A rchive Date
[ 23-03-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Palestine ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur.html
Forced Mideast 'marriage' lacks clear accounting
By SALIM MANSUR - For the London Free Press
March 23, 2002
As I read reports of the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East, I am reminded of the following words: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
The words belong to Milan Kundera, the Czech emigre writer living in Paris. He was speaking of men and women behind the Iron Curtain, which once divided Europe, struggling to maintain their sanity against the deluge of lies of officialdom.
To quote Kundera again: "Since we can no longer assume any single historical event, no matter how recent, to be common knowledge, I must treat events dating back only a few years as if they were a thousand years old."
These words are from his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Kundera's words have a special meaning for North Americans, unlike Europeans, fed by the mainstream media on a steady diet of half-lies masquerading as truths when it comes to reporting and commenting about the conflict in historic Palestine between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.
No subject reported in the North American mainstream media has been so grossly bent out of shape or torn out of its historical context, as is the conflict in Palestine.
While images on television defy the written or spoken words, North American media commentators endlessly repeat the canard the Israeli David, armed with tanks, helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft, is waging a war for survival against the Palestinian Goliath, armed with stones, slings and automatic rifles. Somewhere, with his deep sense of irony, the ghost of George Orwell must be smiling with the thought that "doublespeak" is alive and well in the North American media.
However long this conflict of Israelis and Palestinians continues before it finds its resolution, it is now more than 100 years old. And, despite all the egregious interpretations representing victims of this struggle as victimizers, the core of the matter remains defiantly simple. It is about dispossessing a native population from its land and the resistance such injustice provokes.
The elementary simplicity of the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is narrated by Avi Shlaim, an Israeli historian currently teaching at Oxford University, in his recent book, The Iron Wall.
Soon after the First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. They reported back: "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."
In this anecdote is contained all the contradictions of the Zionist movement before and after the founding of Israel in 1948.
It is not normal that any man, of his own volition, without offering any resistance, accept forcible separation from his bride. Only those whose moral vision has been twisted out of shape for whatever reason will deny the rightfulness of a man to protect his bride and his marriage. It would take a special kind of lawyer to make a case against such a man protecting his rights and a bigoted jury to find him guilty.
The Israelis have mostly succeeded to forcibly separate the bride from her groom. But the subsequent forced marriage has turned out to be a nightmare. The Oslo Accord of 1993 was an effort at finding an historic compromise.
While it is conveniently forgotten who killed Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister of Israel and an architect of that agreement, and which side politically gained from that crime, right-wing Israelis led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remain adamant in pursuing their untenable goal of maintaining a greater Israel in all the lands of historic Palestine.
Where now the wisdom of Solomon is needed to secure peace, security and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, the prevarication of Pontius Pilate prevails as injustice reaps its harvest of suffering.
Albert Einstein once observed, "Peace in Palestine cannot be achieved by force, but only through understanding."
The North American media in this respect has failed abysmally to explain and understand when it comes to the subject of Palestine.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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