2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Accomplices in crime
A sense of guilt presumes a modicum of conscience, a trace -- even belated -- of moral responsibility. To commit a crime and then try to cover it up reveals not only an inverted morality, exposes not only a dead conscience, but is evidence of a pathological criminality. All of these are evident in Israel's approach to the UN fact-finding mission on Jenin.
The massacres committed in Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine are emblematic of the evil inherent in Israeli policy, an evil Sharon has come to symbolise. The atrocities committed against the Palestinians will some day be viewed by historians as precisely what they are, war crimes. Crimes, furthermore, committed with the knowledge and complicity of the major powers, particularly the United States.
Washington did all it could to downgrade the commission of inquiry into Jenin to a mere fact-finding mission. Then it backed Israel's attempts to change the brief and composition of the fact-finding team by including military experts of Israel's choice and excluding figures the Israelis fear may not be sympathetic enough. Now, Israel is delaying the mission until the rest of its conditions are met. In particular, the Israelis want guarantees that the work of the team will not lead to legal action against its officials. Of what use is the mission, then?
Israel is desperately seeking to depict the Jenin massacres as "collateral damage." In other words, the Israelis went into the camp to flush out "terrorists". Palestinian civilians were murdered in the process but only accidentally. Israel also wants the fact-finding mission to somehow link the slaughter in Jenin with Palestinian suicide attacks.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had to revise the composition of the fact-finding team. He then postponed the mission, more than once, in response to Israeli and US pressure. Such behaviour -- to say the least -- raises a great many questions.
Israel is seeking to argue that there is no difference between its actions in the West Bank and US actions in Afghanistan. But high-ranking UN diplomats have been shocked by what they saw in the West Bank. Terje Roed-Larsen, UN high commissioner for refugees, described what he saw as "beyond belief." Mary Robinson, the human rights commissioner, voiced the same view. What reasons did the Israelis have to destroy Palestinian civilian institutions, schools, power and water facilities, radio and television stations? What reasons did they have to raze houses and destroy hundreds of farms and trees? And what compelled them to kill hundreds of civilians and then dump the bodies in mass graves?
Washington, curiously enough, did nothing to deflect Israel's claims that the massacre of Palestinians is somehow affiliated to its own war against terror. On the contrary, Washington is helping Israel in stalling the UN, at least long enough to cover up the crime, dispose of the evidence, and keep from the world the horrors committed.
Israel is not the only one to blame. The US has abetted Israel all the way. It gave Sharon a green light to attack the Palestinian and continues to provide him with political and diplomatic cover. It even prompts its European allies to do the same. This may explain the extraordinary announcement by Chancellor Schroeder to the effect that Germany opposes any punishment of Israel, regardless of what the latter does. Who, we might ask, gave Israel the Apaches and the F-16s that it used so lethally against the Palestinians? Who blocked the efforts by the UN Security Council to send international observers to monitor the violence in Palestine? Who opposed Mary Robinson's proposal to send a commission of inquiry to Palestine? Who, ultimately, is responsible for downgrading the proposal to a fact-finding mission?
The fact-finding mission may or may not arrive in Jenin. It may or may not find all the answers it seeks. But no crime can be kept hidden forever. And the American people may yet muster the moral courage to remove the forces of evil that have taken charge of the White House under Bush and his ally, Sharon.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page