The increasing temperature across the Middle East is felt long before the weather forecast pages. Dina Ezzat prays for rain Mohamed Al-Sammak summed it all up -- perhaps unintentionally -- in his 'Suez to Iraq' opinion piece in the daily Lebanese Al-Mustaqbal on Monday. The boiling point that this region hit when legendary leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser declared the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July 1956 to end decades of Western abuse of Egyptian resources and facilities, may be reached one more time this summer. This time the region is not heading for the boil due to increasing sentiments of liberation from colonisation (at least not yet). This time as Al-Sammak so perceptively noted, it is the aggressive attempt of today's main, if not only, colonial power, the US, to reproduce colonisation in different forms and methods that is dragging the region to a stage of confrontation. Day in, day out, the Arab press kept reminding readers of what the US, at times alone and at others in the company of others, is trying to do to this part of the world. The US, in accordance with the wishes of Israel, is trying to topple the Hamas government by starving an entire population under occupation (with nobody talking much about the Geneva Conventions) and to use its obvious tactics to instigate internal Palestinian disputes. And as the daily UAE Al-Bayan rightly noted on Tuesday morning in a story filed from Israel and the Palestinian territories, "while Israel is secretly drawing its security interest-based borders, Palestinians are sinking into a deep dilemma." Capturing the early signs of the much warned against Palestinian civil strife, Al-Bayan expressed concern, as did most Arab papers, that the Palestinian president and prime minister will keep their promise to prevent inter- Palestinian strife that has already passed the stage of brewing. And as many other Arab papers did during the week, Al-Bayan called on the Arab League to come to the rescue and expressed skepticism over the efficiency of Egyptian and Jordanian diplomacy in managing the situation. Obviously, it was no other than Abdul-Bari Attwan, the Palestinian editor of the London-based daily Al-Quds Al-Araby , who put it bluntly in his weekly Monday article, this one called 'Hamas and Arab confusion'. Attwan was not at a loss for words when attacking Arab governments for failing to collect funds for the Palestinian Authority, now under Israel and Western economic boycott. This, he typically attributed, to the fear of most Arab governments to upset the US. However, Attwan warned, "The Arab people who are currently exercising an almost unprecedented stage of dynamism -- as reflected in the reaction to the Danish cartoons -- will soon take to the streets to protest against the anti-Hamas conspiracy" that is orchestrated by the US and Israel and is implemented in collaboration. As the editorial of Al-Quds Al-Araby noted a day later, the harsher the attack on Hamas the more popular its government becomes and the angrier this makes the US and Israel. At that point it would be useless for Arab diplomacy to try and persuade Hamas to subscribe to the ideology or content of the Arab peace initiative that has consistently been shrugged off by Israel. If leaders are attempting to dismiss looming signs of civil war in Palestine, they cannot do so with regard to Iraq which is screaming from a brutal civil war that, from accounts in newspapers, has caused over 100,000 Iraqis to flee their cities, and at times all of Iraq. Sunnis are not wanted in Shia neighbourhoods and vice versa. And those who are half Sunni and half Shia seem to be faced with a situation where they have to choose alliances and consequently decide where to live or rather from where to flee. Whether Sunnis, Shias or other affiliations, all seem in serious danger. Indeed, on Monday, Al-Quds Al-Araby quoted Mayda Zoheir, the chairwoman of an Iraqi women's organisation, as saying that a staggering three million Iraqi women have now been rendered widows with no way of making a living and no chance of getting re-married -- all the men apparently getting killed anyway. But it must have been particularly striking to read Ghassan Charbale, the prominent Lebanese commentator of the prestigious London-based Al-Hayat, on Monday quoting an Iraqi doctor as telling a family looking for a missing member that they could take any maimed body they suspect might be one of their own so as "to at least have a body to bury and a tombstone to put". As Charbale noted, "what is most horrifying is for us to get used to seeing Iraq covered with the blood of its people; it is horrifying that we are getting used to counting those who die in Iraq every single day as if we are following news coming from another planet or worse, as if we are accepting that Iraq is coming to an end." Of course Iran was not overshadowed in the news; rather the opposite with Israeli Deputy Premier Shimon Peres threatening to "erase Iran" if it dares attempt to attack Israel. The Iranian foreign minister called on the world to "completely boycott Israel" and there was news from Britain suggesting that the outgoing British foreign secretary lost his job in the recent cabinet reshuffle after having expressed serious opposition to any war on Iran. Indeed many commentators this week wrote what Mohamed Sadiq Diab indicated in the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat on Monday. "As the chances of war and peace with Iran seem equal, one can only pray for wisdom to prevail," so as the region be spared more havoc.
