“Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals, as well as the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah have reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them from Hezbollah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to the open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and all progressive forces in the region.”
Arab Collaborators of Israel
Joseph Massad
One is often baffled by the
ironies of international relations and the alliances they foster. Take for
example the Israeli colonial settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian
people and several Arab countries since its inception while at the same time it
built alliances with many Arab regimes and with Palestinian
leaders.
While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist
relations have always been known and documented, there has been less
documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues to
provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's
1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the
enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and
before it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed.
Israel thus rendered a great
service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from "the ocean to the Gulf,"
whose survival was threatened by Nasser and
Nasserism. Israel 's
subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the Jordanian army destroy
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of
that organization in its massive invasions of Lebanon in 1978
and 1982 were also important services it rendered to these same regimes
threatened by the PLO's "revolutionary" potential and its sometimes recalcitrant
positions. Israeli intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial
information to several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political
opposition and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among
recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani
dictatorships.
Israel 's services to Arab regimes
continue apace. Its 2006 invasion of Lebanon , engineered to destroy
Hizballah, was cheered by Arab regimes and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile
to Hizballah and employed exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive
Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of more than a thousand Lebanese
strengthened Hizballah and weakened Israel 's military standing, the invasion was much
appreciated by Israel 's Arab allies. Indeed since
2006, Israel 's Arab regime allies as well
as neoliberal Arab intellectuals have been openly calling on it to neutralize
the so-called Iranian "threat" for its own sake and at their behest as well. The
US has seen this as an opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region,
so much so that it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new
regional alliance that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign
minister suggested a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many
such proposals have already been made in the past few months welcoming the
colonial settlement to the regional alliance against Iran .
Since 2006, Arab
regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals, as well as the Palestinian
Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah have reached an understanding that
only Israel will be able to
save them from Hezbollah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to
the open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and all
progressive forces in the region. These were not closely guarded secret hopes,
but strategies that were openly discussed in private meetings, which often
spilled into the public realm. The discussions in the Arab media and the
declarations made by Israeli officials in the context of the ongoing Israeli
massacres of the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in the last 10 days
have left little to the imagination. A veritable open alliance now exists
between the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, Arab regimes, and
Israel with the support of
neoliberal Arab intellectuals, wherein Israel is subcontracted to decimate
the Hamas government -- the only democratically elected government in the
entire Arab world.
Here let us remember that Hamas was democratically
elected in free elections and that its elected officials and members of
parliament were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation and have been languishing in
Israeli jails for years, and that the Palestinian Collaborationist
Authority set their offices on fire, staged strikes against them, and signaled
the PCA bureaucracy not to follow their orders. It was after all this failed to
dislodge Hamas from power that the US , Israel , and the PCA staged a coup to massacre
Hamas leaders in Gaza that backfired on them. The carnage
unleashed by Israel in the
last 10 days is the latest attempt by Israel to ensure that all Arabs and
all Palestinians are ruled by dictators and never by democratically elected
officials.
Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can be so
brazen in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't they fear being
overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question. The answer of course is
a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration with Israel by Arab
regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely their openness about it, but
there is a perfectly good reason for this. In the 1940s and the 1950s, these
regimes could not declare openly their alliance with Israel , as there
were popular and international forces that would have removed them from power
had they done so. Indeed, some at the time flirted with alliances that
unofficially included Israel , like the Baghdad Pact, but
they paid a heavy price for such collaboration. The Cold War, Third World
revolutionism, Arab nationalism, the Soviet Union, China , Nasser ,
were all factors to be considered. While a few of these factors had remained
when Egypt 's Sadat declared
his open alliance with the US
and Israel in the late 1970s, none of
these factors remains today. The US, Israel, and their major Arab allies have
neutralized these forces one by one since 1967, opening the way for this brazen
alliance between Israel and the Arab dictatorships, all of which are in the
service of US interests in the region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and
fear and have at their disposal the best secret police and repressive security
apparatus that the US can train and equip and which oil
money and US aid can buy.
When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was
asked point blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with
Arab regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally
denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there are
those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas is their enemy
as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally, the same Tzipi Livni, who
only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian citizens of Israel that she has slated them for
denationalization and deportation to the Palestinian Bantustans once
Israel and the international
community grants these West Bank prisons the
status of an independent Palestinian state enclosed within the apartheid wall.
After her war on Palestinians in Gaza started
last week, Livni declared that her war against the Palestinian people is not
only about security but also about Israel 's "values" which
non-collaborator Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni is of course
right. Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing ideals
and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is
Palestinenser- rein, most Palestinians believe that they should remain
present on their lands even and especially if this sullies the purity of a
Jewish Israel.
Livni has also asserted that Israel 's values are shared by the
"free world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies of the "free world." We
can add that her values are also shared by Saudi-funded neoliberal Arab
intellectuals and by the leadership of the Palestinian Collaborationist
Authority ensconced in the Green Zone of Ramallah. The civilized values of
Israel are not unlike those
espoused by the US in its ongoing wars against Arabs
and Muslims, and are very much like European colonial values during the high age
of colonialism and beyond. Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human
rights, democracy, peace, and justice as universal while applying them only to
Jews and denying them especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an Israeli
ruse. Let us remember the undying words of Frantz Fanon in this regard: "leave
this Europe where they never tire of talking of
man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of
their own streets, in all the corners of the globe."
On the Palestinian
front, the term of chief Palestinian collaborator and coup leader Mahmoud Abbas
ends on 9 January. Israel
hopes to extend his collaborationist rule as head of the PCA it set up through
the Oslo
agreement in 1993. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the
main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in
all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for Palestinian
resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel the right
to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their livelihoods, to
imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being resisted.
The
only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities
has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the
earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators
since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither
Israel nor any of its collaborators
has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and
still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the
Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel's crimes
become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in
Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality
in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European
colonial settlement in their midst.
Joseph Massad is associate
professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York . The Article was published originally
under the title Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Massad’s references to
the Jewish uprising are quite out of tune with the rest and apparently were
necessitated by the Americans’ obsession with holocaust stories. They are
removed here, and can be seen in full on the Electronic Intifada site.
