uniform he was part
of a group that specialized in undercover assassinations."
[The Independent - 24 November 2000]: The timing was desperately unfortunate.
Yesterday morning, a fighter jet
from the Israeli Air Force dropped a bomb on the West Bank city of Nablus. By
mistake. True, it was a training
bomb, empty of explosives. But the blunder was serious enough for the Israeli
armed forces to rush out a statement �expressing sorrow� and to offer to help
Yasser Arafat�s Palestinian Authority clear up.
All this, only a day after Israel�s Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had blamed the
Palestinian Authority for being indirectly responsible for a car bombing in the
Israeli coastal town of Hadera, which killed two. And only three days ago �
not for the first time � Apache helicopters from the Israeli air force were firing
rockets at the Gaza
offices of the authority.
The strange contradictions of this grim low-level war grow by the day. Just the
night before yesterday�s embarrassing error, the streets of Jerusalem filled
with tens of thousands of right-wing Israelis, infuriated by the Hadera bomb
and demanding that the army use more force.
Israel�s entire dilemma is complicated by doubts over the competence of the Israel
Defence Forces (IDF) to deal with the urban guerrilla war now developing out
of what began as a popular intifada. No one beyond the most wildly extreme elements
in Israel wants to see the military make a mistake by slaughtering a large number
of
Palestinian civilians in one attack.
International pressure on Israel has mounted sharply in the past few days and,
feeling isolated and abandoned, Israel wants to avoid mistakes; meanwhile, its
armed forces have moved to what it �alarmingly � calls �pro-active� operations,
a euphemism for killing people on the basis that you suspect them of planning
to kill
you, a policy known in Britain in Baroness Thatcher�s years as shoot-to-kill.
A �pro-active operation� was almost certainly behind the death yesterday of Ibrahim
Bani Odeh, an alleged activist in the Islamic militant group Hamas, who was found
dead in his car in Nablus. Reports said he had been released from jail only
24 hours before.
For the IDF, one mistake has followed another in the uprising. Three Israeli
soldiers, and a reserve colonel, have managed to get captured by Hizbollah guerrillas
in Lebanon. And if the Palestinian mob that butchered two
Israeli soldiers in Ramallah on 12 October acted in abarbaric way, the soldiers
had made a breathtaking
mistake by wandering into an autonomous Palestinian area.
Even after the lynchings, an Israeli military bus managed to stray into an Arab
area. And what Israel clearly intended as a clinical helicopter strike to take
out a Palestinian guerrilla in Bethlehem was horribly marred by the casual killing
of two middle-aged Arab women, who happened to be passing by.
This is not the heroic stuff on which the Israeli army�s reputation as a brilliantly
efficient force was built. At heart, Ehud Barak, Israel�s most decorated soldier,
is a commando; in uniform he was part of a group that specialised in undercover
assassinations. But his enemies now are guerrilla fighters and a complex, popular
uprising not directed by one single leader, but by several, almost certainly
at odds with one another. The military manuals offer no quick fix.
ISRAEL WON'T RETALIATE FOR CAR BOMBING SAYS BARAK
"Barak, meanwhile, renewed his call for a
'national emergency government' with right-
wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon."
JERUSALEM (Reuters, 23 November, By Jeffrey Heller) - Israel decided on Friday
against launching retaliatory attacks for a deadly Palestinian car bombing and
top officials from both sides met to explore ways to pull back from confrontation,
government sources said.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak's security cabinet, holding its second session since
the car bomb attack killed two Israelis in the northern town of Hadera on Wednesday,
opted not to order strikes on Palestinian targets at this stage, the sources
said.
"It decided instead in principle how to respond to various political and military
scenarios," one of the sources said after the late-night meeting ended early
on Friday.
The source quoted Barak as saying that Israel was continuing its efforts to bring
almost two months of bloodshed to a halt.
Israeli political sources predicted Barak would steer the ministers away from
a strong military response, fearing an international backlash and a hardening
of Palestinian positions on resuming a peace process shattered by the wave of
unrest.
Before the security cabinet session, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim
Sneh and Tayeb Abdel-Rahim, a top aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat,
held surprise talks at Erez Crossing on the Israel-Gaza border.
Political sources in Israel said the two men discussed ways to reduce and stop
the wave of violence in which at least 261 people, mainly Palestinians, have
been killed.
They met after a bomb killed an Israeli lieutenant in a joint liaison bureau
with the Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip.
The facility was part of a chain of District Cooperation Offices (DCOs) in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip where a measure of cooperation still existed between
the two sides.
Israel ordered Palestinian liaison officers to leave all DCOs after the blast,
severing the last formal security link between the two sides. A senior Palestinian
official said they would remain at their posts.
"The DCOs were perhaps the only place where Israeli and Palestinian flags flew
side by side," Sneh told Channel Two television.
A Palestinian official echoed Sneh's sentiments.
"The DCO was the last string in our ties with the Israeli side," the official
said. "We need it for humanitarian purposes, such as coordinating the passage
of ambulances when Israel imposes closure on our lands."
ARAFAT AND ALBRIGHT CONFER BY TELEPHONE
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a senior adviser to Arafat, said Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright had telephoned the Palestinian president on Thursday and that she urged
the warring sides to exercise restraint.
Israeli media reports spoke of a U.S. proposal to establish buffer zones between
the Israeli army and Palestinians at flashpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Earlier, a Palestinian sniper shot dead an Israeli soldier and critically wounded
another near Erez and a member of the militant Islamic group Hamas was killed
by a mysterious bomb explosion in his car in the West Bank city of Nablus.
In other violence on Thursday, Palestinian gunmen renewed shooting attacks on
Gilo, a Jewish settlement regarded by Israel as a neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Five Palestinians were wounded by Israeli return fire toward the village of Beit
Jala, Palestinian medical officials said.
Exchanges of gunfire echoed in several other areas of the West Bank after nightfall.
Earlier in the day, Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said on Israel Radio
that Albright had told him that Arafat had called her to say he wanted to renew
negotiations.
Responding to Ben-Ami's comments, Abu Rdainah told Reuters: "There can be no
return soon to the negotiations before Israel implements the Sharm el-Sheikh
understandings."
He was referring to a deal reached at a Middle East crisis summit in Egypt in
mid-October which laid down steps intended to end the violence, including moving
Israeli forces away from Palestinian towns.
In Moscow, the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin would meet Arafat in the
Russian capital on Friday at the request of the Palestinian leader.
BARAK SIGNALS TOUGHER DIPLOMATIC LINE
Barak, meanwhile, renewed his call for a "national emergency government" with
right-wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon, a coalition which Palestinians say
will deal a death blow to any hopes for peace. They say Sharon's visit in September
to a Jerusalem site holy to Muslims and Jews triggered the violence.
Barak invited Sharon to late-night talks after the security cabinet meeting.
Eyeing a partnership with the right-winger, Barak, leader of the center-left
One Israel Alliance and now head of a minority government, indicated that Israel
would boost its security demands in any future peace talks.
"We will know how to...draw all the conclusions from the security incidents over
the past weeks and to reflect them in the body of the agreements," Barak said.
MiD-EasT RealitieS - www.MiddleEast.Org
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