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The Arab world lies in northern Africa and southwestern Asia. It expands from Mauritania in the west to Oman in the east. The word “Arab” originally referred to the nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in southwestern Asia. Arabs may be described as a people whose native language is Arabic and who regard Arab culture as their own. They differ in significant ways. They do not make up a single race of people. Some have dark skin and some are fair in complexion. Most Arabs are Muslims while some are Christians. The Arab world is made up of nineteen nations. About millions of Arabs live in other countries like Brazil, Canada, France, Great Britain, Iran, Israel, Turkey and the United States of America and Russia.
The west is regarded especially as United States and other countries of Europe. Europe is counted among the west because of their domination of the Arab world.
The west and the U.S in particular, as a result of their growing or advanced financial and moral power, since the 1950s and just like any human force, have been dominating and colonizing the other countries. Most Arabs hate the West, especially the U.S, for many reasons. Some date back to the crusade and the Andalusia period and most recently because of some injustices on Palestine and Iraq. Here, we don’t intend to delve into some historical excursus turmoil for the story is still current and well known.
Interestingly, it is pertinent to recall the sufferings Arabs have undergone in the hands of the West. It is a better experienced situation rather than described. For the Arabs, it will continue to linger in the minds of generations yet unborn. The West, in their hidden agenda have set out to better the lives of the Arabs. They discovered oil wells in this virgin land. Hence, they have been insisting to control their government in order to have absolute access to these wells of oil. If it had not been for these oil wells, they would have left the land for many centuries back. They claim to be peacemakers but for the Arabs, they are monsters disguised in human fashion ready to kill by perpetrating injustice against the weaker ones.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has been the major threat to peace in the Arab world since the 1940s. This conflict also is an issue of intense international concern. The United States and other countries have always supported the Israelis against the Arabs. This is why the Arabs hate the West - especially the United States of America.
This injustice started as early as 1917, when against the Arabs’ wishes, Great Britain declared its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1947, the British asked the United Nations (UN) to handle the Palestine problem. The U.N divided Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, which called itself Israel. The Arabs angrily opposed the division of what they considered their land.
Based on this, the Israelis defeated the Arabs late in 1948 and took about half the land that the (U.N) had planned for the new Arab state. According to the World Book Encyclopedia (Vol.1 P.552), the second Arab-Israeli war occurred in 1956 after several border clashes. Israeli troops invaded Egypt in October of that year as part of a coordinated military operation with the British and French. In June 1961, war broke out again between Israel and the Arab States of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. This war lasted only six days, but it ended with Israel’s occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian administered Gaza strip, Jordan’s West bank and Syrian’s Golan Heights.
Finally, since the 1948 in the Arab-Israeli war, approximately about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs have become refugees, homeless in their own land.
What an injustice! However, for the Arabs, this has been the origin of their political instability. Perhaps this is the mother of all disasters not only that a band of psychopaths who alter history calendars and geography could come to power in Iraq but also that they had an extra-ordinary talent for propelling this country and along with it the rest of the Arab world from one catastrophe to another. Such disaster-bound leadership developed into a full pledged art form, with its own rules, its own crowds of connoisseurs who have found volatility and madness a perfectly acceptable mode of government.
We have been living in a complex world in which nations and political movements interact in intricate ways to formulate policies and handle conflicts. Yet, the Arabs lost Palestine once in 1948; a second time in 1967 and a third time in 2002 and are still at a loss for what is theirs! This has ushered in various periods of territorial occupation in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq etc. This is a miserable record, which for the Arabs, has inevitably become their history. They are yearning for justice. Their hope is that God shall help them realize that it is against the background of injustice to the Arab world that in September 2001, Osama Bin Laden decided to shock and shake the entire world by bombing the World Power (the United States).
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Henry Ekwuruke
Henry Ekwuruke is Executive Director of the Development Generation Africa International.
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