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A dog-trainer’s nightmare
Posted: Sunday, April 21, 2002
By Donna Yawching
LIFE is full of sad ironies, and one of the most tragic is currently being played out in the Middle East. Consider this: the victims of one of history’s most shocking genocides are poised and by all appearances quite prepared to perpetrate the same crime on another people.
Israelis, 50 years ago the underdogs to end all underdogs, are now overdog enough to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, encircle them with tanks in their ever-more-restricted enclaves, and crush them to a pulp, both literally and figuratively. Whoever said that we must remember history in order never to repeat it, was wrong: clearly, the Jews consider their brutal history as sufficient justification to be inhumanly brutal in their turn. So the world turns, and we turn with it.
I blame America four-square for what is happening right now in the Middle East. Not because they began the conflict (they didn’t); and not even because they continue to fuel it with arms and advice (though this is shameful). Rather, I blame them because of their war against Afghanistan. By choosing to annihilate, with their space-age weapons and inexhaustible finances, one of the world’s poorest and most backward countries–and one, moreover, which had done them no harm (lest we forget the facts in favour of the propaganda)–the US lowered the bar for all future human interaction.
They proved, unequivocally and with the arrogance born of knowing you’re Number One, that might is right: that power talks and BS walks. If Hitler had won World War Two, he would have proven exactly the same thing. Fortunately he didn’t; but is one global bully any better than another?
As for bin Laden, he factors into the equation as a trigger, certainly; but the truth is, the gun was already there, ready to be fired. If the US had been a far weaker country, one that might actually find itself losing a war against someplace like Afghanistan, the response to September11 would have been completely different. Instead, confident in its immeasurable superiority, America didn’t think twice about sending in punishing waves of bombers to destroy a nation of helpless peasants.
This is not meant to be a column rehashing and re-analysing the Afghan war; but rather, its implications for global relations. Having proven that whoever has the biggest guns and the fastest planes has the right to do whatever he likes to whomever he likes, America is now hardly in a position to censure Israel (or any other country) for taking that object lesson to heart. The password into the Bruisers Club is, of course, “terrorism”: all a government has to do is point a finger and scream the T word, and that gives it the right to visit the most egregious of brutalities upon its enemies.
And, of course, it gains the added pious cover of “democracy”, since we all know that terrorists are by definition anti-democratic, which must mean, conversely, that all anti-terrorists are democratic. Nonsense? Of course. But these are the inane formulations with which the US has left us, post-Afghanistan. And it has given the Israelis a built-in excuse to escalate their annihilation of the Palestine people–for that, if anyone cares to look beyond the rhetoric, is what is happening: ethnic cleansing on a mind-boggling scale.
Already hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in refugee camps, having been displaced by Israel a generation or more ago. The few small–and ever-shrinking–patches of Palestinian territory are now being unashamedly aggressed, and the casualties are mounting daily. Israel, in justification, claims to be fighting “terrorism”–but is it terrorism to fight for what is rightfully yours? Suicide bombing is not a pretty tactic, true; and it strikes at the heart of the “innocent” civilian population. But how many Palestinian civilians have been killed over the years, or even over the past few weeks? Believe me, the numbers are heavily tilted in Israel’s favour. The countless images of Israeli tanks and guns pointing at Palestinian teenagers armed with stones tell the true story of who are the terrorists in this uneven combat.
Another irony: having established the gold standard, so to speak, for what one powerful nation can with impunity do to another less powerful, America is now seeing the whole thing spiralling out of its control. First there was the face-off (still unresolved) between India and Pakistan, each calling the other the T word. And now, of course, there’s Israel, every dog-trainer’s nightmare. Exactly like when you train a pitbull to be vicious and then it stops listening to you, the US is finding that Israel, teeth bared and frothing for the kill, is no longer prepared to heed its dictates to pull back.
This could jeopardise the fragile “coalition” which George Bush pulled together in order to perpetrate Afghanistan: the Palestinian genocide-in-waiting is clearly becoming unacceptable to virtually the entire global community; even Kofi Annan is starting to talk about sending in an international force. And in the Arab world, rage at the Palestinian slaughter (which is what is happening over there, like it or not) could ignite a genuine popular explosion that would make the bin Laden saga look like a footnote. If this were to happen, the US would truly be hoist on its own petard, since an all-out Middle East conflict would leave absolutely no winners.
Thus it is that one single egomaniac can destabilise an entire planet. Hitler, bin Laden, George Bush, Ariel Sharon–is there really that much difference between any of them? It’s certainly worth pondering.
The real tragedy is, not that they do it, but that we let them.
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