"Darkness awaits many people, now and henceforth. Where there should be complexity and subtlety in perception, there will be simply areas of black and white. The cause of the Palestinian people, already disserviced by abominable leadership, fanatical unreason and murderous anti-Semitism, now lies in ruins. No shield now exists to protect them from whatever biblical wrath Israeli prime minister Sharon might yearn to inflict." Those words appeared in this space two days after September 11th, writes Kevin Myers. And for the most part, and aided by a plague of suicide-bombers, they have come true.
Sharon has visited his biblical wrath on the West Bank, dancing to Osama Bin Laden's command, apparently never having read a page of history in his life.
Here is the lesson from the pages of history which he did not read. You can send in your forces to crush an enemy's city. But having done so, having smashed the defenders, you must cause them to depart their land forever, a broken and demoralised force. This is the peace of Carthage; and it works - for who has heard of Carthage ever since? Or the Pawnee, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho more recently? Or you can come to terms which leave the enemy state humiliated, defeated and powerless, but still in place, and with sufficient organic strength to remember its grievance, and over time, to rearm. Thus such terms provide peace for a generation, maybe. France, 1871; Germany, 1918.
Terrible harvest
But what you must not do is to attack the city in which a partisan army resides, levelling vast areas where civilians live, and killing a few hundred people; and then, claiming your enemy's infrastructure has been destroyed, withdraw as if a condign and permanent lesson has been gratefully accepted. That is what Sharon is hoping to do with his latest adventure; but rather than lay the basis for peace with this insanity, he has sowed instead dragons' teeth that will one day, and perhaps soon, yield a vast and terrible harvest.
The operation in the West Bank - both excessive by far, yet not excessive enough - is madness. Insane? To be sure - but what else was he to do? As we survey the broken Palestinian bodies under the rubble of Jenin and Bethlehem, we are already forgetting the scores of Israelis murdered going about their daily business, the 12-year-old girls deliberately massacred at a bar mitzvah only a few weeks ago. Did Israel ever knowingly choose such a target? Moreover, a new, unconsciously anti-Semitic ethos is gaining ground within the Western intelligentsia, of the kind which Tom Paulin so notoriously exemplified recently. He was not banned from the BBC for his remarks that American Jews in Israel should be butchered; yet had he said the same about Palestinians, he would almost certainly have been off the airwaves faster than you could murmur "Eichmann".
What makes the dilemma excruciating is that the Palestinian people have suffered unspeakable, frightful degradation for the past half-century; yet they were not unique in either their original expropriation, or in their much of their suffering. Over 10 million Germans were expelled from their ancestral homelands in Eastern Europe in 1945, and hundreds of thousands raped and murdered by Soviet forces. None has been able to return.
Socialist sanctuary
Yet one people suffered even more, vastly more, and in despair; and in all their post-Holocaust innocence, the relatively few survivors of the Final Solution sought to create a socialist sanctuary in Palestine. I believe the creation of the state of Israel was a grave error; but then history is littered with grave errors. Our job is to live with the mistakes of those who have gone before us, even the best-intentioned ones, such as the Jewish state in Palestine.
After all, none of its founders believed that the result would be endless war; all sought a paradise in which Jews would be socially and sexually free sons and daughters of the soil, unfettered by wealth, and living in a frugal peace with their Arabic neighbours. None foresaw that down the generations they would become the most militarised people on earth, with all the pathological neuroses of permanent warriors under permanent siege.
Back to basics
Go back to basics. We cannot undo the Israeli state. It is a historical fact. Nor is there any point in complaining about the Israeli tendency towards aggressive self-pity. It was, after all, the Jewish people, survivors of the greatest tribal holocaust in history - not a bunch of middle-class vegetarian hippies from San Francisco - who, with all their instincts and all their memories and all their insecurities, settled in the Holy Lands.
Now they are beset by natives, with appalling and bloody consequences. But before we give them lectures on their conduct, we might remember that it was European Christians, including millions of Irish, who settled in the Americas: and where, please, are the natives of those lands now?
Set history aside. How do we proceed from here? The issue of fundamentalist Zionist settlers on the West Bank is no longer the question, though Israel was mad to allow such zealots further to goad a Palestinian people who had already been already provoked beyond endurance.
In the Middle East anyway, the affairs of man seem now beyond our mortal reach, like a mustang out of control. Will that riderless horse bolt just by himself? Or will he stampede that herd of horses peacefully grazing on unsuspecting meadows? We should be aware: the little foal that is us might well be in their midst.