You know the old Arab proverb, no doubt, about the fellow who is so deceitful that after he vindictively kills a man mournfully joins his funeral cortege, in a cunning display of phony remorse.
A version of that would be a government that gives the green light to an invading army to wreak havoc on a community, leaving its members homeless and destitute, and then turns around to offer that community, in a disingenuous expression of compassion, an aid shipment of 800 tents, 5,000 blankets, army-surplus canned food and — hold on to your "Twilight Zone" hats — children’s toys. That’s what the American government offered the residents of Jenin last week, a people still digging under the rubble of their homes for the bodies of missing relatives.
The residents angrily, and it would seem a touch contemptuously, refused to accept the offer.
This news item passed largely unnoticed in the midst of a broad design of events taking place in Palestine in recent days, but it is of great relevance. In a way, it goes to the heart of Prince Abdullah’s central message to President Bush last Thursday: By its blind support of Israeli actions, right or wrong, the US is alienating the Arab people and, by extension, the entire Islamic world.
If you think Arabs go overboard when they accuse Washington of being a partisan player in the Middle East dispute, almost always siding with Israel, consider these facts about the confrontations in Palestine over the last five weeks: Though President Bush "called" on Israel to end its invasion of Palestinian cities in the West Bank, he made sure that his message was ambiguous enough, and carried just the right equivocal tone, that Ariel Sharon could exploit it whichever way he wanted. (Sure, Ariel, you’re asked to withdraw, but take your sweet time doing it, old fellow.)
The US defines the steps that both sides need to take, beginning with a cease-fire, and Israel’s army continues to mount raids on Palestinian towns, with the latest raid taking place as recently as last Sunday in Hebron, where at least ten Palestinians were killed and dozens arrested, and with Israel’s leaders all the while craftily tucking their actions under President Bush’s anti-terrorist umbrella.
While the American administration backs the Palestinian Authority as the putative interlocutor in future peace negotiations, Sharon commits himself not only to destroying that Palestinian body, but all institutions that run the cultural, educational and social affairs of the people living in the occupied territories. (What purpose was being served, you ask, when rampaging Israeli soldiers ransacked the offices of the Palestinian Education Ministry in Ramallah and walked off with students’ transcripts going back to 1961?)
The American government calls on Israel to stop the settlement of occupied Palestinian land, and Sharon responds brazenly, as he did last week, by retorting that the matter is "not up for discussion" till after the next Israeli election in 2003.
So there you have it — the American government turns a blind eye to Israeli excesses, and a deaf ear to Arab complaints.
Why shouldn’t the Arab people then yield to the suspicion that America is taking them for a ride? Why shouldn’t they become "alienated" from a country that presents itself as an evenhanded mediator but is clearly an advocate of one side?
We in the Arab world, however, err, and err grievously, if we equate American policies in the Middle East — policies determined by a complex interplay between Congress, the White House and the State Department — with the American people themselves.
Ordinary Americans — call them middle-class, middlebrow, middle-aged, middle Americans — are not necessarily anti-Palestinian, and pro-Israeli. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, released April 23, for example, 68 percent of Americans responded affirmatively to the question, "Do you think the United States should or should not recognize Palestine as an independent state?" (21 percent said no and 11 had no opinion.) Moreover, 61 percent condemned the civilian casualties caused by Israel’s invasion of the West Bank recently, and only 30 percent said Israel "did all it could" to avoid casualties.
These statistics would have been unthinkable, say, 20 years ago.
Though still for the most uninformed about the dynamic of the Arab-Israeli conflict and though they still embrace several myths about who the Palestinians are, Americans are a literate people who are not above changing their views about an issue once they feel it is warranted, even in a conflict involving their own nation and their own military forces. The dramatic shift in public opinion that took place in the wake of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, widely reported in the media, is one such example. (And no, guys, I don’t go along with the nonsensical, not to mention offensive, view current in the Arab world, that the "American media is controlled by Jews.")
If there is such a thing as a national character, that of Americans is imbued with common decency and common sense. How else would you explain the 100,000 people who converged on downtown Washington on April 21 to show solidarity with the Palestinians? And trust me on this one, it will be that common decency and common sense that will, sometime in the future, win the day.
And who are Americans anyhow, average or otherwise? They are ordinary folk who happen to be the citizens of the first and only country in history that is literally made up of people from every part of the world. They don’t go around telling you — they are way too smart for that — that Ariel Sharon is a man of peace. I would put their shock and consternation at that bizarre observation by their president recently at being equally acute as yours and mine.
Alas, when Arabs lapse into a simplistic and — because it lacks nuance — knee-jerk rhetoric to castigate America for its double standard in the Middle East, and for presenting itself as a moral exemplar in the rest of the world, they fail to distinguish between government and people.
By all means, let’s be critical — and this column has been unstinting in that regard — of American officialdom, but let’s not err, I say, by directing our frustrations at ordinary American folk. Bush and his hawkish advisors may have gotten themselves into the business of making enemies in the Arab world and beyond, but the average American, whom we know as our next-door neighbor or our colleague, knows better. ([email protected])
