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Letter frOm europE

Palestine : From Deir Yassen to road map for peace

Chaklader Mahboob-ul Alam writes from Madrid
ally , it is also the most important military power in the Middle East. Through a series of military conquests and confiscation, Israel now possesses 78 per cent of former Palestine ( In November 1947, because of intense pressure from the American administration a little over 50 per cent of the territory-- a disproportionately high percentage considering the relative numbers of Jews and Arabs in the territory at that time-- was allotted to the future state of Israel
the three or more million Palestinians , who stubbornly refuse to disappear from the scene or flee to the neighbouring countries as many others had already done?
Israel could not absorb several million Christian and Muslim Palestinians as its citizens without losing its jealously guarded status as an exclusively Jewish fundamentalist state. Since in the late twentieth century the world opinion would not endorse the physical
not allowed to use these motorways.) The long-term strategy was that eventually under an American-sponsored ( the Israelis do not trust anybody else) peace treaty, l the Palestinians will be allowed to live in geographically isolated t towns and villages scattered
across the West Bank and Gaza ( which Mr. Sharon graciously conceded, if the Palestinians wanted to call "state" or "states", he would l not mind.) The Palestinians living in these "semi-autonomous ban-
pressure from the American government, Yasser Arafat refused to sign on the dotted line. This is the reason why he has become a "persona non grata" in Washington. This is also the reason why Americans insisted on a regime change in Ramallah even though they knew that Yasser Arafat was democratically elected by the Palestinians as their leader.
Now that regime changes have taken place in Afghanistan, Iraq
THIS is a sad story -- a story of yet another example of man's inhumanity to man. It happened on April 9, 1948 . At about 4 in the morning , when it was still dark and everybody was sleeping in a peaceful Palestinian village called Deir Yassen ( now part of West Jerusalem), it was attacked by a Jewish terrorist group called Irgun Zvai Leumi . The terrorists massacred dozens of men ,women and children -- all of them innocent civilians. In order to create panic among the Palestinian population in other villages and towns of Palestine, some of the Deir Yassen villagers were paraded and jeered at in Jerusalem before being shot in public. A Polish emigre called Menachem Wolfovich Begin ( who went on to become the prime minister of Israel and to win the Nobel Peace Prize) was the leader of Irgun at that time. Later, he boasted that the news of the massacre created such panic among the Palestinians that they " started to flee for their lives". During the course of the next few months 80 per cent of the Palestinian population fled the country . That was precisely the objective of these terrorist activities. How could there be a Jewish state without a Jewish majority in the population? In the process the Jews also confiscated all the land and properties left behind by the Palestinians. Fifty-five years have gone by since that fateful day and the sad story of Palestinian suffering still continues. A combination of extraordinary factors and the twists and turns of history have placed them in this terrible predicament.
A few days after the massacre, on May 14, 1948 , despite Arab
opposition, the state of Israel was proclaimed by the United Nations because President Harry Truman ( yes, the man who ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), had taken up the Jewish cause. The subsequent events covering deportations, massacres, assassinations, illegal settlements , Arab incompetence, America's blind support for the Jewish state, Israel's military supremacy and the failure of the Oslo Process are well-known to everyone. Today , Israel is what Theodor Herzl, the author of The Jewish State ( 1896) and father of World Zionism could never imagine it to be. It is much more than a simple little homeland for the oppressed European Jews. Besides being America's closest
by the UN) and militarily occupies the rest ( 22%), where three and half million Palestinians are crammed in virtual concentration camps. Some members of the Likud party and the ultra-religious groups have openly admitted that their ultimate goal is to get rid of all the Palestinians and establish the state of Greater Israel in 100 per cent of the land which was once Palestine.
The situation has never been worse. During the last two and half years of Intifada (which was instigated by Ariel Sharon), the Israeli government has unleashed a reign of terror. Sharon has reoccupied most of West Bank, frequently sealed off Palestinian towns and villages as closed military zones to keep the press and television cameras out, killed thousands of Palestinians by using the most modern military equipment like tanks, armoured vehicles, helicopter gunships and F-16 jet fighters, perpetrated summary executions, injured thousands, incarcerated an indeterminate number of civilians ( at least six thousand), denied basic medical assistance to the injured by shooting and killing ambulance drivers, demolished hundreds of houses with people inside , destroyed the Palestinian Authority , destroyed the political and economic infrastructure of civilised life in most of the occupied territories and finally turned the Palestinian towns and villages into vast prison camps by installing miles of electrified barbed wires around them. And all this has been and is still being done " with US equipment, US political support and US finance".
Ever since 1967 war and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip , Israeli government policy both under the Conservatives and the Labour Party , has been guided by one unequivocal principle, i.e. never to give up control over the conquered Palestinian territories. However, they realised that they would have a "small" problem if they wanted to implement a policy of straightforward annexation : What to do with
extermination of such a large number of human beings, the Israelis worked out a long-term strategy with a view to maintaining the status-quo ( the military occupation) and quietly and surreptitiously ( very few people in the West except the American government knew about the extent of Israeli settlement activities until Sharon's visit to the Al Aqsa mosque on September 28, 2000 and the subsequent start of the Intifada) converting the occupied territories into a colony and the Palestinians into serfs by building hundreds of Jewish settlements and introducing a South African type apartheid system
Most of these fortified settlements are strategically located and are linked among themselves and with Israeli cities by modern motorways ( The Palestinians are
tustans", will be a source of cheap labour for the Israelis and they ( the Palestinians) will neither have freedom of movement nor control over connecting roads, airspace and water. The Palestinians will be allowed to have a lightly-armed police force , whose primary obligation will be to ensure security for the Israelis from Palestinian " terrorist" attacks. They will not be allowed to have an army. The frontiers of the Palestinian " state" will be under the control of the Israeli armed forces. (Sharon is now busy building a high wall like the infamous Berlin Wall to further isolate the Palestinian areas.)
Actually, this was more or less what was offered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton in the year 2000 at Camp David to Yasser Arafat as the best ever peace offer. Despite immense
and the occupied territories of Palestine, the Bush administration has felt compelled to publish the much-publicised road map for peace sponsored by the United States, the European Union , Russia and the United Nations. It is not a detailed peace plan but a staged process leading to a "sovereign, independent, democratic and viable Palestine" in 2005, "in return for security guarantees and an end to violence against Israelis ". Sharon has already tabled 15 amendments to the Road Map, one of which is very old, i.e. there must be a complete quiet ( no suicide attacks) for a period of time before the negotiations could start. Sharon has used this trick before. Until now, he has used every lull in Palestinian violence to perpetrate targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders and massive incursions
in Palestinian camps and villages with the clear objective of provoking either retaliatory violence from the Palestinians or a civil war among them. Although the Road Map vaguely mentions a gradual withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Palestinian areas and a halt to further settlement activities, it gives immediate priority to the cessation of Palestinian attacks against the occupiers. Abu Mazen says that he is capable of getting Hamas and Jihad Islamica to "sheathe their swords", at least for the time being. But the question is: Will Sharon stop the Israeli violence? It seems, no one wants to face this question because everybody (including the die-hard conservatives of Bush administration) knows that Sharon does not really want peace unless it is on his terms which means complete capitulation of the Palestinians. Curiously enough, 83 American senators and 278 members of the House of Representatives have already issued statements supporting Sharon.
Long and protracted negotiations will not yield any positive results. They will simply incite quibbling over details and maintain the military status quo on the ground, which will suit Sharon fine. He will continue with his policy of building more settlements, committing more targeted assassinations and more armed incursions in Palestinian territories. The Palestinians will retaliate by committing more suicide attacks. In other words, the cycle of violence will continue. Therefore, bolder action is required. Actually, although the Road Map has got four sponsors ( and all of them must actively participate in the negotiations), such is the power of the United States and its leverage over Israel that the only person who can bring about a change in Sharon's attitude is President Bush. Now, after his victory in the war against Iraq, he is in a unique position to put pressure on Sharon to withdraw his army from the occupied territories, dismantle the settlements, return all the land captured during the 1967 war in return for complete security for Israel. By doing so he will not only be able to regain credibility in the Muslim world but also help stabilise a politically volatile region and contribute towards global security. As Aaron Miller, the former State Department negotiator, (who is now the head of Seeds of Peace) puts it , "In Arab world, no single issue resonates everywhere more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing would do more to enhance American maneuverability in the region at large, than
for us to make a credible effort to defuse this issue. A burning Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates so many opportunities for our enemies and so many problems for our friends, including Israel". Has President Bush got the courage and conviction to take such a bold step? Will his neo-conservative advisers allow him to do so?
***Long and protracted negotiations will not yield any positive results. They will simply incite quibbling over details and maintain the military status quo on the ground, which will suit Sharon fine. He will continue with his policy of building more settlements, committing more targeted assassinations and more armed incursions in Palestinian territories. The Palestinians will retaliate by committing more suicide attacks. In other words, the cycle of violence will continue. Therefore, bolder action is required.***