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In the looking-glass world of Middle
East politics, it is easy to forget that Ahmad Saadat, the imprisoned
Palestinian leader Israel summarily arrested in Jericho late
on Tuesday, is wanted for masterminding the killing of the Jewish
state's most notorious racist politician-general.
Rehavam Zeevi, head of the
Central Command in the late 1960s and early 1970s, personally
developed and managed Israel's brutal regime in the newly occupied
West Bank. After retiring from the battlefield, he waged a relentless
war against "the Arabs" on the political front. His
Moledet party, founded in the 1980s, advocated the ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians from Greater Israel--in other words, from Israel
and the occupied territories.
His thinking became so acceptable
after the outbreak of the intifada that he was appointed tourism
minister in Ariel Sharon's first cabinet. Maybe Sharon thought
that, with Zeevi for company, he really might start to look like
a man of peace.
Zeevi's killing by gunmen in
a Jerusalem hotel in 2001 was about as close as the Palestinians
have managed to get to emulating an Israeli-style targeted assassination--with
the difference that, in the Palestinian operation, no bystanders
were killed.
Israelis were, and still are,
horrified by the killing of Zeevi, with most taking the view
that the Palestinians broke all the rules of engagement in targeting
an elected politician. That neatly ignores the point that Zeevi's
death was retribution for Israel's earlier assassination of a
widely respected Palestinian politician, Abu Ali Mustafa, the
leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
But what is sauce for the goose
was never going to be sauce for the gander.
Ahmad Saadat, Mustafa's successor
and the man blamed by Israel for Zeevi's killing, raced to the
top of the army's wanted list. Under international pressure,
the Palestinian Authority, in the days before it was entirely
dismembered by the Israeli army, arrested him.
To prevent his targeting for
assassination by Israel, and in the vain hope of winning a reprieve
for Yasser Arafat from his effective house arrest in Ramallah,
the Palestinian leadership brokered a deal with Britain and the
United States in 2002. The two countries agreed to provide monitors
to guarantee Saadat's confinement in the tiny West Bank town
of Jericho, in the sun-baked lowlands of the Jordan Valley.
Four years later, on Tuesday
morning, Britain reneged on its understandings with the Palestinians
and quit Jericho, but not before telling Israel it was going.
As if waiting for its cue, Israeli armour rolled into Jericho
at once to capture Saadat and a handful of other wanted men.
To Palestinians, the British
broken promise, as well as the hasty exit from Jericho and apparent
collusion with Israel, all smacked a little too painfully of
other episodes of British foreign policy in the Middle East.
There were echoes of 1956 and London's pact during the Suez Crisis
with Israel on the invasion of Egypt. And there were echoes too
of 1948, when Britain hurriedly abandoned Palestine, though not
before it had effectively fulfilled the Balfour Declaration's
promise of creating a Jewish homeland by allowing hundreds of
thousands of Jews to immigrate.
That in large part explains
the outpouring of rage from Gaza to Ramallah on Tuesday, as well
as the kidnapping of foreigners. Britain's duplicity was a reminder--if
it was needed--that nothing has changed in a century of Western
"diplomacy".
So what was Britain's defence
of its inflammatory action? According to foreign minister Jack
Straw, Britain had no choice but to pull the monitors out of
Jericho because of growing concerns for their safety.
That will have sounded more
than hollow to Palestinians. The intifada has all but passed
Jericho by. With a population of about 15,000, it is the quietest
place in the West Bank and Gaza. During the decades of Israeli
occupation it earnt a unflattering reputation as the dumping
ground for small-time collaborators, the ones Israel did not
reward with safe haven in its own territory.
Jericho is a small Palestinian
island in a sea of Israeli occupation. Most of the Jordan Valley
has been entirely controlled by Israel for decades. According
to reports in the Hebrew media, Israel is poised to announce
the Valley's annexation sometime after its elections later this
month.
Around Jericho itself the Israeli
army has dug a deep ditch to prevent all unauthorised movement
in and out of the city. And beyond that is the busy "settlers'
highway" through the occupied Jordan Valley, linking Jerusalem
with the north of Israel, officially known as Gandhi's Road--after
Rehavam Zeevi. He earned the nickname "Gandhi" as a
skinny youth in the army.
In fact Jericho has been so
peaceful during the intifada that six months ago, Israel reopened
it to tourism, allowing package tours to pass through the Israeli-manned
checkpoint on the only route into the city. I myself have visited
the city on several recent occasions, staying in its hotels and
enjoying their open-all-year swimming pools. What is apparently
safe for tourists and journalists is not safe enough for British
officials.
The problem now is that Straw's
"concerns" about safety may become self-fulfilling.
A backlash against foreigners is as certain as the attack on
Tuesday against the British Council offices in Gaza. There are
few tourists in the West Bank any longer, particularly since
Israel made entering so difficult with the construction of its
wall. But there are still a significant number of foreigners
working for humanitarian organisations.
Their presence is important.
Many of the organisations themselves have become little more
than sticking plasters, unable to cope with the festering sores
of Palestinian life under an ever-more restrictive occupation.
But having foreigners living in Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron offers
an insurance policy--even if a small and inadequate one--against
more reckless Israeli army incursions. At the very least, foreigners
can bear witness.
There would be nothing worse
than the West Bank--after Israel's limited withdrawals and the
completion of its wall--becoming a tiny Palestinian ghetto-state,
one where neither the international media nor aid workers dare
venture. There is also nothing that would satisfy Israel more.
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