One important element was missing from Ariel Sharon's speech to the Israeli nation this week: an offer to resign. Like his old enemy, Yasser Arafat, the Likud prime minister is now overwhelmingly part of the problem, not part of the solution.
His year in office has brought a steady deterioration in Israel's security situation, the very opposite of what he promised voters. Improved security was his key pledge: indeed, it was perhaps the only persuasive argument for supporting him and, in doing so, many Israelis seem to have closed their eyes, crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. Their collective gamble has not paid off. Mr Sharon has not delivered. For this reason alone, he should go.
Mr Sharon's unimaginative, heavy-handed tactics in the occupied territories have brought a rising toll of Israeli army and Jewish settlement casualties, while the civilian population of Israel itself has become increasingly vulnerable to suicidal attacks. One result has been a groundswell of vocal opposition among army reservists and middle-ranking officers to the mindless immorality of what they are being asked to do in the West Bank and Gaza.
It just got a little harder to ignore the dissenters in America's War on Terrorism.
Family members of victims, about seventeen so far, have joined under the banner "Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" to encourage discussion of alternatives to war and to bring aid to families affected by the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan.
A smooth Valentine's Day press conference in New York announcing the organization's formation illustrated the group's strengths and the challenges ahead. The packed room, at the Church Center for the United Nations, across from the UN, included several reporters. The event saw no ink in the next day's papers--except in El Diario, a Spanish-language daily--but this group should have an edge over other antiwar activists in getting mainstream media attention. After all, they speak the same simple language of grief as the thousands of others who have lost loved ones in the attacks, and who have garnered ample coverage in both print and electronic media.
A checkpoint turns on its creators
The boundaries of the concept of terror have been stretched even further in recent days. An attack on armed soldiers at a checkpoint that for over a year has robbed area residents of their freedom of movement, and at which Palestinians have been killed, was defined as a terror operation (Ma'ariv called it a "massacre"), while the bombing of Palestinian cities, the killing of dozens of civilians (including a mother and her daughter), the blowing up of broadcasting stations that was captured by the camera of the army magazine Bamahane and the revenge assassinations of Palestinian police officers at checkpoints - were defined as legitimate security operations.
These word games we play with ourselves, however, cannot change the fact that the Israeli occupation has over the past several days begun to turn on its creators. First it was the tragic death of Duvdevan commander Lieutenant Colonel Eyal Weiss when an army bulldozer pushed a wall onto him during the demolition of a Palestinian house. Next came the fatal assaults on soldiers at checkpoints , bringing the news that the occupation, in the words of the current slogan, is killing us all.
A History of Bombing is an anti-war book to beat all anti-war books. And although it was written before events in Afghanistan, reading it now gives on an overriding sense of deja-vu.
Last week, for instance, I was sent a fax by the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan asking me to join a protest against the current use by the US of cluster bombs. These, known in Chinese as "mother-and-son bombs," also appear in Sven Lindqvist's history. Aiming to spread death and injury to as many living targets as possible rather than damage a specific installation, they consist of a canister that opens in the air and disperses smaller bombs over a wide area. These then explode throwing some 200,000 projectiles in every direction.
In Vietnam B-52s often dropped explosives on military structures, napalm to scorch out their contents, then cluster bombs to kill people trying to help their burning comrades. Sometimes time-release cluster bombs were dropped to kill people who emerged when they thought the danger was past. Small wonder some people are protesting, even in pro-American Taiwan.
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