The ‘Palestinization’ of Iraq
Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV will be on hand to record the ultimate image that Saddam knows is capable of igniting the Arab world into an ocean of fire: an American tank in the streets of Baghdad juxtaposed with an American tank in the streets of Gaza.
To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back “to defend their homeland” as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as “clean” and “quick” and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan.
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The street knows that all Arab regimes – from reactionary Saudi Arabia to relatively progressive Jordan – have failed. They have been incapable of achieving Arab unity and independence. They have been incapable of providing social, economic and technological development. They have been impotent in their promises to try to help liberate Gaza and the West Bank.
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One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. “We are all Palestinians now,” as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it.
Everyone here believes this is a war for oil. In nearby Jordan and across the Arab world the view is the same. Some suggest a second motive – Washington’s desire to strengthen Israel. Under one theory US hawks want to break Iraq into several statelets and then do the same with Saudi Arabia … Oil is the war aim on which all Arabs agree. While the Palestinian intifada is resistance to old-fashioned colonialism with its seizure and settlement of other people’s land, they see the Iraqi intifada as popular defence against a more modern phenomenon. Washington does not need to settle Iraqi land, but it does want military bases and control of oil.
When Ali Hammadi al-Namani killed himself and four American soldiers in a suicide attack near Najaf on Saturday, he put the final nail in the coffin of the “liberation” scenario of the Washington-London alliance. The invading Anglo-American forces will now have to keep all Iraqi civilians at bay, treating everyone as a potential suicide bomber – just the way Israel’s occupation army treats Palestinians.
Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi’ite city of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani issued a fatwa, calling on “Muslims all over the world” to help Iraqis in “a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our homeland”.
Yes, I openly advocate the very harsh punishment of paying 1-2 million people to move 30 miles, or about 1/2 hour on an air conditioned bus, to Jordan, a country that currently makes up 77% of “Palestine”, has the same language, religion, and culture, and it alreaday made up of a majority that call themselves Palestinians, and has a capital with 2/3rds Palestinian. I am a meanie. To pay for this movement, I call upon the several million Sephardim to sue the arab states for the money and property that was stolen from them.
Excerpt from an article by Sabri Jiryis, a well known Palestinian Arab researcher in the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, published in Al-Nahar, Beirut, on May 15, 1975:
“This is hardly the place to describe how the Jews of the Arab States were driven out of the countries in which they lived for hundreds of years, then how they were shamefully deported to Israel after their property had been confiscated or taken over at the lowest possible price. It is plain that Israel will air this issue in the course of any serious negotiations that might be undertaken one day in regard to the rights on the Palestinians. Israel’s claims are these: It may perhaps be the case that we Israelis were the cause of the expulsion of some Palestinians, whose number is estimated at 700,000, from their homes during the 1948 War, and afterwards took over their properties. Against this, since 1948, you Arabs have caused the expulsion of just as many Jews from the Arab States, most of whom settled in Israel after their properties had been taken over in one way or another. Actually, therefore, what happened was only a kind of “population and property exchange,” and each party must bear the consequences. Israel is absorbing the Jews of Arab States; the Arab States, for their part, must settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems. There is no doubt that, at the first serious discussion of the Palestinian problem in an international forum, Israel will put these claims forward.”
You could learn amazing things if you asked.