|
January 07, 2006
The rewriting has begun even though Ariel Sharon is not even dead. Sharon is being recast as a warrior for peace in Murdoch's Australian:
Soldier statesman Ariel Sharon had one objective throughout his long career – to secure the safety of Israel. Over the years, he found many means to do it, most of them involving Israel's ability to overcome surrounding states on the battlefield.....Mr Sharon was a tough old bird who only became a dove after decades as a hawk...evacuating Gaza Mr Sharon demonstrated Israel was in the market for a permanent peace.
This was a man of muscle whose history is one of opposition to peace; building Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in Sinai, in the Golan Heights; and having responsibility for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in two Beirut camps by local Israeli-backed militias. This warrior for Israel did everything in his power to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. He stood for conquest by military means.
Alan Moir
The Sydney Morning Herald reinforces the historical rewriting with its peace hangs by a thread headline. Presumably that is peace in terms of securing the safety of Israel as an expnsionist neo-colonial state, whose occupation of Palestinian territory leaves the Palestinians in a state of impoverishment.
What the two newspapers portray is Israel as a democracy, defending itself from Arab-Muslim terrorists. What they dont show and is the history of an expansionist colonial power engaged in ethnic cleansing and large-scale long-term forced population expulsion.
Sharon was a merciless general with a long-term agenda who used peace as a tactic. Karma Nabulsi describes Sharon''s strategy of 'peace as destruction' well:
To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and above all our national liberation movement. He did not want us to have a national framework, his desire was to reduce us to small quarrelling groups and factions trapped under his prison rule, disorganised, disintegrated, or co-opted; he planned actively and provocatively (and carefully) to create such an impoverishment of our people's public and private life.
Peace hangs by a thread? Only if you think a Hobbesian world is a world of peace. Karma Nabulsi continues:
This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination, imprisonment, violent military invasion. His fate for us was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what he had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.
This is peace on Likud Israel's terms: keep the illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories, expand settlements at full pace, continue the Judiazation of Jerusalem and build the wall deep into Palestinian land.
|
