Borders, Oil and Power and a bit of Israel-bashing

BBC World service Newshour Extra. The BBC’s Owen Bennett Jones hosted a discussion called “Borders, Oil and Power in the Middle East.” 

Newshour extra.  The blurb:

The map of the Middle East, established after World War One almost 100 years ago, is crumbling. Islamic State militants now control large parts of Iraq and Syria including the border region that divides the two countries, and their territorial ambitions have not ended there. Is Islamic State permanently re-drawing the map, or can the traditional regional powers retain their dominance? What are the consequences for the people who live within those borders and for control of the region's vast mineral wealth? Owen Bennett Jones discusses these issues with professors Fawaz Gerges, Rosemary Hollis, Sari Nusseibeh and Avi Shlaim, and John Hamilton, the London director of Cross-Border Information.

(Photo: A group of IS fighters in an undisclosed location in Iraq holding guns and wave IS flags. Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Colourful fashions sported by IS fighters, from l - r : 

Blazer and baggy pants combo accessorised with full-face kaffiyeh; khaki and stone baggy-pants look topped off with black full-face pashmina; nightie, tea-towel, sandals and AK- 47; combat ensemble and balaclava; black top-to-toe accessorised with bullet-belt and colour co-ordinated face-scarf; lounge suit, grey v-neck jumper and colour co-ordinated full-face kaffiyeh; flack jacket layered over hoodie, teamed with khaki low-crotch pants, full-face black mask and AK-47 

I.S. flags, black edged with gold-fringing: retro look inspired by granny’s velvet curtains.

Although I’m not qualified to evaluate the panel’s comments about the political journey that led to the current situation in the Middle East, I was sorry to see that three members of the panel are from the anti-Israel school of historians and lecturers.

Somewhat more realistic was  Palestinian Al Quds University ex-president Sari Nusseibeh, who ‘retired’ from his post last year, three days after masked supporters of Hamas marched through the Al Quds campus.  Sari Nusseibeh spoke of religion, politics and human values.

Sari Nusseibeh

At the time Tom Gross said:

“Mr. Nusseibeh should stay and show that he is the moderate that he purports to be, by engendering a spirit of tolerance and moderation among students on campus, rather than allowing military-style parades that encourage violence, and that other students, who simply want to study, find intimidating,” said Gross on Thursday. “Were he do to this, President Nusseibeh could play a significant role in helping create a better future for Palestinians and Israelis alike.” 

Fawaz Gerges is on the BBC’s speed dial, and has been known to assert that I.S. has nothing to do with (the real) Islam. He said Isis is on a course of self-destruction. “Once the dust settles you’re gonna see the collapse of this particular utopian project.”    

      

Rosemary Hollis is a professor of Middle East Policy Studies, City University. She analyses the concept of ‘narratives’ (Israeli v Palestinian) in a scrupulously “even-handed” manner, but is inclined to be more ‘even-handed’ about the Palestinian narrative than the Israeli one. She chaired a Chatham House Q & A  called:  “What next for the Middle East Peace process?” during which a question was posed, beginning: “I want to thank Professor Mekelberg (a panellist) for his very succinct summary of Israeli policy: grab more land, sit and wait. I’ve never heard it so succinctly summed up.” (Just to give a flavour of the kind of event Rosemary Hollis seems to involve herself in.)

Professor Hollis  questioned whether the western concept of nation states is as seminal as they like to believe. She said the Sykes Picot order should not stand.

Rosemary Hollis

Avi Shlaim  had more to say about Sykes Picot. 

“Britain made three irreconcilable promises, promise to the Arabs, Sykes Picot agreement to carve up the Middle East at the expense of the Arabs and The Balfour declaration. Palestine, the thrice promised land.” He opined that all the borders had remained stable except one. (Israel’s)   Avi Shlaim, as we already  knew, is in favour of the ‘one-state solution’, which he appears to believe, if implemented, would somehow bring about peace in the region. (albeit after thirty or so years.)

Avi Shlaim

Apart from an introductory statement by Sari Nusseibeh there was virtually no acknowledgement from Owen Bennett Jones  or the other three panellists of the irrationality of political Islam, so the discussion, in my view, was meaningless. 

What started out as a programme about borders (in view of Islamic State’s recent efforts towards obliterating them all to create a worldwide caliphate) gradually morphed into a discussion questioning Israel’s legitimacy via a rather complex, specialised exposition of the current state of the oil industry. 

All the speakers appeared to regard the Arabs, the Palestinians, various Islamist groups (bar I.S.) as rational beings, rather than religious, Jew-hating fanatics, many of whose  raison d'être is the ‘removal of Israel’ (or more specifically all Jews) from so-called ‘Muslim lands.’

Someone else’s what?

Honest Reporting warns us to watch out for certain ‘spins’ during Obama’s M.E. visit. Number one is: “Settlements are the biggest obstacle to peace’

We don’t have to look far. Here’s the BBC’s Yolande Knell.

‘Peace talks derailed with the end of a partial freeze on settlement building’

is the caption to the photo of storm clouds over (presumably) an ‘illegal settlement’.

It’s spin, and it’s misleading.  BBC readers might not realise that the peace-talks were just as derailed during Israel’s ten-month freeze on settlement construction as they were before and after it.

“The AP got the facts straight, however, noting that the Palestinians did not take advantage of the freeze during the ten-months” but nevertheless the Palestinians have managed to persuade Yolande Knell, the BBC and the rest of the world to regard settlements as the sole obstacle to peace, (or peace talks)  so we are forced to accept that this erroneous theory will prevail, while the real obstacles, both insurmountable and pernicious, are the rejectionist,  genocidal aspirations of the Palestinians.

Extensively quoting the words of ‘noted British/Israeli Avi Shlaim’, Knell presents a Palestinian eye-view of the tribulations of the I/P conflict. Shlaim is ‘noted’.  He’s noted as a prodigious writer on the Middle East. A writer on the Middle East of a certain kind. 

For example his description of Benjamin Netanyahu: 

“a bellicose, right-wing Israeli nationalist, a rejectionist… and a reactionary.” whose government is “the most aggressively right-wing, diplomatically intransigent, and overtly racist government in Israel’s history.” A government of “militant nationalists.” It “is in danger of drifting towards fascism.” He is “a jimcrack politician.” He is “the war-monger in chief.” 

Again, from JPost:

"In a 2010 edition of The Antonian, the newsletter of St. Antony’s College (Oxford), he wrote, in another brutal assault on Israel, that: “Netanyahu is like a man who, while negotiating the division of a pizza, continues to eat it.” 

He embellishes that image in the language used in a subsequent article-

“In the Independent op-ed, he said “He (Netanyahu) is like a man who pretends to negotiate the division of a pizza while continuing to gobble it.” ‘

It’s not topical, but Yolande Knell gratuitously quotes that mischievous analogy, and it’s not relevant; but she likes it, and she knows her readers will like it too. Pizza? What’s not to like. 

The side-bar uses a Shlaim quote too:

 "I'm a supporter of a one-state solution, not as my first choice, but as a default solution in the light of Israeli actions”

 "Avi Shlaim, an Israeli-British professor of International Relations and one of Israel’s so-called New Historians, has now come out in favor of such a solution." Continues Knell.  This was quoted in an article written in Haaretz in October 2012, so also not exactly breaking news, but useful for the BBC. 

Knell describes the phrase “two state solution” as:

  “ the snappy shorthand for a final settlement that would see the creation of an independent state of Palestine on pre-1967 borders in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem living peacefully alongside Israel.”

“Pre 1967 borders” is Knell’s snappy shorthand for  “1949 armistice lines” which do not represent any kind of territorial frontier but, at Arab insistence, were specifically defined as lacking any such status in the 1949 Armistice Agreement. “

To Knell, the “Islamists of Hamas” and ‘hawkish Israelis’ are two sides of the same coin. 

All the nitty gritty is towards the end of the article, when most readers will have lost concentration. 

Suffice it to say that the whole thing appears to be written entirely from the Palestinian perspective.  

It seems that Mahmoud Abbas fears that a one-state solution would eventually create an apartheid state. I was under the impression that  the anti-Israel movement already sees Israel as an apartheid state, but that aside, why would Abbas fear such a state when he proudly boasts that a Palestinian state would be “Jew-free’” That’s not very nice, is it Mr. Shlaim?

On a lighter note, I see that the last of the highlighted quotes is incomplete.. “After all these years of occupation and struggle and sacrifice, Palestine cannot be moved and placed in someone else's” 

Someone else’s what, I wonder? Answers on a homemade rocket-postcard please.

Update. Read Hadar Sela's analysis of Yolande Knell's article here (at BBC Watch.)