Shattering Democracy: Sharon's Plan For Palestine
By Remi Kanazi
22 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, showed his true colors earlier this week as his normative praise of "democratic values" subsided. "I announced as clearly as I could that we formally oppose Hamas participation in the election as long as it is not disarmed and has not cancelled the Hamas charter, which is a horrible document," Sharon stated on Wednesday. On Saturday, he went further in an interview with reporters in New York, rejecting calls for democratic elections in the Occupied Territories, "We will make every effort not to help [the Palestinians]. I don't think they can have elections without our help."
Hamas plans to engage in the Palestinian political process, as it has in previous municipal elections, so why hinder the charged peace process after the successful "disengagement" of Gaza? Sharon realizes that Hamas is gaining momentum in the Occupied Territories and understands how much political power it can attain through sweeping parliamentary elections, which will likely occur in January if Israel doesn't interfere. Keeping a balance of power between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas effectively destabilizes a unified Palestinian voice and further advantages a politically savvy Israel. Israel supported Hamas in the 1980's as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—the de facto representative of the Palestinians people—because the PLO was gaining political ground on the international front.
Sharon is trying to politically deligitimize Hamas by keeping it out of the elections, while demonizing Abu Mazen for not cracking down on "terror" and using the excuse of having "no partner for peace" as a ploy to further expand settlements, the Apartheid Wall, and to impose greater restrictions on Palestinian life in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Just this week as half the world was sleeping and the other half was still dazed by the effects of Hurricane Katrina, Sharon stated on Israeli radio referencing the controversial Maale Adumim settlement, "They {Maale Adumim and East Jerusalem}will be connected, and I don't think that this will become a problem."
The militaristic mind of Ariel Sharon cannot forget the irony and hypocrisy in demanding Hamas to disarm. The three major Jewish militant—many claim terrorist—groups, the Haganagh, Irgun, and Lehi were not disarmed before the creation of Israel. On the contrary, they went on the offensive under the instruction of Haganagh leader David Ben Gurion on March 10, 1948 when the groups implemented Plan Dalet (Plan D). The effects of Plan D led to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians and the massacre of nearly 120 Palestinians at Deir Yassin. There was no attempt by these Jewish groups to put their faith in the political process and live with the indigenous population in peace; rather they coveted the land on which the Palestinians lived, and sought to expel them to create a Jewish homeland. Hamas is doing something the founders of Israel never thought to do: assimilate into the political process in the land on which they live, and substantiate their voice by positive means. If the founders of Israel and people like Ariel Sharon had done this, armed groups such as Hamas wouldn't be fighting against the injustices that have plagued Palestinian society for the last 58 years.
Remi Kanazi is the founder and primary writer for www.PoeticInjustice.net and I live in New York City as a Palestinian American freelance writer.
URL: http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-kanazi220905.htm
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another related article "‘Politicide’ in Palestine" added in the comments section.
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‘Politicide’ in Palestine
Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com
SAMIR, my younger brother who has lived in Paris for well over thirty years and before that pretty much grew up in Britain, spoke to me on the phone last weekend, as he often does every now and again to shoot the breeze.
Our chat (conducted in French because that’s the language he’s most comfortable with these days) predictably dealt with events taking place in our ancestral homeland where half the population of our destitute nation has suffered under occupation for close to four decades.
“Scandaleuse!” he hollered into the receiver, the word echoing into my ear from across the other side of the Atlantic.
This cognate obviously has a harsher connotation in French than it does in English. In the former language, it refers to something sinister, outrageous, or evil. To our English ears, it smacks, in its quaintness, of Moliere, Racine and Zola, of boorish characters in French fiction and theater. When the French, however, tell you something is “scandalous” they mean that it is sinister, insufferable or villainous.
What elicited the impassioned exclamation from my younger brother was the news last week that Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — in the manner of overlords in a European colony in the 1870s or white apartheid supremacists in South Africa in the 1970s — vowed to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Palestinians to hold free legislative elections in January if candidates from Hamas took part.
Sharon told journalists at a meeting in New York last Friday that since Palestinians would not be able to have elections without “our help,” saying that Israel could choose not to remove roadblocks and checkpoints, thus blocking voters from reaching the polls and making it difficult for Palestinians in Jerusalem to vote.
Sharon explained to reporters that he told President Bush of his intentions at a private meeting they held during the UN’s 60th General Assembly session last week. Allegedly the American president had “offered no reaction.”
Asked to comment, a White House spokesman suggested that the American government opposed any attempt to interfere in the elections while noting “agreement over Mr. Sharon’s concerns.”
“The decision as who participates in legislative elections is obviously up to the Palestinian Authority,” said Fred Jones, spokesman for the National Security Council, “but Hamas is a terrorist group and the United States will not talk to any elected officials who are members of a terrorist group.”
Is that a nod to Sharon? Looks like it.
Sharon, without a doubt, is one of the most dangerous, brutal and deceitful leaders of the new millennium, found on many occasions directly responsible for acts considered war crimes under international law, a man above all committed to “politicide” against Palestinians, or the obliteration their national identity.
His cruelty and ruthlessness in pursuit of that goal are documented in at least three unforgettable occasions in his military and political career.
In 1948, he was out there in the forefront of the ethnic cleansing campaign that emptied 80 percent of Palestine of its native people, turning them into refugees in surrounding countries — a campaign, mind you, that the Zionist movement initiated against a little, Third World people just three years after the unspeakable Nazi crimes against European Jews.
Sharon’s second foray into “politicide” was, of course, during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which included not only an attempt to destroy the military infrastructure of the PLO there, but the political, social and economic institutions of the people of Palestine in exile. For note how the first thing Israeli military forces did when they entered Beirut in September that year, after the exit of PLO fighters, was to head to the Institute for Palestine Studies, the repository of the Palestinian people’s history and culture, and cart off, in trucks, its entire archival material, that researchers there had been collecting for decades, transporting it to Israel.
Deny Palestinians, along with a political leadership, expressions of their culture, history and identity, and you reduce them to nameless, faceless nobodies. From there on, determining their destiny in the West Bank and Gaza as mere “Arab residents” becomes quite easy.
Indeed, Sharon’s dreadful Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002 in the occupied territories, when waves of tank and infantry units, supported by Apache helicopters, burst into the cities, towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, was an upgraded version of his attacks in Lebanon twenty years earlier, known then as Operation Peace for Galilee.
As with Operation Peace for Galilee, Operation Defensive Shield ended not just with massive destruction and killing, but, as Baruch Kimmerling, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, wrote in a book about the subject: “They (Israeli forces) systematically destroyed buildings and infrastructure, radio and television stations, databases and documents — some of which were taken to Israel as the spoils of war — thus destroying years of hard work by Palestinians during the post-Oslo period. Water treatment facilities, power generating plants, and roads were damaged or completely bulldozed. This operation not only destroyed political organizations and their facilities but civilian institutions like universities, schools, clinics, churches and mosques under the pretext that terrorists were hidden inside.”
What and who is this man — if man, not beast, he is — and how could the Israeli people have elected him as their prime minister? What kind of ideology informs the state they have established in our part of the world almost six decades ago?
Ask an Israeli, even a rational, decent Israeli who is against his government’s excesses, what Zionism is all about, and he will tell you, with a straight face, that it is “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people,” as if a meaningful definition of Zionism could be given in isolation of that ideology’s impact on the lives of the native people of Palestine.
Ask a Palestinian under occupation what Zionism is all about and...well, he may give you any number of answers arising out of what aspect of Zionism he has come up against that day. To that Palestinian Zionism is not an ideology or a doctrine or a set of beliefs, but a context in which his whole existence is rigidly enclosed.
As for that rational, decent Israeli, how could he continue to call Zionism “the national liberation movement” of the Jews when for years these same Jews have had to be so vigilant to keep “liberation” only to themselves?
And now the monstrous villainy of their leaders denying Palestinians the basic right to hold free elections. “Scandaleuse” indeed!
URL: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=70450&d=21&m=9&y=2005
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