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Lead article
News & Letters, March 2001
Sharon's election, Bush's bombs deepen crisis in Middle East
by Kevin A. Barry
Two events in February--the election of war criminal Ariel Sharon as Prime
Minister of Israel and U.S. President George W. Bush's massive bombing of
Iraq, his first big foreign policy action--together showed a type of
imperial arrogance toward the Arab world not seen since the early 1980s,
when Israel's then-General Sharon invaded Lebanon and the U.S. (under
Reagan) mercilessly shelled its capital, Beirut, for months on end. It was
in that period that Sharon allowed the massacre of nearly a thousand
unarmed Palestinian refugees.
The JORDAN TIMES, hardly a radical paper, wrote in response to Bush's
recent air raids on Iraq: "We are rather incredulous at the timing of the
strikes, which coincide with the collapse of Israeli-Arab peacemaking, the
election of a right-wing prime minister in Israel whose regard for Arab
life is slight, and the emergence of an Arab population that is more
disillusioned about the future of the region than at any time in the past
two decades." Yet the U.S. and Israel, convinced that their superior
weaponry can protect them forever, blithely ignore the rising anger of
hundreds of millions of Arabs against them.
Bush's ignorance of the Arab world (or anywhere outside Texas) was surely a
factor, but his air attacks also showed a reactionary type of political
shrewdness. For the domestic effect of this new raid on Iraq, which was
after all an intensification of the weekly raids Clinton had been carrying
out for the past two years, was to get Democratic as well as Republican
leaders to back him. This served further to demoralize those forces within
the Democratic Party and to its Left that had been challenging Bush's
vote-stealing in Florida, the very forces opposed to such imperialist
actions.
In a parallel fashion, Ariel Sharon's successful courting of the Labor
Party and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, to orchestrate the
formation of a "unity" government, was designed to knock the wind out of
the sails of the Israeli peace movement. It was also an attempt to suggest
to the Arab world that Sharon's racist and militaristic policies were the
true face of Israel, and that they could take it or leave it.
SHARON'S REACTIONARY LEGACY
The utter unacceptability of Sharon to the Arab side, which views him as
the worst possible Israeli leader, dates to those massacres at the Sabra
and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut. During 62 hours
between Sept. 16 and Sept. 18, 1982, Israeli forces commanded by Sharon
allowed their Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies, whom they had armed and
funded since 1975, to rampage through the two camps. In the end, they
slaughtered some 800 people, many of them accompanied by unspeakable
torture and brutality. Soon after, a quasi-governmental Israeli commission
of inquiry found Sharon responsible and called for his resignation, a call
that the conservative government of Menachem Begin ignored.
In the early 1970s, Sharon was in charge of policing the Gaza Strip, where
one million Palestinian Arabs live today. He bulldozed farms, built roads
dividing the various communities from each other, installed checkpoints
allowing for a total lockdown, and cracked down brutally to eliminate
resistance.
During the years 1977 to 1981, as part of Begin's government, Sharon was in
charge of building large numbers of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories. As intended, these settlements, often inhabited by religious
fanatics, and which would need to be dismantled as a precondition for any
viable Palestinian state, remain one of the chief obstacles to peace.
The fact that a man like Sharon could be elected--and by a strong majority
of 62% to 38% of those who voted--is a tremendous retrogression, not only
for Israel, but globally. It will strengthen all types of reactionary
fundamentalists, both Muslim and Jewish, for example. In a symbolic sense,
it is far worse than Bush's victory in the U.S. While Bush tried to hide
his most reactionary policies during the campaign, Sharon trumpeted his.
Such retrogression is the price Israelis and Palestinians will now be
forced to pay for seven years of missed opportunities since Oslo in 1993.
Most of the missed opportunities have been from the Israeli side:
stonewalling and delays on withdrawals from the occupied territories,
cantonization of even those areas ceded the Palestinian Authority,
continuing to allow the settlements to expand even when talking peace, and
refusing until six months ago even to discuss shared sovereignty over
Jerusalem.
This was compounded by the zigzags of defeated Prime Minister Ehud Barak
since July 2000, when the Palestinian leadership rejected a U.S.-brokered
plan that would have evacuated most (but not all) settlements and given
Palestinians limited control over parts of Jerusalem. Two months later,
when Barak responded to rioting after a provocative claim-staking visit by
Sharon to Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem by digging in, the peace
process was effectively derailed. This was especially true after Barak's
soldiers and police proceeded over the next months to kill no less than 300
Palestinians, many of them children and teenagers. His forces also engaged
in other atrocities, including the publicly avowed assassination of
Palestinian leaders.
THE PALESTINIAN RESPONSE TO BARAK
During these same crucial months, from July through February, the
Palestinian leadership--not only Yasir Arafat's corrupt Palestinian
Authority, but also more independent voices--grew increasingly rejectionist.
In January, even after Barak, under U.S. prodding, seemed to accept a
substantial compromise on Jerusalem and a near-total withdrawal from the
occupied territories, the Palestinian leadership refused to go along.
Nearly unanimously, it insisted that, in addition, all the Palestinian
refugees from 1948 and 1967 and their descendants, now nearly four million
people outside Israel or the territories, be granted an unlimited right of
return, not to a new Palestinian state, but to Israel proper. Given current
demographic trends, such a return would have made Israeli Jews a minority
in a largely Arab country in a decade or so.
As LE MONDE France's left of center newspaper, one that has long supported
critically the Palestinian movement, editorialized on Jan. 4: "In
recognizing the existence of the Jewish state ten years ago, the Palestine
Liberation Organization had implicitly renounced the objective, avowed
openly or secretly nourished, over several generations: the 'return to
Jaffa' of the refugees from 1948 and their descendants. Today, the hour has
come for Arafat to officially dissipate this sad mirage, maintained for the
exiles, that of a reconquest of the old Palestine."
Unfortunately, the murderous Israeli actions that accompanied Barak's peace
offers made just such a renunciation by the Palestinian leadership
impossible. This was even more the case as it became known, from September
onwards, that Barak had lost his majority because of these very peace
offers.
Those who might have wanted to compromise with Barak were forestalled by
all sorts of demagoguery. This included secular intellectuals who wrote of
the absolute right of return, but knowingly ignored the one million or more
Israeli Jews expelled from Arab lands since 1948.
But the most destructive voices were religion-tinged. Listen for example to
Sheik Ekrima Sabri, Jerusalem's top Muslim cleric, who stated: "There is no
proof the Jews ever were in Jerusalem" during Biblical times. During the
battle over the Florida election, he stated that "Jews" were trying to
steal the election for Gore: "They will steal it, and then they will remove
him and then the Jew Lieberman will take over. That is why we support Bush"
(quoted in THE NEW YORKER, 1/29/01).
On the Israeli side, such voices found their counterpart, not only in
Sharon's bombastic threats to bomb Egypt's Aswan Dam if necessary, but also
among the 100,000, many of them Jewish religious fanatics, who demonstrated
on Jan. 8 in Jerusalem. They came out to denounce any effort to share
control of the city and to support a ruling by two chief rabbis forbidding
any relinquishing of Jewish control over the Temple Mount, which contains
the city's two most important Muslim religious sites, as well as the
Western Wall, the most revered one for Judaism.
ARE THERE ANY OPENINGS?
Not for a generation has the overall situation in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict looked so bleak. However, while this needs to be faced squarely
and not minimized in any way, we need also to note a few signs of hope,
small as they are.
One of these lies in the fact that voter turnout was the lowest in Israel's
history. While Sharon's relative majority was very large (62% to 38%), in
absolute numbers he drew no more votes than had Netanyahu in 1996, the last
time a reactionary anti-peace candidate won. The difference today is not in
the size of the pro-reactionary vote but in the sharp decline of the Labor
vote.
That decline was due to massive abstentions, constituting fully 40% of the
eligible voters, almost entirely from the Labor camp. To be sure, some of
these abstentions were from the Right, labor supporters who thought Barak
had not cracked down enough or had offered too many concessions. However
many abstentions came from the Left, from those who could not bring
themselves to vote for Barak because of his murderous crackdown that
destroyed the prospects for peace.
On the Israeli Arab and Jewish sides, the abstention was a well-organized
movement. It included not only the well-publicized near-total abstention by
voters from Israel's Arab minority, some 13% of the potential electorate.
There were also hundreds of thousands of pro-peace Israeli Jews who refused
to vote for Barak.
Israeli sociologist Lev Greenberg organized an appeal signed by some 50
pro-peace intellectuals, calling for the casting of blank ballots.
According to a report on Feb. 7 in HA'ARETZ, Israel's left-of-center paper,
some "believe that the blank ballot movement will have a continuation after
the elections, that it will be led by the Jewish and Arab Left and that it
will be an extra-parliamentary movement."
Can the Israeli Left really break with Labor, soon to be part of Sharon's
government, and draw a substantial part of the 40% who abstained into a
mass-based peace movement? One test is the various demonstrations that were
called, including the Peace and Justice marches held simultaneously in both
Israel and the West Bank on Feb. 24. Another will come on March 8, when
Jewish and Arab women plan to demonstrate for peace. Yet another will come
inside the military, where increasing numbers of youth may refuse to fight
for Sharon's reactionary government, especially in the face of what is sure
to be escalating Palestinian resistance.
Nonetheless, Sharon's victory and its consequences cannot be
underestimated. He will care little about the fact that he was far from
obtaining an absolute majority. His uninterrupted history of aggressive
wars and massacres, of violence and racism, make him a truly dangerous man.
Most ominous of all, he will now be the commander-in-chief of one of the
world's best--equipped and sophisticated militaries, complete with nuclear
weapons--one backed up by an equally shortsighted and dangerous U.S.
administration led by George W. Bush.
--Feb. 26, 2001
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