When running for Prime Minister in February of last
year, Ariel Sharon, Israel’s ferocious hawk, tried to reinvent himself as a man
of peace. Against the background of the al-Aqsa intifada, which he had helped
to trigger by his provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), he ran
on a ticket of peace with security. In his first year in power, Sharon has
achieved neither peace nor security but only a steady escalation of the
violence. In the last two weeks Sharon has revealed himself once again as a man
wedded to military force as the only instrument of policy.
The 74 year-old Israeli leader has been at the sharp
end of confrontation with the Arabs for most of his life. The hallmarks of his
career are mendacity, the most savage brutality towards Arab civilians, and a
persistent preference for force over diplomacy to solve political problems.
These features found their clearest expression in the invasion of Lebanon in
1982 which Sharon masterminded as defence minister in Menachem Begin’s Likud
government.
The war that Sharon is currently waging on the West
Bank, fraudulently named ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, is in some ways a replay
of his war in Lebanon. It is directed against the Palestinian people; it stems
from the same stereotypes that the Palestinians are terrorists; it is based on
the same denial of Palestinian national rights; it employs the same strategy of
savage and overwhelming military force; and it displays the same callous
disregard for international opinion, international law, the UN, and the norms
of civilised behaviour. Even the principal personalities are the same: today,
as in 1982, Ariel Sharon confronts Yasser Arafat.
The invasion of Lebanon was not a defensive war but a
war of deception. Sharon obtained cabinet approval for a limited military
operation against the PLO forces in southern Lebanon. From the beginning,
however, he planned a much bigger operation to serve broader geostrategic aims.
The principal objective of Sharon’s war was to destroy the PLO as a military
and political organisation, to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism,
to spread despair and despondency among the inhabitants of the West Bank, and
to pave the way to its absorption into Greater Israel. A second objective was
to give Israel’s Maronite allies a leg-up to power, and then compel them to
sign a peace treaty with Israel. A third objective was to expel the Syrian army
from Lebanon and to make Israel the dominant power in the Levant.
Under Sharon’s devious direction, an operation that
was supposedly undertaken in self-defence developed into a merciless siege of
Beirut and culminated in a horrendous massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps
of Sabra and Shatila which led to the removal of Sharon from the ministry of
defence.
In his crude but relentless propaganda war, Sharon
tries to portray Arafat as the master terrorist who orchestrates the violence
against Israel and secretly encourages suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. To be sure, Arafat is not above using
violence. Nor has he done as much as he could to curb the activities of the
Islamic militants. Yet Arafat is the leader who persuaded his movement to
abandon armed struggle and adopt the political path in the struggle for
independence. By signing the Oslo Accord in 1993, and clinching it with a
hesitant handshake, he and Yitzhak Rabin undertook to resolve the outstanding differences
between their two nations by peaceful means. Until the assassination of Rabin
two years later, Arafat proved himself an effective partner on the road to
peace. The subsequent decline of the Oslo peace process was caused more by
Israeli territorial expansionism than by Palestinian terrorism. Israeli
settlements on the West Bank, which Sharon’s government continues to expand,
are the root of the problem.
Ever the opportunist, Sharon was quick to jump on the
bandwagon of America’s ‘war against terror’ in the aftermath of 11 September.
Under this banner, Sharon has embarked on a sinister attempt to destroy the
infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. His real agenda is to subvert
what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into the ground,
and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood. To add insult to injury,
he wants to remove Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader and symbol
of the Palestinian revolution, and to replace him with a collaborationist
regime which would serve as a sub-contractor charged with upholding Israeli
security.
What Sharon is unable or unwilling to comprehend is
that security cannot be achieved by purely military means. The only hope of
security for both communities lies in a return to the political track,
something that the champion of violent solutions has always avoided.
Consequently, Sharon’s second war, like his first, is doomed to failure. If the
history of this conflict teaches anything, it is that violence breeds more
violence.
Many people who do not necessarily support Sharon’s
brutal methods nevertheless have sympathy for Israel’s predicament. They point
out that the suicide bombs against innocent Israeli civilians pre-dated the
incursion of Israeli tanks into West Bank towns and villages. Israel’s illegal
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however, goes back to 1967 and
constitutes the underlying cause of Palestinian frustration, hatred, and
despair of which the suicide bombs are only the cruelest manifestation. They
say that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deny altogether Israel’s right to exist. These
are, however, the extremist fringes. The savage treatment meted out by Sharon
to the Palestinians is self-defeating precisely because it undermines moderates
and strengthens extremists.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current
crisis is America’s complicity in the Israeli onslaught. One might have
expected George Bush Jr. to resume the even-handed policy of his father towards
Arabs and Israelis. Instead, he has reverted to a blatantly pro-Israeli policy
reminiscent of the Reagan years. Although America is a signatory to the Oslo
Accord, Bush has abandoned the Palestinian side.
Sharon is holding Arafat hostage in his headquarters
in Ramallah, depriving him of food, water, medicines and telephone lines. The
only concession that the American President has managed to extract from the
truculent Israeli Prime Minister is a promise not to kill the Palestinian
leader. The Israelis have destroyed much of Arafat’s police force and security
services, leaving him with a mobile phone. Under these conditions the embattled
Palestinian leader does not have the means to prevent suicide attacks even if
he had the will to do so.
In an apparent reversal of American policy a week
ago, President Bush called on Sharon to pull out his troops from the
Palestinian towns and villages. Sharon insisted they would stay as long as
necessary to accomplish their mission of uprooting the infrastructure of
terror. Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to the region to broker
a ceasefire and restore the political track. He is unlikely to get far with
Sharon unless he backs up his words with the threat to cut economic and
military aid to Israel. The death toll in ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ is more
than 200 Palestinians and 60 Israelis. How many more lives will have to be
sacrificed before the Americans understand that General Sharon is part of the
problem, not the solution?
Avi Shlaim is a
professor of International Relations at Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall:
Israel and the Arab World (2000)
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