Israel/Palestine: how the peace was lost

New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2001

TELEVISION AUDIENCES AROUND THE WORLD watched in horror as a 12-year-old boy was shot dead by Israeli troops clashing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters on 2 October. Once again the Middle East was at war, as Israelis and Palestinians attacked each other with a fresh ferocity. Igniting the violence was Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Haram al-Sharif Mosque in Jerusalem to assert Israel's sovereignty over the shrine.

In Gaza, the West Bank and Israel's Arab villages, Palestinian residents took to the streets to defend the violated sanctity of Islam's third holiest shrine. Anger was also sparked by the failure of another Camp David summit in July -- Palestinians claim US President Clinton sided with Israel in trying to force concessions out of their leader Yasser Arafat.

On 12 October, after the lynching of two of its soldiers, Israel unleashed hundreds of rocket and artillery `retaliatory' attacks on Palestinian settlements. Around 10,000 civilians were injured and hundreds killed. The UN Human Rights Commission condemned Israel for `widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights'. A resolution put forward by the Arab nations strongly condemned `the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force ... by the Israeli occupying power'.

The violence was mirrored in shifts of political power on both sides. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak invited the right-wing Likud party to take part in an emergency coalition government and was later forced to agree to elections. Arafat released 22 members of Hamas, the Islamic militia responsible for suicide attacks on Israeli civilians in 1996. With these hard-liners in place, both sides initiated more armed attacks, creating empty streets with the tense silence of a war that has worse to come.

A credible mediator and a peacekeeping force are desperately needed. But the UN Security Council has refused to send in a protection force unless Israel approves. With the Israeli military in full force -- patrolling streets, enforcing curfews and unlawfully killing and arresting `suspicious' Palestinians -- this seems unlikely. If anything is to be learnt from this resurgence of violence, it is that an international approach more sensitive and democratic than the current US-brokered one is needed if peace is to be fostered in the Middle East.