The transformation of the conflict in the MidEast

This is a fantastic post that brings together some old images, video clips and background research to offer a theory about how the conflict in the MidEast has changed over the last 60 years.

Although Nasser’s dream had failed – and he died in 1970 – the PLO and their fighters had inherited his progressive world view. Many of the groups in the PLO were left wing revolutionaries and they believed that they were not only fighting to get rid of Israel, but also to create a new kind of secular, socialist state in Palestine.

But in Egypt that optimistic view of politics and its ability to transform society was collapsing. A vacuum was opening up which would be filled by the group that only fifteen years before everyone thought was dead and buried – the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, along with their much more conservative view of how to run society.

In 1975 a feature film was made called Al-Karnak. It told the story of how after the defeat in 1967 hundreds of Nasser’s opponents had been jailed and tortured. The film showed the torture in detail and it was a powerful exposure of how Nasser’s visionary ideals had become horrifically corrupted.

It seemed to prove dramatically the central message of the Islamist movement – that if you gave power to politicians in a secular society they would inevitably become corrupted and dangerous – however noble their original ideals had been.

…And that pessimistic mood began to spread through the Palestinian resistance movement too – carried by the odd logic of terrorist violence. Because the terrorists’ actions would lead them to be haunted by the same old ghost that Eichmann had brought back into the heart of Israel – the Final Solution.

Since the early 1970s various different Palestinian groups had hi-jacked western passenger planes. The motive was to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israeli occupation. They also had developed close links with a number of western terrorist groups – in particular the groups in West Germany like the Red Army Faction, and The Revolutionary Cells.