Sintesi personale
Subito dopo gli attacchi dell'11 settembre 2001, i palestinesi avevano
ogni ragione di temere che sarebbero i grandi perdenti
Il giorno degli attacchi i canali americani ripetevano costantemente i filmati di un piccolo gruppo di palestinesi che festeggiava .
I sostenitori israeliani hanno cercato di dimostrare con queste immagini che i palestinesi erano un popolo barbaro e nemico degli
Stati Uniti e di Israele.
Per i palestinesi, che hanno naturalmente condiviso l'orrore del resto
del mondo, è stato un momento particolarmente difficile e molti temevano
che ,dopo le migliaia di persone uccise negli attacchi, sarebbero stati loro le "seconde vittime" dell'11 settembre.
Anche se i peggiori timori dei palestinesi non si sono realizzati, il
governo del primo ministro israeliano Ariel Sharon non ha perso tempo per sfruttare le atrocità di New York, di Washington e della Pennsylvania
intensificando gli attacchi alle città palestinesi e distruggendo le
strutture appartenenti alla PA .
Israele ha tentato di vendere la tesi che la sua guerra con i
palestinesi fosse un altro fronte nella "guerra al
terrorismo".
Quando il presidente americano
George W. Bush ha dichiarato : "con noi o con i terroristi", Sharon è stato tra tra i primi a
identificarsi con gli Stati Uniti contro Al-Qaeda, equiparando istericamente il presidente palestinese Yasser Arafat con Osama bin Laden.
Tuttavia la tesi che la guerra di Israele contro i
palestinesi fosse la stessa che portava avanti l' America contro Al-Qaeda non
fu immediatamente accolta negli Stati Uniti .
Il motivo era questo: il segretario di Stato Colin Powell stava lavorando
per costruire una nuova coalizione anti-terrorismo, in particolare con i
paesi arabi e musulmani. Ciò provocò un senso di frustazione in Sharon che accusò Bush di abbandonare Israele per gli arabi,
non diversamente dalla Gran
Bretagna che aveva abbandonato la Cecoslovacchia alla Germania nazista.
Tuttavia, in ultima analisi, il tentativo di Israele di modificare la
comprensione fondamentale della natura del conflitto
palestinese-israeliano non è riuscito. Nel novembre 2001, Powell presentò l'approccio dell'amministrazione Bush al conflitto. Per la prima volta un funzionario statunitense parlò "di due stati, Israele e Palestina, con confini sicuri e riconosciuti"
Israele tuttavia ha ricevuto ricadute positive .
I neoconservatori americani (guidati da figure come il vicepresidente
Dick Cheney, il ministro della Difesa Donald Rumsfeld e il suo vice Paul
Wolfowitz) erano da tempo ammiratori del Likud Attraverso di loro, conseguentemente,
molti elementi della politica israeliana sono diventati attivi nella politica degli Stati Uniti.
Prima dell'invasione dell'Iraq, per esempio, le truppe americane sono
andate in Israele per sapere come l'esercito israeliano aveva
"combattuto" in modo efficace nelle aree urbane e nei campi profughi,
come Jenin.
L'insuccesso tristemente insoddisfacente della road map sottolinea che le dinamiche di base della politica interna degli Stati Uniti
rispetto al conflitto palestinese-israeliano sono rimaste invariate
dopo l'11 settembre. L'amministrazione Bush può articolare un approccio
plausibile, ma non può ancora raccogliere la volontà politica di
esercitare pressione su Israele per consentirne la realizzazione
Questo articolo è stato pubblicato per la prima volta in The Daily Star l'11 settembre 2003.
Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Palestinians had every reason to fear they would be the events’ great losers.On the day of the attacks, American news channels repeatedly aired footage of a tiny group of Palestinians celebrating.
Israel’s supporters tried to spin these images as proof that the
Palestinians were a barbaric people and as much enemies of the US
as of Israel. For Palestinians — who naturally shared the horror of the
rest of the world — it was a particularly anxious moment, and many
feared that after the thousands killed in the attacks, they would be the
“second victims” of September 11. In a worst-case scenario, many feared
Israel would use the events to completely destroy the Palestinian
Authority (PA), or even depopulate parts of the Occupied Territories.
Two years on, we can say that September 11 did have something of an
impact on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but not one as negative as
Palestinians feared. Indeed, in some ways the Palestinian cause is in an
even better position today.
Though the Palestinians’ worst fears were not realized, the
government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also wasted no time in
trying to exploit the atrocities in New York, Washington and
Pennsylvania by intensifying its attacks on Palestinian cities, and
destroying facilities belonging to the PA. Israel attempted to sell the line that its war with the Palestinians was essentially another front in the “war on terrorism.”
When US President George W. Bush declared
that in the post-September 11 world countries were either “with us, or
with the terrorists,” Sharon was among the first to identify himself
with the US, and his enemies with Al-Qaeda. At
its most hysterical, Sharon’s campaign equated Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat with Osama bin Laden.
Yet Sharon’s pronouncements that Israel’s war against the
Palestinians was the same as America’s war against Al-Qaeda weren’t
immediately welcomed in the US. The reason was
that Secretary of State Colin Powell was working to build a new
anti-terrorism coalition, particularly with Arab and Muslim countries.
Within a month, Sharon grew frustrated at Washington’s gentle rebuffs.
Relations with Bush reached a low point when Sharon accused him of
abandoning Israel to the Arabs, as Britain had abandoned Czechoslovakia
to Nazi Germany. Sharon also refused a direct request to withdraw
Israeli tanks from Palestinian towns.
It is understandable that Sharon thought his ploy would work. The
September 11 attacks heightened the genuine revulsion felt in the US
with suicide bombings used by Palestinian factions against Israel. Many
Americans not versed in the intricacies of Middle East politics easily
associated groups like Hamas — which never deliberately targeted
Americans — with Al-Qaeda. This made it more difficult for Palestinian
advocates to make their case to the American public.
However, ultimately, Israel’s attempt to alter the fundamental
understanding of the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict failed.
In November 2001, Powell laid out the Bush administration’s approach to
the conflict. For the first time a U.S.
official spoke “of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine, live
side by side within secure and recognized borders.” For Palestinians,
the U.S. had at last formally recognized their national rights in their homeland.
Yet Israel also made gains. American neoconservatives (led by such
figures as Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz) who exploited the September 11 attacks
to push their long-standing agenda to assure U.S.
global hegemony through aggressive “regime change,” starting with Iraq,
had long been admirers of Israel’s Likud. Through them, many elements
of Israeli policy became operating procedure for the U.S.. Prior to the
invasion of Iraq, for example, American troops went to Israel to learn
how the Israeli Army had “successfully” fought in urban areas and
refugee camps, like Jenin.
Indeed, much of the official language in which the U.S.
war on terrorism is cast has been adopted wholesale from language
pioneered by the Israeli military and Foreign Ministry, above all by
former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he was ambassador to the UN.
As Bush’s rhetoric moved closer to Sharon’s, feelings of identification
between them increased. Once Bush proclaimed the neocons’ regime change
agenda as his own, this opened new paths for Sharon.
If Sharon was unsuccessful in making the Palestinians a target of the
war on terrorism, he was able to convince Bush that regime change in
the PA was a precondition for peace. Sharon’s
triumph came when Bush declared on June 24, 2002 that “peace requires a
new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state
can be born,” and demanded that the Palestinian people elect new leaders
“not compromised by terror.”
Sharon’s victory was fleeting, however. The Bush administration,
seeking to rally the world both to the war on terrorism and the invasion
of Iraq, could not afford to be seen as sitting idly by as Israelis and
Palestinians butchered one another. To some extent Bush’s
post-September 11 agenda impelled him to take an activist role in
peacemaking that he had previously sought to avoid. Any plan he put
forward had to reflect the international consensus on the sources of the
conflict and how to resolve it.
When the “road map” was published last spring, the news was not that
it represented a fundamental change in America’s pre-September 11
approach to the Palestinians, but that it didn’t. It merely took the
traditional approach further. Many observers were surprised at how
relatively balanced and logical phase-one of the plan was, consisting
principally of bringing an end to Palestinian violence in exchange for
an end to Israeli settlement building. Had it been implemented, the plan
could have led to a workable final agreement by demonstrating that the
Palestinians could more easily achieve freedom and the Israelis security
through negotiations rather than conflict.
The road map’s sadly unsurprising failure underscores that the basic dynamics of U.S.
domestic politics with respect to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
remained unchanged after September 11. The Bush administration can
articulate a plausible approach, but still cannot muster the political
will to pressure Israel to allow the plan to be implemented.
This article was first published in The Daily Star on 11 September 2003.
Allegati
A group of Palestinians
were filmed celebrating in the street in celebration of the local news
reports of attacks on the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands
of Americans. Fox News reported that in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, revelers fired weapons in the air, with similar celebratory gunfire heard at the Rashidiyeh camp near the southern city of Tyre as well.[36] Yasser Arafat and nearly all the leaders of Palestinian National Authority
(PNA) condemned the attacks and attempted to censure and discredit
broadcasts and other Palestinian news reports justifying the attacks in
America,[36] with many newspapers, magazines, websites and wire services running photographs of Palestinian public celebrations.[46][47] The PNA claimed such celebrations were not representative of the sentiments of the Palestinian people, and the Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo
said the PNA would not allow "a few kids" to "smear the real face of
the Palestinians". In an attempt to quash further reporting, Ahmed Abdel
Rahman, Arafat's Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority
could not "guarantee the life" of an Associated Press
(AP) cameraman if footage he filmed of post-9/11 celebrations in Nablus
was broadcast. Rahman's statement prompted a formal protest from the AP
bureau chief, Dan Perry.[48][47]
James Bennet reported in the New York Times that while "most" towns in the West Bank were quiet, some drivers in East Jerusalem were honking horns in celebration, he saw one man passing out celebratory candy.[49] Big crowds" celebrated in Nablus of Palestinians, chanting Beloved bin Laden, strike Tel Aviv! while Palestinian Authority personnel prevented photographers from taking pictures.[49] Annette Krüger Spitta of the ARD's (German public broadcasting) TV magazine Panorama
states that footage not aired shows that the street surrounding the
celebration in Jerusalem is quiet. Furthermore, she states that a man in
a white T-shirt incited the children and gathered people together for
the shot. The Panorama report, dated September 20, 2001, quotes
Communications Professor Martin Löffelholz explaining that in the images
one sees jubilant Palestinian children and several adults but there is
no indication that their pleasure is related to the attack. The woman
seen cheering (Nawal Abdel Fatah) stated afterwards that she was offered
cake if she celebrated on camera, and was frightened when she saw the
pictures on television afterward.[50][51]
There was also rumour that the footage of some Palestinians
celebrating the attacks was stock footage of Palestinian reactions to
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.[52] This rumour was proven false shortly afterwards,[53] and CNN issued a statement to that effect.[54] A poll conducted by the Fafo Foundation in the Palestinian Authority in 2005 found that 65% of respondents supported "Al Qaeda bombings in the USA and Europe".[55]
2
Those images, recorded by Reuters in East Jerusalem
immediately after the attacks, showed a small number of Palestinians
cheering on a street. The footage was provided by the news agency to
clients including Fox News, CNN and NBC, who included it in their rolling coverage of the attacks in the United States.
The recorded footage
was broadcast later on an extended version of NBC’s “Today” show at
11:58 a.m., just after a live report from Lower Manhattan, where the
second tower had collapsed 90 minutes earlier.
Although the images of
children dancing in the streets in Jerusalem had been recorded earlier
in the day, and the size of the crowd was not large, in the chaos of the
day it seems possible that some viewers might have mistaken what they
saw for a live reaction to the collapse of the towers.
Festeggiamenti a Gaza: una montatura della destra neocon . Documentazione e ricostruzione della "notizia"
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