WASHINGTON/GAZA, 6 October — The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was taken to task by Washington yesterday for his “unacceptable” comments on US policy in the Middle East, while a last-ditch Palestinian effort to salvage a cease-fire was shaken by further aggression by Israeli troops and tanks.
At a press conference on Thursday night, Sharon told US President George W. Bush that in forging his coalition against terrorism he should not try “to appease the Arabs at our expense. We won’t accept it.” He called on the Western democracies “not to commit again the terrible mistake made in 1938 when European democracies sacrificed Czechoslovakia for a temporary solution.”
“Israel will not be Czechoslovakia,” he thundered at the press conference. Sharon was alluding to the 1938 Munich conference, when European powers yielded to German dictator Adolf Hitler and allowed him to take over part of Czechoslovakia.
In response, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said US Secretary of State Colin Powell told Sharon in a phone call yesterday that Bush had deemed his comments about appeasing Arabs at Israel’s expense “unacceptable.”
Sharon adviser Dore Gold scrambled to strike a conciliatory tone later in the day after Washington’s scathing criticism. “What the prime minister is saying is that he must protect the security of Israel given the escalating violence that it is facing,” Gold said, trying to mitigate the damage from the rare slap in the face from Israel’s closest ally.
According to an Israeli official, Sharon’s speech aimed to rally the influential Jewish community in the United States against Bush. “Ariel Sharon played the note of the threat of a new holocaust,” an Israeli official told AFP on condition of anonymity. Left-wing Israeli opposition leader Yossi Sarid blasted Sharon’s comments as “groundless, miserable, uncalled-for and dangerous. “They are something of a show of ingratitude to America, without which Israel would have a hard time surviving, and they are also a very serious diplomatic error,” he said.
Israeli newspapers also criticized Sharon. “In a very short speech to the nation, Sharon warned the free world not to ‘sacrifice Israel’ to appease the Arabs, as Czechoslovakia was sacrificed on the eve of World War II to appease Nazi Germany,” wrote the Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s top-selling daily.
“This was an unfortunate statement, historically mistaken, politically damaging, factually incorrect, and it deepens the sense of threat and strangulation that Israelis feel. It weakens us and insults our friends.”
The flap came a day after the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement urged Palestinians to stick to a truce with Israel for the sake of the Palestinian cause.
But that bid was sent reeling as six Palestinians were killed and 17 others were wounded after Israeli tanks, backed by helicopters, entered Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank city of Hebron before dawn, police and hospital sources said. Witnesses said the five were killed as an Israeli helicopter blasted a house with a missile. Israeli Army units yesterday occupied two Arab districts of Hebron. The army then declared an unlimited curfew for the some 40,000 Arabs living in the two areas. Israeli troops backed by up to 50 tanks and armored cars entered Hebron’s Arab districts of Abu Sneineh and Harat Al-Sheikh at around 3 a.m. yesterday.
Eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers destroyed two buildings and took over five others. They also fired from tanks and combat helicopters on Palestinians trying to halt the tanks, the eyewitnesses said. At least six people were killed and 12 injured, Palestinian sources said. The sources said more victims could lie beneath the rubble of the destroyed buildings, with the Israeli Army preventing rescue efforts.
In another blow to the shaky truce-consolidation accord hammered out nine days ago by Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, gunmen shot dead an Israeli and wounded another on a road near the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, Israeli settler sources said. The attack was claimed by both the “Return Brigade” of Fatah, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A meeting between Peres and leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Thursday ended after an hour with no results, the Palestinian side said.
