While the regime in Tel Aviv wields a big military advantage, it continues to confront stubborn opposition from Palestinians. It also faces growing war weariness among working people in Israel, reinforced by the accumulating effects of three years of economic recession.

“Since mid-December, the Israeli occupation forces have stepped up their aggression through the northern West Bank, focusing heavily on the city of Nablus and its adjacent Balata refugee camp,” stated the Palestine Media Center (PMC), which is supervised by the Palestinian National Authority (PA). Nablus is home to 60,000 people. The January 8 report added that Israeli soldiers “have killed 14 Palestinians in the city over the past three weeks.”

Israeli troops reentered Nablus January 7, the day after a curfew imposed in late December was lifted, and fatally shot two Palestinians who they claimed had fired on them. “I don’t find any justification for killing them,” Nablus governor Mahmoud el-Aloul told Reuters. “It is just more military pressure in order to make the Palestinians lower their political demands.”

The same night troops also killed a 22-year-old man in Tulkarm, to the northwest. According to the Palestine Media Center they held 24 Palestinians overnight throughout the West Bank.  
 
Sharon declares ultimatum
Speaking January 5 at a convention of his Likud Party, Sharon reiterated threats that if the Palestinian leadership did not effectively clamp down on suicide bombings and other attacks organized by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israeli government would begin to “disengage” from parts of the occupied territories. “The test will be in deeds, not words,” he said. “If it turns out that there is no partner on the Palestinian side, we will cut ourselves off from them both politically and physically.”

Sharon asserted that “if we receive security, we will give—give a lot. If the terrorist infrastructures will be dismantled from the root, if the incitement stops, then the government of Israel under our leadership, under Likud leadership, will be prepared to do its part to make possible the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”

Sharon’s speech did not receive unanimous acclamation from the Likud delegates. Despite his ultimatums toward the Palestinians and continuing refusal to negotiate with their elected leaders, a number of convention delegates loudly booed him for his statement that Tel Aviv might have to “relinquish some Jewish settlements” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The steps proposed by Sharon were among those stipulated in the “road map for peace” promoted by the White House since the spring of last year and provisionally accepted by Tel Aviv. The London-based Economist noted that back when the “road map” was proposed, Sharon’s government had promised to enact this part of the agreement “immediately.” Promises notwithstanding, the big-business weekly reported, “nothing happened bar some desultory attempts by the army to evacuate a few tiny outposts, most of them reoccupied since.”

Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz have reportedly listed six outposts for short-term removal. “But nothing has happened on the ground,” reported the Economist.  
 
Wall around the West Bank
Amid the rhetoric about “peace negotiations” and debate about whether or not to “disengage,” Tel Aviv has pressed ahead with the construction of a 400-mile concrete and steel wall that surrounds and penetrates the West Bank. On December 31 Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators in Budrus who surrounded an olive grove to block the paths of demolition and construction crews. Seventeen people were detained that day and the next.

As planned, the barrier will surround Budrus, cutting its residents off from their groves and livelihoods. In total some 70,000 Palestinians in at least three towns will be roped into Israel as the wall loops around strategic and productive areas, including Israeli settlements, incorporating about 80 percent of Israeli West Bank settlers into Israel. “The fence also would contain several unconnected sections around settlements, including Ariel, a community of 18,000 Israelis some 15 miles inside the West Bank,” the Associated Press reported.

Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei pointed out January 8 that “Israel’s continued policy of building the wall means that talk about a Palestinian state makes no sense.

“If this Israeli policy continues,” he stated, “we are going to come back to the option of a single, bi-national state”—a position that would involve the rejection of a separate impoverished Palestinian statelet in the occupied territories.

Israeli officials were “furious” at the rhetorical suggestion, reported Agence-France Presse. One anonymous high-ranking official told AFP, “This is nothing less than a threat to put an end to the state of Israel as a Jewish state, and we categorically reject it. Instead of threatening us, Mr. Qurei would be best advised to come back to the negotiations table and start implementing the road map.”

U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell rejected Qurei’s statement as well, pinning the blame for the conflict on so-called Palestinian “terrorism.” Washington is “committed to a two-state solution,” he said at a January 8 news conference—“a state for the Palestinian people called Palestine; and a Jewish state, the state of Israel, which exists.”

Powell added, “what we need right now is for the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority to get control of security forces and to use those forces and use the other tools available to him to put down terror and to put down violence.” Qurei and others, he said, “have got to wrest authority away” from longtime Palestinian leader and PA president Yasir Arafat.  
 
Economic crisis, political dissent
With the sealed-off West Bank and Gaza Strip no longer readily serving as mass sources of cheap Palestinian labor, the Israeli capitalists have stepped up attempts to lure workers from overseas. By the end of 2003, reported the December 24 British Guardian, about 260,000 immigrants were working in Israel, “having replaced Palestinian labourers during three years of fighting.” They have come from countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

The budget just passed by the Israeli parliament includes a range of cuts to spending on government services, including Social Security, reported the Financial Times. Among other measures, the government has raised the retirement age by two years. The UK paper noted that such measures “are also Washington’s conditions for $9 billion in loan guarantees granted this year, which have helped Israel to raise finance through international bond issues at lower interest rates.”

Meanwhile, the number of Israeli troops who refuse to take part in the repression in the West Bank and Gaza, while still small, has continued to grow. Late in 2003 three officers and 10 soldiers from the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit wrote to Sharon to say, “We have long ago crossed the line between fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing another people.”

They had decided to go public with their criticisms, said the Israeli troops, “out of deep fear for the future of the state of Israel as a democratic, Zionist and Jewish country and out of concern for its moral and ethical image…. We will no longer butcher our humanity by taking part in an occupying army’s missions.”  
 
 
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