Sharon Wears Oppressor's Cloak
The Los Angeles Times
April 16, 2002
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Robert Scheer:
What is the fundamental difference between
Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former
is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads
an occupying army.
For those already loosing angry e-mails from their
quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider
the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's
scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a
necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser
Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to
stop.
Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of
neighboring peoples--Croatians, Bosnians and
ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision
of a secure Yugoslavia--as a rationale for
preemptive use of massive military force against
them. An occupied people can get ugly in their
resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas
Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement
away from mayhem while winning political victories.
Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much
blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier,
with the big guns and control of the real estate, that
holds the real keys to reconciliation.
Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace
only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by
former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League
peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it
anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the
end of the Yugoslavia wars.
Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging
war.
Sharon has humiliated President Bush, not only by ignoring his demand for a
withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as
cover for his drive to prevent--forever, if possible--a Palestinian state. How
simple it would be if only the "axis of evil" targeted civilians, but from Saddam
Hussein to Hamas to Sharon, nobody in the Mideast conflagration has a
monopoly on such cruelty.
By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake,
the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level
of suicide bombers.
Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's
forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic
cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves.
The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian
statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water
supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population.
Despite stereotypes, Serbs did not start out as oppressive occupiers any more
than did Israelis; both their peoples suffered terribly during World War II and
sought peace within secure borders. However, the historical insecurity of both
peoples has led them into the role of oppressor, feeding a cycle of resistance
and repression.
This is the opposite of what the idealistic Zionists who founded Israel had in
mind. They always knew that the ultimate test of the new state would not be
merely its ability to survive but rather its ability to survive with democratic
values intact.
Almost 70% of Israel's officer corps in the 1967 Six-Day War had been raised
in the idealism of the kibbutz movement. They deemed justice a universal
right--even for Palestinians.
Of course, an Arab world that long refused to accept and guarantee Israel's
right to exist did much to kill that idealism. Yet Israel's decision to keep the
captured territories has ultimately boomeranged, drastically undermining its
democracy and stability.
"If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future
might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia--two communities bleeding
each other to death for generations," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak this week in an op-ed article. "Alternatively, if we do not disengage from
the Palestinians, Israel might drift toward an apartheid state."
Unfortunately, under the heavy hand of Barak's successor Israel already is an
apartheid state. This may be what Sharon and Arafat prefer to the Camp David
compromise, but it represents the deepest betrayal of the interests of both the
Palestinians and Jews.
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