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Nothing can justify the killing of the innocent. It is unacceptable that civilians are made targets in a policy of violence that is founded on the tenet that there are no innocent bystanders. Again and again those who are unable to attain what they consider to be their rights by democratic means or through conventional warfare, resort to guerrilla warfare and more: acts of war deliberately committed on civilians to sap the morale of the enemy population.
It is a policy of death. It is a policy anybody can embrace. Far too many do. Once commenced it justifies equally horrific retribution. Inhumane actions dehumanize the perpetrators in the eyes of the victims. Inhumanity ignites like a grass fire in a drought. It leaves only a blackened earth.
The Hagana was a terrorist organization and the Irgun Zvai Leumi also. Their justification knows its roots in the horror of the Nazi extermination camps. Menachem Begin was a terrorist long before he became Prime Minister of Israel. It was the suffering of his people that led him to ignore the suffering he caused. It was a matter of survival. It was the horror of war, the monstrosity of industrialized genocide, the glut of weapons left over from the greatest orgy of killing the world had ever seen that made the fight to create Israel a holy cause and made it possible.
The cost was not only the lives lost in the process but the injustice to Palestinians. The world had seen a fighting Jew for the first time in almost 2000 years thanks to the stench from the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen Belsen. Now it would see a fighting Arab.
Osama bin Laden is a child of Adolf Hitler and Menachem Begin is tainted with the same evil. Yes, so is Yasser Arafat. The helicopter gunships and tanks wrecking the homes of relatives of Hamas suicide bombers extend the taint to yet another generation. The suicide bombers spread more than terror on Israel’s streets, they harden Israeli hearts and prepare more potential victims to accept the burden of treating others just as inhumanely.
If one side in the current slaughter does give up exhausted and crippled there is no reason to believe that the hatred will not be passed on. Israelis should know; they returned to the fight after 2000 years of injustices. Defeating the enemy is possible by military means. Ending the war is not. Only an act of humanity can end the spiral to the abyss.
The death of Yasser Arafat provides an opportunity to escape. In allowing his burial on Temple Mount, the Israeli government would make the one move that all its military might cannot hope to achieve. It is Israel’s one hope of becoming a country engaged with its region rather than an alien bridgehead never consolidated in fifty years of fighting.
Whether Israelis like it or not Arafat will remain an icon of resistance for his people for all time, whether or not he is accorded the burial Palestinians demand. His death seals a reality that cannot be changed.
He is the Palestinians’ Moses. At his death Israelis can shed the role of Pharoah and let his people go. It is time to stop sacrificing the first born of Israel on the altar of obstinacy and having Israelis’ hands steeped in their enemies’ blood to insist on their surrender. Arafat has been denied entry to the Palestinians’ promised land, a sovereign state of Palestine. His hands too are bloodstained. His death can mark the moment when Palestinians cross their Jordan and Israelis with them.
His funeral in Jerusalem would necessitate a truce. The bloody obstinacy of attrition to exhaustion can be suspended. It is a way out of the stand off preventing talks until the bombings end. The presence of Heads of State with whom Israel has no diplomatic relations is not a problem – it is a remarkable opportunity. They will put themselves in Israel’s hands and Israel will keep them harmless. Mr Sharon has an opportunity to escape the spiral of slaughter and to take his country and the Palestinians’ to a new era.
If it is missed there may never be another chance. It is time to bury Arafat and with him the era he represents: the killing of the innocent, resistance at all costs, terror dressed as patriotism, state terror disguised as defense of national security. It is time to isolate Al Qaeda and make it a threat to the welfare of a new Palestinian State and of its people, to defeat it in the only way possible: by quenching the fire on which it feeds.
The much inflated responsibility for the failure of the Camp David talks attributed to Arafat will be nothing compared to the inhumanity of a Sharon who wreaks vengeance on a corpse and fails to seize the moment on the death of his arch-enemy. It is a time for greatness or for political incompetence of epochal proportions.
If Ariel Sharon has the political courage to contradict Israeli settlers and demand their withdrawal from Palestinian lands, he surely is capable of contradicting himself in his flat no to Arafat’s burial in Jerusalem. It would be fitting if the perpetrator of Sabra and Chatila could atone by the sacrifice of his pride in the decent burial of his enemy and bring about a lasting peace. In writing the epitaph of a terrorist he could consign the dead to the past and secure a future for his people which he has no hope of securing in any other way.
The permanent guard at his tomb would have to be a joint Palestinian and Israeli task, they would not be there to honour the deceased but to guard the peace against desecration to secure their common future.
harry.vassallo@alternattiva.org.mt
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