An old adage has it that birds of a feather flock together. This is certainly true when it comes to hypocrisy. American double standards are matched only by Israeli double standards.

Back in November 2004, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lay in a coma “between life and death” in a hospital on the outskirts of Paris, one was reminded of what US President George W Bush had said more than three years earlier in the wake of a suicide bombing in occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem) on August 9, 2001, which killed 18 people.

Said Bush: “Palestinian Authority Chairman Arafat must condemn this horrific terrorist attack, act now to arrest and bring to justice those responsible, and take immediate sustained action to prevent future terrorist attacks.”

The statement, which was issued after Yasser Arafat had already condemned the bombing, came from Bush in Crawford, Texas. “I deplore and strongly condemn the terrorist bombing in downtown Jerusalem,” Bush said. “Nothing is gained through cowardly acts such as this. The deliberate murder of innocent civilians is abhorrent to all.”

The thing about this statement was that it hardly lay in the mouth of the American president to condemn the Palestinians for an attack in which Israeli civilians died when no US president – neither Bush nor Clinton nor any of their predecessors – has ever condemned any Israeli government for attacks by Israeli military forces against Palestinian civilians, such as the artillery bombardment carried out by the Israeli army against a UN observers compound in southern Lebanon a few years ago in which more than 100 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, who had taken shelter in the compound, were killed. That, too, was the deliberate act of murder of innocent civilians. So why didn’t the US government condemn it? Was it because the victims in that case were Palestinian civilians?

A moral position can only be considered moral when it is applied equally across the board to incidents of a similar nature. Thus when the US condemns Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, it must, by the same token, condemn Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians. Yet it doesn’t. It never has, and there is nothing to suggest that it ever will – unless the influence of the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington diminishes to the point that American politicians are no longer afraid to speak out against Israel when it does something wrong, such as killing Palestinian civilians. So strong is the Israeli lobby, however, that the possibility of such a change of heart ever occurring in America remains remote.

Not only has the US never spoken out against Israeli governmental wrongdoing, it has also never spoken out against Jewish settler violence against the Palestinians. Settler violence, an old problem, has increased since the current Palestinian intifada began on September 28, 2000. Between that date and September 30, 2007 more than 400 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Jewish settler attacks.

And that’s in addition to over 5,000 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, killed by the Israeli army since September 28, 2000. Hundreds of them were crushed to death by Israeli army tanks and bulldozers in the Jenin and Rafah refugee camps in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many of the bodies buried under the rubble of demolished homes in Jenin in April 2002 have not been found to this day. So the families of the dead couldn’t even give them a burial.

In the wake of what happened in Jenin, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, long known as the “Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla” for his part in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanese refugee camps by the Israeli-backed Christian Falangist militia in 1982 (when Sharon was Israel’s defence minister and a serving general in the Israeli army), also became known as the “Butcher of Jenin and Rafah.”

As a captain in the Israeli army in 1953, Sharon had ordered his troops to set fire to dozens of houses in a Jordanian village which he knew to be occupied by sleeping Arab civilians, and had then ordered his troops to shoot anybody who ran out of the burning houses. More than 70 Arab civilians, including women and children, died in that horrific massacre.

Sharon was a terrorist then and remained a terrorist after he became Israel’s prime minister. Yet President George W Bush had the gall to call Sharon “a man of peace.” That was like calling Jack the Ripper “a man of peace.”

The Sharon government, like previous Israeli governments, was totally derelict in its duty to protect Palestinian civilians under its jurisdiction and to arrest, investigate and prosecute Israelis in the Occupied Territories who attacked Palestinians. The sad and shameful conclusions of the Karp Commission in 1984 and the B’Tselem report from 1994 have still not been addressed.

The Karp Commission, set up by the Israeli ministry of justice to investigate the state’s handling of crimes by Israeli civilians in the Occupied Territories, published its findings in 1984.

The commission concluded that the Israeli police department’s handling of complaints against Israeli civilians was severely deficient, and called for urgent action to safeguard the rule of law.

In 1994, a B’Tselem report examining the handling of complaints against Israeli settlers by the police found that “nothing has changed in this regard since the publication of the Karp Commission Report more than a decade ago.”

The Israeli army still stands by and does nothing while Jewish settlers shoot, stone and beat up Palestinians. The army still fails to report crimes it has witnessed to the police. The police still fail to accept complaints from Palestinians, or make it difficult for Palestinians to complain. Moreover, the police still refuse to act on Palestinian complaints or acts only half-heartedly at best.

In short, the Israeli police continue to refuse to take Palestinian complaints seriously. They protect Jewish settlers who have committed crimes against Palestinians by not investigating complaints, or by being lax in their investigations.

The Israeli judiciary, too, continues to apply double standards when it comes to interpreting the law. The judiciary sentences Jewish settlers far more leniently than Palestinians who commit the same crimes.

Part of the problem is the continuing system of legal apartheid that exists in the Occupied Territories: Israelis and Palestinians are tried under different penal codes. Settlers who have killed or injured Palestinians are systematically given much lighter sentences than the law allows.

This discriminatory sentencing policy devalues Palestinian life and sends a signal to the settlers that violence against Palestinians is less serious in the eyes of the Israeli judiciary than violence against Palestinians.

The Israeli government and its law enforcement agencies – the army, the police department and the judiciary – have failed to abide by international law, domestic Israeli law and universal human rights standards requiring all people to be treated equally before the law.

The Israeli government has also failed in its duty to protect Palestinians under its jurisdiction from attacks by settlers, and has done nothing to discourage settlers from operating their own so-called “security patrols” – an Israeli euphemism for what are often little more than vigilante hit squads.

Even schoolchildren have not been spared in the reign of terror unleashed by the Israeli government. Palestinian schoolchildren, teachers and others involved in the education system have been subject to Israeli violence and brutal control tactics. Palestinian schools have been attacked and turned into army bases; Israeli checkpoints and concrete roadblocks have been installed to impede travel on roads leading to schools; and Palestinian students and teachers have been shot at, killed, wounded or arrested on their way to school by the Israeli army.

Neither President Bush nor any of his predecessors has ever condemned any of these acts of Israeli brutality against the Palestinians.

The other thing about Bush’s statement of August 9, 2001 was his stress on the word “terrorism.” No word in modern political usage is more controversial than “terrorism.” The United Nations spent 17 years trying to come up with a universally acceptable definition, and failed. In the West and particularly in the United States, it is used to describe political groups that use violence to advance their agenda.

But the Palestinians, who have often been on the receiving end of the word, say that the “terrorist” label unjustly vilifies them and their cause. They argue that the label is used to smear legitimate movements of resistance and national liberation whose interests do not mesh with the interests of the United States and other Western countries.