Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Those who seek justice do so in vain
Some nations – and some leaders – are beyond the reach of the lawMonday, 2 February 2009
So that's that then, is it? Gaza is done and dusted? Very satisfying, I'm sure, for the Israeli leadership and their devoted allies at the BBC. But not so fast. For the one and a half million traumatised and wounded souls in that small strip, unendurable agony goes on. The very earth they stand on burns and cracks. And I am not here indulging a writer's tendency to hyperbole or neat metaphor.
Up to 60 per cent of the best farmland in Gaza has been systematically destroyed, livestock too. Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, a director at the World Food Programme, says this deliberately blighted land "may not be exploitable again". The lemon trees and noisy chickens must have been hiding Hamas rockets. Israel is also keeping some of the remaining arable land beyond the reach of the Palestinians who own it by making it into a buffer zone. Almost all the infrastructure has been flattened too. The resulting perpetual humiliation and dependency, one assumes, is part of Israel's strategic plan.
President Obama has sent forth George Mitchell, a skilled and respected negotiator, to start dialogues that could eventually lead to a durable settlement. We must hope he can achieve the impossible. But even if he does, that alone cannot ensure the kind of peace that all the people in that region sorely need and surely deserve.
There is too much unfinished business, too much reckoning left over. Peace without equality and credible scrutiny is itself a violation of human rights, an affirmation that some nations are beyond the reach of the law. Mitchell would not have been able to achieve peace in Northern Ireland if Britain had, with impunity, bombed the Catholic areas and slaughtered civilians. Israel is today a ruthless nuclear state, with arsenals of artillery, missiles, chemical and biological weaponry. It respects no international laws and conventions (originally set up to stop Jewish persecution) and does what it pleases.
But why pick only on Israel? Western nations, including Britain, supply some of the killing machines used on children in Gaza. The US and UK have never been hauled through any independent judiciary to explain their lies spun to justify the war on Iraq, or the cluster bombs dropped on civilians, the massacres in Fallujah, the million dead and many more who are born deformed.
We may at long last learn about what happened in the run-up to the war in Blair's cabinet meetings. Many of the ministers who colluded – Hoon, Straw – or acquiesced have gone on to further great success. As have several "ethnic minority" MPs and Peers always happy to oblige. Blair has enriched himself faster than any recent British PM I know of – an indication of how low is his sense of public morality and of those who pay him for his services. All is forgiven and forgotten. He is even our most trusted Man in the Middle East – who must have known about Israel's plans in Gaza and did F all.
Henry Kissinger is in the same happy position. Instead of being tried for actively supporting Pinochet, bombing Cambodia etc etc, he became a sought after statesman, rich and famous enough to stroke the fair arms of Princess Diana. How shocked he was when, a few years ago, Jeremy Paxman interrogated him on Start the Week on his unethical foreign policies. (Paxo's finest hour in my view) and Kissinger walked out of the studio. Such men do not expect to answer such questions. They are above all that. Watch this space and George Bush Jnr will be raking in loot and obsequies. That is what power gets you – immunity and pleasures untold.
Independent
