Political Science: Middle East Questions - Essay Example

The Palestinian Question The origins of the Palestine-Israeli conflict lies in the British colonial government's decision to allow the Jews to build a separate homeland in the region inhabited by Palestinians. In 1917, after the First World War, the Balfour Declaration thus stated: "His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country". As the world peace was slowly returning in the wake of the Second World War, on May 15, 1948 came the declaration of Israel as the Jewish State. The UN adopted a partition plan and the United States supported it. This step was apparently taken at the instigation of the UK-based organization called the Zionist Federation but other reasons such as the Zionist armed militias growing attacks against the British establishment in Palestine are equally convincing. Whatever the reasons, the establishment of Israel infuriated the Palestinians who deemed the Jewish state as occupation of their homeland including that of their second most important place of worship, the Aqsa Mosque. The most revered place of Muslim worship is the Ka'aba in Saudi Arabia. The Palestinians and Arabs felt that it was a total injustice to ignore the rights of the majority of the population of Palestine. The Arab League and Palestinian institutions rejected the UN partition plan supported by the United States, and formed volunteer armies that infiltrated into Palestine beginning in December of 1947. Thus the formation of Israel in 1948, laid the foundations of a conflict which took the lives of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis but even more devastating was the diaspora of Palestinians who took refuge in neighboring Arab countries fleeing the conflict and the associated socio-economic problems. While Israel was recognized by the United Nations as a sovereign state with rights to self-determination, the Palestinians remained a tribe without any rights. "The Arab-Israeli conflict has been a persistent source of tension for decades, for example, but it has taken on new dimensions in the aftermath of the failed Oslo process and the recent explosion of violence that shows no signs of abating." (Bensahel et al, 2003) In fact, no sooner was the Jewish state announced that the region was engulfed in a war: as the British left Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia declared war on Israel. Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian began to invade the newly declared country. An armistice was soon reached with the mediation of the UN, but as the dust settled, Israel had conquered double the land it was originally allowed under the UN Partition Plan. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed under the leadership of hardliner Yasser Arafat with the aim of destroying Israel. The Palestinian National Charter called for the liquidation of Israel. Three years later, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan and Golan Heights from Syria. UN Resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal. This was followed sooner by the Yom Kippur war involving the Egyptians, Syrians and Israel. The signing of a peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1979 ushered in an era of relative peace. But three years into this era, Israel attacked neighboring Lebanon and conquered most of its land in pursuit of wiping out PLO fighters. In 1993, the Oslo Declaration signed by Israel and the PLO called for mutual recognition. Two years later, the Palestine Authority was established. In 2005, Israel evacuated Gaza and parts of West Bank occupied in 1949. In the wake of the September 11 attack, Israel and Palestine Authority reached a peace accord but it was never implemented. The Arab countries as well as the former Soviet Bloc, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) view the state of Israel as serving the interests of the United States in the Middle East. A nuclear Israel armed with the latest weaponry in the American arsenal virtually functions as a satellite state to keep control over the oil-rich Middle East. Thus, by extrapolation of this argument, one may be justified in asserting that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the pinnacle of the so-called clash of civilization, an idea propounded by Samuel Huntington. Gulf Crisis The origins of the Gulf Crisis date back to 1920. Under the San Remo Peace Conference of Allied Powers, Britain held the mandate in Iraq, then part of the vanquished Ottoman empire's velayats of Basra, Baghdad & Mosul. Five years later, the League of Nations Council demarcated borders between Turkey andIraq, placing the Mosul region in Iraq against the wishes of the Kurdish population which, incidentally, is culturally different from the Baghdad and Basra velayats. Thus the seeds of discontentment were sown and later on when Iraq's cultural differences with Iran became a source of conflict, Iran allied with Kurdish population against the Iraqi governments in Baghdad. More recently, in 1990, Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein's decision to invade neighboring Kuwait, which he claimed was the nineteenth province of Iraq, and the war waged by a coalition of thirty countries and backed by the United Nations to "liberate" Kuwait mark the beginning of the Gulf Crisis. As the war ended in a humiliating defeat of Iraq which also came under economic sanctions, the security situation in the Middle East worsened. Since the 1990-91 Gulf War was televised live, the effect on Muslims was negative leading to a new wave of anti-Americanism and hatred against the Western societies. It may be argued that the rise of Muslim armed groups also known as "terrorists" became inevitable given the unjust nature of the war in which a leader who represented the Muslim world was defeated and his defeat was "advertised" on television. The term "advertise" is more appropriate than the word "televised" because the Western corporate media received payments in cash and kind for running the show as a Public Relations exercise rather than as news based on high journalistic standards. Majority of those who followed the war, were not happy about it because it was an unjust war whose purpose was not removing Saddam Hussein but "fueled by billions of dollars of US taxpayer money, the "Iraq racket" after 2003 provided a feeding frenzy for corporations woven into the military industrial complex, including not just military and energy corporations but industrial, electronics, high-tech, communications, security, and prison corporations, all with their own foreign "contractors"-a legal nicety for mercenaries, by any other name-despite the desperate Iraqi need for jobs." (Smith, 2005) In 2003, The United States invaded Iraq-a weak, sanction-ridden and demoralized country on suspicions that its leader Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destructions and had links to the Al Qaeda. Both suspicions were proved wrong, but by that time the damage had been done. "A severe sanctions regime, originally meant to achieve compliance with ceasefire regulations, has now eroded the economy, the society, and the institutions of state, while Iraq's regional and international isolation has continued." (Friedman, 1998) According to media reports, as many as 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives during the last three years of occupation in addition to heavy damage to social infrastructure, governance, economy and military. Both conflicts involved Arabs on one side and the West on the other. In both cases the Arabs suffered defeat and humiliation. The two conflicts were apparently aimed at inflicting damage to Arab states. The dissimilarities are restricted to the nature of the conflict. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the belligerents never came face to face in a battle, Whereas in the Gulf crisis, US military was heavily involved. Unfortunately, the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in bringing back the pre-1948 status quo thus undoing the injustice. And to resolve the Gulf crisis, withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, lifting of sanctions and restoration of Saddam Hussein. REFERENCES Nora Bensahel, Daniel L. Byman; The Future Security Environment in the Middle East: Conflict, Stability, and Political Change, Rand, 2003 Robert O. Freedman; The Middle East and the Peace Process: The Impact of the Oslo Accords, University Press of Florida, 1998 Neil Smith; The Endgame of Globalization, Routledge, 2005 Magazine article; Behind the War on Iraq, Research Unit for Political Economy, Monthly Review, Vol. 55, May 2003, Gale Group Read More