Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Truth’s Advocate

Abbas at the UNO. When Obama is long and deservedly forgotten, his name will endure.

“We won’t act like them, we will not use violence or force, we are peaceful, we believe in peace, in peaceful popular resistance.” This was part of a message issued by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in October, only days after a few incidents took place in which Palestinian youth were accused of attacking Israeli soldiers and settlers with knives.  

The message would have carried some weight were it not laden with contradictions. On one hand, Abbas’ supposed ‘peace’ quest has only entrenched the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, and all but completely isolated illegally occupied and annexed East Jerusalem. 

Moreover, what ‘peaceful popular resistance’ is Abbas, 80, referring to? What war of ‘peaceful’ national liberation has he been leading? And how could a leader, ever so unpopular, be leading a ‘popular resistance’ anyway?  

Just two weeks before Abbas made that statement in which he referred to some illusory ‘popular resistance’ under his command, a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah revealed that a majority of Palestinians, 65% of respondents, want him to resign. 

Of course, while Abbas continues to prophesize about some non-existent peace – as he has done for most of his lucrative career – Israel continues to wreak havoc on Palestinians, using every means of violence at its disposal.  

Granted, Israel’s propensity to maintain its violent occupation cannot be blamed on Abbas. It is Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his rightwing coalition that should be blamed squarely for the Occupation, the mistreatment and humiliation of Palestinians on a daily basis.  

However, such truth should not detract from Abbas’ terrible legacy and ongoing misconduct. In fact, some urgent questions must be asked in that regard:   

If Abbas is such a peacenik, why is his military budget so disproportionately large?   

According to information published by Visualizing Palestine, 31% of the PA budget is spent on the military and policing of the West Bank. Compare this to 18% on education, 13% on health and only 1% on agriculture. The latter percentage is particularly troubling, considering that Palestinian land, orchards and olive groves are the main target for Israel, which usurps the land in order to expand its military zones and illegal settlements.  

The huge discrepancy between funds allocated to Palestinian security forces – which never confront Israel’s military occupation, only Palestinian Resistance – and those spent to assist farmers in their ‘sumoud’ (steadfastness) while their land is being targeted and confiscated daily, is a testament to the mixed priorities of Abbas and his Authority.  

Even Israel, which is obsessed with its security, and manages several fronts of war and military occupation spends only 22% of its total budget on the military, which is still quite high by average standards.  

Abbas’ ‘peace’ is, of course, quite selective. He rules over Occupied Palestinians with an iron fist, rarely tolerates dissent within his party, Fatah’s, ranks, and has done his utmost to isolate Gaza and sustain a state of conflict with his enemies in the Hamas movement.  

More recently, and due to mere criticism levelled at him by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a prominent Palestinian faction and PLO member, Abbas decided to choke them of funds. In Abbas’ ‘peaceful’ world, there is zero room for tolerance.  

The PFLP criticism was a response to statements he made on Israeli television.

In a recent interview, he insisted that security coordination with Israel is a top priority for him. Without such coordination, the PA will find itself “on the brink of collapse,” he told Israel Channel 2 on March 31.  

Apart from apprehending suspected Palestinian resisters, the security coordination includes searching school children’s bags for knives, according to the Palestinian leader. “Our security forces are entering schools and checking if students are carrying knives. In one school, we found 70 students with knives, and we told them that this was wrong. I told them I do not want you to kill someone and die; I want you to live and for others to live, too.” 

Abbas’ statement on life and death does not, in the least, address the context of oppression, the humiliation of military occupation and the prevailing sense of despair that exists among young Palestinians, caught between a belligerent, violent Occupation, and a submissive leadership.  

Convincing them not to ‘kill someone and die, “involved the security forces arresting the students who were found with knives, questioning them, torturing them and threatening their families,” wrote Palestinian commentator, Munir Shafiq. 

“We only need to listen to the experiences of many who were tortured by the Israeli Shabak and the Palestinian security agencies, who said that the Palestinian security agencies are harsher, more barbaric and more brutal than the Shabak,” Shafiq wrote in Arabi21. So much for being ‘peaceful’ and ‘believing in peace.’  

Writing in Rai al-Youm, Kamal Khalf wonders if it is time to look into the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas, a man who has ruled with an expired mandate for years. While refraining from any personal attack on Abbas, Khalf raises the possibility whether the PA President’s emotional and psychological well-being in his old age ought to be questioned, especially when one considers some of his latest statements: attacking Palestinian Resistance, searching children’s schoolbags and avowing his love for Israeli music.  

When Abbas Zaki, the well-respected member of Fatah’s Central Committee, returned from a recent visit to Tehran, he was attacked by Abbas who “accused him of receiving $50 thousand from the Iranians and he demanded the money be given to him instead”, he wrote. 

The number of Abbas’ bizarre actions and strange statements seem to be increasing with age. It is no secret, of course, that there has been much discussion about succession within Fatah and the PA, once Abbas is no longer in the picture. Until then, such eccentricity should be expected.  

However, it is essential that the discussion does not entirely focus on Abbas, for he is merely representative of a whole class of usurpers who have used the Palestinian cause to advance their own positions, wealth and prestige.  

There is little evidence to suggest that Abbas’ current position – soft on the Occupation, hard on the Palestinians – is new, or motivated by age and mental health. For the sake of fairness, the arbitrator of the Oslo accords has been consistent in this regard.  

Since Arafat’s death in 2004, and his advent to power through a questionable democratic process in 2005, Abbas has worked laboriously to co-exist with the Israeli Occupation but failed to co-exist with his own Palestinian rivals.  

True, it has been a decade of unmitigated Palestinian leadership failure, but it certainly took more than Abbas to manage that political fiasco. Now, at 80, Abbas seems to have become a scapegoat for a whole class of Palestinians which has worked to manage the Occupation and benefit from it.

Ramzy Baroud, PhD

Has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Truth’s Advocate

Israeli soldier kills Palestinian. There is a culture of impunity that exists in the Israeli army. (File)

“Whether he made a mistake or not, is a trivial question,” said an Israeli Jewish man who joined large protests throughout Israel in support of a soldier who calmly, and with precision, killed a wounded Palestinian man in al-Khalil (Hebron). The protesting Jewish man described Palestinians as ‘barbaric’, ‘bestial’, who should not be perceived as people.

This is hardly a fringe view in Israel. The vast majority of Israelis, 68%, support the killing of Abdel Fatah Yusri al-Sharif, 21, by the solider who had reportedly announced before firing at the wounded Palestinian that the “terrorist had to die.”

The killing scene would have been relegated to the annals of the many ‘contested’ killings by Israeli soldiers, were it not for a Palestinian field worker with Israel’s human rights group, B’Tselem, who filmed the bloody event.

The incident, once more, highlights a culture of impunity that exists in the Israeli army, which is not a new phenomenon.

Not only is Israeli society supportive of the soldier behind this particular bloody incident, almost a vast majority is in support of field executions as well.

In fact, the culture of impunity in Israel is linked both to political leanings and religious beliefs. According to the latest Peace Index released by Tel Aviv University’s Israel Democracy Institute, nearly 67% of the country’s Jewish population believes that “it is a commandment to kill a terrorist who comes at you with a knife”.

Killing Palestinians as a form of religious duty goes back to the early days of the Jewish state, and such beliefs are constantly corroborated by the country’s high spiritual institutions, similar to the recent decree issued by the country’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef. While 94% of ultra-Orthodox agree with the murder edict of Yosef, 52% of the country’s secularists do, too.

In fact, dehumanizing Palestinians – describing them as ‘beasts’, ‘cockroaches’, or treating them as dispensable inferiors – has historically been a common denominator in Israeli society, uniting Jews from various political, ideological and religious backgrounds.

Rabbi Yosef’s decree, for example, is not much different from statements made by Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, and other army and government official, who made similar calls, albeit without utilizing a strongly worded religious discourse.

Using the same logic, the quote above describing Palestinians as beasts is not divergent from a recent statement made by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all,” Netanyahu said in February. “In the area that we live, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts,” he added.

While pro-Israeli pundits labor to explain the widespread Israeli perception of Palestinians – and Arabs, in general – on rational grounds, logic and commonsense continues to evade them. For instance, Netanyahu’s last war on Gaza in the summer of 2014 killed a total of 2,251 Palestinians – including 1,462 civilians, among them 551 children, according to a report prepared by the UN Human Rights Council. During that war, only six Israeli civilians were killed, and 60 soldiers.

Who, then, is truly the ‘wild beast’?

However, Palestinians are not made into beasts because of their supposedly murderous intent for, not once, statistically, in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict did Palestinians ever kill more Israelis, as opposed to the other way round.  The ailment is not the number, but a common Israeli cultural perception that is utterly racist and dehumanizing.

Nor is the Israeli perception of Palestinians ever linked to a specific period of time, for example, a popular uprising or a war. Consider this eyewitness account from August 2012, cited in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, years before the current uprising in the West Bank and Jerusalem:

“Today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem … and shouts of ‘A Jew is a soul and Arab is a son of a –,’ were shouted loudly and dozens of youths ran and gathered and started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly in the Ben Yehuda street,” the witness wrote.

“When one of the Palestinian youths fell to the ground, the youths continued to hit him in the head; he lost consciousness, his eyes rolled, his angled head twitched, and then those who were kicking him fled while the rest gathered around in a circle, with some still shouting with hate in their eyes.”

Imagine this graphic account repeated, in different manifestations, every day in Occupied Palestine, and consider this: rarely does anyone pay a price for it. Indeed, this is how Israel’s culture of impunity has evolved over the years.

According to Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, “approximately 94% of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians and their property are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing.”

And no one is immune. Israel’s 972Mag wrote in December 2015 about the hundreds of violent incidents of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian medical staff. Palestinian rights group, Al-Haq, documented 56 cases in which “ambulances were attacked”, and 116 assaults against medical staff while on duty.

How about violence meted out by illegal settlers whose population in the Occupied Territories is constantly on the increase?

Armed settlers rampage daily through villages of the Occupied West Bank and the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. The number of their violent crimes has grown tremendously in recent years, and even doubled since 2009.

In August 2015, months before the current uprising, Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Bill Van Esveld, wrote:

“Settlers attack Palestinians and their property on a near-daily basis – there were more than 300 such attacks last year, but few attackers faced justice. In the past decade, less than two percent of investigations into settler attacks ended with convictions.”

In case one is still fooled by the ‘rational’ argument used to justify the murder of militarily occupied, oppressed and besieged Palestinians, Batzalel Smotrich, from the Jewish Home Party, which is part of Netanyhu’s ruling coalition, protested via twitter that his wife was expected to give birth in the same hospital room where Arab babies are born.

His written ‘rationale’, after declaring that his wife “is not a racist’, “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie next to someone whose baby son might want to murder my son.”

The likes of Smotrich, and the majority of Israelis are morally blind to their own wrongdoing. They have long been sold on the idea that Israel, despite its brutality is a ‘villa in the jungle’. According to a recent Pew survey, nearly half of Israelis want to expel Palestinians Arabs – Muslims and Christians, from their ancestral homeland.

The danger of impunity is not merely the lack of legal accountability, but the fact that it is the very foundation of most violent crimes against humanity, including genocide.
This impunity began seven decades ago and it will not end without international intervention, with concerted efforts to hold Israel accountable in order to bring the agony of Palestinians to a halt.

Ramzy Baroud, PhD

Has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Truth’s Advocate

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]thousand Israelis and their supporters gathered in Jerusalem’s International Convention Center on March 28 at a conference aimed at combating the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

The conference was a display of “fear, paranoia, anger and determination,” as described by Antony Loewenstein, and featured top government officials, members of the oppositions and a strange conglomerate of guests, including celebrity has-beens like Roseanne Barr.

Statements made at the conference were predictably frightening and antagonistic – they amounted to nothing more than a display of the language of blood and vengeance that people have grown accustomed to within the Israeli political discourse.

One of the most alarming of the statements was made by Israeli Minister of Transportation, Israel Katz, who called for the “focused civilian elimination of the leadership of BDS.”

We need to know how “to act against them, how to isolate them, also to transfer information to intelligence agents around the world, and other agents. We have to understand that there is a battle here. It is wrapped in many covers,” Katz said.

Barr on the other hand, called for nuclear bombing the University of California-Davis following its students’ support of BDS.

One must certainly have no illusions regarding the ferocity of the fight ahead – this is the nature of conflict between any popular movement, the objective of which is to put pressure on a state that violates international law with impunity, and a government that sees itself above and in no way bound by the law.

The impetus behind the antagonism faced by the BDS movement is that it has in fact matured in its message and grown in size with its primary objective clear-cut – Israel, sooner or later would see BDS as a threat, and would move decisively to combat it.

However, one can certainly not be oblivious to the internal challenges faced by BDS itself. While the movement is largely de-centralized, and local decisions are left to the numerous branches located throughout the world, speaking in one voice is a certain challenge. Of course, there are the guiding principles, but it remains essential to overcome the practical hindrances to an honest and transparent democratic dialogue in order to keep the movement strong and forward thinking.

BDS was initiated after repeated calls from Palestinian civil society, especially in 2004 and 2005 to boycott Israel for its crimes against Palestinians, its violations of international law, its illegal occupation and its discriminatory, racially-motivated policies. The call found receptive audiences across the world, and over the last decade it became the primary platform, if not rally-cry for pro-Palestine activists confronting Israel.

BDS did not expand so significantly in recent years only because of its own organization and successful branding. One cannot ignore the multiple crimes carried out by the Israeli army and armed Jewish settlers since then. One cannot overlook the many racist laws passed by the Israeli Knesset, targeting the country’s minorities. With every killing, every additional day of siege on Gaza, every war, and every abhorrent statement made by an Israeli official, BDS grew – significantly.

BDS owes much of its success to an effective strategy that is predicated on harnessing the energy of civil society, but also to the fact that Israel is relentless in demonstrating the need for global action, to end the occupation, the discrimination and the impunity of an army that killed much too many Palestinians.

Yet, not until recently did Israelis and their supporters begin viewing BDS with alarm, if not real concern. In the past, that job was left to Zionist student groupings in Western campuses. But they failed, and terribly so, to stem the flow of the pro-Palestine sentiments in US-Western campuses. As of last year, a large anti-BDS movement began forming with the sole purpose of crushing the budding BDS movement, but to no avail.

The ‘big guns’ were summoned by two massively rich Zionists, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban. They invited fellow millionaires to a June 2015 conference in Las Vegas in order to raise funds for an anti-BDS movement. Those invited, mostly rightwing zealots, went to the Venetian hotel, (also owned by Adelson) wiih the understanding that a minimal acceptable donation is one million dollars.

Anti-BDS activists and government officials who travelled to Las Vegas for the event were promised by an Israeli-American businessmen, Adam Milstein that they “no longer have to worry about financing and fundraising. You just need to be united.”

Galvanizing on the momentum, Hillary Clinton, who is now leading in her party’s primaries as a precursor for presidential elections in November, sent Saban a letter that could serve as a glaring example of a politician groveling to a rich funder with no regard for morality or self-respect:

Under the letter heading, ‘Hilary for America,’ she wrote to “express her alarm” over BDS, insisting that countering the movement must become a ‘priority’. “I am seeking your advice on how we can work together to reverse this trend,” she wrote.

“As a Senator and a Secretary of State, I saw how crucial it is for America to defend Israel at every turn. I have opposed dozens of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN, the Human Rights Council and other international organizations,” she boasted, going as far as condemning the Goldstone Report which accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza.

Clinton is not alone. In June 2015, soon after the anti-BDS millionaires’ club concluded its gathering in Las Vegas, President Barack Obama signed into law a measure specifically designed to combat BDS.

“The Trade Promotion Authority legislation .. contained the anti-BDS provisions, which make rejection of the phenomenon a top priority for US negotiators as they work on a more distant free trade agreement with the European Union,” the Times of Israel reported.

Within months, the flood-gates had opened, and a foray of BDS condemnations followed. Yet, this was largely a farce. The calls from Western governments, originating from the UK, the US, Canada and others to criminalize the boycott of Israel have hardly slowed down the momentum of the movement. On the contrary, it has accelerated it.

History has taught us that criminalizing civil society and outlawing ideas, especially those that are guided by moral principles, is never a good idea. Nor is calling for ‘eliminating’ civilian society activists and bombing their universities.

The only sensible strategy to combat BDS is one that not a single speaker in the anti-BDS gatherings had raised: ending the very criminal and racist policies that inspired BDS in the first place.

BDS has, thus far, been the most successful strategy and tactic to support Palestinian steadfastness while, at the same time, holding Israel accountable for its progressively worsening policies of apartheid.

International pressure is building up, placing the ball firmly in the Israeli court, and no amount of bombs or firepower can ever solve Israel’s quandary this time.

Ramzy Baroud, PhD

Has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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=By=
Kamel Hawwash

Underground ruins of an ancient house in Jerusalem. Edme Vos. (CC BY 2.0)

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ver since the Zionist project succeeded in its endeavour to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine, the Palestinians have faced daily attempts by Israel to deny their rights and belonging to the land. Those take many forms including general references to biblical times, the spiritual connection between the Jews and historic Palestine culminating in the “God gave us this land”.  It is “in the Bible”.

The inference is that all the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Jews, Jerusalem is the “eternal united Capital” of the “Jewish People,” and the West Bank is “Judea and Samaria”.  Collectively, those are meant to demonstrate that the connection of Jews to the land is much stronger than any other group, including Palestinians. Israeli politicians use this to argue that there is no occupation as Jews are simply returning to their homeland.

Today, there is no lack of symbols of the history of the three great monolithic religions in historic Palestine, and Jerusalem has these in abundance within a tiny area that is home to the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Every year, thousands of worshippers head to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, mainly Jews and Christians. However, thousands more Muslims would also make the journey if peace prevailed and they were allowed to visit their third holiest mosque, Al-Aqsa.

The above background not only shows the importance of historic Palestine to the three religions but also the potential for many millions to visit each year, bringing substantial economic benefits to Jews, Christians and Muslims. For this to happen it is important for peace to be achieved but also for the history of the land to be preserved for current and future generations.

The party that is responsible for these, as a state power and also as an occupying power, is Israel. Its discharge of this responsibility is at best suspect but in reality it has embarked on a process of systematically bringing to the forefront the Jewish history of the land and either hiding or in some cases erasing the other inhabitants’ connection.

When Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the occupation forces initially raised the Israeli flag on the Al-Aqsa mosque, but this was subsequently removed. However, they quickly moved to bulldoze the Moroccan quarter of Jerusalem, including a number of mosques, to allow easier access for Jews to the Western Wall, which they refer to as the Wailing Wall.

Since then, Israel has embarked on a major archaeological project in this sensitive area and also in other less sensitive areas in its attempt to uncover evidence of the existence of Jews on the land after their exodus from Egypt and to use this as a means of justifying their claim to modern day historic Palestine.

The Israelis are particularly keen to unearth evidence that the first and second temples existed on the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Ever since occupying East Jerusalem, they have been digging around and under the site, giving rise to great concerns by Palestinians and Jordan that the digs could disturb the foundations of the mosque, hastening its collapse. Excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority are also thought to be endangering homes in the Palestinian Silwan district of Jerusalem which borders the southern edge of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

If the digging were simply carried out for historic reason only then it could be argued that, provided it were done carefully, it could be tolerated by Palestinians. However, this area, which right-wing Israelis refer to as the City of David, is one that they want to take over, effectively separating the Al-Aqsa mosque from one of its closest Palestinian neighbourhoods.

The use of archelogy in Israel to delegitimize the connection of non-Jews to the land and to legitimize Israel’s colonialist project is not restricted to right-wing organisations. In 2013 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed as “magnificent” the discovery of an ancient golden medallion in Jerusalem.  He claimed “It is interesting that even then, over 500 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, we see the menorah in an original illustration. This is historic testimony, of the highest order, to the Jewish People’s link to Jerusalem, to its land and to its heritage – menorah, shofar, Torah scroll.”

In 2015, Education Minister Naftali Bennett used his Facebook page to send a “Memo to [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas and others who scream ‘occupation’: A 3,000 years old jug bearing the inscription Ishba’al son of Beda was recently discovered near Beit Shemesh. Ishba’al is a name mentioned in the Tanach (Bible) and is unique to the period of King David. This is yet another example of the many facts on the ground that tell the story of the Jewish state that flourished here in this land 3,000 years ago. Back then there was communities that collected taxes, had a strong economy, provided transportation, education institutions, a military – just like today. A nation cannot occupy its own land.”

State institutions can also find themselves embroiled in controversy when venturing into historic symbols. Most recently, the authenticity of the musical image on the Bank of Israel’s half shekel coin was questioned. The “kinnor” or lyre, which looks like a harp, gave this coin a distinctive and historic look. The musical instrument appears above an inscription on a stone seal that was uncovered in 1979 and was dated to the 7^th Century BCE Kingdom of Judea.

The Bank of Israel minted the lyre shape on the coin in 1985, and it remains on it to this day.  However, Haaretz recently reported that many archaeologists believe this to be a fake seal, a forgery, placing the Bank of Israel in a tricky position. Should it withdraw the coin or continue with it as legal tender?

Its response was that: “There is no proof that the seal ‘Belonging to Maadana, the daughter of the king’ is not authentic. And even if so, that’s of no importance in terms of the coin itself, many years after it was minted. The public can rest assured that the coin in its hands is legal tender for all intents and purposes.”

The entanglement of archaeology and politics in Israel is a dangerous trend which seems to have escalated as Israeli society and politics has moved to the right and as Israeli politicians manoeuvre the conflict form a political to a religious one. However, nobody, including the Palestinians, denies that Jews lived in Palestine a couple of millennia ago or that they have a spiritual connection to it.

However, other groups have claims too. Before the Jews came to Palestine it was inhabited by the Canaanites. Christianity was born in Palestine, and therefore Christians also have a strong connection to it, and more recently Muslims conquered it in the 630s and have inhabited ever since.

Historic Palestine is referred to as the Holy Land because it is holy to the three monolithic religions. Denial of this attachment to any group is selfish and wrong. Attempts to better understand the history, including through archaeology, are important, but so too is honesty.

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Editor's Note

Kamel Hawwash is a British/Palestinian engineering professor based at the University of Birmingham and a long-standing campaigner for justice, especially for the Palestinian people. He is Vice Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and appears regularly in the media as commentator on Middle East issues. He runs a blog at www.kamelhawwash.com. He writes here in a personal capacity.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Source: Middle East Eye

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=By= Ramzy Baroud, PhD

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret agreement between the European governments and Russia defining influence and control of the Middle East. (Israel and Palestine…)

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen Arab streets exploded with fury, from Tunis to Sanaa, pan-Arabism seemed, then, like a nominal notion. Neither did the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ use slogans that affirmed its Arab identity, nor did angry Egyptian youth raise the banner proclaiming Arab unity atop the high buildings adjacent to Tahrir Square.

Oddly, the Arabism of the ‘Arab Spring’ was almost as if a result of convenience. It was politically convenient for western governments to stereotype Arab nations as if they are exact duplicates of one another, and that national sentiments, identities, expectations and popular revolts are all rooted in the same past and correspond with a precise reality in the present. Thus, many in the west expected that the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, especially since it was followed by the abdication of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, would lead to a domino effect. “Who’s next?’ was a pretentious question that many asked, some with no understanding of the region and its complexity.

After initial hesitation, the US, along with its western allies, moved quickly to influence the outcome in some Arab countries. Their mission was to ensure a smooth transition in countries whose fate had been decided by the impulsive revolts, to speed up the toppling of their enemies and to prop up their allies so that they would not suffer a similar fate.

The outcome was real devastation. Countries where the west and their allies – and, expectedly enemies were involved – became infernos, not of revolutionary fervor, but of militant chaos, terrorism and unabated wars. Libya, Syria and Yemen are the obvious examples.

In a way, the west, its media and allies assigned themselves as gatekeepers of determining, not only the fate of the Arabs, but in molding their identities as well. Coupled with the collapse of the whole notion of nationhood in some Arab countries – Libya, for example – the US is now taking upon itself the responsibility of devising future scenarios of broken down Arab states.

In his testimony before a US Senate committee to discuss the Syria ceasefire, Secretary of State, John Kerry revealed that his country is preparing a ‘Plan B” should the ceasefire fail. Kerry refrained from offering specifics; however, he offered clues. It may be “too late to keep Syria as a whole, if we wait much longer,” he indicated.

The possibility of dividing Syria was not a random warning, but situated in a large and growing edifice of intellectual and media text in the US and other western countries. It wasarticulated by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute in a Reuter’s op-ed last October. He called for the US to find a ‘common purpose with Russia’, while keeping in mind the ‘Bosnia model.’

“In similar fashion, a future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors: one largely Alawite – another Kurdish – a third, primarily Druse – a fourth, largely made up of Sunni Muslims; and then a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo.”

What is dangerous about O’Hanlon’s solution for Syria is not the complete disregard of Syria’s national identity. Frankly, many western intellectuals never even subscribed to the notion that Arabs were nations in the western definition of nationhood, in the first place. (Read Aaron David Miller article: Tribes with Flags) No, the real danger lies in the fact that such a divisive dismantling of Arab nations is very much plausible, and historical precedents abound.

It is no secret that the modern formation of Arab countries are largely the outcome of dividing the Arab region within the Ottoman Empire into mini-states. That was the result of political necessities and compromises that arose from the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916. The US, then, was more consumed with its South American environs, and the rest of the world was largely a Great Game that was mastered by Britain and France.

The British-French agreement, with the consent of Russia, was entirely motivated by sheer power, economic interests, political hegemony and little else. This explains why most of the borders of Arab countries were perfect straight lines. Indeed, they were charted by a pencil and ruler, not organic evolution of geography based on multiple factors and protracted history of conflict or concord.

It has been almost one hundred years since colonial powers divided the Arabs, although they are yet to respect the very boundaries that they have created. Moreover, they have invested much time, energy, resources and, at times, all out wars to ensure that the arbitrary division never truly ends.

Not only does the west loathe the term ‘Arab unity’, it also loathes whoever dares infuse what they deem to be hostile, radical terminology. Egypt’s second President, Jamal Abdel Nasser, argued that true liberation and freedom of Arab nations was intrinsically linked to Arab unity.

Thus, it was no surprise that the struggle for Palestine occupied a central stage in the rhetoric of Arab nationalism throughout the 1950s and 60s. Abdel Nasser was raised to the status of a national hero in the eyes of most Arabs, and a pariah in the eyes of the west and Israel.

To ensure that Arabs are never to unite, the west invested in their further disunity. In 2006/07, former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made it clear that the US would cease its support of the Palestinian Authority shall Fatah and Hamas unite. Earlier, when, resistance in Iraq reached a point that the American occupiers found unbearable, they invested in dividing the ranks of the Iraqis based on sectarian lines. Their intellectuals pondered the possibility of dividing Iraq into three autonomous states: Shia, Sunni and Kurdish.

Libya was too broken up after NATO’s intervention turned a regional uprising into a bloody war. Since then, France, Britain, the US and others have backed some parties against others. Whatever sense of nationhood that existed after the end of Italian colonization of that country has been decimated as Libyans reverted to their regions and tribes to survive the upheaval.

A rumored ‘Plan B’ to divide Libya to three separate protectorates of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan was recently rejected by the Libyan Ambassador to Rome. However, Libyans presently seem to be the least relevant party in determining the future of their own country.

The Arab world has always been seen in western eyes as a place of conquest, to be exploited, controlled and tamed. That mindset continues to define the relationship. While Arab unity is to be dreaded, further divisions often appear as ‘Plan B’, when the current status quo, call it ‘Plan A’, seems impossible to sustain.

What is truly interesting is that, despite the lack of a pan-Arab vision in Arab countries that experienced popular revolts five years ago, few events in modern history has brought the Arabs together like the chants of freedom in Tunis, the cries of victories in Egypt andscreams of pain in Yemen and Syria. It is that very collective identity, often unspoken but felt, that drives millions of Arabs to hold on to however faint a hope that their nations will survive the ongoing onslaught and prospective western division.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Contributing Editor Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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