“Off with his head!”
“Let them eat cake!”
“Remove Iran from the UN!”
“Take action now!”
One would think a few political lessons had been learned since the 16th and 18th centuries. Yet despite the West carving lines throughout the sand in the Middle East in the 20th century, and certainly not an apology since, a leader who professes to do the same thing today is to be sanctioned, vilified and hauled before the UN for immediate action. Except for any US leader — busy with neo-colonialization this time. And except for an Israeli leader — concerned with redrawing the map of Palestine on a daily basis, walls erected, cities destroyed and villages eradicated. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated the charges of Ayatollah Khomeini, pronouncing, “Israel should be wiped off the map”, not officially recognizing the State of Israel long having been Iran’s position.
World leaders went into hyperdrive in their condemnation of such an atrocious comment from Iran. Israel cried foul and ran to the UN asking for protection from such a frightening bully. This is the same UN they so regularly thumb their noses at and thoroughly despise despite the UN’s precursor, the League of Nations, being “a Jewish idea. We created it after a fight of 25 years” (per Nahum Sokolow, at the 1922 Zionist Congress). To date Israel has ignored more than 85 UN resolutions; Iraq was bombed in part because it violated eleven.
In absolute fairness, Iran should be put before the UN to address any charge. Israel can debate Iran side-by-side, face-to-face, equal time.
Israel can then tell us why it contravenes scores of UN resolutions, extra-judicially assassinates political leaders, and has hundreds of nuclear weapons it refuses to acknowledge, let alone account for.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair responded to Iran’s charges by expressing shock at never heaving heard of another country ever making such a statement, adding “Can you imagine a state like that with an attitude like that having a nuclear weapon?” Blair forgets British history regarding the use of weapons, and might want to recall Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who said of the Iraqis, “(I advocate) using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes (and) against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. (I do not understand) the squeamishness about the use of gas (...).”
The UN can then give Israel the chance to explain Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin’s comment about Gaza, just prior to signing the Oslo Accords, “If only it would sink into the sea”; or an Israeli minister’s writing in the “Koenig Memorandum “that diluting (the) existing Arab population” should be considered; or military leader Moshe Dayan’s comment, “There is no more Palestine. Finished.”
The European Union instantly issued a statement on Iran wherein “Calls for violence, and for the destruction of any state, are manifestly inconsistent with any claim to be a mature and responsible member of the international community.” The statement did not claim that Ahmadinejad was calling for the annihilation of the Israeli people, or a mass exodus of the inhabitants of the region or war. But Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion said at its creation in 1948: “The wisdom of Israel is now the wisdom of war, nothing else.”
At the UN, Israel would be able to clarify Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement, made in 1989: “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories”. Or Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s assertion: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them. It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” Or Rabbi Meyer Kahane supporter Yitzhak Ginsburg’s “The killing by a Jew of a non-Jew, i.e. a Palestinian, is considered essentially a good deed, and Jews should therefore have no compunction about it.”
Long has the world failed to demand such equal explanations from Israel. Perhaps it is time to give its leaders the floor, for a simple answer as to why it remains above international law.
As President Jimmy Carter made clear, “I cannot (exercise major pressure on Israel) because it would be a personal political suicide for me.”
So many leaders long in fear of the State of Israel, it is time to ask, and have answered, the ultimate question: Why?
— Tanya C. Hsu is a Saudi-US political analyst now living in Riyadh. A contributor to recent written testimony on Saudi Arabia for the Senate Judiciary Committee, she is working on two books on Saudi Arabia
