Defying the world

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused by the West of committing the mother of all sins when he ordered his army to take over Crimea and annex it to mother Russia, an action highly disruptive of the world order that emerged after World War II.

And when Moscow went ahead also with its intervention in East Ukraine, the West became more convinced that the Russian behaviour was a stab to the world order and the international rules of the game.

The West’s charges against Moscow made is sound as if the Russian intervention in Ukraine were the first of its kind in contemporary history, that nothing of the sort had ever been committed by other nations in the post-World War II era.

Putin is thus regarded as a major breaker of the world order.

We in the Middle East would hasten to remind the West that committing acts of aggressions against nations and then occupying their territories did happen, not once but many times in the Middle East when Israel openly invaded, colonised and usurped territories belonging to neighbouring countries.

This happened  starting with the 1947-48 Arab-Israeli war after which the newly formed Israel occupied and annexed Palestinian territories in open defiance of the UN 1947 partition plan for Palestine.

Practically the same thing occurred again in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and formally annexed them in a de facto manner.

In the 1973 Israeli war with Syria and Egypt, Israeli forces occupied the Syrian Golan Heights and officially annexed them before the very eyes of the West.

Israel also clung to the Sinai until the 1979 peace treaty it concluded with Egypt.

Against this backdrop, it is unfair to say that Russia was the first to disturb the world order through its military action in Ukraine.

The Israeli precedent is out there for all to see. What it showed is that might is right.

Moscow did the same in 2014. Nothing more and nothing less.