In One Word: MASSACRE!
By Uri Avnery, 11.11.06
"THANK GOD for the
American elections," our ministers and generals sighed with relief.
They were not rejoicing
at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this
week. They love Bush, after all.
But more important than
the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the
terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were
relegated to the bottom of the page.
THE FIRST revolutionary
act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call
what happened in Beit Hanoun?
"Accident"
said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. "Tragedy",
said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive,
wavered between "event", "mistake" and
"incident".
It was indeed an
accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a
massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.
The word
"accident" suggests something for which no one is to blame - like
being struck by lightning. A tragedy is a sad event or situation, like that of
the New Orleans inhabitants after the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was
sad indeed, but not an act of God - it was an act decided upon and carried out
by human beings.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER the
facts became known, the entire choir of professional apologists,
explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in
perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action.
"An unfortunate
mistake… It can happen in the best families… The mechanism of a cannon can
misfunction, people can make mistakes… Errare humanum est… We have launched
tens of thousands of artillery shells, and there have only been three such
accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz era was in Qana, in the Second
Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza sea shore, where a whole family was wiped
out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What more can they demand from us?"
There were also
arguments like "They can only blame themselves." As usual, it was the
fault of the victims. The most creative solution came from the Deputy Minister
of Defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The practical responsibility is ours, but the
moral responsibility is theirs." If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what
else can we do but answer with shells?
Ephraim Sneh was raised
to the position of Deputy Minister just now. The appointment was a payment for
agreeing to the inclusion of Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical
Hebrew, the payment would have been called "the hire of a whore", Deut. 23,19). Now, after only a few
days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his thanks.
(In the Sneh family,
there is a tradition of justifying despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father,
Moshe Sneh, was the leader of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the
massacres committed by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder
of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish
"doctors plot").
Any suggestion of
equivalence between Qassams and artillery shells, an idea which has been
adopted even by some of the Peaceniks, is completely false. And not only
because there is no symmetry between occupier and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams
launched during more than a year have killed one single Israeli. The shells,
missiles and bombs have already killed many hundreds of Palestinians.
DID THE shells hit the
homes of people intentionally? There are only two possible answers to that.
The extreme version
says: Yes. The sequence of events points in that direction. The Israeli army,
one of the most modern in the world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the
most primitive of weapons. This short-range unguided rocket (named after
Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in
a battle against the British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a
pipe filled with home-made explosives.
In a futile attempt to
prevent the launching of Qassams, the Israeli forces invade the towns and
villages of the Gaza Strip at regular intervals and institute a reign of
terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun and killed more than 50 people,
many of them women and children. The moment they left, the Palestinians started
to launch as many Qassams as possible against Ashkelon, in order to prove that
these incursions do not deter them.
That increased the
frustration of the generals even more. Ashkelon is not a remote
poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most of whose inhabitants are of
Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also an elitist population of European
descent. The army chiefs, having lost their honor in Lebanon, were eager -
according to this version - to teach the Palestinians a lesson, once and for
all. According to the Israeli saying: If force doesn't work, use more force.
The other version holds
that it was a real mistake, an unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander
of an army knows very well that a certain incidence of "hitches" is
unavoidable. So-and-so many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many
percent die from "friendly fire", so-and-so many percent of shells
fall some distance from the target. The ammunition used by the gunners against
Beit-Hanoun - the very same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana - is known
for its inaccuracy. Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their
course by hundreds of meters.
He who decided to use
this ammunition against a target right next to civilians knowingly exposed them
to mortal danger. Therefore, there is no essential difference between the two
versions.
Who is to blame? First
of all, the spirit that has gained ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy
disclosed that a battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12
Palestinians with the words: "We have won by 12:0!"
Guilty are, of course,
the gunners and their commanders, including the battery chief. And the General
in charge of the Southern Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates
indifference spiked with sanctimonious platitudes. And the Deputy
Chief-of-Staff. And the Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, the Air-Force general who
said after another such incident that he sleeps well at night after dropping a
one-ton super-bomb on a residential area. And, of course, the Minister of
Defense, Amir Peretz, who approved the use of artillery after forbidding it in
the past - which means that he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.
The guiltiest one is the
Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister.
Olmert boasted recently
that because of the clever behavior of his government "we were able to
kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted." According to
Olmert, a "terrorist" is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of
thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel.
They may now be shot freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and
children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly:
the children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who
grow up to be terrorists.)
Olmert can go on with
this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the US even vetoed a
very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that
the governments throughout the world - America, Europe, the Arab world - are
accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the
citizens of those countries.
THE WORLD did not pay
much attention to the massacre, because it happened on US election day. The
results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of
mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election
diverted attention.
A cynic might say:
Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected
last time and replace them with a new moron.
But let's not be too
cynical. The fact is that the American people has accepted, after a delay of
three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around
the word - including us here in Israel - were saying already on the first day:
that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but
have the opposite effect.
The change will not be
quick and dramatic. The US is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a
very big circle and needs a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat
that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.
Of course, in both new
houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the
Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones.
But the American army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another
military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy
neo-conservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel,
are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian
fundamentalists.
As former Prime Minister
Levy Eshkol once said: when America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America
starts to recover, perhaps there is hope for us, too.