Bush Plays Pontius Pilate

The tragedy of the Palestinian people is an indelible stain on Western civilization in general and on America in particular. President George Bush has played Pontius Pilate and turned his back while Israelis crucify Palestinians.

These people are the last victims of racist colonialism in all its ugliness, brutality and duplicity.

I don't know whether President Bush is naive and doesn't realize what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is doing, or if he does know and condones it. The latter would be far worse than the former.

Sharon is neither defending Israel nor pursuing terrorists. He is doing what he has planned to do from the very beginning — destroy the Palestinian Authority and thus the peace process, and wreck what's left of the infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza.

Sharon believes that will leave the Palestinians where he wants them — leaderless, impoverished and demoralized. I think he will fail, though the time ahead will be bad for the Palestinians, as impossible as that sounds given the suffering they've already endured in recent decades.

It is now obvious that no one in Washington has the courage to face the junkyard dogs of the Israeli lobby. Arab governments will not go to war to save the Palestinians because they know they cannot win a war against the Israelis and the United States. They would be subjecting their people to slaughter and their economies to ruin for nothing. But they won't forget. And an arrogant Israel might force them into a war.

While the Israelis put on their usual false face to the international media, moaning about how difficult and dangerous this operation is, just remember that it is an army against civilians. Some brave Palestinians armed only with rifles have resisted, but a rifleman can't do much against a main battle tank protected by infantry, snipers, F-16s and helicopters.

The Israelis move into a town and immediately shut the press out by declaring it a "closed military area." The meek and submissive press then covers its eyes and ears while the Israelis do their dirty work cloaked in secrecy. Some America TV talkers act surprised when the Israel Defense Forces takes another city. Well, I can tell you right now that the Israelis are going all the way to the Gaza Strip. They plan on being there for months.

Nevertheless, Sharon will fail. Israel will know no peace. One of the lies Israel uses in its nonstop barrage of slander against the Palestinians is that families teach their children to hate Israelis. Nothing is further from the truth. It is Israeli behavior that teaches children to hate Israelis. A military friend related a story of how IDF members operated in Lebanon. They went into a house, wrecked it, beat the father in front of his wife and children, then dropped their pants and defecated on the coffee table in front of the family. Do you think those children, watching their parents' humiliation, will have to read a book to hate Israelis? Even the American officer came away hating Israelis.

Or what about the father in the West Bank trying to drive his daughter to a hospital only five miles away. He was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and refused passage. His little girl died in his arms an hour or so later when her appendix burst. Do you think anyone has to teach that bereaved father to hate Israelis? You could write a 1,000-page book telling individual stories of Israeli cruelty and the brutality they routinely display toward Palestinians.

So Sharon's problem is not a few terrorists. Sharon's problem is the entire Palestinian population. When people are made miserable and hopeless, they don't mind dying. As much as the Israelis would like to, they can't kill them all, and they can't beat them into submission. As long as the Palestinians have no state, Israel will have no security. I have great admiration for the Palestinians, but much less for George Bush, who is endangering Americans with his feckless subservience to Israel.