Arab newspapers spoke of a ‘massacre’. But western newspapers spoke of ‘killings’

October 1990, and echoing the present-day crisis in the Middle East, Robert Fisk asked how there could be a “settlement” in the Middle East until double standards were abandoned

An Israeli border officer points his rifle at a Palestinian man in October 1990 (AFP/Getty)

Anyone who wanted to understand the Gulf yesterday – not just the Arabian Peninsula but the psychological canyon that divides Muslim East from Christian West – had only to read how the world reacted to the slaughter of Palestinians by armed Israeli police in Jerusalem. Arab newspapers spoke of a “massacre” but Western newspapers spoke of “killings” and James Baker, the US Secretary of State, referred to them as a “tragedy” – as if the deaths were caused by some natural disaster such as an earthquake or a flood.

If soldiers of an Arab nation had shot dead 19 Jewish demonstrators on Monday, wounding another 140, the positions would, of course, have been reversed. The American news agencies that recorded the “killings” of the Palestinians would have been referring to a “massacre” while the Arabs would have been reduced to pleading, pathetically, for “restraint” – the very same inappropriateness of response that President Bush demonstrated towards the dreadful events at the Mosque of Al-Aqsa.

Until these double standards can be abandoned, how can there be a “settlement” in the Middle East? For in just a few minutes on Monday, those Israeli police officers firing their live rounds into the crowd of stone-throwing Palestinians handed Saddam Hussein his greatest victory since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August. A quarter of a million young Americans – and 8,000 Britons – are preparing to fight the Iraqis in the Gulf in a war that may, if it breaks out, cost tens of thousands of lives. And at the very moment when those Western armies desperately need to maintain a broad measure of Arab support for their stand against president Saddam, the Israelis have done more to damage this new alliance than all the radical Arab leaders combined.