Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 21

Point of View

There is a Moral Equivalency Between “Arab Terrorism” and Netanyahu’s Actions

By Ray Hanania

American leaders have taken the lead from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in an attempt to put distance between acts of "Arab terrorism" and Israeli persecution of the Palestinian People.

What bothers the ever-self-righteous Netanyahu is the argument not only by Palestinian leaders but also by Israeli peace activists, including the mother of one of the Israeli teenagers killed in the Sept. 5 Jersalem suicide bombing, that it is the Israeli government that is provoking "Arab extremists" into acts of terrorism.

So Netanyahu has publicly denounced what he calls the "moral equivalency" argument of the Arabs that attempts to link "Arab terrorism" with Israeli aggression against the civilian Palestinian population.

Misstating the Arab Argument

But in doing so, Netanyahu and his American apologists must misstate the Arab argument. In a meeting I attended as part of a delegation of Arab- American leaders with President Clinton's adviser on Near East affairs, Bruce Riedel, and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, the argument was wrongly stated by them as follows:

"We do not see a moral equivalency between bombs and bulldozers."

I challenged their comment, saying it misstates the point. No Arab or Palestinian in his right mind would suggest that such a "moral equivalency" exists, I explained, but there is a moral equivalency between the "taking" of a person's life and the "destroying" of a person's life.

While "Arab terrorists" are "taking" the lives of civilians in suicide bomb attacks in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, Netanyahu is "destroying" the lives of innocent Palestinians through a sweeping policy of harassment that borders on violence.

Let's look at the facts.

While Israelis argue that there have been some 200 Israeli deaths since the White House signing of the Oslo accords between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993, the Israelis fail to point out that as many as 600 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and armed settlers during that same period.

The Israelis also employ policies of collective punishment that include the closure of the territories, essentially turning the Palestinians into prisoners in their own lands. Further, the Israelis destroy the homes and properties of family members of individuals accused of being "terrorists." That is an essential term, "accused," because it clearly states that they have not been proven to be terrorists at all. (In countries that respect the rule of law, people are innocent until proven guilty.)

The Israelis have arrested thousands of Palestinians and they have refused to allow these Palestinians the right of legal defense or the right to know the charges against them, the laws they are accused of breaking, or even the identities of their accusers or the nature of the evidence that is being used to justify their arrests.

These detainees are held in maximum security prisons in Israel for periods of up to six months, and the detention can be renewed on the whim of an Israeli magistrate or military administrator without ever giving the prisoner a chance to defend himself or herself.

Netanyahu also is expanding existing Jewish settlements and creating new ones on Arab land in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

When you view all of the above actions as a whole, suddenly the comparison of "bombs and bulldozers" makes no more sense than comparing apples and oranges. Instead, a valid comparison becomes one of "taking" a life or "destroying" a life.

There is, therefore, a moral equivalency between the actions of "Arab terrorists" and the state terrorism of the Netanyahu government. This becomes especially clear when the Netanyahu government is pursuing policies that facilitate the work of the terrorists by creating more hatred and desperation among the Palestinian people from whom they draw their recruits.