WHY THE MIDDLE EAST WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
UK
The Palestinians won’t achieve statehood, but they will consign the
‘peace process’ to history.
The Palestinians won’t get a state this week. But they will prove
– if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud
Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face
of US-Israeli power – that they are worthy of statehood. And they
will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to call – when it
is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – “facts on the ground”:
never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers and
expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase
on the Middle East. It’s over: the “peace process”, the “road map”,
the “Oslo agreement”; the whole fandango is history.
“In the new Middle East,” writes Fisk, “Amid the Arab Awakening and the
revolt of free peoples for dignity and freedom, this UN vote – passed
in the General Assembly, vetoed by America if it goes to the Security
Council – constitutes a kind of hinge; not just a page turning,
but the failure of empire. (EPA) Personally, I think “Palestine”
is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have
stolen so much of the Arabs’ land for their colonial projects. Go take
a look at the West Bank, if you don’t believe me. Israel’s massive
Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian
homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems
as punishment, the “cordons sanitaires” beside the Jordanian frontier,
the Israeli-only settlers’ roads have turned the map of the West Bank
into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect
that the only thing that prevents the existence of “Greater Israel”
is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.
But we are now talking of much greater matters. This vote at the UN –
General Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters
– is going to divide the West – Americans from Europeans and scores
of other nations – and it is going to divide the Arabs from the
Americans. It is going to crack open the divisions in the European
Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between Germany and
France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical
reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians)
and, of course, between Israel and the EU.
A great anger has been created in the world by decades of Israeli
power and military brutality and colonisation; millions of Europeans,
while conscious of their own historical responsibility for the
Jewish Holocaust and well aware of the violence of Muslim nations,
are no longer cowed in their criticism for fear of being abused as
anti-Semites. There is racism in the West – and always will be, I
fear – against Muslims and Africans, as well as Jews. But what are
the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, in which no Arab Muslim
Palestinian can live, but an expression of racism?
Israel shares in this tragedy, of course. Its insane government has
led its people on this road to perdition, adequately summed up by its
sullen fear of democracy in Tunisia and Egypt – how typical that its
principle ally in this nonsense should be the awful Saudi Arabia –
and its cruel refusal to apologise for the killing of nine Turks in
the Gaza flotilla last year and its equal refusal to apologise to
Egypt for the killing of five of its policemen during a Palestinian
incursion into Israel.
So goodbye to its only regional allies, Turkey and Egypt, in the
space of scarcely 12 months. Israel’s cabinet is composed both of
intelligent, potentially balanced people such as Ehud Barak, and
fools such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Ahmadinejad of
Israeli politics. Sarcasm aside, Israelis deserve better than this.
The State of Israel may have been created unjustly – the Palestinian
Diaspora is proof of this – but it was created legally. And its
founders were perfectly capable of doing a deal with King Abdullah
of Jordan after the 1948-49 war to divide Palestine between Jews
and Arabs. But it had been the UN, which met to decide the fate of
Palestine on 29 November 1947, which gave Israel its legitimacy,
the Americans being the first to vote for its creation. Now – by a
supreme irony of history – it is Israel which wishes to prevent the
UN from giving Palestinian Arabs their legitimacy – and it is America
which will be the first to veto such a legitimacy.
Does Israel have a right to exist? The question is a tired trap,
regularly and stupidly trotted out by Israel’s so-called supporters;
to me, too, on regular though increasingly fewer occasions. States –
not humans – give other states the right to exist. For individuals to
do so, they have to see a map. For where exactly, geographically, is
Israel? It is the only nation on earth which does not know and will not
declare where its eastern frontier is. Is it the old UN armistice line,
the 1967 border so beloved of Abbas and so hated by Netanyahu, or the
Palestinian West Bank minus settlements, or the whole of the West Bank?
Show me a map of the United Kingdom which includes England, Wales,
Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it has the right to exist. But
show me a map of the UK which claims to include the 26 counties of
independent Ireland in the UK and shows Dublin to be a British rather
than an Irish city, and I will say no, this nation does not have
the right to exist within these expanded frontiers. Which is why,
in the case of Israel, almost every Western embassy, including the
US and British embassies, are in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem.
In the new Middle East, amid the Arab Awakening and the revolt of free
peoples for dignity and freedom, this UN vote – passed in the General
Assembly, vetoed by America if it goes to the Security Council –
constitutes a kind of hinge; not just a page turning, but the failure
of empire. So locked into Israel has US foreign policy become, so
fearful of Israel have almost all its Congressmen and Congresswomen
become – to the extent of loving Israel more than America – that
America will this week stand out not as the nation that produced
Woodrow Wilson and his 14 principles of self-determination, not as
the country which fought Nazism and Fascism and Japanese militarism,
not as the beacon of freedom which, we are told, its Founding Fathers
represented – but as a curmudgeonly, selfish, frightened state whose
President, after promising a new affection for the Muslim world,
is forced to support an occupying power against a people who only
ask for statehood.
Should we say “poor old Obama”, as I have done in the past? I don’t
think so. Big on rhetoric, vain, handing out false love in Istanbul
and Cairo within months of his election, he will this week prove that
his re-election is more important than the future of the Middle East,
that his personal ambition to stay in power must take first place
over the sufferings of an occupied people. In this context alone,
it is bizarre that a man of such supposed high principle should
show himself so cowardly. In the new Middle East, in which Arabs are
claiming the very same rights and freedoms that Israel and America
say they champion, this is a profound tragedy.
US failures to stand up to Israel and to insist on a fair peace
in “Palestine”, abetted by the hero of the Iraq war, Blair, are
responsible. Arabs too, for allowing their dictators to last so long
and thus to clog the sand with false frontiers and old dogmas and oil
(and let’s not believe that a “new” “Palestine” would be a paradise
for its own people). Israel, too, when it should be welcoming the
Palestinian demand for statehood at the UN with all its obligations of
security and peace and recognition of other UN members. But no. The
game is lost. America’s political power in the Middle East will this
week be neutered on behalf of Israel. Quite a sacrifice in the name
of liberty…