Mid-East Politics Are Getting Hotter
In a previous post I discussed the changed position of Saudi King Abdullah toward George Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq. Now Dick (Shotgun) Cheney himself is going over to Saudi Arabia to try some sort of workaround.
“Vice President Cheney faces a diplomatic rescue mission tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah has told top State Department and Pentagon officials over the past six weeks that the kingdom no longer supports Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and does not believe the new U.S. military strategy to secure Baghdad will work, U.S. officials and Arab diplomats said.
The oil-rich kingdom, which has taken an increasingly tough position on Iraq, believes Maliki has proven a weak leader during his first year in power and is too tied to Iran and pro-Iranian Shiite parties to bring about real reconciliation with Iraq’s Sunni minority, Arab sources said.
Assuaging Saudi concerns is the primary reason for the vice president’s trip — and even a key reason he went to Baghdad this week”
Cheney wouldn’t be making that trip to sweet-talk Abdullah unless this was really getting serious. Up until now it’s been much lesser figures who have conducted that diplomacy, so threats must have been issued. Abdullah has already made it clear that he’s prepared to conduct a proxy war against the Shiites by arming and funding the Iraqi Sunnis, and he’s openly joined the anti-Israel rhetoric.
To appreciate the clout of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, one has only to remember that it’s the home of Mecca, the moon-rock shrine Holy of Holies. All Islam bows toward Mecca when they pray 5 times a day. There is great pressure being brought to bear by King Abdullah on Bush to get rid of Al Maliki, something that should have been done long ago anyway. Al Maliki is totally self-serving and is deliberately prolonging the war and the increasing number of dead.
Bush doesn’t like anyone telling him how to ruin a war and his stubbornness is setting the Middle East up for a conflagration that will expand well beyond Iraq. I don’t know what Cheney will promise the Saudis but if he makes threats instead of promises, you can bet all Hell will break loose. Dick Cheney is NOT a talented diplomat, he’s a face slapper who believes in his power, and he won’t be able to order King Abdullah around the way he did Pakistans Musharraf.
This meeting could go either way. It may be just another minor moment in Middle East politics, or it could be a final straw.
Don’t you just love cliff-hangers?
BTW, Right Truth has set up a great Sunday Reading List for a well-rounded view of current Mid-East events.
May 20th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1815835.ece
Thats in Lebanon.
In Gazoo
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4211
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4212
You got to wonder at the sanity of Gazoo residents. A city/region, handed over on a plate, and all they want to do is make war on their neighbours. I know of no other country that would be as tolerant as the Israelis in the face of these daily atrocities. Add in fatah vs hamas fighting, and you conclude that gazoo needs melting down!
In Iran
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/world/middleeast/15iran.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Yup, things are warming up. The window of opportunity is closing fast. NK and Iranian cooperation will yield results even faster in the immediate future.
May 20th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Gee, I’ve never been “moderated” for so long.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Rejoice, Jordon. You are Moderated no longer.
I saw that Lebanon fracas in the news. It looks like typical muslim interaction to me, nothing special, but then you never know with those people. An offhand comment can send whole neighborhoods into violent confrontations.
May 20th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
The Leb fracas.
I saw the Leb army as sunni, and palestine gunmen as Iran funded, so it may be more of the proxy war, - saud vs iran.
Didn’t know 40,000 palis refugees in Leb.
No doubt stirring up the shiite vs sunni.
certainly getting hotter.
How much longer are we gonna tolerate all this crap?
And how long before Iran reaches melt-down from where-ever?
The inmates are taking over.
BTW, how’s the little house on the range developing?
May 21st, 2007 at 12:43 am
Jordon, check my “Back Again” post comments.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I didn’t know there were so many Palestinians in Lebanon either. I have some sympathy for Lebanon. They are sandwiched between some really back guys, who are all plotting against a democratic government there. Who knew there were so many al-Qaeda linked groups in Lebanon either?
Al Maliki is totally self-serving, you are so right. He’s pathetic.
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Dozens of people are thought to have been killed in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon – at least seventy in two days — as the Lebanese army goes all out to destroy the al Qaeda affiliate Fatah al Islam which is apparently embedded in the camp.
A refugee camp under heavy bombardment; civilians being killed along with the terrorists who are hunkered down among them; military authorities talking of having terrorists ‘hermetically sealed’ and that they will be removed one way or another because they pose a threat to the country which simply cannot be tolerated; ambulances prevented from reaching the injured and even being fired upon. Can you imagine the reaction if Israel were to be doing this?
But just look at the MSM. Where are the virulent denunciations of the Lebanese government? Where are the editorials condemning it for dangerous over-reaction? Where are the columnists screaming war crimes? Where are the politicians and the bishops condemning the Lebanese for a disproportionate response and demanding a cease-fire now? Funny, that — I seem to have missed them.
And now look at the British media’s coverage of the bombardment of Israel by Hamas, and its belated military response. That response has been reported as if Israel is driving events. The bombardment has scarcely been mentioned – except in passing in the stories about Israel’s response, which is thus presented as the driving force. The fact that getting on for two hundred rockets have been fired by the Palestinians at Sderot in the past two days has been virtually ignored. The fact that yesterday a 35 year-old woman was killed by one of these rockets has been all but ignored by journalists who usually preface any reference to the Kassams as ‘home-made’, to give the impression that this is a Gazan Dad’s Army up against the Israeli military behemoth. The fact that – according to Israel’s deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh – Iran is behind the Hamas rocket bombardment in order to distract attention from its nuclear programme is virtually ignored. The rationale is presumably to force Israel to do what it is now doing by attacking Hamas in Gaza; because Iran and Hamas know very well that the attention of the west will instantly be drawn to Israel like a moth to a flame. The pressure on Iran to abandon its goal of nuclear genocide will thus be transferred to Israel, the prime target of the nuclear genocide. Sure enough, it’s working like a charm.
The Israelis are worried, and with good reason, that Iran/Hamas will now extend their bombardment beyond Sderot to cities such as Ashkelon or Beersheba. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
High-ranking defense officials told the Post terrorists had smuggled long-range rockets into Gaza from the Sinai through tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor. Islamic Jihad is known to have a limited number of outdated Grad-model Katyusha rockets, but has yet to fire them at their maximum range of 25 km.
To prevent this, Israel may well now have to escalate its attacks on Hamas in Gaza. We can all write the western media script that will follow.
Who needs al Qaeda when the enemies of the free world have got the western media on their side?
I just wonder when the MSwesternM will actually tell the TRUTH to its readers? After all, THAT IS THEIR JOB
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Western hostility to Israel rests on a particular false assumption base on widespread ignorance about the history of Israel, and in particular the land known as the West Bank. People assume Israel itself was an artificial creation resulting from Holocaust guilt, when a load of European Jews were transplanted into a land owned for millennia by Palestinian Arabs. That itself is false. Israel was the nation state of the Jews centuries before the Arabs took it by force, and an unbroken Jewish presence remained in Jerusalem and other cities, some of which, indeed, had a Jewish majority.
And even if people don’t make this false assumption about Israel itself, they certainly believe that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal and illegitimate because Israel has no claim to that land which it has, ‘stolen’ from the Palestinians whose land it rightfully was. The animus against Israel’s occupation of this territory after the 1967 war is therefore not really about the behaviour or attitudes of the settlers or the Israeli military. It is based on the perception of gross injustice – of a land that has been stolen from its rightful owners. It is not surprising therefore that people with perfectly decent instincts are enraged by the continued ‘occupation’ of the West Bank. But they have been led to believe something that is not true.
For a start, Israel’s occupation of this territory is perfectly legal and legitimate as an act of self defence, after a war of aggression against it in 1967, against an enemy that refused to abandon its aggression. But at a deeper level still, the idea that Israel had no locus in this territory until 1967 is simply false. This West Bank land was never owned by the Palestinians. It was part of the post-Ottoman Empire Mandate administered by Britain until Israel’s creation in 1948. Following the war of extermination waged by the Arabs against the fledgling Israel at its creation, Judea and Samaria – as they then were – were illegally occupied by Jordan, and became ‘the West Bank’ as a result.
Furthermore, and even more significant, Judea and Samaria were part of Mandatory Palestine, within which Britain was enjoined to re-establish a Jewish national home. That’s right – the ‘West Bank’ was part of the territory to which the Jews had such a strong historical claim that Britain and the League of Nations decided they should be restored to it. Hebron, for example, where Moses settled after exiting Egypt, is actually one of the four most sacred Jewish cities. Jews lived there continuously for some 38 centuries — Abraham settled there some 1800 years before Christ – until they were driven out by an Arab pogrom. In 1929, Palestinian Arabs committed a massacre in Hebron in which more than 60 Jews were murdered. Babies were beheaded, rabbis were castrated and there were incidents of rape, torture and mutilation with hands and fingers torn off apparently to rob the bodies of jewellery. The atrocity was so severe that the surviving Jews were evacuated, although some later returned and lived there until the Arab riots in 1936 finally ethnically cleansed this sacred place of its Jews.
To be told that Hebron is a place where Jews have no claim is therefore nauseating beyond belief. The fact is that Hebron and many other places to which the Jews could lay rightful claim were either renounced by the Zionist leadership, which was always prepared to compromise and give up territorial claims in order to get a small piece of the Jews’ inheritance restored to them, or were lost in battle. It is very important that the world should realise that Israel has a legitimate claim to Judea and Samaria and yet it has been and still is prepared to give up territory to which it has a right, if the outcome is that Israel can finally be allowed to exist in peace. It is very important that people come to understand that – whatever legitimate criticisms may be levelled at aspects of Israel’s behaviour – its core claim is one of justice, and the way this has been misrepresented is profoundly unjust. Indeed, it is monstrous.
The first core myth that Israel is the artificial creation of Holocaust guilt which displaced the rightful Arab owners of Palestine by European Jews. This is totally untrue. The Jewish nation ruled what later became known as Palestine for hundreds of years — almost two millennia before Islam was even invented in the seventh century and the Arabs invaded. And subsequently, during the long centuries of occupation, the Jews retained an unbroken presence in the land.
This recognition was fundamental to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which committed the British to re-establishing the Jewish national home in Palestine. The British government’s 1922 White Paper on Palestine made the point that Jewish rights in Palestine were not a gift from anyone:
[I]n order that [Palestine’s Jewish] community should have the best prospect of free development and provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognised to rest upon ancient historic connection.
The fact is that there never was an independent state of Palestine. Judea was renamed Palestine when the Romans conquered it to erase its Jewish history. And the period of Arab rule was actually very short, lasting less than one century. During the following centuries Palestine was under protracted periods of Islamic rule, largely through the Turkish or Byzantine empire which was brought to an end when the Turks were defeated in the First World War. But from the time the Jews of Judea were conquered and exiled, apart from the Jews who remained in Palestine the non-Jews who lived there — who we are told were the ancestors of the Palestinian Arabs who were displaced in 1948 after 1000 years of rule — were actually descended from Latins, Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Algerians, Tartars, Danes, Russians, Nubians. Oh, and Arabs. The only nation for which Palestine was the historic national home was actually the Jews.
Even under the Mandate, the Arabs in Palestine did not regard themselves as a people seeking nationhood at all. Very few were there before the Jews arrived. The Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1913 that on the road from Gaza to the north, ‘no orange groves orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached Yabna [a Jewish village]… the western part towards the sea was almost a desert… The villages in this area were few and thinly populated’. Sherif Hussein, the guardian of holy places in Arabia, wrote: ‘The resources if the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants’.
Many Arabs moved to Palestine on the back of the prosperity brought by the returning Jews during the first half of the 20th century. Between 1922 and 1947, the Arab population in Palestine rose by 120 per cent. And they regarded themselves as mainly Syrian. In 1937, the Peel Commission found that the Palestinian Arabs and their kinsmen in Syria ‘clung to the principle that Palestine was part of Syria and should never have been cut off from it’.
The idea that the Jews kicked out the indigenous Arabs was also a myth. The Jews bought most of the land from the Arabs —mainly absentee Arab landlords — as many Arab sources have testified, such as King Abdullah of Transjordan, who wrote that the Arabs were ‘as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping’.
The second great myth of injustice is that the Jews drove out the Arabs when Israel was created in 1948. But the evidence is that most of them fled because they were told to do so by the Arab world. Various Arab newspapers excoriated those who were abandoning their houses and businesses. Syria’s Primer Minister after 1948, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees. while it was we who made them leave…We brought disaster upon the refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave…We have rendered them dispossessed…’ The Economist, never a friend of Israel, reported that the most potent factors for the Arabs’ flight were ‘the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades’.
Only very recently a columnist in the Palestinian Authority’s official paper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, acknowledged the same thing. The columnist, Mahmud Al-Habbash, wrote that in 1948, Palestinian Arabs left their homes willingly under the instruction of their own Arab leaders and their false promises of a prompt return. And if we’re talking refugees, there were more Jewish refugees from Arab lands than Arabs who fled Israel. Far from being a European imposition, half of Israel’s population came from the Arab world where an estimated 800,000 were forced out during that period alone, almost double the number of 472,000 Arabs who fled Palestine, according to figures from the UN Mediator on Palestine.
In 1946 the British politician Richard Crossman, who served on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, wrote in his book Palestine Mission: ‘Looking at the position of the Palestinian Arab, I have to admit that no western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so little the life of the indigenous people’.
The next great myth of injustice is that Israel has stopped the Palestinians from having their own state. We are about to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, from which come all the allegations of the illegal occupation of the disputed territories. We will celebrate the triumph, and indeed the miracle, of that war. But many of us don’t even fully appreciate that the Jewish presence in these territories is entirely legal and indeed just. That doesn’t mean it is desirable — but that’s a quite different matter.
The first thing to note about this myth is that the Jews have always accepted two states in Palestine. A Palestinian Arab state was on offer in 1937, 1948 and 2000, but the Arabs always refused it and chose to try to destroy Israel instead. It’s also important to realise that two states were indeed established. In1920, Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to establish a Jewish national home within Palestine. At that time, Palestine included what is now Jordan. One year later Winston Churchill gave almost 80 per cent of Palestine away to King Abdullah to form what is now Jordan. Jordan is, in fact, east Palestine. So when the Palestinian Arabs say they are being expected to accept a tiny fraction of what is rightfully their, this is a deep distortion of history. It was the Jews who were forced to accept a tiny fraction of what was rightfully theirs. The Palestinians were given their state. The problem is that they never wanted the Jews to have theirs.
Moreover, Article 25 of the Mandate emphasised that it extended both west and east of the Jordan River: ‘in the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine.’ In other words, the ‘occupied territories’ actually form part of the original land of Palestine within which the British were enjoined to establish the Jewish national home. And rightly so — after all places like Hebron are part of our ancient and sacred history. These territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were indeed illegally occupied — but by Jordan and Egypt, between 1948 and 1967. To repeat: I am not suggesting that Israel should retain Judea and Samaria. Indeed, I think it should not. But it is very important to point out that the Jews are entitled to them, according to both law and history, and that the great injustice was done to Jews
It is claimed that the Israeli ‘occupation’ is illegal. But it is not. It is legal, not least because Jewish rights there do not derive from Israel’s capture of the territories in 1967. They derive from the Mandate.
This secured Jewish rights to a homeland and to ‘close settlement’ in Palestine. In doing so, it did not distinguish between Judea and Samaria and the rest of western Palestine. Nothing since that time has abrogated those terms for territories that have not yet come under the sovereignty of any state.
Those rights did not expire upon the demise of the League of Nations or the creation of the United Nations. Article 80 of the UN, Charter expressly preserves such ‘rights of peoples’ as existed under League mandates.
Eugene V Rostow, who as undersecretary of state during the Johnson administration helped draft the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242 after the 1967 war, has written that Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip constitute portions of the Palestine Mandate trust territory that have not yet been allocated to a sovereign. Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School, concludes that the Mandate remains in force for those regions. Similarly, contrary to the refrain of various United Nations resolutions, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention does not render Jewish settlement in these territories unlawful because these territories have never been lawfully part of a sovereign state.
Resolution 242 itself, which states the general principles on which ‘a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’ should be established, leaves the issue of territorial rights open for resolution by agreement among the parties. By stressing the importance of security, highlighting the right of all states to live ‘within secure and recognized boundaries’ and refraining from calling for withdrawal from all the newly acquired territories, Resolution 242 envisions that peace talks will produce borders different from the 1949 armistice lines. If the Security Council had intended that Israel withdraw its forces to a definite line, it could have said so.
We are told repeatedly that Israel is behaving illegally and that it must observe international law. So we should insist that the legal demarcations of the Mandate which have never been rescinded should be recognised and upheld. It is not enough for us to say that Israel was attacked in 1967 and won a famous victory, because it is its behaviour since then that has been called into question. So to defend Israel, we must remind people of this history and this law. We have allowed the running to be made by people who misrepresent both. The MSM are guilty of profound lies in almost everything that is printed.
There are those who believe that making such facts better known is a waste of time because the vilification of Israel is a prejudice which is not susceptible to reason. Call me an incorrigible optimist (!) but I beg to differ. Much of this madness is based on profound ignorance, which in turn has been fed by an equally profound evil. It is perfectly possible for decent people to be misled into believing indecent things. Only when people are taught the truth will the big lie finally be nailed.