The Arab people will never accept Israel

“Israel was imposed on us” – those are the words of a Jordanian activist who filmed a recent video showing construction of the Israel-Jordan gas pipeline.

The video, posted to social media recently, shows the demolition of what the videographer says are olive trees that had been more than 40 years old.

The videographer slams the Jordanian prime minister for the process that led to the destruction of a farmer’s land. In stating that Israel was imposed on the Jordanian people, the anonymous protester was speaking literally of the gas pipeline to Israel being imposed on Jordanians, despite widespread popular opposition to the project.

But his words also speak to a wider truth – the establishment of Israel was imposed on the Arab people, against their wishes.

As my colleague at The Electronic Intifada Tamara Nasser has recently reported, the Jordanian regime (which, despite the presence of a puppet parliament, is utterly controlled by the king so beloved of Western governments) has had to impose the gas pipeline to Israel against the wishes of the vast majority of Jordanians (more than half of whom are Palestinian refugees and their descendants).

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A Jordanian construction firm recently refused to help build the pipeline. As Nasser reported, “The Dwairi Contracting company was told that the sand was for a fellow Jordanian citizen” and sent the building materials for the construction of such, “but when they got to the building site, workers realised its true purpose” – to help build the gas pipeline.

Fuad Al-Dwairi, the head of the company, stated on Facebook that the building materials were sent back once they realised they had been tricked. The company had been contacted multiple times to sell building materials for the pipeline in recent months but consistently rejected the requests.

It tells you something about the strength of popular opposition to Israel in Jordan that such deceptive tactics have to be used. And the same can be said of the fact that most members of even the puppet parliament of Jordan (which is usually a rubber stamp and amen corner for the king) reportedly opposes the gas deal. Much like in Egypt, the deal has to be imposed by the regime – which in turn is in hock to US imperialism.

But what else would we expect of the Jordanian regime, a state whose very existence depended on the Zionist movement, and which came into being as a collaborationist entity with the Zionists in order to split up and sell Palestine out from underneath the country’s native inhabitants?

Despite occasional deviations, the Jordanian regime has time and again fulfilled this role, admirably in the eyes of the Israeli occupation regime.

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Indeed, the only support anywhere in the Arab world that Israel can muster is from either the leaders of such despotic regimes, often backed by the US, or from hired thugs, terrorists and mercenaries.

An outstanding article by Rémi Brulin – an expert in the history of the discourse on “terrorism” – in May demonstrated decisively, from primary sources, that Israel had in the 1970s and 1980s been behind the creation of a far-right terrorist group in Lebanon (the “Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners”) which aimed to create death and destruction against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians which would be of “unprecedented  proportions, even in terms of Lebanon” – to quote the Israelis themselves.

The group was behind dozens of car bombs and other atrocities which indiscriminately targeted civilian streets and neighbourhoods, even while Israel later claimed these were “PLO positions”.

The group was essentially a fake one, a thin veneer for an openly terrorist campaign which was directed and controlled by leading Israel officers with the knowledge of Israeli politicians. But to actually plant the bombs Israel relies on the recruitment of Lebanese collaborators. Such terroristic mercenaries are the calibre of “support” which Israel can muster in the Arab world.

Israel was established and built, literally, on the mass graves of Palestinians slaughtered during the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleaning of Palestine by the Zionist movement’s militias. And Israel has also fought wars against all the neighbouring Arab countries too, carrying out occupations and massacres in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and even further afield.

Such a colonial entity cannot ever expect to ever receive popular support from the native people of the region. Peace can only come to the region when Zionism is removed, and a democratic state established in Palestine for all the inhabitants of the land.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.