LIES, HATRED AND THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE
By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent
The Independent, London, 13 October 2000:
This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It's about
our inability ? after more than half a century ? to understand the
injustice of the Middle East. It's about a part of the world
where it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television
the funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar ? who died two days
after being shot through the forehead by Israeli soldiers ?
for a crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents to death. It's
about a nation that claims "purity of arms" but fires missiles
at civilian apartment blocks and then claims it is "restoring
order". It's about people who are so enraged by the killing
of almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an
entire American warship.
It's as simple as that. When I walked into the local photocopy
shop yesterday afternoon, the boys there greeted me with
ecstatic smiles. "Did you hear that an American ship has been
attacked?" one of them asked. "There are Americans dead."
All I saw around the room were smiles. In a corner, on a small
television screen, an Israeli Apache aircraft was firing a
missile at Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.
Seven years ago, CNN showed us the Israeli prime minister
shaking Yasser Arafat by the hand, live on the White House
lawn. Now, live from Gaza, we watch a pilot carrying out an
order from the Israeli prime minister to kill Arafat by bombing
his headquarters.
As usual last night, the television news broadcasts ? those
most obsequious and deforming of information dispensers ?
were diverting our minds from the truth. They did not ask why
the Palestinians should have lynched two Israeli undercover
men. Instead, they asked why Palestinian police had not
protected them. They did not ask why a suicide bomber in a
rubber boat should have bombed the USS Cole.
Instead, they asked who he was, who he worked for, and they
interviewed Pentagon officials who denounced "terrorism".
Always the "who" or the "what"; never the "why".
It is of course possible that Osama bin Laden, one of the
more recent American hate figures, could have inspired ? by
sermons rather than direct instruction ? the attack on the USS
Cole. Bin Laden's family originally came from Yemen. And it
was Yemen that demanded the right earlier this week to fly
arms direct to the Palestinians of the occupied territories
?
provoked, it seems, by slow-motion footage of yet another boy,
a 12-year-old, dying on top of his father in Gaza after being
shot by the Israelis. Yet many of the attacks on Israeli
occupation forces in Lebanon were carried out by young men,
unconnected with the corrupt Arab political élite but enraged
by the injustice of their lot. Maybe it was the same in Yemen.
When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreement seven years
ago, only a very few asked how soon this raddled, flawed,
hopeless "peace" would collapse. I thought it would end in
violence because the Palestinians were being forced by
Americans and Israelis to sign a peace that would give them
neither a state nor an end to Jewish settlements on Arab land,
nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem.
I wrote that Arafat had been turned from "super-terrorist" into
a "super-statesman" but could easily be turned into a
"super-terrorist" again. And so it came to pass. Yesterday,
the Israeli spokesman Avi Pasner shared a BBC interview with
me ? and called Arafat a "terrorist".
Alas, none of it was surprising ? none save our continued
inability to grasp what happens when a whole society is
pressure-cooked to the point of explosion. A Pentagon official
was saying last night the US government was trying to find out
if the attack on the USS Cole was "related" to "violence" in
the Middle East. Come again? Related? Violence? Who can
doubt that the attempt to sink the Cole and all her 360
American crew was directed at a nation now held responsible
for Israel's killing of scores of Palestinian civilians? The
United States ? despite all the claptrap from Madeleine
Albright about "honest brokers" ? is Israel's ally.
Ever since Arafat tried to leave the US ambassador's
residence in Paris two weeks ago, the Palestinians have
placed this responsibility on America's shoulders. If the US
wants to go on supporting an ally that shoots down
Palestinians in the streets of the occupied territories, then
the United States will be held to account. And will pay for it.
No, of course this does not excuse the bloodthirsty killing
of armed Israeli agents or the desecration of the Tomb of
Joseph in Nablus, or, indeed, the murder of Jewish settlers.
But the cruelty of the Palestinians can be explained by the
cruelty of the Israelis. The death toll among Palestinians now
is almost exactly equal to that at Qana in 1996 when Israeli
gunners butchered 106 Lebanese civilians. We called it a
massacre. The Israelis said it was a mistake. True, it's
scarcely 5 per cent of the death toll at the Sabra and Chatila
refugee camps, when Israel's militia allies killed up to 2,000
Palestinian civilians. We called that a massacre. Israel said
this, too, was a mistake. Like they called the death of two
12-year-old children and a seven-year-old child and Sami Abu
Jezar a mistake.
And yesterday ? with no institutional memory to guide them ?
journalists were taking at face value Israel's extraordinary
claim that they fired "only at military targets", that the civilian
population of Gaza had been "told to evacuate" the areas to
be bombed. Do I not seem to remember how the Israelis said in
1982 that in Lebanon they "only fired at military targets" ?
and left more than 17,000 civilians dead in two months? Do I not
recall that the Israelis ordered the villagers of Mansouri to
"evacuate" before they shelled it in 1996, then attacked their
cars on the road and fired a missile into the back of an
ambulance, killing four children and three women ? the
missile made, of course, by the Boeing company of America?
And was not the CIA supposed to be training the Palestinian
policemen now being derided by Mr Pasner as "terrorists" (his
own country having personally vetted which of them should
carry arms)? And was not the United States the guarantor and
broker of the disastrous Oslo agreement? So is it really
surprising that the Palestinians ? indeed, the Arabs ? blame
the United States for the tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land?
And is it any less surprising that the Israelis have now turned
on the man w ith whom they thought they would conclude a
peace that would turn "Palestine" into a Bantustan? The man
who was supposed to "control" the Palestinians, who was
supposed to lock up opponents of the "peace process" ?
whether they be peaceful or violent ? is not doing what he was
told. He walked out of Camp David because it was a
surrender too far. So President Clinton blamed him for the
conference's failure ? on Israeli television, of all places
? and ordered Arafat not to declare a state. Or else.
And now, when two US presidential contenders ? Messrs
Bush and Gore ? try to out-do each other in their love and
loyalty for Israel, can America comprehend what is
happening?
I suppose it's the same old story. The Israelis only want
peace. The unruly, riotous, murderous Palestinians ? totally
to blame for 95 of their own deaths ? understand only violence.
That's what Israel's military spokesman said last night. Force,
he said, "will be the only language they understand". Which
is about as near to a declaration of war as you can get.
Mahdi Elmandjra