Palestine has been a failure and I'm sorry if Muslims will jump down my throat about this. Recent events have shown that even with an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza for peace and a rush to free elections, the Palestinians and their political institutions lack an understanding of democracy in its truest sense. The "secularism" of Fatah and the radicalism of Hamas, the unwillingness of the late Yasser Arafat to compromise and strike a deal with the Israelis, and a culture of anti-Semiticism and perversion of Islam among the Palestinians in corrupting the ideas of "jihad" with idolization of the land and secular nationalism has led to the scenario that we witness today. A nationalist struggle on the verge of collapse, and who is to blame, the "evil" Jews?! Or is Palestine emblematic of the state of affairs plaguing Muslims the world over?
But to insist that their struggle is unique in light of other conflicts in the Muslim world is something I will not entertain. I will not engage in the cult of victomology, which is almost a sixth pillar of Islam among many contemporary Muslims. I will not engage nor entertain the notion that Islam is somehow the "faith of the repressed" who are lashing out through violence and brute force.
Gustavo, your posting is so full of misleading assumptions that I honestly don't know where to begin.
The biggest one is that Arafat 'refused to compromise with the Israelis'. In fact, he compromised too much during the Oslo accords, agreeing to become the puppet dictator of the Israelis in exchange for unscheduled and unenforced promises of removal of West Bank settlements. But the West Bank settlements were never removed, even though that was part of the deal that the Israelis made.
Since the Israelis never removed the settlements, of course Oslo went nowhere.
Try reading Edward Said's Peace And Its Discontents someday for a reality check on what happened back then. Arafat agreed to Oslo only to save his own political skin; his stupid support of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War during the early 90's led to the PLO almost disintegrating. By signing a near-treasonous agreement and giving the Israelis almost everything they wanted in exchange for no borders, no removal of settlements and finally no state, he guaranteed that he would survive but that Palestine as laid down in Oslo would fail.
And that's exactly what's happened.
What do you say now with Egypt shunning Hamas and the US pressuring the Saudis to throw their support at Fatah?
Do you know a "jihad" is occurring in the southern three provinces of Thailand, where countless Muslims of Malay ethnicity reside?
But wait, the Muslim agenda in North America is dictated by South Asians and Arabs, if it ain't Kashmir or Palestine, it gets little to no attention.
What does awareness of the ill effects of Zionism accomplish? The occupation still continues, and now with the Arab world invalidating the elections that gave Hamas the majority, what do you say to that?
There is an article by Alastair Crooke in the current London Review of Books which is pretty pertinent to Gustavo's claims, although it doesn't sustain them much.
"Our Second Biggest Mistake in the Middle East," by Alastair Crooke, in: London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 13, 5 July 2007 (url: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/croo01_.html)
As an example of how Arafat 'negotiated' with (=caved in to) the Israelis, have a look at Jan Selby's article "Dressing up domination as ‘cooperation’: the case of Israeli-Palestinian water relations" (Review of International Studies (2003), 29: 121-138) (I can email this to anyone who doesn't have access to the journal). It's not on a 'high-profile' topic like final status negotations topics, settlements, or roads, but even here, in what one might assume are relatively less important areas, there is pretty clear evidence that whether willingly or not, Arafat's 'negotiations' amounted in effect to recognising the post-1967 status quo.
Post new comment