Looking Inward

By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban

A review of the news coming out of our region shows something akin to organized anarchy enveloping the sources of the news related to our fundamental causes and an absolute absence of a value system regulating such news. This engulfs the Arab reader in swirl where s/he finds it difficult to identify a starting point or a desired goal. What adds to this confusion is the lack of Arab strategic research centres which should chart the issues of the present in preparation and anticipation of the desired future.

I can feel the confusion felt by the non-specialized readers, who do not have the time to examine the background of the news stories they watch on TV or read in Arabic media not guided by the unity of thought, vision or destiny. We read on the first pages of Arabic magazines news stories intended to sow the seeds of sedition between members of the same nation, while stories which promote the rights of Arabs and the justice of their causes are completely neglected.

The confusion is also exasperated by the aggressive Israeli statements which aim at bolstering the morale of the Israelis after the many losses and defeats they have incurred since 2006. They also aim at spreading a spirit of frustration among Arabs and mobilizing the world public opinion against them. The Israeli war minister Ehud Barak said that Israel will not allow the existence of weapons which could break the balance in Lebanon . Israel also leaked news that it is developing a Merkava tank with a new defence system. Meanwhile, the racist Israeli foreign minister toured the countries of Latin America to spread his poisonous claims of Hezbollah sleeping cells there and warning of possible operations in Venezuela and other countries.

Another aspect of Israeli tension manifests itself through accusing respected international figures such as the former Irish president, Mary Robinson, of anti-Semitism when US president Barak Obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom. It should be noted that when Robinson was the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, she submitted a report to the organization about Israeli violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and called for putting an end to such violations. She played an important role in the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban 2009 as conference chair. As a result Robinson’s term as UN Human Rights Commissioner was not renewed.

The strange thing is not the ferocious campaign Zionists waged against her and against all the international figures who support the Palestinian cause, but the absence of such figures from the Arab book of honour and the fact that attacks against them in Western and Israeli media do not make headlines in the Arab media.

All of this shows that the Zionist strategy today is based on two main pillars: exaggerating Israeli power and terrorizing the Arabs with it and waging international campaigns to mobilize world public opinion against the Arabs. Israel ’s characterization of resistance as “Islamic” or Shiite” is but an attempt to present the Arab-Israeli conflict as a religious conflict, while it is in reality a political conflict over crystal clear rights.

In the same context, Human Rights Watch published a report supported with photographs, White Flag Deaths, about young people, women and children killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza while trying to leave their homes unarmed. Despite the fact that the report condemned Zionist soldiers for their acts, and the chairman of the committee held a press conference in which he gave an accurate and detailed account of the investigations, Arabic media failed to turn the report into headlines on their front pages.

This leads me to two important studies published recently and with special relevance to the issue at hand. One is Ephraim Kam’s 2009 Annual Strategic Report of the Israeli National Security Centre which points out that the Arab position towards Israel today is mainly based on negotiation not on the option of war and elimination. However, he fails to state that Israel ’s option has always been based on war, genocide and settlement. The study tries deceptively to focus attention on the ‘radical’ threat coming from “ Iran , Hezbollah and Syria ”.

The study makes clear that Israel banks mainly on a change in the Arab mental attitude towards Israel , from perceiving it as an enemy into a state which can be lived with. Moreover, they rely on an Arab party which claims that good relations with Israel will bring the Arabs better rewards than those gained by war. The report expands on the Iran threat against the Arabs, the importance of neutralizing Egypt , and then Iraq , in the Arab-Israeli conflict which weakens and reduces Arabs’ resistance, and international stand.

The question is: why wealthy Arabs do not fund research centres and scholarships focused on Arab rights, archives and causes? Until when shall Western think tanks remain the only source of news and information about our causes and the future of our countries?

Dr Mahmoud Muhareb of the Department of Political Science, Jerusalem University , published a study on Zionist articles published in Lebanese papers during the Palestinian revolution 1936-1939, and the money Zionists paid to promote the Zionist project. We should not be surprised today to see the Israeli media octopus trying to manipulate the media in order to divide Arabs, weaken them and distort the Arab identity by presenting it in the form of sects and factions and stigmatize resistance as terrorist.

The more important question is: what are we doing? And what is our role in intellectual and cultural resistance? Those who wrongly believe that the Zionist lobby is an invincible power because it pays billions of dollars in the United States should read part one of Anthony DiMaggio’s article, “Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power” in Counterpunch to realize that the secret of the Israel lobby is not the money but organized ideological action and having teams working for the same end. There are no names of individuals in this action, but one single cause they all serve.

Shall we learn from our enemies, who stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of injustice, occupation, oppression and displacement, to unify our ranks and defend historical, human and cultural rights? The cause of Palestine is no longer an Arab cause, it is a cause of international justice.