Roadmap
To A Concentration Camp
By
Mahir Ali
Znet
12 May , 2003
The toll continues
to rise. A couple of weeks ago, gunfire from an Israeli tank cut short
the life of award-winning British journalist James Miller. He and reporter
Saira Shah - the two of them had collaborated on Beneath the Veil, a
ground-breaking documentary on the plight of Afghan women under the
Taliban - were filming the demolition by Israeli forces of a house in
Rafah, on the Gaza Strip, when he was shot in the back of the neck.
"Local kids who loved him have built a shrine on the spot where
he fell," writes Shah, "and the Palestinian Children's Parliament
held a march in his memory."
Last month Tom Hurndall,
a 21-year-old English peace activist, was shot in the head by an Israeli
sniper while he tried to protect a five-year-old girl at the same refugee
camp. He went into a coma from which doctors don't expect him to emerge.
Last week Hurndall's parents were on their way to visit him at Rafah
when the British embassy convoy they were travelling in was briefly
detained at gunpoint at a Gaza crossing.
About six months ago, Iain
Hook, a former British military officer in charge of an UNRWA project
to rebuild the Jenin refugee camp, died when an Israeli sniper shot
him in the back. Jack Straw promised a thorough investigation into the
shooting, but the British Foreign Office has since resiled from that
position. An inquiry by the UN was assigned to a former US naval intelligence
officer whose blatantly pro-Israeli report proved unacceptable to Hook's
colleagues and other UN staff. A second report is being treated as classified.
Israel assured Straw it would provide a full account of the killing,
but has now changed its mind.
And then there is the extraordinarily
harrowing case of Rachel Corrie, a young American activist crushed to
death by an American-supplied bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier.
On March 15, she was trying to prevent the demolition of a house at
Rafah. Richard Purssell, a fellow activist who was standing just a few
feet away from her, recalls: "She was standing on top of a pile
of earth. The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed
the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as
if she got her foot caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran
over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."
These murders - eyewitness
accounts suggest that in each case the Israelis were well aware of what
they were doing - may be a drop in the ocean in the broader Palestinian
conflict, but they are exceptionally significant as an illustration
of the Sharon regime's impunity. Israel's security forces appear no
longer to have too many qualms about killing foreigners even when they
happen to be the citizens of Israel's closest allies. And on the basis
of the available evidence, this does not appear to be a miscalculation.
It is not hard to imagine the furore in both official circles and the
mainstream press in Britain and the United States had it been possible
to hold the Palestinian side accountable for any of these deaths. But
because the responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of the Israeli
regime, it is considered advisable to collaborate in a cover-up.
An Israeli army investigation
into Corrie's death last month absolved Israeli forces of any misconconduct.
In a classic application of the blame-the-victim strategy, Corrie and
other members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) were accused
of "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous" behaviour. Last
week, shortly before Colin Powell arrived in Jerusalem for talks with
Ariel Sharon and his putative Palestinian counterpart, Abu Mazen, Israeli
forces raided the ISM offices near Bethlehem and took two American activists
into custody. A day earlier, two British ISM activists were arrested
by Shin Bet for trying to enter the Gaza Strip.
Israel's rulers abhor the
likes of Rachel Corrie because they are driven purely by humanitarian
concerns. Rachel couldn't, by any stretch of the imagination, be portrayed
as a terrorist sympathizer, nor could her faith be held accountable
for her solidarity with Palestinians. As her emails to her parents -
made available to the press after her murder - testify, she was simply
an average American responding to a profound injustice. Sharon and his
gang have no time for such Americans; they'd rather see them dead. George
W. Bush and many of his closest aides appear to empathize with that
point of view.
Rachel, aged 23, was the
youngest daughter of an insurance executive and a school volunteer.
She attended Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington; she played soccer,
enjoyed gardening and the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Reports suggest her
political consciousness was a post-September 11 phenomenon ("There
are eight-year-olds here," says one of her emails, "much more
aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just
a few years ago"). In Gaza, her tasks, like those of other ISM
activists, included accompanying Palestinian children to school in order
to protect them from Israeli bullets.
When her mother suggested
that a cessation of violence on the Arab side would be beneficial to
the Palestinian cause, Rachel responded: "If any of us had our
lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking
place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and
tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all
the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did
this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people
for several hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent
means to protect whatever fragments remained?"
She also reported feeling
"sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very
sweetly, by people who are facing doom".
"When I come back from
Palestine," she wrote, "I probably will have nightmares and
constantly feel guilty for not being here .... Coming here is one of
the better things I've ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli
military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white
people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the
midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which
my government is largely responsible."
If a lot more Americans were
able to conceptualize the situation in the Occupied Territories in such
clear-cut terms, it would become considerably more difficult for successive
US governments to go on supporting and subsidizing Israeli repression.
But that is not going to happen - at least not in a hurry. If, as opinion
polls suggest, large numbers of Americans can be convinced that Saddam
Hussein masterminded the September 11 operation, then mass enlightenment
is clearly not a short-term prospect.
It isn't exceptionally difficult
in these circumstances to portray, at least for purposes of domestic
consumption, the so-called roadmap unveiled late last month - after
much ado about the composition of the Palestinian cabinet - as a bold
new initiative that will deliver a lasting settlement, provided the
new-look Palestinian Authority can put an end to "terrorism".
The roadmap can, in other
words, be interpreted as an endorsement of the Israeli prejudice that
Palestinian resistance to occupation is the main problem, rather than
the occupation itself. As far as violence is concerned, the spotlight
is on the suicide bombings rather than the assassinations, the murder
of civilians, the demolition of dwellings and the targeting of international
activists and journalists. On the day that Rachel Corrie was killed,
nine Palestinians suffered the same fate on the Gaza Strip; they included
a four-year-old girl and a man aged 90 - dangerous terrorists, presumably.
So, Abu Mazen is now being
asked to deliver what the sidelined Yasser Arafat was unable to provide:
a guarantee against attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad - organizations
that Israel initially encouraged, incidentally, as a counterweight to
Arafat. The new Palestinian prime minister, more or less handpicked
by the US-Israeli axis, is expected to prove himself more ruthlessly
efficient than Shin Bet and Mossad - despite his uncertain credibility
among Palestinians as a consequence of being perceived as a puppet.
There are, of course, some
reciprocal demands made upon the Israelis. But not too many. Sharon
is only required to exercise rhetorical restraint - hence his recent
"concessions" on Jewish settlements and talks with Syria.
It has been reported that he'll be in for a shock when he visits the
US later this month, because the Bush administration is determined to
push through a settlement. That sits uneasily, however, with Condoleezza
Rice's recent assurances to Sharon's representatives, who were told
to have no fears: although the roadmap is officially the product of
a quartet that includes the UN, the European Union and Russia, it is
the US that is in the driving seat.
With an election year looming
in the US, pressure on Israel - at least pressure of the sort that would
produce tangible results - is almost inconceivable. With an electrified
fence cordoning off all "autonomous" areas, the "independent"
Palestine that the roadmap is supposed to lead to by 2005 couldn't possibly
be anything other than a glorified concentration camp. Perhaps not even
glorified. And most likely a series of concentration camps.
No matter how "moderate"
Mahmoud Abbas turns out to be, it is extremely unlikely that he could
live with such a scenario any more than Arafat could.
And when the final solution
dreamt up by Sharon's hawks in collusion with the neo-cons in Washington
turns out to be unimposable, one can only hope that increasing numbers
of Americans will feel compelled to ask themselves: Did Rachel Corrie
- and so many of the poeople she learned to love - die in vain?
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