The politics of the last atrocity

By Graham Usher
Last week, Israeli Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz kicked off the Sharon era by describing the Palestinian Authority as a "terrorist entity" against which the army would be forced to "take one step further in its activities against terrorists and those who dispatch them." Having endured blockades, land seizures, tank shelling and the killing of 355 of their kin in less than six months, Palestinians may wonder what other rungs are left on Mofaz's ladder. "Nuclear weapons?" asked Yasser Arafat on Saturday.
All are aware, however, that Israel has steps in its locker short of the bomb but far beyond those it has already taken in its desperate efforts to quell the Palestinian uprising. One is to install a regime of terror against the Palestinian civilian population, the better to drive a wedge between it and the "terrorists and those who dispatch them."
A glimpse of this future was revealed last weekend. In a turn of repression savage even by Israeli standards, the army shot dead six Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. None of these, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been described as among the "commanders" of the resistance now publicly on Israel's hit list.
One was a Palestinian youth killed by a rubber-coated steel bullet during clashes outside Jerusalem's Kalandyia refugee camp on 2 March. Another was a nine-year-old boy shot through the chest while watching his father paint a wall of his house under the military base in the Psagot settlement near Ramallah. The third was a 43-year-old woman shot in the same town, and from the same location, on Sunday while returning from shopping for the Eid Al-Adha holiday.
The fourth was a 44-year-old mentally retarded man who had wandered into the lethal area now surrounding Gaza's settlement of Netzarim. The fifth was a 20-year-old killed by an Israeli undercover squad while travelling home to Hawara village near Nablus, and the sixth was a 25-year-old, also from Nablus, slain in an ambush mounted by settlers, according to Palestinian sources.
"They have turned our villages into army firing zones," said Saeb Al-Ajez, head of the PA's National Security Force in northern Gaza. He was referring to the utterly random murder of "that simple man," Mustafa Al-Rimlawi. He could have been referring to any of the five others.
But indiscriminate firing zones are precisely what lie in store for the Palestinians, according to Israel's newly anointed Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. "The rules of the game must be clear to the Palestinians," he said on Friday, the day of his accession. "There has to be a continuous and consistent policy in Israel of striking at the terrorists and their masters, and this policy must hold until the Palestinian leadership understands that the only fighting it can do is across the negotiating table." Ben-Eliezer is a contender for the Labour party leadership and, reportedly, the favoured heir of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Arafat is surely aware that such an "exit" is shorthand for surrender, which is why his Eid Al-Adha message advocated that Palestinians "continue our way until the Palestinian flag is raised over Jerusalem despite the closure, this dangerous military escalation [by Israel] and the starvation." It is also why he ordered an increased alert by his forces throughout the Palestinian areas lest the Israeli army be tempted to reconquer parts of them in readiness for Sharon, Mofaz and Ben-Eliezer's new "rules of the game."
As for the "way" he has in mind, this appears to be his allowing events to proceed at the behest of those armed Palestinians -- from all the factions and from none -- who believe the best means of defence is to meet kind with kind. A day after Hamas's military arm Izzedin Al-Qassam vowed a "warm welcome" for Sharon's tenure, a Palestinian man blew himself up in the Israeli town of Netanya, leaving three Israelis dead and more than 60 wounded.
The three -- an 85-year-old man and two women aged 58 and 70 -- were no more responsible for their deaths than had been the woman and child in Ramallah, the man in Gaza and the two Palestinians in Nablus. But sympathy is in short supply these days. A Palestinian worker was nearly lynched by a Jewish mob in Netanya solely for being an Arab in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the funeral for the two Palestinians killed in Nablus, the cry was "Netanya is our revenge."
"The most dangerous thing now is for the Intifada to become a war of retribution between the army and the Palestinian guerrillas," says a former leader of the PLO's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Gaza. He was also a founder political leader of the first uprising, but has declined a role in the present one "because it is a revolt with a lot of slogans but is going nowhere," he says. And he is keenly aware that in such a vortex the "rules" are going to be set by the Mofazs on the one hand and the Izzedin Al-Qassams on the other, and that the only politics left will be those of the last atrocity.
Recommend this page
Related stories:
Sharon, the King of Israel
Losing paradise 1 - 7 March 2001
Whining and dining 1 - 7 March 2001
A strategy to confront Sharon 22 - 28 February 2001
Killing frenzy 22 - 28 February 2001
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor