The shadow cast by Israel’s Assassination of Sheikh Yassin

By Gerry Foley

The Zionist state’s ruthless assassination of the religious leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, on March 22 continues to cast a dark shadow over the entire Middle East. Yassin was a symbolic figure, a nearly blind paraplegic who could not even speak well. He was confined to a wheelchair, in which he was targeted by Israeli (made in the U.S.) Hellfire missiles fired from helicopter gunships. News photos showed little left of Yassin but a red spot on the sidewalk.

Seven people died with him, mainly his bodyguards. About a dozen people were wounded, including two of his sons.

It appears that Yassin and his bodyguards had no warning of the strike. The Israeli helicopters that carry out such attacks now generally fly very high and are not easily seen or heard from the ground.

Yassin was viewed as a religious figure. He was killed coming out of a mosque in which he had just attended prayers. He was indeed a political leader given to making very violent threats against Israel. But his physical helplessness and his role as an Islamic cleric had made him seem sacrosanct and untouchable to the Palestinian public and to the Arab public in general.

Despite the fact that Yassin was a target of an earlier Israeli assassination attempt and had been openly marked for death by the Zionist government, his murder came as an electric shock to the Arab world. More than 200,000 Palestinians demonstrated their rage and their grief at his funeral. It was the largest Palestinian mobilization in at least the last 10 years. Despite their bitter and sometimes violent competition with Yassin’s movement, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and Yasir Arafat were moved to praise him as a "martyr" and "one of the greatest of Palestinians."

Protest demonstrations took place throughout the Middle East, even in Iraq. They have dealt a considerable blow to U.S. attempts to defuse Arab nationalist feelings and aspirations.

The March 23 Los Angeles Times reported the reaction of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the successor of Anwar As-Sadat, who made a separate peace with Israel: "Asked about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which Egypt has been trying to kick-start for more than a year, he scoffed: ‘What peace process? … With this act we have aborted the peace process.’"

Egypt is the major ally of the United States in the Arab world and by far the most important Arab country. It is decisive for the success of an anti-imperialist movement in the region.

Egypt’s separate peace with Israel was accompanied by a general capitulation to imperialism, an opening up of the country to imperialist business. The result has been the worsening of economic conditions and deepening impoverishment of the people. The reaction to the Yassin killing has set another spark to the powder keg.

The Los Angeles Times noted: "Prodded by the United States, which gives Egypt about $2 billion a year in aid, Mubarak has labored to broker peace among his northern neighbors. But the talks have repeatedly failed. Meanwhile, popular opinion in Egypt has grown ever more outraged and ashamed of the country's dealings with Israel.

"‘Demonstrators are calling to cut all ties to Israel, and they're even calling for revenge,’ said Egyptian analyst Dia Rashwan. ‘This will put the Egyptian government under more pressure, and we don't know how much pressure the government can support. It's very dangerous now, not only in Egypt but all over the region.’"

The most profound effect of the Yassin murder will be on the consciousness of the masses in the Arab countries and the other oppressed peoples whose have common cultural ties with them. It is on this level that the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian people will ultimately be decided. The Zionist state and its imperialist backers have the military power to beat down the Palestinian people but not to enduringly subdue the hundreds of millions of people in the entire Middle Eastern world.

Most of the commentary in the Israeli and international capitalist press, however, has been on possible Palestinian revenge attacks, in particular by Hamas. That is characteristic of a liberal bourgeois attitude that sees such atrocities as a "provocation" to "hot heads," which prevent the moderates on both sides from making a deal. But this is illusory in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No one who supports the Zionist state is interested in a deal that will grant the Palestinian people their national rights, because that would mean the end of the Zionist project. And although the Palestinian people may be divided or demoralized, they can always be roused again to fight for their country. And the Zionists and the imperialists know that.

The danger is that the Palestinian fighters can be goaded by desperation into emotional responses that will open the way for the Zionist repressors to impose an even more intense suffering on the Palestinian people.

In particular, the Islamist forces, including Hamas, have prospered by offering an emotional outlet to Palestinians. Thus, Hamas responded to Yassin’s murders with wild threats. But that has obscured the fact that in the aftermath of this chilling assassination of Yassin, it is Palestinian militants who are being killed, every day more of them, while the Israeli army is suffering minimal casualties.

Thus, Hamas sent three militants on an amphibious attack on a Zionist settlement in Gaza. It announced this as the start of "earthquakes." But the result was simply that Israeli soldiers picked off two of the three as easily as if they had offered themselves as doves on an altar. In any case, the Sharon government has accepted the need to evacuate all the Gaza settlements.

The Zionist authorities have so tightened the roadblocks around Gaza that the international aid agencies on which most of the Palestinian people of the area depend to survive have announced that they may not be able to maintain their food deliveries.

The Zionist repression has destroyed the Palestinian economy. Most of the people have no way of making a living. Even before the latest crackdown, international agencies had noted a disastrous decline in the standard of nutrition of the Palestinian people.

Under these pressures, there are signs that point to a breakdown of social cohesion among the Palestinian population. The Israeli and international capitalist press was able to blunt the horror of its readers at the Yassin assassination by focusing on incidents in which Palestinian groups have sent young teenagers on suicide missions.

This is obviously an issue that divides Palestinians. But when an entire people is imprisoned like wild animals, such developments are virtually inevitable. More fundamentally, there are indications that Palestinian neighborhoods are becoming dominated by competing armed groups that have no effective political or military control of their members.

The danger on which the attention of world public opinion needs to be focused is that of the demoralization and crushing of an entire people. That is something that will have a historic impact—a terrible setback for all of humanity.

The article above first appeared in the April 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.