By Marwa Osman*
Last week saw yet another Israeli military offensive against the besieged Palestinians in Gaza. The Netanyahu government, as always, argued that military action is necessary, but here does not lie the surprise; the actual surprise was in the reaction of the Arab heads of state, which was so silent it was actually deafening. Only few regional observers fully condemned the Zionist aggression, calling for an immediate halt of all military offensives against Gaza.
As the Israeli entity saw the attack on Gaza as an opportunity to restore Israel’s deterrence capability vis-à-vis Palestinian resistance groups, it was evident that more needs to be done internationally to stem the violence and the blockade against the Palestinians of Gaza. However, who will stem this violence when it has spilled and spread over most of the Arab world, with the continuous fueling and full blessings of the Israelis and their Persian Gulf allies?
Israel has, unfortunately, succeeded in removing the Palestinian cause from the priorities of the Muslim Ummah, especially those in the Arab world. It has done so by promoting and supporting terrorism across the Arab world; from Tunisia to Libya; Yemen to Sudan; and to Syria, Bahrain, Lebanon and Iraq. The Zionist entity has devastated entire nations, they even participated in killing most of them by directly raiding areas in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—with the direct support from Al Saud and the United States government.
Millions of people in Yemen are now starving, including children who according to the UN will be crippled for life, as new photographs from areas worst hit by the war show teenagers dying of hunger. Yemen now has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world according to the UN World Food Program (WFP). More than 14 million people are going hungry, half of them starving. At least ten of the country’s twenty-one governorates are close to a famine.
Over the past 23 months, at least 13,000 civilians have died in the Saudi-US led aggression against the people of Yemen, who simply chose not to bow down to the Saudi monarchy. Yemen, a country that holds one of the world’s oldest repositories of civilization, dating back centuries before Christ, is now at the highest levels of emergency status due to the continuous Saudi genocide on the country. Across this war-torn country, factories, hospitals and power plants have been leveled, threatening Yemen’s future existence.
If you go farther north on the map of the Arab world, consumed by death and destruction, Syria is also a ruined caricature of its former glory.
Syria, which once reflected the world’s Jewish, Christian, and Islamic civilizations, has become a failed state, while takfiri terrorists installed by remote and regional powers tear at its skeleton. The violence has displaced more than half the country´s population and caused massive destruction. Despite the fact that the Syrian Arab Army and its allies have done a tremendous job liberating massive swaths of land across the country, the destruction is vast and no political solution is detectible on the horizon.
Go back down to the tiny island of Bahrain, located in the Persian Gulf, and your blood will boil at once. The Al Khalifa monarchs have learnt from the best of tyrants and stepped up their repression of their own citizens during 2016/17. The government did not stop at dissolving the main political opposition group, illegally prosecuting leading human rights activists and Shia clerics, they also resorted to the Saudi radical form of governance, political executions without fair trials or any possibility for an appeal. So far, in 2017, 6 young men have been brutally executed: the world watches silently.
The oppressive authorities in Bahrain have also prevented numerous activists from leaving the country and deported six Bahrainis, including a human rights lawyer, after arbitrarily stripping them of their citizenship. This orchestrated crackdown on the rights to free expression, assembly, and association was a marked deterioration in the human rights situation and further undermined the prospects of a political solution to Bahrain’s domestic unrest.
Let me take you a bit west to Libya. Libya is now a failed state, torn apart by rival militias. Daesh is growing stronger by the day, and poorly armed makeshift militias are all that stand in its way. The political conflict in Libya between Islamist groups and anti-Islamist politicians has spilled onto the streets of Libya in the form of ferocious battles that destroy anything that stand in their way. The militias, who linked together by the command of the US, brought the country down to its knees, as they vie for power to control the Libyan capital and its oil revenues. Hundreds have been killed, and thousands have fled their homes as this war, fueled by western and regional states, continues to tear the country apart.
All this devastation began fourteen years ago in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime, and then occupied the country for the next eight and a half years. Then President George W. Bush blatantly claimed that the U.S. went to war to liberate Iraq and “free its people”, the same people whose death toll was estimated at 1.4 million as a result of this invasion. Another 4.2 million Iraqis were injured, and an estimated 4.5 million Iraqis were driven from their homes. Fast forward to 2011, and watch Daesh eat away Anbar province and then Mosul in 2014, before the brave PMU began a liberating mission to restore peace and security to the people of Iraq.
Read a bit of history, you will have no doubt that this destruction, and plenty more in other Arab states, is all part of the Yinon Plan, a continuation of Britain’s colonial design in the Middle East orchestrated by Israel and funded by the US. The Yinon plan is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states. All in the favor of a “Greater Israel” which requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into smaller states.
The plan operates on two essential premises. In order to survive, Israel must “1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.”
Is there any more evidence needed to prove who is behind much of the Middle East chaos? From the wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, to the political upheaval in Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain, the Zionist entity of Apartheid Israel is the main instigator and ultimate provocateur. All that chaos is being delicately orchestrated as a new Israeli law, last week, legalized dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land and renewed Israeli settlement expansion as Gaza was under attack again, ironically, this time with the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.
* Marwa Osman is a Media studies university lecturer at the Lebanese International University and a political commentator from Lebanon. She is also a member of The Blue Peace initiative's media network. She hosted a political show on 'Al Etejah English' TV channel, and she is often seen on 'Russia Today' as a panelist.
The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir .
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