Israel's Targeted Assassination Policy

By Rosemary Radford Ruether

On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, appeared before the U.S. Congress to decry the lack of any "genuine Palestinian partner for peace," with whom Israel could talk. Although declaring "our deepest desire to build a better future for our region, hand in hand with a Palestinian partner," Olmert warned that Israel cannot "wait forever," If such a partner fails to appear, Israel will move forward to set the borders of Israel vis á vis the Palestinians unilaterally. Olmert received the warmest ovations from the Congress and was promised support from the White House for the plan to unilaterally set Israel's borders, should no Palestinian leaders who satisfy Israel's conditions as "partners for peace" appear.

Olmert's stance should be put in the context of Israel's long standing policy of targeted assassination of Palestinian leaders. For more than thirty years it has been Israel's policy to assassinate or otherwise eliminate popular Palestinian leaders who were independent and had wide trust of the people, while seeking to construct a subservient leadership with whom it could negotiate "peace" on Israel's terms. In the 1970s, after Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, Israel tried to create the "village leagues," a puppet leadership which Israel could pass off as Palestinian self-government. These pseudo-leaders were resoundingly rejected by the Palestinian people. In 1976 Palestinian municipalities were allowed to elect their own mayors. When pro-PLO candidates swept the elections, Israel sought to assassinate several of them. The mayor of Ramallah lost one leg and the mayor of Nablus both legs in car bombs. In 1982 Israel removed all the elected mayors and replaced them with Israeli military governors.

From the founding of the PLO in 1964 until 1992 Israel refused to talk to the PLO, claiming they were determined to "destroy the state of Israel," even though the PLO had accepted a two state solution by mid-1970s. Prominent leaders of Palestinian organizations were killed in rocket attacks and car bombs. In 1973 a group of Israeli commandos, led by Ehud Barak, (later Prime Minister of Israel) arrived by speedboat in Beirut. Disguised in women's clothes Barak and his men gunned down three top PLO officials in their downtown apartments. Arafat himself escaped assassination only by living constantly on the run, seldom sleeping in the same place on successive nights.

In 1993 Israel announced that it had been meeting secretly with the PLO in Norway and had reached an interim agreement for Palestinian self-government. After signing a Declaration of Principles for this plan in September, the PLO leaders were allowed to return from Tunis to head the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a "peace process" that would lead to the negotiated settlement of the conflict under the Oslo accords. But it soon became apparent that what Arafat and the PLO thought they were doing and what Israel thought they were doing were two very different things. Arafat thought he was an autonomous leader of the Palestinian people parallel to Israel's leaders who could negotiate the details of a two-state solution leading to an independent Palestinian state.

What Israel wanted was to convert the PA into a subservient tool of a permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These territories would be divided into small enclaves of Palestinian population largely cut off from agricultural resources, separated from each other and surrounded by the Israeli military, while the areas of Israeli settlement would be annexed into Israel. The PA leaders could administrate its enclaves under Israel's permanent control. Israel and the U.S. played a continual cat and mouse game with Arafat, occasionally agreeing to negotiate with him and then rejecting him as someone with whom they could "talk," when he failed to accede fully to this plan of permanent colonization.

More at;
Palestine Chronicle