- How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he's fighting
in the "war against terror"? How much longer are we supposed
to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly
silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring
the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like
a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American
speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth:
that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war
which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?
-
- Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past
24 hours. "Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror
and formed a coalition of terror." That's pretty much what President
Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat
is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount
of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death
squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, his killers
have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including
occasional women and children who get in the way.
-
- The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in
common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise
each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military
power. He doesn't realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon's
own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people
lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide
bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this.
-
- No, of course he doesn't send the bombers off on their
wicked missions to restaurants and supermarkets. But he does know that
every suicide bombing destroys Sharon's credibility and proves that the
Israeli leader's promises of security are false. Arafat is well aware that
the ferocious bombers are serving his purpose however much he may
condemn them in public.
-
- But he like Sharon also believes his enemies
can be broken by fire. He thinks that the Israelis can be frightened into
withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. Ultimately,
the Israelis probably will have to give up their occupation. But the Jews
of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition.
Even if Sharon is voted out of power a prospect for which many Israelis
pray the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out
of fear of the suicide bomber.
-
- Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more cruel, ever more
revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies "the sons of pigs and monkeys",
while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as "serpents",
"crocodiles", "beasts" and "cockroaches".
Now we have an Israeli officer according to the Israeli daily Ma'ariv
advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the
Second World War. "If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee
camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an (Israeli)
officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all
else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even
shocking though this might appear to analyse how the German army
operated in the Warsaw ghetto."
-
- Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account
for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian
prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is
now to regard the Palestinians as sub-humans which is exactly how
the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto
in 1944?
-
- Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence,
in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now
making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called "illegal
combatants" and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped
for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory and
then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other "fronts"
in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by "terrorists". Washington
has also said that its intelligence agencies the heroes who failed
to discover the 11 September plot have proof (undisclosed, of course)
that Arafat has "a new alliance" with Iran, which brings the
Palestinians into the "axis of evil."
-
- Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a
week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with
al-Qa'ida. "Contacts and linkages", have been established, he
told us. And that's what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by
saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qa'ida and Iraq towards America
and Saudi Arabia "suggests that tactical cooperation between them
is possible?" "Suggests?" "Possible?" is that
what Mr Tenet calls proof?
-
- But now everyone is cashing in on the "war against
terror". When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce
that they are participating in the global "war on terror". When
Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the "war on terror".
When Israel fires at Arafat's headquarters, it says it is participating
in the "war on terror". Must we all be hijacked into America's
dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September? Must this vile
war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?
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