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17.09.03, 19:26
Why is Israel threatening to murder Arafat?
By the Editorial Board
16 September 2003
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The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has publicly declared
its intention to murder Yasser Arafat, the popularly elected president of the
Palestinian National Authority.
This announcement was not an emotional outburst by some out-of-control
cabinet member. It was delivered by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, Sharon’s closest ally and a man frequently mentioned as his likely
successor. The threat was deliberate and calculated to serve definite
political purposes.
The magnitude of this proposed crime deserves careful consideration. Arafat
has been a major figure on the world stage for some 35 years. Whatever one
thinks of his politics—and the World Socialist Web Site certainly differs
with his nationalist outlook—he is unquestionably identified with the
national strivings of the Palestinian people, to which he has devoted his
entire adult life.
This is a man who just a decade ago was invited to the White House to sign an
ill-fated peace treaty and—when it served the purposes of the major powers—
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
What is the purpose of publicly announcing plans for assassinating such a
person?
The Israeli government claims that the murder of Arafat is necessary because
the 74-year-old Palestinian president is an intolerable “obstacle to the
process of reconciliation and peace.” This from a regime that has engaged in
ceaseless provocations, from the assassination of leading Palestinians to
such collective punishments as the demolition of housing and the lockdown of
entire towns, as well as the bombing of crowded residential neighborhoods and
the uninterrupted seizure of Palestinian land.
The complaint of the Sharon government boils down to Arafat’s having failed
to function as its puppet and balking at launching a civil war against his
own people.
There is, however, a deeper political logic to this depraved call for murder.
The Israeli government is pursuing a definite political strategy that is
aimed at scuttling the Palestinian national movement, annexing as much land
in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip as possible and making the formation
of a Palestinian state impossible.
It is pursuing a well-worn tactic to a qualitatively new level—staging a
deliberate provocation with the intent of provoking a violent reaction that
can in turn be used to justify further Israeli armed aggression and expansion.
The Sharon government shrugs off warnings that Arafat’s killing would provoke
popular upheavals and even more acts of terrorism within Israel, because it
welcomes such a confrontation. It sees an eruption of popular anger among the
Palestinians as an opportunity to put an end to any possibility of a
negotiated settlement and to realize its long-held aim of creating a “greater
Israel” through the forced expulsion of millions of Palestinians from the
occupied territories.
This is a regime that specializes in provocations and thrives upon violence.
Sharon himself, it should be recalled, orchestrated the political campaign
that led to one of his right-wing followers assassinating former Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing the accord with Arafat. In September 2000,
he deliberately ignited the last three years of bloodletting with his visit
to the Temple Mount in a successful attempt to instigate a confrontation and
make any discussion of a peaceful settlement between Israel and the
Palestinians impossible.
The murder of Arafat would represent the ultimate provocation, calculated to
provoke a violent response that the Israeli regime would use as a
justification for a full-scale assault on the Palestinian people.
There is also an element of psychological warfare in this threat. It is
designed to send a message to the Palestinian people: resistance is futile.
It is meant to impress upon a population already subjected to occupation,
roadblocks, constant harassment and humiliation that it is isolated,
defenseless and without hope. The Israeli government is saying to its victims
that there is no crime that it cannot commit against them, and no one can
stop it.
This line of thinking was spelt out by the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s largest
circulation English-language daily, in an editorial entitled simply “Kill
Arafat,” published September 11. In language that can only be described as
Hitlerian, the newspaper dismisses warnings that such an assassination will
ignite upheavals throughout the occupied Palestinian territories and the
entire Middle East:
“Arafat’s death at Israel’s hands would not radicalize Arab opposition to
Israel; just the opposite. The current jihad against us is being fueled by
the perception that Israel is blocked from taking decisive action to defend
itself.... Killing Arafat, more than any other act, would demonstrate that
the tool of terror is unacceptable, even against Israel, even in the name of
a Palestinian state.”
It is worthwhile considering the ideology that gives rise to the Jerusalem
Post’s stunning conclusion that the murder of an elected president is a means
of demonstrating that “the tool of terror is unacceptable.” This language
reeks of fascism and exposes the extent to which the Israeli right has
absorbed the outlook of the Nazis.
Present-day Zionism and the Israeli state both justify their existence by
invoking the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. The peculiar
impact that this ideological justification has had upon the behavior and
psychology of the Israeli state was noted by the Israeli historian Tom Segev,
in his book The Seventh Million: the Israelis and the Holocaust:
“The assumption is that the Holocaust requires the existence of a strong
Israel and that the failure of the world to save the Jewish people during the
Second World War disqualifies it from reminding Israel of moral imperatives,
including respect for human rights. The sense that the Holocaust was
inevitable, in accordance with Zionist ideology, and the identification with
the Jew as a victim are liable to lead Israelis to conclude that their
existence depends solely on military power...”
The Jerusalem Post “Kill Arafat” editorial provides a particularly grotesque
expression of this tendency described by Segev. It states: “The world will
not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and
Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly as possible, while minimizing
collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill
Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative.”
There is a murderous logic to this conception that the Holocaust was
inevitable, and that the Nazis were merely an example of how the world works.
Among right-wing elements of Israel’s founding generation like Sharon, is the
idea that something can be learned from the crimes of the Nazis—principally,
that anything is possible provided one employs sufficient violence.
These layers explicitly rejected the universalist, humanitarian, liberal as
well as socialist ideals with which the Jewish people had been identified for
generations, and which made them a target for the extreme right. Embracing an
ideology of ethnic and religious nationalism, they found certain elements of
the Nazi outlook deeply attractive.
Compounding the historic tragedy of the Holocaust, the Israeli state that
claimed legitimacy as a response to the crimes of the Nazis has adopted
methods that echo those of the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps.
