At the heart of the attitude of Israel and its paymaster, the United States, to the Palestinians lies a fundamental double standard. Washington lauds Israel as a stable democracy and condemns the Palestinians and Hamas in particular for terrorism.
Yet in January 2006, Hamas won a majority of the seats in Palestinian parliamentary elections that international observers ruled free and fair. But Tel Aviv and Washington together with their unthinking European allies rejected this democratic decision, because Hamas was deemed a terrorist organization.
Yet the only way that Hamas or any other so-called terror organization is going to eschew violence is through the ballot box. Yet when Hamas took this route, its victory was rejected thus beginning the Palestinian schism and starting the slide toward the bloodletting we see in Gaza today. And what indeed is the “terror” or terrorism if it is not Israel’s endless bombardment of a densely populated tiny piece of land, whose inhabitants have nowhere to flee and a thousand of whom have now perished, with several thousands more maimed and wounded?
Yet, the Israeli electoral authorities have just banned two of the three Arab Israeli political parties from taking part in next month’s general election on the grounds that they support violence and terrorism. On that basis every other Israeli political party should be barred from taking part, because they too, to one degree or another, support the terror and violence that is being meted out by their country’s war machine on the helpless people of Gaza.
This is the sort of anomaly that makes even the most moderate observer doubt Israel’s commitment to the values of freedom and democracy, which Washington claims makes the country such a beacon of hope in the troubled Middle East. Never mind that the Israelis are in breach of a string of UN resolutions, have acquired an undeclared nuclear arsenal with US connivance and are currently perpetrating repeated acts of terror in Gaza — they are in American eyes supposedly different and more acceptable than their Arab neighbors. In the end, all violence is an abomination, especially what Israel is currently doing in Gaza. Only the scale of force being used is different. Still the US and Israel continue to pretend that the assault on Gaza is anything other than terror. Just because a fighter wears a uniform, has state-of-the-art US-supplied equipment, marches and salutes, does not, in any way, change the quality of the violence that he is prepared to dish out to the those imprisoned in the Gaza ghetto. The Nazis were just as well drilled when they crushed the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
Peace will come not from the barrel of a gun but via the slot in a ballot box. It is the job of elected politicians to reflect and argue the concerns of their voters and find solutions through peaceful compromise. But when the “democratic” Israelis ban Arab political parties and ignore electoral results, they demonstrate the feebleness of vaunted political principles.
