After 70+ years of Arab apartheid — separation in camps; separate diminished treatment — deep political control and suppression (from Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/23/palestine-authorities-crush-dissent), this may be the beginning for the Palestinian People. No longer Jordanian; no longer Egyptian; no longer Ottoman; no longer anything that has been before but a part of everything that has crossed through the middle east, there’s definitely a population that has been in modern times isolated in time and space, i.e., A People!
Flip the baby over and let it be born and breath refreshed and new.
The Palestinian People may be so only as consequence of more than 70 years of Arab Apartheid, i.e., separation in the camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. They will learn that they have been duped as well by the PLO and, later, Hamas — and ultimately by Moscow.
The real revolution in the Middle East may be normalization — peaceful Palestinian democracy in Gaza and the West Bank; citizenship and inclusion with full return of state rights in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, albeit slowly to fade the Soviet Era’s poison from the system.
The Palestinians may be many people — they may be even a little bit of all of the people whose cultures and languages and lives have cross-crossed that small patch of earth for millennia.
Event: “Is a Sovereign Palestine Still Possible?” Sponsor: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Date: October 11, 2018 Note: Audio starts after 8:30, and the program runs about two hours.
What will the recent changes in U.S. policy—including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, terminating assistance to Palestinians and UNRWA, and closing the Palestinian representative office in Washington—mean for the future of U.S.-Palestinian relations and the Palestinian national project? Will the accelerated pace of settlement construction and attempts to normalize Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory create irreversible realities with long-term ramifications for Palestinian self-determination and regional security?
Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt: Arab Apartheid.
Arab denial of political crimes and violent provocations summoning Israeli and western response: Shameful.
Corruption and political suppression associated with the PLO/PA and Hamas: Heinous.
“Palestinian People”: after 70+ years of Arab / Arab-Russian abuse by crude manipulation: yes, but in situ.
Any other people would both deserve and have obtained better governance for themselves.
At a point early in the program, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, claims the Jewish Israeli and ? Palestinian narratives equal on the basis of belief and absolute truth. However, the Palestinians have never been of one national or religious background: Christian, Muslim, Jordanian, Egyptian, wandering. What has fixed them in place and time has been Arab animus toward the (Majority) Jewish State of Israel, and it may be suggested that after 70+ years of punitive separation, the same may well have established themselves as another “people apart” — and perhaps ready to grow into new and better fit and more survivable shoes. The time has come to step out of what has become a worn out narrative serving only the self-serving.
While powerful mercenary, political, and religious forces sustain the Middle East Conflict (MEC), one may hope that nothing evil lasts forever. That is the one hope that should bridge what most divides Israelis and Palestinians ready to move on with their lives as well as the great wall that exists in time between the region of feudal absolute power and that of the modern democratic distribution of power, rule of law, and responsible and responsive governance.
In the course of a day — and just about every day — the editor of this blog visits the “camps” in which complaint and demonizations prompted by attacks, injuries, and deaths are par for conversation. Few, however, either side, take in the scope of the conflict in its post-WWII East v West / Moscow v Washington / Feudal v Modern aspect, so BackChannels tries (and tries and tries) to get to thought that is both short but broadening.
For the most part, the angered narrow their vision, speak their own truth, and summon their own choruses when it might prove more helpful to grasp the greater politics and the historic manipulation attending the same.
The end of the Cold War should have produced a Moscow different from the one that groomed Arafat, established the PLO, and introduced the world to airline hijacking (in association with the “Palestinian cause”).
It didn’t.
While the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU) found itself diminished and disfavored, the methods, relationships, and rhetoric survived the transition, and I think it’s those phantoms that continue cycling the Palestinians through the same old same old and go nowhere / get nowhere political habits supporting incitement. There’s dirty arms and narcotics money in the conflict also (Barack Obama’s $1 billion cocaine “grant” to Hezbollah — https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/ . It has paid “the other side”, which is larger than it first looks, to keep the Palestinians boiling with the Big Lie — “Israel stole your land” .
I don’t know if there’s too much money in war.
What happens beneath the table produces a lot of heat — defense R&D, manufacturing, trade — on the surface. I believe — or would like to believe — that Moscow benefits more from the sustained conflict than Washington. Be the truth as it may be, the “Phantoms of the Soviet” have rather cooked down their own interests: Assad has pretty much destroyed his own state; irksome Hamas appears not to want another war; Abbas with his KGB record has turned into an old man rattling on about “resistance” without any place to take it.
Should the Middle East Conflict remain a reliable focal point for “east-west competition” with feudal structures and criminality on one side and constructive democratic features and the semblance of order on the other?
After 70+ years — and 26 years past the end of the Cold War — the MEC has to come down, but Palestinian political “cadre” and the main base susceptible to last century’s messaging and propaganda need help figuring out how they’ve been used — and they need to wake to the idea that peace would serve them (and everyone else) much, much better than a continued and mindless “resistance” based on the myth of their own myth founded on simple face-saving misdirection.
Funny thing about “the truth”: all the small parts fit — the contributions of events and personalities add up — and the whole right image of the past grows stronger with time.
In the Soviet Era, the KGB groomed Arafat and installed the PLO as a block and goad holding the then communist and Russian line against the expansion of western liberalism. Mahmoud Abbas has also his KGB record, and he too has sustained the Palestinian “People’s Liberation” mythology in service to an Orwellian model of political power, and combination of feudal power as guided by “secret” police (to get back to the promotion of Russian anti-Semitic political mechanics, go back to the Okhrana at the end of the Russian Imperial period).
Abbas essentially serves Moscow while trying to sustain a patronage system funded by obligations diplomatic and practice met by the west. Neither Abbas nor the Soviet / post-Soviet political “vision” he represents have any place to go. He’s an old man; the old Soviet bloc has been largely ruined in the middle east. However, Putin has chosen to support the older politics and related alignment to either the point of war, which I feel is near, or some bitter end afterward. I suspect Israel, the United States, and NATO and others would have preferred a diplomatic transition to archaic medieval destruction (as witnessed in Syria), but here we are with another Soviet-type dinosaur in power in the opposition and we’re dealing with primitive but effective fire-bearing kites and balloons from Gaza, which seems a sight both ridiculous and surreal.
Possibly: when the Soviet Union dissolved Dec. 25, 1991 and then presumably ended the Cold War, it’s possible (possibly) that American and Russian security elements thought to cooperate on issues confronting both states, Islamic Terrorism high on the list of possibilities conveniently at hand for that.
For the United States, one presumes that cooperation would have been intended to reduce the power and presence of dictatorship in the world and (in domino effect) remove the vestiges of the defunct Soviet Union in global foreign affairs. In the way of political “optics” — how things look — the American and other EU / NATO constituencies would have perceived some great measure of peace and trade taking place between the former superpower antagonists, so when Clinton and others signed off on “Uranium One”, it may have been in that context that the deal went down.
East and West had taken the great leap forward toward peace in 1992 and by 2010 business involving uranium, a strategic asset, appeared to have been conducted in overall calm, bureaucratic, and peaceful conditions.
While other business and political mixers were proceeding, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya were also transformed (in 2003 and 2011, respectively), at least as regards the deposing of each dictator — and let none remember them fondly: they were both monsters in each their own demonic way.
Then in 2011: Syria.
When offered the choice, Putin refused the liberal western path and reverted to the KGB past. At that moment, possibly(!), Team Security USA, in some part, discovered that it had been duped
(Note: intervention in Libya preceded the perceived (Wikipedia) start date of the Syrian Civil War — on BackChannels, the “Syrian Tragedy” — by five days).
Moscow had intended to refuse the adoption of democratic liberalism all along.
What the United States and EU / NATO had done for peace between 1992 and 2011?
I don’t know.
However, one may imagine the possibilities.
However, the old news cross my desktop a few minutes ago, and it seems to add its little bit to the BackChannels perspective on Cold War / post-Cold War / Phantom of the Soviet history.
If you haven’t hit the link, the “old news” was this:
Syria was a key participant in the C.I.A. rendition program at a time when President George W. Bush’s administration labelled Damascus part of the “axis of evil,” according to a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
The report – titled “Globalizing Torture” – said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” indicating an established security relationship between Syrian intelligence and Western agencies.
The story — and not written for conservative Americans — traces its thesis back to at least 2003.
Apparently, Moscow and Washington had been fighting terrorism together in the double-0’s of the new century.
Welcome Moscow’s post-Cold War totalitarian design and the west’s apparent partial cooperation with it, possibly, up to the Syrian gambit of spring 2011 when Obama tested Putin’s navigational tendencies.
In Russia’s persistent feudal mode, states serve power, and power need see no difference between property and persons, sovereignty in the politically absolute mode implying the right — more: even the obligation and demonstration — to destroy either with impunity and without explanation. A little foolery with political perception and CIA “rendition” programs (to fight al-Qaeda and others) would be one thing, but to travel further with Moscow and Damascus in their tyrannous journey appears to have been something Washington could not bring itself to do.
Now everyone has a problem, not least the state of ______: do the leaders of the world — and the worlds of business, finance, and politics — want the present to recycle into the future using totalitarian techniques — or does it want authentic progress on behalf of our species and the planet that hosts all of us?
I have come to know — no longer just think — the Moscow believes that political issues and perceptions can be invented and controlled from ‘behind the curtains”. Knowing the little I know of wildness in nature and evolutionary unpredictability, I would counsel against that Orwellian ambition.
Place the blame for 9/11 on “east-west competition” for political and resource (“Grand Game”-related) control; post-Cold War realignment, perhaps — the idea that western security services would cooperate with Moscow’s on crime, for example, or on “fighting the terrorists” (after Moscow has positioned them) where it belongs and in proportion to the contribution to design. Of the two, “Moscow” and “Washington”, the data I have dredged from the web points to Moscow’s so-far persistent totalitarian ambition.
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
In which world would you rather live?
Point by point —
First, official Saudi Arabia revoked Osama Bin Laden’s citizenship over the crime visited on the United States of America on September 11, 2001. That leaves unofficial KSA and other actors as possible donors to the Wahhabi al-Qaeda enterprise, but as the sovereign state has maintained its innocence, the potential rogues within have made themselves only potential persons of interest for internal policing. At this time, about 17 years later, a KSA-USA alliance has been established and is being promoted as reliable online.
Regarding reliability, we shall see, as it seems in the nature of history and politics to be full of surprises.
Second and in regard to the news articles cited, BackChannels has noticed from the Cold War Era a kind of symmetrical diplomacy attending “east-west relations”. When, for example, the Soviet Union reclaimed its nuclear missiles from Cuba, the United States moved back its forward-based Jupiter missiles from presence near the Soviet Union’s fringe. Whatever the two states may have been saying to one another, they were saying it at the same time. In popular history, the more dramatic and visible recovery of “nukes” from Cuba was more quietly matched by similar behavior in Europe. It would not be much of a stretch, if any, to suggest that as the Soviet Army retreated from Afghanistan, the American CIA similarly pulled back from its involvement with the Mujaheddin even though that would leave the proxy available to the next Russian state, which was to announce its presence, however pale, with the appearance of the Russian Tricolor raised above the Kremlin on the morning of December 26, 1991.
Finally, BackChannels may wish not to know what took place in 1992 between business interests and multiple state security services with the Cold War presumed over, Communism defeated in Russia, and some new western-leaning and capitalist state about to be born. It would rather — and so will — fast forward to today’s “Phantom of the Soviet” and the destruction brought to Syria and Ukraine (Crimea), the revival of feudal ambitions spurred in EU/NATO targets by the reflexive response to Islamic terror attacks, and in both Turkey and nascent Kurdistan the leverage applied to ego by Putin’s “energy politics” and appeals to narcissistic aggrandizement in leadership in both geopolitical spaces.
Today’s Hamas-produced political theater on Gaza’s border with Israel smacks of Soviet Era spectacle. While nothing would appear to have changed from earlier days, much has changed as regards “state-sponsored terrorism”. The Soviet Union passed into history more than 25 years ago, and the phantoms of it in search of the source of their dark souls must find it absent. In its place now stands the autocratic “Mafia State” fully willing to destroy innocents in its chosen combat arenas, induce greater chaos in the world (seldom more so than in Syria and in Ukraine’s Crimea), bomb hospitals with impunity, and revive the Soviet’s most criminal and pernicious practices and programs.
If Gazans, who in the main have gotten very little out of decades of so-called — and violent — “resistance” only knew for what and for whom they were protesting . . . .
Hmm.
The Internet is fully up: now the Palestinians may know (and know well who has lied to them and how) and — if and when determined to extricate themselves from the powers that have profited off their sustained suffering — make themselves truly free within their own community and more genuinely nascent Palestinian state.
“On the streets of Gaza people have a sense of security – except when Israel attacks” — In defensive modes, preventive, responsive, retributive.
The Palestinians have long surrendered their dreams to propaganda, the PLO/PA, and Hamas as well as the corruption attending such governments that hold themselves beyond criticism.
From what sense of ethics, integrity, or justice were the greenhouses and synagogues of Gaza destroyed after departure in 2005?
Such rage would seem to have been set loose by officially and socially approved, promoted, and popular anti-Semitic incitement, the same that had Hamas in 2006 proclaiming to Palestinians that Hitler admired them as ideal revolutionaries (PMW: “Hamas: Hitler praised the Palestinians as models”).
Perhaps Israel should treat as poison the disinformation fed to the Palestinians and see the same receive an antidote in an honest telling, for Hamas fairy tales have only enslaved the Palestinians and gotten them to get themselves killed for show.
Posted to YouTube March 30, 2018. Ten more Palestinians were to draw fire and die, and the cause should be clear through what the cameras recorded in the way of “peaceful” demonstration.
One may marvel at the power of bad ideas and failed dreams to continue placing the innocent in harm’s way — and for the global press, the more souls corralled and misled into martyrdom, the better for sympathy and “understanding”, never mind the squandering of billions of dollars intended for Palestinian practical betterment going into the pockets of corrupt and venal leaders and their systems of patronage.
The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy about 26 years, and yet the scenes remain much as Yuri Andropov must have seen them when promoting dictatorship beneath the cover of Popular Liberation Movements.
The peace camps of the west may have to soon decide whether they wish to remain in business by doing their part to sustain the middle east conflict on bogus claims; and Mr. Putin may soon have to decide whether he will take KGB and more general historic Russian barbarism forward with the cynical manipulation and destruction of every space in which Moscow has chosen to play.
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
BackChannels 