New Nazis

(11) Israeli settlements

Western audiences are told by the present Gang of Four in Washington, that Arab terror is the root of all evil in the

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Middle East. But Israel captured during the 1967 war large chunks of Palestinian territory and categorically ignores all UN resolutions to give them back. They are intentionally depriving Palestinians of prime land and water. They are purposely breaking up Palestinian geographic continuity. Israel deliberately makes it impossible for a secure border to be established.

In an editorial, April 4, 2002, The New York Times recalled that before the Oslo Peace process began, settlements were still a major concern for the US government of Bill Clinton. Even father Bush at one time threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Israel worth 10 billion dollars, if the building of more settlements was not immediately frozen. The controversy over settlement policy between Washington and Tel Aviv eventually contributed to Shamir's downfall in 1992. Yitzak Rabin took over.

The Oslo Peace Talks started in 1993. Israeli settlement policy was then still a major concern for the US. But, while peace negotiations were proceeding, the US lost interest in illegal moves by Israeli settlers. Under a bombardment of US-Israeli propaganda Arafat was condemned by world public opinion as being responsible for the collapse of the talks. However, while the Oslo discussions were still proceeding an additional 100.000 illegal Israeli settlers invaded Palestinian territory bringing the total to 200.000. The standard Goebbels tricks were repeated by calling Arafat an unreliable partner and a murderous monster as well. How did anyone ever expect Arafat to overlook, or even agree beforehand, to this massive illegal settlers invasion of Palestinian territories for the sake of a so-called peace? How could Arafat ever allow illegal occupations to become part of a status quo?

The New York Times summarized this dilemma as follows: ‘Two decades ago, most Israelis considered the settlers to be oddballs by messianism and nostalgia for the derring-do of Zionist pioneers. A few thousand, and then a few tens of thousands set up cheap mobile homes on windswept hillsides and vowed to double their number. But by the early 1990s, when Sharon served as Housing Minister, the situation had changed radically. Aided by government subsidies and other inducements, there were already 100.000 settlers. For Israelis, settlers were no longer zealots but ordinary fellow citizens. Suddenly their plumber or neighbor's sister was living in a big semi-detached house in a community on land captured (illegally) in 1967.’ Does the outside world understand, that Palestinians look upon a seemingly endless occupation of their land as the continuation of war by other means? The present evil foursome that sets the rules for the world in Washington obviously does not. In utter myopic stupidity Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld side with Sharon.

Concurrently, a so-called ‘battle royal’ is being waged between the Pentagon and the State Department over a joined approach to the Middle East. Powell and his staff continue to have grave concerns, that the unprecedented

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Israeli offensive and destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, and other similar actions by massive military force, have fostered a rage and hatred among Palestinians that will be extremely difficult to defuse. As it stands, it has only prompted thousands of Muslims throughout the world, to prepare themselves for the Jihad against American imperialism.

In the 1970s Sharon was Agriculture minister and promised by the year 2.000 that 2 million Jews would have become settlers. As foreign minister in 1998 he called on settlers to grab hilltops before they were ceded to Palestinians through ongoing negotiations. Now, Sharon is prime minister and named a former Soviet refusnik Natan Sharansky as Housing minister. At the same time, the present Defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer has authority over new settlement construction. Who will stop them?

Tim Golden reported from Givat Eshkodesh, an Israeli settlement on the West Bank, that Jews told him, that their illegally occupied hills ‘looked straight up to God’. Palestinians in the nearby village of Singil, however, told The New York Times-reporter, ‘They are coming closer all the time. The Jews here believe they have been chosen by God and that we are animals.’ (The New York Times, July 5, 2002). And, last but not least, the suicide bombers in the Eshkodesh region feel they serve Allah, if they shoot settler families in their houses, much the same way as Israeli tanks do aim at stone throwing children.

Yet, as David Ignatius eloquently summarized, ‘Twice over the past 20 years Sharon has gambled with Israel's security and lost. Each time the reason was essentially the same. He thought the explosive application of military power would demoralize and overpower his enemies - and intimidate them into submission. Both times, the ‘strategy’ failed. Sharon operates without any backup plan - other than waiting for a diplomatic rescue from the United States.’ (Washington Post, March 23, 2002)

The first major butchery happened in Lebanon, when Sharon using the classic Hitler's Blitz method, thought he could quickly drive the PLO out of Beirut. But the Palestinians held their ground forcing Sharon to a siege of the Lebanese capital. Thanks to US intervention, Arafat and his men were safely led out of Beirut and settled in Tunisia. To this day, Sharon talks like a Nazi executioner, when he keeps saying, he wished he had killed Arafat in 1982.

The second strategy failure unfolded during 2001, when Sharon desperately tried to crush the new Palestinian Intifada by naked military power. Ignatius likened the latest Palestinian uprising to the collective equivalent of a suicide bomb. Sharon's approach showed the same flawed logic as when Washington believed the Vietnam War could be won by ‘gradual escalation’. Lyndon Johnson and his successors assumed that the will of the enemy could be broken by employing ever more force. The Viet-

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namese made fools of America's military super power. Apparently nobody in Washington learnt anything from the Saigon debacle in 1975. They embarked on a similar military fiasco in Afghanistan, and are about to open a second front against Iraq. In the mean time, as James Bennet warned in The New York Times, ‘the death ratio during the first Intifada 15 years ago was 25 dead Palestinians for one Israeli. In the present Intifada 3 Palestinians die against one Israeli’.

When Zionism overran Palestine in 1948 the Jewish invasion of a predominantly Arab state was simply a repeat performance of 19^th century colonialism. During 52 years of systematic Israeli colonization Palestinians were powerless to effectively resist that 85 per cent of their land was taken over by unwanted foreigners. The invaders themselves had come as victims of Nazi terrorism. Slowly but securely the newcomers became terrorists themselves. The evil mind of Sharon is now leading Jews behaving as Nazis to another blood bath in a life and death struggle with Muslims. Why do so many in America and the West refuse to accept the simple fact, that in 2002 Palestinians are resisting Israel no longer, because they are Jews, but because they stole and are continuing to steal their land?