So who still thinks Israel is the root of Middle East problems? By Dominic Lawson. The Independent, September 2, 2013.
Lawson:
When regimes in the Middle East feel
threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection
on Israel or “the Jews.”
Forget
the massacre of thousands in Syria and Egypt, whether by chemical weapons or
more conventional methods of mass slaughter. The Middle Eastern issue
galvanising some of our musical mega-stars and their followers, even now, is
the treatment by Israel of Palestinians. A fortnight ago the violinist Nigel
Kennedy told the audience at a Proms concert that Israel should “get rid of
apartheid” – his tendentious reference to the treatment of the Arab minority
within that country.
Kennedy’s
remarks were cheered by many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, but the
BBC cut them from its later television broadcast of the concert, allegedly
following a complaint by Lady Deech, a former governor of the corporation. The
London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign fizzed into action, declaring that “suppressing free speech and political dissent is the norm for state
broadcasters under dictatorships. It is worrying when we start to see this kind
of suppression being practiced by our own state broadcaster.”
This
remarkable suggestion that the BBC was acting as state censor on behalf of
government (rather than merely demonstrating its own determination not to see
its great music festival turned into a platform for contentious political
slogans) is an example of how the state of Israel makes so many people lose all
sense of perspective.
So it
goes with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters who immediately issued a call to arms “to
my colleagues in rock’n’roll” over the treatment given to “my brother Nigel
Kennedy.” Waters denounced “one Baroness Deech (née Fraenkel), who disputed the
fact that Israel is an apartheid state”. What’s with the “née Fraenkel?”
Presumably this is the rock star’s way of letting us know that Deech is – aha!
– a Jew. Enough said – although Waters did go on to say: “I have many very
close Jewish friends.”
Perhaps
some of those friends – whether or not they adhere to Jewish dietary laws –
might be tiring of his latest porcine stunt, in which Pink Floyd’s pig balloon
is imprinted with a Star of David before being “symbolically” shot down. With a
delightful irony, this active boycotter of all things Israeli is now himself
facing calls to be boycotted, from the admittedly small Jewish population of
Dusseldorf, which German city is Waters’ next destination on his current tour.
You
might dismiss this as completely irrelevant to the slaughter on the streets of
Damascus – and in any rational sense it is – were it not for the fact that the
Syrian Free Press, one of Bashar-Al Assad’s propaganda outlets, has been
extolling Waters in recent weeks (when not too busy claiming that the murder of
hundreds of children by Sarin nerve gas was actually organised by the CIA on
behalf of Israel).
Given
the longstanding iconography of anti-Semitism within the Middle East, it is
perhaps not surprising that when regimes in the region feel threatened by their
own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or “the
Jews.” When the wave of popular uprisings sometimes known as “the Arab Spring”
reached Syria, Damascus’s envoy in London went on BBC’s Newsnight to tell a
clearly startled Jeremy Paxman that “the Israelis could be behind it . . . they
could be behind any bad thing in the world.”
Actually,
the Israeli government was most discomfited by the uprisings in the region,
rather preferring the dictators it knew to the possibility of Islamist regimes
in their place. It is Israeli citizens who are now stampeding for gas masks,
not those of the US, in preparation for what might follow if President Obama
does unleash part of America’s vast arsenal in the direction of sites believed
to hold Assad’s chemical weapons.
It is
true that Israel in 2007 sent eight fighter jets laden with 17 tons of high
explosives to demolish the Dair Alzour site in Syria, which the International
Atomic Energy Authority has since concluded was the base of a “gas cooled
graphite moderated nuclear reactor not configured to produce electricity . . . built
with the assistance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” So Israel is
indeed ferociously single-minded in pursuing its self-defence within the
region.
Yet the
idea that Israel is the proximate cause of any tension within that part of the
world – and therefore of the sea of blood sweeping through Egypt and Syria – is
paranoiac when not deliberately mendacious. In many cases, the origins of the
problems go back to the death of the prophet Mohamed, and the split between the
followers who believed his successor should be appointed under Arab tribal
tradition – later known as the Sunni – and those who insisted his successor
should be from his family, and nominated Mohamed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali –
the group which became known as Shia Muslims.
In
certain Arab countries, power had been held for generations by the Sunni, even
while a majority of the population might have been Shia. This was the case in
Iraq, where a sectarian civil war was precipitated by the disastrously
misconceived US invasion. The opposite is true of Syria, a majority Sunni
country, yet ruled by Alawites, a branch of the Shia. Not surprisingly, the
rebels there are overwhelmingly Sunni, backed by the Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia
and Qatar; and Bashar’s main backer is the Shia regime of Iran.
This
tribal and sectarian dispute, which has the potential to become the Muslim
equivalent of the Thirty Years War, has about as much to do with Israel as did
the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. And the peoples
involved care very little, if at all, about the fate of the Palestinians –
certainly much less than do Nigel Kennedy and Roger Waters.
Yet
some western governments still fall for the bizarre idea that if the dispute
between Israel and the Palestinians were to be sorted, then this would help to
solve all the other conflicts in the region. Thus the French foreign minister
Laurent Fabius declared last week, following a meeting with the Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israeli-Palestinian issue is . . . perhaps
the central issue of the region.”
To be
fair to Fabius, that is the sort of thing visiting dignitaries are expected to
say when in Ramallah. But, in the midst of the conflagrations in Egypt and
Syria, it does bring to mind the remark of the late French ambassador in
London, Daniel Bernard, who in 2001 delivered himself of the view that “all the
current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country
Israel.”
Hyperbole
has surrounded that little nation ever since it was created in 1948 and the
secretary of the Arab League pronounced, as five Arab countries launched a
joint attack on the one-day-old state: “This will be a war of extermination and
a momentous massacre.” Now the exterminations and massacres are Arab on Arab;
but somehow it will still be said to be all to do with Israel.
I think
I made a similar point on this page over six years ago – but unfortunately this
is the last of my columns for The Independent. To those readers who have
enjoyed reading them as much as I did writing them, I’m sorry to desert you; to
those who did not – you can calm down now.
