To digest the events of the past few weeks in the Palestine-Israel conflict, this is a retrospective on how the Palestinians themselves have journeyed since their ethnic cleansing from their homes, villages and cities and into refugee camps in 1948.
I'll note first that we no longer refer to the Palestine tragedy as the "Arab-Israeli" conflict because Arab countries have finally lined up behind the Zionist-American "peace" plan and have swallowed the bitter pill of the existence of Israel. We now call it more correctly the Palestine-Israel conflict, one between two peoples fighting over the same territory. The reason behind the earlier nomenclature of "Arab-Israel" has to do with both the Zionist control of language and vintage Arab testosteronic hubris: Back in the 1940s, the four-centuries long Turkish Ottoman colonization was still coming to an end and specific national identities were still in the making. Arab-speaking regions were becoming Arab states and Palestine was one such a region destined to become a state under the guidance of the British crooks mandate. Arabs felt that Palestine was being stolen from them by the European Zionist colonial settlers in cahoots with the perfidious English crooks. National identities hadn't yet gelled out of the broader and vague Muslim realm of the Ottoman empire, borders were still worked on, and nation-states were only beginning to emerge. For the Zionists, this was a golden opportunity: Referring to the Palestinians as Arabs and part of the broader ethnic community of Arabs, the Zionists were able to deny the Palestinians a specific national identity, claim that those "Arabs" of Palestine that they ethnically cleansed could settle anywhere else in the Arab world, and that there was "no such thing as a Palestinian people" according to then-Israel's prime minister Golda Meir.
As a result, Arab states waged war against colonial Israel, not necessarily to grant Palestine independence as a nation state but to retrieve it into the Arab fold. Had they succeeded, Palestine could easily have become an independent state as much as a part of Egypt, Jordan or Syria. Having failed repeatedly to achieve any success against Israel, the Arab countries gradually came to terms with the existence of Israel, and eventually signed peace treaties with it (primarily Egypt and Jordan but also other Arab countries far and wide like Morocco, Sudan and the Gulf States in more recent times) or agreed reluctantly to pacify their borders with it (Syria).
Lebanon is an outlier. Though it has borders with Israel, it never saw itself really as an enemy of Israel because the Christian consitutent of its demographics saw itself too as a non-Muslim minority under threat. I remember as a child when the 1967 war broke out, our neighborhood in Beirut used to cheer Israel and mock the lies of the Syrian radio which was yelling victory while Syria was actually losing the war. Lebanon fought one little battle in 1948 when it conducted a quick incursion into the Galilee only to withdraw almost immediately. Lebanon and Israel are theoretically still bound by the 1949 truce agreement following the 1948 war. I also have photos of the Lebanese UN ambassador Charles Malik congratulating the recently admitted Israeli envoy. Lebanon was a founder state of the UN, having achieved independence in 1943, and Malik was the youngest delegate and secretary of the Human Rights Commission led by Eleanor Roosevelt, and one of the co-authors of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
From a pro-western Arab country, when all other Arab countries were anti-western, Lebanon will, over the next few decades, decline from a prosperous, open, diverse and liberal country in which the Christians set the tone, into the cesspool of poverty, decline, backwardness and endless wars that the Muslims engineered as they gradually evinced the Christians out of effective power. For Lebanon's Muslims, the country was an anomaly since it was the only Arab country to be ruled by a non-Muslim and whose constitution did not include Sharia Law as the source of law. So they worked on destroying what the Christians had built, using every crisis, every war, every coup and every revolution around them to claw themselves into power and push the Christians aside.
In the 1950s, the Lebanese Muslims rode over the wave of Arabism (العروبة) and sided with Gamal abdel-Nasser of Egypt who wanted to force Lebanon into the short-lived failed union between Egypt and Syria.
In the 1960s, the Fascist ultra-nationalists of the SSNP (Syrian Socialist National Party, a party born the same year as the Nazi party and whose ethos was cloned off the German Nazi party. For details see: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html) attempted a failed coup in 1961 that aimed at unifying Lebanon and Syria. Then in the mid-1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded by Yasser Arafat. Having been evicted from Jordan during the bloody Black September in 1970 by King Hussein, the PLO headquartered itself in Beirut.
In the 1970s, Lebanon's Muslims rode the wave of the Palestinian Revolution and used the armed Palestinians as a militia with which to overturn the Christians, leading to the 1975-1990 war between the Syrian-Palestinian tandem and the Christians. The Muslims, the Sunnis in particular, sealed their victory in the Taef Agreement of 1989 (thanks to Saudi Arabia and its American handlers) with the transfer of the executive power from the Christian president to the Sunni Prime Minister. Having served to bring the Lebanese Sunnis to power, the Palestinians went back into their refugee camps.
Finally, in the early 1980s, and soon after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the Lebanese Shiites decided it was their turn. They hated both the Christians and the Sunni Muslims. Hezbollah was fashioned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley and began undermining everything the Christians had built and what the Sunni Muslims were retrieving from the Christians' legacy. The Shiites now saw the crushed Palestinian cause as their ticket to power. With the help of the perfidious Assad regime in Damascus and the Tehran Ayatollahs, Hezbollah violently evicted all remaining western presence from Lebanon and slowly took over the reins of power, not through constitutional changes or agreements or elections, but by military coercion. As you probably know by now, Hezbollah today is a more powerful army than the Lebanese army, it has blocked the election of a president and imposed an impotent corrupt caretaker government, and has monopolized decisions of war and peace. And this is how we are today where we are: On the verge of a major blowup between Israel and the pro-Iranian elements in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
But what about the Palestinians whose cause remains the incandescent fire across the region? Soon after the 1947 creation of the Zionist colony in Palestine, the ethnically cleansed Palestinians first saw themselves as temporary refugees who will soon go back to their homes. After all, there were several UN resolutions calling for their return and a special UN agency had been created specifically for the Palestinians - UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency). But with the Zionists refusing to let the refugees back, the failure to implement these UN resolutions, and the failure of Arab countries at ensuring their return, the Palestinians realized they had to assert their specific identity as Palestinians, and not just as some random Arabs. In the mid 1960s, they initiated their own liberation movements with the PLO as the federating entity grouping them all under one command structrue.
With no one in the international community paying attention to the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian cause, as is often the case with other occupied peoples trying to liberate themselves from their colonial aggressors (e.g. Vietnam, Algeria South Africa, etc.), the Palestinians resorted to violence and terrorism just so the international community pays attention to them. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, the Palestinians conducted endless acts of international terrorism (hijackings, assassinations of diplomats and representatives of Israel abroad, etc.). In contrast, there were very few such acts inside Israel or occupied Palestine proper. That early movement was secular under the banner of Arab nationalism and was primarily directed at securing recognition by the international community.
Ironically, as is always the case, the terrorism campaign paid off: By the late 1980s, the PLO had gained recognition as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and negotiations with Israel led to the signing of the Oslo accords in which occupied Palestine was granted some autonomy. It now had its own governing body, the Palestinian Authority, and cooperation with the Israeli occcupation was supposed to lead to independence at some time in the future. With Israel maintaining a tight grip over the autonomous Palestinian territories, the Palestinians realized that this autonomy was a lure and that the Zionists had lied. By continuing its illegal settlements inside the autonomous Palestinian territories and its repression of the Palestinians, Israel signaled that it wasn't really interested in granting independence to the Palestinians. Today's events are confirming this conclusion: Israel is now openly rejecting a two-state solution.
The disgruntled Palestinians had no option but to revert back to violence as a means to expose the Zionist treachery and seek their independence. Two uprisings (Intifada) took place: The first began in December 1987 and ended in September 1993 with the signing of the first Oslo Accords, which provided a framework for peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada began in September 2000 and ended in late 2005.
By the mid-2000s, it became clear that the Zionists had whatsoever no desire to see an independent Palestine alongside their Jewish-only supremacist Israel. The Zionists wanted to take all the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, evict and kill as many indigenous Palestinians as they can, and keep the rest chained as second-class bonded citizens to work the menial jobs that the superior Israelis do not want to do. The two-state solution that everyone keeps talking about will never materialize because the Zionists do not want an independent Palestine. Period.
Therefore we are condemned to a situation in which:
- The indigenous Palestinians will be maintained in a form of captivity by foreign settlers of the land whose claims are based on some toilet paper from the Bronze Age known as the Torah.
- Those Palestinians who refuse that fate will continue to resort of terrorism, since a negotiated settlement is impossible with the rabid ultra-religious Zionists. As long as Palestinians are condemned to living in bonded captivity by the Zionists, Israel is condemned to living in a state of war and fear.
- As a result, Israel will always seek the military advantage using various pretexts for war, like the chaarde of "ensuring its security". Imagine the absurdity in which the occupier and rapist of Palestine, the most hyper-militarized country in the region backed by the American superpower, continuously plays victim and demands that its own victim, the occupied and raped indigenous population, ensure the security of its rapist and occupier. Right now, Netanyahu has realized that Israel has lost the media war with his barbarity in Gaza. He will seek war to continue justifying Israel's savagery against the indigenous Palestinians. The argument of his prolonging the war for his own personal political survival is well taken, but it is in fact secondary to the grander scheme of seeking pretexts to continue the rape of historic Palestine and expand colonial Israel beyond any recognized borders. Israel does not have a constitution because having one requires it to declare its borders. Since it seeks expansion beyond what it already has, it will not declare its borders yet. Beyond the Golan, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it is eyeing southern Lebanon.
- In the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, Netanyahu's recklessness is pushing the region into war as a way to cover up for his barbarity. By dragging the region into war, there will be more sensational narratives and more actors (e.g, the US and others) than Gaza and people will forget the genocide. Given the cataclysmic potential of a regional war, the Palestinians are destined to go back to terrorism to keep their cause alive.
The international community should expect a double whammy from the Palestinians: Domestic violence (another intifada and a wave of terrorism inside Israel and occupied Palestine), and more critically, a wave of Palestinian international terrorism across the western world because the west remains subservient to the claws of Zionism despite the chronic Israeli violations of UN resolutions, human rights, repression and occupation of another people. It is one thing to keep saying that Israel illegally occupies Palestine and yet support Zionist savagery at all cost, but it is another thing to never do anything serious to force Israel to comply and bring this tragedy to an end. In that, the Palestinians and their supporters around the world see the West as an accessory and accomplice in the historic rape of Palestine. It is the West that perpetrated the Holocaust against its own Jewish population. Why should the Palestinians pay the price for a western crime?
Netanyahu is trying to drag the US and the West into a war with Iran. Iran has worked with the West on a nuclear agreement (JCPOA), but the criminal Trump was led by the collar by the Zionists to withdraw from that agreement, thus precipitating the region toward an inevitable war. The Americans don't want another war in the region because they always lose. Since WWII, the US has won one only one war (Kuwait 1991) and lost a dozen others (Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.). But the Zionists will use their victim-blackmail instrument to force the Americans into a war against their will. This instrument has worked like a magic wand with westerners since WWII, but it is increasingly losing its edge. It doesn't work as well with the newer generation, despite the continous brainwashing by the media and Hollywood, because of the exposure of the younger generation to alternative sources of information long occulted by the Zionist narrative.
Will the Americans fall in Netanyahu's trap? Perhaps yes in an initial phase during which the Americans will try to force a solution to Palestine on Netanyahu. But on the long term, the specter of a major Arab reversal against the West is not to be discounted, for the current love affair between the West and the Gulf states is mainly driven by fear from Iran. Once the Iran stalemate is broken, that fear will evaporate, and the West will be openly labeled an enemy.
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