18 - 24 October 2001
Issue No.556
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 October 2001 Issue No.556 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Terrorism is the issue
David Hirst discusses attempts to link and delink
Tony Blair says that both he and George Bush are "completely seized of the need to push forward" the Middle East peace process, because the Arab-Israeli conflict plays into the hands of "terrorists who seek to utilise prevailing feelings of frustration and despair in the Arab and Islamic world to justify terrorist activities." He concedes that the West is in danger of losing the propaganda battle for Arab and Muslim support. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is reportedly preparing to increase the pressure on Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to accept a viable Palestinian state that would include a "shared Jerusalem." Officials describe the president as "incensed," and "really steamed," over Sharon's recent outburst likening Israel to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and warning him not to "appease the Arabs" in another Munich.
This comes close to a recognition, by the joint leaders of the "war on terror," of the centrality of the Palestinian question in this world crisis, of the need to address it with a greater urgency, seriousness and impartiality than ever before, and of the likelihood that to do so will involve a decisive showdown with Sharon and the most extreme government in Israel's history.
That recognition is already an achievement for Bin Laden, even if it is others than he, defeated in the war, who ultimately profit from it. It is being widely said that, messianic fanatic that he is, he is totally, exclusively preoccupied with his holy war against the "infidel" West and the establishing of Taliban-style rule throughout the Muslim world, and that he only seized on Palestine out of opportunist demagogy.
That is not true. It stands to reason that destroying Israel, driving the Jews out of Dar Al-Islam, the lands of Islam, of which, for him, Palestine is an intrinsic part, would be inherent in his world- view from the outset; and in fact, ever since the 1980s, when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he used to say that Palestine should be next.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't alter the fact that the Palestine problem is central indeed, merely show that, like any politician, he exploits the issues from which he derives most profit. The more thoughtful Palestinians don't want to be associated with the Lucifer of international terrorism, but, as Ghassan Al-Khatib, editor of Palestine Report, says, the fact that he chooses to associate himself with them simply means that "the Palestinian cause is the most legitimate and credible in the region. As long as there is an illegitimate Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the refugee problem of four million Palestinians is not solved and East Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque remain under the control of the Israeli occupiers, we will continue to see attempts to make use of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause -- whether they are right or wrong." Bin Laden is only doing what Saddam Hussein did in the 1990 Gulf War. It was Saddam who established the now entrenched concept of "linkage" between Palestine and any separate crisis of another's making. Having perpetrated his great act of international banditry, the rape of Kuwait, he announced that he would withdraw from it just as soon as Israel withdrew from the occupied territories.
To Arabs and Muslims, this "linkage," and the Western bias that has made it possible for the likes of Saddam and Bin Laden to exploit it, is an obvious and fundamental reality -- even if they concede, as many do, that sicknesses in their own ruling systems and societies are part of the reality too. And, for them, the very fact that it is so obvious -- as well as so obvious what conclusions Western policy-makers should draw from it -- explains why the "other side" seems so resolutely blind to it. Thus, Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US, wrote last week that he saw no connection whatever between fundamentalist terror and "Israeli occupation"; it all stemmed from extremist Islam's hatred of anything that smells of democracy, freedom, human rights. It is essentially the same mind-set that caused mayor Rudolph Giuliani to reject the $10 million donation to New York City from the Saudi tycoon Prince Waleed Bin Talal, who had made that connection. Even the Washington Post, in an editorial last week, argued that "the largest single 'cause' of Islamic extremism and terrorism is not Israel, nor US policy on Iraq," but pro-Western Arab governments, such as President Mubarak's, which "encourage state-controlled clerics and media to promote the anti- Western, anti-modern and anti-Jewish propaganda of the Islamic extremists."
It has to be said any Bush-Blair recognition of the obvious will create the unfortunate impression that terrorism does pay, and the more drastic it is the greater the pay-off. The pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi was sarcastic about that: "It is nice of Blair to declare that the Palestinians have a right to live on their land, to achieve justice and an opportunity to prosper as equal partners to Israel, but did we have to wait for the loss of 6,000 innocent American lives and $100 billion to hear such words from the prime minister of the country that had the largest role in the tragedy of the Palestinian people?"
Naturally, neither Bush nor Blair can allow that impression any credence, or admit that "linkage" is once again surreptitiously asserting itself. But it is. "Linkage" came to nothing last time because, once the crisis was over with the liberation of Kuwait, the US could no longer summon up the will required to fulfil the pledge that George Bush Sr had made to the Arabs at the time: namely, "to push the Israelis into a solution."
But this is a far graver crisis, already infinitely more damaging to Western interests, of no known duration, scope or definable outcome. If, as Bush and Blair seem to be acknowledging, the Palestine problem helped create the conditions that created Bin Laden, they must, Arabs are saying, deal with those conditions here and now. They cannot just wait till their war is over, as they waited till Saddam had been driven from Kuwait. Furthermore, any such political assault on the causes of terror cannot but profoundly influence the course of their military assault on the terror itself.
It means, for a start, that there cannot be any widening of the war, as the hawks in the US administration apparently want, to embrace Iraq, or even some other Arab countries such as Syria, taxed with sponsoring Lebanese or Palestinian organisations such as Hizbullah and Hamas. After 10 years of "containment" of Saddam -- however possibly justified that might be in itself -- Arab and Muslim attitudes to the Iraqi question have become almost entirely derivative of the Palestine one. The relentless punishment inflicted on a miscreant Arab and Muslim state is bad enough on its own; it is infinitely worse when set against the succour and indulgence which the US heaps on what, to Arabs and Muslims, is its no less miscreant Israeli protégé. There may be no more evil despot than Saddam, no ruler whom his own people would more dearly love to be rid of. The tragedy is, however, that, because of the cumulative errors of the past, to attack him, possibly without any proof of involvement in the New York atrocity, would be a truly devastating example of the Western double standards that poisons everything. At the very least the US and Britain could only deal with Saddam after they have given convincing evidence that they are serious about Palestine.
Will they be? The Arabs are deeply sceptical. But two things might compel them. One is the sheer gravity of the crisis. The other, paradoxically perhaps, is Sharon himself. He is so extreme, so seemingly indifferent to the larger interests of Israel's US benefactor, so recklessly apt to prove that his country, far from being the Western strategic asset it has always deemed itself, is, when the chips are really down, the most burdensome of liabilities. If the US and Britain are really serious there is almost bound to be the kind of collision, or battle royal, which successive US administrations, fearful of the extraordinary influence of the Zionist lobby in Congress and elsewhere, have shied away from in the past. The emotional blackmail of Sharon's "Czechoslovakia" jibe, the mentality and method that lie behind it, would then rebound against him, as well as the whole rightist camp, some even more extreme than him, who now dominate Israeli political life. Terrorism is the issue. It would not be very difficult for an American president exasperated beyond endurance to portray an Israeli leader with such a violent and brutal past as a terrorist on a par with those, the Arafats and the Hassan Nasrallahs, whom Sharon calls "our own Bin Ladens" -- and, in the patriotic fervour of the times, to carry the American public with him.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page