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<PRE>THE HOFFMAN WIRE
Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History
Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
<A HREF=" http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html
">http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html</A>
*******************************************</PRE>
April 1, 2002
Editor's note: In yesterday's Hoffman Wire we briefly cited the
bombshell revelation of Lord Gilmour, Britain's former Secretary of
Defense, concerning Ariel Sharon. Here below is his complete statement.
At a time when the denizens of the American media ghetto are lining up
like nine pins to endorse Sharon, even as he bans them from Ramallah,
the following words from one of the pillars of the British
establishment, shows the extent to which Americans are out of touch with
reality.
LET THERE BE JUSTICE FOR ALL, MR. BUSH
by Ian Gilmour
March 31, 2002
The Observer (U.K.)
http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,676774,00.html
Excerpt: "...Ariel Sharon has never wanted peace with the Palestinians
and never will - he only wants their surrender and expulsion."
The appalling events in the Middle East are the predictable results of
the negligence and prejudice of the Bush administration. The Passover
massacre in Netanya was an abominable crime. Indeed, all suicide
bombings in Israel proper are terrorist atrocities, unspeakable and also
self-defeating. But while such crimes cannot be excused, they can be
explained. As Israel's most influential journalist Nahum Barnea told his
readers: "The terrorism of suicide bombings was borne of despair and
there is no military solution to despair."
That despair has been induced by the Israeli army killing more than
1,400 Palestinians in 18 months, Israel's continued building of illegal
settlements on Palestinian land, military occupation, daily humiliation
and economic suffering. When, as the Israelis have done, you make life
not worth living for thousands of Palestinians, there will be no
shortage of suicide bombers.
The Bush administration has long known that for it to remain largely
passive while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew steadily worse would
sooner or later ensure an explosion. It also knew that Ariel Sharon has
never wanted peace with the Palestinians and never will - he only wants
their surrender and expulsion.
As the speaker of the Knesset said a few weeks ago, Israel now has "a
violent government out to destroy the Palestinian authority to avoid
giving up the settlements." Yet because the US believed that the
Israelis would eventually win the conflict, they gave Sharon a green
light to be as brutal as he liked, short of killing Yasser Arafat, the
Palestinian leader. And despite Sharon's record, Bush happily hobnobbed
with him, while refusing to meet Arafat.
If Bush and Cheney hoped that Sharon's treatment of Arafat would bring
him to heel, they badly mistook their man, as I saw for myself in
Ramallah a few days ago. Arafat has long thrived on adversity, of which
he has known a great deal. When I met him after he had been imprisoned
for months in his headquarters at Ramallah, with Israeli tanks only a
few yards away, and he had been shelled and bombed, he was notably
unintimidated and, though depressed by suicide bombings, surprisingly
ebullient.
He had no intention of sacrificing Palestinian interests or dignity
simply to be given Sharon's gracious permission to attend the Arab
summit in Beirut, which he knew he would not be given, or to be granted
an audience with Vice President Cheney. As the peace activist and former
Knesset member Uri Avnery said of Cheney: "When an overbearing Vice
President dictates humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat he pours
oil on the flames... persons who lack empathy for the suffering of the
occupied people would be well advised to shut up."
Arafat, who has made some serious mistakes, was relaxed but defiant.
Needing a document, he was anxious to exhibit his 'infallible filing
system', which consists of bulky piles of documents in his battledress
pockets. His files, as he showed us, even extend to large wads of paper
in both hip pockets which, one would have thought, must be exceedingly
uncomfortable. He was particularly scathing about the Israeli claim that
justice for the Palestinian refugees would entail Israel being swamped
by millions of Palestinians.
Is it likely, he demanded, that they would want to go back to being
ruled by Israel? He was convinced that the problem could be solved
justly without the Jewishness of Israeli being threatened. Sharon may
well kill Arafat, but he won't frighten him.
As Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney general between 1993 and 1996,
wrote in Haaretz earlier this month: "The intifada is the Palestinian
people's war of national liberation. We enthusiastically chose to become
a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating
lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories,
engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities...
we established an apartheid regime."
The Israeli organization "Peace Now" has spotted 34 new settlements
started since Sharon became Prime Minister. When I was driving round the
West Bank last week and seeing both these new settlements and the growth
of the old ones, that seemed, if anything, an underestimate.
Yet while Bush has constantly told Arafat to stop the Palestinian
violence, which Sharon's purposeful destruction of the Palestinian
infrastructure and police stations has rendered him incapable of doing
under present conditions, he has made no effort to make Sharon cease all
settlement activity and enter peace talks.
Since even the American Secretary of State said last November that the
occupation must end, it is presumably the pro-Israeli bias of the
dominant members of the Bush administration which is responsible for
that administration determinedly shutting its eyes to the basic fact of
the Palestinian struggle - that Israel is fighting a colonial war to
subjugate the Palestinians, while the Palestinians are fighting to end
35 years of occupation of their land.
As Michael Lind, an Israeli journalist, puts it, Bush's "reflections on
the conflict seem to have been written by the Israeli lobby" in the US.
In an illuminating article in Prospect magazine, he points out that the
Israeli lobby distorts US foreign policy and makes anything more than
the mildest criticism of Israeli taboo in the mainstream media. "Until
Americans have ended this corruption of our democratic process," Lind
concludes, "our allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East will continue
to view our Middle East policy with trepidation."
Of course, that is not a new development, but the current Bush
administration looks like being even more pro-Israeli than all its
predecessors. Until now, President Bush has seemed more intent on
securing Republican majorities in Congress in November and getting his
brother re-elected as governor of Florida than on securing decency and
justice in the Middle East.
America's need to gain some Arab support or, at least, acquiescence to
its intended attack on Iraq has necessitated some adjustment to its
attitude on Palestine, but only a small and inadequate one. Much more is
now needed. On Wednesday, at the insistence of Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, the Arab League offered its historic and long overdue
vision for peace: Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in
exchange for full peace with the entire Arab world.
Sharon's reaction to this peace offer and to Palestinian violence has
been to launch a massive assault on the Palestinian Authority's civilian
institutions and effectively to declare war. The situation is so grave
that an imposed solution on the basis of the Saudi peace initiative is
now the only hope. One of the imposers will have to be the United States
because America is the only country that can deliver Israel. The other
imposer must be Europe to ensure that at last the Palestinians get a
fair deal.
A postscript on Arab perceptions of Britain. A Lebanese newspaper wrote
during the Beirut summit that "the British Cabinet remains set in its
course to Americanize its positions in foreign policy, sounding more and
more like an offshoot of Voice of America." If we join the US in
pulverising Iraq, while remaining silent as America's ally pulverises
the Palestinians, the damage to Britain's interests in the entire region
may take a generation to repair.
Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar is Britain's former Secretary of State for
Defense
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Link: The Israeli Massacre of Palestinians, March 29 -ongoing:
http://www.hoffman-info.com/palestine52.html
<PRE>Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press
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