Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 11. november 2006 / Timeline November 11, 2006
Version 3.510. November 2006, 12. November 2006
11/11/2006
Våbenstilstand efter første verdenskrig, 1918.
11/11/2006
In One Word: MASSACRE!
By: Uri Avnery
"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.
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