I have respected France’s stand on the political aisle of the international system issues over key issues for long while I despise the French culture, except the discipline of the system I find working good in neighbouring Francophone to the envy of our bastard indiscipline.
But President Nicholae Sarkozy’s instance summit of an amalgam of 43 nations from Europe, the Maghreb and Arabs in the rebrand of a Euro- Mediterranean Union is the face of a new plot of refooling the world and hijacking the cause of Palestine, a minor but key issue on the agenda that day.
Palestine is the unfortunate land and people arrested to a mastermind of political checks, in an orchestrated global plot overseen by the economic beneficiary powers behind the system. I have never been wrong in my idea about the Middle East peace process as a means of sustaining the excesses of the international order which benefits the few and subjects the majority to misery, war, torture and disease. We have travelled the world road for long enough to live with it. But the current interplay of the issues to no Palestine State in sight is just too bad for the world – and dangerous for Barack.
The order thrives on American ideas. And we have been talking for and against the plight of a people denied the right of a nation on American terms. Everything is coded in the tongue of the master. The ‘Middle East’ is an American term. The geographical location is a middle east from the geographical standpoint of the United States only. Other parts of the world do not share the United States’ distance from the Arabs. To the rest of us the place is something else we failed to use: the ‘Gulf’ or the ‘Arab World’ which includes the Maghreb or North Africa.
The ‘peace process’ is an added term to qualify the issue to international limelight and prolong it to last or outlast the world itself. A process, we know, is an endemic exercise. It begins somewhere and does not end on certainty.
Will it surprise you then that something meant to last will be finalized soon? No. there is no any peace for the Middle East, only a lingering process to the end of the world which subjects a cheated people and serves others.
I have read much recently on the pages of Nigeria’s dailies on the celebrated anniversary of Israel, including a piece by Moshe Ram, the Israeli Ambassador in Nigeria in which he prided his nation and lambasted hardliners like Ibrahim Elzakzaky. The curse of Israel is inextricably tied to the cause of Palestine.
The sympathy for Palestine and the odds on Israel is not – His Excellency misses out – a Zakzaky doctrine alone. It is rooted in every rational mind in all nations, ideologies, creeds and religions including surreal Judaism – shared by those who value justice for both having and lacking it. And there are many who love justice for either reason.
The true Jews do not believe in the existence of a Jewish State. I met one sometime on Aljazeera speaking from London. They respect God’s decision on the Jewish nation which He once favoured but later dispersed to punish for whatever reason.
What I read about Israel’s anniversary, will not change my idea – and others’. Israel is the creation of this International system for which the United Nations was conceived in May, 1945, as a reason for what befalls the Palestine Arabs and all the gray spots on the world’s map.
Three years later in 1948, Israel was arbitrarily located in a strange land of innocent and legitimate owners whose shout, “This Land is our Land” cannot be shouted down, whatever the action or inaction of Sarkozy’s Summit would be and whatever times the process drags. The strategic location was agreed to that part of the world after Europe refused to host the Jews for what they know best about them. Europe would have been the Palestine Europeans foresaw.
Once established, the debacle of Israel got the all instruments of the system used to check every protest and keep the agenda on course. Ever since, the treason in the issue is the misrecognition of Israel’s right to exist as a state. It is something everyone – including the forerunners of anti Israel – has toyed with, and has jeopardized the struggle.
Responding to a question on the BBC’s Hard Talk one time, Syrian-based Hamas Leader Khaled Mashaal spoke well but would not answer Tim Sebastian’s question frankly: “Do you believe in the existence of Israel?” From the pane of my home screen, I itched to put the idea into his mind: “yes but not at the expense of another nation.”
The quarrel with it is that Israel lives on others’ fate, chances, sucking their blood. Israel is the only illegal nation I know which is legitimized on the lives of innocent women and children who have never seen peace in their lives since ‘peace’ became a global trade commodity in their name.
I am just discomforted with the plots to derail good minds and human rationale to build castles in open toying with the lives of millions of Palestines and the supporters within and without the walls of the West Bank. Sarkozy’s main unmaking is in Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak’s attending and giving a speech by the host’s side. The Summit would not have been that spoilt. A new idea should not include anything old. No.
Mubarak was not only the natural successor to late Anwar Sadat’s opposition to Israel as the then Vice President. He was also the natural instrument for the plot to secure Israel’s future. His names literally translate to good blessings.
The late Egyptian scholar Shaykh Abdulhamid Kishik says there is neither good nor blessing in him. His opening speeches have been the same everywhere – at the Arab League, the African Union or national address – pouring rhetoric into a leaking sack.
He has been one of the dogs the custodians of holy Israel – United States and the Western Europe – use to check the excesses of the Intifada, the then vibrant Fatah Movement and Hamas so that Israel exists above every other interest.
The other cohorts were the late monarchs: King Hussein, King Hassan and King Fahd. Their successors King Abdallah, King Mohammad IV and King Abdullah, expected to be strong and revisionists, have given upto the whims of the system in an open betray of their fathers and brother.
Any Arab leader who refused to succumb to this unholy idea did not survive both his reign and life. The last to fall for the cause was Iraq’s Ba’athist Saddam Hussein in 2003.
I am not a fan of Hussein’s brutality against his own people and will not forgive him for being an unArab who – for all the years that he was powerful – could not build an ally group or person to hide him when the enemies closed up on him. It was enough shame that his hideout was reported by his own people.
But I will remember Saddam today and always for something the Palestines will never forget. In the wake of the Israeli-Arab war, Saddam was the only Arab leader who openly embraced Palestine refugees and followed them with food and drinks on mountaintops. He was also one of two who maintained a staunch political standpoint on the Palestine issue to the end.
The other was late Hafiz Al-Asad who lived his name as the lion of the Arabs and whose Ba’athism is mantled today by his son Basshaar Al-Assad, the only good presence in Paris last Sunday. Basshaar shared the roof with Michelle Suleiman, the new Lebanese President. Both agreed Sunday to restore diplomacy much to the dismay of the order which wanted a Syrian pullout of Lebanon.Syria’s interferences have been the trouble of Lebanon’s politics and government for – I think – the good of the Arabs and Palestine. If not for Hisbullah, Lebanon would have been the nerve centre of eliminating all Palestines from the little earth surface left to them to patch on.
Palestine is the main reason the Arab League has failed. Every League, Iike the League of Nations, is doomed to this grand strategy. And Arab leaders are just not the type of politicians who cannot regroup under any name for any unity of purpose because they have been drained down the western spring too much they do not listen. Mubarak and co brought spoils to Paris and seemed succeeded.I find them worst than African leaders whose audacity for corruption is pushed by poverty and want. The Arab region is blessed with oil on the promissory note of prophets. And its leaders, unsure of an uncertain world brandishing American might, gave up to the fallacy that their assurance of lasting rule in addition to lasting wealth is only possible if they cooperate not challenge. They again differ in this lure of power with their African fellows whose perpetuation of power is largely cruelly self-designed not patroned, self-styled not copied.
Every summit since the years, the council of Arab ministers would draw the agenda for Heads of State League summit with Palestine issue on top. But that is in principle only. The Heads of State know everything was presumed on sailing with the tide, and no idea would go beyond the supreme agenda. At the early years, it was pregnant promises which would be aborted after the summits. Then later, they would make stage-managed disagreements over key issues and come to ‘resolutions’ which were never implemented. This has served their masters well and guaranteed their rules in the only part of the world where democracy does not matter to the United States and Europe.
Overtime recently only Muammar Al-Qazzafi of Libya had, in seeking redefinition of relevance, scorned the late Fahd then on deathbed for being the hypocrisy, and quarreled with Abdullah to boycott the Summit in Doha, Qatar that year.
Hosni Mubarak emerged the champion at every Summit. He is one brutal leader whose systematic elimination, jail, torture and sentencing of the opposition branded as ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ is rewarded with aid while other brutal governments in some unfavoured part of the world are sanctioned, maltreated, toppled, assassinated or out-elected for lesser sins. There would never be anything near Oslo 1993 and there will never be any political will close to Bill Clinton’s. Yitzhak Rabin and Oslo died for the peace. Their deaths sealed any hope for balancing the interests in the long process. The Paris Summit was just a usual step in the process.
Thankfully, Abu Maazin and Ehud Olmart said it like Abu Ammar and Ehud Barak did before. Israel and Palestine seriously “want to achieve a peace deal.” And they have “never been this close” to a deal. Yes. Peace is desirable. But the deal, Mubarak takes his joy home, is too close to call.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
