Yousef Ibrahim was the long-standing Middle East correspondent for the NY Times.
He makes some important points – some which you might agree with and others you won’t.
In reply to the question in his title, as far as Israel is concerned, I refer you to my two part presentation on Middle East Radio Forum, of April 5 and 19, 2009: “What Israel Does for the United States.” Visit the Archive Section of www.middleeastradioforum.org to listen to them.
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March 6, 2010
America should butt out.
What Did the USA Get In Return?
by Youssef M. Ibrahim
I agree with Israeli peace advocate Uri Avnery that George Mitchell, America’s Middle East peace envoy, should stop wasting his time and our American taxpayers money.
As an Arab-American , I disagree on everything else with my friend Uri.
Primarily, the notion that the USA ”owes” anything to the Palestinians, the Arabs or for that matter Israel is wrong. We tried for decades and succeeded in mediating two peace treaties between Egypt, Jordan and Israel. For that America is owed gratitude, but it has no further obligations to do more.
If anything, we overpaid Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel and continue to shell out $ 5 billion a year in aid to those countries, money that we should put to better use in America.
Furthermore, it’s patently false to repeat the empty refrain that unless the Arab-Palestinian conflict is resolved nothing else in the Greater Middle East– from Iraq to Afghanistan can be resolved. The problems of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan , indeed the whole Muslim world, have nothing whatsoever to do with Palestine or the Palestinian-Israeli problem.
Most Muslim people are fighting their own terrorists, their own illiteracy, their own corruption. Indeed many Pakistanis could not show you Palestine on a map, if they can read at all.
That Palestinian-Israeli conflict has lasted a 100 years, if you assume it began in 1917 with the Balfour declaration made by the British Empire to European Jews. There was no Palestine then and America had no involvement whatsoever with the issue of the Middle East. We do not have to babysit someone else’s problem. The Israelis have a democracy which unmasks their own corrupt people by free elections as we have seen numerous times. They take care of themselves. I find it amazing that everyone today mimics , without a moment of thought that America ”must” force Israel to do this and do that. Why?
If the Arabs want Palestine liberated, go ahead, liberate it. Why do you need America to do it for you? We do not want to be involved, but it is in the strategic American interest to Israel’s basic right to exist as a Jewish state. It is a crucial strategic ally in our war against terror. We do not have to agree with it, but we surely will never help the Arabs attack it. We have no further Middle East obligations than that. If anything the Arabs need us a lot more than we need them. Without US protection, most Arabs will soon be speaking farsi, or Persian, the language of Iran in a few decades. But should we care? I argue the answer is “no”. Iran is not an enemy of the US. And if it attacks Israel, the Israelis will bury it under 200 atomic bombs.
But Arabs do have a problem all right: It is called Iran. But any objective analysis would show that if Arabs and Iranians went at each other, the vital interests of the USA would not be affected.
Iraq and Iran fought an 8 year long war from 1980 to 1988: American interests were not in least bit affected. In fact we sold weapons to both sides.
The real problems facing the Middle East today are all local: They include several Arab-on-Arab and Muslim-against-Muslim conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria. They also include a feverish spread of Islamic terrorism within each Arab country and the widening of conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites.
None of these have anything to do with the USA– nor with Palestine.
Indeed the biggest Palestinian problem today and the for the past 40 years has been war among Palestinians themselves. Not only are Palestinians killing each other but most of their political factions have been ”hiring themselves out” as killers to other regimes: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen etc. In fact even Israel is using and funding it own Palestinian factions within both Hamas and Fatah.
When people like Avnery feel so much compasssion asking for pressure on Israel to help, they never tell us how to solve the other puzzle which is to get Palestinians to talk to other Palestinians. Today there are at least 9 various Palestinian armed groups– they include Hamas, the PLO, Fatah, Jihad Islami, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine and several other ”fronts” spread over 10 countries as far as Yemen and Iran in addition to Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.
In a political sense, the Palestinians have become the Arab world whores.
Mr Avnery and Jewish liberals never explain how to address this conundrum.
There is, too, the Palestinian-Arab problem.
One is with Egypt which is now defending its own borders against Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians of Hamas.
Then there is a conflict between half a million Palestinians who live in Lebanon and who went to war back in 1975 as that country still refuses to even let them work.
And there are another half a million Palestinians who live in Syria and have a problem with that country which refuses to give them citizenship. And then there are a million Palestinians living in refugee camps in Jordan and also went to war against Jordan in 1970 known as the Black September war led by Yasir Arafat against King Hussein.
Speaking as an Arab-American and more important, as a taxpayer in these USA, I do not want any more of my money wasted playing peace maker in the Mideast. The USA accomplished peace between two Arab countries and Israel. To help keep that peace, the USA agreed to pay a ”bribe” — or financial aid to Israel, Egypt and Jordan which so far added up to more than $ 150 billion since 1979 : $ 3 billion (with a B) to Israel per year; $ 2 billion (with a B) to Egypt per year since 1979 ; and more than $ 200 million (with an m) per year to Jordan.
And what did the USA get in return? Read and watch the Arab media.
Everyday, Al Jazeera, Al Ahram, the Jordanian papers and the UAE Television daily, Moroccon news, Algerian news agencies , all , call the USA the ”enemy of Islam” , the ” imperialist neo-colonial superpower” , a ”nation of infidels’’.
Americans Christians and Jews are regularly referred to — in every Muslim mosque every Friday– as as ‘’sons of pigs and monkeys’’ .
Save for Israel the rest of the Middle East is of no strategic value today to the USA. This id 2010 not the 1950s. In fact, we can strategically state that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not resolved for another 100 years, nothing at all will happen. Nothing at all expect a few more wars that do not affect US interests at all.
As for those Arabs — and Europeans — who so hate Jews and want Israeli wiped off the map, why don’t they do it, if they can?
We will be glad to watch who wins the next wars as we watched in 1956 , in 1967 and in 1973 in which Arabs lost more and more lands. If some folks think Israel was beaten by Hizbollah in 2006 , why do they not fact check that the Lebanese who did not think they won anything and watch their country being destroyed.
And if the Palestinians of Gaza think they humiliated Israel in the last invasion, why does Hamas not attack Israel again with rockets? They have been rather quiet ever since. Arab people should stop fooling themselves.
Israel is here to stay. The West , even the Europeans, will not allow any combination of Arabs or Iranians to cross a red line.
The Palestinians will continue to try and drag more Arabs into loosing war after war as they did with Egypt and Jordan, but in the meanwhile the only piece of land they will have left to negotiate an independent state is shrinking by the week. In the end, when Palestinians are ready to say yes, maybe in a hundred years, they may only be negotiating on a small national park outside the mayor’s home in Ramallah , the place where their current leader Abu Mazen lives. Uri, my friend, If the dispute has waited all that time — 2000 year plus– I do not see why we are in hurry. Your grandson can still write about it in 100 years. Relax.
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