[WCUSP] Uri Avnery (Gush Shalom): "America's Rottweiler" (vs Iran's Doberman)

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

America's Rottweiler
By Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom

Saturday 26 August  2006

In his latest speech, which infuriated so many  people, Syrian  
President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that  deserves attention:  
"Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than  the previous one."

Of all that has been said about  the Second Lebanon War, these  
are perhaps the most important  words.

The main product of this war is hatred. The  pictures of death  
and destruction in Lebanon entered every Arab home,  indeed every  
Muslim home, from Indonesia to Morocco, from Yemen to the  Muslim  
ghettos in London and Berlin. Not for an hour, not for a day,  but for  
33 successive days - day after day, hour after hour. The  mangled  
bodies of babies, the women weeping over the ruins of their  homes,  
Israeli children writing "greetings" on shells about to be  fired at  
villages, Ehud Olmert blabbering about "the most moral army  in the  
world" while the screen showed a heap of bodies.

Israelis ignored these sights, indeed they were scarcely  shown  
on our TV. Of course, we could see them on Aljazeera and some  Western  
channels, but Israelis were much too busy with the damage  wrought in  
our Northern towns. Feelings of pity and empathy for  non-Jews have  
been blunted here a long time ago.

But it is a terrible mistake to ignore this result of the  war.  
It is far more important than the stationing of a few  thousand  
European troops along our border, with the kind consent of  Hizbullah.  
It may still be bothering generations of Israelis, when the  names  
Olmert and Halutz have long been forgotten, and when even  Nasrallah  
no longer remember the name Amir Peretz.

IN ORDER for the significance of Assad's words to become  clear,  
they have to be viewed in a historical context.

The whole Zionist enterprise has been compared to the   
transplantation of an organ into the body of a human being. The   
natural immunity system rises up against the foreign implant, the   
body mobilizes all its power to reject it. The doctors use a heavy   
dosage of medicines in order to overcome the rejection. That can go   
on for a long time, sometimes until the eventual death of the body   
itself, including the transplant.

(Of course,  this analogy, like any other, should be treated  
cautiously. An analogy  can help in understanding things, but no more  
than  that.)

The Zionist movement has planted a foreign  body in this country,  
which was then a part of the Arab-Muslim space.  The inhabitants of  
the country, and the entire Arab region, rejected  the Zionist entity.  
Meanwhile, the Jewish settlement has taken roots  and become an  
authentic new nation rooted in the country. Its  defensive power  
against the rejection has grown. This struggle has  been going on for  
125 years, becoming more violent from generation to  generation. The  
last war was yet another episode.

WHAT IS our historic objective in this confrontation?

A fool will say: to stand up to the rejection with a growing   
dosage of medicaments, provided by America and World Jewry. The   
greatest fools will add: There is no solution. This situation will   
last forever. There is nothing to be done about it but to defend   
ourselves in war after war after war. And the next war is already   
knocking on the door.

The wise will say: our  objective is to cause the body to accept  
the transplant as one of its  organs, so that the immune system will  
no longer treat us as an enemy  that must be removed at any price. And  
if this is the aim, it must  become the main axis of our efforts.  
Meaning: each of our actions must  be judged according to a simple  
criterion: does it serve this aim or  obstruct it?

According to this criterion, the Second  Lebanon War was a disaster.

FIFTY NINE years ago, two  months before the outbreak of our War  
of Independence, I published a  booklet entitled "War or Peace in the  
Semitic Region". Its opening  words were:

"When our Zionist fathers decided to set  up a 'safe haven' in  
Palestine, they had a choice between two  ways:

"They could appear in West Asia as a European  conqueror, who  
sees himself as a bridge-head of the 'white' race and a  master of the  
'natives', like the Spanish Conquistadores and the  Anglo-Saxon  
colonists in America. That is what the Crusaders did in  Palestine.

"The second way was to consider themselves  as an Asian nation  
returning to its home - a nation that sees itself  as an heir to the  
political and cultural heritage of the Semitic race,  and which is  
prepared to join the peoples of the Semitic region in  their war of  
liberation from European exploitation."

As is well known, the State of Israel, which was established  a  
few months later, chose the first way. It gave its hand to  colonial  
France, tried to help Britain to return to the Suez Canal  and, since  
1967, has become the little sister of the United  States.

That was not inevitable. On the contrary, in  the course of years  
there have been a growing number of indications  that the immune  
system of the Arab-Muslim body is starting to  incorporate the  
transplant - as a human body accepts the organ of a  close relative -  
and is ready to accept us. Such an indication was the  visit of Anwar  
Sadat to Jerusalem. Such was the peace treaty signed  with us by King  
Hussein, a descendent of the Prophet. And, most  importantly, the  
historic decision of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the  Palestinian  
people, to make peace with Israel.

But after every huge step forward, there came an Israeli step   
backward. It is as if the transplant rejects the body's acceptance of   
it. As if it has become so accustomed to being rejected, that it does   
all it can to induce the body to reject it even more.

It is against this background that one should weigh the words   
spoken by Assad Jr., a member of the new Arab generation, at the end   
of the recent war.

AFTER EVERY single one of the  war aims put forward by our  
government had evaporated, one after the  other, another reason was  
brought up: this war was a part of the  "clash of civilizations", the  
great campaign of the Western world and  its lofty values against the  
barbarian darkness of the Islamic  world.

That reminds one, of course, of the words  written 110 years ago  
by the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl,  in the founding  
document of the Zionist movement: "In Palestine, we  shall constitute  
for Europe a part of the wall against Asia, and serve  as the vanguard  
of civilization against barbarism." Without knowing,  Olmert almost  
repeated this formula in his justification of his war,  in order to  
please President Bush.

It  happens from time to time in the United States that somebody  
invents  an empty but easily digested slogan, which then dominates the  
public  discourse for some time. It seems that the more stupid the  
slogan is,  the better its chances of becoming the guiding light for  
academia and  the media - until another slogan appears and supersedes  
it. The latest  example is the slogan "Clash of Civilizations", coined  
by Samuel P.  Huntington in 1993 (taking over from the "End of History").

What clash of ideas is there between Muslim Indonesia and   
Christian Chile? What eternal struggle between Poland and Morocco?   
What is it that unifies Malaysia and Kosovo, two Muslim nations? Or   
two Christian nations like Sweden and Ethiopia?

In what way are the ideas of the West more sublime than those of  
the  East? The Jews that fled the flames of the auto-da-fe of the  
Christian  Inquisition in Spain were received with open arms by the  
Muslim  Ottoman Empire. The most cultured of European nations  
democratically  elected Adolf Hitler as its leader and perpetrated the  
Holocaust,  without the Pope raising his voice in protest.

In  what way are the spiritual values of the United States,  
today's Empire  of the West, superior to those of India and China, the  
rising stars of  the East? Huntington himself was compelled to admit:  
"The West won the  world not by the superiority of its ideas or values  
or religion, but  rather by its superiority in applying organized  
violence. Westerners  often forget this fact, non-Westerners never  
do." In the West, too,  women won the vote only in the 20th century,  
and slavery was abolished  there only in the second half of the 19th.  
And in the leading nation  of the West, fundamentalism is now also  
raising its  head.

What interest, for goodness sake, have we in  volunteering to be  
a political and military vanguard of the West in  this imagined clash?

THE TRUTH is, of course, that  this entire story of the clash of  
civilizations is nothing but an  ideological cover for something that  
has no connection with ideas and  values: the determination of the  
United States to dominate the world's  resources, and especially oil.

The Second Lebanon War  is considered by many as a "War by  
Proxy". That's to say: Hizbullah is  the Dobermann of Iran, we are the  
Rottweiler of America. Hizbullah  gets money, rockets and support from  
the Islamic Republic, we get  money, cluster bombs and support from  
the United States of  America.

That is certainly exaggerated. Hizbullah is  an authentic  
Lebanese movement, deeply rooted in the Shiite community.  The Israeli  
government has its own interests (the occupied  territories) that do  
not depend on America. But there is no doubt that  there is much truth  
in the argument that this was also a war by  substitutes.

The US is fighting against Iran, because  Iran has a key role in  
the region where the most important oil  reserves in the world are  
located. Not only does Iran itself sit on  huge oil deposits, but  
through its revolutionary Islamic ideology it  also menaces American  
control over the near-by oil countries. The  declining resource oil  
becomes more and more essential in the modern  economy. He who  
controls the oil controls the world.

The US would viciously attack Iran even it were peopled with   
pigmies devoted to the religion of the Dalai Lama. There is a   
shocking similarity between George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,   
The one has personal conversations with Jesus, the other has a line   
to Allah. But the name of the game is domination.

What interest do we have to get involved in this struggle? What   
interest do we have in being regarded - accurately - as the servants   
of the greatest enemy of the Muslim world in general and the Arab   
world in particular?

We want to live here in 100  years, in 500 years. Our most basic  
national interests demand that we  extend our hands to the Arab  
nations that accept us, and act together  with them for the  
rehabilitation of this region. That was true 59  years ago, and that  
will be true 59 years hence.

Little politicians like Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are unable  to  
think in these terms. They can hardly see as far as the end of  their  
noses. But where are the intellectuals, who should be more  far-sighted?

Bashar al-Assad may not be one of the  world's Great Thinkers.  
But his remark should certainly give us pause  for thought.



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