Two days after the killing Washington—exercising the veto power reserved to the U.S., British, Chinese, French, and Russian governments—blocked passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the assassination. The previous day, U.S. president George Bush said that Israel has the “right to defend herself from terror.”

“If only there were more opportunities like this,” said Israeli Defense Forces chief Moshe Ya’alon, crowing about the early morning helicopter missile attack that killed Yassin, a 67-year-old quadriplegic, along with seven others.

Citing an Israeli “security official,” the Associate Press reported March 23 that “Israel will try to kill the entire Hamas leadership, striking whenever an opportunity presents itself,” rather than waiting “for the next Hamas attack to take action.”

A senior military official said, “We’ll hit them at every opportunity,” reported the Israeli daily Haaretz.

These targeted assassinations have killed 327 Palestinians, including 160 bystanders, since a rise in Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation began in late 2000, reported the Palestine Monitor, a news web site based in the occupied territories. They are often carried out with rockets or bombs delivered by helicopter gunships or fighter jets.

Yassin was the most prominent Palestinian leader to fall victim to Tel Aviv’s hit squads. His assassination sparked an outpouring of hundreds of thousands across the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A number of smaller protests were organized over the following week.

In addition to providing some social services in the occupied territories, Hamas, a bourgeois nationalist organization that calls for the replacement of Israel with an Islamic state, has built a political following through its opposition to Tel Aviv’s occupation. It has organized a number of military attacks on targets inside Israel and the occupied territories, including suicide bombings.

In addition to their stepped-up policy of targeted killings, reported Haaretz, Tel Aviv’s military officers are openly discussing expanding their regular incursions into Gaza into a broader military offensive. “In recent weeks there’s been a rise in the number of officers claiming that an escalation in Gaza would lead to a wide scale operation there, along the lines of Defensive Shield,” the daily reported.

Launched in April 2002, Defensive Shield was the largest Israeli military offensive on the West Bank since its armed forces occupied the area in 1967. Some 20,000 Israeli reserve soldiers were called up in the lead-up to the assault, which hit every West Bank city except Hebron and East Jerusalem.  
 
Veto a ‘green light’ for Tel Aviv
Such actions have consistently received tacit support from Washington. While lower-level U.S. State Department officials expressed mild criticism of the March 22 assassination, describing it as “not helpful,” Bush and top administration officials placed it in the framework of Washington’s “war on terror.”

On March 23, Bush told a news conference that he was worried about Hamas officials’ threats of retaliation against U.S. targets, and stated: “There are still people who want to harm our country. And so whether it be a Hamas threat or an al Qaeda threat, we take them very seriously.”

Bush added, “Any country has the right to defend itself from terror. Israel has the right to defend herself from terror, and as she does so, I just hope she keeps consequences in mind as to how we stay on the path to peace.”

On March 26 Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah pointed out that the U.S. veto of the UN Security Council vote gave Tel Aviv a “green light” for its policy of assassinations and “comprehensive aggression.” The vote was the latest in a long line of vetoes by U.S. representatives of resolutions condemning Zionist expansion and aggression—including three over the past six months. The representatives of London and Berlin abstained on the motion, while 11 governments voted for it.

The U.S. government has targeted Syria for allegedly providing offices and other facilities to Hamas, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, and other Palestinian groups. According to the media reports, the administration plans by April to implement measures laid out in the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act. This legislation, which was passed in December, gives the president the power to cut off trade in food and other goods with Damascus if it does not comply with U.S. demands to shut down offices of the Palestinian groups, withdraw its troops from Lebanon, and halt its alleged development of medium- and long-range missile systems.

As his government continues its assaults on the Palestinians, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon is pressing to win broader support for new steps to corral the Palestinians into tightly controlled areas in the West Bank and Gaza, all in the name of “withdrawing” from the occupied territories.

Sharon says that he will pull 7,500 Israeli settlers and occupation forces out of Gaza as part of a series of so-called disengagement steps. On March 15 he won a 46-45 nonbinding parliamentary vote in support of his approach. At the same time, Sharon has stressed, Tel Aviv would reserve its self-proclaimed right to conduct military operations in any nominally Palestinian-controlled territory.

The Jerusalem Post reported March 26 that Dov Weisglass, a top official in the Sharon government, told U.S. officials in Washington that Tel Aviv was willing to withdraw six small settlements from the West Bank in exchange for Washington’s explicit approval of Tel Aviv’s formal annexation of the main West Bank settlement blocks.

Over the past decade, Tel Aviv has expanded the West Bank settler population by half, to over 300,000. It is well into the construction of a 450-mile wall that will confine the majority of the Palestinian population to 42 percent of the West Bank, leaving Tel Aviv with the lion’s share of water resources and agricultural land.

Bush will meet with Sharon, as well as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah of Jordan, at the White House in April. Like his predecessor, the U.S. president is pressing for a “two-state” agreement designed to stabilize the situation and quell the resistance of the Palestinian people.

A March 24 Jerusalem Post editorial warned of the potential dangers for the Israeli regime of the weakening of the divisions between the 1.2 million Palestinians living as Israeli citizens inside Israel, whom Tel Aviv refers to as “Israeli Arabs,” and those in the occupied territories.

Titled “Cheering the Enemy,” the editorial noted the increasing “‘Palestinization’ of Israeli Arabs” and warned them that “disloyalty will backfire.” It described a demonstration the day before on the streets of Nazareth, a majority Arab city inside Israel. “On Tuesday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, where he was accosted by Arab students…shouting, ‘We’re all Ahmed Yassins,’” the daily reported.

“In a mass protest in Nazareth that day, participants also resorted to the ‘We’re all Ahmed Yassins’ chant, along with ‘There are a million Yassins…’ The scene in Nazareth’s streets was difficult to distinguish from the streets of Gaza,” complained the Post’s editors.  
 
British prime minister visits Libya
Meanwhile, British prime minister Anthony Blair traveled to Libya March 25 to meet Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

The visit followed the Libyan government’s announcement last December that it would cease development of chemical and other destructive weapons, and bow to demands by Washington, London, and other imperialist powers to open its military installations to imperialist “monitors.”

“If a country is prepared to say, ‘We want to put the past behind us, we want to give up chemical and nuclear weapons capability, we want to cease our ties with terrorist groups,’ then we should be willing to open up to that and give them the hand of partnership,” Blair said following the meeting. The British prime minister also helped seal the deal on a $200 million oil exploration agreement between Tripoli and Anglo-Dutch oil monopoly Royal Dutch Shell.  
 
 
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