I’m not used to feeling sympathy for Ariel Sharon, but I confess to a twinge last week. For Sharon is the latest victim of the Israeli far right. That sounds funny, I know. For decades Sharon has been the spiritual leader of the Israeli far right. But those years of dedicated service counted for nothing when members of his own Likud Party rejected him in a referendum, rebuffing him as too much of a peacenik for their tastes.
His crime was to propose that Israel withdraw completely from the Gaza strip, pulling out its troops and, crucially, its illegal settlements. In return, he told his party, he had won a great prize: United States permission for Israel to retain its hold over large chunks of the West Bank.
But that was not good enough for the fire-breathers of the settler movement, who regard every inch of what they call Greater Israel as divinely promised turf, too holy to give up. They persuaded the Likud to reject their own leader by 60% to 40%. So I almost felt for Sharon on Sunday night. Of course his plan was flawed: unilaterally imposed, it would have entrenched occupation here even as it ended it there.
But now the old bulldozer has had a taste of what Israel’s peace camp has swallowed for more than three decades — defeat at the hands of extremists too blind to see that by holding out for a big Israel, they are putting a safe, secure Israel ever further out of reach.
My sympathy deepened when I came across this little gem from the ”Middle East analyst” Emanuel A Winston, circulating on the internet and by no means the most extreme example of its kind. ”Is Sharon a court Jew?” it asked, wondering if the ultra-hawk had become one of the medieval grovellers of old, desperate to curry favour with his masters.
”History,” Winston went on, ”will likely decide that he has become a quisling to his own people and I would say to his God — except he seems to believe in neither.”
This is the treatment that has been meted out to Sharon’s Jewish and Israeli critics for years now, so one cannot but feel a sense of solidarity with the Israeli prime minister now that he is in the same, vilified little boat as the rest of us.
Truth is, I find it heartening. If these fanatics consider even hard man Sharon to be a self-hating traitor, then we should scarcely lose sleep when they hurl the same charge at the rest of us. Armed with this new perspective on the prime minister, I find myself thinking afresh about one of the Sharon camp’s most tireless arguments — that the countries of the world apply a higher standard to Israel than they do to anybody else, including themselves.
So now I notice that when Thai security forces killed 107 Muslim youths (most of them armed only with knives) in a single session two weeks ago, it did not make the front pages nor boil up the phone-in programmes with outrage.
If Israel had killed 107 Palestinians, most without firearms, in a single day I have a feeling it would have sneaked its way towards the top of the news agenda. Nor was there a flood of opinion pieces asking how long the mainly Buddhist country could continue to defy international norms. Strangely, not a single voice called on Buddhists around the world to denounce and distance themselves from Thailand.
I find myself thinking again about United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s condemnation of Israel’s consecutive assassinations of the Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul ‘Aziz al-Rantissi. ”The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called ‘targeted assassinations’ of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive,” Straw said after Rantissi’s killing.
Yet one now learns in intimate detail from Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack that the start of the 2003 war on Iraq was brought forward so that the US could attempt a ”targeted assassination” of its own against Saddam Hussein. Once woken to hear of the news, British Prime Minister Tony Blair did not read the riot act to US President George W Bush, condemning his ”unlawful, unjustified” behaviour — but was rather in ”expansive mood”.
One does not instantly recall Straw’s scathing criticism of the US move either. Perhaps the UK position is that extrajudicial killings are not wrong in principle — it just depends who’s doing the killing.
But the key example is the one that has been playing out these past, bloody few weeks.
On March 31 four US security contractors were killed in Falluja and their bodies mutilated. The US response was to lock down the entire city of 300 000 and mount a protracted, military campaign against it.
Estimates vary from 300 to 750, but no one doubts that hundreds of Iraqis have died in the subsequent siege. One United Nations figure says that 90% of the dead are civilians, perhaps half of them women and children.
That is not hard to believe when one contemplates the firepower the US trained on Falluja: airforce F-15E and F-16 warplanes, F-14 and F-18 fighter-bombers — between them dropping three dozen 225kg laser-guided bombs in the space of 48 hours — Super Cobra helicopters unloading Hellfire missiles, AC-130 gunships pounding trucks and cars with howitzers, snipers at every turn, and all of it watched by Britain’s own Tornado jets, patrolling the skies overhead.
It was two years ago that every news outlet in the world focused its gaze on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin where Israel sought to root out what it called a ”nest of terror”. The press was kept away and spread stories of a terrible massacre; there were calls for an immediate UN inquiry.
In the end, it turned out that the Palestinians had engaged the Israelis in battle. Many were proud of their steadfastness and defiance. A later UN report put the confirmed death toll at 52, suggesting that as many as half that number had been fighters rather than civilians.
During the siege, Jenin stirred global outrage. MPs could not keep away from the television cameras, so determined were they to condemn this heinous act. One British newspaper said that of all the recent atrocities — Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kosovo — none had been worse than Jenin. Yet now in Falluja, when the death toll is in the hundreds rather than the dozens, these voices are silent.
The Sharon crowd would say that the explanation is simple — people are unfair to Israel — and the solution equally straightforward: the world should get off Israel’s back. But I draw a different conclusion.
It is right to hold Israel to a high standard, right to expose the daily brutalities of occupation. But that standard must be applied equally.
If the battle of Jenin merited a UN inquiry, then surely the shooting-gallery of Falluja requires one, too. If the more than 2 880 Palestinian deaths of the intifada since September 2000 are to be properly mourned, then so, surely, are the 30 000 to 60 000 Iraqi casualties the US military reckons it inflicted in the opening weeks of the war, according to Woodward.
As Bush tells the author: ”We had just been mowing them down.”
If we condemn Israel, then let’s also condemn the US and Britain. For now we are occupiers, too. — Â