SHARON USES THE 'O' WORD:
SHARON USES THE 'O' WORD: Might the fragile-seeming Mideast 'roadmap' have some legs after all? The most intriguing indication that this just might be so came from reports that were leaked out of a seemingly stormy encounter Monday afternoon between Ariel Sharon and some of his colleagues in the Likud Party leadership.
According to these reports, which were relayed breathlessly to a waiting outside world by Reuters and the Israel daily Ha'Aretz, among others, Sharon actually confronted his colleagues with some harsh truths about the nature of Israel's longterm administration of military rule over the lives of the 3.5 million Palestinian residents of the occupied territories.
"We don't like the word, but this is occupation," Reuters reported him as saying. "To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians...We need to get away from this in a way that won't hurt our security. This cannot continue forever."
Hallelujah!!
Sharon's confrontation with his colleagues came one day after the Likud members in the government showed themselves badly split over how to vote in the government's vote on the four-party International Roadmap for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Sharon's motion that the government support the roadmap squeaked through by only one vote, with many abstentions-- and a number of Likud leaders were among the abstainers.
I wonder how many decades it has been-- if indeed it has ever happened before--since a leader of Likud used this particular "'O' word"? For decades now, Likud and all the rest of Israel's territorial maximalists have studiously avoided ever using it. And in addition, they have exerted massive efforts in order to force other people not to use it, either. The territories in question-- that is, the West Bank, Gaza (and Golan)-- are always referred to, when specification of their status is necessary, as either "the administered territories", or "the territories." Occasionally, if they were feeling very generous, Likud people would allow as to how these lands might be "disputed territories".
Well, actually, Golan and a hugely expanded version of East Jerusalem are not even considered to be in these categories, since the Israeli Knesset unilaterally annexed them in respectively 1981 and 1967. But no-one else of any note has ever recognized those acts of annexation as legitimate.
And then, the rest of the West Bank-- after expanded East Jeruslaem was gouged out of it-- was referred to by the Biblical tags "Yehuda and Shomron" (Judea and Samaria).
So now, finally, in 2003, Sharon utters the word "occupation".
It is true, he uses this to refer only to the people of the occupied territories, rather than to the territories themselves. (That should be the next step.) But still, it is excellent that he has come to recognize and name the nature of the administrative arrangement according to which the Israeli government has--for 36 long years now-- come to exercize military rule over the Palestinian people of these lands.
According to Ha'Aretz's version, Sharon told the Likud meeting Monday afternoon, "It is not possible to continue holding three and a half million people under occupation... This is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy. Today 1.8 million Palestinians live thanks to support from international organization. Do you want to take responsible [sic] for them yourselves? I do not think that it is right to control Bethlehem and Ramallah."
Well, of course there are more ways than one to end Israel's occupation over the Palestinian PEOPLE. One way would be the way advocated by extremists inside the Israeli government like Tourism Minister Benny Elon. He advocates widescale "transfer"-- that is, the ethnic cleansing of large numbers of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza, into neighboring countries.
That way, Israel would get the land, and Jordan or Egypt would get the "responsibility" for the looking after its now already deeply pauperized Palestinian population.
That's why it is important to urge Sharon to go one stage further, and giver explicit recognition not only that the nature of Israel's relationship to the people of the West Bank and Gaza is one of "occupation", but that its relationship to those territories themselves is also one of "occupation".
Because "occupation"-- as everyone involved in this business either states openly, or implicitly admits by their very employment of complicated circumlocutions-- is not an acceptable longterm situation.
So I really want to applaud Sharon for having started to use the O word. But he needs to go on and use it in reference to the lands concerned, and not just the people...
He also needs to take concrete steps that show that the "support" he has now grudgingly extended to the Roadmap will be actualized in concrete steps his government can and should take, starting now. Like, for example, ordering the total halt on all new construction activity in connection with the settlements project in the occupied territories and the dismantlement of the so-called "illegal" settlements. (Of course, under international law, ALL the settlements are quite illegal.)
Will he take such steps? Unlike his good buddy Bill Safire, I cannot read his mind.
But some of what he reportedly said at Monday's Likud meeting did not augur well for the prospect of him taking such actions. Questioned by one Likud MP who's a resident of the "Ariel" mega-settlement in the northern West Bank, Sharon soothingly replied that the roadmap did allow for the continued building of settlement housing. "It certainly allows the unlimited building for your children and grandchildren, and I hope even for your great-grandchildren," he was reported as saying.
Despite such warning signs as this though, still, I just have to savor the moment of reading about Sharon's encounter with the 'O' word.