Kez
2nd May 2002, 20:13
WHITE HOUSE DEEPENS ANTI-PALESTINIAN POLICY: U.S.
BLOCKS JENIN PROBE
By Richard Becker
President George W. Bush announced on April 29 that an
agreement had been reached to release Palestinian Authority
President Yasir Arafat from his month-long captivity inside
the destroyed PA compound in Ramallah.
The terms--official and unofficial--of the U.S.-brokered
deal shed light on the relationship between the U.S., Israel
and the PA, as well as U.S. strategy for suppressing the
Palestinian struggle.
Arafat has been surrounded by Israeli troops and armor since
Israel began its massive assault on the West Bank on March
29 with an attack on Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin and
other West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps. The PA
president has held out under very difficult conditions and
against the arrogant and colonialist demands of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As a result, Arafat's prestige, along with demands for his
freedom, have risen throughout the Arab world and beyond.
News of his imminent release was widely welcomed.
The conditions for ending his imprisonment, however, pose a
danger to the unity of the Palestinian resistance movement,
and may presage a wider direct U.S. intervention in the
conflict.
Israel's offensive, the largest since the June 1967 war when
it conquered the West Bank and Gaza, has left unprecedented
destruction and a still-uncounted number of dead in its
wake.
The Israeli attack, carried out by 100,000 troops, hundreds
of tanks and the heavy use of attack helicopters,
deliberately destroyed much of the Palestinian urban
infrastructure, including water, power, sewage, phone and
other systems.
Israeli army troops systematically wrecked and looted PA
offices, among them the health and education ministries.
The offensive was clearly aimed at destroying not only the
Palestinian resistance organizations but the entire
structure of the PA, from top to bottom, and to humiliate
and demoralize the Palestinian people.
PALESTINIANS STRUGGLE AGAINST COLONIALISM
Isolating and confining the elected Palestinian president,
after leveling most of his compound and killing many PA
officials, illustrated once again in dramatic fashion the
colonial character of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Most appalling was the utter destruction of the Jenin
refugee camp, which Israeli military officials, in their
typical racist language, had described as "a hornets' nest."
That kind of racism is employed to justify the most terrible
atrocities, like those carried out against this impoverished
camp housing 13,000 people in one square mile of the
northern West Bank.
The entire central area of Jenin camp was reduced to rubble.
The Palestinian resistance fought heroically. It took Israel
more than a week, with all their high-tech weaponry, to
subdue Jenin and cost Israel at least 23 soldiers killed and
more than 100 wounded. The Palestinian toll is not
confirmed, because many of the bodies are buried under
destroyed homes.
The U.S. corporate media commonly presents the struggle in
Palestine as one between two peoples, and depicts the
Israelis as the victims and the Palestinians as the
aggressors.
The developments of the past month show how thoroughly false
that presentation is.
It is not the Israeli leader who is held captive by the
Palestinians; it is not Israelis who are forced to live
under 24-hour, shoot-to-kill curfews; and it is not Israeli
cities that are occupied and destroyed by Palestinian
soldiers.
THE U.S.-ISRAELI OCCUPATION
But it is not just Israeli colonialism and occupation
either, and that too was proven once again in the past
month. The F-16 fighters, "Apache" and Cobra attack
helicopters and much of the other weaponry in the Israeli
arsenal are not produced in Israel. It is all delivered,
usually free--or more accurately paid for out of U.S.
workers' taxes--by the United States government.
Without the enormous assistance Israel receives from the
U.S., the occupation could not continue, nor could it have
started. Israel gets more than $300,000 per hour in military
and economic aid from Washington, far more than any other
country in the world.
U.S. military aid has turned Israel into the nuclear-armed,
fifth-ranking military power in the world, despite the fact
that Israel has a population of less than six million
people.
The reason for such massive support is simple, and it has
nothing to do with sympathy for Jewish people. Sentiment is
not a category of imperialist foreign policy. Israel earns
its keep by playing a key role in defending the interests of
Corporate America in the Middle East.
>From an objective viewpoint, what is going on today must be
called the U.S.-Israeli war against the Palestinian people.
The support of the U.S. leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
others, for the Israeli offensive was unmistakable.
The role of the U.S. was more than apparent to the survivors
of Jenin, who turned away a shipment of U.S. aid after their
homes were destroyed. Residents refused to even unpack the
food, tents and toys delivered by trucks of the U.S. Agency
for International Development.
A spokesperson at the camp told the Voice of America that
they "would not accept U.S. aid because their homes had been
destroyed by the Israeli army using American-made weapons."
PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE AN OBSTACLE TO WAR ON IRAQ
The problem for Washington was that as Israel escalated its
attack to new heights in early April, protests of a size and
militancy not seen in two decades broke out all over the
Arab world. These massive demonstrations posed a serious
problem for pro-U.S. regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and
elsewhere. The anger of the masses was clearly directed
against their "own" subservient regimes as well as the U.S.
and Israel.
The mass protests came at a time when the U.S. leaders were
trying to line up Arab support or acquiescence for a new war
of conquest against Iraq. Iraq is a huge prize for the oil,
banking and military-industrial interests who predominate in
the Bush administration and every U.S. government.
The Palestinian struggle and the mass militant support for
it throughout the Middle East emerged as a new and
formidable obstacle to Washington's war plans in the oil-
rich Gulf.
The argument in Washington centered on how to remove that
obstacle in order to get on with the wider Middle East
agenda. One side, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell,
advocated a renewal of negotiations. Powell was clearly
behind the Saudi plan passed by the Arab League. The idea
was that the Palestinians would call a halt to the struggle,
and talks would then resume, possibly leading to the
creation of a Palestinian mini-state on part of the
territory of the West Bank and Gaza.
Powell's aim is to liquidate the struggle by splitting the
Palestinians and making the Palestinian Authority beholden
to the U.S.
Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and others held a different perspective.
Their view is that the Palestinian movement as a whole must
be simply crushed and destroyed as a necessary step in
subjugating the entire region.
That outlook coincided with Sharon's view, although for
different reasons. Sharon wants to annex all of historic
Palestine, or as much as is politically possible. The
remainder, in Sharon's plan, might be called a state, but
would be in reality a bantustan-like dependency, completely
sub ordinated to Israel.
Bantustans were the phony "independent states" set up by the
South African apartheid regime as "homelands" for African
people. The bantustans were entirely surrounded by South
African territory and ruled by puppet leaders appointed by
the apartheid government. They went unrecognized by the
world and disappeared with the end of the apartheid system.
Sharon's entire political and military career spanning more
than 50 years has been dedicated to the elimination of the
Palestinians as a people and the absorption of all of
Palestine into Israel.
Sharon's favored tactics have been the most brutal
repression and massive destruction, with the aim of driving
out the Palestinian population by means of terror.
To the astonishment of most of the world, Bush recently
called Sharon "a man of peace," a statement revealing more
about the president than it did about the prime minister.
Sharon could much more accurately be called "a man of
massacres." Since 1953, when he led the Unit 101 force of
the paratroopers that massacred the population of the
village of Qibya, Jordan, mass killings have been Sharon's
specialty. It could not have been a coincidence that the
same unit was sent to carry out the horrendous destruction
of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.
After the June 1967 war when Israel conquered the Golan
Heights, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and Gaza, Sharon became
military governor of Gaza. His job was to crush the
formidable Palestinian resistance to the new occupation.
Just like in Jenin, Sharon ordered the bulldozers in to
widen the streets in the densely populated Gaza refugee
camps so that Israeli battle tanks could do their deadly
work.
Sharon is most infamous for the Sabra and Shatila massacres
in 1982. As then-defense minister, Sharon ordered the
Israeli army occupying Lebanon to allow a Lebanese fascist
militia to enter the two undefended Palestinian refugee
camps. For three days the fascists rampaged through the
camps under the watchful eye of the Israeli army,
slaughtering as many as 2,000 Palestinians, mostly children,
women and elderly men.
Now, the same Sharon has ordered the destruction of Jenin.
Rather than a "man of peace," Sharon should be seen for what
he is: a serial killer. Having executed so many poor people
himself when he was governor of Texas, Bush may truly see in
Sharon a kindred spirit.
U.S. DEAL TERMINATES UN MISSION TO JENIN, ENDANGERS
UNITY
The hard cops in the Bush administration support the Sharon
approach, not because they share his desire that Israel
annex all of the West Bank, but because they want to crush
all resistance to imperialism in the region.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on one side, and soft-cop Powell
on the other, are carrying out a concerted and coordinated
policy against the Palestinians.
Their strategy has apparently begun to produce some results.
On April 29, it was announced that a U.S.-brokered agreement
had been reached for Arafat to be released from his
captivity. In exchange, the PA leader agreed to place six
men who are inside the compound under U.S.-British
supervision.
The six include a high-ranking member of the PA, Fuad
Shubaki, who was accused by Israel of the "crime" of
attempting to arrange for an arms shipment to the PA
security forces. Of course it's not crime for Israel to get
hundreds of times as much weaponry.
Four of the men are members of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who are said to have
assassinated former Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam
Ze'evi last October. The PFLP is the largest Palestinian
Marxist party.
Ze'evi, a former general and crony of Sharon's, was an
extreme right-winger and racist. He publicly referred to
Palestinians as "lice," and advocated that all Palestinians
should be driven out of Palestine. Ze'evi was assassinated
in retaliation for the August 2001 murder of PFLP General
Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa, who was killed by missiles fired
from an Israeli helicopter into his office in Ramallah. The
assassination of such a high-ranking Palestinian leader
could only have taken place at the behest of Sharon himself.
The four PFLP members and Shubaki were arrested by the PA
and have been held inside the Ramallah compound throughout
the siege. So, too, has a sixth individual, Ahmed Saadat,
who replaced Abu Ali Mustafa as PFLP leader.
Sharon, in true colonialist fashion, has been demanding that
all six be turned over to Israel for trial as the price for
Arafat to be released. No Israelis, of course, are to be
tried for the murder of Abu Ali Mustafa or any of the
hundreds of Palestinians assassinated over the past 18
months by the Israeli army and secret police.
The U.S.-engineered "compromise" calls for U.S. and British
wardens to supervise the imprisonment of the six in a PA
prison in Jericho.
This development raises the question of whether this is the
first step in a wider direct intervention by U.S. forces in
Palestine.
To "sweeten" the deal for the Israelis, the U.S. agreed to
support Israelis rejection of the UN investigation into the
atrocities and war crimes committed by the Israeli army in
Jenin. The UN's Jenin fact-finding team, it was announced on
April 30 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has now been
disbanded.
The Politburo--leadership body--of the PFLP responded to the
announced agreement by stating that "it is a continuation of
a series of major mistakes . . . that began with the arrest
of Comrade Ahmad Saadat, General Secretary of the PFLP."
The PFLP statement maintained that this concession by the PA
will "further the appetite of the enemies of the Palestinian
People in Washington and Tel Aviv to demand more and more."
Such concessions, the statement continued, will inevitably
lead to "the termination of the isolation" imposed on Israel
and its prime minister by the international community as a
result of "its continued occupation of all of the
Palestinian lands, and its progression with new massacres
and crimes that have been condemned by the international
community."
The statement expressed the PFLP's view that the PA position
is a "direct and dangerous attack against the national unity
of the Palestinian movement."
BLOCKS JENIN PROBE
By Richard Becker
President George W. Bush announced on April 29 that an
agreement had been reached to release Palestinian Authority
President Yasir Arafat from his month-long captivity inside
the destroyed PA compound in Ramallah.
The terms--official and unofficial--of the U.S.-brokered
deal shed light on the relationship between the U.S., Israel
and the PA, as well as U.S. strategy for suppressing the
Palestinian struggle.
Arafat has been surrounded by Israeli troops and armor since
Israel began its massive assault on the West Bank on March
29 with an attack on Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin and
other West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps. The PA
president has held out under very difficult conditions and
against the arrogant and colonialist demands of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As a result, Arafat's prestige, along with demands for his
freedom, have risen throughout the Arab world and beyond.
News of his imminent release was widely welcomed.
The conditions for ending his imprisonment, however, pose a
danger to the unity of the Palestinian resistance movement,
and may presage a wider direct U.S. intervention in the
conflict.
Israel's offensive, the largest since the June 1967 war when
it conquered the West Bank and Gaza, has left unprecedented
destruction and a still-uncounted number of dead in its
wake.
The Israeli attack, carried out by 100,000 troops, hundreds
of tanks and the heavy use of attack helicopters,
deliberately destroyed much of the Palestinian urban
infrastructure, including water, power, sewage, phone and
other systems.
Israeli army troops systematically wrecked and looted PA
offices, among them the health and education ministries.
The offensive was clearly aimed at destroying not only the
Palestinian resistance organizations but the entire
structure of the PA, from top to bottom, and to humiliate
and demoralize the Palestinian people.
PALESTINIANS STRUGGLE AGAINST COLONIALISM
Isolating and confining the elected Palestinian president,
after leveling most of his compound and killing many PA
officials, illustrated once again in dramatic fashion the
colonial character of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Most appalling was the utter destruction of the Jenin
refugee camp, which Israeli military officials, in their
typical racist language, had described as "a hornets' nest."
That kind of racism is employed to justify the most terrible
atrocities, like those carried out against this impoverished
camp housing 13,000 people in one square mile of the
northern West Bank.
The entire central area of Jenin camp was reduced to rubble.
The Palestinian resistance fought heroically. It took Israel
more than a week, with all their high-tech weaponry, to
subdue Jenin and cost Israel at least 23 soldiers killed and
more than 100 wounded. The Palestinian toll is not
confirmed, because many of the bodies are buried under
destroyed homes.
The U.S. corporate media commonly presents the struggle in
Palestine as one between two peoples, and depicts the
Israelis as the victims and the Palestinians as the
aggressors.
The developments of the past month show how thoroughly false
that presentation is.
It is not the Israeli leader who is held captive by the
Palestinians; it is not Israelis who are forced to live
under 24-hour, shoot-to-kill curfews; and it is not Israeli
cities that are occupied and destroyed by Palestinian
soldiers.
THE U.S.-ISRAELI OCCUPATION
But it is not just Israeli colonialism and occupation
either, and that too was proven once again in the past
month. The F-16 fighters, "Apache" and Cobra attack
helicopters and much of the other weaponry in the Israeli
arsenal are not produced in Israel. It is all delivered,
usually free--or more accurately paid for out of U.S.
workers' taxes--by the United States government.
Without the enormous assistance Israel receives from the
U.S., the occupation could not continue, nor could it have
started. Israel gets more than $300,000 per hour in military
and economic aid from Washington, far more than any other
country in the world.
U.S. military aid has turned Israel into the nuclear-armed,
fifth-ranking military power in the world, despite the fact
that Israel has a population of less than six million
people.
The reason for such massive support is simple, and it has
nothing to do with sympathy for Jewish people. Sentiment is
not a category of imperialist foreign policy. Israel earns
its keep by playing a key role in defending the interests of
Corporate America in the Middle East.
>From an objective viewpoint, what is going on today must be
called the U.S.-Israeli war against the Palestinian people.
The support of the U.S. leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
others, for the Israeli offensive was unmistakable.
The role of the U.S. was more than apparent to the survivors
of Jenin, who turned away a shipment of U.S. aid after their
homes were destroyed. Residents refused to even unpack the
food, tents and toys delivered by trucks of the U.S. Agency
for International Development.
A spokesperson at the camp told the Voice of America that
they "would not accept U.S. aid because their homes had been
destroyed by the Israeli army using American-made weapons."
PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE AN OBSTACLE TO WAR ON IRAQ
The problem for Washington was that as Israel escalated its
attack to new heights in early April, protests of a size and
militancy not seen in two decades broke out all over the
Arab world. These massive demonstrations posed a serious
problem for pro-U.S. regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and
elsewhere. The anger of the masses was clearly directed
against their "own" subservient regimes as well as the U.S.
and Israel.
The mass protests came at a time when the U.S. leaders were
trying to line up Arab support or acquiescence for a new war
of conquest against Iraq. Iraq is a huge prize for the oil,
banking and military-industrial interests who predominate in
the Bush administration and every U.S. government.
The Palestinian struggle and the mass militant support for
it throughout the Middle East emerged as a new and
formidable obstacle to Washington's war plans in the oil-
rich Gulf.
The argument in Washington centered on how to remove that
obstacle in order to get on with the wider Middle East
agenda. One side, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell,
advocated a renewal of negotiations. Powell was clearly
behind the Saudi plan passed by the Arab League. The idea
was that the Palestinians would call a halt to the struggle,
and talks would then resume, possibly leading to the
creation of a Palestinian mini-state on part of the
territory of the West Bank and Gaza.
Powell's aim is to liquidate the struggle by splitting the
Palestinians and making the Palestinian Authority beholden
to the U.S.
Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and others held a different perspective.
Their view is that the Palestinian movement as a whole must
be simply crushed and destroyed as a necessary step in
subjugating the entire region.
That outlook coincided with Sharon's view, although for
different reasons. Sharon wants to annex all of historic
Palestine, or as much as is politically possible. The
remainder, in Sharon's plan, might be called a state, but
would be in reality a bantustan-like dependency, completely
sub ordinated to Israel.
Bantustans were the phony "independent states" set up by the
South African apartheid regime as "homelands" for African
people. The bantustans were entirely surrounded by South
African territory and ruled by puppet leaders appointed by
the apartheid government. They went unrecognized by the
world and disappeared with the end of the apartheid system.
Sharon's entire political and military career spanning more
than 50 years has been dedicated to the elimination of the
Palestinians as a people and the absorption of all of
Palestine into Israel.
Sharon's favored tactics have been the most brutal
repression and massive destruction, with the aim of driving
out the Palestinian population by means of terror.
To the astonishment of most of the world, Bush recently
called Sharon "a man of peace," a statement revealing more
about the president than it did about the prime minister.
Sharon could much more accurately be called "a man of
massacres." Since 1953, when he led the Unit 101 force of
the paratroopers that massacred the population of the
village of Qibya, Jordan, mass killings have been Sharon's
specialty. It could not have been a coincidence that the
same unit was sent to carry out the horrendous destruction
of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.
After the June 1967 war when Israel conquered the Golan
Heights, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and Gaza, Sharon became
military governor of Gaza. His job was to crush the
formidable Palestinian resistance to the new occupation.
Just like in Jenin, Sharon ordered the bulldozers in to
widen the streets in the densely populated Gaza refugee
camps so that Israeli battle tanks could do their deadly
work.
Sharon is most infamous for the Sabra and Shatila massacres
in 1982. As then-defense minister, Sharon ordered the
Israeli army occupying Lebanon to allow a Lebanese fascist
militia to enter the two undefended Palestinian refugee
camps. For three days the fascists rampaged through the
camps under the watchful eye of the Israeli army,
slaughtering as many as 2,000 Palestinians, mostly children,
women and elderly men.
Now, the same Sharon has ordered the destruction of Jenin.
Rather than a "man of peace," Sharon should be seen for what
he is: a serial killer. Having executed so many poor people
himself when he was governor of Texas, Bush may truly see in
Sharon a kindred spirit.
U.S. DEAL TERMINATES UN MISSION TO JENIN, ENDANGERS
UNITY
The hard cops in the Bush administration support the Sharon
approach, not because they share his desire that Israel
annex all of the West Bank, but because they want to crush
all resistance to imperialism in the region.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on one side, and soft-cop Powell
on the other, are carrying out a concerted and coordinated
policy against the Palestinians.
Their strategy has apparently begun to produce some results.
On April 29, it was announced that a U.S.-brokered agreement
had been reached for Arafat to be released from his
captivity. In exchange, the PA leader agreed to place six
men who are inside the compound under U.S.-British
supervision.
The six include a high-ranking member of the PA, Fuad
Shubaki, who was accused by Israel of the "crime" of
attempting to arrange for an arms shipment to the PA
security forces. Of course it's not crime for Israel to get
hundreds of times as much weaponry.
Four of the men are members of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who are said to have
assassinated former Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam
Ze'evi last October. The PFLP is the largest Palestinian
Marxist party.
Ze'evi, a former general and crony of Sharon's, was an
extreme right-winger and racist. He publicly referred to
Palestinians as "lice," and advocated that all Palestinians
should be driven out of Palestine. Ze'evi was assassinated
in retaliation for the August 2001 murder of PFLP General
Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa, who was killed by missiles fired
from an Israeli helicopter into his office in Ramallah. The
assassination of such a high-ranking Palestinian leader
could only have taken place at the behest of Sharon himself.
The four PFLP members and Shubaki were arrested by the PA
and have been held inside the Ramallah compound throughout
the siege. So, too, has a sixth individual, Ahmed Saadat,
who replaced Abu Ali Mustafa as PFLP leader.
Sharon, in true colonialist fashion, has been demanding that
all six be turned over to Israel for trial as the price for
Arafat to be released. No Israelis, of course, are to be
tried for the murder of Abu Ali Mustafa or any of the
hundreds of Palestinians assassinated over the past 18
months by the Israeli army and secret police.
The U.S.-engineered "compromise" calls for U.S. and British
wardens to supervise the imprisonment of the six in a PA
prison in Jericho.
This development raises the question of whether this is the
first step in a wider direct intervention by U.S. forces in
Palestine.
To "sweeten" the deal for the Israelis, the U.S. agreed to
support Israelis rejection of the UN investigation into the
atrocities and war crimes committed by the Israeli army in
Jenin. The UN's Jenin fact-finding team, it was announced on
April 30 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has now been
disbanded.
The Politburo--leadership body--of the PFLP responded to the
announced agreement by stating that "it is a continuation of
a series of major mistakes . . . that began with the arrest
of Comrade Ahmad Saadat, General Secretary of the PFLP."
The PFLP statement maintained that this concession by the PA
will "further the appetite of the enemies of the Palestinian
People in Washington and Tel Aviv to demand more and more."
Such concessions, the statement continued, will inevitably
lead to "the termination of the isolation" imposed on Israel
and its prime minister by the international community as a
result of "its continued occupation of all of the
Palestinian lands, and its progression with new massacres
and crimes that have been condemned by the international
community."
The statement expressed the PFLP's view that the PA position
is a "direct and dangerous attack against the national unity
of the Palestinian movement."