WASHINGTON — The largest threat to the Israeli right wing that now rules the country is the moderates on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides.
Those groups want peace as they declared in the Oslo negotiations and subsequent agreement.
It was publicly cemented in the September 1993 hand shake that followed in front of President Bill Clinton between Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in front of the White House in Washington DC.
They went on to start to implement these historic accords arrived at in Oslo, Norway in secret during the summer of 1993. Along with Peres they all received the Nobel Peace Prize for starting the peace process between those two long-term adversaries, an achievement not mentioned much today. These were very hopeful days.
During all these days in which Israel’s current prime minister constantly talks about terrorism, it is forgotten who started the terror in that area within the last ten years.
On Feb. 25, 1994, less than six months after that historic handshake, Baruch Goldstein, entered a mosque in Hebron and killed 50 Muslim worshippers as well as himself. Goldstein was a member of Kach and the Jewish Defense League, founded by "Rabbi" Meir Kahane in New York City in the 1960s. Kach, which is well connected with Sharon, is on the official US State Dept. list of terrorism organizations.
Thus with that Jewish act of terrorism, the cycle of violence started again in the Holy Land of three great religions. In fact, it set into motion the "cycle of violence" that has yet to end.
That Goldstein attack came at the precise time when Prime Minister Rabin and Arafat began the implementation of the Oslo agreement, which envisioned the establishment of a State of Palestine by 1998.
It was not until two months later that the first Hamas-linked suicide attacks started when Rabin and Arafat signed the agreement for the establishment of the Palestine National Authority.
It called for elections and the setting up all governmental institutions to have an internationally recognized State of Palestine.
Arafat, at the time, led a massive crackdown on the terrorism, which tried to break the Rabin-Arafat alliance. That terrorism failed to break that partnership. That alliance was finally broken by a right wing Jewish seminary student who killed his own prime minister, on Nov. 4, 1995, calling Nobel Peace laureate Rabin a traitor to the Jews for making peace with the Palestinians.
A year after former Gen. Ehud Barak came to power; Sharon provoked another crisis when he led a Sept. 28, 2000 march to the Islamic holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif or as the Jews call it the Temple Mount.
Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz Party, writing in the best Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, on Jan. 3, 2002, "What does frighten Sharon....is any prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation was to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can."
He goes on to say, Sharon understands "that the terrorists and those that give them asylum are not the real enemies. Instead, the real enemies are the moderates....You fight terrorist — a pretty simple operation — but you must talk with moderates, and this is a very tricky, if not dangerous, business."
Sharon has shown how he can undertake the crushing of these people during the last month. It was brutal, somewhat like how the Nazis that killed so many Jews in Europe during World War II.
The real interest of Sharon is having a rejectionist Palestinians force to deal with and then be able to say to the world that "see you can’t deal with the Palestinians...they are all terrorists and we have to control them." Now we have to come to the United States and what the American media are not releasing.
On Dec. 11, 2001, Fox News reported that 60 Israelis were being held in the Justice Dept.’s post Sept. 11 sweep and that "investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it." Later in the story it continued, "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified, I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified."
There is a great deal of suspicion that the Israeli intelligence had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and did not share that information on orders from Sharon and his right-wing operatives. That would fit into what they are now doing now in Israel and Palestine — using the excuse of action against the Palestinians as their terrorism, which is now on everyone’s lips. It fits into Sharon plans of making the Palestinians as those who don’t want peace and are always viewed as terrorist.
And the American president has the gall to call Sharon "a man of peace." It would be more appropriate to call him a "man of piece". Carving the West Bank and Gaza into pieces for himself and the Israelis.
When will the world wake up to what is really happening in the mind of this man who has caused so much trouble in the land so many of us call holy.
(Dr. Thomas B. Jefferson is a foreign affairs commentator.)
