Bush 'doctrine' paves the way
Israel launches assault on Palestinian Authority
By Fred Goldstein
The latest attacks on the Palestinian people by the Israeli
government can only be understood in the context of the
worldwide wave of reaction stirred up by the U.S. government in
the wake of the Sept. 11 disaster. The so-called Bush doctrine
of "You are either with us or them" is the new framework that
right-wing, adventurist forces in Washington, in and out of the
government, rally around.
In the White House and the Pentagon this "doctrine" means
that everyone who resists U.S. military domination, U.S.
corporate and financial control, and Washington's control over
the strategic regions of the globe--is "them."
In Tel Aviv this battle cry has been gladly taken up by the
Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and converted into a
justification to carry out new aggression aimed at further
weakening, if not destroying, the Palestinian national
movement. In this endeavor, the right wing of the Israeli
ruling class has been strongly encouraged by growing support in
the summits of power in Washington.
Israeli offensive aimed at Palestinian Authority
In the wake of the Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem and
Haifa--which had been in retaliation for the assassination of
Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, a Hamas leader on the West Bank--the
Israeli Defense Forces have opened up an offensive of selective
destruction aimed at the Palestinian Authority and its chair,
Yasser Arafat. This offensive is also aimed at terrorizing the
Palestinian people and all resistance forces while promoting a
civil war within the Palestinian national movement.
On Dec. 3 Israeli helicopters used missiles and machinegun
fire to destroy three helicopters stationed near Arafat's home
in Gaza City. Israeli planes bombed positions in the West Bank
town of Jenin. The next day Israeli troops and tanks moved into
Ramallah, taking up positions 200 yards from Arafat's
headquarters. Later in the day Israeli helicopters fired
missiles into the Palestinian Interior Ministry building, close
to Arafat's headquarters. He was there at the time but was
unhurt.
Missiles were also fired into the Khan Yunis refugee camp in
southern Gaza and into the West Bank towns of Tul Karm,
Qalqilyah and Salfit. The towns of Nablus and Ramallah are in
areas under Palestinian control, but Israeli forces entered
them. There were numerous other acts of Israeli aggression--and
more are planned.
Meanwhile, the capitalist media stepped right into service.
There was round-the-clock coverage of the 25 innocent civilians
killed in the Hamas bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa. There was
no mention of the 80 Palestinian leaders who have been
assassinated in the 14 months of the present Intifada uprising
against the occupation. There was no mention of the hundreds of
innocent, unarmed Palestinian men, women and children killed or
wounded during this period.
The media did not tell the people of the U.S. about the
200,000 olive trees destroyed by the Israeli army over the last
14 months, the principal crop for poor Palestinians. CNN did
not give round-the-clock coverage to the hundreds of homes
bulldozed; to the schools closed; to the people unable to
travel even to a doctor in case of illness or for employment
because they are barred from roads reserved for Israelis or
because they are not allowed through checkpoints staffed by the
IDF for so-called "security" reasons.
The West Bank alone is separated into 220 little
disconnected areas by military checkpoints.
The real suffering and oppression of Palestinians--who live
with 60 percent unemployment and a 70 percent poverty rate,
defined as less than $2 a day--has been deliberately concealed.
One million Palestinians are confined to only 17 percent of the
land of the occupied territories. The rest is occupied by
400,000 Israeli settlers, who get the best land, the most water
and all the privileges of occupiers. Furthermore, they are
armed and carry out vigilante justice against the
Palestinians.
Palestinians view Israeli occupation as
terrorism
There is no way to comprehend the suicide bombings in
Jerusalem without understanding the occupation that has gone on
for 53 years--ever since the Israelis expelled 870,000
Palestinians from their homeland by force and created a refugee
population that not only wants an end to the brutal occupation
but yearns to return to its rightful homeland.
From the Palestinian perspective, the regime in Tel Aviv is
a "terrorist entity," heavily armed with $3 billion a year
worth of Pentagon weapons and ammunition. Yet Sharon ordered
these attacks after having the Israeli cabinet declare the
Palestinian Authority a "terrorist entity" and declaring the
Hamas bombings an "act of war." This declaration, put in the
language of the Bush administration, came 24 hours after Sharon
had a one-hour meeting with Bush in the Oval Office.
The timing of this latest sequence of events is highly
significant.
As Washington was anticipating victory in the war in
Afghanistan, it felt the need to begin building political
support for the next phase of the war. There was mounting
pressure inside the administration to make some gesture in the
direction of moderating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Nov. 19 Secretary of State Colin Powell made a highly
touted policy speech in which the Bush administration reversed
its position of "hands off" diplomacy--which had really meant,
let the Israelis do as much damage to the Palestinian struggle
as possible without any interference from Washington.
In this speech Powell announced that he had appointed a
delegation to go to the region to get the "peace process" going
again. This delegation consisted of a highly prestigious
Mideast career diplomat, former Assistant Secretary of State
William Burns, as well as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, former
head of the Central Command in the Middle East and Central
Asia. This post is now held by Gen. Tommy Franks, who is
running the war against Afghanistan.
In this speech Powell spoke of a Palestinian state, of an
end to the occupation, of freezing the settlements, and of
sharing Jerusalem. But he also laid down the preconditions
being put forward by the Sharon government for any
talks-namely, that the Palestinian Authority make arrests and
put an end to the resistance. A period of nonviolence by the
Palestinians was a precondition for negotiations.
To make the speech as appealing as possible to the Arab
audience, however, he spoke of an end to the suffering of
Palestinian children and innocent civilians.
Killing of children followed by assassination
Two days after the Powell speech, five Palestinians boys
walking to school were killed by a booby-trap bomb planted by
the Israeli Army in the refugee camp of Khan Yunis in the Gaza
Strip. At first the IDF denied responsibility for the attack,
but later admitted it after an investigation was
threatened.
The following day, Israeli helicopters fired missiles into a
van on a West Bank road killing Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud
and two people with him. This was guaranteed to bring about
retaliation on the eve of the Zinni-Burns trip.
In case the assassination was not enough, on the same day
the IDF killed a 15-year-old boy and wounded six others at the
funeral for the five boys killed the day before in Khan
Yunis.
In the view of the Alternative Information Center, a
Palestinian-Israeli organization based in Israel, "The summary
execution of the Hamas military commander ... ordered by the
Israeli government was clearly timed to coincide with the
arrival to the region of the American envoys, led by Gen.
Anthony Zinni. Israel's assassination of Abu Hanoud crowned a
bloody week in which more than 14 Palestinians were killed,
among them five children, six Palestinians were assassinated
and hundreds of houses were damaged."
The dispatch continued, "the execution ... was an attempt to
establish a new reality that will make the envoys' task
impossible to implement."
Sharon's offensive had to have support in
Washington
To understand this event as strictly the right-wing Israeli
regime taking advantage of a situation that fell into its hands
would be to overlook the role of the U.S. government and the
factions within it at the moment.
The Sharon regime is aiming its blows at the Palestinian
Authority, trying to cripple it and put it completely on the
defensive. It is trying to make the climate impossible for any
sort of negotiations, whether for minimal concessions or even
for show. It has reflexive, historical hostility to any form of
discussion about justice for the Palestinians. It wants to
concentrate on destroying the movement. It feels it has the
upper hand with Bush's "war on terrorism" behind it.
But it is difficult to conceive that in the midst of a
world-wide diplomatic military offensive by the U.S.
government, even the Sharon government, brash as it is, could
carry out the assassination of a Hamas leader without some
support at the highest levels in Washington. This is
particularly clear in that it took place on the eve of a visit
by an important U.S. delegation to initiate a new phase of U.S.
diplomacy, calculated to placate the European imperialists and
the Arab regimes.
This is the first time that the Israelis have launched such
a massive military retaliation without the U.S. president
calling for "restraint" on both sides. It is always possible
that Bush will get around to it, if things go too far. But
enough damage has already been done. It took Bush almost a
whole day before he spoke on the Israeli attack. But when he
did, he clearly came down on the side of those who wanted the
delegation to fail.
On the Dec. 2 Sunday NBC talk show Meet the Press, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Tim Russert, "Do you
think Yasser Arafat is a terrorist?"
Rumsfeld replied: "I think that Yasser Arafat has-it's not
for me to characterize him, but if one looks historically, he
has been involved in terrorist activities. We all know that.
That's been his background. "
This is the line of Ariel Sharon. Now, according to the Bush
doctrine and applied by Rumsfeld, Arafat is an enemy-a
"terrorist."
But Rumsfeld, who represents the right wing in the Pentagon
and is in the faction that is pushing for war on Iraq, was also
asked by Russert, "Will we insist, demand, that Saddam Hussein
allow in the United Nations inspectors to find out just how
developed his biological, chemical and perhaps nuclear weapons
systems are?"
Russert was mouthing Bush's most recent demands for weapons
inspectors to reenter Iraq, which the president had enunciated
in his Rose Garden interview the previous week. Rumsfeld
replied: "Now that's a call the president and the secretary of
state are going to have to consider. The reality is that we had
inspectors in Iraq for many years, and we didn't find
much."
In short, Rumsfeld does not think much of Bush's demanding
inspectors in Iraq. He did not pick up on the president's
demand at all. His grouping, including Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and a large grouping of former military
and government officials, consider the struggle for inspections
as a potential diplomatic morass which would only slow the
momentum towards war.
It is this grouping that is growing in strength and feeding
off the war against Afghanistan. Their mentality about the
world at large now happens to overlap with the mentality of the
right wing in Israel, making this offensive against the
Palestinian people possible for Sharon.
The attacks on the Palestinians--even if the Israelis are
forced to pull back eventually--are being supported by the Bush
administration for the moment as part of the renewed struggle
to build a New World Order where all forms of resistance to
imperialism and oppression are considered "terrorism."
Reprinted from the Dec. 13, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page