The Independent, 16 June 2007
Welcome to 'Palestine'
by Robert Fisk
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that
the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party -
Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza
Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited
President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation
marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should
have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically
elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have
voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which
declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo
agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to
recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The
Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and
Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of
"Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?
And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas,
the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian
leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning
the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather
than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes
to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't
vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how
Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of
the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian
Authority".
I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls
had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck
me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of
them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to
corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and
thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve
them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer
"Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the
right people?
All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in
Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government
(and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan
civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand
province).
We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with
the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose
presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and
whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.
We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have
murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it
should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning
his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly
acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror".
Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and
all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such
vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down
its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can
indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he
quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians -
would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are
educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be
to control.
For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and
withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will
our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN,
Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people
(fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to
acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of
hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?
It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's
what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't
President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the
cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he
doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).
If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn
countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle
Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the
wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we
will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the
kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole
place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying
of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?
Copyright © The Independent 2007