In Focus: Priorities of conflict Arab intellectuals must understand that the entirety of the Arab world is under attack, writes Galal Nassar On the first anniversary of the war on Lebanon, many Arab satellite television stations and newspapers spoke of the importance of having a pan-Arab strategy for the liberation of occupied Arab land. It was necessary, many argued, for Arabs to set priorities with regard to reclaiming Arab lands. It is not in the interest of Arabs, they contended, to fight on all fronts, for some of those who occupy their land are neighbours, and therefore potential friends. I heard this argument several times in seminars and conferences I attended in the months following the summer 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and also during personal encounters with some Arab strategic thinkers. The essence of the argument is that parts of Arab land, including islands and other areas that were carved off in keeping with Western imperialist strategies -- as is the case in Iskenderun, now part of Turkey, and Arabstan, now part of Iran -- have been lost a long time ago. Therefore, it wasn't in the interest of the Arabs to try to restore them and in the process create more enemies. Better to focus on Israel, the argument went. The same argument surfaced whenever someone called for a clear Arab position on Iran's occupation of Arabstan and several United Arab Emirate islands, or referred to the subversive efforts of pro-Iranian militia in Iraq. Iran, which has settlers in Iraq and offices running Iranian affairs in Basra, is suspected of fomenting sectarian strife in Iraq. Iran, therefore, stands accused of involvement in the displacement of Sunnis from entire parts of Baghdad through ethnic cleansing activities. Setting priorities for Arab land under occupation is rather a thorny matter. Those who make the above argument often forget a few things. For starters, they see Israel's occupation of Palestine as the central Arab issue, which is true, but only if we remain conscious of the nature of the Zionist expansionist scheme. The Palestinian issue is not important to us because of the hurt to our pride it involves, nor because Palestinian olive trees are sacred. It is a central issue to all Arabs because of the threat the Zionist scheme poses to Arab national security. The usurping entity -- and let's leave aside conspiracy theories for now -- was created to be a thorn in the side of our nation, a barrier to our unity and progress, and a buffer between our eastern and western flanks. The Arabs have no option but to resist the Zionist scheme so that peace may prevail and so that our people may assume their befitting place among world nations. What matters to us, therefore, are the perils that aggressive scheme harbours for the Arab nation, regardless of who supports Israel and what slogans they raise. Secondly, colonialism is not a stagnant phenomenon that can be kept at bay until the circumstances are favourable for demanding our rights. There are, for example, Arab areas three times as big as Palestine, with a population of over eight million of our compatriots, where the occupiers didn't just grab the land but did everything possible to eradicate the Arab identity of those areas, encouraging settlers to move into the occupied land. The more time passes, the more the occupiers destroy the national identity of those areas, bring in more settlers, and weaken the resistance of people living under occupation. It would be unimaginable to liberate those areas once their identities are erased and their resistance smashed. Keeping this in mind, the call for setting priorities for the liberation of Arab land, however well intentioned, would lead to the abdication -- not deferment -- of Arab rights. Thirdly, the argument lacks understanding of the dialectics and indivisibility of the conflict in Arab land. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), for example, must be seen from a comprehensive perspective. The PNAC treats the Arab world as a guinea pig. It aims at redrawing the political map of the region in keeping with the balkanisation strategy that is being implemented on the pretext of defending the rights of ethnic and sectarian communities and the principles of human rights. Successive statements by US officials, including George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Richard Perle, and some reports released by strategic institutes and research centres and published in reputable newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have revealed some details of this agenda. New maps aimed to change the geopolitical reality of the region are being imposed. The US wants to replace the regional Arab system in place since World War II with a new Middle East. Specifically, it wants to replace the nation state with cantons and federations organised along ethnic and sectarian lines. The new Middle East order would be led by the US and controlled by Israel. This US project is no longer an idea. The US administration has started implementing it by force following its occupation of Afghanistan. As for the Arab region, the occupation of Iraq was the gate through which the US project entered the region, with plans to threaten national security in other Arab countries. Iraq was followed by Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan. The hostile remarks by US officials have not ended, nor did threats to conduct other campaigns. The US scheme covers all the centres of renaissance and of geographic, demographic and economic weight in the region. The grand strategic project launched by the US Rand Corporation is among the most notable in this quest. The point I am making is that imperialist projects are not targeting one specific area, but the entire Arab people. And the confrontation now taking place in Palestine is but a taste of things to come. Current threats against Arab national security have wide-reaching consequences. The enemy may be attacking one country at a time, but we're all ultimate targets. Therefore, we must have a comprehensive view of the threats facing us. We mustn't overlook the dialectics of the conflict, its unity, and the interaction among its elements. Resistance in Lebanon is not separate from resistance in Iraq and Palestine. We must look at the tools implementing this hostile project and denounce them with equal zeal. In Iraq, there is now a constitution and a federation representing the balkanisation project and calling for the partitioning of the country along ethnic and sectarian lines. We cannot assess the imperialist project in Iraq without assessing the tools and human forces that accompany it and aim to implement it. And we cannot assess that imperialist project without asking ourselves: who are the regional forces that support it, and who are those who give it political legitimacy? The projects of division in the Arab world may use different mechanisms, but they all boil down to the same thing. We have to see those projects as part of a whole. Therefore, the steadfastness of Arab resistance in one place is a harbinger of steadfastness in other areas. Arab intellectuals, thinkers and strategists must quit prioritising the conflict and start thinking of how to defend our collective national security. We cannot go on ignoring the laws of dialectics: synthesis, counterpropositions and interactions. We cannot become victims of our own double standards, or we risk losing more, if not all, of our rights.
