FRFI 168 August / September 2002
The last two months have seen the Zionists intensify their terror campaign against the Palestinian people. Operation Defensive Shield has given way to Operation Determined Path. The purpose of the first was to smash all Palestinian resistance on the West Bank; the objective of the second is to force them into complete submission. Robert Clough reports.
The slaughter that took place under Defensive Shield represented the bloodiest phase of the Intifada. During March-April, 478 Palestinians were murdered; a further 518 injured by live gunfire. 55 children were killed, 21 of them under the age of 12. Defensive Shield allowed the Israeli army to complete the re-occupation of the towns and cities which had passed to Palestinian control under the 1993 Oslo Agreement. The Israeli government was able to ignore all international protest since it was confident that it had the complete support of the Bush administration. Now it has set about the next stage: the complete cantonisation or fragmentation of the West Bank and the isolation of its Palestinian population from each other.
The Israeli government has never had any intention of allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state: Sharon himself has stated that withdrawal to its 1967 boundaries would be ‘suicide’ for Israel. Yet it would be diplomatically impossible to explicitly rule out such a development. Hence the Israeli strategy has been one of preventing any chance of negotiation by imposing impossible preconditions on the Palestinian people. First it was to demand at least a week’s complete peace as a prelude to any initial contact. Every time there was a chance of this happening the Zionists would provoke the resistance either by the murder of some civilians or the assassination of a resistance fighter. Now they have invented a new excuse: no negotiations before a complete reform of the Palestinian Authority. This gives them space to establish new ‘facts on the ground’ through Operation Determined Path.
Determined Path
Determined Path represents the end of Oslo. There are no longer any areas of the West Bank under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli army can now move in and out of cities, towns and villages at will, wreaking destruction, detaining thousands. Cantonisation of the West Bank is complete. There are now eight discrete areas surrounding the principal Palestinian cities and towns of the West Bank. Palestinians need a permit from the Israeli government to travel from one canton to the next. Trade is next to impossible. Lorries have to unload all their goods at the single checkpoint for each canton. The goods then have to be carried across the checkpoint and loaded up into another lorry to take them to their destination. It means that goods may have to be loaded and unloaded half a dozen times to travel the length of the West Bank, some 150 kilometres. The impact is appalling. Orchards and groves once surrounded Jericho at the north of the West Bank. Now these lie in ruin: it is not possible to transport the ripe produce to markets elsewhere on the West Bank before it has rotted because of all the checkpoint delays.
Ditches, walls and fences surround the cantons. Concrete slabs block the roads. Movement by road is not possible, so many resort to riding donkeys across country. Added to this are the constant re-invasions of urban centres accompanied by widespread curfews of arbitrary length. This is the purpose of Determined Path: to make conditions unbearable for the Palestinian people. Jenin, Beitunia, Tulkarm and Bethlehem have been under curfew for weeks at a time since 19 June; Nablus since 21 June, Qalqilya since 22 June, Ramallah since 24 June and Hebron since 25 June. The Israeli army never fully withdraws from the cities: it remains on their outskirts effectively placing them under siege. Curfews may be lifted and then re-imposed without announcement. The penalty for breaking curfew is death. In the three weeks following the start of Determined Path, eight children were shot for this ‘offence’. Infrastructure was wrecked during Defensive Shield: the Zionists are waging the most intense form of economic warfare against the people of the West Bank to force them to capitulate.
Bush backs Sharon
Bush’s unconditional support for the Sharon government is crucial. Without it, Sharon would not have been able to tear up the Oslo Agreement and dismiss any negotiations about a Palestinian state. Bush’s speech on 24 June summed up the US’s position clearly. Any political process has to be predicated on both the ‘fight against terrorists and dismantling of their infrastructure’ and a ‘new and different Palestinian leadership’. ‘True reform’, Bush says, ‘will require entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism’. In short, Arafat must go: the Palestinians cannot choose their own leadership. Bush offered no timetable for ending the occupation of 35 years. Instead, there will be ‘American support for the creation of a provisional state of Palestine’, but only ‘if the Palestinians embrace democracy, confront corruption and firmly reject terror.’ Only after these have happened to Israel’s and the US’s satisfaction will they ‘work towards a final status agreement’. According to Israeli minister Danny Neveh, it meant ‘the end of the Arafat era and the victory of the Israeli position’. He was right.
Bush’s speech was not just directed against the Palestinians: he placed specific demands on Arab regimes. Syria has to ‘choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organisations’. Saudi Arabia was clearly in his sights when he instructed ‘every nation to stop the flow of money to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah’, and Egypt when he ordered ‘every leader actually committed to peace to end incitement to violence in official media and publicly denounce homicide bombing’. In general, Arab regimes were to ‘build closer ties of diplomacy and commerce with Israel’ and to ‘oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq’. This the world’s hegemonic superpower – bristling with racist arrogance, issuing edicts and instructions.
The sycophantic welcome given to the speech by both Arafat and other Arab leaders demonstrates their absolute determination to resolve the Palestinian ‘problem’ no matter how degrading the terms. Bush’s idea of an ‘interim’ or ‘provisional’ state has no precedent in international law. But it is a useful device for the Zionists to describe the group of cantons that might form this bantustan. The absence of formal national sovereignty will also allow Israeli forces a free hand to continue to invade at will without being technically guilty of aggression. Meanwhile Britain, Europe and Russia have protested that the US should not dictate who should lead the Palestinian people, but they are powerless to do anything about it. What the US has ensured, however, is that if there are presidential elections in Palestine next January, Arafat will be elected by a landslide. This will not be because of any surge in personal or political popularity – he has forfeited this by exiling and gaoling resistance fighters at the behest of the US and Israel – but because the Palestinian people will rightly reject any attempt to tell them who should be their leader.
Zionist ‘facts on the ground’
Whilst it may be that the reforms demanded by the US and Israel have as their purpose the installation of an even more compliant leadership than Arafat’s, it is more likely that they are a device to stall any further negotiations. This will provide more time for the Zionists to establish further ‘facts on the ground’. The Israeli human rights group B’tsalem published a report in June which showed that although settlers occupied 1.7% of the West Bank they had in fact been assigned 42% of the territory. Settlements continue to expand. 34 new ones have been established since Sharon came to power. The new 360km fence being built between the West Bank and Israel proper is another ‘fact’. Construction of the first 115km long section in the north started in mid-June; true to Zionist traditions, it required the uprooting of olive groves belonging to Palestinian farmers. Although it runs along part of the 1967 border, there are points at which it cuts into the West Bank and Palestinian cartographers estimate it will involve the annexation of 77 square kilometres of the West Bank to Israel, land which contains 11 Palestinian villages with thousands of inhabitants. It is likely that they will be expelled rather than be allowed to live on the Israeli side of the fence. This might also be the fate of the one million Palestinians who still live within Israel so that partition becomes complete.
Resistance continues
Although the resistance forces have suffered enormous losses, they have been able to break through whatever barriers the Zionists put up. A car bomb attack on 5 June just inside Israel killed 13 soldiers on a bus. Since then settlers have become the main targets, 28 being killed in three attacks in mid-June, and seven more on 16 July. Following the last action the mayor of the nearby settlement of Ariel declared that ‘the government should destroy in Gaza all the headquarters of the Palestinians. If there would be 1,000 people killed in an air-raid or some 5,000 people killed, so we have shouting from Europe and the world for a week and that’s all.’ Sharon’s response was to launch a bomb attack on an apartment block killing 15 including a Hamas military leader and 10 children. Settlers represent the ultra-racist wing of Zionism, usually organised on a paramilitary basis. Their dream is of an Israel which stretches to the River Jordan and beyond, where the West Bank has been cleansed of all Arabs. Whilst there has been renewed debate about the appropriateness of ‘suicide’ attacks on civilians in Israel, there are very few who are prepared to condemn attacks on settlers.
On 26 June the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine published a declaration of a meeting of the main resistance organisations which was held the previous day. The declaration condemned ‘the position taken by the Palestine Authority regarding the Bush speech, that is, welcoming rather than repudiating it. By taking that position, the Palestine Authority was submitting to American and Zionist dictates’. The declaration also stated ‘that the Authority’s position does not express the will of the Palestinian people who are holding fast to their rights and to the continuation of the Intifada, the resistance struggle, and the martyrdom operations’. The message is clear: the struggle will continue.
