AUSTIN, Texas -- Great, now everyone who thinks Ariel Sharon is
a screaming disaster for Israel has been read out of the pro-Israeli camp.
This excommunication comes not from Israel -- where quite a few people think
exactly that -- but from William Safire and his fellow grandees of the
journalistic right, who apparently have no doubt about their own authority
to decide who is for Israel and who is not. Some of us who think Sharon is a
walking catastrophe have been under the apparently misguided impression that
we, too, were devoted to Israel's best interests.
But ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft informed me that
worrying about cancellation of the Constitution was the same thing as aiding
terrorists, it has been clear to me that I mustn't think what I think. I
need to be instructed what to think by people who think the way he does.
This is the same attorney general who spent $8,000 to cover up the tits on a
statue and who believes calico cats are a sign of the Devil, but I am not
allowed to conclude that the attorney general is something of a nincompoop
because that would aid terrorists.
Likewise, the evidence before my eyes is insufficient for me to
notice what a perfect blessing Ariel Sharon has been for his country in
every way. From Qibya (a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Sharon in
1953), to the invasion of Lebanon, to Sabra, Shatila, the visit to the
Temple Mount, the policy of reprisal -- boy, hasn't all of that just added a
whole lot to Israel's safety, not mention its reputation and standing in the
world? Just the other day, one of the grandees announced, grandly, that it
is Unfair to point out that this Intifada was started by Sharon's own
reckless and deliberately provocative visit to the Temple Mount. It is? But,
it was.
And here are the results: From September of '93, when the Oslo
peace process started, to September 2000, when Sharon visited the Temple
Mount, 519 Palestinians and 287 Israelis were killed in the conflict. From
September 2000 to mid-April, 1,620 Palestinians and 440 Israelis were
killed. Would somebody tell me why that's good for the Jews?
Just when I began to fear the Clinton-haters were giving up the
ghost, they come back with the prize assertion of all the history of
Clinton-hating. The Blame Bill First crowd has really outdone itself this
time. Here's their latest deal: Bill Clinton tried really, really hard to
bring about peace in the Middle East. It didn't work. George W. Bush did not
try at all to bring about peace in the Middle East. That didn't work either.
Therefore, the current mess is all Clinton's fault.
I swear to God, that is the actual line of reasoning the right
wing is now using. I am not making this up -- you can read it in their own
columns. Personally, I think it's stranger than calico cats from the Devil,
but Clinton-haters always would believe anything.
The last thing the Israelis or the Palestinians need is one more
iota of rage added to this mess, one more scintilla of self-righteousness,
one more soupcon of moral certainty and even a trifle more of feeling
victimized. An hour on a call-in show the other morning reminded me of that
the right seems to have a need to be terribly angry about something. It's so
unhelpful.
It does not harm Palestinians to acknowledge Israel's right to
exist. It does not harm Israel to acknowledge that Palestinians have
legitimate grievances that must be addressed. Israelis and Palestinians have
gone for relatively long periods without a lot of killing -- peace is not
some impossible dream. But America can't help achieve peace if we can't keep
our own heads cool.
In the current issue of The Nation, Richard Falk makes several
cogent points, directly addressing a problem that has been with us since
Sept. 11: how to define terrorism. Falk reminds us the word itself comes
from the bloody excesses by the government during the French revolution, a
true case of "state-sponsored terror."
"By overgeneralizing the terrorist threat posed by the Sept. 11
attacks, Bush both greatly widened the scope of needed response and at the
same time gave governments around the planet a green light to increase the
level of violence directed at their longtime internal adversaries," Falk
writes. "By not limiting response to the Al Qaeda threat, (the
administration) has taken on a mission impossible that has no end in sight.
... Related to this broadening of the goal is the regressive narrowing of
the concept of terrorism to apply only to violence by nonstate movements and
organizations, thereby exempting state violence against civilians. ... (It
does not regard) state violence as terrorism even when indiscriminately
directed at civilian society."
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at
www.creators.com.
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