Gość: Tim
IP: 168.103.126.*
06.12.01, 17:55
TIMOTHY BANCROFT-HINCHEY:MIDDLE EAST MADNESS
By raising the stakes in the fever-pitch climate in the region, Israel again
adopts its classical approach of matching violence with violence. However, for
a country to use its armed forces against civilian targets, as well as military
ones, is an act of state terrorism, which would cause an international incident
if it were practised by any other country.
If, for example, the British Armed Forces had launched missile attacks on the
citizens of Belfast after one of the many atrocities carried out by the IRA
(backed with money from NORAID, the North American Aid organisation which for
years raised funds for the IRA to fight the British), the incident would have
reached the UN Security Council. Similarly, whenever the Russian Army attacks
Chechen terrorists hiding in civilian areas, there is a wave of concern that
human rights are not being respected.
However, when it is Israel, there is a wall of silence. Israel has
systematically violated UN Security Council Resolutions and declares openly
that it is not interested in adhering to them. Israel occupied Palestinian
territories and forced the residents to move out of the country. Israel has
built colonies on these occupied lands. Israeli soldiers shoot stone-throwing
Palestinian youths in the eyes with rubber bullets. Israeli security forces
have on more than one occasion left pregnant women to die in the street,
laughing, as the baby and mother die through not having been allowed to cross
the border to get to a hospital.
If Yasser Arafat is the spokesperson of the moderate Palestinians, as claimed
by the internationally respected Hanane Ashrawi, the hostile acts by the
Israeli Armed Forces against his person – he was metres away from being killed
on Tuesday in a missile attack – make sense only in the context that he is to
be eliminated, only for there to be an implacable war against the extremists in
the wake of his death.
It is more and more apparent that Ariel Sharon, himself indicted for acts of
terrorism in the past in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Lebanon
in the 1980s, can only remain in power in a climate of war. It is more and more
evident that the policy undertaken by Israel is the elimination of the
Palestinian Authority, and its people, from the Middle East.
How there can be talk of a serious commitment to peace when one side
unilaterally steals territories, refuses to give them back to their rightful
owners, kills civilians and refuses to adopt UN Resolutions defies logic.
Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
