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A wall's a wall
US President George W. Bush said recently that the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was historic and could be equated with the fall of the Berlin wall.
Musa Keilani
04/17/05 "Jordan Times" - - One has no quarrel calling the toppling of the Saddam regime historic, as indeed was the fall of the Berlin wall. However, Bush, more by design than by coincidence, forgot to mention that we now have a new Berlin wall in the Middle East. Calling it different names — apartheid wall, separation wall, security wall, border wall, etc. — would not change the reality that it is as sinister as, if not more sinister than, the Berlin wall.
Bush talked about democracy sweeping the region following the ouster of Saddam, as if to lend support to people like neocon Paul Wolfowitz and others that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was solely aimed at liberating the people of Iraq, setting them on the path to democracy and then following up and nudging other Arab countries into democratisation. Well, we know better than to swallow the American line about democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab region. We have seen what “democracy” has done to Iraq, where cities are burning, insurgent attacks and suicide bombings claim dozens of lives everyday, there is no employment, no security, no food and no water.
Against this sordid picture, the US president is speaking about the Palestinians being unrealistic to expect the return of all their land that Israel occupied since its creation in Palestine in 1948.
Effectively, Bush simply legitimised the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and said there could not be a return to the 1949 armistice lines. That affirmation weighs on our mind more than the much-touted American pressure that was purportedly applied on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during the latter's visit to Washington last week. That was the crux of the talks at Bush's ranch in Texas. That is what figures as the real substance of the meeting, with the media hailing Bush for having told the Israeli prime minister not to expand the Maale Adumim settlement and to remove “illegal settlements” from the West Bank.
When hearing about “illegal settlements” in the West Bank, the first question that comes to anyone's mind is whether there is such a thing as “legal” settlement. Obviously, for Bush and others there could be “legal” settlements that are set up by an occupation force in an occupied territory.
We also know that the so-called “illegal settlements” are those makeshift, mobile vehicles and tents that Jews have set up, mostly as token symbols of their “right to settle anywhere in Judea and Samaria”. They are not settlements, “legal or illegal”; they were set up to be used as convenient structures whose removal can be cited as major compromise on the part of Israel — and that is what is happening now — without really making the slightest dent on the Israeli settlement policy.
Bush told Sharon not to expand Maale Adumim. Of course, Bush did not expect the Israeli prime minister getting on his hotline with his office and ordering his aides to ask the bulldozers and construction workers to go home. The US president knew very well that he had to go through the exercise of publicly admonishing Sharon while being fully aware that Israel does only what it wants and would brush aside American pressure — if there indeed such a thing — and go about its way.
It was funny to hear Sharon talk about an independent Palestinian state with physical contiguity for the first time after his talks with Bush. Surely, that was part of a pep talk aimed at offering an implicit deal to the West Bank Palestinians; Israel cuts them off from occupied Jerusalem but allows them to travel from Nablus to Qalqiliya without hindrance; that is, of course, only if they stop challenging Israel and halt demanding what they consider as their rights but what Israel believes to be its rights.
One should be realistic and call a spade a spade. As far as the US is concerned, Israel will get what it wants, regardless of what the Arabs and the Palestinians want. All these White House talks, warnings and admonitions are part of the script. That is not to say that Bush and Sharon are engaged in a conspiracy to gyp the Palestinians and Arabs of their territorial rights. It only means that Israel is telling the Americans what its intentions are on a need-to-know basis and Washington has no choice but to gulp down whatever it is being told, while making some growls and noises for Arab and world consumption.
It would not matter the least to Bush if Israel refused to give up a square millimetre of territory to the Palestinians as long as the Israeli prime minister could make the refusal stick. That is the game being played out now. There are many buts and ifs, and the only force which could really make a difference to the drama being played out as it was scripted is the will of the Palestinian people to resist.
But then, new realities are being created on the ground and the separation wall is one of them. It was distressing to see and hear the leader of the self-styled free world conveniently highlighting the fall of the Berlin wall and ignoring its reappearance in Palestine. It was an insult to freedom-loving people around the world.
Copyright: Jordan
Times
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