By Saneya Arif Sydney Sheldon in one of his famous fictions, best laid his male muse in the newly elected young American presiden...
By Saneya Arif
Sydney Sheldon in one of his famous fictions, best laid his male
muse in the newly elected young American president. This young blood had the fantasy
of wiping out all the conflicts from the Middle East. Thus without informing
his trusted personnel’s and the senators he planned a visit to Middle East,
where he was to meet all the rulers of these countries in a yacht all alone. There
in the secret meeting he tried to convince them to resolve the matter of issue
among them and acquired fruitful results, when these rulers said yes for the
related negotiations. Later when he returned back to his country, he informed
his trusted ones about the secret meeting and the cherished results. Having
known about such a euphemistic of an act being performed by the American
president, they showed great resentment as what they feared was the settling of
the disputes among the countries of Middle East and not its very continuation.
If the issues gets resolved it will be America’s loss, the country will profit
only if the issue remains.
The above mentioned belief although is endorsed with a mere
utopia, yet holds similar predicaments to America’s idiosyncrasy till date. After
laying down such a belief so straight against Uncle Sam, Sydney Sheldon might
have suffered a writer’s block but that is totally a different part of the
story. Here my attempt is to put a note to the opportunistic tendencies
showcased by America in the matters between Palestine and Israel from the time immemorial
in an attempt to best serve its selfish interests.
Tragedies and traumas do lie at both the Israel as well as
the Arab’s part. Both boast themselves to be the real sufferers. In this paper
of mine, my aim is to bring forth the realities of this Palestinian cauldron to
the self made blurred eyes of the world. Cornel West says “we must keep in
touch with the humanities of both sides”. I agree with him when the memories of
the Holocaust flash past into my eyes. I do get swayed in the waves of sensitivity
remembering the unmitigated horror of the Nazi atrocities and the genocide
against the Jew’s. Yet this no longer holds the same, the moment the year 1948
struck my mind. A day before the ides of May, when Israel declared herself to
be a state under the report submitted by the special commission set up by U.N.O
which laid down the division of Palestine into two states, Arab and Israel. When
Israel was formed America was the first one to give its acceptance to it,
followed by Soviet Union and Britain. This well shows the utmost interest Uncle
had in all these hassles and is still seen playing their card when Israel is a
party to any of the related disputes. This has further escalated the anger
among the Arab people. It was in the same year when Israel won a decisive war
against the Arab countries. As a result Palestinians homes and villages got
demolished, thousands of them were killed, most of their lands were taken away
to grow the eucalyptus brought from America, and all this under the so called
Israeli Diaspora. Israel professes to follow Zionism which supports a Jewish
nation state in the defined land of Israel, but in reality what it follows is a
perverted form of Zionism which allows assimilation of Jews into other societies
too. It seems what Jews have in them for Israel is not patriotism; rather they
excel in jingoism and thus are seen wiping off the Arab people from Palestine
and trying to capture the whole land in the name of various peace propaganda.
1948 is commemorated as Al-Nakba,
Arabic for "catastrophe."[1]
Israel declared herself a state on May 14, 1948. It is since then the year and
the following months have brought chaos and violence for Palestinians. Palestinians
were forced to leave their land permanently by the Israeli troops. Their villages
and homes were demolished and thousands were killed. Many left their homes out
of the fear, to protect themselves from the bullets soaring in their
neighborhoods between Jewish and British soldiers. Even after so much of
hassle and tussle these Palestinians carried immense hope of returning back to
their homes after the violence abated. But that did not turned out to be a
reality. Credit goes to the so called settler state, ‘Israel’, settler just for
name sake. Nearly 750,000 Palestinians were rendered homeless and forced into
settling in surrounding Arab countries and that was later to become the West
Bank and Gaza. They have never been allowed to return till date. At present
many refugees and their descendants, who are approximately 3.6 million in
number, have the keys of the houses that were either taken over or destroyed by
Israelis. Furthermore, the catastrophe still continues. The filthy refugee
camps in Lebanon, the West Bank, and other Arab countries are the places meant
for the Palestinians to live in. They are not permitted to be citizens of any
Arab state except to that of Jordan. Others are spread throughout the world in
the Palestinian Diaspora. According to the Oslo agreements, Palestinian dream
of the West Bank and Gaza to be their future state, but Israel has even
occupied much of these regions today. It is because of all these reasons that the
Palestinian economy and infrastructure witnesses itself in shambles. People are
living without food and healthcare. Their lives have been destroyed.
Israel claims to follow Zionism in
an attempt to spread the so called Israeli Diaspora. I do not understand as to
what sort of Zionism is this in which they are seen occupying and encroaching
upon the lands of others building up for themselves more and more illegal
settlements and bypass roads, taking virtually all of the Palestinian water,
bulldozing their homes, destroying olive groves, and engaging in endless
humiliation rituals at road blocks. The current tendency is such in which the
Palestinians are to face the arbitrary arrests, beatings, killings, curfews,
their infrastructure reduced to debris; an economy torn to shreds; relentless
harassment by soldiers; everyday life irrevocably disrupted and collective
punishment. Almost all Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem,
and Gaza have been touched by such acts. At every nook and corner a brother, a father,
a mother, a husband, a wife or a child is being killed, wounded, or died for
lack of medical care. Such butcheries performed by the Israelis against the
Palestinians have made the latter pose a question to itself “Are we
Palestinians one big lie?” Their very existences have come to acquire a
question mark which has no answer to it in the short run. God alone knows about
the long run for they believe that their god has even failed.
Since the time Israel occupied Palestine, it has always
tried to increase the paradigm of its Diaspora. It says it wants peace with
Palestine but the reality holds different. Its peace initiatives are merely
propaganda. It has never wanted peace with the state, to which it must owe its
origin to. The reality showcases that Israel has always subverted the peace processes
be it the Oslo peace accord of 1993, the Israeli Palestinian peace talks at Camp
David, the Arab initiatives or any other such peace agreements. Israel has
always served as a cancerous tumor for all such peace processes and has come
to fire all of these with the all time help extended to it by America. It has
tried to show that it is interested in peace but actually it is interested in flushing
out the Arab people from Palestine and capture the whole land. The question
that arises at this point is why such a special treatment given by Uncle to the
settler? Does Israel need a pro Israel lobby? The answer finds itself in the
statement of Martin Kramer. “Israel does not need the whole array of organizations that
claim to work on its behalf. The rationale for keeping Israel strong is
hardwired in the realities of the Middle East. The United States does not have
an alternative ally of comparable power. And if the institutions of the lobby
were to disappear tomorrow, it is quite likely that American and other Western
support would continue unabated”. [2]
Today we hardly give a damn to the
debate of Israel being a liability or an asset to America. This is because we
are well aware of the social relationships being showcased every now and then
by the American president towards Israel on the international forefront. The
moment we encounter an all time inclination of Uncle towards Israel with least
or no preferences for Palestine, such questions of liability and asset looses
all its importance and gets to drop then and there. Anyhow there is end number
of rationales for why the United States backs Israel.
According to Kramer, most
supporters of Israel, when pressed to go a bit deeper, will give two prime
rationales for why the United States should back Israel. One is a moral
obligation to the Jewish people, grounded in the history of Jewish persecution
and culminating in the Holocaust. Israel, so this thinking goes, is something
the civilized world owes to the Jewish people, having inflicted an
unprecedented genocide upon it. This is a potent rationale, but it is not clear
why that would make Israel an asset to the United States. If supporting Israel
is an obligation, then it could be described as a liability — a burden to be
borne. And of course, as time passes, that sense of obligation is bound to
diminish.
Another powerful rationale given
by him is the fact that Israel is a democracy, even an outpost of democracy, in
a benighted part of the world. But the fact is that there are many
non-democratic states that have been allies of the United States, and important
assets as well. Quite arguably, the Saudi monarchy is an asset to the United
States, because it assures the flow of oil at reasonable prices, a key American
interest. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority and Iran, which have many more
democratic practices than Saudi Arabia, are headaches to the United States, for
having empowered the likes of Hamas and Ahmadinejad through elections. So the
fact that Israel is a democracy is not proof positive that it is an American
asset. [3]
No matter whatever the rationale is, be it the democracy of
Israel, moral obligation of Americans towards Jewish people or the centralism
of the petro-currency in this state, the eyeballing effect being created is
that United States has always come to back Israel in all its pros and cons.
Similar is the case with the peace processes being undertaken between Israel
and Palestine.
It was not Palestine rather Israel which jeopardized the Oslo Agreements in
its very essence by delaying each and every phase of it. Israel’s occupation forces were to have
withdrawn from substantially all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by July,
1997 – more than four and a half years ago. The process of withdrawal was to be
carried out in three phases, beginning in October 1996 and ending in July 1997
and would have transferred approximately 88 percent of the West Bank to
Palestinian control. But due to the Israeli hold-ups, the Palestinian Authority
has only full jurisdiction over 17.2 percent of the West Bank. [4]
Moreover the freedom which Palestinians would have had by 1999 under this agreement
seems to be no less than a hallucination. The Israeli military operations are
becoming intensified time and around. Israel goes on negotiating and
renegotiating deadlines with PLO on matters of peace but at the end of the day
stresses on initiating crimes against Palestinians to wipe them out.
Interim
Agreement that stubbed premonitions of prosecuting Israel for crimes committed
against Palestinians was all a miasma being spread by Israel. Since this
agreement there have been hundreds of attacks against Palestinians and
Palestinian property and none of the Israeli settlers have been prosecuted till
date. Furthermore the closure of the southern safe passage route and the yet
not opened northern route adds to the recalcitrant behavior of Israel towards
Palestine.
While Israeli tanks
and bulldozers were rolling into, and Israeli planes were bombarding
Palestinian towns and cities, including refugee camps, President George W. Bush
proclaimed that the situation in which Palestinian Authority (P.A.) President
Yasser Arafat found him—imprisoned in a room of his Ramallah headquarters—was
"largely of his own making." Bush claimed that Arafat had
"broken every promise made at Oslo," and that had led to the crisis. [5] Here I wish
to remind Mr former President that Arafat is no more and thus under no
circumstance will ask for forgiveness crying out loud the biblical maxim ‘Mea
maxima culpa’.
All of the above made claims well shows the burgeoning pro
Israel tendencies of America from the time immemorial because we very well know
the slaughter hands behind the failure of the Oslo agreements. The 1993
agreements failed because powerful
Israeli interests and their U.S.-based allies caused it to fail. Similar were
the cases when it comes to peace talks at Camp David. Again here it was the
Palestinians who were held responsible by the Clinton’s administration for the
collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Camp David in the summer of 2000.
But the reality holds different. If one will closely examine the events both at
Oslo and Camp David and the related initiatives being taken by both Israel and
Palestine since then, however one will be in a position to indicate that the
primary fault for both the failure of the peace process and the subsequent
violence lies squarely with Israel and its benefactor, the United States. Both
the Clinton and Bush administrations, along with leading members of Congress
from both parties, have simply distorted what happened in the peace process
before, during and after Camp David, as well as what has transpired since the
outbreak of the second intifada in late September 2000. From the beginning of the talks subsequent
to the Principles of Understanding negotiated in Oslo between Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organization and signed in Washington in September 1993,
both sides saw the process very differently. The Palestinians saw it as a means
to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. By contrast, the United States and Israel saw it as a way of
maintaining an Israeli occupation of major sections of these territories with
the Palestinian Authority in charge of administrating most major Palestinian population
centers and cooperating in the protection of Israel and its settlements in the
occupied territories. [6] Thus we
see that there was no malice in the hearts of Arab people ever. Contrary to
this Israel and its patron United States had heart filled with filth and they
took each step with an iron fist under the velvet gloves serving their petty
opportunistic interests.
Furthermore the suicide
bombings rigmarole as an attempt by Sharon to root out terrorism is again a
myth. In reality it is simply targeting the P.A.'s police force, which
according to Oslo was shaped as the force to establish law and order, and root
out terrorism in order to maintain peace between Israel and Palestine. As noted
by Russian strategic analyst Pavel Felgengauer, “it is as if Sharon and the
Hamas are working together. In fact, although Sharon invaded every major
Palestinian village and city in the West Bank, he strangely left Gaza, the
stronghold of Hamas, untouched. He has been systematically killing P.A. police
and security, but not the terrorists themselves”.
Few so called
loyalist and anti Palestinians may again put these as the terrorism being
brought in by Palestinians and it’s no more leader Arafat. But then the need of
the time is to make these people go back to the pages of history and do the
introspection as to who in reality was the first suicide bomber to bring in the
so called violence in the region. Was it Palestine or was it Israel who opened
fired a Palestinian group killing them in large numbers in the year 1994? He
must also introspect as to who assassinated the Israeli military professional
and peace lover Rabin? Was it a Palestinian terrorist or was it a right wing
Israeli extremist, acting in compliance with the element of Israeli security?
Thus it could be stated that throughout the peace processes, the Clinton administration always
showed its proclivity towards Israel trying to coordinate the talks very
closely with this state with a special sort of ignorance shown towards
Palestine. The wishes of Palestinians to address the issue of Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories and the status of Jerusalem some years
earlier were always seen delayed and subsequently denied by America. U.S was always seen on a front-line whenever
it was something related to Israel’s security and stood last for the Cause of
Palestinians. Thus Israel and the United States worked closely with each other
on their individual proposals; for all intents and purposes. These were largely
joint efforts to evacuate the Arab land for the Jews under the so called
Zionist regime in an attempt to spread the Israeli Diaspora.
References:
1 Kramer
Martin, Arab Nationalism: Mistaken identity, Deadalus, summer 1993, pp.
171-206.
2 Ben Meir
Alon, Resurrecting the Arab peace initiative, April 25, 2013.
3 Kramer
Martin, Sandbox, Do we need a pro Israel lobby? March 4, 2013.
4 Kramer
Martin, Sandbox, The American Interest, Azure, no. 26, pp. 21-33, January 26,
2010.
5 Zunes
Stephen, Journal essay, Middle East policy council.
6 Flick
Deborah L, Toward understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, June 2002.
7 Mirak-Weissbach
Muriel, Executive Intelligence Review, Who murdered the Oslo Accords? April 19,
2002.
8 Verma
Dinanath, Asian modern history, Ch 39, Formation of Israel and Arab and Israel
relations, pg 171-188.
9 West
Deborah L, WPF Reports, Myth and Narrative in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
