War on Terrorism or Illegal Occupation?
Israelis Mount Offensive
BY MAX ELBAUM AND HANY KHALIL
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More than 1,600 people-at least 1,287 Palestinians and 351 Israelis-have been killed in the 18 months since the second intifada (uprising) began against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The death toll is mounting daily as Israel's powerful military has launched a major new offensive. Justifying the siege, Israeli Internal Security Minister Uzi Landau declared: "We're not facing human beings, but rather beasts."

Even before this latest escalation, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for an end to Palestinian suicide bombings, and condemned Israel for conducting "an all-out conventional war on Palestinian civilians."

Annan told Israel's leaders: "You must end the illegal occupation. More urgently, you must stop the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians."

U.S. BACKS OCCUPATION

The current carnage stems directly from Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people. Washington's support of Israel's daily violation of Palestinian rights and international law is a central cause of the intense anger at U.S. foreign policy that exists throughout the Middle East and South Asia. This anger is the soil in which terrorism grows.

The Bush administration has given the green light to Israel's escalation as part of his global "war on terrorism" and the U.S. bid to dominate the Middle East. The U.S. finances the occupation of Palestine by Israel's ultra-modern military. Every year for the past 25 years, the U.S. government has provided Israel with approximately $2 billion in military aid and more than $3 billion in economic assistance, loan guarantees and indirect funding. (See box on right.)

Israel uses U.S. aid to destroy the Palestinian economy and its social infrastructure, making even ordinary life miserable. Palestinian unemployment has soared to 70 percent.

Most of the recent killing and destruction has taken place in the West Bank and Gaza, territories conquered (along with East Jerusalem) by Israel in the 1967 war. U.N. Resolution 242-which the U.S. voted for-holds that continued occupation of these territories is illegal. That Resolution proclaims the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war."

But Israel refuses to end its occupation. Instead, since 1967, it has built more than 150 settlements, populated by almost 400,000 Jews, on Palestinian land. These settlements are strategically located military outposts connected by four-lane highways that slice up the West Bank.

This pattern of Palestinian dispossession goes back to Israel's founding and even before. (See "A People Displaced.") During the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were driven or frightened from their centuries-old homes and lands. Though U.N. Resolution 194, passed in 1948, orders that these refugees be allowed to return to their homes, Israel has refused to comply for the last 53 years. Despite voting for this Resolution, the U.S. provides the money and political muscle that allows Israel's refusal to stand.

Is there a way to stop the deadly cycle of Israeli invasion and Palestinian suicide bombing? Marwan Barghouti, a top official in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, wrote in the Washington Post on January 16, 2002:

"For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick. But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of peace...I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and a just resolution to the plight of Palestinian refugees pursuant to U.N. resolutions. I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country."