The Abrahamic Accords confront the Palestinian leadership, and Obama’s policy, with their failure
Over the decades, the Palestinians have systematically made alliances wrong and who is standing by their side today? The Islamist and revisionist powers Turkey and Iran, the two main reasons why the moderate Arabs have dumped them, to normalize their relations with Israel. The icing on the cake: the unsuccessful Obama policy of supporting Shiite and Sunni political Islamism, which contributed to the definition of the new Middle Eastern geopolitics. Biden should be careful not to start from that …
On 5 October, an important interview caused a sensation in the Middle East: it is the one granted to al-Arabiya by the Saudi prince Bandar bin-Sultan al Saud, former Saudi ambassador to the United States and former head of intelligence in Riyadh.
In his interview , the Saudi representative harshly attacked the Palestinians, brandishing their criticisms of Arab countries that have decided to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel as unacceptable. Prince Bandar bin-Sultan did not limit himself to this punctual criticism, but in fact disqualified the entire strategy set by the Palestinian leadership over the years. For Bandar bin-Sultan, in fact, the Palestinian one is a case brought forward by "lawyers" who have completely failed in their mission. A failure caused by the constantly wrong alliances that the Palestinians have chosen – starting with that of the Mufti of Jerusalem with Adolf Hitler and his adherence to the Nazi final solution. To then continue with the alliance with Saddam Hussein, against the Sunni monarchies, during the Gulf War (Saddam also launched missiles against Riyadh).
The interview with the Saudi prince confirms what is now known to those who look at the Palestinian question outside the usual ideological schemes. That is, the main problem of the Palestinian leadership has a very specific name: it is called narration. The idea that the Palestinian question is still open because "Israel does not want peace" is in fact a leitmotif by which the Palestinian leadership constantly washes its conscience, without addressing the historical failure that lies behind its slogans.
When the Palestinian question arose, let us remember, it was fully inserted in the Arab context and lacking the objective of making the region an independent state from other Arab countries. To put it bluntly, if Israel had never been born, today we would never have heard of an independent Palestinian state, but rather of a territory that would probably have been divided between the different Arab countries of the region. Things changed only after 1967, when the Palestinians began to realize that so-called Arab solidarity was fragile and not disinterested, and that pan-Arabism itself had begun its inexorable decline, in favor of another political degeneration: the Islam.
Therefore, to avoid failure in the near future, the Palestinians should begin to unhinge their own narrative. The first point to unhinge is the one that sees them heirs of inhabitants who have lived in the region for millennia and who therefore hold a unique historical right over the region. Nothing more false. Palestinians are the heirs of regional migrations (especially from countries such as Egypt and present-day Saudi Arabia). A truth recognized years ago even by Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hammad, when he said that "the Palestinians are a myth: in reality they are only half Egyptians and half Saudis".
Second, even more important, the Palestinian national question is mainly the result of Western intervention in the Middle East. Without this intervention, not only would Israel not have been born, but not even the very idea of a Palestinian state would have occurred to anyone. That idea, in fact, is simply the result of the failure of the negotiations between Zionists and Arabs allies of the British – or the Hashemites of Mecca – who in exchange for a large Arab state had accepted the Balfour Declaration and the birth of a Jewish national outbreak. in Palestine. When the great Arab state failed, the British – also respecting their agreements with the French of 1916 – played with regional borders, sending Emir Faisal to Iraq and his brother Abdullah to Transjordan (present day Jordan, a territory built right on one side intended for the Zionists). It is only from that moment that Westerners, not Arabs or even Palestinians, began to think of dividing the Palestinian region into two parts, in order to resolve the tensions that constantly existed between Jews and Arabs (the first important proposal for partition was that of the Peel Commission of 1937, accepted by the Zionists and rejected by the Arabs). For the Arabs / Palestinians, however, the only objective remained that of jihad to throw the Jews back into the sea. To achieve this result, as recalled by Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al Saud, not only the Palestinian Mufti Amin al Husseini allied himself with Hitler, but he supported with all strength the Axis forces and the Holocaust project.
After the Nasserian pan-Arab solidarity – with Sadat's coming to power in Egypt – the Palestinians began to receive the Shiite Islamist solidarity of the Iranian regime, together with the fragments that remained of "pan-Arabism", that is the Iraqi and Syrian regimes, ruled by the Baath in a national-socialist style. Again, the Palestinians deluded themselves that they could win the game by totally annihilating the "Zionist" enemy. They failed miserably, still making mistakes in the choice of their allies and starting the dramatic process of fracture that will lead them to antagonize most of the Arabian Gulf countries (Arafat sided with Saddam during the Iraq-Kuwait war).
A small space of peace opened up with Oslo, as a direct result of the end of the Cold War. With one hand Arafat held an olive leaf and with the other the machine gun. Eventually, in the war between the Palestinian factions, the machine gun prevailed. And while terrorism blew up Israeli buses, another Arab country signed peace with Israel: it was 1994 and that country was Jordan, not surprisingly led by a monarchy, that of Hussein, direct heir of Sheriff Hussein of the Mecca which fought against the Ottoman Empire in the Arab revolt of 1916 and father of Faisal, who in 1919 blessed Zionism.
With a long leap, we finally come to today: the new Palestinian refusal to support the agreements between Israel, the Emirates and Bahrain. The Abrahamic Agreements which received the Saudi blessing – in this the Wahaabites seem almost to have replaced by pragmatism the Hussein of Mecca, which they expelled in 1932 – and which could soon spread to Oman, Kuwait, Sudan and perhaps Morocco.
Who remains alongside the Palestinians today? The neo-Ottoman Turkey of Erdogan, supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood (ally of Qatar, isolated in the Gulf) and Iran, also an Islamist, albeit Shiite, who wants to wipe Israel off the map, just as the Palestinians wanted to throw Jews back at sea … What will Palestinians come from this support? Nothing, if not yet another failure. Turkey and Iran are the two main reasons moderate Arabs ditched the Palestinians to ally with Israel. Israel, with its resistance to decades-long Arab attempts to wipe it out, has managed to force moderate Sunni Arab monarchies to reflect, making it clear to them that the Jewish state is an integral part of the region. The icing on the cake was the unsuccessful Obama policy of supporting Shiite and Sunni political Islamism, which contributed most to the definition of the new Middle Eastern geopolitics.
In conclusion, the Palestinians now find themselves at a crossroads: they can think in their hearts that they can still throw the Jews back into the sea – with the help of Ankara and Tehran – or understand that even Erdogan and Khamenei do not believe this narrative. Or, Palestinians may choose to self-unhinge their own (false) narrative and embrace realpolitik , trying to save the savable. The difference between the two choices is only temporal: if the Palestinians unhinge their narrative by themselves, perhaps, after numerous refusals, they will be able to bring home some results. Conversely, if history still decides for them, there will be little left to save. It is not known when, but sooner or later Erdogan and Khamenei will go down in the memories of history. And even if their successors are worse for Israel, those will pass too. At the end of the game, as always happens, the States will remain: Turkey and Iran, two ethnically non-Arab countries, which historically and above all geopolitically have no reason to carry on a useless and harmful hostility towards the Jewish world and Israel.
The post The Abrahamic Accords put the Palestinian leadership and Obama's politics in front of their failure appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/gli-accordi-di-abramo-mettono-la-leadership-palestinese-e-la-politica-di-obama-davanti-al-loro-fallimento/ on Sat, 21 Nov 2020 04:12:00 +0000.