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Meet Mr Whatever It Takes

April 11 2002
By David Langsam

What is a Jew with a moral conscience meant to do in these dark days of "Arik" Sharon's Palestinian putsch?

Last week my three-year-old son melted my heart by singing the Ma Nishtana for our Passover meal. The song's four questions call for an explanation of the celebration of our escape from slavery in Egypt. The rest of the evening is spent answering those questions, including the analogy of the four sons: the wise, the wicked, the simple and the one who did not even know to ask.

Should I remain silent - as Pastor Neimoller said he did - as we watch the climbing toll of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, journalists and peace activists?

Do I keep my mouth shut as we witness the amazingly disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defence Forces against what are essentially the wrong targets?

Does anyone want to know - or would they care - that more Israelis have died in Sharon's 15 months as prime minister than all his predecessors combined back to 1982, when he, again, was responsible for a very large number of Israeli deaths?

Is it "breaking ranks" to be Jewish and to criticise Israel's terrible government now that Israel has unilaterally declared war on the Palestinian Authority? Or is standing up for what is right still seen as a positive attribute?

I know that by this paragraph, somewhere a pro-Israel lobbyist will be reaching for his or her keyboard to accuse me of being an anti-Semite, or a self-hating Jew, or a traitor. Some will reach for their telephones to deliver hate messages to my 85-year-old father - that's always an easy way to respond.

Am I to be intimidated by the pro-Israeli extreme right just because Israel is wrong?

While Sharon spends much of his nation's resources fighting the Palestinian Authority, the facts are that most of the terrorist suicide bombings have been by Hamas and/or the smaller Islamic Jihad. And just as George Bush's Taliban and al Qaeda were funded by his father, the fledgling Hamas was funded during the first intifada by the Israeli security service Shin Bet, under the guidance of prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and defence minister Yitzhak Rabin, with the aim of dividing Palestinians and creating an alternative to the PLO. Some alternative.

So every time the religious fundamentalists kill a score of Israelis, Israel responds by attacking Hamas's secular rivals. It is, indeed, a bizarre policy.

To claim that Arafat is in control when he is holed up in the Ramallah ghetto is ludicrous.

How is he meant to exert control when every Palestinian town is under siege and the death toll is mounting?

What right does Sharon have to declare Ramallah a "closed military area" and prevent the world's media from documenting his abuse of what was once a respected army and is again being used for occupation, subjugation and ethnic cleansing, shooting live ammunition at peace activists? Ramallah is not meant to be under Israeli control at all.

Not that I have much sympathy for Arafat. His complete stupidity in rejecting the December 2000 Taba offer was hard to believe. Arafat should not have walked away from that deal. He is wholly to blame for that mistake, which - among other factors - led to Israel's loss of faith in prime minister Ehud Barak, paving the way for Israel to elect Sharon the Bulldozer.

What is happening today was entirely predictable.

When you elect a general known as "The Bulldozer", who has always acted like a bulldozer, there is a very good chance he will continue to act with all the sensitivity of a bulldozer.

What else can one say about Sharon's relentless provocation, starting with his preelection march on the Temple Mount?

Every time we see Sharon on television claiming he is fighting terrorism, it is worth asking: why he is attacking the secular Palestinian Authority when the terrorists are primarily the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas? The truth is that Sharon believes in Greater Israel. I have not heard him renounce this concept of Israel's borders spanning not just from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, but onward to include all of Jordan as well. The dogma of his Likud party that "Jordan is Palestine" contradicts this concept, but Likud has never been much concerned with contradiction.

The revisionist descendants of Ze'ev Jabotinksi have a bottom line of "whatever it takes". They do not see parallels between their behaviour and that of other oppressors, and they scream the loudest when the words genocide and ethnic cleansing are applied to their policies, particularly when it is true.

There is a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Actually, there are two.

The first is to build a 10-metre-high concrete wall, crowned with three coils of razor wire, around Gaza and the West Bank, with a connecting highway and surrounded by a dust road, an electrified fence and Israeli sentry posts every kilometre. Any Israeli settlers who wish to remain inside this perimeter would be welcome to do so, but would have to pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority.

The second is to obliterate Palestine once and for all.

But I probably do not have the right to ask these questions or consider these options. I had better keep my mouth shut and let the world believe that all Jews support Israeli atrocities, right or wrong. Loyalty before honesty. Or is honesty still the best policy?/p>

Who will pen the first hate letter? Who will make the first abusive phone call?

David Langsam is a Melbourne journalist.



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