PERSIAN GULF CRISIS

I

link the Iraqi occupation of
Kuwait and the Israeli hold
on the West Bank, Gaza and
east Jerusalem remains on
the table.
"Linkage hasn't been
disposed of," warned Matti
Steinberg, a Hebrew Uni-
versity expert on the PLO.
"It's merely been changed
from an issue to be dealt
with as part of the Gulf con-
flict to one that has been
postponed until after the
war."
The U.S. government has
so far publicly dismissed all
attempts by Baghdad to link
a withdrawal from Kuwait
with resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To do so, the Bush ad-

"By embracing
Saddam Hussein, the
PLO has injured its
cause in every
imaginable way."

—New York Times

ministration maintains, is to
hand Saddam a clear victory
that goes far beyond face-
saving.
The majority view in the
West also holds that the Pa-
lestinian cause has suffered
badly by its association with
Saddam.

The New York Times, for
one, editorialized this week
that "by embracing Saddam
Hussein, the (PLO) has in-
jured its cause in every
imaginable way." Legiti-
mate Palestinian grievances,
and said the newspaper, have
been overshadowed by sup-
port for Saddam's "bloody ag-
gression."

However, the conventional
wisdom among Middle East
pundits also holds that the
United States now owes po-
litical debts to Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Syria and the other
Arab nations as a result of
their support for the anti-
Iraq coalition.
The general feeling among
these experts is that this
debt will force Washington,
once the war is successfully
concluded, to put additional
pressure on Jerusalem to
negotiate a solution to the
Palestinian issue. It is in
this way, say Palestinians,
that Saddam's aggression
may yet serve to advance
their cause.
Right now, however, that
is cold comfort to the Pales-

20

FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 1991

tinians —particularly since
it is not clear who will be left
with enough credibility to
lead their post-war struggle,
or, more importantly, who
will win the war.
Consequently, a wait-and-
see attitude prevails among
the Palestinian leadership.
If Saddam is moved to corn-
mit an "act of despair"
against Israel, the Palestin-
ians could conceivably follow
suit, stirring trouble in the
territories. But for the mo-
ment, at least, judgment
seems to have overruled
emotion.
The Palestinians are keen-
ly aware that they face a
double threat; not just from
stray Iraqi missiles that
could rain chemically induc-
ed death upon them, but also
from tough Israeli govern-
ment measures should Israel
be drawn fully into the war.
For Palestinians, the
nightmare scenario has been
that Jerusalem would use
the outbreak of hostilities
between Israel and Jordan to
drive them over the border
into the Hashemite kingdom
in what would amount to a
mass "transfer."
"The risk they run is that
a war will play right into
Israel's hands," noted Prof.
Steinberg, the Hebrew Uni-
versity expert on the PLO.
Already, interest in the
West has shifted sharply
away from the plight of the
Palestinians to the fate of
Israelis under a missile bar-
rage. The result is Palestin-
ians in the territories have
temporarily lost their ad-
vantage on the "sympathy
front," although this could
change at any time.
A prime example of this
shift in sympathies is that
when gas masks were being
distributed to Israeli settlers
in the territories but not to
the Palestinian population,
the world did not cry out in
protest.
In fact it was Israel's own
Supreme Court that redress-
ed the issue after a
Bethlehem woman filed a
discrimination suit.
But it should be noted that
the movement of Palestin-
ians over the Jordan bridges
into the occupied territories
picked up substantially as
the Jan. 15 United Nations
deadline approached: Ap-
parently, many Palestinians
felt that in case of fighting,
they stood a better chance of
survival on the West Bank
facing Jordan's troops than
on the east one in the path of
Israel's. 0

How Lies Led Us To War

We in the West have been taught lies and myths about the
Mideast. And we are paying dearly now for believing them.

A.M. ROSENTHAL

Special to The Jewish News

1AI

e are at war in
the Middle East
because for dec-
ades the Western
powers refused to
tell themselves and their
people the truth about the
Middle East. The Western
powers created a whole struc-
ture of lies which is now col-
lapsing around our heads.

This war would not have
happened if the United
States and its allies in the
West had been brave
enough, honest enough,
with enough intellect to
face the truth about the
Middle East. It should have
been faced a long time ago. It
could have been faced as late
as the first week in April
1990.
For decades, Saddam Hus-
sein has made himself clear.
He will rule the Middle East
at whatever cost in blood. So
the West sold him the
weapons and the death fac-
tories to do it. We did; we
and our allies. Then, last
April, Saddam. Hussein said
that if it came to war, he
would incinerate half of
Israel.
That was not just a piece of
rhetoric. It was an attempt
to test the reaction of the
world if he did decide to go to
war as part of his clear in-
tention to control the Middle
East.
What happened? The West
went on doing business with
Saddam Hussein. It went on
selling him weapons and
death factories. Our State
Department assured us that
if only we would not be
unpleasant to Saddam Hus-
sein, everything would be
fine.
His Arab brothers went
into orgasms of pleasure at
the threat to Israel. Two of

This article is adapted from
a speech delivered to the re-
cent annual dinner of Ameri-
can Associates of Ben-Gurion
University in New York. Mr.
Rosenthal, former executive
editor of the New York
Times, is now a columnist for
the newspaper.

his bagmen — Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia — immedi-
ately pumped more billions
into his country for his
army.
But what do you know?
Saddam's plan did not call
for an immediate attack on
Israel as the first step. That
would come later, after he
had perfected delivery of his
chemical and biological
weapons and had nuclear
weapons of his own.
Meanwhile, he decided to
turn on the bagmen and take
the whole bag.
He would gather the oil
riches of the Arab world to
himself, control the spigot of
the Western world himself
and threaten to turn it off if
the West ever dared to
interfere with his plans
about Israel.
He assumed that if the
West did not do a single
thing to show annoyance
with a death threat against
Israel, it would not do much,
to save one small Arab
princeling and his state.
Saddam made a little ,
mistake; oil seems to be
more valuable to the West
than Jews. This turns out to
be lucky for the Jews be-
cause if he had attacked
them directly in the beginn-
ing, I doubt strongly that
there would be a grand coali-
tion to save them.
We did this to ourselves.
We — our free institutions,
our government, our busi-
nesses, our politicians, our
academics, our journalists —
created a fantasy world
about the Middle East. After
a while, we could not tell vic-
tim from oppressor, hero
from villain, or reality from
mirage.
All the time, there were
people in the United States
and Israel urging us to face
the truth, but we paid them
very little attention.
Sometimes, our own enemies
looked at us with rage and
contempt, and told us the
truth about what they plan
to do and we said it cannot
happen and went back to
sleep.
Aside from Egypt, vir-
tually every Arab state owes
its existence and its very
borders to expansionist wars

by Arab chieftain against
Arab chieftain, or to British
and French colonial admin-
istrators, or the lust in the
hearts of Western oil com-
panies. Arab armies were
organized and usually com-
manded by Western officers.
Their military power was
created for them by Western
businessmen for cash and
oil, which are the same
thing.
The story about Arab
brotherhood and solidarity is
a bad joke. Egypt's second
president, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, used poison gas
against the Yemenites. The
Saudis slaughtered every
opposing tribe within reach
to gain the throne and so did
most of the other Gulf royal
families now treated with
21-gun salutes.
The Syrians shelled the
Lebanese day and night. The
Hashemite princes from the

Arafat has not been
fighting all these
years to become
mayor of Ramallah.

Hijaz in Arabia changed
their name to Jordanians
and killed Palestinians
whose land the British turn-
ed over to them. The Iraqis
killed a million or so of the
Kurds, their brothers in
Islam, and, of course,
Saddam himself suffocated
them with chemicals.
In not one Arab country
did freedom ever ring for the
Arab people. So let us say
out loud what our Western
leaders have never had the
courage or the wisdom to
say: In every important way
— in the preaching of re-
ligious hatred, in war
against neighbors, in the
elimination of every political
and social freedom, in the
suppression of women and
minorities, in the control by
oligarchies of the national
wealth — the Middle East
lived in and still lives in
what can honestly be de-
scribed as an international
system of Arab fascism.
Such an admission on the
part of the West would have
given encouragement to