It is a key demand of the Sharon government that Chairman Yasser Arafat stop the attacks that have shattered Israeli complacency and brought to ordinary Israelis a taste of the terrible violence being visited upon the Palestinians in their name by their rulers. Without such a cessation, the Israeli regime will not take part in any talks to end the violence.
This demand does not, however, square with Sharon’s statement that Arafat is no longer relevant to the peace process and could be dispensed with — the suggestion being that he should be murdered by Israeli forces. If Arafat is truly irrelevant, then he cannot be in a position to stop the violence. But if he can stop the violence, as Sharon is demanding, then he has to be relevant. The truth is that Sharon is trying to force Arafat into a position of irrelevance, by depriving him of any and every means of physically exercising his office as leader of the Palestinian Authority. A leader whose police posts have been destroyed, whose security forces have been gunned down and whose own headquarters has been attacked and deprived of power and virtually all communications is hardly in a position, even if he wants to, to issue an order an end to suicide attacks.
And Ariel Sharon is not so stupid that he is not perfectly aware of this. So why is he trying to isolate and sideline Arafat while he pounds civilian targets? The answer is that Arafat and ordinary Palestinians are the only targets that Sharon and his hawks can aim at.
In his fanatical attempt to crush Palestinian aspirations, Sharon has kicked open a hornet’s nest. A million bullets sprayed into the sky cannot stop the furious attacks of the normally peaceable creatures. If their homeland is being crushed and torn apart, the Palestinians have nothing left except anger and despair. If Sharon treats their lives and their futures with such sickening contempt, then they have nothing to lose by strapping explosives to their bodies and destroying themselves and those around them in a horrific blast.
It is notable how even moderate Palestinian opinion now generally accepts the awful necessity of using suicide bombers to fight back the Israeli aggressor. There are simply no other means. Sharon is only interested in negotiations as a ploy and a smokescreen for continued oppression, for the continued theft of Palestinian land and for the expansion of settlements in complete defiance of international opinion. The Americans, who alone have the power to rein in Sharon, are willing dupes for his terrorist rhetoric and anyway have a political system shot through with Zionist sympathizers. Even if Bush actually understood what was going on, his political masters would never dare enrage the US Zionists and thus jeopardize a second term for their man in the White House.
However, even Sharon cannot exterminate the hornets that he has bludgeoned from their nest. He can kill thousands but he cannot kill them all. As long as his jackboot stamps down on a defenseless Palestine, the awful stings of the suicide bombers will continue. And it is not Arafat, whose moral and personal authority has never been higher among his people than it is now, who is calling in these terrible and tragic attacks. It is the Palestinian people themselves, humiliated and robbed of all hope, who are volunteering to become martyrs.
