The American threat to cut of some $50 million of aid to the Palestinians is a pathetic act that throws into stark perspective the slavish support for Zionism that determines its foreign policy. If the withholding of such a relatively tiny sum really could persuade the Palestinians to end their suicide bombings, how much more potent would be the threat to cut off just some of the billions of dollars that the US pours directly and indirectly into Israeli coffers every year?
A little bit of historical perspective would teach them the emptiness of their gesture. It could make them understand how the terrible indiscriminate weapon of suicide bombings has become the only way in which the Palestinians can strike back against their oppressors. The first Palestinian bomb, a car bomb, was set off in April 1994 by Hamas in revenge for an attack by a fanatical Zionist settler, who had gunned down 29 Palestinians. In January of the next year, the first Palestinian suicide bombing took place, when two members of Islamic Jihad mingled with a group of Israeli soldiers near Netanya and blew themselves up, taking with them 21 of the soldiers.
Initially these awful attacks were aimed at the Israeli military but by 1995 Palestinians were finding it ever harder to get close to soldiers and resorted to attacks that also killed civilians. Their reasoning was that if Palestinian civilians were being butchered by Israeli forces, then Israel’s civilians were fair game in their turn. No right-thinking person can applaud this argument, any more than he can accept the murder of ordinary Palestinians by the Zionists. Nevertheless, the stark fact remains that in an occupied land, with oppressive military control and arrogant, heavily armed Zionist settlers as interlopers on Arab territory, the suicide bomber became the only way in which the Palestinians could hit back.
When the Israelis were conducting their own terror campaign against the British government and the Arab majority in Palestine, they thought nothing of blowing up civilian targets. The one big difference was that there was never an Israeli terrorist who was prepared to give up his own life as a human bomb. Modern Zionism, of course, sees terrorism as objectionable, even though past fanatics like the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who led the murderous Stern Gang, used terror as a highly successful weapon to bring about the formation of the Israeli state.
The US State Department ought to have enough Middle East experts to understand the hollowness of President Bush’s thinking on Palestine and the Israeli oppression of its luckless people. Even more to the point, the American people, post-Sept. 11, ought to understand the horror of pointless waste of innocent lives. Yet thanks to Zionist propaganda in their country, they see only the Palestinians of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorists, and cannot bring themselves to view the violent occupiers of Palestine as terrorists too.
The bitter truth, of course, is that the Bush White House is not interested in understanding the realities of history. White House involvement is driven simply by the domestic political need to keep Zionist opinion sweet back home, in the face of this year’s mid-term elections. Therefore, any American voting the Republican ticket is effectively marking his voting slip with Palestinian blood.
