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CounterPunch
October
5, 2002
Arafat the
Hunted
Low Point of Powerlessness
by EDWARD SAID
Sixty years ago, the Jews of Europe were at the
lowest point of their collective existence. Herded like cattle
into trains, they were transported from the rest of Europe by
Nazi soldiers into death camps where they were systematically
exterminated in gas ovens. They had offered some resistance in
Poland, but in most places they first lost their civil status,
then they were removed from their jobs, then they were designated
official enemies to be destroyed, and then they were.
In every significant instance they were
the most powerless of people, treated as insidious, potentially
overpowering enemies by leaders and armies whose own power was
far, far greater; indeed, even the idea of Jews representing
a danger to the might of countries like Germany, France, and
Italy was preposterous. But it was an accepted idea, since with
few exceptions most of Europe turned its back on them during
their slaughter. It is only one of the ironies of history that
the word used most frequently to describe them in the hideous
official jargon of fascism was the word "terrorists",
just as Algerians and Vietnamese were later called "terrorists"
by their enemies.
Every human calamity is different, so
there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one
and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth
about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen
to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective punishment,
it should not happen to any people at all.
But if there is no point in looking for
equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps
hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion.
Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes and misrule,
Yasser Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by
the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the
greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli  army in his ruined Ramallah compound,
is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic
leader who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want
to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians
under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were
in the 1940s. Israel's army, air force and navy, heavily subsidised
by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally
defenceless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and
Gaza strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been
a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the
rest under a 35 year old military occupation, at the mercy of
armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land
and an army that has killed Palestinians by the thousands. Thousands
more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihood,
made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without
civil or human rights.
And still Sharon makes the case that
Israel is struggling to survive against Palestinian terrorism.
Is there anything more grotesque than this claim, even as this
deranged killer of Arabs sends his F-16s, his attack helicopters
and hundreds of tanks against unarmed people without any defences
at all. They are terrorists, he says, and their leader, humiliatingly
imprisoned in a crumbling building with Israeli destruction all
round him, is characterised as the arch-terrorist of all time.
Arafat has the courage and defiance to resist, and he has his
people with him on that score. Every Palestinian feels the deliberate
humiliation inflicted on him as a cruelty without political or
military purpose except punishment, pure and simple. What right
does Israel have to do this?
The symbolism is truly awful to register,
and is made even more so by the knowledge that Sharon and his
supporters, to say nothing of his criminal army, intend what
the symbolism so starkly illustrates. Israeli Jews are the powerful
ones. Palestinians their hunted and despised Others. Luckily
for Sharon, he has Shimon Peres, perhaps the greatest coward
and hypocrite in world politics today, going round everywhere
saying that Israel understands the difficulties of the Palestinian
people, and "we" are willing to make the closures slightly
less onerous. After which not only does nothing improve, but
the curfews, demolitions, and killings intensify. And of course,
the Israeli position is to call for massive international humanitarian
aid which, as Terje- Rod Larsen correctly says, is in effect
to cajole international donors into actually underwriting the
Israeli occupation. Sharon must surely feel that he can do anything
and not only get away with it completely but somehow even to
manage a campaign whose purpose is to give Israel the role of
victim.
As popular protests grow worldwide, the
organised Zionist counter- response has been to complain that
anti-semitism is on the rise. Only two days ago Harvard University
President Lawrence Summers issued a statement to the effect that
an anti-divestment campaign led by professors -- an attempt to
pressure the university into divesting itself of shares in American
firms selling military equipment to Israel -- was anti-Semitic.
A Jewish president of the country's oldest and richest university
complains of anti-semitism! Criticism of Israeli policy is now
routinely equated with anti-semitism of the kind that brought
about the Holocaust, even though in the United States there is
no anti-semitism to speak of. In the US, a group of Israeli and
American academics are organising a McCarthy-style campaign against
professors who have spoken up about Israeli human rights abuses;
the main purpose of the campaign is to ask students and faculty
to inform against their pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating
the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom.
A further irony is that protests against
Israeli brutality -- most recently Arafat's humiliating isolation
in Ramallah -- have taken place on a mass level. Palestinians
by the thousands defied curfews in Gaza and several West Bank
towns in order to go out on the streets in support of their embattled
leader. For their part, the Arab rulers have been silent or powerless
or both together. Every one of them, including Arafat, has for
years openly stated a willingness for peace with Israel; two
leading Arab countries actually have treaties with it. Yet all
Sharon gives in return is a kick to their collective bottoms.
Arabs, he says repeatedly, only understand force, and now that
we have power we shall treat them as they deserve (and as we
used to be treated).
Uri Avnery is right: Arafat is being
murdered. And with him, according to Sharon, will die the aspirations
of the Palestinians. This is an exercise short of complete genocide
to see how far Israeli power can go in sadistic brutality without
being stopped or apprehended. Today Sharon has said that in the
event of a war with Iraq, which is definitely coming, he will
retaliate against Iraq, thus no doubt causing Bush and Rumsfeld
the nightmares they rightly deserve. Sharon's last attempt at
regime change was in Lebanon during 1982. He put Bashir Jemayel
in as president, then was summarily told by Jemayel that Lebanon
would never be an Israeli vassal, then Jemayel was assassinated,
then the Sabra and Shatila massacres took place, then after 20
bloody and ignominious years the Israelis sullenly withdrew from
Lebanon.
What conclusion is one to draw from all
this?
That Israeli policy has been a disaster
for the entire region. The more powerful it becomes, the more
ruin it sows in the countries around it, to say nothing of the
catastrophes it has executed against the Palestinian people,
and the more hated it becomes. It is power used for evil purposes,
not self-defence at all. The Zionist dream of a Jewish state
being a normal state like all others has come to the vision of
the leader of Palestine's indigenous people hanging on to his
life by a thread, while Israeli tanks and bulldozers continue
to wreck everything around him. Is this the Zionist goal for
which hundreds of thousands have died? Isn't it clear what logic
of resentment and violence is at work in all this, and what power
will come from the powerlessness that can now only witness but
will certainly develop later?
Sharon is proud to have defied the entire
world, not because the world is anti-Semitic but because what
he does in the name of the Jewish people is so outrageous. Isn't
it time for those who feel that his appalling actions do not
represent them to call a halt to his behaviour?
Yesterday's
Features
Ahmad Faruqui
The Anvil
of War and the Ailing American Economy
Norman Madarasz
The
Truth and Violence
of a Symbolic Act
William Hughes
Political
Show Trial for
Marwan Barghouti
Ron Jacobs
The Struggle
Against
Another Oil War
Sen. Robert Byrd
Bush War
Plan:
Blind and Improvident
Michael Schwalbe
The
Costs of American Privilege
Ralph Nader
Holding
Politicians' Feet to the Fire on Corporate Crime
Robert Buzzanco
Pacifica
Caves in to Zionist Smear Campaign
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
- Padilla's Predecessor: Court Ruling Cites 1904 War
Against Mining Union;
- Adios Hitchens: the Dorian Gray of Our Time;
- Object of Suspicion: How the FBI Watched Janis Ian
From Birth;
- First Carter, Then Clinton,
Now Sen. John Edwards:
Another "New South" Slimeball;
- Corporate Crooks: Nature or Nurture?
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October 2,
2002
Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
President Nuts?
Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
Rotten in Klamath
Linda S. Heard
Might Sharon
Nuke Iraq?
Joanne Mariner
When
the Judge Says:
"I Botched It"
Peter P. Mahoney
A Vietnam
Vet Makes the
Case Against War on Iraq
Mark Engler
From the
Quarantine
Agaisnt Greed
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
Jennifer Berkshire
Converging Against Capitalism
October 1,
2002
Benjamin Shepard
On the
Road Again:
IMF/World Bank Protest
Reveal a Revived
Movement for Global Justice
Dr. Susan
Block
Cockfight
at the
Baghdad Corral
Krystal Kyer
Growing Union Opposition
to War
Ron Jacobs
Born Without a Spine
Scott Loughrey
Mysteries
of 9/11
Jeremy Brecher
Collective
Security is Working
Brenda Norrell
Troy
Black Feather on
the American Flag
Sam Bahour
Wake Up
and Smell
the Occupation
Richard Harth
Contrary
to Reason:
Adieu, Hitchens, Adieu
Carol Norris
Rumsfeld
the Surrealist:
Things Related and Not
Ben Tripp
Lists Upon
Lists
September
30, 2002
Rep. Barbara
Lee
Alternatives
to War
Kurt Nimmo
Iraq: The
Vision
of the Velociraptors
Zeynep Toufe
"We
Own the World, We Ignore the Children"
Dave Marsh
The Troubador's
Highway
Tariq Ali
Taking
It to London's Streets
Neve Gordon
Bush's
War of Self-Adulation
September
25 / 29, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Dogs of War,
the Bears of Wall Street
Ben Tripp
Hunting with George
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Haywire: Boeing's New Navy Fighter Fails Bomb Tests
Joanne Mariner
Naming Genocide
James T. Philips
Riding to Maine
Anis Shivani
Life of a Bum
David Vest
Too True North
Jacob Levich
Case of the Missing Terrorist
William MacDougall
British Immigration Tests
Edward Hammond
Pentagon Develops Illegal Chemical Weapons Capability
Molly Secours
Bush's "I" Words:
Intervention & Impeachment
Edward Lazarus
Civil Liberties After 9/11
Lee Sustar
Employers Attack
Anthony Gancarski
Ledeen's Mad World
Krystal Kyer
Bush the Magician
David Wiggins
West Point Grad:
Bush Threatens World Peace
September
24, 2002
Chet Batsmack,
American
The American
Century
Paul de Rooij
Smear Mongers
George Szamuely
International
Kangaroo Courts
Jack Wheeler
Janet Reno: America's Saddam?
Linda S. Heard
Portrait
of Uncle Sam
Gary Leupp
Random
Thoughts on Anti-Americanism
Wayne Madsen
Germany
Leads the Way
William Hughes
George
Will: War Pimp
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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Whiteout:
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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