Cue the days of rage

Editorial

Mobs in Egypt stormed Israel’s embassy in Cairo last week, seizing the Israeli flag and forcing the evacuation of the ambassador and diplomatic staff.

Now, a Jordanian Facebook page is urging a “Million Man Rally” (women, evidently, can stay home) at the Israeli embassy in Amman this week, again with the aim of capturing the Israeli flag.

These may sound like the sort of childish flag games we played at summer camp, but the stakes are enormous. Egypt and Jordan are the only adjacent states that recognize Israel’s right to exist. The new revolutionary government in Egypt has yet to make clear its intentions vis-à-vis Israel, although initial indicators are not positive. Jordan, perhaps retreating to the well-trod deflection game, may be seeking to focus their people’s attentions on the Zionist bogeyman at a time when dictators all across the region are on the ropes.

Moreover, one of Israel’s few other erstwhile allies is more bellicose than ever. Turkey’s president, stirring things up before a visit to Egypt, is said to have promised that Turkish warships would intercept Israeli ships if Israeli ships attempt to intercept boats headed to Gaza. This despite the recent United Nations investigation report on the 2010 flotilla violence that legitimized Israel’s Gaza blockade as legal (while calling the Israeli Defence Forces’ response to violent attacks by flotilla participants “excessive and unreasonable”).

The UN also, for once, seems unequivocal on the bad deeds of a Mideast totalitarian. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, condemned the Syrian regime, saying 2,600 people have been killed in the six-month crackdown against anti-government activists in that country.

But no, says a spokesperson for the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, only 1,400 people have died: 700 activists and 700 police. The perfect symmetry of opposition deaths versus police deaths implies a fair fight, which is almost certainly far from the reality. The UN is being uncharacteristically vocal on the Syrian issue, exhibiting a degree of proactivity usually reserved only for Israel.

Russia, for its part, has said that Syria is facing enough international pressure and does not require additional sanctions. The Soviet empire may be dead, but Russian deviousness in the region is alive as ever.

The Russian ambassador at the UN has given a green light to whatever actions the Palestinian Authority takes next week at the General Assembly. The UN is likely to vote on whether to make “Palestine” a member state, though the PA has not fully made clear its strategy. The United States and Israel are portraying the vote as an effort to delegitimize Israel and to legitimize Palestinian statehood without the irksome necessity of negotiating peace with Israel – an accord that would necessitate the Palestinians acknowledging Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This is, in a sense, the diplomatic equivalent of mounting a mob and snatching the flag, implicit as the UN vote would be in recognizing the legitimacy of a terrorist state while delegitimizing a democratic state. The mob, this time, would not be Egyptian or Jordanian rabble, of course, but the vast majority of UN member countries.

The expected turn of events would see a General Assembly vote Sept. 20, in which Palestine is victorious by the overwhelming numbers common to every condemnation of Israel at the international body. The United States is then expected to veto Palestine’s admission at the Security Council, after which the usual suspects will arise in ecstatic rage across the Middle East and in “progressive” communities everywhere, denouncing Israel and the Zionist lapdog, America.

A Sept. 20 vote would, not coincidentally, nearly coincide with the Durban 3 conference, on Sept. 22, in New York. This event marks the 10th anniversary of the World Conference against Racism, at which demonization of Israel eclipsed every other injustice in the world combined. If things unfold as expected, Durban 3 will open just about the time the world awakens to the American veto of Palestinian admission to the UN, creating a backdrop of outrage for what is already certain to be a convention of moral indignation and anti-America, anti-Israel wrath.

Expect more than flag-snatchings. If all goes as planned, there will be the burning of American and Israeli flags in New York and elsewhere as the great defenders of good, those opponents of racism and Zionism, and the assembled autocrats and their allies from all over the world, express their fury at the forces that keep the Palestinians – and all oppressed peoples – under the capitalist boot heel.

Of course, no one – not even the Palestinian leadership – expect that this gambit will advance the hope for statehood or peace. On the contrary, it is really just another choreographed “day of rage” against the Jewish state and its friends.

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