Стр. 18 - V

Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
Author : Rami Mohammad Al-Shaer
Journalist
NEARLY 32 YEARS AGO, the International Affairs
journal carried my article under the same title. These were
different times; the international situation and the political
priorities of the local peoples were likewise different. Cer-
tain problems are still on the agenda; they have not lost
their urgency yet the approaches to their settlement and
the conditions, in which they should be settled, radically
differ from what we had 30 or even 15 years ago.
The majority of problems the peoples of the Middle East
have been coping with in the last few decades are rooted
in the world problems created by the political principles of the West, globalization, domination of
the United States and its allies in many countries of Western Europe, Africa and Latin America,
and continued neo-colonialist policies of the West worldwide whenever it is possible.
The Middle Eastern countries are gradually losing their economies. American and West European
bankers, political scientists and economic advisers, past masters of persuasion, re-orientated our
economists to what they called the "promising" branches. This primitive method bound the most
initiative industrialists of the Middle East hand and foot and removed the most important links
from the chains of industrial production. The West spared no effort to reduce the developing coun-
tries, the Middle Eastern countries in the first place, to the status of raw material appendages that
would never move beyond primary refinery; it never sought equal and honest trade relationships
with the developing countries.
My reader might say that a big part of the American establishment wants to develop relations with
Arab countries, that a considerable number of American liberals, including Jewish intellectuals, crit-
icize Israel and its policies, that Western countries supply the Gulf countries with latest weapons
and it is thanks to the West that the two Arab countries shook off their dictators Saddam Hussein
and Muammar Qaddafi, the favor of dubious value. In fact, they pushed Libya and Iraq, as well as
their neighbors, to the brink of an economic catastrophe; their trade with the West dropped to the
level of the late 1940s.
The life on the West Bank and labor conditions are not easy at all. The everyday life in Gaza is even
harder. The life of the majority of the young people who live there is joyless; they have to cope
with everyday problems, they have no future and no very simple joys that young men of their age
in Europe take for granted. Israel is not bothered with the future of occupied territories and the
future of millions of Palestinians living in the milieu of apartheid. This means that millions of peo-
ple living in other places of the world should pay attention to this problem. The war in Syria, and
in other places for that matter, has temporarily screened the problem of the occupied Palestinian
lands. Mankind, however, should not lose sight of this situation. This is the duty of us all.
The Middle East: Urgent Problems