Arab World Archives - Page 2 of 2

Arab World Condemn But Smotrich Not Listening!

CrossFireArabia
November 12, 2024

A call by Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to annex the occupied West Bank has drawn a wave of condemnations across the Arab world.

On Monday, Smotrich said he instructed Israel’s Settlement Division and Civil Administration to initiate the groundwork for infrastructure to “apply sovereignty” in the West Bank.

The Qatari Foreign Ministry called the Israeli minister’s call a “blatant violation of international law.”

A ministry statement denounced the call as a “dangerous escalation that would hinder the chances of peace in the region, especially with the ongoing brutal war on the Gaza Strip and its horrific repercussions.”

It called on the international community “to stand firmly against the occupation’s settlement, colonial and racist policies, and its repeated attacks on the Palestinian rights, especially its ongoing crimes in the West Bank.”

“The repeated Israeli statements that violate international laws and resolutions clearly reveal that the occupation is the obstacle to any efforts for peace and stability” in the region, the ministry said.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry decried Smotrich’s call as a “flagrant violation of international law and international humanitarian law.”

“The irresponsible and extremist remarks by a member of the Israeli government clearly reflect Israel’s rejection of adopting the peace option in the region,” the ministry said in a statement.
Jordan termed the Israeli minister’s call “racist” and “extremist”

It called Smotrich’s statements a “blatant violation of international law and the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state with sovereignty along the June 4, 1967 borders and its capital in occupied Jerusalem.”

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says he has ordered preparations to annex the occupied West Bank, hoping “2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” pic.twitter.com/qhPFTI8IDt
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 11, 2024

This June, Smotrich confirmed reports from The New York Times that he had a “secret plan” to annex the West Bank and thwart any efforts to incorporate it into a future Palestinian state.

In July this year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark opinion that declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land “illegal” and demanded the evacuation of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

According to the Israeli public broadcaster KAN on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to reintroduce the annexation of the West Bank to the agenda of his government when US President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

In 2020, Netanyahu planned to “annex” the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, based on the so-called Middle East peace plan announced by Trump in January of the same year.

Territories Netanyahu planned to annex at that time constitute about 30% of the West Bank. His plan, however, wasn’t launched under international pressure and lack of US approval.
International law views both the West Bank and East Jerusalem as “occupied territories” and considers all Jewish settlement-building activity there as illegal according to Anadolu.

Opinion

Religion, Nationalism, Middle East Style!

Dr Khairi Janbek
November 5, 2024

Dr Khairi Janbek

When you consider yourself as a member of the greatest group in existence, irrespective of its characteristics, it is only natural to assume that the values of this group are the greatest, and consequently, the only valid values which are permissible to hold.

However, we must not delude ourselves, because religion cannot be neatly put in the pigeonhole as a moral, or personal spiritual force, for the very ancient nature of organised religion has given it a powerful role in defining peoples personal and group identities,

in other words, religion plays a national as well as personal, moral, and spiritual roles.

Nationalist and religious identities are both manifestations of the need for belonging, as people have the basic need to belong, a need which can be expressed in inclusive or an exclusive way leading to serious consequences.

Dualism

In the context of the Arab world, dualism has ruled supreme, the choice has always been, either religion or nationalism, but Iran, Israel and Turkey, have managed to fuse religion into nationalism. Each one of those countries, reflecting on themselves individually, thought of themselves as great nations, consequently, this meant that great nations require great religions, and not only that, but their own perspective of their own faiths can only be the true path.

The Arab world till now, shows that religion and nationalism remain irreconcilable, which makes it difficult for the Arab individual to understand Iranian, Israeli, and Turkish societies.

In fairness however, one must say that, the reluctance of any Arab state to claim representation of Islam is very likely to bring severe opposition from both Islamists and nationalists.

Therefore by separating Islam from nationalism, the individual Arab state strengthens its own brand of legitimacy, and as we see, every Arab state is comfortable with the abstract notion of an Islamic Umma (greater nation) in as much as it is comfortable with the abstract notion of Arab Umma (greater nation).

Dr Khairi Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris and the above opinion is that of the author and doesn’t reflect crossfirearabia.com.

News

Gaza Genocide 1 Year On; Western Complicity, Arab Silence

CrossFireArabia
September 7, 2024

As the Palestinians approach the one-year mark of the Israeli occupation’s genocide in Gaza, the slaughter of Palestinian innocents and the ongoing blockade persist.

This relentless violence continues with the backing of western governments and unwavering American support, while the Arab world remains conspicuously silent.

Since 7 October, 2023 Israel has waged a war on the Gaza Strip ongoing war on the Gaza Strip killing nearly 40,900 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring over 94,200 and displacing over 90 percent of the Gazan population that used to be 2.2 million.

Opinion

Gaza Genocide Fails to Move The Arab Street

CrossFireArabia
August 21, 2024

The ongoing genocide on Gaza over the past 11 months have failed to move the Arab Street even one iota. This is an Israeli genocide but the Arab world continues to look on helplessly and hopelessly unable to fathom of what to do to stop it.

Despite the intensity of Israel’s war on the whole of the Gaza Strip since 7 October, 2023, and the consequent daily massacres perpetrated by the Zionist army, literally committed nonstop, the popular streets across the Arab world has largely been dormant, lethargic and ineffective, spectators to a deadly bloody match with vastly unequal partners.

Gone are the days…

People have been glued to their television sets, especially on Al Jazeera, stunned at the annihilation of Gaza by Israeli bombardment and missiles. But they have not been able to do anything except wonder in amazement at the scale of destruction of the Palestinian territory with men, women, children, toddlers, babies and infants standing alone to face the Israeli enemy only to be blown up to pieces.

Gone are the days when popular protest gripped the Arab world to-the-teeth and were a sense of nationalism, dignity, values and pride once held sway. This of course was not always this way.

https://twitter.com/GazaMartyrs/status/1826270375279288537

The pan-Arab street have always been ripe with anger and frustrations and political awareness of right and wrong expressed in almost daily demonstrations right from at least 1956 when Israeli, Britain and France carried their tripartite attack on Egypt at the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Then countries like Kuwait, Jordan and others took part in the protests against the three-country attack crying foul of neocolonialism and subjugation. But then was the period of the pan-Arab nationalist movement that grew up in Beirut and spread to other Arab cities in the wake of the fall of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.

No new dawn!

Despite statist policies and autocratic governments popular protests continued across the Arab world sporadically, whether in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with the central question being Palestine.

This culminated in the Arab Spring of 2011 when there was a new popular push forward and the promise of a new dawn across the region. With the economic squeeze increasing against the Arab masses Palestine was joined by calls for regime change and economic modernization to increase employment and lower the stinging rates of poverty.

Despite the fact that governments were brought down, here and there, starting with Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring – the great popular deluge of protests that was unprecedented in many ways – succumbed to the strong and powerful Arab state, together with its institutions, leaderships, bureaucracy and security apparatuses and military forces.

Whilst Arab governments were at first taken by surprise, they quickly recuperated, gained their power back and dominated the will of the majority and stomped the popular uprisings movement in their tracks; halting regime change there and then.

The popular Arab street may have erupted again in 2019 in particular in Lebanon, Sudan and Algeria but it once again failed in its demands to change the political status quo and reflected the dichotomies of awkward change. There was regime change in Sudan for instance, but the country degenerated into a civil war up till now with its power elites fighting each other over the seats of government.

Cool reaction

The present Gaza situation, and the Israeli onslaught on its people and resistance, must be understood within this context. The ebbs and flows of the popular street and its failure to change states, regimes and governments – starting from the radicals to the most conservatives – may explain why the present pan-Arab street is reacting in coolly to the present attacks on Gaza and which very quickly turned into a criminal genocide, in deed and practice.

People feel even if they continue to rally, and protests are continuing against the mass bombing of Gaza by countries like Morocco which has established a normalization deal with Israel, they will not be able to stop Israel from its daily war crimes in Gaza mainly because popular movements have limits. And that it is finally it is up to these states to make decision and pressure the United States and Israel to stop the genocide on Gaza.

It’s a strange situation with emotions dampened and cushioned despite the horrific images of babies cut to pieces, children dying in hospitals, women and men crying at loved ones and which have jam-locked the the social media. Growing daily statistics of the dead, buildings bombed, homes ripped apart have become just numbers regurgitated daily by televisions anchors or skimped through in newspapers and websites.

In this onslaught on Gaza, the apathy of the Arab street has reached a very low point – to the nadir because people are in a whirlpool of helplessness. They tried before and they failed and now these people have long become divided between poor and rich states in the Middle East region where consumerism and the high life has taken the better of them and where ideologies and nationalism are reduced to second place and where religion is interpreted differently.

This time around, the “popular world” erupted for Gaza, in Europe, across America, including in US university campuses and elsewhere like Japan, demonstrating time and again, against the genocide, but sadly this has not been the case in the Arab world.

Later on sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists would need to explain what happened this time around – almost total Arab silence against the Gaza genocide, why!