Arab Likudniks

Is political scheming alone enough to turn individuals who have spent most of their lives chanting against the Zionists into pseudo-Likudniks gnawing at the body of the Palestinian resistance? Is hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood enough to move a “professional nationalist” from the resistance camp directly to the Zionist swamp? Such Arabs are promoting a political discourse that is not much different in content and form from that of retired Israeli generals.

Forget about the minor Likud-like incitements bottled-up in the counter-revolution factories in Egypt. I am talking about a faction of unqualified nationalists and Nasserists who have been floating on the surface of the Arab media for too long. They are stripped of any human values and national Arab features and are condemning the brave resistance operations in Gaza with the ugliest of words. Some have even gone a step further and say arrogantly that Gaza was “much better” under the Israeli occupation.

These neo-Zionists first expressed their Likudnik tendencies when Egyptian soldiers were kidnapped in Sinai during Mohamed Morsi’s year in office; they rejoiced over the kidnapping because it was a point against the Muslim Brotherhood president and weakened his position. Satellite television stations became the stage for such games, as well as the continued cycle of condemnation and gloating over the kidnapping and the tireless attempts to drive a wedge between the armed forces and their supreme leader.

In addition, some have outdone themselves and taken it even further by revealing the existence of what you could call “Camp David Accord slaves”. This group appeared when the president ordered the deployment of troops in Sinai to recover the kidnapped soldiers. A foolish broadcaster attacked the deployment on the grounds that it was a “violation” of the peace treaty.

I still remember the statements made to Hamas by educated Egyptians during Israeli aggression against Gaza on previous occasions; they were the first to call for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Egypt and the recall of the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv. They even cheered for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and held up his pictures during protests in Cairo after the attack on the Mavi Marmara, when Israeli commandos attacked the Freedom Flotilla. However, these people have disappeared without a trace; they have swallowed their tongues and resumed their position as obedient lambs in a flock, none of them daring to speak.

The Israeli crimes being committed in Gaza today have exposed Arab intellectuals. They have shown their Ariel Sharon-like fangs and expressed full solidarity with the Zionist war generals, calling for even more brutality. The hawks in Israel feel coy about this supportive trend among individuals they had once thought were against them.

Many of these individuals would push themselves through the crowds to get a photo with Khaled Meshaal or Ismail Haniyeh, and some made a living by singing songs in praise of the martyrs Mohammed Al-Dura and Shaikh Ahmed Yassin. Now their songs are for the murderous general; the new version of Israel’s “strategic treasure”, with one significant difference. Whenever their old treasure, Mubarak, faced accusations of corruption, failure and oppression at home, he would play the Palestinian card, like all of his fellow leaders who subject their people to tyranny, oppression and degradation. However, Israel’s new treasure is an obedient son of legitimacy of the new world order, just like Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Abbas, Nouri Al-Maliki and Mohammed Dahlan. In short, this legitimacy is nothing but the legitimacy of the “war on terror” in the American-Zionist sense of the term, while the new treasure’s predecessors maintained some remnants of Arab nationalism, albeit of a false kind.

Is this chameleon-like quality of such Arabs that we are witnessing today the product of a gusty wave of scheming and hatred, or have they been hiding the Likudnik within them the whole time?

Translated from Al-Araby Al-Jadid, 13 June, 2014

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