'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Iraq-Palestine revisited

Yesterday, reader Adel el-Sayed put up a comment onto a post I wrote on JWN Feb. 22 in which I argued against the point of view that, "Anyone who wants a just Palestinian solution should be supporting a war in Iraq... It would be good for Palestinian aspirations."

Those had been the exact words used by the once-smart (British) Mideast affairs analyst Fred Halliday, writing that week in Salon.com.

Though I have respected Fred's work a lot in the past, I just could not agree with that assessment. (Read my earlier post for my reasoning there.)

But in general, I think we should all add this whole question of the alleged "Palestinian-Israeli benefits" of a US war to topple Saddam to the Bill of Particulars in which we list the many forms of dishonest argumentation that prior to the March 19 Day of Infamy were used to jerk the US (and UK) publics into supporting the war effort...

The main argument I heard before March 19 from several war supporters was admittedly was a little different from the one that Halliday expressed, though it had the same bottom line: that a US war against Saddam would be good for the Palestinians. It ran roughly as follows:

(1) The financial support the Saddam Hussein regimes gives to Palestinian "terrorists" is one of the main factors motivating them to continue their actsof otherwise quite inexplicable violence against Israel.

(2) It is only because of these acts of wanton, quite unprovoked violence that the hard-pressed Sharon is obliged, becuase of its responsibilities to the Israeli public, to retaliate against the Palestinian sources of this terror. Otherwise, this Israeli government----which is as eager as all Israeli governments are to make peace with its neighbors!--would conclude a reasonable, durable peace with the Palestinians tomorrow.

(3) Therefore, if the US can topple the Saddam regime, this will reduce to zero or near-zero the violent Palestinian actions taken against the Israelis, and

(4) This will then allow the Israeli government to make peace with the Palestinians.

On (1), the financial support that Saddam's regime gave, or tried to give, to the families of Palestinians killed or injured in the intifada have seldom or never been mentioned by Palestinian themselves as among the reasons for the continuation of Palestinian violence and other acts of resistance against the Sharon government's acts.

The Palestinians have always had scores of reasons far more significant than those paltry and often non-existent payments, for maintaining their resistance to Israel's military occupation in general, and to the expansion of the settlement-building project in particular.

On (2), the Sharon government's use of violence has never, at any point since his election in 2001, been reliant on the existence of prior Palestinian acts of violence to which the Israeli violence was merely a "retaliation". And the Sharon government has to this day shown not the slightest interest in concluding any kind of a reasonable, sustainable peace with the Palestinians.

Recall that during Sharon's premiership there have been numerous, multi-week periods of time in which there have been NO acts of Palestinian violence against Israelis. Those periods of truce have never led to Sharon doing any of the following: (a) stopping the IDF's policies of extrajudicial killings of Palestinians and other acts of wanton and illegal physical violence against Palestinians, (b) stopping the continued expansion of the Israeli settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the expropriation of Palestinian land there, or (c) entering into a serious, good-faith effort at peace negotiations with the (much, much weaker) Palestinian leadership.

So since premises (1) and (2) of the argument above were quite unsubstantiated in reality, small wonder that conclusions (3) and (4) never came about.

Halliday's argumentation had, it is true, been a little different... He had argued that in the wake of a US war against Iraq, the US government would push hard for a Palestinian-Israeli peace (and the Arab leaders would back it up).

As it turned out, the Arab leaders have done just about nothing effective since the war to push for a serious, re-opened Israeli-Palestinian process. And as for W, he has felt not the slightest need to make his own push in that direction.

Which is what I predicted.

Eat your hat, Fred Halliday.

And as for all those other sad supporters of the US attack against Iraq who spouted the kinds of argument that I have described above... Maybe it is time they learned a little more about the Palestinians' chroncially unbreable situation of oppression and dispossession, and about all those strange factors--like an "inexplicable" desire for national independence and to throw off intrusive foriegn rule--that are the main driving force of both the legitimate and the illegitimate acts of Palestinian resistance that we see day after day after day....

And of course, even after Saddam is quite clearly not making all those alleged payments...

Footnote: I only added the 'Comments' boards to JWN in around May or so. Then after that, that February post sat there comment-less--like many others, *sigh*-- for many months. Until mid-December that is, when someone called Brian Kaufman left a sniffy comment describing my argument as "ridiculous". And then, yesterday, Adel el-Sayed left his comment, which argues that "the situation in Palestine/Israel after 'the liberation'" proves me right.

Nice, too, that Mr. el-Sayed found that Feb. 22 post in the Archives here-- even though I never elevated it to the level of "Golden Oldie."