The Middle East has always been a place where illusion paves the road to disaster. In 1095, Pope Urban’s religious mania launched the crusades. In 1915, Winston Churchill’s arrogance led to the WWI bloodbath at Gallipoli. Illusion tends to be a deadly business in those parts. And once again, illusions are about to plunge the Middle East into catastrophe.
Palestine has scarce resources to face the enormous challenges in a struggle that has now continued for over five decades. Operating with a scarcity of resources is true of our Palestinian Authority (PA), the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that make up civil society, and our local and national institutions. For this reason, it is imperative that all available resources be mobilized in efforts that have the greatest potential political, social, and community return.
Every foreign military invasion has a predefined end called withdrawal. The hideous Israeli incursion of internationally recognized Palestinian territories is no exception. Every military operation has a defined political goal, yet Sharon seems to be keeping this a secret from his cabinet, the Israeli people and, indeed, the world.
The Palestinian economy is one of the many, but less often discussed, victims of Israeli military aggression on Palestinian towns, cities, villages, and refugee camps. Before Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was elected, the Palestinian economy was engaged in an internationally acknowledged pattern of growth. This growth started to be realized despite the fact that during the first several years after Oslo, the Palestinian standard of living actually decreased because of Israeli closures and land appropriation for illegal settlement building. The Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator in the Occupied Territories (UNSCO) reported, “In the spring of 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Finance projected that the Palestinian economy would continue to grow as it had since 1997 and that real growth rates for GDP and GNP for the Palestinian territory would reach 5 and 6 percent respectively.” Today the Palestinian economy is in shambles.
The Palestinian people have no grudge against the American public. We never did. As a matter of fact, if one resists the media spin and takes a closer look at what the Palestinians have been struggling for during the past two weeks–let alone the past thirty-five years–it will be revealed that the Palestinian Intifada is a very American struggle. After all, it is a struggle for national independence, civil liberties, human rights, as well as a struggle to establish an open market in an independent economy, free to market forces and free from Israeli domination.
Let’s hear it for Saddam Hussein’s most important comrade–the man who has done more than anyone else to frustrate George Bush’s big push on Baghdad. Take a bow, Ariel Sharon.
In his televised address to the Israeli public following another deadly suicide bombing in Haifa, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared that once again Israel has no other choice but to wage war. As the military activated 20,000 army reservists, the largest number since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon–another unnecessary war masterminded by Sharon–the Israeli leader promised that this war will be a widespread, prolonged, and bloody campaign.
As war raged in the occupied territories, peace flowered in Tel Aviv. On Saturday, February 16, 14,000 Israelis marched, sang peace anthems, lit candles, and demanded Israel “Get out of the territories, get back to ourselves!”
Since it began 15 months ago, the Palestinian Intifada has had little to show for itself politically, despite the remarkable fortitude of a militarily occupied, unarmed, poorly led, and still dispossessed people that has defied the pitiless ravages of Israel’s war machine. In the United States, the government and, with a handful of exceptions, the “independent” media have echoed each other in harping on Palestinian violence and terror, with no attention at all paid to the 35-year Israeli military occupation, the longest in modern history: as a result, American official condemnations of Yasser Arafat’s Authority after 11 September as harboring and even sponsoring terrorism have coldly reinforced the Sharon government’s preposterous claim that Israel is the victim, the Palestinians the aggressors in the four-decade war that the Israeli army has waged against civilians, property, and institutions without mercy or discrimination. The result today is that the Palestinians are locked up in 220 ghettos controlled by the army; American-supplied Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, and F-16s mow down people, houses, olive groves, and fields on a daily basis; schools and universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and tens of thousands injured; Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian leaders continue; unemployment and poverty stand at about 50%–and all this while General Anthony Zinni drones on about Palestinian “violence” to the wretched Arafat, who can’t even leave his office in Ramallah because he is imprisoned there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security forces scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices and barracks.
“We Palestinians believe that the creation of the State of Israel was a grave political error, one which has done grievous harm to the interests of all concerned […]. But it was not merely an error, it was also a crime. A crime perpetrated against the natural, fundamental, and inalienable rights of the Palestinians.” (A Palestinian Strategy for Peaceful Coexistence: On the Future of Palestine, Said Hammami as quoted in Israel: Apartheid State, Uri Davis, 1975).