Endorsing ethnic cleansing in the guise of political debate

"Why do they hate us?" So went the question after Sept. 11, in the wake of the worst terrorist attacks in American history. I was thinking about this last week, having watched open-mouthed as the Republican leaders from the House of Representatives, Tom Delay and Dick Armey, outdid each other in breathless attacks on the Palestinians.

First up was Delay, aligning himself with the most extreme elements in Israeli society by arguing that Israel was not to be criticized for its 35-year occupation: In fact, the West Bank was really called 'Judea and Samaria,' and belonged to Israel. The Palestinians, despite hundreds of years of uninterrupted residence, were squatters on Israeli land.

A couple of days later, Dick Armey, the majority leader of the House, went one step further on MSNBC: "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank," he told an amazed Chris Matthews. And what about the one and a half million people who live there? "I happen to believe that the Palestinians should leave," Armey replied.

So there you go: An elected U.S. leader advocates the removal of the entire Palestinian population to make way for a greater Israel. We gave this kind of policy a name in the 1990s — ethnic cleansing — but we'd have to go back to Stalin or Hitler to find an example on this scale. And the consequences for saying this in front of a television audience of millions? Well, there are none — Armey went back to the House the next day to pilot another pro-Israel resolution through Congress, and his remarks were ignored by the media. (With the exception of MSNBC, whose website asked viewers to join the debate: "Do Palestinians have any right to the West Bank?") Let's be clear about this — a prominent politician advocates ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, and no-one thinks this is a big deal? What's worse, in the present crazy climate in Congress — where flamboyantly pro-Israel resolutions are passed almost unanimously — it seems more likely that Armey will be rebuked for leaving out Gaza (that's another 1.2 million Palestinians to load onto the trucks . . .) than for proposing mass expulsion.

What we're seeing right now is extraordinarily dangerous: the range of political expression in America — already diminished by Sept. 11 — is narrowing into a tiny band in which praise and support for Israel is mandatory, and increasingly outrageous attacks on Palestinians are either embraced by U.S. leaders or quietly allowed to stand. Given this, it's no wonder that American foreign policy has gone off the rails. The Bush administration leaks word that it intends a major attack on Iraq this winter despite last week's admission by federal authorities that there has never been any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, not to mention the objections of Saddam's neighbors to a military attack. Bush continues to trumpet Hamid Karzai and the new government in Afghanistan, and overlooks the fact that the warlords who wielded power between 1992 and 1996 (and were arguably even worse than the Taliban) have resumed their control of the vast areas beyond Kabul. Colin Powell notes the Israeli ransacking or destruction of civilian infrastructure (schools, banks, government offices, private homes) in the West Bank and issues his fearsome ultimatum to Ariel Sharon: Withdraw or we'll do nothing. And, meanwhile, the newspapers quietly report that the United States has failed to find any evidence linking the 19 suicide bombers of Sept. 11 to Anyone else — the trail is completely cold. Even the evidence against the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, is completely circumstantial. With the acknowledgement that bin Laden and most of his top lieutenants have evaded the US global dragnet, should we feel more or less secure today than we did eight months ago?

I watched the CBS "9/11" documentary the other day, trying to remind myself what it felt like to be in New York in the days after the attacks. There was, briefly, a real sense that things might change — that the old mistakes and lies wouldn't survive the fall of the World Trade Center. Instead, on the rubble of old fallacies, we seem to have built a series of new ones. Some of them, including Armey's remarks about the expulsion of the Palestinians, even manage to tower over their predecessors. ("Why do they hate us?" Perhaps because our elected leaders openly advocate ethnic cleansing on a Stalinist scale, without shame or fear of reproach). Even as these fallacies multiply, we should be quite clear about one thing: unless there is a genuine effort on the part of the United States to assuage the enormous injustice in and beyond the Middle East, Sept. 11 will not be the last of these attacks. Will it take another massive loss of life for Americans to realize this? Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.