The murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect sense as long as you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's strategy.
That strategy is to make peace impossible.
For three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He himself provoked the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied territories, destroyed the Palestinian Authority, forced Yasser Arafat into house arrest and launched an unprecedented, brutal campaign of assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and random killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700 Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700 Israelis killed in the same period.
At the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and whenever the Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon broke it with a provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue state or rogue leader would have been allowed to get away with such behavior, but Israel has the U.S. government in its pocket. That's the answer to the question posed by the French ambassador to Great Britain as to why the world allows "this (expletive deleted) little country to cause the world so much trouble."
Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Israel's goal has always been Palestine without Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that the world will lose patience and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his strategy is to make peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own settlement – a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to unlivable conditions.
Now, that's all well and good if you are an Israeli and don't mind condemning future generations to perpetual conflict, but what about Americans? This is, after all, not legitimately our conflict. I've traveled in Palestine and the Middle East, and while it's interesting, it's not high on my list of vacation spots. We would be much better off if the only Americans who ever went there were the crews of oil tankers.
Unfortunately, our politicians, by cravenly obeying the wishes of Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby, have made us a part of the conflict. We've already paid in blood and treasure. Anybody who doesn't understand that the attack on 9/11 was directly related to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict hasn't been paying attention.
The Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after the fact to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and other Arabs in the area. We cannot load Israel down with modern weapons, with gifts of more than $90 billion of American tax dollars, with absolute protection from all attempts to hold it accountable under international law, and then pretend we are innocent. We are guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property and all the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.
So, if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't complain when the terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your politicians to enlist you in somebody else's war, and in war there are always casualties on both sides.
America has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody wants to take responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the basic cause of the litigation flood. Least of all do American politicians wish to do so. They would rather heap on the manure that the terrorism directed at us has nothing whatsoever to do with the policies they have followed for the past 30 years or more. In truth, it has everything to do with those policies.
So, if you or your loved ones get bloodied by terrorists, then blame your Christian Zionists, your Israel First crowd and your corrupt politicians who have their tongues in the ears and their hands in the pockets of the Israeli lobby.
www.antiwar.com/reese/?oarticleid=2197
Last updated 02/04/2004
Homepage