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Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist and distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, speaks with Democracy Now! about the historical context of Western colonialism in the Middle East amid the war against Iran. Khouri says the U.S.-Israeli attack is the latest act “causing people across the world to look at the idea of … Western liberal democratic tradition as a hoax.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
The U.S. is sending more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East as the death toll mounts in the region after the U.S. and Israel launched an unprovoked attack on Iran on Saturday. Iran has retaliated by striking Israel and U.S. allies in the region. Over the past day, Iranian drones hit U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Meanwhile, Israel has sent more ground troops into Lebanon as Israel and Hezbollah exchange attacks.
We go right now to Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.
Rami, thanks so much for being with us again. If you can respond to what has taken place, now this escalation with — Israel’s escalation with Lebanon, and the shifting rationale for why the U.S., though they have said, from Marco Rubio to House Speaker Johnson, that they were supporting Israel in doing this, that Israel took the first move, and that they understood that if Israel attacked Iran, they felt Iran would attack Israel, so — Iran would attack the United States, and so Israel was making a preemptive — so that United States was making a preemptive move? Sorry, I’m sounding so confused, but the rationales have been very confusing.
RAMI KHOURI: Well, it sounds like a new puzzle in the newspaper that we’ve got to figure out. But this is the constant — one of the constant factors that we see going on now. There’s three or four things that have converged. One is this confusion and militaristic overkill from the United States. It’s been there for 40 years or so in the Middle East, and it goes from Iraq to Iran to Lebanon to Libya to Somalia, all over the place.
Second one is that the Israelis have continued, since the 1940s, the Zionist movement, and now the state of Israel — they’ve continued to try to expand their region of sovereignty and control and expand their region of hegemonic influence across the entire region. They don’t want anybody in the West Asia-North Africa region to challenge them or offer a different alternative or fight them.
The third one is the nonstop attempts by two groups in particular, the Iranians and the Palestinians, who since 1947 have been denied by the U.S., U.K. and Israel — have been denied their right to self-determination. In other words, the Iranians and the Palestinians are not permitted to exercise their self-determination rights to have the kind of sovereignty they wish, they’re entitled to by law, and to chart policies that they want to chart. So, there’s been nonstop Zionist, Israeli, American, British military action and political action, coups and all kinds of things in Iran and in Palestine. And that’s why the Iranians and the Palestinians are the two groups of people who continue to resist in any way they can. They can’t match the military might of Israel and the U.S., but they can match the determination to live in dignity and freedom and self-determination. That’s the third one.
The fourth one is the inability of any combination of Arab countries to mount a cohesive diplomatic or military response to the threats that they face all the time, whoever the threats may be coming from. Mostly they’re coming from Israel. Sometimes they come from the U.S., sometimes from Iran, sometimes from somebody else. So, all of these have converged together, and we’re seeing, ultimately now, the consequence of allowing the state of Israel, with full U.K. and then U.S. support, to run wild across the region militarily, do whatever it wants, annex territory, colonize territory, carry out ethnic cleansing, do a genocide, and they tell the West, “We’re the only democracy, and we’re protecting the West from the barbarians in the Middle East.”
This has gone on now for decades and decades, and it’s astounding, astounding that there’s very little done about this. The region can’t do very much, but it’s astounding that the Western democracies have done virtually nothing, other than mostly support or parrot Israel. And this is causing people across the world to look at the idea of Western culture and Western liberal democratic tradition as a hoax. It’s not serious, it’s not sincere, and it’s not credible. And we’re seeing it in practice today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rami, I wanted to ask you about the impact, the religious impact, of what has happened over the last few days, this killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, and also the fact that the — what’s happening at the street level, not at the government level, in many of the Middle East countries, but we’re seeing massive protests in Pakistan, attacks on the U.S. Embassy there, in Iraq, in Bahrain, and the lack of understanding of the United States government that Khamenei was not just the supreme leader in Iran, he was a religious figure throughout the Shia portion of the Muslim world.
RAMI KHOURI: And he was a model of ideology and resistance to many people who are not Iranians or Shiites around the region and around the world. The big, big force that is asserting itself now via Israel and the U.S. and some other Western countries, like the U.K., Germany, is the continuation and the rejuvenation and the digital reconfiguration of Western colonial, imperialistic militarism. This has been going on since the 15th century. The Europeans have gone out and carried out conquests and holocausts and genocide all over the world, killing millions and millions of people. And this is the latest configuration in the digital age. And Israel is spearheading this with the U.S. in the Middle East.
And the people in the region, the ordinary people, have protested this steadily for the last century and are unable to do anything about it, because none of the countries in the Arab region, not a single one in the Arab region, has practiced true sovereignty, credible sovereignty. In other words, they can make decisions for their own well-being on their own. They have to get permission from Israel or the U.S. or Turkey or Iran or Saudi Arabia, or somebody outside their country has to approve what they want to do. And therefore, they’re powerless, and the people are powerless. And the combination of powerless people and powerless governments has given rise to these nonstate armed movements, like Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah and many others, and has led to massive immigration, outmigration of the finest young minds across the region. And so, this is the terrible situation that the populations of these countries face, and they just can’t do anything about it.
The 10 years of the extraordinary Arab uprisings between 2010 and 2020 was an incredible movement, a historic movement, where the whole region, the people were out in the streets, and they were just calling for dignity, good governance, reasonably priced food, decent education, less corruption and steady electricity supply. They were not asking for revenge for cutting people’s heads off. And they were ignored by their leaders, and then they were beaten up by their leaders.
So, this is the dilemma that has faced this region in the modern period, since statehood was introduced in a serious way in the 1930s. We’ve had a century now of nonstate states, states that don’t have the authority or the capability or the will to act as sovereign states, and therefore, this is what we end up with. The Israelis do what they want. The Americans do what they want. Other people penetrate the region. And public protests will always be an immediate emotional response. Demonstrations, a lot of this, you see it on the internet. But in terms of organized political action, there’s very little that is going on.
And then, now we’re going to see in Iran, whenever this attack stops, there’ll have to be some kind of transition. The Iranians themselves are in the process of creating a new leadership and deciding what they want to do. I don’t think there’s going to be radical change from the old to the — from Khamenei to the new leadership. There might be some changes here and there. And I don’t think we’re going to have a system where the Iranian people will be directly or credibly involved in making these strategic decisions about the government’s ideology, the government’s policies, the government’s priorities. This is the trouble. The whole region is run by top-heavy autocratic systems that don’t consult their people and don’t give them an opportunity to express themselves. And until this pattern is broken, we’re going to, unfortunately, see this going on for years and years.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what do you make of Israel’s now calling up 100,000 reservists and renewing its war in Lebanon against Hezbollah?
RAMI KHOURI: I think this is expected. They’ve done it many times. Every time they’ve done it, they’ve occupied land. They’ve killed a lot of people. They’ve destroyed a lot of villages and homes and public facilities. They retreated, nothing changed, and they had to come back and do it again.
All it does, as it’s done in Palestine, as you’re going to see now in Iran with the American-Israeli assault — all this does is heighten the determination of Indigenous people to find out how they can resist. They don’t know how they can resist. They don’t have the military power. They don’t have the organized political mechanisms to do that. So people are constantly searching for what to do.
And I think we’re going to see the same thing in Lebanon. The thing in Lebanon that’s different is the internal structure of Lebanon is very delicate. It’s a balance between four or five major groups that are ethnic and religious groups, and they’re deeply influenced by foreign actors, like Israel, the U.S., France, Iran, others. And Lebanon is way more delicate than most of the other countries, and it’s fractured several times and had civil war, and it may do so again — I hope not. But this is what makes Lebanon unique. And the Lebanese themselves don’t want to have a peace treaty forced on them with Israel, and this is what they’re afraid of now, and this is what the Israelis and the Americans are trying to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian American journalist, distinguished public policy fellow at American University of Beirut, also nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.
