Hamas in their sights

Hamas in their sights -- The assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

Israel has gone a step too far, says Salim Lone, and the United States is implicit by association

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Right after the slaying of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice emphatically denied that Israel had alerted the White House about the assassination, and the media dutifully played up the notion that the United States was not in the loop on the assassination.

But of course it was: The wheelchair-bound paraplegic cleric six months earlier had survived an Israeli jet's bombs, and a government minister two months ago had quite brutally proclaimed that the sheikh "should hide in the deep underground where he won't know the difference between night and day" but that Israel would "still find him in the tunnels, and eliminate him." To claim lack of U.S. foreknowledge is disingenuous at best.

In Gaza the morning of the assassination, a young Palestinian woman, her voice choking with unbearable grief and anger, captured the utter sense of Palestinian helplessness. "I feel adrift from everyone in the world," she said softly. The greatest boost for Islamic militancy and terrorism comes from humiliations like this, and from the devastations visited upon Palestinian, and now also other Arab and Muslim societies, by powerful states seen by the vast majority of the world's Muslims as determined to crush Islam.

In the West, which focuses primarily on the terrorism that the powerless employ, it is almost entirely forgotten that the Israelis and the Palestinians are not equals in this bitter struggle. One people are occupied and the other are the occupiers; one is weak and poor, the other a mighty industrial and nuclear power with, currently, unquestioned U.S. support.

The killing of Sheikh Yassin, whose wasted body but untrammeled spirit made him for all Muslims a symbol of Palestinian courage in the face of overwhelming odds, is a cataclysmic event. He was the undisputed, and much-beloved, leader of Gaza, his Hamas not only leading resistance to occupation but providing a network of badly needed schools, hospitals and financial assistance for refugees living in teeming camps where intense deprivation, dispossession and despair co-exist with all-encompassing social conservatism and communal solidarity. He was also a champion of ties with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat despite strong opposition within Hamas, and agreed more than once to truces with Israel.

His killing comes at an already difficult moment. The Arab and Muslim world has been aflame over post 9/11 U.S. military threats and campaigns in some of their countries, particularly the war and occupation of Iraq, which is seen as resulting from a U.S. desire to base troops in an important Arab country in order to dominate the Middle East, have direct hold over its oil and to further Israeli interests. In Pakistan, the U.S.-based Pew Trust poll found huge sympathy for Osama bin Laden.

The Musharraf government's American-supported hunt for al-Qaida leaders and the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan have raised anxieties about new instability stemming from those two pivotal Muslim battleground countries as well.

The world is used to Sharon's brazen disregard for international law and opinion, and global security, but in this explosive environment, it is possible that Israel finally went a step too far.

The U.S. response to the assassination might also have gone a step too far. With anti-American passions high and all its western allies condemning Tel Aviv, President Bush's support for a legally forbidden "targeted assassination" that his own administration has ruled unacceptable can only endanger more American lives.

Such strong support from President Bush's team for whatever Israel decides to do has also meant that other world leaders have found it easier to forget about Palestinian rights. So from the grand notions of the still-unimplemented U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, under which a united international community promised them the land they lost in 1967 in exchange for peace for Israel, Palestinians have seen the world stand by as their dispossession and oppression multiply while Israel expands its settlements. As a result, the Bush administration's much-touted Road Map means little to the Palestinians. Prime Minister Sharon has refused to implement even this modest plan's first steps, and the assassins wanted to kill much more than Yassin: there will be no talk of peace for some time to come.

Periodically, the Europeans are galvanized by a crisis, but invariably they are trumped by U.S. power or a Security Council veto, as happened again over this assassination. Some U.S. leaders have also been more favorable than others to Palestinian aspirations, including Presidents Carter, Clinton and Bush the elder, but even then Israeli settlements proceeded apace and Palestinians stayed stateless. However, the international groundswell of anger against Israel for this reckless assassination and the resulting endangerment of international security should worry the Bush team, already under pressure for overseeing a growth in global terrorism resulting from its exclusively military approach to tackling this scourge.

The current situation, of which Sheikh Yassin's assassination is the most vividly explosive, provokes as well as imperils the Palestinians as a people, and with it imperils Israel, the United States and the entire world. If the United States is serious about combating terrorism, nothing is more important for it right now than to win a measure of approval from the world's Muslims. It can make a beginning by restraining Israel and demanding immediately an end to its audaciously proclaimed plan to kill all Hamas leaders.

Salim Lone was a senior communications official of the United Nations until his recent retirement. His last assignment was as director of communications and spokesman for the U.N. mission in Iraq headed by the late Sergio Vieira de Mello last summer.