Thursday, June 12, 2003

Sharon's folly

PV Vivekanand

PEOPLE LIKE Ariel Sharon would never realise that there is a legitimate cause behind the Palestinian struggle and that without addressing this cause no Israeli would ever be able to sleep in peace. They believe that the Palestinians should never demand anything and should accept what Israel says at face value and simply fall in line with whatever the occupiers of their land have in mind for them. There is no other go, and Sharon is determined to force them into that situation by hook or crook.
He would resort to lies and blatant deception if that is what would serve his purpose of subjugating the Palestinians into swallowing whatever conditions Israel attaches to "allowing" them to live in their ancestral land.
That is the picture that emerged this week after Sharon deliberately touched off a fierce wave of Palestinian resistance attacks by ordering an attempt to assassianate a prominent leader of the Hamas movement, Abdul Aziz Al Rantisi.
Sharon, who, only less than a week earlier, had proclaimed that he was ready to do what it takes to make peace and urged his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas to do the same, showed that his words were hollow by ordering the attack in violation of the pledge he made not to continue "targeted killings" of Palestinian activists.
Surely, Sharon would have known that the attack on Rantisi would seriously set back Abbas's efforts to arrange a suspension of armed resistance attacks by groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Sharon was actually sending a message to all Palestinians that he had no intention of making peace through dialogue and negotiations and would only want to choke the Palestinians into swallowing his version of Palestinian-Israeli co-existence in the land of Palestine.
Emotions and fury are running high in Palestine, wiping out all hopes for an early advance for a negotiated peace process. But then that is what Sharon wanted, and it is high time the world, particularly the US, realised the truth and behaved forcefully and with determination to ensure that the Palestinians are not denied justice. This would need unprecedented American pressure on Israel, and if Washington is not ready to apply that pressure then it should let the rest of the world do so.