Tags: genocide | Israel | occupation

Letters to the Editors, Issue #54

Dear Think

THINK reached a new low with Colin Shea's slanderous and grossly biased essay entitled "Sharon's contest". Headed by a photo bearing a caption that implies that Palestinian suicide bombing is justified, it went rapidly downhill from even that low-point.

Mr. Shea's little crusade to see Sharon in the dock seems to confuse what the role of international justice primarily stands for. Magistrates in Europe have played an essential role, first with the symbolic victory of the indictment of General Pinochet of Chile and then with the very real trial of Milosevic, in bringing criminal officials of states to trial where mitigating political circumstances make domestic prosecution impossible. In both Chile and Serbia the political situation was thus and Europe played an admirable role in attempting to bring these men to justice.

Regarding Sabra and Shantila, Sharon has already paid the price for any role he might have had in what happened. He was dishonorably dismissed from his role as Defense Minister and had his reputation dragged through the mud though direct complicity in the massacre was never established.

What Mr. Shea doesn't seem to realize is that the fact that Sharon has risen up from this disgrace to become Prime Minister of Israel is an example of just how fearful the Israeli people have become in the face of overwhelming intransigence and violence from the Palestinians and their Arab supporters.

Sharon is simply a manifestation of this collective fright and a yearning for some sort of solution. When Arafat spit in the face of the most left wing Prime Minister he will ever encounter and walked away from the Camp David peace plan, a plan that was perhaps more generous than what the Israeli public could have even accepted, he brought his old nemesis out of retirement and back into the public forum as Israelis saw the true face of the Palestinian cause, which still seeks Israel's annihilation.

If Shea thinks Sharon is bad, wait until the Israeli's grow weary of his seeming centrist stances in the face of continuing suicide bombers and elect a galvanized Netanyahu.

But let's not move too far from Shea's claim of war crimes. Has Shea ever heard of Hama, Syria, where over 20,000 people were killed by Hafez Assad's war machine when that dictator felt threatened by a growing Muslim fundamentalist movement? What about what happened East Timor, a larger state-sponsored war crime by anybodies reckoning?

When he makes the completely unfounded claim of Sharon as ethnic cleanser I wonder if he ever heard of the Kuwaitis expelling 300,000 Palestinians from their state when they chose to support Saddam's invasion much in the way the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip supported the September 11th attacks.

No, those are not as sexy as finally bringing to justice Ariel Sharon. People like Shea co-opt the counter-arguments of anti-Semitism when they say that any charges of such hate in response are unfounded and unfair to the legacy of Jewish history. But anti-Semitic is exactly what they are when measured against comparable crimes and figures of the last 50 years. The fact is for people like Shea Sharon is the portly, grotesque, pushy caricature of a Jew and "bringing him to justice" whets the appetite of latent Jewish-hatred that continues to fester unabated in many of today's intellectuals.

Colin, have you ever been to Israel? Have you ever talked with a veteran of the 67 war, when the Arab world massed on the doorstep of tiny Israel seeking to "push the Jews into the sea"? Have you read about the subsequent war in 1973 when the Arab world again launched an offensive against the Jewish state on the religion's highest holiday, Yom Kippur (no Ramadan-like delay there)?

The facts of modern warfare have made notions of strategic depth in most circumstances (see Kashmir) obsolete but not in Israel, which is nine miles wide in some parts along the 1967 armistice lines (not the lines of a state mind you but only the lines of where the 1948 conflicted settled) and where on the other side Israel's neighbors have proven an overwhelming hunger to plot its destruction.

Shea writes "The squalid camps where refugees have been living for decades, under carefully scripted collective punishment regimes, are grimly reminiscent of early Nazi 'relocation' policies." How dare you make such an equivalent? The fact that refugee camps exist today is a testimony to the empty dream that Arafat has sold to his people of the right to return to the pre-1948 borders.

This delusion is taught in Palestinian schools where maps don't show Israel anywhere and where schools have become suicide-bomber factories, teaching young Palestinians how the Jews are evil people who stole their land. This is how Arafat has prepared his people for peace. Anyone remotely reasonable on the subject knows that any peace and creation of a Palestinian state will be founded on borders roughly resembling the 1967 armistice lines with only a symbolic number of Palestinians allowed to return.

Any other discussion about right of return is predicated upon doubt of Israel's legitimate right to exist, which still makes up a huge part of the Palestinian resistance movement and has undercut all peace negotiations. The fact that Arafat and his nepotistic Palestinian Authority have siphoned off millions in foreign aid while leaving their people in "squalid camps" to fester with misdirected rage is but one of the incredible ways that Arafat has overwhelmingly failed his people.

With now documented proof of Arafat's complicity in the recent string of the most heinous suicide bombings in history the time has come to perhaps think about bringing charges of war crimes against Arafat or at the very least rectifying the absurdity of Arafat having the Nobel Peace Prize

Finally, while I respect the fact that THINK is something of a community bulletin board for those of us in Prague to express their opinions it is not appropriate to have a dilettante with no relevant qualifications at all accuse someone of war crimes. Having contributed to the magazine for years I've stood by it as it takes its many lumps from snobs who turn their nose up to it. This essay was the first time I found I could not defend THINK from those who charge it with idiocy.

- Very sincerely yours, Jeremy Hurewitz

Colin Shea replies:

Mr. Hurewitz's response shows little concern for logical argumentation and only tangentially addresses the points I raised in my original article. As such is difficult to take seriously, much less respond to. I would like to make a couple of points, however, as he has chosen to employ a rather shrill and somewhat insulting tone.

In spite of referring to my article as "slanderous", and to me as a "dilettante with no relevant qualifications", Hurewitz does not dispute or contest anything I have claimed as a fact in my article. He disagrees with the conclusions I draw from these facts, and attempts to justify this in what amounts to a tirade of name-calling and finger-pointing. Surely he must realize that this strategy fails abjectly as a defense of his point.

Hurewitz makes the contemptible charge of anti-Semitism against me simply because I dare to suggest that Israel be held accountable to the provisions of the Geneva Convention. He seems oblivious to the fact that anyone reading his letter and following his own line of reasoning would dismiss him as a rabid anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. In the juridical sense, the actions of Israel as a state and as a polity have nothing to do with Judaism and the Jewish people, any more than Palestinian bombers are a reflection of the Muslim faith or the actions of the Lebanese Phalangists were comments on the nature of Christianity.

I firmly believe that this holds true in an individual moral sense as well, for the simple reason that I am a quarter Jewish, and I will not have despicable crimes such as Sabra and Shatila defended in my name. Hurewitz's crude attempt to plant the flag of Jewish persecution on the mass graves of Sabra and Shatila is the true slur against the Jewish faith and people.