Why Do They Hate The West So Much, We Will Ask

So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the
Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school,
three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army
that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have
we forgotten the 17,500 dead - almost all civilians, most of them
children and women - in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700
Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana
massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them
children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were
ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an
Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment
and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is
amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime
ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old
lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties.
"Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet
another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre.
And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as
an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery
on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate
ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women
and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just
shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a
description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had
been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After
covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East - by
Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops -
I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is
fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim
they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our
security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also
complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've
reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for
these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours,
here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees,
that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in
the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they
supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately
used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila
massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist
allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry
revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed,
Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After
Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996,
the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the
base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 - a war started
when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border - were
simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed
the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been
taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was
never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed
Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The
refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which
they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were
innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range.
Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve
years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance
carrying civilians from a neighbouring village - again after they were
ordered to leave by Israel - and killed three children and two women.
The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It
was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all,
talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of
course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being
anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest
doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have
the Hamas-to-blame lie - heaven knows, there is enough to blame them
for without adding this crime - and we may well have the
bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the
Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the
anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the
world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel
broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six
Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment
killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security.
Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed.
But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years
since 1948 - when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to
kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that
was to become Israel - is on a quite different scale. This recalls not
a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the
Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself
with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the
West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we
will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.