March, 2004

Is blowing up old men in wheelchairs what a democracy does? Looks like it, since Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East', we are told. It also bulldozes widows' houses, kills by accident infants caught in unfriendly fire, 'targets' for 'killing' men opposed to the government, shoots little boys for throwing stones, builds walls on land of long-resident farmers, long resident for hundreds of years, and shoots them when they try to climb the walls, and hoards illegal, undeclared and massively destructive atomic weapons.

Does a democracy do such things? Does a democracy execute people on suspicion, denying them lawyers, due process, trial by jury, appeal to a higher court, a final farewell phone call to their children? Does it then wreck the houses of their widows, houses they have lived in all their lives? Does it hoard WMDs?

Looks like it. Or maybe Israel has become the world's great exception, innocent by definition of the bad it does, and guilty only of the good. Whatever we can't do, by some weird rule Israel can. Like 007 it is licensed to kill. Like Yahweh it moves in mysterious ways.

Is Israel really a democracy? Well, its press is free, its health care fine, its education first-rate, its public discussion vigorous and everybody votes in its frequent elections.

But not everybody lives to cast their vote, like the three thousand Palestinians dead by 'targeting' or 'incursion' or 'crackdown' since October 2000, or the thousand Israelis killed by mortars, bullets and suicide bombers, or the seven thousand 'militants' locked up in prison, and under torture, for their political incorrectness.

Yes, it's a democracy, they -- and we -- keep saying, even though those eleven thousand dead and locked-up voters might have changed the election result. But imagine it here. Imagine John Howard 'targeting' for 'killing' Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter, Bob Brown, Andrew Wilkie, Bishop Carnley, Phillip Adams, Kevin Rudd, Dick Smith, Pru Goward (who isn't talking to him any more) and some of their children and bulldozing their families' dwellings. Imagine 'incursions' with tanks and helicopter gunships into Balmain, Fitzroy, Norwood, Battery Point that killed three thousand dissidents and some of their children, and Green-voting suicide bombers blowing up Chatswood Chase and Bondi Beach's ritzier cafes, and Adelaide Markets and Flinders Street Station.

A liberal democracy, just like ours? I don't think so. Nor is it the usual kind of democratic state, self-reliant and self-funding, that out of tourism, exports, farm produce and manufacturing pays for its governing class and its defensive superstructure. For Israel makes ends meet each year, and keeps its army going and builds its nuclear weapons, with the billions upon billions America sends to it. It's more like a colony really, a Somerset Maugham kind of place, with a 'white' ruling class and a 'coloured' servant class, restless in their impoverished encampments, a colony propped up with unearned shekels by a faraway imperial power and notionally accountable to it.

If we look at it this way, and judge it this way, we can start to see how wrong it is to forgive the Sharon cabinet for every act of murder, torture, arson, theft of property and wrongful imprisonment it orders its choiceless soldiers to commit. If we look at it this way we can begin to recognise it as the smalltime tyranny it is, and call for its peaceful overthrow -- by UN pressure, trade sanctions and so on -- as we do the Mugabe tyranny, as we did the Marcos tyranny and the Pinochet tyranny, which hid a cruel and murderously punishing police state under the appearance of a democracy.

My grandmother Rachel Larkman was an orthodox Jewess and my father therefore, I suppose, though I didn't think of him that way, a secular Jew, and much of my ancestry, perhaps no more than ten thousand direct forbears, were Jewish, and I say with no relish or enjoyment that I loathe my distant relative Ariel Sharon, and if I go on his hit list so be it. For he has made for Australians, a people I quite like, a billion Muslim adversaries and sooner or later some of us -- perhaps no more than two hundred, perhaps as many as ten thousand -- will die because of him and his bloodthirsty foolishness, his primitive doctrine of eternal revenge.