Messing Up the Middle East

Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf of the U.S.

Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West's failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. The implication being, of course, that, without the West's benevolent guidance,
Arab societies are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.

But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash of
political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference. Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from - increasingly a choice between the U.S. or Iran - seems to determine where they stand in this confrontation.

Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between their democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted - in free elections they showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realize that goal - and the basic need to put food on the table for their families. The combined Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government and the Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle for control of resources inevitable.

Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe that the country's future lies with attracting Western capital and welcoming Washington's embrace, while others regard America's interest as cover for Israel realizing its long-standing design to turn Lebanon into a vassal
state, with or without a military occupation. Which side the Lebanese choose in the current stand-off reflects their judgment of how plausible are claims of Western and Israeli benevolence.

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