‘Extremely worrying signs’ of a
‘firestorm’ approaching Middle East
As the US sounds the alarm over renewed terrorist plots against it and points accusing
fingers at the Middle East, columnist Rajeh al-Khoury, writing in the Beirut daily
An-Nahar, blasts the Lebanese authorities for their complacency in the face of
“extremely worrying signs” that Lebanon is being portrayed as a potential target
of Washington’s “war on terror.”
First, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee charged that Islamist
groups like Hizbullah and Egypt’s Islamic Jihad were planning attacks in the US, he
writes. Hizbullah, which has never been implicated in any such activities in America,
initially maintained its policy of not responding to US accusations. But why did the
Lebanese state keep tight-lipped too? Khoury wonders.
Then, a US television network ran a report, quoting US officials, claiming that Hizbullah,
Hamas and Al-Qaeda operatives had held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks in the
US. Hamas quickly denied the report, the Egyptian Islamists ridiculed it and Hizbullah
maintained its silence. “But what justifies Lebanon’s failure to respond quickly
and forcefully to such ‘terrorist charges’ that fall on receptive ears in many
parts of the world?”
Then, the US State Department published its annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, in
which “Lebanon got a bigger share of blame and implicit admonition than
Afghanistan,” and yet the state did nothing to set right this “damaging
distortion” of Lebanon’s image.
“It is also not clear whether those in charge of the state have noticed the ominous
climate that accompanied, and continues to accompany, the hurling of all these extremely
ugly accusations at Lebanon,” Khoury writes. Americans are being “terrorized
around-the-clock” with official warnings of imminent terrorist attacks against their
country, and Lebanon is simultaneously “being placed under an extremely bright
spotlight as a country that hosts meetings to plot such attacks and which harbors
‘terrorism.’ This, at a time when the US continues its blind ‘war on
terror’ and the region appears to be facing a firestorm.”
Other Arab commentators offer divergent explanations for the way senior Bush
administration officials have recently been sounding the alarm about impending major
terror attacks in the US.
According to Jordanian commentator Tarek Massarwa, the Bush administration has been
engaged in a campaign to “sew terror amongst its citizens” by raising the
specter, even the inevitability, of being attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass
destruction. “The aim is obvious: to motivate citizens to agree to waging unjustified
wars in various parts of the world, and to agree to pay for those wars and bear their
moral burdens,” he writes in the Amman daily Al-Rai. “Terrorism here is, mainly,
that of the Bush administration terrorizing the American people.”
Hisham Milhem, filing from Washington for the Beirut daily As-Safir, says the prevailing
feeling in the US capital is that the Bush administration is playing up the threat of
possible terrorist attacks for internal political reasons to counter charges that it
failed to act on similar warnings it received prior to Sept. 11. But some observers
believe that the warnings may have an additional dimension namely, to signal that
Washington has “no choice” but to pre-empt the looming threat by acting against
states that might supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, above all Iraq.
That is the position of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other hard-liners who
want the war on terror extended to “axis of evil” states Iran, Iraq and North
Korea, and “recently expanded to incorporate other countries, including Syria.”
But Saudi editor Abderrahman al-Rashed says the Arabs especially should take the warnings
of possible terrorist attacks against the US at face value, as they would be again held
collectively to blame if there were any repeat of Sept. 11.
“Had anyone said prior to Sept. 11 that Arabs were plotting a huge scheme to murder
thousands of people in the US,” no one would have believed them, and “we would
have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and
Muslims,” he writes in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat.
We can hardly complain now if the US or any other country is apprehensive about further
attacks, and we have every interest in forestalling any such operations “for they
will be held against us as in the past, and we will not be able to defend our reputation
however much we try to claim there is no evidence of a plot,” he writes.
But we cannot ensure that there will not be such attacks “when there is an ongoing
war whose main protagonists are Arabs declaring openly that their aim is to carry out
major terrorist attacks,” Rashed says.
“We should be alarmed by the Arabs’ threats, rather than irritated by the
Americans’ warnings,” he writes. For while the physical damage resulting from
further attacks may be contained, “the disrepute will follow us everywhere … as
it did after the events in New York and Washington,” he writes.
Washington’s war on terror weighs heavily on the ongoing debate in the Arab press
about the Palestinians’ future in the wake of Israel’s storming of the West
Bank.
In the Saudi-run pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, Hazem Saghiyeh urges the Palestinians to
ditch the “Hizbullah model” for achieving liberation, which they tried to
emulate during the intifada, and which he argues has “resulted in disaster.”
Instead, they should seek again to “align themselves with Israeli public
opinion” something that must feature a “categorical ‘no’ to suicide
operations” and help turn it against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the
hard-liners “with whom there is absolutely no hope for peace,” he writes.
The Israeli peace camp shows signs of stirring, and the Palestinians have begun debating
reform, whose direction remains unpredictable but which is unlikely to favor the
“Hizbullah option.”
But there are other factors at play pushing things in the opposite direction, Saghiyeh
writes. The killings in Beirut of Jihad Jibril and Ramzi Irani smack of an attempt to
“take us back to where we were,” he says. Some speak of a reversion to the 1975
Palestinian-Maronite standoff in Lebanon, and others speak of Jordan as Ahmed Jibril
did when he accused its intelligence services of complicity in the assassination of his
son.
Let’s not forget, Saghiyeh adds, that Sharon is the godfather of the “Jordan is
Palestine” concept, and that he masterminded both Israel’s 1982 invasion of
Lebanon and the expansion of its meddling in Lebanese sectarian politics a policy the
Israelis dropped only after Sharon stepped down as defense minister.
To this backdrop, says Saghiyeh, Syrian Vice-President Abdel-Halim Khaddam’s visit to
Mukhtara earlier this week did not send out encouraging signals, either to those who want
peace in Palestine or those hoping for economic revival in Lebanon.
The pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi says Israel’s own actions guarantee that there
will be a resumption of suicide bombings by Palestinians.
Its assassination, by helicopter gunships, of the local Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander
and two other activists in Nablus’ Balata refugee camp was a case in point. It was
the latest in a long line of murders that were tailor-made to provoke the Palestinian
factions, raise tensions, and incite vengeance, making retaliatory actions like the
latest bombing in Rishon Letzion inevitable.
“So long as Israeli forces continue targeting civilians, making incursions in the
West Bank and Gaza, and killing and detaining people by the tens, they can’t expect
the Palestinians to respond by putting roses in the gun-barrels of their tanks,” the
paper says.
The Palestinians have no tanks or warplanes with which to fight back, “but only their
bodies to turn into bombs with which to retaliate for the daily humiliations inflicted on
them. The Islamist resistance movements affirmed on more than one occasion that they will
desist from martyrdom operations if Israeli forces stopped their so-called targeted
killings of civilian activists, but Sharon’s government does not want to incline to
peace, and is incessantly working to perpetuate the tension and escalate the
violence.”
Bashir Moussa Nafie, writing in Al-Quds al-Arabi, warns that the hopelessness of a
negotiated settlement with Israel for the foreseeable future will have to be uppermost in
the Palestinians’ mind as they go through the process of reforming and restructuring
the Palestinian Authority.
He says it is meaningless to talk of reforming the PA without simultaneously
“rethinking the Palestinians’ entire strategy.” And so far, that strategy
has been based on the belief that it is possible to reach a final status agreement with
Israel a belief Palestinian President Yasser Arafat adhered to even after the intifada
broke out.
The Palestinians will now have to “liberate themselves from illusions” regarding
the future of the peace process. They must remember that it was under a Labor government
in Israel that the peace process broke down and gave way to open warfare, and that it was
the Israeli side that escalated the violence until it torpedoed the Oslo Accords and
destroyed their physical manifestations, says Nafie
Thus, taking into account the Palestinians and the Arab world’s formal commitment to
the peace process, the Palestinian leadership will have to reform and restructure itself
in such a way that it can “negotiate as though an agreement will be reached tomorrow,
while preparing for persistence and confrontation as though the conflict will go on for
ever,” he writes.
Other components of the new Palestinian strategy, suggests Nafie, should be to turn the
Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories into “prime targets of
Palestinian resistance,” and to concentrate on the rebuilding of the
Palestinians’ bonds with the Arab world, which have always been their main
“strategic asset.”
The Americans’ current preoccupation with “reforming” the PA is not aimed
at seeing the Palestinians establish a fair democratic regime, he says, for the US
administration knows that the overriding concern of the majority of Palestinians is to get
rid of the occupation.
What the Americans want is a Palestinian Authority that is subservient to external powers
and repressive at home. After all, the vast majority of America’s allies in the
region “have nothing to do” with democracy or the rule of law. But for the
Palestinians, “reform must be a matter of strategy first. All other reforms should
serve the strategic goals of the Palestinian struggle, and not be in isolation from
them.” Copyright © The Daily
Star |
