Middle East Eye has taken note of the shift that is underway in Southwest Asia, a shift that is seeing unity developing in the Arab-Muslim world that has not been seen in more than 100 years. “Israel is clearly embarked on an expansion by brute force. Only the combined diplomatic, economic and military force of the region is capable of stopping it,” MEE editor-in-chief David Hearst wrote in a commentary, posted yesterday.
Hearst notes that Abdul-Muttalib al-Qaisi, the Jordanian truck driver, who killed two IDF soldiers at the Allenby Crossing a few days ago, left a will in which he wrote: “what is happening in Gaza will be repeated in Arab countries. Our silence is complicity. Do nothing and Greater Israel will come to us.”
Hearst commented: “If this message represents, as I believe it does, a mood that extends far beyond the outskirts of Amman where it was written, then Israel is making a misjudgement of historic proportions.” Hearst goes on to argue that the Greater Israel ideology of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is a threat to the whole region and that al-Qaisi’s message is resonating throughout the Arab world.
Drunk with power, or so desperate to cling onto it, that keeping the war going is his only option, Netanyahu thinks he can impose Israel’s new borders on the region by force, Hearst writes. But it’s also a religious war. He quotes U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee: “You don’t stand with Israel because you agree with their government…. You stand with Israel because Israel is standing for a tradition of the God of Abraham.”
In seeking total victory over a humiliated Muslim region, Netanyahu is making the mistake that many warrior leaders have done before him, notably Napoleon and Hitler, who attacked and were defeated by Russia, Hearst continues. Netanyahu thinks that 7.7 million Jews in Israel can dominate 473 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, 92 million Iranians, or for that matter, 2 billion Muslims in the world.
Hearst goes on from there to elaborate on the Israeli threat and the Arab response to it, pointing to indications of the Arab world moving towards unity, not from a re-evaluation of Hamas or Hezbollah but rather the threat to stability by Greater Israel to the regimes in Egypt, Jordan, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Alliance that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, such as Egypt and Turkey, are now forming as a result. “Arab disunity has been a rock on which the project to create a Jewish state has been built,” Hearst writes. “But it would be a fool to think this situation will last forever as little Sparta becomes bigger and bigger.”
