Who will arrest the Israelis?

A syndicated report states that Mr. Bargouthi will be ‘put on trial’ in Israel for his alleged role in planning “dozens of attacks”. The self-righteous pomposity of Mr. Bargouthi’s supposed trial, along with that of the trials or administrative detentions of hundreds if not thousands of other Palestinians, never mind torture, is only equaled by world inaction. Israel’s belief that, as an illegal occupying power, it somehow has the right, or the moral authority, to effect such a trial on Mr. Bargouthi is no less preoccupying than the related inaction of the world institutions which find themselves too toothless to send peacekeeping troops in order to protect Palestinian civilians; those terrorist children and their adult family members who are dying at a much higher rate than Israeli civilians or military personnel. For this we can, of course, thank the United States of America and its horde of high-tech killing machines, in addition to a world community whose bark is worse than its nonexistent bite.

The toothless world that refuses to send an arrest squad for taking Ariel Sharon to The Hague and putting him in a cell next to Slobodan Milosevic is, indeed, a truly shameful enterprise. I have not even been capable of asking Allah, subhouana wa taala, to forgive them. And despite U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s request for troops with a “broad mandate” in Palestine, I am going to pretend I am from Missouri, the ‘show-me state’ and let the reader know that I will believe it when I see it. As a professor told me in graduate school, the best judge of future behavior is past behavior. Sorry, United Nations, but I am sick of resolutions, statements, pining and whining. Or is it that since old Slobodan ethnic-cleansed white people, i.e., Europeans, as opposed to brown peoples, even mild enforcement of world order only goes to those who hurt Europeans, and not to those who systematically kill, maim and terrorize non-Europeans? If this disturbing pattern, so evident during the genocide in Rwanda, is to continually be put forth as the world status quo, the ICC has already been emasculated even before its inauguration and I am prompted to ask, then… who will arrest the Israelis?

The Rwandans would understand this question quite well. That is because they know what it is like to not be European and to not have oil, hence the world powers had no interest in saving them from slaughter and mayhem, just as they currently have no interest in helping them recuperate from their genocidal nightmare, spawned by colonialism and Hutu Power supremacist thought. And now we are supposed to feel relieved that the United Nations is sending a fact-finding mission to Jenin. Too bad Palestinians, who have neither European voice nor accent, are not validated in their own story-telling and fact-living. A group of European specialists on an ample budget who will stay in comfortable hotels need to go to see what ‘really’ happened, since the Arabs cannot accurately say. I guess one cannot trust Arabs with donated heavy equipment and tracking dogs, not fact-finders, to sniff out the dead, and, inshallah, the living. The world needs some specialists to fly in to do that work, and only because Israel kindly lets them fly in through Tel Aviv (neither Amman nor Gaza has an airport?), be debriefed at a nice café overlooking the Mediterranean, and buy some souvenirs in shekels, not Palestinian dinars, from the Holy Land for their nice European children who will miss them terribly and call them on their satellite phones every half an hour to make sure Daddy is o.k. Besides the U.N.’s usual racist rebuffs to local Third World victims and its corrupt and feeding frenzy expense accounts, what facts does it pretend that it needs to know? A massacre happened, and Israel is responsible for it. Send in the troops and protect the Palestinians… none of us care about the salaries you earn or the reports you will write. Arabs can write their own reports, and count their own dead, and lift their own rubble, and rebuild their own cities, al Hamdoullilah. And what will the U.N. do with that information once it has it? Will the U.N. arrest the Israelis?

What will the world do about the intellectual authors of these evident crimes which need no European white boy fact-finding missions so some Swedish dude, whose Queen blames Palestinian mothers for their kids’ murders, can make his career off of them? Someone gave the orders. What is his name? Where does he live? Arrest the genocidaire. Who flew the Apache helicopters over Jenin, over Nablus? The F-16’s over the people I love and know in Bethlehem? Who pushed the buttons, sending missiles flying into homes and our beloved mosques (sorry, I still cannot ask Allah, subhouana wa taala to forgive them)? What are their names? Where do they live? Arrest the genocidaires. Who were the soldiers in the home of this young woman whose diary was published today in The Times of London? Where do they live? Who will arrest the genocidaires? A fourteen-year old boy was shot in the head yesterday in Ramallah and was killed. Who pulled the trigger, after deliberately aiming at that young man between his lovely eyes? What is his name? Where does he live? Who will arrest the genocidaires? And what about the Israelis who advocate the massive ethnic cleansing of Historical Palestine and call it ‘transfer’? This is incitement to genocide, just like that which was spewed on that now-famous Hutu Power radio station, the RTLM, in Rwanda during the 1994 world-ignored events. Who will arrest those genocidaires?

Yes, I feel so safe now that Israel has arrested Marwan Bargouthi. I am sure that no other martyr operations will be conducted, and Israeli Jews will now be safe from fear and the chaos that they themselves have fed on, been nurtured on, and sown, from their Jewish-only ‘socialist’ kibbutzim to their Hutu Power ‘let’s drive out the Tutsi-Palestinians’ colonies on occupied land, to their Jewish-only ‘bypass the Arab niggers’ roads which connect the two. Israel thinks that by decapitating the Palestinian leadership it can destroy Palestine. All facetiousness aside, Israel, do not even begin to think about feeling safe as long as Palestinians cannot ever enjoy or know that sweet security you no longer feel at your seaside seders.

And who will assist the Palestinians to ever feel safe? Safe from the racism of Zionism? Safe from the racism of European inaction? Safe from the fact-finding missions of the United Nations and the milque-toast statements of one Mr. Kofi Annan? Who will bring the terror-bombers of Israel to justice? Who will jail the IDF murder-bombers and baby-killing snipers? Yes, Dear White World, who will arrest the Israelis?

Frank M. Afflitto, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

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by courtesy & © 2002 Frank M. Afflitto