Resistance and the Illusions of Arab Sovereignty

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Egyptian officials, in their propaganda against Hezbollah, keep insisting on Egyptian sovereignty, and they insist that no one may be allowed to violate that sovereignty, that Hezbollah must stay within its borders, and that it must pay the price for the actions it carried out on Egyptian soil in support of Gaza and its people. Jordanian officials have been no less quick to make the same case about Jordanian sovereignty, in the matter of the sentencing of individuals who gathered information for Hamas about Israeli sites in Jordan. And it appears the Palestinian Authority wants to make the very same point regarding the explosives it discovered hidden inside a mosque in Qalqilya.

I look into the eyes of Arab officials as they speak on television screens about their states’ sovereignty and their insistence on protecting it, and I see no trace of shame, no change in the color of their faces as they let loose their fiery statements. It is clear they have lied to themselves, and lied so much that they have come to believe themselves, so that their words come out as though they were facts. Whose sovereignty are they even talking about? Of course, no state in this world can speak of absolute sovereignty, since global interconnection and the rising tide of mutual dependence have, one way or another, affected every state’s exercise of sovereignty. But we must not confuse this with the surrender of sovereignty in exchange for personal or factional interests that bring shame and humiliation upon the homeland and the citizen.

Egypt:

As for Egypt’s sovereignty and its national security, I would point to the following facts:

Egypt has no sovereignty over Sinai; all it exercises there is a form of self-rule under the terms of the Camp David Accords. The agreement confines Egypt’s military presence in Sinai to a symbolic force on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, and Egypt is forbidden from bringing in combat troops or military equipment except with Israel’s permission. Egypt is permitted to bring in Egyptian police forces or limited, lightly armed border-guard units for the purpose of maintaining internal security; and if Egypt needs to bring in additional such forces with heavy equipment, it must first obtain Israel’s permission. This very issue arose when Israel needed a strong Egyptian presence in Egyptian Rafah to prevent the smuggling of food, medicine, and weapons into Gaza, and it became necessary to bypass the Camp David Accords and grant Egypt just such a privilege — one whose purpose was not to safeguard Egypt’s security but Israel’s.

Actual sovereignty over Sinai belongs to the Multinational Force and Observers, led by the United States, which controls the strategic Mitla and Giddi passes at roughly the center of Sinai. This force sets up early-warning systems and monitors troop and air movements on both the Israeli and the Egyptian sides; in practice, the monitoring is directed at the Egyptian side, and not a single soldier of this force is present on the Palestinian land occupied in 1948.

Egypt cannot fly even a single warplane into Sinai. This is absolutely forbidden. There are civilian helicopters that cross the airspace of southern and southwestern Sinai for the purpose of transporting the Egyptian president or visitors to Sharm el-Sheikh.

The Sharm el-Sheikh resort teems with spies and agents from numerous countries, and it serves as a launching point for espionage against Egypt, its factories, its institutions, and its military installations. This resort is nothing less than a den for international intelligence services, and it is a center of relaxation and leisure for all those who conspire against Egypt (I mean Egypt itself, not the Egyptian regime).

Warships pass through Egypt’s waterways, particularly the Suez Canal, not only in times of peace but also in times of war. American naval warships have repeatedly passed through the canal in order to attack Iraq, an Arab country bound to Egypt by a mutual defense treaty.

Israeli warships pass through the Straits of Tiran, at the tip of southern Sinai, into the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea in order to spy on the activities of certain resistance factions and on Iran. These vessels do not merely carry out routine patrols; they carry out actual military operations aimed at Arabs and Muslims.

Israeli warplanes have flown through the airspace of Egypt’s Straits of Tiran to bomb Sudan, and to bomb supply convoys bound for the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

Egypt cannot exercise its sovereignty over the oil and gas wells located in Sinai, and the Egyptian regime violates Egypt’s own constitution when it grants Israel preferential treatment in fuel prices.

More important than all of this: whoever lives off resources granted by another, under conditions set by that other, has no right to claim sovereignty. Egypt receives economic assistance from America not because America has any compassion for Egypt and Egyptians, but because it and Israel secured political concessions from the Egyptian regime through the Camp David Accords. Those political concessions consist of surrendering Egyptian sovereignty wherever necessary — that is, wherever Israeli and American interests require it. Egypt today cannot even meet its people’s food needs, owing to financial and administrative corruption and recklessness in building the Egyptian economy, and the regime has no way out but submission, if it wants the calm of the Egyptian street to continue. That street remains calm thanks to the assistance of outside powers, and those very powers are capable of setting it ablaze should the Egyptian regime ever decide to truly defend Egypt’s sovereignty.

Jordan:

One might perhaps find some excuse, however flimsy, for Egypt when it speaks of sovereignty — but what excuse does the Jordanian regime have when it speaks of sovereignty? The Emirate of Transjordan was originally created to serve as a holding pen for Palestinians expelled from their homeland, and to stand guard over Zionist interests, and later over Israel’s security. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan possesses no sovereignty whatsoever; it enjoys nothing more than a form of self-rule closely resembling the self-rule enjoyed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Consider the following facts:

Jordan cannot stand on its own feet economically without foreign external support, or Arab support that is itself directed and programmed by foreigners. The Jordanian government cannot continue to pay its employees’ salaries without this support, and the Jordanian dinar would collapse overnight were the United States to withdraw its financial cover. This support carries a political price, and just as Western states give nothing to Egypt out of charity, they give nothing to Jordan out of charity either. Money always comes with political costs attached, and whoever refuses to pay them must find his own way out, if he can.

American and Israeli intelligence are deeply entrenched inside Jordan, operating in broad daylight and without any need for concealment, and the clearest proof of this is the activity of Freemasonry and its open operations among people of every stripe. There are no state secrets or security secrets in Jordan; the country is an open palm laid out before foreign security services.

Israel, America, and Britain have always stood behind the Jordanian regime, and have intervened by every method and means available to preserve that regime against any Arabs or Jordanians who have tried to change the system of rule.

There are American forces stationed in Jordan, with bases in the Levantine desert.

American and Israeli aircraft continually violate Jordanian airspace. American warplanes never once stopped passing through Jordanian airspace during the war on Iraq.

The Jordanian regime bears the primary responsibility for liberating the West Bank from occupation, yet we see it instead upholding Israeli security at the expense of the resistance. The PLO bears a share of the responsibility on this specific point, but a righteous regime does not abandon its moral responsibilities.

The Palestinian Authority

Palestinian officials sometimes speak, in the media, of the Palestinian Authority’s sovereignty, but they become a joke to themselves the moment the camera lenses turn away.

Sovereignty in the Face of Resistance

Talk of Arab sovereignty grows sweet the moment resistance is the subject at hand. Most Arab regimes have chosen the path of seeking a negotiated settlement with Israel; they are normalizing relations with Israel and coordinating with it on security matters, both secretly and openly. Israel poses no danger to the Arab regimes; its danger is directed only at the Arab nation. The resistance, by contrast, defends the Arab nation, and must inevitably collide with Israel and with the regimes that receive support from Israel and America. Most Arab regimes are, in effect, in objective alliance with Israel, because the interests of these regimes align with Israel’s in their shared hostility toward the Arab nation. This is why the interpretation of sovereignty across the Arab arena remains one tailored to serve the interests of the regimes, not the interests of the state, the people, or the nation. It is the Arab regimes that lead the nation from defeat to defeat, from backwardness to backwardness, from humiliation to humiliation, and from failure to failure — and despite all this, they never cease their boasting and their claims to sovereignty and independent national decision-making.

All these outrages committed against the Arab nation, and all these violations of Arab land and Arab honor, stir no jealousy or feeling whatsoever among the Arab regimes — yet a resistance fighter’s rifle seeking vengeance against Israel, or a burlap sack of Arab medicine smuggled in for the children of Gaza, sets off this entire uproar about sovereignty. It is true that this uproar may harm Hezbollah and Hamas temporarily, but the Arab peoples have absorbed the lesson, and they understand perfectly well that it is the Arab regimes themselves that pose the greatest threat to the sovereignty of the nation.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “المقاومة وأوهام السيادة العربية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.