CAIRO: I received a phone call from a French TV correspondent asking me to comment on Gaza. A few minutes earlier, I had watched the Israeli Embassy spokeswoman in Paris speaking on another TV program. The presenter told her that the World Public Opinion calls for a ceasefire on both sides. “You cannot put Israel and Hamas in the same scale pan the spokeswoman replied. What applies to one cannot be applied to the other; Israel is a democratic state committed to the world order and its laws. On the other hand Hamas is an Islamic terrorist organization which aims at bringing down the international system and demolishing Israel. This being the last question, the interviewer told her “Merci, ending the interview.
In my turn, I too say “Merci to the Israeli spokeswoman. Her reply is more succinct than all ado in the Arabic satellite media. I said to the French TV correspondent that what the Israeli spokeswoman uttered is an arrogant racist view which holds that Israel is comparable and equivalent to none. Its nature is totally different. Israel has a unique history which no other people share, no matter how much is persecuted and expunged. Neither the Armenian, the Kurds nor the Tutsi tribes in Rwanda have the right to speak about the genocide they suffered. If they absolutely have to, they are to choose another name than the “holocaust, which is a brand name, confined only to the Jews.
This is the logic of the Israeli policy, which views Israel as unlike any other country and thus should be allowed what other countries are not; namely, occupying the land of others, annexing these lands to its territories after confiscating them and expelling their indigenous residents. It is also allowed to persecute any Palestinian who refuses to leave his land, wages regular genocide campaigns against the Palestinians with a view to getting rid of the rest of them or driving them to settle in neighboring Arab countries.
Now for the details of what the Israeli spokeswoman said: that Israel is a democratic state. Since when did democracy mean occupation, expansion, bloodletting, expelling the indigenous population and discriminating against Sephardic Jews?
If Israel is truly committed to the international system, does this commitment allow it to defy the resolutions adopted by the international community represented by the UN and its specialized agencies and hide behind the support of the US, which backs Israel in its violation of the international legitimacy out of greed for the Jewish vote? Does Israel’s commitment allow it to stock weapons of mass destruction, chemical and nuclear alike, at a time when other countries are threatened if they try to obtain such weapons?
Does this commitment allow Israel to refuse adamantly to sign international agreements on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons? Does Israel’s commitment to international laws make it, by means of wars and acts of aggression, annex much more land than what was allotted to it by the UN resolution based on which it came to exist; a resolution which also stipulated the establishment of a Palestinian state on land which has now been annexed by Israel?
Then comes her description of Hamas as a terrorist movement. According to the official Israeli statistics, the number of rockets launched by Hamas are finite. However, the country of democracy and international laws [meaning Israel] has so far killed more than 400 Palestinians, including children, women and innocent civilians and injured more than 1,500 others. So, who is the terrorist? If the terrorism of the former is terrorism by a movement, we as Arabs have reservations about its behavior, the latter’s terrorism is that of a state that has become more barbarous and destructive.
Then, I leveled my criticism to the French TV correspondent saying: “It could be understandable that the Israeli embassy’s spokeswoman utter these falsities. However, it is not understandable that the French TV broadcasts them with no comments. He answered: “We give freedom [of speech] to each side to present his viewpoint.
I said: “It is your duty towards viewers to present them with the truth. But I have not heard once that the Palestinian people are under Israeli occupation and that they are seeking to liberate their land after more than 40 years of occupation. I imagined that France can better understand than anybody else the legitimacy of resistance movements. However, by accepting the descriptions given by the Israeli spokeswoman, you are de facto accepting what the Nazis, who occupied your country, said about the French resistance movement.
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
