April 18, 2024 (EIRNS)—Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, together with Sybil Fares, posted an article on Common Dreams news outlet on April 17 saying that if the U.S. and the British “had any shame,” they would vote for Palestine to become a member state of the United Nations in the Security Council. (That vote took place today, in which 12 of the 15 members voted for Palestine to become a member state; the British and Swiss countries abstained; the United States vetoed the resolution.) Sachs and Fares then rip into the historic role of the U.K. in the region:
No countries in the world have done more to wreck the Middle East than the U.K. and U.S. The lead role certainly goes to Britain, whose imperial machinations in the region date back to the 19th century and continue until today. Britain kept Egypt under its thumb for decades, from the 1880s to the 1950s. It deceitfully promised overlapping parts of the Ottoman Middle East three times over during World War I: to the French (in the Sykes-Picot Agreement), to the Arabs (in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence), and to the Zionists (in the Balfour Declaration), purporting to allocate what was not theirs in the first place.
After World War I, Britain took Palestine for itself under a so-called mandate of the newly created League of Nations, while France grabbed a mandate over Lebanon and Syria. Britain left Palestine in a shambles in 1947, but continued its relentless meddling by teaming up with France and Israel to invade Egypt in 1956. Britain’s meddling has also contributed to destruction and disarray in Yemen, Iraq, and many more parts of the Middle East.
After World War II, the U.S. picked up where Britain left off, first joining Britain in the MI6-CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, and then going on to a long career of CIA-led regime-change operations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, among others. Throughout the entire postwar period, the U.S. has been the lead dishonest broker between Israel and Palestine, for example, calling for the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 but then boycotting and trying to overthrow Hamas when it won those elections. In 2011, when Palestine applied for UN membership, and won the support of the UN Security Council membership committee, the U.S. leaned on Palestine to wait and to accept observer status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow. This was yet another lie.
Sachs and Fares concludes:
After more than a century of U.K. and U.S. meddling in the Middle East, it’s time to be honest about the facts and the solutions. Most importantly, welcoming Palestine as a UN member state and implementing the two-state solution according to international law is the path to peace, justice, and security for both Israel and Palestine.
