Israel and the Palestinian trap

By Gwynne Dyer Q: Why did the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine assassinate Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi? A: To make the Israelis so angry that they refuse to resume talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a ceasefire. Q: But wasn’t Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refusing to meet Arafat anyway? A: Yes, but American pressure on him to do so was growing so great that Palestinian 'rejectionists' were afraid Sharon would cave in and make a deal with Arafat. Knowing Sharon's reflexes, they hope he will now retaliate massively against the Palestinians instead. The PFLP's strategy, in other words, is a model in miniature of the strategy that al-Qaeda was trying to use against the United States in the attacks of September 11. In both cases, the point is to drive the victim to strike back with his immensely superior weapons not against the actual planners of the attack (who are hard to find), but against the innocent people among whom the terrorists live. Whether it's the Marxist PFLP or the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, all the terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups that reject the idea of a negotiated peace with Israel have the same aim: to enlist Israel's unwitting aid in order to undermine or overthrow Arafat. In just the same way, the atrocities committed by Osama bin Laden's organisation in the United States last month were meant to trigger US retaliation that would undermine pro-Western governments throughout the Arab world. The only major difference between the two situations, in fact, is that George W. Bush never walked into the trap bin Laden set for him. For 25 days after the attacks in New York and Washington, no American troops anywhere in the world fired a shot in anger, and even now the bombing campaign in Afghanistan is being conducted with painstaking care in order to minimise the Muslim civilian casualties that bin Laden needs. Whereas Sharon's pattern, over a long career, has been to leap enthusiastically into every trap that is set for him. It’s not really a trap, however, if he actually wants a fight and Sharon generally does. His political goals require that there be a confrontation with the Palestinians, not a peace deal that would involve abandoning some or all of his beloved settlements in the occupied territories. Every Israeli politician must say that he wants peace, but for Sharon that means a “victor’s peace” in which Israel holds onto much of the Palestinian land it conquered 34 years ago. Since he knows that no Palestinian leadership could ever agree to that, in practice he doesn’t really want final peace negotiations. And since he can't be expected to talk about concessions when he is actively fighting the Palestinians, that too becomes an attractive option when the pressure gets too great. It is very great at the moment, as the US is desperate to stop the nightly TV pictures of Palestinians being killed by Israeli troops that are seen nightly throughout the Arab world. The support of Arab and other Muslim countries for the coalition is vital in order that the operations in Afghanistan not confirm Osama bin Laden's accusation that it is 'the United States against the Muslims', and they cannot be expected to stay with the coalition if the US cannot stop the killing on the Israeli-Palestinian front. But for Sharon to yield to American pressure would come close to cutting his own throat politically, and he has no intention of doing that. So now we have the United States dropping heavy hints that it was going to push for a Palestinian state before the events of September 11 distracted it, and Sharon accusing the American government of betrayal. Behind a frayed facade of politeness, the Bush administration and Sharon's government are barely on speaking terms by now. When Sharon, under heavy pressure from the US to pacify the Palestinians, is instead given a pretext to retaliate against the Palestinians with massive force, he is likely to see it as a golden opportunity. The fact that it could cause great trouble for the United States in building its coalition against terrorism simply doesn’t matter to him. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist