Dina Ezzat believes what she might have thought was truly unbelievable It is never easy to understand, or rather to fully comprehend, the way things develop in the Middle East, especially when it comes to the Arab part of this region where countries, leaders and peoples seem to be in a constant state of failed communication or worse. This week was no exception as the press offered some stories that must have left the reader with many question marks. The Palestinian scene was certainly rich with many strange developments. As the papers quoted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as saying he thanked God every day for the support the current US administration is showing all his schemes -- not excluding a plan to unilaterally draw the final borders of Israel -- the Palestinians seemed to be going too far with an internal dispute that is most ill-timed and even absurd. Again, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, which has failed to spare the Palestinian population from the many atrocities of the Israeli government, is conducting talks with Israel at the same time it is challenging, at times violently, the leadership of Hamas, the elected choice of the Palestinian people. And at a time when members of Hamas are being shot at by activist PA affiliates, the Palestinian police, the press says, arrested a senior Hamas leader for allegedly attempting to bring a huge amount of money into the Palestinian territories despite an economic crunch imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and a good part of the international community to punish them for voting for Hamas. Stranger still, members of the PA-affiliated Fatah chose to pre-empt an inter-Palestinian national dialogue by accusing Hamas of "not wanting a partnership and only focussing on power," quoting Fatah leader in the Palestinian parliament Azzam Al-Ahmed. Strangest of all is that Arab countries neighbouring the Palestinian territories are observing this disturbing inter-Palestinian fighting (despite its inevitable spill- over effect) with no serious containment effort, or by applying the traditional, outmoded and futility-proven military containment tactics -- strictly inspired by the mentality of coercion -- if only to please onlookers in the White House. "Some Arab foreign ministers have even declined to meet their Palestinian counterparts just to please the US... Those who have had the kindness to give Palestinian officials the pleasure of meeting them do not tire of referring to them as the ministers of Hamas, just as the US wants them to be called," noted commentator Hamed Al-Maguid in a perceptive opinion piece published by the London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat under the daring headline, "Hamas: a barometer for poor Arab judgement". And as prominent Lebanese commentator Satei Noureddin, of the daily Lebanese As-Safir, noted in his Tuesday column "History", "the current slide towards Palestinian civil war is no haphazard development; it is rather the natural outcome of the failure to build on the first and second Intifada by both the Palestinians and the Arabs which led to an all-out Israeli violation of the Palestinian entity and then of the Palestinians themselves." This violation is not confined to Palestinians under occupation. It is also accorded to Israelis of Palestinian origin. It was also on Tuesday that Al-Mustaqbal, another Lebanese daily, reported that a Knesset member of the ruling Kadima Party asked for the suspension of the Knesset membership of Arab Israeli Ahmed Al-Tibi for his relationship with former President Yasser Arafat whom Al-Tibi still keeps a picture of. Such a discourse might be strange of any country which likes to call itself a democracy (even when it is an occupying power) but it is certainly very true of Israel. Mohamed Sayed Rossass warned in an illuminating opinion piece in Al-Mustaqbal, also on Tuesday, that Israel is far from parting with "the eternal dream of a greater Israel" and that, according to reports in the London-based dailies Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat, it is actively and aggressively seeking the development of its nuclear arsenal and is adamantly opposed to any attempts to even remotely handicap its nuclear ambitions. Some of the relevant headlines: "Israel conducted a nuclear test in 1979", "Israel firmly opposes US proposal to ban production of centrifuged materials", "Israel and US disagree over several military, including nuclear, issues". But Israel is not the only country that calls itself a democracy and exercises atrocities and occupation. The US is doing so in no less style and with equal effortlessness. Less than a day after papers quoted the damming remarks of the Geneva-based UN anti-torture committee on the disgraceful record of human rights violations exercised by the US in Guantanamo, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had the courage to tell the press that Washington would like nothing better than to close Guantanamo if it could. As quoted by the Saudi daily Al-Watan on Monday, Rice was innocently wondering about the fate of the world if the US was to close down Guantanamo and let all these dangerous terrorists (who according to top international human rights groups, are still to be convicted of any serious crime) out on the loose. As Abdul-Wahab Badrakhan noted in Al-Hayat on Saturday, it might be strange that the level of human rights violations committed by the US is very high but it is very true. "Much erosion has affected the traditional US championing of the values of liberties and freedoms."
