Mathew Mavaak, Distinguished Collaborator

It’s time to re-draw New Silk Road routes given security threats emerging in the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as a looming economic crisis in the West, geostrategic analyst Mathew Maavak told Sputnik.

While the BRICS bold infrastructural projects aimed at creating a unified trade space in Eurasia have begun to take shape, Russia, India and China need to focus their attention on emerging security and economic challenges, Mathew Maavak, geostrategic analyst and doctoral candidate in Security Foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) believes.

The geostrategic analyst called attention to the fact that some of the New Silk Road’s routes run through existing and potential hotbeds of instability, posing a significant risk to the project.

Trouble Brewing for New Silk Road Project

“The primary threat comes from Islamic states and regions that form a contiguous crescent of instability from Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) to the southern expanses of the Caucasus to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as a narrow spur to Bosnia and Kosovo. Religious fundamentalism and anarchy in MENA is rising unfettered by the year. There is no light at the end of the tunnel here for the foreseeable future,” Maavak told Sputnik.

“Not so coincidentally, many of these nations are allied to the West — the same West that is continually antagonizing Russia along its western borders, particularly in Ukraine,” the analyst remarked.

According to Maavak, “prior lack of coordination” between the RIC (Russia, India and China) nations has led to many arterial chokepoints being concentrated in these high risk regions.

Given the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups “it will be myopic to spend hundreds of billions in infrastructure in Central Asia,” he believes.

On the other hand, Iran may play a balancing role in the Middle East region, the geostrategic analyst added.

“Iran may play a balancing role here. The newly-opened Chabahar port, built with Indian assistance, provides a viable port of call for a revived maritime silk route in the Indian Ocean. It all depends on the Iranian leadership and whether it desires some form of limited security accommodation with the RIC nations. Otherwise, Iran might smolder with the rest of the Middle East,” he stressed.

This map shows the breadth and scale of China’s plans for ‘new silk roads’, including extensive transport and logistical links by land and sea.

How could major Eurasian powers tackle the problem?

First and foremost, Russia, China, Iran “should spread their arterial trade risks across geographically safe regions, and avoid undue reliance on Central Asia as a transit or economic corridor,” the analyst explained.

“To ensure geo-economic autarky, the RIC nations should prioritize trade routes within their borders — to the extent possible. The safest trade routes in the near-future would look something like the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor. Southeast Asia can also reap great rewards from the RIC nations. After all, the entire region was literally forged by the DNAs of both China and India since time immemorial,” Maavak underscored.

“Southeast Asia traditionally provided excellent returns on investments. India itself is hungry for new infrastructure with Prime Minister Narendra Modi never missing a chance to promote his ‘Make in India’ program,” he continued.

“Perhaps, the RIC nations along with Malaysia and Thailand can also revive the Kra Canal project, in tandem with upgrades and planned connections to the Kunming-Singapore railway network. China is grappling with excess steel and cement output, and these surpluses could be put to good use by building regional trade arteries of the future,” he stressed.

Could Eastern Eurasia’s Nations Form Self-Sustaining Ecosystem?

“I had written how Greater Eurasia now forms a self-sustaining ecosystem. For the first time in modern history, the East can survive without the West — albeit perhaps at a sub-par level — but the West cannot function for a single day without the East. Virtually every nut, bolt and washer is produced in the East. If our economies collapse, it will deprive the West of every hook, line and sinker. And the plumbing tape too! Even their underwear is manufactured in this region,” Maavak elaborated.

Eurasia’s Hotspots and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘Arc of Crisis’

According to the analyst, there is no coincidence that the “crescent of instability” has currently engulfed the north and northeast of the African continent, the Middle East, the Central Asia region and beyond.

Back in the 1970s, then President Carter’s security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski promoted the idea of the “Arc of Crisis” stretching from the Indian subcontinent in the east to the Horn of Africa in the west — with the Middle East as its central core.

The Brzezinski doctrine targeted nation-states of the region which he regarded as a potential bulwark against the USSR and its allies.

In his 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur Brzezinski acknowledged that the US had weaponized radical Islamism in the region against the Soviet Union and secular regimes.

Following the collapse of the USSR, Brzezinski wrote in his book “The Grand Chessboard” that the key to preserving the US-led unipolar world order was to prevent the rise of any competitors in Eurasia.

Interestingly enough, a strikingly similar concept was recently voiced by George Friedman, the founder and chairman of the private intelligence and geopolitical forecasting corporation, Stratfor.

During his speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in February 2015 Friedman admitted that though “the United States cannot occupy Eurasia,” it can throw its geopolitical rivals off balance to prevent their rise.

Washington does “have the ability to support various contending powers [in Eurasia], so that they will concentrate on themselves, with political support, some economic support, military support and advisors,” Friedman explained.

Is there possibility that the US will try to complicate the Russo-Sino-Indian infrastructural project in Eurasia?

“Without a shadow of doubt!” Maavak asserted.

“The West’s economic clout is waning rapidly but it wants to take the East down with it. Playing second fiddle to Eurasia is not an option for Washington,” he underscored

Source: Sputnik

Mathew Mavaak

is a doctoral researcher in security foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His areas of study include strategic foresight; open source intelligence (OSINT); science, technology and innovation (STI); national policy-making; Eurasian integration; and global risks and uncertainties.

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Rowan Wolf, PhD
Voice of Conscience

Credit: Before It’s News

Ah yes, it has finally hit the big time news, and Trump actually has something to sink his dentures into – the Clinton Foundation. Of course readers of TGP have seen this coming for some time, and have groaned with frustrations as Sanders went down in flames carrying Hillary’s secret (among other things) to his political retirement back in the senate.

Let me do a brief chronological synopsis.

May 30, 2016 With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Must Demand Answers:

The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefited from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.

June 3, 2016 Clinton’s Anti-Trump Rant Ignored Her Own High Crimes:

In her (Hillary Clinton’s) Thursday address, she called America “an exceptional country.” Its sordid history shows otherwise. Her anti-Trump rant ignored her longstanding criminal record, including using the Clinton Foundation as a suspected criminal enterprise, masquerading as an NGO charity, vulnerable to racketeering charges.

July 9, 2016  From the mouth of toxic babes… :

For exposing Hillary’s true political nature and character, that is, focusing on her career as a willing shill of moneyed interests, and its corollary, being an eager instrument and cheerleader for the numerous crimes of the American ruling class —from coups in Latin America to the utter destruction of Syria, Libya (her crown jewel in policy disasters), the Ukraine and elsewhere— most under her watch, and her shameless enrichment —along with Hubby Bill, of slick fame—through crooked front organizations like the cynically created Clinton Foundation and its spawn the Clinton Global Initiative (see Clinton Disaster Fundraising: Predatory Humanitarianism? by Haiti’s foremost intellectual in exile, Dady Chery) is no tangential or frivolous matter, it IS the issue that the electorate, especially many Blacks and women, who follow this woman benightedly, should be considering now that HRC’s likelihood of becoming the next president increases by the day (a fact augmented by Obama’s obvious reluctance to press the FBI investigation into mailgate).

July 22, 2016 The Triumph of Imperialist Feminism: Hillary vs the Immense Revolution:

Clinton and her supporters highlight her decades of advocacy on behalf of women and children, from her legal work at the Children’s Defense Fund to her women’s rights initiatives at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

And yet there are parallels between the tactics Clinton employed to defend Taylor and the tactics she, her husband, and their allies have used to defend themselves against accusations of wrongdoing over the course of their three decades in public life.

Alana Goodman does not elaborate on this last part, except to say that, in discussing this episode, HRC does not mention either the hotline, or “the plight of the 12-year old girl who had been attacked.” (This is from interviews conducted by Arkansas journalist Roy Reed, with both Clintons, in 1985, for an Esquire magazine profile that was never completed; these are the “Hillary Tapes” of Goodman’s title.) And, okay, sure, clearly this episode in the life of an attorney who had aspirations for political power was not the thing she was always interested in talking about.

However, as with the Clinton Foundation, and as Goodman indicates, there often seems to be something smarmy going on whenever the Clintons engage in “good works.” This is no surprise to anyone who follows the Clintons’s story, and any Clinton supporters who are somehow convinced otherwise (or who think it’s all coming from the vast right-wing conspiracy–which does exist, of course, but it’s the right-wing of the vast imperialist machinery, of which the Clintons are a part) are the kind of liberals (and “progressives,” ugh) who are always ready to drink the kool-aid.

July 25, 2016  Erdowin, Erdowon, Erdogan:

Apparently, Fehtullah has imported scores of Turkish instructors to teach English to Americans in his charter schools, thanks to the farcical H1B visa scheme (foreigners can be imported when no Americans can be found, able to do the same job).

But all makes sense, when considering the strong ties between the fetid mullah and the Clinton Foundation. Which, as demonstrated in the blog “The Clintons’ War on Women” should be more accurately renamed “The Oral and Anal Sex Foundation.” http://wp.me/p2e0kb-1Xk

August 15, 2016 Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics:

A new cache of emails has emerged courtesy of the Clintons’ old nemesis Judicial Watch, showing how quickly Clinton Foundation flacks circled the State Department seeking favors and contracts for their noxious clients, none more malign than Gilbert Chagoury, the Lebanese-Nigerian developer and big Clinton donor who was seeking access to Jeffrey Feltman, the former ambassador to Lebanon. These malign emails showing how access was auctioned off at Foggy Bottom were largely submerge by the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s self-inflicted wounds.

August 17, 2016 Did the Clinton Foundation Steal from the Poor?

Please note that Dady was one of the first (going back at least to May 2016) ringing this bell because of the Clinton Foundation’s absolutely despicable showing in Haiti.

The Clintons have many problems these days, but the worst of them is probably the information that Charles Ortel started to release from his website and Twitter account (@charlesortel) in early May 2016. Ortel is the financial analyst who exposed General Electric’s stock as being overvalued before it took a dive in 2008. After 15 months’ examination of the public records of the Clinton Foundation entities, he finds that huge sums of money cannot be accounted for, and he believes that it is a family affair for Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton to harm the victims of disasters and the desperately poor throughout the planet. Educated and privileged people like the Clintons should know better, yet they preen, even now, believing we will fall for the hype manufactured by their handlers. The true, damning facts, however, are out there for each of us to see.

“Smarmy” is kind of like sticking your hand in a barrel of slugs, it doesn’t even capture the amount of suffering that has resulted from the Clinton Foundation, and frankly a high majority of big foundations and charities. Where there is a lot of money, there is a lot of power, and a there are too many who cannot and will not turn away from corruption when it will line their own vaults with platinum and influence of an even higher values.

Obviously, this raises the question of Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate. With her already high disapproval ratings, Trump could be in a “default” situation. If such a scenario, a third party candidate could have a significantly increased shot. Therefore, at least hedge your bets and throw some support behind Stein and Baraka.

Rowan Wolf, PhD

Is Managing Editor of The Greanville Post and Director of The Russian Desk. She is a sociologist, writer and activist with life long engagement in social justice, peace, environmental, and animal rights movements. Her research and writing includes issues of imperialism, oppression, global capitalism, peak resources, global warming, and environmental degradation. Rowan taught sociology for twenty-two years, was a member of the City of Portland’s Peak Oil Task Force, and maintains her own site Uncommon Thought Journal. She may be reached by email at rowanwolf@greanvillepost.com

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Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Politics for the People

Photo: Day Donaldson

From Nice to the Middle East

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

I visited Iraq in 1999. At the time, there were no so-called ‘jihadis’ espousing the principles of ‘jihadism’, whatever the interpretation may be. On the outskirts of Baghdad was a military training camp, not for ‘al-Qaeda’, but for ‘Mojahedin-e-Khalq’, an Iranian militant exile group that worked, with foreign funding and arms, to overthrow the Iranian Republic.

At the time, the late Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, used the exiled organization to settle scores with his rivals in Tehran, just as they, too, espoused anti-Iraqi government militias to achieve the exact same purpose.

Iraq was hardly peaceful then. But most of the bombs that exploded in that country were American. In fact, when Iraqis spoke of ‘terrorism’, they only referred to ‘Al-Irhab al-Amriki’ – American terrorism.

Suicide bombings were hardly a daily occurrence; in fact, never an occurrence at all, anywhere in Iraq. As soon as the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 followed by Iraq in 2003, all hell broke loose.

The 25 years prior to 2008 witnessed 1,840 suicide attacks, according to data compiled by US government experts and cited in the ‘Washington Post’. Of all these attacks, 86 percent occurred post-US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, between 2001 and the publishing of the data in 2008, 920 suicide bombings took place in Iraq and 260 in Afghanistan.

A fuller picture emerged in 2010, with the publishing of more commanding and detailed research conducted by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism.

“More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation,” it emerged.

“As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq … total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically – from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009,” wrote Robert Pape in Foreign Policy.

Tellingly, it was also concluded that “over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.”

When I visited Iraq in 1999, ‘al-Qaeda’ was merely a name on the Iraqi TV news, referring to a group of militants that operated mostly in Afghanistan. It was first established to unite Arab fighters against the Soviet presence in that country, and they were largely overlooked as a global security threat at the time.

It was years after the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1988, that ‘al-Qaeda’ became a global phenomenon. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US’ misguided responses – invading and destroying countries – created the very haven that have espoused today’s militancy and terror.

In no time, following the US invasion of Iraq, ‘al-Qaeda’ extended its dark shadows over a country that was already overwhelmed with a death toll that surpassed hundreds of thousands.

It is hardly difficult to follow the thread of ISIS’ formation, the deadliest of all such groups that mostly originated from ‘al-Qaeda’ in Iraq, itself wrought by the US invasion.

It was born from the unity of various militants groups in October 2006, when ‘al-Qaeda’ in Mesopotamia joined ranks with ‘Mujahedeen Shura Council in Iraq’, ‘Jund al-Sahhaba’ and the ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI).

ISIS, or ‘Daesh’ has been in existence since then, in various forms and capacities, but only jumped to the scene as a horrifically violent organization with territorial ambitions when a Syrian uprising turned into a deadly platform for regional rivalries. What existed as a ‘state’ at a virtual, cerebral level had, in fact, morphed into a ‘state’ of actual landmass, oil fields and martial law.

It is easy – perhaps, convenient – to forget all of this. Connecting the proverbial dots can be costly for some, for it will unravel a trajectory of violence that is rooted in foreign intervention. For many western commentators and politicians it is much easier – let alone safer – to discuss ISIS within impractical contexts, for example, Islam, than to take moral responsibility.

I pity those researchers who spent years examining the thesis of ISIS as a religious theology or ISIS and the apocalypse. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. What good did that bring about, anyway?

American military and political interventions have always been accompanied by attempting to also intervene in school curricula of invaded countries. The war on Afghanistan was also joined with a war on its ‘madrasas’ and unruly ‘ulemas’. None of this helped. If anything, it backfired, for it compounded the feeling of threat and sense of victimization among tens of millions of Muslims all around the world.

ISIS is but a name that can be rebranded without notice into something entirely different. Their tactics, too, can change, based on time and circumstances.  Their followers can mete out violence using a suicide belt, a car laden with explosives, a knife even, or a truck moving at high speed.

What truly matters is that ISIS has grown into a phenomenon, an idea that is not even confined to a single group and requires no official membership, transfer of funds or weapons.

This is no ordinary fact, but in a more sensible approach should represent the crux of the fight against ISIS.

When a French-Tunisian truck driver rammed into a crowd of celebrating people in the streets of Nice, the French police moved quickly to find connections between him and ISIS, or any other militant group. No clues were immediately revealed, yet, strangely, President François Hollande was quick to declare his intentions to respond militarily.

Such inanity and short-sightedness.  What good did France’s military adventurism achieve in recent years? Libya has turned into an oasis of chaos – where ISIS now control entire towns. Iraq and Syria remain places for unmitigated violence.

What about Mali? Maybe the French had better luck there.

Writing for ‘Al Jazeera’, Pape Samba Kane described the terrible reality that Mali has become following the French intervention in January 2003. Their so-called ‘Operation Serval’ turned into ‘Operation Barkhane’ and neither did Mali became a peaceful place nor did French forces leave the country.

The French, according to Kane are now Occupiers, not liberators, and according to all rationale data – like the ones highlighted above – we all know what foreign occupation does.

“The question that Malians have to ask themselves is”, Kane wrote: “Do they prefer having to fight against jihadists for a long time, or having their sovereignty challenged and their territory occupied or partitioned by an ancient colonialist state in order to satisfy a group allied with the colonial power?”

Yet the French, like the Americans, the British and others, continue to evade this obvious reality at their own peril. By refusing to accept the fact that ISIS is only a component of a much larger and disturbing course of violence that is rooted in foreign intervention, is to allow violence everywhere to perpetuate.

Defeating ISIS requires that we also confront and defeat the thinking that led to its inception: to defeat the logic of the George W. Bushes, Tony Blairs and John Howards of this world.

No matter how violent ISIS members or supporters are, it is ultimately a group of angry, alienated, radicalized young men seeking to alter their desperate situation by carrying out despicable acts of vengeance, even if it means ending their lives in the process.

Bombing ISIS camps may destroy some of their military facilities but it will not eradicate the very idea that allowed them to recruit thousands of young men all over the world.

They are the product of violent thinking that was spawned, not only in the Middle East but, initially, in various western capitals.

ISIS will fizzle out and die when its leaders lose their appeal and ability to recruit young men seeking answers and revenge.

The war option has, thus far, proved the least affective. ISIS will remain and metamorphose if necessary, as long as war remains on the agenda. To end ISIS, we must end war and foreign occupations.

It is as simple as that.

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= Gary Brumback

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are roughly 15,000 publically traded companies and countless millions of people who invest in them. Each of these companies belongs to an industry of companies in similar businesses. Three industries are the subject of this short article; the funeral service industry, the gun industry, and the war industry.

The first provides burial and crematory services and paraphernalia for people no longer living due to nonviolent domestic deaths. The second provides the means to cause violent domestic deaths. The third provides the means to murder people in foreign lands.

The first industry is tangential to the focal point off this article. The other two are the focal point. But to be true to the article’s catchall tile, I feel behooved to say something about investing in the first one, so I will start with it.

Investing in Death from Natural Causes

Funeral homes, crematoriums, and cemeteries, but excluding related costs such as headstones and crypts is a $15 billion a year industry in America. Almost gone are the days of small, family owned funeral homes. They are being gobbled up or swamped by funeral service corporations that promise investors healthy returns, at least if you buy one or more of the “six stocks to die for” as one authoritative source put it.

Investing in Death from Domestic Guns

It is said that Americans have had a love affair with guns and cars for a century. Until recently more people have died from car accidents than from guns. That apparently has changed and not surprisingly since there are more guns than cars in America.

Firearms’ makers and sellers tell investors and Wall Street that massive gun killings are a ripe opportunity for investors. The reason is simple. After a massive, homegrown slaughter the public panics and buys more guns.

Investing in Death by International Murder

Einstein called war an act of murder. I agree and would add that it’s an offensive act more so than a defensive act if you know the true history behind America’s endless wars since her founding. That’s why I call this industry the war industry, not the defense industry. The US government finally got smart and changed the name in 1949 from the Department of War to its current euphemism, the Department of Defense. But let’s not be fooled by our government that is always trying to fool us.

The war industry yields very good ROI’s (return on investments) if one is not squeamish or morally inhibited about investing in merchants of death. And thousands upon thousands of investors aren’t. A writer for Forbes magazine has given five reasons why other industrial sectors aren’t as good as the war industry; its stocks weather economic storms better; it dominates the market “selling Uncle Sam a billion dollars in goods and services every day, seven days a week;” it is “politically protected” (that’s an understatement); its oblivious to any “waning demand;” and its future prospects are more publicly known through news of any impending dips in the defense budget and thus give cautious investors pause to reconsider” (when does that ever happen for more than blip of time?).

Protected Investors

We can partly blame the second and third industries’ investors for the consequences of their companies’ miscreant behavior but we can’t sue them for wrongful death and other damages. The reason why dates back over two centuries ago in America’s history when the first state in the union enacted a limited liability law and other states quickly followed suit in a race to the bottom. States initially gave their chartered corporations limited liability only if they provided public services, but with the advent of sham charters, any chartered corporation gets limited liability. That includes the chartered and insulated gun makers and sellers and war contractors.

The war contractors are also shielded from lawsuits for wrongful deaths for two reasons. The foreigners have no standing in our courts and our lawless, criminal, war perpetuating government makes murder by war legal.

Socially Responsible Investing: An Alternative for Morally Minded Investors?

One would think that out of 15,000 publicly traded companies there surely ought to be some socially responsible ones in which to invest. Well, name me one if you find a company that meets all of my seven criteria a company must meet in order to be rightly called socially responsible. A socially responsible company is one that 1) stays financially viable, 2) provides socially beneficial products and/or services, 3) without knowingly causing any physical, psychological, financial or ecological harm, 4) without externalizing costs (e.g., job outsourcing, waste disposal), 5) without seeking or depending on “warfare welfare” or other government favors such as corporate personhood recognition, campaign financing, lobbying, subsidies, revolving doors, laissez-faire regulations, or criminal immunity, 6) conducts business ethically and legally, and 7) treats all stakeholders fairly and with dignity.

The rationale for all but the first criteria is that they are hallmarks of the corpocracy, the Devil’s marriage between big corporations and government. The corpocracy is far more egregious than just being socially irresponsible. It is directly responsible for America being ranked the worst among industrialized nations on various measures such as income inequality and unemployment; for America being the most imperialistic and death dealing nation on the globe; and for America being vulnerable to continuous blowbacks from drone strikes and other forms of unending, devastating and deadly military aggression done solely for profit and power.

Closing Remarks

You know the old saying; “there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes.” I will add two more certainties; 1) America was born in the womb of war and will die in her arms unless the American people rise up to demand the end of the military/political/industrial complex; and 2) people who invest in the gun and war industries are as morally and socially irresponsible as people populating the complex and are not only investors in death but also accomplices of death by murder.

Gary Brumback, PhD is a retired psychologist and Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is the author of The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch; and America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. His most recent book is Corporate Reckoning Ahead. Gary can be reached at: democracypower@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Gary, or visit Gary’s blog site, www.democracyorcorpocracy.blogspot.com.

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Nauseated by the
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Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Truth’s Advocate

Time marches.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the age of 21, I crossed Gaza into Egypt to pursue a degree in political science. The timing could have not been worse. The Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had resulted in a US-led international coalition and a major war, which eventually paved the road for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I became aware that Palestinians were suddenly ‘hated’ in Egypt because of Yasser Arafat’s stance in support of Iraq at the time. I just did not know the extent of that alleged ‘hate.’  

It was in a cheap hotel in Cairo, where I slowly ran out of the few Egyptian pounds at my disposal, that I met Hajah Zainab, a kindly, old custodian who treated me like a son. She looked unwell, wobbled as she walked, and leaned against walls to catch her breath before carrying on with her endless chores. The once carefully-designed tattoos on her face, became a jumble of wrinkled ink that defaced her skin. Still, the gentleness in her eyes prevailed, and whenever she saw me she hugged me and cried.  

Hajah Zainab wept for two reasons: taking pity on me as I was fighting a deportation order in Cairo – for no other reason than the fact that I was a Palestinian at a time that Arafat endorsed Saddam Hussein while Hosni Mubarak chose to ally with the US. I grew desperate and dreaded the possibility of facing the Israeli intelligence, Shin Bet, who were likely to summon me to their offices once I crossed the border back to Gaza. The other reason is that Hajah Zainab’s only son, Ahmad, had died fighting the Israelis in Sinai.  

Zainab’s generation perceived Egypt’s wars with Israel, that of 1948, 1956 and 1967 as wars in which Palestine was a central cause. No amount of self-serving politics and media conditioning could have changed that. But the war of 1967 was that of unmitigated defeat. With direct, massive support from the US and other western powers, Arab armies were soundly beaten, routed at three different fronts. Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were lost, along with the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley and Sinai, as well.  

It was then that some Arab countries’ relations with Palestine began changing. Israel’s victory and the US-West’s unremitting support convinced some Arab governments to downgrade their expectations, and expected the Palestinians to do so, as well. Egypt, once the torch-bearer of Arab nationalism, succumbed to a collective sense of humiliation and, later, redefined its priorities to free its own land from Israeli Occupation. Without the pivotal Egyptian leadership, Arab countries were divided into camps, each government with its own agenda. As Palestine, all of it, was then under Israeli control, Arabs slowly walked away from a cause they once perceived to be the central cause of the Arab nation.  

The 1967 war also brought an end to the dilemma of independent Palestinian action, which was almost entirely hijacked by various Arab countries. Moreover, the war shifted the fcus to the West Bank and Gaza, and allowed the Palestinian faction, Fatah, to fortify its position in light of Arab defeat and subsequent division.  

That division was highlighted most starkly in the August 1967 Khartoum summit, where Arab leaders clashed over priorities and definitions. Should Israel’s territorial gains redefine the status quo? Should Arabs focus on returning to a pre-1967 situation or that of pre-1948, when historic Palestine was first occupied and Palestinians ethnically cleansed? 

The United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 242, on November 22, 1967, reflecting the US Johnson Administration’s wish to capitalize on the new status quo: Israeli withdrawal “from occupied territories” in exchange for normalization with Israel.  The new language of the immediate post-1967 period alarmed Palestinians who realized that any future political settlement was likely to ignore the situation that existed prior to the war.  

Eventually, Egypt fought and celebrated its victory of the 1973 war, which allowed it to consolidate its control over most of its lost territories. A few years later, the Camp David accords in 1979 divided the ranks of the Arabs even more and ended Egypt’s official solidarity with the Palestinians, while granting the most populous Arab state a conditioned control over its own land in Sinai. The negative repercussions of that agreement cannot be overstated. However, the Egyptian people, despite the passing of time, have never truly normalized with Israel.  

In Egypt, a chasm still exists between the government, whose behavior is based on political urgency and self-preservation, and a people who, despite a decided anti-Palestinian campaign in various media, are as ever determined to reject normalization with Israel until Palestine is free. Unlike the well-financed media circus that has demonized Gaza in recent years, the likes of Hajah Zainab have very few platforms where they can openly express their solidarity with the Palestinians. In my case, I was lucky enough to run into the aging custodian who cried for Palestine and her only son all those years ago. 

Nevertheless, that very character, Zainab, was reincarnated in my path of travel, time and again. I met her in Iraq in 1999. She was an old vegetable vendor living in Sadr City. I met her in Jordan in 2003. She was a cabby, with a Palestinian flag hanging from his cracked rearview mirror. She was also a retired Saudi journalist I met in Jeddah in 2010, and a Moroccan student I met at a speaking tour in Paris in 2013. She was in her early twenties. After my talk, she sobbed as she told me that Palestine for her people is like a festering wound. “I pray for a free Palestine every day,” she told me, “as my late parents did with every prayer.”  

Hajah Zainab is also Algeria, all of Algeria. When the Palestinian national football team met their Algerian counterparts last February, a strange, unprecedented phenomenon transpired that left many puzzled. The Algerian fans, some of the most ardent lovers of football anywhere, cheered for the Palestinians, non-stop. And when the Palestinian team scored a goal, it was if the bleachers were lit on fire. The crowded stadium exploded with a trancing chant for Palestine and Palestine alone.  

So, did the Arabs betray Palestine? The question is heard often, and it is often followed with the affirmative, ‘yes, they did.’ The Egyptian media scapegoating of Palestinians in Gaza, the targeting and starving of Palestinians in Yarmouk, Syria, the past civil war in Lebanon, the mistreatment of Palestinians in Kuwait in 1991 and, later, in Iraq in 2003 are often cited as examples. Now some insist that the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ was the last nail in the coffin of Arab solidarity with Palestine.  

I beg to differ. The outcome of the ill-fated ‘Arab Spring’ was a massive letdown, if not betrayal, not just of Palestinians but of most Arabs. The Arab world has turned into a massive ground for dirty politics between old and new rivals. While Palestinians were victimized, Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Yemenis and others are being victimized, as well.  

There has to be a clear political demarcation of the word ‘Arabs.’ Arabs can be unelected governments as much as they can be a kindly old woman earning two dollars a day in some dirty Cairo hotel. Arabs are emboldened elites who care only about their own privilege and wealth while neither Palestine nor their own nations matter, but also multitudes of peoples, diverse, unique, empowered, oppressed, who happen at this point in history to be consumed with their own survival and fight for freedom.  

The latter ‘Arabs’ never betrayed Palestine; they willingly fought and died for it when they had the chance.  

Most likely, Hajah Zainab is long dead now. But millions more like her still exist and they, too, long for a free Palestine, as they continue to seek their own freedom and salvation.

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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