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Peres’s Coup!

By Dr Marwan Asmar

17 May, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Israel’s public relations exercise last week celebrating its 60th anniversary has to be seen a major international coup that will be remembered for a long time to come. It was about images rather than about who is right or who is wrong.

It was their anniversary and our Palestinian Nakaba, the Catastrophe of 1948, in which around 750,000 people were driven off their land to establish the Israeli state but that didn’t really matter. The world and people, like to believe in historical twists, ironies and injustices.

The Palestinian Nakba was passed as water under the bridge with the celebrations being for the strong of the world who responded cheerfully. The 60th anniversary was a coup masterminded by Shimon Peres, Israel’s crowning president who he says has been planning for such an event for the last 10 years so the high and might, the rich and the powerful, the brainy, the academic, and the scientist can join in a congratulatory event.

And they all came in droves with 13 heads and former heads of states and leading politicians to grace a state that has been created out of misery and on misery lead by US President George W. Bush, who spoke to the Israel Knesset with extreme fraternity and friendship, emblazoned by the Ehud Olmert hugs, the smiles, the warm handshakes and the endless commitments.

Former British Prime Minister and peace process guru Tony Blair was also there, no doubt to give the required push to the 60-year-old democratic wonder bouts of confidence and pats on their backs.

The occupation, the military rule, the sieges, the curfews and the stoppages, the knee-jerks to the Palestinians never really counted, they were peripheral. The West were now talking to the powerful giants, not to the political dwarfs. The lots and lots of American money who fund the Zionist state was never mentioned of course which would have upset the mint brand—Israeli is no monster, it’s a democratic wonder, a civil state, a state based on institutions with rights and obligations to the liberal Israelis, to the left, socialist, slightly right-wing, extreme-right-wing and those bordering on the fascists or neo-fascists.

Of course Palestinians and Arabs Palestinians who live in thank you kindly Israel, are either completely prohibited from such privileges or massively discriminated against, but tough they are not good citizens!

Israel is a wonder just the same backed by non-other than billionaires, capitalistic businessmen and past politicians who get a mantle and physical buzz, a twinge out of the extraordinary. Mikhail Gorbachev, the great visionary, a man who likes to be in these gatherings, as if somehow wouldn’t do to miss the celebrations. After all, if he had stayed away nobody would probably miss him! He managed to end the Soviet Union and the Cold War and joined by the once Cold War ideologue Henry Kissinger who in his early 1970s heydays used the international system as textbook case for practicing his theories of power-politics he would dish out to his students in the 1960s was among the flag carriers.

The invitees wondered, smiled, clapped their hands and said hooray to a new marvel that kills Palestinians by bombs, jets, tanks, machine guns provided willingly and with gratefulness, yes-sir--can-do, American money.

The 60th anniversary celebrations, and all with international backings, including one most important former Indonesian leader Abdel Rahman Wahib, who according to the Haaretz website attending, was made under the guise of Israeli firepower on the people of Gaza, and the endless siege of the Strip, while people, so-called important people, politicians and presidents, who want our welfare, just looked the other way, and choose to ignore the plight of the new Jews, the Palestinians.

It was a coup for Israel because it aligned its interests with the future of the world, putting its concerns for the next decades as the concerns of the world, whilst forgetting its own backyard, as it presumably belongs to the good countries looking for the future.

Thinking strategically forward is always good, and its no denying Israel has it all in terms of science and technology, in terms of thinkers and hard-workers, but its myopic and shortsighted. Its loosing on the population argument with fewer and fewer Jewish families producing less off-springs, it is losing on the migration argument as less and less people are coming into the country and more and more getting out.

By contrast it is the Palestinians who are once again wining the population argument although refugees in the strips of land that used to be their own country, and of the Arab population within itself. They are producing more and more children and good for them since they need to make up for those that are shot on a daily basis.

This will surely dictate by the end of the day. However since the world is on short-term modes, Israel can afford to be myopic and think in terms of tomorrows and short-term happiness but in the end injustice will not and can not continue.


 


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