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Letters

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.

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Kevin A. Shapiro ’00

Dec. 12, 2001

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

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