WASHINGTON, 15 October 2003 — The Israeli attack inside Syria on Oct. 5 has virtually rendered the two countries’ 1974 Disengagement Agreement irrelevant. Nevertheless, the entire episode is swamped with indecision. Is Israel pushing to widen the frontiers of war? Is this Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s way of avoiding accountability for his failed war on the Palestinians? Is the bombing an Israeli message or an American one? What does Israel hope to achieve by precipitating another crisis when the US has yet to deal with her own?
Bush, who ordered his lone ranger at the United Nations, to prevent UN members from condemning the Israeli act, reacted in a manner that left little doubt that Sharon’s bold plans must have passed through Washington first. Bush’s words held no hesitance but in fact a full-fledged backing for war: Israel “must not feel constrained” in defending itself, Bush said. On Oct. 6, Bush telephoned Sharon and “made it very clear to the prime minister, like I consistently have done, that Israel’s got a right to defend itself and that Israel must not feel constrained in defending the homeland.”
For Bush, like many hawks in his administration, Arabs and Muslims are all the same — geographically, culturally, religiously and politically. Bombing Syria, therefore, might not seem a far-off pitch in retaliation for a suicide bombing carried out by a young Palestinian in Israel on the preceding day. But in a world where many countries, including Syria but excluding Israel and the United States, do in fact still adhere to international law and condemn such violations of sovereignty, the “bring it on” mindset of Bush, Sharon and their followers is by all means repugnant.
But Bush’s repeated defense of Israel’s act was only the tip of the iceberg, an introduction of what will be remembered as the formal inclusion of Israel in a more practical and critical sense in the “war on terror”, an alliance that Israel strived to achieve and despite its empathy, the US continued to defer. No more. One day after the Israeli bombing, the US House International Relations Committee voted in favor of diplomatic and economic sanctions against Syria.
Although the bill has been around for a while, it passed this time after assurances that the Bush administration no longer objects to it. Israel received the news happily, as the predetermined transaction is now complete.
This was not all accidental. By choosing such a time, the Bush administration has delivered a shocking blow to the Arab world and also to the rest of the world. The sanctions against Syria are unlikely to produce mass hunger and death, at least not for now. It remains a first step however, of what may culminate in a war, unless there is a total Syrian submission to Israel.
The US backing of Israel and the passing of anti-Syria legislation were a formal marriage between two sinister elements, Now Israel’s war to suppress the Palestinians has become identical to the US war to suppress just about everyone. “The decisions he (Sharon) makes to defend his people are valid. We would be doing the same thing,” said President Bush.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, on July 31, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an attentive and affable audience: The war on terrorism “is a global campaign against a global adversary.” This “global campaign will not end, “until terrorist networks have been rooted out, wherever they exist.” Another war and a momentous propaganda campaign later, with the help of the pro-Israeli, anti-Arab and Muslim group in the administration, Israel has finally managed to use the same logic. “Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way,” exclaimed Sharon on Oct. 7, just over a year after Rumsfeld articulated his ‘total war’ logic once again. Bush described the Israeli decision, apparently aimed at regionalizing the conflict, as an “essential campaign.”
If this should answer at least one of the many questions being asked these days, it should leave no doubt that Israel struck Syria, not only with the routine American “green light”, but with a mutual, timely and well-calculated decision, all with the aim of — aside from diverting attention from the preposterous policies that both follow in Iraq and the Occupied Territories — subduing another Arab nation that refuses to be part of the Israeli-American hegemony in the region.
And, for obvious reasons, the calamity created by the inexcusable war on Iraq is doomed to be repeated if an attack on Syria takes place, this time with even more adverse consequences, considering the conspicuous Israeli role in the foreseen adversity. True, Arab regimes are likely to hide behind their futile, closed-door “emergency summits” and empty rhetoric, and Europeans are likely to oppose at first, ease the opposition later and then demand their share when sharing the spoils draws near. But in the end, it is the spirit of the resistance, which is only possessed by the Arab masses that will turn the “cakewalk” wars, as envisioned by the neoconservatives prior to the war on Iraq, into ruthless battlegrounds on which invaders never win even after “major combat” is declared officially over.
— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist and editor in chief of The Palestine Chronicle online newspaper. He is the editor of the anthology: “Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion.”
