Robert Fisk - The Age of the Warrior - Selected Writings

And oddly, the Arab regimes go along with all this. The Arab people do not – they know full well what lies behind the dreadful deeds of 11 September – but the leadership has to pretend ignorance. It supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then asks – begs – America to recognise a difference between ‘terrorism’ and ‘national resistance’. The Saudis wilfully ignore the implications of their own citizens’ involvement, howling instead about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Saudi Arabia. Arafat says he supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then – let us not kid ourselves – permits his acolytes to try a gun-running operation on the Karine A . *And Sharon, hopelessly unable to protect his people from the cruel Palestinian suicide bombers, concentrates on presenting the intifada as ‘world terror’ rather than the nationalist uprising that it represents. After all, if it’s about nationalism, it’s also about Israeli occupation and, like American policy in the region, that is not to be discussed.

At the end of next month, the Arab presidents and princes are to hold a summit in Beirut. They will issue ringing declarations of support for the Palestinians and almost equally earnest support for a war against ‘terrorism’. They cannot criticise US policy, however outrageous they believe it to be, because they are almost all beholden to it. So they will appeal again to America’s conscience. And they will do what the Emir of Qatar did a few days ago. They will beg. And they will get nothing.

The Independent , 14 February 2002

At the March 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, Saudi Arabia offered Israel recognition by the Arab states, including peace agreements and normalisation, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war, a ‘just solution’ to the Palestinian refugee problem and recognition of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel rejected the proposal. Washington showed no interest .

*The Karine A , a 4,000-ton freighter, was stopped at sea by the Israeli navy on 3 January 2002. Israel claimed that it was carrying 50 tons of weapons for Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults on the US, Israel tried to bind its continuing colonial war with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians into the same narrative. Israeli diplomats referred to Arafat – transmogrified from ‘superterrorist’ to ‘superstatesman’ under the Oslo agreement – as ‘our bin Laden’ in the hope that Americans would see Israel’s conflict with its colonised Arabs as part of the same battle against ‘terrorism’ that George W. Bush thought he was fighting .

How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past twentyfour hours. ‘Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.’ That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, Sharon’s killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this. No, of course he doesn’t send the bombers off on their cruel missions to restaurants and supermarkets. But he does know that every suicide bombing destroys Sharon’s credibility and proves that the Israeli leader’s promises of security are false. Arafat is well aware that the ferocious bombers are serving his purpose – however much he may condemn them in public.

But he – like Sharon – also believes his enemies can be broken by fire. He thinks that the Israelis can be frightened into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. Ultimately, the Israelis probably will have to give up their occupation. But the Jews of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition. Even if Sharon is voted out of power – a prospect for which many Israelis pray – the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out of fear of the suicide bomber.

Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys’, while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as ‘serpents’, ‘crocodiles’, ‘beasts’ and ‘cockroaches’. Now we have an Israeli officer – according to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv – advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. ‘If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even – shocking though this might appear – to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.’

Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans – which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?

Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence, in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called ‘illegal combatants’ and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory – and then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other ‘fronts’ in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by ‘terrorists’. Washington has also said that its intelligence agencies – the heroes who failed to discover the 11 September plot – have proof (undisclosed, of course) that Arafat has ‘a new alliance’ with Iran, which brings the Palestinians into the ‘axis of evil’.

Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. ‘Contacts and linkages’ have been established, he told us. And that’s what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qaeda and Iraq towards America and Saudi Arabia ‘suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible’. ‘Suggests?’ ‘Possible?’ Is that what Mr Tenet calls proof?