Opinion | Columnists
Talk is cheap for George W. Bush
Over the past seven years of his presidency, he has shown a penchant for extravagant declarations.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:12 January 18, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Dwynn Ronald V. Trazo/Gulf News
A marathon it may have been, that official trip President George W. Bush made to several Arab countries recently, but it was also the most soporific yawner of them all.
For this lame duck president, with one year left in office and with the previous seven devoted to cultivating a cosy fellowship with Israel, talk is cheap. His seemingly seductive statements on the first leg of his journey in Palestine, about the need to "end" the occupation by Israel of Palestinian land, were not read by those of us who make a living figuring out the implications of political events, with the same scruple we muster for other world leaders. It goes without saying, surely, that the occupation of a people by another, especially where that occupation has lasted for four brutal decades, accompanied by a massive land grab where people were bled and whistled clean of their human rights, needs very much to end, if for no reason other than the fact that it is both in violation of international law and represents a morally bankrupt practice.
Billed as a follow-up on the "peace talks" in Annapolis late last year, Bush's trip, which also took in countries in the Gulf, elicited scant interest in the region. It is no wonder. The American president, with his no-holds-barred support of Israel, and his disastrous record of entanglements in our part of the world, possesses no capital, commands no trust and draws no confidence there.
Over the last seven years of his presidency, he has shown a penchant for extravagant declarations ("an independent, viable Palestinian state in 2006") that proved mockingly remote from the policies he actually pursued. Consider how, for example, in 2004 he all but agreed to the continued existence of the colonies that Israel had established in Arab East Jerusalem, thus severing the city from the West Bank and rendering the outcome of future negotiations over that putative state pre-ordained.
And now he tells us his administration wants to see these negotiations restarted - negotiations, mind you, that would determine the fate of that pitiful piece of land, a 22 per cent remnant of the Palestinian people's historic patrimony in Palestine, known as the West Bank and Gaza. And bear in mind the mayhem Israeli occupation forces bring daily in their sweeps, incursions and bombing runs, killing and maiming dozens of men, women and children. And that's on a slow week-end. Last Tuesday alone, four days after Bush left the Occupied Territories, the Zionist entity (yes, we have to resurrect that appropriate moniker, for no other will do) launched a pre-dawn raid into Gaza, involving troops, tanks and helicopters, leaving 20 Palestinians dead and well over 60 wounded. Military operations in West Bank cities are daily occurances, resulting in major casualties.
Bush's response to all this? Feeble at best. And when Zionist leaders pressed ahead with the construction of new colonies, and the expansion of existing ones, within days of Annapolis, his response was that "settlement activity is an impediment to success".
And we are supposed to respect, or take seriously, a political leader who criticises Iran for not adhering to UN resolutions while never mentioning that Israel has been brazenly dismissing them for decades? The very political leader who criticises Palestinian violence but never the 40-year-old occupation that triggers it? The very delusional leader (the delusion, in this case, born out of naivite)who would have us believe the tall tale, which he tried to sell while visiting the Gulf countries, that the Iranian people, our neighbours and brothers with whom for centuries we have shared the same history, the same faith, in the same locale, are our enemies against whom we should ally ourselves with Israel.
Arabs do not need to be embroiled in, or allow themselves to be suckered into, a geopolitical mess that Bush and the neocons in his administration have concocted out of thin air in order to confront Iran on Israel's behalf. We should know better than that.
Gaza carnage
Not that leaders of the Zionist entity in Palestine are less delusional and naive about their place, and eventual fate, in the heartland of our world. A commanding axiom in the life-work of virtually all philosophers of history, from Oswald Spengler to Arnold Toynbee, is the conviction that there is a close relation between the capacity of a society's leaders to respond to justice and that society's general fitness for humane existence. Khalid Mesh'al, the exiled chief of Hamas, a group I'm not here holding a brief for, addressed those leaders directly early this week, following the carnage in Gaza on Tuesday, when he said: "Palestinian blood being spilt by you will be your curse. It will not bring you security. It will not prolong the existence of your entity". The parlance may seem rhetorical, abstract and spiky, but one can see imbued in it a teleological spirit of history.
When someone who occupies the White House gets serious and comes visiting our capitals in the future in order to admit that, sadly, his country has been complicit, all these years, in the institutionalised sadism and the political bestiality that Zionist leaders have shown in Palestine, and he or she is there to make amends, we'll listen respectfully and cooperate fully. For otherwise, talk is cheap.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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