While Palestinians are stigmatised as perpetrators, not victims, the illegality of Israel's occupation of their lands is passed over in silence, writes Raymond Deane
It took the horrendous Israeli bombing of a Gaza City neighbourhood to bring the plight of Palestinian civilians back to the front page of The Irish Times yesterday.
Clearly the sheer quantity of civilians slaughtered in the process of targeting a Hamas commander, coupled with the seemingly harsh condemnation from the US government, was deemed to merit such coverage. Nevertheless the steady toll of civilian fatalities consequent on Israel's blanket "reoccupation" of the West Bank this summer has been consistently relegated to a few dry sentences on an inside page, while the lethal acts of retaliation against Israeli civilians yield headlines and photographs - to say nothing of the repeated featuring of unauthenticated images of Palestinian babies in paramilitary gear. Of course The Irish Times is not alone in applying this double standard: I know of no Western newspaper that has given the slightest impression of the grim concentration camp into which the West Bank has been transformed, or of the daily arbitrary and sadistic humiliations to which Palestinian civilians are subjected by a rampant and patently undisciplined occupying force.
Furthermore, it is surely an exaggeration to describe the official US reaction as constituting "particularly ferocious criticism", in the words of this paper's correspondent, David Horovitz. The US administration's spokesman called the attack "heavy-handed", a term that would hardly be considered appropriate condemnation of Palestinian assaults on Israeli settlements.
I will be told that the fundamental difference is in the absence of an intention to kill civilians, as evidenced by the IRA-style expressions of regret emanating from Israeli politicians and military officials. But when civilian deaths are the inevitable consequence of an action it is a primitive and self-serving morality indeed that persists in justifying that action. In last week's Sunday Independent, Ireland's new Chief Rabbi, Yaakov Pearlman, asserted (in relation to Jenin) that "unfortunately innocent people have to suffer" when Israel decides to "go in there and track down suicide bombers". Here a religious leader makes no pretence that civilian casualties should be avoided, and his attitude is surely more representative of both Israeli and US thinking and practice.
In reality the difference between Western perceptions of Israel and Palestine resides in the fact that the former is our official ally, while the latter, however much we may sympathise with its misfortunes, is perceived as merely an obstacle in that ally's path. The Israelis are the subjects of their own history, which is part of the history of the West, while the Palestinians are mere objects within that history. Such thinking belongs firmly within the tradition of Western colonialism and is inherently racist.
In order for the Palestinians to be stigmatised as perpetrators rather than victims, it is necessary for the illegality of the 35-year Israeli occupation of their territories to be passed over in silence, a stratagem in which the media collude. The present US administration has deliberately pushed UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967 (calling on the Israelis to "withdraw from (the) territories occupied" and reaffirming the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war) into the background, while the concomitant "land for peace" formula which underpinned US and international diplomacy since the days of former president Johnson has all but vanished.
Former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison claims that it was former president Clinton and his Camp David negotiators in 2000 who, in order to further the interests of former Israeli prime minister Barak, decided "to treat the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem not as occupied territories but only as territories under dispute" (Counterpunch, June 28th).
The "myth of Camp David" has recently come under fire from the great Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery (Gush Shalom website, July 6th) who states baldly: "The real criminal in this story is Ehud Barak. In order to hide his monumental failure as a peacemaker, he created the legend that 'we offered them everything, they rejected everything'." A consequence of this "historic lie" (Avnery) has been that Barak was succeeded by an even greater criminal, Ariel Sharon, whose murderous record extends from the Qibya massacre in 1953 through Sabra and Shatila in 1982 to Jenin and now Gaza in 2002.
We know that such achievements qualify Mr Sharon for the epithet "man of peace" in the misty eyes of President Bush, but I have little doubt that his real attraction to the US resides in the fact that "he may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch". It is worth recalling that F. D. Roosevelt used that phrase to describe Somoza, the US-backed Nicaraguan dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. It will be further recalled that its violent attempts to subvert the Sandinista regime earned the US a World Court condemnation for "unlawful use of force" in 1986. Not alone did the US ignore this judgment and its accompanying demand for reparations, but it subsequently vetoed a UN Security Council resolution "calling on all states to observe international law"!
This speaks volumes for America's commitment to the "democracy and the rule of law" that George Bush enjoined upon the Palestinians in his infamous June 24th speech, and provides a fitting context for the sidelining of UNSC resolution 242. Of course the violence against Nicaragua continued, coupled with the starvation of its people and threats of even more dire consequences were the US client not successful in the 1990 elections.
The result was hailed as a "triumph of democracy", with the media again playing the role of compliant cheerleaders. The Nicaraguans were abandoned to the degradation from which they had slowly been extricating themselves, and their fate has been lost from sight in the ongoing reporting of history from an exclusively Western - or, more accurately, northern - perspective. All the signs are that a similar "triumph of democracy" is being planned for the Palestinians, unless the rest of the world wakes up and brings resolution 242 back into the foreground.
There must be an end to the impunity enjoyed by Israel in the prosecution of its brutal and illegal occupation. Such an outcome would be facilitated were the media to pay more attention to the stark realities of that occupation, and were more explicit about the illegality of many of the Israeli actions they report, from the occupation itself to the colonial settlement on occupied land to the deportation either of alleged terrorists or of their families, whether to Gaza or the European Union.
The end of the occupation, the deployment of international peacekeepers, and intensive negotiations involving the so-called "quartet" (UN, US, EU, Russia) is the only course that can begin to undo the unspeakable injustice already visited on the Palestinians, while preventing the kind of reciprocal atrocities that are almost certain to follow in the wake of the Gaza bombing.
The policies of President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon can only perpetuate the cycle of retribution and counter-retribution that deprives Palestinians and Israelis alike of the peace and security they deserve.
Raymond Deane is a composer and a founding member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.