by ISRAEL SHAMIR
Autumn in the Middle East hasn’t the melancholy connotations you attach to it in the North. For you, this is the season of dying; maple leaves turn purple and geese fly south. For us, this is the jolly season of awakening after stupefying summer heat; grass hatches again on the burned-to-reddish-brown lawns and trees are heavy with ripe figs and pomegranates.
Arab Spring, as the wave of spectacular February risings was called, gave way to Arab Summer, that hot and meaningless season of vainly seeking shade or a cool dip under a mercilessly blazing sun. In Egypt, the military junta continued Mubarak’s policies; in Libya, armed gangs prowled the desert under the expensive parasol of the NATO Air Force; in Syria, mythic adventures of a Damascus Lesbian Blogger unfolded, penned and composed by a middle-aged American ex-intelligence agent from his Scottish retirement. Palestine was easily forgotten, and a neocon observer happily and hastily reported that “the Arab Spring has rendered the Palestinian issue irrelevant”.
Autumn came, and the summer haze dissipated. The first fruits sown in the spring budded forth: the Israeli Embassy fortress-on-the Nile was stormed, Turkey recalled last year’ s insult, and the Saudis threatened the US for the first time ever. Palestine is center stage again, and the UN application for Palestinian statehood of Mahmud Abbas is the centrepiece of the new mosaic. Now we can reassess the evidence and finally begin to understand what is actually happening in the Middle East: is it an authentic drive for liberalization and democracy, a credit card revolt, a carefully orchestrated plot? And where is it all leading to? Apparently our region is being re-formatted just like the hard drive on your computer, and at the end of this brief process, a long-forgotten Caliphate will rise again, as we shall further explain.
Why Palestinians are applying for UN recognition
Palestinians are tired of never-ending negotiations. They were promised speedy independence in long-gone 1993, the year Mandela got his Nobel Peace Prize and Jurassic Park was a box office hit. The Oslo Agreement between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was expected to solve the whole problem very soon after a brief autonomy interlude. It didn’t work out: Arafat was poisoned, Rabin was shot, consequent Jewish governments played for time and intermittently massacred the impatient Palestinians. The negotiations went on, nevertheless. . . and on, and on . .
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