söndag 1 augusti 2010

Inget samband mellan palestinakonflikten och andra konflikter

Det påstås allmänt att en lösning på konflikten mellan araberna och Israel skulle påverka andra konflikter positivt. (Bl.a har Martti Ahtisaari gjort sådana uttalanden) I följande artikel visar James Kirchick att saken inte är så enkel.
The Broken Link: What Peace Won't Fix
...The creation of a Palestinian state would not put an end to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. More importantly, it would hardly put a stop to the group’s destructive role in Lebanon, which has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with Lebanon’s own fractious confessional politics, the hegemonic impulses of the Iranian mullahs, and the shaky Assad dictatorship in Syria, which uses the chimera of “resistance” against the West to maintain its grip...

...But why would al-Qaeda—an organization that has killed far more Muslims than it has Americans (or Israelis, for that matter), and which seeks the overthrow of a variety of Arab regimes across the Middle East—care so much about an agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis? Yes, Osama bin Laden did mention Israel in his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, but it followed a laundry list of other grievances, including the presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia and continued sanctions on Iraq. And a survey of al-Qaeda statements in the years since has shown the cause of “Palestine” to be a passing concern, secondary to “crusades” like the international effort to help East Timor achieve independence from Muslim Indonesia. As Lee Smith, author of the excellent new book The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, has argued, the Israeli-Palestinian issue “is one among many conflicts [emphasis added] that plague this conflict-prone area, and so I see the Arabic-speaking regions in terms of intra-Arab clashes, or an Arab cold war, where regional actors—not just nation-states, but also regimes and their domestic rivals, in addition to competing sectarian groups—are warring with each other at varying levels of intensity.”...

...The recent obsession with linking the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian question to broader world peace might give one the impression that the theory is somehow new. But linkage is a myth that various Arab leaders and intellectuals have been pushing for sixty years. Today, the argument is merely a moderated form of the earlier claim (still widely held by Arabs, if not expressed by their leaders) that the very presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East would be “contrary to the Arabs’ birthright” and “only lead to trouble and bloodshed and probably to a third world war,” as a representative of the Arab League to the United Nations said in 1947. Today, with the existence of Israel a reality and successive Arab attempts to destroy it thwarted, the claim has been modified. Now it is the lack of a Palestinian state, rather than the existence of Israel itself, that is supposed to enflame the hearts of Arabs and Muslims from Marrakech to Riyadh to Lahore and everywhere in between. This much, at least, is clear from the history of linkage: the Arabs have learned which positions sell and which don’t. ..

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