Essays

The current Bush-Cheney administration and Israel share the same logic, if not the same misreading of the present Muslim world: Force and might will bring about a change in the hearts and minds of the Palestinians, who in due time will accept a superior reality imposed by Israel and supported by the United States and discredited Arab leaders. The question that now confronts Israel and its allies is what their long-term strategy is, if they succeed in dethroning a democratically elected Hamas and imposing a new Palestinian government. Will the elimination of Hamas finally end the conflict, or simply give Israel breathing room? Will it produce peace and a resolution of the standing issues? Will it inspire the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim masses to look anew at Israel as a “light unto the nations,” and its ally America as “the shinning city upon a hill”—and also to look inward at their own collective error of opposing the new civilizational project?

The more likely outcome is that Israel, the U.S., and Arab elites are sowing the seeds for a future that will be even more destructive and counter to long-term American national interests, if those interests can be defined outside of an ill-advised 60-year Israeli alliance that has already outlived its usefulness. And, if those interests can shift away from the interventionist demands of a military-industrial complex, a shift that Israel-first supporters would surely oppose because it would mean the demise of the American golden goose that lays upwards of $6.9 billion a year at Tel Aviv’s door step.

The savage, ongoing attack on Gaza is not in response to Hamas rockets, indiscriminate and strategically limited as they may be; rather, it is a well-planned operation six months in the making that needed an opportune time for execution. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Israel and its allies immediately regretted their own strategic mistake of permitting Hamas to participate in the elections in the first place. The way to reverse a convincing Hamas victory over Fatah seemed cut and dry. Bring in Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security advisor for President Bush and a convicted (and pardoned) felon of the Iran-Contra Affair, and request a small-scale civil war to replace Hamas with Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt supporters. Similar strategies worked perfectly in Latin America in the 1980s, and there was no reason they wouldn’t work again in the Occupied Territories.

However, before moving on the Palestinians, a small problem in the north, namely Hizballah, would have to be dealt a death blow and removed as a “strategic threat” to Israel’s borders. Israel’s campaign against Hizballah, though, did not work out and instead resulted in a limited strategic shift that weakened Israel’s deterrence. Since this defeat, Israel and its allies have been seeking a “game changer” that can reconstitute the agenda for the region and elevate the priority to confront Iran. For almost two years, the U.S. and its Arab allies have been attempting to open an internal Lebanese front against Hizballah with some $450 million in military hardware and private security contractors. These attempts have resulted again in failure, an outcome that is perhaps not so surprising considering the strategic goal of containing Iran, Hizballah, and Hamas comes from the same group that outlined the goal of ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. At its core, the containment of Iran, Hizballah, and Hamas is a goal made in Israel—and is unachievable no matter what tool kits are used because American and Israeli failures in the region have emboldened the population and delegitimized the United States and Israel as well as all the Arab leaders who are partners in this plan. Six decades of Palestine’s experience with U.S. foreign policy, the Guantanamo gulag, the war on Iraq and the Abu Gharaib images, the war in Afghanistan, and the recent official responses to Israeli actions in Lebanon and in Gaza provide an empirical clue to anyone dismissing the Arab street as irrational.

The American agenda in the Middle East has failed and will continue to fail as long as it is based upon an Israel-first approach and at the expense of Palestinian national aspiration. Palestinian national aspiration is the key to undo the damage and to heal the mistrust sowed in the region since the end of World War I. Yet, another round of misguided regional planning is underway with Iran as the most recent incarnation of evil that must be arrested by any means necessary, which include bombing civilian targets such as universities, mosques, and water purification centers, as Israel has been doing in Gaza and the U.S. in Iraq. After the invasion of Iraq, the Israel-first crowd has moved toward the next regional goal, to contain Iran’s “threat” by creating a Sunni alliance ready to take on the task of a possible military confrontation. The Sunni alliance will have a familiar cast of supporting actors: Egypt, Jordan, member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon’s Sunni population, and a defanged Palestinian Authority. The hope is for an internal Sunni-Shia conflict that can keep western oil flowing and sustain military-industrial complex growth. If this Sunni alliance is fully developed and if an issue, such as WMDs, can generate a confrontation, the strategy of containing Iran can succeed. A divide-and-conquer strategy is especially profound in the Middle East because these states, along with Iran, possess the majority of the world’s proven oil reserves, which they will be selling for the next 50 to 100 years.

American mastery in the region allows the United States to buy the oil from each of these states, then immediately make the money back by selling them inferior weapons and charging them hefty consultation and replacement fees. The end result would be that the Middle East will remain in debt for the next few generations, despite the black gold under their feet. However, if isolating groups opposing the American-Israeli plans in the region and developing an anti-Iran coalition is the goal, then we must all be made aware that the two focal points of resistance to this agenda are Hamas, a Sunni-Arab group, and Hizballah, a Shia-Arab group. Setting aside the sectarian conflict in Iraq, the region’s populations are refusing to partake in the strategy of Sunni-Shia divide and conquer, and opting to resist and mobilize a popular grassroots counter movement.

The attack on Hamas in Gaza will be a “game changer”—but not the one Israel, the U.S., and Arab governments desire. While the attack will weaken Hamas militarily, it will emerge with increasing political and regional legitimacy after withstanding the full strength of Israel’s military might, a feat only matched by Hizballah until today. Merely staying alive is sufficient. In this sense, military defeat for Hamas is not an issue because the balance of power is decisively against them. As a classical anti-colonial nationalist and religious guerrilla movement, Hamas’ strategy is built on prolonging the war and shifting the battlefields. This shift of the battlefields is already underway, as the lines of demarcation have moved into all the Arab and Muslim capitals. Just weeks ago, the economic crisis was the major concern of Arab and Muslim capitals, and the 1.5 million Palestinians under siege were virtually ignored. Now, Gaza’s current plight has mobilized increasingly defiant populations to demand change from their own corrupt governments. Israel, the U.S., and their Arab allies wanted to isolate Hamas to teach it a lesson. However, winds don’t flow as ships desire, an Arabic proverb goes, and the end result has instead been that corrupt Arab leaders are facing mounting pressure to embrace Hamas and support the resistance to save face with their own populations.

The response that we see across the Arab and Muslim world should be understood for what it is. Arabs and Muslims are beginning to emerge from the post-colonial period and into the multiple possibilities of a de-colonized self consciousness. The challenge for the Arab and Muslim world is not to confuse symptoms for the root causes of their condition. Gaza is a symbol and the focal point for Arabs and Muslims who have seen their collective freedoms, liberties, happiness, dignity, self-worth, wealth, and countries put to waste by internally colonized elites and external colonial forces. In the past eight years alone, Arabs and Muslims have lost more than a million of their population in the illegal invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine. Yet, they are expected to be normal, to get along, to go out shopping for western made-in-China products, to dress like "emaciated European" models, and to build structures insulting the basic historical and cultural norms of their societies. The masses are now expressing a collective, “Enough!” Enough to the present colonial rule, and enough to the double standard of the so-called “international community,” which at its core is nothing but colonial legalities transformed into modern modes of control. The protests focusing on Gaza are an expression of solidarity with the oppressed and a symbol of the unity of Arabs and Muslims. Yes, the idea of the nation-state has managed to create borders and fences; however, the Palestinian struggle has managed time and time again to unify and reenergize the Muslim world. The protests today are focusing on Gaza as they should, but in the long run, they will make a difference in every state. In the midst of these dark days, the cause of freedom and justice is ringing even louder in the streets, alleys, and cities across the Arab and Muslim world, and only the colonial powers are worried because they don't want to lose their colonies and captured markets. The “New Middle East” is an imagined Orientalist figment of imagination, and it has been brought to an end by people who built civilizations out of sand.