SHAMEFUL REWRITING OF HISTORY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Robert Fisk Columnist
Belfast Telegraph
December 18, 2006 Monday
CTY Edition
OH how – when it comes to the realities of history – the Muslims
of the Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining
to Arab friends that the Jewish Holocaust – the systematic, planned
murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact –
I am still met with a state of willing disbelief.
And now, last week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
of Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a
supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat
the lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred
towards Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those
other Semites, the Arabs of the Middle East.
How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept
the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine
in 1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the
Jews of Europe?
And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For
what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out
to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust,
that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous
injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for something
they had no part in and – even more disgusting – that they should be
treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinejad has neither the brains
nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.
True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with
Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before
he died and it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had
al-Husseini made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in
one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes
to Palestine and deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped
to raise a Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and
his photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden,
crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time – of Sabra and
Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Hanoun – were not even alive in the Second
World War. Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders
that they should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in
the Second World War.
When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the then Israeli
Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to US President
Ronald Reagan explaining that he felt he was marching on "Berlin"
to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy comparing his
own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).
That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avnery wrote an open letter to
Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did
not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. He said
that, by talking to the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler,
who also wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second
half of the Second World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal.
"… Arafat is the same kind of enemy".
Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German
troops in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with
their constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as
anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction.
Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas
chambers for the Palestinians.
But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce
from such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres –
when Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias
into the camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their
beloved leader – up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli
troops watched – and did nothing.
The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country’s
soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the
same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald
and Treblinka and did not know what was happening".
After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men,
according to the Israeli Press, that, with close quarter fighting,
they might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.
And I have to say – indeed, it needs to be said – that, after the
countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads
of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and
again this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe
attacks on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands
of Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.
And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about
the marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying
Israeli helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and
children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air
force helicopter as they fled along the roads after being ordered to
leave their homes by the Israelis?
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it’s time we talked of war crimes
unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to
talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish
history – and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians
who tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel’s birth.
As for the West’s reaction to Ahmadinejad’s antics, Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief, while Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt.
Strangely, no-one recalled that the Holocaust deniers of recent years –
deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in
1915, that is – include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent
Armenians from participating in Britain’s Holocaust Day and the then
Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their
massacre of the victims of the 20th century’s first Holocaust did
not constitute a genocide.
I’ve no doubt Ahmadinejad – equally conscious of Iran’s precious
relationship with Turkey – would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian
Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of
Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?