Hail Arab Nationalism! Thoughts on the Israeli Bombing of Syria and the Arab Reaction

By Haroon Moghul

Let me tell it like it is.

Thank Allah I’m not a Syrian. You know? I don’t know how I could live with the knowledge that some other country’s warplanes just streamed across my sovereign borders, charged over my ancient and storied capital, and that to drop bombs on something they considered a fitting target. (Watch, it’ll turn out to be no more than a milk bottling facility. But, in all fairness to pre-emptive doctrines, none of the products were homogenized or pasteurized.)

Thank Allah I’m not a Syrian soldier.

Did troops manning radar patrol stations along a troubled frontier report to their commanders: “Several Israeli warplanes have just now violated our airspace.” Hello? Reaction? Hail Arab Nationalism! I mean, at least from the superficial perspective of someone who is not an international lawyer, a country should have the right to resist the sudden intrusion of hostile flying objects originating in what is quite clearly not a neighborly nation. Or maybe they couldn’t retaliate, and by that I don’t mean they couldn’t handle the consequences of an escalation, let alone fighting a real war against Medinat Goliath, but really, that their outdated army just didn’t have the technology to deter or deflect an immediate, happening, occurring assault on their country. Good grief.

Who knows what those aircraft were carrying! I mean, what would you do if you were in that position? What would America do? What would Israel do?
Speed dial the Arab League, there’s a plan and a half. Wake up the despots, dictators and deranged dreamers, all of them, for a lazy afternoon emergency session. (First it must be decided which august state will host the auspicious forum, of course, which naturally means that such a session will never take place or will take place in a forum so neutral as to be neutered. Perhaps Djibouti.)

Mr. Bashar would warn those gathered there, in that hot, inhospitable, unlocatable place: “One day, this same turn of events could happen to you.”

Ah, our young dictator for life, but it already has, you are only too juvenile to know it. Many times your father talked the talk and then shrank from action, something your ophthalmology education no doubt spared you. Nor, indeed, would anyone in the audience feel the relevance of the moment, the great tragedy of the Arab movement, a monument to its inactive and inattentive leadership. That is, what happens to Syria does not happen to Iraq, and what happens to Egypt could never happen to Yemen, because of course, all of them are on different planets, which are connected by wormholes—tears in the fabric of spacetime, on the dimensional level of hyperspace—known to us as “airports.” No one, furthermore, is sure why they all speak essentially the same language, seeing as they are in separate universes.

Not to say that Arab leaders (or Muslim leaders at large) are moronically predictable, but, well, let us type that anyway. Here are my predictions for how they shall weasel their way out of this predicament. Jordan will not show any concern, because Jordan knows it will not get attacked, because Israel need not bomb a country already surrendered (if King Abdullah is sovereign, I am a mujtahid). Lebanon won’t be touched, because even though Syria owns Lebanon, it really doesn’t, and the last time Israel attacked Lebanon, Ariel Sharon committed war crimes and two decades later ended up Prime Minister. (We have found, I think, a downside either to elections or imperialist settler states. We are waiting for distracted academics to solve this profound dilemma and then report on its associations to Eurocentric assumptions.) I cannot believe for one minute Egypt would do anything remotely helpful. And Iraq is basically on extended sick leave, not likely to help out a Ba’athist brother because it is no longer Ba’athist. Or much else, really. It must be very lonely for Bashar in that room, very sad to think, nobody is going to help me, even though I could do free eye surgery for all of them, in my hospitals, unless someone bombs those too.

”But they weren’t even attacking Bashar!”

Who said that? Some journalist tossed into jail for making a cogent if potent—and ergo, painful—point. Yeah, sure, humiliation is nice if you’re a sick and demented freak, but well, here we have a definite case of rousing an Iran that gets pretty nasty when roused. (You know, when you make fun of someone and they don’t just get mad, they punch you in the face, well then it’s your fault for making fun of them again.) Israel is trying to tell Iran to back off, I think. We can support terrorism but you can’t. Other such noble white man’s burdens. But Iranians think they’re Aryans. We all know what happens when Aryans start considering themselves Aryans. The Israelis have thus further convinced the Iranians that they better get going on that nuke project before they end up like Iraq, which was attacked only because it didn’t have the WMD necessary to unleash hell on earth (and thereby decrease someone’s GDP).

The big problem is, once more, Israel. Their overwhelming military superiority fires even more paranoia and panic in a region already too insecure to deal with its inadequacies in any relevant and constructive way. Then, they go and bomb Syria. Great freaking timing. As if it isn’t bad enough to be an Arab after Iraq fell for the forty-sixth time in three centuries, the last twelve times of which were to white Northern European Protestants commanding their multicolored slaves (or descendants of them) to do their nasty war-mongering for them. Now, Iran knows it needs nukes. Turkey needs them if Iran is going to have them. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile—late to the meeting because His Emptiness is paradoxically unable to find a suitably fitting and relaxing plain white thobe—is going to buy its way into nuclear exclusivity (I could write a book about that and in fact, I already have). Friends, brothers, countrymen, we have the recipe for radiation sickness writ large. We – humanity, I mean – are only a handful of ill-starred decisions away from such a horrifying fate. Unfortunately, somebody somewhere doesn’t realize that what happens to Israel is what happens to Syria is what happens to me. And you, too.

Let me also note: Djibouti hosts several hundred American troops.

Haroon Moghul is a student at Cardozo School of Law, in Manhattan. His novel, My First Police State, is available (with a sample chapter) through Xlibris.com.