-Caveat Lector-
>From www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
The political significance of Israel�s assassination policy
By the WSWS editorial board
7 September 2001
Back to screen version| Send this link by email | Email the author
It is time to call things by their right name and expose what is taking place
on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel, with the support of the United
States, is carrying out a policy of assassinations that has as its aim the
destruction of the political infrastructure of the Palestinian national movement.
The claim that Palestinian leaders are being stalked and killed to preempt
terrorist acts is little more than a cover for a policy with far broader aims. The
Israeli state is employing the most sophisticated military and technological
means to decapitate the leadership and terrorize the entire Palestinian
population. The basic objective is to prevent at all costs the emergence of an
independent Palestinian state.
The Bush administration knows full well that Israel�s claim to be using
targeted killings only as a defensive tactic against imminent terrorist attacks
is a lie. The US government, the American media and the bulk of the liberal
establishment are complicit in a policy of state murder.
Events of the past two weeks have illuminated the real motives behind the
series of assassinations carried out by Israel over the past year. On August
27 Israeli helicopters fired two laser-guided missiles into the West Bank
office of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. Mustafa, one of the top five officials of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, was the highest-ranking Palestinian to be eliminated in the
recent wave of Israeli assassinations.
Four days later Israeli forces attempted to murder the head of the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Khayis Abu Leila. Anti-tank
missiles smashed into the home of the DFLP leader in the West Bank town
of Ramallah, but Leila was not at home at the time.
The Israeli bourgeoisie is the consummate practitioner of Realpolitikin its
most extreme and brutal form. No other state in the world so openly defends
assassination and mass repression as legitimate instruments of rule. Israel
uses the most advanced technological means�satellite-based
communications, intelligence gathering and targeting; smart missiles; state-
of-the-art attack helicopters�to track down and kill its leading political
opponents among the Palestinians. Never before has advanced technology
been used in so open and concentrated a manner to eliminate an entire
political class.
By such means Israel seeks to render impossible any organized and
politically directed struggle against its occupation of Palestinian lands.
Palestinian leaders are compelled to move daily from safe house to safe
house to avoid being exterminated. They are unable to hold meetings. Their
communications�via telephone, email, fax�are monitored and disrupted.
They are forced into a semi-underground existence under conditions in which
the enemy enjoys a massive preponderance of military and economic power.
In this manner Israel seeks to disperse and ultimately wipe out the leaders of
all anti-Zionist organizations in the occupied territories and throughout the
Arab world. The message from the Israeli authorities is clear: no one will
survive who does not secure the approval of the Israeli state.
The recourse to state murder is, in the first instance, the response of the
Israeli establishment to the eruption of mass resistance in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip. The second intifada began last September
following the collapse of the Camp David Israeli-Palestinian summit and
subsequent Israeli provocations.
The present policy follows a definite pattern. In April 1988, some four months
after the outbreak of the first intifada in the occupied territories, an Israeli
death squad broke into the home of Abu Jihad in the Tunisian capital of Tunis
and gunned down the Palestinian military and political leader. Abu Jihad,
born Khalil Al-Wazir, was a founder of Al Fatah and Yasser Arafat�s closest
political associate.
Abu Jihad played a central role in organizing and directing the intifada from
the PLO�s headquarters-in-exile in Tunis. His assassination at the hands of
the Israeli military and Mossad secret police was aimed at the head of the
popular uprising.
In 1997 the Israeli newspaper Maariv revealed that then-deputy military chief
Ehud Barak ran the assassination operation from a command center on a
navy missile ship off the shore of Tunis. Barak became prime minister in May
1999 after running as the Labor Party candidate and defeating Likud Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a landslide vote. He was voted out of office
and replaced by Likud hard-liner Ariel Sharon last February.
Barak�s role in the assassination of Abu Jihad makes it clear that all wings of
the Israeli Zionist establishment, the so-called doves as well as the open
supporters of Israeli expansionism, are tied to the policies of state murder
and mass terror. It substantiates the fact that the present recourse to
political assassinations is part of a strategy to destroy the Palestinian
national movement that has the support of the Labor Party leadership as well
as Likhud.
A constant feature of this policy is the attempt to isolate PLO Chairman
Arafat by eliminating all of his colleagues.
Barak�s own record of infiltration and assassination goes back to his earliest
years in the Israeli military. In 1973, disguised as a woman and carrying a
purse packed with explosives, he led an assassination unit that killed three
leading PLO officials.
Political killings, including the 1995 murder in Malta of Islamic Jihad leader
Fathi Shakaki, have long been a staple of Israeli policy. Such methods are
part and parcel of counterinsurgency operations conducted over many
decades by imperialist powers, including the United States in Southeast
Asia and elsewhere. They fall within the range of tactics�infiltration,
provocation, assassination, terror�that constitute the modus operandi of
what experts in the field call �low intensity warfare.�
What is unprecedented is the way in which these methods are being openly
defended by Israel and its American backers.
Since the collapse of the Camp David negotiations 13 months ago, the Israeli
state has pursued a course of military aggression and provocation calculated
to arouse Palestinian retaliation, which is then used as the pretext for
assassinations and further attacks on the Palestinian Authority. Barak
essentially gave his backing to this policy when he defended Sharon�s
instigative visit to the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem in late
September of 2000.
When Sharon, accompanied by a retinue of police and troops, was met with
spontaneous protest demonstrations, Israeli police responded by storming
the Al Aqsa mosque and opening fire on stone-throwing worshippers, killing
six. This bloody provocation set off a further wave of mass protests, against
which Israel employed live ammunition, tanks and attack helicopters. Within
the first week of the intifadaIsrael had killed at least 60 Palestinians and
wounded 1,500 more.
Sharon is one of the world�s leading exponents of the policy of creating �new
facts.� This was the purpose of the settlement policy, which he championed.
The goal was to create a major Israeli presence in occupied territories that
had long been considered Palestinian. Now he is seeking to create a new
set of facts�the absence of an independent Palestinian leadership.
In defense of their campaign to wipe out the Palestinian leadership, the
Israeli authorities employ a combination of cynicism and deceit. One tactic
is a variant of the �big lie�: namely, to accuse your enemy of the crimes for
which you are responsible.
Thus Israel, secure in the knowledge that its claims will be parroted by the
American press, charges the Palestinians with initiating the violence and
brands all critics of its methods as anti-Semites. Israeli leaders have gone so
far in recent days as to accuse the Palestinians of �ethnic cleansing.�
The Israeli justification for the policy of political assassination is the ultimate
�Catch 22� argument. They claim they only kill those who are preparing acts
of terrorism. What is the proof that the targeted individuals are guilty as
charged? The fact that the Israeli state has decided to kill them.
No independently verifiable evidence is ever presented to substantiate the
charges against those marked for assassination. The Israeli authorities do
not seek to arrest the accused, put them on trial and present the factual
case for their elimination. Instead, Israeli hit squads and the Mossad act as
judge, jury and executioner.
Israel could not pursue such a bloodthirsty course without the logistical
support of the US military and intelligence apparatus, and the political
support of the American political and media establishment. The response of
large sections of the US media has been to leap to Israel�s defense,
employing frenzied anti-Palestinian rhetoric and calling for all-out war to
destroy the Palestinian resistance.
In mid-August there was a veritable eruption of propaganda in the US press
defending Israel�s assassination policy. On three successive days the
Washington Post ran op-ed pieces labeling the Palestinians as inveterate
terrorists and urging Israel to annihilate the Palestinian Authority and build a
Berlin-type wall to keep the Arab population in a state of permanent
subjugation.
Michael Kelly wrote in a column published August 15: �[Israel] can win only
by fighting the war on its terms, unleashing an overwhelming force (gosh, just
what is called for in the Powell Doctrine) to destroy, kill, capture and expel
the armed Palestinian forces that have declared war on Israel.�
The following day Charles Krauthammer called for �A lightning and massive
Israeli attack on every element of Arafat�s police state infrastructure�the
headquarters and commanders of his eight (!) security services, his police
stations, weapons depots, training camps, communications and propaganda
facilities (radio, TV, government-controlled newspapers)�with a
simultaneous attack on the headquarters and leadership of Arafat�s Hamas
and Islamic Jihad allies.� Krauthammer made an explicit call for ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian population, summed up in his slogan: �Strike
and expel.�
George Will followed on August 16 with a similar diatribe that included the
following prescription: �Israel needs a short war and a high wall.�
These and numerous other commentators in the press and on CNN and Fox
TV have declared that �we� in the US would be doing the same thing as the
Israelis if faced with a similar situation. Among the public defenders of Israeli
assassinations is Henry Kissinger, the chief architect of American imperialist
policy in Vietnam under President Nixon.
One can only imagine the international outcry, orchestrated by the US
media, were Palestinian leaders to announce that they intended to reply in
kind, i.e., to identify and target those Israelis involved in planning and
carrying out assassinations and other terrorist acts.
The US government has responded to the Israeli campaign of assassinations
with perfunctory public criticisms, delivered by mid-level State Department
officials, combined with private assurances of American support from the
highest levels of the Bush administration. The US posture, dripping with
hypocrisy, signals the revival by Washington of its own practice of using
murder as a tool of foreign policy.
If it is acceptable for Israel to �take out� its political opponents, then the
same applies to the US. Washington�s support for Sharon�s murder
incorporated signals a reversion to the methods that resulted in such
atrocities as the CIA assassination of Congo independence leader Patrice
Lamumba in 1961, the repeated attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and the
1986 bombing of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhaffi�s residence.
Political assassinations were formally outlawed in laws passed in the 1970s
following Congressional hearings headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church into
the activities of the CIA. Today, even more crassly than under the Reagan
administration, the US government flouts its own laws in order to support its
main client regime in the Middle East and suppress the struggle of the
Palestinian masses against foreign occupation, repression and poverty.
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless
of frontiers."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will
teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
