Dialogue: Israel pumping up rage into hatred

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Israel is becoming a rogue nation under Ariel Sharon, who doesn't seem to realise that the philosophy of 100 eyes for an eye is not going to work any more, if it ever did.

He is trying to sell the world the concept of anti-terrorism terrorism and defying the belated demands from Europe and the United States that he pull out of Palestinian territory.

An American CNN reporter this week ended a broadcast from the region by saying that Israel's incursions into Palestinian territory might have been controversial but one thing was clear: no more suicide bombers had killed Israeli citizens for a week. Two days later, a bus was blown up and 14 Israeli soldiers killed in an ambush.

No one can condone the suicide bombings by Palestinian religious perverts but they are from the fanatical fringe. Ordinary, non-political Palestinians are dying every day as Sharon seeks to capture or assassinate enemies he doesn't even call terrorists any more, just militants (Oxford English Dictionary: "favouring confrontational methods in support of a cause").

You don't have to have a highly developed imagination to know that another generation of both vengeful terrorists and mad martyrs is being spawned among the miserable, humiliated, dispossessed Palestinians, surrounded, pinned down and outgunned by what is the most fearsome military power in the Middle East.

And, looking on from nearby, a new crop of young men from other Middle East countries will pump up their rage into hatred for Israel and the United States, whose Government has largely condoned the Israeli vengeance.

Of all the countries in the world, Israel should have the greatest understanding of the desperation of the dispossessed. The country was itself born of terrorism. Does Sharon ever think about July 1946 when Zionist terrorists intent on setting up a Jewish state in Palestine blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people? That was the culmination of a long-running campaign in which many innocent British soldiers and British and Palestinian civilians died.

Our disgust then was tempered by our profound sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped the unmatched horror of the Holocaust, the extent of which was gradually becoming known. They wanted somewhere safe to live. They fought with great skill and tenacity to survive, but once that survival was assured and they had military superiority they turned bully.

Foreign Minister Phil Goff must have picked up on how the majority of Kiwis are feeling when he complained to the Israeli Ambassador this week about what is an international disgrace. The ambassador replied that Israel was doing what any responsible country would do when its peace was threatened.

Well, here's a scenario. Lets go back, say, 10 years. A car bomb explodes in a busy London or Belfast street. Or both. Half a dozen people are killed and many more wounded. (The explosives, by the way, were more than likely financed by donations from the United States.) British Army intelligence "knows" who they are but can't find them and, even if they could, might have trouble proving their complicity.

So the Army gets a list of the names and addresses and rolls tanks, armoured cars and heavily armed troops, all covered by helicopter gunships, into the Belfast suburb where these IRA people are known to have been recently. They declare war on the suburb and move in house to house. They assassinate all "suspects", keep journalists out, destroy the houses from which anyone fights back, and rocket cars which have registration numbers intelligence has told them belong to suspects.

Oops! They make mistakes and kill innocent people but blame that on the leaders of Sinn Fein for not keeping the psychopaths under control. That would have been impossible then in the face of public opinion - which demonstrates how the world has changed since the United States effectively ruled that even the rights of non-political citizens are waived in the fight against terror.

One danger from the Israeli conduct is that some people will turn to the unfathomable madness of anti-Semitism. Synagogues have already been attacked in France and Belgium. But, of course, there are many, many Jews in Israel and around the world who are as troubled by Sharon as any of us.

For example, an English translation of a Yiddish play about the hubris of power, The Golem, opened in New York on Thursday. Wrote one critic, Ailsa Solomon in the New York Times: "While Israelis exist among ever-mounting fears of attack, any effort to find an analogy in The Golem to the current situation requires one to notice that, unlike the Jew-haters of 16th-century Prague, the Palestinians have expressed genuine grievances. Taking the logic further, one confronts the most troubling question that some Israelis and American Jews are beginning to raise: has the militarily mighty Jewish state become a golem for the 21st century, promising protection but leading to peril?

Footnote: Since September 11, two new cliches have infected the language. The first is that the world has been changed forever, and the second, a variation on the theme, is that his/her/their lives have been changed forever.

This week, a TV3 journalist came up with an unconsciously Milliganesque fall-about version of the second. The topic was the use of the extraordinary athlete Steve Gurney as a personality to help to prevent teenage suicides. He, it was explained, once seriously thought of taking his own life. The TV3 presenter intoned: "For Gurney, the decision not to end his life changed it forever."

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