It must be feared that the missiles that rammed into Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s seaside headquarters and the airstrikes in Gaza and the West Bank represent more than the hit-for-hit strategy that Israel has been following since the intifada began. It could be the first move in a bigger plan.
The White House sees in the airstrikes the exercise of Israel’s right to self-defense. Gone are the calls for restraint. Absent again from Washington’s righteous indignation is even the suggestion that the anger on the Palestinian street springs from Israel’s occupation of the areas that had come under Palestinian rule after years of tortuous negotiations and signing ceremonies. Israel’s tanks are in those areas, demolishing homes and leveling farms, strangulating the economy and killing people. Israel, Washington says in effect, is defending its borders in every Palestinian kitchen, school and hospital.
The question now is, how far more will Sharon’s Israel go, and Bush’s White House agree that it should go, “defending” itself? The methods of self-defense so far — the assassination of prominent Palestinians, tanks rolling in to reoccupy towns and villages, the slaughter of countless more protesters, blockades of the West Bank and Gaza strip — vicious though they have been, have been futile from Sharon’s point of view. They have not quelled Palestinian fury. On the contrary, they have fueled it.That is why a much deadlier response has now to be feared. Sharon is dead set against a peace deal with the Palestinians - not one that gives them an independent state. He has no intention of giving up an inch of the occupied territories, no intention at all of dismantling a single Jewish settlement. Indeed, he wants to increase and expand them. As to where the Palestinians fit into his plans, his vision has been firmly rooted in the idea of endless occupation and servitude — a people in perpetual chains.
The danger now is that, aware of the futility of his current attempts, he will opt for something much more dramatic — an answer that will solve Israel’s problems once and for all: the final solution — the expulsion of the Palestinians.
That would have to mean war. There is no way that the international community, even Washington, would tolerate such an action in peacetime. But in war it would be a different matter. There is a lot that Washington would tolerate if Israel were seen to be at great risk — likewise the Europeans, and probably even Washington’s newfound Russian and Chinese allies.
Sharon has made it increasingly plain that he regards not merely Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorists, but the entire Palestinian people. It seems frighteningly logical then that he would want to treat them as he sees the US treating Al-Qaeda and the Taleban. Even before this Saturday’s and Sunday’s carnage he was loud in his boasts that the Americans and the Israelis were equal victims of terrorism and equal partners in the fight against it. There is, he tries to pretend, a moral equivalency in their positions. It is a lie, but such lies constitute the edifice of his destructive politics.
If so, then there is a real danger that he will try to engineer a war — a war which he can use to expel and terrorize into flight as many Palestinians as possible: Deir Yassin all over again.
