The Vicious Cycle … and the Politics of Metamorphosis in the Middle East
The history of conflict in the Middle East is a confusing grid of miscalculations and morphing on all sides. One constant is that it has always been anchored between the rhetoric of inept and corrupt Arab leaders and the ‘myth’ of the Israeli military solution. In the Sixties, the Arab rhetoric was championed by the mother-of-all-miscalculation, Egyptian president Gammal Abd El-Nasser. His firebrand politics of pan-Arabism centered on the messy business of the destruction of Israeli.
As a youngster growing up in Egypt, we were fed, sometimes forcefully, the fictitious, but powerful drug of Arabs’ superior power. We were all strongly convinced that it was only a matter of time until we kicked Israel into to the sea. We held on firmly to the stereotype of Israelis as white blood-suckers, who with the help of the Americans and the European imperialists, destroyed our brothers in Palestine and were marching to control the rest of the Arab world from the Euphrates River to the Nile.
The 1967 war, which is commonly known to most 40-something Arabs, as the “Nakbah”, or the catastrophe, ended all this Arab chauvinistic crap. The area went through a period of reckoning and revolution; from Sadat’s brief military crossing of the Suez Canal to the east and permanent political crossing to the West via the peace process, resulted to the domestication of the Egyptian army in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 1979, after the Arab nationalist leaders had been thoroughly discredited, the Iranian revolution and the revival of Islamic fundamentalism emerged to fill the political void in the region. With the virtual elimination of the secular Arab national movements, Islamists took control of the conflict and the still-unfinished business of the liberation of Palestine. This morphed the conflict from a struggle between two national identities Arabs and Israelis to a conflict between two religious identities; Moslems and Jewish identities.
After Sharon’s destruction of Yasser Arafat’s secular movement (FTAH) the result was the emergence of the Muslim brotherhood’s military wing, Hamas, in Gaza. His bloody miscalculation in the invasion of Lebanon in 82 was another morph occurred as the Islamic party of god, better known to everyone now as Hezbollah, came into existence under new firebrand leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Now we come to the latest miscalculation from ironically the first non-military Israeli government since the Jewish state inception. With the chip on his shoulder as a softy politician, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert assert again Israeli military chauvinism and the myth of the military solution in reaction to Hezbollah’s overplaying of their hand.
Now, what will be the metamorphosis from all of this madness, God only knows. Bringing God into this mess seems appropriate since he is believed to be the one who promised two peoples, the Jews and the Muslims, the same beautiful, peaceful piece of land to live on, which is a very bad real estate business practice indeed. Now the conflict morphed into two parties of god fighting each other instead of one.
Ahmed Tharwat/ Minnesota
Producer and Host of the Arab American TV show Belahdan