Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 10-12

Four Views

The Assassination of Sheikh Yassin: Sharon Opens the “Gates of Hell”

Sheikh’s Assassination Crosses All Red Lines

By Linda S. Heard

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, assassinated March 22, 2004 (AFP photo/Mohammed Saber).

SHEIKH AHMED YASSIN, spiritual head of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, has fallen victim to “justice” Israeli-style. Early yesterday morning as the white-haired, wheelchair-bound leader exited his local mosque after prayers, Israel’s Apache helicopter gunships lay in waiting on the direct orders, and under the personal supervision, of Ariel Sharon.

This high-profile extra-judicial assassination—one in the long line of many—has thrust the region into turmoil, and, far from weakening the Palestinians and their supporters, it has united them. It has also gagged the moderates and fueled the extremists.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has called for a three-day mourning period, and has accused the Israelis of crossing “all red lines.” Ahmed Qurei, the authority’s prime minister, has described Yassin’s murder as “one of the biggest crimes that the Israeli government has committed.”

Palestinian resistance leaders have declared an open war against the occupation and have vowed to target Sharon and others in his government. “War is now open with Israel,” Abdel Aziz Rantisi told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya network. Rantisi himself escaped assassination when, in June last year, his vehicle came under a missile attack.

Fatah leader Hussein Al-Sheikh said the response would be “shuddering with earthquake-like effect.” A leader of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Abu Qusayee, warned that while “thousands of Israelis would now be targets, the head of our hit list is Sharon himself and his henchmen.”

From Beirut to Cairo, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted in response to Yassin’s murder, while the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood told the Al-Jazeera network, “There can be no life for the Americans and Zionists in the region.” Some 7,000 Egyptian students held an impromptu demonstration at Al-Azhar upon news of Yassin’s killing.

Condemnations have poured in from governments around the world, including Britain. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, while conceding Israel has a right to defend itself, said there was no excuse for going outside international law. “We, therefore, condemn it. It’s unacceptable, it’s unjustified, and it’s very unlikely to achieve its objective,” he said.

The assassination is an embarrassment to the Egyptian government, which, along with Jordan, had been pulling out the stops to mediate between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority over cease-fires and peace proposals.

King Abdallah of Jordan, who recently met with Sharon at his private ranch for discussions on the future of Gaza, is likely to be even more embarrassed. His prime minister, Faisal Al-Fayez, read out this statement on state television: “We, in the government, condemn strongly this heinous crime and affirm this act will escalate the cycle of violence and instability in the region and will lead to more bloodshed.”

Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese president, termed the murder “a savage crime committed by Israel,” adding, “Israel is mistaken if it thinks by killing the resistance fighters, it can kill the Palestinian cause, which is based on right and justice.”

Mohammed Al-Saqer, the parliamentary head of Kuwait’s Foreign Affairs Committee, asked the United States to clearly condemn the Israeli actions before other Palestinian leaders too became victims of Israeli aggression.

Thus far, a U.S. State Department spokesman has only urged both sides to show restraint.

Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir defended the murder, saying that Israel held Sheikh Yassin responsible for scores of suicide attacks against Israelis. “He is the one who is sending children and women to explode themselves,” he said. Arab political analysts believe that, on the contrary, Sheikh Yassin was a moderating influence on the military wing of Hamas. But will the demise of Sheikh Yassin make Israelis and their backers any safer? Not according to Hamas, which has now suggested that the U.S. could become a target for revenge attacks.

In a statement faxed to the Associated Press, Hamas said: “The Zionists did not carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration and it must take responsibility for this crime.”

If this is a serious threat, then it represents a change in strategy on the part of Hamas, which has always cited Israel as its sworn enemy, as opposed to Israel’s closest ally and financial backer, the United States. [Rantisi later told reporters that Americans will not be targets of Hamas operations.] This would be a blow to America’s “war on terror,” as reflected by descending world markets.

The assassination could also lead to fundamentalist groups worldwide joining with Hamas and could shake the foundations of the Palestinian Authority, already struggling to maintain order with only 20,000 policemen and limited security resources. It could also prove an ideological turning point for Palestinians, who have so far hoped that a just peace, forged under the rule of international law, would eventually prevail.

Those who wondered about Sharon’s unilateral decision to withdraw from Gaza and to build an apartheid wall separating the Palestinian residents of the West Bank from Israel could now have their answer.

It appears that Sharon, George W. Bush’s “Man of Peace,” is determined to thrust the West Bank and Gaza into chaos, in an attempt to justify an even more hard line and brutal response from Israel when Palestinian groups seek revenge. Jordan’s fears that panicked ordinary Palestinians might cross its borders in large numbers seeking refuge could well materialize. As Israelis brace themselves for what might follow, their streets deserted and their stores shuttered, hooded Palestinian militants are appearing on television citing Israel’s latest assassination as a precedent for a new international law—one in which any leader is a valid target.

Sheikh Yassin has been turned into a martyr, his ideological legacy assured in a way it could never have been had he been allowed to pass away naturally in his own bed. Perhaps Sharon had hoped to splinter Hamas into smaller, more manageable groups with the killing of its spiritual leader, but the reverse is likely to be the case.

Hamas may, indeed, gain more support, but there are no real winners here, as both sides of the conflict can only wait to count their dead in an atmosphere of mounting violence, fear and dread.

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Mideast affairs and can be contacted at <>. This article first appeared in the March 23 edition of the Arab News (Jeddah). Reprinted with permission.

The Helicopter vs. the Wheelchair

By Samah Jabr

Neither the fact nor the brutal manner of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s cruel assassination was surprising—nor was Israel’s indifference to the severe human cost other Palestinians paid because they happened to be around Sheikh Yassin when he was targeted.

Sheikh Yassin is not the first and will not be the last Palestinian leader killed for struggling for Palestinian rights. Israel has assassinated many Palestinians and non-Palestinians—intellectuals, writers and artists from across the political and ideological spectrum—who led the fight against its occupation of Palestine. Under all its democratically elected prime ministers, Israel has assassinated Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories, in refugee camps and throughout the Diaspora.

What astonishes, however, is the stunningly accurate way in which Sheikh Yassin’s assassination metaphorically reveals the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The image of an American-made Apache helicopter launching three sophisticated missiles to kill a quadriplegic—an almost deaf 69-year-old man, made nearly blind by the “moderate physical pressure” applied by Israeli prison interrogators—leaving his mosque in his wheelchair following dawn prayers, exemplifies, on a smaller scale, what is taking place in occupied Palestine. Israel resorts to the logic of power to smother the Palestinians’ power of logic in struggling for a free and decent life in the land of their birth.

Sheikh Yassin was expelled as a teenager from his village, Al Joura, near Askalan, in 1948. For the rest of his life, he lived as a refugee in a small, modest house in a poor neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. Even though he was a captive of his wheelchair, Sheikh Yassin had a creative mind and a big heart. A brave, influential, daring speaker, he was known for his wisdom, balanced assessment and steadfast faith. He did not struggle to exterminate the Jews and create an Islamic empire, as the manipulative Western media likes to portray him. In fact, he distinguished between a Jew and an occupying Zionist. He did, however, advocate armed resistance to liberate occupied Palestinian land and end Israel’s daily killing and oppression of Palestinians.

Some of us agreed, some differed with the visions, opinions and strategies of Sheikh Yassin and his organization, but we all knew he loved Palestine and so we loved him, and we united with him in this love. Those who are aware of the politics of the occupied land know that Ahmed Yassin was a fair, sage, responsible leader. Indeed, many Israelis refer to him, and to Ismael Abu-Shanab, the high-ranking Hamas leader who was assassinated last year, as the soft-liners in the Islamic resistance movement. The two men knew when to say yes and when to say no to armed resistance, they cooperated with the Palestinian Authority and offered more than one hudna—truce—that the Israeli government violated.

The Israelis could very well have arrested Sheikh Yassin had they thought that removing him from the Palestinian public would be beneficial. They could have taken him to court and tried him if they really believed they could prove him guilty of terrorism. But they chose extrajudicial murder—even though they knew very well that this could severely harm Israel’s security, and jeopardize political options for a resolution of the conflict.

But it is no secret that the Zionist project has always used terror to achieve its objectives. This is what they have declared and practiced since the first international Zionist congress in 1897. They use terror to kill Palestinians and evacuate their lands, to threaten Arab nations and blackmail the international community. They killed Sheikh Yassin to call for more blood and spread fear and intimidation in Palestinian hearts.

“I, too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea,” wrote Chaim Nachman Bialik, Israel’s much-admired poet, in his 1934 “The Present Hour.”

Israel’s killing machines work in synchrony with its media machines. The day after Ahmed Yassin was assassinated, international media broadcast footage of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy from Nablus who arrived at the Hawwara checkpoint wearing a vest of explosives.“ He came seeking help from Israeli soldiers,” said an IDF spokeswoman, “and he was well cared for. But we need to find out those evil people behind him.”

The point of the report was to show the world how horrible Palestinians are and that they truly deserve death, and to serve as damage control for the images of the smashed wheel chair over the large bloodstain—all that is left of Yassin—in the previous day’s news reports. Only Al-Jazeera reported that the boy’s “mental capacity...is very low,” and quoted another boy from Nablus, also presented as a would-be suicide bomber, who reportedly told his family that the Israelis “told me to do this or else they would kill me.”

Even the international community’s weak official disapproval of Sheikh Yassin’s assassination was smashed in the face by another American veto of a Security Council resolution condemning the latest Israeli violation of international law.

Today, there is a feeling of dread and deep depression among Palestinians. While we have different opinions of what has occurred and various expectations of what will ensue,the one thing we all realize is that Israel is seeking a bloody war, not a peace, with the Palestinians.

Our task now is to develop strategies corresponding with this realization. Despite our mourning, anger and apprehension, giving up certainly is not an option.

In their attacks on Palestinians over the decades, Israelis have put many of us in wheelchairs—physically and mentally—and sought to cripple and restrain us. Despite his death, however, Sheikh Yassin, a man bound to his wheelchair, has given us a model of resoluteness, sincerity and gallantry. We hold our heads high for being the children and grandchildren of the man who chose his path, and lived and died according to his principles. The teacher is gone, but his lessons are eternal.

Samah Jabr, a native of Jerusalem, is a physician currently studying in France.

The Chilling Implications Of This State Killing

By Robert Fisk

It doesn’t take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Yes, he endorsed suicide bombings—including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not.

But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday—and something infinitely more dangerous, another sinister precedent—was set for our brave new world.

Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheikh Yassin was the “head of the snake”—to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London—the head of Hamas, “one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations.” But then came obfuscation from the world’s media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us at lunchtime, was originally freed by the Israelis in a “prisoner exchange.” It sounded like one of those familiar swaps—a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. And then, later in the day, the BBC told us that he had been freed “following a deal brokered by King Hussain of Jordan.” Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This “head of the snake” was in an Israeli prison. And then, bingo, this supposed monster was let go because of a “deal.”

Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right-wing Likudist Binyamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister of Israel. King Hussain wasn’t a “broker” between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison, and the late King Hussain called the U.S. president in a fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn’t given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn’t released.

Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the “head of the snake” was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the Israeli prime minister—a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten yesterday. Which is all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Mr. Netanyahu let him go in the first place? It was not a question that anyone wanted to ask yesterday.

But there was something infinitely more dangerous in all this. Yet another Arab—another leader, however vengeful and ruthless—had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill Osama bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam’s two sons. The Israelis repeatedly threaten to murder Yasser Arafat. It’s getting to be a habit.

No one has begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there has been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government-versus-guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides—government ministers, spiritual leaders—were allowed to survive.

Now all is changed utterly. Anyone who advocates violence is now on a death list. So who can be surprised if the rules are broken by the other side?

With all their own security, Bush and Blair may be safe, but what about their ambassadors and fellow ministers? Leaders are fair game. We will not say this. If, or when, our own political leaders are gunned down or blown up, we shall vilify the killers and argue a new stage in “terrorism” has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all-out assassination spree.

Robert Fisk is a correspondent for the London Independent. This article first appeared March 23, 2004. Copyright 2004 The Independent. Reprinted with permission.

Fear and Loathing in Israel

By Larry Derfner

Despite the way it is being framed in this country, the choice was not whether to kill Sheikh Ahmed Yassin or sit with our hands folded. Even though few people around here noticed, Israel was not sitting with its hands folded in Gaza before the missiles hit Yassin and the people around him.

Before the assassination, the army was killing Palestinians five, 10, as many as 15 a day, day after day, for weeks on end. And it didn’t start in response to the Gazan suicide bombers who killed 10 Israelis at Ashdod port. It began well before that, when Sharon and the IDF decided that we wouldn’t get chased out of Gaza like we did from Lebanon—no, this time we would leave as victors.

The problem is that by killing Yassin, and all the other terrorist leaders we’re now going to kill, we’ve as much as guaranteed that terrorists are going to strike back against us, and maybe against targets overseas, in new, extraordinary ways.

After a couple of “quality” terror strikes, will we still feel like victors? Will we be able to get out of Gaza then—under fire as we so vividly will be?

The air force just knocked off Gazan terrorist No. 1, and Israelis aren’t acting very victorious—they’re afraid to sit in a downtown restaurant again. When the explosions begin, then we’ll really have fear, agony, rage, and of course more escalations, and then nobody will be talking anymore about any disengagement plan.

It will be too late. I’m afraid it already is. We could have gone on fighting a low-intensity war like we did against Hezbollah in Lebanon, then gotten out of Gaza and been so much better off; but in the end, Sharon proved too much the imperious, prideful general to be able to cut Israel’s losses.

After three years of fighting, he seemed to have admitted that there was no military solution to the intifada—but he wasn’t willing to accept the consequences of that admission. He couldn’t watch the Palestinians cheer and gloat and burn Israeli flags like Hezbollah did.

No Israeli was fond of that scene, and none was looking forward to seeing it again in Gaza. But was it worth escalating the war so gravely to prevent the Palestinians from claiming victory once Israel left Gaza, as if they could be prevented from doing that once we were gone?

Sharon, along with the other generals in and out of uniform who lead this country, decided it was. And now we’re back to where we were when he got elected, three years and about 900 Israeli deaths ago: Let the IDF win.

Yet the IDF’s chance of winning seems no higher; the only thing that suddenly does is the war’s intensity.

We’re asking the old questions again: What is the endgame here? What is the goal? And the answers we’re hearing from Sharon, Ya’alon, Mofaz, Netanyahu, Shalom and the rest are so ridiculous, so discredited over the decades, that it’s very hard to believe they’re serious.

One line of “reasoning” is that once the terrorist leaders see that they are not immune, that they will pay with their lives for sending others out to kill Israelis, they will stop. Fear of death will stop them. Then: no terrorist leaders, no terrorism.

So how do you explain Yassin’s successor, Hamas’s new leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi? He’s a pediatrician by profession. Why did he quit examining babies and start a second career as a terrorist leader if he was afraid of getting killed? The air force fired a missile at him last summer and put him in the hospital; why did he go right back to work? He knows Israel is gunning for him now and his days are probably numbered; why has he agreed to become Gaza’s new “ace of spades”?

Or what about Arafat? He was a University of Cairo-educated civil engineer who made a lot of money in Kuwait, and then decided to spend the rest of his life escaping death as leader of the Palestinians. He’s got billions of dollars and various other currencies stashed away; if he’s so concerned for his own skin, why didn’t he just take the money and run a long time ago?

Palestinian terrorist leaders are masters at slaughtering innocents, but they’re not cowards; and Israeli leaders would make better decisions if they stopped pretending they were.

The other happy ending being floated is that once Hamas is crippled, a moderate Palestinian leadership will be able to emerge in Gaza and move toward peace with Israel.

Anybody who’s paid any attention to our little conflict over here, anybody’s who’s been watching the news since Monday morning knows that this is an insult to the intelligence, so I’m not going to bother with it. I just hope that for our sake our leaders are lying, that they’re just spinning this “moderate leadership” line to soften the Yassin assassination for Western consumption; because if they sincerely believe that this is the way to find a Palestinian partner for peace, then they’re even more dangerous than they appear.

And that’s saying a lot. The missiles they aimed at Yassin also took out the one light at the end of the tunnel that’s shone since this war of attrition began—the hope of getting out of Gaza and starting to get out of the West Bank. It was certainly no sin to kill Yassin, but it was reckless and self-destructive in the extreme, and who knows how many innocents who otherwise would have lived are going to get killed for it?

The writer is a veteran journalist. This article first appeared in The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, March 24, 2004. Reprinted with permission.

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