FRFI 166 April / May 2002
Whenever it seems that Israeli forces have reached a new level of violence and brutality in their oppression of the Palestinian people, they ratchet it up even further. The slaughter that took place in the first two weeks of March was, however, born of desperation. Far from suppressing the Intifada, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon now faces an armed resistance which has proved itself capable of inflicting such damage on the forces of occupation that Zionist society has started to split. Sharon’s domestic support is waning; from the right, he is opposed by deranged racists, and from the left, by an opposition which seeks a unilateral withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Robert Clough reports.
The renewed offensive against the Intifada that started with the invasion of Jenin on 28 February followed a period when the liberation struggle had scored significant successes against the occupation. In FRFI 165 we pointed out how the Zionists had been unable to break the unity of the Intifada and how within the ranks of the liberation struggle there had been intense debate on the most suitable tactics for taking the struggle forward. Those tendencies which favour hitting military and settler targets have generally won out.
This was evident by the resounding victory of 14 February when one of the Zionist army’s apparently impregnable Merkava-3 battle tanks was blown apart by a 200-pound explosive charge outside Netzarim refugee camp in Gaza. No one should underestimate the psychological impact of this action which al-Aqsa Brigades and Islamic Jihad later claimed as a joint operation. The device, apparently made from explosives obtained from Israeli landmines, killed three of the tank crew. The Zionist army was so horrified that it refused to publish photos of the tank shell. The next day, the army suffered another significant loss when Eyal Weiss, commander of the Israeli death squads on the West Bank, was killed as a wall collapsed on him whilst he prepared an assassination mission near Tulkarm. Then on Saturday 16 February, a PFLP guerrilla entered a shopping mall in the tightly-guarded Karnei Shomron settlement near Nablus and detonated himself, killing five settlers. Two days later, a Fatah guerrilla killed a settler driver and two soldiers near Gaza’s Gush Qatif settlement before he himself was killed. On 19 February, Fatah guerrillas attacked an army checkpoint at Ein Ariq, a few kilometres west of Ramallah, and killed six soldiers before withdrawing undetected and unharmed. This succession of events proved that despite the death squads, the air raids, the invasions and the murders, the strength of the liberation movement, its organisation and its capability is growing.
The response to all these incidents was immediate and ruthless. Within hours of the tank attack, the Zionist army killed three policemen in an invasion of north Gaza, shooting them in cold blood as they took dinner outside their tent. On 16 February it assassinated Hamas activist and teacher Nazih Abu Siba’a. Two days later, the Zionist army attempted to invade Balata refugee camp in a new strategy to rid the camps of their armed defenders. Inadequately prepared, they failed. The whole camp stood firm, but two inhabitants died. In Gaza, F16 fighters bombed the Palestinian Authority (PA) military intelligence headquarters in Rafah, whilst Apache helicopters rocketed a Hamas information office in Jabalya, killing three, including a three-year-old child. Near Rafah, three more were killed, including a 40-year-old mother and her 14-year-old daughter, Maryam and Mona Bahabasa, who were found dead in their bullet-ridden tin shack. On 19 February, the Zionist war machine hit targets in Gaza, Ramallah and Nablus, killing 14 PA policemen, including five outside Batala, revenge for their failure the previous day.
Despite this brutal response, the number of Israelis who believe that Sharon can deliver the goods has fallen dramatically. As one Israeli paper, Yedeot Ahranot, reported, Sharon’s strategy has failed: ‘After 17 months of the Intifada, we must admit that the Palestinians haven’t been broken. Despair has only steeled them. Economic and human distress has only pushed them to acts of madness.’ This has led to deep divisions within Israel itself. These have been exacerbated by the economic crisis the settler state is experiencing. Hit by a combination of world recession and the Intifada, 2001 saw the first contraction of the Israeli economy in 48 years – by 2.9% GNP. The tourist industry has collapsed, with a fall in the number of visitors from 2.7 million in 2000 to 1.2 million in 2001. As a consequence, El Al, the national airline, has piled up increasing losses: $109m in 2000, and $83m in the first six months of 2001. Factories have closed, bringing unemployment to 10%. A sign of the times is that the US Sixth Fleet refuses to call at Haifa port because of the perceived danger. People are starting to emigrate: ‘The settlement enterprise in the Jordan Valley is collapsing’, the Israeli paper Ha’aretz noted recently.
This division has been expressed in the refusal of a large number of reserve army officers to serve in the Occupied Territories. All Israelis are expected to serve three years in the
armed forces from the age of 18 unless they are ultra-Orthodox Jews or Israeli Palestinians. They then have to spend one month per year in reserve units until they are 40. In early February, 52 reservists wrote an open letter to the Israeli press stating that they would not ‘take part in the war for the peace of the settlements’ and that they ‘will not fight beyond the Green Line (the 1967 border with the West Bank) in order to rule, expel, destroy, blockade, assassinate, starve and humiliate an entire people.’ Although they reaffirmed their commitment to defending Israel proper, the statement was a shock for the Sharon government. Within a couple of days, nearly 200 more reservists signed. At the same time, 1,000 retired generals and officers issued a call for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and much of the West Bank as a prelude to negotiations. In addition there are believed to be hundreds of teenage conscientious objectors who have refused to be drafted. On 16 February, 14,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv demanding ‘Get out of the territories, Get back to ourselves.’
On the other hand, however, the Israeli paper Ma’ariv published a poll which showed that 35% of Israelis advocated the mass deportation of Palestinians, and regular demonstrations of tens of thousands of Zionists called on Sharon to intensify the onslaught. The virulent racism that is inherent within Zionism was expressed by a car bumper sticker campaign ‘No Arabs – No terror attacks’ which the government’s chief legal officer had to ban as racist. Benni Elon, Rehavem Ze’evi’s replacement as tourist minister, who lives in a West Bank settlement, is openly in favour of the ‘transfer’ of Palestinians, and calls for the withdrawal of all services and civil rights to Israeli Palestinians.
By late February, Sharon and the Zionists had reached an impasse. Despite their enormous suffering, with over 1,000 dead and 20,000 injured, the Palestinian people remained solidly behind the armed and united resistance. If Sharon were still to fulfil his boast that he alone could crush the Intifada, he would have no choice but to raise the campaign of repression to an altogether new level. This was exactly what happened. On 28 February, Israeli armour and troops smashed into Jenin and Balata refugee camps in a massive assault which left 24 dead and 300 wounded. Tanks flattened cars and ambulances on their way into Jenin; Apache helicopters machine-gunned Balata camp whilst 30 tanks stormed through it. Palestinian ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded. Two were deliberately targeted by the Israeli army. The following day another seven civilians were killed in house-to-house operations in Jenin.
The response of the Palestinian resistance was swift. On Saturday 2 March, a guerrilla killed nine people in orthodox Jerusalem in a suicide attack. More significantly, the following day a lone Fatah sniper killed seven Israeli troops and three settlers at an isolated checkpoint with an ancient single-shot rifle. The rage of the Zionists was uncontrollable, as the events of the following days demonstrated:
Monday 4 March: 23 Palestinians murdered. Six die in an attack on a car belonging to a Ramallah Hamas leader, five of them children, plus the mother of three of them. Fighting in refugee camps kills 11, including three in Rafah and six in Jenin. One of those killed in Jenin is Dr Khalil Suleiman, head of Emergency Services for Palestinian Red Crescent, when tanks shell his ambulance.
Tuesday 5 March: F16s bomb Ramallah and three Fatah members are killed in a helicopter attack on their car; one is an associate of West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti.
Wednesday 6 March: Seven Palestinians are killed as Israelis shell Gaza; 10 are killed in all throughout the day. Apache helicopters bomb Nablus. Three die in attacks on the PA naval force; three others are killed because they are relatives of a Hamas leader. One of those shot dead is a 48-year-old woman.
Thursday 7 March: 38 Palestinians die in an assault on camps in the West Bank and Gaza; 18 are killed in Tulkarm alone including two paramedics: one in a UN ambulance, the other in a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance. Both are deliberately targeted and shot by snipers. Three other ambulance workers and a doctor accompanying them are also shot.
Friday 8 March: At least 56 Palestinians are killed throughout the day, 22 of them in Tulkarm. This is the worst day of the whole Intifada, but the focus of the Western media is on the death of five Israeli officer cadets in a military academy located in an illegal settlement in Gaza. The West describes these 18-year-olds as mere boys, oblivious to the fact that by this time over 270 Palestinians aged 18 or under have died in the Intifada, of whom 141 were under 16.
Over the following weekend, tanks continued to pound Palestinian towns and villages on the West Bank including Tulkarm and Hebron. Camps in Gaza also came under heavy attack. On Sunday, a massive invasion of Tulkarm led to some 800 Palestinians being seized as hostages. In an operation which was to be replicated in other camps and towns over the next few days, Israeli vehicles with loudspeakers toured Tulkarm calling on all Palestinian men between the ages of 16 and 40 to leave their houses and surrender. Once the Israeli army had seized them, the detainees were blindfolded and had numbers stamped on their arms. They were then bussed to an Israeli army base at Ofer and to Kedumim, an illegal settlement. Denied food for over 24 hours, their diet for the next 3-4 days was cucumber, tomato and yoghurt. They were threatened with beatings and shooting if they did not obey stringent conditions: ‘If you stood up, you would be shot. If you turned your head to the left or right, you would be shot. If you looked at a soldier you would be shot’ said one detainee held at Ofer. Many were released in the dead of night miles away from Tulkarm so that they would have to run the gauntlet of settlers and army before they got back home.
This was the prelude, however, to the largest military operation of the Intifada involving 20,000 Israeli troops and hundreds of armoured vehicles, which started on Tuesday 12 March. Thousands of troops backed by no less than 250 tanks invaded Ramallah killing 14 people and wreaking widespread destruction as they shelled schools and even hospitals. Once again, male inhabitants were called on to surrender; those that did experienced the same humiliating treatment that their fellow Palestinians had received in Tulkarm. At the same time, more troops and tanks stormed into Jebaliya refugee camp in Gaza: more than 25 died and 75 were seriously injured. Meanwhile 60,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding harsher action, and two Israeli cabinet ministers from the ultra-nationalist National Union Party resigned from the cabinet. An Israeli government spokesperson, David Gold, announced that Israel was showing restraint by ‘not using the full strength of its airforce against the refugee camps’!
By the end of the week, 3,000 Palestinians had been detained for periods of up to three or four days. In less than two weeks, close to 200 Palestinians had been murdered. The Zionist terror machine had particularly targeted ambulance workers and medics throughout with a combination of tank and sniper fire, preventing them from reaching the wounded. Six medical workers were killed; dozens of others died because they were denied first aid, many bleeding to death as the Zionists looked on. Others died because they were prevented from getting to hospital for routine treatment such as an elderly diabetic woman in Ramallah, Nezha Attqa Mansour. Children were killed for allegedly bypassing roadblocks or ignoring orders to halt. Others died for driving their cars: there was and remains a blanket ban on Palestinian traffic in the West Bank. On 16 March, a mother and three of her children were killed when their donkey cart hit an Israeli landmine in Gaza.
Yet the Palestinian resistance was undefeated. Few of those killed were guerrillas – the vast majority were innocent civilians. Even the Israeli army acknowledged that hardly any of those detained were wanted men: it was purely an exercise in collective punishment. As if to underline the point, a joint Hamas/Fatah operation resulted in the destruction of a second Merkava tank, blown up by a remote controlled landmine near Khan Younis in Gaza on 14 March. All that Sharon could do was rave: ‘We must cause the Palestinians losses, casualties, so they understand that they will gain nothing by terrorism. We must hit them, and hit them again and again, until they understand…until they beg for a ceasefire’ for ‘only after they have been battered will we be able to conduct talks’. But the Bush-Powell-Sharon strategy of beating the Palestinian people to their knees had failed.
What can the Zionists and their imperialist allies do next? They have a problem: for all the talk after 11 September about the need to establish a Palestinian state there has been no progress in this direction. The talk was necessary in order to sustain an alliance for the attack on Afghanistan. Now, however, everyone can see the deception, and as Vice President Cheney embarked on a nine-country tour around the Middle East in mid-March to whip up support for a strike on Iraq, there was little he could get from even the most pliant of US allies such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Much hope is being pinned now on a Saudi plan which offers general Arab recognition of Israel in return for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, reinforced by a UN Security Council resolution approved in mid-March which referred loosely to the future possibility of a Palestinian state. Yet the Saudi plan is just one more rehash of plans which have been around for the past two years: the Clinton plan, the Mitchell-Trenet plan, the Powell plan. None of them has worked because there is no way that the Zionists will stop the settlements and therefore no way that in practice they will concede a Palestinian state unless they are forced to do so.
Meanwhile, the struggle continues to intensify. There has been only a very partial withdrawal of the Israeli army from PA territory; restrictions on movements are still in place and the tanks are poised on city outskirts ready to re-enter at a moment’s notice. The rabid wing of Zionism is in full cry. 60,000 demonstrators gathered in Tel Aviv on 11 March calling for more intense action. A minister in Sharon’s government, Avigdor Lieberman, was quoted as suggesting in a cabinet meeting that ‘At eight o’clock we bomb all commercial centres; at 12 o’clock we bomb all fuel stations; and at two o’clock in the afternoon we bomb all the banks’. A renowned Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, also advocates genocide; when asked how many Palestinians should be killed, he said ‘as many as are needed…We have to strike so hard that there won’t be need for a second strike. Perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 killed won’t be enough and then we will have to kill more’. Yet Israeli streets have become deserted in expectation of further attacks from Palestinian guerrillas, whilst tens of thousands of Israeli Palestinians marched in solidarity with the Intifada, and participated in a general strike, the first since the Intifada began. The liberation movement is gaining in strength, and the petit bourgeois ‘peace’ movement is in eclipse. The plans of the US and Israel have been frustrated because they have attacked the only true friend they have in Palestine: Arafat himself. Despite the fact that he has arrested five people allegedly involved in last year’s assassination of tourism minister Rehavem Ze’evi, Sharon is determined to keep him penned up in Ramallah. And, true to form, Vice President Cheney declared on 19 March that ‘I cannot emphasise enough how important it is in the coming week for Chairman Arafat to take steps to get the ceasefire started’! However much Arafat wants to cut a deal, the resistance will not let him whilst there is no withdrawal and whilst he is subjected to this kind of ultimatum.
Victory to the Intifada!
Isolate the Zionist state!
Palestinian casualties and the media
The deaths of Palestinian people are far less important to the Western media than those of Israelis. BBC and ITV are the most brazen in this regard. News items always lead on Israeli casualties when they happen, and give them far more air time; there is always an Israeli government spokesperson on hand to give the Zionist view. There is no reference to the illegal occupation of the West Bank. The Zionist terror campaign is always called ‘retaliation’.
To set the facts straight, as of 9 March, 320 Israelis had been killed during the Intifada, of whom 170 have been civilians, about half of them settlers. During this time, according to Palestine Monitor and other sources:
• 1,199 Palestinians were killed, 141 of them under 16, 57 of them women;
• 34 died because ambulances taking them to hospital were detained at checkpoints;
• 45 were murdered by settlers;
• 103 were killed by Israeli assassination squads;
• 20,000 were injured, one in three with live ammunition.
• 2,000 were permanently disabled, 440 of them children.
The Labour government and Israel
FRFI has constantly pointed to Labour’s complete support for Israel which has not wavered over the past months. Blair had to invite Arafat to Downing Street last autumn as part of the diplomatic effort to build the ‘anti-terror’ coalition. That soon changed, as Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw started to place exclusive responsibility for the violence on Arafat. In a visit to the Middle East during mid-February, Straw repeated the mantra that the first step towards negotiations had to be an end to Palestinian violence. Blair has gone much further than Thatcher dared in supporting Israel. Last December, instead of voting with other EU countries on a UN resolution on Palestine, it abstained for the first time. Every other EU country voted for it. According to The Guardian, the Foreign Office cited the failure of the resolution to include enough language critical of the Palestinians.
On 26 February, just two days before the onslaught on Jenin, The Guardian gave Jack Straw space to peddle his obscene views. Defending Labour’s slavish support for the Bush-Sharon strategy, he argued that ‘any attempt to push for a solution without American support would be short-sighted and self-defeating. If we in the EU allowed ourselves to be played off against our US ally, then we would weaken efforts to help move the peace process forward and reduce our influence.’
Having defended the US, he moved to defending the Zionists directly: ‘…it is necessary to understand why Israelis have been reluctant to demand their government’s serious engagement in peace negotiations while on their own streets they are continually subjected to appalling terrorism. Try to imagine what it would feel like if, week by week, there was the prospect of our teenagers, out for an evening, being randomly maimed and killed by the dozen…even in the worst depravity of Irish republican terrorism, we never had to cope with the constant threat of suicide bombers.’ The morality of someone who can ignore the daily use of fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships, tanks, and death squads against a civilian population, the unending and illegal use of collective punishment, the mass destruction of homes, educational and health establishments, is beyond belief.
In Straw’s view, then, the onus is not on the colonial power to take the first steps towards peace. It is up to the oppressed: ‘Whether one agrees with the stance of the Israeli government is not the point. What is important is to understand the huge pressures on them. This puts a real onus on those in the PA…to take serious and effective action to stop the violence as a first step towards talks. Above all, the terrorists have to be reined in. They have to be locked up and stay locked up.’ In Parliament on 12 March, Straw still demanded sympathy for the Zionists when he said that ‘the terror felt in Israel is palpable because of the escalating use of suicide bombers. I ask the House to understand and appreciate what it would have been like in this country had the terror from the IRA …been the terror of suicide bombs.’
Racism: that is all that Straw’s views amount to – pure, unadulterated racism. Every statement he makes on Palestine makes it clear that he regards Palestinians as beings inferior to the Zionists in their culture or indeed their right to life and freedom. That is why in supporting the Palestinian liberation struggle, we have to fight the racist and imperialist hypocrisy of the Labour government.
