OPINIONSome Israeli army people rang Nizar Rayam MP and told him to leave his house quickly since they were going to bomb it soon. ''I'm not leaving my house,'' he said. ''It's my house. Do your worst.'' And they bombed it and killed him, his four wives and 10 of his 12 children. The Israelis are the heroes of this story; discuss.
Israeli soldiers fired on a United Nations school and killed 30 sheltering civilians including children, and two other UN schools as well. The hospitals cannot cope, the injured are dying in the corridors, a quarter of a million Gazan children will be drinking dirty water soon, and Tzipi Livni says there is no humanitarian catastrophe. The heroes of this are the Israelis; discuss.
If Solomon were asked to arbitrate the Gaza dispute he would say; I imagine, ''Stop it. The destruction will now cease. And each side will pay in full for the repair of the buildings it has damaged, and pay as well $100,000 into a family trust for each infant, child, woman or old person it has killed. This will mean a net loss in hundreds of billions to the Israelis, which the US will then reimburse with money borrowed from the Chinese, thus damaging all three economies while enriching the Gazans and funding their children's Harvard educations, a good outcome I think. L'haim!''
It raises the question of who does pay for the damage, the funerals, the hospital costs and road repairs, and what law absolves Israel from paying even a fraction of this sum.
I don't think such a law exists. In peacetime a government is required to pay for the damage it inflicts $2.3million to Cornelia Rau for instance, for five months of unjust confinement and mental persecution. But in wartime or, as the Israelis might call it, incursion-time the government pays nothing for killing five little girls in their beds, and knocking down their parents' house as well, and Parliament House, and a children's hospital, a police academy, and a High Court of Justice, three UN schools, and so on.
Why this is so is hard to say. It is part of the doctrine of Israeli exceptionalism, I guess: ''No rules of the known world apply to us, the Chosen People.'' The rule of due process, for instance. In most western countries a suspect may be arrested and detained, but he has a right to a phone call, a lawyer, a look at the evidence against him, a day in court, a jury verdict, an appeal to a higher court, and a speech from the dock before sentencing. In Israel he is blown up by a helicopter gunship in his own house and his family too if they're with him before any due legal proceedings begin. He is a ''legitimate target'', we are told; which means that unlike Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, O.J.Simpson, Wolf Tone and Ned Kelly he has no right to trial by jury, nor even to howling his confession under torture at Guantanamo and 20 years alone and naked in a cell.
No, he is pre-emptively assassinated, and this we are told is a good way to do things. He is a ''legitimate target''. No jury called him that, no jury was consulted. A politician did, a politician soon to be tried for corruption himself and put in jail, a politician admired by 2per cent of his nation. A ''legitimate target''. Or, as Orwell might say, an ''unperson''. A human being one must not (as the Bible might say) ''suffer to live.'' He can make no pleas for his life, nor challenge his accuser to a duel, a debate or a chess game. He is blown up by a rocket fired from high above him, in his wheelchair outside a mosque . This is the Israeli way; in peacetime and incursion-time as well as wartime.
Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East but it doesn't seem to be as democratic as Canada or New Zealand or Iceland or Norway or even the United States, not always anyway. Last week it blew up the Gazan television station, and a Gazan university, three mosques, three UN schools and the Court of Justice and called them ''legitimate targets'' because views expressed within them were views the Government found unsettling, inappropriate, unseemly much as the Catholic Church blew up Galileo in his lecture theatre in the 17th century and the US government blew up the Mormon Tabernacle in the 19th century and the Australian Government blew up News Limited in Kippax Street only last week; I guess it happens all the time. It's important dissenting voices be blown to bits, into flying chunks of meat, and any adjacent children with them lest they too grow up and keep talking unconscionable nonsense like their fathers. This is what a democracy does to dissenters; discuss. This is what a democracy always does. Discuss.
It's what Israel does anyway and is daily more and more proud of. It's exceptional; and it sometimes admits it's exceptionally exceptional. Because of their special history its people have special rights, Israel asserts, like blowing up the parliaments of adjoining nations, or the kidnapping and beating of duly elected members of parliament because they have different views.
To show how exceptional this is, you have to imagine native Americans arrogating to themselves the right, because of past wrongs rapes, massacres, dispossessions, broken treaties, decades of exile to assassinate any elected official in the US and his family and to blow up the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. Like the Israelis they'll claim the land was theirs and it was taken from them; like the Israelis they'll use past atrocities to justify the killing and crippling of little girls ''in the line of fire''. Like the Israelis they'll regret the deaths of little girls but blame the Americans, the bastards, for putting them ''in harm's way''.
Or you have to imagine the Kurds, the Armenians, the Gypsies, the Chechnyans, the Basques, the Scots or the Belfast Irish, with American help and weaponry, dynamiting the House of Commons or the houses of elected parliaments in Turkey, Italy, Russia, Spain to acclamatory editorials in The New York Times and The Guardian egging them on. Assassination. Air raid. Arbitrary imprisonment and torture of backbenchers. Right on.
This is how we advance the cause of democracy in Europe as we did in the Middle East. Or you have to imagine Australian Aborigines in helicopter gunships attacking Parliament House in Canberra, and citing (correctly) that their land was taken from them their waterholes poisoned and their children stolen as justification for doing this, and the various Fairfax and Murdoch editors applauding their right to do it. What is the reason they would not, and we know they would not, do this? Not destroy the emblems of democracy in freedom's name? Why is the Israeli cause so exceptional that war crimes, committed every day, are routinely forgiven , and even applauded, in the West? Can the reason be racist? Or religious? Or some imperial memory of the meaning of the word ''wog''? Or ''heathen''? Or ''savage''? Or ''heretic''? Perish the thought.
I should go carefully here. For I, like many nervous humanists, absolutely abominate Islam as I do Scientology, Seventh Day Adventism (my birth religion), Mormonism, Catholicism, Judaism or any other bloodstained cult of a sky-god hungry for human sacrifice. I do not think its proliferation does much good to anyone, especially its women, on whose cowed and beaten and mutilated bodies it is written, or most of it is. But I do think you shouldn't kill people because of their religion. Or because they differ with you on the primogenitive ownership of certain tracts of land.
You do not blow up Aboriginal elders who claim some parts of Australia are theirs and mining companies should get off them. You do not blow up Fred Niles because he believes homosexuals will fry in hell. You do not blow up Archbishop Hollingworth because he excuses pederasts on Australian Story. You do not do these things.You do not say it's all right to kill a child because a man in her vicinity has had bad thoughts. You do not blow up the man who has had bad thoughts either. This is because freedom of opinion, and freedom to speak that opinion, is what you have in a democracy. It is what a democracy is all about.
If I'm wrong about this I'm wrong, and the Navaho chieftains with neutron bombs who next year take out Cincinnati because of past wrongs to their dispossessed people will get the full support of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Jerusalem Post. But I doubt I'm wrong. And if I'm right Tzipi Livni (a woman with characteristics of a Russian air hostess in training but none of the intellect) will stand trial soon on a charge at least of collusive multiple manslaughter (we do not mean to kill little Arab girls while they sleep but we will so little Jewish girls will sleep sounder, this is only fair) and will end her days in a fairly comfortable air-conditioned cell in The Hague.
Or am I wrong? Some say Israel has a right to self-defence, but the same folk also seem to believe that Gaza does not, that Gaza has only the right to slowly starve, and see their blue and shrivelled infants die in cold humidicribs, and be woken nightly by the booms of supersonic jets.
The Gazans are human beings, with human rights a right to trial by jury, a right to adequate hospital treatment and sufficient food to survive on, the right to insurance money when their house falls down, and the larger, more fundamental right, a right we take for granted, not to be murdered in their beds.
But I might be wrong. They might be sub-human in some way that I don't understand. But I need to be told why they are. I need to be told why I'm wrong. Any takers?
Bob Ellis is a Sydney freelance writer. His new book And So it Went: Night thoughts in a year of change will be published by Penguin in May.