In the over-heated atmosphere that prevails today as a United States-led war against Iraq looms ever closer, many inveterate critics of Israel have piggy-backed on the wave of anti-war sentiment to further demonise the Israeli state and, in particular, its Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Unfortunately Richard Calland’s last column (Contretemps, February 28) falls four-square into this category.
Calland’s over-the-top charge that Sharon has ”ordered the death and destruction of an ethnic group within his nation-state domain” and ”continues to pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing against them” is a serious misrepresentation of Israel’s actions and intentions. It ignores the fact that Israel, through no choice of its own, finds itself engaged in a deadly war of attrition against an enemy whose stated purpose is not self-determination within the territory it currently occupies but the total eradication of the Israeli state.
Depicting Israel’s legitimate and necessary defensive operations as the wanton persecution of a helpless civilian population is a gross injustice to the Israeli people. It also, ironically, does the Palestinians no favours since it serves to reward rather than discourage terrorist activity.
Since Yasser Arafat walked away from the negotiations table and instigated a terrorist war in September 2000 there have been more than 16 300 attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. To date 724 Israelis, the majority of them civilians, have been killed and 5 063 injured, many shockingly maimed. These are not the sporadic actions of a ”desperate” people goaded beyond endurance, as apologists for Palestinian terror try to argue, but a coordinated programme of mass murder carried out by those who have dehumanised Israeli Jews to the point that their extermination is regarded as a noble and holy act.
Is there a peaceful, non-violent way to halt Palestinian terror? If so, the Israelis would love to know about it. Effectively, those who slam Israel for taking steps to counter this modern-day genocide are denying Israelis their right to self-defence, and it is hard to imagine a more insidious human rights violation than that. Alternatively, Israel’s right to self-defence is recognised — so long as it doesn’t kill any Palestinians, injure any Palestinians, cause damage to Palestinian property or otherwise inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It amounts to the same thing.
Calland deplores the current wave of Israeli military incursions that are taking place ”despite the absence of terror inside Israel”. This, however, begs the question as to exactly why terrorist attacks have dropped off in recent months. It is certainly not through lack of effort on the part of the Palestinians. Literally scores of attempted attacks have been nipped in the bud, including a planned triple car bombing scheduled to take place on the day of the last Israeli elections. This has been done not by the Palestinian Authority, which has repeatedly ignored calls from the international community to act decisively against terrorist activity, but by the Israeli security measures that are being so vociferously condemned. Israelis, it seems, have two choices: act decisively against terrorism and be pilloried for committing ”crimes against humanity” or do nothing and scrape the body parts off their streets.
Of all modern-day propaganda canards, few seem so impervious to debunking as the ”Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla” slur so regularly hurled at Sharon, and which Calland employs as if it is an established fact. Responsibility for the notorious massacre, carried out in the Sabra-Shatilla refugee camp by Christian Phalangist militias in 1982, has long been laid at Israels and particularly at Sharon’s door. This is despite the fact that not one Israeli soldier took part in the atrocity and the extent of Sharon’s culpability, such as it was, amounted solely to a failure to foresee what might transpire in the event of Israel’s Phalangist allies entering the camps.
Though an Israeli tribunal subsequently censured Sharon for this failure, it is a far cry from the deliberate gassing to death of thousands of Kurds carried out on the express orders of Saddam Hussein. The mere fact that the Belgian Court of Appeal recently upheld the competence of the court to try individuals for violations of international humanitarian law is not itself evidence of Sharon’s ”criminal responsibility” (Calland’s words) for Sabra and Shatilla, unless the principle of ”guilty until proven innocent” has suddenly become part of the international legal code.
Calland’s understanding of international law and, in particular, of the all-important United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 is also questionable. Contrary to what he writes, Israel is not guilty of a 35-year-old breach of Resolution 242. The resolution places obligations on both sides, making Israel’s eventual withdrawal from territories captured during the 1967 war dependent on the ”termination of all claims or states of belligerency” on the part of its neighbours, as well as the recognition of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
At the Camp David talks in July 2000, then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered to withdraw almost entirely from the captured territories in exchange for a Palestinian undertaking to declare an end to the conflict. The response was war and terrorism. By continuing to this day, in both word and deed, to work towards the elimination of the state of Israel, it is the Palestinians, in particular such extremist factions as Hamas, who are in breach of Resolution 242.
The same reciprocity is true of more recent United Nations resolutions. Resolution 1435, for example, called on Israel to pull out of the Palestinian cities it had reoccupied and go back to the positions it held before the outbreak of violence in September 2000, but it also instructed the Palestinian Authority to cease all violence and incitement, and to bring ”those responsible for terrorist acts” to justice. Neither side complied with these terms, yet only Israel was censured for it.
Calling for justice for the Palestinians is meaningless if not accompanied by equally forthright calls for justice for the Israelis. This means taking into account the claims of both sides and at no time distorting the real issues by making wild and emotive over-statements. One hopes that cooler heads will prevail if the bitter conflict is to be resolved.
David Saks is senior researcher at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies