8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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Reflections
Victims of brutality
By Hani Shukrallah
"The King of Israel" in 2001 is a war criminal and a butcher; his responsibility for one of the most heinous massacres of the second half of the 20th century, in which over 3,000 men, women and children were butchered in cold blood, has long been confirmed by a commission of his "peers."
This is apt.
A great many of Sharon's peers, after all, have a decided capacity for forgiveness and understanding when it comes to the shedding of Palestinian blood, however "innocent" -- "today's frightened and helpless children are tomorrow's 'terrorists'." A man, writes Ha'aretz's Gideon Levy, "runs after a small, frightened child, knocks him to the ground, hits him, perhaps with a kick or two to the head, and whacks him on the back of his neck until he kills him." The man, one Nahum Korman, was sentenced to six months' community service for having killed, in just this way, Helmi Shousha, a Palestinian child. The sentence was the result of a plea bargain, justified by both the judge and the prosecution as being in deference to Korman's "family circumstances."
Citing a report of the Israeli human rights organisation B'tselem, Levy reveals that since the first Intifada, Israeli civilians have killed 129 Palestinians, 23 of them children. Only six of the child murderers were convicted of murder; their sentences, with one exception, reduced to just a few years in prison. "The ravages of the occupation," writes Levy, "have long since infiltrated into the most vital of the country's systems; not just the army, the Shin Bet security services or the border police, but also the society's beacon of justice. It broadcasts a message to Israelis that it's not so terrible if they kill Palestinian children, and to Palestinians that their lives and those of their children are inconsequential to us."
The sense of a culmination, of the closing of a circle, felt with increasing force since the outbreak of the Intifada, is now complete. It was never a matter of Barak or Sharon, but of Barak leading into Sharon, notwithstanding the fact that he did so kicking and screaming, as he desperately tried to hold onto the reins of power, including a blatantly cynical apology to Israel's Palestinian citizens on election morning -- and despite also, the best efforts of the PA and the rest of the Arab "realists" to hold onto the "lesser evil."
On election day, the "Jewish State's" 1.2 million Palestinians demonstrated their legitimate disdain for the PA's obscene call for a Barak vote. The Palestinians' history has not been sullied by the depravity of backing the murderer of their children, the same man who oversaw Israel's most brutal war against a largely unarmed Palestinian population since 1948, and has presided over what the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom described as a full-blown pogrom directed against Israel's own Palestinian "citizens." There has been much that was ignoble and shameful in the Palestinian leadership's conduct in the peace process. Nothing, however, could compare in its symbolic connotations with this final, contemptible bid to salvage Oslo's putrid remains.
The bankruptcy of Oslo, made glaringly obvious since the Intifada, is now confirmed by the utter bankruptcy of its architects: Labour Zionism and the "historic" Palestinian leadership.
Sharon's coming to power is ominous in itself, his having done so through a landslide victory even more so, for it underlines the extent to which "the ravages of occupation," as Ha'aretz's Levy calls them, have transformed every nook and cranny of Israeli society. Grisly scenarios of regional war, reoccupation, massive (as opposed to gradual) ethnic cleansing operations, will certainly haunt the region and the world in the weeks, and possibly months, to come.
Bill Clinton's CIA chief, George Tenet, reportedly threatened Arafat during the Camp David negotiations with the words: "We can make new borders, we can make peoples, we can make new regimes." Tenet may like to think so, and no doubt so would Sharon. It is not that easy. Weak, fragmented and lacking leadership and a coherent strategy the Palestinians and Arabs may well be; they can still make life very difficult indeed for Israel and its American patrons in the region. Sharon may be a bloodthirsty warmonger, but he is not totally insane; nor, of course, are his inseparable allies in Washington.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth is, in any case, futile. Eight years of Oslo have tested the extreme limits of a strategy based on choosing "the lesser evil." In an "ideal" world, master and slave should be able to live in relatively amicable peace once the enslaved concedes his servitude. It has never worked this way, at least for any substantial length of time. The weaker and more submissive the oppressed, the greater the contempt with which their oppressors hold them, and, therefore, the greater their greed and capacity for cruelty (hence: "the ravages of occupation"). The universality of this rule could be demonstrated by experiences as diverse as those of a battered wife in North America or of a black in Apartheid South Africa. And the oppressed do not submit for very long. They rebel, they rise up, they resist, and they do so as an expression of their fundamental humanity, very often with little or no regard for whether their resistance will bear fruit (not even children believe they can defeat a tank or a helicopter gunship with a stone). And, perhaps paradoxically, resistance, as it grows in strength, coherence and clarity of purpose, has a way of reeducating, indeed of winning over, sections of the oppressors.
Sharon is a product not of the Intifada, but of its brutal repression.
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