November 2003
After Israel's Oct. 5 bombing of what turned out to be an abandoned training camp near Damascus, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad accused Israel of diverting attention from the crisis in the occupied territories and trying to lure Syria into a wider conflict.
The pretext for Israel's unilateral attack on a neighbor was the suicide bombing of a restaurant in Haifa by a young woman from Jenin. The connection seems tenuous at best. On the other hand, it is in keeping with Washington's premise that the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were appropriate responses to the 9/11 al-Qaeda terror attacks. That premise, in turn, was based on Israel's long-standing policy of "pre-emptive" attacks.
"Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told journalists after the attack on Syria. In truth, not only are Israelis less "protected" than ever, but if Israel tries to bomb every country which harbors people who sympathize with the Palestinian cause, it will have to bomb the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and even the U.S. and Israel itself.
The world condemned the unprovoked attack on Syria, a country doing its best to toe the line in Washington's war on terrorism. The only beef the United Nations has with Damascus is that Syria has overstayed its welcome in Lebanon. Certainly Israel, which has brutally occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights for 36 years, can't point fingers on that account.
If Israel can bomb Syria with impunity, what country will be its next target? Lebanon? Iran? According to Richard Cohen's column in the Oct. 7 Washington Post, Israel lashing out against Syria wasn't a matter of good policy—it was out of fury.
Cognizant of the ever-present threat of a U.S. veto, the U.N. Security Council has yet to condemn the Israeli attack. Because the U.S. unabashedly vetoes any U.N. reprimand of Israel—including a resolution scolding Israel for threatening to kill or exile Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, or for actually killing U.N. personnel such as Ian Hook—Israel rightly figures Washington will always block the world's wrath.
Indeed, President George W. Bush seemed to approve Israel's latest violation of international law. The president said to reporters he'd told Sharon in a phone call Oct. 5, the day of the Israeli attack, that "Israel's got a right to defend herself; that Israel mustn't feel constrained in terms of defending the homeland."
If Israel can bomb Syria with impunity, what country will be its next target?
Israel also was emboldened to attack its neighbor by the Syria Accountability Act, currently wending through Congress, which seeks to impose sanctions on Damascus. In it Israel, and its U.S. supporters in Congress, repeat a litany of accusations which sound suspiciously like those leveled against Iraq. Their hope clearly is that the same tired lies—weapons of mass destruction, biological warheads, support for terrorism—will work again. With U.S. politicians heaping insults upon Syria, the time was ripe for Israel to lob a bomb or two.
Just as Americans and Britons are questioning their leaders' honesty in presenting their case for the war on Iraq, Israelis should now be asking their prime minister some tough questions of their own. The biggest question is why are they in greater danger with each passing month than they were when Sharon first made his provocative assault on Haram al-Sharif on Sept. 28, 2000? After provoking demonstrations and, finally, full-scale warfare, he took office promising greater security. Are his tactics preventing or inspiring more terrorism? Israelis might want to know.
What about Sharon's "security wall"? Israel already has built 84 miles of the wall, mostly on Palestinian land. The 60-yard-wide complex of 25-foot-high walls, electronic sensors, ditches, roads and steel barriers, built at a cost of $4 million per mile, may in the end cost more than a billion dollars. Will this wall actually stop suicide bombers from entering Israel? It didn't prevent the latest suicide bombing—and it won't prevent the next. It will only serve to infuriate Palestinians, whose promised state has been carved and eaten up by the wall.
Is Sharon's policy of "targeted assassinations" halting suicide attacks? It's obvious that one of these state-sponsored murders actually motivated the suicide bomber who struck Maxim's, the popular Haifa restaurant owned by two families, one Jewish and one Arab.
Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer, blew herself up in the crowded beachside restaurant on Oct. 4, killing 19 Israelis, including five Arab Israelis. Jaradat sought revenge for the June 12 deaths of her brother, Fadi, and her cousin, Salah Jaradat. Fadi, a produce vendor, was the Jaradat family's main breadwinner. Israeli undercover soldiers shot and killed the two men while they were drinking coffee outside their house, in front of Hanadi and her cousin Salah's wife. Their bodies were thrown into an IDF truck and dumped outside of town.
A Witness to Terror
Hanadi was hospitalized, prostrate with grief, after witnessing the shootings. Four months later, this bright young lawyer, whose educational achievements had brought pride to her entire neighborhood in Jenin, was dead, along with 19 innocent diners. Does Sharon's penchant for "targeted assassinations" halt terrorism, or does it actually encourage recruitment of new suicide bombers?
The numbers speak for themselves. More than a hundred bombers, including four women, have carried out successful attacks since Sharon took office. Israel has assassinated more than 196 Palestinians who may or may not have been planning terrorism—since they were never tried, we will never know. They left behind many hundreds of relatives ready to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.
Within hours of the suicide bombing, Israeli soldiers demolished the Jaradat family's home. This is one of Sharon's favorite collective punishments, meted out to the relatives of "terrorists" (not, however, of Jewish terrorists such as Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, or Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque). Are these home demolitions an effective deterrent to terrorism? It's hard to decide if a potential bomber pays much attention to that inevitable consequence as he or she straps on the explosives. After all, it is always possible that a Palestinian's family home will be bulldozed because it is too close to a new wall/settlement/road/restricted area or was not issued a building permit.
Finally, has Sharon's policy of first ignoring, then isolating, and finally threatening to kill or deport the Palestinians' elected leader Arafat worked? Or has it strengthened the man, already weakened by illness and charges of corruption, and made him a greater potential martyr to the Palestinian cause? Arafat's compound is now guarded by Israeli and international peace activists. Evidently Sharon found it easier, and less likely to cause an international outcry, to bomb Syria than to kill Arafat.
"Israel must return to the so-called Green Line—the border before the 1967 Six Day War," advises The Washington Post's Cohen and other American true friends of Israel. "It must dismantle most of the settlements. It must do this because occupation is corrupting and, in the long run, impossible. The more Israel expands or retains settlements, the more it gets stuck in a quagmire where the enemy is everywhere."
Ariel Sharon cannot distract Israeli voters and American supporters for much longer. He may bomb and threaten Syria, Lebanon, and even Iran. The Likud government can provoke hopeless Palestinian patriots into committing ever more horrific suicide bombings by killing, bulldozing, and destroying their dream for statehood and a normal life. Israel can continue building its wall to isolate Palestinians and protect illegal Jewish-only settlements. In the end, however, Sharon's policies will cause the eventual demise of the Jewish state.
Sooner or later it will dawn on both Israelis and Americans that terrorism can never be defeated by brute military force. When that happens, voters in Israel (as well as in the U.S. and Britain) will demand an end to war. They'll demand a "recall" of their own and cast their votes for a leader who uses words, not bombs, and who promises hope and peace, not more despair.
Only a just political agreement can end the tragic cycle of violence—in Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Cyprus, Kashmir, and other nations wracked by terror.
After Israel's Oct. 5 bombing of what turned out to be an abandoned training camp near Damascus, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad accused Israel of diverting attention from the crisis in the occupied territories and trying to lure Syria into a wider conflict.
The pretext for Israel's unilateral attack on a neighbor was the suicide bombing of a restaurant in Haifa by a young woman from Jenin. The connection seems tenuous at best. On the other hand, it is in keeping with Washington's premise that the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were appropriate responses to the 9/11 al-Qaeda terror attacks. That premise, in turn, was based on Israel's long-standing policy of "pre-emptive" attacks.
"Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told journalists after the attack on Syria. In truth, not only are Israelis less "protected" than ever, but if Israel tries to bomb every country which harbors people who sympathize with the Palestinian cause, it will have to bomb the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and even the U.S. and Israel itself.
The world condemned the unprovoked attack on Syria, a country doing its best to toe the line in Washington's war on terrorism. The only beef the United Nations has with Damascus is that Syria has overstayed its welcome in Lebanon. Certainly Israel, which has brutally occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights for 36 years, can't point fingers on that account.
If Israel can bomb Syria with impunity, what country will be its next target? Lebanon? Iran? According to Richard Cohen's column in the Oct. 7 Washington Post, Israel lashing out against Syria wasn't a matter of good policy—it was out of fury.
Cognizant of the ever-present threat of a U.S. veto, the U.N. Security Council has yet to condemn the Israeli attack. Because the U.S. unabashedly vetoes any U.N. reprimand of Israel—including a resolution scolding Israel for threatening to kill or exile Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, or for actually killing U.N. personnel such as Ian Hook—Israel rightly figures Washington will always block the world's wrath.
Indeed, President George W. Bush seemed to approve Israel's latest violation of international law. The president said to reporters he'd told Sharon in a phone call Oct. 5, the day of the Israeli attack, that "Israel's got a right to defend herself; that Israel mustn't feel constrained in terms of defending the homeland."
If Israel can bomb Syria with impunity, what country will be its next target?
Israel also was emboldened to attack its neighbor by the Syria Accountability Act, currently wending through Congress, which seeks to impose sanctions on Damascus. In it Israel, and its U.S. supporters in Congress, repeat a litany of accusations which sound suspiciously like those leveled against Iraq. Their hope clearly is that the same tired lies—weapons of mass destruction, biological warheads, support for terrorism—will work again. With U.S. politicians heaping insults upon Syria, the time was ripe for Israel to lob a bomb or two.
Just as Americans and Britons are questioning their leaders' honesty in presenting their case for the war on Iraq, Israelis should now be asking their prime minister some tough questions of their own. The biggest question is why are they in greater danger with each passing month than they were when Sharon first made his provocative assault on Haram al-Sharif on Sept. 28, 2000? After provoking demonstrations and, finally, full-scale warfare, he took office promising greater security. Are his tactics preventing or inspiring more terrorism? Israelis might want to know.
What about Sharon's "security wall"? Israel already has built 84 miles of the wall, mostly on Palestinian land. The 60-yard-wide complex of 25-foot-high walls, electronic sensors, ditches, roads and steel barriers, built at a cost of $4 million per mile, may in the end cost more than a billion dollars. Will this wall actually stop suicide bombers from entering Israel? It didn't prevent the latest suicide bombing—and it won't prevent the next. It will only serve to infuriate Palestinians, whose promised state has been carved and eaten up by the wall.
Is Sharon's policy of "targeted assassinations" halting suicide attacks? It's obvious that one of these state-sponsored murders actually motivated the suicide bomber who struck Maxim's, the popular Haifa restaurant owned by two families, one Jewish and one Arab.
Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer, blew herself up in the crowded beachside restaurant on Oct. 4, killing 19 Israelis, including five Arab Israelis. Jaradat sought revenge for the June 12 deaths of her brother, Fadi, and her cousin, Salah Jaradat. Fadi, a produce vendor, was the Jaradat family's main breadwinner. Israeli undercover soldiers shot and killed the two men while they were drinking coffee outside their house, in front of Hanadi and her cousin Salah's wife. Their bodies were thrown into an IDF truck and dumped outside of town.
A Witness to Terror
Hanadi was hospitalized, prostrate with grief, after witnessing the shootings. Four months later, this bright young lawyer, whose educational achievements had brought pride to her entire neighborhood in Jenin, was dead, along with 19 innocent diners. Does Sharon's penchant for "targeted assassinations" halt terrorism, or does it actually encourage recruitment of new suicide bombers?
The numbers speak for themselves. More than a hundred bombers, including four women, have carried out successful attacks since Sharon took office. Israel has assassinated more than 196 Palestinians who may or may not have been planning terrorism—since they were never tried, we will never know. They left behind many hundreds of relatives ready to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.
Within hours of the suicide bombing, Israeli soldiers demolished the Jaradat family's home. This is one of Sharon's favorite collective punishments, meted out to the relatives of "terrorists" (not, however, of Jewish terrorists such as Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, or Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque). Are these home demolitions an effective deterrent to terrorism? It's hard to decide if a potential bomber pays much attention to that inevitable consequence as he or she straps on the explosives. After all, it is always possible that a Palestinian's family home will be bulldozed because it is too close to a new wall/settlement/road/restricted area or was not issued a building permit.
Finally, has Sharon's policy of first ignoring, then isolating, and finally threatening to kill or deport the Palestinians' elected leader Arafat worked? Or has it strengthened the man, already weakened by illness and charges of corruption, and made him a greater potential martyr to the Palestinian cause? Arafat's compound is now guarded by Israeli and international peace activists. Evidently Sharon found it easier, and less likely to cause an international outcry, to bomb Syria than to kill Arafat.
"Israel must return to the so-called Green Line—the border before the 1967 Six Day War," advises The Washington Post's Cohen and other American true friends of Israel. "It must dismantle most of the settlements. It must do this because occupation is corrupting and, in the long run, impossible. The more Israel expands or retains settlements, the more it gets stuck in a quagmire where the enemy is everywhere."
Ariel Sharon cannot distract Israeli voters and American supporters for much longer. He may bomb and threaten Syria, Lebanon, and even Iran. The Likud government can provoke hopeless Palestinian patriots into committing ever more horrific suicide bombings by killing, bulldozing, and destroying their dream for statehood and a normal life. Israel can continue building its wall to isolate Palestinians and protect illegal Jewish-only settlements. In the end, however, Sharon's policies will cause the eventual demise of the Jewish state.
Sooner or later it will dawn on both Israelis and Americans that terrorism can never be defeated by brute military force. When that happens, voters in Israel (as well as in the U.S. and Britain) will demand an end to war. They'll demand a "recall" of their own and cast their votes for a leader who uses words, not bombs, and who promises hope and peace, not more despair.
Only a just political agreement can end the tragic cycle of violence—in Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Cyprus, Kashmir, and other nations wracked by terror.
Delinda C. Hanley, is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
© Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 2003
