Assassination of Palestinian Sheik Yassin
Israeli murder draws world condemnation
By Richard Becker
The assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the
leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement also known as Hamas,
outside a mosque in Gaza City, Palestine, on March 22 has drawn
world-wide condemnation. Sheik Yassin and seven other people
were killed by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter
gunship.
The murder of Yassin signals that Israel, in the words of a
statement from the International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War
and End Racism) Coalition, "is preparing an all-out assault on
the Palestinian people, much in the same context as the attack
on Lebanon in June 1982. The aim then was to destroy the
Palestinian national liberation movement and turn Lebanon into
a virtual colony."
Following the assassination, hundreds of thousands of people
took to the streets of Gaza City in what may have been the
largest demonstration in the area's history. Hundreds of
thousands more staged militant protests in cities all over the
West Bank and in Palestinian areas inside the 1948 Israeli
border.
Massive street protests took place in many Middle Eastern
countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
Virtually all governments in Arab and predominantly Muslim
states--even those most under U.S. domination--issued
statements condemning the attack, as did political leaders
around the globe.
The Hezbollah guerrilla movement, which was largely
responsible for driving Israeli forces out of most of southern
Lebanon in 2000, fired heavy artillery and rockets into the
still-occupied Chebaa Farms area in retaliation.
Hamas in its statement held both Israel and the U.S.
responsible for the assassination.
The U.S.-Israeli role
After several hours of taking a neutral position while
stating that it had no advance notice of the assassination, the
Bush administration was finally compelled by the depth of world
reaction to issue a statement mildly criticizing Israel. State
Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said that the U.S. was
"deeply troubled" by the attack, but stopped short of
condemnation.
Just before the attack, Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter jets
flew over the site. The roar of the jets was meant to mask the
sound of the helicopter, which rose up over a neighboring
building and fired three rockets into a group of people,
including the wheelchair-bound Yassin, as they were leaving the
mosque following morning prayers.
Both the F-16s and the helicopters that Israel commonly uses
to attack Palestinian civilian targets were supplied by the
U.S. Israeli pilots can operate with impunity, knowing that the
Palestinian side has little with which to counter Israel's high
tech and heavily armored weaponry.
The murder of Yassin, like so many other "targeted killings"
of Palestinian leaders, was specifically authorized by the
Israeli cabinet headed by Ariel Sharon. Sharon is infamous for
the countless massacres and assassinations carried out at his
direction during his bloody half-century career as a military
officer and politician.
The assassination and Sharon's strategy
The Israeli tactic of assassinating Sheik Yassin is part of
a larger strategy that sees all-out conflict as being both
necessary and desirable. Sharon and his advisors aim to destroy
not only Hamas but all the Palestinian resistance
organizations.
The Israeli regime has engaged for decades in a relentless
daily campaign of violence and economic strangulation against
the Palestinian population. Pales tinian casualties have far
exceeded those on the Israeli side. Since the current Intifada
(uprising) began three and a half years ago, three times as
many Pales tinians as Israelis have been killed and 10 times as
many wounded. At least 6,500 Palestinians are illegally held in
Israeli prisons under deplorable conditions. Israeli income is
15 times that of Palestinians.
The media here glorify Israel and the Israeli military while
demonizing the Palestinian resistance, which is driven to use
desperation tactics. Palestinian suicide bombers, who suffer
certain death in an operation, are called "cowards" and
"homicide bombers" by President George W. Bush and U.S.
networks, derisive terms never attached to the actions of
Israeli snipers and pilots, who kill from afar at no risk to
their own safety.
Despite all the killing and deprivation, however, the
Palestinian resistance--both secular and religious-based--has
not been defeated.
Sharon's aim is to permanently add a large section of the
West Bank to Israel. But to accomplish this conquest, it is not
enough to simply exert military control over the area. That the
Israelis achieved long ago.
The situation is similar to that in early 1948, during the
war that established the state of Israel. It was not enough for
the Israeli army to take territory. In order to establish an
exclusivist Jewish state--the Zionist ideal--the indigenous
Palestinian people not only had to be defeated, but also
removed. That is what led to the mass expulsions of 780,000
Palestinians in what came to be known as Al-Nakba, "The
Catastrophe."
It was not very different at all from what took place in
North America to make way for the creation of the United
States.
The Sharon government is squeezing the Palestinian
population in every imaginable way, using the apartheid wall,
hundreds of checkpoints and economic deprivation, as well as
tanks, missiles and systematic torture.
But to disempower and demoralize the Palestinians into
giving up and leaving in large numbers, Sharon and his fellow
gangsters believe, it is necessary to destroy the deeply rooted
organizations of resistance.
For this strategy to succeed, the Sharon grouping assuredly
knows, will take a prolonged period of upheaval and the deaths
of unknown numbers of both Palestinians and Israelis. They are
well aware that there will likely be many casualties on each
side, and are willing to shed unlimited quantities of blood to
fulfill their expansionist dreams.
Complications for U.S.
As much as the U.S. government and both capitalist parties
support Israel--because of its role policing the region on
behalf of imperialist interests--they must recognize that the
Yassin assassination has potentially far-reaching negative
implications for the U.S. project in the region and beyond.
Anger was already widespread and growing against the U.S.
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the seemingly unlimited
support for Israel against the Palestinians, the multiplying
Pentagon bases across the Middle East and Central Asia and
more.
Photos of demonstrations from Cairo in Egypt to Mosul and
Baghdad in occupied Iraq to Islamabad in Pakistan showed
protesters burning U.S. as well as Israeli flags in the
aftermath of the assassination. Repressive pro-U.S.
governments--called "democracies" in the obedient corporate
media here--in Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere were forced for the
first time in years to allow mass street demonstrations.
Even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose fealty to
Washington is legendary, was compelled to declare in response
to a question about the U.S.-sponsored "peace" initiative:
"Peace process? How can you speak of a peace process when the
region is burning?"
Already faced with growing mass resistance to occupation in
Iraq, intensified fighting in Afghanistan, and a resurgent
global anti-war movement, this "burning" may greatly complicate
the U.S. achieving its imperialist aims in the coming weeks and
months.
Reprinted from the April 1, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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