Matter of moral inconsistency

By Gareth Smyth, Khaleej Times, 25 April 2002

BEIRUT-- Jenin is now as notorious as Sabra and Shatila - the camps in Beirut, where Ariel Sharon's Lebanese militia allies killed 2,000 men, women and children in 1982.

But it is not enough to feel sick. Now, more than ever, there is a need for truth, moral leadership and consistency. "A war crime is a war crime, no matter who commits it," said Chibli Mallat, the Lebanese lawyer who has both advised the campaign to indict Saddam Hussein and initiated proceedings in Belgium against Sharon for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.

"We are talking here (about) war crimes and we believe Israel has a case to answer," said Javier Zuniga, director of regional strategy in Amnesty International, the respected international human rights organisation. "We believe that nothing short of a proper internationally-commissioned inquiry will do."

But is the international community showing such moral consistency? Can the victims of Jenin expect justice from anyone?

Kofi Annan has offered a UN enquiry, but excluded three officials that the Israelis had already objected to as being "biased" - Terje Roed-Larsen, Annan's own envoy in the Middle East, Mary Robinson, the UN commissioner for human rights, and Peter Hansen, the commissioner of UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees.

Is it surprising that so few in the Arab world have faith in the consistency of either the US or the UN? For the Arabs, Jenin represents another stage in an Israeli "ethnic cleansing" that began over 50 years ago. The residents of the camp came in 1948 from areas near Haifa as the state of Israel was created.

"We expect Israel will continue carrying out massacres to serve its evil goals," wrote Selim Hoss, the mild-mannered former Lebanese prime minister, in an article in As Safir, the Lebanese daily newspaper. "It intends a huge displacement of Palestinians, as happened in Deir Yassin."

Deir Yassin is notorious in Palestinian history, a village west of Jerusalem, where in 1948 Jewish militiamen slaughtered 250 men, woman and children. According to the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, the massacre had "the most lasting effect of any incident of the 1948 war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine".

But 1948 was not the end of the story. The 1953 attack against the West Bank village of Qibia, a second milestone in the terrorisation of Palestinians, was carried out by a special unit of the Israeli army, Unit 101, which was led by Ariel Sharon, then a soldier. During the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatilla, Sharon was directing operations in Lebanon as defence minister.

"The butcher Sharon," continued Hoss, "carries in his bag a project to uproot the Palestinians from their land in order to realise the Zionist dream of establishing Jewish state from the sea to the river [from the Mediterranean to the Jordan]."

Was Hoss wrong? Reuters described Jenin refugee camp as an "earthquake zone" where relatives mourned their dead: "A man's skeletal body was inside a furnished apartment, burned black and decomposed, a massive hole in his chest." Israel deliberately kept reporters out of the camp, although Professor Derrick Pounder, forensic pathologist at Dundee University, examined at the request of Amnesty International a number of bodies found at the camp.

Professor Pounder was quoted last week in dispatches by Phil Reeves, of the London-based Independent, who was one of the first reporters to gain access to Jenin camp, while Israeli troops were still preventing access. Reeves' reports, made at personal risk ("We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp ... "), were examples of brave, old-fashioned journalism.

In truth, this kind of journalism was the exception rather than the rule. The international media took its lead from the US and opted for a bland 'objectivity' that sanitised the human effects of the Israeli offensive - at least until it was too late to save lives.

As Colin Powell, the US secretary of the state, toured the region seeking to secure some kind of ceasefire, the media used words like "terror" (which Yasser Arafat, barricaded in his wrecked headquarters, was asked to "renounce") with little regard for accuracy or meaning. Even newspapers that pride themselves on impartiality wrote that Sharon had "declared war on terrorism".

For the Israelis, there was a collective sigh of relief when Powell did nothing concrete to stop Israeli offensive. This turned to joy when, last week, George W Bush, the man who aspires to lead the world in a "crusade" against "terror", described Ariel Sharon - the man of Qibua, Shatilla-Sabra and now Jenin - as "a man of peace".

Bush's praise of Israel's leader came after he had, for two weeks, completely ignored requests from the US president to "begin withdrawal" from the Palestinian towns that the Israeli armed forces had reoccupied. Unsurprisingly, the Arab media was more than ever convinced that Bush had all along been backing Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister. Even the belated US call for some kind of international enquiry into Jenin (once it was too late to save the victims) was laced with the observation from Richard Armitage, the US assistant secretary of state, that "there is a mythology sometimes to these events where numbers are bandied about".

The Jerusalem Post was already seeking to lay such "mythology" to rest. It attacked Western reporters - like Reeves - who it said had confused "fantasy with fact" over the Israeli bombardment of Jenin. The Post reassured its readers that "nearly all" the dead were "male combatants bearing ammunition belts". How did the Post know? Most of the dead were still buried under rubble. But no matter. "Israel could quite easily have unleashed its air power on the Palestinian fighters," continued the Post, presumably meaning that they could have used jets rather than just rocket-firing, machine-gunning Apache helicopters. This mixture of reassurance over the deaths of Palestinians and stress on military superiority was prevalent throughout the Israeli Press. The racist assumption that one set of human beings are of less value than another leads to the belief that military might is the way to solve disputes.

Also in the Post, "Middle East expert" Professor Amatzia Baram, reviewing tension with Israel's northern neighbours, reminded readers that "Israel can inflict 10 to 20 times more damage on Syria than it [Syria] can inflict on Israel".

Citing Israeli army sources, the Post revealed that Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance group, had been "using civilian inhabitants as a cover for its activities" - the same argument used by the Israelis over Jenin. It was used, too, six years ago last week when Israeli shells incinerated around 110 men, women and children sheltering from Israeli bombardment in a UN compound in Qana, south Lebanon.

The Lebanese have noticed these parallels, and have allied to the Palestinian cause with enthusiasm. Newspapers have been publicising collection points for donations for medical relief. Even those Christians who 20 years allied with Israel are now appalled by what has happened.

But such moral leadership has proved too much for some. The Daily Star, the English language paper published jointly with the International Herald Tribune, is to be charged with "stirring racism" after publishing an IHT advert, paid for by a US Jewish group, expressing solidarity with Israel and condemning "the vicious campaign by Palestinian terrorism".

"Israel we are with you. Now more than ever," continued the advert. "We are deeply saddened and pained by the tragic loss of life as a result of the vicious campaign of Palestinian terrorism."

Having published the advertisement, Jamil Mroueh, the publisher of Daily Star and Herald Tribune in Lebanon, then tried to make amends by an editorial accusing some of those behind the advert as having "extremist tendencies". Rather than apologise those who suffered in the Israeli offensive, Mroueh said that he was "caught between a rock and a hard place".

He was wrong: it was the victims of Jenin who were caught between a rock and a hard place. And the very least they are entitled to - from the United Nations and the world - is moral consistency and justice.

Copyright ©2002 Khaleej Times.

[In The Press]