“NOT IN OUR NAME!”

International Middle East Conference

By Michel Warschawski

[This article published in: SoZ-Sozialistische Zeitung, November 2007 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.vsp-vernetzt.de/sozkoeln/index2.htm.]

At the initiative of George W. Bush, an international Middle East conference will take place at the end of November in Annapolis, Maryland to prepare peace talks for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the eve of the conference, the rightwing coalition partners of the Israeli government threaten to leave if anything substantial is negotiated at the conference. Olmert does not want an inclusion of the conflict with Syria or the Golan heights occupied by Israel. According to Israeli desires, everything essential like participation of Hamas should be excluded.

A meeting where peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be the theme and Hamas is not invited will not be a meeting for peace but a war conference directed against Hamas and against the majority of the population in West Jordan and the Gaza strip who voted for Hamas in the parliamentary elections.

The conference of Annapolis should be seen in the context of the neoconservative global war strategy or “against Islam” as the US fundamentalist Christian rightwing says very simply and bluntly. Hamas is only one of the enemies; others are Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and finally Syria although the Syrian regime is secular or laicist and kills more Islamists than any other Middle East state. However who bothers about this? For certain unmerciful neoconservatives around Bush, all Arabs are Muslims and all Washington’s enemies are objects of the US crusade to defend the “Judaic-Christian” civilization against the threat by Islam, even if this threat is called Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales. On her Middle East visit, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice swore the allies to the imminent war and the Israeli government gave its final instructions. The front of “moderate states,” as Washington calls its vassals, should be ready for war. The conference of Annapolis will be the first session of the “war cabinet.”

One thing is missing in the US calculus: How will Iran strike back? What will this war cost in human life and material? Teheran is not Gaza. Iran has the means to respond to an Israeli-American aggression. Residents of Tel Aviv could be among those who pay dearly for the mad insane plans of George W. Bush.

The most recent remark of the mad fanatic in the White House makes one shudder with horror. He warned of a “Third World War”! “Warning” in the language of neoconservatives means “threatening.” In short, in a boundless absurdity, Bush threatens to instigate a nuclear war against the Middle East, a war in which the whole world could be drawn. In their unsurpassable cynicism, the neoconservatives propagate this war as a war waged “to defend the Jews.” The Jews are made a pretext for a new crusade of Christian fundamentalists and the state of Israel is made a spearhead in this war to save the Judaic-Christian civilization!

No thanks! We Jews will have to pay twice in this war, first as the frontline troops and second as a scapegoat if this war is lost. The same leaders who use the Jews as a pretext will be responsible for the failure. One does not need to be a prophet to foresee that the Christian fundamentalists around Bush who constantly provoke a “clash of cultures” and are ultra-Zionist and extremely anti-Semitic will punish the Jews once more if their holy crusade against Islam leads the western world into catastrophe

In Israel and worldwide, a strong Jewish voice must protest loudly and clearly: “Not in our name! Don’t use Jews for an imperial aggression!”