Golan and
Palestine
Rashed Rahman
The divided Arab
leaders of the 22-country Arab League (AL) met in Tunis on March 31, 2019 to
paper over the cracks in its membership and condemn unanimously the US decision
to recognize Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. This annexation,
flying in the face of international law that forbids the acquisition of
territory through war, and numerous UN Security Council resolutions, was
carried out by Israel in 1981 of the territory it had seized from Syria during
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The AL summit also reminded the world that the
stability of the Middle East depended on the creation of a Palestinian state.
The Arab world
is bitterly divided over a dispute between Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies and
Qatar, the latter accused of backing terrorism (i.e. Hamas in the Gaza Strip) and
cosying up to Iran, the bête noir of Riyadh. It is also split over Iran’s
regional role and influence, as well as over the war in Yemen and popular
unrest in Algeria and Sudan. The aspiration of a show of unity was punctured by
the abrupt and without explanation departure of Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin
Hamad al-Thani after the inauguration ceremony where AL Secretary-General Ahmed
Aboul Gheit praised Saudi Arabia’s handling of its rotating AL presidency last
year.
The Arab leaders
have been under popular pressure in their respective countries to condemn the
US move, which comes four months after President Donald Trump decided to
recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there from Tel
Aviv. That decision too was condemned by Arab leaders. The final status of
Jerusalem was meant to be part of the process of a two-state solution, as
enshrined in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian aspiration is that East
Jerusalem be declared the capital of a Palestinian state.
The pathetic
state of Arab unity and the AL is neither new nor surprising. It has a long
history of precedent. During WWI, the Ottoman Empire’s Arab colonies were
instigated to mount the Arab revolt to divert and harass Turkish forces, thus
not leaving the Turks with the option of transferring their troops to the
European battlefield. British intelligence officers such as T E Lawrence played
a critical role in stoking the Arab revolt, ostensibly while dangling the prize
of independence for the Arabs when the war was over. In the meantime, as late
as 1917, the Zionist movement prevailed on the British to issue the Balfour
Declaration supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Under
the British Mandate over Palestine after WWI, an incremental flood of Jewish
immigration was allowed into the country. These immigrants were the advance
guard of Zionist settler colonialism, supported by European imperialism.
This imperialist
enterprise of ‘resolving’ the issue of the bad treatment of and discrimination against
Jews in the west by imposing a homeland for them on Palestine, which the
Zionists claimed as their ancient birthplace, was given an extraordinary fillip
by the ravages of Hitler on the Jews before and during WWII. The victorious
western allies not only encouraged the acceleration of Jewish emigration to
Palestine, they clandestinely supported the underground Zionist militias in
their campaign to drive out by force the original inhabitants, the Palestinians.
These efforts culminated in carving an Israeli state out of Palestine in 1948,
accompanied by the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their country.
The Palestinian resistance calls this catastrophe the Naqbah.
Israel since
1948 has been engaged in an unrelenting expansionism at the expense of the
Palestinians and Arabs. In 1967, Israel comprehensively defeated the Arabs and
captured the West Bank (till then under Jordanian control), Gaza Strip
(controlled at that point by Egypt) and Syria’s strategic Golan Heights. The
defeat led to profound changes in the Arab world. While the defeated Arab
leaders either retired or were removed, the gloom that descended on the Middle
East was relieved only by one chink of light: the emergence of a Palestinian
armed national liberation movement under Yasser Arafat. Arafat early on defined
the most critical issue of the Palestinian resistance as the lack of a
territorial base from which to wage the armed struggle against Israel.
Initially based in Jordan, the Palestinian resistance was ousted from the
country by King Hussein’s forces in 1970 when the monarch felt his rule
threatened by the growing strength of the Palestinian movement (our General
Ziaul Haq won ‘glory’ in this conflict by surrounding and shelling the
Palestinian refugee camps with his tanks). The Arab-Israeli war of 1973, in
which the Arabs, particularly Egypt, gave a better account of themselves than
in 1967, proved to be the illusory semi-victory that became the preliminary for
the betrayal, one after the other, of the Palestinian cause by all Israel’s
Arab neighbours except Syria. The Palestinian resistance was once more ousted
from Lebanon in 1982 where they had relocated from Jordan by an Israeli
invasion in collaboration with Lebanese fascist forces. With the leadership and
fighters in forced exile in Tunisia and elsewhere, the old problem of not
having a territorial base to wage the armed struggle against Israel returned,
this time with a vengeance.
Arafat now
turned to diplomacy, and having wooed the west, particularly the US, thought he
had pulled off the impossible by getting a Washington-brokered peace deal with
Israel. This was enshrined in the 1993 Oslo Accords, whose foundation was a
‘return’ to the original UN plan for a partition of Palestine in 1948 that
Israel violated, but this time with a reduced territory of the West Bank, Gaza
and East Jerusalem to go to a Palestinian state. This two-state solution has
long been overtaken by Israel’s aggression against and suppression of the
Palestinians, lately particularly in Gaza (Hamas-controlled), the successors of
assassinated Arafat being perceived to have gone ‘soft’ in their enclaves in
the West Bank.
Israel has been
on a charm and diplomatic offensive for years with some success. Peace treaties
with Egypt and Jordan laid the foundations for an incremental opening up to
Israel by most Arab states at the expense of the Palestinian cause. Lobbies
within these Arab states either having recognized Israel or secretly hankering
for it to earn brownie points from the US and the west are hard at work, with
their counterparts having made an entrance in Pakistan too of late.
Pakistan cannot
and should not become a party to the wholesale betrayal of principles of
international law and the repeated UN Security council resolutions that condemn
Israel’s occupation and annexation of Arab and Palestinian territories through force
and war. In fact this is a time to resurrect and expand our help to the
beleaguered Palestinian people in whatever way we can, who otherwise have been
abandoned to their fate.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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