Pakistan and Palestine

By S.P.SETH

The alleged killing of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban tribal leader, has created rejoicing in the Pakistani establishment. And it has equally pleased the United States. Mehsud had united some fragmented Taliban groups, and created them into a force to be reckoned with.

He is said to have been the leading hand behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. And he also led his followers to unleash a reign of terror in the Swat valley, thus succeeding in creating a virtual state under the Taliban rule.

His death (from an American drone attack), if confirmed, is, therefore, a cause celebration. It will certainly create disarray among his followers. And there are reports that some of his lieutenants, aspiring to leadership, have started fighting among themselves.

Whether this will weaken the Taliban movement is too early to say.

The problem with such militant movements (like the Taliban and al- Qaeda) is that they derive their sanctity from some fundamental beliefs and religious interpretations, however erroneous. They believe that the God is on their side.

Therefore, despite some temporary setbacks here and there (like Mehsud’s reported death), they fervently believe that the divine nature of their cause is bound to prevail sooner or later.

However, the ferocity of the Taliban cause is frightening Pakistan’s middle and professional classes. The creeping Talibanization of the country is not only threatening their comfortable way of life, but is also becoming physically dangerous. This was dramatized with a string of recent bombing incidents in and around Lahore, regarded as the cultural capital of Pakistan.

These people (from the middle classes) would like to seize the initiative away from the Islamic militants. But they lack credibility because they are regarded as part of the country’s corrupt and venal establishment.

There is one issue where they can seize the initiative. And this is the question of Palestine where, across the board, (irrespective of class, sect and status, as is the case all over the Muslim world) people want to see justice done to the Palestinians.

But Pakistan’s middle class leadership (as elsewhere in the Islamic world) finds itself helpless because of the support for Israel from the Western world. And they are increasingly becoming irrelevant and marginalized by the Islamic militants, with the Taliban seemingly emerging as the champion of their religion and people against powerful forces.

The question is: what is it that makes Israel keep on using the bludgeon in Gaza and West Bank, whenever they feel like? The answer might lie in the psychology of the Israeli state. A letter recently published in the Guardian newspaper about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, signed by more than 300 British academics, put it this way:

“The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources.”

The letter goes on, “Israel’s war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons…”

Israel was created largely as a safe haven for European Jews who had continually suffered horrendous persecution wherever they lived in Europe. They were also subject to discrimination in the United States, sometimes bordering on hysteria.

The holocaust under Hitler was its worst manifestation.

Even during World War 11, when Jews were dispatched to concentration and death camps under Hitler, the allied governments were indifferent to their plight. Indeed, those fleeing such persecution were often received with hostility and put in detention camps.

Not surprisingly then that the United States and Europe welcomed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (anywhere but in their midst) to atone, as if, for having ignored their sufferings.

The idea of returning to their legendry original home, and the sense of belonging and security this engendered, was highly appealing to Jews all over the world.

The problem, though, was that the Palestinians who had lived in that land for whenever, weren’t considered worth consulting by all the external parties promoting the creation of a homeland for the Jews in their midst.

The Western countries, by now overwhelmed by the centuries’ old accumulative guilt of Jewish persecution, made more poignant by Hitler’s holocaust, found in the creation of Israel a convenient solution to an age-old dilemma.

The creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been the Zionist demand for many years. It was given some validity by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Balfour was the British foreign secretary at the time.

What it all means is that the Jewish state of Israel was foisted on the Palestinian people. And it resulted in the expulsion of many of them (some forced out, while others felt unsafe) to constitute a Palestinian diaspora refusing to accept the loss of their Palestinian identity.

With its preponderant military power and the occupation of more Palestinian territory following the 1967 war, Israel had hoped to create a fait accompli which the Palestinians would have no option but to accept.

But it hasn’t worked out like that, even though Israel was able to break Arab solidarity by signing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

Even the Oslo agreement of 1993, leading Yasser Arafat’s PLO to recognize the state of Israel, did not break the logjam. The building of more and more Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem to encircle and dominate the Palestinian territory, and thus effectively negate the prospect of a new state of Palestine, made any real progress virtually impossible.

At its core, the problem is with the psychology of the state of Israel. Because Israel was created in the midst of Arab opposition, it suffers from this deep sense of insecurity being surrounded by hostile Arab populations all around it.

And even with its preponderant military power and support from the United States and much of Europe, this sense of insecurity tends to surface all the time. Hence, Israel keeps making more and more demands on the Arabs and the world community to feel more secure, which is a never-ending process.

For instance, it wants Hamas to recognize Israel’s existence, among other things. But a similar recognition by the PLO under Yasser Arafat didn’t lead to any worthwhile progress towards a Palestinian statehood.

The Palestinians and the Arab world know for sure that the state of Israel is a fact of life, whether they like it or not. For Israel to nurse a perpetual sense of insecurity and to seek iron clad guarantees (non-existent in any situation) will only prolong its agony, and worse still, of the Palestinian people.

A strong power like Israel should work to win the goodwill of the Palestinian people by withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders. Which will immediately unleash all the possibilities inherent in the situation where both sides desperately need peace.

Only a spectacular initiative like this will eventually work. Only Israel can do this because it has taken away so much and can afford to be magnanimous.

In any case, nothing else is working and such an initiative might do the trick over a period of time.

Imagine how empowered the middle and professional classes in Pakistan and Islamic countries will feel to fight off the unrelenting propaganda of the Taliban and al-Qaeda which focuses, among other things, on the injustice of the Palestinian situation.