Thrusting Victory On Netanyahu Trump Plan Has Chosen Narrative Over Facts
Saeed
Naqvi
Muslim countries assembled at Sharm al Sheikh in Egypt, to endorse
Trump’s Peace Plan were Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Malaysia, Indonesia and
Pakistan. None among these participated in the two year Israeli-Gaza conflict.
Muslim countries in the region that fought for the Palestinians were not present. These countries were Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. Two other countries left out were Bahrain which has an overwhelming Shia population and Kuwait which has a substantial Shia population. The Shias in these Sheikhdoms are on a short leash.
In brief, countries which gave military and political support to Hamas, and therefore the Palestinian cause, were all Shia and were not present at Sharm al Sheikh. Would Hamas or the Palestinians leap with joy at a plan in which neither they nor their supporters have any space?
To widen the Shia-Sunni divide has been a western pursuit for decades. I remember the late Henry Kissinger describe the sectarian divide as the dominant theme defining West Asian politics which subsumes the Palestinian issue. Whoever scripted Trump’s plan had this long term perspective.
When the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia returned in February 2011 from convalescing in Germany, he found that two pillars of the West, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia had become casualties of the Arab Spring.
King Abdullah rained $136 billion on his people. He worked behind the scenes to ignite the Syrian Civil war in 2011 as the first phase of disrupting what was named the Shia arc – Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and, the ultimate trophy, Iran.
If the Saudi population was so agitated by the Arab Spring as to warrant the showering of billions to calm them, surely a two year long genocide of Muslims next door would have caused greater agitation among the Saudi public. Was all the speculation about Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman straining at the leash to rush into relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords not tinged with wishful thinking? Chinese generally get involved in initiatives after carefully weighing the consequences. They are invested in a Riyadh-Tehran rapprochement.
A Palestinian state in any form is anathema to Netanyahu and Israel’s Right. What then is the basis for any speculation of a Saudi interest in the Abraham Accords “unless Israel accepts a two state solution?”
Even though Hamas was ideologically a direct descendent of Hasan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, its Sunni antecedents were seldom underlined for emphasis because that would confuse the theory of the Shia arc.
The Times of Israel has touched a very raw nerve in the Jewish state. “Hamas isn’t behaving like a defeated force, which puts the entire Gaza ceasefire at risk.” Why? Because the Israelis know that victory has been thrust upon them by the Trump plan.
This means that considerable care was taken for the tamasha mounted in the Israeli Knesset on October 13 to make it an occasion for Israeli victory. Three distinct forces were brought together. It were these three who coordinated action to make possible history’s greatest televised genocide for two years.
The three forces responsible for the genocide had all been carefully assembled that day in the Knesset – Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Miriam Adelson whom Trump introduced as “Miriam, with $60 billion in the bank”, obviously a pillar of the celebrated Israel lobby in the US.
When this, the most powerful trio was celebrating Trump’s peace plan, and the fact that “all of Netanyahu’s war aims had been achieved”, it was required of Hamas not to celebrate the return of Palestinian prisoners. The narrative of Israeli victory had to be amplified to such a pitch that facts are drowned.
Facts on the ground were that Netanyahu failed to bring home the hostages. It was Trump’s peace plan which facilitated the return of the Israeli hostages. He destroyed Gaza and assassinated regional leaders and scientists. Is that the stuff of victory?
Netanyahu also failed to exterminate Hamas. A pronounced schizophrenia afflicts Israel’s attitude towards Hamas: ceasefire has to be negotiated with the group but once peace has been established. Hamas must magically disappear.
The truth being obscured is this: Israel will never be able to commit the atrocities on Palestinians on the scale the world has seen on their TV screens these past two years. No genocide anymore.
The unspeakable brutality in excess of anything since the Naqba (catastrophe) in 1948 when the Jewish state was founded, will become an impossibility for two reasons: public opinion in the US, has turned against unstinted American support for Israel’s inhuman behaviour with Palestinians.
Secondly, the US is rapidly losing its position as the global hegemon. The imperial hegemon which supported all Israeli impunities as a matter of policy is no longer powerful enough to ignore world opinion.
US and Israeli impunity was at its peak in the decade between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11. This was the period when dreams of the American century received a fillip.
We now have it on good authority that in November 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu handed a list of seven west Asian countries where regime change would be affected.
Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO commander, was handed the list by an officer in the Pentagon. The list was Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and the ultimate trophy, Iran.
Netanyahu had spotted the sole superpower moment to have his wish list implemented. A powerful neo-con lobby in the US backed him to the hilt.
Israel lobby, Neo cons, Netanyahu had sketched their design for the future of West Asia in the sole superpower moment. Europe’s delusionary dreams of a post Ukraine “weakened” Russia are also anchored in the sole superpower moment which alas has passed. The stalemate which is holding up movement in Ukraine as well as Gaza is an enormous waste of time and hundreds of thousands of lives. The new world order may be in the distance but watch the horizon carefully and hazy outlines of it are already emerging in Silhouette.
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