25.03.2004

Sharon boosts islamists

Ariel Sharon’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the ‘spiritual leader’ and founder of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), is an incredible piece of provocation. Nothing could be more deliberately calculated to stir up more hatred than this action. Nothing could be more calculated to recruit more young Palestinians to sacrifice their lives with the suicide-belt, while taking with them a brace of Israelis. Nothing could be more calculated to humiliate and embitter those who aspire to Palestinian self-determination.

Indeed, this was the whole point of the assassination, which is only the latest in a whole series of so-called ‘targeted killings’ (political murders) by Israel of its opponents. Up to 200,000 Palestinians turned out to the sheikh’s funeral, and many thousands also marched in protest in Arab capitals around the region. And rightly so! All democrats, socialists and defenders of the rights of the Palestinian people should make their voices heard in protest against this grotesque and murderous act of national oppression, which can only breed more bloodshed and destruction in the region.

In the midst of international condemnation of its actions, the Sharon government has now brazenly announced that it intends to wipe out the entire Hamas leadership - a promise that is virtually impossible to carry out, but will no doubt bring with it a further ratcheting up of the stakes of atrocity and counter-atrocity. If it was possible a few years ago to theorise that Hamas existed to aid the political career of Ariel Sharon, with its ubiquitous suicide bombings of Israeli civilians; many may now begin to think that Sharon may also be seeking to give the credibility and career of Osama bin Laden a new lease of life. From the standpoint of the current world situation, considered with any degree of rationality, this will obviously be the impact of the murder of a man who, after all, had an enormous following among Palestinians as a religious and political leader.

Yassin, a 66-year-old, semi-blind quadriplegic, unable to move around freely, was assassinated in his wheelchair while being pushed to the local mosque by bodyguards. He was killed by an unmanned Israeli drone, which fired three rockets; he died instantly, along with at least six others, while many more, including two of his sons, were injured. Hamas itself, which was founded by Sheikh Yassin in the 1980s, immediately threatened bloody revenge against the Israelis: “You have now opened the gates of hell,” their statement taunts Sharon. Hamas reportedly is now threatening to take their attacks against Israelis and Israeli interests, as well as the citizens and interests of the United States which backs Israel to the hilt, around the world. This is something that it has eschewed until now, confining itself to armed struggle (and suicide bombings) within the theatre of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The threat may appear unlikely - Hamas is not al Qa’eda and indeed had condemned the Madrid bombings earlier this month. Though if anything appears calculated to provoke some kind of meeting of minds between these very different strands of political islam, the latest Israeli action could be it.

Coming such a short time after the trauma of the attacks in Madrid - which was followed by the collapse of the conservative Popular Party government in Spain and the election of a Socialist Party administration that has now announced its intentions to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq - Sharon’s action hardly fits in with the sensibilities of European, and indeed American, capital. Not only will it act as a red rag to the Palestinian masses, but it will inevitably inflame sentiments among both sunni and shia Iraqis - the American, and in part the British, occupiers have been having a hard time holding back a nationalist insurgency that appears to owe much to some kind of islamist sentiments. Sharon tries to paint his action as part of the imperialist ‘war on terrorism’ and to paint Yassin as some sort of Osama bin Laden-type figure, but from the point of view of the western imperialists, this action can only politically strengthen the real bin Laden and al Qa’eda itself.

Knowing this very well, Jack Straw rushed to condemn the killing of Sheikh Yassin as “unnecessary” and “unlawful”. Blair himself added his own voice to the condemnation. The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said pretty well the same thing, as did the EU foreign ministers jointly in a statement issued from Brussels. The Bush administration, however, was visibly in disarray over this: when the news broke, national security adviser Condoleeza Rice rushed out a statement that echoed Sharon: “Let’s remember that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and that Sheik Yassin has himself, personally, we believe, been involved in terrorist planning.” However, within a few hours, the White House was “deeply concerned” and “deeply troubled” by this action, which “increases tension and doesn’t help our efforts to resume progress towards peace”, according to a state department spokesman acting on behalf of Colin Powell.

Sharon’s government was itself split over the wisdom of this action, with at least two cabinet ministers voting against the decision to murder Yassin. Sharon seems to regard himself as a free agent these days - with the Bush administration, having originally set much store by its ‘road map’ for the Israel/Palestine question, in trouble over Iraq. The US originally, and fatuously, believed that subjugating Iraq would give it a unique opportunity to ‘redraw the political map of the Middle East’ and impose acceptance of a US puppet ‘provisional’ state on the Palestinians as a supposed solution to the national conflict.

But the quagmire in Iraq has upset all these calculations. Bush’s favoured Palestinian stooge, Abu Mazen, was humiliated by Sharon and Hamas, as the US president’s leverage on the situation grew weaker after the Iraq war - eventually he was forced out. And, in the absence of any coherent US initiative in the region, Sharon has moved to implement his ‘solution’, discarding some Gaza Strip settlements in favour of domination by remote-controlled firepower, presumably (Gaza being the least useful part of the occupied territories for the purposes of Israeli settlement). At the same time he has built a ‘security wall’ on the West Bank as a means to annex, de facto if not de jure, large sections of the most valuable land to Israel, leaving the Palestinian authority with a shrunken, chopped up piece of territory that no-one can even pretend to be minimally viable.

Sharon’s aim is the crushing of all Palestinian national aspirations, the breaking of Palestinian will. Failing that, he aims to keep the conflict going and exacerbate it so as to unite Israelis behind himself as the only leader who can run a country in a state of siege from ‘terrorists’. Better to prepare in this way for a barbaric ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem at some time in the future, which despite the ratcheting up of islamophobia in the west in recent years would still cause major political problems to Israel’s imperialist allies, were it to be attempted at the moment. The casting of Hamas as akin to al Qa’eda, the brazenness of the killing of Sheikh Yassin in the aftermath of Madrid, may well be a means to an end to Sharon - to create conditions whereby Palestinians can be associated in the western popular mind with al Qa’eda, giving the opportunity to Sharon to do his very worst with impunity.

The international left must combat this, by seeking ways to demonstrate in practice the real solution to the national conflict in Palestine - a struggle, led by the working class, for consistent democracy: fighting from below for the right to self-determination of both peoples. This programme - two states for two peoples - is so powerful in its objective logic that it is more than capable of defeating the reactionary ideologies of both Zionism and islamism and thwarting all the imperialists’ ‘road map’ scheming.