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Welcome to 'Palestine'
By Robert Fisk
06/16/07 "The
Independent" -- -- How troublesome the Muslims of
the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians
embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas -
and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza
Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the
discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and
let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime
ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course,
we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like
the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people.
They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt
leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to
recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo
agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was
supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the
post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on
building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land,
gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still
left to negotiate over ?
And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman,
Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to
him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about
Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always
referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a
"leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the
White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians
didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic -
which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but
because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah
and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official
whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell.
All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his
bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost
Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption -
the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and
thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them
and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote.
Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be
gracious enough to vote for the right people?
All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid
Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug
barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry
about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our
"war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).
We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet
finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently
arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm
support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession
will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.
We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose
werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to
murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's
recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be
remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for
abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose
"democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our
side in the "war on terror".
Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in
Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially
those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that
even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the
orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he
doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly
calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians -
would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and
daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier
the "Middle East" would be to control.
For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold
out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs
to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our
pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have
to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they
will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to
acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe
pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful
Hamas in Gaza?
It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses.
But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only
Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the
alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't
actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).
If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little
back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But
no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people,
support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave
like us civilised Westerners.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps?
Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on
giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely
presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in
our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of
the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?
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