The Israeli government is targeting areas of the strongest Palestinian resistance for cordoning off with fences and other barricades, forcing residents to come and go through military checkpoints, similar to the way the regime controls Palestinian travel in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of young men have also been rounded up in the latest actions.

Israeli deputy defense minister Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff paid back-handed tribute to the resistance of the Palestinian masses and their refusal to submit to the military onslaught in a May 29 statement. The April assault, she said, "hit the terrorist infrastructure hard, but it’s clear that motivation has risen as a result and more suicide bombers have been created." Since the offensive ended one month ago, suicide bombings and other Palestinian military actions have taken the lives of 27 Israeli citizens.

Coinciding with a several-day occupation of Bethlehem in late May, the Israeli forces dug a trench more than five feet deep and five feet wide through the Palestinian olive groves surrounding much of the city. The soldiers erected a six-foot-high fence of barbed-wire coils beside the trench and bulldozed a dirt road alongside it.

Such modern-day moats are under construction across the West Bank, circling Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Ramallah, Jericho, Hebron, and other refugee camps and cities.  
 
Israel reinforces encirclement
With the ditches and fences the Israeli forces are reinforcing the network of military checkpoints that weaves among the Palestinian-administered areas, turning Palestinian areas that comprise less than one-fifth of the West Bank’s area into walled prisons. Military checkpoints at which Palestinians are forced to stop to be searched number well over 150. The Israeli regime has also established "flying checkpoints" that can change without warning and introduced a system of travel permits for Palestinians between towns.

These steps increase the already institutionalized delays, inconveniences, and arbitrary police harassment associated with the Israeli presence. People line up for several hours, for example, to travel from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Such "official crossing points," reported the May 27 Financial Times, "have come to resemble international frontiers.... In the process, the Palestinian economy is grinding to a halt."

This "cantonisation," as the enforced isolation has been christened in the big-business media, aims at increasing the Israeli armed forces’ domination within the West Bank. Accompanying it are ongoing raids involving the destruction of Palestinian homes that allegedly include "bomb-making" factories and, more usually, the roundup of Palestinian men.

On May 31 and June 1, for example, Israeli troops and tanks rolled through the Balata refugee camp in the outskirts of Nablus, nearby Tamoun, and Qalqilyah. Using methods that have become all too familiar to West Bank Palestinians, Israeli troops in Balata ordered Palestinian men between the ages of 15 and 45 to present themselves. Holding their hands to the sky or clasped behind their heads, hundreds of Palestinians were herded into an open area, where soldiers checked their identity papers. Some of the detainees were handcuffed and blindfolded, while a number were carted away in trucks.

Students living near the Al-Najah university were among those arrested in Nablus itself. Saying they wished to cover themselves from Palestinian gunfire, Israeli forces moved from house to house by smashing holes in walls. Families were forced to move into a single room as soldiers commandeered their apartments for observation posts and sniper nests. Hundreds of Palestinians gathered to protest before being dispersed by the Israeli soldiers.

Palestinians told reporters that Israeli tanks had fired shells to knock out the city’s electricity supply, and had killed a 24-year-old man who had allegedly tried to break the military blockade. Two mines were set off under Israeli tanks, and Palestinians also threw rocks at the military vehicles, injuring one Israeli officer.  
 
‘Routine police work’
Israeli officials have dubbed these aggressive military actions "patrols" rather than "incursions." The new word suggests "not invasion but routine police work," noted the New York Times. "Israel has all but erased negotiated boundaries between territory controlled by its forces and territory controlled by Palestinian security," reported the paper.

Yuval Steinitz, a Likud Party representative who acts as a parliamentary spokesperson on "security" issues, had said a few days earlier, "I’m confident that there is a military solution, and by brute force we can completely, or almost completely, eradicate terrorism."

This public brushing aside of the Palestinian Authority is at odds with the approach of the Bush Administration, the principal backer of the Israeli government. In their media pronouncements, White House officials have emphasized their efforts to "reform" the PA security forces to more effectively clamp down on the resistance of the Palestinian people and the military activity of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In his present visit to the region, CIA director George Tenet, who helped to set up the Palestinian security forces under the 1993 Oslo agreement and subsequent negotiations, aims to "consolidate about a dozen Palestinian security forces and increase their discipline and accountability," according to the Times.

In addition to meeting Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Tenet will hold talks with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in an attempt to revive the role of the Egyptian government in bringing pressure to bear on the Palestinian fighters.

Cairo has announced a plan to establish a Palestinian state next year, and follow it up with continued negotiations. The state would cover some 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In other respects the plan appears similar to the proposals drawn up by Saudi Arabian officials and endorsed by an Arab League summit in March.  
 
Middle East regimes seek to intervene
"The Arabs have spelled out at the Beirut summit their solidarity to make peace with Israel provided that Israel respect international law and UN resolutions," Lebanese prime minister Rarik Hariri told the International Herald Tribune May 30.

In the Tribune’s summary of its interview with Hariri and Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese politicians "urged the United States to implement an Arab peace proposal that would recognize Israel’s right to exist in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state.... Lahoud said that the continued Israel-Palestinian instability was adding to Lebanon’s economic woes by making people wary of investing in the country."

The bourgeois regimes of Iraq, Syria, and Iran are all continuing to use the Palestinian struggle to advance their own state interests in the region. In late May, for example, the Iranian government sponsored an international conference on the Palestinian struggle that brought together Iranian politicians with Islamic Jihad and the Hezbollah organization that operates in Lebanon. Both are backed by the Iranian government with arms and funds. Also attending was the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. For its part the Iraqi regime pays out $25,000 cash grants to the families of suicide bombers, and $10,000 to relatives of those who die in other military actions. In the past the Saudi government has also given money to suicide bombers’ families.
 
 
Related articles:
Israeli occupation deprived Palestinians of their land  
 
 
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