Israel's strategy: All Palestinians are terrorists (Robert Fisk alert!)
Foreign Affairs
Source: Irish Independent
Published: 12/5/01 Author: Robert Fisk



ARIAL SHARON provided one bright moment in the darkness for Osama bin Laden yesterday
when he declared his "war on terror".
George Bush Senior managed to keep Israel out of the 1991 Gulf War and preserve his Islamic
 alliance. But George Bush Junior must be cursing Israel's arrival on the American crusade against
"terrorism". Angry enough when Mr Sharon first compared Israel's losses at the hands of Palestinian
suicide bombers with America's murdered thousands on September 11th, the US President has no
 reason to thank the Israeli Prime Minister for his latest outburst.

Yasser Arafat is not Osama bin Laden, however much the Israeli's try to persuade the world
 otherwise; he is much less efficient, infinitely more corrupt and very definitely no threat to
 civilisation.

So will Arafat "crack down on terror" - how easily we use Israel's words - or are the Palestinian's
 now doomed to lose even the hope of statehood in Israel's latest retaliation? The fact that the suicide
 bombings were the revenge of Hamas for Israel's latest murder of a Hamas leader - in its turn revenge
for other Hamas bombings which were themselves revenge for Israeli attacks - makes no difference
to 'Palestine's' predicaments. Israel is lining up Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and its various
 security Mafia as the centre of all evil, of "terrorism", "Mindless violence", etc. Arafat is now under
orders to arrest his own people not only from the Sharon Government but from the European Union
 as well as the United States.

And as usual, we are forgetting recent history. Hamas - the principal target of the Sharon "war on terror"
- was originally sponsored by Israel. Back in the 1980's, when Arafat was the "super-terrorist" and
Hamas was a pleasant little Muslim charity - albeit venomous in its opposition to Israel - the Israeli
Government encouraged its members to build mosques in Gaza. Some genius in the Israeli Army
decided that there was no better was of undermining the PLO's nationalist ambitions in the
occupied territories than by promoting Islam even after the Oslo agreement - during a row
with Arafat.

Senior Israeli Army Officers publicly announced that they were chatting to Hamas officials. And
 when Israel illegally deported hundreds of Hamas men to Lebanon in 1992, it was one of their
 leaders - hearing that I was travelling to Israel - who offered me Shimon Peres' home telephone
 number from his contact book.

The Israeli's are now re-preaching the lesson that Yizhak Rabin once tried to teach Arafat:
That true Statesmanship might entail the risk of Civil War; that just as the Israeli Government
once had to shoot down the wild men of Irgun, so Arafat may have to liquidate the men
 who want to destroy Israel.

But this is 2001, not 1948. A Palestinian Civil War may be to Israel's advantage - it could
 perhaps choose a new Palestinian leader - but it will be no gain to Arafat and certainly
 not to the Palestinians. In any case, if Israel really wanted to string Arafat to vanquish his
 internal opposition, it would not be bombing and destroying his police stations and security
posts - the very instruments he needs to "crackdown" on Israel's Palestinian enemies.

Arafat knows this all too well. Even when he ran his repulsive little statelet in Lebanon he
killed only those Palestinian militants who personally threatened him. He is a patient man, a '
time' man, a guerrilla leader who knows that a little more delay, another promise, will buy
time in which his enemies can make mistakes. How soon before Sharon's latest "war on
 terror" bathes Israel's hands in Palestinian blood? How soon before the American's realise
 that their adventure in Afghanistan may unravel because of Israel's unrequested support for
Washington's "war on terror"? In Pakistan today, the front-page headlines are of Israeli missiles
on Gaza rather than the fate of Osama bin Laden.

Besides, Arafat knows - even if too many journalists buy the Israeli line - that Israel's "war on
terror" always failed. Sharon waged a "war on terror" in Lebanon in 1982 which ended in a
war crime - the massacre of Palestinian's in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

Since 1970 Israel has used F16's and tanks and missiles on thousands of occasions to attack the
Palestinians in Lebanon - all for its "war on terror". It's been doing the same for months in Gaza
and the West Bank. It doesn't work. The Arabs have lost their fear of the Israeli's and - once
 fear is lost - it can never be reinjected.

Sharon's "war on terror" was thus lost the moment it began. As the next suicide bombings will
prove yet again.

So Arafat will sit it out. He will gamble on a simple equation: That America's anger with him will
eventually be outweighed by America's embarrassment with Sharon, that the very "war on terror"
 in Afghanistan will be endangered by Sharon's "war on terror" in Palestine. Arafat knows that in
the end - Jewish lobby not withstanding - American lives count for more than Israeli lives - the
 only flaw in his argument is the assumption, even if America can ultimately control it's Middle
 Eastern ally, that Israel can control Sharon.