Double Standard Will not Bring Peace to Middle East

Saturday, 9, October, 2004 (25, Sha`ban, 1425)

Ali Kazak, Arab News

The Palestinian intifada, for freedom and independence, has entered its fifth year. The intifada started on Sept. 29, 2000 following the provocative incursion by Israel’s current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the sacred Muslim grounds of Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem, and the storming by Israeli troops of the sanctuary the following day killing and wounding tens of worshipers.

Israel has been waging a war with the most sophisticated American weapons against an unarmed civilian population. What Israel is doing, in terms of daily breaches of human values and international laws, is unprecedented since the end of World War II. Over the last four years Israel has killed 3,441 Palestinians (85 percent of them civilians), including 663 children (this is equivalent to the killing of over 260,000 Americans including more than 50,000 children), assassinated 290, wounded 27,668, destroyed 6,650 houses (sometimes while the occupants are still inside), high-rise buildings, farms and factories, completely destroyed the economic infrastructure of Palestine and turned the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, into the biggest concentration camp in the history of humankind. Palestinians are imprisoned in their own cities and villages, isolated from each other and the outside world; unemployment has reached a staggering 65 percent bringing the poverty line to over 70 percent of the population.

Jewish extremists killed Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin because he signed the Oslo Accords with President Arafat. Current Prime Minister Sharon is the leader of the extremist anti-peace forces in Israel. He was vehemently against the Oslo Accords as well as Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan and against Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon. Sharon is also against withdrawal from the territories Israel occupied in 1967. He is the father of the Jewish colonies, which he is building and expanding on a daily basis. And now he is building an 8-meter high and 788-km long Apartheid Wall, which is more than twice as high and 19 times as long as the Berlin Wall. And he has put Rabin’s Palestinian partner, President Arafat, without whom there would never have been a peace process, under siege, claiming there is no Palestinian partner for peace. And he rejected the Arab summit’s peace initiative.

Israel is the longest military-occupying power in the world today. It occupies Palestine and parts of neighboring Syria and Lebanon, threatening their security and preventing the Palestinian people from exercising their right to freedom and self-determination. It grossly violates international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and refuses to comply with tens of UN Security Council resolutions, not to mention the hundreds of other resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly.

Israel ethnically-cleansed, through 36 massacres, over 70 percent of Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) from their country on racial and religious grounds and occupied 78 percent of Palestine which they renamed Israel in 1948. But the United States and some Western governments, which claim to uphold international law, democracy and human rights, have closed their eyes to such violations, racial discrimination and war crimes, and appeased Israel’s extremist leaders. If any other government committed a small percentage of these violations and crimes, we would have witnessed an international outcry. This hypocrisy and double standard of some Western governments is responsible for more hatred, anger, frustration, destabilization and war in the Middle East and the escalation of violence and terrorism around the world. Fifty-seven years of Israel’s occupation, oppression and violations has failed to bring the Palestinian people to surrender, as have Sharon’s military plans. All that Sharon and former Israeli leaders have achieved is more suffering, killing and bloodshed for the Palestinians and Israelis. The language of force, occupation, oppression and the denial of Palestinian human and national rights will not bring peace or security to the Israelis. The international community cannot expect changes to occur from within Israel to arrive at a just and lasting peace with the Palestinian people because of its extremist component. Change will only come through the exercise of serious international pressure exactly as was exercised on the apartheid regime in South Africa, Yugoslavia, East Timor and elsewhere. Gen. Sharon’s government will continue its challenge to the international community, escalating the very dangerous situation in the Middle East, until the international community shoulder its responsibilities and take the danger Israel is imposing seriously. Accordingly, it is time the international community discharged its responsibility toward the Palestine people and end Israel’s occupation and war crimes. The US and its allies must put an end to their double standard and hypocrisy and employ the same set of principles on Israel. International law and UN resolutions must be implemented on all countries, including Israel. Israel should not be allowed to continue to be above international law and we should not forget that UN Resolution 181 established Israel itself in Palestine. In fact Israel’s membership in the United Nations is conditional on its compliance with this resolution.

The Palestinian people are in need of international protection similar to the protection the international community gave to the Bosnians, the Kurds and others. In our new millennium we need to have a new world order free from occupation, racism, hegemony and the threat of weapons of mass destruction which Israel has the largest stockpile of in the Middle East.

— Ali Kazak is Head of the General Palestinian Delegation to Australia & New Zealand and Palestine ambassador to Vanuatu & East Timor.

Middle East | Politics | |