Sordid history hastens US failure in the Mid-East

The British decision to create too many nation-states out of a single people stands at the root of it. The other major British blunder was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine despite the Palestinian Jews constituting only 6% of the population in the 1940s. The trauma of the Palestinian dispossession thus began to echo in every political inclination of the people of the region ever since.

Added to this were doses of subsequent US policies that fanned more unrest and mayhem over the last half-a century. Though the British had relinquished her Mid East commitments to the Americans following the Suez war of 1956, the US failed to redress Arab grievances due to its obsession for Israeli military preeminence in the region.

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Consequently, the Mid East is left to its own dynamics upon the collapse of the regional sub-system. The quagmire has also sucked in, once again, the US-UK duo into a war of attrition entailing two Arab lands -- Iraq and Palestine -- under foreign occupations. The significance of the 133 votes on September 20 in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) against the Israeli decision to expel Arafat lies herein.

Bush's Achilles' heel

The UNGA re- endorsed Arafat's legitimacy at a time when Bush chose to castigate him as a 'failed leader.' Bush's Arafat bashing is a continuation of the senior Bush's similar attitude toward the octogenarian Palestinian leader who, along with Saddam, proved too strong to quiver. Arafat is an elected leader of a people, empowered by the UNGA (Res. 3236 of Nov. 22, 1974) 'to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.'

Though the UN recognised the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1964, the US never took heed of it. Hence, the peace process remained frozen since the Security Council's adoption of Resolution 242 (demanding withdrawal of Israeli forces from all occupied land) in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli aggressions against neighbouring Arab countries.

Hidden agendas

The one major exception was the US-moved Camp David accord of 1978 that brought, thanks to Carter's good offices, Egypt and Israel to the negotiation table. But the gain of the Camp David was sacrificed a year later by the two major US decisions: (1) Carter's consent to sharing satellite intelligence with Israeli forces, a rare privilege that even eluded US' major ally, UK, and, (2) The decision to transfer US army's W-4 nuclear warhead to Israel. The nuclearisation of Israel created a permanent imbalance in the Arab regional sub-system.

The peace initiative got further derailed by the US inaction in stopping Israel from attacking Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1982. Iraq does not share an inch of territory with Israel and the unprovoked Israeli attack made the Iraqis more vengeful against Israel and its US mentor. The seeds of today's discord were, hence, sown in the early 1980s.

The US backing also emboldened Israel to invade Lebanon and evict Arafat and his followers from Beirut in the same year. Following this, the Arabs did not view the dispatch of US marines to Lebanon as a mere coincidence. A massive Arab resistance by the Iran and Syria-backed Hebollah guerrillas drove the US out of Lebanon after one single truck bomb killed over 300 marines in 1982. The Israelis too left Lebanon a decade later. Lebanon was thus freed from foreign occupation.

From Oslo to the oblivion

One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. The US was willing to share only half of that truth with respect to Palestine. It was not until 1993 that Bill Clinton resumed the peace process and arranged for the signing of the Oslo agreement.

But the strategic collusion between US and Israel kept the PLO out of negotiations since Reagan's decision in 1988 to revive the peace process on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338. Declassified documents reveal that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon signed an agreement on September 1, 1975 on behalf of two governments to exclude the PLO from any peace negotiations.

Thus, when the Oslo accord faced some insurmountable obstacles due to Israeli negation to accepting Palestinian refugees' return to their homeland, one had the hunch for a backlash to follow. Israel showed similar stubbornness when asked to concede a number of enclaves (that connect West bank with the Gaza strip) to the Palestinians. The issue of accepting refugees back to Palestine was another thorny one.

If one has a friend like Sharon, one needs no other enemy. Sharon rekindled Palestinian anger by visiting the Muslim holy site of Al-Aqsa in September 2000. His visit sparked the latest spate of Intifada. The Road Map having arrived after the devastation of 9/11, and Israel becoming the staunchest Mid East ally of the US to fight Islamic terrorism, the maiden Road Map was destined to die in its cradle.

For, the Arab mistrust has had historic roots. During World War 1, the British government sought an alliance with the Arabs to defeat the Ottoman Turks. The Arabs were promised in return of self- government and an independent Palestine state. Though the Arab revolt brought down the Ottoman Empire, Britain never kept her promises.

The British assurances were not hollow. Declassified in 1939 by Her Majesty's government, the British Command Papers contain a treasure trove of legal materials, including correspondences between Sherif Hossain of Hijaj and the Cairo-based British High Commissioner Sir Reginald Wingate. Wilson's 14 Points charter too incorporated a provision for the creation of a separate homeland for the Palestinian Arabs.

Resistance as a response to treachery

Oblivious to Palestinian plight, the British-Jewish nexus chose to allow Jewish immigration to Palestine since the Balfour declaration of 1917 that assured the Jews of a separate homeland. And, during the thick of World War 1, Britain and France signed a secret agreement (Sykes Picot, 1916) to partition Iraq and Syria. The content of this secret pact was published by Moscow's Bolshevik regime in 1917.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were evicted from Palestine while Britain held a League of Nations mandate to administer Palestine. A century on, the déjà vu replays. Who then can deny that the Oslo accord of 1993 sprang from the ferocity of a number of Intifadas that began with the 1988 one, and the intifada of 2000 produced the Road Map.

Meanwhile, Saddam's overt vouching to remunerate Palestinian suicide bombers made the Jewish lobby in Washington hell bent on removing him from the power of world's second largest oil producing country. This is what lay behind the US-UK decision to invade Iraq under any pretext.

But the US-UK cabal was grossly mistaken this time. Until 9/11, the US economy alone produced over 35% of the world GDP. Now the world's richest nation has lost 90% of its savings and over a million jobs. US budget deficits will have overshot the record $480 billion in 2004, creating a major setback for the already feeble global economy. The crisis is further compounded by $137.7 billion current account deficit in the second quarter of this year alone.

Politically, the US today is one of the most mistrusted nations on earth. Incapable of retrieving the situation from the brink of an impending catastrophe, another British leader, Tony Blair, now desperately tries to mend fences with France and Germany to end the US-UK occupation of Iraq. And, Bush himself too returns to the UN with a sullen face to beg for global support for an adventure that recoiled badly on his face.

With man like Sharon

As the US' Mid East policy remained an Israel-centric one, resulting in the outbreak of one conflict after another (particularly since the Iranian mass rose against US hegemony in a popular revolution in 1979), Israel must learn its lesson and trade land for peace sooner. The Israeli expansionism has reached a cul de sac and Sharon's strategy has rebounded with a bang. Sharon is an accused war criminal and his ambitions are dangerous for global peace.

The world is also aware how the US backed Israel blindly over the decades despite Israeli policy covertly aiming to grab more lands from the Arabs. The war in 1948 was the very first step toward fulfilling such a stratagem. Had that not been the mission, what else could have driven Israel on the eve of the 1956 Sinai campaign to plan for the expulsion of all Palestinian Israelis from the North-Central Israel (known as the 'little triangle')?

And, in the 1960s, Sharon, then a Colonel, ordered his subordinates to investigate how many buses would be needed to transfer 300,000 Palestinians out of northern Israel. Decades on, his views remain unchanged.

During the 1967 war, 200,000-300,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank, their buses carrying a sticker that read, 'free passage to Amman.'' Uzi Narkiss, head of Isreal's central command during the 1967 war, explained the ghastly episode as, " We came in the morning, asked everyone to go to Ramallah. Then we leveled the villages and today we have Canada Park there."

It is no wonder that a high percentage of attacks on Israeli targets during the latest Intifada aimed to warn both the Israeli citizenry and their US mentor that, Road Map or not, Palestinian youths will not stop short of a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories seized in the 1967 war. Such a demand accords well with Resolutions 242 and 338.

One also sees in hindsight that every time the US-Israel cabal tried to resolve the Palestinian issue with military means, it backfired. The Arabs are least scared now of such brutalities. At the beginning of the 2000 Intifada, hundreds of unarmed children were shot dead by Israeli army although Palestinians did not use any lethal weapons to face the Israeli armour and helicopter gunship that targeted them almost daily. In the first 10 months of this Intifada, 107 Palestinians were killed, one third of them children.

The disproportionate Israeli response to the stone throwing Palestinians pales all other atrocities of recent history. Israeli forces fired 700,000 live rounds in West Bank and another 300,000 in Gaza strip during the first few days of the Intifada. An Israeli military officer dubbed the operation as 'a bullet for every child.'

The Palestinians also feel flabbergasted due to the US' condoning of the Jenin massacre of April 2000 and Sharon's brutal atrocities in the early 1980s when over 600 Palestinians were murdered by his forces in the Sabra and Satila refugee camps of Lebanon.

How can a Road Map play itself out when Sharon goes ahead with new settlements and targeted assassination of Palestinian activists and the US uses its veto power time and again to further strangulate a people that had passed generations under brutal occupation?

Author and columnist M. Shahidul Islam is a Senior Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.