Views » June 12, 2006

Diplomatic Hypocrisy in the Middle East

By Salim Muwakkil

In May, President George W. Bush and an adoring Congress offered lavish support for a unilateral plan by Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to set Israel’s final permanent borders. The plan involves annexing large portions of the occupied West Bank, including highly contested land near the city of Jerusalem, and building a wall enclosing the expanded Jewish state in a secure bastion. Doing so would completely negate the so-called “road map” agreement once lauded as the surest path to a two-state solution for the Palestinians and Israelis.

At the same time, the United States and the European Union have withdrawn their support of the Palestinian Authority because voters elected Hamas members to represent them. Hamas refuses to abandon violent resistance to Israeli occupation and even denies Israel’s right to exist. Hamas’ behavior is hard to condone, but this disparate treatment is troubling to me.

Perhaps it’s a product of my American upbringing. After all, throughout my life, I’ve seen at least a dozen films and heard many tales lauding the heroic acts of the French and Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation of World War II, while deriding France’s dreaded Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. We now use quisling, the last name of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian president who collaborated with the Nazis, to define treason of a particularly despicable kind.

Today, however, the U.S. government and its media handmaidens insist we must despise the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghani resistance fighter and embrace the occupiers and their collaborators. Today’s occupiers argue that their actions are necessary to insure national security, relieve human suffering and bring democracy to these countries. But we should recall that all of history’s occupiers justified their actions with similarly haughty motives.

We now demonize those rebellious spirits we once celebrated. Have we forgotten that it’s the very act of occupation that is the point of contention, not the occupier’s identity? This disparate treatment of the Palestinians seems hypocritical, as does punishing them for electing Hamas representatives, even as we trumpet our dedication to democracy. 

One reason for this change of heart may be that the Bush administration has defined these contemporary resistance fighters as enemies in the war on terrorism. The term has become a staple of contemporary discourse. But the definition of  “terrorism” could mean many things: targeting civilians for violence, trying to intimidate by terrorizing, or perhaps simply asymmetrical warfare, etc. Although definitions vary, few dispute that terrorism is a tactic, not an agent. A war on terrorism is actually an oxymoron: a war on war.

The Bush administration’s war on terrorism is really a conflict with a small clique of radical Muslims who have decided to wage asymmetrical warfare against U.S. interests. A closer look reveals these radicals are progeny of people formerly colonized by European powers, and most of their grievances derive from colonialism’s legacy.

They once framed those grievances in a secular context. The Pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), as well as the Baath parties of both Syria and Iraq, was the most coherent expression of anti-colonial resistance in the region. 

But these secular ideologies (many informed by socialist ideals) failed to provide real solutions to their problems. Some of that failure was due to U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of any nation that threatened the West’s access to its resources. The United States has a bad habit of interfering when the profits of its corporations are threatened.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 that ousted the U.S.-sponsored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in favor of Ayatollah Khomeni heralded the emergence of a new paradigm of anti-colonial resistance in the Muslim world. Nationalist radicals adopted Islam as an animating ideology.

The Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation was one of the last anti-colonial movements to undergo this religious conversion. But that changed in September 2000 when Ariel Sharon, who then was leader of the Israel opposition, led a security force of 1,000 to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a venerated Muslim site. The visit set off a chain of events that exploded into the “Al-Aqsa Intifada.” During this period, Islamist resistance groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah began gaining traction on secular groups like the PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

As punishment for Hamas’ electoral success, the European Union and United States (as well as other governments) have halted payments to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian people are now in a crisis for exercising their democratic franchise and voting to resist occupation. If only they had a political option like the Vichy regime.

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• Reader Comments

  Well, Monsieur Muwakkil,, at long last I find little to disagree with in much of your analysis, in so far as it goes.

  I read an US interview with the Hamas leader, where he asked the vital question—Which Israel , What borders ?
  1948, 1967, ??????????????????

  One of my older French friends was a “TERRORIST”. That is what the German Occupiers and their Collaborationist Vichy Allies called the French Resistance.
  He was lucky. On the 6th june44, in Caen, Normandy, he was in his THIRD Resistance group , and now he’s 86 years old, and still dynamic.

  I have no idea IF Hamas MAY become more ‘reasonable’, more ‘secular’. (IF they had sense, they would easily do so, and gain really solid support at home…..most Palestinians are not fundamentalists )

  What is known, as you emphasise, is that US efforts to counter “COMMUNISM” have led to the empowerment of loony Islamism.

  All that because the US has refused to “allow” states to be ‘sovereign’. 

  Acting within an extraordinarily narrow remit, the US has lost potential friends at an ever-increasing speed.

  Which brings me to Barbara Tuchmann’s “March Of Folly.”

  How could the USA do so much so wrong for so long ? 

  Well, they dunnit. Just like King George.

  Posted by frog on Jun 12, 2006 at 9:39 PM

  As Muwakkil indicated, terrorism can be defined as “assymetrical” warfare. This is important if we are to understand the relationship between those with a legitmate right to enact violence and those who cannot.

  The asymmetrical relationship of power and violence is determined by a subject/object binary. The powerful are the privileged “subjects” who have the power to enact violence, as a kind of divine right, make laws, determine punishment (in the form of sanctions or prisons), and control the dissemination of information, including visual and textual media.

  Groups like Hamas are on the weaker side of the binary and are thus treated like objects; like the Palestinians, in general, Hamas is never considered a “subject.”

  Denied subjecthood, Hamas and the Palestinians are viewed as a void, a mute object. As long as they are treated as objects, they have no claim to use violence to pursue their own ends because as an object they are denied their humanity. Only those who are granted the privilege of being human (subjects), with a right to exist, have the power to impose themselves on the objective world. The “terrorist,” is a form of objectification, and, therefore, a natural extension of an innate, dehumanized condition. The subject has a right to exist; the object does not.

  From this it is easy to grasp the hypocritical nature of “legimate” violence committed by the “subject,” as opposed to the object of “illegitimate” violence.

  Posted by Epistrophy on Jun 13, 2006 at 11:51 PM

  Binary-shminary. Actually, I think this could be simplified. Here ya go: Israel is taking Palestinian land. That’s not right, or legal. You come take my land, I’ll shoot you, all philosophical bullshit aside.

  Posted by opeluboy on Jun 15, 2006 at 10:46 PM

  “One reason for this change of heart may be that the Bush administration has defined these contemporary resistance fighters as enemies in the war on terrorism.”

  Or, perhaps Muwakkil is defining these contemporary terrorists to suit his own bias.

  “After all, throughout my life, I’ve seen at least a dozen films and heard many tales lauding the heroic acts of the French and Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation of World War II, while deriding France’s dreaded Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis.”

  Should I take it that Muwakkil sees no difference in any of these?  The French and Polish resistance fighters are equal to the Nazis and the Vichy collaborator?

  I doubt that he does.

  However, he makes no distinction between any of the Iraqi factions. He seems to think they all have the purist of motives for fighting against the coalition of the wicked invader/occupiers.

  Life is not quite that neat.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jun 17, 2006 at 6:13 PM

  wth
  Shooting from the hip again, me old gunslinger ?

  Muwakkil was brought up on Resistance films like the rest of us, and nowhere does he “equalify them” ( to coin a Bushism before the Master of that genre)  with the Vichy ADMINISTRATION.

  Muwakkil is talking about Palestine , Israel, and OUR leaders and OUR PRESS that reiterates the Bullshit. .

  Your comment about “Iraqi factions” has nothing AT ALL to do with this thread.

  NOTHING.

  SOMEHOW, for their own nefarious reasons,, Western Powers have seen fit to discourage, or kill off,  secular alternatives to more or less extreme Islamist alternatives.

  Jay Garner, who from all accounts should have been part of theTEAM got fired because he believed IT was their OIL WE WANTED; HE WANTED ELECTIONS WITHIN 90 dAYS;

  Posted by frog on Jun 17, 2006 at 9:54 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 17 posts.

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