http://indymedia.org.il
Israel and the Bush War PushTuesday 10 Sep 2002
author: Hans Lebrecht, Kibbutz Beit-Oren (hlebr@trendline.co.il)
summary
The warnings of the Israeli communists and other consequent peace activists should not be pushed aside, when Israel’s current rulers are taking sides with the U.S. war designs against Iraq. Sharon and his right radical associates, with the fig-leave assistance of Labor Party coalition partners, have their own goals, when showing so much enthusiasm about the Bush war push.
ISRAEL AND THE BUSH WAR PUSH
by Hans Lebrecht, Kibbutz Beit-Oren, September 9, 2002
(One year after the Twin-Tower Terror Disaster)
In his statement to the Jewish New Year (Sept. 7 / 8), Israel’s PM Ariel Sharon stressed that his government is not involved in U.S. planning for an assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime and is also not pushing President Bush to attack Iraq. But, he would give Israel’s >>one hundred percent support<< to whatever the U.S. Administration will decide. He added that >>the strategic cooperation between our two countries had never been stronger<<. Israel was >>the best prepared country in the whole world for an attack by unconventional ABC weaponry<<, Sharon aired himself.
In a statement on the imminent threat of a war against Iraq, the Israeli Communist Forum pointed out among others, that >>recent declarations of the U.S. President Bush and other senior officials in his administration sound as echoes of the rhetoric that prevailed in Europe of the 1930’s. Certain leaders claimed also then, that they have the right to inflict harm upon anyone who refuses to comply with their >New World Order<, which they wished to impose on the whole world. They too wrenched for themselves a license to dictate to other states how they must behave in all spheres of life, and to topple by use of force any regime resisting their dictates<<.
That precisely these days the Deputy Foreign Minister of Turkey is on a state visit in Israel has, according to some media analysts, not the officially stated subject of an eventually Turkish water import to Israel alone in his back, but most probably also the impending cooperation within the framework of the strategic alliance of the two states with the U.S. in case of a soon to come attack on Iraq. It is no secret, and international media are reporting about it, that besides American air force units, Israeli military aircraft, bomber-fighters and gun-ship helicopters, are stationed on at least one Turkish air force base near the border with Iraq.
In their common declaration summing up the British PM Blair’s Camp-David meeting with Bush, both were stating that they have a shared strategy on how to deal with Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, concerning that country’s threat with weapons of mass destruction. However, nobody should be browbeaten by these allegations. It should be said without any shade of doubt, that if there exists a real threat concerning the use of such unconventional ABC weapons of mass destruction and life extermination, it stems from the side of the U.S. and Israel. Fact is, that both these countries have in their possession such dangerous weaponry, as well as their having the means of delivering them into the heart of Iraq. Nobody can be sure they would not employ them in case of war. And sure enough, it is not so much Saddam Hussein, or whether Iraq is preparing this or that weaponry, the U.S. Bush administrators are after. It is the fact that Iraq is one of the countries of the larger oil rich Caspian Basin, they are after in the interests of the big trans-national oil corporations.
Sharon’s statement, quoted above, that Israel is best possibly prepared for such a war as no other country on earth should not cause astonishment to anybody.
During his long- and outstandingly ill-famed career as a militarist and political master hawk, he has proven to mean what he says. However, he never succeeded by this his arrogant macho style policies to secure peace and security to Israel. The disastrous and blood-stained Sharon initiated Lebanon invasion twenty years ago, or his escalated Jewish settlement storm upon robbed Palestinian soil, have caused death and disaster not only upon his enemies, the Palestinians, but also upon Israel and the peace and security of its people. Never since the establishment of their state 54 years ago, the Israeli people has felt so much insecure, as now, after 15 months of Sharon’s rule and the terror onslaught upon Palestine, he administers.
Moreover, many a statement by Sharon and his right-radical partners in government hint at it, that they want to use any war involvement against Iraq in order to execute their design of >>transfer<<, or in other words of ethnical cleansing from the indigenous Palestinians of the whole of Eretz-Israel, of Greater Israel from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean coast. Sharon’s historic strategic aim of finishing the not finished expulsion of the Arabs during the 1948/49 war, has been quoted before. Lately statements concerning this final >>transfer<< by some of Sharon’s cabinet ministers (Effi Eytam and Benny Eyalon), the >>Homeland<< Party chief and coalition partner Michael Kleiner, and some of Sharon’s closest Likud associates, leave no doubt about their intentions. They design to use the shadow of an Israeli involvement in a war with Iraq to realize their ethnic cleansing design, >>not finished in 1949<<.
That the war preparations are accompanied by restricting inroads against democratic freedoms, in the U.S. as well in other involved countries, has also its historic prototypes. So, for instance, the socially most downtrodden and impoverished masses are asked to bear the main burden of the huge costs of enormously rising military expenditures. In Israel, legislation is motioned to restrict the democratic freedoms of opposition forces to the rulers’ policy, especially the representation of the Arab-Palestinian minority. Now, Sharon himself has asked Israel’s Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein to indict the Gush-Shalom peace bloc for warning some occupation involved army officers and commanders, that they might see themselves in future to be brought to court in Israel or abroad for war crimes perpetrated against Palestinians.
Therefore, the warnings of the Israeli communists and other consequent peace activists should not be pushed aside, when Israel’s current rulers are taking sides with the U.S. war designs against Iraq. Sharon and his right radical associates, with the fig-leave assistance of Labor Party coalition partners, have their own goals, when showing so much enthusiasm about the Bush war push. Neither the Bushmen, nor all of Sharon’s knights and men should ignore the opposition, or even militant resistance to their war designs, and think they could put together the broken eggs again, if the war they start will go out of control and bring unforeseeable disaster upon many millions of people, their own nations included, may be even upon human life on earth.