Monday, August 24, 2020

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer

A version of the proverb you see in the title of this piece was uttered throughout time and space, from the ancient Chinese to Machiavelli's Rome to a Hollywood Godfather movie.

In one form or another, the wise men and women of the modern world have adopted that proverb as their motto, and have done well protecting themselves because it kept them from being blindsided by an enemy when they were not watching. In fact, I still remember the headline of an article I read in an Arabic newspaper decades ago. It went like this: “e3lam 3addoak” which translates into “know your enemy.” This was a United Arab Emirates publication discussing Israel.

What brought back that memory at this time, is an article I read in English under the title: “Israel-UAE agreement has major potential for a political realignment in the Middle East,” written by Abraham Wagner, and published on August 21, 2020 in The Washington Times. Obviously, when writing his article, Wagner was not thinking about that proverb, or the one that says, “blood is thicker than water”.

The point of the Wagner article is summed up in the title itself. It shows that the man is dreaming the typical Jewish dream of seeing Jews get into a hate pact with someone (it does not matter who) and go after someone else (it does not matter who) to beat them up and loot them. In fact, this has been the most prevailing feature in the long legacy that the Jews have left behind, and nothing of what they do now indicates that they wish to change their ways.

And this happens to be the substance of the Abraham Wagner article. Here is his conclusion as it appears near the end of the article: “The Israeli-UAE deal is an attempt to establish a group in the Middle East and achieve a regional realignment based on confronting Iran and avoiding any real notion of solidarity with the Palestinians.” He dreams of the Arabs hating the Palestinians and the Iranians and loving the Jews instead. Will someone remind him that blood is thicker than water!

To understand what's really going on out there, we need to understand the Arab mentality. And the first thing we need to do to understand the Arabs, is to reject the childish notion which the Jews have about everything boiling down to who loves whom and who hates whom. When you do that, you’ll begin to understand why a few months ago, the idea of America organizing the Arabs into a hate-Iran pact, sank like a stone into the cesspit of Jewish morality.

In fact, it has been seven decades since the colonial powers, and then America tried to organize the Arabs into a hate-somebody pact, the most notorious being the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. But they all sank ingloriously, letting the hapless organizers know that the Arabs, unlike the Jews, do not recognize hate as a worthy currency to own, to trade with or even pretend to have.

A noteworthy occurrence that can serve as a key to understanding the Arab mentality is what happened shortly after the Israeli Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on its neighbors in 1967. Having gained the notorious “Jewish leverage” from that attack, the Israelis said to the Arabs, “let's negotiate,” and the Arabs gave the famous three “Nos,” one being no negotiation. In 1973 the Arabs counterattacked, smashing the Bar Lev Line and liberating the Sinai. They gave the Israelis enough time to effectuate an “orderly” withdrawal of their troops and equipment from the rest of the Sinai, as requested by America's Henry Kissinger who spoke in the name of President Richard Nixon.

When this was done, Anwar Sadat, who was then President of Egypt, said to the Israelis something to this effect: “Now that we have the upper hand, we shall not do what you do, which is to use the advantage as an Arab Leverage. What we'll do instead is show you what Arab magnanimity looks like.” He added that he would go talk to them in their own Knesset, and he did. This, my friend, is what it means to be an Arab.

Throughout the ages, that Arab mentality has worked to keep their friends close and their enemies closer. But time after time, the Jews made the mistake of not seeing Arab magnanimity for what it was, seeing instead every goodwill gesture made by the Arabs as a response to the Jewish leverage they only imagined they had most of the time. And so, the Israelis erroneously responded in a way that turned off the Arabs and sent their relationship back to square one.

With regard to the current situation, it must be said that the Arabs are a patient people and will give the Jews plenty of time to come to their senses and end the occupation of Palestine. But as long as you see Netanyahu allude to the possibility that he might someday annex parts of the West Bank, you should know that the burgeoning relationship with the UAE and the rest of the Arab World, will remain on shaky grounds.

And you can be certain that there will always be a Netanyahu in Israel who will work to prolong the misery of the Jews as long as there will be influential American Jews, such as Abraham Wagner, who will continue to utter nonsense in America such as the following:

“The so-called occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza ... The Palestinian issue has gone nowhere and is highly unlikely to go anywhere in the future ... The UAE and other Gulf states have decoupled their support for the Palestinian cause from their own interests ... A Palestinian state or the 'two state' solution that was the mantra before Trump”.

As long as they have influence in America and as long as they get enough taxpayers' money to live on the high life, characters such as Abraham Wagner, will continue to hang on to the politico-diplomatic game they now play. They are playing it in the way that a normal person hangs on to his profession, except that the Wagners of this world make a living at the cost of inflicting horror, pain and death on millions of people of all races and all religions.

They must be stopped, and this will only happen when their followers will follow them no more. Meanwhile the Arabs will patiently wait for the Jews to smarten up, while reminding each other that they must “e3lam 3addoak”.