Sunday, February 02, 2003

Scoundrels Seek Refuge in Tragedy

By Mark Hand

Space Hero All that is wicked about a country’s policies often is forgotten with a hero’s death.

In death, many of our warts are removed, even if our lives weren’t portraits of compassion. Take the death of Richard Nixon and all of the kind words that many of his political enemies recited when they knew he wouldn’t be there to kick around. A similar scenario is acted out when a national hero dies, except it’s the sins of the deceased person’s government - not only the transgressions of the hero - that are frequently forgiven.

With the tragic disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia over the skies of Texas, sympathy extended to Israeli officials because a member of the crew was Ilan Ramon, a 48-year-old former fighter pilot in the Israeli air force and Israel’s first astronaut. Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp during the Second World War, honored those who endured the Holocaust by carrying a small pencil drawing titled “Moon Landscape” by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed at Auschwitz.

President Bush telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon soon after the incident to offer his condolences for the death of Ramon. All through the day, television and radio commentators spoke about the great pride that Ramon had brought to Israel, a country that was allowed to grow out of the Holocaust into a beacon of hope for Jews around the world.

Expressing one’s sympathy to the family and friends of the deceased shows compassion, but to let tragedy blind you to the conduct of a vicious government is naive. Israel is a nation-state whose government extends a civil rights guarantee only to Jews; it essentially has held the Palestinian people hostage since 1948. South Africa was an apartheid state that terrorized blacks, “coloreds” and Indians until a decade or so ago in order to keep the nation “secure” for a minority white population. A consensus eventually developed among world leaders (embarrassingly too slowly, though) that recognized the white South African regime as a despicable entity that should be deemed an international outcast in order to expedite the development of freedom for all within its political borders.

The same can be said about world public opinion of Middle Eastern and North African countries whose leaders have ruled with an iron fist and have implemented despicable policies, including those that drove Jewish residents out of their countries. (Nations that deal in arms, however, continue to do a brisk business with these Middle East tyrannies.) The leaders of Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and almost all of the other nations in the region have no firm ground on which to stand to criticize the policies of Israel. Their patriarchal and tyrannical rule, along with the intrusiveness of the Islamic religion into all aspects of life in these countries, makes them a bigger target for criticism than Israel because, while Israel certainly mistreats the Palestinians, it provides a relatively large amount of freedom to its Jewish residents.

Most other countries in the Middle East place significant political and social restrictions on everyone; all residents within their political boundaries are bound to the rule of the despots. The imperial powers that formerly controlled the region, however, played an important role in creating the tyranny in the Arab countries. The imperialists also oversaw the redrawing of political boundaries that led to the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land in order to create Israel.

Enlightened world opinion long ago recognized that the world would be a better place without such despotic governments as the apartheid regime in South Africa and the vicious regimes that control the Middle East. That day has yet to arrive with regard to official world opinion toward Israel.

Curiously, Israel held extremely close relations with the South African apartheid regime and was one of the few countries that kept extensive military and intelligence ties with South Africa until the end of white rule. The Israeli and South African governments also launched a joint nuclear weapons development program in the 1970s.

After the Columbia disaster, news reports kept repeating that Ramon’s participation in the space shuttle flight gave a “troubled country” something to cheer about.

When the Columbia space shuttle mission began a couple weeks ago, Israel celebrated Ramon as a national hero because of his astronaut training and his past involvement in Israeli military operations. He had logged thousands of hours of flight time and was part of the first Israeli squad to pilot American-made F-16 fighter jets in 1980. He fought in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and in the 1982 war in Lebanon.

The mainstream U.S. press has been reporting on the “troubled country” since its creation in 1948 - more so since the 1967 Six-Day War - but has always failed to mention that Israel operates as a brutal, apartheid regime. Invariably, the Holocaust is mentioned to evoke sympathy for Israel as it continues its apartheid policies, with only a hint of censure by the world community. And the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon again are sanitized so future generations will view them as heroic episodes in Israeli history.

In conjunction with the Columbia mission, Israel also highlighted Ramon’s involvement in the military strike that destroyed a French-built nuclear reactor in Iraq. On June 7, 1981, Ramon and other Israeli pilots participated in an operation that involved a group of Israeli F-15s and F-16s leaving Etzion Air Force Base in southern Israel, flying in a tight formation the 700-mile distance. Upon identifying the Osiraq nuclear plant and catching Iraqi defenses by surprise, the Israeli attackers managed to demolish the reactor in one minute and 20 seconds.

Today, Israel proudly repeats the story behind its attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor to let the world know that it was the first to recognize (with the help of CIA-supplied satellite reconnaissance photographs) the danger of Saddam Hussein’s potential to build nuclear weapons and that it succeeded in doing something about it. Iraq’s Osirak reactor was a replica of the Osirus model housed at the Saclay, a complex of reactors outside of Paris known as the Institute of Nuclear Science and Techniques.

On the flipside, if its neighbors had decided to take out Israel’s nuclear facilities, U.S. officials certainly would have had something to say about it. In the close relationship that has developed between Israel and the United States during the past 35 years, U.S. officials have learned to overlook Israel’s massive weapons program and to fixate on the weapons of mass destruction elsewhere in the region when politically expedient.

Political expediency also plays a role in the mourning of Israeli citizens. Ilan Ramon obviously was a talented person who died a tragic death. His death certainly leaves a hole in the lives of his friends and family. The exploitation of Ramon’s death for the purpose of whitewashing the Israeli government’s sordid history is lamentable but expected from Israeli leaders always in need of a cover for their warts and all.

Let’s mourn Ramon’s death and the deaths of the six others on the space shuttle because they are fellow human beings who died working an extremely dangerous job. Let’s not let the tragedy become a rallying point for any alleged higher national purpose.

More from Mark Hand

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