Let there be justice for all, Mr Bush
The US's pro-Israeli bias must be tempered by
European pressure to ensure a just peace agreement
in Israel, writes Ian Gilmour
Observer Worldview
Sunday March 31, 2002
The Observer
The appalling events in the Middle East are the predictable
results of the negligence and prejudice of the Bush
administration. The Passover massacre in Netanya was an
abominable crime. Indeed, all suicide bombings in Israel proper
are terrorist atrocities, unspeakable and also self-defeating. But
while such crimes cannot be excused, they can be explained.
As Israel's most influential journalist Nahum Barnea told his
readers: 'The terrorism of suicide bombings was borne of despair
and there is no military solution to despair.'
That despair has been induced by the Israeli army killing more
than 1,400 Palestinians in 18 months, Israel's continued building
of illegal settlements on Palestinian land, military occupation,
daily humiliation and economic suffering. When, as the Israelis
have done, you make life not worth living for thousands of
Palestinians, there will be no shortage of suicide bombers.
The Bush administration has long known that for it to remain
largely passive while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew steadily
worse would sooner or later ensure an explosion. It also knew
that Ariel Sharon has never wanted peace with the Palestinians
and never will - he only wants their surrender and expulsion. As
the speaker of the Knesset said a few weeks ago, Israel now
has 'a violent government out to destroy the Palestinian authority
to avoid giving up the settlements'. Yet because the US believed
that the Israelis would eventually win the conflict, they gave
Sharon a green light to be as brutal as he liked, short of killing
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. And despite Sharon's
record, Bush happily hobnobbed with him, while refusing to meet
Arafat.
If Bush and Cheney hoped that Sharon's treatment of Arafat
would bring him to heel, they badly mistook their man, as I saw
for myself in Ramallah a few days ago. Arafat has long thrived
on adversity, of which he has known a great deal. When I met
him after he had been imprisoned for months in his headquarters
at Ramallah, with Israeli tanks only a few yards away, and he
had been shelled and bombed, he was notably unintimidated
and, though depressed by suicide bombings, surprisingly
ebullient.
He had no intention of sacrificing Palestinian interests or dignity
simply to be given Sharon's gracious permission to attend the
Arab summit in Beirut, which he knew he would not be given, or
to be granted an audience with Vice President Cheney. As the
peace activist and former Knesset member Uri Avnery said of
Cheney: 'When an overbearing Vice President dictates
humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat he pours oil on the
flames... persons who lack empathy for the suffering of the
occupied people would be well advised to shut up.'
Arafat, who has made some serious mistakes, was relaxed but
defiant. Needing a document, he was anxious to exhibit his
'infallible filing system', which consists of bulky piles of
documents in his battledress pockets. His files, as he showed
us, even extend to large wads of paper in both hip pockets
which, one would have thought, must be exceedingly
uncomfortable. He was particularly scathing about the Israeli
claim that justice for the Palestinian refugees would entail Israel
being swamped by millions of Palestinians.
Is it likely, he demanded, that they would want to go back to
being ruled by Israel? He was convinced that the problem could
be solved justly without the Jewishness of Israeli being
threatened. Sharon may well kill Arafat, but he won't frighten
him.
As Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney general between 1993
and 1996, wrote in Haaretz earlier this month: 'The intifada is the
Palestinian people's war of national liberation. We
enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring
international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers
from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and
finding justification for all these activities... we established an
apartheid regime.'
Israeli organisation Peace Now has spotted 34 new settlements
started since Sharon became Prime Minister. When I was
driving round the West Bank last week and seeing both these
new settlements and the growth of the old ones, that seemed, if
anything, an underestimate.
Yet while Bush has constantly told Arafat to stop the
Palestinian violence, which Sharon's purposeful destruction of
the Palestinian infrastructure and police stations has rendered
him incapable of doing under present conditions, he has made
no effort to make Sharon cease all settlement activity and enter
peace talks. Since even the American Secretary of State said
last November that the occupation must end, it is presumably
the pro-Israeli bias of the dominant members of the Bush
administration which is responsible for that administration
determinedly shutting its eyes to the basic fact of the
Palestinian struggle - that Israel is fighting a colonial war to
subjugate the Palestinians, while the Palestinians are fighting to
end 35 years of occupation of their land.
As Michael Lind, an Israeli journalist, puts it, Bush's 'reflections
on the conflict seem to have been written by the Israeli lobby' in
the US. In an illuminating article in Prospect magazine, he
points out that the Israeli lobby distorts US foreign policy and
makes anything more than the mildest criticism of Israeli taboo
in the mainstream media. 'Until Americans have ended this
corruption of our democratic process,' Lind concludes, 'our allies
in Europe, Asia and the Middle East will continue to view our
Middle East policy with trepidation.'
Of course, that is not a new development, but the current Bush
administration looks like being even more pro- Israeli than all its
predecessors. Until now, President Bush has seemed more
intent on securing Republican majorities in Congress in
November and getting his brother re-elected as governor of
Florida than on securing decency and justice in the Middle East.
America's need to gain some Arab support or, at least,
acquiescence to its intended attack on Iraq has necessitated
some adjustment to its attitude on Palestine, but only a small
and inadequate one. Much more is now needed. On
Wednesday, at the insistence of Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, the Arab League offered its historic and long
overdue vision for peace: Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied
Territories in exchange for full peace with the entire Arab world.
Sharon's reaction to this peace offer and to Palestinian violence
has been to launch a massive assault on the Palestinian
Authority's civilian institutions and effectively to declare war. The
situation is so grave that an imposed solution on the basis of the
Saudi peace initiative is now the only hope. One of the imposers
will have to be the United States because America is the only
country that can deliver Israel. The other imposer must be
Europe to ensure that at last the Palestinians get a fair deal.
A postscript on Arab perceptions of Britain. A Lebanese
newspaper wrote during the Beirut summit that 'the British
Cabinet remains set in its course to Americanise its positions in
foreign policy, sounding more and more like an offshoot of Voice
of America'. If we join the US in pulverising Iraq, while remaining
silent as America's ally pulverises the Palestinians, the damage
to Britain's interests in the entire region may take a generation
to repair.
· Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar is a former Secretary of State for
Defence
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