Middle East Peace: From Custers Last Stand to Arrow Missiles [Archives:2000/38/Focus]

COMMON SENSE
By: Hassan Al-Haifi
Any observer of the Middle East peace process being engineered by the persevering Dennis Ross and his many friends in the US State Department is bound to wonder if the longest peace negotiations in history will ever see their end. Even if the process does eventually culminate in a permanent peace treaty, will this peace be a lasting one, and a peace that has done away with all the factors that might ignite into open warfare at anytime in the future? It is unlikely to think that a peace engineered for the sake of only providing some form of international legitimacy to all the wrong that has been done to the Palestinians and the other Arabs in the surrounding Holy Land a land that is holy to a lot more people than the Israelis could ever hope of cramming into the area, in order to fulfill a mythical promise to a people who claim to be the Chosen People of the world, and are thus forgiven in advance for all the maladies they have created over the past century in this Holy Land. One would hope that such a peace would take into consideration that, as long as this peace is intended to meet the interests of only those who mediate the peace or those who possess the heart and soul of this mediator, then such a peace can not ever be guaranteed or even called permanent. Thus, it seems fair to assume that all this coming and going and camping out at Camp David, is really a matter of biding time, while at the same time the Israelis continue to pursue their well planned robbery of the Holy Land and the surrounding areas. We should never mistake the fact that there are certain facts that should never be overlooked when analyzing the Middle East dilemma: Israel is a forced concoction on the area, that cost many innocent lives and lead to the creation of a refugee population from the indigenous population of the area; that there is no logic or justice in demanding or pleading with the Palestinians to make concessions for the sake of the permanent peace, when they have conceded their entire country forcefully, so that the only thing they have left is a post office box and a telephone booth. Mr. Arafat luckily does not need office space, since most of his duties are usually carried out in flight, from one capital to another, trying to explain the plight of his people, which nobody he sees seems to have either the interest or the care to listen to. If he did, there would be no place to have a Chairmans Office fitting for a leader of state that is only on the negotiating table, and apparently will stay there until the proponents of Zion are assured that such a state has no attributes of sovereignty and no claims whatsoever on any ills suffered by its people for close to a century now since the Balfour Declaration was issued by the wily Foreign Office at Whitehall.
In any case, it is clear that whatever peace comes out of this coming and going and summit meetings, it will be no more than an assurance that, in this world it is might that makes right and any other interpretation is a waste of time and breath. No one in the Arab world is ignorant of the fact that the Arabs will continue to be getting the short end of the stick in any interaction with the rest of the world. For one thing, the Arabs do not seem to be in full comprehension of what is really happening to them. Here they are in possession of the largest oil reserves in the world and one of the greatest cultural legacies of any people in the world, yet they stand today as helpless as a lamb, against an enemy that one would think can be squashed like a fly, when looking at the apparent physical advantages possessed when compared to the small almost surrounded peace loving, oppressed people who live in their happy kibbutzes and all the mythical media cliches that have been aired about the Israelis, and their pioneering spirit.
Perhaps, the American foreign policy makers see in Israel what the American forefathers had in mind when they gave hell to another indigenous people, who literally lost 2 whole continents to pioneers, who came to tame the wild to produce a haven for freedom loving oppressed people of Europe, who have yet to come out of the suffering of a refined feudal system that was inherited from the Middle Ages, and which served the interests of the very small nobility and clergy and the owners of the means of production in the land. However, that is another story. Yet, the Israelis find interested ears to such cliches in the American Congress, many of whom see the Israelis as tamers of the wild and fighters for freedom. This observer once heard a US Senator naively state: Of course we support Netanyahu. What do you expect us to do for a man who is fighting for his peoples freedom. It is not clear to the listener freedom from what? Yet, this is the kind of American misconception on the Middle East problem that a poor man like Yassir Arafat would like to think will lead to a just settlement of the problem for his people. Mr. Arafat should bear in mind that the Americans do not see his people as being oppressed, but rather as terrorists out to cause rampage and to massacre an innocent freedom loving people with a pioneering spirit like that which brought Chief Sitting Bull to his end in revenge for Custers last stand. To the Americans, the Palestinians are no more than being like the Red Indians, who endangered the lives of peace loving Sunday morning church goers.
That is why Israel is continuously allowed to squeeze out of the American treasury more than what is given to any of the American states as government support, and is allowed to partake in all the strategic arms build-up that America sees as essential for its own security and for guaranteeing world peace. Little do the Americans care about the fact that a lot of American weapons technology is actually stolen from the US by double agents like Pollard and others, we may have not heard about yet. Now, Israel is boasting that it has come up with the ultimate weapon to ensure its everlasting security, with the Arrow surface to air missile, that is said to be able to shoot down any threatening long range ballistic missile fired at Israel from anywhere in the Middle East. Perhaps, this is one of those staged technological feats, that are geared to make the American people think that their taxes, which are being channeled to Israel, are paying off better than they are in the United States remember the Patriot Missile. Of course the results that have been given wide illustrated publicity are only of simulation tests, where it is truly unsure if indeed the Arrow missile can do its feat of magic. However, the obvious implication is that the United States has come ever closer to being an unsuitable mediator of a peace that seems to be on the pretext that this is all you have, take it or leave it. The Arrow missile show was part of an effort to make the Arabs feel, that they are in the same position as the Soviet Union was, when the Americans were publicizing their Star Wars science fiction simulations and laser guided space weapons technology, which eventually lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But, the Arrow missile will not undermine the reality that the Israelis know full well; no matter what their weapons superiority may come to in the area, there is still a potentially strong latent fighting spirit that can be ignited at anytime, to produce results that would turn all the space age technology that Israel may possess into childrens toys. They have seen this already in the spirit of the Intifada, when stone throwing children of the West Bank and Gaza drove the Israelis to seek a peaceful way out of the problem, and when the indefatigable Hizbullah guerillas and the other elements of the Lebanese Resistance showed the Israelis that their might and technology can easily be overcome by a little courage and perseverance from a people who know that what is yours can only stay yours if you fight for it to the end. When God is truly with you, then the power equations be meaningless and the Arrow can easily be broken by the throw of the stone.
On the side, however, the Arrow scenario, leads one to think that it is time that the Arab leaders fully understand: as long as they keep suppressing intellect and their peoples ability to harness the resources of the Arab World to the benefit of all the people in their countries, and as long as freedom and civil liberties becomes just clichs that are used to decorate what really are dictatorial or totalitarian regimes that keep the interests of their people way behind in their minds, then there can be no way to ever think that we can have the balance of power, which will ensure that whatever peace comes out of the efforts of Dennis Ross or others will be a just and lasting peace.

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