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   Vol.65/No.31            August 13, 2001 
 
 
Israel plans all-out war on Palestinians
(front page)
 
BY PATRICK O'NEILL  
Plans by the Israeli rulers for a full-scale military offensive to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip and crush Palestinian resistance have been reported by CBS News and other sources. Alongside the day-to-day conflict, which has raged unabated in the aftermath of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire, the revelations help to underscore the irreconcilable interests of the Israeli imperialist ruling class and the Palestinian people.

"Israeli generals are planning for a possible massive invasion of Palestinian territories if the current Mideast cease-fire fails, says a published report denied by Israeli officials," announced CBS News July 12. "The goal of the action would be to destroy Palestinian armed forces and the Palestinian Authority, forcing Chairman Yasser Arafat back into exile, as he was for 12 years after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon."

The assault "calls for air strikes by F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers, a heavy artillery bombardment, and then an attack by a combined force of 30,000 men, including paratroopers, tank brigades and infantry," wrote CBS correspondent David Hawkins.

The report, published by Jane's Information Group, "indicates that Israel expects up to 300 of its troops to die in such an attack, with Palestinian deaths in the thousands," continued Hawkins. The invasion plan "would be launched after another suicide bomb attack which causes a large number of deaths, like the one [on June 2] at a Tel Aviv disco."

The Israeli cabinet discussed the option of "an all-out military assault on the Palestinians" at its July 9 meeting, reported Lee Hockstader in the Washington Post. Some ministers accused Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has opposed the proposal, of showing too much restraint.

Turning reality on its head, the Post article depicted the Palestinians as the aggressors. Hockstader wrote that "persistent Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation--defying what is supposed to be a cease-fire--have fed an intensifying debate in Sharon's government: Should Israel launch a devastating military attack aimed at liquidating Yasser Arafat and destroying the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank?"

"The argument is raging not only around the cabinet table," observed the report, "but also inside key Israeli institutions, including the army and the Shin Bet, the domestic security service."

The CBS News report said the Israeli government is prepared for a regional military response. "Israel's Arab neighbors, Syria, Jordan and Egypt are expected to stay out of the fight," the CBS article said, but the Jane's report "considers the possibility that Iraq might try to intervene with troops, who would be destroyed by the Israeli air force. It also states that Egypt could invade the Sinai peninsula, forcing Israel to call up its reserves."

Less than two weeks before the story, Israeli warplanes had struck a Syrian radar installation inside Lebanon, the second such attack since April. The raid was "in keeping with a new retaliatory policy of targeting Syrian military sites in Lebanon," reported the New York Times.

The Economist discussed some of these developments in an article entitled "Prospects of War" in its July 21 issue. "As Israel's tanks encircled Bethlehem at mid-week," went the report, "suspicions were reawakened that its army could be laying out a contingency plan for an all-out assault on the Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel denies this, insisting that however vigorous its military actions--including the helicopter rocketing of Palestinian targets, tank fire and incursions into Palestinian territory--it is still only responding to, or preempting, Palestinian attacks." However, noted the article, "Israeli talk of 'self-restraint' has subsided and the right is pushing for war."

"War is the temper of the moment," stated the Economist. It described how in the previous week "the Israeli army laid siege to Palestinian towns and villages, commandeered Palestinian homes and snatched 'wanted' men from PA-controlled areas."

Hanan Ashrawi, a well-known Palestinian leader and spokesperson for the Arab League, described Tel Aviv's policy as "a systematic war, daily and incremental and debilitating. It's an attempt to put into effect a war plan by an occupying military force against an occupied people without the negative responses that would accompany any kind of sudden or dramatic escalation." More than 650 people have been killed since the conflict escalated in late September--almost four Palestinians to every one Israeli.  
 
Republican journalist initiates debate
Republican Party ideologue David Brooks addressed the potential for a major war and its implications for the U.S. ruling class in "The Death of Compromise--There's no more middle in the Middle East." The article appeared in the July 2 issue of the Weekly Standard--a publication closely associated with the National Committee of the Republican Party.

"The Middle East conflict has been polarized and simplified," Brooks wrote. Brushing aside the political and social divisions that exist today among the people of Israel, he stated that "almost all Israelis of left, right, and center are unified behind the proposition that Israel must fight to defend its moral legitimacy." Similarly, he admitted, the Palestinian struggle has won mass support.

"It's interesting for Americans to watch the evolution of this conflict because this is what happens when one state is militarily and economically dominant over its rivals," Brooks wrote. "The rivals give up even trying to compete on the battlefield or in the marketplace. Instead, they challenge the very idea of the dominant power. And the people in that dominant power have to do something that is very difficult for a bourgeois democracy. They have to remind themselves of the ideals for which their nation was founded....

"America, the world's dominant power, may soon face this kind of challenge," stated Brooks. Aiming to supply his readers with arguments for supporting Israel for the long haul, and looking forward to deeper social conflicts and wars involving the United States, he denied that the conflict has anything to do with land or the forcible denial of Palestinian nationhood. Rather, he says, it is "a war over moral visions.... over [the] intangibles" of Israeli nationalism and Palestinian nationalism.

"In the end," he wrote, "the new Israeli patriotism is more admirable. For while Palestinian nationalism looks a lot like 19th-century blood and soil nationalism (laced with a large dollop of Islamic fundamentalism), Israeli nationalism is...a patriotism infused with democratic pride, and with respect for individual opportunity." He marveled that the Israeli people "seem able to be patriots as well as yuppies."  
 
'U.S. role is clear'
"The role for the United States is clear," Brooks concluded: "to stand with the democratic nationalists over the blood and soil nationalists.... The struggle will be long, and it will force the people in the area and the American people to come to grips with the full implications of their political ideals."

The announcement of the cease-fire on June 13 led to only a short-lived reduction in the conflict. The period has been marked by increased pressure by the Israeli government and Washington on Palestinian leader Arafat to arrest members of the Hamas organization and others involved in attacks on Israeli territory--including those suspected of planning such attacks. Tel Aviv demands that all signs of Palestinian resistance be suspended for a full week "before it will relax economic and travel restrictions on Palestinians and resume talks," reported the July 3 New York Times.

Israeli security forces have maintained their suffocating regime of checkpoints around Palestinian areas, and have continued to use bulldozers to level Palestinian housing and clear their lines of fire. Helicopter gunships have struck down a number of Palestinian officials and activists, in keeping with the government's defense of its policy of assassinations.

For their part, Palestinians have continued to mount protests and armed resistance against the occupation, often pouring into the streets during the frequent funerals for the victims of attacks by the Israeli security forces, or seizing other opportunities to assert their nationhood.

Around 20 people took part in an armed demonstration July 24 outside the home of the military intelligence officer of the Palestinian Authority government headed by Arafat. They protested the PA's arrest of several people on charges of disorder. The crowd included members of the Fatah movement associated with Arafat.  
 
Call for foreign monitors
The Bush administration, which initiated the cease-fire negotiations, announced in late July that it will send a team of monitors to the region once a "sustained period of quiet" has taken hold. Earlier officials of the G-8 group of major imperialist powers passed a resolution calling for "foreign observers" to be sent to the area. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations in Washington had previously rejected calls by Palestinian representatives for a "neutral" observer force to be established between the two sides.

"The proposal for a U.S. monitoring team would inject the Bush administration into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new and novel way and reflects the alarm that many U.S. officials feel about the 10-month surge of violence," reported Alan Sipress in the Washington Post. Israeli defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer responded to the G-8 resolution by saying that "if this will be forced upon us, I will live with the presence of the monitors of the Americans."

Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership has launched an effort to counter the depiction by Israeli and U.S. spokespeople of the breakdown of negotiations in 2000 as being due to Palestinian refusal to compromise. "The biggest lie of the last three decades is...that [then-Israeli prime minister Ehud] Barak offered everything [and] the Palestinians refused everything," said Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Korei July 23.

Korei emphasized that the territorial concessions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip offered by Barak at negotiations at Camp David last July "would have carved Israeli-controlled cantons out of the West Bank and dashed any hopes for a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state," reported the Washington Post.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Arafat presented his view of the negotiations with the Israeli regime. The Israeli government, he said, says it must "control the Jordan Valley, with five early warning stations there. They have to control the air above, the water aquifers below, the sea and the borders. They have to divide the West Bank in three cantons. They keep 10 percent of it for settlements and roads and their forces. No sovereignty over Haram al Sharif. And refugees, we didn't have a serious discussion about."
 
 
Related articles:
Celebrate, build on L.A. 8 win
Palestinians in Los Angeles push back deportation  
 
 
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