Already in summer 2001, the authoritative Jane's Information Group reported that Israel had completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of the Occupied Territories. But the US vetoed the plan and Europe made equally plain its opposition. After 11 September, however, the US came on board. Sharon's goal of crushing the Palestinians basically fit in with the US administration's goal of exploiting the World Trade Center atrocity to eliminate the last remnants of Arab resistance to total US domination - or, in Robert Fisk's succinct formulation, "to bring the Arabs back under our firm control, to ensure their loyalty." Through sheer exertion of will and despite a monumentally corrupt leadership, Palestinians have proven to be the most resilient and recalcitrant popular force in the Arab world. Bringing them to their knees would deal a devastating psychological blow throughout the region. (46)
With a green light from the US, all Israel now needed was the pretext. Predictably it escalated the assassinations of Palestinian leaders following each lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks. "After the destruction of the houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued to act with restraint," Shulamit Aloni of Israel's Meretz party observed. "Sharon and his army minister, apparently fearing that they would have to return to the negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated Raed Karmi. They knew that there would be a response, and that we would pay the price in the blood of citizens." (47) In fact, it was plainly the case that Israel desperately sought this sanguinary response. Once the Palestinian terrorist attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to declare war and proceed to annihilate the basically defenseless civilian Palestinian population.
Judging by Israeli carnage in the West Bank culminating in Operation Defensive Shield - the targeting of Palestinian ambulances and medical personnel, the targeting of journalists, the killing of Palestinian children "for sport" (Chris Hedges, New York Times former Cairo bureau chief), the rounding up, handcuffing and blindfolding of all Palestinian males between the ages of 15 and 50, and affixing of numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity, and medical assistance to the Palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate air assaults on Palestinian neighborhoods, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes with the occupants huddled inside... When the operation, supported by fully 90 percent of Israelis, was finally over, 500 Palestinians were dead and 1500 wounded. (49)
A Human Rights Watch investigation of the Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 found that "Israeli forces committed serious violations of humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes." Some 4,000 Palestinians, more than a quarter of the camp's population, were rendered homeless in "destruction [that] extended well beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued." Typical of the Israeli atrocities HRW documented in Jenin were these: a "thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man was killed when the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home"; a "fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair"; "IDF soldiers forced a sixty-five-year-old woman to stand on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle of a helicopter battle." A senior HRW researcher further observed that what happened at Jenin was "not so different from any of the attacks" during Operation Defensive Shield, with Nablus and Ramallah suffering worse depredations. (50)
Maintaining that Sharon "has always harbored a very clear plan - nothing less than to rid Israel of the Palestinians," respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has posited ... alternative pretexts for expulsion. (1)Should Israel attempt expulsion, it can probably count on support from powerful sectors in American life. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and House Majority Leader Dick Armey sponsored a resolution supporting Israel's claim to the whole of "Judea and Samaria," while Armey explicitly upheld that "the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there." Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma intoned that "the most important reason" the US ought to support Israel was that "God said so.... Look it up in the book of Genesis.... In Genesis 13:14-17.... This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true."
"Every morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding," the insightful Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reflected this past year."There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it." (78) Apart from being a moral abomination, expulsion of the Palestinians can set off a chain reaction in the Arab world that will make September 11 look like a pink tea.
(excerpts)
Finkelstein, Norman.Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd Rev edition (April 2003) introduction
Comments