Sharon’s Victory and Tight Bonds Between U.S. and Israel Hold Long-term Dangers

By Rachelle Marshall

Sharon will not leave us alone. He is determined to mark the election campaign with more Palestinian blood.

— Saeb Erekat, Palestinian minister for local government, The New York Times, Jan. 13.

The United States loses credibility when perceived as supporting terror in one part of the Mideast, while professing to fight it elsewhere.

— Former Illinois Sen. Adlai E. Stevenson, III, in The New York Times, Feb. 7.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s overwhelming victory in Israel’s January election sent a clear signal of how the next Israeli government intends to deal with the Palestinians. The Likud Party Sharon founded in 1974 won 39 seats—double the number it held in the previous government—while Labor dropped from 25 to 19. The third largest number of seats went to Shinui, a secular right-wing party. The extreme right National Union, which openly favors the expulsion of the Palestinians and had no seats in the former government, won 7. Sharon now has a mandate from Israeli voters to carry out his agenda, and the full backing of a Bush administration poised to make war on Iraq.

Although the vote could hardly have been more decisive, the results defy traditional political logic. Sharon ran for election in 2000 promising to bring the Israelis peace and security, yet he has brought neither. During his two years in office violence sharply escalated, resulting in the death of at least 400 Israelis and more than 2,000 Palestinians. Israel’s gross domestic product shrank by 6 percent and unemployment rose to 10.4 percent in what Israeli economist Nadine Baudot-Trajtenberg called “the worst recession that any industrialized country has seen since World War II.”

According to Jerusalem Post columnist Daniel Bloch, there was no serious dialogue regarding Israel’s future during the campaign, and little mention of Sharon’s “dismal performance.” Instead, he wrote, the campaign was “a clash of emotions, dominated by hate, fear, and discrimination.” Why, then did Israelis vote the way they did? Post-election analysts ascribed Sharon’s victory to the fact that Israelis consider him a grandfatherly figure and still trust him when it comes to security, whereas his Labor Party opponent, Amram Mitzna, was an unknown quantity.

The real reason may be much darker, however. Although public opinion polls show that most Israelis favor peace based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians and the evacuation of some settlements, 65 percent of those surveyed last November said they approved of Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians no matter how brutal. The same percentage of voters cast their ballots for Sharon. To a majority of Israelis, then, the desire for revenge and punishment is apparently greater than the desire for a peace based on territorial compromise.

That fact helps explain why, in the weeks leading up to the election, the Israeli army waged intensive and increasingly deadly attacks in the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon’s reelection, like his rise through the army, was soaked in Palestinian blood. On Jan. 16 Amira Hass reported in Ha’aretz that “every day one, two, three, five Palestinians are killed.” “Hardly a night passes without demolition and destruction,” wrote Gideon Levy in the Jan. 20 Ha’aretz, “hardly a day passes without the killing of innocent civilians.”

Two weeks before the vote, 50 Merkava tanks, each weighing 60-tons, accompanied by Apache helicopters, attacked Gaza City, bulldozing houses and workshops. In water-starved Rafah, soldiers destroyed wells and water pumps. On Jan. 21, Israeli bulldozers demolished the entire business section in the West Bank village of Nazlat Issa, flattening 62 stores that had been a main source of income for the inhabitants. Four days before the election Israeli helicopter gunships bombarded Gaza City and killed at least three Palestinians. The next day Israeli tanks and gunships again attacked Gaza City, this time killing 12 people and wounding 65 while soldiers dynamited scores of shops and homes. According to the Palestine Monitor, in the two days before the Israeli election, Israeli forces killed 24 Palestinians—one every two hours.

For Palestinians, the election results meant only a mandate for the army to continue its curfews, arrests, and killing. In the days that followed, the attacks continued unabated, as Israeli troops and tanks swept into West Bank towns, destroying property and making arrests. After troops flattened Hebron’s central marketplace on Jan. 30, and began demolishing dozens of homes, one resident pointed to the wreckage and said, “This is the real result of the election.” By early February, 72 more Palestinians had been killed since December, and 9,000 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons.

Sharon clearly intends to follow through on the goal he expressed a year ago: “to increase the losses on the other side.” In launching a major military offensive last March that destroyed Palestinian civic institutions, and left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, he declared, “Only after they’ve been battered will we be able to conduct talks.”

He now has a government that is fully behind him. A majority of Likud Knesset members are ultra-hawks, such as Binyamin Netanyahu and Gen. Shaul Mofaz, who radically oppose a Palestinian state under any circumstances. Even if Labor agrees to join a national unity coalition, as Sharon wants, they will serve only as a political cover while the government pursues its goal of incorporating the West Bank into a greater Israel.

The only possible obstacle to achieving this goal would be objection from the United States, since Israel is now heavily dependent on the billions of dollars in aid it receives from Washington each year. Israeli officials are currently seeking an additional $10 billion in loan guarantees.

But no objection seems in the offing. On the contrary, President George W. Bush has backed off completely from the “roadmap” for peace he proposed several months ago and that has been endorsed by Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. Sharon, who opposes the plan’s call for a settlement freeze and creation of a Palestinian state by 2005, has accused its three European backers of “bias” and stresses the affinity between himself and Bush. In a Jan. 18 press conference he said, “Israel and the U.S. see eye to eye on the suitable interpretation of and the appropriate methods for implementing President Bush’s speech, in contrast to the position of the other Quartet members.”

In caving in to Sharon and abandoning any timetable for establishing a Palestinian state, Bush has deliberately ignored the progress toward reform made by the Palestinians—progress he has repeatedly demanded as a price for Israeli concessions. Delegates to a conference on Palestinian political and economic reform, called in mid-January by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, noted that the Palestinian Authority had already made “very significant progress,” according to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. The conference was held at the Foreign Office in London and included representatives from the European Union, the United Nations, the U.S., Russia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In addition to describing reforms already in place, Palestinian officials laid out plans for a new constitution that provided for a prime minister and a bill of rights. “Reforms in democracy and meritocracy are a Palestinian aspiration, a Palestinian expectation, a Palestinian right, and even a Palestinian duty to ourselves,” Palestinian representative Afif Safieh assured the meeting. He pointed out however, that their efforts were limited because of the restrictions imposed on them by the Israelis. In fact, the Palestinian delegates had to take part by video link from Gaza and Ramallah because Sharon had forbidden them from traveling to London. The Israelis were outraged that the conference was taking place at all, according to Straw, who had received an angry phone call from Israeli Foreign Minister Netanyahu the week before.

Sharon Stonewalls

It seems clear that the Sharon government hopes to block any real movement toward Palestinian reform for fear it could pave the way toward a Palestinian state. The Israelis refused to lift the road closings and curfews so that Palestinians could hold scheduled elections on Jan. 20, and in late January Sharon rejected out of hand the draft of a new Palestinian constitution, calling it a sham. The draft provides for a 150-member legislature, transfers some power from the president to a prime minister, and makes Islam the state religion but guarantees the rights of all religions. Although a new Palestinian constitution was one of Bush’s demands in setting forth his peace plan, there has been no sign of American encouragement or help for the Palestinians’ efforts. The Bush administration also showed surprisingly little interest in defeated Labor candidate Amram Mitzna’s offer to evacuate all of Gaza and 65 percent of the West Bank if he were elected.

In any case, Israeli-Palestinian peace remains far down on the U.S. agenda. There is no question that Bush’s first priority is getting rid of Saddam Hussain and imposing a U.S.-controlled regime on Iraq, and that Sharon is the administration’s closest, most committed partner in this enterprise. There is a question, however, of how far their joint vision extends beyond Iraq to the rest of the Middle East.

A Pentagon document approved last October laid down the principle that the United States would fight terrorists and the countries that sponsor them wherever they are located, which means such countries as Syria, Iran, and possibly Lebanon. All three have supported Hezbollah, which, in accordance with Israel, the Bush administration has branded as terrorist.

But if fighting terrorism is the immediate object, the long-range goal appears to be the makeover of most of the Middle East. A Defense Policy Guidance statement drawn up in 1992, when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, called for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence in the world, preventing the rise of a rival power, and “reshaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”

That document is now de facto policy, backed by such administration officials and advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. All of them, along with Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are among Israel’s most ardent supporters (see March 2003 Washington Report, p. 14), so it requires no stretch of the imagination to assume that in the Middle East, “American interests” means the interests of Israel as well. This impression was reinforced by an op-ed column in the Jan. 31 New York Times by Stephen C. Pelletiere, a senior analyst with the CIA during the Iran-Iraq war.

The main thrust of Pelletiere’s piece was to cast doubt on Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussain “gassed his own people” by bombarding the Kurds in Halabja with poison gas in 1988. Pelletiere cites strong evidence that the Kurds were gassed by Iranian forces, and also punctures the conviction of some peace advocates that Bush intends to go to war in Iraq solely to gain control of its oil. More important than Iraq’s oil, Pelletiere says, is Iraq’s extensive river system, which includes the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Greater and Lesser Zab rivers. A pipeline from Iraq would bring water to the parched Gulf states and, he points out, to Israel. “With Iraq in American hands,” Pelletiere concludes, “America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades.”

If this is indeed the Bush administration’s aim, it will either have to clamp down on the Sharon government and demand an end to the occupation, or face growing hostility in the Arab world and beyond. “If the U.S. was serious about launching a wave of political change toward democracy, it should solve the Israeli conflict first,” Lebanese economist Kamal Hamdan said recently. Hesham Youssef, a spokesman for the Arab League agreed. “I doubt you could find one person who would agree that the Americans are coming just for the sake of the region and because they want to bring democracy,” he said. “We think it’s Israel. We think it’s control. They want a police station in Baghdad like they have in Kabul.”

And, noted Gen. Saeed Al-Hazenawi, a Saudi army commander, “Iraq is not really a threat to us….The most destabilizing factor in this region of the world is Israel’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.”

Such statements are warnings of the deep well of opposition to U.S. Middle East policy in the Arab world. Washington’s uncritical support for Israel, its refusal to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its determination to launch an unprovoked attack on Iraq form a volatile combination.

There is a bridge between Vermont and New Hampshire where residents have been holding weekly vigils for peace. A sign on the bridge says, “A million bitter enemies will be born out of this war.” Whether or not this is true, it is certain that America’s dangerous partnership with Israel and the imperialist ambitions of administration policymakers will result in growing resistance to U.S. interventions and the death of more innocent people.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.