Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: "Profeti" o gente che capisce?

From Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, it is now possible to
travel through the Middle East and not pass through more than one
country that still boasts a U.S. Embassy. In Amman, Jordan, the
embassy is a fortress. In Damascus the compound is one of the
smallest in the region. In Beirut, in Algiers and in Cairo, U.S.
diplomats live in virtual bunkers, traveling only with large armed
escorts. (Israel, of course, is another story.) However unpleasant
the rest of the region's regimes may be -- and the hangman's
dictatorship in Baghdad is by far the worst -- the startling fact
remains that today more than half the Middle Eastern land mass is
without U.S. diplomatic representation. Yet, incredibly, we are
asked to admire the United States' political "success" in the
Middle East -- and to have faith that the grotesque imbalance
built into the Arab-Israeli negotiations represents a just peace.
The unspoken truth is that U.S. policies, and the Arab leaders who
have endorsed them, are becoming ever more unpopular throughout
the region. But Western journalists rarely convey the depth or
seriousness of this failure. Instead, they paint a false but
glowing picture of "moderate" leaders moving together with the
United States and Israel toward a new regional stability. This Pax
Americana, which is founded on the Arab-Israeli "peace process,"
at its center, and the Iran/Iraq "containment program," at its
fringe, necessitates much deception.
True, the initial peace conference at Madrid in the fall of 1991
suggested that a just peace could be obtained for Arabs and
Israelis alike. Secretary of State James Baker repeatedly said
that a future peace would be constructed around U.N. Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the first of which demands
Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab land and "acknowledgment
of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political
independence of every state in the area and their right to live in
peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or
acts of force." President Hafez Assad of Syria asked for -- and
received -- a confidential letter from Baker repeating the nature
of the proposed deal: land for peace. On that basis, the Arabs
turned up at Madrid.
Yasir Arafat's secret negotiations with the Israelis, however,
effectively destroyed the trust that was built into these official
talks. For the 1993 Oslo agreement, while it claimed to be based
on Resolutions 242 and 338, undermined them. It allowed for an
Israeli redeployment in -- rather than withdrawal from -- the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. It contained no international guarantees. And
it fatally postponed discussion of the very issues that would have
insured real peace: the future status of Jerusalem, of Jewish
settlements, Palestinian statehood and the fate of the exiled
Palestinian refugees of 1948, who -- along with their descendants
-- now number more than 3 million.
Oslo allowed an all-powerful Israel, backed by the most
pro-Israeli U.S. administration in a generation, to delay the
timetable of withdrawals and begin to build huge new settler roads
across the West Bank, slicing up the still-occupied territory like
a salami. Arafat was repeatedly ordered to crush Islamic
opposition inside the portions of land he ostensibly controlled.
And, since the most crucial elements of this "peace" -- Jerusalem,
settlements and statehood -- were to be left to the end of the
"process," they could no longer be a cause of contention. Indeed,
the very "process" itself was used to legitimize what had been
illegitimate. The West Bank, U.S. diplomats were told, was no
longer to be called "occupied"; it was to be referred to as
"disputed" -- as if the Israelis had some claim in international
law to the tens of thousands of acres of Arab land that they had
seized and built upon after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Oslo
agreement, it turned out, was not based upon U.N. Resolutions 242
and 338. It provided an opportunity for the Israelis to
renegotiate those resolutions.
Most journalists went along with this fiction. When Jews tried to
extend a settlement in January 1995, for example, Jerrold Kessel
felt able to tell CNN viewers that the settlers "feel themselves
fully part of the landscape" and to refer in his report of January
16 to "heritage claims [sic] going back hundreds of years." No
attempt was made to explain that the Jewish "claim" had no
standing in international law and that the Palestinian "claim" was
not a claim at all but legal ownership of the land. By the same
token, anyone objecting to the "peace process" -- either the
Arafat variety or the Madrid version -- was treated as "supporting
terrorism."
By continuing this tendentious form of journalism into the period
of the "peace process," reporters helped to establish a
particularly dangerous trend: that of portraying Arabs as
intrinsically less trustworthy than Israelis at a time when the
Arabs themselves were being forced to accept what many of them
regarded as an unjust peace. The vicious Palestinian suicide
bombings of this spring were regarded as a direct assault on the
"peace process." In fact, they were retaliation for the Israeli
murder of a Hamas bomber called Yahya Ayyash. Those who live by
the sword -- or the bomb -- can expect to die by it, but Hamas was
maintaining a cease-fire at the time and the Israelis must have
known that the killing of Ayyash would provoke bloody revenge.
Like the Palestinians, Jordanians have shown little affection for
their own "peace." On the night of October 26, 1994, I left my
hotel in Amman to walk the eerily silent streets of the Jordanian
capital. A few hours earlier, King Hussein and Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin had signed a peace treaty in the desert at
Arava, watched over by President Clinton. For the first time in
almost half a century, Jordan was at peace. Its sons would never
again have to go to war. In any other state, you would have
expected the capital to explode with joy. And yet on that night in
Amman, not a soul left his or her home. The streets were patrolled
only by nervous and heavily armed security men, several of whom
demanded to know my identity when I strolled into the empty city
center. It was, in every sense of the word, an important news
story: "Peace Breaks Out: No One Cheers."
But no one reported it. On CNN, on the U.S. networks, on the front
pages of newspapers across the United States, there were identical
images of Hussein and Rabin shaking hands, of President Clinton
beaming with delight behind them. This wondrous extension of the
Pax Americana that already covered Egypt and the West Bank and
Gaza was a miracle that must not be disturbed by harsh realities,
especially those that might throw into question the very nature of
the peace itself.
The Jordanians' silence is understandable. More than half the
population is of Palestinian origin, and they saw all too
painfully how little the Oslo agreement was going to achieve for
their brethren on the other side of the Jordan River. The
Israeli-Jordanian peace also claimed to be based on U.N.
Resolutions 242 and 338. But the references to Palestinian
refugees in Jordan related only to U.N. humanitarian
organizations, and the frontier between Jordan and Israel was
recognized as an international border between both states -- even
though part of Jordan's border runs alongside the West Bank, which
is definitely not part of the State of Israel.
For both the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, the promises of an
economic boom have not been fulfilled. King Hussein could scarcely
have been surprised at the rioting that followed the ending of
bread subsidies this summer. Jordanians saw the monarch's desire
to placate the I.M.F. as another sign of their country's
humiliation at the hands of the West. Was not the Arab-Israeli
peace supposed to improve conditions for ordinary Jordanians?
It is extraordinary that the only two men to sign a peace with
Israel after the 1991 Gulf War, Yasir Arafat and King Hussein,
should be the only two men to have embraced Saddam after his
invasion of Kuwait. Even more incredible is the way we
journalists, in our euphoria at the supposed peace breaking out in
the Middle East, simply erased these recollections from our copy.
It is, of course, an essential act of memory cleansing. For
keeping the historical record intact would have raised the one
fact that has tormented and humiliated the Arabs since the "peace
process" began in Madrid in the aftermath of the 1991 U.S. victory
in the Gulf: that to make peace with Israel, and be embraced by
the United States, you must be weak, even discredited. The act of
signing thus represented, for both Arafat and King Hussein,
survival and resurrection. Their support for the Beast of Baghdad
was rubbed off the tape. Expletive deleted.
If forgiveness is bestowed upon those who sign up for peace on
Israel's terms, the other side of the Pax Americana is reserved
for Israel's enemies. Iran is to be economically isolated, Iraq to
be cowed into further submission by U.N. sanctions and airstrikes.
Syria, still on the State Department's list of countries that
support "terrorism," is threatened with military attack by Israel.
Sudan is isolated for its alleged support for "terrorism," while
Qaddafi's tinpot dictatorship in Libya remains under U.N. blockade
for its alleged involvement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
As the prospects of a real peace steadily fade away, cynicism and
suspicion take over. There is a real need, too, to find a
scapegoat for the increasingly probable collapse of the whole
process, especially after the electoral victory of Israel's
right-wing Likud Party -- and there is little doubt that the
scapegoat will prove to be Syria. Even before the Likud victory,
Shimon Peres had been setting up President Assad as a potential
fall guy, arguing that he did not want peace because he had
refused to accept the return of the Golan Heights in return for a
full peace treaty. In fact, Assad never turned down such a
proposal; the Golan was offered back by the Israelis with so many
conditional clauses -- an Oslo-style withdrawal by stages, of
which Assad was understandably suspicious, and a demilitarization
on the Syrian side that would, in Syrian eyes, have denuded
Damascus itself of any defenses -- that Assad could never have
signed such a deal. This did not stop Israeli commentators, and
their friends in the U.S. media, from rediscovering the Demon of
Damascus.
And so the Israeli pillar of the Pax Americana is ever more based
upon raw military and political dominance. When that other arm of
the Pax Americana -- the "containment" policy against Baghdad and
Teheran -- supposedly necessitated another strike against Saddam
Hussein's barefoot army, we got President Clinton's latest Iraqi
adventure. American retaliation for Saddam's military support of
the Kurdistan Democratic Party was presented, at least in its
initial days, as an act of firm leadership. Only after a week did
it become clear that, despite the flurry of cruise missiles, the
C.I.A.'s $100 million project in northern Iraq -- designed to
topple Saddam -- had collapsed, and the 1991 Gulf War coalition
had effectively disintegrated.
The Saudis and their neighbors were obviously far more worried
about their own domestic reaction to the U.S. airstrikes than
fearful of another invasion by Iraq's depleted army. Add to this
the growing belief in the Middle East that election success for
Israeli and U.S. leaders appears to necessitate bombing Arabs --
even if Shimon Peres's April onslaught in Lebanon went astray
after the Qana bloodbath -- and it's not difficult to understand
why Defense Secretary William Perry received so little
encouragement during his tour of the Middle East in mid-September.
The United States pays ritual obeisance to the idea of Arab
"sensitivities" without understanding what those sensitivities
really are. Arab distress at U.S. cruise missile strikes does not
spring from cowardice, nor from any secret admiration for the
ghastly Saddam. It comes from something far deeper, something
heartfelt and emotional about the very idea of Iraq. For Iraq
contains what no other Arab nation possesses: both water and oil.
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt have water but little or no oil;
the Gulf Arabs have oil but no water. By comparison, Iraq
represents a land of plenty, the ideal Arab nation whose naptha
means wealth and whose water means survival. And against this
paradise -- however mythical in the world of Realpolitik --
President Clinton has been sending his missiles.
And now, as the "peace process" dies, frightening signs of mutual
hatred and distrust between Jews and Muslims have emerged. Earlier
this year an article in Le Monde by a leader of France's Jewish
community was headlined "Islamist gangrene." On the opposite page,
a cartoon showed a Muslim imam with octopus tentacles emerging
from his cloak. In The Jerusalem Post an Israeli "security expert"
is quoted referring to "hundreds of Iranian-directed Muslim
maniacs...slobbering over the promised virgins waiting them in
paradise." In the Arab world, a new fit of Holocaust denial has
taken hold. Hitler's Mein Kampf has just been reprinted in Beirut
and has already sold out in the shops. In Cairo, Roger Garaudy's
Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne, which attempts
to throw the very nature of the Holocaust into question, has been
printed in Arabic for the first time. Garaudy himself has just
been officially received in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, feted by
Arab intellectuals in all three countries and greeted by no less a
figure than Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam in Damascus.
In this poisonous atmosphere, we are still, remarkably, being
asked to believe in the Middle East "peace process." The truth --
that it is dead and may even have been stillborn -- eludes us.
Arafat's physical survival has long been in doubt. The Hashemite
monarchy of Jordan, locked into a flawed peace, is looking
increasingly precarious. The Arabs, if not their dictators, have
understood this for months, which is why they give such a warm
reception to European leaders who warn of the demise of peace and
insist on the fulfillment of the U.N. resolutions that were
supposed to underpin the whole exercise. Yet the United States,
uncritically following Israel as usual, fails to grasp that the
most important foreign policy initiative of the Bush and Clinton
years is in pieces. Is it too late to go back and start again? Is
it possible at this critical moment to re-insert land-for-peace --
the return of all occupied land for total peace -- into the
negotiations? If not, many Arabs believe we are destined to suffer
years of growing hatred between East and West, and increasing
bitterness toward the United States as an uncritical ally of
Israel. At the top of the newly elected President's list of
foreign policy objectives should be five words: a new Middle East
peace.
Robert Fisk, who is based in Beirut, is the Middle East
correspondent for the London Independent.

 modo eccellente.
gli articoli sono lunghi per cui li leggero' con piu' calma prima di
commentarli.
Tuttavia mi pare che tu abbia dimenticato un terzo criterio, e cioe'
che gli assiomi rispecchino fedelmente la realta' (quello che in gergo
tecnico si chiama "dato sperimentale").
Ed era proprio questo il punto quando ho detto a proposito di un altro
thread che eri "acritico". Ovvero, non basta che il discorso sia
coerente con certi assiomi, ma occorre che gli assiomi siano "veri".
In logica si dice che "ex falso sequitur quodlibet", cioe' se le
premesse di un ragionamento sono false (in fisica: "non corroborate da
dati sperimentali", in diritto: "non supportate da prove") con un
ragionamento valido si puo' dimostrare qualunque cosa.
Quindi i criteri IMO diventano
a) Principi generali di metodo: eguaglianza degli esseri umani, evitare
spiegazioni semplicistiche
b) Verifica delle premesse: ovvero, raccogliere dati e testimonianze
che permettano di stabilire *quali sono gli assiomi*.
c) Deduzione di conclusioni dalle premesse, cioe' formulazione della
"teoria".
d) Verifica delle conclusioni.
Ciao
Riccardo

Ok, ho letto gli articoli.
Mi sembra condivisibile il fatto che l'Islam stia purtroppo diventando
il nuovo spauracchio mediatico per l'Occidente, che un po' alla volta
andra' a sostituire il comunismo ormai morente (e quindi non piu'
credibile come "minaccia").
Che questo sia l'obiettivo di un imperialismo congiunto US-IL mi pare
un po' meno certo.
Innanzitutto, non credo che Israele possa avere velleita' imperialiste,
avendo gia' problemi di gestione dei rapporti col "vicinato". Quindi,
se a certe fazioni israeliane puo' far comodo cavalcare
l'anti-islamismo emanato dalla destra americana, cio' avviene per pura
coincidenza di metodo, avendo comunque fini differenti (chi e' piu'
esperto di me su Israele sapra' eventualmente correggermi e/o
approfondire).
La tensione che segue gli accordi di pace, raccontata nel secondo
articolo, mi riconduce ancora una volta all'analisi delle
responsabilita' delle grandi potenze nell'aver determinato una
situazione instabile (tempo fa avevo citato una riflessione di Einstein
sul ruolo dell'impero britannico nel fomentare l'odio tra musulmani ed
ebrei in Palestina). Evidentemente il modello di pacificazione imposto
ai fini delle potenze occidentali non e' soddisfacente per nessuno
degli interessati.
Non ho capito pero' come c'entri la tua premessa sui postulati e le
conclusioni. Non ho visto in questi articoli un grande esercizio di
logica deduttiva, e non ho capito quali siano i postulati che li
rendano particolarmente validi.
Ciao
Riccardo

 articolo,
Veramente il secondo articolo non parla di tensione, ma di
un'inevitabile collasso che sarebbe sfociato, da una parte in una
repressione armata, e dall'altra nella degenerazione verso
l'irrazionalista' fondamentalista.
Direi che ci ha azzeccato con 5 anni di anticipo, purtroppo.
GT