FRFI 159 February / March 2001
Despite murderous repression by Israeli occupation forces, the Al Aqsa uprising of the Palestinian people has continued. With over 320 Palestinian dead and 12,000 injured, the toll has been terrible – yet tanks, helicopter gunships, snipers, death squads, everything the Zionists have hurled at the Palestinians to break their resistance, has failed. Even the US has been unable to impose a ‘peace’ deal: Clinton’s ambition to achieve a settlement before he was replaced as US President by George Bush Junior proved in vain. The mass of the Palestinian people are deeply suspicious of negotiations after their experience of the 1993 Oslo settlement, and are opposed to Yasser Arafat’s involvement in the current round. Robert Clough reports.
Such suspicion is well-founded: all that is being served up is what was on offer at Camp David in July last year. The Palestinian people also know that whatever appears to be on offer, the reality will fall far short. Thus the US says the Zionists should ‘give up’ 95% of the West Bank territory. But the reality is that their calculation includes the waters of the Dead Sea which would become Palestinian ‘territory’, but excludes Israeli army ‘buffer’ zones as well as West Bank areas illegally annexed into Jerusalem; the upshot is that the real percentage falls to about 65%. The US also proposes that there would be some ‘land swap’ for the West Bank areas that would be incorporated into Israel: in reality this would be ‘some land outside the Gaza strip in the south of our country’, as one Israeli journalist put it. In other words, the exchange would be desert for illegally-built settlements which would still contain 80% of West Bank Zionist colonialists. The US is no impartial power-broker: it is anxious to ensure that the Zionists hold on to as much as they can of their 1967 conquests. Whether it is Bill Clinton or George Bush who is president makes no difference.
Zionist murder machine
Since FRFI last reported, the Zionist murder machine has continued without restraint. Of the Palestinians who have died, nearly one in three have been children. On 8 December, the anniversary of the start of the 1987 Intifada, four Palestinians (including three police officers) died when tanks shelled a police station in Jenin on the West Bank. The Israeli army admitted it fired first. Three more Palestinians were killed in other battles: two of the dead being youths aged 15 and 16. By the end of November, the Zionists were using more live ammunition than rubber bullets. In the early days of the Intifada, live bullets caused 25% of injuries, and rubber-tipped rounds 75%. Two months later, the proportion of injuries caused by live bullets had risen to 55%. An Israeli army sniper interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said ‘You don’t shoot at a child who is 12 or younger. Twelve and up is allowed. He is not a child anymore’. On 15 January, 10-year-old Amro Khaled died after being shot earlier in the month. On 21 January. 15-year-old Mohammed el-Sharif also died, shot as he threw stones at Israeli soldiers in Gaza. The same day, an Israeli court sentenced a Jewish settler to six months’ community service for clubbing 10-year-old Hilmi Shusha to death with a rifle butt in 1996. It is not just the young who suffer, however: on 10 January, Ibrahim Al Maghasahib was shot dead by Israeli troops as he tilled his field. He was 73.
Using a network of informers, Zionist death squads have targeted and murdered 19 Palestinians according to the Palestine Authority; others put the total at 30. Their first target was Fatah leader Hussein Abayat, who was killed on 9 November when his car was blown up by a rocket from a helicopter gunship. Two women bystanders were also killed. Others include Mahmoud Al Mughrabi, who was wounded and captured by the Israeli army on 11 December and then summarily executed, and Hani Abu Bakra who was shot with automatic weapons in his car as he was held at a military checkpoint on 14 December. On 31 December, a well-known Fatah leader Thabet Thabet was a further victim: the 54-year-old dentist and health official had had links with Israeli peace movements. He was hit 15 times with fire from an automatic weapon.
Economic repression
Zionist repression is also economic. Gaza has been sealed for much of the Intifada; a respite at the beginning of the recent negotiations lasted only a week before it was once more cut off following the death of a settler. Palestinian workers have been unable to enter Israel and have become effectively unemployed without any form of income. Women in labour are unable to travel to hospitals because they are stopped at the innumerable checkpoints in the Occupied Territories. Hundreds of houses have been bulldozed, ostensibly because they did not have planning permission. Olive groves have been uprooted because they might ‘harbour snipers’ – 24,000 trees have to date been torn up. Greenhouses have been smashed, Palestinian roads blockaded. The repertoire of Zionist repression is endless.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the pressure on Arafat not to make further concessions is considerable. Yet there is a great divide between Arafat and his cronies in the Palestinian negotiating team on the one hand and the rest of the people on the other. The one issue that encapsulates this is that of the return of 3.7 million Palestinian refugees. The Zionists will not countenance this. The US has urged them to accept 100,000 and proposed that the remainder be resettled in the West Bank or Gaza; compensation would be paid by the US and Europe. In response, Palestinian negotiators have said they are ‘prepared to think flexibly and creatively about the mechanisms for implementing the right of return’, and argued that there is a difference between the right of return and exercising that right. However, refugee leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria have made clear their rejection of this sort of deal, as have leaders in Gaza and the West Bank, making it clear they would turn against Arafat if he ‘crossed the ultimate red line’. Thus Palestinian National Council leader Abdul Jawwad Saleh has declared ‘the Palestinian ghettoes will never surrender to Oslo and its conditions. The Al Aqsa Intifada, as a popular uprising, is a rejection of Clinton’s attempt to dictate the priorities of the political process in the interest of Israeli security…the Palestinian leadership should think twice before returning to the negotiating table on the same terms’. Marwan Barghouti, acknowledged as the chief co-ordinator of the Al Aqsa Intifada, called for the rejection of Israeli-US plans and any formula for proceeding with negotiations on such a basis, whilst the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said the negotiations ‘would only serve Israel and its aggressive programme in the region.’
On 6 February, the Zionists will elect a new Prime Minister. The incumbent, Ehud Barak is despised by many Israelis as being too weak in his dealings with Palestinians – a verdict which demonstrates the degree of their hatred for the people they have dispossessed. An Israeli poll on the peace negotiations at the end of 2000 showed 51% opposed to US proposals and 44% in favour, and put Barak’s support at 30% compared to General Sharon, his Likud opponent, at 53%. There has been no significant change in their respective support since then. Shimon Peres, a Labour politician closely associated with Oslo, has been unable to obtain a nomination and thereby replace Barak as the Labour candidate. It seems a foregone conclusion that General Sharon, whose provocation at Al Aqsa last September sparked the Intifada, will be the next Israeli Prime Minister. In early January, a huge demonstration of 200,000 Zionists in Jerusalem underlined the extent of his support. His election will give a free hand to the monster of Zionist fascism. Our solidarity becomes all the more urgent: the Palestinian people face a terrible future. We cannot let them be defeated through their isolation. M
Sharon and Peres: their background
While the more ‘enlightened’ sections of imperialism might have hoped that Shimon Peres would have stood for Labour against General Ariel Sharon in the Israeli general election, the fact is that they are of the same generation of Zionists, and have a very similar background. Both made their names in the early days of the Zionist state’s existence. Peres was a protŽgŽ of David Ben Gurion, one of the architects of the Zionist state and Prime Minister till 1954. In 1954, the Israelis organised a sabotage group in Egypt to provoke an armed conflict. When it was uncovered and its leaders arrested, the assumption was that the Israeli defence minister of the time, Lavon had authorised it. Intelligence chief Benyamin Givli confirmed that Lavon, his boss, had authorised the campaign. Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, future leader of the Israeli army, supported Givli’s allegation, and Lavon, a relative ‘dove’ was forced to resign. In fact, Lavon knew nothing of the plot; and Peres’ testimony against Lavon was a complete falsehood. When this was exposed in 1960, Israeli students demanded the resignation of Ben Gurion who had returned as Defence Minister, and insisted that both Dayan and Peres go with him. Both were to stay.
Sharon’s career came to public notice a couple of years earlier as leader of the infamous commando Unit 101. In an operation sanctioned by the ‘dove’ Lavon and Ben Gurion in October 1953, Unit 101 attacked the village of Qibya in Jordan ostensibly in retaliation for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two children. 66 men women and children were killed in the raid; many were blown to pieces as their houses were dynamited whilst they were locked inside.
Ben Gurion (as was ever the case with such Zionist operations) denied any official involvement. Unit 101 went on to be used as a role model for the Israeli army in its murderous brutality towards Palestinians and Arabs.
