As usual, there has been a disproportionate and unbalanced reaction to recent and ongoing violence in our region. Since late September, Israel has been butchering civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip. As I write, the death toll has passed 115, of which over 30 are children.
Israel routinely kills 10 to 12 Palestinians per day, the daily equivalent of a Palestinian suicide bombing or two. Israel is engaged in the mass destruction of the Gaza Strip, subjecting people who have been suffering for decades from what in any other circumstances world leaders would denounce as ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide. Yet, other than pro forma criticism, there is great tolerance for the ongoing massacre.
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Israel's assault on Gaza killed more children in a few days than the entire number of victims in Taba. It is simply immoral to continue to pretend that there is any difference whatsoever between the two types of terrorism. The point here is not to say that the attack in Taba is in any way excusable or justifiable, but rather to underline that the attacks in Gaza should be treated just like the attacks in Taba, as terrorist outrages, viciously targeted and calculated to kill innocent people.
If Western leaders and commentators recoil at this equivalence, they should at least understand that people here in this region already see the parallel. What they see are powerful nations that treat the lives of Jewish Israelis and other Westerners as inherently more valuable and worthy of protection than those of Arabs, Muslims and other people of colour. This is the case in Palestine and in Iraq. Europeans and Americans kidnapped by Iraqis and sometimes brutally murdered receive far more attention than the Iraqi children and guests at weddings that Arab television viewers routinely see being pulled out of rubble of buildings bombed by the United States in Fallujah and Samarra. Every sane person must unreservedly condemn the horrifying beheadings that have been taking place in Iraq, but it should be no crime to ask why they are taking place now, and why they never occurred before in the history of Iraq or the region.
More and more we see a world in which those who possess high-tech weaponry and uniforms are entitled to kill people far from their shores with absolute impunity and call it "self-defence" while those who challenge them in their own streets and villages in any way are labelled "terrorists". The world's expressed outrage at Taba and relative silence about Gaza and American actions in Iraq does not go unnoticed in the region. Rather, the double standard only fuels the fires of anger and extremism and leads to ever more desperate and horrid reactions.
Strangely though, Israel, which usually blames the Palestinians for absolutely everything, went to great lengths to exonerate them of any responsibility for the Taba attacks and was quick to blame Al Qaeda despite the absence of any evidence one way or the other. This was, of course, no act of generosity. Israel is simply desperate for the world not to draw the most obvious conclusion: as long as Israel occupies and terrorises an entire nation, Israelis will never find safety or security and will never build a wall high enough to hide from the consequences of the horrors they have wrought.
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