Different Narratives In The Middle East

************************************************

-It's Time We Talked About War Crimes-

Courtesy Of: The Independent

Published: 16 December 2006

By Robert Fisk

...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."

...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?

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.

Complete Story:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2079304.ece