IN 1985, President Ronald Reagan openly supported Israel’s Operation Wooden Leg, the bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunisia that led to more than 100 deaths. I was interviewed by a local radio station based in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, when I was Vice President for the International Student Council at Iowa State University, Ames.
The radio station wanted some alternative views in opposition to 80% of Americans who agreed with the bombing at that material time.
I gave my frank views that it was “an escalation of an endless war”.
I condemned Israel’s “state terrorism” as the root cause of the endless war. Its “state terrorism” left no room for any non-violent resistance and peaceful settlement, like the Apartheid regime in that material time. Israeli State Terrorism has further fueled resentments among the Muslims and radicalised Palestinian youths, for which Benjamin Netanyahu has shrewdly used the radicalisation of the Palestinian youths, that has been further fueled by Israeli far-right elements’ hawkish narratives and violence, to justify Israeli systemic aggressions against Palestinians and the Islamic world.
After 40 years, Israel’s aggressions have not brought the Middle East any long-term peace as it continues to use violent means to settle scores.
It has to be remembered that Israel was the staunch supporter of the former Apartheid regime in South Africa, which justified each of their own race supremacy as the “chosen race” to rule over other races with an unstoppable degree of atrocities. Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Al Fatah and South Africa’s ANC were the members of Socialist International, which sought peaceful and democratic solutions to each of their predicaments. Continuous state terrorism has made any peaceful settlement impossible.
However, Apartheid was dismantled eventually with the intervention of the international community and its regime’s willingness to reform, while Israel’s agressions have rampaged on for one man’s perverted world view-that is, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was accused of instigating Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by Rabin’s widowed wife.
Ironically, Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli Defence Minister who ordered Operation Wooden Leg, the bombing of PLO headquarters in 1985. Yitzhak Rabin and PLO’s Yasser Arafat were able to reach a peace deal in -that is, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and brokered by President Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the opposite course to nullify the Oslo Accords and destabilise the Middle East.
Israel’s continuous aggressions and determination to make Israel a nuclear power have directly provoked Islamic countries such as Iran to develop their own nuclear programs. Benjamin Netanyahu has to go if the peace process in the Middle East and the possibility of having long-term coexistence of both Palestinian and Israeli States is ever going to be achieved.
Asean is an excellent example whose member states with differences in ethnicity, culture, religion and ideology could coexist in peace. Asean declared South East Asia as the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (Zopfan) in 1971 that has effectively maintained regional peace and stability by preventing interference by any superpower.
For more than half a century, Its neutrality has ensured peace and economic growth in the region and resolved many conflicts in the region, including overseeing the ending of vietnam War, Indochina’s socialist bloc join its fold, Cambodia’s recovery from genocide committed by the Pol Pot regime, independence of East Timor, brokering a peace deal between the Philipino government with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
In 1995, ASEAN member states signed a historical agreement, the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (SEANWFZ Treaty) to ensure South East Asia would be free of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. The treaty consolidates the bloc’s member states commitment and mutual trust to regional peace and stability. It ameliorates any border conflicts between the member states by eliminating suspicions between them. Peaceful negotiations and constructive engagement not only become
the only means of settling conflicts and consolidate peace, but also the continuous effective means in preventing any interference by superpowers who have their own agendas and vested interests.
Any ambition to possess nuclear weapons, and even nuclear energy technology as the prelude to the former, would aggravate any regional conflicts. Not Iran but Israel’s long-term ambition to be the sole nuclear power within a war-torn Middle East has made long-term peace in the region seems extremely bleak in the near future, unless the regional powers are willing to look forward to not only making the region a neutral and peaceful zone, but the eminent efforts to denuke the region seem to be a very first step to go, and Israel being the only nuclear power in the region has to stop the habitual massacres of Gazans and Palestinians, and denuke itself while seeking peaceful co-existence with the Palestinian state and other regional states, and Asean’s Zopfan and SEANWFZ concepts are just a living example to be inspired with. – July 1, 2025
The writer is a two-term DAP assemblyman for Skudai and member of the Johor State Legislative Assembly