Robert Fisk: Different narratives in the Middle East
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it’s time we talked of war crimes
Published: 16 December 2006
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, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad 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, Ahmadinajad 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 Yanoun – 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 Avneri 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. 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 sentits 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 didnot 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 Ahmadinajad’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 Ahmadinajad – 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 andIran had so much in common?
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, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad 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, Ahmadinajad 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 Yanoun – 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 Avneri 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. 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 sentits 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 didnot 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 Ahmadinajad’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 Ahmadinajad – 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 andIran had so much in common?
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited