The Observer, March 28, 2004
Avi Shlaim says that the Prime Minister's violent pursuit of a Greater Israel has lengthened a relentless dance of death
Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder and spiritual
leader of Hamas, marked an extraordinarily dangerous escalation in the
conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There could hardly be a
more dramatic demonstration of the disparity in military power between
the two parties to this conflict. The trouble is that there is no
military solution and there are only losers in this dance of death.
Both the official Israeli justification for the killing of Yassin and
the Hamas response were entirely predictable. Ariel Sharon described it
as part of the war on terror and called Yassin the 'first and foremost
leader of the Palestinian terrorist murderers'. He compared him to
Osama bin Laden and congratulated the Israeli security forces on their
success. Hamas leaders overflowed with fury, seeing the killing as an
attack on Islam. They vowed to take revenge and escalate the armed
struggle until they achieve independence. Israel, they said, had opened
the gates of hell. Secular Palestinian leaders denounced the attack as
dangerous, crazy and cowardly and suspected that the motive was to
create chaos in Palestinian society and bring about the collapse of the
Palestinian Authority.
One thing was clear: with this single act of violence, Israel killed
any prospect of a revival of the Middle East peace process. The road
map, launched with so much fanfare a year ago, is now dead. All of Tony
Blair's efforts in prodding and persuading a reluctant George Bush to
adopt this plan for a two-state solution by 2005 appear to have been in
vain. No Arab leader can be expected even to talk about peace with
Israel, given its callous disregard for both Muslim sensitivities and
international legality.
The assassination is likely to strengthen rather than weaken Hamas. In
the wretched Gaza refugee camps, recruitment of suicide bombers has
never been much of a problem. With Yassin turned into a martyr, more
desperate young people will rally behind the Islamic banner. Political
support for Hamas is also likely to grow at the expense of its secular
rival, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Yassin's spartan lifestyle
commanded universal respect. His honesty and that of his colleagues
stood in marked contrast to the endemic corruption in parts of Fatah.
Yassin's removal will almost certainly tilt the internal balance within
Hamas in favour of the more radical military wing. The political wing,
headed by the organisation's new leader, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was
much more pragmatic than is commonly realised in the West. It observed
several ceasefires scuppered by Israel. While approving suicide
bombings as the only weapon available to their movement, its leaders
leaned increasingly towards de facto acceptance of Israel within its
1967 borders. Israel's action, however, is bound to reinforce the
argument of the hardliners that the Jewish state only understands
force, and can only be dislodged from the occupied territories by
force.
All this could have been predicted, so why did Israel embark on such a
high-risk strategy? To answer this, you have to delve into the
personality and policies of Israel's Prime Minister, a right-wing
extremist who abhors negotiations and compromise and imposes his will
by brute force. He is a proponent of Greater Israel and the champion of
violent solutions. The Palestinians pose the main challenge to his
vision of Greater Israel, so he has always advocated the use of
military force to crush them.
By destroying the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Sharon hoped to
break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the
absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The war was a
disaster, but Sharon doggedly persisted in his objective of denying the
Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. Evidence
for this is ably presented by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in
Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians.
Equally dogged Palestinian resistance since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa
intifada persuaded Sharon that the dream of Greater Israel had to be
modified, if not abandoned. His new strategy rests on two main planks.
One is the building of the wall on the West Bank that would prepare the
way for the de facto annexation of roughly half its territory to
Israel. The other, announced in January, involves unilateral Israeli
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Few Israelis want to hang on to Gaza, where there are 1.2 million Arabs
and 7,500 Israeli settlers, who control 25 per cent of the territory
and 40 per cent of the arable land. Sharon knows that the occupation
cannot be sustained in the long term, so he wants to cut his losses to
consolidate occupation of half of the West Bank. This plan amounts to
an attempt to redraw the map of Israel-Palestine unilaterally without
negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, without complying with any
external diktats, and without following any international roadmaps.
Yet although Sharon's plan is fixated exclusively on Israeli interests,
it has met opposition inside his cabinet from the pro-settler,
ultra-right-wing parties and from the aggressively hawkish Minister of
Defence, Shaul Mofaz. The General Staff is worried that Hamas would
turn Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, leaving it with a
powerful enemy on its southern border. Therefore it wants to break
Hamas before the withdrawal.
The decision to execute Yassin has to be seen in this light. Some
Ministers and the director of the internal security service opposed the
proposal on the grounds that it was illegal and would only increase the
violence, but the majority voted in favour.
It transpired that the cabinet decided to eliminate not just Yassin but
the entire Hamas leadership in response to the double suicide bombing
in the port of Ashdod. This means that Israel will strike at Hamas
leaders whenever opportunities present themselves, not only in
retaliation. Israeli strikes will be followed, inevitably and
inexorably, by Palestinian retaliation with suicide bombs. This is a
recipe for violence and bloodshed without any hope. Sharon has truly
opened the gates of hell.
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