- (march 2009)
The Arab view of the peace negotiations.
I had the venture of hearing a lecture on the Arab-Israeli peace
negotiations by Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Center
for Individual Rights at Stanford University.
His argument
(parroting a long-held view by Ayn Rand)
was (is) that for the USA to try and broker a peace between
Israel and the Palestinians makes non sense because one side is "good"
(that's Israel) and one side is "evil" (the Palestinian leadership).
The USA should therefore side with "good" and help "good" prevail over "evil".
It was an interesting talk because it highlighted all the misconceptions
that create a strong pro-Israeli sentiment at the expense of the Palestinian
people (who are rarely taken into consideration by this kind of talks).
And that, ultimately, accounts for why the USA hasn't been able to act as
a credible broker in the Middle East.
So it's as good a place as any other to present, instead, the viewpoint of
the Arabs, who are 300 million, who are not any less intelligent than Elan Journo
and who, unlike Elan Journo, live near Palestine, receive daily information
on what is happening there and can actually hear thousands of Palestinians interviewed
live on television.
Journo's view of the facts is that Israel's moral
superiority stems from its democratic system (he specifically mentioned the
fact that Israelis voted out of office a corrupt politician) and its capitalist
system (and he specifically mentioned the existence of 3,500 start-ups).
The Arab explanation is simple: the Palestinians too had a free election,
and they too voted the corrupt politicians (Al Fatah) out of office. However
the West did not recognize the outcome of that election and decided to boycott
the new government (Hamas). Israel is free to choose its candidates and vote
them, whereas the Palestinians were forced to accept a government decided
by Israel and the USA (Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were appointed
and not really elected) and then are prohibited from voting that puppet
government out of office.
The Arab explanation for the start-ups is even simpler: the USA sends billions
of dollars to Israel, and those 3,500 start-ups are basically enjoying one
million dollar each. If the Palestinians received so much money from the USA,
they would probably have 3,500 start-ups too.
(Arabs, and particularly Palestinians, do very well in the USA, don't they?
according to the magazine "Foreign Policy",
41% of Arab-Americans hold college degrees vs an average of 24% for the general
population, and the median income for Arab-American families is 4.6% higher
than the average, and that's despite the fact that 50% of Arab-Americans
were born abroad).
Journo mentioned that Hamas allies itself with Iran, an enemy of the USA
and a tyrannical regime. But isn't Iran the only country that is willing to
help them? Once the world decided not to recognize the results of a fair and
democratic election, what was Hamas supposed to do? What would any country do?
Iran is one of the few countries that respected the will of the Palestinian
people, and the Palestinian people (who have never shown any love for the
Shiites of Iran) had no choice but accept the only help they could get.
Journo paints the Palestinians (at least the leadership) as a bunch of
bloody terrorists and claims that any concession is a reward for their violence
and an encouragement to become even more violent. The Arab answer is simple:
we (the West) are teaching them to become terrorists because we only listen to
terrorists.
As a Jordanian once asked me, what has the USA done for the Burmese people?
Nothing. Why? Because the Burmese people don't blow up people. If the Burmese
people blew up USA citizens, we would start caring for their plight.
It's the behavior of the USA (and of the West in general) that encourages
people to use extreme violence: the more violence they use, the more likely
that we recognize their rights. Would Journo be spending one second in
discussing the Arab-Israeli issue if there were absolutely no violence there?
The Palestinians would simply fade away: either emigrate or die of starvation
or be "cleansed" by the Israeli settlers.
And, excuse-moi, would the USA exist if some American "terrorists" (led by George Washington) had not taken up arms and fought against the British?
Would Israel itself exist if Jewish "terrorists" (still hailed by Israel as national heroes) had not blown up the King David Hotel (july 1946), the British military and civilian headquarters, killing 91 people in an attack much deadlier than anything ever dreamed by Palestinian suicide bombers?
Journo claims that the USA should not deal with "evil" people who killed a lot
of civilians. Any Arab would assume that Journo is referring to Israel.
The Arab world (and probably the planet in general) is painfully aware
that Israel has killed a lot more Palestinian civilians than the Israeli
civilians killed by Palestinian terrorists. Why does Journo think that
it is bad for a Palestinian terrorist to kill an Israeli civilian but it is
good for an Israeli soldier to kill a Palestinian civilian? When Israel
bombed schools and hospitals and residences didn't they know that they
were killing a lot of civilians? Both in Lebanon and in Gaza the majority
of victims were ordinary people. One must be very naive to believe that Israel
had no intention of punishing and killing ordinary people: Israel's implicit
was precisely to punish the people who support Hezbollah or Hamas. But how is
this different from a Palestinian terrorist blowing up ordinary Israelis
who, by definition, support the state of Israel?
Journo's final claim was that Israel shares the same values that the USA
believes in. But an Arab would ask if collective punishment, ethnic cleansing,
a racist constitution and a de-facto theocracy are what the USA believes in.
I suspect that very few USA citizens would answer "yes" to a poll that
asked them if they support any of those principles (although they would
probably answer "yes" to whether they support Israel).
Israel is de facto acting like a colonial power, stealing the natural resources
of the Palestinian lands (see this article). The only reason
that the USA public opinion does not turn against Israel is that these facts
are unknown by the vast majority, but they are very well known by the Arab
public opinion.
The theory that the USA should not deal with any organization that violates
human rights is interesting. But of course any Arab (and non-Arab) knows
well that this is baloney: the USA is closely allied with the most racist
regime in the world, Saudi Arabia, and supports one of the most totalitarian
regimes in the world, Egypt. Not to mention Israel itself, a country that has
repeatedly violated United Nations resolutions.
Arabs know countless small episodes that Journo probably ignores (either because
of ignorance typical of the Western analysts who have never spent a day in
Palestine or because of racial bias). For example, the day after he gave that
lecture, a Palestinian construction worker rammed his bulldozer into an Israeli
police car (causing no major injuries) and into an empty bus.
A taxi driver and a police officer shot the Palestinian repeatedly, and then
boasted of their heroic act in stopping this "terrorist".
Here is Israel's official version and here is the version of the "terrorist's" family.
If the official version is true, the world is at least appalled that it is so
easy for a citizen and a police officer to shoot dead a suspect who has not
killed anyone and has no way
of further injuring anyone, and we are appalled that the murderers would boast
of just having killed a human being. If the family's version is true, then
the world certainly demands that the murderers be arrested and tried for what
they are: they took justice into their hands and killed a man based only on
his race. It's like hanging a black man because he happened to be in a bank
when the bank was robbed.
"It is without a doubt a terror attack" boasted Jerusalem's deputy police chief,
but this only proves what the Arabs claim: that the definition of "terrorist"
varies wildly between Israel (that basically calls "terrorist" any Palestinian)
and the rest of the civilized world (that is more likely to see "terrorism" in
the expropriation of Palestinian land carried out that very same day by the
state of Israel, and condemned even by USA secretary of state Hillary Clinton).
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev called the rampage a "senseless act of violence against innocent civilians." That's what the rest of the world thinks of
Israel's expropriation of Palestinian land that occurred that very day.
There is one such episode almost every week. This is a very minor incident
compared with, say, the countless children killed by Israeli soldiers or by
Israeli settlers. Journo is either unaware of the reality on the ground or
wildly biased towards Israel's version of each and every such episode.
Last but not least, Journo spoke of the traumas of one Israeli child who has
heard a missile land near his school. Journo did not spend a word on the fact
that not only Palestinian families are routinely dispossessed of their
farmland and
hundreds of their homes have been destroyed by Israeli bombs, but Palestinian
children in Gaza (who hear much more frightening explosions)
have virtually no schools to go to and no hospitals for serious emergencies: they've all been demolished during Israel's invasion of Gaza (and they had been
hardly working at all before, thanks to Israel's blockade of Gaza).
How many Israeli children have no prospect of surviving
a serious illness? The death rate among Palestinian children is one order
of magnitude higher.
More than 60 Palestinian women have given birth at Israeli checkpoints in a vain
attempt to reach a hospital (36 of those babies have died): has Journo spent
any time checking the story of those women the same way he checked the story
of that traumatized Israeli child?
Journo views this "inferior" lifestyle of the Palestinians as reason for the USA
to choose Israel as the morally superior nation, but it's like choosing Hitler
over the Jews because Jews lived like animals into ghettos created by Hitler.
Germans certainly looked like more respectable and civilized people than the
Jews dumped into concentration camps and lined-up naked in front of the gas
chamber: in those days Journo would have voted for siding with those
well-dressed German children, traumatized by the evil enemies of Germany who
refused to accept its superior civilization.
Journo's lecture was a good summary of the vast gap of perception that separates
the Arab and the USA public opinions.
And it was also a reminder of how powerful
Adolf Hitler's theories expressed in "Mein Kampft" still are in Western
civilization. Journo obviously
hasn't read that book, or he would have known that many of his words about
moral imperatives are eerily reminiscent of that book.
(This doesn't mean that i support Hamas or that i blame only Israel for the
plight of the Palestinians. I have written plenty of historical analyses to
explain how today's situation is largely the consequence of
the actions of the Arab regimes,
who have probably caused more harm to the Palestinians than Israel, and that
a state of Palestinians never existed in history,
thus refuting much of the usual Arab propaganda;
and i have criticized the Quran for being a much more violent and
racist book than Muslims think, and therefore i am no fan of Islamic
organizations, and of religious organizations in general,
whether Palestinian or Saudi, whether Islamic or Catholic; but to me the
Palestinians are, first and foremost, human beings, and most of them as decent
or more decent than their Israeli neighbors; and, yes, i have personally
been both in Israel and in Palestine, and in all Middle Eastern countries except
Saudi Arabia and Iraq).
An Ayn Rand's article
An Ayn Rand's article
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (february 2009)
Who pays.
The USA has committed $900 million to help rebuild Gaza after it was destroyed by Israel.
(See this article)
The question is very simple: why the USA and not Israel? It is Israel that
scientifically demolished the infrastructure of Gaza. Why in heaven can't
Israel be charged with rebuilding what it destroyed?
Either the international community has a moral obligation to help the people
of Gaza or it doesn't. If it does, it is ridiculous that the country responsible
for the destruction is not asked to pay for it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2009)
Premeditated murder.
There is no question that Israel's attack on Gaza was meant to hurt the people
of Gaza: 22 thousand buildings were destroyed in just a few weeks of carpet
bombing, and white phosphorus was used in densely populated areas.
Hamas commands about 20,000 armed men. This means that Israel destroyed
more than one buildings per soldiers of Hamas. This makes Hitler's Germany
look lenient. Journalists were not allowed inside Gaza. The only reports
coming out of Gaza were from Al Jazeera (that was already there before the
conflict started): Al Jazeera looked more professional, fair and balanced than
the Western media. Only Israeli stupidity could achieve this feat.
It is telling that today it is Israel that sounds like the fundamentalist
madman of the Middle East, and the moderate and sensible voices are instead
coming from the Arab world (the Arab League has a standing proposal to
recognize Israel in return for peace, and read
this article by Libya's dictator Qaddafi, who suddenly sounds more
reasonable than the prime minister of Israel).
Israel made no mystery of targeting universities and other civilian
structures. At least, it told the truth: we have now entered the era of
collective punishment. The people of Gaza were massacred and their house were
destroyed and their whole society bombed back to the stone age because they
dared vote for a party that Israel opposes. Secretely, the Arab countries
were happy to see this happen because nobody wants an Islamic movement to
be successful (it might give ideas to other Islamic movements in other
Arab regions). As much as i dislike today's Islam (as i have profusely
written in articles such as Intolerance and modern Islam), there is no question that the world basically authorized
the murder of a political organization that had been democratically elected.
The rockets were certainly an international crime against Israel, so are the
millions of illegal immigrants that Mexican authorities de facto help cross
the border with the USA: the USA does not go on a rampage and kill people
who voted for the president of Mexico, does it?
Israel is honest enough to admit what others don't want to admit: that it
never recognized the results of that democratic elections, and it will
recognize the results of a democratic election only when the winner is
someone it approves of. People are free to vote, but they (the voters) will
be punished if they vote someone who is opposed by Israel.
Democracy therefore becomes a farce as much as Saddam Hussein's elections
were a farce.
(There is, of course, a precedent, when the Islamic party won the elections
in Algeria and then the military staged a coup with the implicit approval of
the Western countries).
We overthrow democratically-elected governments as we please: that's the
message that Israel is sending to the world on behalf of the entire Western
world.
In the process, we are also happy to devastate the lives of 1.5 million
lives. Those kids will never have a chance in life because their parents
voted for Hamas. Those kids will have no decent education, no decent
jobs, no decent infrastructure.
The truth is that every country in the region just wants the people of Gaza
to go away, and Israel carried out a premeditated murder on behalf of both
Arabs, Israelis and Westerners.
If it is ok for Israel to destroy 22,000 buildings to punish those who voted
for the Hamas government, why is it not ok for Palestinians to destroy
buildings in Israel to punish the Israelis who voted for the Israeli government,
and why is it not ok for Al Qaeda to destroy two building in New York to
punish those who voted for the USA government?
Let's be honest and admit that we live in the age of hyper-terrorism, and that
we are simply trying to win the war by staging bigger terrorist attacks than
the enemy.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2009)
The new rules of the game.
There was a time when the Arab countries wanted to destroy Israel.
It was not out of compassion for the Palestinians, who never had any status
within the Arab or Ottoman world (See The population of pre-Israel Palestine).
It was out of the desire to take those lands: pure imperial ambition by newly
born states ruled by medieval despots.
The Palestinian issue slowly emerged during the 1970s to become the dominant
factor in this holy mission to wipe out the Zionist state of Israel.
Fast forward to the 2000s: while secretely still wishing its destruction and
still confident that sooner or later it will take place, the Arabs have largely
come to accept that, for the time being, they have to coexist with Israel.
In fact, many of them see Israel as a gate to prosperity because it has
taught the whole region how to make money in the globalized world.
At the same time, though, Iran has slowly emerged as a regional power. Iran
is an Islamic republic and cannot accept the existence of Israel on religious
grounds (although Islam's passion for Jerusalem is far from clear, as Jerusalem
is never mentioned in the Quran). Iran never cared for the Palestinians, who
are mostly Sunnis (Iran is Shiite, i.e. it believes that Sunnis killed the
family of the founder of Islam). It cares only to the extent that they fight
Israel, i.e. right now it cares for Hamas.
On the other hand, Iran cares a lot about Hezbollah, based in Lebanon,
which happens to be both Shiite (and therefore feared by both Christians and
Sunnis in Lebanon) and committed to the destruction of Israel.
The Western powers have often assumed that this is just a passing stage in the
confrontation between the Arabs and Israel, and that eventually even these
extremist organizations will come to accept Israel's existence. That notion is
very much predicated on Iran's willingness to accept Israel. As long as Iran
remains ruled by the ayatollahs, its stance is unlikely to change.
Israel has simply adapted to the new game. It is back to the situation in which
some neighbors want to destroy it, except that this time those entities are not
kingdoms and republics (which are relatively easy to fight and defeat) but
well-established grass-roots organization, remotely funded and armed by Iran.
Therefore Israel has become less interested in the "land for peace" approach
of previous decades and more interested in maintaining control of the land
for the purpose of restraining Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Arab countries behave as if they lost all hope in a peaceful settlement,
and largely accept Israel's methods in trying to stamp out the resistance.
The Palestinian resistance has become an annoyance for the Arab regimes.
Egypt, for example, accused Hamas of acting irresponsibly when it refused to
extend the truce with Israel. Coincidence or not, Israel struck just days after
those accusations surfaced in the Egyptian press.
And the government-controlled press around the Arab world never fails to
underscore how Hamas takes its orders from Iran, implying that Hamas is merely
a pawn in Iran's expansionist plan.
Some Arabs view the whole Palestinian resistance as pointless not because it
cannot succeed but because there is no need for it to succeed: Israel is doomed
by demographics. On both sides of the barricades (inside and outside Israel)
this phenomenon is changing the psychology of the game. Knowing that it is
just a matter of time before the Jews become a minority in their own state,
Israel feels insecure. Knowing the same fact, the Arab regimes would prefer a
peaceful "wait and see" strategy: time is on the Arab side.
Israelis are painfully aware of this contradiction of democracy that Europeans
are also slowly beginning to realize. When you have a minority that does not
believe in the foundations of your state, and that minority grows faster than
the fouding majority, the minority will eventually have enough votes to
overthrow the very state that tolerated it and gave it the right to vote.
Ultimately, Serbia had to surrender its historical heartland of Kosovo
because of demographics. Many in France wonder if the liberal-minded French
are truly prepared to accept a Muslim majority in their country.
In the old days such change could only happen through wars. Israel is the
vanguard of something that never happened before: a state likely to be
overthrown by "enemies" through democratic means.
Democracy as a tool to demolish the democratic state.
In the old days the regime would simply expel or massacre
that minority before they could pose a threat.
But democracies don't do that anymore. Therefore each democracy has to accept
its inevitable fate: the minority that has the highest birth rate (and that
maintains its identity throughout the generations) will come to rule the country.
In 1967 there were only 2 million Jews in the country. Today there are 5.5 million. But the Arab citizens of Israel are now 1.3 million. The birth rates for Israeli Arabs are among the highest in the world, with 4 or 5 children per family (as opposed to the 2 or 3 children per family among Israeli Jews). Israeli Arabs openly support the Palestinian cause (implying the destruction of Israel or something very similar to it). Arabs are projected to become the majority of Israel's citizens by 2050. Even before they gain the majority in parliament, it could be just a matter of time before this growing population of Israeli Arabs joins with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to start a civil war within Israel, something that Israel has never witnessed before.
It was easier to destroy the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights than to stop demographic change.
That said, the real winner of the war between Israel and Hamas may turn out
to be Hezbollah, whose "wait and see" attitude has puzzled its own members
in Lebanon. There are elections coming up in Lebanon, and Hezbollah seems more
interested in winning those democratic elections than in getting involved
in another war against Israel. Unless Israel escalates its war to an
unacceptable level (which is unlikely because in a few days the USA will have
a new and presumably less accommodating president), Hezbollah will limit its
action to rhetoric. This will reassure the Lebanese electorate that would
otherwise fear Hezbollah's passion for confrontation with Israel. In other
words, Israel has indirectly given Hezbollah the golden opportunity to show
a "peaceful" and "domestic" face, i.e. to win over
the Lebanese moderates who were afraid of Hezbollah's militaristic face.
There seems to be only one man in the Arab world who consistently outsmarts
Israel, and that's Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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