Sharon's career has been built on fetishising violence, which provides all the clues one needs to understand Israeli policy, writes Azmi Beshara The assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader and founder of Hamas, is a landmark in Israel's colonial policy of violence towards the Palestinian people. That the assassination is not an exception -- Sharon and his ministers have made it clear that they intend to continue targeting resistance leaders -- must dictate the response. And in gauging that response all must be aware that the mandatory displays of anger are inadequate. Anger that does not spawn a strategic vision is useless. Protests fade. What is needed is for legitimate political outrage to become part of the struggle against occupation. Sheikh Yassin was not the leader of a terrorist group, as US officials are trying to depict him as they attempt to justify his murder as an act of Israeli self-defence. He was, rather, the founder and leader of a broad- based social and political movement. He was, and remains, a symbol of the steadfastness and defiance of the poor and disenfranchised who dwell in the Gaza Strip and its camps. When he founded Hamas he opened a bridge between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian national movement. He created an outlet for the sentiments of the Palestinian people on the eve of the first Intifada. This was the historic task he had assumed. It did not matter to the Apaches whether the sheikh was crippled. Nor does the state of Sheikh Yassin's health increase or decrease the brutality of the act for that brutality issues from an occupation so vicious it can survive only by chasing its opponents at dawn, pursuing them down the dark corridors of poverty and deprivation, behind the iron bars and walls of the detention camp that is known as the Gaza Strip. And this is a point Arab leaders who keep referring to Sheikh Yassin's wheelchair miss: the wheelchair is not a mark of victimisation. Had the sheikh not been crippled he would still have been a victim. The wheelchair, eventually, acts only as a symbol, of those weak in body but strong in will. It becomes the mark of those paralysed in the face of a vile occupation. Sheikh Yassin's wheelchair epitomised the rebellion against oppression, the revolt against powerlessness. The context within which Sheikh Yassin operated could not be more different from that of the Afghan Arabs or the other ethnic fundamentalists that shun modernity and target western civilians. Sheikh Yassin's life, and now his death, can be understood only within the framework of those suffering beneath Israeli occupation, of those who reject occupation on religious, nationalist and humanitarian grounds, of those who join hands with nationalist forces to resist occupation. The sheikh fought for independence, and repeatedly stated that any halt in resistance was conditional on ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He did so without abandoning his vision of an Arab and Muslim Palestine. Sheikh Yassin was no Islamic ideologue who relished conflict with the West. He did not command a terrorist organisation or movement. He was not thirsty for bloodshed. He was the political and spiritual leader of a popular movement, a man in touch with his roots. He was the founder of an Islamic resistance movement opposed to occupation. It is legitimate to argue over the methods employed by Hamas: those methods, after all, are no longer Hamas's exclusive concern. What no one can argue about is that Hamas acts within a context of struggle against occupation. Hamas is not party to a religious war, to a conflict of civilisations, and Sheikh Yassin was no stranger to pragmatism. Some Hamas supporters and militants may borrow from the lexicon of religious or civilisational conflicts, or from anti-Semitism: such language is hardly one of the strengths of the movement, has, indeed, harmed Hamas on more than one occasion. It was not, however, the language Sheikh Yassin spoke. The reason I am saying this is that on the day of Sheikh Yassin's assassination both Sharon and his foreign minister -- the former addressing the Likud, the latter speaking in Washington -- did their best to link the assassination with the campaign against terror. Sharon tried, through deceptions and lies, to give the assassination an international context. The Palestinian resistance is a resistance against occupation. Occupation is based on violence against civilians. Occupation is underwritten by terror. Sharon has killed far more Palestinian civilians than Hamas has killed Israelis. Nor can the question be reduced to which is more or less brutal. The conflict is between those who occupy, and those who are occupied. The occupiers are not all bad, nor are those living under occupation all good. Only one thing is certain -- those who live under occupation are not the terrorists. On the day of the assassination Sharon congratulated the forces that carried out this sordid attack against an old man emerging from prayers in a poor section of Gaza. It was as if the assassination of Sheikh Yassin was somehow the equivalent of the battle of Alamein or the Normandy landings. So desperate was Sharon to impress on the Israeli public the reach of his military, so eager was he for reward that he unwittingly diminished the status of his military machine while boosting that of Sheikh Yassin. Sharon's political career has been shaped by his fetishising of acts of violence. Only displays of might, and nothing else, satisfy him. Do not for a moment think there is a single figure in Israel's ruling establishment that believes their current approach to the occupied territories can result in a settlement. Do not for a moment believe that there is anyone within that establishment that does not know that current policies are absolutely inimical to the possibility of settlement. But Sharon believes, above all else, in violence. There are other things in which he believes. He believes the conflict will continue following Israel's unilateral redeployment -- a redeployment that does not, of course, involve any political settlement. He does not want a Hamas-led Gaza Strip to emerge following Israel's withdrawal and, as a means of preventing this, intends to kill as many Hamas leaders and activists as possible before Israel withdraws in the hope that a political vacuum will emerge, one conducive to chaos and rivalry. Sharon, who still believes that the Lebanon war was a success, that all it would have taken would be for Israeli society not to have blinked first, as always strikes first and then thinks. Sharon believes Israel's disengagement must be a fait accompli, that it must somehow be linked to the war on terror, and that it must involve no concessions. The Israeli right is rallying behind Sharon's policy. A poll conducted by Ma'ariv the day after the assassination showed 61 per cent of Israelis supported the operation while only 21 per cent opposed it, though 55 per cent expected Palestinian reprisals to follow. Some Arabs, as I mentioned earlier, have used the wheelchair as a way to portray Israel's brutality as apolitical and immoral, its target an old and paralysed man who had just finished his prayers. Yet others have focused on the apparent contradictions between Sharon's actions and his declared intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip: in doing so they make a remarkanble conflation between withdrawal as some kind of lofty act rather than one of vicious criminality. Force and assassinations are clearly an integral part of the Israeli plan: unilateral redeployment, Sharon's preferred means of furthering that plan. In the absence of agreement withdrawal simply delineates new lines of deployment. The disengagement involves areas over which Israel intends to maintain sovereignty. In the absence of agreement, then, Israel expects the conflict to continue. It hopes forces will emerge that will take control of the areas evacuated, forces that will have an interest in cooling the situation. Israeli politicians generally see Gaza as a model of success. The few martyrdom operations launched from Gaza simply prove, they say, the efficacy of the wall. There is no link between the Israeli violence in Gaza -- including the assassination of Sheikh Yassin -- and the Ashdod operation. Palestinian forces, aware of these facts, must unite and coordinate their startegies. This is urgent, the only possible safeguard against any escalation in the violence of the occupation. Palestinian unity is the best guarantee of Palestinian resistance. The current phase is not one in which Palestinian factions can continue chalking up trophies. Martyrdom is not an achievement, is not something any faction can boast of in the context of the false rivalry between so- called secular and religious leaderships. To busy oneself by doing so is the offer Sharon rewards for his deeds. The current phase demands steadfastness in the face of an occupation that will reproduce its patterns regardless of redeployment. Nationalist forces need to unite and formulate a common strategy for the administration the Palestinian society pre- and post-redeployment. A unified strategy with which to persuade Arab countries to stop placating the US, through placating Israel at the expense of the Palestinian issue, must emerge for without it Israel's appetite for blackmail will grow. The Arabs must agree, in short, to treat Sharon as the terrorist that he is. See: Focus: Ahmed Yassin
