Under Sharon
If Yassin's assassination triggers an earthquake of revenge, Sharon is willing to pay the price--indeed, it might even shore up his popularity among Israel's battered, frightened citizens. A wave of suicide attacks would bolster Sharon's efforts to frame the conflict as a war against Islamic terrorists rather than one between occupier and occupied--and to continue with the project most dear to him, the colonization of the West Bank (where he wants to transfer the Gaza settlers) and the creation of a 400-mile wall that carves up Palestinian land into an archipelago of prisonlike cantons, divided from one another and cut off from their natural resources.
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There may be another casualty of the assassination: the remarkable flowering of nonviolent resistance to Israel's wall. Over the past six weeks Palestinians, led by older veterans from the first intifada, and Israeli activists have joined in protests in villages near the wall, facing ferocious assaults from the Israeli army--an attempt, it would seem, to transform nonviolent resistance into rioting and to discourage wider participation. From Sharon's vantage point, nothing could be more menacing than the emergence of a nonviolent movement of civil disobedience, particularly one in which Jews and Arabs work together.
Roane Carey & Adam Shatz/The Nation Mar.25.04
