Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 21, October 25, 2003
“This man is the greatest obstacle to peace, and therefore Israel is determined to bring about his removal from the political arena,” the butcher and international war criminal Ariel Sharon repeated in the Israeli parliament on October 20. He was speaking of elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, whom Israel wants to get rid of.
With these words, the Bush administration’s closest ally in the Middle East was setting the stage for new crimes during its intense air strikes on the Gaza Strip, which the Palestinians describe as a “massacre” with at least ten people killed and more than one hundred wounded. In just one night, no less than five attacks that all resulted in killed and wounded people, including many children, were carried out.
While Sharon, in words, is sticking to the so-called “road map for peace”, which was buried under the ruins in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip long time ago, he is behaving contrary to all international law and despite the condemnations of a whole world, with the purpose of realizing the dream of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people.
Sharon is bolting with green light from the US.
In the UN, the US has rejected a resolution explicitly prohibiting the Israeli government from killing or exiling Arafat.
The Americans do not want to condemn the Israeli apartheid wall and its illegal annexation of Palestinian soil which excludes a two-state solution. On the contrary, it seems that the US is encouraging both the construction of the wall, new settlements and the intensified repression that Israel is carrying out under the pretext of fighting terror and by using illegal executions of leading Palestinian resistance fighters and killing numerous civilians.
The mass bombings came after the barbaric attack on the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip last weekend where ten people were killed and more than eighty wounded, most of them being teenagers and children, and left behind 1500 Palestinians homeless because the Israeli occupational forces blew up their houses. It looked like a repetition of the massacre in Jenin.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Cornel Eyal Eisenberg, supreme commander of the operation, denied that the Israeli military had been too rough in its search for tunnels: “I want people to ask how many houses we have not demolished, not how many we have. I believe that the actions have been entirely moral and that our behavior has been above and beyond that of any other army in the world,” he told Israeli army radio.
Nazi commanders used to express themselves in much the same way.
The US had only acknowledging words to say about the action. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” US president Bush stated. But what the Israeli nuclear power and terror state is doing in Palestine is not self-defence, but occupation, repression, aggression against a defenceless people and a blatant violation of international law. The US also gave Israel green light for launching the unprovoked attack on Syria two weeks ago. And again, the US prevented a condemnation of this Israeli act of aggression in the UN Security Council, an aggression that aims to increase the tension in the Middle East and maybe provoke a big war.
As one commentator noticed: “Bush bombed Syria. He is just as guilty as if he had been in control of the stick in one of the F-16 planes.”
It is unthinkable that Israel attacked Syria without the consent of the US.
The facts speak for themselves: To an ominous extent, Israel has been escalating provocations against its neighbouring countries, carrying out the most brutal military attacks on the Palestinians in many years, and annexing big parts of the Gaza Strip.
All of this is happening with US support.
The criticism of Israel is mild. The European countries, including Denmark, are on the whole keeping their mouths shut. And the criticism of the US being the kingpin and supporter of the Israeli aggressions does not come out.
Nowhere, the so-called “War on Terror” is showing its face more grotesquely than in Palestine where a completely oppressed, stateless and defenceless people are the victims of a doctrine of looting war.
On the other hand, the US has no problem with the UN when it serves Bush and Co. The UN Security Council has recently, and unanimously, passed a resolution that half-way “legalizes” the US occupation of Iraq. In Denmark, the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals say that they are ready to send more Danish troops to Iraq and prolong their stay. It is a bitter joke.
October 21, 2003