When will Israel really want peace? [Archives:2004/755/Opinion]

The International Court of Justice decision, clearly rendered the so called “Security Wall” or sometimes “security fence”, which Israel is building in the West Bank an illegitimate enterprise. The decision also goes to prove that Israel's policies under Ariel Sharon are not in line with a quest for peace or cohesion with the international community's desires to work towards a peaceful world. What Israel has time and again shown is that it neither wants peace nor to abide by any laws or statutes that will regulate its hunger for land and Ariel's Sharon's hunger for Arab blood. If the havoc that Ariel Sharon has unleashed in the Holy Land has not done enough to satisfy Israel's quests in the West Bank, then Ariel Sharon went on to build his diabolical wall, to make sure that all this havoc does not get lost. Israel has no intention of living at peace with the Palestinians, nor is it willing to let the Palestinians live in any decent conditions worth living. Time and again, notwithstanding the eyes of the world being so busy with the unsettled situation in Iraq, Ariel Sharon's thugs are continuously making life as miserable as it can be in what remains of Palestine. How can that ever be the doings of a man who earnestly wants peace?
Time and again, the Israelis have been told by the international community, this is just not the way to seek peace. Time and again, Ariel Sharon carries out his relentless drive to end all facets of a neighboring Palestinian State. The bulldozers and earth moving equipment, side by side with the latest air and ground military arsenal are out to drive the Palestinians inch by inch out of their indigenous homes. So, to make sure that all these efforts are entrenched, Ariel Sharon comes up with the building of a wall, which he says is to secure Israelis from “suicide bombers”. The Israelis claim that because of the wall, suicide bombings have stopped. That is a farce. The Palestinians have been hit so hard over the last four years that they are demoralized and all facets of organized resistance have been hatcheted. With merciless bombardment and indiscriminate shillings, the Israelis have killed all spirit amongst the Palestinians. Even the crippled have been killed on their wheelchairs, so there can be no means of organizing any form of resistance even without the wall. The Guardian notes: “the wall also helped, along with the military strikes, assassinations and arrests that characterize the Sharon strategy, to cut down the number of successful suicide attacks in Israel to almost nothing”. Yet, no one should forget who caused the thereat of suicide bombings: “But the real, and appalling, threat that the wall is being built to keep at bay would not have existed in the form or in the intensity that it does had it not been for Sharon's policies”. Yes, Ariel Sharon, as the Guardian attests, unleashed his thirst for Palestinian blood in a deliberate provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, with three thousand men of the Israeli security machine armed to the teeth (he wasn't even Prime Minister yet at the time). Yes, it was Ariel Sharon, when he ordered his forces to attack any Palestinian peaceful protest with “rubber bullets, then with live ammo (remember the brutal killing of Mohammed Al-Durra and so many other Palestinian children). This was before suicide bombings hit the airwaves, when the Palestinians realized that the Israelis were not ready to accept any form of peaceful protest against an illegitimate occupation that has just about turned the West Bank and Gaza into the world's largest Abu Ghreib-like prison. To clarify the peaceful intentions of Ariel Sharon, the Guardian in its Leader Op-Ed again gives an outsider's view: “Those included, as most of the world well knows, an avoidance of negotiations, a refusal to respond to Palestinian efforts at political reform or ceasefires, and an unreadiness even to entertain the thought that Hamas might be brought into the search for a solution.”
It was amazing to hear the Israelis point out that they have no intentions of abiding by the International Court of Justice's decision, as the only law that Israel recognizes is the Law of the State of Israel. They want the world to believe that a nation that was built on stolen land at the cost of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives, most of whom were helpless civilians, is really a law abiding nation that succumbs to the most just of laws. God only knows, that Israeli law has made life so miserable during the occupation that the Palestinians of Jerusalem now only occupy a small neighborhood and are almost cut out of their brethren in the rest of the West Bank, thanks to all sorts of rules and regulations that destroyed many Palestinian homes in the city and prevented any services from being accessible to the Palestinians. Of course they expect us to be fooled by the theatrical Israeli court decision that placated the petitions of Palestinians who sued for grievances against the wall. That decision was timed nicely to come before the ICJ decision, to make the Israelis seem humane. This observer knows well that even that decision will never see implementation. Israeli tractors simply never destroy anything that Israel has built. Oh, they may build a gate here and there and make it look like they have abided by the decision, but the fact of the matter is that the wall will be there to stay. Of course, the ICJ has made it also clear that the United States among others should see to it that the ICJ decisions are enforced. Although the 46 ICJ decisions that have so far been issued were eventually enforced, NO. 47 will simply be shelved among all the international rulings and conventions as Israel has been at liberty to make a mockery of international legitimacy in all its manifestations. All thanks of course go to Uncle Sam, whose representative in the ICJ was the only decline among the 15 member ICJ tribunal.
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