Subject: Robert Fisk (cf. the views of American journalists)
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 00:18:46 -0700





           LIES, HATRED AND THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE

                         Arab View

          By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent

 The Independent, London, 13 October 2000:
 This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It's about our
 inability - after more than half a century - to understand the
 injustice of the Middle East. It's about a part of the world where
 it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television
 the funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar - who died two days
 after being shot through the forehead by Israeli soldiers - for a
 crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents to death. It's
 about a nation that claims "purity of arms" but fires missiles at
 civilian apartment blocks and then claims it is "restoring
 order". It's about people who are so enraged by the killing of
 almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an
 entire American warship.

 It's as simple as that. When I walked into the local photocopy
 shop yesterday afternoon, the boys there greeted me with
 ecstatic smiles. "Did you hear that an American ship has been
 attacked?" one of them asked. "There are Americans dead."
 All I saw around the room were smiles. In a corner, on a small
 television screen, an Israeli Apache aircraft was firing a
 missile at Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.

 Seven years ago, CNN showed us the Israeli prime minister
 shaking Yasser Arafat by the hand, live on the White House
 lawn. Now, live from Gaza, we watch a pilot carrying out an
 order from the Israeli prime minister to kill Arafat by bombing
 his headquarters.

 As usual last night, the television news broadcasts - those
 most obsequious and deforming of information dispensers -
 were diverting our minds from the truth. They did not ask why
 the Palestinians should have lynched two Israeli undercover
 men. Instead, they asked why Palestinian police had not
 protected them. They did not ask why a suicide bomber in a
 rubber boat should have bombed the USS Cole.

 Instead, they asked who he was, who he worked for, and they
 interviewed Pentagon officials who denounced "terrorism".
 Always the "who" or the "what"; never the "why".

 It is of course possible that Osama bin Laden, one of the
 more recent American hate figures, could have inspired - by
 sermons rather than direct instruction - the attack on the USS
 Cole. Bin Laden's family originally came from Yemen. And it
 was Yemen that demanded the right earlier this week to fly
 arms direct to the Palestinians of the occupied territories -
 provoked, it seems, by slow-motion footage of yet another boy,
 a 12-year-old, dying on top of his father in Gaza after being
 shot by the Israelis. Yet many of the attacks on Israeli
 occupation forces in Lebanon were carried out by young men,
 unconnected with the corrupt Arab political élite but enraged
 by the injustice of their lot. Maybe it was the same in Yemen.

 When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreement seven years
 ago, only a very few asked how soon this raddled, flawed,
 hopeless "peace" would collapse. I thought it would end in
 violence because the Palestinians were being forced by
 Americans and Israelis to sign a peace that would give them
 neither a state nor an end to Jewish settlements on Arab land,
 nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem.

 I wrote that Arafat had been turned from "super-terrorist" into a
 "super-statesman" but could easily be turned into a
 "super-terrorist" again. And so it came to pass. Yesterday, the
 Israeli spokesman Avi Pasner shared a BBC interview with
 me - and called Arafat a "terrorist".

 Alas, none of it was surprising - none save our continued
 inability to grasp what happens when a whole society is
 pressure-cooked to the point of explosion. A Pentagon official
 was saying last night the US government was trying to find out
 if the attack on the USS Cole was "related" to "violence" in the
 Middle East. Come again? Related? Violence? Who can
 doubt that the attempt to sink the Cole and all her 360
 American crew was directed at a nation now held responsible
 for Israel's killing of scores of Palestinian civilians? The
 United States - despite all the claptrap from Madeleine
 Albright about "honest brokers" - is Israel's ally.

 Ever since Arafat tried to leave the US ambassador's
 residence in Paris two weeks ago, the Palestinians have
 placed this responsibility on America's shoulders. If the US
 wants to go on supporting an ally that shoots down
 Palestinians in the streets of the occupied territories, then the
 United States will be held to account. And will pay for it.

 No, of course this does not excuse the bloodthirsty killing of
 armed Israeli agents or the desecration of the Tomb of
 Joseph in Nablus, or, indeed, the murder of Jewish settlers.
 But the cruelty of the Palestinians can be explained by the
 cruelty of the Israelis. The death toll among Palestinians now
 is almost exactly equal to that at Qana in 1996 when Israeli
 gunners butchered 106 Lebanese civilians. We called it a
 massacre. The Israelis said it was a mistake. True, it's
 scarcely 5 per cent of the death toll at the Sabra and Chatila
 refugee camps, when Israel's militia allies killed up to 2,000
 Palestinian civilians. We called that a massacre. Israel said
 this, too, was a mistake. Like they called the death of two
 12-year-old children and a seven-year-old child and Sami Abu
 Jezar a mistake.

 And yesterday - with no institutional memory to guide them -
 journalists were taking at face value Israel's extraordinary
 claim that they fired "only at military targets", that the civilian
 population of Gaza had been "told to evacuate" the areas to be
 bombed. Do I not seem to remember how the Israelis said in
 1982 that in Lebanon they "only fired at military targets" - and
 left more than 17,000 civilians dead in two months? Do I not
 recall that the Israelis ordered the villagers of Mansouri to
 "evacuate" before they shelled it in 1996, then attacked their
 cars on the road and fired a missile into the back of an
 ambulance, killing four children and three women - the
 missile made, of course, by the Boeing company of America?

 And was not the CIA supposed to be training the Palestinian
 policemen now being derided by Mr Pasner as "terrorists" (his
 own country having personally vetted which of them should
 carry arms)? And was not the United States the guarantor and
 broker of the disastrous Oslo agreement? So is it really
 surprising that the Palestinians - indeed, the Arabs - blame
 the United States for the tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land?

 And is it any less surprising that the Israelis have now turned
 on the man w ith whom they thought they would conclude a
 peace that would turn "Palestine" into a Bantustan? The man
 who was supposed to "control" the Palestinians, who was
 supposed to lock up opponents of the "peace process" -
 whether they be peaceful or violent - is not doing what he was
 told. He walked out of Camp David because it was a
 surrender too far. So President Clinton blamed him for the
 conference's failure - on Israeli television, of all places - and
 ordered Arafat not to declare a state. Or else.

 And now, when two US presidential contenders - Messrs
 Bush and Gore - try to out-do each other in their love and
 loyalty for Israel, can America comprehend what is
 happening?

 I suppose it's the same old story. The Israelis only want
 peace. The unruly, riotous, murderous Palestinians - totally to
 blame for 95 of their own deaths - understand only violence.

 That's what Israel's military spokesman said last night. Force,
 he said, "will be the only language they understand". Which is
 about as near to a declaration of war as you can get.







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