Sixty years ago, the
Jews of Europe were at the lowest point of their collective
existence. Herded like cattle into trains, they were transported
from the rest of Europe by Nazi soldiers into death camps where they
were systematically exterminated in gas ovens. They had offered some
resistance in Poland, but in most places they first lost their civil
status, then they were removed from their jobs, then they were
designated official enemies to be destroyed, and then they were. In
every significant instance they were the most powerless of people,
treated as insidious, potentially overpowering enemies by leaders
and armies whose own power was far, far greater; indeed, even the
idea of Jews representing a danger to the might of countries like
Germany, France, and Italy was preposterous. But it was an accepted
idea, since with few exceptions most of Europe turned its back on
them during their slaughter. It is only one of the ironies of
history that the word used most frequently to describe them in the
hideous official jargon of fascism was the word "terrorists", just
as Algerians and Vietnamese were later called "terrorists" by their
enemies.
Every human calamity
is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence
between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one
universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never
again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective
punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there
is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing
analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a
sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes
and misrule, Yasser Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted
Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that
the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined
Ramallah compound, is that his ordeal has been planned and carried
out by a psychopathic leader who claims to represent the Jewish
people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true
to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as
powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, air force and
navy, heavily subsidised by the United States, have been wreaking
havoc on the totally defenceless civilian population of the occupied
West Bank and Gaza strip. For the past half century the Palestinians
have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of
the rest under a 35 year old military occupation, at the mercy of
armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and
an army that has killed Palestinians by the thousands. Thousands
more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihood,
made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without
civil or human rights.
And still Sharon makes
the case that Israel is struggling to survive against Palestinian
terrorism. Is there anything more grotesque than this claim, even as
this deranged killer of Arabs sends his F-16s, his attack
helicopters and hundreds of tanks against unarmed people without any
defences at all. They are terrorists, he says, and their leader,
humiliatingly imprisoned in a crumbling building with Israeli
destruction all round him, is characterised as the arch-terrorist of
all time. Arafat has the courage and defiance to resist, and he has
his people with him on that score. Every Palestinian feels the
deliberate humiliation inflicted on him as a cruelty without
political or military purpose except punishment, pure and simple.
What right does Israel have to do this?
The symbolism is truly
awful to register, and is made even more so by the knowledge that
Sharon and his supporters, to say nothing of his criminal army,
intend what the symbolism so starkly illustrates. Israeli Jews are
the powerful ones. Palestinians their hunted and despised Others.
Luckily for Sharon, he has Shimon Peres, perhaps the greatest coward
and hypocrite in world politics today, going round everywhere saying
that Israel understands the difficulties of the Palestinian people,
and "we" are willing to make the closures slightly less onerous.
After which not only does nothing improve, but the curfews,
demolitions, and killings intensify. And of course, the Israeli
position is to call for massive international humanitarian aid
which, as Terje- Rod Larsen correctly says, is in effect to cajole
international donors into actually underwriting the Israeli
occupation. Sharon must surely feel that he can do anything and not
only get away with it completely but somehow even to manage a
campaign whose purpose is to give Israel the role of victim.
As popular protests
grow worldwide, the organised Zionist counter- response has been to
complain that anti-semitism is on the rise. Only two days ago
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers issued a statement to
the effect that an anti-divestment campaign led by professors -- an
attempt to pressure the university into divesting itself of shares
in American firms selling military equipment to Israel -- was
anti-Semitic. A Jewish president of the country's oldest and richest
university complains of anti-semitism! Criticism of Israeli policy
is now routinely equated with anti-semitism of the kind that brought
about the Holocaust, even though in the United States there is no
anti-semitism to speak of. In the US, a group of Israeli and
American academics are organising a McCarthy-style campaign against
professors who have spoken up about Israeli human rights abuses; the
main purpose of the campaign is to ask students and faculty to
inform against their pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the
right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom.
A further irony is
that protests against Israeli brutality -- most recently Arafat's
humiliating isolation in Ramallah -- have taken place on a mass
level. Palestinians by the thousands defied curfews in Gaza and
several West Bank towns in order to go out on the streets in support
of their embattled leader. For their part, the Arab rulers have been
silent or powerless or both together. Every one of them, including
Arafat, has for years openly stated a willingness for peace with
Israel; two leading Arab countries actually have treaties with it.
Yet all Sharon gives in return is a kick to their collective
bottoms. Arabs, he says repeatedly, only understand force, and now
that we have power we shall treat them as they deserve (and as we
used to be treated).
Uri Avnery is right:
Arafat is being murdered. And with him, according to Sharon, will
die the aspirations of the Palestinians. This is an exercise short
of complete genocide to see how far Israeli power can go in sadistic
brutality without being stopped or apprehended. Today Sharon has
said that in the event of a war with Iraq, which is definitely
coming, he will retaliate against Iraq, thus no doubt causing Bush
and Rumsfeld the nightmares they rightly deserve. Sharon's last
attempt at regime change was in Lebanon during 1982. He put Bashir
Jemayel in as president, then was summarily told by Jemayel that
Lebanon would never be an Israeli vassal, then Jemayel was
assassinated, then the Sabra and Shatila massacres took place, then
after 20 bloody and ignominious years the Israelis sullenly withdrew
from Lebanon.
What conclusion is one
to draw from all this? That Israeli policy has been a disaster for
the entire region. The more powerful it becomes, the more ruin it
sows in the countries around it, to say nothing of the catastrophes
it has executed against the Palestinian people, and the more hated
it becomes. It is power used for evil purposes, not self-defence at
all. The Zionist dream of a Jewish state being a normal state like
all others has come to the vision of the leader of Palestine's
indigenous people hanging on to his life by a thread, while Israeli
tanks and bulldozers continue to wreck everything around him. Is
this the Zionist goal for which hundreds of thousands have died?
Isn't it clear what logic of resentment and violence is at work in
all this, and what power will come from the powerlessness that can
now only witness but will certainly develop later? Sharon is proud
to have defied the entire world, not because the world is
anti-Semitic but because what he does in the name of the Jewish
people is so outrageous. Isn't it time for those who feel that his
appalling actions do not represent them to call a halt to his
behavior?
