The Arab world against Israel A war to save Arafat

THE CAIRO – In the headquarters of the Arab League, the general secretary of the organization, the Egyptian Amr Moussa has experienced another day of passion, struggling with requests and pressures from the contents and from the modalities to say the least paradoxical and extravagant. Beginning with the singular initiative of the Libyan leader Gaddafi who has the innate virtue of saying everything and the opposite of everything to show off to call a new extraordinary summit of the Arab heads of state to repeal the resolutions just adopted by the Beirut summit on 28 March. At the end of the day, Gaddafi was able to take home a small victory: an extraordinary meeting of the permanent delegates of the member countries will be held today at the League. He is not talking about a new summit at the moment, but to realize the reasons for the Libyan request, yesterday it was enough to look out the windows of the headquarters of the Arab League: and listen to the echo of the shots of tear gas by the police, committed to preventing the assault of about 20 thousand protesters at the Israeli embassy. The message that comes ever stronger from the squares of Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Tripoli and first of all Palestine – where tens of thousands of people have chanted violent slogans against Israel and the United States – is a real indictment against the Arab leadership: “Enough with the words ,says the common feeling, do something concrete to save the Palestinians”. Also the resolution adopted by the ministerial meeting of the OIC (Organization for the Islamic Conference) held in Kuala Lumpur – in which Israel is warned “to drag the entire region into a total war” and the UN Security Council is asked to use force to enforce the decisions taken – it will probably remain a dead letter. The strongest image of the Arab denunciation is symbolized by the coffin with the words “League of Arab States” carried in procession in Gaza in a symbolic but very crowded funeral. At the edges, a young fighter with his face totally hidden by the black and white checkered keffiyeh and the kalashnikov clutched in his fist, released Qatar’s Al Jazeera on fire: “The Arab regimes are all traitors, thieves and corrupt”. No less firm was the indignation of an anonymous Egyptian questioned by the television in Abu Dhabi: «Either the Egyptian regime expresses the popular will or it must go. And the people want the Israeli ambassador in Cairo to go away “. Never had there been such bold tones in a country where freedom of expression has an insurmountable limit in criticizing the head of state and the political regime, as depositories of the “supreme interests of the nation”. But it seems that this “red line” has been broken: “Traitors, take it out first with the Jews”, the protesters shouted – mostly university students who were joined by public figures, including the famous director Youssef Chahine – at the address of the riot police in the act of firing tear gas. “It is humiliating,” said one boy, to see an Egyptian striking another Egyptian to protect the ambassador of those dogs. ” However, the agents failed to prevent a violent fringe from hitting a restaurant in the American chain Kentucky Fried Chicken, completely destroying its three floors. Already on Saturday night, still in the center of the capital, a McDonald’s restaurant was attacked and looted in the belief that it is an economic empire of the American Jewish lobby. The request to expel the Israeli ambassador is also strongly echoed in Jordan, the other Arab country that has normal diplomatic relations with Israel. Yesterday protests took place at the University of Amman and in the Palestinian refugee camps. Foreign Minister Marwan al Muasher has summoned Israeli ambassador David Dadon, warning that Jordan will be forced to take serious decisions if Israel does not withdraw from Palestinian cities and does not end the siege of Arafat. The options for consideration are the reduction of the Israeli embassy staff and the expulsion of the ambassador, but for the time being the categorical rupture of diplomatic relations is categorically excluded: “Jordan would pay a heavy political and economic price. Then who would help the Palestinians? We would no longer be able to send food and medicines or intervene diplomatically, “a source from the Jordanian government confessed. But it is clear that this would be an extreme decision if the situation on the home front became unmanageable. The situation in which Egypt finds itself is similar: the government hopes to keep the domestic front calm because it is aware that a direct involvement of the country in the Middle East crisis would end up undermining the current timid recovery of tourism and the economy. This explains the statements of Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher who, on the one hand, argued that “the way the Israeli government works is between total crime and inexplicable madness” but, on the other, he fired as “conjecture” the hypothesis of the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Cairo. Anger, frustration and powerlessness are the characteristics that characterize the Arab and Islamic attitude. A Saudi newspaper published a cartoon showing a pistol with a cell phone instead of a cane and the caption reads: “Here is the weapon of the Arabs”. That is a gun that only fires small talk. Probably the person who best embodies the Arab malaise is the Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh who, afflicted by “a depressive state”, has decided to entrench himself in his residence in Sanaa by “refusing any hearing or telephone contact” in protest against “the silence and ‘impotence of Arab leaders’.

April 2 2002