Stripping the Strip

Why are they stripping the Gaza Strip? As I begin to write, Israel has launched the expected ground offensive. In 2006 when Israel made the mistake of going in for the Hizbullah kill, Robin Wright of the Washington Post was quoting top officials of the Bush administration saying: “For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East.” At the end of the day, all the four of them came out stronger in one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of the United States; though, in the circumstance, such a fate was unavoidable.

Hizbullah, strong as ever, now adds defeating Israel to its credentials. Already its leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah is the most popular leader in the Middle East; and it is said that he can defeat any and every Arab leader in his own country in a free and fair election.

Hamas had shown how to organise and win an election even with all the Arab potentates ranged against it. It had vowed never to bow down before their financial power or the military might of the Israelis. Hamas’ only problem is its excessive anti-Shiism, which must appear grotesque in view of the fact that in the whole wide world, it is only Iran that helps it.

Syria, for long a pariah, has now become mainstreamed and battle-hardened and aware who its friends are. And, ominously, Bashar al-Assad had just warned that those who armed his attackers will pay a heavy price, promising that those who kindled the fire of conflict and sectarianism would be consumed by it

As for Iran, even its enemies know that it is perhaps the only truly independent country in the world; but even if there are other truly independent nations in this world, it is the only one that does not fear any other country in the world, thanks to its adherence to the principles of true Islamic conduct. It respects everybody, but, it does as Malcom X said, “If someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”

But the question is that of American domination, and everybody in the Middle East has prostrated before the Americans except these four; and the first three are able to do this because they can always count on the support of Iran.

But for the Western man, especially Western politicians, as much for Western countries, the fear of Zionism is the beginning of wisdom; for Zionism is to be feared and not to be admired—as much for what it can do as for what it may fail to do—just at the right moment. You are expected to express public support for whatever excesses Israel decides to commit in the Holy Land, because you share some Judeo-Christian ancestry or values; and if you don’t praise, then you must not criticise. Better put all those high-sounding principles in the cooler right now, because, for the moment, you are only a cheerleader.

As Israel bombs the 365 square kilometres that is the Gaza Strip and contemplates the possibility of committing ground troops, all judgment and disbelief are suspended. “Israel has the right to defend itself” goes the chorus from the White House to the Capitol, from Downing Street to Whitehall and from le Chateau de Versailles to the Champs-Elysses. Not a single Western man is left standing.

When the Zionists bomb any country in the Middle East, American support is a foregone conclusion: it is either it has been cleared with them, or it will be cleared by them; as it clears it with its friends in the Gulf, meaning the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or with their stooge in North Africa, meaning Egypt. And the Arab street is not unaware of what is going on: for every bullet fired, for any Palestinian felled, for the women and children frightened, they know the four fingers that pulled the trigger; and they know who to hold responsible on the day this becomes inevitable.

For the Arab regimes, the struggle for Palestine had been a veritable raison d’être. They justified the existence of their regimes on the liberation of the Arab homeland; they imposed harsh economic conditions on their people; they created varying editions of police states; they abbreviated their freedoms and employed high-sounding rhetoric, all in the name of liberating Palestine.

They had realised its value to help them keep their people in check and under control. Even back in 1984 when the first fighters took to the arena of battle in the name of Islam, it was the Arab regimes that decimated them so that the struggle is kept national and secular. They nationalised the Palestinian revolution in order to more properly muzzle it; and, among them—Syria, Lebanon and Jordan—they had killed more Palestinians than Israel.

Meanwhile, they were all in league with Israel; and, if not directly with it, then with its protector—the United States of America. They had set up a variety of organisations—from the Arab League to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference—attending conferences of Arab and Islamic summits and even declaring jihads in Riyadh, Fez and Mecca; but they never meant to liberate any Palestinian land. And they never did.

It was only when the Palestinian struggle started to turn Islamic with the rise of Hamas, Hizbullah and, especially, the Islamic Jihad group among the Palestinians that the game started slipping from the hands of the United States and its friends in the Middle East. If the nationalist leaders at the head of governments or organisations can be made to betray their own people, there has arisen a new set of players who consider the liberation of their land a religious obligation, and compromise and sell-out are not part of their strategy. And the international system is unable to handle what it cannot control.

It could not understand the new Iran that had come to replace the obedient Shah, and it could not be toppled in a coup or in a Persian

SSpring. It could not understand the children of Musa Sadr in Lebanon; and what audacity that they could take on and shame Israel—the so-called invincible army of the Middle East. It could not understand Hamas: these children of Yasser Arafat. Why have they changed so much beyond recognition after him? And if the international system could not understand an issue or those promoting it, the answer is only one—crush it.

That, presumably, is what the Zionists have been trying to do the past fortnight or so in Gaza, our Gazzata Hashim. And despite all the crocodile tears and wailings by officials of all the Middle Eastern governments, what Israel is doing has been cleared with all of them. Suppose it has not been thus cleared, so what exactly are they doing individually or severally to protect, to help or to send supplies to the beleaguered and the wounded?

Only Iran, which has no border with Palestine, has been arming the Palestinian resistance; and Egypt, which has a border, impounds the arms. Gaza has been under an effective Egyptian blockade in aid of the Israeli one for the past eight years. Presumably, if Palestinians were to go back to Jordan today, the Black September of 1970 will be a dinner party. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States have declared the Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorism; and if they would do that to Ikhwan, what would they say of militant Hamas?

In effect, therefore, what Israel is doing is just being a subcontractor for a new Black July to neutralise the Islamic resistance on behalf of the leaders of the Arab World, who cannot be seen directly killing Arabs, and who have always wished for Palestine to disappear but will not.

The truth is that except for what it gets from Iran, Hamas is alone; but someone who is in the right, is in the might. The morality of their struggle and their personal dedication to free their land, with or without the help of the Arab regimes, has made them not easily frightened by the immensity of immoral might that is on its way to crashing under the weight of its own contradictions.

The Palestinian condition is not unlike the case of a stranger coming to your house and evicting you from the bedroom to the living room or to the patio. When at long last the police arrive, instead. of arresting the person, they set up a table outside the house to begin and oversee a peace process. They set up barricades to indicate areas of your house where you dare not venture.

Later, the burglar decides to come out of the bedroom and settle in the living room—and shoots you and your children if you complain. Besides the injustice in it, every so-called agreement is a temporary measure; because Israel doesn’t really need or want peace. What they want is the land—the whole of it, and they really believe it is theirs. And anything that can buy them time to grab the land, including a so-called two-state solution: you keep the parlour, I keep the house, will do.

What they call the peace process is neither about peace, and nor is it a process. Israel believes that the tough approach is the only one Arabs understand, respect and fear; and they are probably right. And that is what they are subjecting the people of Gaza to; and, unfortunately, the Arab regimes will never allow Islam—the real Islam and not this manufactured misfortune that goes by its name—the only idea that will rid their people of the fear and dependence, to flourish. But whether they like it or not, and whether they allow it or not, in the end Gazzah will come back to the children of Hashim.