WASHINGTON, 2 November 2003 — A solemn message was delivered on behalf of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Seville. “Suicide bombings are immoral. They are counterproductive. They must be stopped,” he said. Annan’s observations however, underscored a profound, even formidable, presentation of a political and intellectual trend that is essential for Israel to sustain its genocidal war against the Palestinians.
Oddly, according to Annan’s vision, the ills of the Middle East start the moment when a young Palestinian detonates himself in a crowded Israeli street. The historically attentive Annan must have known that he omitted a vital sequence from the equation.
The secretary-general’s observation is the overpowering norm now. He is only a brick in a grotesque edifice of, if not bigotry, then intellectual gutlessness: If one’s peace vision is not bracketed by a condemnation of Palestinian violence then its chances of being embraced are diminutive.
Censuring Palestinian violence is nothing to frown upon, granted that such violence was not employed in cases of self-defense and targeted innocent civilians whose correlation with the conflict was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the trend of intellectual and thus political gutlessness appears to place Palestinian violence in a vacuum, and divests it of any relevance to the larger political and historical spectrum of the conflict.
Indeed, Palestinian violence becomes the progenitor of the conflict rather than one of its wretched, albeit predictable, outcomes.
Bush is the most obvious example. “I condemn unequivocally the vicious act of terrorism committed today in Haifa,” he said, speaking of the “murderous action, aimed at families gathered to enjoy a Sabbath lunch, killed and injured dozens of men, women and children.” The Haifa bombing struck on Oct. 4. Israel “retaliated” by bombing Syria, marching into a destitute refugee camp in Gaza, killing 15 Palestinians. Bush’s pathos hurriedly evaporated. Israel “must not feel constrained” in defending itself, he said of the Syria attack, while other administration officials drew on the same logic following the Gaza onslaught.
What Annan and Bush have in common is that both are members of the quartet for Middle East peace. They, along with the European Union and Russia, are now the godfathers of the dormant peace process. To activate it, the quartet’s impartiality is key.
But statements routinely issued by European and UN officials and of course Americans cast doubt on their impartiality. While Palestinians are enduring the brunt of the Israeli aggressions unprotected, their humble and often-desperate self-defense endeavors never escape the harshest condemnation.
Israel, in the meantime, is hardly reprimanded if it goes too far in punishing its subjects. Only the “disproportionate use of force” concerns Annan for instance.
Just a week after the Israeli operation in Gaza, the Israeli Army carried out deadly strikes focused on another refugee camp: Nuseirat. The death toll swelled to 13 and the wounded exceeded the 100 mark.
Javier Solana, the EU High Representative for Common Policy was one of very few who protested the strikes. He laid down his argument with the almost ritual pacification: “The EU fully recognizes the Israeli right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.” But “I urge the Israeli government to exert maximum effort to avoid civilian casualties.”
It was not the missiles tossed at a refugee camp that posed Solana’s dilemma, but the lack of precision that resulted in the high death toll among civilians. Under international law, Israel’s mere presence in the refugee camp is illegal, let alone its decades-long occupation, but this seems to bother no one. The EU is often dubbed a “partner” in the peace process.
With the lack of concrete denunciation, Sharon’s military machine could hardly fight the temptation to terrorize Ramallah two days later: Issuing a curfew, closing down media offices, raiding a mosque and, of course, taking the lives of a few people during the raid.
That intellectual gutlessness alone is of course not enough to smother the international uproar that such Israeli aggressions generate. That is what the media is for. The Haifa bombing, for instance, was described as “holiday horror” in a headline in the British Observer, a heading that was duplicated with gruesome images and angry words across Europe and North America. The Gaza invasion coverage was hardly as angry, and even repeatedly accredited Israel’s “security concerns” over alleged tunnels used in the camp to smuggle weapons.
Shortly afterward, the bombing of Nuseirat was not what interested the New York Times, who chose a different angle to diminish the horrific nature of the Israeli bombing: “2 sides sharply split on how Israelis killed 7 at Gaza camp.”
Even censure of Israel in mainstream Western media, mostly displayed in editorials and the carefully chosen commentaries, often works on behalf of the occupier, not for the occupied: “Construction of settlements threatens Israel’s Jewish identity”; “apartheid wall endangers two state solution” — hence Israel’s “demographic needs”; “violence damages Israeli economy”, the state of mind of its ever-anxious population, and so on. In short, the presentation of the Arab— Israeli conflict remains consumed by the interest of the aggressor rather than the subjugation of the victim.
Without the endorsement of Western apologists of its state-practiced terrorism, Israel could not have possibly sustained its military occupation of Palestinian land all these years. While the politicians, presently manifested in the quartet, downplay and even justify the Israeli aggression, the media devises a reversed reality, depicting the cruel oppressor as a blameless seeker of security swindled by a hostile, malicious nation vested with militants and afflicted with anti-Semitism.
While such generalized conclusions might for now provide an answer, at least for me, it can hardly soothe the pain of a refugee from Nuseirat, shocked by the scenes of blood and the screams of hurt innocents: “Where is the world, where is the United States and the United Nations? Why do they keep silent to see us being slaughtered like sheep?”
— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist and editor in chief of the online Palestine Chronicle.
