A rchive Date
[ 28-04-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Israel ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_sun.html
Breaking the wall of silence around Mideast violence
By SALIM MANSUR -- Toronto Sun
April 25, 2002
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote, "April is the cruelest month" and, indeed, this has been so for the Palestinians in recent history.
This April by a quirk of gruesome irony, due to the Jewish calendar being lunar, the Holocaust remembrance day on April 9 coincided with the commemoration of Deir Yassin.
On a quiet spring morning 54 years ago, the Palestinian residents of Deir Yassin, a village in the vicinity of the Jewish area of Jerusalem, woke up in terror as their homes were stormed by the Jewish militia of the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
David Shipler of the New York Times in a 1979 article about the forced evacuation of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramleh wrote, citing Red Cross and British documents, that the Jewish militia on entering Deir Yassin "lined men, women and children up against walls and shot them."
Deir Yassin, in Shipler's words, "remains a name of infamy in the world."
Now 54 years later, the world is witness as Israeli military forces, not some fringe Jewish militia, have gone about destroying Palestinian towns and cities in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli justification being its war is no different than America's war against terrorism since Sept. 11.
The mainstream North American media have readily swallowed this Israeli version of airbrushed history.
There is no equivalence between America's response to Sept. 11 and Ariel Sharon's war against the Palestinians, against the peace process and the Oslo Accord signed between the late Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority.
Sharon's war against Palestinians has a history prior to Sept. 11. Indeed, there is a significant difference between Sharon and Arafat. The Palestinian leader came to a fork on the path of history in his people's struggle with Israelis, and he chose the path of peace and reconciliation which resulted in the Oslo Accord of 1993.
Sharon is an unreformed enemy of Palestinians, has personalized this enmity with Arafat, and has continued to make "a savage war of peace" - recalling Alistair Horne's phrase about France's tragically foolish attempt to suppress the Algerian struggle for freedom - in denying Palestinians their right to nationhood.
It is grotesquely wrong to equate the Palestinian struggle for freedom with the sheer evil of Osama bin Laden and his gang of killers. The Palestinian struggle for freedom originates from loss and longing that is similar to the history of European Jews.
On the anniversary date of Deir Yassin this year, April 9, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported the destruction of refugee camps in the town of Jenin. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Ha'aretz noted, referred in private to the battle for Jenin as a "massacre."
Peres' rumination indicates concern about war crime evidence piling up as the Israeli forces, driven by Sharon and his extreme right-wing allies, went on a rampage in Jenin, Nablus and other towns of the occupied West Bank.
This, too, is consistent with Sharon's record of involvement in the massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla outside of Beirut in 1982.
Occasional courageous voices are beginning to break through the wall of silence that the North American media have constructed around Israel and its record of violence against Palestinians.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to former American President Jimmy Carter, in a recent interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour observed, "The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life, not hesitating to kill a great many of them and justifying this on the grounds that they are being the objects of terrorism..."
It has long been asked if television was available would it have prevented the Holocaust from taking place. We know television would have made no difference. The pictures of death and destruction from Jenin confirm this and more, that we are in complicity with those in power who bully, maim and kill the weak and the dispossessed when we watch and do nothing.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column will appear on alternate Thursdays
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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