People's Democracy

THE assassination of Israel’s Transport Minister, Rehavam Zeevi, in the third week of October, in a hotel in Jerusalem, has given the right-wing government in Israel yet another excuse to unleash its formidable array of weaponry against the Palestinian people.

Zeevi, like the current Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon, was an unabashed Zionist hawk, who once had the temerity to announce in public that all Palestinians should be repatriated to Mecca and Medina. He was among the influential cabinet members in the Sharon government supporting the assassination of Palestinian leaders by the Jewish state. In the last couple of months, scores of leading Palestinian figures belonging to a spectrum of parties ranging from radical Islamic ones to Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah, have been become victims. Rehan Zeevi is the first Israeli cabinet minister who has been assassinated since Israel became independent.

The Israeli government had tried to cash in on the worldwide condemnation of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in September. Sharon tried to draw a parallel between the depredations of the terrorists and the just struggle of the Palestinians. Sharon had publicly stated that Yasser Arafat was the Osama Bin Laden of the region and that peace was only possible if the Palestinian leader was removed from the scene.

This demand has come from a man whom many hold responsible for horrific war crimes in the region. Thousands of innocent civilians, mostly Palestinians were killed during the brutal occupation of Lebanon by Israeli troops under Sharon in the early eighties. The wounds left behind by the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla have yet to heal.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in September, Israeli forces had launched one of their fiercest attacks in many years, on Palestinians, as world attention was focused on the tragic events unfolding in New York. Cries from within the Likud-led government in Israel for targeting Arafat personally were getting louder. The first wave of attacks only stopped after the Bush administration strongly reprimanded the Israeli government.

The recent events have forced American policy to re-evaluate their strategy in the region. A section of America’s influential policy makers have belatedly realized that one of the primary reasons for the widespread Arab anger against the West was due to the inherent double standards in its policies towards the region. Osama Bin Laden, to further his own opportunist and sectarian agenda, in a statement issued after the events of September 11, had put the issue of Palestine on top of his agenda, followed by the demand that American forces leave the Arabian Peninsula and end the undeclared war against Iraq,.

President George Bush had to go the extent of publicly rebuking the Israeli Prime Minister after he launched a new military offensive against the Palestinians in the last week of September, following the assassination of the Tourism Minister. The Bush administration’s current stance in being dictated by the political and military realities of the prevailing situation. The Bush administration which, till the events of September had virtually given the Sharon government a "carte blanche" to send tanks and planes into the occupied territories to terrorise the Palestinians, now wants Sharon to keep his power dry, at least for the time being.

As things stand today, even pro-American governments in the region like the Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are finding it difficult to fully support their patron, the US, in its so-called war against terrorism. To try and convince skeptics in the region, the Bush administration has even gone to the extent of announcing that a Palestinian state could be a reality in the not too distant future. But just after Bush made his observations, Sharon sent in his tanks to once again reoccupy parts of Palestinian land which Israel had recently ceded.

Bethlehem and Beit Jalla were among the towns occupied. The Christian-dominated areas were terrorised by the Israeli forces in the third and fourth weeks of October. Only an ultimatum from the US had made the Israelis withdraw and that too only partially. The trail of devastation left by the Israelis was horrific. More than fifty Palestinians have been killed so far by the occupying Israeli forces till the end of October. The Israeli government wants dozens of activists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other organisations to be handed over to them.

Helicopter gunships and car bombs seem to be weapons of choice for the Israeli state machinery as it goes about ruthlessly eliminating individuals it perceives as its enemy. Among those killed by a car bomb was Atef Abayat, the leader of the Fatah's military wing. More than 30,000 people attended his funeral - a protest not only against the Israelis but also against Arafat. Arafat, under considerable pressure from Washington, has been arresting activists whose incarceration has been demanded by Israel. There was a warrant out for the arrest of Abayat,

The Palestinian police have had to use force to quell some demonstrations. Four people were reported killed when Palestinian security men had to open fire to quell a violent protest on the West Bank against the American bombing of Afghanistan.

After the assassination of the Israeli Tourism Minister, many PFLP activists have also been put under arrest, with the military wing being officially banned by the Palestinian State Authority. The PFLP is an avowedly Marxist organisation that operates under the umbrella of the PLO. The PFLP, in the seventies and the eighties, under the leadership for George Habash, was involved in many spectacular incidents that helped propel the Palestinian cause on to centre stage.

The military wing of the PFLP had claimed credit for the killing of Israeli Transport Minister. They said that it was done to avenge the assassination of the PFLP leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, in late August. Mustafa was killed in cold blood by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. Until then the PFLP, while justifying the right of Palestinians to wage a guerrilla war, was also against the cult of suicide bombings being glorified by militant Islamist groupings like the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

As Israeli troops start withdrawing from the areas they had recently occupied, their "targeted deterrence" (code word for state sponsored assassination) policy is being actively implemented, despite international condemnation. The United Nations Security Council is all set to take up the issue of Israeli occupation very soon. The Security Council will have to decide on the issue of UN peace-keepers being sent to the region. The Bush administration seems to have bluntly told the Sharon government that it too would go along with the proposal unless Israel expeditiously withdraw from the towns and villages it had occupied in its current offensive. The West does not want its attention diverted by Israel while it is engaged in its so-called global war against terrorism.

Meanwhile, despite the overwhelming odds, the Palestinian "Intifad" continues. The Palestinian people now only talk of the Oslo agreements in the past tense. In the context of the dramatically changed world situation, the majority of the Palestinians are now demanding implementation of the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, the original foundation of the Oslo agreement. They justifiably argue that responsibility for the failure of the Oslo agreement lies squarely at the doors of Tel Aviv and Washington.

Slowly but surely the two "natural allies" acting in tandem reduced the flawed Oslo agreement to a farce.

The 1967 agreement calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories it captured during the 1967 war, in return for the security of all the states (including Israel) in the area. The resolution also underlined the illegality of the acquisition of land through war.

Implementation of Article 242 would mean the return of Israel to the 1967 borders and the giving up of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza will also have to return to Israel.