Consequently despite all the brouhahas about Obama’s Cairo Speech, the Muslim World has not much to expect of the US administration, which cannot go against American public opinion to force Israel to accept the 1967 lines as its borderlines with Palestine. Days after Obama’s advice to Israel to accept the 1967-Border as the basis of Arab-Israeli border, on May 24, 2011 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the US Congress. He told the audience that his country was not going to accept a divided Jerusalem and that the issue of a Palestinian State was least important, while the security for a Jewish state was of prime concern to Israel and America. He “reportedly got 59 rounds of applause — including 29 standing ovations” — for (in effect) telling Obama to shove off his suggestion to start the peace process on the basis of 1967 borders.
What is noteworthy is Obama’s volte-face at the end of the day. On September 21, 2011 his so-called soft corner for Palestine simply evaporated on the floors of the UN General Assembly. The Israeli Lobby in America – possibly more powerful than the “Military-Industrial-Complex” – forcefully retaliated against Obama’s “harsh policy” against Israel. Consequently, the US President, supposed to be the “most powerful head of state” in the world, was forced to eat his words.
In his UN General Assembly speech in September 2011 Obama unabashedly pooh-poohed Palestinian National Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas’s proposal of granting formal UN membership to Palestine. Obama, as one analyst tells us, in “an empty and arrogant sermon” to the UN, which evoked no applause for “a single line in his speech” suggested that a Palestinian state would emerge only after “negotiations between the parties”, the Israelis and the Palestinians. He simply ignored the fact that decades of negotiations between the two parties had been fruitless and futile. In the same speech, Obama concocted history and simply refrained from telling the truth to the world body. He told that a) Israel’s neighbours had “waged repeated wars” against it; and b) “In Bahrain, steps have been taken toward reform and accountability”.
Not long after Obama’s UN speech, America condemned the UNESCO for formally admitting the Palestinian State as a member and cut US funding for the world body – worth $60 million per year. In this backdrop, it seems the Palestinian State will remain ever elusive unless “‘something’ that will ‘somehow happen’”, to paraphrase Mark Danner, who is critical of both the UN and US administration for their pro-Israeli bias.
It is evident again that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not know anything about the plight of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, let alone the history of Zionism and Israel. As America does not seem to realise the gravity of the Arab-Israeli problem, the “mother of all conflicts” in the Arab World, so is the Muslim World unwilling to accept Israel’s legitimacy. It is noteworthy that despite many secular Israelis’ public assertion that their country can deal with their enemies and that they do not need American support, the “hawkish side of Washington” is more than willing to give Israel a “bear hug”. It is, again, no longer a secret that George W. Bush sabotaged the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks by favouring the rightist Likud Party of Israel, and the “Right-of-Likud” policy of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Americans simply do not understand that if the conflict persists, democratic and Islamist Arab governments will take a strong stand against Israel.
What is most striking is conservatives’ and other pro-Israeli Americans’ total inability to understand the Arab and Muslim discourse on Israel – which redraws the pre-1948 map of Palestine – meaning the total obliteration of the Zionist State. Last but not least, the Israel lobby is so well entrenched in US administration that even Obama has to concede undue advantages to the Zionist nation. Obama’s inability to reverse the pro-Israeli US policy – and his helplessness in this regard – is well reflected in a private conversation with President Sarkozy (which journalists overheard as the microphone was on) at the G20 Summit in Cannes on November 3, 2011. On Sarkozy’s terse comment on Benjamin Netanyahu, “I cannot stand him, he is a liar”, Obama replied, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him everyday.”
In view of the emerging changes in the Arab World since the Spring of 2011, which have emboldened Hamas and other groups, they are least likely to cooperate with the West that is committed to protect the Zionist State to the detriment of more than ten million expropriated, humiliated and state-less Palestinians in the world.
Meanwhile, Islamist parties are emerging powerful in Egypt and Tunisia. The fate of the rest of the Arab World will not be that different in the coming years; “anti-Israel public opinion will remain a feature of Middle Eastern politics until a final and equitable peace treaty is struck.” Even “secular” Turkey – a NATO member having diplomatic ties with Israel – is not immune to the growing anti-Israeli sentiment that one notices in the Arab World, Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim World.
Then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reflected his country’s strong reservations about Israel without any ambiguity. In an interview with the Time magazine he favoured Palestine’s full membership to the UN; condemned Israel’s violations of UN Security Council’s “more than 89 resolutions on prospective sanctions related to Israel”; and killing of nine Turkish “activists” by Israel on the Mavi Marmara, one of the Turkish ships that the Israeli military stopped from reaching the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid in 2010. He categorically denied that Iran was becoming nuclear or posing any threat to anybody. He posed the question: “Is it Israel or the countries in the vicinity of Israel that are under threat?” And he added, “Israel has nuclear weapons.”
However, despite the growing influence of the Israel lobby on the Congress, many American security analysts and even a general consider Israel a threat to “U.S. national security”. In January 2010 General David Petraeus in his brief to Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, depicted Israel a “security threat” to America. Despite many Americans’ strong reservations about Israel and the perils that Israel poses to America’s national security, the Congress remains unperturbed about having Israel as America’s main ally in the Middle East. America’s failure to understand why “they” (Muslims) hate Americans is unbelievable.
As Ehsan Ahrari has pointed out: “It took the American policy makers more than fifty years to realise that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been a core Muslim issue.” And one cannot agree more with him that although Saddam Hussein was “no one’s hero” in the Muslim World, yet the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 made the average Muslim very angry at America. What the West has persistently failed to understand that despite its avid promotion of democracy, Western tolerance of unpopular autocrats in the Muslim World, along with its pro-Israeli and, by implication, anti-Arab / anti-Muslim policy, secular democracy has become synonymous with Western “hedonism”, “materialism” and “Godlessness”, as we find in the writings of Sayyid Qutb and his ilk.
There is no room for taking Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi’s shoe throwing at President Bush in isolation or condescendingly, as Condoleezza Rice attributed it to the “confirmation of the democratisation” of Iraq. Zaidi’s emergence as a hero not only in the “liberated and democratic” Iraq but also in the entire Arab and Muslim World for his public display of courage and hatred for the West tells us a thousand tales and reveals the “hidden transcripts” of the Muslim World. Muslims across the board, the vast majority being peace loving ordinary people, love to glorify anyone who hits the West, symbolically or literally. This incident and its positive repercussion in the Muslim World should be an eye-opener to Western policymakers. The mass protests in the Muslim World against Israeli air raids in Gaza since 2008 and Israeli commandos’ killing of nine Turkish civilians in the Gaza-bound aid flotilla in May 2010; and the Muslim mass support for Hezbollah’s war against Israel in 2006 simply reflect Muslims’ contempt for Israel and the West.
Mahathir Mohamad, among many leading Muslims, condemned the Israeli attack on the unarmed Turkish flotilla as “most cowardly and deserving only of brutes, not civilized people”. He also portrayed Israel as a “rogue state”. As the West condones Israeli retaliatory air raids as acts in “self-defence”, Muslims in general have no qualms about justifying Hezbollah or Hamas rocket-attacks against Israel to kill indiscriminately. It is noteworthy that while the Western media in general and the ones run by the neo-cons in particular – Fox News for example – portrayed the Israeli bomb victims in Gaza as “Palestinian militants”, most other sources confirmed the bulk of the victims as non-combatant civilians, women, children and the elderly.
In view of the above, it appears that Israel is more than a Zionist state. It is a rogue state serving the interests of the neo-imperialist West, as Theodore Herzl envisaged, “a rampart of Europe [and America] against Asia”. (concluded)
[TAJ HASHMI teaches security studies at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. Sage has recently published his latest book, Global Jihad and America: The Hundred-Year War Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.]