Palestine
Is Now Part Of An Arc
Of Muslim Resistance
By Seumas Milne
26March, 2004
The Guardian
Ariel
Sharon's decision to incinerate a 67-year-old blind quadriplegic cleric
outside his local mosque will certainly go down as one of the most spectacularly
counter-productive acts of violence in the history of the Israel-Palestine
conflict.
Quite apart from
the morality of assassinating Sheikh Yassin, it is the Israeli people
themselves who will suffer from certain retaliation. Israel has the
right to defend itself, President Bush declares, while apparently denying
the Palestinians the same luxury. But the killing can have no military
value at all. Whatever his authority as the founder and figurehead of
Hamas, the idea that Yassin was involved in planning armed attacks is
preposterous. When Israel rocketed the apartment block he was visiting
last September, the ailing sheikh was reported not to have even realised
that an attack had taken place. And regardless of the domestic political
calculations of the Israeli government, such attempts to destroy a popular
movement by decapitation are doomed to failure.
From Algeria to
Vietnam, the past century is littered with evidence that such strategies
invariably come to nought. Where resistance has deep roots - as Hamas's
undoubtedly has in the occupied territories - it will always re-emerge,
however savage the repression. Yassin has been succeeded by Abd al-Aziz
Rantissi, and if the Israelis incinerate him, another will take his
place. What Monday's killing has done is simply widen the range of targets
on each side, expanding the arena of terror.
The chances of a
lasting settlement should in reality be higher than ever before. For
the first time, every significant political and armed Palestinian group
- including Hamas and Islamic Jihad - is now prepared to accept a de
facto end to conflict in return for an independent state in the West
Bank and Gaza - just 22% of historic Palestine.
The sharp-tongued
Rantissi is widely regarded as more hardline than Yassin. But, as he
told me in Gaza a couple of months back, Hamas is ready to call a ceasefire
that "should be seen in terms of years" in exchange for full
Israeli withdrawal from the territories it has illegally occupied for
the past 37 years. On another occasion, referring to the Hamas dream
of Islamist rule throughout Palestine, he has said: "We can accept
a truce ... live side by side and refer all the issues to the coming
generations." And the organisation's new number two in Gaza, Mahmoud
Zahar, confirmed its commitment to a West Bank/Gaza state in yesterday's
interview with the Guardian.
But instead of seizing
the opportunity for peace offered by such political signals, the Sharon
government is deliberately undermining the basis for a two-state solution
by carving up the occupied territories with its electrified fences,
closed zones and ever-expanding settlements. At the same time, it is
planning a partial withdrawal from the most heavily populated areas,
while effectively annexing other areas of the West Bank and confining
Palestinians to walled bantustans that can never form the basis of a
viable state.
Such a rearrangement
of the occupation will clearly not resolve the conflict. And considering
that the US arms and funds Israel to a greater degree than any other
state on the planet, such leverage might be seen as an ideal opportunity
for the much-vaunted project of western humanitarian intervention. But
instead of applying pressure to achieve a just settlement, the US and
its friends refuse to talk to the elected Palestinian leadership, while
insisting that no end to occupation is possible unless it stamps out
resistance.
After September
11 2001, Tony Blair promised hope to the slums of Gaza and convinced
his supporters that he would deliver US commitment to a Middle East
peace deal in exchange for backing the invasion of Iraq. Now his main
contribution appears to be extra funding for Palestinian police and
prisons to provide security to the occupier - while Gordon Brown's response
yesterday to the killing of Sheikh Yassin was to announce the freezing
not of Sharon's, but of Rantissi's, (probably non-existent) assets in
Britain.
None of this, of
course, justifies the targeting of civilians by Hamas and others - defended
by Rantissi as a "deterrent" to the killing of Palestinian
civilians. If deterrence is the intention, it appears to be a failure,
as Palestinian civilian and military deaths outstrip the Israeli toll
by more than three to one (and five to one when it comes to children).
In any event, the offer by Hamas last year of a mutual commitment to
avoid civilian deaths was rebuffed by Israel.
The killing of Yassin,
along with the wider bloodletting in the occupied territories, will
further heighten the Arab and Muslim anger that is fuelling Islamist
terror attacks. Justice for the Palestinians should self-evidently be
pursued on its own merits. But given the extent to which Palestine has
become a focus of global Muslim grievance, it has also become a necessity
for international security. And the failure of western leaders to confront
the crisis in a remotely even-handed way is now a threat to their own
people.
The most dangerous
delusion of our time must surely be the notion - trotted out by all
manner of public figures, from George Bush to Clive James - that Islamist
terror is motivated by hostility to freedom and the western way of life.
As anyone who is familiar with the Arab and Muslim world, or even bothered
to read successive statements by al-Qaida leaders, it is in fact overwhelmingly
driven by hostility to foreign, and especially west ern, domination
and occupation of Arab and Muslim countries. Of course, there are other
factors in play. But from the start of his campaign in the 1990s, Bin
Laden's call to arms focused above all on US foreign policy in the Middle
East: its troops in Saudi Arabia, backing for pro-western dictatorships
like Egypt, sanctions against Iraq and support for Israel against the
Palestinians - along with the subjection of Muslim populations in Kashmir
and Chechnya. Since September 11, US interference in the region has
gone much further, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result
is an arc of foreign occupation across the Middle East, unmatched anywhere
else the world.
That has in turn
spawned an arc of resistance, while anti-US feeling among Muslims has
reached unprecedented levels, as demonstrated in this week's Pew opinion
survey. Muslims now find themselves in perilously unequal conflict with
the world's military powers: the US, Russia, India, China and Israel.
There are also dangers that the boundaries between nationally based
mass resistance movements against occupation and socially disconnected
(though widely supported) terror networks of the al-Qaida type become
blurred. But to address the swelling and legitimate grievances that
underlie both is now a global imperative. Unless and until the occupying
powers - notably the US, Britain and Israel - do that, they will be
fuelling, not fighting, terror.