arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity," said author and playwright George Bernard Shaw.

That quote certainly rings true today. Aren't we all becoming accustomed to the daily suffering and pleas of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza? Aren't we becoming shamefully immune to Israel's atrocious violations of international laws and humanitarian ideals?

Thanks, perhaps, to our collective apathy, Israel now feels free to break former taboos and arrest respected 'men of the cloth' on trumped-up charges.

Last Thursday morning, the Archimandrate Dr Theodosios (Atallah) Hanna, Spokesperson of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, was arrested outside his home by members of Israel's secret service and subject to interrogation for six hours.

Warned
Dr Hanna was warned that he should stay away from politics and that he should desist in fraternising with the enemies of Israel, in particular Lebanon and Jordan. Dr Hanna's passport has been confiscated and he has been told that he must stand trial and is forbidden to leave the country in the interim.

The Israelis are angry because of Dr Atallah's support for the Palestinian people. He believes that they have every right to fight this brutal occupation and holds to the precept that every person in the world has the right to live in dignity and freedom."

Just two years ago, such an arrest and affront to the Orthodox Church would have been unthinkable, and given that Israel's Shas Party is comprised mostly of Jewish religious extremists, Israeli demands that Dr Hanna should stay clear of politics is the ultimate in hypocrisy.

It is also an attempt to muzzle advocates of the Palestinian cause and a violation of free speech. Israel's claims of being the only true democracy in the region are fast being shown up as spurious.

Thus far, there has been little outcry from the Christian world in response to the arrest of this controversial church leader, which isn't so surprising when we recall the Israeli military's siege of the Church of the Nativity when a monk and a bell-ringer were shot dead.

Not only are religious leaders no longer secure in the Israel of Ariel Sharon and the Lukudists, neither are members of the international media. Journalists and cameramen have been frequently intimidated by the IDF and fired at, including ex-Gulf News reporter Christine Hauser of Reuters.

Hauser was one of the lucky ones and escaped uninjured, but many others have been wounded, some fatally so. It is time we had a reality check and faced up to the idea that we just may be complicit by our silence in Israel's crimes.

After World War II, many ordinary Germans said that they didn't know what was going on in the work camps. They had no idea that Jews, Romas, the mentally and physically challenged and others were disappearing never to return. What excuse will we have when questioned by our grandchildren in the future?

Can we possibly say that we didn't know in this age of satellite television and the Internet? Imagine that your emirate, county or state had been turned into a gigantic, open-air prison, surrounded by an electric fence.

The seas patrolled by enemy warships; the skies, the unfettered territory of enemy helicopter gun-ships and F16s. On a regular basis, these air-borne killing machines drop bombs or launch missiles, destroying lives and property.

In time you become almost become resigned to living in this hell on earth and even to the fact that you have joined the ranks of unemployed and can hardly afford to feed yourself and your family.

Helpless, you stand by watching while your spouse battles with anemia and your children suffer from malnutrition, nightmares and depression. Welcome to Gaza! Imagine too that the one-ton bomb, recently dropped on a heavily populated area of Gaza killing 14 and injuring 140 had been dropped on, say, Seattle or Dallas.

Much imagination
It doesn't take much imagination, in fact, to picture the uproar that would have ensued. There would have been a minute's silence for the victims around the world. Memorial services would have been held at regular intervals to a background of the drawing up of war plans.

Instead, the victims of Gaza and Jenin are being slowly forgotten, and we don't see their loved ones being offered millions of dollars in compensation, or hiring expensive lawyers to sue Israel and its mentor the US for trillions of dollars.

The victims of Israeli aggression are lucky if they get an apology, even the half-hearted one reluctantly offered to the families of the Gaza victims by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

This came with the excuse that there had been an intelligence failure and the Israeli government did not know that the Hamas Commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades Salah Shehadah lived in a densely populated part of town. This is strangely reminiscent of America's justification of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

In that case, the error was blamed on faulty intelligence from the CIA, which had designated the embassy as a weapons warehouse. So much for technology! Why on earth do the world's leaders and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan pretend to believe this obvious insult to their intelligence?

Should we, therefore, assume that Israel, which has ignored some 60 plus UN Security Council resolutions and regularly flouts the Fourth Geneva Convention, is a law unto itself?

Israel regularly carries out collective punishments, illegal deportations, extra-judicial assassinations, and uses innocent civilians as human shields. These are all war crimes. Instead of taking Israel to task by suspending her UN membership and imposing sanctions, the United Nations does little apart from passing more unheeded resolutions.

America's pro-Israel bias comes further under the spotlight when we hear President George W Bush condemning Iraq for not conforming to the demands of just one Security Council resolution, even going so far as to threaten a forced regime change, while blatantly over-looking all of Israel's transgressions.

But Sharon and his uniformed thugs have little time to worry about war crimes. They are too busy planning yet more misery to inflict upon the Palestinian people. The West Bank has been split up into some 220 zones, separated by military checkpoints.

In recent months, its population has been entirely occupied and subject to stringent curfews, which have prevented West Bank residents from going to work, school, college and even seeking medical treatment.

Travelling from one area to another has become a major test of endurance and patience. What kind of people are these young Israelis who receive a license to kill when they don a uniform at age 18?

Fresh out of school, they are torn from the cosy atmosphere of their family homes and handed guns, tear-gas cylinders, stun-grenades, and tanks, and with these they are given the power over life or death. Little more than children themselves, these trigger-happy, often terrified, young Israeli soldiers soon discover that power is corrupting.

Israel calls its army 'the most moral in the world', and yet many of these 'moral' recruits take drugs to enable them to commit their daily crimes against humanity. Others are in denial believing even when they are leaving a pregnant woman no choice but to give birth at a checkpoint, that they are 'defending' their country.

Doom and gloom
But it isn't all doom and gloom. A growing number of young Israelis and older reservists are refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza and receiving prison terms in response. More and more Israelis are now waking up to the fact that the only reason millions of Palestinians are being oppressed and maltreated is so that some 200,000 Jews can live comfortably behind walled colonies  with fountains and swimming pools.

Last Saturday, hundreds of Israeli peaceniks joined hands with Arab Israelis, braving IDF guns and tanks to take baby food, wheat, milk and medicines to the West Bank town of Nablus. The group said that their aim was to show the Palestinians that not all Israelis are the same.

Israel's left-wing, and supporters of a two-state solution, have become invigorated by the appearance on the political scene of 57-year-old Amram Mitzna, the Mayor of Haifa - a contender in Israel's next elections, and a man who has vowed to immediately return to the peace table.

Mitzna's campaign rests upon the evacuation of all Jewish colonies in the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians gaining authority over part of Jerusalem.

While nothing and no-one in Israel is sacrosanct these days – including Church leaders, such as Dr Hanna – the State of Israel itself appears to be so.

Backed by the Superpower and armed with every weapon of mass destruction known to man, it does pretty much what it likes, unchallenged.

For how long this untenable state of affairs is allowed to continue is anyone's guess but unless the Israelis themselves experience a collective attack of conscience and change direction or, alternatively the world manages to rein-in Sharon and his expansionist ambitions, the region's future looks grim.