The lion went into labor and gave birth to a mouse. Classical Arabic adage
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites!... straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. (Mathew 23:23f)
Here we all are after the painful delivery of President Bush’s long-awaited speech on the Middle East. Was it a gnat or a mouse? God only knows. But whatever puny monstrosity was born in the White House with the help of shady ghostwriters and national security advisers whose sole purpose is to make a Heaven out of a Hell and a Hell out of a Heaven, a lot more than camels were swallowed. Justice, mercy, faith and the rule of law, to say the least. Instead of a peace plan, or even a feeble attempt to protect a million Palestinians from a ruthless Israeli invasion relentlessly ripping apart Palestinian cities, all we got were worn-out slogans: “the war on terror,” “you’re either with us or against us,” and “Israel’s right to defend herself.” To use the words of Morris Berman, all we got was a “repackaging of cultural content (e.g. “democracy”) as slogans and formulas,” to replace critical thinking and plain commonsense. What was created was a surreal and distorted world where democracy, free market and independent judiciary will be forced to sprout under an oppressive Israeli occupation and callous American brokerage. We are left to presume that details of this crazy White House script would follow. But of course they never will! Endless negotiations and endless settlements have always been the Israeli plan since the start of Camp David in 1978. Ironically enough, after their initial euphoria, the Israeli Knesset is now debating what to do should the crushed Palestinians now try to implement the self-demeaning surreal conditions demanded of them.
With an ingenious stroke of their pens, White House speech writers spun their magic web of words for Israel. Nahum Barnea in Israel’s best-selling daily Yediot Ahronot, describes it well: “The mouth was President Bush’s, but the hand that wrote the speech was Arial Sharon’s.” Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the Bush administration where deceit, dishonesty and fraud are the name of the game. Tragically, this speech did not confront the issue of the racist occupation of Palestine by the oppressive Israeli regime of Ariel Sharon. Instead, it absolved the Israelis of their 54-year occupation and the moral and political responsibility that goes with forcing millions of Palestinians to live out their lives in impoverished ghettos and refugee camps. In eerie hypocrisy, Bush passionately told the Israelis that the ungrateful Palestinians had refused their Jewish hands magnanimously stretched out to them. Emotional appeals unfolded when the subject came to Israeli suffering, with emotionally charged words like “kindergartens,” and “shopping malls” deliberately used to highlight the implied savage acts of the morally deficient Palestinian population. (Did anybody bother to ask why immigrant settlers placed their children and their kindergartens in harm’s way, right smack in the heart of the heavily populated Arab West Bank?) As always, the ruthless Israeli occupiers were lavished with sympathy and blamed for nothing but their righteousness, steadfast morality and spirit of perseverance.
As usual, the Palestinians were labeled as terrorists but this time also blatantly blamed for bringing about their own plight, for the Israeli occupation of their homeland, while other Arab nations were blamed for using this inefficient and subjugated race of Palestinians as pawns. When the Zionist proclaimed their state of Israel in 1948, it only took minutes, seconds, for the US to recognize that newly-carved state, even though its leaders were all members of notorious terrorist organizations like the Haganah and Irgun, and even though its formation was at the expense of millions of Palestinians who had lived there for thousands of years since the dawn of civilization. Now, the US cannot bring itself to offer a mere semblance of statehood to the original inhabitants of the land the Israelis conquered and stole by brute force. It can’t even bring itself to act according to the Geneva Convention, or even to allow other nations to intervene, by sending in an international observer force to ensure the safety of the terror-stricken civilian population. Bush’s America shows no mercy nor will it allow God’s mercy to descend.
What happens when a 180,000-strong modern army is given permission to do as it wishes in large and heavily populated cities? Just close your eyes and imagine. Verified eye-witness reports of Israeli atrocities coming out of the West Bank are horrific and beyond belief. Naturally, the Israelis were ecstatic, taking Bush’s speech as a green light for the continued brutalizing of the Palestinians. Within hours of Bush’s speech, Hebron was invaded and so the rape and slaughter of the West Bank continued unabated and at full force spurred on by Bush’s overt blessings. As if the Palestinian Holocaust of 1948 and 1967 weren’t enough, Bush’s speech formally announced the official start of the Third Palestinian Holocaust replete with 24-hour curfews, a 350-kilometer barrier of fences, trenches and walls, house-to-house searches, deprivation of food and water, the rounding up of Palestinian men aged between 15 and 50, rape, vandalism, ethnic cleansing, transfer of population, torture, demolition of homes, mass executions of alleged would-be suicide bombers and the mass expulsion of their entire families from the West Bank.
To be fair, yes, there were a few gnats scattered here and there in Bush’s speech on Monday. There were pockets of so- called “positive points” mentioned in-between the biased love-of-Israel rhetoric; i.e. the ending of Israeli occupation, the reference to UN resolutions 242 and 338, and the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state with no sovereignty, no borders, no capital, no foreign relations, and above all no ability to protect its unarmed noncombatant civilian population. According to Bush’s vision of peace, within this illusive provisional monstrosity will sit a “new” and “different” leader of the Palestinians who would be given no basic authority other than to crush all forms of resistance to Israel’s 35-year occupation. He would have no other mandate but to lead his people into further servitude and slavery. His job would be to please his Israeli and American masters as best he could. There must not be a single Palestinian left to denounce the occupation or to call for the dismantling of settlements and lifting of siege. These terrorists must be slaughtered if not by ever more remorseless Israeli soldiers than by reformed Palestinians officers.
But even these positive gnats are all conditional promises. Everything hinges upon the Palestinian people’s ability to “reform,” to slaughter their national leaders who, according to Bush, are all corrupt and compromised by terror. They have led you astray, Bush points out to Palestinians, as if they were a nation of undeserving dimwits with no commonsense or practical aspirations of their own. But what is the point of Palestinians negotiating or laying down their arms and their suicide bombers when the Israeli Knesset and the Republican House leader, Representative Tom DeLay and his deputy Richard Armey have said that the entire West Bank rightfully belongs to Israel? If they are forever to be condemned to a future of servitude and occupation, the Palestinians see no other choice than to continue their 54-year struggle against their Israeli aggressors, armed with whatever crude weaponry is available to them.
Why aren’t the Palestinians as high-tech and well-armed as the Israelis? The answer has a lot to do with Western dictatorship and racial superiority. If the Palestinians are forced to resort to the abhorred suicide bombers, the Israelis and their American supporters have only themselves to blame. A 1979 article by Edward Abbey explains it all:
In medieval England a peasant caught with a sword in his possession would be strung up on a gibbet and left there for the crows. Swords were for gentlemen only (Gentlemen!) Only members of the ruling class were entailed to own and bear weapons. For obvious reasons. Even bows and arrows were outlawed – see Robin Hood. When the peasants attempted to rebel, as they did in England and Germany and other European countries from time to time, they had to fight with sickles, bog hoes, clubs – no match for the sword-wielding armored cavalry of the nobility.
Bush’s speech condemns suicide bombers, but never condemns the aggressive Israeli regime that nurtured them. He denounces corrupt and undemocratic Palestinian leaders, but never denounces the institutionalized tortures, targeted killings and aerial bombardments practiced by Israeli leaders. As things stand now (that is after Bush’s speech), no Muslim or Arab leader in his right frame of mind can condemn the actions of a small band of Palestinian men and women who are risking their lives to defy the Israeli invaders, defend Palestinian right to return and rescue millions of Palestinian refugees from almost certain extermination. At this very hour, men and women in the West Bank are being tortured by Israeli soldiers in an effort to force them to reveal the whereabouts of their loved-ones. An Arab leader would have to be mad or from Mars not to sympathize with Palestinian bombers!
Enmeshed in their dubious game of semantics and emboldened by their smooth-sailing doublespeak, Bush and his ghostwriters went one step further, calling upon all Arab governments to stop the publication of any form of opposition to this diabolical Middle East policy. Technically, the sort of article I’m writing now should be banned and censored. Aren’t opposition and freedom of speech supposed to be major tenets of democracy? Don’t people in America ever think of offering a critique of Bush’s policy? Or is opposition a taboo only for Arab writers? Remember when an enraged and just-freed Arafat ranted against the Israeli occupation while inspecting the destruction and carnage of Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jenin; he was rebuked by Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer for “speaking ill of others.” How mundane can you get? Was Arafat supposed to sing the praises of those who raped, murdered and bulldozed his people with total remorselessness and impunity? Just remember that under Bush’s new Patriot Act, anyone can get arrested for the books he or she reads once the FBI gets a hold of all library and bookstore records. For those of you planning to read Michael Moore’s books this summer, before they mysteriously disappear, be warned. The FBI is monitoring what everybody reads; so far 85 libraries across America have been checked for information regarding which patron checked out which book and for how long. As Bush dashes around campaigning for his war against terror, we need to remind him that Might does not make Right; that when the mighty man is cruel and oppressive, as Rousseau tells us, disobedience becomes legitimate.
In 1981, Michael Korda in an inspiring article, ”How to Be a Leader,” offered us some basic truths about leadership:
People can only be led where they want to go. The leader follows, though a step ahead…He cannot make a nation that wants peace at any price go to war, or stop a nation determined to fight from doing so. His purpose must match the national mood…He won’t come until we’re ready for him, for the leader is like a mirror reflecting back to us our own sense of purpose, putting into words our own dreams and hopes…Our strength makes him strong; our determination makes him determined; our courage makes him a hero; he is, in the final analysis, the symbol of the best in us, shaped by our own spirit and will. And when these qualities are lacking in us, we can’t produce him; and even with all our skill at image-building, we can’t fake him. He is, after all, merely the sum of us.
Sharon, Bush, Arafat – to use Korda’s words, they’re merely the sum of us. The question is: Is that what we are? A butcher whose sole objective is to grab Arab land and transfer or remove the Palestinians by whatever brutal means available; a religious fanatic who thinks that he’s Richard the Lionheart with a verbatim mandate from God to crush the evil forces of Islam; or a humiliated and occupation-weary fighter who is too weak both physically and morally to offer his people any form of protection from Israeli terror or American complacence.
— Dr. Afnan Hussein Fatani is professor of stylistics at King Abdul Aziz University. Currently she is a visiting professor at Dar Al-Hekma College, Jeddah.