Massacre in Jerusalem
ON October 8, 1990, the Israeli government perpetrated outside already witnessed the evident embarrassment of the Arab govemments engaged in the West-
ISRAELI STATE brought to heel in their turn, albeit in a much more gentle manner. Mitterand has floated the idea of an international conference for a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The nadir, for the Shamir government, was to see Bush himself, in his October 1 speech before the UN General Assembly, following the French president's lead, saying that an unconditional Iraqi retreat from Kuwait would permit the "settle-
Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque the biggest massacre committed since the invasion of the Occupied Territories in 1967. The murderous rage of the Zionist forces led to more than 20 deaths and a hundred wounded.
T HIS massacre was no accident.
According to the Jerusalem Alternative Information Centre, "There is no doubt that the shots fired at the crowd on the hill of the Dome of the Rock did not result, as Police Minister Ronnie Milo has claimed, from the purported need of the police to defend themselves and to protect Jewish worshippers assembled before the Western Wall. It was, in fact, a premeditated attack by the police, with the intention of killing. It was a response to the continued pressure of the right, which calls for the brutal elimination of the intifada in a bloodbath and the deportation of thousands of activists".
Like the preceding slaughter at Rishonle-Zion on May 20, 1990 (see /V 186), the new massacre — more serious still, not just because of the much greater number of victims but also because it has been committed by the forces of "order" and not by a "maniac" - has inflamed the entire Palestinian people, on both banks of the Jordan. On the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the intifada was in full flood at the time of this massacre (this was not the case on May 20), stimulated notably by the solidarity of the Palestinians with Iraq and by their indignation at the hypocrisy of the United States and its allies appealing to "international law" in the case of Kuwait. In Jordan also, and for the same reasons, the Palestinian and Jordanian populations were in a state of mobilization.
The immediate consequence of the October 8 massacre has been an upsurge of the mass movement throughout these territories, confirming the growing synchronization, since Rishon-le-Zion, between the popular struggles in Jordan and Palestine.
The new slaughter will also contribute to the radicalization of public opinion throughout the Arab region, which will not fail to make the obvious link with the imperialist strangulation of Iraq. We have ern war effort - including the
Kuwaiti government in exile — who feel themselves obliged to demand strongly that Washington for once does not show its usual complicity
For them, such a distancing is necessary if they are to continue to participate in the war effort
In any case, this massacre greatly complicates the tasks of the US administration in relation to Iraq.
It puts a question mark over the military option prepared by the Pentagon, which the White House has been waiting for the right moment to implement.
Bush faced with political dilemma
Despite the efforts of the anti-Iraqi hawks to deny that there is any connec tion between what is happening over
Kuwait and the massacre in Jerusalem, in fact, the overlapping of the problems is such that Washington has been obliged to react vigorously to this massacre, lest it compromise gravely its possibilities of action in the Gulf. Bush faces a difficult dilemma — to offend the powerful pro-
Israeli lobby in the United
States, a month before the legislative elections, is a perilous enterprise, above all in the midst of the current budget cri-
SIS.
This raises the question of why the the present rightist
Israeli government has committed this
For massacre.
everything seems to indicate that, as our correspondents in
Jerusalem maintain, this was a premeditated
The only act.
possible explanation - which conforms moreover to the thinking of the Israeli far right
- is the politics of doing the worst.
Since the beginning of the crisis in the Gulf, the Israeli leaders have watched with growing apprehension as they have begun to be viewed as a political handicap to the strategy of the imperialist West in the Middle East. It has been spelled out to them from many directions that after Iraq has been dealt with they will be ment of the Arab-Israeli conflict".
There can be no doubt that the slaughter in Jerusalem is directly related to these declarations, which are very displeasing for the Zionist leaders. These latter feel obliged to convince the US godfather that the Palestinians are in the same trench as Saddam Hussein, thus cutting short any parallel established between their occupation and annexation of Arab territories and that of Iraq against Kuwait.
In fact, the Zionist leaders hope in this way to turn the confrontation they desire between Iraq and the imperialist camp to their own advantage. Their aim would thus be to launch a general assault against the Palestinians and provoke their exodus en masse ("transfer", , according to the preferred euphemism in Israel). They would profit thus both from the unprecedented security which a massive US presence in the area would offer them, and the neutralization of the enemy they fear the most today, Iraq.
The imperialist intervention in the Middle East is a reactionary offensive against the Arab peoples. Today genuine solidarity with the Palestinian people is inseparable from the struggle for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of imperialist forces from the entire region. .*
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