No escaping the consequences of this war

Hasan Abu Nimah, Electronic Lebanon, 9 August 2006

"Israel may have the most on its post-war menu. The war has shaken the foundations of matters once taken for granted. It has underlined that Israel's security cannot be guaranteed by military superiority alone, even with unlimited support from a superpower. Even the growing trend, over recent decades, of Arab recognition of the Jewish state and the formal agreements with a few Arab states may now have to be gradually downgraded. Israel cannot expect the so-called peace process to move any further with so much more innocent Arab blood spilled by its new massacres in Palestine and Lebanon. The Israeli apartheid system has totally and finally disqualified itself from ever becoming part of this region.

Time is also running out for the Arab regimes who have for so long ignored the feelings of their people, building up layers of humiliation, anger and disgust as a result of defeatism, corruption, incompetence, hypocrisy and oppression. If they have managed so far to dismiss the rising forces of resistance and rejection as extremist trends of terrorism, this may not be possible any more. The victory of the resistance in Lebanon is going to change the equation drastically and it will gradually weaken Arab officialdom as outdated and defeated.

And for the so-called "international community," which trailed blindly behind the forces led by US and Israeli thinking, justifying all their injustices and rationalisations of lawlessness, it is time to realise that the victims of the prevailing chaos will not for long remain restricted to Arabs and Muslims, so easily demonised as "terrorists." The precedents tested on Arab and Muslim peoples and countries will soon be used elsewhere, and no one will be spared the consequences of America and Israel's, with European collaboration, undoing of all the achievements in international law and human rights since World War II. All of us must stand up to the horrors being committed in the name of this "war on terror," a war of the rich against the poor, of the privileged against the disenfranchised, of the white North against people of colour in the global south, if we are to stop the flames from leaping higher and engulfing us all."