The French newspaper Le Monde has been found guilty of defamation for publishing an article called Israel-Palestine: The Cancer. They’ve been forced to pay a fine of one Euro and made to publish a retraction of sorts. That’ll really teach them a lesson.
It’s difficult to decide which segment of this utterly repulsive article to print here, and you should read the whole thing to get a good sense of how incredibly dishonest and hateful the Le Monde piece really is.
“From yesterday’s oppressed, tomorrow’s oppressor,†wrote Victor Hugo. Israel presents itself as the spokesman for the Jewish victims of a an age-old persecution culminating in the Nazi attempt at extermination. Its birth, attacked by its Arab neighbors, came close to being its death. Since its birth, Israel has become a formidable regional power, benefiting from the support of the United States and equipped with Nuclear arms.
And still, Sharon claimed to be fighting for Israel’s survival by oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population, by destroying its schools, archives, finance offices, by eviscerating houses, destroying irrigation ditches and proceeding in Jenin with a carnage the scale of which it is forbidden to know.
The survival argument can only have acted to reawaken in Israelis the anxieties of 1948, the specter of Auschwitz, by giving an abolished past a hallucinatory presence. Thus, the new Intifada has aroused an anxiety that lead the reconquistador Sharon to power.
In reality, Sharon is compromising Israel’s chances for survival in the Middle East while believing he is assuring Israeli security in the immediate by the use of terror. Sharon is ignorant of the fact that today’s triumph prepares tomorrow’s suicide. In the short term, Hamas is enacting Sharon’s policies, but seen from a distance, it is Sharon who is enacting the policies of Hamas. If, up to a point, the Intifada has pushed Israel to negotiate, beyond this point, it has reawakened the anguish felt by the prey, exasperated by the suicide attacks, and pitiless repression seems a just response to the threat. If no exterior force prevents it, the Israel of Sharon is at the very least heading toward the bantustanization of the severed Palestinian territories.
It is the knowledge of having been the victim that allows Israel to become the Palestinian peoples’ oppressor. The word “Shoah,” which singularizes the Jewish vicimized fate and makes all the others banal (those of the Gulag, the gypsies, the enslaved blacks, the Indians of America), becomes the legitimacy of a colonialism, of an apartheid and ghettoization for the Palestinians.
