An Phoblacht editor MARTIN SPAIN spoke last weekend with DR ALI HALIMEH, Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, about the current Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian people.


The Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, is a quiet spoken and polite individual. He is also very calm, and in the current situation he needs to be. There was an air of unreality as I sat drinking coffee with Dr Ali Halimeh in the lobby of the Conrad Hotel in Dublin. His phone was constantly ringing, as he received news of the latest developments in Palestine, almost all bad.

He had lost a good friend in the Palestinian administration to Israeli bombardment just that day. Another friend, a senior member of the Palestinian security forces, had evacuated his office only minutes before it was destroyed by an Israeli air-to-surface missile. Each day now for the past fortnight, the body count of Palestinian victims has risen relentlessly, reaching daily double figures on an all too depressing basis.

Ali Halimeh was born in Lebanon, his parents, like so many thousands of other refugees, having been forced to leave their land and everything they owned by the Israelis in 1948. He attended school and university in Beirut and graduated in Arabic literature and history. He joined the Palestinian national liberation movement in 1969. He spent 19 years representing the Palestinians in Zimbabwe before being posted to Ireland. He was five years in Tanzania before that.

I was anxious to discuss with him the growing desperation that leads young men and women to sacrifice their lives as suicide bombers, a phenomenon unheard of in Palestine until recently. He, however, preferred to discuss the big picture and took me back to the Oslo agreement in 1993, which he says was a genuine effort by the Palestinian leadership to conclude a historic agreement with the state of Israel for peace in the Middle East.

The problems started, he said, with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The four prime ministers since, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and now Sharon, have each brought their own interpretation to the Oslo agreement. "We wanted to stick to the terms agreed at Oslo, not to have to engage in endless renegotiations," he said. "We are very much committed to Oslo, but it is not working. Sharon has never believed in Oslo, From day one he rejected it. He is seeking to destroy the Palestinian Authority and what remains of Oslo with it. Given the current situation, the whole basis for Oslo is gone.

"Sharon has targeted the security establishment, institutions and symbols of the Palestinian Authority. He calls Arafat a terrorist and he is supposed to be a partner in peace.

"There is despair, frustration and anger among Palestinians at this persecution by Israel but the Israeli public have not come to appreciate the meaning of the historic shaking of hands between Arafat and Rabin. For the first time in modern history, there was a Palestinian acknowledgement of the state of Israel. We told the entire world that we wanted to live side by side in peace.

If there is to be progress, said Dr Halimeh, "we have to have genuine common trust. We need Israel and the West to help us by giving Arafat some hope". He said that under Barak, there was a Palestinian state but it was controlled by remote from Israel. "Arafat did not lose the opportunity to build the peace. He was never given the chance to sell it to the Palestinian people. And Israel refuses to admit any political or moral responsibility.

"Sharon has never presented any political programme. He just presents ultimatums. That will not work with Arafat. He is flexible and pragmatic but he will never compromise on Palestinian national rights. They won't destroy the Palestinian national aspiration. Sharon will bring more problems to his country by trying.

"The big word for us is occupation. If you don't tackle that issue there will always be resistance. We have done everything possible to liberate our country. We tried political means and agreed that they would have 78% of the territory and we would have 22% but still they want to share Jerusalem and part of the West Bank. Over the years, the Israelis have pulled out of Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Why not Palestine?"

Halimeh said the Palestinian leadership believes Sharon is on the way out. "The Americans have prolonged his lifespan as premier," he said. "Bush wanted to justify his actions in Afghanistan and Sharon was happy to give him support. At the end of the day, the solution will only be based on the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people. We need a fully independent and sovereign state, not one controlled by Israel from within or without."

Dr Halimeh concluded with a word of praise for the Dublin government. "Ireland has been the most progressive among the European countries," he said. "They have distinguished themselves within Europe in the way they have acted with regard to the Middle East."

Where human dignity ends

In his second report from the war zone that is Palestine and Israel, SILVIO CERULLI describes the atrocious living conditions endured by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and how they have borne the brunt of Israel's latest military strategy.


    
1,147 Palestinians have been killed and 18,250 Palestinians have been injured in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 29 September 2000 and 8 March 2002. - Source: Palestinian Red Crescent Society
Children are playing on the dusty side of the road, no shoes on; they run on the banks of open sewers as they were creeks of fresh water. Old men have to wade across them. Large families live in shacks, tents, sand holes or in the ruins of their destroyed houses, having nowhere else to go. Most of them were already refugees who escaped Israeli persecution; now they can't escape from Israeli random bombings.

There are over 1,200,000 Palestinians surviving in these conditions along the Gaza Strip; 65% of them are under the age of 18. Many refugee camps erected during 53 years of occupation have developed into small size towns with their own schools and markets, but conditions remain atrocious. Now, most of the schools have been razed to the ground by Apache helicopters and missiles from F-16s and markets are empty: the vast majority of people rely on humanitarian aid since the Israelis have destroyed plantations, harvests, factories, electricity power stations.

Palestinians are strangled by a form of military and economical apartheid that kills more people, usually children and the elderly, than the Israeli army itself. More than half of the 220 children killed since the start of this Intifada (Sept 2000) were murdered here. Craters pepper the roads, some areas look like they were hit by an earthquake, destruction and debris are everywhere; even the distant thunder of a passenger plane makes eyes search for signs of death in the sky.

This is the Gaza Strip, where human dignity ends. People are confined in the largest and overcrowded open prison on earth; a laager bordered by trenches, watchtowers and sandbags, 48 km long and 7km wide, caged between the Zionist promised land and the Mediterranean. Many houses and buildings are collapsed, a carpet of debris and rubbish marking Sharon's tray of madness. Third class citizens on their own land, people move on carts pulled by skinny donkeys; often their only possession is a goat to provide milk for the infants and pots to save precious water. The 6,000 Jewish settlers who occupy 35% of the Strip can water their gardens and fill their swimming pools as many times as they wish; at the same time, the Israeli army has diverted rivers, streams and canals and blocked 220 water wells with sand in the rest of the Strip. In the West Bank, Sharon is denying access to the River Jordan, which is an international river system, and his forces are obstructing waterways that only run through Palestinian territory.

A fortnight ago, Sharon had promised a week without attacks on Palestinians; it followed an apparent shift in Palestinian resistance strategy: no more strikes at civilians in Israel but the liberation of their country by hitting occupying forces - soldiers and settlers. Four days after the promise, Israeli police and army shot two Palestinian civilians and, by mistake, an Israeli settler. Since then, the escalation has progressed relentlessly. Gaza City, Rafiah and many refugee camps in the Strip suffered nightly air raids for twelve days, incurring more than 25 deaths, including six children. Israeli battleships opened fire from the west while artillery was shelling from the east; in between them, for the first time in the Intifada, dozens of tanks rolled into Gaza City and others major centres; it was regarded as "the most extensive army assault ever in the Gaza Strip".

In the West Bank city of Nablus, soldiers opened fire on the Red Cross, killing a doctor. Two pregnant women, one Palestinian and one Israeli, were killed by army gunfire at a checkpoint. Thirty-two people were reported dead in the first two days of March after tanks and commandos stormed refugee camps at Talaba and Jenin, totally unrelated to a previous attempted killing near the Gilo settlement, 30 miles south.

It was enough for the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, radical extremists from the Fatah movement: on Saturday 2 March, the day for the Sabbath prayers, the first human bomb for nearly two months killed nine Orthodox Jews outside their Jerusalem mosque. A few hours later a lone sniper, using what was described as a World War Two carbine, fired 24 rounds in two minutes at a checkpoint in Ofra, West Bank, killing in quick sequence seven soldiers and three settlers before vanishing beyond the rocky hills. Sharon then told his cabinet about the need to bring "heavier losses" on the Palestinians and few hours later two cars were blown up by tank shells in Ramallah: inside were a woman and five children. Back in Gaza, they bombarded camps and villages, killing 12 people in a matter of hours, bringing the toll for only a week to 105 deaths (73 of them Palestinian). A UN special school for blind people was destroyed during the bombings and Palestinian pupils and teachers were injured when a bomb planted by a Jewish settler detonated outside a primary school on the outskirts of East Jerusalem.

It was too much for UN chief Kofi Annan and even for American secretary of state Colin Powell, who criticised Sharon for an actual declaration of war, "which won't work". But Sharon's goal remains to occupy and annex the West Bank and Gaza and he's ready to perpetrate atrocities to achieve it. On the ground the siege is becoming total and permanent. Soldiers have been ordered to prevent Palestinians from walking their own streets in the West Bank and by now only ambulances can get through the checkpoints, if Israeli soldiers choose to allow them. In Gaza, tank invasions and air raids are showing the full extent of Sharon's total disregard for human rights and international law. For Israelis, all Palestnians are terrorists, from Arafat to the last child of the Gaza Strip; that's why the slaughter will go on.

But eventually, against a backdrop of graveyards, Sharon will have to negotiate with the Palestinians. At the moment Israeli Police minister Landau is looking to further aggravate the situation by asking his Premier for permission to use on the Palestinians "the same methods Saddam Hussein applied against the Kurdish population".

It remains to be seen if and when Sharon will give the green light for a full scale reoccupation.