Gaza: Where Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are partners

The Arabs’ problem has always been a very simple one: failure to understand that there is such a thing as a balance of power. One cannot build policies in isolation from the balance of power. Arabs have never understood the balance of power and its importance. They believe that bluster and sparkling orations can take the place in attempting to understand the meaning of the balance of power. In short, it is a crisis of the Arab mind which refuses to advance. The current Gaza war reveals the depth of crisis of the Arab mind. It is a crisis that has been continuing since before the creation of Israel in 1948 and has led, among other things, to tens of thousands of Palestinians leaving their towns and villages to find refuge in neighbouring Arab countries as they awaited Arab armies’ triumph over the “monster entity.” This triumph did not did take place. These refugees never returned to their homes and their land. There are still hundreds and thousands of Palestinian refugees distributed among camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank and until recently, Iraq. Palestinians - most of them, at any rate - have learned nothing from this bitter experience and others that followed in Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. They became convinced at certain times that victory over Jordan or Lebanon or Kuwait was a substitute for victory of Israel. Sowing the seeds of this illusion among Palestinians only serves certain Arab regimes that have found no way but to exploit their blood and their cause. On the other hand, Arabs and non-Arabs have not learned that they must desist from making promises to the Palestinians that are impossible to keep. There is, it seems, a determination among some Arabs and by the Iranian regime to deceive Palestinians and drag them into wars that are lost before they begin. In the absence of Palestinian awareness, some Arabs are free to exploit the Palestinian people to no end. The Syrian regime is quite adept at this and the skill has been inherited by Iranian regime which exchanges messages with Israel (being “the Little Satan”) and the United States (“the Great Satan”) using something called the Palestinian people and its cause card. The Palestinian people are not a thing, and neither is their cause. But what is to be done when the matter depends on camps that see them only as a card? How does one explain the murder of a Palestinian in Syria so easily for nothing more than being a Palestinian that refuses to be one of the regime’s thugs? In simple terms, the Palestinian people and its cause are no more than an Iranian card. The sad thing is that there are Palestinians who believe that Iran is on their side and that it will recover the Holy City for them. There are those among Palestinians now who believe it has become possible to depend on Egypt to enter the region in another way, whereas Egypt is in a world of its own with concerns to do with recovering from its deep political, economic and social crisis. Egypt has to first pay attention to the insane population growth and how to preserve Nike water, in addition to the situation in Sinai. There is an equation that sums up the regenerating Palestinian tragedy. It is an equation based on the idea that the Arab world has changed, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egypt is better than military Egypt, and that the intensely anti-Israel Iran is now present in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and other parts of the Arab world. Palestinians continue to dream that some Arabs and the Iranians will rush to their rescue. They do not know that the Iranian rockets they have is only a way for Iran to tell all parties concerned that it has the last word in Gaza and that it is only interested in Gaza from two angles and only two. The first angle is affirming that the nature of the relationship between it and the Muslim Brotherhood has secured the loyalty of some of these. Some Arabs thought they could contain the Brotherhood. After the latest war in Gaza, it is clearer than ever that that is not true in any way. The second angle is that the Arab bets, including Egypt, on the ability to return some Palestinians to the right path, are mistaken. There are Palestinians that cheer for the Lebanese Hezbollah - which is nothing but an Iranian Revolutionary Guard phalanx - because of its anti-Israel slogans, whereas its weapons are aimed at Lebanese chests. There are Palestinians who believe that the rockets launched from Gaza at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem will liberate Palestine, from the sea to the river, or from the river to the sea? Even worse, there are Arabs already waving the banners of victory, while Gaza was militarily defeated, is under a blockade and thousands of Palestinians are still out in the elements since the war of 2008–2009 in which almost 1,400 Palestinian were killed (most were civilians, women and children) whereas no more than 10 Israelis were killed, most by friendly fire. It is indeed the crisis of the Arab mind that refuses to understand that the upshot of this war is that Iran wants to tell the Arabs that it can also use the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve its own ends. It remains broadly the Arabs’ problem - specifically, the Palestinians’. Is the problem a cultural one? Is it caused by an education that has collapsed to such a degree as to make Arabs and Palestinians thing that the rockets launched by Hamas and others represent a deterrent force that will alter the regional balance? It is indeed a problem. There are Arabs and Palestinian who do not want to admit that it is not possible to liberate Palestine through Gaza and that Israel withdrew from there in the summer of 2005 to get a better hold on the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem. Can we tell the poor, miserable Palestinian, who cheer for the rockets fired from Gaza, that all this war can achieve is to divert attention from the crimes committed by the Syrian regime against its people? Can we tell all those concerned that Iran wishes to inform the world of its control of Gaza and that it can launch rockets at Israel whenever it wishes, and that the Muslim Brotherhood are not that distant and are at Iran’s disposal to use whenever they want, regardless of Egyptian and non-Egyptian influence in Gaza? What we are witnessing in Gaza now is not strange. There are Arabs and Palestinians who do not want to learn a thing from the experiences of the recent past. They do not want to remember that in Israel, there is an extremist government engaged in state terrorism and that the world is prepared to play the observing bystander before the crimes of the Israeli killing machine. Nothing can protect Palestinian blood except an independent Palestinian decision. That, at this juncture, means first standing up to those exploiting the Palestinian cause, and then being careful not to fall into the trap of escalating ideological puritanism that led to the defeat of 1967 after the Catastrophe of 1948. Can the Palestinians and some Arabs learn something from the Catastrophe and the defeat, or are they still placing their bets on the Conqueror and Victor rockets displayed by Nasser in Cairo before he entered his war with Israel? --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.