Only World’s Muslims Can Save Palestine Without a Bloodbath

by Richard H. Curtiss

“I am building Har Homa next week, and nothing is going to stop me.”—Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, March 13, 1997.

“To the Palestinians, it looks as though Mr. Netanyahu’s idea of withdrawal is to give them patches of land in the West Bank—Bantustans surrounded by Israeli-held territory, shattering their dream of a real homeland. And meanwhile, as they see it, Israel acts to foreclose the discussions on Jerusalem that are supposed to be part of the final status talks under Oslo…Does Mr. Netanyahu understand how dangerous the situation is? Judging by his public reaction, he does not.”—Columnist Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 14, 1997.

After the U.S. vetoed a United Nations resolution approved by the other 14 members of the Security Council censuring Israel for its plan to build a new Jewish neighborhood of 6,500 houses at Jebal Abu Ghneim/ Har Homa, 50 nations, including the 15 European Union members, sponsored the same resolution in the 185-member United Nations General Assembly. The final vote on March 14 was 130 for the resolution criticizing Israel for annexing to Jerusalem the last remaining open wooded space in the area in order fill it with Jewish settlers to seal Arabs in the city off from Arabs in the West Bank. Only the United States and Israel voted against it, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained, and 51 remaining U.N. members did not take part.

Since only a Security Council resolution is binding, however, the overwhelming moral victory that singled out not only Israel but also the United States as pariah nations will not help the Palestinians. Nor will it thwart Israeli plans to continue to exercise control over all of Palestine, leaving 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem without industry, a port, an airport, international borders, jobs, human and civil rights, or even passports from a state of their own. In short, unless the world comes to their aid, over time the Palestinians will be left with no choice but to watch their children emigrate from the country of their ancestors, because it has become a land where neither Muslims nor Christians, only Jews, can make a living and live a normal life.

How did Israel seize nearly total control of foreign policy in the United States, a largely Christian nation where Muslims actually outnumber Jews? The Israelis poured money into giving the tiny but highly educated, skilled and affluent U.S. Jewish community leadership, discipline, a sense of special purpose in the United States and special recognition in Israel.

By contrast, American Muslims and Christian Arab Americans remain almost as divided and disconnected as the 45 countries from which most of them, their parents or grandparents have arrived. Leaders who have arisen among them in the United States are largely ignored overseas.

To determine how those countries, with combined populations totaling well over a billion people, one-fifth of the earth’s inhabitants, reached their current nadir of international political power, where does one begin? With the disastrous eight-year war between Muslim Iran and Muslim Iraq? With Saddam Hussain’s catastrophic invasion of Kuwait? With Yasser Arafat’s fatal partisanship for Iraq? With the resulting understandable but nevertheless short-sighted cutting off of Arab funds to his PLO? With his desperate decision to make a separate peace with the Israelis, even though their unwillingness to spell out its vague terms left the Palestinians, supposedly with more than a billion foreign backers, totally dependent upon the “goodwill” of their five million Israeli erstwhile enemies?

There’s more than enough guilt to go around. To debate what might have been, or should have been, is to postpone making the choices and changes necessary to end the Muslim cycle of defeat and demoralization before Palestine is lost.

The first concern of contemporary Muslim governments, like governments anywhere, is with their own survival. Therefore, if their principal fear is of an over-the-border invasion or of subversion from a Muslim neighbor, like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait or Iran’s persistent undermining of its Gulf neighbors, they necessarily become dependent upon outside powers. So much for Muslim unity of purpose.

A lack of mutual respect for national borders and national sovereignty can’t be vanquished overnight, but there is no reason not to begin dealing with it immediately by giving real teeth to permanent Islamic mechanisms for peaceful adjudication of disputes, and collective resistance to external aggression.

A Firm Basis for Unity

Such mechanisms, in turn, can be based upon the Muslim world’s most visible strength. The West says it was the Palestine problem that unified the Arab world. In fact religion, language and culture all provide a firm basis for the Arab world’s still incomplete but increasing political unity, and the strong sympathy the Arab states enjoy among other Islamic states from Senegal to Indonesia.

But the West is right in one respect. On the Palestine problem the entire Arab world, and to only a slightly lesser degree the entire Muslim world, is unified psychologically. The Kashmir and Bosnian problems have the potential to further solidify this psychological unity, which can readily be wielded as a political and economic weapon.

Suppose, to use a hypothetical example, that the Organization of the Islamic Conference had concluded during the siege of Sarajevo that Germany and the United States were playing constructive roles in seeking to preserve the Muslim-led Bosnian Republic, and that Britain and France were not. And suppose, when the OIC said this, more than one-fifth of the human race had, quite spontaneously, stopped buying British and French products, from luxury automobiles to tinned biscuits, and developed a preference for German and American substitutes. Suddenly lobbyists for all manner of special interests in the four affected countries would have swung into action—to strengthen the Bosnian policies of the U.S. and Germany, and to change them in France and Britain.

Are things normally that clear-cut? And are the Arabs or Muslims that unified on all questions? The answers, of course, are no and no. Right now, if Iraqis had a choice they would be buying Russian and French, and certainly not American products. The Iranians are buying anything but American, which they can’t get anyway. In Pakistan, however, consumers might be buying Chinese but not Russian products because of the complexities of those countries’ respective relations with India, and they might not be reluctant to buy things American at all.

On some, perhaps many, issues there is no clear Muslim-world consensus. But this year, and particularly on March 14, there was a resounding Muslim World consensus on the Palestine issue, and it agreed with that of all but two countries in the rest of the world.

The late Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, said he would fear the Palestinians when they learned to queue up for buses. By now they’ve come a long way past that. Witness the stand of all of the Palestinian women political prisoners in Israeli jails. None would accept the release promised by the Oslo agreements until all were released. For many, including wives and mothers, it meant an extra year and a half behind bars. But they stood together, and they won. So can all Muslims around the globe.

In fact consumer spending patterns in the Middle East already have been affected by the souring of the peace process that set in with the election of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel last May. Ask anyone in the U.S. tourism industry if 1997 bookings from the Middle East are up or down compared to 1994 and 1995 when the Oslo agreements seemed to be working.

If they’ve noticed as yet, they’ll probably tell you bookings are down because the dollar is stronger compared to European currencies. Maybe. In fact, however, oil prices are tied to the dollar, so U.S.-Middle East tourism should be up. But it isn’t.

Maybe if this year Saudis are deciding to take their families to see Euro Disney’s towers in France, or castles on the Rhine, or the gilded spires of Bangkok instead of Disney extravaganzas in Florida or California, they should tell Americans why.

The Arab boycott of Israel lasted more than 40 years. It didn’t hurt the Israelis as much as it was intended to, because the only things they make in large quantities for export are arms and souvenirs—neither of which the Arabs would have bought from Israel in any case.

But it was a mortal pain for any company trying to do business in the Arab world, and much of the ultimate cost was paid by the Arab consumer.

Now, as the Arab countries get serious again about at least the primary boycott, it will behoove them to keep it simple this time. Obviously they aren’t going to buy any products from Israel, unless the Israelis have a complete change of heart and let the Palestinians export their produce, their flowers and whatever else they can sell directly to the Middle East and Europe.

Equally obviously the Arabs aren’t going to buy U.S. or European or Japanese cars, aircraft or other manufactured goods that contain components made in Israel. That’s a matter of basic self-respect.

But if U.S. F-16s are the best fighter planes for Gulf defense, or U.S. main-frame computers are the most efficient for use in Pakistani industries, who is hurt most if Muslim countries reject the best solely because its American?

Where Muslim economic power can become a much more potent and enduring weapon is in the normal play of economic forces. If automobiles, commercial airliners, diesel locomotives, pickup trucks, printing presses, school lunch boxes, gingersnaps or chocolate cookies are of equal quality whether they’re made in Asia, Europe or North America, however, why not let emotions rule?

There are huge numbers of people in Muslim countries who, as individuals, already are doing this. What’s important now is not just to tell other Muslims who already are or soon will be doing the same thing, but also to tell U.S. diplomats and journalists. It may even mean throwing exquisite Muslim courtesy to the winds and telling every American they meet why they’ve stopped buying American goods. Muslims already know what they’re doing, and why. It’s important that Americans do too.

What’s more, by now a clear majority of Americans who pay any attention at all to Middle East matters already sympathize with the Palestinians—and definitely not with the Israelis who elected Binyamin Netanyahu to end the land-for-peace process. Even many American Jews have reached this conclusion and have quietly dropped out of organized Jewish activities in support of Israel.

Most Americans realize that Netanyahu defied the United States as well as his Arab neighbors when he dreamed up his meaningless election slogan, “peace for peace.” Therefore most Americans are coming to realize that the reasons the U.S. supports Netanyahu in the United Nations are rooted in U.S. domestic politics.

Clinton has long drawn crucial financial support from the Israel lobby, and as the rising stench of corruption threatens to abort his second term, he desperately needs the media support it can provide. Similarly, Vice President Al Gore is almost a creation of the Israel lobby. He has no other power base.

If not many Americans can articulate this so clearly, few would challenge it. But it takes a while to get attention for the overweening injustice to the Palestinians from people living within the relative security of a superpower.

Most “ordinary” Americans, however, are by now uncomfortable with what the Israelis are doing to their Arab neighbors. But they rationalize that if the other Arabs don’t do much about it, why should Americans be concerned?

Bombs in the World Trade Center only generate American resistance. Attacks on Israeli civilians create American sympathy for the seeming underdog nation of only 5 million people. But coordinated and sustained economic pressure by a billion and a quarter Asians, Middle Easterners and Africans on 260 million Americans who need their foreign markets to sustain their standard of living may finally force some of them to think about the plight of the Palestinians. And when Americans start paying close attention, they’ll finally notice who is stealing which land from whom. They may even bring it to a halt.