CAIRO: Why do they hate us, my son asked me when he saw the Palestinian children who were killed by the Israeli massacre in the Gaza Strip.
The question surprised me because my boy is under than four years old, but he cries every day when he watches the horrific scenes of Palestinian children. I told him that they did not hate us, but they hated to live in peace.
Even if Israel is able to achieve its objectives by killing Hamas leaders, it has lost a lot when it comes to Arabs and their children. If you ask any Arab child now what he or she wants, they will say to seek revenge from Israel. It is no longer a question of achieving peace, but of saving the lives of children, women and the elderly who have been killed and their homes destroyed just because they are Palestinians.
Israel miscalculated the situation as usual and took us back six decades.
Everyone is wondering: Why are the Arabs paying the price for the Holocaust? Why should the Palestinian children pay the price for the Hamas-Israel confrontation? Why are civilians being killed?
Now there is a common Arab feeling that Israel, as a State, is no longer wanted in the region and that whatever it does to normalize relations with Arab regimes, it will not gain the sympathy of the Arab people, who see it as a brutal, heartless State.
Whatever dispute takes place among the Palestinians, the Arabs will continue to lay the blame on Israel, which refuses to give the Palestinians their legitimate rights and establish their State, as they are the only people in the world without a State.
Many Arabs and Palestinians are now wondering: What is the feasibility of peace with Israel? Since the 1993 Oslo agreement the Palestinians have not received got nothing but the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, disconnection between the West Bank and Gaza, and a rise in the number of Palestinian refugees abroad. The result is that Israel sold an illusion to the Palestinians, when they accepted a powerless Palestinian Authority.
I understand the feelings of despair and frustration among the Palestinian youth, and fully understand why they prefer death to life. For three years, Israel has besieged them like rats in the Gaza Strip and cut off medicine, electricity and bread. Moreover, Israel and the US also punished them for their democratic choice of Hamas.
All Arab peoples have been disappointed by the shameful silence of US President-elect Barack Obama. Their optimism turned into pessimism because of his failure to criticize Israel’s massacre of civilians and children.
Feelings of hatred towards the United States have been exacerbated because it treated the Israeli army and Hamas fighters as equals, in spite of the huge difference between their military capabilities.
Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of these brutal events in Gaza are the extremist organizations that will mobilize a lot of angry young Arabs to carry out bombing operations against Israeli and US interests.
Chances for peace have become very weak as long as the political parties in Israel are killing the Palestinians to win the elections, and as long as Israel insists on depriving the rightful owners of this land of their rights.
Khalil Al-Anani is an Egyptian expert on political Islam and democratization in the Middle East and is a senior fellow at Al-Ahram Foundation. E-mail: [email protected].
