IF YESTERDAY’S EVENTS — the shooting of four Palestinian policemen in cold blood in the West Bank and another bombing in Haifa — prove anything, it is this: The more Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon draws on Israel’s military might to quell the uprising, the more the Palestinians will resort to defending themselves. The violence stems from the longest military occupation in modern history, the existence and continuing growth of hundreds of illegal settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem and the draconian closures to which Palestinian civilians are subjected to every day. Sharon and his government claim that the security of the Israeli population is their paramount concern but now there is clear and ugly evidence that violent solutions do not and cannot guarantee this security.
There can be no security for Israelis if Sharon’s agenda is to eliminate the Palestinian leadership and destroy Palestinian lives, livelihood and property. The events of the last few days only prove that the harder Sharon hits, the harsher the backlash on the Israeli people. Israel’s policies of targeted assassinations of Palestinian figures, frequent invasions and closure of Palestinian towns and cities, involving destruction and properties and killing of innocent people to force the Palestinians to accept peace on Israeli terms have generated a dangerous cycle of violence.
Sharon is exploiting the current confusion over the difference between terrorism and national resistance. The West’s persistent attempts to describe liberation movements as terrorists defy laws and conventions that distinguish clearly between random crimes and acts aimed at liberating an oppressed and occupied people. The world should be aware of this distinction. People should not be ruled by laws and systems of government forcefully imposed by others. There should be no regimes that live off the oppression of others and the occupation of their lands.
Israel cannot expect the world to continue viewing its actions as self-defense while condemning the Palestinians’ retaliatory attacks as acts of terrorism.
The suicide bombings in Israel cannot be viewed in isolation from the brutal practices to which the Palestinian people are being subjected. It is glaringly obvious that the bombings are a product of a climate fueled by Israeli occupation and terrorism, by a systematic murder of Palestinians and by closures and economic blockades.
If Yasser Arafat has come under some of the most intense pressure he has ever faced to crack down on anti-Israeli activists, then Israel must not be exempted from pressure under the pretext that it is fighting terror. If the world wants to turn up the heat on Arafat, it will simultaneously have to heap blazing coals on Sharon, whose insistence on peace with occupation is the root cause of all the violence.
Sept. 11 gave Sharon the pretext he needed most to cripple the Palestinian Authority to the point where continuing the Oslo accords, which Sharon was never fully reconciled with, would become academic. All that held him back from going full throttle was American opposition and the shaky foundations of his national unity government.
Sharon was unencumbered last week by American demands for restraint. It was a clear sign that the voice of the right-wingers in Sharon’s Cabinet might have finally drowned out their Labor coalition partners, including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
Ultimately, the cards for a peaceful settlement are in Israeli hands for Israel is the occupying power and the Palestinians the occupied people with a right to resist that occupation.
