The United States bought icy, oil-rich Alaska from a crumbling Russian Empire for a pittance, a bargain rivaled only by the De Freij family’s takeover of the Hippodrome in Beirut, or the Salam family’s seizure of the Golf Club pastures in the suburbia of Ghobeiry.
A century and a half later, in that forty-ninth state, Donald Trump – officially the 45th and 47th president of the US – welcomed Vladimir Putin, Russia’s sole ruler, although officially he’s the second and fourth president of Russia since the Soviet Union collapse, to a summit branded “Pursuing Peace.” Washington’s military-industrial complex media declared the outcome a victory for Moscow. Trump naturally had a different interpretation.
In a Fox News interview after the Anchorage summit, Trump sat with his Sean Hannity, to take inventory of the accomplishments of both the meeting and his presidency. Inevitably, they concluded that Donald Trump will be history’s most worthy Nobel Peace laureate, and the prize shall be retired after him.
Trump’s self-proclaimed achievements included “ending seven wars,” from India-Pakistan to Armenia-Azerbaijan and beyond. This, in contrast to the “Nobel man” before him, Barack Obama, who started wars across seven Arab countries. Trump added to his list the disruption of Iran’s nuclear program, supposedly a week away from producing the “bomb”, “not to mention the Abraham Accords,” as Hannity eagerly reminded viewers.
It is the age of peace then. That is, if one ignores the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the partition wars tearing through the Arab world. Many seem to want to board Trump’s “peace train,” but reality leads to a different destination. The lived experience of the people bears no resemblance to Trump’s hallucinations, nor to those of the Trump-struck rulers in our capitals today. In an ideal world, peace would not need to be “pursued”; it would simply exist. To beg for peace from a genocidal tyrant is nothing but collective suicide.
From the comfort of Alaska, it may be easy to overlook the daily annihilation of a people half a world away. But how can decision-makers in our region, who cannot sip their coffee on their balconies without being serenaded by the buzz of Israeli drones hunting the bravest of their country’s youth, peddle submission as peace?
The choice officially offered to our peoples is not war or peace. It is between the “prosperity” of the West Bank or the terrors of Gaza’s genocide. That supposed comfort, should the colonizer grant it, is nothing more than decadence for a select few, insulated from their own society, like the gated compounds of the Arabian peninsula and other colonial outposts.
Still, reality offers broader possibilities. Never shall our peoples accept an occupation like that imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank, nor will they ever accept the continuation of occupation there or anywhere else. In a time when Arab armies compete to display their surrender plans to the empire and act as police forces against their own societies, blame cannot fall on those who choose resistance, no matter the price. They are not suicidal, as the submissive claim. Those who shirk confrontation, condemning us all to slaughter, generation after generation, without end, are the ones who should feel shame.
Trump closed his Fox interview by trading compliments with Hannity. Both boasted that “America is great again.” The peace doves among us bowed in awe.
Jamal Ghosn is the editor of Al Akhbar English.
This is an edited translation of an article originally published in Arabic.
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