Middle East: Of Trump and nuclear buttons!
Incoming US president, Donald Trump, thinks he has a cure all for the ills of the country he is about to inherit. Respect for the United States, he believes, is top on America’s problems and this will not come without the big stick. Mr. Trump has therefore spoken of plans to embark on an aggressive nuclear race that will ‘force the world to its senses’. It’s all part of the incoming president’s idea of making America great again!
As a mark of how serious he is, Mr. Trump has put the United Nations on notice. The world body, in Trump’s estimation is an assembly of lazybones whose rules America is no longer going to play by. The tough talks came at a time the outgoing administration of President Barrack Obama caused a one-act-too-late stir by abstaining from a crucial UN vote to pressure Israel to accede to UN plans for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli crisis. The US abstention was the excuse the erratic Trump needed to serve notice that Israel could provide him the opportunity to trigger America’s nuclear arsenal. The world must braze up!
The Trump era is a return to the gung-ho years of American imperialism that characterised the administration of many Republican presidents. Mr Trump is going to dust and upgrade the infamous Monroe Doctrine. This time the doctrine will affect the entire world, not just South America which America considers its traditional sphere of in influence! Under Trump, the diplomatically correct language to speak to the world is to whip friends and foes into line. There are encouraging signs that the Middle East will be Mr. Trump’s main test.
For two decades, Israel created the impression that it was on the same page with the world on a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis. Then, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution in that direction which curiously turned the eyes of every hawkish Jew to red! Since then, the hawks in Tel Aviv have been running from pillar to post and calling on their unquestioning allies, to stand up to the United Nations.
As usual, unquestioning friends of Israel see nothing wrong with the Janus-faced stance of the Israeli establishment. The latest resolution, stiff-necked Jews and their friends argue, is a reward for enemies of Israel and a tonic for Muslim terrorists to continue their slaughter of Israeli civilians! The world continues to accept the depiction of Israel, the world’s surviving major colonial power as the victim and Israeli-occupied Palestine as the culprit!
The Middle East crisis is even given a religious undertone as a way of sending the world on a wild goose chase. In the search for the Antichrist, gullible religionists are programmed to look in the wrong place, the Muslim world, for the Antichrist! While the search goes on, the cause of the crisis is relegated to the background. No one is told that the state of Israel became a fait accompli by the letters of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and was only given a stamp of approval in 1948. No one tells the world that had Ben Gurion and his ultra right fellow travellers in World Jewry succumbed to the idea of a negotiated settlement, as the United States keeps telling the Palestinians, there would not have been a state of Israel as it is known today.
What Jews did ahead of independence in May, 1948, contradicts their untenable characterization as persecuted lambs surrounded by turban-wearing Muslim murderers. The Jews never conducted their independence struggle as a tea party because the seed of the independence struggle was watered with the blood of Jewish martyrs who killed and got killed! Even before WWI ended in 1918, right up to independence, the Jews conducted themselves like today’s ISIS and Boko Haram. Not even UN sanctioned peace mediators were spared by Israeli terrorists!
In fact, every Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups of today had their equivalents in the Israeli terrorist groups, Irgun and Zvai among others. It was the bombing spree of Israeli terrorists, more than any negotiated settlement, that forced the hands of the British, who exercised a United Nations mandate over Palestine, to accede to the creation of the state of Israel. In their quest for nationhood, Christian and Muslim Palestinians have so far proved to be good students of history by following the example of their Jewish cousins.
Like the Jewish cousins, Palestinians know too well that they have to water the seed of their own independence with the blood of Palestinian martyrs. They are aware that no amount of hours spent around conference tables in Geneva or New York will give them a home. They also know too well that if the early band of Zionist land-grabbers fell for the sweet talk of the West, their offspring would not be the lords of the manor of today’s Middle East and, in all probability Jews would still be homeless, like the abused and denigrated Gypsies of Europe.
Within the last two decades, the rogue state of Israel has forcefully ejected more Palestinians from their land, killed, maimed and impoverished many more and turned what remains of Palestine into a big prison! Judged by the unrestrained criminal land-grabbing policy of the Jews, what is left of Palestine will soon disappear if Palestinians choose to be sitting ducks! If Palestinians expect any manna, they have to fight for it; otherwise they have to wait till kingdom to come!
In the midst of the criminal occupation, however, successive occupants of the White House and their carbon copies in some European capitals, desirous of arming and sustaining a strong ally in the strategic Middle East, turn the blind eye and continue to delude themselves that the peace agreement is on course. It was this dishonesty that encouraged extremist groups in the Arab world, some of them trained by the United States to ‘contain Soviet expansionism’ during the Cold War years to grab the initiative.
Like his predecessors, Mr. Trump is coming with an agenda to hurt perceived enemies of Israel. Specifically, he has vowed to ensure the relocation of capital of Israel to Jerusalem! At the end of the day, Mr. Trump will be amazed at the failure of his agenda. Though he alluded to doing the needful when it comes to Israel, no one can tell how Mr. Trump will handle the disappointment arising from the failure without activating the nuclear codes.
What you can almost take to the bank is that the Trump era will not bring the much-needed Shalom/ Salaam the Middle East craves.
Magaji lives in Abuja and can be reached at < [email protected] >