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"But They're
Not Human Beings, They are Not People, They are Arabs!"
Israel's
Foes as Beasts and Insects
By PUNYAPRIYA DASGUPTA
New Delhi
Israel's ambassador in New Delhi, David
Danieli, sees Hezbollah as something akin to a scorpion (Times
of India, 28 July). His is not much of a new invention.
Other Israelis in responsible positions have made similar statements
before. A few days earlier, Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative
at UN, regretted Kofi Annan's failure to mention that the Hezbollah
was a bunch of "ruthless, indiscriminate animals".
During its First Lebanon War in 1982 Israel's chief of staff
Rafael Eitan was gleeful that he had shoved the Palestinian "
drugged cockroaches" into a bottle. To Menahem Begin, chief
author of the Deir Yassin massacre, who went on to become Israel's
prime minister and get a Nobel peace prize, the Palestinians
were "two-legged beasts". Immediately after the 1967
war Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, a British Conservative, recounted
in the House of Commons a conversation he had with David Hacohen,
one-time Israeli ambassador to Burma. As related by Maxwell-Hyslop,
Hacohen "spoke with great intemperance and at great length
about the Arabs. When he drew breath I was constrained to say:
"Dr Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak
of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius
Streicher [notorious Nazi propagandist] spoke of the Jews. Have
you learned nothing?" I shall remember his reply to my dying
day. He smote the table with both hands and said: "But
they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs"."
One of the many things Israeli spokesmen seem incapable of realizing
is that abuse is no substitute for reason. Israel has amassed
much military prowess but remains very poor in logic.
Facts cry out against Israel. The root cause of the present
war in Lebanon is, according to the Israelis and Americans, in
the capture of one Israeli soldier by Hamas and two by Hezbollah.
Not true. It is in the original sin of the partition of Palestine
by UN against all moral, historical, demographic, legal reasons.
The General Assembly's non-binding Resolution 181 envisaged
an astonishingly intricate carving of Palestine into seven pieces
to make 608,000 (half of them illegal immigrants) of a total
population of 1,935,000 the majority in the biggest possible
area. This was the warrant the Israelis needed to begin their
relentless drive to restoration of their "historical frontiers"
i.e., from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river through the
instrumentality of calculated massacres and wars and incredible
mendacity.
Had Israel stopped even at
the pre-June 1967 lines there would have been no 1973 war, no
Lebanon wars, no Hezbollah, no intifadas. Hezbollah was born
of the need for an effective resistance to the Israeli juggernaut
after the Arab armies had repeatedly failed. Hezbollah ran the
Israelis off from Lebanon, excepting Shaaba Farms, a tiny patch
Israel treats as a part of the Syrian Golan Heights it conquered
and annexed. To the people in the Arab world Hezbollah is their
David confronting the Israeli Goliath. Hezbollah's standing
firm and inflicting substantial losses on the world's fourth
mightiest force this time has heightened Arab expectations.
Mr Danieli's many accusations against Hezbollah include "inventing"
the Israeli enemy. The wrong end of the stick. Political invention
is an Israeli art. Remember Golda Meir's statement that there
was no such thing as a Palestinian people "they did
not exist"? Hezbollah was reckoning with unceasing Israeli
violations of Lebanese sovereignty Israel's peace activists
say they had watched with alarm the deliberateness behind the
Israel's latest war and soldiers admit they had rehearsed the
offensives .
Mr Danieli stigmatizes Hezbollah as terrorists. How does he
explain the proud confession of Yitzhak Shamir, one-time terrorist
and twice prime minister of Israel: "Neither Jewish ethics
nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat"?
Mr Danieli's claim about his government's "calculated restraint"
sounds terribly ironic with the current proportion of eight Lebanese
dying for each Israeli.
CounterPunch
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