The recent attempts by the US to liquidate Palestinian rights are nothing new. Israel has no intention to relinquish any part of Palestine for the Palestinian people to establish a State of their own. The Obama administration knew that, as did previous US administrations. Israeli assaults on al-Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa specifically are the latest in a series of events that clearly demonstrate Zionist intentions of stealing more Palestinian land. Whether US attempts would ultimately succeed in pressuring the Israelis to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the fact of the matter is that the Palestinian people have already lost all of Palestine to settler-colonialists.
Unconditional US support for the Zionist state in Palestine dates back to at least the 1950s. World War II and the ensuing Cold War dictated to US geopolitical strategy the establishment of Israel in Palestine. Israel has served as a good tool in the US arsenal. It thus far has disrupted and prevented the development of the Middle East region in a direction contrary to US and Israeli interests as evidenced by the 1967 June war, the 1973 October war, the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1982 Israeli sweep of Lebanon, and the 2006 US-Israeli war on Lebanon. More recently, intervention in Syria by Israel, the US and regional and Western powers have destroyed the country, but failed to destroy the Syrian state institutions.
The «creative chaos” that Condoleezza Rice expressed in the 2006 July war is currently in full swing across most of the Middle East. The Arab states have been incapable of facing the Israelis in their assault on al-Haram al-Sharif or imposing their own plan that calls for a two-state solution in Palestine. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have collaborated with Israel, the US and other Western powers to destroy the anti-imperialist resistance in the region. However, that resistance has thus far been able to prevent the US from achieving its main strategic goal of completely dominating the region.
US global strategy is designed to counter Russian influence from the Mediterranean to the Ukraine and from Moldova to the Chinese borders passing through the Central Asian countries. It is also designed to encircle China. It is not enough for Obama to visit East Asia to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific. The Middle East is clearly pivotal in this grand design.
A sine qua non for dominating the Middle East is to guarantee Israel’s military, economic and political superiority in the region. That goal would not be possible without liquidating the rights of the Palestinian people. However, the US faces intransigence from the Zionists themselves who have not yielded an inch as evidenced by the recently failed negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. On April 26, 2014 Mahmoud Abbas declared that Israel has violated all of the agreements the Palestinian National Authority had reached with the Israelis regarding negotiations, especially the agreements regarding the release of Palestinian political prisoners.
The US faces other major hurdles in the Middle East beyond Israel’s intransigence. The main regional states upon which it relies have been unable to help it reach its strategic goals: Thus far the Syrian state is still in place and registering battlefield successes. In Lebanon, US allies have been unable to dominate the political process despite regional and US overwhelming political and diplomatic support. It is unclear whether political instability in Turkey would wax or wane in the ensuing months. Not clear either is the direction that Egypt would follow after the upcoming presidential elections. Those were a few examples of what the US is currently facing. More disturbing for the US, however, is the anti-imperialist mass mobilization across the region. It appears that US expenditures on public diplomacy could not sugarcoat its practices on the ground.
In the face of all this opposition, the US has resorted to a multi-pronged intermediate strategy: (1) continue to push in its destabilization schemes in the hope that the Syrian state, for instance, would crack and fall; (2) negotiate occasionally, depending upon political conditions as happened in the Syrian case (Geneva II) and with Iran (the Five-plus-One negotiations); (3) compromise in certain countries such as Lebanon hoping that the situation would break out in its favor at a later stage; and (4) continue to improve the US position in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.
At the rate events are shaping up, however, the US has to entertain the possibility that some of its main allies in the region might not be as stable as it currently believes. The US had been bitten twice before in the case of Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Mubarak’s Egypt. In Jordan, the recent protests in Ma’an, supported quickly by protestors in Irbid, Karak and Tafeelah are but harbingers of dark developments. It is hard to predict which trajectory events in Jordan might take given the explosive nature of the political mix in those protests: Muslim Brothers, Salafis, nationalists and leftists. It is highly probable that the spread of protests would unleash a more devastating round of violence that could easily join the ongoing violence in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. It would not be wise to think that Palestine and Saudi Arabia would be immune to the spread of that violence.
Connecting galloping events in the Middle East with those occurring in the Ukraine and quickly turning our gaze to Obama’s tour in the Pacific, it becomes clear that the war danger is ramping up. Humanity has no interest in such a war; its fate is hanging in the balance.