Robert Fisk: Posturing and laughter as victims rot

[IndianaGreen]

Robert Fisk: Posturing and laughter as victims rot

Mahmoud Abbas stepped further into humiliation by saying the only option for Arabs isto make peace with Israel

Tuesday, 20 January 2009

The front page of the Beirut daily As-Safir said it all yesterday. Across the top was a terrible photograph of the bloated body of a Palestinian man newly discovered in the ruins of his home while two male members of his family shrieked and roared their grief. Below, at half the size, was a photograph from Israel of Western leaders joking with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister. Olmert was roaring with laughter. Silvio Berlusconi, arms on the back of Olmert's shoulders, was also joshing and roaring – with laughter, not grief – and on Olmert's right was Nicolas Sarkozy of France wearing his stupidest of smiles. Only Chancellor Merkel appeared to understand the moral collapse. No smiles from Germany.

Europe laughs while Palestinians mourn their dead. No wonder that in the streets of Beirut, shops were doing a flourishing trade in Palestinian scarves and flags. Even some of Palestine's most serious enemies in Lebanon wore the Palestinian keffiyeh in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Over and over again, Al-Jazeera television strapped headlines on to their news reports of Palestinians carrying the decomposing corpses of their dead: "More than 1,300 dead in Gaza, 400 of them women and children – Israeli dead in the war 13, three of them civilians." That, too, said it all.

All day, the Arabs also had to endure watching their own leaders primping and posing in front of the cameras at the Arab summit in Kuwait, where the kings and presidents who claim to rule them also smiled and shook hands and tried to pretend that they were unified behind a Palestinian people who have been sorely betrayed. Even Mahmoud Abbas was there, the powerless, impotent leader of "Palestine" – where is that precisely, one had to ask? – trying to suck some importance from the coat-tails and robes of his betters.

Slipping and sliding on the corpses of Gaza, these assembled supreme beings should perhaps be pitied. What else could they do? Saudi King Abdullah announced £750,000 to rebuild Gaza; but how many times have the Arabs and the Europeans been throwing money at Gaza only to see it torn to shreds by incoming shell-fire?

It has to be said that the two cowled Hamas gunmen who announced that they had won a "victory" in the ruins of Gaza were only fractionally less hypocritical. Still they had not understood that they were not the Hizbollah of Lebanon. Gaza was no longer Beirut. Now, it seemed, Gaza was Stalingrad. But whose uniforms did Hamas think they were wearing: German or Soviet?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-posturing-and-laughter-as-victims-rot-1451410.html

[Jim Sagle]

1. The only option for Arabs isto make peace with Israel.

End. of. discussion.

[subsuelo]

3. Precisely what was said about Native Americans

Make peace with murderous colonizers (otherwise, face mass ethnic cleansing)

[Hippo_Tron]

4. I'm going to ask you a serious question

Do you really not believe that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a desirable goal? But should we not work for a Palestinian state with sovereign control over the West Bank and Gaza and shared control of Jerusalem?

[subsuelo]

11. Desirable goal for who?

Colonization of someone else's land is a difficult business to be in. For Israel it seems they have decided that a ruthless Apartheid system is the best way of handling the displaced natives, for whatever reasons they may have.

[cali]

12. Desirable for both the Palestinians and the Israelis

That should be obvious. And I hate to break this to you, but Israel exists. It's not possible to change that except through violence that would cause hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinians need a viable, independent state of their own. You seem to see all of Israel, even behind the 1967 lines, as an illegitimate state to be dismantled.

Down such a route lies terrible things for all. It's simply madness.

[subsuelo]

13. Why would you hate to break it to me that Israel exists?

I've never argued that it shouldn't, nor have I claimed Israel to be illegitimate. I'm just opposed to the brutal Apartheid system and terrorizing the native Palestinians as a way of dealing with them. Is that really a difficult concept?

What's become - as a result of Israel's policies and actions - is a single state now, with two large reservation camps for the natives. The only way to move forward at this point is to acknowledge the reality and find a way of dealing with it in ways that humanely satisfy the basic needs and rights and aspirations of everyone involved.

[Jim Sagle]

9. They just have to stop lobbing rockets over Israel's border.

Nobody's being cleansed - that's just the usual hysterical I/P upside downism.

[subsuelo]

10. After wiping out 1300 of the natives, you write "Nobody is being cleansed"

The denials are truly amazing. As if nothing has happened the last 3 weeks...

Nope no killing have happened. No bombings, no destruction, no cleansing. It's allll just people being hysterical over nothing.

:crazy:

[hack89]

14. Darfur is ethnic cleansing - Gaza is a nasty war

if you don't understand the difference, start with the death tolls.

[cali]

15. Disagree. Darfur is genocide. Gaza is ethnic cleansing.

What else do you call it when an entire population is being penned in, bombed and blockaded. Making life insufferable for the population is ethnic cleansing. I don't agree with everything Fisk writes, but he's correct on this.

[hack89]

16. Show me a population that has been "cleansed"

that remains where they were and whose population is enjoying explosive growth.

Words have meaning - dumbing down the meaning of ethnic cleansing like has happened to genocide simply renders the words meaningless. That is not a good thing in the long run.

[cali]

17. OK, let me put it this way: It's an attempt at ethnic cleansing

And that population in Gaza isn't enjoying anything. Poor choice of words.

[hack89]

18. It is not even that

if they were serious the death toll would be in the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands. I don't think you have an appreciation for the power of modern weapons - the Israelis could have slaughtered tens of thousands in the first minute of the war without dropping an additional bomb, they simply needed to deliberately target civilians. Yet they didn't.

My choice of words was fine for anyone not deliberately looking for something to be outraged at. Get over yourself.

[Vegasaurus]

19. Which is why all the bantering about of "genocide" etc

is ridiculous.

Israel could have killed half a million people in this war, and it WAS a war.

People die in wars.

Regrettable, for sure, but this is why weak cowards, posturing with their bravado about how they could defeat the Israeli army, should not start wars.

There wouldn't have been a single dead person, had the militants valued those civilians' lives more than terrorism.

[Shaktimaan]

23. Perhaps you can help me out here Cali.

I consider you to be an intelligent and rational person who isn't automatically beholden to either side's policies at any given time. Maybe you can explain to me why it is that you think this. Because I honestly don't understand how someone who is approaching this from a level viewpoint could arrive at that opinion.

Primarily because it's obvious that the Palestinians have nowhere to go, even if they wanted to leave Gaza. The amount of people killed is not a significant number relative to the population as to qualify as ethnic cleansing on its own. So how is this attempted ethnic cleansing?

Are all of the other explanations really so unbelievable that this is the sole conclusion? How would it work exactly? I mean, how could this have possibly benefited Israel as an exercise in EC?

[Shaktimaan]

24. Why do you do that?

Nope no killing have happened. No bombings, no destruction, no cleansing. It's allll just people being hysterical over nothing.

No one has said that nothing happened. We are just trying to be accurate with these labels that you seem to find synonymous with each other. Yes there was killing. Yes there was bombing. Yes there were lots of other horrible things. But none of that automatically signifies ethnic cleansing. You can certainly have EC without bombing and destruction, just as the reverse is also true.

I mean, was the Vietnam War ethnic cleansing in your opinion?
How about the NATO intervention in Bosnia? Was that ethnic cleansing?
What about the US in WWII? Did we ethnically cleanse the Germans?

[madrchsod]

2. fisk is the only observer in the middle east that writes the truth

[IndianaGreen]

7. His coverage of the war in Afghanistan and Lebanon was second to none

and he lives in Beirut.

[joshcryer]

8. Indeed, he's great. Anyone who denounces him is delusional.

This is an extraoridinarily telling piece of writing here.

[Idealism]

5. Not many people mention that if Israel wanted peace they could've had it numerous times

Several times in the 1990s, in 2001, 2002, 2004, etc. All 22 members of the Arab league offered Israel normalized relations, full recognition, and lasting peace if Israel would only go back to the 1967 borders. Apparently, the Golan Heights and the best land in the West Bank are important enough to obstruct the peace process.

[azurnoir]

6. exactly n/t

[oberliner]

20. Jerusalem is the problem

In all the cases you cited, the demand was that Israel give up all of East Jerusalem.

A sizable percentage of Israelis view Jerusalem as having been liberated from Jordanian occupation in the 1967 War.

There are those emblematic photos of Israelis finally being able to pray at the Western Wall after having been preventing from doing so while Jordan was in control of that portion of the city.

[Idealism]

21. It is a big part of the problem, but not all of it

It amazes me how people can't share one of the holiest cities in the world with others who feel the same way about it. As we speak, there are more illegal Jewish-only settlements being built in East Jerusalem, more Arab Israeli's getting kicked out of their homes that they have lived in for decades to make way for wealthy settlers. It breaks my heart to see such a one-sided conflict.

[Shaktimaan]

22. The situation is far more complex than that.

ESPECIALLY in regards to east jerusalem. Out of all of the facets of this conflict, Jerusalem is perhaps the least one-sided. All aspects of the situation in EJ are convoluted and highly subject to personal interpretation: historical, legal, ethical, etc. It remains the largest, and most intractable, stumbling block on the path to a permanent peace.

For example, the illegality of Israeli settlement in EJ is anything but cut and dry. From a legal perspective EJ shouldn't belong to either party right now. It isn't really any more Palestinian than it is Israeli. And ethically, it is difficult to argue that Jews should have no right whatsoever to live on land that they themselves were evicted from just a few decades ago. I'm not talking about evicting Palestinians to make room for Jews here, btw, I'm speaking in general terms. To say that it is illegal for Jews to live in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem because they had been driven out 20 years previously is problematic in my view.

But for the most part it is the old city that presents the biggest problems in terms of settlement. The problem is that it is a zero-sum game... what one side gets the other side loses. No feasible compromise exists that either side can live with (so far.)