Robert Fisk’s World: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons
On both sides of the Atlantic the experience has been weirdly repetitive
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Independent Minds
It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel's propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don't realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza. Forget the 600 Palestinian dead; travelling on both sides of the Atlantic these past couple of weeks has been an instructive – not to say weirdly repetitive – experience.
Here's how it goes. I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills," writes Gunter, "and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid's school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist's office..."
Getting the message? It just so happens, of course, that the people of Scarborough are underprivileged, often new immigrants – many from Afghanistan – while the people of Don Mills are largely middle class with a fair number of Muslims. Nothing like digging a knife into Canada's multicultural society to show how Israel is all too justified in smashing back at the Palestinians.
Now a trip down Montreal way and a glance at the French-language newspaper La Presse two days later. And sure enough, there's an article signed by 16 pro-Israeli writers, economists and academics who are trying to explain what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Imagine for a moment that the children of Longueuil live day and night in terror, that businesses, shops, hospitals, schools are the targets of terrorists located in Brossard." Longueuil, it should be added, is a community of blacks and Muslim immigrants, Afghans, Iranians. But who are the "terrorists" in Brossard?
Two days later and I am in Dublin. I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what's coming? Of course you do. "What would you do," Zion Evrony asks readers, "if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars..." And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I'm waiting for the same writers to ask how we'd feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 fatalities.
In Ireland, my favourite journalistic justification for this bloodbath came from my old mate Kevin Myers. "The death toll from Gaza is, of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable," he mourned. "Though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas had its way." Get it? The massacre in Gaza is justified because Hamas would have done the same if they could, even though they didn't do it because they couldn't. It took Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times's resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. "When does the mandate of victimhood expire?" he asked. "At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?"
I had an interesting time giving the Tip O'Neill peace lecture in Derry when one of the audience asked, as did a member of the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society a day later, whether the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement – or, indeed, any aspect of the recent Irish conflict – contained lessons for the Middle East. I suggested that local peace agreements didn't travel well and that the idea advanced by John Hume (my host in Derry) – that it was all about compromise – didn't work since the Israeli seizure of Arab land in the West Bank had more in common with the 17th-century Irish Catholic dispossession than sectarianism in Belfast.
What I do suspect, however, is that the split and near civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has a lot in common with the division between the Irish Free State and anti-treaty forces that led to the 1922-3 Irish civil war; that Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel – and the enemies of Michael Collins who refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border with Northern Ireland – are tragedies that have a lot in common, Israel now playing the role of Britain, urging the pro-treaty men (Mahmoud Abbas) to destroy the anti-treaty men (Hamas).
I ended the week in one of those BBC World Service discussions in which a guy from The Jerusalem Post, a man from al-Jazeera, a British academic and Fisk danced the usual steps around the catastrophe in Gaza. The moment I mentioned that 600 Palestinian dead for 20 Israeli dead around Gaza in 10 years was grotesque, pro-Israeli listeners condemned me for suggesting (which I did not) that only 20 Israelis had been killed in all of Israel in 10 years. Of course, hundreds of Israelis outside Gaza have died in that time – but so have thousands of Palestinians.
My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn't give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn't give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that "the IDF are not Hitler". Of course not. But who said they were?
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Comments
Wow, i wonder how Mr. Fisk's brain processes information. Of course one must be "pro-Israeli" to make you choose your words more carefully so as not to belittle the victims of terrorism.
There is no doubt the inhabitants of the Gaza strip are suffering, this is not the point of the debate.
The author suggests that not enough Israelis were murdered to justify a retaliation of this magnitude. Interesting.
I ask this: what do the anti-Israeli terrorist groups need to do in order to justify an assault of this magnitude?
Blow up buses full of kids going to school? They did that...
Blow up night clubs where teenagers celebrate youth? They did that as well....
Maybe they just didn't kill enough people. Perhaps, according to Mr. Fisk, the terrorists need to be better at their jobs before Israel can use its right of self defense.
So Israel is wrong, Israel is mercilessly killing innocent people and so on.
Of course, it's easy to pawn off your opinions sitting in a cafe' in Europe or wherever, but it's quite difficult to suggest alternatives.
War is bad. Juvenile and naive but true non the less. So let us analyze the options and circumstances.
Terrorism should be eliminated. If you disagree, there is nothing i can do for you. If you agree you must ask yourself this: Do i try to fix what is allegedly the cause of terrorism under fire, or do i first do my best to stop the attacks and then proceed?
Israel went for the latter, giving them weapons, autonomy and eventually full control over Gaza, all this under fire.
Now what is the cause of terrorism?
Occupation? Surely not since Israel withdrew from Gaza completely. Of course Gaza was under Egyptian occupation and Judea and Samaria under Jordanian occupation, so "occupation" itself is not a reasonable cause.
Is it the siege?
Maybe, but then again the siege is about 2 years old and terrorism began long before that, so it can't be that.
Is it the fence?
Perhaps, but Israel erected the fence to keep terrorism in Israel down instead of going to war and killing lots of people. Would that have been a more reasonable course of action?
Maybe terrorism is fueled by hatred of Israel, not because of what it does but for what it is. Full of Jews.
You can hate Israel for the war and for the fence, for its racism or for its imperialism, but ask yourself if terrorism is justified?
Is Israel's actions a good enough reason to storm into someone's home with an assault rifle and kill everyone including a baby in a crib? Because that's what terrorists did before the fences and walls.
Do you honestly think that the IDF targeted civilians in this war? If so wouldn't there be more than 600 dead civilians?
You can ask Israel to do its best to avoid civilian casualties, but you can not sit idly by as Israel is under attack and tell it to stop killing people when it tries to protect its citizens.
Either try to stop ALL violence or sit down and shut up. Anything in between is a waste of breath.
I hope that whoever reads this will take a moment to ponder over this issue, and only then form an opinion.
Have a good day,
From a proud Israeli
penelope kelly
We all know that there is only one way in which Israel can achieve security and peace: by ending the oppression of the Palestinian people, clearing all occupied territories and co-operating with the establishment of a Palestinian state.
As long as Israel refuses to do this, it will have casualties, regardless how many Palestinians it kills.
Indeed. Collective punishment is terrorism. Destruction of public facilities is terrorism. The fact that these are done by an organized state and not paramilitary organizations does not make them less terrorist. So please, stop terrorizing palestinians.
"Now what is the cause of terrorism?
Occupation? Surely not since Israel withdrew from Gaza completely."
This is a lie plain and simple. Israel still occupies palestinian land.
"Is it the siege?[...] Is it the fence?"
Both and a lot other similar Israeli actions before them. It's the checkpoints and the daily humiliation. It's the settling on palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing. It's the massacres of the past. The situation is a vicious circle and as long as you don't acknowledge your part in it you'll never break it.
"You can hate Israel for the war and for the fence, for its racism or for its imperialism, but ask yourself if terrorism is justified?"
We don't hate Israel. We hate violence and the loss of human life, israeli and palestinian alike. And it seems that the palestinians are the ones suffering more so we tend to sympathize with them. Not the terrorists. The people. We don't justify terrorism. In fact, you do since you seem to advodate the collective punishment of palestinians.
"Is Israel's actions a good enough reason to storm into someone's home with an assault rifle and kill everyone including a baby in a crib? Because that's what terrorists did before the fences and walls."
Is terrorist's actions a good enough reason to bomb someone's house with incendiary explosives and kill everyone including a baby in a crib? See, it works both ways. See previous argument about the vicious circle. Btw the fact that someone killed your baby does not give you moral justification to kill his baby. Obviously, because the baby itself is innocent (not to mention a human being).
"Do you honestly think that the IDF targeted civilians in this war? If so wouldn't there be more than 600 dead civilians?"
In fact since the israeli army bombed schools and hospitals it's pretty obvious that it did target them. Regardless, according to law when you are aware of the likely consequences of your actions and you decide to go ahead the consequences are considered intentional. So if you knew that civilians would die and you bombed anyway the deaths are considered intentional acts (i.e. war crimes). The "not intended" excuse is ridiculous, not only from a legal but from a moral point of view as well. Israel could and should have pursued alternative courses of action.
"Either try to stop ALL violence or sit down and shut up. "
I think that's exactly what people in all the world are asking for. Although we do expect a greater amount of self restraint from an organized state and a democratic society than a bunch of paramilitary fanatics.