A Good Piece
By Alberto Cruz, CEPRID-Rebelión
"......Only one organization is applying the brakes now, in a hurry: the Arab League. But not to Israel, to the Palestinians. To Hamas. On June 16th during an urgent meeting of its Foreign Ministers, it said it was not going to get involved and would not favour either of the parties concerned, Hamas or Fatah. Now it is clearly doing so in favour of Fatah . The reactionary Arab regimes cannot let Hamas win. Mubarak's regime thinks that the permanent refusal of Hamas to recognise the State of Israel calls into question its own legitimacy as a leader of the Arab world and one must remember the close links between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, who control almost a fifth of the Egyptian parliament, despite being declared illegal, against whom repression is increasing, with dozens of its leaders and hundreds of its militants imprisoned. Egypt cannot accept a Hamas government on its border with the influence that might imply for the Muslim Brotherhood. That has been Israel's great victory.
We are going to see in the days ahead the reappearance on the table of the "Jordanian option" on the West Bank to give Abbas some stability and to revive the old agreement adopted by the Palestinian National Council in 1983 for a Jordan-Palestine confederation, on condition that the members of that confederation be independent States. Without ignoring the possibility that the Arab League may propose the placing of its own troops (that is to say from Egypt and Jordan) under command of the UN in Gaza. It was Abbas who made the proposal in his meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, on June 29th. A move that recalls very much what Karzai did in Afghanistan, Maliki in Iraq or Siniora in Lebanon.
Hamas obviously rejects both prospects. It will treat any troops as a force of occupation, with all that implies. Once more, other people doing Israel's dirty work. As in Lebanon. Hamas has the huge challenge ahead of feeding a million and a half people in Gaza. But the reactionary Arab regimes have ahead of them, the challenge of their own peoples who are not going to stand impassively by watching the degradation of Gaza and the famine of its inhabitants. For the moment a poll by the Palestine Information Centre on July 3rd shows clearly that if there were elections in the Territories, as Abbas has said he is prepared to carry out, 51.47% of the population would vote for Ismail Haneya and 38% for Abbas.
What has happened in Gaza is directly attributable to the pro-Western Arab regimes who have on their debit side a huge credibility gap with their peoples and downright failure every time they promote or revive any peace agreement, like the timid 2002 plan they felt obliged to get down from the attic after Hizbollah's victory in the war last summer (2).
And what happened in Gaza has a lot to do with the overall situation in the Middle East. Precisely now with the first anniversary of Israel's Last war in lebanon, the UN Security Council is going to discuss a report from the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon which accepts as valid Israeli claims on the supply of arms from Syria to Hizbollah. The despatch of "international experts" to "supervise" Lebanon's border with Syria is getting ever closer. International tutelage neo-colonial style in Lebanon. As in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the Palestine of Abbas."
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