Mirror 4.15.02 WEST MUST FACE RESPONSIBILITES Why the West must face its economic and diplomatic responsibilities and find a solution to the bloody crisis which is engulfing the Middle East By Christopher Hitchens
THE horrifying crisis in Israel and Palestine may not yet be, in the now-familiar and over-used phrase, a "clash of civilisations". But it is increasingly a clash about civilisation.
At one end of the Mediterranean, the inhabitants of miserable refugee camps become the victims of horrifying police-state tactics.
At the other end - in the south of France - synagogues are set alight by people who prefer to operate under cover of darkness.
To say this is not to equate one kind of violence with another, or one kind of propaganda with another. It is to emphasise that we are not faced here with any mere local or tribal or provincial dispute.
Ordinary diplomacy and phrase-mongering will not be enough. Our politicians must realise that the issues are immense - stretching from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the Islamic streets of Jakarta, Indonesia - and potentially apocalyptic.
The civilised world made a decision about half a century ago that the Jewish people should forever be protected from the sort of persecution and massacre and exile that had afflicted them for so many centuries.
The national home that was provided for them, in Palestine, was provided on condition that the rights of the pre-existing Arab population be respected. (The first promise, by a British government in 1917, is still binding upon us in letter and in spirit. So is the second promise, made on the same conditions by the United Nations in 1947 and 1948.)
We now live with the consequences of failing to insist upon the second half of that pledge. There were always some Israelis and Zionists who wanted to annex the entire area of historic Palestine and horrible recent events have brought them to the top of the political heap.
It is absurd for Ariel Sharon to claim today that he does what he does because of suicide bombings.
He has spent his entire life pursuing a vendetta against the Palestinians in whatever country he can find them and he is the leader of a political party which claims that the West Bank was given to the Jews by no less a person than God Almighty. As Palestinians enter their fourth generation of occupation and dispossession, it is too much to expect that they, especially their younger generation, will remain passive or pacifistic.
The repression under which they live has been condemned by international law, and they have a recognised legal right to resist it. However, this does not and cannot justify them in choosing any tactic.
During the struggle in the black townships of South Africa 15 years ago, mobs would sometimes capture supposed traitors or "informers" and kill them by hanging petrol-soaked car-tyres around their necks before setting them ablaze.
On one occasion, Archbishop Desmond Tutu actually waded into a crowd that was about to do this and by force of moral outrage prevented them from disfiguring their cause by such disgusting methods. Nobody will say the misery of the Palestinians is worse than that of the victims of apartheid. But there seems to be a shifty silence at best from their leaders about the deliberate targeting of civilians.
(Of course, the money for the fanatical sectarian groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas comes from our old friend and ally Saudi Arabia, the patron of bin Laden and al-Qaeda - a fact that our own leaders seem somewhat shy to mention, let alone to denounce.)
Instead we have arrived at the absurd position of demanding that Yasser Arafat police his own people, while we allow the shelling and bombing of his police and administrative infrastructure.
There is something appalling about the race to the bottom of the moral scale here, with Israeli military officers and conscripts cleaning out wretched ghettoes while the ghetto inhabitants look for "soft" targets in the other community.
Meanwhile, with a righteousness that it has done little to earn, the United States insists on ritual denunciations of terror from Arafat before even a routine and profitless meeting with Colin Powell can take place.
This is the sort of condescension that Arabs of all opinions have come to hate: no such accounting is demanded of General Sharon, who has in the past been found complicit, and by an Israeli court of inquiry, in the deliberate massacre of civilians, and who has just finished another punitive expedition against civilians which caused even President Bush to protest.
The right of self-determination is just that: a right. It is not a reward for good behaviour. (If it was, then the Zionist bombers who blew up the King David Hotel in the 1940s, and who expelled a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees, might not have carved out their own state.)
The filthy tactic of suicide-murder has made it easier for some unscrupulous Israeli spokesmen to claim that theirs is just another front against the post-September "axis of evil". But a moment's thought will demonstrate the radical difference.
ISRAEL'S occupation has been condemned for decades by a sheaf of United Nations resolutions.
The installations of the Palestinian Authority, set up under the Oslo Accords, were mainly built and funded by the European Union (and have now been levelled by Israeli misuse of American military aid).
The inhabitants of Kabul and Kandahar mostly welcomed the arrival of Western troops as a deliverance from Taliban rule; hell will be an extremely cool place before a single Palestinian however "moderate" will welcome the sight of the Israeli army.
The international force in Afghanistan took extreme care to avoid civilian casualties: credible reports especially from the desolate site of Jenin suggest that something rather shameful and atrocious took place there (during a complete exclusion of the international press and of human-rights monitors) in the past two weeks.
There is another difference, so large that it can even escape attention. In Afghanistan, the United States and Britain decided not to accept any element of the old status quo. They remade the government of the country and re-ordered international relations so as to realign their policy towards India and Pakistan, Russia, and even Iran.
In the case of Israel and Palestine, however, a curious passivity descends on the alleged superpowers. They act as if they are only present in an advisory capacity.
Yet they hold the keys to a solution, while keeping these keys in a locked safe-deposit box. The Israeli author Amos Oz put it rather well at the height of the fighting. Israel, he said, is fighting - or attempting to fight - two wars. The first is a war for the safety of its own citizens. The second is a war for the right to occupy and dispossess non-Israeli citizens.
Not only is the second war morally incompatible with the first, it is a direct contradiction of it.
As long as Israel holds a defiant Arab underclass in its supposedly "iron fist", it will be subject to any tactic that hatred can generate. (Who believes that suicide bombing will end as a consequence of the latest in decades of repression?)
Thus, a withdrawal to the boundaries of 1967 is the only way to make the Jewish state "defensible" either ethically or militarily. The sheer common sense of this is what strikes the eye.
And how does a small Jewish population expect to hold down a Palestinian population of almost the equivalent size, while antagonising and infuriating an Arab and Muslim region of hundreds of millions of people?
Only by using the arms and money and support that comes from the United States. In other words, Washington can make all the difference by the stroke of a pen.
(Incidentally, the whole original idea of a Jewish state was of one that did not need to depend on the goodwill of non-Jews in the first place. Now the Israeli Right insists on Gentile support every minute of every day, insisting that massacre and ruin would result if this was not forthcoming. Quite an admission.)
So what is the point of being a superpower? Does America need always to ask Sharon's permission before it clears its throat? And does Mr Blair intend to do nothing with the immense credit he has earned in official American circles?
It's all very well to talk vaguely of a "viable Palestinian state", as the Prime Minister did in Houston, Texas. Everybody is in favour, in principle, of a Palestinian state. President Bush has become the first US President to employ the term. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin lost his life defending the proposition. Even General Sharon says that he can see no other outcome of the "process". But St Augustine used to pray to God to give him the virtue of chastity - only not quite yet...
The present agony is rather more urgent. An entire people is being humiliated in front of our eyes and it does not believe that the West is blameless.
The harvest of such neglect will be a curse to our great-grandchildren at the present rate of progress.
Meanwhile, General Sharon is lifting a corner of the curtain to show us an even more ghastly outcome than the one we currently fear.
He has invited into his Cabinet the leaders of extremist and Messianic and racist parties, who openly call for the final expulsion of all Palestinians from the territory now occupied by Israel. That would lead to a thousand-year war, even if it pulled Mr Sharon ahead of Mr Netanyahu in the Israeli opinion polls.
It would be nice if once, just once, we heard leaders in Washington and London telling him that it is also his job to discipline his extremists.
But, to the contrary, he gratifies his fanatics and religious maniacs every day: seizing the property and land of other people in order to keep his extremists on board.
AND most people are unaware that this double standard even exists. The mere use of the word "terrorism" is enough to turn the argument to stone, like the flourishing of Medusa's head.
The veteran Israel foreign minister Abba Eban used to like to shock and tease his audiences. When you look at the Israel-Palestine dispute, he would begin, the first thing that strikes you is the easiness of the solution.
Two peoples, one land, two promises made to each of them by the Great Powers. Therefore two states, based on mutual recognition and mutual respect.
There will always be those who say that some deity promised them the whole patch of earth to the exclusion of all others, but civilisation can rise above that, and even out-negotiate it.
It is now thinkable that the moment for this solution was hopelessly lost some time in the past few years, by negligent and vain careerists, and that we will only regret it and realise it when it is too late. The demon of religious absolutism has been released.
(Does Sharon ever regret his swaggering trip to the Temple Mount, undertaken as part of a jockeying for position against the even more fundamentalist Benjamin Netanyahu? Do the Christian and secular and female Palestinians not realise what awaits them under a future Islamic state?)
"The hour is great," said Britain's first Jewish prime minister on another occasion, "and the honourable gentlemen, I must say, are small." Benjamin Disraeli was a believer in Empire but also a believer in his way in Enlightenment and democracy.
The whole area of what was once British Mandate Palestine is extremely small. The concentrated intelligence and education of Jews and Palestinians is extremely large. But something about the mismanagement of the present crisis has made us all hostages to the smallest and most paltry leaders on both sides.
Here is an issue our own politicians cannot spin. Here is a subject too serious for posturing. Here above all is a crisis which must not be allowed to be dictated by ethnic politics or religious sloganising.
There are nuclear arsenals being assembled on both ends of this dilemma, and cynical men who will send desperate children to die and kill for them, and are willing to involve the whole of humanity in their intransigence.
A terrifying shame will descend on any leader who does not say, and mean, that this generation will not yet again bequeath the problem to the next one.
-Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.