WRMEA
The Mustafa assassination followed dozens of other so-called “targeted killings” carried out by Israel during the uprising, and resumed an Israeli tradition stretching back to the early 1970s of liquidating Palestinian leaders and emmissaries. Despite their occasional efforts to retaliate, Palestinian militants had yet to conduct a fatal attack against a prominent Israeli official. In the specific context of the Mustafa assassination, and the general one of an increasingly violent uprising in which the various Palestinian paramilitary formations not only cooperate but also compete to inflict the most painful blow upon Israel, many observers predicted the PFLP would respond by attempting to kill a senior Israeli personality.

Seen from the PFLP’s perspective, perhaps the only candidate with better qualifications than Ze’evi for its retaliatory exercise would have been Sharon himself. To begin with, Ze’evi was at the time of his assassination a serving minister, leader of a political party (which formed part of Israel’s ruling coalition), and a longstanding member of parliament. A graduate of the Command and General Staff College of the U.S. Army, prior to his political debut Ze’evi had attained the rank of general during a lengthy, and often bloody, military career.

Secondly, at the time of the Mustafa assassination Ze’evi was a member of both the Israeli government’s full and security cabinets, and thus shared personal and political responsibility for the killing of the PFLP leader. Additionally, Ze’evi was legally culpable for each and every Israeli attack against Palestinian civilian non-combatants carried out during his term of office not justified by military necessity and conducted pursuant to government decisions he supported; a cursory reading of available human rights reports suggests eventual proceedings would have been rather lengthy.

Ze’evi was also one of Israel’s most visible and bellicose racists. The Moledet (“Homeland”) Party he founded during the 1980s was established for the exclusive purpose of advocating and promoting the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (euphemistically termed “voluntary transfer” in party literature).

While one can question various aspects of the Ze’evi assassination, such as its political utility, it was by any reasonable standard a proportionate response to the Mustafa killing, because it targeted a single individual of broadly similar stature who—unlike Mustafa in relation to the DFLP’s Gaza attack—shared responsibility for the act to which retaliation was being sought.

Although the Oslo agreements commit the PA to prevent any act of violence by any Palestinian (they place no such restrictions upon Israel), there is no suggestion the PA had advance knowledge of the plot and failed to stop it, or was involved in any other way. Rather, Arafat was criticized and condemned in the wake of the Ze’evi killing in the context of the PA’s failure to meet its broader security commitments—obligations the PFLP, which rejected Oslo from the outset, never recognized.

If it seems ironic that Sharon, who ordered the hit on Mustafa, besieged Arafat—who cannot by any standard be considered legally culpable for the Ze’evi killing—in order to force the extradition of PFLP men accused of an act of retaliation against the Sharon government (presumably with the additional objective of deterring Israel from similar attacks in future), there is more. During a previous, albeit less severe, siege of the PA Ramallah compound which commenced in December 2001 and continued intermittently until mid-March of this year, and in which Israeli demands in connection with the Ze’evi case also played a key role, the issue of extradition was never even raised. Rather, Sharon insisted then that the PA fulfil its bilateral treaty obligations toward Israel by itself arresting the remaining PFLP suspects (Sa’adat had been nabbed in El Bireh in mid-January). In order to add weight to its demands, Israel rescinded the unrestricted freedom of travel Arafat had enjoyed pursuant to the Oslo agreements and confined him to Ramallah.

Amid vociferous Israeli accusations that Arafat was extending “protection” to the fugitives in the Ramallah area, the Palestinian Preventative Security Force had located the four in March in a Nablus hideout and detained them after a shootout. The prisoners subsequently were transported to Ramallah in U.S. diplomatic vehicles and there delivered to PA security in an arrangement approved not only by Washington but by Sharon personally. (Like most of the West Bank, the territory between Nablus and Ramallah remains under full Israeli control and the PA feared the men would be grabbed by Israel if it transported them itself.) Sharon demonstratively responded that, since Arafat had met Israel’s conditions, he was once again free to travel—within the occupied territories. Every foreign trip by Arafat, however, would require a separate decision, which, if positive, would not include a guarantee that the Palestinian leader would be able to return.

In August 2001, Washington refused to condemn the Mustafa assassination, did not call upon Israel to arrest those responsible for the planning and execution of the attack and bring them to justice, nor in any way suggest the assassination could influence U.S.-Israeli relations—an important point, given that the killing had been carried out with U.S. weapons funded by the American taxpayer. It responded instead with an oblique reference to its previously stated disagreement with Israel’s policy of assassinations, expressed concern that such attacks could “inflame” the conflict—responsibility for the resolution of which once again was placed squarely on the shoulders of Arafat and the PA—and issued its habitual appeal for mutual “restraint.” If there was any criticism of the Israeli action—and this would be stretching the definition of the term somewhat—it related to the fact that 22 U.S. citizens (none of whom were injured) lived in the building targeted by missile-firing Israeli helicopter gunships.

Seven weeks later the U.S. took a rather different view of such acts. The White House, State Department, and numerous congressional representatives publicly, explicitly, repeatedly, unreservedely, and unambiguously condemned the Ze’evi assassination as an unjustifiable “act of terror,” vociferously demanded that Arafat’s forces hunt down and bring to justice those responsible (and indeed dismantle the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades and all similar formations), severely criticized the PA and (yet again) Arafat personally for their failure to halt Palestinian violence, and made it clear that deteriorating U.S.-Palestinian relations had suffered yet another significant blow and were highly unlikely to be set right unless and until the Ze’evi matter was adequately resolved. One would be forgiven for concluding that the Mustafa killing had been the inevitable Israeli reprisal for the PFLP’s felling of Ze’evi, rather than the other way around.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/august2002/0208013.html