Opinion Sur
Cruel game in the Middle East: Everyone lies and fights with each other, but each and every one kicks, or worse, destroys, those below.
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For those who have a keen eyesight, it is not uncommon to observe that when someone lies, he must continue to lie in order to cover up the original fraud. This creates a whole structure of fiction. Lie upon lie: sooner or later the house of cards crumbles and it does so with a bang. And sometimes violently.
When looking at the political map of the Middle East, one can see a number of countries whose boundaries function “as if” they were borders between real nations. Actually, those boundaries were drawn more than a century ago in some cabinet of European colonial powers, between cigar smoke and the taste of cognac.
One morning in April 1920, France and the United Kingdom held a conference in a small town on the Italian Riviera—San Remo—with the aim of formalizing the division of the Ottoman Middle East. Paris would keep Lebanon and Syria, while London would take control of Iraq and Palestine, as agreed at the San Remo conference, held on April 19-26, 1920, exactly 103 years ago.
This division between the two great colonial powers of the time had been agreed four years earlier, in a secret meeting in which, with the consent of Russia, the Frenchman François Georges-Picot, and the British Sir Mark Sykes negotiated the now famous Sykes-Picot Agreement.
That spring week not only laid the foundations for the current borders of the Middle East, but also for many problems that continue today and are manifested in the current bloody war.
The boundaries were arbitrary: between invented countries, dismembered countries, imposed countries, and an installed country. With the passage of time, each invention took on a life of its own, erecting structure upon structure of fiction and crushing any resistance in pre-existing populations. That’s how they got to the present.
Today, ancient Syria pretends to be a country, but it is nothing more than a diabolical regime that reigns in a cemetery. Libya went from being the invention in the desert of a bizarre colonel to an area disputed by opposing tribes. Iraq also held a similar fiction under a harsh dictator until the U.S. military tore it apart. Today it is ungovernable. The very wealthy emirates have built cities like mirages in the desert: police regimes inside large, luxurious shopping malls. Saudi Arabia is a typical ancient feudal kingdom that uses the immense wealth of the underground to play “as if” it were a great regional if not global and “very modern” power. In Egypt, new pharaohs appear with depressing regularity[1], with biases similar to Ali Baba, “as if” the modern did not make a dent in the ancient, and with the silent complicity of the West. The only ancient and structured country – Iran – has fallen under the rule of a theocracy that crushes a modernized and complex society. From power, a bunch of misogynistic old clerics whip young women for their clothing. Their regime is bellicose and corrupt, but it acts “as if” it is pure and austere.
The other modern and well-structured society in the region is notably Israel, with marvelous achievements but based on an original imposition on a displaced population, and increasingly acting “as if” that native population did not exist[2]. Its political system—unique in the region—is a Western-style democracy that until now has functioned “as if” it had a constitution. But it does not have it and that is why the supposed constitutional guarantees are about to fall into the hands of a government full of extremists and opportunists. This authoritarian slip is resisted by large sectors of the civilian population. A perverse and unintended consequence of such a confrontation provoked by the prime minister (he acts “as if” he were a great statesman and not a thief and a bribe[3]) is the distraction and weakening of the state in the face of its enemies.
In the Gaza Strip, which is a large Palestinian concentration camp, a long-suffering population (and supported mostly by European and international humanitarian aid) is run by a terrorist organization “as if” it were a government protecting it[4]. In its founding charter, dated August 18, 1988, Hamas presented itself as an offshoot of the international Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine and declared that its members are Muslims who “fear God and raise the banner of jihad in the face of the oppressors.” The letter states “our struggle is against the Zionists, death to the Jews” and calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel.
In reality, Hamas uses the legitimate aspiration of the Palestinian people as a pretext to provoke a massive response from Israel, to damage that country’s prestige and bring about a change on the regional geopolitical chessboard. Their strategy is to sabotage the rapprochement between Israel and several Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. It uses savagery (copied from the manual of Daesh or misnamed Islamic State[5]) to portray Israel when it defends itself “as if” it were the only victimizer. It is a systematic and well-organized actor, which, although it is not a state, acts “as if” it were a power in the geopolitical game.
We could go on and on and on about how each one created and maintained their own invention. Above and behind these countries and their power elites is the geopolitical game of the great powers, which we could call real, although they too are addicted to fiction (but on a larger scale). Underneath are subjugated populations whose pain is whipped up into hatred by those above and those behind, who play with them like pawns in a bloody chess game. The mega-fiction that covers the whole is the assumption that “it is what it is,” that “everything is normal,” that it will always remain the same, in short: “as if” history were nature.
Under this horrendous “as if” many guilts accumulate, which lead me to say, with Eduardo Galeano:
From moles, we learned how to tunnel.
From beavers, we learned how to make dams.
From birds, we learned how to make houses.
From spiders, we learned how to weave.
From the trunk rolling downhill, we learned the wheel.
From the drifting log, we learned the ship.
From the wind, we learned sailing.
Who taught us the tricks? ¿From whom
Have we learned to torment our neighbor and humiliate the world?
Because behind the cold analysis in geopolitical matters, what counts in the end is the suffering of ordinary people: unnecessary suffering, unacceptable suffering, learned and constructed, inhuman but all too human.
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[1] The most recent is General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who overthrew the elected government of President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, in a coup in July 2013. The general has ruled the country with an iron fist ever since, using Egypt’s anti-terrorism laws to jail some 60,000 people, many without charge or trial.
[2] For a brief history, see the United Nations publication https://www.un.org/unispal/es/history/
[3] Israel’s attorney general has indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for corruption, in three separate cases including bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
[4] There are 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, locked up in a strip of land 40 km long, by 14 km at its widest, bordered to the south by Egypt, to the east and north by Israel and to the west by the Mediterranean Sea.
[5] The Direction of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass, by Abu Bakr Naji translated by William McCants, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
