Uri Avnery
8.6.02
One has to pity this man, Bush.
When he was elected, almost by accident, he was a local politician without any international experience. He would have been hard put to locate half the world's states on the map.
Since then he has been sleepwalking around the world, pushed hither and thither, sometimes listening to one of his handlers, sometimes to the other. He moves in circles, zigzags, forwards and backwards.
He tells Sharon to withdraw immediately - "I repeat, immediately!" - and when Sharon laughs in his face he declares that Sharon is a Man of Peace. He calls for an international conference and kills it before it is born. He fantasizes about the "vision" of a Palestinian state and humiliates the leader of the Palestinians every day. He brings himself and his office into disrepute.
What's happening here?
Well, Bush is torn between two mighty forces that are pulling him in opposite directions.
On the one side, there is the domestic political pressure. The Jewish lobby is, of course, one of the strongest in the United States. The Jewish community is highly organized on rigid, authoritarian lines. Its electoral and financial power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress. Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel.
But nowadays, even the power of this mighty lobby does not match the influence of the Christian fundamentalist lobby, dominated by the evangelist preachers. It puts the fear of God into the leaders of the Republican Party. George Bush Jr. remembers well that his father was forsaken by this lobby, when he failed to obey it.
This fanatical religious lobby appears to be extremely pro-Zionist. "Appears", because there is a darker side to it. According to its theological beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory, so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible. The evangelists don't like to dwell openly on what's comes next: before the Coming, the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don't will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, as long as they support Israel.
The combined might of the two lobbies is being brought to bear on Bush every time he tends in the direction of the Arabs. There other powerful factors are at work: the Arab governments and the Arab oil. The kings, presidents, Emirs and Sheikhs are subservient to the United States, but they are afraid that the suffering of the Palestinians will push their people into rebellion. They infect the Bush family with their fears. The Bushes, of course, are heavily involved with oil.
In Washington, as in Jerusalem, all problems are translated into personal struggles. The pro-Sharon faction is headed by the extremist Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, and his even more extreme deputy, Wolfowitz. They have Vice President Cheney on their side, and also, so it seems, the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, whose legs aroused the vocal admiration of Sharon. Opposing them, almost alone, is the Secretary of State, Powell, supported by the experts of his department. Every time Rumsfeld and Co. convince Bush that he has to satisfy the Jewish-Christian lobby in order to win elections, along comes Powell and convinces him at the last moment that the national interests of the United States demand the opposite.
This week Bush received Mubarak. Sharon at once invited himself to the Oval Office, obviously believing that Bush is so weak-minded that he is always influenced by the last person he has listened to.
That is the struggle that meets the eye. Underneath, perhaps, a more profound struggle lies hidden. My friend Afif Safieh, the PLO delegate in London, believes that two souls have dwelt in the American nation from birth.
The one is that of the original settlers, the destroyers of the Native Americans, the slavers, a soul that adores brute force and cherishes the myth of the Wild West, that supports tyrants around the world. This soul identifies itself automatically with the Zionist settlers and the expulsion of the Arabs. Sharon is their man.
The other one is the soul of Thomas Jefferson (in spite of the fact that he was a slave-owner, too, of course) and the framers of the constitution; of Lincoln, the emancipator of the slaves; of Wilson, whose 14 Points proclaimed the right of self-determination; of Roosevelt, who helped to save the world from Hitler; an idealist, liberal and freedom-loving soul. This one tends nowadays towards the Palestinians.
The first soul occupies Bush's heart, the other one knocks on the doors of his mind. It will be interesting to see which one wins.
The Great Reformer
Uri Avnery
18.5.02
When the inhabitant of Bethlehem came out of their homes, after the long weeks during which Israeli soldiers shot at everything in town that moved, they discovered that the landscape had changed. While they were imprisoned in their homes, the army had been working day and night to separate them from the world by a trench two meters deep and a murderous wire fence, sharp as a razor, that could cause anyone entangled in it to bleed to death. The town and its suburbs (Bet-Jala, the Aida and other refugee camps) had become a big prison.
This week, members of the Palestinian parliament tried to get to the session that dealt with "reform". The trip to Ramallah, half an hour in ordinary times, took them four hours, including a series of humiliations at the many army checkpoints.
Bethlehem is a suburb if Jerusalem. Hundreds of threads tie it to the city. All these threads are cut now. Jerusalem is further from Bethlehem than the dark side of the moon.
This kind of fence is being erected now in many places around the country, cutting the Palestinian enclaves off not only from Israel, but from each other, too. The slogan is "separation", and that sounds good to Israeli ears. "We are here and they are there," as the lamentable Ehud Barak used to declare. The real situation is quite different: "We are here and we are there." Because the separation is not only unilateral, but also unidirectional. Palestinians are forbidden to cross into Israel, but the settlers and soldiers cross into Palestine.
Sharon's war against the Palestinian people is continuing at full speed. The erection of the fences is only one of its operations. The second one is the settlement activity that has not stopped for a moment. Old settlements expand, new ones spring up and all over the occupied territories the building of bypass roads goes on, expropriating Palestinian lands and strangling Palestinian villages.
The third operation of the war bears the glorious title of "reform".
When Sharon declares that the reform of the Palestinian Authority is a condition for the resumption of the peace process, it is another device to prevent any negotiations. It also allows Sharon to climb on the bandwagon of Bush, who is demanding a democratic reform of the Authority (without, of course, demanding the same from countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and China.)
The slogan of reform also serves another of Sharon's purposes: it attracts public attention, causes the Jenin events to be forgotten and the daily incursions and killings of the IDF in the Palestinian territories to be ignored.
But as the Great Reformer of Palestine, Sharon is following a much more important agenda. As a general in the army, he was famous as a commander who "reads the battlefield", meaning that he had the ability to grasp instinctively where the crucial spot in the enemy front is located. For example: long before the October 1973 war, Sharon had decided exactly were he would break through the Egyptian front and cross the Suez canal when the time arrived.
Sharon decided long ago that the crucial point in the Palestinian front is the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Many believe that Sharon's efforts to eliminate the Palestinian leader spring from a personal vendetta, after Arafat slipped out of his hands in Beirut. But the matter is far more serious.
Sharon knows that if he succeeded in breaking Arafat, we would be breaking the backbone of the Palestinian people for many years to come -- years in which he could finish the job of filling the territories with settlements and annexing them to Israel. Arafat is a strong and authoritative leader, who holds all the strands of the Palestinian people together, preventing a civil war between them and is the only one who can take courageous, historic decisions.
Many different parties are now speaking about reforming the Palestinian Authority, and each one of them has a different agenda. For Sharon, reform means doing away with Arafat and installing a group of Quislings (as he tried 20 years ago with the creation of the "village leagues".) For Bush, "reform" means appointing a Palestinian leadership that will follow his (and, indirectly, Israel's) orders, in return for the creation of a Palestinian client-state like Puerto Rica or Andorra (as Netanyahu once said).
Among the Palestinians themselves, some see reform simply as a means to push their rivals out and take their place. I suspect that some of the reform-toting Palestinians work for the Mossad and/or the CIA. Hamas hopes that the reform will bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and clear the way for its own takeover. Other Palestinians are striving honestly for the immediate establishment of practices appropriate for an ordered state, quite ignoring the fact that the Palestinian people is still in the middle of a fight for its very existence, faced with the real danger of finally being driven out of its country.
Many Palestinians want a different reform: one that will cut out the parasitical elements, which have attached themselves to the Palestinian authority, and prepare the Palestinian people for the next, decisive stage of its struggle for liberation. Not reform instead of the struggle, but reform for the struggle. None of them intends to fulfill the dream of Sharon and Bush to liquidate Arafat or turn him into a Palestinian facsimile of Moshe Katzav, the figurehead President of Israel.