Banality
And Barefaced Lies
By Robert Fisk
26 December, 2006
The
Independent
I
call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United
States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which
I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape
which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America,
into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the
Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?
I picked up Jimmy Carter's
new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and
zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American
president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment
meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession
of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded,
subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with
two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each
other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving
Palestinians of their basic human rights".
Carter quotes an Israeli
as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government
like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and
Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but
unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the
taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining
Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints,
living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".
Needless to say, the American
press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently
sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse
at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest
lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt -
secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times
("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free
to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews"
with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied
by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced
among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli
government".
Typical of the dirt thrown
at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of
course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist
government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement
from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason
Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful
canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially
when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not
just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former
president of the United States".
But well, yes, that's the
point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power
of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel
as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman.
Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here,
by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead
of believing Mr Foxman.
But in this context, why,
I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream
newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with
that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not
supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond
trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful
and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming,
looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister
John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like
system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured
with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin,
war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This
of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate
on Carter's book.
At Detroit airport, I picked
up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report
- which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways
in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much
blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of
Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few
worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a
resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal
from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing
think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution
and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman
- full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time
is running out".
The clue to all this nonsense,
I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts"
consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars
of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freedman of The New
York Times.
But for sheer folly, it was
impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good
who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace,
the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of
the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not
losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced
that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but
we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense
pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By
the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point,
Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're
not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.
I pondered this madness during
a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's
when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq
war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's
a draw!
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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