- Following the January 2005 election of
Hamas as the ruling party in Palestine, the United States, Israel, the
European Union and the UN conspired to withhold assistance to any Hamas-led
government in order to bring it down. The agreed procedure, clear and callus
in its brutality, was to teach the Palestinians a lesson in modern western
concepts of democracy: Having a fair and open election was great, but
selecting a leadership the Western cabal did not like was a costly mistake,
and the Palestinian people collectively would be punished for their bad
judgment. From that point onward the financial screws on Palestine have
been tightened, and on Monday, June 12, the International Committee of
the Red Cross said the situation could turn into a "major humanitarian
emergency."
-
- The ICRC judgment, predictable from the
first day of the collective Western decision to deny Palestinian aid, is
unlikely to have any effect on the perpetrators of this humanitarian crime.
The intent, loosely put, is to bring down any Hamas government, however
constructive it might be, and bring the Palestinians back to a negotiating
frame of mind with Israel. That means they must buy into a Fatah, Mahmoud
Abbas led process of agreeing to everything the Israelis want, while the
Israelis will continue to agree to nothing the Palestinians want or need.
Here, once more, the Israelis have enlisted the West to do the dirty work
for the Zionists, while Israel's new leadership under Ehud Olmert prepares
openly to add more settlements, to complete walling in the Palestinians
and to add the Jordan Valley to Israel.
-
- This all began when Hamas broke the house
rule on negotiations with Israel: They proposed preconditions to recognizing
Israel that required actual Israeli concessions. But under Israeli rules--tacitly
accepted by the West--the Palestinians simply cannot ask for anything in
return for concessions; they can only agree with Israeli dictates. Shortly
after it won the January 2006 election, Hamas indicated it would accept
a two state solution based on a return to the 1967 green line, a capital
in Jerusalem and recognition of other Palestinian rights. That is a basic
position previously agreed upon by the Arab League. A recent survey of
key Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons showed they also
accept that basic position.
-
- By denying aid to the Hamas-led government,
the Israeli goal is to get back to safe but pointless negotiating territory
with Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas in charge. That, the Israeli Zionist leadership
thinks, will quash, once and for all, any prospect of a Palestinian state.
That cannot be done with Hamas in power, so Hamas has to go.
-
- But where will Hamas go? With the known
history of Middle East violence, that question urgently needs consideration.
The West and Israel seem hell-bent on skewering themselves, and, as the
well-known maxim holds, ignoring history and living to repeat it.
-
- Ever since Yassir Arafat began to mobilize
the Palestinians around the idea of a national home, Middle East violence
has been on the rise. This pattern of violence has been fired by the fact
that the Israelis ruthlessly have emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages
of their people, and they forced those people into refugee camps or exile.
Palestinian insurgency and, by export, international terrorism had their
main roots in this problem. There were few international terrorist incidents
of any kind before the Israelis began wholesale dispossession of the Palestinian
people. No Middle East terrorist group of international consequence existed
before wholesale expulsion of the Palestinians began. Al Qaida is a late-comer
in this picture.
-
- As a direct consequence of Palestinian
repression, the groups proliferated. The Palestine Liberation Organization
or PLO (Yassir Arafat's creation), the Abu Nidal group (that split off
from the PLO in the mid 1970s), the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al Aksa Martyrs Brigades,
Hamas, and variations of those groups or lesser clusters all sprang from
the fertile soil of resistance to Palestinian repression.
-
- Only when there was some hope among Palestinians
that their situation might improve through negotiation did the growth of
terrorism of Middle East origin begin to level off. It has waxed and waned
in loose fashion with the promise, or lack of promise of the peace process
as perceived by the Palestinian people or their supporters. Before the
Iraq War, at least half of the known Middle East militant groups were outgrowths
of the Palestinian problem. The others were local groups aimed at bringing
change or bringing down their local governments in places such as Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, and others. In short, virtually all Middle East terrorist
groups Westerners know anything about sprang from Israeli repression of
the Palestinians.
-
- That Palestinian repression is the mother
of most Middle East terrorism has been obvious to anyone who cared to examine
the situation. However, the point seems lost on the loose Western cabal
now bent on bringing about the political downfall of Hamas. But here are
some critical facts. Sabri al Banna, whose war name was Abu Nidal, the
earlier of two "heroic" terrorist enemies of the West, grew out
of the Palestine problem. Credited, or better, charged with over 900 attacks,
he was eased into semi-retirement partly by the peace process, partly by
US and other efforts to contain him, until he died in 2002 in Baghdad.
However, his disagreement with Arafat over the utility of negotiations
with Israel has been proven more right than wrong over the years.
-
- The second "heroic" terrorist
enemy of the West has been Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian born
Palestinian. Hardly known before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, al Zarqawi's
work has been in the context of the Iraqi resistance against the US/Coalition
occupation of Iraq. While the Iraq War has become its own breeding ground
for terrorists, the odds are that any "terrorist" with enough
experience and recognition to succeed al Zarqawi will have been brought
up on the Palestine resistance experience.
-
- Three Middle East countries have borne
the brunt of Western irritation with Middle East terrorism. Syria, Iraq,
and Iran, all charter members of the US State Department log of terrorism
sponsoring states, are on the list principally if not entirely for their
support of Palestinian groups. In effect, they are labeled "terrorism
sponsoring states" because they have abetted the Palestinian insurgency
against Israeli occupation and repression of the Palestinian people. The
United States could support the Contras in Nicaragua or Jonas Savimbi's
UNITA in Angola (both insurgent/terrorist groups in the 1980s) without
being labeled a terrorism sponsoring state, while at that same time pinning
the label on the three Middle East countries.
-
- Given that history, the chances are that
Zarqawi's reported successor, Sheikh Abu Hamza al Muhajir ( Muhajir means
"immigrant" in Arabic), will have a history in one or both of
the world's major terrorism generators the Palestinian struggle or the
US supported Mujahidin fight against Russia in Afghanistan. A US military
spokesman in Iraq has suggested that Abu Hamza al Muhajir may be a pseudonym
for Abu Ayyub al Masri (Masri means "Egyptian" in Arabic), but
the dominant theme in his description is that he is an "experienced
jihadist". If he is Abu Ayyub, his experience appears to have been
gained alongside Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan war with Russia. If
true, ironically he, as well as Osama, is a product of American training
in Afghanistan. It can pretty much be taken as given that he shares Osama's
support for the Palestinians, or more accurately the hate born of Israeli
repression of the Palestinians.
-
- The clear message for US, European, Israeli
and UN leadership is that the principal training ground for Middle East
terrorists has been the Palestine insurgency. That being so, the West
collectively, and the Israelis specifically are taking a horrendous chance
by causing Hamas to fail. If Hamas fails, the likely prospect is that everybody
in the West will pay for this with a resurgence of terrorist violence,
first in Israel and more widely spread among Western targets. Failure
to give the Hamas political wing the time needed to bring the hardliners
along on a political process will simply undercut any Hamas effort to transform
the movement into a political party.
-
- For more than half a century the Israelis
have slowly stolen Palestine from its people, and they have done that with
more or less constant US aid and support. The effort to suppress Hamas
turns that pattern into a collective Western assault on Palestine. As
the Palestinians suffer, their treatment by the west will be seen by Muslims
as a generalized assault on Islam, a repeat of the Crusades. Added to numerous
reported abuses by US forces in Iraq, legend will center not merely on
treatment of the men, but on the brutal starving, killing and abuse of
women and children.
-
- Many Israelis do not agree with the agenda
being pursued by Ehud Olmert's ruling coalition. Based on reports from
Israeli peace activists such as Gush Shalom, the odds are that a majority
would settle for a two state solution bounded by the 1967 Green Line, if
that brought enduring peace. A significant number disapprove of the occupation
and repression of the Palestinian people. How is it then, one might ask,
that the occupation, the land grab, the creeping Israeli expansion go on,
if so many people oppose them?
-
- Politics in the United States is now
a model for the answer. The US is following policies that are driven by
a small cabal of single-minded military expansionists who are supported
by a Congress whose members grow fat on the contributions of the military,
industrial and financial lobbies who profit from military expansion. America's
reputation, economic security, the lives of young men and women killed
and maimed in a pointless war, all are sacrifices to the profits of that
Washington cabal. What the people may want, as the cabal sees it, is unimportant.
-
- Israeli politics operate much the same
way, no matter how democratic the process may look. The Ashkenazi Zionist
cabal that makes Israeli decisions on war and peace has never been out
of power. In their hands, with no regard for Palestinian rights, the slow
absorption of all of Palestine goes on, regardless of what many Israeli
citizens may want.
-
- Some powerful individuals, such as former
Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, have said publicly that causing Hamas to fail
is a mistake. Under a Zionist leadership that brutally suppresses dissent,
there are simply not enough opposing voices.
-
- The world was sufficiently divided when
only the US was paired with Israel in repressing the Palestinians. A virtually
total Western alliance aimed at starving the Palestinians to suppress Hamas,
or to bypass Hamas and force its failure, will strengthen the Islamic extremist
charge of a Western war on Islam.
-
- According to some observers, a very active
version of the Western strategy is to provoke a civil war in Palestine.
There are enough deep-seated differences between Fatah and Hamas to bring
that about, and Hamas has sufficient reason to believe Fatah, at least
Mahmoud Abbas, is supporting the assault being launched on the Hamas government,
mainly by the US and Israel. The Europeans, perhaps without enthusiasm,
are supporting this effort.
-
- The tragedy of the likely outcome is
that the West must take credit for the renewal of terror in and around
the Middle East. As a result of the boycott of assistance to Palestine,
Hamas has already ended its unilateral truce. The superficial intended
consequence may be a US-Israeli effort to jolt the Palestinian people back
into a placid compliance with Israeli wishes. The actual intended consequence
for the Zionists is to restore the enemy they need to cover their continuing
takeover of what is left of Palestine.
-
- The Palestinians, as always, will be
the losers, because they will have made no progress toward a settlement
with the Israelis, and, with the failure of Hamas, they will have lost
their only promising political sponsor. Fortunately for humanity only
a few of the repressed Palestinians become militants and insurgents. In
the West, in the United States particularly, those few who fight back against
Israeli repression will be blamed for all the violence in Palestine. But
the next generation of "heroic" enemies of the West and Israel
will grow in that newly re-fertilized soil.
-
- The next "heroic" enemy of
the West may not be a Palestinian, but, if not, he is very likely to be
someone who thinks, quite sanely, that the Palestinian people are being
brutally repressed, and that the perpetrators should be made to pay for
it. In either case, the Bush administration War on Terrorism will be given
new life, and Israel will get the violent cover it needs to complete the
rape of Palestine. Those are the likely outcomes of a collective failure
of judgment by the United States, the European Union, Israel, and the UN.
Both intended and unintended consequences are future horror stories.
-
-
-
- **********
-
- The writer is the author of the recently
published work, A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a
regular columnist on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service
Officer of the US Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions
were as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counterterrorism, and as
Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War
College. He will welcome comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.
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