watto
22.04.02, 17:02
"With a green light from the US, all Israel now needed was the pretext.
Predictably it escalated the assassinations of Palestinian leaders following
each lull in Palestinian terrorist attacks. "After the destruction of the
houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued to act with
restraint," Shulamith Aloni of Israel's Meretz party observed. "Sharon and his
army minister, apparently fearing that they would have to return to the
negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated Raad Karmi.
They knew that there would be a response, and that we would pay the price in
the blood of our citizens." (Yediot Aharonot, 18 January 2002) Indeed, Israel
desperately sought this sanguinary response. Once the Palestinian terrorist
attacks crossed the desired threshold, Sharon was able to declare war and
proceed to annihilate the basically defenseless civilian Palestinian population.
Only the willfully blind can miss noticing that Israel's current invasion of
the West Bank is an exact replay of the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. To
crush the Palestinians' goal of an independent state alongside Israel - the
PLO's "peace offensive" - Israel laid plans in August 1981 to invade Lebanon.
In order to launch the invasion, however, it needed the green light from the
Reagan administration and a pretext. Much to its chagrin and despite multiple
provocations, Israel was unable to elicit a Palestinian attack on its northern
border. It accordingly escalated the air assaults on southern Lebanon and
after a particularly murderous attack that left two hundred civilians dead
(including 60 occupants of a Palestinian children's hospital), the PLO finally
retaliated killing one Israeli. With the pretext in hand and a green light now
forthcoming from the Reagan administration, Israel invaded. Using the same
slogan of "rooting out Palestinian terror," Israel proceeded to massacre a
defenseless population, killing some 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, almost
all civilians."
www.normanfinkelstein.com/id122.htm
