[Salon] The never-ending Nakba spells the decline of the West - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

The never-ending Nakba spells the decline of the West Summary: one year after the 7th October attack of Hamas which killed 1139, tens of thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives and Benjamin Netanyahu has extended his military operations to Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. Hezbollah has been decapitated, Hamas degraded but beyond the dead and the wounded, the major victim of the spectacular violence unleashed on Gaza and Lebanon is the rule of international law. We thank our regular contributor and North Africa expert Francis Ghilès for today’s newsletter which is an edited and updated version of his article first published by CIDOB, where he is an Associate Senior Researcher. “Justice must be done. But I caution this: while you feel rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” Since those words spoken by President Joe Biden on his visit to Israel on 18 October 2023, 11 days after the attack of Hamas which killed 1139 (a figure that includes 71 foreign nationals) more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza alone, a majority of them women and children. This small stretch of land on the Mediterranean has been more ruthlessly bombed than any other area of comparable size since the Second World War. And since 17 September and Israel's synchronised pager and radio bombings and then the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah more than 1300 Lebanese have died, thousands more have been wounded and 1.2 million displaced. The bombing of Lebanon and the killing of Nasrallah has devastated Hezbollah but solves nothing. It has offered the ultimate diplomatic humiliation for the US, displaying America’s inability to control its troublesome ally: every time the Biden administration has expressed misgivings about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics and every time it has continued to pass him the ammunition. Washington’s strategy lies in ruins. The strategy of the European Union finds itself in the same disarray. Jacques Chirac and Gerard Schroeder opposed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. That was the last time leading EU statesmen dared to articulate a strategy on the Middle East which diverged from that of America. International law is the victim of the Middle East crisis Beyond the dead and the wounded, the major victim of the spectacular violence unleashed on Gaza and Lebanon is the rule of international law and the rules of war which the United Nations attempted to construct after the end of World War II with the strong support of the United States. Such rules have been openly flouted by the state of Israel ever since its creation in 1948. The first Nakba (catastrophe), the systematic illegal seizure of West Bank land, the persecution, imprisonment and torture of young people, and now the mass killings in Gaza accompanied by the relentless bombing of schools, hospitals and residential neighbourhoods, the destruction of water and sewage treatment facilities have brought a kind of victory to Israel but destroyed the lofty ideals on which that state was said to have been built. The Israelis have left Gaza in ruins, its population crushed. The same fate risks being visited on Lebanon. One year after the 7th October attack, the major victim of the spectacular violence unleashed on Gaza and Lebanon is the rule of international law [photo credit: @WearThePeaceCo] As the president of the board of Al-Shabaka (the Palestinian Policy Network) Tareq Baconi, points out, the war that established the state of Israel was a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”, known as the Nakba, which “drove out more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes”. According to Baconi’s widely shared analysis: “in another sense the Nakba never ended. (It) is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession” visible “both in moments of spectacular violence” as over the past twelve months, but also “in the endless grind of colonisation, in mundane everyday routines, and in the ghosts that haunt our domestic lives”. Yet every tactical victory that the IDF scores in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Lebanon makes the inhabitants of Israel less secure. The country’s leaders are masters at snatching strategic defeat from the hands of tactical victories. Outside Israel the most obvious victims of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruthless use of violence include leading Western countries and Arab states in the Middle East and North Africa. The capacity of the US to lead “the free world” is fast declining. The American failure to broker a ceasefire will confirm in the eyes of many the decline of a country which has lost each one of its recent wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and failed in its sanctions’ strategy (Russia, China, Iran and Cuba). The decline of the EU mirrors that of America. Both have forfeited the respect of countries in the Global South. Hypocrisy is not limited to the West. Arab regimes have shown how little they care for ordinary Palestinians. The fate of Palestine is just one factor in the cynical game they play among themselves and with the West. One example: the leaders of Algeria - which has strongly supported the Palestinian cause since the country became independent in 1962 - have allowed only one public demonstration in favour of Gaza last October so fearful are they that any street protest will turn against the army which rules the country. Another is Morocco gaining Israeli recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for diplomatic recognition. Two examples among several which could be cited that underline the contempt Arab leaders feel for their “Palestinian brothers.” The defence and security expert Andreas Krieg argues that “the silence of Arab regimes (about Gaza) has also created a lot of friction between the regimes and the people on the ground”. This friction will increase instability in southern rim Mediterranean countries to the detriment of the EU. Western misreading of the Middle East goes back a long time. Granted some European states such as Spain, Belgium and Ireland have dared to criticise Israel but the media in France, Germany and the UK have usually reflected the views of their respective country’s leaders while largely ignoring that of millions of ordinary European citizens who are appalled by the killing fields of Gaza and Beirut. The strong support for Israel from European leaders, particularly in London and Paris is rooted historically in what Michael Ancram described a decade ago: “They [the Arab street] roundly believe, not entirely without justification, that we have always only been interested in their region for purely selfish motives, for our own gain. They know from bitter experience that when they have trusted us, we have too often betrayed that trust.” (“How the West Lost the Middle East”, Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University 1 October 2013) Writing in Responsible Statecraft the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and distinguished scholar of the Middle East, Chas Freeman noted two months before the horrendous Hamas attack that Israel faced a difficult future. “Zionists sought Jewish independence in the mythic Jewish homeland, Palestine, which – with the racist condescension toward non-European native peoples that was typical of the time – they described as a land without people.” This sowed the seeds of today’s Zionist state, which“practices segregation against Arab Israelis in Israel, denies basic rights to West Bank Palestinians and deliberately immiserates and occasionally massacres the nearly 2.2 million Palestinians it has imprisoned in Gaza.” The word “occasionally” no longer applies. The one leader who is pulling the chestnuts from the fire is Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has adroitly used Western missteps in Libya, Syria and the Sahel to reinsert Russia into a position of influence in the Mediterranean. The refusal of Western suppliers of weapons to Ukraine to allow President Zelensky to use those weapons to strike inside Russia stands in sharp contrast, and contradiction, to the refusal to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu. Joe Biden has become an international laughing stock. As for the EU, it has for decades presented itself as a rule “giver” where democracy, economic governance and environmental law are concerned. That sits uncomfortably with its refusal, especially over the past year, to sanction a country, Israel, which has been tearing up the rules of war book for decades.