Land: the essence of the Middle-East conflict

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban

The scales of pain in our region are scoring a new high every day, but without drawing the attention of any world leader, or pushing them to take a conscientious civilized position beyond “calling the two parties to dialogue”.   The reason is that events here are entwined with an implicit racist feeling covered up by events which do not affect the future or essence of this conflict.  However, these events are promoted for a while in order to stealthily implement hidden designs on the ground. 

Western wars against the Arabs have been ongoing for over a hundred years; but in recent years there have been two aspects of these wars which are particularly painful.  For the first time we see on TV screens Iraqi men crying the heart-rending loss of a child, a wife or a family.  The footage lasts only for a few seconds, and all of these victims turn into figures on the news reel in their tens or hundreds. 

The other painful front is Palestine which is smothered by the brutal Israeli fetters, as if conducting genocide against the Arabs has become an ordinary thing.  When the victims are of any other nationality, sanctity is restored to human life, and the whole world condemns killing the innocent, as it should indeed.  But the implication here is that all Arabs and Muslims are not innocent.  That is why killing them should not be considered a real crime against humanity.  Maybe, this is the first and ultimate objective of the war on terrorism which classified Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. 

Wars have been waged against them in west Asia and inquisitions launched against their communities in the United States and Europe .  This might also be the desired objective of a wrong strategy for facing terrorism.  Whenever a terrorist act is committed, calls are made to exterminate them.  Killing or assassinating an Arab or a Muslim is not terrorism, as we have seen in the assassination of Mahmood al-Mabhooh and the thousands of assassinations planned and committed by the Israeli government.

But the price of this deception in Palestine is extremely high, because it takes the form of an ethnic cleansing where the land is stolen, sanctities are Judaized and the native population is displaced and killed and their homes destroyed.  The latest method of ethnic cleansing is running Arabs over by cars by Jewish settlers.  It is hard for anyone to imagine that Israeli ethnic cleansing against Palestinians reached the extent that they force Palestinians to demolish their own homes or make them pay a hefty fine that no Palestinian can pay.  It will not be surprising if these crimes escalate, supported by the silence of the ‘civilized’ world, to forcing Palestinians to kill their own children.

These crimes of ethnic cleansing have proven for the past sixty years that Israeli leaders do not care about carefully worded Western statements made to sound like condemnations.  These condemnations are not accompanied by deterrent measures.  They are even intended to give more time to Israelis to cleanse the rest of the Palestinians who are still in Palestine by confiscating their land.

All the talk about peace initiatives, all the agreements which have been signed and all the measures they claim to have taken are only meant to buy the Israelis more time to carry on with their ethnic cleansing.  So, all that is being said about deteriorating relations between the United States and Israel and European criticism of Israeli acts have no weight because they are not accompanied by deterrent measures like those taken against Iran , for instance.  Settlements have swallowed 85% of the land of Palestine, the racist segregation wall ate up 555 km², i.e. 9.8% of the West bank, while the area to the east of the wall which is surrounded by a partial or complete wall is about 191 km², i.e. 3,4% of the West Bank.  About 29% of the West Bank , in the Aghwar region is of restricted use.  3.2% of the land of the West Bank has been confiscated by circumventing roads and settlements which have received $ 60 billion of American taxpayers’ money.

In Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation has created a buffer zone along the eastern border of the strip which means that it has taken up 87 km².  Thus, the Israeli occupation controls about 24% of the strip which is 365 km², and which is one of the most densly populated places on earth.  Israeli occupation soldiers destroyed 23,100 houses in the period 1967-2009, in the framework of the ethnic cleansing policy, including 13,400 houses destroyed between 2000 and the end of May 2009 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  Add to these figures over 4,100 houses destroyed completely and 17,000 destroyed partially in Gaza Strip during the Israeli aggression on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009.

Against this destruction and displacement, Israeli military bases have increased to 440 in 2008 and there are more than half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank, most of them living in the governorate of Jerusalem where they have become 41% of the total population of the governorate.

It might be appropriate to point out an article in The Economist (March 27, 2010) titled “ Israel , America and the World: a wall of suspicion”.  It starts as follows in describing Netanyahu entering the White House in his last meeting with President Obama: “glum Israelis likened the event to thieves entering in the night. When Binyamin Netanyahu and his aides met Barack Obama in the White House on March 23^rd, the president forbade any media coverage - not even a quick photograph -in the Oval Office.

The history of the Middle East for over a hundred years is the history of thieves robbing the land, water, wealth and sanctities of the Arabs.  That is why all that is being said about deteriorating relations, a reprimand or expelling a diplomat will be to no avail with those embarked on a plan of ethnic cleansing and implanting it with the force of arms under the full gaze of world leaders who claim that their world is democratic and civilized, but what a monster they have created in the Middle East!  And that is why the conclusion of The Economist article is true: despite the humiliation the Israeli prime minister suffered in the White House, he did not back down. 

Despite all the fuss about a crisis in the relationship between the United States and the West on the one hand and Israel on the other, Israel ’s policy leads in one way: expelling Palestinians and replacing them with Jewish settlers.  And for that end, the question of security, fear of terrorism and classifying resistance as terrorism and branding Arabs and Muslims as terrorists was invented.