Any reading of the mind of Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon must be judged a hazardous business, short of putting him on a psychiatrist’s couch or submitting him to the sort of torture practiced in his own prisons. Why did he order the killing of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual head of Hamas, shortly after dawn prayers in Gaza on Monday, 22 March 2004?
First : The easiest explanation is to say that killing is what Sharon does best. He has lived by the sword from his earliest years and is the foremost champion of Israel’s long-standing policy of reprisals against its Arab neighbors.
His career is marked by massacres, of which a very short list would include the massacre at the Jordanian village of Qibya in October 1953 in which 69 civilians were killed; the Gaza raid of February 1955 which killed 37 Egyptian soldiers, causing Nasser to turn to the Soviet bloc for arms; the unprovoked aggression against Syrian forces on the shore of Lake Tiberius in December 1955, which killed 50 soldiers and lit the fuse which led to the 1967 war; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, intended to establish Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East, which killed some 17,000 Palestinians and Lebanese. A further 2,000 Palestinians were butchered by the Maronite Phalange, under the gaze and protection of the Israeli army, at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
The killing of Sheikh Yassin is simply the latest episode in Sharon’s life-long ambition to break the back of Palestinian nationalism and absorb the West Bank into Greater Israel.
Sharon 's ‘strategy of fear’
Second : For Sharon the choice is stark: victory or holocaust. To this way of thinking, a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on compromise and mutual accommodation must be ruled out. One or other party must achieve total victory. Sharon’s strategy, therefore, is a ‘strategy of fear’: Israel’s enemies must spend their energies and resources protecting themselves, rather than attacking Israel. They must not, even for one moment, think that Israel is weak. No one is immune from physical extermination - neither Yasser Arafat nor the Hezbollah leader Hussein Nasrallah, and certainly not the new heads of Hamas.
An illustration of this coarse and brutal mind-set was recently provided by Zeev Boim, Israel’s deputy defense minister, when he said that Sheikh Yassin was ‘marked for death … he should hide himself deep underground where he won’t know the difference between day and night… We will find him in the tunnels, and we will kill him.’
Third : Sheikh Yassin was killed because Sharon wants to strengthen Israel’s deterrent capability, damaged by the suicide bombings. Israelis recognize that the killing might stimulate more suicide bombings, but Sharon and like-minded Israelis argue that in the longer term others will be deterred from daring to attack Israel, knowing that certain death will follow.
Fourth : A related reason is the need to hammer home the lesson that ‘the Palestinians can achieve nothing by violence’. In other words, Israel alone has the right to use force, a right it has won by its military supremacy. Its enemies must remain passive and accept to be disarmed and subjugated – or face destruction.
Fifth : In killing Sheikh Yassin, Sharon is aping the doctrine, preached by America’s neo-conservatives and practiced by President George W. Bush, of the unilateral use of force, unrestrained by international law or the condemnation of the world.
This week an Israeli commentator, Uri Dromi, cited the killing in Yemen in November 2002 of Selim Sinan Al Harethi, a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, by a missile fired from a CIA drone. If America can do it, so can Israel.
Sixth : Sharon killed Yassin because he was confident of ‘political cover’ from Washington. Of all the major world capitals, Washington alone did not condemn the killing. Its spokesmen said it was ‘troubled’ and called for restraint by both sides. However, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, echoed Sharon in saying that Yassin had personally been responsible for acts of terror.
Seventh : The killing of Yassin comes at a time when Sharon has been dropping broad hints of his plan to withdraw Jewish settlements from Gaza. With that in mind, he seems to have two immediate aims: to decapitate Hamas before pulling out, and to dispel the view that Israel has been driven out of Gaza by the militants - as it was driven out from Lebanon. Any withdrawal should not be seen as a victory for Israel’s enemies.
Eighth : Sharon killed Yassin in order to silence domestic critics of his proposed withdrawal from Gaza – which include Gaza settlers, outraged at having to move, and the more extreme members of Israel’s coalition government, who threatened to walk out.
Sharon wants land not peace
Ninth : A more serious reason to kill Yassin is Sharon’s determination to pre-empt any offer of a long-term truce, or Hudna, by Hamas’s spiritual leader. Israel has demonized Sheikh Yassin as the ‘godfather’ of terrorism, the ‘head of the snake’, and so forth, whereas he was in fact the most moderate of the Hamas leaders, who repeatedly offered Israel a long-term truce - for ten years or even fifty years – on condition that it withdrew from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Since 1993, Hamas has proposed a ceasefire with Israel no fewer than eleven times.
Yassin’s most recent offer of a truce was on 1 December 2003, while his boldest proposal was in May 1999 when he told the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram: 'We have to be realistic. We are talking about a homeland that was stolen a long time ago in 1948 and again in 1967. My generation today is telling the Israelis, “Let’s solve this problem now, on the basis of the 1967 borders. Let’s end this conflict by declaring a temporary ceasefire. Let’s leave the bigger issue for future generations to decide.”
Sharon is well aware that Sheikh Yassin was probably the only man in Gaza with the authority to propose a truce and make it stick. By killing him, he has ruled out any such possibility.
Tenth : Sharon is equally concerned to pre-empt any possibility of a renewed peace offer from the Arab summit in Tunis on 29-30 March. The summit was widely expected to repeat and clarify the offer of peace and ‘normal relations’ with Israel made at the Beirut summit of March 2002, on condition that Israel withdrew to its 1967 borders and allowed the emergence of a Palestinian state.
But any such program is anathema to Sharon for whom a return to the 1967 borders in unthinkable. Sharon wants land not peace. He has no interest in negotiations with the Arabs. Instead, he is engaged in one of Israel’s traditional arm-twisting haggles with the U.S. government.
The essence of it is that he wants to trade an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza for an acceptance by Washington of his land-grab on the West bank by means of his infamous wall - what he euphemistically describes as establishing ‘long-term interim borders’.
Any peace offer from Arab leaders would therefore be most unwelcome. By killing Yassin, Sharon has created conditions in which none will now be forthcoming.
Israel is today more isolated and vulnerable than ever. The country is in a state of siege. This is the price Sharon is prepared to pay for his long-term dream of a Greater Israel.
Uri Avneri, Israel’s veteran peace campaigner, commented this week: 'The fate of the State of Israel is in the hands of a group of bankrupt political and military leaders who have failed in all their actions. They have tried to cover up their failure by a catastrophic escalation.
‘This act will not only endanger the personal security of every Israeli, both in the country and around the world, but also the existential security of the State of Israel. It has grievously hurt the chances of putting an end to the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Muslim conflicts.’
