Steve Niva’s column is filled with the usual propagandist’s tricks, such as repeating old wives’ tales about Gaza as “the world’s most crowded patch of land” (it isn’t) or making grotesque analogies between Hamas and the Irish Republican Army (which, as far as I know, laid no claim to London or Manchester) or imputing Hamas’ violence to Israeli “occupation” (which ended years ago).
But, it also reminds us that in Middle East studies as in Mideast diplomacy, nothing succeeds like failure. In September 1993, President Clinton rewarded the world’s (then) leading terrorist, Yasser Arafat, by inviting him to preside over a state of his own. But Arafat, like his current successors in Gaza, showed far more interest in destroying somebody else’s society via bloody “jihad” than in building one of his own; the hideous effects of Clinton’s reward of terrorism are still very much in evidence.
Nevertheless, Clinton to this day is widely revered as a peacemaking wizard in Middle East affairs because he presided over this charade performed in the Rose Garden itself. Dennis Ross, a prime architect of the whole catastrophe, is now slated to be the lead man in President Obama’s team of experts on the Middle East.
Other stale bromides trotted out by Niva -- the “political” or peace process, land for peace, two-state solution, etc. -- have also been tried and failed, confuted again and again by Arab rejection.
When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, Hezbollah began its incursions and bombardments. When Israel withdrew from Gaza and expelled Gaza’s Jewish inhabitants, Hamas, entirely in charge of its own fate, did not set about the boring business of building the institutions of a civil society -- commerce, health care, public works, education -- but devoted all its demonic energy to pulling down the state of Israel.
The practitioners of Middle East studies have invariably been wrong -- wrong about the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Lebanese civil war, the less than perfectly democratic nature of Arafat’s regime and the threat of Islamic fascism.
Thus, Niva’s is a representative specimen of his academic guild in ignoring the obvious: It is Arab-Muslim hatred and violence that leads to occupation, not occupation that causes hatred; and the imperial threat in Gaza is not Israel, but the fanatical regime in Iran, for which Hamas is a proxy.
-- Edward Alexander, Seattle
