[iwar] Time for Israel to get global message

From: Mohammad Ozair Rasheed (ozair_rasheed@geocities.com)
Date: 2001-10-24 22:41:39


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Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 10:41:39 +0500
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Subject: [iwar] Time for Israel to get global message
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http://www.dawn.com/2001/10/25/int16.htm
 
 
 
Time for Israel to get global message 

By Polly Toynbee 


LONDON: The little town of Bethlehem does not lie still in deep or
dreamless sleep. Instead a Palestinian altar boy was machine- gunned to
death in Manger Square when Israeli tanks stormed in and occupied six
Palestinian towns, leaving many others dead in their wake. Israeli
hit-squad assassinations of suspected Palestinian terrorist leaders have
now reached over 40 dead. 

But six days into Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, there is still
no response from George Bush. A state department spokesman did call for
Israeli withdrawal and behind the scenes pressure is being applied. But
what is needed urgently is the same thunderous and threatening language
the president applies to the war in Afghanistan. 

Spell it out - no more money, no more support, no sympathy for future
attacks until Israel withdraws and talks start at once on building the
promised independent Palestinian state. 

Israel does not get the new global message, does not see how little
patience its old friends have for Sharon's dangerous hard line. That is
partly because the message has still not been delivered by presidential
megaphone so that the whole world hears, announcing an end to the double
standards of the west's treatment of Palestinians. 

Ugly Israel is the Middle Eastern representative of ugly America - and
though it is not the sole cause, Palestine is the rallying cry for the
terrorism that hurled itself at the World Trade Centre. Once secure as
the west's best friend, overnight Israel's failure to make peace has
turned into a lethal liability. 

Why, the Israelis ask angrily, should the world turn against them -
victims acting in self-defence - instead of directing all anger at the
perpetrators of suicide bombings and deliberate massacres of innocent
Israeli civilians? Because, as Israel itself keeps pointing out, they
remain one of us, ours, our people, partly our creation. The west that
sustained and protected it in its fragility for all these years is also
morally responsible for its behaviour and must take the blame for its
abuses. 

For the left, Israel was once Jerusalem the Golden, Zionist banners
fluttered on peace marches, young idealists worked in summers on
socialist kibbutzim, full of all the earnest hopes described in Linda
Grant's excellent novel about early Israel, 'When I Lived in Modern
Times'. 

Now the left feels all the more betrayed by Ariel Sharon, war criminal,
igniting the intifada by striding into the Al-Aqsa mosque and using the
trouble he caused to seize power. 

The race-biased, them-and-us reporting of Israel/Palestine conflict
works both ways. Consider the media coverage of death - how western
audiences are invited to feel the agony of Israeli teenagers slaughtered
in a disco or two, poor 14-year-old Israeli boys bludgeoned to death in
a cave, as if they were our own children. Palestinian deaths are rarely
made so graphic or memorable: they are anonymous people, counted as
numbers, bodies aloft among depersonalized funeral crowds. 

If Israel succeeds in annexing our emotions, it also means Israelis reap
a fiercer indignation when they do wrong - because the west feels
angrily implicated in their crimes. The Palestinians may be the prime
perpetrators, Hamas might be relentless in its wicked fantasy of
sweeping Israel into the sea, but maybe our innate racism regards their
alien sins as a political problem while emotionally demanding far better
behaviour of our Israeli cousins. Palestinian guerrillas are not right,
but the miserable history of mutual blame and victimhood has to end now.


Indignation about injustice only flares up when the searchlight of
public events falls upon that particular seething corner. Why care about
Palestine now and not last year? Because it matters now, like the
Taliban matters now. There is a right time for dealing with long-running
oppressions - Serbia and Kosovo, or East Timor. Whatever the reason,
when the chance comes it has to be seized and Tony Blair must urge the
president to act loudly and decisively now, so all can see some good
come of this. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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