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![]() Israel and America vs the Rest of the World 5 April 2002 So, George W. Bush has, finally, told Ariel Sharon, as has the United Nations Security Council twice to pull his tanks, armoured vehicles, guns and soldiers out of the West Bank and ease the suffocating siege of Palestinians which left them with little food or water or electricity, their injured unattended in demolished homes, their ambulances shot at and their dead lying in the streets or buried in a hospital parking lot. What took the president so long? Domestic politics, said some commentators. But Bush was really caught in a trap of his own making. While waging war on terrorism, he let the far right in Israel and his own administration hijack his post-Sept. 11 agenda to brand the Palestinian struggle as terrorist, even more so than it already had been. Despicable suicide bombings made their job easier. But the mantra against Palestinian terrorism masks a distorted narrative riddled with double standards, one that sets America and Israel apart from the rest of the world. Were Bush and Sharon reacting to the same set of events as Jean Chrétien, Bill Graham, John Manley and even Stephen Harper, along with virtually all the leaders of the European Union, and moderate Arab and Muslim states, as well as Kofi Annan and Pope John Paul II? Were they all wrong and only the right-wing American and Israeli governments right? Yes, according to the latter, which tend to extend all the understanding and sympathy to the Israelis and none to the Palestinians. They are entitled to that view. But repeated ad nauseam in most American and some Canadian media, it suffuses the public space with one-sided formulations. To wit:
There is also the uncomfortable reality of America's best allies in the Arab world being non-democratic, and kept so as a buffer against the near-unanimous domestic public opposition to the Israeli occupation and now against Bush's plan to attack Iraq.
Hatred is not the exclusive preserve of one side. There is anti-Semitism, and there is anti-Arabism and anti-Islamism, the latest accepted face of racism, as recently noted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The right-wing anti-Arab narrative reviles not just Arafat, or suicide bombing, but discredits the Palestinian struggle against brutal and unjust occupation. As Israeli historian Amos Oz has said, it is useful to keep that distinction in mind. The reminder is even more pertinent for Canadians watching CNN. More than battling terrorism, Sharon is trying to impose military control over a hostile population a hint of a colonialist desperate to delay his inevitable departure, or merely a believer of Greater Israel sabotaging the peace process. Regardless, his is a disastrous formula, which has given Israelis the exact opposite of the peace and security he promised, while dragging them to the brink of war, yet again. Israelis deserve to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinians. Neither will have either so long as the occupation continues. That is the harsh truth. The rest is mostly propaganda and bloodshed.
Haroon Siddiqui
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