Anjalisa — A New Middle East is Born: But not exactly the one Shimon Peres had in
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A New Middle East is Born: But not exactly the one Shimon Peres had in
mind
Omar Barghouti, Electronic Lebanon, 19 July 2006
Smoke rises from the scene of an Israeli attack on a Lebanese port on
the morning of July 17, 2006. (IRINNews/Peter Speetjens)
Six long, bloodstained days have passed since Israel launched its
barbaric attack on Lebanon without succeeding in exacting a
significant military toll on the resistance itself. Six days are
exactly what it took Israel to deal a crushing and humiliating
military defeat to the largely inferior armies of Egypt, Syria and
Jordan in June 1967, and to subsequently occupy the Palestinian Gaza
Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan
Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. How the “Middle East” has
changed in the past 4 decades! Indeed, thanks to the Lebanese
resistance, and to an extent its Palestinian counterpart, this
volatile zone is undergoing radical transformation from a region where
Arab regimes — and societies, more or less — have largely
internalized defeat and US-Israeli hegemony as fate to one that is
palpably rebuilding its confidence in the future and its hope for an
era of justice and peace, without colonial and racist oppression.
This is certainly not the “New Middle East” that had been on the
agenda before the current Palestinian intifada broke out. Shimon
Peres, the current Israeli deputy prime minister and one of the few
remaining historic Zionist leaders, often spoke during the heyday of
the Oslo “peace process” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) of his vision for a new Middle East, where Israel
and its Arab “neighbors” would live in harmony, peace and common
prosperity. For the uninitiated in Zionist talk, this translates into
an official Arab capitulation to Israel’s hegemony over the Middle
East, opening up lucrative Arab markets to its advanced economy and to
its insatiable desire for becoming a regional empire. Conspicuously
missing from Peres’s grand plan was a just solution of the
Arab-Israeli conflict which, according to international law, would
entail ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of the Palestinian,
Syrian and Lebanese territories occupied in 1967; recognizing the
rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands, from which
they were ethnically cleansed to establish Israel on the ruins of
their society; and ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination
against its own Palestinian citizens, who are denied any semblance of
equality in a state that not only discriminates against them in the
provision of basic services and recognition of fundamental rights, but
precludes them from its very self-definition as well.
After six days of Israel’s aggression against Lebanon — ostensibly to
free two of its soldiers captured by Hizbullah in a stunningly
sophisticated military operation at the Lebanese-Israeli border — and
its deliberate, gradual massacre of innocent Lebanese civilians as a
tactic to erode Hizbullah’s public support, the Lebanese resistance
has not only persevered but has also dealt Israel some unexpectedly
harsh blows that have already succeeded in lastingly changing the face
of the Middle East. While the West chose to ignore the plight of Arab
civilians who have fallen victim to these latest Israeli war crimes,
the Arab world did not miss the blunt felling of several other
“victims,” illusions and myths that have hitherto been perceived by
many as facts of life.
The first of those victims is Israel’s “deterrence.” Israel explicitly
admitted that its deliberate use of overwhelming — or
“disproportionate,” in the West’s sanitized language — force was
aimed at recovering its “damaged deterrence.” Its patent means for
achieving this end is through indiscriminate killing and gratuitous
devastation, both intended to reinforce Israel’s image in the
collective “Arab mind” as an invincible, unrivaled power in the
region, and, crucially, as a “mad dog” that knows no rational bounds
to the exercise of brute force to achieve its objectives, as Moshe
Dayan once advocated. From this perspective, instilling despair and
utter fear becomes Israel’s weapon of choice in psychological warfare,
the tools of which it has mastered for decades. Accordingly, hope
among the oppressed must be crushed at any price lest it leads to
upheaval and open defiance to the oppressive order. What Hizbullah did
in six days, coming at the heels of six years of open Palestinian
defiance in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), is nothing less
than tearing down that “iron wall” of Arab hopelessness, thereby
further undermining the foundations of Israel’s deterrent capability.
Another casualty of Israel’s double-aggression on Gaza and Lebanon is
the official West’s claim to moral consistency, decency, or even
respect for international law. Western governments have, by and large,
openly or bashfully supported Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its
ruthless bombardment of Lebanon as a form of “self-defence,”
overlooking the standard definition of this notion and the limits set
on it in international legal conventions. European submission to, or
voluntary adoption of, the US doctrine that only Israel is entitled to
the right to “defend” itself in this conflict betrays Europe’s
collusion in reinforcing a key pillar in the US empire’s world view:
might makes right, and international law can take a hike. As an
editorial in the Guardian today rightly states, “Not calling clearly
for a truce at once could suggest [Europe’s] complicity with what
Israel is doing and the US is tacitly backing: using overwhelming
force to defeat or cripple Hizbullah, whatever the consequences for
Lebanon or the region.”
Furthermore, by expressing a nauseatingly unbalanced concern over loss
of Israeli lives — military and civilian — while comparatively
devaluing loss of life among Arab civilians in Lebanon and Gaza to
little more than a nuisance that may potentially blemish Israel’s
otherwise bright image, Western officials and most of the sheepish,
corporate-controlled mainstream media in the West have betrayed a
level of naked racism that many had thought extinct in these beacons
of democracy and enlightenment. Reflecting this phenomenon, a recent
New York Times editorial, for instance, describes Israel’s atrocities
in Lebanon as “far-reaching military responses” that are “legally and
morally justified.”
Of course this hardly comes as a surprise to anyone closely monitoring
Western political and cultural discourse about the Arab world, as
expressed by officials, pundits and media editorials. Still, the
unmitigated disregard for the sanctity of human life in the “global
south” in general, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay,
Rwanda, Palestine or Lebanon, in comparison with Western — including
Israeli — lives, is a disturbing reminder that racism, far from being
an ugly memory of the colonial West’s past, is live and kicking and
abundantly present in its corridors of power, singularly affecting its
decision making vs. the Middle East. At the core of this resilient
bigotry is a common view — not always overtly articulated — of
non-whites as merely relative humans, lacking some of the basic
attributes associated with “full” humans, i.e. whites. The essentially
equal worth of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, color,
gender or faith, has again become among many Western elites a matter
of opinion.
The latest fatality in Israel’s war of aggression is the Arab-Israeli
“peace process.” The Arab League’s Secretary General, Mr. Amr Moussa,
has officially announced its death in a press conference held right
after the emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on
Saturday. Again, this is not news to any observer of this process of
deception, which was carefully designed to legitimize Israel’s control
over parts of the occupied Palestinian territory and its denial of
some of the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine, as well as
to dictate Israel’s terms for “peace,” namely unqualified Arab
submission to its injustice.
Given all the real and virtual victims of Israel’s ongoing trashing of
international law and mockery of the so-called international political
system, purportedly headed by the UN, Arab civil society ought to
struggle to further spread the reach and depth of the growing,
progressive movement advocating a boycott of Israel, similar to that
applied to apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, only such a morally
sound, non-violent form of resistance can produce sustainable and
practical pressures that can hold Israel to account and therefore give
just peace a chance.
Israel embarked on its latest bloody adventure hoping to change the
rules of the game. People of conscience everywhere can indeed hand it
brand new “rules of the game”: turning it into a pariah state until it
fully complies with its obligations under international law and starts
treating its victims as equal humans who deserve full human and
political rights, most crucial of which is their unassailable right to
live in freedom and dignity.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian analyst.