To hear an Israeli government minister this week tell Indian and Pakistani governments that they must not resort to violence, but should use talks to resolve their differences, was, on the face of it, an act of the most astonishing hypocrisy. But the minister who made this plea on a visit to India was Shimon Peres, the isolated dove in Sharon’s hawkish Cabinet. Many will believe that he was talking as much to the government of which he is part, as he was to India and Pakistan.
Until Tuesday night’s suicide attack on an Israeli post in Gaza, which saw the two Palestinian attackers and four Israeli soldiers die, there had been almost a month without serious violence from the Palestinian side. This was the truce that Sharon had demanded, in the clear expectation that it would not be allowed to happen. If Palestinian militants did not ignore Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority leadership, he was sure that he could provoke them into attacks, by having his forces continue their attacks on Palestinian areas and people he claimed were terror suspects.
But there may have been an alternative plan to discredit the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat, in the eyes of US peace envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni, who is due to return to the region in eight days’ time. The capture by Israeli commandos of the Karine A, seized in international waters in the Red Sea on Thursday, struck even the Americans as being uncannily convenient. They were at first extremely cautious in their reaction and have only now demanded an explanation from Yasser Arafat about the 50 tons of arms on board.
According to the ship’s captain, the arms were to be smuggled ashore onto the Gaza coast, after the ship has passed through the Suez Canal. What is odd about this whole incident is that American intelligence, on such a high state of alert in the region did not find out about the arms shipment, which apparently originated from Iran. Either US spies are not doing their job properly or they were put off the scent by Israeli intelligence. This has all the characteristics of a sting operation, in which militant Palestinians, who see no reason why the Palestinians should not be arming themselves in the face of the hugely better-equipped Israeli occupation forces, were duped into an elaborate trap. Israel is also claiming that it possesses documentation proving Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were involved in the shipment. These are, again, too pat to be true. If Arafat were involved, he would hardly have been so lax in his security as to allow any such evidence to exist and travel on board any smuggling vessel.
Leaving aside the argument that Palestinians would be justified in seeking to obtain weapons to defend themselves, the fact is that Yasser Arafat has denied having anything to do with the shipment. He has further said that he will deal with any of his people who were. We must assume that Israeli intelligence duped a group of Palestinian militants into an elaborate trap, from which it is now intent of extracting the maximum propaganda benefit, in the hope of wrecking the Zinni mission. If the Americans did, in fact, know about the scam from the start, their initial lack of enthusiasm is explained. The subsequent change of heart, however, suggests Zionist arm-twisting.
