As each side calls the other a Satan, Iran can continue to entrench its influence in the Arab world and Israel can continue to occupy Palestine unhampered

Salman Masalha ||

Israel and Iran: War Games 

The airstrikes attributed to Israel deep inside Syria, aimed at weapons shipments to Hezbollah or at Iranian bases and missile stocks, and the launching of an Iranian drone into Israel have been nothing but war games, with their boundaries set in advance. This is a cat-and-mouse game played by Iran and Israel.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which total war erupts between Iran and Israel. Such a war, if it broke out, would sow devastation and exact an intolerable toll in human lives.

It doesn’t seem likely that the ayatollahs in Tehran and their counterparts in Jerusalem are unaware of these destructive implications. Such a war could draw in other countries in the region and require the intervention of the big powers to stop the destruction. Therefore, the scuffle between Iran and Israel must be viewed as war games that serve the purposes of both sides. Israel and Iran need each other because each fulfills the other's goals.

Iran needs Israel in order to expand its sphere of influence across the Arab countries in the region, because as long as Israel maintains its occupation in Palestine, Iran can keep feeding the Arab world declarations about the Little Satan and the Zionist entity that must be annihilated. It well knows the intensity of anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab world.

Thus Tehran, without much effort, can show people in these countries that their leaders are incompetent. Iran continues to gain; it can send out its long tentacles and further entrench its influence in the Arab world.

Iran isn’t doing anything new. It learned these games from Arab leaders who have used the Palestinian issue to block any demand for freedom by their citizens. The Palestinian problem has helped perpetuate the rule of Arab tyrants.

Israel also needs Iran. Just as Iran calls Israel the Little Satan (compared to the great American one), Israel also portrays Iran as the devil incarnate.

Portraying Iran as the Great Satan fits the way some Arab leaders perceive the danger of the ayatollahs trying to undermine their regimes. This has also led to the prevailing view on the Israeli right that seeks a regional peace agreement that includes “moderate Sunni states” as defined by Israel. The big Iranian devil serves the interests of Israel’s right, letting it push aside dealing with the Palestinian problem, portraying it as less pressing. Israel can claim that the conflict with the Palestinians isn’t the main issue needing resolution on the road to establishing a new order in the Middle East.

Thus there’s some mutual back-scratching in these war games. Iran can continue to entrench its influence in the Arab world and Israel can continue to occupy Palestine unhampered and without international pressure to end the occupation. This in a nutshell is all there is to the game of conflict theory guiding Iran and Israel. The problem is that sometimes war games get out of control.


Haaretz, May 8, 2018


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The Syria Crisis Exposed Nothing More Than The Failure Of Arab Leaders And The Illusion Of Arab Solidarity

Salman Masalha ||

Syria and the Illusion of Arab Solidarity

"There is no morality in the politics of the superpowers, and all the more so where wars are concerned, especially when they take place in distant arenas. In such a situation, self-interest dictates policy, and these interests – even when couched in honeyed words – are ultimately economic interests. The people and their fate are not taken into account in the calculations of profit and loss of the superpowers' policymakers.

"For example, let us examine the recent statement by Russian General Vladimir Shamanov in the Russian parliament. He stated that the Russian army had brought 200 types of new Russian weapons [systems] to the battlefields in Syria, to test them. The general added that these experiments proved the efficacy of the Russian weapons, which will increase the sales of Russian arms worldwide and advance the Russian economy. We are aware that the Russian economy is based solely on the military industries and that Russia has nothing to export to the world other than its military products. What this means is that the Russian war in Syria is an [just] an opportunity for the Russian Czar [President Vladimir Putin] to try out the new Russian weapons. What is true of Russia in this sphere is also true of the U.S. and of the other powers. As I said, there are no morals in politics.

"That's how Syria, with its ethnic and religious complexities, became an arena for disputes and tugs of war [between parties with conflicting interests], and a testing ground for the regional and international forces. In its calls on the 'international community' to intervene to bring an end to the Syrian tragedy, the Arab leadership expresses only its own shameful national failure to deal with what is happening in its own Arab back yard.

"If there really and truly was a thing called 'Arabism,' meaning strong connections [of solidarity], those same [leaders] and those like them wouldn't be calling on the 'international community' to interfere so as to bring an end to these massacres and acts of slaughter. If these [leaders] were real Arabs, connected to one another by strong bonds, they would have intervened themselves to stop the slaughter of their own people. Are they not leaders of countries that have tremendous armies? So how is it that in a situation like this they stand with their arms folded and charge the 'foreigners' from the international community to intervene and solve their problems? Why don't they do what they are asking the international community to do?

"And furthermore, note the difference between the way the other [non-Arab] world treated the refugees who knocked on its gates and the way the Arabs treated the refugees, who are supposedly fellow Muslims. Is it not the case that the refugee camps are only to be found in Arab and Muslim lands? What about the millions who migrated to Europe? Those millions are not living in refugee camps, but are being absorbed into European cities and becoming citizens there. Only in the lands of the Arabs and the Muslims, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, are the Arab [refugees] crowded into disgraceful camps. And what does this mean? It means one thing – that the Arabs and Muslims are not [really] taking in the refugees, unlike the European countries, which are 'infidel' [countries] according to the ideologies by which they [the Arabs and Muslims] have been educated from birth.

"This state of affairs, which is obvious to all, does it not mean that what is referred to as 'Arabism' is nothing more than a baseless illusion? And furthermore, when a regime that attributes Arabism to itself, such as the Syrian regime, is helped by foreign Russian planes to murder those who are meant to be its 'citizens' or 'its people,' does that not mean that what is supposed to be a single people is not a single people at all?

"These truths that are obvious to us mean that every Arab who retains a shred of human dignity should be ashamed of belonging to this wretched nation and its leaders, of every stream, who have long been feeding [the nation] empty slogans. Long decades of chewing over slogans achieved have nothing for the Arab citizen. What have these slogans yielded after all those decades? The Arabs have become groups of people with nothing that unites them, who wander aimlessly in a world that is becoming a political, social, cultural, and moral desert.

"The Arab world has become an testing ground for the superpowers, and the Arabs have become the aimlessly wandering guinea pigs who can't find a way out of their crises. These are truths that are obvious to all and cannot be hidden or swept under the carpet."


Translated by Memri

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Salman Masalha

HER MAJESTY

Neither dust, nor a rock, nor a site
Shall I praise from the desert’s edge
Nor the reign of thieves that mines
Only nightmares under siege.

There’s no joy in my grieving heart
For a past, for now, for what is to be,
For the land or its tenants, apart
From just one: Her Majesty.

A tongue that lived for two thousand years,
And under blockade kissed my own.
They turned into twins, like lips
That can blend two hopes into one.


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Translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden

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Haaretz


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Reflections on Israeli independence day, the Nakba and how the thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land

Salman Masalha ||

How We All Got Here 

Three reflections on independence and the Nakba:

1. Despite the fierce opposition to Israelization by Arab politicians of all stripes in Israel, for some reason the Palestinian citizens of the country actually behave like the ultimate Israelis. Their Israeliness is so deeply rooted that they mark Nakba Day according to the Jewish calendar, on the 5th of the month of Iyar – Israel’s Independence Day.

And lo and behold, when Independence Day is moved up a day at the request of the Chief Rabbinate over fear of a mass desecration of Shabbat, the Israeli Palestinians also move up their Nakba Day commemoration, as if they and the Rabbinate were Siamese twins.

The Palestinians in the occupied territories, in comparison, mark the event on May 15, according to the secular calendar, and no one commemorates the Nakba according to the Muslim calendar, which moves from year to year.

Maybe they do this because they’re afraid that
it will dissociate them from Israel’s Independence Day, or maybe according to the saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: “Among all the nations of the world, you are the most like the children of Israel. You follow them step after step.”

2. All those accused of criminal acts – murderers, rapists, robbers or any other criminals – will always claim they are innocent, usually with the aid of experienced lawyers, in the hope that this will earn them points on the day their verdict is handed down and they ask for a lighter sentence. In many cases, even after the criminal is thrown in prison, he continues to claim his innocence, to search for more witnesses, to offer more evidence and ask for a retrial. He can be an ordinary citizen or a public figure, a Knesset member or prime minister.

The common Zionist is no different in this aspect. By virtue of his Zionist essence and his being here, he will always claim his innocence in causing the Nakba for the Palestinians. He will not recognize reality because the Nakba is a lie and because there is nothing because there was nothing. Four years ago, Moshe Arens tried to repel any attempt or even any hint of recognizing the disaster that befell on the Arab residents of the land with the establishment of the “Jewish” state. (“The Nakba - Perpetuating a Lie,” Haaretz, May 19, 2014)

3. On the Palestinian side too, we cannot expect an Arab to question the actions of his “leaders,” who have led him to this point. He, too, will not recognize the situation created here. It is no coincidence that there are no new Arab or Palestinian historians. For them to arise, Arab society needs to have a democratic substructure of free thought, with mechanisms for self-criticism.

An intellectual infrastructure for conducting self-examination does not exist in Arab culture. From the point of view of Arab rulers and tribal leaders, the implications of self-criticism are far-reaching. They could very well bring about the end of their tribal hegemony, allowing other tribes or ethnic groups to rise up in their stead. These would replace them, take control of the reins of power and fill their own pockets and those of their friends with coin. This is the way it has been since time immemorial, and this is still the way it is to this very day.

And this is how we all have reached this point. The thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land. One says, “It’s all mine,” the other says the same thing, and they cannot find a way to divide it. And the land drinks its fill of blood, sweat and tears over the years.

It seems that this good land is sick and tired of both of them.
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Haaretz, April 18, 2018

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Salman Masalha ||

The Massacre of Arab Nationalism

The Israel Defense Forces are slaughtering Palestinian civilians on the border of the Gaza Strip. Bashar Assad’s regime continues to slaughter Syrian civilians. And the entire world is sitting and watching with folded hands. Tweets, Facebook posts and press statements – these are the lip service the world knows how to pay to silence its conscience. But let’s focus on the Arab world, which presumes to describe itself as a single nation.

It must be admitted that the siege imposed on Gaza ever since Hamas took power there isn’t just an Israeli siege. It’s also an Arab one – because a single Egyptian decision would be enough to break the siege on Gaza’s border with Egypt. After all, the Egyptians pretend to be “Arab brothers,” and also “Sunni Muslim brothers.” Astoundingly, however, they aren’t Arab brothers at all.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has also joined in the festival of abuse heaped on Gaza residents. Every so often, he imposes sanctions on them and cuts the salaries of employees and bureaucrats.

The Palestinian issue always served repressive Arab regimes as a pretext for rejecting all civic demands from within their own countries for freedom, democracy, economic development and jobs for the young. These repressive regimes always beat their citizens with the stick of the slogan “Palestine is the top Arab issue,” and the slogan that followed from it, “No voice will take precedence over the voice of the war” to liberate Palestine. These slogans were the opium which with the regimes silenced and neutralized any aspiration for domestic political and social change.

Thus it’s no wonder that the intifadas that swept the region and became known as the “Arab Spring” occurred precisely in those presidential regimes that raised the standard of Arab nationalism and other empty slogans, such as freedom and socialism.

The past several years have provided decisive proof that all the pompous Arab slogans from the ideological school of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties, about “a single Arab nation with an eternal mission,” were empty ones.

In this context, it’s worth noting that after the champions of these Ba’ath slogans, Assad’s father Hafez and Saddam Hussein, seized power in Syria and Iraq, respectively, there was no sign of these ideas of the unity of the “Arab nation” and its “eternal mission” being implemented on the ground. On the contrary, both in Syria and Iraq the “pan-Arab national party” served as a platform on which both tyrants, the Syrian and the Iraqi, built a sectarian and tribal regime.

In Syria, in every key governmental post, Assad placed members of his own tribe and sect – brothers, uncles, cousins – along with bootlickers from other communities, who received only governmental crumbs. Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq. The empty slogans of Arab nationalism received grotesque expression in the 1991 Gulf War, when the elder Assad sent Syrian soldiers to join the American-led coalition that fought against Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. So the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism from Damascus fought alongside the “imperialist” American superpower (to use the Ba’athists’ own term) against their “Arab brothers,” who ostensibly advocated the same ideology.

Recent years have provided evidence not just of the absolute failure of pan-Arab nationalism, but also additional evidence of the failure of the Arab “nation-states” created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Syria is the salient example of this failure.

The Syrian civil war, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees, along with Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, show that there is no “Syrian people.” A president who slaughters civilians who are supposed to be “members of his own nation” has through these crimes removed the mask he wore for many years and revealed the naked, tribal-sectarian truth for all to see.

In the face of these sights, every self-respecting Arab must recalculate his path.
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Haaretz, April 9, 2018

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