The divided Arab leaders of the 22-country Arab League (AL) met in Tunis on March 31, 2019 to paper over the cracks in its membership and condemn unanimously the US decision to recognize Israel's annexation of Syria's Golan Heights. This annexation, flying in the face of international law that forbids the acquisition of territory through war, and numerous UN Security Council resolutions, was carried out by Israel in 1981 of the territory it had seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The AL summit also reminded the world that the stability of the Middle East depended on the creation of a Palestinian state.
The Arab world is bitterly divided over a dispute between Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies and Qatar, the latter accused of backing terrorism (i.e., Hamas in the Gaza Strip) and cosying up to Iran, the bête noir of Riyadh. It is also split over Iran's regional role and influence, as well as over the war in Yemen and popular unrest in Algeria and Sudan. The aspiration of a show of unity was punctured by the abrupt and without explanation departure of Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani after the inauguration ceremony where AL Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit praised Saudi Arabia's handling of its rotating AL presidency last year.
The Arab leaders have been under popular pressure in their respective countries to condemn the US move, which comes four months after President Donald Trump decided to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. That decision too was condemned by Arab leaders. The final status of Jerusalem was meant to be part of the process of a two-state solution, as enshrined in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian aspiration is that East Jerusalem be declared the capital of a Palestinian state.
The pathetic state of Arab unity and the AL is neither new nor surprising. It has a long history of precedent. During WWI, the Ottoman Empire's Arab colonies were instigated to mount the Arab revolt to divert and harass Turkish forces, thus not leaving the Turks with the option of transferring their troops to the European battlefield. British intelligence officers such as T E Lawrence played a critical role in stoking the Arab revolt, ostensibly while dangling the prize of independence for the Arabs when the war was over. In the meantime, as late as 1917, the Zionist movement prevailed on the British to issue the Balfour Declaration supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Under the British Mandate over Palestine after WWI, an incremental flood of Jewish immigration was allowed into the country. These immigrants were the advance guard of Zionist settler colonialism, supported by European imperialism.
This imperialist enterprise of 'resolving' the issue of the bad treatment of and discrimination against Jews in the west by imposing a homeland for them on Palestine, which the Zionists claimed as their ancient birthplace, was given an extraordinary fillip by the ravages of Hitler on the Jews before and during WWII. The victorious western allies not only encouraged the acceleration of Jewish emigration to Palestine, they clandestinely supported the underground Zionist militias in their campaign to drive out by force the original inhabitants, the Palestinians. These efforts culminated in carving an Israeli state out of Palestine in 1948, accompanied by the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their country. The Palestinian resistance calls this catastrophe the Naqbah.
Israel since 1948 has been engaged in an unrelenting expansionism at the expense of the Palestinians and Arabs. In 1967, Israel comprehensively defeated the Arabs and captured the West Bank (till then under Jordanian control), Gaza Strip (controlled at that point by Egypt) and Syria's strategic Golan Heights. The defeat led to profound changes in the Arab world. While the defeated Arab leaders either retired or were removed, the gloom that descended on the Middle East was relieved only by one chink of light: the emergence of a Palestinian armed national liberation movement under Yasser Arafat. Arafat early on defined the most critical issue of the Palestinian resistance as the lack of a territorial base from which to wage the armed struggle against Israel. Initially based in Jordan, the Palestinian resistance was ousted from the country by King Hussein's forces in 1970 when the monarch felt his rule threatened by the growing strength of the Palestinian movement (our General Ziaul Haq won 'glory' in this conflict by surrounding and shelling the Palestinian refugee camps with his tanks). The Arab-Israeli war of 1973, in which the Arabs, particularly Egypt, gave a better account of themselves than in 1967, proved to be the illusory semi-victory that became the preliminary for the betrayal, one after the other, of the Palestinian cause by all Israel's Arab neighbours except Syria. The Palestinian resistance was once more ousted from Lebanon in 1982 where they had relocated from Jordan by an Israeli invasion in collaboration with Lebanese fascist forces. With the leadership and fighters in forced exile in Tunisia and elsewhere, the old problem of not having a territorial base to wage the armed struggle against Israel returned, this time with a vengeance.
Arafat now turned to diplomacy, and having wooed the west, particularly the US, thought he had pulled off the impossible by getting a Washington-brokered peace deal with Israel. This was enshrined in the 1993 Oslo Accords, whose foundation was a 'return' to the original UN plan for a partition of Palestine in 1948 that Israel violated, but this time with a reduced territory of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem to go to a Palestinian state. This two-state solution has long been overtaken by Israel's aggression against and suppression of the Palestinians, lately particularly in Gaza (Hamas-controlled), the successors of assassinated Arafat being perceived to have gone 'soft' in their enclaves in the West Bank.
Israel has been on a charm and diplomatic offensive for years with some success. Peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan laid the foundations for an incremental opening up to Israel by most Arab states at the expense of the Palestinian cause. Lobbies within these Arab states either having recognized Israel or secretly hankering for it to earn brownie points from the US and the west are hard at work, with their counterparts having made an entrance in Pakistan too of late.
Pakistan cannot and should not become a party to the wholesale betrayal of principles of international law and the repeated UN Security council resolutions that condemn Israel's occupation and annexation of Arab and Palestinian territories through force and war. In fact this is a time to resurrect and expand our help to the beleaguered Palestinian people in whatever way we can, who otherwise have been abandoned to their fate.
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