ISRAEL

Guardian: Neglect of the Palestinian plight is risky and wrong

So anxious are we about the coming war in the Middle East that we sometimes overlook the one that is already going on. It takes an unusually bloody round of killing by Israelis and Palestinians like the one this week to remind outsiders that they are still at each other's throats. Yet the hostilities between the two peoples are clearly as great a source of instability, violence, and terror as anything for which Saddam Hussein is at this moment responsible. Clearly. And yet that is not clear to the Israeli government, nor to the Bush administration in Washington, welded as it is to Ariel Sharon and his purposes. Their blindness is familiar enough, but familiarity does not mean that it is any the less dangerous.
The worst prospect of all is that a project to permanently suppress the Palestinian people could become part of a supposed new order in the region after an an American victory over Saddam. It is not that the evidence for such an outcome is conclusive. It is not. But the mere fact that the question is at all open is in itself outrageous. That the Palestinian cause is being neglected, or shuffled off till a more "convenient" time is deeply unfair and wrong, as well as enormously risky at a time when the US and Britain are contemplating the invasion and occupation of an Arab country. Those risks are obvious everywhere in the region. Even in Iraq itself, however grateful people might immediately be for liberation from Saddam, can it be imagined that they would for long tolerate without protest an intimate connection with a US involved in cheating the Palestinians? Let alone the kind of close relationship with Israel that some in Washington seem to envisage for a new Iraq? The resentment some may feel at the way the Palestinian cause has obscured the plight of the Iraqis and at Yasser Arafat's past associations with Saddam will be a passing thing. The democracy the US wishes to help establish in Iraq would surely make the early expression of pro-Palestinian feelings more rather than less likely.