So the Arabs are talking about action on Gaza…again
So the Arabs are talking about action on Gaza…again. Why don’t they ever do anything?
The Arab League convenes in the Iraqi capital today (Saturday, May 18) with the intention of focussing on Gaza.
If only they would really focus on Gaza.
The summit comes after a week in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes.
It is a dead cert that Arab leaders will once again demand a ceasefire and for Israel to lift the aid blockade it imposed on March 2.
As before, their denunciations and appeals will have no effect. Israel will take no notice. Nor will the United States, its powerful backer and provider of the money and weapons with which Israel is exterminating a whole people — before the anguished gaze of a watching world.
So, the killing will continue. As will the starvation. And the day may come when there will be hardly any Palestinians in Gaza and Israel may be able to build a beach resort using plans provided by Donald Trump’s companies.
Why doesn’t anyone stop this mass murder? Why don’t the Arabs? They have clout, make no mistake, because they are rich enough to pull towards them the president of the United States.
Unlike Israel, which is a recipient of US largesse, the Gulf Arab states have the money to get Mr Trump’s attention. They can sign deals promising billions in investment in Mr Trump’s America First schemes, while also making sure they are in active and lucrative business with the Trump family.
Oh yes, the Arabs have wasta with the Trumps. The Arabic word means influence and the Arabs have it in spades.
So why aren’t they using it to help the Palestinians?
It may be worth reading this knowledgeable piece by University of California Berkeley history professor Ussama Makdisi. Dr Makdisi, who has written books on the making of the modern Arab world as well as on US-Arab relations, says the US has “worked hard to defang secular Arab anti-colonialism and build up Israel militarily [while also working] relentlessly to isolate the question of Palestine — and hence the fate of Palestinians — from any concerted Arab state support”.
How the US did this is obvious. It pretended to “even-handedness”. But all the while, as Professor Makdisi notes, it was “encouraging deeply anti-democratic, absolutist, pro-western monarchies in the Gulf to fight a Palestine-centric anti-colonial consciousness”.
He quotes a US State Department research memorandum after the June 1967 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states (primarily Egypt, Syria and Jordan) . The memo insisted, he writes, “that the Arab failure to become a secular democratic ‘modern man’ was rooted in an allegedly internal archaic Islamic mentality, not external geopolitical reasons. The memorandum stated that what was required was, in essence, ‘the de-Arabisation’ of the Arabs; that is, to make them accept the supposed rational values of the West, which included its support for Israel”.
After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, which saw the US overtly aiding Israel’s military for the first time, “the significant Arab states fell in line with Washington, accepting their subordinate role within a US architecture of hegemony over the Middle East”.
That was “the last time the world witnessed concerted Arab state action to resist Israel militarily and economically”, writes Professor Makdisi. “The rewards of lavish western attention and praise were too tempting for Arab despots, while the costs of ongoing warfare with Israel were made to appear far too high for their societies to bear”.
They would go on to abandon “any pretence of military resistance to Israeli colonialism”, he points out. And then came Mr Trump’s first presidential term, during which the US recognised Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem and moved its embassy there. Soon after, came the 2020 Abraham Accords under which Morocco, the UAE and Bahrain “normalised” relations with an Israel that refused to even speak any longer of a two-state solution. That was the end of any prospect that popular Arab opinion (ie that of the people rather than their rulers) on Palestine and Palestinians would ever carry any weight.
The professor finishes on a crucial note: “Today, despite Israel’s genocidal assault being live-streamed around the world, leading Arab states have not carried out diplomatic or economic sanctions against Israel, let alone sent military forces to defend the Palestinian people, as their forebears did in 1948”.
The Arab League itself has issued perfunctory statements on Gaza and it will continue to do so. It doesn’t deserve anyone’s attention.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
