STIRLING: Canadian MPs poorly equipped to help settle Middle East conflict

The ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel is horrifying. Edmonton NDP MP Heather McPherson wants peace in the Middle East, wants a ceasefire, wants a state for Palestinians, wants to heal a raw and open wound in the world and so she launched a motion in the House of Commons to recognize a Palestinian state.On Monday night, it passed (with changes.) But to what good purpose?Such intentions are commendable, but the Middle East is a tough neighbourhood that outsiders do not understand very well. Despite Heather McPherson’s demands for a Palestinian state, as anthropologist Geoffrey Clarfield wrote in The Dorchester Review #26, the Palestinian state exists already in “The Promised Land of Jordan.” War is ugly and Westerners are exposed to detailed images of it because Western news agencies have lots of journalists stationed in Jerusalem. Getting posted to Jerusalem is a cushy station for journos. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) ferry accredited journalists in and out of conflict areas to do dramatic stand-ups, then back to modern-day Jerusalem for editing, upload and dinner.Back to 1987, for a moment. During the early days of the ‘intifada’ — the Palestinian street uprisings of that year, the number of foreign journalists in Jerusalem was wholly disproportionate to the region’s news value. Global events are often decided in Washington. If there were an equivalent number of journos in Washington as there are in Jerusalem during times of conflict, the numbers would be in the thousands.But stories out of Washington, DC, come from boring press conferences and presidential public flubs. Everyone wanders around in a suit jacket, not a flak jacket. Sure there are headlines to be had, but no gut-wrenching visuals. Boring!By contrast, in other Middle East regional conflicts, such as Jordan’s “Black September” or Syria’s annihilation of the city of Hama, there’s a media blackout. Western journalists are ejected during the regime’s actions and only after the fact are the tens of thousands of dead counted amidst the smoking ruins. But by that time the story is over and only a handful of very brave journos are willing to venture in, more or less alone. Today, just the cost of insurance for such heroic news coverage makes it unlikely to happen, as journalists in south Lebanon have recently found out, the hard way.But here's the thing. Lost in the gruesome war coverage of Gaza, we do not see the socio-economic challenges of the region. We do not see that prior to the first intifada, Israel employed about 100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. Many worked as trades people in construction, but many also worked in positions of trust. Their earnings were double, triple, sometimes many times that of ‘fellahin’ in surrounding countries, countries that often struggle to feed their populations. Israel literally made the desert bloom and is a large exporter of food to Europe and the world. Meanwhile, its equally desert-ified neighbours often cannot feed their flocks. While the naïve Westerners celebrated the “Arab Spring” that struck the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region in 2010 as being emblematic of a burgeoning desire for regional democracy, the truth is that millions of people were going hungry and jobless. That is why they rioted.The World Bank had issued a report in 2006 that by 2020 some 100 million young Arabs across MENA region would be coming of age — jobless. It is 2024 now.In 2011, the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) reported that it could predict where the next global civil unrest would unfold based on food prices via the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). What had happened was the unintended consequence of the USA’s food-to-fuel corn ethanol project, which had moved ~6 million megatonnes of corn off world markets to put in gas tanks in the US to ‘stop climate change.’ Corn is a staple for poor people worldwide — for humans and for their livestock. For people who live on $1 or $2 dollars a day, any price rise is untenable. Thus we see a world-wide flow of economic refugees flooding Europe, the southern border of the US and into Canada. The economically moribund autocracies of Middle Eastern countries, many of which are fraught with internal ethnic conflicts, are not able to respond to the challenges of high unemployment, food shortages and lack of small business innovation due to being “Citadels of Dead Capital.”Peter Zeihan foresees chaos and famine ahead for the whole region as globalization collapses. If he is right, the West Bank and Gazan Palestinians will be but a blip in the tragic domino effect over regional geopolitics.That means Israel and its partner Palestinians — during good times — were a socio-economic poke in the eye, a different kind of threat to the region!The two-some exemplified an economic powerhouse; how a capitalist, democratic system could create jobs, ample food and a reasonable life for everyone. The case could be made that disproportionate international food and financial aid has gone to a very small number of Gazan Palestinians. As we now know, Hamas absconded with it, to build its tunnel empire of terror; meanwhile regional nations struggle to feed their millions of people and keep a lid on simmering discontent over unemployment and food shortages.Terrorist organizations such as Hamas have exploited both the Western media who only cover the ghastly images and the body count before going out for supper and the West’s naivety of regional geopolitics and socio-economics.There’s much more to the story than standing up in the House of Commons, calling for miracles in the Middle East that have eluded so many others — a ceasefire or making peace... or declaring a state when, as Geoffrey Clarfield (above) relates, one already exists.Canada has its own troubles at home. Maybe we should deal with those first before wading in to poorly understood, complex conflicts abroad. We should not blindly walk down that road of good intentions… no matter what we see on the news.Michelle Stirling worked and lived in Israel for a decade and comments on various socio-economic issues.

STIRLING: Canadian MPs poorly equipped to help settle Middle East conflict

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