Sunday, November 12, 2000		Article

Tears for Palestine
By Chanchal Sarkar

HAVE we pondered for even a moment how the crisis in West Asia has been "managed" by the world’s sole superpower, the United States, and by its dependent godson Israel which has the fourth largest military force in the world which includes nuclear arms and, of course, armed Israeli settlers.

Watching the Star News Channel I have, needless to say, not seen a single Indian face in Jerusalem, Jericho Ramalla, Gaza, Bethleham or Nazareth giving an Indian perspective or, for that matter, a Third World perspective. And I have been appalled by the partisanship of the Western media channels under the clock of ‘objectivity’.

The desperate struggle in Palestine is between an armadillo and a mosquito — the Israeli Army with tanks, bomber planes, helicopter gunships, cluster bombs, mortars, rockets, missiles and machine guns on the one hand and Arab youths with little except rocks and stones which could probably be stopped by plexiglass shields, and perhaps some home-made Molotov cocktails, maybe a small body of armed Palestinian youth called the Tanzim and a few Palestinian policemen armed with rifles provided by Israel. Yet Israel says that the violence erupts from the Palestinians, whose casualties have been some 20 times more. Except for saying that over 100 Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have died, many times more than Israelis, the world media and politicians do not draw any inferences from the figures. There is repeated talk of the "lunching" of two Israeli soldiers by the mob in a Ramalla jail. Certainly a most deplorable incident, but the 12-year old boy deliberately picked out by Israeli sharpshooters while his father desperately tried to draw him to the back of a feeble obstruction is mentioned no more. And there have been other young boys of 14 or so killed.

For the first few days, the Western media talked of the provocation by Rightist leader Ariel Sharon by visiting the Al-Aqsa, third most venerated shrine of Islam, then that dropped out of the commentaries. To questions, Ehud Barak shouted that the blaming of Sharon was only "an excuse". The Western world raised its eyebrows slightly when Barak insisted on having as his partner in government that same Sharon but there was no outrage from the so-called fair minded players. The United States would have vetoed, if it could, the UN resolution about Israel using excessive force but decided that a veto would be too much for the world to swallow and abstained, with its UN Ambassador Richard Holbroke calling the resolution a basketful of dirty names under the sun. And yet the Western world, and sadly, Yasser Arafat, would want the United States to head the ‘independent’ enquiry committee the Arabs demanded. While the Israelis wanted the United States to chair it. Again the Israelis won — the United States and the U.N. Secretary General are to choose the members and what is the UN Secretary General but a pawn of the USA?

Where is India in all this? It issues some mealy-mouthed hypocritical statements like the one on October 18 which should be placed against the statements against it made about Israel 15 or 20 years ago when it thought to boot-lick Muslim opinion to wean it away from Pakistan over Kashmir. It never managed to do that. Even during Pakistan’s barbaric treatment of Bangladesh, no major Islamic country sided with Bangladesh. India, a large country aspiring to a full membership of the Security Council, makes not even a ripple in international crisis. The Palestine struggle is only a confirmation.

For us to be sidelined in this humiliating manner is galling, perhaps as galling as the way the United Nations and its Secretay General are sidelined. You will remember that in both the onslaughts against Iraq, the United Nations Secretary General was not even informed, nor was it when the NATO bombing onYugoslavia started. The U.N. and its Secretary General remain as puppets stringe pulled by the greatest debtor to the organisation and also the supporter of the greatest debt-collectors from the poor nations that the IMF and the World Bank are. Poor Kofi Annan, he looks a little, a very little, like Othello but hasn’t a gram of his courage or fighting spirit. He wants to bring off a diplomatic triumph under the wings of the United States.

It is equally mortifying to see how the richest countries in the world outside the United States, the European Union and Japan, are willing to suppress all their moral principles and economic might. At one stage a couple of years ago the European Union tried to squeeze into the peace-making in the Middle-East, but a little frown from the Americans for intruding on their patch and that enterprise died. Japan has not shown that it wants to do anything.

And yet, and yet, if there is anyone doing anything to set the focus of citizens straight it is, paradoxically, the western media. The BBC correspondent in Ramalla can shriek that the Palestinian policemen in the jail are doing nothing to prevent the mob from getting to the captured Israeli soldiers. He didn’t know but made the accusation nevertheless. A BBC correspondent near Ramalla said she was speaking from and Israeli base 1.5 km from Ramalla town. So much, then, for an "independent" Palestine which Iareali can seal off at will. At the same time, John Pilger can make a bold, sombre and magnificent TV film about the slow massacre of generations of children in Iraq under sanctions and that, too, was shown by the BBC.