Highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and slapstick elements
by Nigel Parry
September 6, 2001
Nigel Parry worked
at Birzeit University between 1994 and 1998. His journal from the time, A
Personal Diary of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, available at nigelparry.com/diary,
documented the post-Oslo experience of Palestinians in the Ramallah area. He is
also one of the founders of The Electronic Intifada.
St. Paul, MN -- The Palestinian
Center for Human Right's latest round-up of Israeli actions on the ground is
particularly interesting when you consider that the events documented took place
during the UN Worldwide Conference on Racism.
This was the third world conference
on racism, but the first the United States and Israel attended, albeit
temporarily. Both countries boycotted the 1978 and 1983 conferences, citing in
part anti-Israeli language. Both offered the same explanation at the current
conference. Reparations for slavery and the injustices done to Native Americans
presumably had nothing to do with the US withdrawal.
"[This] conference turned into a
tribunal against Israel," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement, "The
conference against racism turned into a racist conference against Israel."
What gave this anti-racist conference
the idea it could criticise Israel? Israel, after all, is a country to which any
Jew in the world can emigrate! How much more inclusive can it get? And, after
all, Israel was established as a solution to the worst example in history of
what happens when a racist state decides to "solve" its "race problem". They
know better than any of us, surely!
Of course, when tenth generation
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem decide to move out of the municipal
boundaries of the city for six months or so, they are stripped of their
citizenship. But what we, the people of the world, clearly don't understand is
that, because it's Israel doing this it can't be racism. No, it's a form of tidy
municipal management that fits Israel's unique situation. We don't understand it
because we don't live in the Middle East, where millions of people want to
destroy us and as a result there have to be different rules.
This kind of point is exactly what
the thoughtful columnists such as William Safire at The New York Times and
Charles Krauthammer at The Washington Post have been so patiently trying to
explain to us for years. And to think that it used to make sense to me that if
Israel could only make friends with the Palestinians, this might end the
conflict in the Middle East. Silly me.
If you think about it long enough, it
almost makes sense. Which is exactly how the Africaans used to play it:
apartheid is necessary, they used to say, because of the nature of blacks. They
drew you in to 'understanding' their point of view by playing you off against
internalised racist perceptions of blacks. This is why Israel spends millions of
PR dollars trying to demonise the Palestinians, by making sure that no statement
about Jews from any mosque pulpit in Palestine falls to the ground without
having every drop of use squeezed out of it.
The point is that hate works because
it contains seeds of truth. There's no arguing, for example, with the veracity
of the mosque pulpit statements, obsessively catalogued and distributed by
pro-Israeli groups. But to argue they represent the sum total of how
Palestinians feel about Israel, or that they are even representative at all, is
as false as using the words of white racists to smear everyone from Texas.
Sowing these seeds only works if the
person already sees Arabs as a malevolent mass, which is par for the course in
the West these days. This is one reason that Anti-Arab racism should have been
high on the agenda of the Western nations attending Durban. Instead we had to
witness the spectacle of diplomats defending the indefensible at the expense of
the powerless. It was revolting.
US congressman and member of the US
delegation to Durban, Tom Lantos, added his condemnation of the various negative
references to Zionism, the political ideology that systems -- such as that faced
by Palestinian residents of Jerusalem -- exist to protect. Expressing particular
dismay at the specific accusation that Israel practices "racial discrimination",
Lantos wasted no time during his spirited defence of Israel aquainting himself
with the facts.
On the ground, Israel further
underlined the ludicrousness of this assertion by killing two Palestinian
activists without trial in a "targeted killing" that completely missed its
target. Several bystanders were injured when one of the three
helicopter-launched missiles used in the attack hit a city street. Israel did
not apologise for or even acknowledge injuring the bystanders. Presumably this
would be a different story had they been tourists. Well, American tourists at
least.
The Durban conference, according to
Lantos, should have been about horrible discrimination around the world.
Instead, he lamented, with all this mistaken focus on Israel, it had been
"hijacked by extremist elements for its own purposes."
While the US and Israel bravely
challenged these elements in Durban, mainstream Israeli forces on the ground
used artillery shells, combat helicopters, surface-to-surface missiles and
heavy, medium and light machine guns to indiscriminately shell extremist
Palestinian cities. Eight extremist Palestinians, including an extremist
physician and three extremist civilians, were killed as a result. Dozens of
others, mostly extremist civilians, were injured.
Pulling out of the Durban conference,
Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the US had tried to work
"productively" despite all the unproductive criticism of Israel, adding a final
wish that "it could have turned out more successfully." Meanwhile, Israeli
occupation forces demolished seven houses during just one incursion into Rafah
Refugee Camp in Gaza, successfully rendering 80 Palestinians homeless.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
underlined that Israel was pulling out of the conference because of "anti-Israel
and anti-Semitic comments," adding that the conference was "a farce."
During Peres' previous terms as both
foreign and prime minister in power, between the start of the "peace" process in
1993 until May 1996, Israel carried out more than 270 demolitions of Palestinian
homes. In 1994, at an event with similarly and highly improbable plot
situations, exaggerated characters, and slapstick elements as noted in Durban,
he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Nigel Parry