Tel Aviv's escalating military repression has involved land, naval, and aerial bombardments. On February 20 Israeli forces killed 18 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nine were gunned down in Nablus, while helicopter missiles struck and killed two Palestinians near Yasir Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank. Arafat is the chairman of the Palestinian Authority and central leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The 18 deaths were among the highest totals in one day since the upsurge of Palestinian protests against Israeli occupation began in September 2000. Since then, at least 861 Palestinians and 273 Israelis have been killed. Thousands more have been wounded.

The next day, Israeli tanks and troops rolled into Gaza City, firing heavy machine guns and destroying the Voice of Palestine broadcasting station. The city is home to 500,000 Palestinians. This major military operation came two days after an Israeli rocket slammed into an office rented by Hamas, killing two of its members and injuring several children who were playing outside.

In mid-February U.S.-made F-16 warplanes bombed Gaza City, destroying Palestinian property and institutions, along with offices of the United Nations. This assault followed the aerial pounding of the city that began February 10 in broad daylight.

The February 12 Washington Post described the F-16 fighter bomber as "a weapon that, before last spring, had not been used in 34 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, in Gaza or the West Bank. Now its use is becoming commonplace."

"This is not a one-time operation," said Israeli military commander Brig. Gen. Yisrael Ziv after a February 13 incursion into Gaza. "This is one of a series of actions to tighten the noose around those responsible for firing the Qassam 2 and mortars." The homemade Qassam 2 rockets were fired February 10 by Hamas at Israeli settlements in Gaza. They exploded in fields, causing no injury.

The Israeli government seized on the use of these rockets to justify harsher military action and the roundup of Palestinian fighters. Israeli troops raided areas near Beir Hanun in the Gaza Strip, where the rockets were fired from, and seized 18 Palestinians.

In addition to its military assaults, the Israeli regime imposed travel restrictions on February 20 that effectively closed down all major roads in the northern West Bank, home to more than 1 million Palestinians. Israeli tanks have been deployed within 100 yards of Yasir Arafat's headquarters, and the Israeli regime announced February 24 that the Palestinian leader would have to obtain permission from Sharon if he wanted to travel outside Ramallah.  
 
Economic downturn hammers Israel
The world capitalist economic downturn has dealt blows to Israeli stability, with the country's gross domestic product dropping 4.7 percent in the second half of 2001. Although the contraction was expected, it "did not soften the blow of the country's worst economic performance in nearly 50 years," said an article in London's Financial Times.

At just over 10 percent of the workforce, the jobless rate in the country is "at its highest ever level" since its founding, the Israeli news daily Ha'aretz reported. In the past year 42,600 people lost their jobs--an annual increase of 19.7 percent. The paper noted that there is "no reason to believe" that the trend will "get anything but worse."

Palestinians living inside Israel's borders are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. The 21 towns with the highest unemployment levels are all Arab, including Kafar Manda, in the Galilee, where 22 percent of the workforce are without a job.

Some Israeli workers have begun organizing job actions in response to the deepening recession and the assault on their living standards. Workers at the Bagir textile plant in southern Israel barricaded themselves in the factory, started bonfires, and threatened suicide in mid-February after learning that more than half the 1,080 workers were on the verge of being fired.  
 
'War-weary Israelis'
A recent article in the Washington Post reported that a rising number of Israeli citizens see the "impossibility of a military victory" despite "their armed forces' almost daily strikes." The article, headlined "Weary Israelis Once Again Feel Grind of Conflict," noted that the "growing Israeli despair has been fueled not only by suicide bombings but also by the Palestinians' growing prowess as guerrilla fighters."

A 30-year-old staff sergeant who was a veteran of Tel Aviv's military occupation in Lebanon told the Post, "These guys are fanatic and determined. It's like if you blink, you get it, even if you're unprepared for a second."

The war-weariness of the Israeli population and the escalating military repression by the Zionist regime against Palestinians fighting for self-determination have fueled dissent among the Israeli military. Some 270 Israeli Army reservists--mostly sergeants and junior officers in combat units--have signed a statement saying that if called up for duty they will refuse to serve in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The public refusals began in January, when 52 reserve soldiers declared that their stance was based on the unwarranted killings of Palestinian teenagers and the daily humiliations of Palestinians in the territories.

A group of 1,000 army reserve generals and high-ranking veterans of the Mossad and Shin Bet secret service, organized in a group called the Council for Peace and Security, have announced a campaign to press the government to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and large parts of the West Bank. The group has called for 50 Israeli settlements to be dismantled.

These developments have helped to revive protest actions. A rally against the war on February 16 drew 10,000 people in Tel Aviv, the largest since September 2000.

For his part, Israeli prime minister Sharon, who has won support from the Bush administration, has proposed establishing "buffer zones" in and around the West Bank and Gaza Strip that could be more than half a mile wide with fences and patrols by Israeli military forces. He did not elaborate on how the buffer zones would affect the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers who live in the occupied territories, surrounded by 3.2 million Palestinians.

Palestinian officials denounced the plan as a pretext for grabbing more Palestinian territory. "It amounts to a new occupation of our lands," said Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

The Bush administration expressed support on February 26 for a "peace proposal" floated by Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Abdullah. A senior official later told CNN that the plan "isn't doable for now," without a cessation of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians.

The proposal is presented in the big-business media as a plan for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it captured in the 1967 war against Arab countries, in return for the full normalization of relations with all Arab governments. While no details of the plan have been made public or formally presented to the Israeli or other Arab regimes, Tel Aviv has rejected similar deals for decades.

"[Israel] is not expected to return to the vulnerable lines of 1967," wrote Dore Gold, an adviser to Sharon, in an opinion piece published in the February 27 New York Times. The Israeli ruling class "will not experiment with the lives of its citizens by agreeing to concessions that strip away tangible components of its national security," he added, reiterating Sharon's plans to set up buffer zones.  
 
Decline of Israeli state
Despite the attempts to pummel the Palestinian people into submission, Israel is declining as a colonial-settler state. While the regime has sought to encourage Jewish immigration, many are instead leaving the country. A growing number of Israelis who have dual citizenship are beginning to spend more of their time outside the region. "Israeli society is disintegrating and fragmenting," observed a Palestinian analyst on Israeli affairs, speaking in Hebrew on Palestinian television.

"They're quite distraught about the situation because they had thought that this was behind them and they could get down to living normal lives," said Joshua Muravchik, of the American Enterprise Institute. "They're painfully disappointed to suddenly discover that that's an illusion. And they're not really ready to go back to the days of the pioneers, when people were always armed and always under fire."

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, with the full support of the U.S. government, involved the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland and confiscation of their land. Palestinians who remain in Israel, while having a status above those living in the occupied territories, live a life of second-class citizenship. Today the official number of Palestinian refugees living in the Middle East is more than 3 million, according to the Palestinian National Authority. The Israeli regime staunchly opposes their demand to return to their homes and land.  
 
 
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