Wagging which way
DAVID HIRST
al Ahram, 23-29 October 2003
Few disputed at the time that Israel was a factor that pushed Bush to go to war on Iraq. Just how much weight it had among all the others was the only controversial question. But what is clear, six months on, is that Israel is now a very important factor indeed in the stumbling neo-imperial venture that Iraq has become.
This "Israelisation" of US policy crossed a new threshold with the two blows dealt Syria in the past fortnight -- President Bush's endorsement of Israel's air raid on its territory and the Syrian Accountability Act passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. A community of US-Israeli purpose pushed to unprecedented lengths is now operational as well as ideological. For the US, the primary battlefield is Iraq, and any state which sponsors or encourages resistance to its occupation. For Israel, it is occupied Palestine, its "terrorists" and their external backers. These equivalent agendas converge on Syria.
Of course, with his raid, Sharon had his own specifically Israeli agenda, growing out of frustration at his failure to crush the Intifada. Breaking the rules that have contained Israeli-Syrian armed conflict these past 30 years, he signalled his readiness to visit on Israel's Arab neighbours the same punitive measures he uses on the Palestinians. But whereas such an escalation might have had some deterrent value when these neighbours truly did sponsor or harbour Palestinian resistance, it doesn't now. An essential feature of the Intifada is that, spontaneous and popular, it derives almost all its impetus from within. Nothing illustrated that like Hanadi Jaradat, the young woman from Jenin whose very personal grief and need for vengeance prompted the atrocious, self-sacrificial Haifa bombing which prompted the Syrian raid in its turn. So, other than brief emotional gratification to the Israeli public, it achieved nothing. But that will not deter Sharon. Having embarked on this course, he has little choice but to continue it. More importantly, violence has always been the indispensable means by which, in the guise of fighting terror, he pursues his real, longer-term aims -- those of building a "Greater Israel" and crushing any opposition, Arab as well as Palestinian, to it.
But he is also, he believes, serving an American agenda. At least no one in Washington says he is not. There was a time, even under this administration, the most pro-Israeli ever, when the superpower would have strenuously distanced itself from such an act by its prot