Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2001, page 14

Special Report

 

“Why Do They Hate Us So Much?”

 

By Ahmed Bouzid

“I have no doubt that civilians deserve punishment.” These words were famously uttered not by Osama bin Laden after the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, but by the prime minister of America’s closest ally, Menachem Begin, who spoke them publicly, on the record, addressing Israel’s Knesset during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. The civilians he was referring to were, of course, the millions of Palestinians living in utter destitution in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Begin’s logic was simple, impeccable, airtight: since the PLO could not operate, survive, and flourish without the support it enjoyed from the Palestinian people, an important component in the strategy of breaking the back of the PLO was to raise the price of supporting it to above what regular Palestinian civilians could tolerate. This meant not only making daily life a running series of humiliations—from roadblocks that made free movement impossible to curfews that would confine whole towns and villages to their homes for days on end, to flattening houses and confiscating land—but also pushing the envelope a bit further during the invasion, and doing so systematically, as a matter of open policy. The strategy was cruelly elegant: let’s relentlessly mete out collective punishment so that the masses are made to feel the pain in their very bones and eventually reach the breaking point, say “uncle” and surrender in utter defeat.

When a couple of months later, in September 1982, close to a thousand helpless Palestinians living in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were slaughtered by the Christian Phalangist militia, under the watch and supervision of the Israeli army (as concluded by Israel’s Kahan commission), few among those who were familiar with Israel’s long-standing policy of punishing civilians as a tactic and strategy for getting at the PLO were surprised. In the name of safeguarding its security, and under the unwavering protection of the United States, Israel was given carte blanche to do as it pleased, including playing with the lives of innocent civilians. And so, predictably, during its Lebanon invasion campaign, Israel killed more than 17,500 Lebanese civilians, maimed untold hundreds of thousands, and caused the utter devastation of an entire country.

Back then, a question all Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs and Muslims repeatedly asked themselves and the world around them was: why does America hate us so much that they would not only tolerate, but finance and politically support our physical extermination in broad daylight, under the glare of cameras and the watch of journalists?

Most of the innocent lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, were lost in a flash, in a ghastly instant, when no one could have intervened to stop the carnage. During its invasion of Lebanon, however, Israel could have been stopped, just as the Phalangists, taking long hours to carry out their dastardly deed, could have been stopped. To this day, Palestinians and Lebanese ask, never really recovering from that nightmare: why didn’t the United States, lover of humanity, intervene to stop the horrors?

Twenty years later, the same questions are being asked about the current uprising in the occupied territories: why does the mightiest nation in the world, the purported lover and defender of peace and human dignity, not only stand on the sidelines, but provide military and financial aid to an ally and beneficiary that continues practicing its decades-long policy of blockading whole populations, demolishing houses, confiscating land, tearing up roads, using live ammunition against stone-throwers, and assassinating, as a matter of open policy, the popular leadership of the Palestinian people?

Americans watched in dismay as some Palestinians “cheered” the news of the attack on the World Trade Center. They watched and asked in horror: why do they hate us so much? But Americans must remember that they too “celebrated” when Baghdad went up in flames, 10 years ago. They rallied, tied yellow ribbons, and turned on their headlights, as their mighty navy and air force visited horror and death upon the innocent, to the tune of more than 10,000 civilians killed during the five-week air campaign alone. Hundreds of thousands later would die an agonizing, slow death, from disease directly caused by the destruction of Baghdad’s sewage system. Iraqis watching the reaction of Americans must have wondered why anyone—and especially a people living in prosperity and under the protection of a mighty military force, and oceans away—would celebrate the killing of helpless civilians sitting terrified in their dark homes while hundreds of jet fighters dropped bombs on their city—and celebrate not once, or twice, but day in and day out, for five weeks of round-the-clock bombing.

And they continue to ask, to this day: why do Americans hate us so much that they would insist on imposing a decade-long embargo that has done nothing but ensure the misery of ordinary civilians, costing the lives of half a million of our children, devastating thus a whole generation of Iraqis, and reducing what was once far and ahead the most modern Arab country to a backward nation barely able to subsist? Why?

Ahmed Bouzid is president of Palestine Media Watch, <http://www.pmwatch.org>.

< Prev		Next >