Stop Sharon: Israel's leader has gone too far
Leader
Friday March 15, 2002
The Guardian
It is said that this week's Israeli incursions into the Palestinian
areas represent the country's biggest military operation for 20
years. This is an allusion to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The
same man who is forever associated with the notorious attacks
on the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut at that time is also
behind the ongoing assaults on the refugee camps in the West
Bank and Gaza: Ariel Sharon. And his conduct now suggests
that he has learned little in the intervening period. Mr Sharon
always goes too far, always overreacts, always disregards the
consequences (and frequently the legality) of his actions; he
never looks beyond the short term.
He is running his country like
a platoon lieutenant ordered to pacify an enemy position.
Attaining that immediate objective appears to be all that matters
to him; he cannot see and seems not to comprehend the bigger
picture. Thus is he always surprised when, having won his
skirmish in habitually brutal fashion, he finds yet more
opponents waiting for him the next day, and the next. He has no
plan for tomorrow. But Mr Sharon knows, better than most, how
to turn today into a living hell.
That there are rights and wrongs on both sides of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a truism. But chief among the
wrongs, perpetrated by both, is the constant, constantly futile
resort to violence. There is no justification, no defence and no
mitigating factor powerful enough to excuse the depredations of
Palestinian suicide bombers in Israeli restaurants, discos and
other public places. There is no cause on earth that can
rightfully countenance the heinously immoral, murderously
deliberate targeting of mothers and their babies in Beit Israel in
west Jerusalem. There can be no legitimacy, no honour and no
lasting security for a Palestinian state founded on such gross
disregard for basic human decency.
In similar vein, however, there is no tenable justification, moral,
political or military, for Mr Sharon's armoured offensive into
heavily populated civilian areas of the Occupied Territories. Mr
Sharon has sent his tanks (and British-made armour) into
Ramallah, Palestine's de facto capital; they should get out
immediately, not in phases. Mr Sharon has ordered
indiscriminate roundups of Palestinian men, corralling and
herding them, humiliating them and writing numbers on their
arms. That such things should be done in the name of the
Jewish people, of all peoples, is as stunning as it is shameful.
Mr Sharon sends his most advanced, American-supplied, F-16s
to bomb and destroy the headquarters, infrastructure and
administration, much of it funded by the European Union, of the
Palestinian Authority. Yet even while he hacks at the remaining
bloodied, screaming sinews of Palestinian statehood, he has the
nerve to demand that Yasser Arafat exercise greater control.
For sure, Israel has suffered, and is suffering, terribly. For sure,
it has a right of legitimate self-defence. That is guaranteed by
the planet's most powerful country. But this week, as 20 years
ago, as so often in the past 12 months, Mr Sharon has gone too
far. He is beyond the pale. And he must be stopped. His Labour
defence minister tried to rein him in this week. Now, stopping Mr
Sharon, enforcing a total Israeli pullback and implementing a
ceasefire must be the top priority for the US envoy, Anthony
Zinni. For Israel's prime minister is no twisted teenage bomber
blinded by bloodshed, misery and vengeance. He is a head of
government. And of heads of government, far better is expected.
Mr Sharon's actions, now as in the past, reveal him as an
enemy to peace and to his own people.
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