Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2003, pages 7-9, 26

Special Report

Bush’s “Road Map to Peace” on Hold While His Advisers Push for a Wider War

By Rachelle Marshall

We are fighting a variety of enemies…If we just let our vision of the world go forth and wage total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

—Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, interview in the London Daily Mirror, quoted in Peace Action Newsletter, April 2002.

Eleven years after the first Bush administration initiated Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to gain Arab cooperation for the first Gulf war, a looming war in Iraq has prompted a second Bush administration to try to revive the Middle East peace process. And once again Israel has declined to cooperate. In 1991 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to take part in the Madrid peace conference, but soon made it clear he intended to negotiate endlessly while he rapidly increased West Bank settlements. The talks led nowhere until Shamir was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin and a different team of negotiators initiated the Oslo peace process.

In order to lessen Arab opposition to a new attack on Iraq, George W. Bush made a serious effort this fall to get Israelis and Palestinians to implement his proposed “road map to peace.” The plan, endorsed by the European Union, Russia and the U.N., requires the Palestinians to replace Yasser Arafat with a new leader, institute political reforms, and seek to end violence. Israel in return would ease curfews and travel restrictions, freeze settlement construction, withdraw from areas it has reoccupied, and release a portion of the tax revenues collected from Palestinians. Once these measures were completed, a step-by-step process would lead to a Palestinian state.

Faced with little choice, the Palestinians accepted the plan, but Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately expressed reservations and put the plan on hold until after Israel’s elections in January. In early December Bush effectively killed his own proposal by appointing neoconservative Elliott Abrams as his new director of Middle East affairs (see p. 11). Abrams fiercely opposed the Oslo agreement, and has urged Jews to work more closely with evangelical Christians in support of Israel. He now insists that Israel should make no concessions until the Palestinians stop all violence and get rid of Yasser Arafat. Abrams will undoubtedly make it harder for Secretary of State Colin Powell to pursue his more conciliatory approach. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, himself an ardent supporter of Israel, commented that “There are two foreign policy teams in this administration…Clearly Elliott is coming out of the hard-line team. But that is where Bush’s heart is.”

While Israelis cope with the growing financial and psychological costs of subduing Palestinian resistance, and face yet another election campaign, the Palestinians’ plight has become what one administration official called “horrific.” Isolated and imprisoned in their communities, forced to remain indoors for days, they are suffering from increasing poverty and malnutrition. Their economy and civic institutions remain paralyzed, and a generation of children and young people are being denied schooling. In Gaza hundreds of children have become beggars.

Deadly sweeps by the Israeli army now make ordinary existence precarious in Gaza and in West Bank towns such as Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin, where soldiers often shoot at random. In one such incident in October, seven people were killed and dozens wounded when an Israeli tank fired shells into a crowded neighborhood. In early November two 2-year olds were killed within three days, one by shrapnel and the other by gunfire. The following week in Tulkarm Israeli soldiers shot to death six unarmed civilians, including two young boys.

The constant curfews, arrests and killings inevitably provoked bloody responses. A Nov. 10 attack by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade on an Israeli kibbutz that killed a mother and her two children along with two others was followed five days later by the killing of 12 Israeli soldiers in Hebron by Islamic Jihad. Less than a week later a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis and wounding dozens of others. Several of the victims were schoolchildren. Israel responded to the attacks with another round of collective punishment.

The army imposed a 24-hour curfew on Palestinians in Hebron, demolished several homes and olive trees, and allowed settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba to establish a new settlement on the newly seized Palestinian land. The next day Israeli helicopters and tanks shelled Gaza City. After the bus bombing, the army reoccupied Bethlehem, placed the whole city under curfew, and wrecked the offices of the Palestinian governor. The Israelis also intensified their attacks in Jenin, where soldiers pursuing a wanted militant shot to death 12-year-old Muhammed Bilalweh and a senior U.N. aid official, Iain Hook. Hook had recently arrived to oversee the rebuilding of the refugee camp that Israel destroyed last spring and was shot when soldiers fired into the U.N. compound. He bled to death when the army refused to allow a U.N. ambulance to evacuate him. The army said the soldiers had fired at him because he was holding “an object that appeared to be a gun.” The object was a phone.

Sharon’s appointments of Netanyahu as foreign minister and Gen. Shaul Mofaz as minister of defense are likely to bring even harsher repression. Both Netanyahu and Mofaz favor exiling Arafat, and one of Netanyahu’s closest allies, Avigdor Lieberman, has been urging the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israeli-held territory. Lieberman, who is head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party and was Netanyahu’s chief of staff in 1996, has said he even favors blowing up Arafat’s headquarters with Arafat inside.

Sharon defeated Netanyahu by a wide margin in a Nov. 28 vote for party leader, a result influenced partly by the bombing on the same day of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya and a shooting in northern Israel—
attacks that killed a total of more than 20 people. Since such attacks tend to strengthen support for the right wing in Israel, Lieberman and other extremists are almost certain to play a prominent role in the next Likud government.

Until the nomination on Nov. 19 of Amram Mitzna to head the Labor party, polls showed that Likud could win as many as 33 Knesset seats in the January election—a number large enough to allow Sharon to govern without coalition partners. With Mitzna in the race Israeli voters will have a clear choice…and the hope of peace. As the mayor of Haifa, he is popular with Israeli Palestinians and has pledged that he will immediately resume peace talks with Arafat, dismantle all Gaza settlements, and withdraw from large areas of the West Bank. Mitzna was a brigadier general during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila he asked to be relieved of his command until Sharon was ousted as defense minister.

A Labor victory would not be good news for pro-Israel hawks in the Bush administration who see war in Iraq as the first step toward reshaping the Middle East and count on both Sharon and Netanyahu to be partners in the process. Netanyahu, who recently declared that a U.S. strike at Iraq “would...provide a good opportunity to get rid of Arafat,” has been an articulate supporter of the Bush administration’s broader goals in the Middle East. An article of his published in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin on Sept. 28, 200l, entitled “We must cut terrorism at its roots, penalize the states that aid it,” echoes Richard Perle’s call for “total war.”

Netanyahu accused Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and “several other regimes, such as the Sudan” of providing support for international terrorism. “To win this war,” he said, “we must fight on many fronts. We must make no distinction between terrorists and the states that support them.” Two senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Robert Graham of Florida and Richard Shelby of Alabama, are also urging that the war on terrorism be extended, saying it should include Iran, Syria and Lebanon because of their support for Hezbollah.

Middle East scholars warn that the war Israeli leaders and administration hawks are calling for—a war to eliminate Israel’s enemies—would cause political and social upheaval throughout the Middle East and could delay for years any progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Nevertheless the first phase of such a war, a U.S. attack on Iraq, seems increasingly likely. After the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1441 on Nov. 8 ordering Iraq to allow arms inspections to resume and agree to disarm or face serious consequences, Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed the resolution allowed for “zero tolerance,” and that the United States had the authority to launch an attack at the first sign of deception or obstruction on Iraq’s part. France, China and Russia, on the other hand, insisted in a joint statement that the resolution did not provide for the automatic use of force, and that only the arms inspectors had the authority to define and report possible breaches. Syria’s representative said he had voted for the resolution only because he had been assured that “it would not be used as a pretext to strike Iraq.” The conflicting statements bore out Denis Halliday’s charge that the resolution was “dangerously ambiguous,” and designed to give a U.S. action the respectability and cover of the United Nations. Halliday is a former chief of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.

Chief arms inspector Hans Blix clearly favored restraint. He pledged that the inspectors would not “harass, humiliate or provoke” the Iraqis or engage in the kind of confrontational tactics that had characterized the previous inspections. His colleague on the inspection team, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El-Baradel, also urged patience. Contrary to Bush’s assertions that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program—assertions never verified by intelligence services—El-Baradel said, “I figure it will be a year before we can come to any conclusion.”

Bush is not likely to wait that long, since winter is the optimal time for an attack. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops are stationed within striking distance of Iraq, along with vast quantities of military equipment. The Pentagon has been practicing offensive operations 10 miles from Iraq in Kuwait, where one-fourth of the country has been set aside for U.S. military exercises. Once the inspectors begin their work Bush will be able to find ample excuse to launch a strike. Iraq is obliged to hand over a complete list of its chemical, biological, and nuclear resources by Dec. 8, but since much of this material can also be used for civilian purposes, there are bound to be omissions in the list that Washington can label deliberate deceit. In fact Bush may regard any dispute over wording as a sign the Iraqis are lying and therefore in violation of the U.N. resolution. Administration officials already have insisted that Iraqi attacks on U.S. and British warplanes in the “no-fly zone” are material breaches of the resolution, even though other members of the Security Council disagree. The overflights have never been sanctioned by the U.N.

The question of why Bush [was] is so intent on getting rid of Saddam Hussain was answered in a revealing statement by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Nov. 15. She referred to Iraq as a “regional rival” to U.S. power in the Persian Gulf, and said that “sooner or later, the ambitions of Saddam Hussain and the interests of the United States are going to clash.” Rice’s statement reaffirms the view of some analysts that the administration’s real goal is not to promote freedom for the Iraqis, as Bush frequently claims, but to install a subservient regime in Iraq that will welcome a strong U.S. military presence in the Gulf region and allow U.S. firms to control the development of Iraq’s rich oil reserves.

There is no doubt that a new Gulf war would do devastating damage to Iraq and its people. In the first Gulf war the 88,000 tons of explosives used by U.S. forces demolished Iraq’s entire infrastructure—including dams, power stations, water and sewage systems, irrigation systems, factories and communication lines. According to a recent article by Newsday reporter Patrick J. Sloyan, tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed, including the thousands of soldiers who were mowed down by U.S. tank fire, rockets and cluster bombs, then buried under the sand—some of them alive—by plows mounted on the tanks. Since then a million Iraqi children have died from malnutrition and disease. The next war could have even more devastating effects. A top Pentagon consultant was quoted in the Nov. 18 New Yorker as boasting that with the new and much improved weapons now available, “We can do five times the damage with one-quarter of the planes.”

If critics of the war are right, however, there could be painful consequences as well for the United States and its allies. Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American educator and writer, asked in a guest column for the San Francisco Chronicle last October,” Suppose we do conquer Iraq—and then North Korea and Iran and then Sudan and Libya and Syria…will we have defeated terrorism?” Ansary’s answer is no, that “Terrorism is born of grudge and grievance…of failed states and unraveled societies…Reducing a functioning society to anarchy by destroying its infrastructure and killing great numbers of its citizens is likely to increase whatever legacy of grudge and grievance is already in place.”

One of the origins of this legacy, the grievance that many Muslims blame for the rise of Islamic militancy, is Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinians and occupation of their land. As Israel’s chief defender and benefactor, America has become an object of hatred for many people in the Middle East and in Europe, and a U.S. war on Iraq will vastly increase their numbers. No matter how tight a lid the Pentagon puts on the American media, television viewers in other parts of the world will see brutal images of the slaughter of Iraqi civilians and the massive destruction of their cities, images that will inevitably fuel future terrorism. Jordanian Ambassador Karim Kawar warned that war in Iraq “will be a recruiting tool for Osama bin Laden.”

Bush now has a clear choice: he can make a serious effort to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and seek ways to eradicate the causes of terrorism, or he can ignore world opinion and order an attack on Iraq. The wrong choice could lead to a never-ending war, a war in which there are no clear battle lines and everyone is the loser.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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If Israel’s current foreign minister and leader of the far right, Binyamin Netanyahu, should in the future again become Israel’s prime minister he could count on friends at the highest levels of the Bush administration when it comes to dealing with the Palestinians. Frances Fitzgerald revealed in an article in the Sept. 26 issue of the New York Review of Books that in 1996 Richard Perle, now chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and his protégé Douglas Feith, now U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote an advisory paper for Netanyahu calling on him “to make a clean break with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel’s claim to the West Bank and Gaza.” Netanyahu was then Israel’s prime minister, but was defeated for reelection before he could act on Perle and Feith’s advice. In a separate article quoted by Fitzgerald, Feith urged that Israel reoccupy the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. “The price in blood would be high,” he wrote, “but it would be a necessary form of ‘detoxification’—the only way out of Oslo’s web.” Feith was right in one respect: Israel under Sharon has reoccupied Palestinian territory, and the price in blood has indeed been high—for more than two thousand Palestinians and six hundred Israelis. —R.M.

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Caoimhe Butterly talks to Annie Higgins in Jenin Refugee Camp

Nov. 22, 2002

In today’s reinvasion of Jenin Refugee Camp, the Israeli Occupation Forces made the bottom section of the camp into a closed military zone in the morning, using about 12 tanks, 10 jeeps, and at least two Apache helicopter gunships. I had been trying to get between the unarmed children and the tanks, when I received a call from a friend who wanted me to evacuate her sick daughter, as the army would not let any ambulances through. I went with a friend who is a Palestinian journalist, and we were immediately arrested, along with another international volunteer, and taken to a place where about 20 Palestinian men were being held. They were blindfolded, handcuffed, stripped to their trousers or underwear, and beaten severely. After I was detained for two hours and interrogated briefly, the Israeli soldiers said that I was free to go. I asked permission to remain with the men, hoping to minimize the violence, but the soldiers refused, saying it was not allowed. When I refused to leave, I was forcibly dragged away, pulled down the road, and told that if I returned to the area I would be shot.

I went back the way I had come, past the United Nations compound. There I spoke briefly with Iain Hook, project manager of UNRWA [United Nations Relief Works Agency] in Jenin, who said he was trying to negotiate with the soldiers for women and children to go home. He came out of the U.N. compound waving a blue U.N. flag, and the soldiers’ only response was to broadcast with their microphone in English, “We don’t care if you are the United Nations or who you are. F*** off and go home!” They were trying to go home. Iain said that things were not going well. He insisted that he wanted to provide safe passage for his 40 Palestinian workers and himself using legal means, i.e., official coordination with the army. Some worried parents had begun to knock a hole in the wall at the back of the compound to evacuate children who were there for a vaccination program. We accompanied some of the children home.

After this, I headed again to the sick girl’s house. On the way I met a group of children who told me that a 12-year-old friend of mine, Muhammad Bilalweh, had been killed and three children had been wounded by tank fire, one of whom sustained brain damage. So I went to where the children were gathered, and the tanks were firing on them erratically. I walked down the road between the children and the tanks until I was 50 meters from the tank, where I tried to dialogue with the soldiers. I implored them not to shoot live ammunition at unarmed children. At that point, they stopped their shooting. A few moments later, an APC [an armored personnel carrier, like a tank with all the armor except a cannon] drove up to the tank. I could see their faces very clearly and I imagine they could see mine also. I had seen both of these tanks earlier in the day. A soldier raised his upper body and his gun out of the hatch of the second vehicle and began shooting. At first he shot into the air, and most of the children dispersed, running into an alley on the left side of the street. About three small children remained, however, and I tried physically to get them to the alley, dragging and pushing them. I looked back over my shoulder and could see the soldier in the APC pointing his gun at me from about 100 meters. Near the entrance to the alley, I was shot in the thigh. When I fell they continued shooting in my direction. I crawled part of the way up the alley, and then some of the youngsters dragged me up the rest of the way. No ambulances were allowed into the camp, so I was carried on a makeshift stretcher to where a Red Crescent ambulance could reach me near the entrance of the camp. While I was in the emergency room of Jenin Hospital, Iain Hook of UNRWA was brought in. He died a few minutes later.

We have been told that when he was shot, the Israeli army prohibited a clearly marked U.N. ambulance from evacuating him and transporting him for nearly an hour, during which time he lost much blood. Finally the ambulance crew evacuated him by taking him out by the back wall that employees had broken down earlier.

Having been present in the Camp all morning, I can testify that any Palestinian fighters had stopped shooting a good two hours before either of us was wounded. When I passed the U.N. compound in the morning, it was surrounded by Israeli army snipers and soldiers who were shooting erratically into the Camp. Two people were killed and six wounded. All but one were shot by tank fire outside what the army deemed a closed military zone. I was not caught up in any kind of crossfire as the Israeli Occupation Forces are falsely stating, and I don’t believe that Iain was either.

The massacre has not stopped. Human rights violations and war crimes seen so blatantly across the world in April of this year continue on a daily basis in Jenin. Yesterday, with the casual killings that marked it, was not an unusual day in Jenin. It has become a potentially suicidal act to engage in the most basic acts of survival. The Israeli Occupation Forces engage again and again in a shoot-to-kill policy without regard as to whether its targets are civilians or armed fighters. Israelis have been shown in April that they can get away with a massacre, and that all the international condemnation in the world cannot get one ambulance in to evacuate a wounded person.

Thus the lack of accountability on Israel’s part has become bolder as the events witnessed yesterday become almost standard. These are not military campaigns. They are acts of terror designed to humiliate, brutalize, and bully Palestinians into subjugation. They are being denied not only the right to resist, but to exist.