https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-01-30/gaza-middle-east-lies/
This is a helpful summary and reminder of the scope and magnitude of deceit when it comes to mainstream Western narratives regarding the Middle East, its wars, and America's part in them. And this is true when it comes to the Establishment (or Legacy as some would have it) media outlets - with everything turned up a notch or two when it comes to the growing array of Right-wing platforms.
The 1993 Oslo Accords may have been born of sincerity but there were problems on both sides. First, with Arafat and the PLO - what would become the Palestinian Authority (or PA), the fact that they went to the table at all was an admission of defeat - a defeat not all Palestinians would embrace.
After the terrible rout and loss of additional territory in the Six Day War of 1967, the Palestinians staged an uprising in Jordan - the Black September uprising of 1970-1971. The PLO was defeated and fled to Lebanon. This played a role in fomenting the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). When Israel invaded (for the second time) in 1982, the PLO was forced to flee once again, this time to Tunisia. Israel would occupy southern Lebanon until 2000, and attack PLO targets in Tunisia throughout the 1980's - the most noteworthy being the bombings in 1985.
For Arafat and the PLO, defeat was staring them in the face and by the late 1980's, he was ready to negotiate - setting the stage for the Oslo Accords a few years later.
However, Arafat's position and concession were far from universal. Hamas emerged in 1987, in response to PLO compromise and capitulation. Likewise Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon during this period (the mid-1980's) in response to Israel's role in the Lebanon War and its occupation. For some, this was a period of renewal - a new revitalised challenge to Israel and they were disgusted with Arafat and the PLO's willingness to cave in and negotiate.
So while the Oslo Accords were a moment for hope, there was a larger reality that those following events would have been aware of - namely that Arafat didn't really represent the anti-Israel opposition any more. In that sense Oslo was something of a farce.
On the Israeli side, the Settler movement was energized by the accords (which they viewed as a betrayal) and stirred and egged on by Benjamin Netanyahu, they would resist its implementation - and of course Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated in November of 1995 by a radicalised settler.
Since that time, apart from a few brief years, the Israeli Right has dominated politics and in particular Likud as led by Netanyahu. The Oslo Accords never had a chance and the various Netanyahu governments worked with the Settler movement to make its implementation all but impossible. At this point in time, it's dead as is the basic premise of a two-state solution. The West Bank has deliberately been carved up to such an extent that it would be impossible to piece together some kind of contiguous land area.
The article touches on other related and important episodes - the Camp David failures in 2000 (under Labor's Ehud Barak) and Ariel Sharon's provocation of the Second Intifada in 2000.
The narratives surrounding 9/11 were problematic from the beginning. As I've eluded to many times I was already tuned into the fact that the US was looking for an excuse to invade Afghanistan. That was clear enough and as soon as the attacks happened, I said to my co-worker - the US is going to war. He was baffled. 'Against who?' he asked. And I said, "Afghanistan for starters.' He was confused by this as were many Americans. They hadn't been following events.
As with the bombings of Serbia, there was no possible response that would deter the United States. The plans were already made (pre-9/11) and the bombs would fall. The Serbian regime had to go - as did the Taliban. The US had been willing to work with them a few years earlier but if there were any lingering doubts, they were gone by the spring of 2001. It was abundantly clear (given the news coverage of the Bamiyan Buddha statues), the US was looking to invade and overthrow the regime. Like many others I continued to follow events that summer and when Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed on 9 September, it felt like a turning point. Two days later the US had its justification for an invasion.
The 9/11 attacks set a host of policies and strategic plans in motion and despite attempts by the Taliban to negotiate, the trigger was pulled and decades of war (and spin-off wars) would ensue leaving millions dead.
The great irony is the US lost its way as these conflicts often went sideways. In keeping with the Neo-Con (now Establishment) grand strategy, regime change operations continue to this day - the most recent being Syria in December 2024, but none have gone according to plan and all have played their part in sowing chaos. They have created as many problems as they have solved and in the interim rival powers have risen to challenge US hegemony, making the overall dream of a unipolar order (to which these regime change operations were a means) seem more distant and impossible than ever.
Most who had been following Iraq closely since the 1990's knew the WMD claims of the Bush administration were false - let alone the absurd attempt to tie Saddam Hussein in with al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. The US had been systematically attempting to destroy and subjugate Iraq since 1990 and hundreds of thousands had already died. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and the civil war it spawned, well over another million would die. The WMD were never found. Tehran's hand was strengthened in South Iraq, the Kurds were granted more autonomy leading to trouble with Türkiye, and the civil war would lead to the rise of ISIS.
The Arab Spring was also a result (at least in part) of the Iraq War and this would lead to civil wars, regime change, and a great deal of bloodshed. The US helped to fuel the wars in places like Syria, and Libya and it backed the bloody second coup in Egypt which overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood and returned the nation to a secular dictatorship.
The lies about Libya were pervasive and the media has never covered the full story of the West's relationship with Qaddafi. The reasons for his removal were not due to some pressing danger concerning his attempt to quash an uprising. They wanted him gone for geopolitical and economic reasons and his regime was toppled by proto-ISIS elements that would soon be shipped to Syria and armed by Western intelligence. By 2011, the US had once more reverted to working with Islamists and Salafist elements as it had previously for decades. The War on Terror was effectively over and after a decade was revealed to a farce, but one still utilized by the regime when the optics demand it.
While the US has been more than happy to back secular dictators in some instances, when it came to Assad in Syria, the problem was his alliance with Iran and thus his hostility to Israel. There was also considerable bad blood with Ankara related to a series of problems going back decades. All too often the disputes were actually rooted in issues related to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the machinations of the UK and France in re-drawing maps and creating countries out of thin air. Türkiye was born in response to this and the questions over water, territory, and the Kurds became issues of contention that remain to this day.
Assad was far from a liberal ruler but Syria was never (and still is not) a viable nation. A liberal order never had a chance and this is true apart from the fact that there was no Enlightenment tradition in that region - no patterns of democracy, social consensus, concepts of rights, social contract, or the rule of law. People could live and worship freely under the Assads, but politics was off limits as was any criticism of the regime. It wasn't ideal but it was better than ISIS rule. The current regime of re-branded al Qaeda leaders is already struggling as just months into their rule episodes of violence and retributive killings point to the possibilities of a larger war of resistance. There is a major shift taking place among the Kurds and if they lay down their arms and are treated fairly, there is a chance for peace. We'll see what 2025 brings to Syria.
And Syria cannot be discussed apart from Lebanon, a nation that had barely recovered from civil war in the 2000's when it was torn apart by the assassination of Rafik Harriri in 2005, the Hezbollah-Israel War of 2006, episodes of civil war in 2007-8, and spillover from Syria's war in 2011 and after. By 2019, the nation was in crisis, exacerbated by the port explosion of 2020 - and the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2023-2025.
And coming full circle, the Gaza War of 2023-present cannot be understood apart from the larger set of regional events. All of the issues are related and tend to overlap and everywhere the violence and cruelty of the Israeli regime is glossed over and justified by Western states and their media outlets.
Cook rightly relates these deceitful narratives to the questions of US relations to Russia and Ukraine. Far from being the 'exceptional' nation, the US government and its media have no moral standing and no credibility. It has foisted on the world an endless stream of lies that have resulted in the destruction of societies and millions of dead. This does not exonerate the governments of the world and the wars they fight or their evil roles in these conflicts but at the very least, thinking moral people should question and reject the post-war and post-Cold War American narratives. This should be a given for Christians but sadly of all people in the United States, they are most likely to fall for these lies and provide unqualified support for them.
Cook is to be commended for telling the truth. How tragic that among Christian leaders the truth about these matters is nowhere to be found.