What can ordinary people in Saudi Arabia or in any other Arab country do in response to the massacre at Qana? What can we do to express our anger and revulsion at what has happened to innocent fellow Arabs? We need to know that those responsible for the atrocity will be punished. We demand justice for those who can no longer demand it. We demand retribution. These were ordinary people, frightened people, doing nothing more militant than seeking shelter from Israel’s bombs. We demand justice, not only from those who launched the missile attacks but from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israel’s military leadership. Because of their criminal policy of destroying every village from which Hezbollah rockets were allegedly launched, they created a vision of hell in southern Lebanon. Group punishment is totally illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Qana is as much a war crime as any in Bosnia or Rwanda.
We demand an account from Olmert and his generals — but an account too from the Bush administration which so arrogantly spurned international calls for an immediate cease-fire. Washington has now changed its diplomacy, playing up the possibility of a UN cease-fire resolution this week although no one is sure that an immediate cease-fire call will be the result. It is sickeningly stomach-churning that it took the slaughter of 60, mostly women and children, to make Washington change its tune. Is the Bush administration so willfully blind or so incompetent that it did not see what the rest of us did — that without a cease-fire the Israeli killing machine would continue to sow savagery and death across southern Lebanon? Or is this just a manipulative response to international outrage? Either way, President Bush has no more right to express regret at the Qana massacre than have the Israelis. Qana is a war crime for which Washington is as responsible as the Israelis. This atrocity might have been avoided had Washington listened to the world and forced the Israelis to stop their bombardment. So what can we do to vent and assuage our anger? What can we do to bring an end to the killing and to help Lebanon? What can we do when the US, far less than the Israelis, does not listen to Arab voices?
To all who listen, we can repeat the truth of Israel’s cold, calculating brutality, of its raining down death on ordinary Lebanese in the hope of turning them against Hezbollah, of these being terrorism, pure and simple. We can tell the world that Israel’s policy is no different from Al-Qaeda’s masterminding attacks on innocent civilians in Madrid or London in order to turn the public against their government because of its actions in the Middle East. We have the right to ask people elsewhere to look into their consciences and to ask them, if they ever had doubts about Israel being involved in state terrorism, whether they can still maintain those doubts in the face of the evidence. We have the right to ask people what they think of a Washington that condemns Al-Qaeda terrorism but condones Israeli terrorism. We can pray for peace too. We can refuse to buy US products as an expression of anger at Washington’s hypocrisy. And we can give. The example of the young bride from Jizan who gave her gold and jewelry is inspiring. In giving, we go some way to bear our anger at Israel’s brutality and Washington’s hypocrisy. We will show the world that there is nobility in the Arab heart — and unswerving loyalty to the Arab cause.
