Impasse in the Arab world

The more we (Arabs) relied on and trusted in the United States, the more the US failed us, sweet-talked us and — yes, let’s call a spade a spade — betrayed us.
From May 14, 1948 when under the stewardship of President Harry S. Truman the US became the first nation that recognized Israel, to the time earlier this year when President Barack Obama gave an approving nod to Israeli colonization of Arab land, Washington continued to string us along.
And what about the visiting secretaries of state? We had a surfeit of them, from William Rogers in 1970 to John Kerry earlier this week, who visited Arab capitals armed with their nation’s professions of impartiality and even-handedness.
Oh, yes, John Kerry. Consider this: Last Tuesday, on the eve of his arrival in Tel Aviv in a quest to create “two states for two peoples,” he was greeted by the news that many in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition and many more in his party, the Likud, along with a substantial number of Knesset members, not only opposed the idea of a Palestinian state but put forward their own plans to annex larger swaths of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin, a staunch annexationist, said, “regardless of the world’s opposition, it’s time to do in (the West Bank) what we did in (Arab East) Jerusalem and the Golan.”
And Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, another Greater Israel nutcase, was quoted as saying: “I think we should no longer think of Jewish settlements in the West Bank but of Palestinian settlements in Israel.” And not a peep from Kerry, who remained deferential, as all his predecessors had been in the face of Israeli provocations.
Imagine the hell that would break loose, if say a majority in the Palestinian Parliament and in President Mahmoud Abbas’ Cabinet had greeted a secretary of state, on the eve of his official visit to their country, by suggesting that since historic Palestine had been Arab for 13 centuries, Israel itself is a large colonial settlement grafted on their homeland, and no way would they bring themselves to accept or legitimize its existence as a state.
It’s irrelevant here to ask as to why the US has eaten humble pie in response to Israeli excesses all these years. The US sees Israel as a vital strategic asset in our part of the world?
The answer to that question is: The Jewish lobby in Washington wields enormous power. The Americans have been quoted as saying, “Israelis are a people who share our values.”
If we, the Arabs, have learned anything over the last six decades, it is that the United States is wholly committed to Israel, right or wrong, will fight for it tooth and nail at international forums, and forgive whatever transgressions it may be guilty of — even when those transgressions are directed at American interests, or at Americans themselves. (A case in point is the deliberate attack in June 1967 against the USS Liberty by Israeli fighter jets that killed 34 crew members and wounded 171 others, and severely damaged the ship, an incident that was swept under the rug, meriting not one single congressional investigation.)
Truth be told, I do not blame the US, a big power, for this posture, anymore than I blame the canary for singing or the beast of prey for preying. Nor, for that matter, do I blame Zionism for its territorial ambitions, its messianic pretensions and its blatant racism. That is the nature of the beast, a nature that was well defined, well declared and well articulated at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897, long before Zionism transplanted itself to Palestine. Rather, I blame us and us alone for having failed to chart a path that would’ve led us to be the only determining force in our political destiny by drawing on our own resources in order to regroup our own national interests.
Before we became free nations, our grim history as colonized peoples had imposed a cruel yoke on our process of socialization, locking a majority of us into the belief that we are what the Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci had called “subalterns,” a community without access to political power, dependent on rulers in some foreign capital to solve its problems.
It’s about time, I say, that we freed ourselves from this straightjacket and recaptured for ourselves the ethos of that “assabiyeh” (Ibn Khaldun’s term) that for centuries had defined our civilizational core. In those days, we were tough, independent and free Arabs who allowed no one to mess with their rights, their land, their property and their social practices and religious beliefs. Thus, for example, when the Crusader Kingdom in Jerusalem stepped on our toes in 1187, the punishment we meted out to it that year was heavy indeed — and we did it without calling 911 in Washington.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has been a guest in our part of the world this week. Let’s listen to him and treat him with respect — as is Arab wont toward their guests — but we should tell him clearly and bluntly what we think of that charade known as American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, it pains one to imagine that one’s region may have become like Blanche Debois, the character in Tennessee Williams’s play, A Street Car Named Desire, who proclaims on stage: “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” When will we ever learn that to go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right via another’s direction — or dictates?