I was truly impressed by one Israeli minister’s great suggestion to abduct Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and take him to court. Indeed as it claims day and night, Israel is an oasis of democracy and progress in the Middle East amid a sea of Arab backwardness fraught with poverty, violence and chaos.
We Arabs must therefore follow in the footsteps of this developed country and learn from it, perhaps one day we too will develop and flourish.
We must learn from Israel how to respect the rule of law and end all the forms of violence and chaos that dominate our lives; not by implementing the law but by implementing the law of the jungle which gives the stronger party the right to wield absolute power, to the extent of abducting heads of state.
The importance of what the Israeli minister has called for springs from the fact that this is not the opinion of a religious fanatic or a racist like the man who, a few years ago, called for the extermination of all Arabs because they are insects and snakes.
The recent suggestion, however, came from a minister who is a member of the elected Israeli cabinet, Rafi Eitan, minister of pensions, a member of the security committee and former head of the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. That’s why I greatly appreciated this minister’s suggestion despite the fact that not a single Western official condemned him the way they raise hell against anything uttered by an Arab official even if he assured them that his ministry doesn’t distribute Israeli books slandering Islam, and added that he his willing to burn these books if they really existed.
My astonishment springs from the fact that the prominent Israeli official has given us Arabs the opportunity we’ve been looking for for years.
How many times did we complain from Israeli leaders and the crimes they commit, whether in the form of ethnic cleansing or genocide against the Palestinian people? How many times did we demand their prosecution? How often did we complain from US President George Bush and the crimes committed by his administration in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and how often did we demand that he too be prosecuted?
But we never knew where to begin until this Israeli minister showed us the right path in his call to abduct heads of state to prosecute them, not to punish them for the crimes they committed.
The Iranian president never committed any crimes against Israel like the crimes Israel has committed against the Palestinians. But still, according to Eitan, statements made by Ahmadinejad against Israel resemble statements made by Hitler and hence he must be prosecuted.
I am one of the biggest supporters of Israel and how we must imitate it to achieve progress and put an end to our backwardness. Now we have another example of this progress and all we have to do is execute it exactly the way the Israeli minister suggested, by abducting Israeli leaders and powerful US officials, and perhaps throw in a few international officials for good measure if we’re not happy with statements they make the way the Israelis weren’t happy with Ahmadinejad’s statements.
But consecutive Israeli governments have surpassed the level of statements, opting instead for committing real crimes by abducting and assassinating leaders of the Palestinian resistance as part of their genocide against the Palestinian people.
Likewise what the Americans did in Iraq, Guantanamo and Afghanistan has also surpassed the level of mere statements, but we haven’t done anything all these past years because we had no idea what was condoned by international law until this Israeli official guided us to the right path.
May God guide him and all his fellow colleagues on the correct path.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
