- (July 2006)
Hezbollah's logic of genocide.
Hezbollah's genocide is not the one committed against the Israeli people (so far
they have been grotesquely incapable of harming Israeli soldiers or even civilians) but the one committed against their own people. Nonetheless Hezbollah is not
a bunch of amateurs or psychos: they know exactly what they are doing. Their
tactic has worked in the past and is working now.
The idea is simple: force Israel to strike in densely populated areas, and keep
those areas densely populated. Hezbollah is making sure that Lebanese civilians
are ammassed in buildings near the sites where Hezbollah fires rockets to
Israel.
Hezbollah's leaders know very well that they cannot cause much damange inside
Israel. Therefore they do not launch rockets to damage Israel or hurt Israelis.
The goal is not to harm Israel directly. The goal is to draw the Israeli air
force to the town and make sure that Israel has no choice but to bomb the
town. Once the bombs start falling, and the civilians have been trapped by
Hezbollah, it is just a matter of statistics that several civilians will be
killed. Officially, they are killed by Israeli bombs, therefore Israel
is responsible in front of the Lebanese people, the Arab street, the Islamic
world and the international public opinion.
By losing the war, Hezbollah wins it.
Hezbollah (just like Al Qaeda) has understood better than Israel than today's
wars are won as much on the field of the news media as on the field of
battle. Al Jazeera is the real enemy of democracy in Iraq, because Al Jazeera
is the organ that
created the the hatred and the violence. Al Jazeera is the real brain of
Al Qaeda, because it is
the organ that promotes Al Qaeda as a group of heroes fighting
for the noble cause of Islam against the decadent and evil infidels.
Hezbollah not only uses Al Jazeera (which per se is more powerful than all
Israeli weapons combined) but also its own station and, de facto, all the
media of the world, all of them routinely accompanied by Hezbollah militiae
to check out the "collateral damage" caused by Israeli bombs.
First Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel from densely populated areas or
United Nations positions. Then it hides and waits. Then the Israeli planes
come and drop bombs. The procedure continues until the Israelis drop a bomb
on the wrong place and kill civilians or peacekeepers.
Then Hezbollah brings the journalists
and cameramen to make sure that the images of the dead and the destruction
are broadcast all over the world.
(News organizations that ask too many questions or try to film anything other
than dead bodies and destruction are kept out by the Hezbollah militiae).
If anything can stop Israel's push into Lebanon, it is the media, certainly
not Hezbollah's soldiers.
Israel is being outsmarted by Hezbollah's propaganda network the same way that
the USA was outsmarted by Al Jazeera in Iraq.
They turn the victims of their own actions into martyrs for their cause.
Israel should be stopped not because its war is senseless (it actually makes
a lot of sense to destroy Hezbollah for the Lebanese people) but because,
quite simply, it is losing it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (July 2006)
The USA-Iran war in Lebanon.
When Sharon "died" (at least politically), the news was celebrated throughout
the Arab world. As i wrote then
(see Israel on the brink), Arabs have a
unique way to completely miss the point.
Sharon's death was likely to bring more instability to the region, and it did.
That region has now not one but six weak regimes. Olmert, the new Israeli
prime minister, is weak because he has to replace Sharon: under attack, Sharon,
trusted by the Israeli public,
would keep calm and make rational choices, while Olmert has to prove to the
Israelis that he knows what he is in control, and thus overreacts.
Lebanon is a young and fragile democracy, still being blackmailed by Iran's
great invention, Hezbollah (also the inventor of suicide bombings, for those
who forgot). Syria is, in theory, ruled by president Assad, but all indications
are that Assad does not have full power: as much as he would like to make
peace with the USA (in order to avoid Saddam's destiny), Assad has to live
with the military establishment created by his father. Palestine is, needless
to say, the weakest of the four, ruled by a prime minister who has vowed to
destroy Israel and by a president who has vowed to recognize and make peace
with Israel.
Jordan is theoretically more stable because king Abdullah is loved by his
people, but Abdullah reigns over the largest population of Palestinians in
the world, a time bomb. Iraq is a mess.
Further down, the sheiks of the Arabian peninsula are warmly hated by their
people. And Mubarak is not any more popular in Egypt.
Iran, instead, has the strongest regime of the region. It is also the one that is
getting richer very rapidly, thanks to the USA
(see How the USA funds the dictatorships of Iran and China). Iran's strong regime was under attack by the USA over
the nuclear issue.
No surprise then that Iran was tempted to take advantage of the situation
and start a war against the USA. Why bend to USA requests when you are actually
stronger in the region?
Now we are witnessing a war by proxies (Israel and Hezbollah) in Lebanon.
Iran figured that an Israeli invasion of Gaza (in retaliation for the kidnapping
of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian supporters of Hamas, an incident
that now looks trivial)
created the ideal conditions to launch a major Hezbollah offensive from the
north. Armed with thousands of Iranian rockets, Hezbollah is perfectly
capable of emptying Israeli cities for months (as opposed to the Palestinians
who can only hide from Israel's vastly superior war machine).
Iran is betting that Israel will not get rid of Hezbollah, that Israel will
eventually accept a ceasefire and leave things as they are, with Iran calling
the shots of when the next wave of rockets will rain on Israeli cities.
The USA is, de facto, opposed to a ceasefire precisely because it does not
want to leave Iran this weapon of blackmail and allow it to claim victory for
Hezbollah.
Alas, it is virtually impossible for Israel to eradicate Hezbollah from Lebanon
without destroying Lebanon.
The only good news (if it is good) to come out of this crisis is that, for
the first time ever, the world powers and even most Arab regimes are on the
same side: they all condemned Hezbollah (and therefore Iran). Russia has
massacred its own Hezbollah militia (the Chechen rebels) and recently murdered
their leader: no more no less than what Israel is trying to do in Lebanon.
China is happy that there is at least one idiot to distract the attention
from the crisis in Korea. India has just been bombed for the 1,000th time by
Islamic fundamentalists and has little sympathy for Islamic fundamentalists
elsewhere. The European Union has denounced Israel's "exaggerated" retaliation
but has done absolutely nothing to punish Israel: de facto, the European Union
has accepted the USA's stance of letting Israel finish the job. The main Arab
regimes (from Egypt to Saudi Arabia) have placed the blame of the crisis on
Hezbollah. All in all, this is quite a diplomatic triumph for Israel, who is
used to be isolated when it fights its enemies.
What next? Being a war between the USA and Iran, now the next move largely
depends on how the USA reacts. If the USA decides to take out Hezbollah,
it will let Israel continue its operation.
Israel may have to destroy Lebanon (and Gaza) because it
is unlikely that Iran "surrenders". This would be a huge loss for democracy,
as Lebanon's democracy was the only clear victory coming out of the Iraqi
invasion.
The other option would be for the USA to use the same technique used by Iran:
change the subject. When attacked about its nuclear program, Iran moved the
center of action to Lebanon. The USA could do the same: attacked in Israel,
the USA could counterattack in Iran itself. This could be preferrable to
killing innocent civilians in Lebanon (who are actually the victims of
Hezbollah) but may open yet another Pandora box. The Bush administration
has proven to be totally incapable of and incompetent at managing conquered
countries. Do we really want this administration to invade Iran, a country
of 70 million people?
Whatever the choices made by the USA, this crisis will bring a lot of sorrow
to the peoples of Lebanon and Palestine.
How Syria has managed to avoid any punishment so far is a mystery. If Lebanon
is being torn apart by Israeli bombs, why is Syria escaping the same fate?
The Palestinian organization that kidnapped the Israeli soldier in southern
Israel is not the (political) Hamas that rules in Palestine, it is the
(military) Hamas that is based in Damascus, Syria.
The organization that invaded northern Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers
is protected by Syria, its weapons being channeled from Iran to Lebanon via
Syria.
Why Israel insists in bombing innocent Lebanese and let the Syrian government
get away with its hostile policies is a mystery.
It will not go unnoticed by the Israeli and USA public opinions that Israel
was attacked precisely in the two places that it surrendered under international
pressure (notably by the United Nations). Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000
and from Gaza in 2005. Neither withdrawal has brought peace to the Israelis.
Both militias operating in those regions have now attacked Israel.
It will be much much harder for the Palestinians to obtain any further
concession from Israel if this is the reward that Israel gets for its
concessions.
Hamas looks more and more like a victim of a regional conspiracy that is
much bigger than its leaders' modest ambitions. Initially it was just a
matter of tit-for-tat between Palestinian extremists (not Hamas in person) and
the Israeli army, and confined within the Palestinian territories.
Now that Hezbollah has dramatically stolen the show and expanded the crisis
beyond the borders of Palestine and Israel, Hamas
finds itself compared on the international scene with Hezbollah,
an Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization (i.e., an enemy of the USA, not
just Israel). It is likely that some within Hamas are not happy about this.
Hamas had just acquired a lot of legitimacy by winning democratic elections.
It was Israel that looked on the defensive when it failed to recognize the
outcome of the Palestinian election
(see A bad day for democracy).
By being equated with Hezbollah (that lost the elections in Lebanon and is
widely perceived as a puppet army of the Syrians, funded by the Iranians),
Hamas
risks losing something very valuable and it is not clear what it gains.
It would be in Hamas' best interest to disengage itself immediately from the
crisis, by releasing the Israeli soldier and forgetting about the whole issue.
This would instantly promote Hamas to a credible partner for peace with
Israel (and a pleasant surprise for the USA). Arafat did precisely this in
the old days, and got a kingdom as a reward.
Unfortunately, the supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah don't realize that they
are being used like pawns by cynical regimes that care even less than the
Israelis about the well-being of Palestinian and Lebanese people.
A footnote:
at the source of Iran's power is the USA's thirst for oil, that has sent
the price of oil skyrocketing, that has made Iran richer and richer.
Whatever is happening now in the Middle East is ultimately due to the USA's
failed energy policy, driven by corrupt oil lobbies.
Get rid of the oil economy and a lot of these problems will disappear.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (June 2006)
Expel the Arab countries from the United Nations.
When Israel withdrew from the Gaza strip, the Palestinians had a chance to
prove that a step towards peace is met by a step towards peace. Instead,
the Palestinians started shooting rockets at Israel from the very cities
that the Israelis had just surrendered to them. Israel counts 500 rockets that
fell into Israeli territory (usually near or into densely populated areas).
The new Hamas government never tried to stop
the rockets, that were clearly targeting Israeli civilians (many of them
falling near Israeli schools). Recently, Israel started targeting the
Palestinians responsible for the rockets (clearly trying to avoid civilian
casualties, although Hamas claims that an entire family was wiped out by
Israeli shells, a claim that Israel disputes.
See Israel massacres a Palestinian family).
Finally, Israel's patience was exhausted when Palestinians (presumably known
to the Hamas government) dug a tunnel under the border and attacked Israeli
soldiers, killing two and kidnapping one. Israel demanded that Hamas arrest
the attackers, Hamas replied by hailing them as heroes. Being obvious that
Hamas was not willing to do anything about it, Israel then invaded
Gaza to rescue the kidnapped soldier.
Technically speaking, it was Palestinians of the Gaza Strip that invaded
Israel, and now Israel has retaliated by invading the Gaza Strip.
The United Nations, that had never condemned the shooting of rockets against
Israel, as if shooting rockets to other countries is a perfectly legitimate
business, is now condemning Israel's invasion of Gaza. Too late, and too silly.
The organ that issued the condemnation is the Human Rights Council, which is
mainly composed of dictatorships. The democracies that are represented in
that council (Europeans, USA, Australia and Canada)
either voted against (11) or abstained (5).
(See these articles from BBC News and News Blaze).
The 29 countries that voted to condemn Israel are mostly dictatorships.
One of the people who helped write the draft of the
resolution is Iran's notorious attorney general, Saeed Mortazavi,
who "has been implicated in torture, illegal
detention, and coercing false confessions by numerous
former prisoners" (the quotes are from
Human Rights Watch). Here is
Wikipedia's biography.
These are the heroes of the anti-Israeli lobby.
Thus the United Nations thinks that the dictators of the world represent the
moral standard that the world should obey.
Expel all dictatorships from the United Nations, or they will eventually expel all democracies.
(See What is wrong with the United Nations).
This Council has never condemned the widespread ethnic cleansing in the Islamic
world against Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Jews. All of them have virtually
disappeared from the Islamic world. But this Council routinely condemns the
small Israeli violations. It is even ironic that it condemns Israel for
violations of human rights when the only Arabs who have full human rights
in the Middle East are those who live in Israel.
(After the liberation of Iraq, also Iraqis and Lebanese have acquired human
rights).
The Arabs who live in all other Arab countries have no human rights, but no
condemnation has ever been issued against all those Arab countries.
The litany of lies does not change the facts. Repeating a lie
louder and louder does not make it a truth.
The cause of the Arab problems is their leaders, not Israel or the USA.
The Palestinian leaders are the ones who stole the money and are
the ones who caused the violence.
Palestinians (and Arabs in general) have to look in the mirror if they want to see the real enemy.
Israel is even the first power ever to give the Palestinians a state.
No Islamic ruler ever dreamed of giving the Palestinians
any kind of autonomy, not even a province.
Privately, Palestinians will admit this much: that Israel treats them
better than most Arab countries (that don't even let Palestinians immigrate).
The current problem was caused by the Palestinians.
The world has to start telling the
Arab world that they have to look in the mirror when they are looking for the
causes of their problems. Enough sympathy and understanding has been
wasted by the world on nations who do too little to police themselves.
We will resume the sympathy and understanding when the Arabs do something
to solve their problems instead of always blaming everybody else for them.
We need a United Nations that is credible.
The punishment must be proportional to the offence.
There is no doubt that most Islamic countries are far worse
offenders than Israel, and so are countless countries from Cuba
to North Korea to Burma. All these countries must be punished
proportionally to the crime, or international justice becomes a joke.
Why is Morocco getting away with the occupation of
Western Sahara and Israel is criticized every time it invades
Palestine? Why does China get away with occupying Tibet, Hong
Kong, Eastern Turkestan and Inner Mongolia? Why does Russia
get away with the massacres in Chechnya? These are all flagrant
violations of human rights and self-determination rights.
Why does the United Nations condemn Israel's abuses that are small compared
with the torture and killings that are daily events in most
Islamic countries or with the thousands of civilians killed in
Chechnya or with the ethnic cleansing by China in its non-Chinese regions?
Why is jailing a Palestinian man
an outrage and the condition of millions of Muslim women
perfectly fine?
A blind man can see that these are all cases of much worse
human-rights violations than the ones perpetrated by Israel against
the Palestinians that shoot rockets against Israeli schools.
Why is Israel routinely considered a gift by Europeans to the Jews, while
Arab countries (that were also created by the old European colonial empires)
are considered natural Arab settlements? If the borders of Israel are arbitrary,
what about the borders of Iraq (a British invention that includes a piece of
old Persia stolen from Iran and bits and pieces of Kurdish territory) or
the borders of Sudan (another British invention that includes a piece of
old Egyptian empire and pieces of Christian and Animistic black Africa)?
What about the borders of Morocco, that includes a former Spanish and a former
French colony? What about Lebanon, a French invention? None of these countries
ever existed under the Islamic rulers that preceded the European colonial
powers. Why is the United Nations always and only treating Israel like an
oddity? If Jews are treated like Europeans who were resettled to Palestine,
shouldn't Arabs be treated like (duh) Arabs (people of the Arabia peninsula)
who were resettled to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria,
Iraq, etc?
Obviously, there is a double standard at the United Nations' Human Rights
Council that always
excuses dictatorships and always blames democracies, when in fact its
mission should be exactly the opposite.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (June 2006)
Israel massacres a Palestinian family.
Or not? The Arab media have been showing over and over the images of a little
girl who lost her entire family when an Israeli rocket landed on a beach.
Needless to say, the Arab media (and the pro-Arab western media) have placed
all the blame on Israel, Islam's favorite scapegoat.
Nothing will ever change in that part of the world until people
start looking at the mirror. Here is the true story.
Instead of studying science and math, Palestinian kids play stupid
games in the fields next to Israel, throwing home-made rockets
against Israeli schools. In october 2004 they killed two Israeli children,
and no Arab or western media showed the images of those victims.
The Israeli army does exactly what
any parent would want its government to do against kids who threw rockets
at their children's schools: the Israeli army periodically
shells the fields to keep the Palestinian kids from playing
such dangerous games.
If you do it every single day of the year, and year after year,
it is inevitable that sooner or later a soldier makes a
mistake and an innocent family gets wiped out.
Thus those stupid Palestinian kids just caused the death of
an entire Palestinian family.
In most parts of the world, the parents of those Palestinian
kids would have (long ago) taught their children to study
science and math instead of throwing rockets.
Notice the difference: the Israeli government immediately
apologized and started an investigation. They have to explain
it to their own public. Not a single Israeli is happy
when innocents lose their lives. What a difference it makes
that parents send their children to school instead of sending
them to throw rockets.
Have the Palestinians started a similar investigation to find out if the
rocket was theirs? In 2000 they accused Israel of killing Mohammed al-Dura. In 2002 they claimed that Israel carried out a massacre in Jenin. In september 2005 they claimed that Israel had bombed the Jabaliya refugee camp killing 21 people. It turned out that al-Dura was killed by Palestinians, that there was no "Jenin massacre" and that the massacre in Jabaliya was caused by Hamas activists who were preparing bombs in the middle of a crowd.
Have the Palestinians started a similar investigation about the kids who fire rockets to Israel, threatening the lives of Israeli children like the two who were killed in october 2004?
It is at least suspicious that Palestinians are removing evidence from the scene of the crime.
If it was an Israeli rocket, why didn't the Palestinians invite the press to see the remnants of the rocket, as they usually do?
Israelis have organizations such as
Btselem that routinely accuse the Israeli
governments of human rights violation. Have the Palestinians anything similar
to criticize themselves?
The Palestinians voted for a party (Hamas) that has vowed to destroy Israel.
Nobody forced them to vote for Hamas. It was their decision to do so.
Now that they elected a party devoted to the destruction of Israel they complain
that Israel is still taking precautionary measures against Palestinian attacks.
What should Israel do?
How can the Palestinians be so blind to the fact that they are the main cause
(although not the only cause) of their own problems?
It is a popular saying in the Islamic world that the Palestinians only have
their bodies to use as weapons against Israel, thus they become suicide
bombers. The Jews have been persecuted and exterminated for centuries, and
they only had their brains to use as weapons against the Christians, thus
they became scientists and mathematicians. When will Muslims understand
the difference between a suicide bomber and a mathematician?
Who is to blame if Palestinians become suicide bombers and Israelis become
scientists and mathematicians?
This "is" the problem.
Muslims cause their own problems, then blame everybody else
(Israel, USA, Russia, India...) except themselves.
No surprise that Muslims are at war against everybody, from Palestine to
Kashmir to Chechnya to Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine.
For the Arab media, the Muslims are always right, and everybody else is
always wrong.
Pick any problem in the Islamic world, and they will tell you
that it was caused by someone else, not by them.
This only escalates the problems.
If they want World War III (the Islamic world against all the
countries of the world), the Arab media are on the right track.
And that is probably what they want. The Arab masses can't realize that
they are being manipulated exactly the same way that Adolf Hitler manipulated
German nationalism.
The Arab media claim that the Palestinians are particularly oppressed by
the Israelis. This statement could not be farther from the truth.
Ask Hamas itself how many Palestinians are killed by Israel
in one year. Now compare with how many people die in
any other conflict of the world
(See Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century).
It is just that people who use suicide bombers get more attention.
And, of course, the Palestinians are Muslims, which makes all the difference.
The Arab media never make a big deal when Muslims kill non-Muslims. But if
a few Palestinians (who are Muslims) are killed by Israel (which is not Muslim),
that "is" an outrage.
The Arab media depict the fight of the Palestinians as a metaphor for everything
that is wrong in the world (the evil infidels are unfair to the good Muslims).
The Arab media forget to mention that Muslims are occupying the homeland of
Hinduism (the Indus Valley in Pakistan), the homeland of Christianity (Betlehem),
the homeland of Judaism (Jericho) and the homeland of Zoroastrianism (Iran),
not to mention the traditionally Buddhist region of Afghanistan, the homeland
of the Greeks (Turkey), the homeland of the Armenians (Ani, now in Turkey)
and the homeland of the Serbs (Kosovo), just to mention
a few. How would Muslims react if a Hindu or Christian or Jewish army occupied
Mecca? There is obviously a double standard, whereby the rest of the world is
supposed to accept Islamic domination, whereas Muslims are always entitled to
fight against the "occupier".
There are many people who are oppressed (a lot more oppressed),
from the Armenians of Syria to the Copts of Egypt to the Hindus of Pakistan,
peoples who have been cleansed over the decades to the point that very few
are left (Pakistan's Hindu population declined from 25% to less than 1%, just
to name one).
And almost everybody in the developing world is as poor as
the Palestinians (take a walk in Africa or South America).
But they don't become suicide bombers. Why only Muslims become suicide
bombers?
The main difference is that too many Muslims tend to blame everybody except
themselves, tend to think "I only have my body to use as a weapon".
All the nations in Eastern Asia, Black Africa and South
America have learned to blame themselves before they blame others (even when
they have plenty of reasons to blame the European colonial powers for their
original problems) and to use their brains, not their bodies, as a weapon.
So what do we tell the little girl whose entire family was destroyed by
an Israeli rocket?
We tell her to make sure that her children will study science
and math, so she will be proud of those who win Nobel Prizes
not of those who blow themselves up in order to kill Israeli children.
In the meantime, let us hope that the Palestinian people rise up against
the terrorists who cause Israel to be an enemy instead of a friend, and
let us hope that Israel fully investigates the incident and punishes
who made the mistake. (No, Muslims of the world: not the whole people of
Israel, but only the individuals who made the mistake. That is how civilized
countries work).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (April 2006)
Israel on the brink
Sharon's political death comes at a critical juncture in the Middle East.
The widespread belief is that the USA is losing the war in Iraq.
The country, or at least the Sunni triangle around Baghdad, is
becoming more and more lawless, and USA soldiers keep getting killed
amid the general delight of the Arab world.
There is also a growing feeling that the USA is losing also in Afghanistan:
more than 1,400 people were killed in Afghanistan in 2005, the worst toll since the USA ousted the Taliban in 2001.
Iran is speeding up its nuclear program, and may have a nuclear
weapon in a few years. Its president openly calls for the destruction
of Israel. He scorns Russia and the European Union, demonstrating that
no country in the world has any influence on Iran's leadership. De facto,
Iran is already behaving like a nuclear power.
The young democracy in Lebanon is at a critical stage. Lebanon is still
occupied by Hezbollah's heavily armed militia, and is still being destabilized
by Syria's agents (who keep killing leaders of the anti-Syrian parties).
There is virtually no country in the world that would be willing to defend
Lebanon against an open Syrian aggression. Syria bent to USA pressure and
withdrew its troops from Lebanon only because of fear that the USA would
cross the border from Iraq, but now the USA is in no position to attack
yet another country. And the European Union is a joke, as usual.
Mubarak's regime in Egypt is more unpopular than ever, and USA's pressures
to open up the country's politics to democracy have indirectly helped
the Islamist movement (the Muslim Brotherhood) to show how much popular
support they can get. In a truly free election, the Islamists are likely
to beat Mubarak hands down, and install an Iranian-styled regime.
But the worst situation is still in Palestine. Israel's unilateral withdrawal
from the Gaza strip has demonstrated the inability of Palestinians to govern
themselves. It is not a mystery that neither Jordan nor Egypt wanted to
rule over Palestinians when they had their chance. Israel tried and failed.
Now the Palestinians themselves are failing. Gaza is being devastated by
as much anarchy as Baghdad (albeit a less murderous one, because it is
not tinged with Islamic calls for jihad, and maybe it is not as widely
reported by the media).
The Palestinian people used to be occupied by a foreign power, Israel; but
now they are worse off: they are hostages to a bunch of fanatical armed gangs.
The political death of Sharon is being perceived by these gangs as a golden opportunity
to restart the intifada against Israel, demanding even more concessions.
After all, the first intifada ended with a victory (Israel's withdrawal from
Gaza). It is an elementary rule of all wars that one should strike the
enemy when the enemy is weak.
And the Arabs tend to think that every good news is not an opportunity for
peace but a mandate to intensify war, an attitude that harks back to
centuries ago.
Unfortunately, Arabs have a unique way to dig their own grave. If Syria, Iran
and the Palestinian extremists threaten Israel all at the same time, the most
likely outcome is a full-fledged war, which Israel is likely to win as usual.
An Israeli attack would turn the tables
on its enemies: who is going to help Hezbollah if Israel invades Lebanon?
who is going to complain if Israel bombs Syria's presidential palace?
Who is going to side with Iran if Israel bombs its military facilities?
Who is going to rescue the Palestinians if Israel re-occupies the Gaza strip
and starts expelling Palestinians?
The post-Saddam world is very different: Arab unity has
been shattered, and appetite for war is virtually inexistent among the ruling
classes of the Islamic countries.
The world's attention is on Israel, trying to figure out if
Sharon's successors can handle the situation. But the world's eyes should be
on the other regimes of the region: the wrong move could cause a catastrophe.
On the other hand, some historians think that a catastrophe is not only
inevitable but precisely the only event that could bring peace to the region.
After all, Europe was at war for 1,600 years.
It took World War II to bring a lasting peace and the end of sectarian
violence to Europe.
Sometimes instability can only be cured with a complete collapse of the
old order and a creation of a completely new order.
That new order could be an order in which the winner finally calls the shots.
So far Israel has won all the wars but has refrained from doing what winners
usually do: take it all. Imagine if the Arabs had won just one of the many
wars with Israel: Israel would not exist anymore. Instead, Israel won several
wars but never annexed major territories from its enemies. The Palestinian
complains about small pieces of land that are nothing compared with the
territorial disputes of past centuries.
Compare with the Arabs in the seventh
century: when they started winning, they kept going, until they annexed
all the territories from Spain to Iran. A few thousand Arabs conquered millions
of Romans, Persians, Jews, Berbers and Goths. So far Israel has not applied the same
logic, but one wonders why not. What if this time Israel decides to keep
the territories it invades? What if this time the Arabs are given the choice
to become Jews or to move to Arabia, their original land?
Put it another way: Israel is an oxymoron, a nuclear power that would probably
win a war against just about every country in the world except the USA (and
maybe Russia) but that occupies a very small territory. This has never
happened before in history. Sooner or later a country's territorial extension
ends up being proportional to its military power.
For decades Israel's goal has been coexistence with its neighbors. That
policy has failed. There has been no peace for 58 years. Given a chance, the
Palestinians elected Hamas, that has vowed to destroy Israel. The new Israeli
government is already behaving as if that "was" the last chance.
If even democracy produces hostile governments, what else is there to do for
peace to prevail?
If any of Israel's
neighbors makes the worst move, the temptation for Sharon's successors to
change policy will be great. That could mean the end of the democratic
state of Israel and the beginning of the Jewish empire of the Middle East.
The newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi wrote: "Sharon's political death will mark the fall of the Zionist ideology and the emergence of a new ideology based on reality and tolerance, participation and peaceful co-existence".
Arab intellectuals have a unique way of completely missing the point.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (January 2006)
A bad day for democracy
Israel has decided to cut funds meant for the Palestinian Authority after
the Palestinian people elected Hamas to govern them. In other words, Israel
decided that democracy is good only if the people vote for the candidates
the Israel likes. It's like the USA deciding to cut off trade with France
if the French reelect Chirac.
The West has been preaching for decades that the Arab countries need to
have free elections. Arafat was a dictator, elected in an election in which
there was only one candidate. Hamas is not a dictatorship:
they won fair western-style parliamentary elections (the first ones in
modern Arab history). Israel has decided that funds originally
meant for Arafat (a dictator) cannot be paid to Hamad (a democratically
elected government).
The Islamic world has been suspicious of the western idea of "democracy"
for a long time.
(See How did we fail so badly?)
This episode will only increase their skepticism.
Many in the Islamic world think that "democracy" is just a western word
for "domination", a different kind of dictatorship in which a Muslim
dictator gets replaced by western armies.
The Israeli justification that Hamas has in the past sent suicide bombers
to Israel is very weak. For example the government of a
Latin American country (or, for that matter, Vietnam)
could claim that the USA is responsible for several atrocities committed
in the past against their people
(the USA supported terrorism in Latin America during the Cold War, for example
the death squads in Colombia, Guatemala
and El Salvador, the Contras in Nicaragua, and a few dictators who
were not any better than Hamas). Does this mean that the governments of
Latin America should not recognize the president of the USA if he
belongs to one of the two parties that previously sponsored
terrorism in Latin America?
Should the whole world ignore the will of USA voters
based on what some politicians of the elected party did? (Note that
some in the Bush administration served
under Ford/Reagan at the peak of the Cold War tit-for-tat policies).
Hamas is not a person, it is a party.
Should every person who serves for Hamas be considered guilty
of what some other people who served for Hamas did?
Then foreign governments could consider all leaders of a USA
party guilty of what some previous leader of the same party
did in the past (how far back? all the way back to the
founding of each party?). This would give no chance to
the new leaders to change the policies of their predecessors:
they would be forever stuck in a timewarp.
And let's assume for a second that Hamas was considering
renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel, and was just looking for
a "face saving" way to do it. Does any Israeli in
her/his own mind think that now they will? The whole Islamic
world, starting from their own Palestinian voters, would
consider Hamas as traitors who gave in to Israel's blackmail.
This Israeli action does not serve anybody's interest.
It could even backfire badly if an oil-rich enemy of Israel (such as Iran)
decided to step in and flood Palestine with much more money than the West
ever gave to Arafat. It would make Hamas richer and thus stronger than
the Palestinian Authority has ever been.
The Islamic world is convinced that in the past Israel has used every
opportunity to create conflicts with the Palestinians, disrupt
any peace plan, and worsen the lives of the average Palestinian.
This action by Israel simply confirms this suspicion.
For outside observers the victory of Hamas might seem like a step backwards
in the peace process. Instead, it could mean just the opposite.
The fundamental problem of most of the Arab world is that inept, corrupt
and evil leaders are causing economic, social and political devastations
to the Arab people which they then blame on Israel. The reason there are
thousands of Arabs willing to blow themselves up in the name of the intifada is,
ultimately, that they have been raised in societies where just about nothing
works. Worse: the only thing that works is religion, Islam, not the most
peaceful one can think of. Therefore the domestic problem has been the cause
of the foreign problem, not viceversa.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and to engage in a peace process, but it
also says that many areas of Palestinian life are in desperate need of reform.
Hamas is right about this one. It is pointless to force peace on people
who will still be poor and desperate after a peace treaty is signed.
The Fatah movement that ruled Palestine since the beginning had basically
struck a deal with Israel and the West: you let us rob the Palestinian people
and we will sign a peace treaty. Needless to say, the Palestinian people were
not excited at all about such a "peace", even though they are so tired of
war that they would have accepted it. But the real "peace" would be a peace
signed by a healthy Palestinian society.
Restructuring the Palestinian society is a key milestone in a real peace process.
Hamas won the elections precisely because the Palestinian people understood
this. Apparently, Israel did not.
But, besides practical and ideological issues, there is the fundamental
issue: Israel's action shows disrespect for the
will of the Palestinian people. If the West wanted to teach them
democracy, this is the wrong way.
When asked for an opinion about the USA and Israeli plan to
destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again,
Farhat Asaad, a Hamas spokesman, laughed and added: "First, I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."
(See this article)
Asaad is right. The USA has launched a world-wide mission to support
all elected democracies. It can't add "unless we don't like who gets
elected". It would lose (not only in the Islamic world) whatever credibility
is left.
Second, the USA missed an important sentence in that answer:
"I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy."
Whether it was ironic or not, i think he was stating a fact: no USA,
no democracy, no Hamas victory.
That's what the USA (and Israel) should focus on, not past behavior by the
party that won the elections.
Israel's cutting funds to Hamas does not serve any practical purpose.
It makes Hamas look even more credible in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians.
It makes Hamas even more popular among ordinary Muslims (not only the
terrorists).
It keeps Hamas from making any concessions.
And, most importantly, it gives democracy a bad name.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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