The Arab Autumn
By Israel Shamir
Autumn in the Middle East hasn’t the melancholy connotations you attach to it in the North. For you, this is the season of dying; maple leaves turn purple and geese fly south. For us, this is the jolly season of awakening after stupefying summer heat; grass hatches again on the burned-to-reddish-brown lawns and trees are heavy with ripe figs and pomegranates.
Arab Spring, as the wave of spectacular February risings was called, gave way to Arab Summer, that hot and meaningless season of vainly seeking shade or a cool dip under a mercilessly blazing sun. In Egypt, the military junta continued Mubarak’s policies; in Libya, armed gangs prowled the desert under the expensive parasol of the NATO Air Force; in Syria, mythic adventures of a Damascus Lesbian Blogger unfolded, penned and composed by a middle-aged American ex-intelligence agent from his Scottish retirement. Palestine was easily forgotten, and a neocon observer happily and hastily reported that “the Arab Spring has rendered the Palestinian issue irrelevant”.
Autumn came, and the summer haze dissipated. The first fruits sown in the spring budded forth: the Israeli Embassy fortress-on-the Nile was stormed, Turkey recalled last year’ s insult, and the Saudis threatened the US for the first time ever. Palestine is center stage again, and the UN application for Palestinian statehood of Mahmud Abbas is the centrepiece of the new mosaic. Now we can reassess the evidence and finally begin to understand what is actually happening in the Middle East: is it an authentic drive for liberalization and democracy, a credit card revolt, a carefully orchestrated plot? And where is it all leading to? Apparently our region is being re-formatted just like the hard drive on your computer, and at the end of this brief process, a long-forgotten Caliphate will rise again, as we shall further explain.
Why Palestinians are applying for UN recognition
Palestinians are tired of never-ending negotiations. They were promised speedy independence in long-gone 1993, the year Mandela got his Nobel Peace Prize and Jurassic Park was a box office hit. The Oslo Agreement between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was expected to solve the whole problem very soon after a brief autonomy interlude. It didn’t work out: Arafat was poisoned, Rabin was shot, consequent Jewish governments played for time and intermittently massacred the impatient Palestinians. The negotiations went on, nevertheless. . . and on, and on . .
The Palestinian people got tired of and lost faith in the negotiations long time ago: in the first free democratic elections in 2006 they voted against Fatah, the party of negotiations. Now, five years later, Mahmud Abbas and his Fatah party have also gotten tired of wasting their time, and fear the possibility of losing everything in the end. Abbas has lost a lot of face. His adversaries consider him an Israeli puppet sitting on Israeli bayonets. They say that he has no mandate to rule. He is worried that the next intifada wave will sweep him away like another Mubarak, and the Israelis would not — will not — save him. His only other option is to become irrelevant to the great new reformatting of the region. That is why he has made peace with Hamas and applied to the UN for recognition, while at the same time ordering anti-riot equipment — just in case!
Unless he and his Fatah plan to cultivate an orchard and sell olive oil in retirement, they need to show some results, but the time – and the reformatting – make Abbas’ position precarious. Fatah belongs to the vaguely socialist nationalist Arab movement, that of Baath and Nasser, and this movement is dying. In Iraq it was destroyed by the US invasion; in Egypt, it was wasted by Mubarak’s policies; in Libya, it was bombed out of existence by NATO and in Syria it is being severely undermined. These Arab socialists have made too many compromises with the neoliberals, encouraged their new super-rich billionaires, taken too many bribes and have lost public support to a great degree. Like salt that has lost its savor, they have lost their meaning. They are suffering the fate of the US trade unions, the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party and the European social democrats, while their inherent post-revolutionary inflexibility did not allow them to change.
Mahmud Abbas understands as well as anybody that the UN resolution will not give him a viable state, but he will regain some annoyance value vis a vis the Israelis. He is very pro-American, his security forces are trained by the Americans, and he was hoping that his bid will be accepted. This would be a reasonable hope in light of Obama’s Cairo speech, and indeed Obama would like to play along. However, US Jews are too powerful and too proudly nationalist to give him some leeway
المزيد
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
متى يتحرك العالم المتحضر لمنع الممارسات العنصرية بحق مدينة القدس المحتلة ووقف الاعتداءات المتكررة على المقدسات الاسلامية والمسيحية وغير اليهودية هناك ؟؟؟