areski@deepthot.UUCP (areski) (04/03/88)
I received the following private message from gazit@ganelon : > In article <1136$deepthot.UUCP> you write: > >> For all practical >>purposes, Israel is now a nuclear power, and the Israelis will nuke their >>neighbours if they are REALLY threatened. > > >US will nuke nations on the other side of the globe if it is REALLY threatened. > >That's the way the world is. Don't expect Israel to be better than other >nations, fair treatment will be enough. > >Hillel gazit%ganelon.usc.edu@oberon.usc.edu > I am afraid gazit@ganelon is not getting the point. This is not ``talk.goodness.mideast''. The fact that Israel IS a nuclear power means that its 1948 borders are SECURE, and the Zionists have no right to use the ``secure borders issue'' --i.e. can't give land back, because this would make Israel insecure-- to camouflage their greed for Palestinian land and their hatred against Palestinian people, whom they have been happily bombing, shooting and deporting for the last 40 years. Due to its nuclear armament, Israel enjoys a level of security NO OTHER COUNTRY in the Middle East enjoys. The successful expansionist policies of the State of Israel are another proof of its military might. It also means that the military threat posed by PLO actions is negligible : they are ``war commercials'' to keep the Palestinian cause alive, at best. THEREFORE, the Israelis are in a position where they can afford to be ``generous'', and listen to the justified demands of the Palestinian people, the United Nations and everybody else. In fact, this would not be ``generosity'', but plain political wisdom and long-term strategic planning. Instead, the State of Israel sees itself as a Middle East Prussia, ( "Un Etat dominateur et sur de lui" as General de Gaulle once put it). Prussia has been very successful indeed, but if you look at a map, you will see that it has taken the Slavic people two centuries to get rid of it.
hijab@cad.Berkeley.EDU (Raif Hijab) (04/04/88)
In article <1136@deepthot.UUCP> areski@deepthot.UUCP () writes: > Arabo-islamism promotes a mythical Arab Nation, based on Islam, > and similarly ruthlessly fights, or suppresses non-Arab peoples > who happen to be under, or close to, Arab yoke : the Iranians, > the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, the Coptes in Egypt, the Anya-Nya > in Sudan, the Berbers in Libya, Algeria and Marocco. The fact > that some of those non-Arab people are Moslem (e.g. the Kurds > or the Berbers), or of the same ethnic origin (e.g. the Coptes, > who are Christian) does not help them a great deal : some Semite > Moslem Arabs can be selectively anti-Moslem or anti-Egyptian. > So, why couldn't they be selectively anti-semitic (against Jews) ? Areski is clearly well-meaning, but not well informed. There is nothing evil or ruthless about Arab nationalism per se. Its modern manifestation evolved in opposition first to Turkish domination and then to British and French colonialism. Today the demon which the Arab world fights is U.S. neocolonialism (via unpopular client regimes) and the soviet-U.S. competition for strategic dominance. Of course, the Arabs are also fighting their own backwardness, the threat to their traditional culture from Western invasion, and internally for social justice, human rights and democratic institutions. What Areski fails to note, in accusing the Arabs of repressing minorities, is how much the supposed Sunni Muslim Arab majority is repressed in most of the Arab countries. In Syria, the country is ruled by the Alawite minority, which ruthlessly oppressed Sunni fundamentalist opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, but has not, to my knowledge, targeted the Kurds in any way. In earlier regimes, Kurds have played a dominant role. The leader of the Communist party in Syria in the fifties was Khaled Bakdash, a Kurd. In Egypt, the Copts actually enjoy a privileged status and have access to all the centers of power. It is true that there is communal friction, encouraged by extremists of both the Coptic and Muslim communities. It is true that the uneducated masses have engaged in unsavory riots at times. This, however, is certainly not true of Egyptians as a whole, nor of any Egyptian government that I can remember. Including the Iranians among the groups 'persecuted' by the Arabs is ridiculous. The last time that Iran was under Arab rule was a long, long time ago, almost eight centuries since the formal demise of the Abbasid Empire. It is true that there are Iranian communities in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and the Emirates. These minorities have generally fared well, although there is a bias in favor of 'authentic' Kuwaitis, Bahrainis, Abu-Dhabians, etc. which other Arabs experience as well. Now to the problem of Iraq: At the present, there is a war between Iraq and Iran. It is an ugly war which I condemn without reservation. My sympathies are directed equally at the suffering of both Iraqis and Iranians. Iraqis of Iranian descent are probably persecuted by Iraq. Indeed, I have read that Saddam actually deported a large number of Iraqi citizens to Iran because that they were supposedly ethnic Iranians. Iraq has also persecuted the Kurds in the north, though not consistently. It seems that each time the regime felt threatened from the outside, it became more paranoid about the Kurdish 'threat'. But there are obvious reasons for the apparently schizophrenic Iraqi behaviour: It all goes back to the Sykes-Picot British-French agreement during the First World War, and the Conference of San Remo of 1920, which created British and French mandates in Iraq, Palestine and Syria. At the same time the Treaty of Sevres, under the influence of President Wilson's support for self-determination, called for a Kurdish state in eastern Turkey. This promise was never fulfilled. As drawn, the northern Iraqi border with Turkey, and the eastern Iraqi and Turkish borders with Iran, left the Kurds divided, with most of them in eastern Turkey, but with sizable minorities in northern Iraq and north-western Iran. Hans Kohn writes in his "Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East" (George Routledge, London, 1932), It was clear that the Peace Treaty of Sevres, which provided for a Kurdish State, was not going to be ratified... There could , therefore, be no question of uniting the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, especially as the Turks had no intention of granting the Kurds in their country autonomy or freedom to develop their national culture. (p.226) [Quoting a British-authored League of Nations Report, 1924] "Himself [King Faisal of Iraq] too far-seeing a nationalist not to recognize and respect the sentiment in others, he was ready to extend to the Kurdish provinces within the Kingdom of Iraq a full measure of local autonomy." (p.226) In surveying the Iraqi approach to the Kurdish problem, Kohn states, The solution to the Kurdish problem in Iraq is the sole example in Eastern States of an attempt to solve the minorities problem, in contrast to the efforts of Turkey and Persia to denationalize the minorities. (p.228) One must admit that the earlier successes of Arab-Kurdish coexistence in Iraq have met with several reverses. This was in large measure compounded by the callous use of the Kurds as pawns by both the United States and Soviet Union, which took turned supporting Kurdish insurgencies in a manner not very different from what happened to the Eritreans, as I mentioned in an earlier posting. Addressing the Shi'a dimension in Iraq, Kohn writes, The Shi'ah question is not a national question in Iraq. With the exception of a few Persian leaders, the Shi'ahs in Iraq are Arabs. In the years following the World War they stood side by side with the Sunnis of Iraq's national claims. (p.228) The problems of Iraq have been compounded by the following: 1. Iraq's borders were drawn to exclude the Arab areas of the district of Khuzestan, which Arab nationalists wanted to be a part of Iraq. A significant result of this, and of the fact that Kuwait was kept as an autonomous Sheikhdom under British protection, left Iraq with the narrowest access to the sea via Shatt-el-Arab. This was probably one of the reasons Saddam Hussein reneged on the 1975 Treaty with the Shah of Iran, which gave Iran control over half of the waterway. Strategically, that meant that Iraq's economic lifeline was to remain hostage to Iran's good intentions. 2. Iraq's richest oil fields are concentrated in two areas. One is Kirkuk, in the heart of the Kurdish provinces in the north. The second is around Basra on the Shatt el-Arab waterway in the south. Iraq feels vulnerable in both areas. There is no doubt that nationalist paranoia has exacerbated these problems, but the seeds of trouble were planted by the Allies in the First World War, when they imposed the present borders. The problem with the Sudan is similar. The Sudan was a British, and later an Egyptian-British, protectorate. Its main purpose was to provide continuity between Britain's military presence in Egypt and her extensive presence in East Africa. It was with this in mind that the British drew up the Sudan's present borders. The result was to attach the largely animist south with its thick jungles and isolated communities to the Arab and Muslim north. The modern state system, based on the principle of sovereign borders, demands of modern states a paranoid defense of their integrity, in the face of secessionist movements. This is not unique to the cases mentioned. Other examples abound elsewhere. Look at the tragic Nigerian wars, and the strife in Zimbabwe, where diverse tribal and ethnic groups are brought together in supposedly national states which often do not respect ethnic boundaries. Look at the Sikhs in India, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The temptation for the dominant group to get a bigger share of the pie is great. The temptation to brutally opress secessionist sentiment is even greater. The Arab states which face this dilemma recognize this. At times, they have tried to deal with their problems in a sensitive and humane way. At other times, regime instability and vulnerabilty has led to brutal policies. The essential problem, all along, has not been rampant nationalism as much as it has been the proliferation of undemocratic regimes, which have often oppressed everyone equally. > How long has one to wait before the Israelis Jews acknowledge that > the Palestinians are their equals in rights and dignity in Palestine, > and before the Arabs acknowledge the same for the Kurds, the Coptes, > the Anya-Nya and the Berbers in their respective lands ? Are Arabs and > Jews incapable of ethical universalism ? I hope not. Raif Hijab (hijab@cad.Berkeley.EDU)