Commentary

Colin Powell's Mission to the Middle East

After several days of delays, which gave Israel more time to prosecute its military offensive against the Palestinian people, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell finally arrived in Jerusalem last Thursday. Despite widespread media speculation that Israel would begin to withdraw from the occupied territories to avoid embarrassing Powell, the Israeli military campaign has not only continued, but escalated.

Since arriving in Israel, Powell has spouted a number of platitudes about the need to find peaceful solutions to the Middle East crisis, but has said nothing about the need for Ariel Sharon to end the Israeli military aggression. Instead, he has repeatedly called on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to end the violence, ignoring the fact that Arafat has been trapped for the past two weeks, cut off from most of his staff, as well as from other Palestinian leaders. With the resumption of suicide bombings in Israel, Powell took up the Israeli demand that Yasser Arafat issue a statement condemning suicide bombings as a pre-condition for any meeting between the two.

Israeli officials appeared to be caught off guard when Arafat issued a statement not only condemning the most recent suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, but opposing all acts of terrorism against both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. This has actually been the consistent position of Yasser Arafat and the PLO for the past 30 years. However, there are other sections of the Palestinian movement, particularly Hamas (an organization originally created, financed and armed by Israel and the United States in an effort to undermine the authority of the PLO), which disagree with this policy.

While the PLO has advocated attacks only on military targets, the intense pressure on the Palestinian people and the Nazi behaviour of the Sharon regime have created a climate favourable to those Palestinian groups that oppose a political settlement and prefer sacrificing young Palestinian men and women in suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. This barbaric practice is causing nothing but harm to the Palestinian cause and has actually assisted Sharon to silence his critics and pursue his own version of the "final solution" against the Palestinians.

The one-sided approach being followed by Powell in which the aggressors are favoured over the victims is not the behaviour of a mediator. While Sharon's troops are continuing to massacre hundreds of civilians in the refugee camps and towns on the West Bank, as well as committing countless war crimes and dismantling the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, Powell is counselling Arafat to call on his people to refrain from violence, to turn the other cheek. This approach will accomplish nothing except, perhaps, taking some of the heat off George Bush and placing it on Powell, instead. It will not get Ariel Sharon to pull back Israeli troops, nor will it halt the cycle of violence which Sharon's policies have created. With his trip nearing an end, Powell appears to be leaving empty-handed in his efforts to achieve a cease-fire. Arafat has insisted that a complete Israeli withdrawal is a precondition for a cease-fire, while Sharon is vowing to continue his invasion until the Palestinians surrender in Bethlehem, Ramallah and elsewhere.

Despite the fact that the Israeli economy and military are almost totally dependent on U.S. support for their existence, the Bush administration and its emissary Colin Powell have seen fit to exert their considerable pressure only on the Palestinians and not on the Israelis. This speaks volumes about the real objectives of Powell's mission to the Middle East.