- An article that makes a lot of sense. Should be read
to understand the Gaza collusion:
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- "Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals,
as well as the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah
have reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them
from Hezbollah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to the
open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and
all progressive forces in the region."
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- Arab Collaborators Of Israel
- By Joseph Massad
- 1-5-9
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- One is often baffled by the ironies of international
relations and the alliances they foster. Take for example the Israeli colonial
settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian people and several
Arab countries since its inception while at the same time it built alliances
with many Arab regimes and with Palestinian leaders.
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- While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist
relations have always been known and documented, there has been less documentation
of the services that Israel has provided and continues to provide to Arab
regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's 1967 invasion
of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of
all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and before
it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel
thus rendered a great service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics)
from "the ocean to the Gulf," whose survival was threatened by
Nasser and Nasserism. Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970
to help the Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive
invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it rendered
to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's "revolutionary"
potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli intelligence
has also provided over the decades crucial information to several Arab
regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition and strengthen
their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among recipients of Israeli
intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani dictatorships.
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- Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace. Its
2006 invasion of Lebanon, engineered to destroy Hizballah, was cheered
by Arab regimes and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile to Hizballah
and employed exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive Israeli
destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of more
than a thousand Lebanese strengthened Hizballah and weakened Israel's military
standing, the invasion was much appreciated by Israel's Arab allies. Indeed
since 2006, Israel's Arab regime allies as well as neoliberal Arab intellectuals
have been openly calling on it to neutralize the so-called Iranian "threat"
for its own sake and at their behest as well. The US has seen this as an
opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that
it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance
that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested
a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals have
already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial settlement
to the regional alliance against Iran.
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- Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals,
as well as the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah
have reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them
from Hezbollah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to the
open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and
all progressive forces in the region. These were not closely guarded secret
hopes, but strategies that were openly discussed in private meetings, which
often spilled into the public realm. The discussions in the Arab media
and the declarations made by Israeli officials in the context of the ongoing
Israeli massacres of the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in
the last 10 days have left little to the imagination. A veritable open
alliance now exists between the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority,
Arab regimes, and Israel with the support of neoliberal Arab intellectuals,
wherein Israel is subcontracted to decimate the Hamas government -- the
only democratically elected government in the entire Arab world.
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- Here let us remember that Hamas was democratically elected
in free elections and that its elected officials and members of parliament
were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation and have been languishing in Israeli
jails for years, and that the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority set
their offices on fire, staged strikes against them, and signaled the PCA
bureaucracy not to follow their orders. It was after all this failed to
dislodge Hamas from power that the US, Israel, and the PCA staged a coup
to massacre Hamas leaders in Gaza that backfired on them. The carnage unleashed
by Israel in the last 10 days is the latest attempt by Israel to ensure
that all Arabs and all Palestinians are ruled by dictators and never by
democratically elected officials.
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- Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can
be so brazen in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't
they fear being overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question.
The answer of course is a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration
with Israel by Arab regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely
their openness about it, but there is a perfectly good reason for this.
In the 1940s and the 1950s, these regimes could not declare openly their
alliance with Israel, as there were popular and international forces that
would have removed them from power had they done so. Indeed, some at the
time flirted with alliances that unofficially included Israel, like the
Baghdad Pact, but they paid a heavy price for such collaboration. The Cold
War, Third World revolutionism, Arab nationalism, the Soviet Union, China,
Nasser, were all factors to be considered. While a few of these factors
had remained when Egypt's Sadat declared his open alliance with the US
and Israel in the late 1970s, none of these factors remains today. The
US, Israel, and their major Arab allies have neutralized these forces one
by one since 1967, opening the way for this brazen alliance between Israel
and the Arab dictatorships, all of which are in the service of US interests
in the region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and fear and have at their
disposal the best secret police and repressive security apparatus that
the US can train and equip and which oil money and US aid can buy.
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- When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point
blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab
regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally
denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there
are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that
Hamas is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally,
the same Tzipi Livni, who only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian citizens
of Israel that she has slated them for denationalization and deportation
to the Palestinian Bantustans once Israel and the international community
grants these West Bank prisons the status of an independent Palestinian
state enclosed within the apartheid wall. After her war on Palestinians
in Gaza started last week, Livni declared that her war against the Palestinian
people is not only about security but also about Israel's "values"
which non-collaborator Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni
is of course right. Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing
ideals and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is Palestinenser-rein,
most Palestinians believe that they should remain present on their lands
even and especially if this sullies the purity of a Jewish Israel.
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- Livni has also asserted that Israel's values are shared
by the "free world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies
of the "free world." We can add that her values are also shared
by Saudi-funded neoliberal Arab intellectuals and by the leadership of
the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority ensconced in the Green Zone
of Ramallah. The civilized values of Israel are not unlike those espoused
by the US in its ongoing wars against Arabs and Muslims, and are very much
like European colonial values during the high age of colonialism and beyond.
Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human rights, democracy, peace,
and justice as universal while applying them only to Jews and denying them
especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an Israeli ruse. Let us remember
the undying words of Frantz Fanon in this regard: "leave this Europe
where they never tire of talking of man, yet murder men everywhere they
find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the
corners of the globe."
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- On the Palestinian front, the term of chief Palestinian
collaborator and coup leader Mahmoud Abbas ends on 9 January. Israel hopes
to extend his collaborationist rule as head of the PCA it set up through
the Oslo agreement in 1993. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians
are the main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political
loser in all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test
for Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel
the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their
livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being
resisted.
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- The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century
of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing
them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab
and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing
Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has
been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and
still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from
the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel's
crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter
in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial
brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of
a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.
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- Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics
and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. The Article
was published originally under the title Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Massad's
references to the Jewish uprising are quite out of tune with the rest and
apparently were necessitated by the Americans' obsession with holocaust
stories. They are removed here, and can be seen in full on the Electronic
Intifada site.
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