Peace may come if Israel drops its double standard

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): February, 1996, was the worst month for terrorism in Israel for sixty years. The worst, in fact, since July, 1936, when over 100 people were killed in terrorist attacks culminating in a bomb in the Melon Market in Haifa that slaughtered 53 people. And the 1996 terrorist bombs have led to even more violence in the region.

Jerusalem broke off peace talks with Syria in March after Syrian President Hafez Assad's regime praised the handiwork of the Palestinian suicide-bombers. Syria retaliated by letting the Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon re-start their Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel, suspended since the 1993 cease-fire.

Over 500 Katyusha rockets have been fired at northern Israel in the past fortnight. They have caused much damage (though no fatalities), and for two weeks Israel's armed forces have responded by hammering Lebanon. Over 150 Lebanese are dead, and half a million have fled north to get away from the Israeli attacks.

It is amazing, in these circumstances, that Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat still got a 10-to- one majority in the Palestine National Council on April 24 to repeal the clauses in the PLO charter denying Israel's right to exist. It is a tribute to Arafat's power of manipulation, but also evidence of the desperate weakness of the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, going into an election campaign in March where his early lead was blown away by suicide bombers, was effusive about the PLO decision. Yasser Arafat had come up with the goods despite the bombs falling on Lebanon.

"Ideologically it is the most important change in a hundred years," Peres claimed (which rather overstates the case, since 100 years ago Palestine was a somnolent backwater of the Ottoman Empire). But Peres's campaign needed good news, and the attacks on Lebanon have gone a bit sour since Israeli shells killed 91 innocent refugees in the United Nations post at Qana recently.

Arafat and Peres will sink or swim together, and they know it. Not only has Arafat arrested 800 members of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that rejects peace with Israel, but he has actually changed the PLO's founding charter. "Both the fighting of terror and the change of the covenant is a new occurrence in the last 100 years," said Peres.

It remains to be seen what effect this act of renunciation by the Palestinians will have on the Israeli election on May 29. But the events of the past couple of months raise a broader question: Can there ever be a lasting Middle East peace if Israel will not accept its share of the blame? Because the double standards applied to the killing of innocent civilians by almost all Israelis are deeply offensive to the other inhabitants of the region.

"A land without people for a people without land." In the early days of the Zionist movement, Zionists dealt with the moral problem of building their homeland in a land already occupied by other people by denying their existence. The later, subtler version of this propaganda just dismisses their moral claim to be heard by making Palestinians and "terrorists" synonymous.

It is the most brazen of double standards: Both sides in former Palestine have resorted to terrorism from the very start. A whole regiment of philosophers could not find the slightest moral distinction between the Palestinian suicide bombers who slaughtered over 60 Israelis in February and March, and the Israeli government that has killed over 150 Lebanese civilians this month.

There is a political distinction, however. Yasser Arafat denounces the suicide-bombers, and has tried so hard to track down their commanders that his own chief of security, Jibril Rajoub, resigned in protest. Whereas Shimon Peres is the commander of the fighter-bombers and artillery units that killed the Lebanese civilians. Nor does he pretend that their deaths were an accident.

"If the people of Hezbollah think that Kiryat Shmona (an Israeli town near the Lebanese border) is a weak target, they will soon realize that Beirut is a weak target, too," Peres said on April 12. "And if they think Katyusha are such good weapons, they will now realize that we also have missiles, and that our missiles are better than theirs. Hezbollah is bringing tragedy to Lebanon."

Israel knows the Lebanese civilians it is killing or driving from their homes are not the guilty parties. It is as cynical a use of force as anything dreamed up by the Hamas commanders who sent the suicide bombers into Israel.

The attacks in Lebanon serve three purposes. First, they relieve the frustration of Israelis who were unable to retaliate directly against the Hamas bombers because they could not find them. Secondly, they improve Peres's re-election chances by showing that he is `tough' with the Arabs. Third (and last), they may be a means of putting pressure on Lebanon's overlord, Syrian President Hafez Assad, to force him to rein in the Hezbollah guerrillas.

But Assad is unlikely to be moved by pity for the Lebanese: they are pawns in his game as much as the Israelis. And even if the whole operation had a plausible strategic objective, it is morally indefensible.

The PLO has actually bitten the bullet. It has accepted that terrorism is bad even when Palestinians do it. A stable Middle East peace will be possible only when Israel drops its double standard and accepts that killing innocent civilians is wrong even when Israelis do it.

The Israeli army regularly blows up the houses of Palestinians who are suspected of terrorist attacks. It could make a start on treating all terrorists the same by blowing up the house of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred the Palestinians in the Hebron mosque last year. And every Israeli should be reminded regularly that terrorism is not a Palestinian monopoly.

Remember that bad month in 1936? The victims were all Palestinians. And the bombers were a dissident faction of Zionists known as the Revisionists.