Arab World
Updated 2024-07-15
2024-05-07 To Achieve Peace and Stability, the Middle East Needs a Regional Security Framework The broader Middle East needs peace and stability, not more conflict. This will not come through more arms and more hostile posturing. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that the region’s antagonists will not be defeated. Conflict either emboldens them or results in a metastasizing of their conflicts’ root causes into new and more virulent forms.
During the past century, the U.S. and its Western allies played an extremely negative role. From the Sykes-Picot betrayal and dismemberment of the region, to the fatal partition of Palestine and United Nation’s failure to insist on Israel honoring the terms of its conditional admission in 1948, the West repeatedly turned a blind eye to Israel’s aggressive behaviors and its egregious violations of Palestinian rights. This only served to make a bad situation worse. As a result, the region has been forced to endure repeated wars involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
Our policies have been no better with regard to Iran. We supported the repressive regime of its Shah and worked to overthrow Iran’s effort to form a democracy in the 1950s—a wound Iranians never forgot. This hostility came into clear focus after the Shah’s pro-Western regime grew more repressive and was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1979. That promising revolution quickly devolved into the aggressive Islamic Republic of Iran with its decidedly anti-Western bent.
During the decade-long war of the 1980s between revolutionary Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the U.S. supplied munitions (including chemical and biological components) to Iraq, while covertly (and illegally) funneling weapons to Iran. The results were devastating to both nations. Then came a decade of crippling U.S.-imposed sanctions on both countries and finally the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to Iran gaining a foothold in Iraq among its long-oppressed Shi’a majority. Iran was now emboldened to pursue its regional ambitions with its allies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, all of whom had their own grievances within their countries and with the West. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/middle-east-regional-security-framework
2024-02-14 The Killing Fields of Gaza Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed tirelessly to be acting in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In truth, the actions of his regime and military these past few months has placed them much closer to the guards than the inmates at Hitler’s death camps during this dark period in human affairs. In other words, and put more simply, when your response to genocide is more genocide, you become precisely that which you claim to be against. This is precisely where we are now after four months of the IDF’s murderous and wholly indiscriminate military campaign against the people of Gaza.
Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention. Supine and tepid calls for humanitarian pauses, temporary cessations, ceasefires, the provision of humanitarian aid; all have dropped and evaporated like snowflakes on the ground, such has been their impotence.
The result is 13,000 Palestinian children being thus far sent to their deaths under the missiles and bombs of a 21st century military machine in the hands of a government comprised of men with 14th century minds. Netanyahu and his supporters will not be happy until the history, culture and entire existence of the Palestinians are relegated to the museum. This is both evident and implicit in the mad slaughter they have and are currently engaged in. A twisted conception of the world as being fashioned on the basis of might is right and racial hierarchy has throughout human history produced monsters. And in this respect, Benjamin Netanyahu is merely the latest in a long line. In this respect, too, he has inflicted a moral injury on every one of us still in possession of a beating heart and a conscience, not to mention consciousness. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/14/the-killing-fields-of-gaza/
2024-02-14 AS’AD AbuKHALIL: Arabs Divided on ICJ Ruling The liberal Arab camp thinks the ICJ ruling will lead to a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question, while the popular camp has lost faith in international organizations, including the ICJ. Israel will forever be stained with the label of genocide and its supporters will always be accused of supporting genocide after the International Court of Justice ruled last month that there was prima facie evidence to put Israel on trial for genocide. Even powerful foreign lobbies will find it difficult to remove the stigma. This is not lost on U.S. citizens who have spent untold millions of dollars and have heard too many lies to continue supporting an image of moral superiority.
If an Arab country rather than South Africa had brought the charge of genocide, the U.S., and other Israel supporters would have easily dismissed it, pointing to a sordid record of human rights violations and repression by that government. But this was South Africa which, given its own record of human rights adherence since the end of apartheid, and high standards of democracy and equality embedded in the South African constitution, has emerged as a moral leader not only of developing countries but of the world. South Africa is a moral superpower, while the U.S. has been reduced to a mere bully. South Africa now leads the “Free World” and not the U.S., NATO and its coalition of former colonial powers. South Africa is the new superpower, without nuclear weapons. Its soft power is not the same as America’s, which camouflages naked aggression and the subjugation of other countries.
There are two camps on ICJ ruling in the Arab world. The liberal intellectuals who are funded by Gulf despots and/or NATO governments/Soros insist that Arabs should never abandon their belief in the “international community” (a code word for the genocide axis of NATO) and in international law and human rights.
The other camp, which speaks more for free Arab public opinion, regard the notion of international law and human rights as tools and even Western government tricks to solidify their domination over people of the South. They want to tranquilize and delude them into thinking justice can be restored through international fora. The fact that a month after the ICJ ruling, Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, and Western governments continue to endorse and sponsor it is testimony to the limitations and even the impotence of international organizations. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/14/asad-abukhhalil-arabs-divided-on-icj-ruling/
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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