Fending off the 'final solution'

A bloody week in the occupied territories has many wondering if the Sharon administration will press ahead with a second Nakba, reports Khaled Amayreh from Jerusalem
For many war weary Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, this week was no different from the past 70 weeks of the ongoing Intifada. The string of deaths of Palestinian citizens continued, as did the extra-judicial killings of resistance leaders identified as "terrorists" by Israel.
The death toll weighed in at 15 this week -- meaning an average of two Palestinians per day. The numbers include seven civilians and four Islamist activists assassinated in Nablus. The deaths, coupled with Israel's hermetic closures and blockades of Palestinian population centres, as well as the continuing siege of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, is pushing Palestinians, including previously non-politicised people, to the edge.
Infuriated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's apparent quest for a "final solution" in the West Bank -- the emptying out of thousands of Palestinians -- more people are being driven to extremism. But an increasingly indifferent Israeli public has averted its eyes as the Israeli military steps up its campaign of oppression.
Four Israelis were killed in four suicide bombings this week -- including, for the first time, an attack by a young woman. More than three times that number of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the preceding 72 hours, demonstrating yet again the sad cycle of action and reaction in this conflict. Activists charge that the Israeli government seeks to inflate casualty figures, counting those suffering from panic and anxiety in order to foster support for the government's fight against "terror."
One of the four suicide attacks was carried out by a member of the Fatah military wing, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, who on 24 January opened fire on Israeli motorists on Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem, killing two people and injuring 10, before he himself was killed by police. And on 27 January, a woman -- reportedly a 20-year-old university student whose identity is still unknown -- blew herself up on same street, killing herself and an Israeli man and injuring others.
On 28 January, an unarmed Palestinian man drove his car from Qalqilya to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, apparently to run over Israeli soldiers awaiting to be transferred. When the young man's car was wrecked in a collision with an old couple's car, he pulled the old man and his wife out of the car, and drove the car to Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, hitting two soldiers before he was shot and killed. These kind of desperate acts inflame the cycle of violence in the region, but this may be what Sharon is hoping for.
On Monday, 28 January, Sharon told a newly-launched commercial television channel that our "fight is a fight for the home, for values, for quality of life, which today offers the only hope for millions of people from different nations who stand now on the rim of the volcano of terrorist forces threatening peace and stability throughout the world." He added: "We shall stand against those forces, against all the murders, and we shall win."
No mention, however, was offered regarding the millions of Palestinians languishing in squalid refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria -- the very people whose homes and land were usurped years ago. Nor was there mention of the three million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have felt the brunt of Israel's war on terrorism, a conflict that has killed 1,100 people, a third of them children and minors, and maimed many thousands.
This week, the violence was reaching such a fever pitch that criticism came from a number of unlikely Israeli politicians. Knesset Speaker Abraham Burg, who accepted an invitation to address the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah amid adamant opposition from Sharon and religious and right-wing hard-liners in the Knesset, told the Israeli parliament on 28 January that "We are an occupying force, we occupy another people against their will." He added that "we must remind ourselves that both the prisoner and the prison- keeper are behind bars: the bars of the absence of hope." But Burg's claim that the Israeli occupation is culpable for the atmosphere of violence and terror was answered by angry calls for his resignation.
Another Israeli peacenik, former Justice Minister Yossi Belen, charged that Sharon's bellicosity was pushing a growing number of Israeli youths to leave the country. He also warned that the collapse of the Palestinian Authority would ultimately cause the collapse of the Israeli society in many respects.
Even Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is giving in to despair. This week he complained that he could not do anything to restrain Sharon, asking "How could I restrain Sharon when he's got Bush on his side?"
Restraint may be unnecessary, in terms of domestic politics. Most of the Israeli public still supports Sharon, despite his manifest failure to bring peace and security and not to mention the country's deteriorating economy. Frustrated and apathetic, many Israelis are drawn to Sharon's confident and hard-line stance. Results released this week of an opinion poll by the Tel Aviv-based Dahaf Institute for Public Opinion Studies revealed that up to 65 per cent of Jewish immigrants in Israel and more than 51 per cent of all Israelis oppose granting equal rights to Arabs in Israel. Professor Naftali Rotenburg, of the Van Leer Institute, which sponsored the study, described the poll as an unmistakable indication of mounting intolerance in Israel.
This week, a private Israeli source revealed that during a private event in Tel Aviv recently, former commander of the Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Eitan Ben Eliyahu said that the only solution for the Palestinian problem was "to expel all or most of them to neighboring countries." According to a reservist colonel who attended the event, Ben Eliyahu said Israel would have to instigate a decisive war in the region, arguing that the Jewish state was the strongest military force in the Middle East and enjoying strong international support.
Eliyahu apparently argued that it would not be difficult to bring Egypt, Syria and Jordan "to their knees" and impose on them as a condition for settlement an agreement in which the Palestinians would be repopulated in the "empty" countries like Jordan and Egypt.
Expulsion of the Palestinians -- or "transfer," as Israel euphemistically refers to it -- seems to be more than just an afterthought entertained by the Israeli political and military establishment. In fact, as prominent Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote recently in Ha'aretz, Sharon has built his career on the concept.
One high-ranking Palestinian official, however, made clear that such a policy is doomed to incite more violence. "Our flesh is very sour, it can't be digested," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I assure you, and assure myself before you, that if we found our backs to the wall, nobody, I repeat nobody, would be safe around the world."
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