The year in the Middle East ends with Palestinians and Israelis thinking not of peace but revenge. Israeli military chiefs are considering how to retaliate for last week’s Tel Aviv suicide blast, which killed four Israelis. In kind, Palestinian fighters have promised a “painful response” after the death of 10 Palestinians killed during Israeli attacks in Gaza. The suicide bombing was one response to the Gaza assault and was the first in Israel since October. Before that there was relative calm. So much for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s promise to meet “quiet with quiet.”
Sharon has now said out loud what he has been working on for a long time: the consolidation of Israel’s illegal seizure of 58 percent of land across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and with it the total subjugation of the Palestinian people.
With the eyes of the world focused on Iraq and George W. Bush otherwise occupied, Sharon found the opportunity to discard the remains of the road map. The result has been a reoccupation of the entire West Bank and 60 percent of the Gaza Strip, and a ferocious policy of settlement expansion. In 2002-2003 alone, 56 new settlements were erected, and of the mere eight Sharon claimed to have disabled, five have been covertly rebuilt.
Sharon’s construction of the separation wall in the West Bank continues. If completed, the wall — the other big bang of 2003 — will stretch for at least 1,000 kilometers, achieving Sharon’s ultimate aim of a strategic destruction of any possibility of a Palestinian state. The West Bank will be reduced to clusters of ghettoes and prisons, with access, security and resources remaining under Israeli control, and the Palestinian population locked away.
But the recent suicide bombing, and 35 attempted Palestinian attacks in the past two months, show that a mere wall cannot contain opposition. Yet Sharon’s record-low popularity took its first upturn in six months when he announced he wanted unilaterally to separate from the Palestinians. Obviously, Israelis have taken a liking to their state’s new go-it-alone policy. But the policy means that Sharon has utterly failed to provide the security he promised to the Israeli people. In killing and oppressing in the occupied territories and abandoning any semblance of a strategy for a peaceful solution, it should be clear to Israelis that their prime minister cannot guarantee their safety. In reducing the Palestinian population to a state of desperation that can only ensure continued conflict, Sharon is jeopardizing the lives of his own citizens.
Sharon has also failed to break the strength of Palestinian resolve, and in attempting to rob them of a country and livelihood, he is breeding generation upon generation of Palestinians whose sole purpose will become opposition to the Israeli occupation. That way the spiral of violence is bound to keep on turning.
