World peace in pieces
There is a local saying about poking the eye of a child who is waiting to cry. The US President’s utterly insensitive, devil-maycare decision to open his country’s embassy in the controversial and contested city of Jerusalem came on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel and the displacement of the Palestinian Arabs who refer to their displacement as ‘Al Nakba’ (the catastrophe).
At least 60 protesting Palestinians, including some children were killed by the Israeli Defence Forces this week alone in the Gaza region where they have been holed up for years.
The US simultaneously jettisoning a nuclear deal with Iran and imposing sanctions on that country has raised the ire of European nations that were firming up lucrative business deals with Iran. They have called current US foreign policy “capricious assertiveness”.
On Friday, Turkey hosted an Islamic summit condemning Israel for its actions in the Gaza and accused the state of running an apartheid regime. The problem in the Arab world is the disunity between the Sunni kingpins, Saudi Arabia and the Shiite proponents, Iran, differences deftly cultivated and exploited by the US over the years to divide the Islamic world.
The US President’s autocratic decision over Jerusalem was patently mala fide compounded by its pretentious role as the ‘honest-broker’ in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. How and why the Palestinians continue to rely on US peace initiatives is beyond comprehension.
That the US Establishment is so heavily reliant on the cashrich Jewish lobby in its domestic politics is bad enough. The bluff has to be called on President Trump’s unashamed, unabashed bias towards Israel. Britain also put forward its ex-PM Tony Blair notwithstanding his own bias to undo the British Balfour Declaration that created Israel in 1948. At a meeting in Colombo, he said that he had visited the region one hundred times to no avail, which should surprise no one given his rather poor standing in the Arab world.
The two-state solution as the only via-media to this seven decade-long conflict, which is at the root of most of the violence and enmity in international relations, is now in tatters. The one-state solution with Palestinians having equal rights as the Israelis seems a pipe-dream. The United Nations has abandoned its role as the world’s peace maker allowing the US to hijack the peace process, which now is nothing but a cruel joke.
On the other hand, the Iranian-backed Hamas group calling for the total extermination of the state of Israel is only giving the hardline Israeli Government reasons to justify its fears, and complain. Earlier this month, Israel bombarded whom it called “Iranians in Syria”. This spike in the violence brings into focus the situation in that part of the world, alas, only to be forgotten once the smoke recedes and then to flare up again in a never-ending cycle of violence, hate and fear.
How much longer this will go on is anyone’s guess. With the US action stoking the fires rather than putting them out, what is certain is that there will be no immediate end to the pain, agony, the fears, and to the detriment of world peace.