The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day War

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The best defense against the suicide bombers is to take away their rallying cry, which is the illegitimacy of Israeli occupation.

 

By: Ahmad Faruqui

 

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war against the combined militaries of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. Within six days, the Israeli Defense Forces had scored a decisive military victory. The Arabs lost East Jerusalem, containing the third holiest shrine of Islam, in addition to losing the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai.

 

In November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242. This laid out two primary conditions for the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First, it called for the "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Second, it called for the "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

 

Israel did not withdraw from the occupied territories. The Six Day War led to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and Israel ultimately made peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai. It also made peace with Jordan, but did not return East Jerusalem. To this day, Israeli occupation of this holy site continues to fuel strong resentment against Israel in the entire Muslim world. It remains a key impediment to the establishment of peace in the Middle East.

 

An entire generation of Palestinians has grown up in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli occupation. Seeing no hope for their future, some of them have resorted to carrying out suicide bombings since September 2000. The bombings have killed hundreds of Israelis and brought on Israeli retaliation, killing thousands of Palestinians. This cycle of violence shows no signs of letting up, even after President Bush's landmark visit to the region.

 

In accepting the Roadmap put forth by the White House, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon conceded that Israel couldn't indefinitely continue to hold millions of Palestinians under occupation. Many regarded this as a breakthrough, since "occupation" was a word that had thus far only been used by Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace block. Sharon also acknowledged that the time had come for Israelis to accept the reality of Palestinian statehood. However, peace will only be achieved if he matches his words with deeds.

 

So far there has been no evidence of his sincerity. Yesterday's pre-emptive attacks in Gaza by Israel against Dr. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the number two man in Hamas, will weaken the hands of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas who had promised to put an end to terrorism in the Aqaba Agreement. President Bush publicly rebuked Israel, "The attacks will make it more difficult for Palestinian leadership to fight off terrorist attacks. I also don't believe the attacks helped Israeli security." However, Israel offered no apology for its action, and seemed determined to carry out missile and other attacks against militant Palestinians, who it considers to be "ticking time bombs."

 

The strategic myopia of this policy should be evident by now. Israel has learned that it cannot eliminate terrorism by killing the terrorists. For every one that is killed, another two are created. After the latest attack, the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, declared there would be a violent response. "The Israelis have sent a message," he said. "Now they have to wait for our reply. Our answer will be of the same caliber. The Israelis don't want peace. They only want to humiliate the Palestinians."

 

The time calls for boldness and courage on the part of the Israeli leadership. The Arab states pose no credible military threat to Israel. The best defense against the suicide bombers is to take away their rallying cry, which is the illegitimacy of Israeli occupation. Israel should declare a unilateral cease-fire with the Palestinians, and stop carrying out attacks against the militants. Ultimately, it should withdraw from all remaining occupied territories and eliminate the illegal settlements from the West Bank, as it committed to doing during the Oslo Accords of 1993. It should also release the 9,000 Palestinians who are being held in Israeli jails and detention centers. So far, only 200 have been released.

 

These actions will bring legitimacy to Israel in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Only then will it acquire the peace and security that has eluded it since its "decisive" military victory 36 years ago.

 

 

Ahmad Faruqui, an economist, writes frequently on security issues in the Middle East and South Asia.

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Peace process in crisis as Hamas man is assassinated in missile attack

By Sa'id Ghazali in Jerusalem

13 June 2003

 

 

The tit-for-tat violence between the Israeli army and Hamas intensified yesterday as Israel assassinated a senior Hamas figure and six others in a rocket attack, provoking threats of revenge from the Islamic militants.

 

An Israeli helicopter fired missiles at the car of Yasser Taha in Gaza, killing him, his wife and their infant daughter. The attack followed a Hamas suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that killed 16 people on Wednesday and a retaliatory helicopter attack by Israel that killed seven. On Tuesday, Israel attempted to assassinate a Hamas leader.

 

As Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, declared that he would fight the militants "to the bitter end", Hamas leaders warned of suicide bombings to come and told foreign citizens to leave Israel as soon as possible for their own safety.

 

The three days of bloodshed, in which at least 35 Israelis and Palestinians have died, have reduced to near irrelevance the US-backed road-map for peace.

 

The Israeli government, which believes that the Palestinian Authority with Abu Mazen as Prime Minister cannot halt the suicide bombings, is directly targeting Hamas.

 

In Gaza, Palestinians ran through the streets carrying a charred body and some of the 29 wounded, their faces stained with blood. A milk bottle and the baby's shoes were displayed for the television cameras.

 

Mr Sharon kept up his verbal attacks on the Palestinian leaders, whom he ridiculed as "cry-babies". He decried Abu Mazen as "a chick that hasn't grown its feathers yet" for failing to halt the attacks by armed militant groups.

 

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian cabinet minister, said of Mr Sharon's comments: "His aim is to discredit the Palestinian government and to assassinate his real enemy, the road-map." The Israeli strikes have made it difficult for Abu Mazen, whose birth name is Mahmoud Abbas, to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas and other militant groups.

 

The Bush administration, which had turned its anger against the Israeli government after the botched assassination attempt on Tuesday, accused Hamas of being the main obstacle to Middle East peace.

 

 

Hamas vows to 'tear Israel to pieces' after Gaza attack

By Sa'id Ghazali in Jerusalem and Rupert Cornwell in Washington

13 June 2003

 

 

Hamas vowed yesterday to "blow up the Zionist entity and tear it to pieces" as Israeli helicopters patrolled the skies over Gaza to hunt down Palestinian militants in one of the most crowded cities in the world.

 

Speaking after an Israeli rocket attack that killed seven people, including a senior Hamas militant, Mahmoud al-Zahar, the Hamas leader, said the movement would "launch a series of new attacks against the Israeli people by the youths of Palestine. This crime will not pass without punishment.''

 

Activists from Yasser Arafat's mainstream movement said they were siding with the Islamic militants of Hamas. Hussein al Sheikh, a Fatah leader in Ramallah, said: "This is a bloody war against the Palestinian people. [The] Fatah movement stands with the Palestinian people in the resistance against the occupation.''

 

The dramatic hardening of their position came after Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, promised at an emergency cabinet meeting to press ahead with attacks against Hamas. His language seemed to doom the US-sponsored road-map for peace in the Middle East, which calls for an end to violence as a first step.

 

Israeli forces thrust into Gaza yesterday after their botched attempt to kill Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas's political leader, on Tuesday, which terrified the people of Gaza City as they went about their business. "We live in panic,'' Halima al-Ghoul, 55, said. "I do not know whether it is safe to ride a car or walk.''

 

Traffic stopped each time aircraft appeared and people got out of their cars, fearing another rocket attack. "We believe in fate,'' Khaled Jondia, 33, said. She was selling baby clothes in Shajia market when yesterday's attack happened.

 

In Jerusalem, Israeli police set up more checkpoints in Arab neighbourhoods, searching people and checking their identity cards.

 

Yesterday's attack - in retaliation for the worst suicide bombing in six months, which killed 16 people on a bus in Jerusalem on Wednesday - came after the funeral of 10 Palestinians who were killed on Wednesday night by Israeli helicopters. They fired missiles at targets in Sabra, where Ahmed Yassin, Hamas's spiritual leader, lives. Hamas claimed responsibility for Wednesday's bus bombing.

 

Mr Sharon has served notice that he will continue to strike at suspected Palestinian terrorists as and when he chooses, whatever the damage to the road-map. Israeli officials say Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Yassin, are not immune from retaliation.

 

Nabil Amr, the moderate Palestinian cabinet spokes-man, blamed the government of Israel for starting the tit-for-tat violence after the Aqaba summit, attended by President George Bush, which endorsed the road-map.

 

"As a Palestinian citizen and a Palestinian Authority member, I say today's attack is deliberate. It is a new war waged by Sharon. The consequences will be grave. Sharon is the one who started it," Mr Amr said yesterday.

 

In Washington, it was announced that Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, will hold talks at the end of next week aimed at rescuing the floundering road-map plan.

 

The descent into violence has been a bitter blow for President Bush, barely a week after he stood alongside Mr Sharon and Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister, in the Jordanian resort of Aqaba. The two prime ministers had embraced the plan, providing for a comprehensive two-state settlement by the end of 2005.

 

Mr Bush is now being criticised both at home and abroad as the plan sinks deeper into trouble. General Powell is planning new talks in Aqaba, probably on 22 June, with senior representatives of Russia, the UN and the EU, co-sponsors of the road-map with the US .

 

But their room for manoeuvre, diplomats say, is very limited. Mr Bush is in a position familiar to many US presidents who have wrestled unsuccessfully with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - he is facing a choice between giving up on an initiative that seems doomed to fail, or committing himself even more intensely, with no guarantee of success.

 

His predicament is compounded by complaints from Capitol Hill and the Israeli lobby there at what is seen as undue pressure on Israel, target of an unusually blunt presidential rebuke after its attempt to assassinate Mr Rantisi on Tuesday. That attack followed the killing of four Israeli soldiers in Gaza. In response to Israel's attack, Hamas launched the suicide bombing in Jerusalem, drawing yet more deadly reprisals from Israel.

 

Mr Bush said he was "deeply troubled" by the strike against Mr Rantisi, which was said to be in breach of an understanding reached with Mr Sharon at the Aqaba summit. In doing so, however, the White House has stirred up trouble at home.

 

In thinly veiled criticism of a president who has hitherto been a firm champion of Israel, the powerful pro-Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC, said the Jewish state had to fight terrorist groups, and "it should be American policy to support such actions".

 

On Capitol Hill too, Democrats in particular have gone after Mr Bush, arguing that if the US had the right to go after terrorists, then Israel had a similar right to defend itself. Force was "100 per cent justified", Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, declared. The domestic pressure on Mr Bush, as he seeks to make inroads into the Jewish vote for the 2004 presidential elections, only emboldens Israel to defy him.

 

Such is the frustration in Washington that some senior law makers are even advocating that Nato forces be sent in to keep the two sides apart. But, US officials say, that is unlikely to be acceptable to Israel

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Talks deadlocked as Sharon demands 'war' on militants

Hamas leaders reject 'surrender', while Israel says a ceasefire would not be enough to restart negotiations

By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem

17 June 2003

 

 

Talks to persuade Palestinian militants to agree to a six-month ceasefire ended inconclusively last night, with Egyptian mediators returning home without success.

 

As the talks appeared to reach a stalemate, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister said in a speech to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that a ceasefire would not be enough and demanded "a comprehensive, ongoing war by the new Palestinian government" against the militants.

 

New hopes for the peace process after the Aqaba summit have all but evaporated in a new round of violence between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas that has seen more than 60 people killed in a little over a week.

 

Unless the violence stops, there are fears the road-map peace plan, personally backed by President George Bush, may go the way of previous attempts to make peace.

 

The Palestinian Authority (PA) was still holding out hope of getting Hamas and the other militant groups to agree to a ceasefire last night. Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister, was due to hold talks with militant leaders in Gaza after mediators sent by the Egyptian government left. The Egyptians offered to resume the talks in Cairo this week, or to return in 24 hours.

 

The Egyptians have been pushing Hamas to agree to a six-month ceasefire. In return, the Israeli army would gradually withdraw from the northern Gaza Strip, and the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

 

Comments from some Hamas leaders yesterday threw cold water on any future talks. "Ceasefire means surrender to occupation," Ismail abu Shanab, a senior figure in Hamas, said. "Now is not a time for truce. It is time for solidarity and standing united against Israeli attacks on our people."

 

Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Hamas's spiritual leader, was less vitriolic. "We have listened to the ideas and the proposals and we are studying them in order to respond," he said.

 

Mr Sharon appeared to write off the peace process as long as militant attacks continued. "We cannot achieve a political arrangement and certainly not a peace deal, when terror runs rampant," he said.

 

But Silvan Shalom, the Israeli Foreign Minister, said unequivocally that Israel would not accept a temporary ceasefire, and Mr Sharon appeared to back that up in his speech. "For me, peace means full security for the citizens of Israel. Not declarations, not talk," Mr Shalom said.

 

Mr Sharon's demand that the PA takes on the militants would put Abu Mazen in a very difficult position. There is a deep reluctance in Palestinian society, and within the PA's security forces, to take on the militants. Many in the security forces have relatives who are among the militants and some Palestinians fear a confrontation could lead to civil war.

 

The main sticking point in yesterday's talks in Gaza appeared to be demands from Hamas for international guarantees that Israel would stop its policy of assassinating the militant group's leaders, in return for a ceasefire. The United States is believed to have been pushing Israel to stop the assassinations, after almost daily attempts last week in which many innocent bystanders were killed.

 

But Mr Sharon appeared to say yesterday the assassinations would continue, when he vowed that Israel would hunt down the militants "in every place and in every situation". That was a considerable change from Sunday, when Mr Sharon was quoted as telling his Cabinet: "If no one fires on us, we will not return fire, except in cases of ticking bombs."

 

Mr Sharon was speaking at a debate called by the opposition. Knesset opposition members have publicly accused him of jeopardising the road-map when he ordered the assassination of Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the most prominent leader of Hamas's political wing, last week at a time when Hamas was talking about resuming the ceasefire talks.

 

After that assassination attempt failed, Hamas vowed to bomb Israel to "rubble" and launched a sickening suicide bombing in central Jerusalem that left 17 dead.

 

In the opening speech, Zahava Gal-On, a Knesset member from the left-wing, pro-peace Meretz party, accused Mr Sharon of deceiving the Knesset, the Israeli people and the Americans by falsely claiming to support the road-map for peace.

 

In response, Mr Sharon claimed his hand had been forced by an attack in which Palestinian militants from three different groups broke into an Israeli army base at the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel and killed four soldiers. The Israeli government was forced either "to hold back in order not to stop the diplomatic process, or to respond to what was placed upon us", he said.

 

The Knesset voted in support of Mr Sharon by a narrow majority.

 

 

Palestinians torn between their desire for peace and anger with the Israelis

By Sa'id Ghazali in Jerusalem

17 June 2003

 

 

Like many Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, Naima Hamad is caught between her desire for an immediate end to hostilities and her anger over the war that has left her husband unemployed and restricted her movement.

 

"We want to have a normal life. We do not want Jews to kill our children and uproot our trees. We want the PA [Palestinian Authority] to come here and prevent the firing of rockets,'' she said, while grazing her seven sheep. Mrs Hamad and her 12-year-old daughter Feda remember Hamas militants firing rockets from Zimo, a large citrus farm next to her house in Beit Hanoun, two months ago. The farm is now in complete ruins. "The people pay a heavy price," she said.

 

Mrs Hamad, who has seven children, said a one-sided truce was meaningless because if Israel did not stop its incursions and air strikes, any ceasefire would not last long. "The two sides should stop," she said as across from her home, several Israeli tanks and military vehicles could be seen and shots could be heard.

 

She said a bullet had missed her head by inches while she was on the rooftop of her house on Sunday.

 

Her neighbour Louai al-Zaneen, 24, whose father's farm was ruined by Israeli bulldozers, said he would support a truce if it meant lifting the closure, allowing more workers to enter Israel and resuming the peace negotiations.

 

Signs of exhaustion are everywhere in the Gaza Strip. It can be seen in the deserted Feras vegetable market, and the fish market in Gaza City and in the pronouncements of established Palestinian figures such as Iyad al-Sarraj, a well-known psychiatrist.

 

He said: "The Palestinian people are very tired. Seventy per cent of the Palestinian people have low income. Many people are desperate. They are ready to stop everything, if they have a little hope."

 

The people are divided between two extremes: those who want to stop the hostilities and get back to normal life, and those who want to continue with the violence and acts of revenge. Colonel Majed al-Kafarneh, a senior security forces commander for the Northern districts of Jabalya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, with a population of 200,000, said there were two groups of people. There were those bent on violence, and those who don't care who's in charge, "whether it is [the Security Affairs minister Mohammad] Dahalan or a monkey, we should reach an end [to the conflict]."

 

Colonel Kafarneh said he was not ready to "arrest or shoot at suicide bombers on their way to Israel", as long as Israel refused to withdraw and end its occupation. He said he would not shoot at Hamas, even if Yasser Arafat or the Palestinian Prime Minister, Abu Mazen, ordered him to.