Rene — U.S. is on Wrong Side of the Wall
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — U.S. is on Wrong Side of the WallU.S. is on Wrong Side of the Wall
By Blatantly Backing Israel’s Ariel Sharon, President Bush has given
Arabs Another Target
by Gwynne Dyer
Friday, April 16, 2004
Newsday / Long Island, New York
You never know which straw will finally break the camel’s back, but it
may have been Wednesday’s summit between President George W. Bush and
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The public endorsement that Bush gave to Sharon’s abandonment of the
“peace process” in favor of “unilateral disengagement” was mostly
symbolic, since the Israeli leader was committed to doing it
anyway. But in the Middle East, patience is finally running out.
The people of the Arab countries have been remarkably patient as they
watched their living standards decline under corrupt and oppressive
governments backed by the West. They have been patient as Israel sat
on the conquered Palestinian territories for 37 years, pushing Arabs
off the land and planting their own settlements on it. They have been
patient about a lot of things – but that dry, snapping sound you heard
a moment ago may have been the camel’s back breaking.
Look at the past month from an Arab perspective. At the end of March,
Israel assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of the
Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. Sheik Yassin was a staunch
supporter of the use of terror against the Israeli military occupation
of Palestinian territory – but he was also an elderly paraplegic who
was widely seen as a holy man, and for many years Israel avoided
attacking him.
Many Palestinians saw Sheik Yassin’s murder as a deliberate attempt by
the Israeli government to stimulate terrorist attacks that would
distract international attention from Sharon’s land grab in the West
Bank. The attacks have not yet come. What did come was a statement by
Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas’ new leader in the Gaza Strip, that “America
has declared war on Allah. Allah has declared war on America and
Bush.”
Rantisi was saying that America’s complicity in what Israel is doing
to the Palestinians is so great that the United States will also
become a target of Palestinian terrorism. Of course, Hamas hasn’t even
retaliated against Israel for Sheik Yassin’s death yet.
Spin forward a week to Iraq, where the ham-fisted mismanagement of the
U.S. occupation regime turns the killing of four men in Fallujah and
the banningof a small circulation newspaper published by a radical
young cleric into two full-scale sieges of major Iraqi cities. No
matter what the American military spokesman says, people watching Arab
television can see that the makeshift hospitals are full of wounded
women and children as well as young men. Perhaps the United States is
not the Arabs’ enemy, but look at it through Arab eyes.
And, finally, Wednesday at the White House. It was obvious why Sharon,
in trouble at home on several fronts, needed Bush’s support for his
radical plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip (where there are only 7,500
Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians), but hang onto almost
all of the far bigger settlements on the West Bank and confine the
Palestinians there behind his “security fence,” thus unilaterally
settling the new borders of an emasculated Palestinian
pseudo-state. It is less clear why Bush had to give it to him.
For 37 years, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have
insisted, along with everyone else in the world, that Israel’s legal
border is the pre-1967 one, and that it can only be changed by freely
negotiated agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet there
was Bush, with Sharon beaming by his side, announcing a new
U.S. policy: “In the light of new realities, including already
existing Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic that the
outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete
return to the armistice lines of 1949.”
Not a word about how those “already existing” Israeli population
centers were planted there by force after the Israeli military
occupation in 1967; not even a nod to the UN resolutions that have
been the bedrock on which every previous negotiation was built. There
aren’t going to be any more peace negotiations, of course, which suits
Sharon fine – but why does it suit theUnited States? Bush’s
unnecessary concessions to Israel were so effective in alienating Arab
opinion that his speech might as well have been ghost-written by Osama
bin Laden.
This may not prove to be the final straw, but we are getting very
close. For decades the United States has managed to preserve a
dominant position in the Arab world despite its permanent disagreement
with the Arabs about Israel, but now it is throwing it away. Five or
10 years from now the Middle East may look a lot more like bin Laden’s
dream than Bush’s.