By Never did I yearn to have the drawing talent of a satirical cartoonist more than these days as words can hardly do justice to the tragic black comedy the Arab-Israeli conflict has become.
The picture I want to draw today is of a mad circus with Sharon running a bizarre show of trained animals. In this number, Sharon, with his long hovering whip, orders Arafat to run after members of Hamas while sadistically preventing him from doing so by tying his feet together. When Arafat starts to run and falls down, more lashes come his way for failing to obey the orders to chase after Hamas. Of course, the whole spectacle has nothing to do with Hamas. The joke is being played on the ageing and helpless Arafat to humiliate and paralyse him.
Or maybe the setting would be in a bull ring with Sharon, the over-sized matador, teasing Arafat, the obliging bull, with Hamas as the muleta (red cloth). When the bull with the poisoned spears dangling from his spine is dared to aim for the muleta, the matador swiftly pulls it away to the cheers of the intoxicated crowds. The elusive red cloth was never the point, you see. The plan all along was to slowly exhaust the big fat bull until the matador could easily aim for the kill.
Endless images are flashing through my head. Of Sharon the safari hunter thinking of Arafat the prey, that got away in Beirut but now will not get away (a little unintentional rhyming there). Or a wood-legged Sharon the sailor holding an old grudge against a keffiya-draped Moby Dick Arafat, swearing to fish him out of the ocean, only for them to be drowned in the same violent storm. Add more variety to the cartoons with a Roman George W. Bush if you like, a ruthless but dumb-witted Caesar at the colloseum, cheering the Israeli lions as they savage the Palestinian gladiators, asking his aides why, unlike in Texas, this entertaining rodeo show has the beasts mounting the cowboys instead.
So dark and surreal is the current scene that mere words cannot do it anymore. But then again, I can’t draw a cartoon to save my life, so I will stick to writing.
I must say here that since the second Intifada erupted, an unprecedented volume of writings, possibly spurred by the internet, outpoured from all over the world, depicting America’s shameless double standards and condemning Israel’s brutality and colonial occupation. Now that Arab intellectuals and their friends seem to have been awakened, I strongly believe that they need to seize this new momentum of awareness and activism to pursue another equally crucial but inward-looking theme. I truly think that a parallel analytical effort is urgently needed to be vigorously undertaken to get our own internal house in order.
It is time that we as Arabs finally underwent a serious phase of self-examination and asked ourselves why our foes have been so much better than us in advancing their causes and achieving their goals while we consistently managed to remain mired in confusion and catastrophic incompetence. We need to understand why we have so miserably lost and they have so triumphantly conquered. We need to soberly ask how we got ourselves into this bottomless pit in the first place - or in the mad circus or the bull ring, for that matter.
Indeed, one of the greatest impediments to the advancement of Arab societies has always been our collective inability to identify and separate the three distinct elements of our division and backwardness as a nation: the cause, the problem, and the solution. We have constantly confused the three. In other words, if the Arabs are today the sick man of the world, as the Ottoman Empire once had been to Europe, then we do not seem to be able to distinguish between the sources of the virus causing our ailment, the diagnosis of the disease itself and its symptoms, and the treatment and cure, if there is any. What we have been unbeatably excelling at, however, is in name-calling the disease with all sorts of eloquent insults and diatribe.
A prime example of our flawed perceptions of our predicament is the way we have failed to challenge the fundamental fallacy implanted in our collective consciousness that Israel is the source of all our troubles - ignoring the fact that Israel is only a symptom of our chronic impotence, a mere manifestation of our weakness. Indeed, it is our simplistic acceptance of this enormous lie that has enabled military dictatorships to hijack entire countries, violate their people and plunder their resources for decades in the name of the higher noble struggle. We all found out of course, to our inconsolable expense, that there had been no struggle whatsoever, only an old-fashioned perpetuation of power and wealth, advanced on a platform of empty slogans.
Yet we still find among us those who have not yet fathomed the equation that we are our own worst enemies, those who continue to look for the blame exclusively at the doorsteps of Israel and America - because they lack the courage to look straight in the mirror. Sadly, these elements today represent the two main active opposition streams on the Arab political landscape, namely, the inheritors of the failed Arab national movements and their offshoots, and the much more influential and mushrooming Islamic movements across the Arab world.
Take first the disorganised remnants of Arab nationalists. Most of these people have not yet realised that there is not much point after more than 80 years to continue to nag and complain that foreign nations are giving us a hard time - if that is all we do. We need to snap out of it. Yes, Israel is a brutal occupying military bully and America is its faithful ally. Despicable situation, isn’t it? Granted, we have been regurgitating this fact for eternity. But have we yet grasped what kind of hard labouring by Zionists in Israel and in the West was accomplished during a whole century to achieve this state of affairs? Have we asked ourselves what we have been contributing all along, apart from the speeches and rhetoric, to counter this imbalance?
The anti-American agitators amongst us never cease complaining about the Israeli lobby in the US, but they rarely ever question why the Arabs, with all their wealth and resources, were unable and unwilling to play the same game of politics and develop a similar, if not necessarily comparable, presence in the US. They still do not comprehend the harsh rules of the game at which they were severely beaten, so they continue to shout foul from the spectators’ seats.
They will tell you that we must fight America because it will never allow us to rise out of our defeat. But why should we expect America or any nation to want us to do that? Since when do superpowers wish success for their subordinates and opponents anyway? Did America really want Germany and Japan to rise out of their ashes and become its main global competitors? Imagine what would have become of Germany or Japan if after the Second World War they adopted these Don Quixotian anti-American attitudes and kept crying over the humiliating conditions of their surrender - instead of silently working to rebuild their nations by decades of selfless sweat and sacrifice.
But our Arab agitators do not seem to appreciate what it takes for a nation to rise again, so they opt for the easy way out by continuously blaming the adversary for being just that, the enemy - without offering any realistic vision for the future. Thus has been their stance for too long; like a climber standing still and then blaming the snow for the avalanche. They are incapable of accepting that the gigantic industrial, technological and economic rift that separates us from the West - whom they seek to antagonise - cannot be bridged overnight and that the West will not be overcome any time soon. Yet all they have ever offered were recipes for military defeats and blunders, and you are the defeatist if you don’t agree.
Because most Arab nationalists today seem to be trapped in a paranoid mindset that the world is out to get them, they have loosely allied themselves with a far more delusional political group, the Islamic movements, the other symptom of our decaying civilisation and the most serious sign of the late stages of our affliction.
The story of political Islam is a long one, but I will start from one of their founding myths. The fundamentalists believe that the utmost overriding priority of the entire world is to destroy Islam - because the Islamic movements offer such utopian models for society that the West feels mortally challenged and must annihilate them before they spread prosperity and justice all over the world (this is not an exaggeration and is how all fundamentalists view the world). I hope to discuss the Islamic movements with examples and in more detail in a later article.
