-Caveat Lector-
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/israel1206.php
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 mane uver 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.
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