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Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, march 22 2004 |
5 june 2006
On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, appeared before the U.S. Congress to decry the lack of any "genuine Palestinian partner for peace," with whom Israel could talk.
Although declaring "our deepest desire to build a better future for our region, hand in hand with a Palestinian partner," Olmert warned that Israel cannot "wait forever," If such a partner fails to appear, Israel will move forward to set the borders of Israel vis á vis the Palestinians unilaterally. Olmert received the warmest ovations from the Congress and was promised support from the White House for the plan to unilaterally set Israel's borders, should no Palestinian leaders who satisfy Israel's conditions as "partners for peace" appear.
Olmert's stance should be put in the context of Israel's long standing policy of targeted assassination of Palestinian leaders. For more than thirty years it has been Israel's policy to assassinate or otherwise eliminate popular Palestinian leaders who were independent and had wide trust of the people, while seeking to construct a subservient leadership with whom it could negotiate "peace" on Israel's terms.
In the 1970s, after Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, Israel tried to create the "village leagues," a puppet leadership which Israel could pass off as Palestinian self-government. These pseudo-leaders were resoundingly rejected by the Palestinian people. In 1976 Palestinian municipalities were allowed to elect their own mayors. When pro-PLO candidates swept the elections, Israel sought to assassinate several of them. The mayor of Ramallah lost one leg and the mayor of Nablus both legs in car bombs. In 1982 Israel removed all the elected mayors and replaced them with Israeli military governors.
From the founding of the PLO in 1964 until 1992 Israel refused to talk to the PLO, claiming they were determined to "destroy the state of Israel," even though the PLO had accepted a two state solution by mid-1970s. Prominent leaders of Palestinian organizations were killed in rocket attacks and car bombs. In 1973 a group of Israeli commandos, led by Ehud Barak, (later Prime Minister of Israel) arrived by speedboat in Beirut. Disguised in women's clothes Barak and his men gunned down three top PLO officials in their downtown apartments. Arafat himself escaped assassination only by living constantly on the run, seldom sleeping in the same place on successive nights.
In 1993 Israel announced that it had been meeting secretly with the PLO in Norway and had reached an interim agreement for Palestinian self-government. After signing a Declaration of Principles for this plan in September, the PLO leaders were allowed to return from Tunis to head the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a "peace process" that would lead to the negotiated settlement of the conflict under the Oslo accords. But it soon became apparent that what Arafat and the PLO thought they were doing and what Israel thought they were doing were two very different things. Arafat thought he was an autonomous leader of the Palestinian people parallel to Israel's leaders who could negotiate the details of a two-state solution leading to an independent Palestinian state.
What Israel wanted was to convert the PA into a subservient tool of a permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These territories would be divided into small enclaves of Palestinian population largely cut off from agricultural resources, separated from each other and surrounded by the Israeli military, while the areas of Israeli settlement would be annexed into Israel. The PA leaders could administrate its enclaves under Israel's permanent control. Israel and the U.S. played a continual cat and mouse game with Arafat, occasionally agreeing to negotiate with him and then rejecting him as someone with whom they could "talk," when he failed to accede fully to this plan of permanent colonization.
In September of 2000 a second Intifada (Uprising) broke out after a provocative visit of Ariel Sharon with armed soldiers to the El-Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, in effect laying claim to this central Muslim shrine as belonging to Israel. The Intifada expressed the growing Palestinian frustration with a supposed "peace process" that was revealed as a continual betrayal of their basic demands for dignity and independence. Israel responded with extreme violence, returning to a policy of targeted killing of Palestinian militants and political leaders that had been suspended during the period of supposed peace negotiations. Israel shelled Palestinian police stations and government buildings, bulldozed Palestinian houses and crops to create barren swaths of land, tightening its control over Palestinian population enclaves and reoccupying areas that had been supposedly turned over to Palestinian control.
In 2002 Israel began the construction of a wall that would permanently separate the Palestinian population enclaves from Israel, including a significant number of Israeli settlements built in the West Bank land around east Jerusalem. Far from being built on the Green Line (the truce line of the 1948 war) the wall cut deeply into Palestinian land, to include these settlements and major aquifers in the West Bank. Although Israel denied it, the line of the wall likely represents its plan for final borders which it is ready to unilaterally impose, if no Palestinian "partner" can be "found" to agree to it.
During the Second Intifada Israel renewed a policy of indiscriminate shooting into Palestinian protest crowds, killing and wounding large numbers. From the beginning of the second Intifada (9/29/2000) until May 15, 2006 some 3394 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories by Israeli occupation forces. Among these 233 were targeted killings in which Israel either invaded a Palestinian area or targeted a house or car from the air to assassinate someone seen as a "militant." These targeted assassinations generally result in deaths of by-standers. 353 bystanders have been killed in the course of targeted killings.
The targeted persons include such religious and political leaders as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and Abdul 'Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior political leader of Hamas. Tanya Reinhart, in her article, "Sharon's Legacy in Action," shows that during Sharon's four years in office he pursued an all-out war against Hamas, killing all its first rank military and political leaders.
In January, 2006 the Palestinians startled Israel and the world by overwhelmingly electing Hamas representatives to the Palestinian Legislative Council (76 seats to Fatah's 43). Israel returned to its rhetoric of the 80s, declaring that it would never talk to a Palestinian government run by Hamas unless it renounced armed resistance and accepted Israel's "right to exist." But the Palestinians did not elect Hamas because it rejected a two state solution (which Hamas does reject outright), but because, among other things, they were tired of the corruption of Fatah's leaders, who had made so many compromises with Israel that any genuine two-state solution had eroded to the vanishing point. Hamas leaders were seen as less corrupt, concerned with the daily welfare of increasingly impoverished Palestinians and possessing more spine to defend a real solution that would bring genuinely independent Palestinian state.
Israel and the U.S. seek to isolate Hamas worldwide, denying the Palestinian Authority any international aid and access to funds, thus undermining the fragile remnants of social, health and educational services in the territories. It has stepped up a virtual siege on all the Palestinian territories, turning both Gaza and the other Palestinian regions into open air prisons, which can be invaded at will. In the week of May 18-24 (while I have been visiting the region of Ramallah) there have been 50 incursions of Israeli Occupation Forces into the West Bank and two into the Gaza Strip. 78 Palestinian civilians have been arrested and nine have been killed.
For example, on May 20 the occupation forces assassinated a member of the al-Quds brigade in Gaza City, by launching a missile from a helicopter at the car in which he was traveling. Three other people were killed and four wounded, all from the same family, in a passing car. On May 24 at 2:30 in the afternoon undercover agents dressed as Palestinians came into the center of Ramallah and entered an internet café to arrest a leader of the Al-Aqsa brigade and four others. Young people in the street, discovering what was happening, began to throw stones at the soldiers and to burn the car in which they had come. Fifteen military jeeps quickly drove into the center of town and opened indiscriminate fire on the crowd, wounding 35 (eight under 18) and killing four. Meanwhile check points have been continually tightened around Gaza and between enclaves in the West Bank, making travel and cultural or commercial exchange difficult to impossible.
It is this system of separated Palestinian enclaves, turned into prisons surrounded by Israeli military who invade or bomb at will - enclaves cut off from each other, whose means of daily life have become increasingly restricted and impoverished - which Israel plans to institutionalize permanently. It will do so unilaterally if necessary, if no compliant Palestinians can be founded to give it a fig leaf of legitimacy. Is the rest of the world prepared to stand by and let this happen? Where is that respect for "democracy" which the U.S. claims to champion for the Middle East and the whole world? Where are the national leaders from around the world who reject this brutal and ultimately untenable scheme? Where are those who will demand that the leaders whom the Palestinians have elected be recognized as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people with whom Israel and the rest of the world must deal?
-Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether teaches at the Claremont Graduate University in California and is the co-author of The Wrath of Jonah: the Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
© CounterPunch.org
Although declaring "our deepest desire to build a better future for our region, hand in hand with a Palestinian partner," Olmert warned that Israel cannot "wait forever," If such a partner fails to appear, Israel will move forward to set the borders of Israel vis á vis the Palestinians unilaterally. Olmert received the warmest ovations from the Congress and was promised support from the White House for the plan to unilaterally set Israel's borders, should no Palestinian leaders who satisfy Israel's conditions as "partners for peace" appear.
Olmert's stance should be put in the context of Israel's long standing policy of targeted assassination of Palestinian leaders. For more than thirty years it has been Israel's policy to assassinate or otherwise eliminate popular Palestinian leaders who were independent and had wide trust of the people, while seeking to construct a subservient leadership with whom it could negotiate "peace" on Israel's terms.
In the 1970s, after Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, Israel tried to create the "village leagues," a puppet leadership which Israel could pass off as Palestinian self-government. These pseudo-leaders were resoundingly rejected by the Palestinian people. In 1976 Palestinian municipalities were allowed to elect their own mayors. When pro-PLO candidates swept the elections, Israel sought to assassinate several of them. The mayor of Ramallah lost one leg and the mayor of Nablus both legs in car bombs. In 1982 Israel removed all the elected mayors and replaced them with Israeli military governors.
From the founding of the PLO in 1964 until 1992 Israel refused to talk to the PLO, claiming they were determined to "destroy the state of Israel," even though the PLO had accepted a two state solution by mid-1970s. Prominent leaders of Palestinian organizations were killed in rocket attacks and car bombs. In 1973 a group of Israeli commandos, led by Ehud Barak, (later Prime Minister of Israel) arrived by speedboat in Beirut. Disguised in women's clothes Barak and his men gunned down three top PLO officials in their downtown apartments. Arafat himself escaped assassination only by living constantly on the run, seldom sleeping in the same place on successive nights.
In 1993 Israel announced that it had been meeting secretly with the PLO in Norway and had reached an interim agreement for Palestinian self-government. After signing a Declaration of Principles for this plan in September, the PLO leaders were allowed to return from Tunis to head the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a "peace process" that would lead to the negotiated settlement of the conflict under the Oslo accords. But it soon became apparent that what Arafat and the PLO thought they were doing and what Israel thought they were doing were two very different things. Arafat thought he was an autonomous leader of the Palestinian people parallel to Israel's leaders who could negotiate the details of a two-state solution leading to an independent Palestinian state.
What Israel wanted was to convert the PA into a subservient tool of a permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These territories would be divided into small enclaves of Palestinian population largely cut off from agricultural resources, separated from each other and surrounded by the Israeli military, while the areas of Israeli settlement would be annexed into Israel. The PA leaders could administrate its enclaves under Israel's permanent control. Israel and the U.S. played a continual cat and mouse game with Arafat, occasionally agreeing to negotiate with him and then rejecting him as someone with whom they could "talk," when he failed to accede fully to this plan of permanent colonization.
In September of 2000 a second Intifada (Uprising) broke out after a provocative visit of Ariel Sharon with armed soldiers to the El-Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, in effect laying claim to this central Muslim shrine as belonging to Israel. The Intifada expressed the growing Palestinian frustration with a supposed "peace process" that was revealed as a continual betrayal of their basic demands for dignity and independence. Israel responded with extreme violence, returning to a policy of targeted killing of Palestinian militants and political leaders that had been suspended during the period of supposed peace negotiations. Israel shelled Palestinian police stations and government buildings, bulldozed Palestinian houses and crops to create barren swaths of land, tightening its control over Palestinian population enclaves and reoccupying areas that had been supposedly turned over to Palestinian control.
In 2002 Israel began the construction of a wall that would permanently separate the Palestinian population enclaves from Israel, including a significant number of Israeli settlements built in the West Bank land around east Jerusalem. Far from being built on the Green Line (the truce line of the 1948 war) the wall cut deeply into Palestinian land, to include these settlements and major aquifers in the West Bank. Although Israel denied it, the line of the wall likely represents its plan for final borders which it is ready to unilaterally impose, if no Palestinian "partner" can be "found" to agree to it.
During the Second Intifada Israel renewed a policy of indiscriminate shooting into Palestinian protest crowds, killing and wounding large numbers. From the beginning of the second Intifada (9/29/2000) until May 15, 2006 some 3394 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories by Israeli occupation forces. Among these 233 were targeted killings in which Israel either invaded a Palestinian area or targeted a house or car from the air to assassinate someone seen as a "militant." These targeted assassinations generally result in deaths of by-standers. 353 bystanders have been killed in the course of targeted killings.
The targeted persons include such religious and political leaders as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and Abdul 'Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior political leader of Hamas. Tanya Reinhart, in her article, "Sharon's Legacy in Action," shows that during Sharon's four years in office he pursued an all-out war against Hamas, killing all its first rank military and political leaders.
In January, 2006 the Palestinians startled Israel and the world by overwhelmingly electing Hamas representatives to the Palestinian Legislative Council (76 seats to Fatah's 43). Israel returned to its rhetoric of the 80s, declaring that it would never talk to a Palestinian government run by Hamas unless it renounced armed resistance and accepted Israel's "right to exist." But the Palestinians did not elect Hamas because it rejected a two state solution (which Hamas does reject outright), but because, among other things, they were tired of the corruption of Fatah's leaders, who had made so many compromises with Israel that any genuine two-state solution had eroded to the vanishing point. Hamas leaders were seen as less corrupt, concerned with the daily welfare of increasingly impoverished Palestinians and possessing more spine to defend a real solution that would bring genuinely independent Palestinian state.
Israel and the U.S. seek to isolate Hamas worldwide, denying the Palestinian Authority any international aid and access to funds, thus undermining the fragile remnants of social, health and educational services in the territories. It has stepped up a virtual siege on all the Palestinian territories, turning both Gaza and the other Palestinian regions into open air prisons, which can be invaded at will. In the week of May 18-24 (while I have been visiting the region of Ramallah) there have been 50 incursions of Israeli Occupation Forces into the West Bank and two into the Gaza Strip. 78 Palestinian civilians have been arrested and nine have been killed.
For example, on May 20 the occupation forces assassinated a member of the al-Quds brigade in Gaza City, by launching a missile from a helicopter at the car in which he was traveling. Three other people were killed and four wounded, all from the same family, in a passing car. On May 24 at 2:30 in the afternoon undercover agents dressed as Palestinians came into the center of Ramallah and entered an internet café to arrest a leader of the Al-Aqsa brigade and four others. Young people in the street, discovering what was happening, began to throw stones at the soldiers and to burn the car in which they had come. Fifteen military jeeps quickly drove into the center of town and opened indiscriminate fire on the crowd, wounding 35 (eight under 18) and killing four. Meanwhile check points have been continually tightened around Gaza and between enclaves in the West Bank, making travel and cultural or commercial exchange difficult to impossible.
It is this system of separated Palestinian enclaves, turned into prisons surrounded by Israeli military who invade or bomb at will - enclaves cut off from each other, whose means of daily life have become increasingly restricted and impoverished - which Israel plans to institutionalize permanently. It will do so unilaterally if necessary, if no compliant Palestinians can be founded to give it a fig leaf of legitimacy. Is the rest of the world prepared to stand by and let this happen? Where is that respect for "democracy" which the U.S. claims to champion for the Middle East and the whole world? Where are the national leaders from around the world who reject this brutal and ultimately untenable scheme? Where are those who will demand that the leaders whom the Palestinians have elected be recognized as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people with whom Israel and the rest of the world must deal?
-Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether teaches at the Claremont Graduate University in California and is the co-author of The Wrath of Jonah: the Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
© CounterPunch.org
25 mar 2005
More than 20,000 Hamas supporters attended a Friday rally in the soccer stadium of the West Bank city of Nablus to commemorate the anniversary of the assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Participants held large posters of the group's spiritual leader, who was killed by an Israeli army missile a year ago.
A Hamas West Bank leader, Sheikh Hassan Yussef told Reuters that the event was a campaign rally and another battle in the group's campaign of resistance against the Israeli occupation.
The Friday rally is considered the largest gathering in the Palestinian territories since the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
It represents a show of the popular strength that Hamas enjoys, especially on the eve of Palestinian local and legislative elections, which the Islamic movement has decided to join.
Participants held large posters of the group's spiritual leader, who was killed by an Israeli army missile a year ago.
A Hamas West Bank leader, Sheikh Hassan Yussef told Reuters that the event was a campaign rally and another battle in the group's campaign of resistance against the Israeli occupation.
The Friday rally is considered the largest gathering in the Palestinian territories since the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
It represents a show of the popular strength that Hamas enjoys, especially on the eve of Palestinian local and legislative elections, which the Islamic movement has decided to join.
23 mar 2005
At least 5000 members and supporters of Hamas participated on Monday in a ceremony commemorating Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the wheelchair bound spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by the Israeli army March 22, 2004.
The procession, marched through the streets of Rafidia, west of Nablus, on Tuesday afternoon, headed by several Hamas leaders, such as Dr. Mohammad Ghazal, Sheik Hamid Al-Betawi, Sheikh Ahmad Ali, and Sheikh Yasser Mansour.
Representatives and members of several Palestinian factions participated in the memoriam of Sheikh Yassin, in additional to dozens of journalists, Folklore bans, and handicapped residents.
Dozens of women also marched and chanted slogans against the Israeli occupation and the assassinations.
Sheikh Yasser Mansour, one of Hamas leader in Nablus , said that the movement will not accept any forced solutions, and demanded the immediate unconditional release of the Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
Also, Sheikh Mansour added that Israeli should dismantle the Separation Wall and the settlements which he described as “cancerous cells" in the Palestinian territories.
Sheikh Yassin was assassinated when Israeli helicopters fired several missiles at his car, killing him and nine of his companions in Gaza . Dozens of by-standers were injured including two of his sons who were with him at the time of the attack.
The procession, marched through the streets of Rafidia, west of Nablus, on Tuesday afternoon, headed by several Hamas leaders, such as Dr. Mohammad Ghazal, Sheik Hamid Al-Betawi, Sheikh Ahmad Ali, and Sheikh Yasser Mansour.
Representatives and members of several Palestinian factions participated in the memoriam of Sheikh Yassin, in additional to dozens of journalists, Folklore bans, and handicapped residents.
Dozens of women also marched and chanted slogans against the Israeli occupation and the assassinations.
Sheikh Yasser Mansour, one of Hamas leader in Nablus , said that the movement will not accept any forced solutions, and demanded the immediate unconditional release of the Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
Also, Sheikh Mansour added that Israeli should dismantle the Separation Wall and the settlements which he described as “cancerous cells" in the Palestinian territories.
Sheikh Yassin was assassinated when Israeli helicopters fired several missiles at his car, killing him and nine of his companions in Gaza . Dozens of by-standers were injured including two of his sons who were with him at the time of the attack.
7 feb 2005
Palestinian sentenced to 20 years in Prison
Palestinian sentenced to 20 years for “attempting to avenge the assassination of Yassin"
The Israeli central court in Ten Aviv sentenced of Monday a Palestinian to twenty years after convicting him of attacking three Israelis with an axe last year in Ramat Gan , after receiving news about the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas.
The Israeli prosecution claimed that Abdul-Rahim Ibrahim, 20, attacked several Israelis on March 22 nd , 2004, and that he was arrested by the Israeli police.
Ibrahim was charged at first of attempted murder, membership in a terrorist organization, and illegal enter into Israel, but the prosecution changed the charges later on to deliberately causing physical injuries and illegal entry to Israel .
Israeli soldiers demolished the home of Abdul-Rahim after he was arrested.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the wheelchair bound spiritual leader of Hamas, was assassinated in March, 22, 2004, as he left a mosque where he was praying for the Morning Prayer.
Palestinian sentenced to 20 years for “attempting to avenge the assassination of Yassin"
The Israeli central court in Ten Aviv sentenced of Monday a Palestinian to twenty years after convicting him of attacking three Israelis with an axe last year in Ramat Gan , after receiving news about the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas.
The Israeli prosecution claimed that Abdul-Rahim Ibrahim, 20, attacked several Israelis on March 22 nd , 2004, and that he was arrested by the Israeli police.
Ibrahim was charged at first of attempted murder, membership in a terrorist organization, and illegal enter into Israel, but the prosecution changed the charges later on to deliberately causing physical injuries and illegal entry to Israel .
Israeli soldiers demolished the home of Abdul-Rahim after he was arrested.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the wheelchair bound spiritual leader of Hamas, was assassinated in March, 22, 2004, as he left a mosque where he was praying for the Morning Prayer.
29 mar 2004
by NEVE GORDON
A few hours after the Israeli military assassinated Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, I entered the classroom in order to teach my politics of human rights course. Everyone had already heard about the extra-judicial execution, so I asked my students whether they felt safer. The response was unanimous: they all felt more vulnerable.
A day later, Ephraim Halevy, former director of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, stated on Israeli television that in the near future the terrorist threat would certainly increase. It would take a while, he argued, before the situation would return to the level it had been prior to the assassination and that in the long run the threat was unlikely to decrease as a result of the execution.
Considering that Yassin’s assassination will exacerbate the violence in the region and thus further endanger Israeli citizens, one might ask why the government authorized the operation.
Israeli commentator Oded Granot seems to have an answer.
A day following the assassination, he noted that the Hamas and Fatah (the largest party within the Palestinian Authority) were on the verge of reaching a cooperation agreement regarding the distribution of authority in the Gaza Strip. The two major political factions in the Strip wanted to ensure that there would be no internal strife and that joint control would be assumed over the region if Prime Minister Sharon went ahead with his plan to dismantle the Jewish settlements and withdraw Israel’s troops.
Israeli officials, Granot added, feared that if such an agreement was signed then the Bush Administration would veto all Hamas assassinations. Israel consequently decided not to take any chances and killed Yassin.
Even if Granot is right, the question regarding the Israeli government’s objective still stands.
One explanation is based on the assumption that Sharon actually intends to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and that he killed Yassin in order to advance this end. This view is informed by three major hypotheses.
First, "Sharon does not want to replicate his predecessor’s mistake." Unlike Israel’s rapid withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which many conceived as an act of defeat and cowardice, Sharon wants to create the impression that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is in no way a result of pressure applied by the Hamas. Accordingly, the assassination is both a symbolic act and an attempt to weaken Hamas’s infrastructure. One may accordingly expect that in the coming months the Israeli military will accelerate its operations in the Gaza Strip.
Second, Sharon hopes that Yassin’s assassination will help him garner support within his own Likud party, both because his popularity is waning and because many of allies are against any withdrawal from Gaza. The execution of the Hamas leader, whose group is responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths, demonstrates to Sharon’s political partners that he is still "attuned to Israel’s security needs and will not hesitate to use all the means necessary to ensure it." The new Sharon is still the old Sharon.
Finally, according to this explanation the attack’s objective was to create chaos in the Gaza Strip so that following the withdrawal internal strife between the Palestinian factions would erupt.
Those who think that Sharon authorized Yassin’s assassination in order to abandon his withdrawal proposal also employ this last point. Sharon, according to this explanation, hopes to use the chaos he has engendered and the violent reaction that will surely follow as a pretence for keeping Israeli troops and settlements in the Strip.
While only the future will tell which explanation is more accurate, Yassin’s assassination has a number of direct effects.
It will certainly lead to a series of bloody attacks against targets within Israel and perhaps even abroad. While the Hamas’s ability to strike against Israelis has in no way been jeopardized, the perpetrators’ will to carry out attacks is surely much greater than it was before the execution.
In addition, the assassination has widely broadened the frontiers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by accentuating its religious dimension. Muslims from Jakarta to Cairo have vowed to avenge the cleric’s death.
While these two effects have been mentioned in the media, commentators have ignored that the Israeli attack will likely deal a harsh blow to the recent emergence of a Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. The three-and-a-half year-old Palestinian uprising, known as the Intifada, began changing its character about two months ago: from a struggle based on violent resistance led by relatively small groups of militants to a massive non-violent grassroots movement.
The impetus for this mobilization is the rapid erection of the separation wall. The protesters use the same techniques developed by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, with hundreds of demonstrators standing or lying in front of bulldozers, chanting songs and waving flags. Although the military has been ordered to disperse the protesters, using tear gas, clubs, and, at times, even bullets, every day in the past weeks more and more Palestinians (alongside a few Israelis and internationals) have joined the ranks. For a moment it appeared that the Palestinians had adopted a tenable strategy which could actually threaten Israel’s occupation.
Yassin’s assassination will probably weaken the non-violent resistance and empower those who favor violent retaliation against Israel. Thus, ironically, Israel’s operation has actually strengthened the legitimacy of Hamas’s military wing.
NEVE GORDON teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and can be reached at [email protected].
A different version of this article appeared in In These Times.
A few hours after the Israeli military assassinated Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, I entered the classroom in order to teach my politics of human rights course. Everyone had already heard about the extra-judicial execution, so I asked my students whether they felt safer. The response was unanimous: they all felt more vulnerable.
A day later, Ephraim Halevy, former director of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, stated on Israeli television that in the near future the terrorist threat would certainly increase. It would take a while, he argued, before the situation would return to the level it had been prior to the assassination and that in the long run the threat was unlikely to decrease as a result of the execution.
Considering that Yassin’s assassination will exacerbate the violence in the region and thus further endanger Israeli citizens, one might ask why the government authorized the operation.
Israeli commentator Oded Granot seems to have an answer.
A day following the assassination, he noted that the Hamas and Fatah (the largest party within the Palestinian Authority) were on the verge of reaching a cooperation agreement regarding the distribution of authority in the Gaza Strip. The two major political factions in the Strip wanted to ensure that there would be no internal strife and that joint control would be assumed over the region if Prime Minister Sharon went ahead with his plan to dismantle the Jewish settlements and withdraw Israel’s troops.
Israeli officials, Granot added, feared that if such an agreement was signed then the Bush Administration would veto all Hamas assassinations. Israel consequently decided not to take any chances and killed Yassin.
Even if Granot is right, the question regarding the Israeli government’s objective still stands.
One explanation is based on the assumption that Sharon actually intends to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and that he killed Yassin in order to advance this end. This view is informed by three major hypotheses.
First, "Sharon does not want to replicate his predecessor’s mistake." Unlike Israel’s rapid withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which many conceived as an act of defeat and cowardice, Sharon wants to create the impression that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is in no way a result of pressure applied by the Hamas. Accordingly, the assassination is both a symbolic act and an attempt to weaken Hamas’s infrastructure. One may accordingly expect that in the coming months the Israeli military will accelerate its operations in the Gaza Strip.
Second, Sharon hopes that Yassin’s assassination will help him garner support within his own Likud party, both because his popularity is waning and because many of allies are against any withdrawal from Gaza. The execution of the Hamas leader, whose group is responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths, demonstrates to Sharon’s political partners that he is still "attuned to Israel’s security needs and will not hesitate to use all the means necessary to ensure it." The new Sharon is still the old Sharon.
Finally, according to this explanation the attack’s objective was to create chaos in the Gaza Strip so that following the withdrawal internal strife between the Palestinian factions would erupt.
Those who think that Sharon authorized Yassin’s assassination in order to abandon his withdrawal proposal also employ this last point. Sharon, according to this explanation, hopes to use the chaos he has engendered and the violent reaction that will surely follow as a pretence for keeping Israeli troops and settlements in the Strip.
While only the future will tell which explanation is more accurate, Yassin’s assassination has a number of direct effects.
It will certainly lead to a series of bloody attacks against targets within Israel and perhaps even abroad. While the Hamas’s ability to strike against Israelis has in no way been jeopardized, the perpetrators’ will to carry out attacks is surely much greater than it was before the execution.
In addition, the assassination has widely broadened the frontiers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by accentuating its religious dimension. Muslims from Jakarta to Cairo have vowed to avenge the cleric’s death.
While these two effects have been mentioned in the media, commentators have ignored that the Israeli attack will likely deal a harsh blow to the recent emergence of a Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. The three-and-a-half year-old Palestinian uprising, known as the Intifada, began changing its character about two months ago: from a struggle based on violent resistance led by relatively small groups of militants to a massive non-violent grassroots movement.
The impetus for this mobilization is the rapid erection of the separation wall. The protesters use the same techniques developed by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, with hundreds of demonstrators standing or lying in front of bulldozers, chanting songs and waving flags. Although the military has been ordered to disperse the protesters, using tear gas, clubs, and, at times, even bullets, every day in the past weeks more and more Palestinians (alongside a few Israelis and internationals) have joined the ranks. For a moment it appeared that the Palestinians had adopted a tenable strategy which could actually threaten Israel’s occupation.
Yassin’s assassination will probably weaken the non-violent resistance and empower those who favor violent retaliation against Israel. Thus, ironically, Israel’s operation has actually strengthened the legitimacy of Hamas’s military wing.
NEVE GORDON teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and can be reached at [email protected].
A different version of this article appeared in In These Times.
