Sharon Stirs
Up Conflict
In Pursuit Of Greater Israel Policy
By Jean Shaoul
World
Socialist Web
15 October 2003
Israel
has taken an unprecedented series of measures designed to widen the
sphere of conflict beyond the West Bank and Gaza. They are aimed at
heightening tensions with its neighbours, Syria and Lebanon, provoking
a conflict that can be used as a pretext to launch a supposedly defensive
campaign as a cover for Prime Minister Ariel Sharons expansionist
policy.
Defence Minister
Shaoul Mofaz has moved troops up to Israels northern border with
Lebanon. This follows the death of an Israeli soldier on border patrol
near Israels most northern town of Metullah.
While Israel blamed
Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group, for the attack, Hezbollah denied
any involvement in the incident. The Lebanese authorities said that
Israeli troops had made an unprovoked attack on two vehicles on a road
in the south of the country. The following day, Israel sent jets and
helicopter gunships over the border, killing a four-year-old Lebanese
boy in the village of Houla.
These events follow
hard on the heels of Israels provocative bombing of Ain Saheb,
a Palestinian refugee camp, north west of Damascus, in Syria. The air
strike that flattened part of the camp was the first direct attack on
Syria for 30 years.
No one should be
taken in by Sharons claim that it was in retaliation for the suicide
attack on a Haifa restaurant that killed 20 people and wounded a further
60. The Haifa bombing was carried by a young woman from Jenin in the
West Bank in revenge for the deaths last June of her brother and cousin,
killed by Israeli troops in their pursuit of Islamic Jihad. She had
no connection with the refugee camp at Ain Saheb.
The attack is a
signal that Syria is now firmly within Israels sights and that
Israel has the power to hit at targets deep inside the country. Israel
will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its
enemies in every place and in every way, said Sharon at a memorial
service for Israeli soldiers killed during the 1973 war.
Sharon acts in the
knowledge that he has been given a green light by the Bush administration.
Syria has sought a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning
the raid as an unprovoked attack and an illegal act against another
state, but this was blocked by Washington which has signally failed
to condemn Israel. President George W. Bush told reporters in Washington
that he had telephoned Sharon and told him, Like I have consistently
done, that Israels got a right to defend itself, that Israel must
not feel constrained in defending the homeland.
Bushs statement
will tell Sharon and his right-wing backers that Israels actions
against Syria are deemed to be consistent with Americas own intentions
in the Middle East and a threat that Syria could meet the same fate
as Iraq if it does not cut off all lines of support to the Palestiniansreal
or imagined.
Israel responded
with an announcement that states harbouring terrorists were
legitimate targets. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir said, Israel
views every state harbouring terrorist organisations and the leaders
of those terrorist organisations who are attacking innocent citizens
of the state of Israel as legitimate targets out of self defence.
It has sent a map
purporting to pinpoint Palestinian terror networks in Damascus
to the press. Israel has in effect served notice that it intends to
exploit the excuse used by the US and Britain to launch their criminal
war against Iraq to justify whatever military attacks it sees fit.
Hezbollahs
general secretary, Syyed Hassan Nasrallah, has responded by warning
that it will retaliate if there are more raids on either Syria or Lebanon.
Sharon has long
sought to get the US to eliminate his regional rivals, particularly
Iraq and Iran, or allow Israel to do so. The war on Iraq, the general
talk of a war against terror and the citing of Iran and
Syria as part of Bushs axis of evil have spurred on
Sharons ambitions. Washington has on occasion acted to restrain
Sharon, but the Bush administrations reluctance to support him
was only tactical because of the need to maintain the support of the
Arab regimes.
Sharon has settled
on provocations against Syria as the best way of escalating the situation.
More importantly from Sharons perspective, outside of a political
conflict with Syria and an invasion of Lebanon, where Syria is the chief
power broker, Sharons project of a Greater Israel is simply not
possible.
Sharons strategy
Anyone who has the
slightest familiarity with Sharons bloody record will recognise
his political strategy. Sharon was after all the architect of the 1982
invasion of Lebanon.
That invasion, which
led to the bombing and siege of Beirut, the expulsion of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation and the atrocities at Sabra and Shatilla, was
also presented as a defensive reaction to Palestinian raids on Israels
northern towns. It was prepared through numerous provocations against
the Palestinians and Lebanon and was designed to torpedo an earlier
peace plan that recognised Israels right to exist and called for
a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel since the
1967 war.
Then as now, such
a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cut across Israels
plans, only partially implemented in the June 1967 war, to expand its
borders to the Litani River. Such natural boundaries would
be easier to defend and give Israel access to the headwaters of the
Jordan River. It was to take 18 years before Israel finally pulled out
of Lebanon. But 21 years after the siege of Beirut, as far as Sharon
is concerned, Lebanon is still unfinished business.
It was Sharon who,
in September 2000, incited the present intifada by entering the Temple
Mount with a huge armed entourage. That too was a deliberate provocation
aimed at scuppering any final chance of salvaging the 1993 Oslo Accords
and expanding the settlements on the West Bank.
More recently, while
appearing to assent to Bushs Road Map that called for negotiations
for a mini Palestinian state and an immediate cessation of the intifada
by the Palestinians, Sharon mounted one provocative attack after another
in order to torpedo even a truncated Palestinian state on land that
his political constituents, Israels ultra-nationalists, claimed
as their own.
Likewise, in the
name of security, he has built a security wall that cuts
deep into the occupied West Bank, effectively seizing control of large
swathes of Palestinian land and confining the Palestinians to a humiliating
and squalid ghetto existence.
Regarding Lebanon
and Syria, this is not the first occasion in recent times that Israel
has upped the ante. In September 2002, Sharon raised the political temperature
by threatening military action against Lebanon if it diverted the waters
of the Wazzani and Hasbani rivers, tributaries of the river Jordan that
flow into Israel.
Israel also accused
Syria of supplying Hezbollah militants in south Lebanon with thousands
of surface-to-air missiles capable of striking northern Israeli towns
and cities and demanded that Syria rein in the Islamic fundamentalist
group. Hezbollah is on the USs list of proscribed terrorist organisations.
On that occasion,
the US dispatched engineers and envoys to calm the situation and prevent
the conflict cutting across its plans for war against Iraq. This time,
at least some sections of the Bush administration view the prospect
of escalating the conflict with equanimity and Sharon feels he has carte
blanche to do as he pleases.
Even more ominously,
within days of Israel seeking to widen the conflict, Israeli and US
officials have confirmed that US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed
with nuclear warheads are being deployed in Israels fleet of three
Dolphin-class submarines. With one submarine designated for the Persian
Gulf, another for the Eastern Mediterranean and the third on standby,
Israel, the regions only nuclear power, has the ability to strike
not only its Arab neighbours but also Iran. The announcement is designed
to browbeat Syria and Iran into meeting US-Israeli demands.
The Los Angeles
Times cited officials as saying that the sea-launch capability gives
Israel the ability to target Iran more easily should it develop its
own nuclear weapons. In 1981, Israel, in its raid on Iraqs Osirek
nuclear plant, had launched a risky, low flying mission across Jordan
and Iraq in a bid to evade their radar systems. Sea power would make
a similar operation very much easier.
The rising tensions
among Israels neighbours take place as Sharon has mounted a dramatic
escalation in the repression of the Palestinians. Last week Defence
Minister Shaoul Mofaz authorised the rapid call up of two infantry reserve
battalions of 800 troops each. He has ordered the reinforcement of defensive
positions and clamped down on the already draconian travel restrictions
on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
On October 10 Israeli
armed forces launched a massive two-day invasion of Rafah, the largest
refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and home to more than 70,000 people.
Eyewitnesses said that more than 40 tanks were seen pulling out of the
camp on Saturday night. At first, the troops penned the Palestinians
into their homes and then went in and demanded at gunpoint that the
residents leave. Thirty minutes later, the tanks had bulldozed the houses.
Israel claimed that the houses were used to fire on security forces
or concealed tunnel entrances. Eight Palestinians, including two boys
aged eight and 15, were killed and more than 50 were injured.
Peter Hansen, commissioner
general for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) who went to assess
the scene said it looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake.
Up to 120 homes were flattened which means, given the shortage of housing
and cramped living conditions, that up to 1,500 Palestinians have been
left homeless.
For Sharon and the
Israeli financial elite, the stepping up of the war against the Palestinians
and any military operation against an external enemy also serves another
purpose: to smother the mounting class conflict at home, where strikes
are a daily occurrence. Under Israeli law, putting the country on a
war footing with a major call up of reservists automatically renders
strike action illegal.