Sharon Not Responsible for Palestinian Violence

To the editors:

Nader R. Hasan’s eloquent commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Column, Dec. 12) is, unfortunately, riddled with both errors of omission and of fact.

The most egregious canard is an assertion that “[Ariel] Sharon…ignited the present conflict in Sept. 2000 when he visited a Muslim holy site with 1,000 armed soldiers”. Hasan neglects to mention that Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount—a Jewish holy site as well as a Muslim one—had been cleared with Palestinian security forces and that Sharon had been assured it would trigger no violence.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that Sharon’s visit was merely a pretext for an uprising that had been planned long in advance. Imad al-Faluji, the Palestinian Authority (PA) minister for communications, put it plainly during a speech in Gaza in December 2000 (reported by the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ayyam): “The PA had begun to prepare for the outbreak of the current intifada since the return from the Camp David negotiations, by request of President Yasser Arafat…and not as a specific protest against Sharon’s visit.” In other words, as al-Faluji put it later, “Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque is wrong.”

Al-Faluji’s damning admission also puts the lie to Hasan’s characterization of Arafat as an “incompetent” leader under pressure to control a situation that is out of his hands. Arafat may be many things, but he is hardly incompetent; since Oslo, he has balanced talk of peace with use of violence in a carefully calculated way. That the United States and European Union have only now begun to call his bluff testifies to Arafat’s skill at playing this bloody game.

Kevin A. Shapiro ’00

Dec. 12, 2001

The writer is a first-year graduate student studying psychology.