[1435] in peace2
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix AuYeung)
Mon Feb 11 08:21:14 2002
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From: Felix AuYeung <FAuYeung@pittsburghfoodbank.org>
To: "'peace-list@mit.edu'" <peace-list@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 08:23:32 -0500
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Sharon Fails to Provide Either Peace or Security
William Pfaff
International Herald Tribune
Saturday, February 9, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/47439.html
PARIS The Year of Sharon has been the most violent year in two decades for
Israel, and the most futile year in the whole of its history.
.
Moral recoil from Ariel Sharon's policies has cracked the edifice of Israeli
public solidarity. Until this week, this recoil seemed still a marginal
phenomenon, but Prime Minister Sharon's popular support now, for the first
time, has fallen below 50 percent. His first year in office has failed to
provide either the peace or the restored security he promised.
.
There has been a revolt by a number of army reservists, mostly from elite
combat units, who have announced their refusal to return to occupation
duties in the Palestinian territories seized in the 1967 war. They
characterize these duties as "ruling, expelling, starving and humiliating an
entire people."
.
A commission of Israel's national bar association has condemned the
government's policy of "eliminating" Palestinian leaders held to be
implicated in terrorism. The commission described this as illegal
imposition, without trial, of the death penalty. It warned the officials and
soldiers involved that they risked prosecution outside Israel for war
crimes.
.
The legal counselor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledges that he
has advised military and internal security officers of their risk of arrest
in certain European countries, as happened to General Augusto Pinochet,
Chile's former dictator, seized in Britain in 1998 after Spanish prosecutors
requested his trial on charges of crimes against humanity.
.
These signs of public unease recall the moral crisis within the Israeli
Defense Forces that contributed to Israel's retreat from the occupation of
Lebanon, following its 1982 invasion of that country. That invasion was also
intended by Ariel Sharon to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement.
.
The Israeli public, traumatized by the suicide bomb attacks of Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, nonetheless has difficulty seeing a convincing alternative to
the Sharon government's policy of assassinations, home destructions, and
attacks on Palestinian security forces, meant to destroy PLO authority.
.
The Palestine movement itself is splitting, with violent clashes between
factions maneuvering to succeed Yasser Arafat, if he is killed or driven
away, and between the PLO and the extremist groups determined to go on with
the suicide bombing campaign.
.
The latter are Mr. Sharon's political, as well as moral, counterparts,
determined to destroy compromise between the sides, fanatically pursuing the
unrealizable goal of expelling Israel from its UN-recognized 1949 borders.
.
The prime minister's reciprocal ambition, acknowledged to the Israeli press
is to gain the rest of the Palestinian territories for Israel - or as much
of them as possible. His current policy is meant to destroy any possibility
of a viable independent Palestinian state.
.
He believes that the Palestinians, under this pressure, will eventually
abandon the PLO and resign themselves to existence under Israeli domination,
and to a steady expansion of Israeli settlements.
.
He would prefer that the Palestinians found life in these circumstances so
miserable and hopeless that they would choose on their own initiative to
leave - for Jordan, or another Arab state, where, of course, they are
unwanted.
.
The United States now is irrelevant, so far as any solution is concerned.
Israeli policy is Bush administration policy. Mr. Sharon has successfully
exploited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to delegitimize Yasser Arafat, in
Bush administration eyes, and indeed to delegitimize the Palestinian
struggle itself, as if it were simply a terrorist affair rather than a
national independence movement.
.
Initiatives inside Israel and from Israel's friends abroad to restore some
movement to the blocked peace negotiations have included proposals for
imposed solutions, working through the UN Security Council.
.
But this and other possible outside initiatives will be thwarted so long as
the United States gives unqualified support to Mr. Sharon, as now is the
case.
.
Some Israelis want unilateral withdrawal from some Palestinian territories
and from Gaza, and separation of the two communities by physical barriers.
However it is objected that this might merely displace the violence, not end
it. It would also contradict the Sharon government's essentially
expansionist policy.
.
The most poignant proposal has come in an open letter in the mainstream
newspaper Ha'aretz, addressed to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres by one of his
former associates in government, Gideon Levy, now a leading journalist.
.
Mr. Levy accuses Mr. Peres of dissociating himself from the Sharon
government in private while serving it in public. He insists that Mr. Peres
is not, as he claims, playing a moderating role by staying in Mr. Sharon's
cabinet, but has rather made himself accomplice in what Mr. Levy calls "a
government of crime."
.
He appeals to Mr. Peres, now the most eminent survivor in Israeli public
life of the leaders who founded and shaped the nation, to resign from the
Sharon government. He asks him to "tell the world what is (perhaps) in your
heart." Despair is written into that sentence, in the parenthesis.
.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
