World Press Review - Middle Eastern News - Israel Palestine - Dishonest Broker

From the August 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 48, No. 8)

Dishonest Broker

Palestine Times (monthly Internet publication), London, England, June 2001

In the mid-1970s, the Palestinian scholar and historian Walid al-Khalidi labeled the United States “the tormentor of the Palestinian people,” a true description reflecting flagrant American backing of the apartheid Zionist regime. Unfortunately, this characterization is much truer today than it was then. The United States remains the main guarantor and sustainer of Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against the defenseless Palestinian people whose sole “crime” is their enduring yearning for freedom from an incomparably evil military occupation. The United States continues to be the financier of Israeli military aggrandizement and defender of Zionist aggression against Arab countries at the U.N. Security Council and around the world. This brazenly shameless attitude makes the United States the main obstacle impeding the implementation of U.N. resolutions in the Middle East [and] the main obstacle to reaching an equitable and lasting peace in the region.

It is ludicrous and preposterous to continue to treat the United States as “the honest broker.” Viewing the United States, or expecting it to be honest, fair, and impartial in the efforts to find a peaceful settlement for the Israeli-Palestinian strife, reflects an astounding degree of ignorance of the way the United States conducts its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. How can a thief, who is also a murderer, be trusted to make justice prevail?

In 1982, the United States promised Yasser Arafat and Lebanon’s then-Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan that Sharon’s invading forces wouldn’t attack the defenseless Palestinian refugees following the evacuation of PLO forces from Beirut. The result, as we all know too well, was the genocidal massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.

The Reagan administration was so brazen then that it didn’t even apologize to the Palestinian people for its criminal connivance with the Zionist entity, a connivance that was more or less responsible for the mass annihilation of thousands of men, women, and children who were counting in vain on “the world’s leading democracy” to save them from [Menachem] Begin and [Ariel] Sharon, the Hitlers and Himmlers of the post-Second World War. Now there is a new tragic joke in town; it is the so-called Mitchell Commission report—a miserable document exuding profound ignorance, bias, and unfair judgment on the part of its authors. Equating the aggressor with the aggressed-upon, the hapless report calls on Palestinian Authority leader Arafat to “take every conceivable effort to combat violence and terror and to tell the Palestinians in unmistakable terms that terror is unacceptable.”

So Palestinian resistance is referred to as “terror” while the murderous Zionist rampage against unprotected Palestinian towns, villages, and hamlets, along with the use of tanks, helicopter gunships, and F-16 fighter bombers, is legitimate self-defense!

This brazen incrimination of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation should raise a million questions about the wisdom of counting on the U.S. administration, which officially espoused the report, to restart the so-called “peace process.”

But Arafat is always his own false god. He nearly jumped out of his skin to embrace the American role to the point of repugnance and impropriety, and on many occasions he did not hesitate to make vacuous remarks such as saying, “We have a friend at the White House,” the same friend that hectored Arafat to forget the paramount Right of Return and much of Al-Quds al-Sharif [Jerusalem]. Now, Arafat and company are advised, indeed warned, not to repeat the same mistakes. The Palestinian people must not allow them to do so, because the blood of the 500 martyrs and of the estimated 25,000 Palestinians injured so far must not be allowed to be the subject of cheap bargaining with the conspiring Americans.

A government made up of the likes of Sharon, [National Infrastructure Minister Avigdor] Lieberman, [Tourism Minister Rehavam] Ze’evi, [National Religious Party leader Yitzhak] Levi, and other fascist and racist murderers will not agree to halt settlement building; the Bush administration will not dare put up a fight with the Zionist-dominated Congress and the terrorizing Jewish lobby, and will likely opt to remain on the safe side.

The Palestinian Authority must not allow itself to be beguiled, once again, into sacrificing the Intifada—probably the Palestinians’ last remaining hope for freedom from Jewish apartheid and occupation—in return for some vague and disingenuous promises from a White House that sees the world through Zionist glasses.