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.
Reprinted from the Dec. 6, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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