LONDON, 26 March 2004 — Ariel Sharon’s decision to incinerate a 67-year-old blind quadriplegic cleric outside his local mosque will certainly go down as one of the most spectacularly counterproductive acts of violence in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel has the right to defend itself, President Bush declares, while apparently denying the Palestinians the same luxury. But the killing can have no military value at all. Whatever his authority as the founder and figurehead of Hamas, the idea that Yassin was involved in planning armed attacks is preposterous.
And regardless of the domestic political calculations of the Israeli government, such attempts to destroy a popular movement by decapitation are doomed to failure. From Algeria to Vietnam, the past century is littered with evidence that such strategies invariably come to naught. Where resistance has deep roots — as Hamas’ undoubtedly has in the occupied territories — it will always re-emerge, however savage the repression. Yassin has been succeeded by Abdulaziz Rantissi, and if the Israelis incinerate him, another will take his place. What Monday’s killing has done is simply widen the range of targets on each side, expanding the arena of terror.
The chances of a lasting settlement should in reality be higher than ever before. The sharp-tongued Rantissi is widely regarded as more hard-line than Yassin. But, as he told me in Gaza a couple of months back, Hamas is ready to call a cease-fire that “should be seen in terms of years” in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it has illegally occupied for the past 37 years.
But instead of seizing the opportunity for peace offered by such political signals, the Sharon government is deliberately undermining the basis for a two-state solution by carving up the occupied territories with its electrified fences, closed zones and ever- expanding settlements. At the same time, it is planning a partial withdrawal from the most heavily populated areas, while effectively annexing other areas of the West Bank and confining Palestinians to walled bantustans that can never form the basis of a viable state. Such a rearrangement of the occupation will clearly not resolve the conflict. And considering that the US arms and funds Israel to a greater degree than any other state on the planet, such leverage might be seen as an ideal opportunity for the much-vaunted project of western humanitarian intervention. But instead of applying pressure to achieve a just settlement, the US and its friends refuse to talk to the elected Palestinian leadership, while insisting that no end to occupation is possible unless it stamps out resistance.
The killing of Yassin, along with the wider bloodletting in the occupied territories, will further heighten the Arab and Muslim anger that is fuelling Islamist terror attacks. Justice for the Palestinians should self-evidently be pursued on its own merits. But given the extent to which Palestine has become a focus of global Muslim grievance, it has also become a necessity for international security. And the failure of Western leaders to confront the crisis in a remotely even-handed way is now a threat to their own people.
The most dangerous delusion of our time must surely be the notion that Islamist terror is motivated by hostility to freedom and the Western way of life. As anyone who is familiar with the Arab and Muslim world, or even bothered to read successive statements by Al-Qaeda leaders, it is in fact overwhelmingly driven by hostility to foreign, and especially Western, domination and occupation of Arab and Muslim countries. Since Sept. 11, US interference in the region has gone much further, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result is an arc of foreign occupation across the Middle East, unmatched anywhere else the world.
That has in turn spawned an arc of resistance, while anti-US feeling among Muslims has reached unprecedented levels, as demonstrated in this week’s Pew opinion survey. There are also dangers that the boundaries between nationally based mass resistance movements against occupation and socially disconnected terror networks of the Al-Qaeda type become blurred. But to address the swelling and legitimate grievances that underlie both is now a global imperative. Unless and until the occupying powers and Israel —- do that, they will be fueling, not fighting, terror.
