For reasons too obvious to need spelling out, world attention is currently focused on Gaza and the intolerably disproportionate use of force by Israel in return for rockets fired on Israeli towns by Hamas, an obnoxious militant organisation also deserving condemnation. However, at the time of writing more than 1,800 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, 80 per cent of them innocent civilians and a fourth of them children. Israelis’ loss of life has been 67, all except three of them soldiers. The horrified United Nations Human Rights Council met and condemned Israel; the United States was the solitary country to vote against the council’s resolution.
President Barack Obama’s only comment was that Israel had a “right to defend itself”. This is unexceptionable but takes no notice of Israel crossing all limits of inhumanity in the clash of arms with Hamas. For their part both Houses of the US Congress speedily and virtually unanimously voted for more military aid to Israel. This was entirely in keeping with America’s blind support to the Jewish state, together with complete immunity.
Against this backdrop it is nothing short of astonishing that even the American conscience was troubled when the Israelis bombed a second UN-run school in Gaza full of nearly 3,000 refugees despite the sharp condemnation of their first attack on a school run by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) in which 19 people were killed and 100 injured. Even though UNRWA representative Pierre Krahenbuhl gave a full and heartrending account of the Israeli action despite being told 17 times the exact location of the school, the US remained tongue-tied. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, called Israel’s shelling of the school a “possible war crime”. The second time around, however, both the White House and the state department have spoken out in the strongest language they have ever used in relation to Israel. A confidante of President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, said on TV that the US was “appalled” by the “disgraceful shelling outside an UNRWA school”.
Although the bulk of the Western media tilts towards Israel and slants the news in its favour, the public in most countries, including those closely allied with the US, cannot be taken in thanks to the social media. In France, for example, Israelis are being called “racists”. In Britain, the new foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, was forced to admit that the “situation in Gaza was intolerable”. He made this statement after a big row between the Labour leader, David Miliband, and “10 Downing Street”. Mr Miliband taunted British Prime Minister David Cameron that he had condemned the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli students in a West Bank seminary, but has remained silent after the “massacre” of Palestinians. At the popular level the outrage against the “Israeli blitz” is huge. Nearly 60,000 people demonstrated against the Israeli embassy and then marched to Parliament a week ago. A similar march by 100,000 is planned for August 9. It is difficult to foresee what will happen in the Israel-Gaza conflict next, but the Economist seems to have summed up the situation accurately when it says that Israel is “winning the battle (but) losing the war”.
What a tragedy it is that a framework for the settlement of the Israel-Palestine issue on the “two states” basis, negotiated by the two adversaries secretly at Oslo and signed formally on September 13, 1993, on the south lawns of Bill Clinton’s White House by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, exists. But more than two decades have passed and yet the two sides are unable to clinch it. The Arab states must accept their share of blame because they have done precious little to help their Palestinian brothers. This remains the seminal problem of the Middle East which we like to call West Asia, but not the only one. There are at least three other states in the region that are in such deep turmoil that maintenance of status quo there does not look possible.
Let us begin with Iraq for that is the country the neo-Conservatives of the US, under the leadership of George W. Bush, invaded in 2003, without any sanction from the UN and on the demonstrably false excuse of destroying the weapons of mass destruction of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. They even promised to convert Iraq into a democracy of such quality that it would become a “role model” for the wider Middle East! Today Iraq is fast ceasing to be a united entity. Sunni Islamic extremists have established control on the Sunni areas in the north of the country and in Syria, calling themselves the Islamic State (ISIS). One of its leaders, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has even appointed himself Caliph. The historical Shia-Sunni conflict is both escalating and spreading across the Muslim world.
In Libya, the war between two rival factions is so acute that the US, Britain and several other countries have withdrawn their embassies from there. We have also advised our nationals to leave that country because it could explode into two any time. Here again the problem was created by the US when, illegally stretching the UN Security Council’s resolution establishing “no flying zones”, it intervened militarily to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi.
In Syria, the American mission to dislodge President Bashar al-Assad has flopped for two reasons: the balance of power between Russia and the United States, and the composition of the opposition to him. The wild bunch out to overthrow Mr Assad would be far more troublesome to America and the world than him.
Finally, the crowning irony: Lieutenant-General Michael T. Flynn, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the US, said last week that the United States “is no safer — and in some respects may be less safe — after 13 years of two wars… We have a whole gang of new actors out there that are more dangerous than Al Qaeda”.
