But the Jews of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition. Even if Sharon is voted out of power – a prospect for which many Israelis pray – the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out of fear of the suicide bomber.
Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys’, while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as ‘serpents’, ‘crocodiles’, ‘beasts’ and ‘cockroaches’. Now we have an Israeli officer – according to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv – advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. ‘If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even – shocking though this might appear – to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.’
Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans – which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?
Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence, in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called ‘illegal combatants’ and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory – and then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other ‘fronts’ in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by ‘terrorists’. Washington has also said that its intelligence agencies – the heroes who failed to discover the 11 September plot – have proof (undisclosed, of course) that Arafat has ‘a new alliance’ with Iran, which brings the Palestinians into the ‘axis of evil’.
Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. ‘Contacts and linkages’ have been established, he told us. And that’s what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qaeda and Iraq towards America and Saudi Arabia ‘suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible’. ‘Suggests?’ ‘Possible?’ Is that what Mr Tenet calls proof?
But now everyone is cashing in on the ‘war against terror’. When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce that they are participating in the global ‘war on terror’. When Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the ‘war on terror’. When Israel fires at Arafat’s headquarters, it says it is participating in the ‘war on terror’. Must we all be hijacked into America’s dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September? Must this vile war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?
The Independent, 30 March 2002
George Tenet resigned as CIA director on 3 June 2004, to be replaced by former Soviet analyst Robert Gates, who had joined the intelligence organisation while still a student at Indiana University.
President George W. Bush addressed the German Bundestag on 23 May 2002.
So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, ‘Hitler’ being the pathetic Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday – and, for the most part, in respectful silence – was extraordinary. Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? ‘He’s a dictator who gassed his own people,’ Bush reminded us of Saddam Hussein for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam’s side.
But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to lean on the northern bit of the ‘axis of evil’, the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Bush’s rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West’s enemies hated ‘justice and democracy’, even though most of America’s Muslim enemies wouldn’t know what democracy was.
In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America’s ever weirder ‘war on terror’ – and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous ‘national security adviser’, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you’ll find they’ve issued more threats against Americans than bin Laden. But let’s get to the point. The growing evidence that Israel’s policies are America’s policies in the Middle East – or, more accurately, vice versa – is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizballah – the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel’s demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 – is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network ‘revealing’ that Hizballah, Hamas and al-Qaeda have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.
American journalists insist on quoting ‘sources’ but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the ‘Syrian Accountability Act’ that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel’s friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘operate freely’ on the southern Lebanese border. And I repeat: there haven’t been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon – let alone the south of the country – for fifteen years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?
Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat – its ‘terrorism’ status has been heightened by the State Department – and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister held personally responsible by Israel’s own inquiry for the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is – according to Mr Bush – ‘a man of peace’. How much further can this go? A long way, I fear. The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don’t come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US consul Roberto Powers out of her husband’s downtown restaurant on 7 April. ‘I went over to him,’ she said, ‘and told him, “Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome – please get out”.’ Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.
How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistani president Musharraf for his support in the ‘war on terror’, but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial ‘referendum’ to keep him in power. America’s enemies, remember, hate the US for its ‘democracy’. So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan’s importance in the famous ‘war on terror’ – or ‘war for civilisation’ as, we should remember, it was originally called – is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I’ll wager a lot that Washington will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.