|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
Please take a moment to
visit and log in at the subscriber
area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this
information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in
your area.
Palestinian
Suffering Used to Demonize Israel
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
No sooner had Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to stop the
sustained rocket and missile attacks on its civilian population by the
Gaza-based Hamas terror organization than it came under a barrage of
international criticism, with tens of thousands of violent demonstrators
flocking into the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Sydney, Buenos
Aires and New York, among other places, to demand an end to the
"Gaza slaughter."
How can this be? Why do citizens of democratic societies
enthusiastically embrace one of the world's most murderous Islamist
terror organizations, overtly committed not only to the destruction of a
sovereign democracy but also to the subordination of Western values and
ways of life to a worldwide Islamic caliphate (or umma)? Not out of a
genuine concern for Palestinian wellbeing. For although the
"Palestine question" has received extraordinary media coverage for
decades to the exclusion of far worse humanitarian and political
problems, the truth is that no one really cares about the fate of the
Palestinians: not their leaders, who have immersed their hapless
constituents in disastrous conflicts rather than seize the numerous
opportunities for statehood since the Peel Commission report of 1937; not
the Arab states, which have brazenly manipulated the Palestinian cause to
their self-serving ends; and not Western politicians, the media, NGOs,
human rights activists, and church leaders enticed into self-righteous
indignation by any Israeli act of self-defense.
Had the Palestinians' dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other
non-Jewish adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the interest
that it presently does. No one in the international community pays any
attention to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians across the Arab world from
Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, which deprives its 500,000-strong Palestinian
population of the most basic human rights from property ownership, to
employment in numerous professions, to free movement. Nor has there been
any international outcry when Arab countries have expelled and/or
massacred their Palestinian populations on a grand scale. The fact that
the thoroughly westernized King Hussein of Jordan killed more
Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel had in decades
was never held against him or dented his widely held perception as a man
of peace.
As the supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist Robert Fisk put it in his
memoirs, King Hussein was "often difficult to fault."
Kuwait's 1991 slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians who
lived and worked in the emirate (and the expulsion of most of its
400,000-strong Palestinian population) passed virtually unnoticed by the
international media, as has the murder of thousands of Palestinians in
the ongoing Syrian civil war and the reduction of countless others to
destitution and starvation.
By contrast, any Palestinian or Arab casualty inflicted by Israel
comes under immediate international criticism.
Take the blanket media coverage of Israel's military response in
Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008- 09, 2012) but not of the original
Hezbollah and Hamas attacks triggering it, in stark contrast to the utter
indifference to bloodier conflicts going on around the world at the same
time. On July 19, 2006, for example, 5,000 Ethiopian troops invaded
Somalia in what it claimed was an action to "crush" an Islamist
threat to its neighbor's government. A month later, Sri Lankan artillery
has pounded territory held by the rebel Tamil Tigers resulting in mass
displacement and over 500 deaths, including an estimated 50 children
following the Sri Lankan air force's bombing of an orphanage. But neither
of these events gained any media coverage, let alone emergency sessions
of the UN Security Council, just as the bloodbath in Iraq at the time,
with its estimated 3,000 deaths a month at the hands of Islamist
militants sank into oblivion while the world focused on Lebanon, just as
the current slaughter in Syria and Iraq is presently ignored.
And what about the-then long-running genocide in Darfur, with its
estimated 300,000 dead and at least 2.5 million refugees? Or the war in
the Congo, with over four million dead or driven from their homes, or in
Chechnya where an estimated 150,000- 160,000 have died and up to a third
of the population has been displaced, at the hands of the Russian
military? None of these tragedies saw the worldwide mass demonstrations
as has been the case during the Lebanon and Gaza crises.
Nor should we forget that Hezbollah has been implicated in dozens of
international terror attacks from Brussels to Buenos Aires.
Indeed, the response to its July 18, 1994, terror attack on the
Israeli- Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), a social center catering
for Buenos Aires' large Jewish population, provides an illuminating
contrast to the relentless coverage of the 2006 events in Lebanon. It was
the worst terror attack in Argentina's history, killing 100 people and
wounding more than 200. More died in this bombing than in any single
action in the 2006 Lebanese war. Yet the BBC, which prides itself on the
worldwide coverage, didn't find the atrocity worth mentioning in its
evening news bulletin. When confronted with a complaint by the normally
timid Board of Deputies, British Jewry's umbrella organization, the
corporation offered an apology of sorts, blaming the omission on a
particularly busy day.
What were those daily events that could have possibly diverted the
BBC's attention from the Argentina massacre? A perusal of the papers
reveals the British premier of Steven Spielberg's new film, The
Flintstones, attended by the prince of Wales. This was also the day when
Gavin Sheerard- Smith, caned and imprisoned for six months in Qatar after
being convicted of buying and selling alcohol, returned to Britain
professing his innocence, and when David MacGregor, an agoraphobia
sufferer jailed for a fortnight for failing to pay poll tax arrears, had
his sentenced quashed. An eventful day indeed.
Given the BBC's indifference to the massacre of Argentinean Jews by
Hezbollah, it is hardly surprising that the corporation, along with much
of the world's media, ignored the almost daily rocket attacks by the same
group on Israel's northern border, not to mention the constant outpouring
of rockets and missiles from Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal from the
territory in 2005.
And why shouldn't they? The killing of Jews and the destruction or
seizure of their worldly properties is hardly news. For millennia Jewish
blood has been cheap, if not costless, throughout the Christian and
Muslim worlds where the Jew became the epitome of powerlessness, a
perpetual punching bag and a scapegoat for whatever ills befell society.
There is no reason, therefore, why Israel shouldn't follow in the
footsteps of these past generations, avoid antagonizing its Arab
neighbors and exercise restraint whenever attacked. But no, instead of
knowing its place, the insolent Jewish state has forfeited this historic
role by exacting a price for Jewish blood and beating the bullies who had
hitherto been able to torment the Jews with impunity. This dramatic
reversal of history cannot but be immoral and unacceptable. Hence the
global community outrage and hence the world's media provision of
unlimited resources to cover every minute detail of Israel's
"disproportionate" response, but none of the suffering and
devastation on the Israeli side.
A profoundly depressing state of affairs indeed. But so long as the
Palestinians continue to serve as the latest lightning rod against the
Jews, their supposed victimization reaffirming the latter's millenarian
demonization, Israel will never be allowed to defend itself without
incurring the charge of "disproportionate force" – never
directed against any other besieged democracy but evocative of the
classic anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as both domineering and wretched,
both helpless and bloodthirsty. In the words of the renowned American
writer David Mamet, "The world was told Jews used this blood in the
performance of religious ceremonies. Now, it seems, Jews do not require
the blood for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the
ground."
The author is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at
King's College London, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies and at the Middle East Forum, and the author most
recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale, 2010).
|
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment