The real aim of “Operation Defensive Shield” was not to “destroy the infrastructure ofterrorism”.
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid afterthe suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on thebandwagon of President Busch’s “war against international terrorism”. Under the umbrellaof “destroying the infrastructure of terrorism” one can do practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”, he would haveacted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving theirnational freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat,the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian securityforces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon’s aim. His program is farmore radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmentalinstitutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This mayentail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the countryaltogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the realIsrael, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was noaccident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of “ethnic cleansing”.
When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured as aman determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism as a meansto achieve quite different aims.
No more.
Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the militarycommander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for myself. I visitedthe Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed.
Take, for example, the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposingbuilding, probably going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European andoriental styles. In front of it there was a rose garden – “was”, because a tank has crisscrossedit, for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To teachthem a lesson.
On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was total.The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the papers strewnaround, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just plain vandalism. Themoney in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers dispersed. But when onelooked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the hard disks were taken fromthe computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty shells remained. All theimportant contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of pupils, examination results,lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian school system.
The Ministry if Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all theinformation, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics ofthe hospitals had been taken.
Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these twoministries – Education and Health – had been functioning well. They have been utterlydestroyed.
This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the informationpertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure, car testsand drivers’ licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.
The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombswas not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvious: todestroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to push it backwith one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the primitive society ofOttoman times.
This is true for the civil society, and even more so for the security system. The headquartersof the security services were destroyed, files burned, computers crushed, the informationconcerning armed underground organizations and all other details pertaining to the waragainst terrorism were obliterated. There is no better evidence of the aims of thisoperation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of organized Palestinian society.
By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the center ofRamallah – from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged headquarters ofYasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and not a single signof hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference between the Israelipeace camp and those who responsible for this brutal attack. Here, perhaps, lies the onlyglimmer of hope.