How to Restore Hope

 

  Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi

Sharon's policy of destruction destroys more than buildings.

The European Union has recently said that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli army have wrought damage worth an estimated 17 million Euros ($14.5 million) on European Union- funded property and projects in Palestine. 

The army has used bulldozers, Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets to destroy property that includes a school-building programme, a sea port, Gaza international airport, a radio station and broadcasting studios, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, greenhouses and an irrigation scheme. Such destruction prompted the European Union foreign affairs commissioner, Chris Patten, to declare he was "shocked and astounded at what is happening." No Europeans were pleased. 

For the past 16 months, however, Israel has carried out a systematic policy of destruction which has included tearing up roads, bombing schools and hospitals, continuously bulldozing and shelling homes, uprooting trees and destroying other agriculture. What surprises me is that this is the first time the scale of the destruction seems to have been mentioned overseas. It is moreover ironic that US taxpayers' money -- in the form of Israeli weaponry -- is being used to destroy European taxpayers' money -- in the form of projects. 
Two questions need to be asked in the face of such policies: first, what can Sharon possibly hope to achieve with such acts? And, second, do these actions really achieve "security"? 

Since his election, Sharon has systematically attacked Palestinian infrastructure and buildings in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian Authority as an institution and to undermine its capabilities. This is a motive in itself, but there is another reason behind his actions: by destroying Palestinian institutions and physical infrastructure, Sharon is nipping the nascent Palestinian state in the bud -- destroying any possible future for the embryonic state. 

Furthermore, by demolishing structures, which can be rebuilt in the long run, he is hoping to destroy an idea and a dream the Palestinian people cherish: that of a future Palestinian state. 

This leads us to the second question: do Sharon's actions provide security for the Israeli people -- the justification for all his destruction? 

The obvious answer is no. 

How can making hundreds of people homeless, killing civilians when shelling Palestinian "targets," invading civilian neighbourhoods and blowing up buildings at dawn, then destroying the power and standing of the person and authority that symbolises their aspirations and dreams possibly achieve this? 
Rather, it has the opposite effect. Every one of his attacks is designed deliberately to provoke an adverse reaction. Again, this has been made clear on numerous occasions. When Mr Sharon is not simply destroying buildings, he is implementing an immoral and illegal policy of assassination, continuing settlement expansion unabated, maintaining a siege on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, restricting Palestinians' movement, destroying the economy, and paralysing the health and education sectors. 

What is obvious is that Sharon's strategy is not merely to destroy -- lashing out to keep his supporters happy -- but destroy the potential for a two-state solution, and thus the potential for coexistence. What he disregards is that destroying the Palestinian infrastructure may be good for the home front in the short term, but is strategically disastrous for both Palestinians and Israelis. 

The peace process put the Palestinians on the path to a state; that goal is accepted by the international community and remains the only way forward. Sharon opposes the idea, absolutely, but he has no alternative to offer the Palestinians. 

Oslo was as much about the mental landscape as the political one, and the Palestinians will not be cajoled into giving up on the idea of their own state. This idea survives even when the infrastructure is destroyed. The end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- not this continued destruction and collective punishment -- is the solution to the ongoing conflict. Furthermore, every denial of a Palestinian state, every action against its formation, translates into a refusal of any political solution to the conflict, which leaves both peoples standing on the abyss of even more violence and a permanent conflict. 

Sharon has not brought the Israeli public security, the Israeli economy is in a terrible state, the tourism industry is collapsing, money that should be spent on education, health and social services is going to feed an insatiable military budget, and the Israeli public is pessimistic and tired. 

With blind determination, Sharon destroyed the peace process and the Oslo agreements. And now he doggedly continues to demolish and pervert any hope that can be pinned on an arduous road to peaceful coexistence. We must stop him, by capitalising on the slowly awakening international awareness of where his policies are leading us, by outright condemnation of those policies, and by giving alternative voices the space in which to be heard and heeded. Only this will lead to a positive future for two peoples who, by necessity, share the same fate.