http://www.Official PA Website editorial: ISRAEL GOES TO WAR

http://www.pna.net/israel_war.htm

Main points:

* THE RAMALLAH EVENTS [IMRA: Ramallah is the effective capital of the
autonomy. It is an area "A" under the complete and total control of the PA.
The PA has free hand to move the thousands of PA forces located in that
area - including 1,200 police specifically mentioned in Appendix 2 of the
Interim Agreement as being assigned to the Ramallah District]

"As a matter of principle, lynch is unacceptable"

"Were the Israeli "soldiers" captured in Ramallah undercover agents?" [IMRA:
That they were middle age reservists who serve as drivers was established
beyond any doubt at the time this editorial was written]

"The only known alternative to mob-rule, however, is the State of Law, and
there is no state of law without state."

"There was no way to reinforce the guard around the Police station where the
two prisoners were detained."

"the assassination of the prisoners has also deprived us of the considerable
assets that their testimonies and the proper investigation that should have
been conducted would undoubtedly have constituted in the effort to throw
light on the methods of the Israeli undercover units and other
anti-Palestinian death squads, and to begin with on the objective of their
own operation. This without mentioning the fact that, in theory at least,
prisoners can be exchanged, as the current Lebanese example shows, and as
earlier Israeli-Palestinian prisoners exchanges have shown in the past."

"Joseph's Tomb, ( the degree of sanctity of which is a subject of
historical and theological controversy) just as the Boraq ("The Wailing
Wall"), Rachel's Tomb or the Haram El Ibrahimi in Hebron, is Islamic waqf
property. The PNA has condemned the damage done to the site, and has ordered
its immediate restoration."

"the burning of the Jericho synagogue, where Jewish worship had gone on
since 1994 under the protection of the Palestinian Security forces, is
another negative sign of a grave degradation of the situation, and the
direct result of the deepening of the religious dimension of the conflict -
a direct consequence of Barak's provocative claim for sovereignty over the
Haram El Sharif, and of Sharon's physical provocation there on September
28th. Indeed, the synagogue will be restored, but the negative signal has
been sent."

+++++full text++++++

Official PA Website editorial: ISRAEL GOES TO WAR
http://www.pna.net/israel_war.htm

A month ago, the whole world wanted to believe that an Israeli-Palestinian
final status peace agreement was imminent. Day before yesterday, this
benevolent dream was smashed under the rockets of the Israeli helicopters on
Palestinian cities, and the brutal mutation of the Israeli discourse from
the sphere of bad-faith negotiation to that of an all-out war against the
Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership. Hate-talk has taken hold
of the Israeli street, media and public debate, while the Israeli Prime
minister negotiates with war criminal Ariel Sharon in order to form what he
calls an "emergency government".

After seven years of an ambiguous, fragile, unsteady and chronically delayed
peace process, paved with crises and massacres, commitments not upheld,
obligations not implemented, and signed interim agreements systematically
emptied of their content by Israel's disrespect for its own signature, the
Israeli government, faced with mounting international pressure to walk the
last extra-mile to a mutually acceptable peace agreement with the
Palestinian side, on the basis of international legality, has opted for
escalation and war. Ehud Barak, who lost his political coalition several
weeks ago, and was faced with the eventuality of anticipated elections, has
thus opened the way to the "national unity" government he has called for
ever since he emerged as the victor of the 1999 Israeli elections. Thus has
Barak saved his political career by aligning himself on the anti-peace
program of his supposed adversaries, and by drowning the peace-process in a
river of Palestinian blood.

Last night, Barak announced, live on Israeli television, that his new
"emergency" government would no longer negotiate with the PLO and the PNA
unless the latter capitulated to all of Israel's demands, and would
therefore no longer pursue the search for peace, but would now on condition
negotiations to a military victory. The heavily and repeatedly hammered
phrase "We have no partner" has become the leit-motiv of this new unified
discourse, and the codeword for the "military solution".

WHO HAS NO PARTNER ?

For Palestinians, who have lived these seven years of unkept promises and
unfulfilled obligations, the notion of having no partner seems totally
preposterous. There is no alternative to war except peace, and in peace as
well as in war, one does not choose his partner. One does not make peace
with friends, but with enemies, who then become former enemies. But one
cannot force peace upon a people by beating him and massacring his children
until they capitulate. Humiliation feeds revenge, and defeat fuels
resentment: this is as mechanical as Archimedes' postulate on gravity. The
Palestinian people has chosen peace as a strategic option in spite of major
crimes committed against us. The Palestinian people has opted for peace,
many years ago, and long before Madrid and Oslo, in full awareness that this
meant peace with those who expelled a million Palestinians from their homes
in 1948, with those who have imposed their brutal occupation upon the West
Bank, the Gaza Strip and Arab Jerusalem, who have committed unnumerable
massacres and war crimes against the sons and daughters of our people, from
Deir Yassin to Sabra and Chatila, and from the days of the Intifada to the
massacre of Hebron in 1994, to name only the most notorious. It is the
Israeli government, blinded by the arrogance of its military might, who
thinks peace can only be achieved with disarmed and submitted native
notables, once the patriots have been liquidated.

THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE

It is the Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy, in a courageous article published
last week, who reminded his compatriots that while claiming that
Palestinians only understand force, it was in fact Israel which never gave
any of its conquests or appetites away, except by force: the October 1973
war made them abandon Sinai; the Intifada engendered negotiations and the
Israeli recognition of the PLO, and Lebanese resistance made them withdraw
from most of Lebanese territory.

If, instead of indulging in racist fantasies, the Israelis, at official as
well as at popular level, recognized the humanity of Palestinians, they
would understand that, as they themselves proudly declare about themselves
from the height of their military might, we will never submit to terror and
threats, and that our people, just like any other people, will never
relinquish its inalienable rights out of fear. The Israeli approach to "the
end of the conflict" - we'll hit you until you surrender - is an absurd,
nefarious, criminal and totally self-destructive one, which can only lead to
the most tragic of consequences for all.

But, for reasons which have to do with Israeli domestic political
considerations as much as with the premeditated decision to turn his back
away from the path of peace, Ehud Barak has buried the peace process, in
conformity with the conditions that all the new allies of his renewed
emergency government, in particular Sharon and Chtaransky, put to their
rallyment. To those who pressed him yesterday to say so clearly, he answered
that Israel had no interest to appear as saying "no" to anything, since the
main common objective was now to get the whole world to accuse Yasser Arafat
of the collapse of the peace process, leaving it to the "irresponsible"
journalists to interpret and read his lips. He also explained that his much
famed Camp David so-called overtures - which his right wing allies demand
that he renege - were only tactical manoeuvers aimed at unmasking the
Palestinian side, and get the American administration to blame Arafat for th
e collapse of the talks.

On the ground, in two weeks of Israeli state-terrorism, more than a 100
Palestinians have been killed, more than 5000 wounded. Israeli settler
mob-violence has exacted a particular cruel toll, with civilians (and not
even protesters) assassinated, tortured and brutalized, property destroyed
and terror imposed upon rural areas of the West Bank, outside the control of
Palestinian forces - all of this under the protective wing of the occupation
forces. In this context, we still want to know how could the settlers
torture to death a Palestinian citizen of the West Bank who had earlier been
seen in the hands of the Israeli police.

Israeli mob-violence against the Arab citizens of Israel, from Nazareth to
Jaffa, and in practically all cities and towns inside the "Green Line" has
also been set loose by the official incitement. Jewish crowds and gangs have
attacked Arab citizens, have assassinated some of them and wounded many
others, while engageing in massive attacks against Arab property. Result of
the incitement and proclaimed will to treat the Arab citizens of Israel as
an enemy community, and of the campaign to deprive them of whatever rights
they have achieved, through years of political struggle against the
institutional discrimination and disposession to which they have been
subjected ever since the creation of the State of Israel.

THE RAMALLAH EVENTS

This is the sad context of the latest Ramallah events, where two Israeli
prisoners were killed by a mob who invaded the Police station where they
were detained.

As a matter of principle, lynch is unacceptable. War prisoners, even when
there are no negotiations, have basic rights, according to Islamic (or
Christian) ethics as much as according to the Hague regulations of 1907 and
the Geneva Conventions of 1949. And even war criminals, if they are not
killed in combat, must be imprisoned and tried. Not lynched. Hence the
Palestinian official inquiry, and the firm Palestinian intention to
establish responsibilities. (Note that the Israeli army has officially
announced its intention to pursue and assassinate everyone of those
"present", according to its analysis of the TV footage).

Were the Israeli "soldiers" captured in Ramallah undercover agents? The
first testimonies gathered mention uniforms concealed under civilian clothes
and all sorts of weapons, including a silencer, all of which strengthen the
popular conviction that they were part of a duvdevan-type killer unit, and
that they were on their way to perpetrate some murderous provocation. An
inquiry has been opened, and we hope the Palestinian Security agencies will
be able to establish beyond doubt, on the basis of undisputable material
evidence, the truth of this matter.

But we affirm it without any ambiguity: even if the two Israeli agents were
what it seems they were, lynch is unacceptable. It makes us litterally go
down to the level of the oppressors of our people, and that is a shame.

The only known alternative to mob-rule, however, is the State of Law, and
there is no state of law without state.

Who has not seen at least one of those hundreds of American "Western" movies
where the crowd, spontaneously or not, storms the sheriff's office to lynch
his prisoner, whom they believed was guilty, even when he was not? The term
lynch itself refers to the American citizen who first openly advocated this
barbarian kind of popular justice, and it has no equivalent in Arabic. For
decades, and until the late fifties, white racist mobs in the South of the
United States have put African-Americans suspected of offending white
supremacy to a horrible death of torture and mutilation. During the conquest
of the American West, the Army ended putting Indians into reservations to
protect them from genocidal settler mob-violence.

The events in Ramallah demonstrate the need for a state, and how far we
still are from enjoying the means of a state when our limited forces cannot
even move on the roads between our cities - because they are not allowed to
go through the "B" and "C" areas that separate them. On that fateful day,
the whole territory was blocked, sealed and closed. All ways in and out of
the Palestinian territory were controlled by occupation forces and nobody
could move - which makes the official Israeli version of the two "innocent"
reservists who just found themselves in Ramallah "by accident" even more
incredible. There was no way to reinforce the guard around the Police
station where the two prisoners were detained. It should be remembered that
15 Palestinian security personnel were injured in the course of their
attempts to protect the building and the prisoners. In this sense, these
events are also the result of the systematic undermining of the PNA's
authority by Israeli occupation, colonisation and bad faith negotiation.

We should add that the assassination of the prisoners has also deprived us
of the considerable assets that their testimonies and the proper
investigation that should have been conducted would undoubtedly have
constituted in the effort to throw light on the methods of the Israeli
undercover units and other anti-Palestinian death squads, and to begin with
on the objective of their own operation. This without mentioning the fact
that, in theory at least, prisoners can be exchanged, as the current
Lebanese example shows, and as earlier Israeli-Palestinian prisoners
exchanges have shown in the past.

LIGHTING A RELIGIOUS WAR

In these circumstances, we hold the Israeli government directly and wholly
responsible for the dangerous trend which tends to transform the conflict -
the essence of which is Land and Rights - into a religious war. Israeli-mob
violence has already taken mosques and churches as targets of destruction
and desecration, from Tiberias to Jaffa and many more localities throughout
Palestine, in a systematic onslaught on Palestinian religious symbols,
provoking an inevitably religious counter-reaction. Thus Palestinian rioters
have caused considerable damage to Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, after the
occupation army evacuated the site. This outburst of popular anger, indeed,
was aimed at what had become an aggressive military stronghold, and a focus
of settler terrorism. It is nonetheless totally unjustified, and alien to
our tradition of religious tolerance. Especially as Joseph's Tomb, ( the
degree of sanctity of which is a subject of historical and theological
controversy) just as the Boraq ("The Wailing Wall"), Rachel's Tomb or the
Haram El Ibrahimi in Hebron, is Islamic waqf property. The PNA has condemned
the damage done to the site, and has ordered its immediate restoration. In
this context, the burning of the Jericho synagogue, where Jewish worship had
gone on since 1994 under the protection of the Palestinian Security forces,
is another negative sign of a grave degradation of the situation, and the
direct result of the deepening of the religious dimension of the conflict -
a direct consequence of Barak's provocative claim for sovereignty over the
Haram El Sharif, and of Sharon's physical provocation there on September
28th. Indeed, the synagogue will be restored, but the negative signal has
been sent. At a time when popular anger at Israeli crimes throughout the
Arab world and the Islamic Umma, from West Africa to Indonesia, is growing
and becoming a factor in the global Middle-Eastern equation, we urge our
brothers and friends, including those who support us in Europe and
elsewhere, not to fall in the Israeli trap, and to abstain from providing
our enemies with arguments to try and convince the world that their war of
aggression against our people is nothing but self-defence.

AND NOW WHAT ?

Now, and because we do not intend to capitulate, we have to be ready for the
next stage, the next strikes, the next vain Israeli attempt to break the
will of the people by force. Already Barak's new allies demand massive
military action against our people, dismissing the crimes committed so far
as falling short of any significant action. The systematic de-humanization
of Palestinians and Palestinian leaders in the Israeli public discourse
constitutes an anticipated legitimation of genocide. We know the Israeli war
machine is powerful, and we remember the siege of Beirut, the 60.000 killed,
the hundreds of thousands wounded, the havoc and destruction, the cluster
bombs and the blockade. And yet, with all the cruelty and slaughter of
innocent civilians it perpetrated in Lebanon, Israel failed there. We are
ready, and we are confident that this present agression will also fail, as
have all earlier attempts at "crushing" Palestinian will. But the world in
general, and the European Union in particular, should not only monitor this
oncoming massacre: they should take things in hand, and prevent the fire
from spreading to the whole region. Israel must renounce war and violence,
and must stop using war as an instrument of domestic political struggle. In
the meantime, our people needs international protection and support in order
to force Israel to stop the state-massacre, and implement international
resolutions.



The gloomy alternative is the regionalization of war. Will the world let it
happen ?



14 October 2000