The War on Palestine has exposed Western double standards and a spineless Arab world
By : Arif Ayyub
It is a hugely indicative display of how two global powers are playing out their ambitions in two different parts of the world. While US President, Joe Biden and top White House officials have been visiting Israel and Jordan and important countries in the Arab world in what is essentially a visit meant to reassure its closest ally, Israel as it bombs Gaza thereby pushing the region precariously towards a catastrophic war, China hosted 130 nations in October to celebrate its Belt and Road Initiative where President Putin of Russia was feted with the roll of honour.
The United States continues to be stuck in its Middle Eastern policing and policies which have ravaged the region. It has given the region its many wars and civil strives, including the two Gulf wars, ostensibly to uphold democracy, freedom and Western values.
Middle East has always been of enormous interest to the US since huge reserves of oil and gas were discovered in many parts of the region in the early part of the 20th century. It gained strategic prominence manifold with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 on Arab lands where Arabs had lived for thousands of years. The US saw for itself an opportunity to establish itself in the region as an arbiter for the region and as a protectorate of the new state of Israel. And it could only do so by determining for itself a broader role in the Middle East, building ties with the Kings and Rulers while preaching democracy and freedom in other parts of the world.
Successive US administrations, as part of their state policy, have always thought it necessary to undermine, interfere, subjugate and even rule by proxy much of the region. And any leader who seemed to have a mind of his own or grew too popular or powerful or both was brutally punished or overthrown in a ‘popular’ uprising.
The United States likes to see itself as the biggest advocate of democracy and democratic rights of people and of their freedom but somehow never for the Arab world or for the Arab people. As a matter of fact, there are enough examples where it enabled coup de’tat because the popularly elected government were a threat to the advancing of its middle-eastern policies whose cornerstone has always been to protect Israel at all costs while the state continues to brutally occupy Palestine and expands its illegitimate settlements against international norms and laws.
An otherwise arbiter of human rights, the United States last week cast aspersions on the casualty numbers emerging from Gaza till the Palestinian health ministry had to release the names of each one of the dead along with their IDs. A White House spokesperson did not shy away from comparing the pro-Palestinian protestors to the white supremacist rallies by the far right in the United States.
If any other country had called for the resignation of the chief of the United Nations alluding to him as a prejudiced man and boycotted the UN General assembly, the west would have possibly referred to it as a rogue state but not when it concerns its close ally, Israel .
Interestingly, the US and Israel are not signatories to the ratifications of the International Criminal Court. It has meant that neither the political nor military leadership of the US who imposed devastating wars across Arab, African, and South American states as well as in Vietnam and Afghanistan will never be tried for war crimes, for uprooting millions and for the heinous acts of killing humans and calling them collateral damage. It therefore comes as no surprise that Israel is relentlessly bombing the tiny Gaza strip and has now killed more than 8000 Palestinians, a third of which are children.
It does not consider ICC to have any locus in how it chooses to deal with Palestinian people. This is not Israel`s first brutal oppression and neither will be its last. From Washington to Paris to London to Berlin and Brussels, western leaders who dearly uphold “western” values have Israel`s back in “defending” itself, even if it means relentless bombing of civilians, cutting water, food and electricity and bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Palestinians deserve collective punishment for being Palestinians but Israelis do not for electing Netanyahu who is presiding over the most right-wing Government in Israel’s history and whose Cabinet members routinely call for the annihilation of Palestinians and treating them as second-class citizens. And this was even before the attack of Hamas on Israel.
While the West has been united and powerful in enforcing its diktat, the Arab states in particular and the Islamic world in general, continue to cut a sorry figure. Most rulers are worried about the ramifications of the images being beamed by channels like Al Jazeera, on their people. It makes their job a tad more difficult to hold power without accountability no matter what costs the Arab people have to pay. Some of these Kings and strongmen have been lining up to sign the Abrahamic accords in return for dole outs by the US which essentially seeks to ensure the brutal oppression of Palestine by Israel is not only normalised but overlooked and never challenged. These accords also are in utter disregard of the aspirations of the Arab people for democracy, peace and prosperity in the region.
And while we are at it, it would be interesting to note that amongst all the Kingdoms and vassal states in the region, the only functioning democracy that routinely conducts elections and elects its leader, apart from Israel, is Iran, a country that Israel considers it`s enemy and wishes is destroyed at the earliest with tacit support of US.
As the current crisis plays out in Palestine, the continuous occupation of Palestine for over seven decades, including of the third holiest mosque in Islam, of Masjid-Al Aqsa, the need for democracy has never been felt stronger across the middle-East. A democratic middle east would have had the spine to stand up to the bullying of Israel and to the hypocrisy of the US. But no wake-up call would be strong enough as long as the US props, protects and provides for the region’s many rulers enabling them to maintain their iron grip on power with quid pro quo such as the Abrahamic accords and defence pacts.
It is nobody’s case that Israel should not exist. It can and it should. But why should it be at the cost of native Palestinians? Why should it be that European and American Jewish citizens (while often maintaining their dual nationalities) should be settled by uprooting Palestinians who have inhabited these lands for thousands of years? Why should Israel, as its state policy, continue to ferociously expand its illegal settlements to accommodate the flow of Jewish immigrants by brazenly stealing Palestinian lands? Why are Palestinians, who were forced out of their lands, denied the right to return to their homeland? Why should Palestinians who were uprooted in 1948 during the first Nakba, continue to live in squalid refugee camps and in open-air prisons like Gaza?
While Europe and US have enacted laws and acts, often inhumanely, to keep war-afflicted African and Arab immigrants out of their countries, they encourage and condone the immigration of the Jewish diaspora from around the world into Palestine. This, in the aftermath of the Second World War and perhaps as a redemption of their collective betrayal of the Jews, they created a Jewish state in Palestine. To this day Palestinians have not known peace and to this day the US and European hands remain as bloodied with Palestinian blood.
In the subsequent decades and with every war Israel fought with its Arab neighbours, while the stated policy of the US has been to ensure peace between Israel and Palestine and create a two-state solution, it has instead chosen to arm Israel to its teeth, provided them billions in aid each year, equipped them with the most lethal jets (which Israel is using to pound and kill Palestinians in Gaza) and allowed let it become the only nuclear weapon state in the entire middle-east who has stockpiled enough nuclear warheads to destroy all of the Arab many times over. Israel and US claim, these measures are to provide a deterrence against a “hostile” Arab neighbourhood.
Indeed, as Biden once said, “if there was no state of Israel, they would have to create one”. Why? Because Israel is the gun that the US needs to keep in the resource-rich region and must obviously protect at all costs. This is best explained by US policies and actions in the Security Council, in its Congressional hearings and in the many wars it has conducted across the Middle East destroying countries, killing millions and impoverishing countries and their people.
Arab unity while a necessity will never be achieved as long as the region remains a collection of authoritarian regimes and kingdoms. That is not going to change anytime soon. It is easier for the US and Israel to deal with authoritarian rulers than democratically elected leaders who will have to face consequences for normalising ties and signing accords with the butchers of their Arab brothers, sisters and children.
The OIC member countries have remained an ineffective, toothless organisation. It`s collective conscience may yet not be rattled by the unfolding images of barbarity that Israel has unleashed upon Gaza. It will probably also ignore that the Masjid Al Aqsa has been wilfully desecrated by the Israeli Defence Forces repeatedly over the last few years. It will perhaps choose to ignore that Palestinians deserve to live as a free people, in peace and in the land that was inhabited by their forefathers with Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestine