Understand, my dear diaspora dwellers from this region, when you use “MENA” to describe it, whose terminology & agenda you are advancing.
Theodor Herzl, the Founder of World Zionism, wrote in 1897 in his diaries […] “a new Middle East commonwealth must be established in which the state of the Jews have an effective & leading position & a leading economic role & will be the centre (that is the state of the Jews is the centre) for the attraction of investments, scientific research & technical expertise.”
It was in October 100 years ago that the Great Arab Revolt, launched to form a united independent state from Syria to Yemen, ended with partitions imposed by Empire. Fragmentation of the people & land of this region is essential to maintaining Anglo imperial dominance.
In 1907, imperialist Britain called for forming a higher colonial committee of seven European countries. The report submitted in 1907 by British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman emphasised that the Arab countries and the Muslim & Arab people living in the Ottoman Empire presented a very real threat to European countries, and it recommended the following actions:
1. Promote disintegration, division, and separation in the region.
2. Establish artificial political entities that would be under the authority of the imperialist countries.
3. Fight any kind of unity – whether intellectual, religious or historical – and taking practical measures to divide the region’s inhabitants.
4. The establishment of a buffer state populated by a strong, foreign presence that would be hostile to its neighbours and friendly to European countries and their interests.
The report stated: “the danger to the West lies in the Mediterranean because it is the link between East & West, & where on its southern & eastern shores live one people (the Arabs) who control spacious territories teeming with manifest & hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilisations & religions. These people have one faith, one language (the Arabic language), one history, geography, & all the elements of grouping & association, in addition to their revolutionary propensities – (that is not a passive people or submissive people) & great natural wealth. No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another. If, perchance, this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation (Palestine) to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects.”
During the 2006 US/Zionist war on Lebanon, Condaleeza Rice, rebuffing calls for ceasefire said it was “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” & that “its time to say to those who don’t want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail.” In 2006 as they waged war on Lebanon (& lost) they said it was the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Now as they wage war on Syria (& are losing) they are talking about how they need “to build a new Syria.”
Empire’s plan is to continue “constructive chaos”, arming & funding all the different “sides” until it births their “new Middle East.” The birth was aborted by the resistance axis’ defeat of “Israel” in 2006. The British-Zionist “Middle East” project evolved into the US-Zionist “new Middle East” project.
They strangle Gaza so that it will submit to their plans for a “new Middle East,” Gaza, Palestine, Bilad Asham is full of people with dignity and honour, and besieged primarily to keep that from spreading. Zionists refuse to even just let Gaza live because they don’t want it to be an example of how resistance can liberate land from the occupier. They insist on punishing it to death, and so Gaza has no choice but to fight for its life.
The US is trying to set the entire region on fire & build its new Mcdonaldised Middle East on the scorched earth, our world is to be rubble so they can help Empire build the “new Middle East.” There will be a “new Middle East” without US hegemony soon.
In early 2013, Palestinian Freedom Fighter Leila Khaled said regarding the war in Syria “what was done to us is now being done to Syria… continue your struggle, unite, act in unity. Do not believe in lies. It is not the ‘greater Middle East initiative’ of the US that will shape the Middle East but only us.” There are people resisting the hegemony of the US empire, successfully, with every fibre of their being. The solidarity of people is stronger than the failure of kings.
It is therefore clear that “Middle East” (& its updated abbreviation “MENA”) is the terminology of Empire’s ongoing project to divide & conquer the Arab world (which can & has included non-Arab minorities who partake in & contribute to this meta cultural/national sphere).
15 years, 33 days
It’s not a coincidence that advocates for the balkanisation of Arab states repeat Zionist narratives & try to make Arabness foreign to this region. It’s a key tool of their divide & conquer policies designed to dispossess the people of their land & history. It was Dr. Ibrahim Frantz Fanon that wrote in his famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, “settlers’ work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to all possible methods for destroying the settler… let us admit it, the settlers know that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality.”
Arabs are as native to the Fertile Crescent as they are to the Arabian peninsula. It is imperialists & Zionists who pretend otherwise to fragment & divide our region so they can take our land. Responding to centuries of anti-Arab incitement in the West by disavowing Arabness is exactly what they hoped for & are getting from too many people ignorant of their own history. Arabness in Bilad Asham is ancient & predates Islam. Divorcing the Levant from Arabia is a political decision promoted by Western Empire & its Zionist proxy.
“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves,” said Frantz Fanon, preacher of the gospel of the Wretched of the Earth.
Too many native informants in the imperial core have built their careers pandering to these imperial narratives, attempting to breed the same self-loathing they have internalised, and even disavowing Arabness to escape from being included among those targeted for elimination. If we do not love & defend ourselves & each other we will forever be subject to this oppression, which is not limited to the Arab world but is a global phenomenon in need of global resistance, united against the US empire & its lackeys & tools & enablers.
Discussing how Arabism can be distorted & deployed by empire or other reactionary elements to persecute others is also necessary, but generalising these deformations & presenting them as the enduring legacy of these ideologies does no one any good, & it directly feeds into empire’s demonisation of Arabs & Muslims. Indeed that is one of the purposes for Empire’s creation of al Qaeda/Daesh & its support for reactionary Iraqi Baathists.
Ethnic identity is not a function of shared DNA. This notion is informed by experiences with Zionists who claim a Jewish birthright to Palestine based on DNA. The idea that Arabs are “colonisers” is used by Zionists to dismiss Palestinian identity and rights, leading some to argue Palestinians are genetically distinct from Arabs & merely Arabised, as if it is DNA that determines rights. It is necessary to reject that line of argumentation as reactionary. Arab is a panethnicity that is not determined by genetics but by culture, and Palestinian rights to Palestine are rooted not in a blood-based nationalism, but in a shared struggle to regain what was denied and stolen by an ethnosectarian blood-based colonising movement that was supported by Empire to dispossess & exploit. My brothers and sisters, what binds the Arab nation is not blood but shared language & culture & history. I am not interested in genetic arguments because I am not interested in the blood-based purity of the nation but in acknowledgment of its greatness in its diversity & openness. The ultimate goal of their strategy. being to demonise regional unity in order to exercise hegemonic control over this region. They believe unity to be the greatest threat to their power, so they do their best to delegitimise it. This pervasive rewriting of history justifying land theft happens all the time.
The history & geography of our region is sliced & diced & tossed around to prevent us from understanding it. Internalising & justifying imperial strategy doesn’t help. We resist so our people can walk & till the land freely and proudly. The land & the people, the people & the land, need to be free to care for each other.
Despite imperialist attempts to undermine Arab unity, more than 80% of people in the Arab world see the peoples of the various Arab states as a single nation. The Zionist state was designed by the West to divide & conquer the Arab world. It has succeeded in physically distancing people of the region from each other, but has not undermined their affinity for each other. Indeed, despite more than a century of Western aggressions, threats, sanctions designed to force Arabs to capitulate to this usurpation of people’s land & rights, the masses remain conscious & opposed to normalising this injustice.
Zionism has always entailed the eradication of Palestine, the Oslo charade was designed to mask that intention, and now that the mask has been dropped again, things are much clearer.
They want to normalise Zealots of Imperialism’s Ongoing Nakba Imprisoning Several Million.
Empire will regret having miscalculated on Syria just as they regretted miscalculating the resolve & capabilities of the resistance in Lebanon in 2006. This is a historic moment, and the region has a real opportunity to clear out US terror forces if it is united, unity should be the priority of every anti-imperialist at this moment, and if for whatever reason you cannot support the resistance, as Sayyed Nasrallah once said during the 2006 war on Lebanon, at least get out of the way and let them take care it.
The Resistance Axis abides by ethics its aggressors ignore. While “human rights” groups bemoan the arbitrary nature of the unguided missiles of the resistance, what the Zionist state really fears is their ability to make accurate strikes because they know the resistance will use them to strike military targets not civilian ones, and the Zionist state does not exist to serve its citizens but rather to serve NATO’s needs for a forward base in a geostrategic region. Most of “Israel”s military installations are located directly adjacent to towns populated by Palestinian citizens, intentionally used as human shields to dissuade attacks by those in solidarity with them or have them suffer from such attacks. After missiles fell short of their target (a military installation in the Nazareth environs) killing two Palestinian children in the al-Safafira neighbourhood, the leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, apologized, hailing them as martyrs and promised the resistance would not attempt to hit such proximate targets again. The father of the children when interviewed by Israeli media at the time said: “we know who the enemy is & it is not Hezbollah.” 72 years of occupation cannot kill a people’s will, resisting & resistance always entails great sacrifices. Their blood drew a flower, drew the banner of revolution, a painter of fire, drew shame against Zionism and Colonialism.
The smell of fermenting melons lying unpicked in the fields filled the Galilee countryside during Harb Tammuz. Sweet & Sour… the smell of the Israeli state dying. 3/4 of a million Israeli Jews left their places of residence in the north of Palestine. Only Palestinians were left. Like a grace period from God, the 1948 war had been karmically reversed. There were no air raid sirens in Palestinian towns then, only the sound of the missiles hitting the colonies around them. Heavy thuds, at first one or two, by the end of the war, 20 or 30. Counting them as you would if you were doing a New Year’s countdown, and it is a countdown. There is not much time left for the Zionist state. 15 years ago, a 33 day war began that ended the illusion of the power of Israeli army. The goal of the war was the dismantlement of an indigenous political movement, or as Condoleeza Rice called them, an “unauthorized armed group.” The Islamic State, Daesh, Qasad, and the FSA contras are all authorised armed groups, the new proxy armies for imperialist objectives in the region that the Israeli State can no longer deliver. Some people believe Hezbollah to be a proxy of Iran & that Iran is a more dangerous threat than Daesh in this region; Zionists, Salafists, Wahhabists. Iran isn’t bombarding & blockading Yemen, starving more than 20 million people, or holding Gaza hostage.
15 years ago, the 2006 war on Lebanon began. The US & its Israeli proxy army were so sure they would defeat the resistance, how wrong they were. The liberation of south Lebanon in 2000 represented the first real defeat for Empire & its number one proxy in the region, a turning point. “A message to the Arab people, your brightness, dignity, and pride regained. People of Lebanon, of Palestine, people of my Arab ummah, the time for victory has come and the time for losses has come to an end,” said Hezbollah after the victory in 2006.
As Zionists walk through occupied Palestine unmolested, it is easy to believe the struggle has died and that Zionism has won. The Palestinian struggle for liberation is a long one, it has its ups and downs, moments of fatigue and reinvigoration, it should not be judged on single instances. It took 134 years for Algerians to end French colonisation, it may take Palestinians just as long. The real victory is that the Palestinian people still exist, millions insist on their identity and rights to their land against an outpost of the most powerful imperial hegemony in history. God willing, with steadfastness and perseverance, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
People’s Attestment to Life, Enduring Steadfastly To Insist on Noble Existence.
Ali ibn Abi Talib (as) said, “I will be patient until even patience tires of me.” Don’t get smug and comfortable, everything comes to an end one day. A lesson in patience from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, “the Truthful must be Patient:”
“The believers who are righteous and patient, in order for them to protect their honour, and what they have achieved, they must confront these difficulties and hardships. However, how do we confront these difficulties and hardships? We cannot confront them without being people of patience. And not of those who give up. People who are not overwhelmed by adversity, nor are they feared by war, nor do they become anxious when attacked, nor are they agitated by accusations, nor are they weakened by sanctions. Because this is life and what it holds within it is as Imam Ali [as] said: “Not even equal to the burp of a goat.” Because this life is as the Imam said: “It is like a day that is concluding.” This life that is finite and ending. We cannot abandon within it our responsibilities. Nor our duties, our struggle, our dignity, our honour, nor our positions of victory. For the sake of surrendering, submitting, humiliation, to be fooled or to flee from the battlefield. And we will end up in hellfire and we would have lost this life and the next.”
Patience And Love, Eternally Steadfast Triumphs, In Neverending, Ever.
Mahmoud Darwish said that ours is a land created for peace that has never seen peace. The indifference of sectarian Arab leaders in the Palestinian cause is only a result of Arab laziness and failure, they are people who are more interested in intimating the West and abandoning their heritage and the inheritance of their ancestors.
Empire uses every trick in the book to fracture our nations & create artificial statelets beholden to it. Injury upon insult, insult upon injury, piling up one on top on the other for more than a century. It has to be stopped. Zionism must end, the US empire must fall, so our people can walk & till the land freely & proudly. With our teeth, we will defend every palm spread of the soil of our homeland. Words won’t liberate land but they can create space for those who do & will. Hold onto hope, for without it there is nothing to struggle for.
