Let us not mourn the 'Butcher of Beirut'

For every leader such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu who are praising the life of Ariel Sharon, there are countless ordinary people for whom his name is synonymous with ruthless, brutal anti-Palestinian policies.

The story of Sharon, who died on Saturday aged 85, was in many ways, the story of the state of Israel itself. During the British Mandate, Sharon was a member of the paramilitary Haganah group along with other Israeli leaders to come, including Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.

The Haganah was instrumental in the 1948 catastrophe, or Nakba, which forced a million Palestinians into refugee camps. It was later re-packaged as an “underground resistance movement” when in fact it carried out a terror programme. It was aimed at both the British and the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine, as Abdel Bari Atwan has noted.

After the Haganah was integrated into the Israel Defence Forces, Sharon headed up its infamous Unit 101, which instigated a rule of terror against Palestinian villagers. In 1953 Sharon led a massacre of 69 Palestinian civilians in the village of Qibya.

During the 1960s when the Palestine Liberation Organisation emerged as a major force, he viewed its leader Yasser Arafat as his nemesis and continued on his mission to destroy any Arab opposition to the state of Israel.

He sent bulldozers into the Gaza strip, uprooting 16,000 people. Hundreds were executed and hundreds more deported. But it was Sharon’s role as defence minister under prime minister Menachem Begin that saw him commit the greatest atrocity of his career.

Expelled from Jordan, thousands of Palestinian refugees and their PLO leadership lived in south Lebanon where they had set up a mini-state. Sharon ordered the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and a massive bombardment of Beirut in which 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lost their lives.

Sharon now masterminded the encirclement of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, fully aware that the fascist Lebanese Phalangist movement would massacre their residents. Some 3,500 Palestinians were slaughtered. For some, Sharon was henceforth known as the “Butcher of Beirut”.

 A year later, amidst international outrage, an Israeli tribunal set up investigate the crime found him “indirectly” guilty of being responsible for the massacre and he was forced to resign his post.

But the words “indirectly” were a whitewash since during the Phalangist attack, BBC monitors picked up an IDF Radio broadcast which said: "The intention is that the IDF will not operate tonight to purge the areas of Sabra and Shatila and the nearby refugee camps. It was decided to entrust the Phalange with the mission to carry out these purging operations."

It would have been impossible for the IDF leaders not to have become aware quickly that the intended “purge” of a small part of Beirut had turned into an indiscriminate massacre. It is documented that the IDF fired flares to help the Phalangists identify their targets.

Sharon was also responsible for assassinations by Israeli security organisation Shin Bet of Palestinian leaders, which he termed Israel’s "continuing war of independence".

By 1996, he had managed to rehabilitate himself, becoming foreign minister under Benjamin Netanyahu. He was elected as prime minister in 1999 and made a provocative visit to the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem, sparking the second Intifada of 2000.

Sharon never disguised his desire to see Arafat dead. He was responsible for surrounding Arafat's compound in Ramallah with Israeli armour. As we know, the PLO leader later died in suspicious circumstances, with plutonium poisoning a strong possibility.

Sharon performed a surprising U-turn and pulled Israeli troops out of Gaza, But rather than any “peace making”, his vision was, as one Palestinian writer notes, of a “total surrender on the Palestinian side and its submission to the dictates of a militarily stronger Israel”.  It thus has the effect of making real peace impossible by perpetuating the crimes of past occupation.

Occupied Palestinian land is now criss-crossed with Jewish settlers – over 350,000 in the West Bank while another 300,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem. The Zionist dream of a Greater Israel has become a Palestinian nightmare. Along with the Palestinians, we do not mourn Sharon’s passing.  

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Palestinians start campaign for one state for all citizens

Momentum for a one-state solution for Palestine is building up just as the Israeli state is destroying even a remote chance of success for any Saudi-US Arab peace plan.

Last week, Palestinians marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. It was also the day chosen by 22 senior Palestinian figures to announce “a popular movement project for a single democratic state in historic Palestine”.

Those calling for the creation of one democratic country between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan were leading members of Fatah, the movement originally led by Palestine Liberation Organisation founder Yasser Arafat.

Their document, issued after a meeting held in the town of El Bireh in the West Bank, was the result of a two-year discussion. It declared that “the racist Israeli policy of separation and segregation has made the two-state solution ‏(based on pre-1967 borders‏) unrealistic”. Therefore, the most desirable option” left for the Palestinian people and the one that will allow the right of return is, they say:  

“[A] democratic state for all its citizens, which will be based on a democratic constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will guarantee freedom and equal rights, without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, skin colour, language, nationality, political opinion, social origin and place of birth.”

Professor Uri Davis, from Al Quds university’s Israel studies department, explained that the concept for such a state was still under discussion, but that he personally was in favour of one state for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The announcement came only a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated Route 20, a new highway connecting Jewish neighbourhoods in northern Jerusalem.

Former Israel Defence Forces leader, Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, said the new roads undermined the prospect of the re-division of the city and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All peace plans put forward so far were based on a division of Jerusalem and transfer of portions of the city to a Palestinian state.

An Israeli expert on Jerusalem’s demography, Danny Seidemann, said that “the purpose of these highways is to clearly integrate the [Jewish] settlement blocs into the national highway network of Israel and thereby place East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs within Israel’s de facto borders”.

Their views were published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which notes that road could be “the nail in the coffin for plans to re-divide the capital and attach its Arab areas to a future Palestinian state”.

In other words, the road project completely scuppers the notion of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, which the extensive Zionist settlement programme on the West Bank had already made unviable.

The highway has been denounced by United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk who is calling on the Israeli government to halt its construction immediately. He says it will ruin the livelihoods of the 9,300 Palestinian residents. 

Netanyahu’s road-building is hardly surprising considering that the Israeli Prime Minister’s aides have denounced the Arab peace plan as “trick” intended to entrap Israel.

And, as Jonathan Cook, a distinguished journalist writing for the Israeli Occupation Archive, notes, Netanyahu’s government demanded that Google should not use the word “Palestine”, claiming it was damaging the peace process.

Wikileaks has disclosed documents proving that Netanyahu is only the last of many Israeli leaders with total contempt for peace negotiations. In cables from 1975, US diplomats describe Israel as “hell-bent on self-destruction”.

The Fatah leaders’ support for a one-state solution is a crucial break from the conciliatory position taken for years by PLO president Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League negotiators who, under American pressure, conceded Palestinian territory in the hopes of a deal. A World to Win welcomes the initiative, which opens up a way forward for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

         

For Gazans, the Nakba is a daily tragedy

This is the month when Palestinians remember their Nakba, or "catastrophe," during which millions of women, men and children were eventually pushed off their land and rendered homeless refugees during and after the founding of Israel in 1948.

For those living in the Gaza Strip, the tragedy worsens by the day. The blockade of the territory by Israel, sanctioned by the European Union and Washington, has led to a failing economy, rising unemployment and deteriorating power, sanitation and health facilities, according to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report.

As a consequence of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, 98% of industrial operations have been shut down since 2007 and there are acute shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies. The ban on imports of building materials has prevented the rebuilding of some 6,400 homes destroyed or severely damaged by Israel’s military assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 and prevented the construction of some 7,500 homes to cater for an expanding population. Some 3,500 families are still displaced.

Water-related health problems are widespread in the Strip because of the blockade and Israel’s military operation in Gaza, which destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure, including reservoirs, wells, and thousands of kilometres of piping. “Gaza is not a refugee camp in a small remote place. It’s a city of one and a half million people with the needs of a developed urban environment that is used to certain standards. It needs certain standards of maintenance. Everybody should be worried because contaminated water has no borders,” said Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

An electricity crisis continues in Gaza with the network only able to meet 70% of demand due to insufficient money to buy fuel for the Gaza power plant, and a lack of spare parts which is causing technical failures. Unemployment in occupied Palestinian territory is over 30%, rising to 67% among young people, according to the WHO report. Seven out of ten families were living on less than $1 a day in May 2008. Chronic malnutrition has risen in Gaza over the past few years to reach 10.2 percent.

Israel’s 2008-2009 military campaign damaged 15 of the Strip’s 27 hospitals and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, none of which have been repaired or rebuilt because of the construction materials ban. Some 15-20% of essential medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment, the WHO report said. As a result, the steady decline in the infant mortality rate in recent decades has stalled.

Israel’s blockade is ostensibly aimed at the Hamas government, which it and its allies refuse to recognise despite its election victory in 2007. In practice, however, the intention is to demoralise the Palestinians and deny them their right to self-determination. In this the Zionists have the support of Egypt’s authoritarian regime. It has blockaded Gaza’s border with Egypt, even driving a steel barrier deep into the ground to prevent Palestinians from using tunnels to bring in goods.

Gazans, however, continue to smuggle everything from fridges to fans, sheep to shampoo and even cars through the tunnels. The UN estimates that as much as 80% of imports into Gaza come through the tunnels. But the head of operations in Gaza for the UNRWA John Ging, says: "Everything is expensive because people are hostage to the dynamics of a black market."

For ordinary Palestinians, the blockade and deprivation imposed by the racist Israeli state are continuing reminders of the tragedy of the Nakba.

Paul Feldman

Communications

Two anniversaries, one catastrophe

Palestinians across the world tomorrow mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba – “the day of catastrophe”. Only hours before, on the evening of May 14, 1948, a group of Zionist Jews declared themselves the independent government of a Jewish state, excluding Palestinians who had lived on the land since time immemorial. They are two very different anniversaries.

A ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion, organised by militias and terrorist groups, had created the conditions for the declaration. In April 1948, future Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Irgun terrorist gang massacred more than 100 men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin. Many villages outside the land allotted to Jews under the 1947 United Nations partition agreement came under artillery bombardment. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, never to see their homes and land ever again.

And that is a tactic that has served the Israeli government well, right up until today. Whilst going along with so-called “peace talks” and international diplomacy, they use force to establish a very different reality on the ground. Of course they have only been able to do this with the support of the United States, which recognised the state of Israel just eleven minutes after the declaration. They were followed five days later by the Soviet Union – a massive betrayal of the Palestinians. Stalin had taken part in the division of the post-war world, and the Middle East was not in his “sphere of influence”. Under the Stalinist policy of peaceful co-existence, the Soviet Union abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.

And for many years their plight was largely ignored, until a new generation launched a fresh phase of resistance, with the formation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The PLO brought all Palestinian groups under one umbrella and gave them an international voice. At its first meeting in 1964 the PLO adopted the Palestine National Charter, which called for the establishment of a democratic and secular state in Palestine and in 1969 Yassir Arafat became its chairman and symbol of national aspirations.

The demand for a secular state is being given fresh momentum today by a new generation of Palestinians – in Israel, in exile and in the occupied territories. This vanguard are refusing to go along with the “two-state” fraud. They recognise that there is no “peace plan” and that Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state.

Settlements continue to expand and Israel exploits the resources of the occupied territories without their population having any political or economic rights. Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank; Hebron is surrounded by thousands of Israeli troops, protecting a handful of crazed Zionist settlers, and 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure, according to a recent UN report. There are over 400,000 settlers who have no intention of leaving the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.

As the London One State Group, which organised a packed conference in London last year, puts it: “The birth of the non-racial democracy in South Africa and the implementation of the power sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland have strengthened the belief that partition is not the inevitable, nor the most desirable resolution to the conflict." Jewish anti-Zionist writer Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to adopt "state-sponsored racism" and says it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”.

The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Prime Minister Yehud Olmert has said: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.” In 2006 the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza taken together was: Jewish 5,393,400, Arab 5,328,949.

But Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one-state solution. Today they live in a militarised society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. Israel’s military spending is higher than all the countries on its borders combined, and it is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. It cannot be described as a safe haven for Jews – in fact is the most dangerous place for them on the planet.

But a new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. The challenge is to relaunch the Intifada along the lines of civil and economic resistance; to reject the whole two-state fraud once and for all; to find ways to make a principled appeal to Jewish Israelis and to re-establish Palestine national identity, to include Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who were excluded by “two states”.

In his 2007 book, One Country – A bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, Ali-Abunimah (founder of the Electronic Intifada website) writes that this is a time of profound uncertainty and risk but also of “tantalising opportunity”. And he concludes: “There is a need for urgent action on two fronts: One is in the realm of dialogue, imagination and construction of an inclusive vision. At the same time, there is a pressing need for resistance to the outcome Israel is trying to impose on the Palestinians ...”

Penny Cole