Gulf Crisis, Palestinians and the Israeli Peace Camp

Abstract

For me, as a native of the region, the inability of the left to mobilize against a major US military offensive aiming explicitly to intimidate, dominate, and if necessary destroy an entire country of the Third World, is really, no surprise at all. It is very sad to say, but as long as the actual war and its horrifying terrors do not hit back home, the discussion on the left will remain theoretical and abstract. But it is distressing to hear voices on the left argue that the massive US military buildup in the Persian Gulf, dressed to kill, is politically correct and morally defensible, qualified only by the caveat that it should be done under UN auspices, or that the intervention should be supported because it is the correct response to prior aggression. This reminds one of the socialists in WWI, where, in the last resort, each European Socialism went to war for its own country's Nationalism. And while socialists here are suggesting that we are now achieving the normative consensus of post 1943, I would propose that what we are seeing instead, is the beginning of the undoing of the Colonial World Order following WWI, where the victors divided the Ottoman Empire among themselves, drew borders in the deserts of the Middle East, gave names to states they established and to nations they split apart and glued together. This was done out of their own political designs and for colonialist interests not only in the Middle East, but also in the Balkans as well as in other regions of the world. This renewal of anti-colonialism exhibits the historical perspective and political context of the present crisis, rather than, the whims and mental disorders of today's Saddam Hussein, yesterday's, Hafez al-Assad, and the villain of the day before, Muammar al-Qaddefi. To view all of this as a new world order being established on the part of the North and West toward the South and East is not a socialist perspective, at least not as far as I am concerned.