- So what's the surprise? Suddenly Israel doesn't want
to take our advice. Ex-general Ariel Sharon prefers to go on wrecking the
Palestinian Authority, tearing up the Oslo agreement in the name of his
Holy War on terror. Why should he worry about the scandalous number of
civilian casualties among the Palestinians? After all, didn't America wreak
its own revenge killing thousands of innocent civilians in one of the
poorest countries on Earth after the crimes against humanity of 11 September?
I must admit, though, to a grim satisfaction when I heard President George
Bush's puzzled, uncomprehending response to Mr Sharon's refusal to withdraw
his army from the West Bank.
The Israeli Prime Minister is, after all, the man who sent his army into
Lebanon in 1982 to "root out Palestinian terror'' note the identical
rhetoric, as well as the same cast of characters and whose "elite''
Israeli forces killed up to 17,500 people, almost all civilians. Mr Sharon
is the man who then sent Israel's vicious Phalangist allies into the Beirut
refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, after which they massacred 1,700 Palestinian
civilians. For this he was held "personally responsible'' by Israel's
own commission of inquiry. Evidence now emerging in Beirut suggests that
most of the slaughtered refugees were actually killed in the two weeks
following the original massacre after the survivors had been handed back
to the Phalange by Israel's own soldiers
So why should Mr Sharon stop now? If Mr Bush wants to rein in his reckless
ally, why doesn't he ask Mr Sharon a few questions? Why doesn't he ask
what has happened to the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who have
disappeared into Israel's hands over the past two weeks? What happened,
for example, to the five men, blindfolded and trussed up like chickens
whom I discovered in the Jewish settlement of Psagot? What happened to
the masses of young men I saw being taken in a bus with its windows wired
over, a bus that made its way around Jerusalem and headed west on the Tel
Aviv highway. How many of these young men are now being tortured either
in interrogation centres or in the Russian Compound, the main torture compound
in West Jerusalem?
But since Mr Bush's soldiers are experts in blindfolding and gagging Muslim
prisoners and putting them in front of drumhead military courts why
should Mr Sharon worry? For month after month, as Mr Sharon tore up the
Oslo agreement, put the building of Jewish colonies on Arab land into overdrive
and sent out his death squads to murder Palestinians, the Bush administration
fearful of offending the Israelis allowed him to do what he wanted.
In response to the wicked Palestinian suicide bombings, Bush expressed
outrage. In response to Israel's aggression, he called for restraint
and then did nothing.
Again, what's the surprise? For months the American media has refused to
tell its viewers and readers what is going on in the occupied territories.
Its newspapers have indulged the insanity of writers who have been encouraging
Mr Sharon into ever-more-savage acts. What are we supposed to make for
example, of a recent article in The New York Times by William Safire, referring
as usual to Jewish civilians murdered by Palestinians but to Arab civilians
"caught in the crossfire'', "crossfire" being the nearest
many journalists will dare to go in saying that the culprits were Israeli.
Safire plays the old game of talking about the occupied territories as
"disputed'' rather than occupied, a grotesque distortion of the truth
upon which the State Department insisted in a policy paper sent out by
the Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
But Safire adds a new threat to journalists who might wish to tell the
truth: "These are disputed territories'' he writes, "to call
them 'occupied' reveals a prejudice against Israel's right to what were
supposed to be 'secure and defensible' borders.'' You can see the way the
argument is going. If we have a 'prejudice' against Israel's rights, it's
only a short step to call us anti-Semitic. But what is one to make of this
nonsense? Am I supposed to pretend that the soldiers who blocked my car
and pointed their guns at me in the West Bank last week were Swiss? Am
I to believe that the rabble of soldiers shouting at Palestinian women
desperate to leave Ramallah were Burmese?
Safire regularly takes phone calls from Mr Sharon (and then insists on
telling us of Mr Sharon's latest fantasies), but my old chum Tom Friedman
in his ever-more-Messianic column in The New York Times, has almost gone
one better. "Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly
shows terror will not pay,'' he announced last week. What, in God's name,
is an American journalist doing when he urges Mr Sharon to go to war? Friedman
was with me in the Sabra and Chatila camps. Has he forgotten what we saw?
Last week, however, Friedman was also amiably advising the Palestinians
to turn to non-violent resistance ¦ la Gandhi.
For Friedman, "a non-violent Palestinian movement appealing to the
conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian
state 30 years ago...'' Needless to say, when Westerners, including two
Britons, protested peacefully in Bethlehem and were wounded by an Israeli
soldier who shot at them, Friedman was silent.
The reason why the Palestinians turned to suicide bombing, according to
Friedman, was not despair over the occupation occupation which, of course,
Safire tells us we mustn't refer to but because "the Palestinians
are so blinded by narcissistic rage'' that they have lost sight of the
sacredness of human life.
And so it goes on. Having bestialised the Palestinians over so many years,
why should we be surprised when a society eventually produces the very
monsters we always claim to see in them? Even Mr Bush's speech last week
in which he dispatched Mr Powell on his "urgent'' mission of peace
allowing him a lazy seven days to reach Israel, reserved its venom for
the Palestinians. And yet, after all that, he fails to see why Mr Sharon
might choose to keep his army in the field.
So this week will be a crucial one in the American-Israeli relationship,
a real test of the Bush presidency. We shall find out who the US or Israel
runs America's policy in the Middle East. It would be nice to think that
it was the former. But I'm not sure.
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