|
The political-military provocation staged by Ariel Sharon, and endorsed and supported by the Israeli prime minister, on the Haram El Sharif on Thursday September 28th, has undeniably worked: after arousing the predictable anger of Palestinian protesters, the stage was set for initiating the massacre of the innocents. From then on, the spiral of violence has not stopped, opposing mostly disarmed Palestinian demonstrators to the over-armed, over-equipped Israeli army, in an totally unequal confrontation. The balance, after ten days of confrontation, is eloquent: nearly a hundred Palestinian were killed, many thousands wounded, and there are no casualties among the occupation forces. For there still hasn't been a decision to reciprocate war, still no instruction to the Palestinian security forces to engage in battle with the occupation forces. In their attempts to crush the expression of Palestinian popular will and protest, the Israeli troops, upon orders from above, have made use of all sorts of live ammunition, including internationally banned "dum-dum" bullets, aiming systematically at the demonstrators heads and chests, as the situation in Palestinian hospitals shows. They have shot at ambulances, and used helicopter-propelled rockets against civilians and buildings. The whole world has watched on TV the live assassination of 12 year-old Mohammed Al-Dura in the arms of his wounded father, the scandalous lies and forgeries of the Israeli military to try and deny the crime, an their subsequent refusal to apologize, even after they had to recognize the established facts. Now, they have not only put the whole Palestinian territory under siege. They have cut the Gaza Strip in two, closed the Gaza airport, warned civilians in "hot" areas that they should evacuate their homes if they don't want to be hurt by Israeli artillery retaliations, and unleashed settler violence against Palestinian civilians throughout the occupied territories. In the meantime, while negotiating a new political coalition with the sworn enemies of peace, and first and foremost with Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak launched a 48 hour ultimatum to the Palestinian leadership, threatening to abandon that which he calls "restraint" and to engage in wholesale mass murder. The promptness and enthusiasm with which the Israeli government responded to Sharon's provocation raises the question of premeditation. It seems now clear that Sharon did not only mean to catch Barak by his own claim for sovereignty over the Haram El Sharif. Indeed he served as an instrument in the Israeli Prime minister's decision to make war instead of peace, and to save his personal political career by bowing to the demands of the settlers lobby and drowning the peace process in a river of Palestinian blood. The deliberate onslaught on Moslem Holy Sites could not but affect the area as a whole. Indeed, the Palestinian negotiators in the last Camp David talks had made it abundantly clear that the issue of Jerusalem in general, and of the Haram El Sharif in particular, was the concern of the entire Arab nation, and of the Islamic Umma at large. As a result, and in outrage at the massacre, the Arab citizens of Israel engaged in mass protest throughout the Arab villages and towns of the "Jewish State", only to be met with the same brutality and murderous repression as their brothers in the occupied Palestinian territories. And while some Israeli politicians and journalists were debating of the respective merits of ethnic discrimination and police repression, in an all-out campaign of racist incitement against the Arab citizens of Israel, Israeli civilians took the message literally, and Jewish mob-violence against Arabs inside the "Green Line" started to spread. In Nazareth, in Jaffa, in Afoula, in Jerusalem, armed Israeli civilians under heavy police protection attacked Arab neighborhoods, cars, houses and inhabitants, shooting, killing and wounding Arab citizens, and engaged in the systematic desecration and burning of mosques and churches. This escalation, on the background of protest and solidarity demonstrations throughout the world, and in all Arab capitals, also reached the Lebanese border, where the almost ritualistic, and relatively harmless stone-throwing across the fence in the direction of Israeli border patrols - who complacently remain within stone-range - intensified in the wake of popular indignation. The Israeli troops responded by shooting and killing Lebanese civilians across the lines, provoking here again the escalation in the course of which Lebanese Resistance Fighters captured, in the still occupied area of the Shaba'a Farms, three Israeli soldiers. The Israeli reaction - threats, threats, bombings, shooting and shelling at Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and more threats, this time directed at Beirut and Damascus - has brought the whole area on the brink of a global explosion. The Palestinian people and its leadership, more united than ever under those circumstances, have unequivocally answered these threats and this ultimatum. We are not afraid, and we shall not bow to state-terrorism. Our people withstood the siege of Beirut for three months, and sustained several years of Intifada. It has shown its determination and its amazing capacity to sacrifice. Sharon, of all people, should remember his own boasting, in 1982, when he explained that the aim of the invasion of Lebanon was to crush the morale of the Palestinians inside the occupied territories. We are fighting for a just and comprehensive peace in our area, built upon international legality and our universally recognized rights, and we will continue to resist the colonial diktat. And we repeat here once again that there will be no peace without an independent Palestinian State, with Jerusalem as its capital, and recognition of the Palestinian Refugees Right of Return. We are greatly encouraged by the fact that Arab ranks have started to tighten in the wake of these horrendous events, and the way is finally opened for the Arab Summit we have demanded for so long. We are encouraged by the many expressions of support and solidarity that come from all over the world, from governments as well as from various sectors of civil society. We are encouraged and grateful to the European Union, to its French Presidency and to President Jacques Chirac in particular, for the principled moral and humane stand it has taken. We expect the European Union, who will hold its general Affairs Council in the coming days, to pursue this just course. We are grateful to President Clinton for not sparing any effort in order to try and salvage the moribund peace-process. We thank all friendly governments and peoples for their assistance in these trying times. But we are also distressed at the weakness, complacency and bias of the American media and body politic, fed by electoral overbidding, who refuse to condemn the criminals, accuse the victims of the violence to which they are subjected, and drive Palestinian public opinion to stop lending any credibility to the American role as "honest brokers". We already warned, on the morrow of the Camp David talks, about the negative consequences of the alignment of US public discourse on Israeli propaganda. The debates over the last Resolution of the Security Council, and the US will to send victims and executioners back to back, in some neutral reciprocity of blame, are a sad illustration of this dangerous bias, which in the long run is totally self-destructive. Today, it is too late to hope and put the devil back into its box. There can be no return to the status quo ante. The international community must intervene firmly in order to prevent the whole area from being engulfed into a new cycle of war, bloodshed, suffering and resentment, that will only make the work of ulterior peace-makers more difficult. It is time for the world to take responsibility, ensure protection to the Palestinian people, conduct an independent inquiry into the latest events, and set up the mechanisms that will force Israel to respect the Law, international conventions and signed agreements, first and foremost UN Resolution 242, which stipulates total Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and ultimately Resolution 1322, adopted day before yesterday. The implementation of those resolutions, and the extension of immediate international protection to the Palestinian people, are tests of credibility for the global system as a whole. The alternative is the extension of violence, and its inevitable spread to the concentric circles which surround this conflict.
9 October 2000
|
The Editor |
