Michael Shaik
The collapse of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has caused a storm of controversy around the world as opinion-makers on left and right have vied with one another to define his life, his career and his "legacy". On January 7, the conservative news magazine the Economist described his stroke as an international tragedy that had cut down in mid-stride "a tough and popular leader, who had come to see the need for compromise with the Palestinians". Head of the Palestinian delegation to Australia Ali Kazak described Sharon as the father of Israel's settlements in the occupied territories, a war criminal and a "disaster for both the Israelis and the Palestinians throughout all his history".
As Sharon is not yet dead and may survive for several years (although in a mentally impaired condition), the sudden outpouring of controversy and impassioned rhetoric provoked by his sudden brain haemorrhage is a testament to the centrality of the Israel-Palestine struggle to contemporary international relations.
In truth, Sharon was neither the father of the settlements nor a peacemaker who sought a compromise with the Palestinians. Though an ardent supporter of Jewish colonisation of the Occupied Territories, his enthusiasm for the settlements was shared by the entire Israeli political establishment, and many more settlements were built by the Labour governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak than during Sharon's term as prime minister. Throughout his career, Sharon's attitude towards the Palestinians has consistently been one of no negotiation and no compromise. Even his much lauded Gaza pull-out was intended to avoid negotiations with the Palestinians.
In October 2004, Sharon's adviser and right-hand man Dov Weissglass explained the meaning of the Gaza withdrawal to the Israeli people. The Disengagement Plan, he assured them, was actually formaldehyde, which had the purpose of freezing the peace process with the Palestinians.
Peace, he noted, was "the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen ... What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
While this statement received extensive coverage in the Israeli media, it went almost unreported in the international media and received no comment from the international community. Even before the Gaza withdrawal began, the US, the European Union and the United Nations were going to extraordinary lengths to reinvent the 20th century's most enduring war criminal as a tough but fair peacemaker.
In March, a host of foreign ministers, senior diplomats and international dignitaries converged on Jerusalem to attend the opening of the city's second Holocaust History Museum, where they were lectured by Sharon on the meaning of the Holocaust. Throughout the carefully scripted ceremony, not one journalist dared to ask those assembled whether they felt comfortable being instructed on the meaning of mass murder by a mass murderer who orchestrated the massacre of more than 2000 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982.
No-one dared to ask why the Holocaust was being commemorated in a different continent to where it happened. No-one dared to ask whether, by reverently applauding Sharon's speech, the dignitaries were implicitly endorsing the demolition of Palestinian houses in suburbs only 10 minutes' drive from the museum.
While the chiefs of Israel's foreign office openly gloated that the guests' attendance expressed their indirect but clear support to Sharon and his Disengagement Plan, any non-Israeli who dared to suggest that Sharon might be exploiting the Holocaust to enlist the international community's de facto support for his solution to Israel's "Palestinian problem" would be immediately condemned as anti-peace, anti-Israel and, by extension, anti-Semitic.
Not everyone, however, has been willing to follow the script and dissenting voices have emerged in the most unlikely of quarters.
In November, ambassadors representing the 25 European countries with missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah submitted a leaked report to the EU warning that Israel is deliberately violating both its "road map" agreement obligations and international law, to make a viable Palestinian state impossible.
The report notes that the completion of Israel's "separation barrier" and the new E1 settlement bloc that will create a new Jewish city "larger than Tel Aviv" to the east of Jerusalem will "complete the isolation of East Jerusalem — the political, commercial and infrastructural centre of Palestinian life" — from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
More ominously still, the report notes that the demolition of Palestinian houses in Jerusalem (which tripled last year) and Israel's discriminatory policies concerning Palestinian residence in Jerusalem are "almost certainly" intended "to reduce the Palestinian population of Jerusalem while exerting efforts to boost the number of Israelis living in the city".
Noting that such policies "risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population of East Jerusalem", the report recommends a formal call upon Israel to cease such activities and proposes that the EU consider ceasing joint activities with Israel in East Jerusalem.
Incredibly, the EU has refused to publish the report, choosing instead to press ahead with plans for closer EU-Israeli cooperation. This aims to go beyond the current EU policy of granting Israeli goods preferential access to European markets, to "a significant measure of economic integration and a deepening political cooperation" based on the understanding that the "EU and Israel share the common values of democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law".
This is the reality of the Sharon legacy: the total abandonment of the Palestinians by the international community. Not a bad trade for the evacuation of a few indefensible settlements and building a new Holocaust museum.
The Palestinians simply have no allies left. All the parties that might have acted as a counterweight to the US's uncritical support for Israel — the UN, the EU, Russia, Egypt and Jordan — have all chosen to ignore the on-the-ground reality of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine in favour of improved relations with the US.
Never in the last 90 years of colonisation and dispossession have the Palestinians been so alone in the world and yet never has global public opinion been so sympathetic to the Palestinians.
This month the provincial government of Sor Trondelag in Norway became the first in Europe to ban the sale of Israeli goods throughout the province in defiance of the EU. The reaction of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was immediate and explicit, warning the Norwegian government of "serious political consequences" should Norway follow Sor Trondelag's example.
Given such pressure, the ban may be overturned, yet Sor Trondelag was also the first place in the world to ban the sale of South African merchandise during Apartheid. This recent move also signals strengthening international support for the Palestinians. Already the word "intifada" has entered into every national language as a synonym for popular resistance to oppression. Already international peace activists have broken ranks with their own governments to stand up, risk their lives and even be killed in solidarity with the Palestinians.
When the US prepared for war with Iraq in 2003, it did so in the face of furious international opposition. Yet as the US and Israel prepare to maintain Israel's nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East by expanding the war into Iran, they do so with the tacit support of the EU and the UN and the resigned acquiescence of a defeated Arab League.
The international right has for a long time understood the ideological and strategic centrality of Palestine to contemporary international relations. Last year, right-wing political and religious organisations sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel in addition to the US$5.5 billion in military and economic aid from the US.
In their struggle for freedom, the Palestinian people are fighting not only for themselves but for all humanity, at the very centre of the global struggle against colonialism, racism and the "new American century". If Palestine and the world are to escape from Sharon's poisonous legacy, we must urgently build an international grassroots campaign in solidarity with the Palestinians.
[Michael Shaik is a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 25, 2006.
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