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29 March 2005 - MiddleEast.Org -  MER is Free |
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Upcoming from MER:
Bush/Sharon War Summit Preparations for Bombing Iran
THE WALL
Palestinian Anquish and Defeat
on top of the 'Death of the Arabs'
"The [Arab] leaders that met this week in Algeria argued and embarrassed the Arab masses on satellite television (nine leaders did not even show up), and came up with a [meaningless] statement, written in flowery Arabic, on the need to show solidarity with the Palestinians and the Iraqis... The history of Arab weakness,
especially during Arab summits, is a phenomenon worth examining...
A main point is that even the Arab leaders themselves have lost faith in their ability to change the terrible conditions of the Middle East, for which they are collectively responsible."
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 29 March: As usual the 'Palestinian Authority' along with its quisling groupings and p.r. flaks has done a miserably incompetent job dealing with just about everything over the years, including of late'The Wall' which now defines Palestinian anquish, isolation, and defeat.
PA incompetence and corruption are now more nakedly on display than ever in the tragically failed attempts to even make use of last years potentially powerful International Court of Justice ruling condemning 'The Wall' and demanded it be removed.
Indeed, truth be told bluntly, had the Israelis not succeeded so well in bribing, corrupting, dividing, co-opting. and blunting so many 'VIP' Palestinians -- with Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Ala, Nabil Shaath, Yasser Abed Rabbo, Dahlan, Erekat, and Rajoub surely at the top of the list -- it would have been far more difficult for the Israelis to do what they have now done; and in fact much of the worst could have been prevented.
Among so may things that could have and should have been done differently and seriously by the PA, the unprecedented International Court of Justice ruling should have been used to relentlessly force the whole issue of Israeli Apartheid into the U.N. General Assembly and world consciousness, up to and including the suspension of Israeli credentials in the G.A. -- precisely what the world body did, also in definance of U.S. threats, in the case of Apartheid South Africa until it was brought down.
With Rachel Corrie's haunting letters still in mind, it's bad enough to realize how unconscionably the Israelis have treated the Palestinians -- bordering on genocide as Corrie herself tried so desperately to explain to family and friends. But add to this, also as Corrie wrote, all that Israel has done has been made possible year after year by the United States; and thus the political poisons created by combined U.S. and Israeli policies have over time now infected world affairs substantially helping create and fuel today's increasingly deadly and dangerous 'Clash of Civilizations'."
Even Jerusalem and Bethlehem now divided by 'The Wall'
Report, Christian Aid, 17 March 2005
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Israel's Apartheid Wall under construction dividing nearby Bethlehem from
Jerusalem and Palestinian homes and villages from each other
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| The Israeli government has revealed its plans for the route of the separation barrier it is building around Jerusalem. It will cut East Jerusalem and the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank off from the rest of the West Bank, and will divide Bethlehem.
Christian Aid's Palestinian and Israeli partners say the route will jeopardise peace talks and argue that the decision amounts to a unilateral attempt to prejudge the borders of a final solution to the conflict and whereas.
The Israeli government says the barrier is for security reasons. Israel has an absolute right to defend its citizens from attack. But the route of the barrier -- snaking deep into the West Bank will mean lands claimed by Palestinians for their future state will lie on the Israeli side of the barrier.
The issue of East Jerusalem is especially contentious -- Palestinians hope it will be the capital of their future state. The plan, which was authorised by Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Supreme Court, will see Ma'ale Adumim, the largest West Bank Israeli settlement encompassed by the barrier.
The town of Bethlehem will also be divided and the holy site of Rachel's Tomb will lie on the Israeli side. Construction is due for completion by the end of the year. As Christian Aid witnessed on a recent trip to the West Bank, the route of the barrier is having a devastating effect on the lives of Palestinians living nearby and many have been forced to move.
The story of Palestinian headmistress and mother of two, Terri Bullata, illustrates the hardships the barrier is causing. She and her family live directly in the shadow of the wall in the Abu Dis district which now falls on the West Bank side of the wall. Their house, however, is on the 'Jerusalem' side. She, being a Jerusalemite, has blue Jerusalem ID which, under the Israeli permit system means that she can reside in Jerusalem and generally enjoy greater freedom of movement than her West Bank compatriots -- including her own husband. If her husband's ID is checked he could be deported to the other side of the barrier, forcing the family apart.
As in the case of the Bullatta family, along the entire length of the route of the barrier in the Jerusalem district, Palestinians are separated from Palestinians and not from Israelis -- which begs the question of how that provides Israelis with security.
Death of the Arabs
By Sami Moubayed *
DAMASCUS - 25 March - Asia Times: Arab leaders have just finished a two-day Arab Summit in Algeria that coincided with the 60th anniversary of the Arab League. Unsurprisingly, as in the past, the outcome of the meeting was insignificant.
Three years ago, the Arab Summit in Beirut seemed promising, because of the peace initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The Arabs made their historic and comprehensive land-for-peace offer to Israel, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by invading and raiding Ramallah 24 hours later, killing hundreds of civilians and coming very close to sniping down the democratically elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, at his besieged compound in Ramallah.
The Arabs did nothing to stop him and the "great" Arab Summit was sent off into history with little ceremony or respect. The leaders that met this week in Algeria argued and embarrassed the Arab masses on satellite television (nine leaders did not even show up), and came up with a statement, written in flowery Arabic, on the need to show solidarity with the Palestinians and the Iraqis.
One year ago on this exact date, Israel assassinated Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the popular leader and founder of Hamas, accusing him of being a "terrorist", infuriating the Arab masses and the Islamic resistance, which promised to avenge the slain leader.
Less than one month later, on April 17, 2004, Yassin's successor, Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, was also killed by the Israeli army. Again, the Arabs promised revenge, and did nothing. A few months back, on November 11, 2004, the historic leader of the Palestinian people, Yasser Arafat, died in a hospital in Paris, and many Palestinians and Arabs speculated that he had been poisoned by Israel. They promised revenge, yet also did nothing. In fact, all they did was rally in rank and file behind the newly elected leader Mahmud Abbas, who promised to take them in the exact opposite direction from where Arafat had been leading them since 1965. This is the sad case today with the Arab street.
The history of Arab weakness, especially during Arab summits, is a phenomenon worth examining. As early as 1948, during a summit to discuss the upcoming war in Palestine, embarrassing arguments broke out between Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the pre-Arafat leader of the Palestinians, and Syria's Shukri al-Quwatli. Husayni demanded that the Army of Deliverance, a volunteer army created by the Arab League, be placed under his command, while Quwatli objected, wanting it under the command of Syria.
Husayni reasoned that his history, during the uprising against the British in 1936, attested that he could lead an army in combat, while Quwatli wanted leadership for Syria, to live up to Syria's history of Arab nationalism. When Quwatli objected, Husayni bitterly reminded him that he had donated generously to the Syrian cause in 1925-27, and expected Quwatli to pay him back for his favors. He said that he would not recognize a resistance movement in Palestine not under his command, and sent Quwatli a list of expenses, salaries and military needs for his 12,000 recruits, which Syria was expected to provide. Quwatli snapped back saying, "If the Palestinian people want to make the Mufti commander of everything in Palestine, then I would be more than happy to give him everything. That way I could rid myself of all the responsibility which rests on my shoulders, and all the problems I face in trying to save Palestine. I could relax. By pushing forward with my efforts to defend Palestine, I am risking Syria's very independence. An independence which is absolute and in which every Syrian takes pride. An independence won with tremendous sacrifice."
Quwatli added that if Husayni took control, then the Palestinians would lose the war. "The Mufti's actions in Palestine over the last 20 years have never been successful, but have only led to one defeat after another," he said. Inter-Arab differences were many, and the Arab camp was further divided between Quwatli and Jordanian King Abdullah. Jordan was reluctant to approve a pan-Arab fighting force in Palestine and showed reservations about involving its own troops in combat. Abdullah expressed resentment at Quwatli's decision to draft a volunteer army from Syria, and added that if an Arab force would be created, he and only he should lead it.
Iraq supported Amman (both were ruled by the Hashemite dynasty) while Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Palestine supported Syria. During their meeting, Quwatli received a cable from Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who claimed that 10,000 fighters from the Brotherhood were ready for combat, and were at the disposal of the Arab League. The proposal infuriated King Farouk, who was facing a violent clash with the Brotherhood at home.
When the Arabs welcomed Banna's proposal, Farouk walked out in protest. The Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni spoke to reporters after the meeting saying, "The Arabs have never been united on any topic before, as they are united today on Palestine." Then British foreign secretary Douglas Hume mocked the Arabs, saying, "As the Arabs have always been without a strategy, there was no clarity or feeling about what they should do on the land that they call Palestine." These colossal arguments were before the creation of Israel.
There are many milestones of embarrassment in the history of Arab summits. In Alexandria, Egypt, in September 1964, the summit formally approved the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), under the command of an Arab aristocrat named Ahmad Shuqayri. It was a political organization, dwarfed by Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser, very different from the revolutionary one that emerged under Arafat, and its leader Shuqayri was a soft-spoken notable who had never carried a gun in his life.
To have him lead the PLO was an embarrassment in its own right, showing how serious the Arabs were in wanting to liberate Palestine. In Casablanca, an Arab summit was held in September 1965 that was so insignificant that no notable decisions were reached.
The summit that came next, officially being the fourth, called for by the Arab League, was memorable, being held in Khartoum, Sudan, two months after the Arab defeat in the war of 1967 where Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Jerusalem. This summit agreed that the heads of state would take all needed measures to liberate the Arab territories occupied in war. They would "unify their political efforts to eliminate the effects of the Israeli aggression" in addition to increasing their military strength through the funding of Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The summit came out with the famous "Three No's": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel. Today, nearly 40 years later, all these occupied lands, with the exception of the Syrian Golan, have been liberated, not by war, as the leaders that assembled in Sudan wanted, but actually by the peace initiatives of Anwar al-Sadat in 1977-78 and Yasser Arafat in 1993. In fact, they were only liberated by doing exactly what the Khartoum summit asked the Arab leaders not to do in 1967.
Then came the Arab summit of September 1970, held while war was raging in Jordan between King Hussein's army and the PLO of Yasser Arafat. To show their disgust with Hussein's bloodbath, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Morocco failed to show up at the summit. By absenting themselves, all four states effectively did little to stop the bloodbath, only increasing tension between Hussein and the Arabs.
It was not until November 1973 that the Arab summit then decided to "refuse any solution that might be harmful to complete Arab sovereignty over the Holy City of Jerusalem". And it was not until October 1974 that the summit affirmed "the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and to return to their homeland".
Jordan objected, but this Arab summit in Rabat, Morocco, acknowledged the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people - a title and honor King Hussein wanted for himself. In October 1976, an Arab Summit was held in Riyadh to discuss the civil war in Lebanon and to form the Arab Deterrent Force to help stop the fighting. In fact, the fighting broke out in April 1975, and the Arabs were one year and six months late in convening to help save Lebanon from the civil war. Even then, they failed drastically in their task, and war did not end until 14 years later, in 1990.
More Arab shortsightedness and weakness was shown at the Arab Summit held in Iraq in November 1978, which called on Egypt not to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and froze relations with president Anwar Sadat. Years later, every Arab leader assembled in Baghdad in 1978, responsible for the strongly-worded declaration against Sadat, tried desperately to repeat what Sadat had done at Camp David.
A summit held in Tunis in November 1979, after the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, affirmed that liberating it would be an Arab responsibility "in as much as it was a Lebanese responsibility". Again, as the case of 1976, the Arab decision was too little and too late, coming months after the actual occupation of the south.
And it was not the Arab League, but in fact the Lebanese resistance of Hezbollah, with the help of Iran (a non-Arab country), that liberated the south in 2000, with no help whatsoever from the Arab community.
At a 1987 Arab conference in Amman, so tense was the situation between the Arabs and Arafat that the Palestinian cause was absent from the leaders' agenda and no mention of Palestine was made in the final communique. In June 1988, six months after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, an Arab summit was held in Algeria, which asked for the organization of an international conference on the Middle East, to be attended by Arafat's exiled PLO, residing at the time in Tunis. It affirmed the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, and did nothing but offer verbal support to the Palestinians, who were leading a non-militant uprising against occupation, armed with nothing but stones.
An extraordinary summit was held in Cairo in August 1990, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The Arab League called on him to withdraw his forces from Kuwait, condemning it as aggression, but took no steps toward pressuring Saddam to comply. The league could have, had it wished, created an Arab force to supervise Saddam's exodus from Kuwait, but preferred to leave the job to the US, thereby facilitating the Gulf War of 1991. In fact, at the Cairo Summit of 1990, it was decided that an Arab force would be deployed between Kuwait and Iraq to enforce a withdrawal and end to hostilities, something that never took place.
In June 1996, a summit was held in Cairo to discuss the election of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel. So divided were the Arabs, and so eager to please the US, that Saddam's Iraq was not invited.
In October 2000, a summit was held in Cairo where a fund of US$1 billion was set aside to preserve the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and support the intifada that had broken out in September 2000. Today, five years later, that money has not gone through into either project, and the intifada is proclaimed dead, by the Arab community at large, and by Mahmud Abbas, the new president of the Palestinians.
The 2000 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh and the 2001 conference in Amman were the greatest proof of Arab inefficiency, where the Arab states were unable even properly to channel the donation funds promised to the Palestinians. In 2000, so terrible was the Arab scene that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi appeared on satellite television and accused the Arabs of organizing summits solely to meet, dine and catch up on one another's stories, claiming that no serious work was ever made at the "so-called summits".
The past three summits were also very memorable. In March 2002 in Beirut, the Arabs met to discuss a comprehensive Arab peace initiative, and the continued house arrest of Arafat. Not only did Israel prevent Arafat from attending the conference, but the organizers in Beirut caused an Arab-Arab crisis by refusing to broadcast Arafat's speech, broadcast from Ramallah, fearing that this would upset the Syrians, who were traditional enemies of the PLO chairman.
At Sharm al-Sheikh in March 2003, the summit was a fiasco because a war of words broke out, on satellite television, between Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Gaddafi. In May 2004, a summit was held in Tunis, after being delayed from an earlier date, where Gaddafi, so upset at the summit's resolutions, took out a cigarette and began to smoke, puffing away in the face of Lebanon's late prime minister Rafik Hariri.
This year's summit opened amid monumental changes taking place in the Arab world. It is the first summit since 1965 held without the towering influence of Arafat. The intifada, which Arafat championed since 2000, is nearly over, and Syria's presence in Lebanon is also coming to an end. In Iraq, the people are moving on after many years of hardship, having conducted democratic elections in January and are working to create a proper post-Saddam Iraq.
Other longtime faces of the Arab world, including the United Arab Emirates' president, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who died in 2004, were absent, and so was Hariri, killed in a bomb attack in Beirut this year.
Even the well-established leaders of the Arab world failed to show up. King Abdullah of Jordan, annoyed by the summit refusing to adopt a Jordanian resolution calling for normalization with Israel, did not attend, claiming that he had prior commitments. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did not show, to protest the presence of Gaddafi, who was implicated in an assassination attempt against the Saudi royals after their feud at the Arab Summit of 2003. Lebanon's Emile Lahhoud is facing rising tension at home in light of Prime Minister Omar Karameh's failure to form a proper cabinet, and the latest car bomb in Beirut, which left eight injured. He did not show up, nor did the leaders of Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The leaders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also failed to show up, for health reasons.
The reasons for so many absences vary, but a main point is that even the Arab leaders themselves have lost faith in their ability to change the terrible conditions of the Middle East, for which they are collectively responsible.
* Dr Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
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March 2005
London Mayor Has His Very Public Say About Israel
(March 30, 2005)
"Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office... Sharon continues to organise terror."
(March 30, 2005)
"Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office... Sharon continues to organise terror."
Palestinian Defeat on top of 'Death of the Arabs
(March 10, 2005)
As usual the 'Palestinian Authority' along with its quisling groupings and p.r. flaks has done a miserably incompetent job dealing with just about everything over the years, including of late'The Wall' which now defines Palestinian anquish, isolation, and defeat.
Palestine State No More
(March 31, 2005)
So many delusions, so many distortions, so much refusal to face realities...and from so many. Why, ask yourself, in recent years has it become those most antagonistic toward the Palestinians, including Ariel Sharon and George Bush, who have so publicly become such rhetorical advocates of a 'Palestinian State' after all these years? And why have so many others who have long struggled for a 'Palestinian State' become such opponents of the 'roadmap' and the 'peace process' that is supposed to bring this 'Palestinian State' into being?
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