The Lost Arab 2001: Endings of a Road

21-7-2018

-        The late "king of journalism in the Middle East," Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, has a large library of works, research and memoirs, and I have been a fan of his rich publications since the 1960s in the volume "International Politics" through the newspaper "Al-Ahram," and then in later decades a bold and famous column he wrote weekly in Al-Ahram...and other newspapers reproduced it by agreement, titled "Frankly." Many other creations of this renowned journalist... These days I am reading a book of his published in 2002, titled "The Lost Arab 2001" Endings of a Road, and the book’s content is about the Arab Summit conference in Amman in 2001, to discuss the situation in Iraq and the second Palestinian intifada... In it Heikal thought that the Arab was lost...in his life, and the roads before him were blocked, due to the forces closing in on him, foremost among them Israel supported by America, and this was more than sixteen years ago.

-        The late Heikal recounts a story about the British Prime Minister in 1938... Neville Chamberlain, that he did not realize while carrying his famous umbrella and flying to meet the then German leader "Adolf Hitler" in Munich, and returning two days later to herald to the British people and the peoples of Europe, ("peace in our time"), that Munich was the end of the road... and that by the illusion he made of "peace in our time" he made World War II inevitable, because Hitler saw that "the rush for peace" was a sign of weakness and feebleness, and a witness to the corrosion and deficiency of political will.

-        Chamberlain did not realize, while he heralded "peace in our time," that appeasing the enemy (at any cost) is the nearest path to war, because the rush to demand incites greed, and because "a noble end is not achieved by a humiliating means."
One of the first laws of conflict is that when one party consents to be fawned upon, the other party is invited to become stronger, and that is the nature of things before it is a law of conflict....exactly as is the case with Arab political leaders toward Israel...

-        On his shuttle tours after the October 1973 War, Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State of the United States, would prepare a folder of papers to take with him on trips to the Middle East, and he did not keep any paper except the paper of the young researcher attached to research at the National Security Council in the White House, named Richard Haas... who became Dick Cheney’s direct superior during Cheney’s tenure as Vice President....

-        The paper in its summary, despite its brevity — a single page — told Henry Kissinger, "There is no need for you, at present, to occupy yourself with many theories of conflict management, the arts of negotiation and security considerations... What will help you now is to remember two traditions from the ‘culture’ of Arab life,
"the tradition of the tent": in which a sheikh sits in the middle of a council that surrounds him, and even though he alone holds the authority, when you enter you will find many around him coming in and out, whispering in his ear, and nodding their heads....all those are formal influences; focus your view on the sheikh and praise him and exaggerate in your praise, and to the extent that you give him what you have, he will give you from what he has....

-        And "the tradition of the market," where bargaining is not a science but an art of haggling, and they start any deal with an exaggerated price and when you negotiate they raise their voices to swear to you that they did not exaggerate, and that for your sake they will lower the price... but their final word they will tell you while you are free, and when you hear it and it seems to them still higher than what you are willing to pay, they will return to you again swearing (and perhaps with an oath of divorce), that that is beyond their ability, because accepting it would be a definite loss...

-        Do not believe their words, hold on to what you deem reasonable, insist on it, and you will find them before you conceding step by step...(even if the steps seem slow)......... And here is the Deal of the Century...standing before us in what has been said about it and what we witness on the scene of events... it assimilates with what we have received orally of its terms...

-        And in his last meeting with Hafez al-Assad, in 1975, Henry Kissinger made an assessment of his experience in Cairo, Riyadh and Damascus, in the phrase "I liked Sadat, I respected Assad, and I did not understand Faisal."

-    The idea is that relations be intimate within each tent, influencing dealings within each "market."
And in the subsequent negotiations, across their different stops, from Aswan to Camp David, and from Oslo to Taba, and from the disengagement between Egypt and Israel in Aswan 1974, up to the Sharm el-Sheikh Declaration at the end of 2001... for twenty-seven years, negotiations with the Arabs were conducted in the manner of the sheikh and the tent... "a sheikh in a council inside a tent, surrounded by a gathering of people and gestures and murmured secrets and quiet mutterings, then the sheikh says the word, and everyone nods in approval....."

-        Paradoxically, the Arab sheikhs had all along confidence that they were at the end of the road heading to a bottom on which there is a deal that satisfies them, because from the outset they had a covenant and contract they themselves called by a description that comforts them, namely the description "international legitimacy," and they do not know that that covenant and contract no longer has a "sacred text." The secret is that the United States of America, and the sheikhs do not know and the market does not know, nationalized international legitimacy by first transferring its ownership to the Security Council, and then privatized the Security Council, turning it into its personal property... it acts in it as an owner acts with what he owns.

-        Heikal wrote in the book that is the subject of this article that Syria was and will remain necessary for the Arabs, and the colonizer tried a great deal to isolate it — this writing is from sixteen years ago — but it will fail, Heikal said in 2002, "Isolating the Levant from the valleys" was an Israeli and American goal for a long time, considering that the Nile Valley is tied by a peace treaty sponsored by the United States, and the Euphrates Valley is being devastated by a war conducted by the United States of America........

-        "If action is confined between the hammer and the anvil in this manner, that denotes the bankruptcy of policy and its falling into a predicament in which it has lost its options, and it has nothing left before it but suicide or martyrdom....." Yet Mr. Heikal clarified, in the course of his optimism, that Arab weakness is not permanent, just as the unjust occupying power is not everlasting...
He said, "If this surrounding power is not now strong enough, then weakness is not guaranteed indefinitely." Wars do not end conflicts,,,, exactly as we see the war on Arab Yemen by an evil Arab coalition for more than three years, which has not even succeeded in the battles, but it destroyed Yemen’s capacities... rich in its people, history and glory, so as Heikal said in this book, that arms remain impotent when they alone hold the decision, and they may succeed in battles, but they are incapable of achieving victory in their war.

-        The path of the Arab nation will not end in blockage... even in light of what we see and witness of changing most of the rules of history and the conflict we learned, at the hands of many leaders in our Arab university, these days cooperating with the forces that destroyed Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen, and are plundering the wealth of their peoples... and now are allying with racist Israel; our failed politicians will end... and our Arab peoples will remain trying to redraw their path anew, built on their glorious history, and their present which they will attempt by knowledge and work to stop the wheel of political corruption, and choose deliberate options in alliance with the forces of good in the world.....And they will triumph...