TAJ HASHMI dwells deep upon Israel’s barbarism vis-à-vis the Muslim world in historical perspective and goes on to prove that ‘this lump in the body politic of the Muslim world’ is more than a Zionist state.
Essentially, since its emergence in 1948, Israel has remained an unassimilated lump in the body politic of the Muslim World. So much so, Muslim-majority countries from Algeria to Afghanistan and Iran to Indonesia – including those having no common border with Israel – do not shy away from expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. As Ayatollah Khomeini publicly asserted his support for the overthrow of Israel, so did many Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan and other Muslims display their solidarity with Palestine at mass rallies soon after the beginning of the “Arab Spring”.
One may mention that Algeria decided to donate its World Cup soccer prize money – $9 million – to the people of Gaza, after the escalation of Israel-Palestine crisis in July 2014. This is an attempt to understand why Palestine is so important in the collective psyche of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia; and what are the short- and long-term ramifications of the collective Muslim hate against the Zionist State.
Despite the tacit support for Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza by some autocratic Arab regimes the overwhelming majority of Muslims across the world consider Israel a rogue state, no better than Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. The pro-Israeli Arab regimes have lost all credibility and support among the bulk of Muslims everywhere. Not only Muslims but also non-Muslims across the world, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and even in Israel, have been publicly condemning Israel for the mass killing of innocent civilians in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been thoroughly discredited among Muslims for its blind support for Israel, the only country which has violated scores of UN Resolutions and international law with impunity. It has not only refused to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, but has also been illegally settling Jews in Palestinian and Syrian territories. Thanks to the overpowering influence of the Israel Lobby and the AIPAC in America, the Obama administration (like those of his predecessors) seems to be totally spellbound and too eager to help Israel by condoning all its illegal activities, including mass slaughter of innocent men, women and children in Gaza, West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab World.
Seemingly, Israel under Netanyahu is striking the last nail into the coffin of the so-called Two-State Formula, and is working for the realization of Greater Israel to annex more territories from Syria, Jordan and neighbouring countries. Interestingly, Netanyahu granted first Golan Heights oil drilling licence to Dick Cheney-linked company, Genie Energy in early 2013. And we know Golan Heights is an Israeli-occupied territory taken from Syria during the 1967 War. In view of Israel’s unique privileged position as it gets away with all illegal acts with impunity – including war crimes and pogroms – one wonders if there is a special set of laws for this Zionist State, or it is something more than just a Zionist State!
The raison d’être for Israel goes beyond the creation of a Jewish homeland. Theodor Herzl’s (the “Father of Zionism”) justified the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine in his famous 1896 pamphlet, Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] in the following manner: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” European colonial powers, especially Britain, were enamoured by the idea of Israel, especially during World War I. Besides the “Balfour Declaration” made by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in 1917 favouring the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine; in the wake of the War in 1918, the British did everything possible to settle a large number of armed European Jews in Palestine (which was under British occupation, 1919-1948), paving the way for the creation of Israel in 1948. Despite many leading Americans’ opposition to the creation of Israel, President Truman (a Christian Zionist), favoured its creation.
From the candid assertions by Herzl and Balfour, and President Truman’s decision to favour the creation of Israel by expropriating more than a million Arabs from Palestine, one has no reason to believe that Israel came into being only as a Jewish homeland, as the last refuge or safe haven of persecuted European Jews who had gone through a series of horrific genocides in Russia, Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Europe for several centuries up to the end of World War II. Since there had already been more Jews in the United States than in Israel in the 1940s, European Jews who survived the Holocaust could be re-settled in America and Europe, especially in Britain, Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia. One does not understand why more than a million Arabs had to be expropriated from their ancestral land in Palestine where they had been living for more than 2,000 years. Palestine was not a barren, uninhibited land, as claimed by Israel and its promoters. What the British did in occupied Palestine was robbing Paul to reward Peter in the most cynical clever way. The British rulers allowed unhindered Jewish migration to Palestine without the permission of the Palestinian people. In May 1948, the British abruptly left Palestine and the heavily armed Jewish settlers (including Jewish British soldiers) declared the “independence” of Israel.
Since the overpowering Zionist Lobby in the West can brand one as “anti-Semitic” even for one’s objective criticism of Israel’s highhandedness in Gaza, West Bank and across the region, and for questioning the way the entity of Israel came into being in the first place, one may cite an Israeli author and activist Miko Peled, son of a former Israeli general who fought for Israel in its decisive wars against Arabs in 1948 and 1967, in this regard. Peled, the author of best selling The General’s Son, questions several myths about the creation of Israel, “the myth of 1948”; “the myth of the existential threat of 1967”; and “the myth of Jewish democracy [in Israel]”. He writes:
Growing up we were taught to believe that the Arabs had left Eretz Israel [in 1948] partly on their own and partially at the directive of their so-called leaders, and that therefore taking their land and homes was morally OK. It never occurred to us that even if they did leave willingly, we had no right to prohibit their return…. Now, although Palestine was not a state yet, it would have become one had it not been so thoroughly destroyed…. What the Palestinians did not have, the one thing in which they did not invest was a military…. In 1948 the Jewish militia became the Israeli army … [which] destroyed close to 500 towns and villages and exiled close to 800,000 Palestinians who to this day are not permitted to return…. It had been a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish militia involving massacres, terrorism, and the wholesale looting of an entire nation [emphasis added].
So, it is evident that Western powers created Israel by using the United Nations (most European colonies in Africa and Asia were not members of the UN in 1947-48), and by condoning the mass expropriation of about a million Palestinians by Jewish settlers from Europe. It seems the main motive behind the creation of Israel was the Western desire to have a “rampart of Europe against Asia” in the oil-rich Middle East in close proximity to the strategically important Suez Canal. The Anglo-French and Israeli invasion of Egypt in the wake of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 may be cited in support of the above assertion. Western and Israeli double standards vis-à-vis the Arabs and the Israeli defence requirements are abysmally striking. On the one hand, Israel is hell-bent to destroy Iran’s alleged nuclear programme, yet on the other hand, Israel not only has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons but in 1975 it also offered nuclear arsenal to South Africa under Apartheid to intimidate its black neighbours.
America’s carte blanche to Israel is at the roots of the latter’s dangerously arrogant policy toward the Muslim World. America favoured Israeli occupation of Arab lands in 1967 and subsequent invasions of Arab nations and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Last but not the least, America has been supportive of Israel’s brazen and unabashed violations of around 90 UN Security Council resolutions condemning its violations of human rights and asking for its unconditional withdrawal from Arab territories it occupied in the 1967 War, which Israel started by invading Egypt, Syria and Jordan, contrary to the Western and Israeli propaganda on the contrary. America also condoned the Israeli (aerial and naval) attack on a US Navy Ship during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in international waters, as a “mistake”. The attack sank the USS Liberty, and killed 34 US soldiers.
One wonders as to why the West does not take cognizance of Arab rebels’ displaying the Palestinian flag in anti-autocracy rallies during the “Arab Spring” in the streets of Cairo, Damascus and San’a. While the Palestine issue has been a flashpoint, the West has been consistently supporting Israel since it hurried its creation in 1948 following a UN Resolution in 1947 in favour of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews. It is noteworthy that the decision to partition Palestine (Resolution 181) was taken at the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947 by 33 votes against 13 with 10 abstentions and one absence while more than two-thirds of the World (under colonial rule) remained unrepresented in the United Nations. The reason of Western / American support for Israel is not far to seek. Days after Resolution 181, on December 11, 1947 British Labour MP Thomas Reid stated in the Parliament the real motive of American support for Israel:
What is the motive? Let us be frank about it. One of the chief motives is that the Jews have a controlling voice in the election for the President in the States of New York, Illinois, Ohio and elsewhere in America. I suggest that the chief reason for this evil proposal of U.N.O. is that the political parties in America, or their party machines, are partly at the electoral mercy of the Jews. That is public knowledge [emphasis added].
Despite Israel’s victory against Arabs and its occupation of Arab territories in the 1967 War, countries like the USSR, China, India and the bulk of the Third World and Muslim-majority countries did not condone the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. Until 1991, a majority of the UN members considered Zionism synonymous with racism. On November 10, 1975 the UN General Assembly could muster enough support among members to adopt Resolution 3379 with 72 votes against 35, which determined that Zionism was “a form of racism and racial discrimination”.
Interestingly, Muslim-majority Iran and Turkey, which had diplomatic relations with Israel in 1975, voted for Resolution 3379, and so did China, India (did not formally recognise Israel until 1992), and the USSR. Resolution 3379 also considered Zionism a threat to world peace and security. Meanwhile, in December 1953 Resolution 3151 of the General Assembly formally condemned the “unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism”.
Israel’s growing influence in world affairs has been the main catalyst in the fast deterioration of the Muslim-West understanding. By1991, the Israeli lobby has become so powerful globally that the UN General Assembly – for the first time in its history – on December 16 revoked Resolution 3379 by Resolution 46/86 by 111 votes against 25. In 1991 countries that had favoured Resolution 3379 in 1975, either abstained/absented from voting or voted in favour of its revocation. The USSR and India, which had voted for Resolution 3379, went against it in 1991. Afterwards all attempts to find out a solution to the Arab-Israeli problem through the good offices of some European and American leaders, including Bill Clinton, failed. They failed, as they wanted to find out a solution without compelling Israel to leave all “occupied territories”, including Jerusalem, in accordance with UN Resolution 242 of 1967.
After Bill Clinton – who had a better image than most American Presidents had in the Muslim World – Obama sounded quite reassuring to the Muslim World through his “path breaking” Cairo Speech on June 4, 2009 and his insistence in May 2011 that the Palestinian State would be based on the pre-1967 War borders. In Cairo, he asked Israel to recognise the Palestinians’ right to have a state of their own, and reiterated boldly: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements [in the occupied West Bank]”. In Washington, on May 19, 2011, on the eve of Israeli hawkish Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arrival, he called for Israel’s return to the pre-1967 borders. He asked Israel to accept the pre-June 1967 boundaries as the basis for negotiations for a lasting peace with the Palestinians. He wanted “full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces” from the West Bank in coordination with Palestinian security forces for “a viable Palestine, a secure Israel”. “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation,” he stressed. Instead of asking Israel to demolish the illegal Jewish Settlements in the West Bank, he advised Israelis and Arabs to do “land swaps to accommodate Israel’s large settlement blocs”.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Yehud Olmert claimed that he had offered quite a pragmatic solution to the Arab-Israeli problem to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, on September 16, 2008, in Jerusalem. According to Olmert, the plan “granted the Palestinians a state with a land area equal to 99.5 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza”. He is said to have promised that Israel would only annex 6.3 per cent of Palestinian territory, and would compensate the Palestinian State “with Israeli lands equivalent to 5.8 per cent, as well as a corridor that would connect the two regions” of Gaza and West Bank. The plan is said to have also earmarked Jerusalem as a “shared capital” of the Jewish and Palestinian states. However, the apparently “generous” promise of conceding “99.5 per cent” of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian State with a corridor to connect the West Bank and Gaza through Israel was nothing but a dead letter. Later, quite conveniently, Olmert said he had not heard anything from Abbas again, while the former “have been waiting ever since”. Elliott Abrams, George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser who tried to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, writes that “rather than ignoring the proposal, the Palestinians asked for clarifications about it and then claimed it was they who never heard back” from Israel. Abrams also believes that Olmert’s so-called “offer” was never made public or shown to anyone to attest to its accuracy.
Since it is least likely that Israel would pay heed to Obama’s advice; and that Arabs would accept Jewish Settlements in the West Bank and part with Jerusalem, the Arab-Israeli conflict is most likely to remain unresolved for decades. The day after his speech, Obama met with the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House. Netanyahu publicly rejected the idea of Israel’s going back to the 1967 border as impractical and hence unacceptable to Israel. Obama’s speech was full of sound and fury and not so palatable to Palestinians for suggesting Palestinians to swap Jewish Settlements in prime real estate in the West Bank with patches of desert. It, however, stirred up pro-Israeli Americans. Conservative American analysts and politicians – from Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin – ridiculed the idea of Israel’s withdrawing from the territories it occupied in 1967 and likened it with the “absurd” idea of America’s returning Texas and other territories it occupied in wars with Mexico. Israel and its American supporters have also rejected the idea of any peace talk between Israel and the Palestinian Authorities having links with Hamas, which does not recognise Israel’s right to exist as an entity and publicly condemned the killing of bin Laden.
Days before evoking some controversy by his Cairo Speech, Obama mended fence with the Israel Lobby and Israel through his American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Speaking to the AIPAC, America’s largest pro-Israel lobby, Obama said that America’s support for Israel remained “ironclad” and that his emphasis on 1967 borders was “misrepresented” and his words were neither controversial nor new. He said he wanted Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a border that would be “different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967”. He also asserted that Israel was not under any obligation to sign peace with Hamas unless it recognised Israel as an entity and that he wanted the Palestinians and Israelis to “swap lands” (allowing Israel to retain the “Jewish Settlements” in the West Bank). What the pro-Israeli Obama administration did to the Palestinian cause contradicted his Cairo Speech of June 2009, where he promised to turn America into a benign soft-power: “Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: ‘I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be’.” As King Abdullah II of Jordan has explained, while the State Department and the Pentagon have been soft on the Palestinians, Obama under the influence of his pro-Israeli Middle East adviser Dennis Ross has been soft on Israel.
(to be concluded)