Condemning words over deeds

Back to Opinions Page

The recent comments by the President of Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad, calling for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ provided Israel with the ammunition to castigate the whole of Iran as anti-Semitic and the US with yet another stick to portray Iran as a potential threat to the ‘World Order’. It was thus not surprising to see Israel within days call for the removal of Iran from the UN, while ironically Israel itself has not abided by a single UN Resolution concerning it. If the reaction from Washington and Tel Aviv were not surprising, the silence on the issue from most Middle Eastern Muslim states was deafening.

Unfortunately history shows that since 1948, the Palestinians have paid the consequences of the rhetoric by Middle Eastern leaders and the flippant comments by Mr Ahmadinejad are no different. Israelis not known to miss a trick responded quickly with a furious diplomatic attack. Israel with the support of the world powers, with even Moscow threatening withdrawal of support for its long-term ally Iran; suggests an Israeli monopoly on the diplomatic scene.

Israeli fears are palpable because despite the unconditional support it enjoys from the US, and its own military strength, it is a state that was built on the death and destruction of an entire race of people, who lived and existed on the land now called Israel for centuries before and after the biblical ‘children of Israel’.

Israelis, by their own admission, live with the eternal fear of being ‘pushed into the sea’. That fear is a result more of nurture rather than nature, as the education of Israeli children from infant schools onwards focus on the past threats faced by the Jewish people, including the pogroms and the holocaust. This fear is then extrapolated in seeing the Palestinians as the present day Jew-Haters. This further serves the purposes of wiping away the reality of the violent birth of Israel, with a version of history portraying the Arabs as the aggressors against the persecuted Jewish people. In the absence of truth about the true nature of the occupation and the Palestinian suffering; the facts of which are concertedly kept away from the Israeli public eye, they are left to ponder whether the Palestinians are just a population of violent blood thirsty people who want to kill Israelis.

The Palestinians on the other hand have enmity for Israelis based largely as a response to the brutal occupation policies which have seen thousands of Palestinians killed. It is a fact that while enmity between Christians and Jews emanates from the time of Jesus Christ, Muslims historically provided refuge for Jews from persecution. It has only been with the birth of Israel that Muslim-Jewish enmity began. The popular Israeli allegation has been that Palestinians teach their children violence and hatred, but in reality their school text books have been very closely monitored since the 1990’s, taking out references to Arab fights for liberation against the immigrant Jewish population, and thus a large and important part of their history. For Palestinian children, it is largely the witnessing of the murder of fellow school children by Israeli bullets that builds enmity, not a systematic method of education about the other encouraging mistrust, fear and anger. The repressive method of the occupying army, which includes death and destruction of every manner, has resulted in the psychological scars that make peace seem so remote.

Israel is forever looking for reasons to reinforce fears in its own population and to divert the world attention away from its own oppression and aggression and unfortunately President Ahmadinejad has provided them with yet another opportunity.