If the extrajudicial murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin intended to destabilise the Hamas leadership then it had failed. A new leadership had almost immediately been appointed without any political struggle to power. Within the short term the assassination has exacerbated Palestinian resentment against the Sharon government and probably further encouraged the notion of martyrdom. The long-term repercussions are yet to be seen, however, judging from past historical trajectory, political predictions in the Middle East have more often than not proven antithetical to their protagonists.
The assassination that has reportedly been supervised by Israel’s prime minister should not come as a surprise. Sharon’s policies, including political assassinations, have for a time now been backed by a strong militant-oriented Israeli public opinion.
In the annual survey of the Israeli National Security and Public Opinion Project, Asher Arien of the Jaffee Centre for strategic Studies finds that 90% of the Israeli public supports the assassination of Palestinians actively engaged in resisting the occupation. Eighty percent approves of the use of tanks and fighter aircrafts, albeit within civilian areas.
Furthermore, 46% supports the “transfer of Arabs from the territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and 31% supports for the transfer of Arab-Israelis.”
At the time that most countries would concede that the military occupation is the core of the present conflict, almost 49% of Israelis thought that the Palestinians [solely or mostly] bore some or all of the responsibility for the continued conflict. A further forty-five percent believed that the Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved by military means.
Successive Israeli governments had continuously given the green light to the Israeli army to carry out political assassinations. Indeed, other than missile air attacks, there are four units within the Israeli army, which go through very rigorous training for such extrajudicial assassinations. The first the Duvdevan (Hebrew for ‘cherry’)– which work in the West Bank and the second is the Shamshon (Samson) – in the Gaza Strip. The third unit belongs to the border police and the last, which works strictly in the Jerusalem area, belongs to the police. According to the ‘Middle East Watch’ and the ‘Yesh Gvul’ movement literature, the training of these assassination squads is structured in the use of weapons, mastering Arabic colloquial language, nurturing instincts of mechanical and swift killing especially at very close range, deception and ideological endorsement to ‘strip the enemy of his humanness’.
It is not an anomaly, therefore, that the Israeli government with this level and quality of public support continues to construct and apply a multi-layered strategy that seem to be heading towards a “unilateral disengagement”. In the absence of a viable negotiating process, Sharon’s vision for a quasi-Palestinian state on 40% of the West Bank plus Gaza continues to gain ground. The building of the apartheid wall falls within the PM’s vision of a non-contiguous state that is totally surrounded by Israeli forces and dotted by a myriad settlement with no air or sea control.
The speech that Arik Scheinerman - or so he was called before he changed his name to Arial Sharon- gave in Herzlia late last year ought to be taken very seriously. The PM stated that an Israeli solution could be implemented in a “piecemeal method”. Eliminating elected, popular and legitimate national Palestinian leadership is one component of this plan. Other policies include land confiscation, house demolitions [eleven within the last three days only], economic strangulation and hindering the United Nations’ humanitarian food distribution.
A solution is becoming increasingly more difficult especially in the absence of a modicum of cooperation between the Arab countries towards supporting a negotiating discourse between the Palestinians and the Israelis as seen in the debacle last week at the Arab Summit.
The Israeli public opinion continues to give support to one of the most right-winged government in the history of the state of Israel. Israeli political assassinations remain a modus operandi for this government. Judging by the history of the conflict over the past 37 years, however, it is inconceivable that any Palestinian leadership will give up the concept of resistance in face of such a dastardly policy.
