FRFI 163 October / November 2001
In the last issue of FRFI, we wrote that Israel’s war preparations were nearly complete. The Zionist state had failed to meet Prime Minster Sharon’s boast that he would defeat the Intifada within 100 days of coming to office. With President Bush firmly on his side, Sharon could count on an easy ride as the Israeli war machine intensified its murderous attacks on the Palestinian people. But in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attack, Arafat was pictured giving blood for the victims whilst Sharon was comparing him to Osama bin Laden and forbidding foreign secretary Shimon Peres from meeting him. Suddenly, US imperialism seemed to realise it had a problem with its Zionist ally. Within ten days, it had demanded that Sharon withdraw his tanks from Palestinian territory and agree to a ceasefire. Why the apparent change of heart?
ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Within days of FRFI 162 going to press, the Zionist onslaught we had predicted started. A booby-trap bomb exploded in a garage at the Al Fara refugee camp just outside Nablus on 30 July, killing six Fatah members. The same day, a Palestinian Authority (PA) policeman and a member of Islamic Jihad were assassinated in Gaza. The next day, a helicopter missile attack on the Nablus headquarters of Hamas killed eight people, including the West Bank Hamas leader Jamal Mansour and his lieutenant Jamal Salim. Also killed were two boys aged seven and ten. Sharon described the attack as ‘one of our most important successes’, the death of two children by implication an irrelevance. From this point on it was clear that the Zionist assassination policy would target political leaders as well as rank and file members of the anti-Zionist coalition.
On 9 August, the inevitable Palestinian retaliation followed when a suicide bomber killed 18 people at a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. The desperate condition of the Palestinian people and their isolation by the reactionary Arab states, has driven them to use this method to carry the war to the Israeli people. A poll in June revealed that 69% of Palestinians thought suicide bombing was ‘a suitable response in the current political conditions’. Faced with overwhelming military odds, this is not surprising. The Zionists possess the fourth most powerful army in the world and the third most powerful airforce. Both wings of the military have been armed to the teeth with the latest US technology; the aid it receives from the US means that all this hardware is effectively free.
By early August, over 600 Palestinians had been killed since the start of the Intifada; four times as many as the number of Israeli troops, citizens and settlers. Alongside its assassination policy, Zionist invasions of PA territory multiplied in scope, impact and duration. The first had taken place on 11 April, when bulldozers and tanks flattened 30 houses in Khan Yunis in Gaza. On 17 April, an attempt at a permanent re-occupation of Beit Hanoun, also in Gaza, was called off after an international outcry. This did not prevent further ‘incursions’ on 18 April, and, for the first time, an invasion of the West Bank at Beit Jalla on 11 May. On 16 July, there was a series of invasions around Hebron. A month later, on 14 August, there was an invasion of Jenin on the West Bank in an assault involving tanks and armoured bulldozers under the cover of Apache attack helicopters and F-16 fighter aircraft. The bulldozers demolished a police station four miles inside the city before withdrawing. Three days later, there was yet another assault on Khan Yunis during which a Popular Resistance Committee (PRC) activist Abdel Rahman Abu Bakr was killed. The following day, two more Gaza residents were shot dead, including 13-year-old Mohammed Abu Arar.
The terror continued unabated. Samir Abu Ziad was killed in an explosion on 19 August along with his two young children. He was a Hamas member and an activist in the Gaza PRC. Three days later, four Palestinians were shot dead, three of them as they tried to rescue the fourth, Fatah member Ahmed Fares, wounded in a gun battle. However, on 25 August, the Israelis received a shock when two volunteers from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) broke into the Marganit military base which protects the Gush Qatif settlement in Gaza. In the ensuing gunfight, three Israeli soldiers were killed and seven wounded, one of whom died later. One of the volunteers was killed during the battle; the other was captured later and summarily executed by the ‘civilised’ Israeli army. Later that night, three Israeli settlers were also killed.
The Zionist response was immediate. For the first time in three months, F-16 jets supported by F-15s and Apache attack helicopters bombarded Rafah, Deir Al Balah and Gaza City in Gaza, and Ramallah, Beireh, Salfit Tulkarm and Beitunia on the West Bank over a 48-hour period. Four Palestinians including a 14-year-old boy were killed as well as dozens injured. On 27 August, Abu Ali Mustafa, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed by missiles fired from a helicopter. His was the 69th assassination of the Intifada, and it came hours after the Israeli cabinet had agreed to step up its campaign of summary executions. 50,000 people demonstrated at his funeral; as a person involved from the mid-1960s in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, Mustafa was an acknowledged leader of the Intifada.
There was to be no let-up. On 28 August, Israeli tanks invaded the south Rafah area of Gaza. The same day, tanks and supporting troops moved again into Beit Jalla, commandeering an orphanage run by the Orthodox church and imposing a complete curfew on those living nearby. During the first week of September, 11 Palestinians were killed, 12 houses demolished, acres of farmland torn up, and ten Zionist army incursions took place. On 2 September, Gaza intelligence chief Colonel Taiseer Khatab was blown up by an israeli car bomb in a further attempt to destabilise the PA. A few days later, two people were killed in a failed attempt by helicopter gunships to assassinate a Fatah commander. Plans were leaked to evict all Palestinians living along a swathe of land next to the Green Line dividing the West Bank from Israel and make it a no-go area where Palestinians could be summarily shot. The exclusion area would include residential areas in Qalqilya and Tulkarm which are right up against the Green Line. Already a high-voltage electrical fence separates Gaza from Israel proper.
In a development which alarmed the Zionists as much as the DFLP attack, on 9 September an Israeli Palestinian exploded a bomb at Nahariya rail station, killing himself and three Israelis. The one million Palestinians resident in Israel as opposed to the occupied territories had played little active part in the Intifada since 13 were massacred in demonstrations shortly after the uprising started. The bomber, Mohammed Shaqir Habishi, a father of six, had become a Hamas member as a consequence of Israeli brutality. His actions as an Israeli Arab made a mockery of any attempt to create a cordon sanitaire along the Green Line. During the next 48 hours, whilst gunships attacked Ramallah and Jericho, two Israeli settlers and two policemen were killed in separate gun attacks. Meanwhile, Israeli forces seized the PLO headquarters in east Jerusalem, Orient House, removing truckloads of documents relating to the ‘peace process’. It remains under occupation today.
After 11 September
On 11 September, the day of the attacks on New York and Washington, Israeli forces encircled Jenin. Tanks then entered the city supported by F-16s and helicopters. In the ensuing unequal gunfight, nine Palestinians were killed. It was described in Yediot Aharonot, a Zionist paper as follows:
‘At about 2pm, the IDF forces reached the building in Arabeh Village where three Islamic Jihad activists had barricaded themselves. The three refused to surrender and were liquidated by missiles and shells. A 12-year-old girl was also killed in the shooting on the inhabited building. Later another wanted Palestinian was liquidated as well. In the three hours’ exchange of fire, four Palestinian civilians were killed by mistake and about 50 wounded.’
Two days later, an armoured invasion of Jericho resulted in four deaths. Sharon denied that it had anything to do with New York, saying that it had been planned beforehand. That it received hardly any coverage was hardly surprising. It was followed on 16 September by yet another invasion, this time of Ramallah; one Palestinian died. The previous night a Palestinian ambulance driver had been killed by a tank shell near Bethlehem. The cities of Tulkaram and Qalqilya were effectively under siege.
But where the interests of the Zionist state conflict with those of its puppet master, those of the US will predominate. On 18 September, the US forced Sharon to agree to a withdrawal from Palestinian territory and a ceasefire. The Zionists were imperilling the prospects of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran joining the coalition against bin Laden and the Taliban. Without the support of these countries, any attack on Afghanistan would be risky indeed. According to the Foreign Office, Sharon has now become ‘the cancer at the centre of the Middle East crisis’. However, the monsters that US imperialism creates and gives succour to have their own interests, and it is not so simple just to order the Zionists to stop their terror. On 20 September, an exchange of gunfire in Hebron left one Palestinian dead. Sharon continued to liken Arafat to bin Laden in an interview with CNN, and continued to demand 48 hours of peace before he would allow foreign minister Peres to meet the Palestinians. The struggle has not stopped.
More than 700 Palestinians have now died since the Intifada started a year ago. 2,000 of their homes have been destroyed; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been uprooted. Unemployment stands at 60%, poverty at 50%. The entire population lives under siege, under constant threat of attacks by US supplied fighter aircraft, helicopters and missiles. These realities will not change because of the immediate diplomatic interests of US imperialism. The US is concerned with the crassness of Sharon’s tactics, not with his overall objectives. The Arab states have no more interest in the fate of the Palestinian people than they did a year ago; they are treated as a bargaining counter to extract some pitiful concession from US imperialism. In reality, the Palestinian people remain completely isolated. Yet even after a year of fighting on their own with stones and bullets against one of the mightiest military forces in the world, they remain undefeated. Our active solidarity with them remains absolutely critical.
Isolate the Zionist state!
Victory to the Palestinian people!
