This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for the US: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein violated UN resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defies other UN resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards -- on the one hand saying the UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said last year.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was more concise: "UN resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. US President George W. Bush has been cozying up to Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion.
For starters, there is a difference between the Security Council resolutions that Israel breaches (nonbinding recommendations under Chapter 6) and those Iraq broke (enforcement actions under Chapter 7). Likewise, many international legal scholars suggest that Israel's occupation of the territories is not itself illegal, even if Israel is in profound breach of its obligations as an occupying power.
Moreover, Arabs undermine their standing to complain about American double standards when they are guilty of equal hypocrisy.
Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is ... that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
One of the moments when I decided that I wanted to be a
foreign correspondent came in
1982, when, as a vacationing law student, I backpacked to Hama, Syria, after the army there had massacred some 20,000 citizens. The sight of the city center -- reduced to rubble, with shards of concrete intermixed with clothing as a few survivors strolled about in a daze -- was indelible. And the survivors' grief wasn't diminished because their children had been killed by fellow Syrians rather than by Israelis.
The Arabs who have been treated worst of all are the people of Western Sahara, who have had their very country stolen out from under them. Morocco has occupied Western Sahara (a former Spanish colony), treated its people barbarously, defied the International Court of Justice and tried to annex the territory for its natural resources. Yet hardly any Arabs or Westerners have ever championed their cause.
And while they are not Arabs, there's a parallel with the Kurds in Turkey. The Kurds, like the Palestinians, have been cruelly suppressed. The Kurds also turned to terrorism, achieving nothing, and the Turkish authorities responded with savage repression that made the Israelis' look mild. Yet when Kurds were being tortured and executed in the 1990s, fellow Muslims looked away.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own.
We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
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