With the toppled President Bashar al-Assad’s departure to Moscow, Russia, the entire Assad family’s 54-year hold on Syria has reached its end. Now many in the country and the international community ask which one is the real al-Jolani.

In a recent interview, al-Jolani, the face of the Syrian rebels, insisted that his evolution was natural. “A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties. This is human nature,” al-Jolani said.

The real al-Jolani will likely emerge in the way he approaches the formation of a post-Assad transition government, as well as the rights, security and safety of minorities. These include the Shiite Muslim Alawites from which the Assads hail and who long supported their brutal rule.

Moreover, even those who question the sincerity of his conversion suggest that al-Jolani may be the one rebel commander who can hold Syria together. “There is no local military power to stand (up to) or compete with Jolani,” an associate of the rebel leader said when he still publicly identified himself as a jihadist. The former associate warned that if al-Jolani fails, Syria, like Libya, will become a state torn apart by rival armed militias.

Al-Jolani “hasn’t changed at all, but there’s a difference between being in battle, at war, killing, and running a country,” the former associate said. He suggested the rebel leader’s more moderate and conciliatory posture stemmed from a recognition that the Islamic State’s sectarian bloodlust was a mistake. He also stated that al-Jolani “now considers himself a statesman,” and claimed the rebel leader may follow suggestions that he turn the group into a political party by transferring its military wing to a reconstituted Syrian military.

Meanwhile, the HTS paramilitary group moved quickly to safeguard public buildings in Damascus and manage the presence of heavily armed factions in the capital. “We will soon ban gatherings of armed people,” said Amer al-Sheikh, a HTS security official.

Al-Jolani needs to earn international trust

On December 10, 2024, the rebels appointed Mohammed al-Bashir as caretaker prime minister for four months. It was not immediately clear what the next step would be.

Al-Bashir ran the rebel-led Salvation Government in their stronghold in Syria’s northern Idlib region. Since HTS launched its offensive, he has assisted captured cities, including Aleppo, Hama and Homs, in installing post-Assad governance structures.

Beyond ensuring domestic security and stability, al-Jolani will need to secure international support for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of traumatised and war-ravaged Syria. To do so, al-Jolani and HTS will have to convince Syrian minorities, segments of Syria’s majority Sunni Muslims and the international community that they have genuinely changed their colors and are not wolves in sheep’s clothing.

A questionable human rights record that has persisted long after they disavowed jihadism compounds HTS and al-Jolani’s reputational problems. As recently as August 2024, the United Nations accused the group of resorting to extrajudicial killings, torture and the recruitment of child soldiers.

“HTS detained men, women, and children as young as seven. They included civilians detained for criticising HTS and participating in demonstrations,” the UN Human Rights Council said in a report. “These acts may amount to war crimes.”

Even so, this week, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen acknowledged that HTS has sought to address concerns in recent days.

“The realities so far is that the HTS and also the other armed groups have been sending good messages to the Syrian people,” Pedersen said. “They have been sending messages of unity, of inclusiveness… We have also seen… reassuring things on the ground.”

Pedersen was referring to rebel assurances given to minorities, a pledge not to impose restrictions on women’s clothing, amnesty for conscripted personnel of Assad’s military, the rebels reaching out to Assad government officials and efforts to safeguard government institutions.

United States officials echoed Pedersen despite the US designation of HTS as a terrorist organization.

Incidents in Damascus and Hama

Against the backdrop of his track record in recent years in administering the Idlib region, the last rebel-held stronghold in Syria when the civil war’s battle lines were frozen in 2020, al-Jolani has sought to project an image of tolerance, reconciliation and ability to deliver public goods and services.

Al-Jolani turned Idlib, historically the country’s poorest province, into its fastest-growing region, despite his autocratic rule and frequent Syrian and Russian air attacks. To his credit, there were no major reports of attacks on Christians, Alawites and other minorities or acts of revenge against representatives of the Assad regime, including the military. Further, there was no mass looting as HTS fighters took over cities and towns, including Damascus.

That is not to say that everything unfolded incident-free. One Damascus resident reported that unidentified armed men had knocked on the door of an acquaintance and asked about his religion. A neighbor returned home to find his door broken down and his apartment looted. Similarly, a nearby government building was looted despite instructions from rebel leaders against violating public property. The rebels imposed an overnight curfew in Damascus to maintain law and order.

Earlier, a man in Hama told prisoners sitting on the ground with their hands tied behind them in a video on social media, “We will heal the hearts of the believers by cutting off your heads, you swine.”

HTS’s statement on Syrian chemical weapons

Meanwhile, with Israel bombing Syrian arsenals of strategic weapons, including suspected chemical weapons sites, HTS missed an opportunity to unequivocally garner trust. In a statement, the group said it will safeguard the country’s remaining chemical weapons stockpiles and ensure they aren’t used against citizens. This is a stark contrast to the Assad regime, which used chemical weapons on several occasions against Syrian civilians.

In the wake of Assad’s fall, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UN chemical weapons watchdog, said it had contacted unidentified Syrian authorities “with a view to emphasising the paramount importance of ensuring the safety and security of all chemical weapons-related materials and facilities.”

HTS responded, saying, “We clearly state that we have no intention or desire to use chemical weapons or any weapons of mass destruction under any circumstances. We will not allow the use of any weapon, whatever it may be, against civilians or [allow them to] become a tool for revenge or destruction. We consider the use of such weapons a crime against humanity.”

The group would have done itself a favor by offering to destroy under international supervision what chemical weapons stockpiles fall into its hands and/or ask OPCW to assist in searching for such weapons.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will the Real al-Jolani Stand Up? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“I was angry. I told him it had to stop, or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off,” Reagan noted in his diary.

The August 1982 phone call between Reagan and Begin provides a template for the US’s ability to twist Israel’s arm and the limits of the Western giant’s influence.

Begin wasted no time in halting his saturation bombing of the Lebanese capital in response to Reagan’s threat. Yet, he rejected the president’s demand that he allow an international force to enter Beirut to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Israeli-besieged city. His refusal had dire consequences.

A month later, at least 800 Palestinians, many of them women and children, were massacred in their homes in Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut by Lebanese Christian gunmen under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military. Public outrage in Israel forced Begin to resign, ending his career.

Biden failed where Reagan succeeded

More than four decades later, US President Joe Biden understood the stakes when Israel went to war in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. He also knew the levers of power at his disposal after test-driving Reagan’s approach in 2021.

At the time, Biden, like his predecessor, picked up the phone to read Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act. As a new book on Biden, The Last Politician, describes, it was his fourth phone call to the Israeli leader in ten days in which behind-the-scenes diplomacy and cajoling failed to end fighting between Israel and Hamas. The president advised him that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.” When Netanyahu sought to buy time, Biden replied: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.”

Netanyahu and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire a day later. Even so, he knew then and now that he had less to worry about than Begin did with the Reagan presidency.

In contrast to Reagan’s administration, which allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass 21 resolutions criticizing, if not condemning, Israel’s policies, Biden gave Israel blanket diplomatic cover and provided it with arms. With these, it could prosecute wars that make 1982 pale in comparison.

Biden’s test-driving of Reagan’s template, familiarity with the Israeli interventions in Lebanon and annexationist policies in the 1980s and beyond, coupled with his predecessor’s willingness to confront Begin in the 1982 war leave the president with little excuse for refusing to rein Israel in over the past year.

Biden’s failure has tangibly devastating consequences for the Palestinians and yet to materialize fallouts for Israelis and the rest of the Middle East. These will haunt the region for a generation, if not more.

Like Begin, Biden will likely see his legacy sullied by Israeli conduct on the Middle East’s battlefields.

Historic destruction may only increase

A heated encounter with Begin during the 1982 war, which involved finger jabbing and fists pounding on a table, spotlights Biden’s lack of an excuse. Echoing Reagan, Biden warned Begin that Israeli settlement policy could cost it US support. In response, Begin snapped, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees.”

Forty-two years later, Biden studiously ignores the fact that Israel’s latest Gaza and Lebanon wars are a repeat of the early 1980s on steroids.

Begin created the template for Israel’s systematic targeting of militants irrespective of the risk to civilians with the 1981 bombing of Fakhani. This densely populated Beirut neighborhood was home to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its affiliates. The bombing destroyed a seven-story building and damaged four nearby structures, killing some 90 people and wounding hundreds of others.

In a letter to Reagan, written during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Begin compared the carpet bombing of Beirut to the Allied destruction of Berlin during World War II.

“I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface,” Begin said.

Begin’s equation of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and his organization with Adolf Hitler and his associates, like Netanyahu equating Hamas with the Nazis, served to justify civilian casualties in operations that were as much about targeting fighters as they were designed to incite the local population against the militants.

“In certain cases, the Israeli shelling and bombing were carefully targeted, sometimes on the basis of good intelligence. All too often, however, that was not the case. Scores of eight-to twelve-story apartment buildings were destroyed… Many of the buildings that were levelled…had no plausible military utility,” recalled historian Rashid Khalidi, who lived in Beirut at the time of the 1982 bombings.

The strategy produced mixed results but, on balance, hardened rather than weakened popular resistance to Israeli policies.

There is little reason to believe that the impact of Israel’s current wars will be any different. Israel has already prepared the ground by turning Gaza into what onetime Australian human rights commissioner and United Nations rapporteur Chris Sidoti calls a “terrorism creation factory.”

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Israel’s Wars Repeat the 1980s on Steroids appeared first on Fair Observer.

Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran want to turn Jordan into a regional flashpoint and funnel for weapons to Palestinian militants in the West Bank.

“The Iranians have instructions to recruit Jordanians and penetrate the Jordan arena through agents. Their recruitment efforts span all segments of society,” said Saud Al Sharafat, a former senior Jordanian intelligence official.

In January 2024, Iranian-backed Iraqi groups supported Hamas by attacking a United States military base. The assault killed three US soldiers and wounded at least 34 others. The US retaliated with a series of airstrikes, so Iran quickly reined in the militias.

At the other end of the political spectrum, vigilante Israeli settlers attacked Jordanian humanitarian truck convoys as they drove across the West Bank en route to Gaza. Israeli politicians led by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir complicated King Abdullah’s life. On May 22, they made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount. Better known as Haram ash-Sharif, this Jordanian-administered place is Islam’s third holiest site.

King Abdullah’s contentious drone response

Several of King Abdullah’s choices have put him in the firing line. On April 19, he intercepted Iranian drones traveling through Jordanian airspace during the Islamic Republic’s massive offensive on Israel. Further, in March and April, he cracked down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

King Abdullah defended the downing of Iranian drones violating Jordanian airspace as an act of self-defense, insisting that “Jordan will not be a battlefield for any party.” Even so, King Abdullah may not have had a choice but to take down the drones. After all, he has long been a US ally and remains dependent on its military and economic support.

The king’s critics were quick to post disparaging, edited images on social media. These depict him wrapped in an Israeli flag or donning an Israeli military uniform, accompanied by negative comments such as “traitor” and “Western puppet.” Engineer Hamid Jahanian sarcastically congratulated King Abdullah, saying that he “not only failed to support the fellow Arab Palestinians but also took the extra mile to support their genocidal murderer.”

The crackdown and assistance in Israel’s defense have drowned out an important fact: Jordan is the only Arab country to withdraw its ambassador to Israel and consistently send aid to Gaza. Jordan is one of five Arab countries that maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.

Meanwhile, Jordanian sources assert that the Muslim Brotherhood organized the protests. Jordan’s unemployment rate is approximately 22%. Nearly half of young people are unable to find a job. With these in mind, officials feared that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations could morph into social and economic protests.

King Abdullah and Israel face mounting tensions

King Abdullah faces a predicament that highlights the Gaza war’s potential to further destabilize the Middle East. Jordan’s geography does not help it; the West Bank is on its western border, Syria is to its north and Iraq is to its east. Politics could spark paradigm shifts in several key Middle Eastern states, including Israel and Iraq.

King Abdullah likely sees that Benjamin Netanyahu’s space comes with rapidly shrinking benefits. There is mounting public demand for Israel to end the Gaza war in order to prompt Hamas to release its hostages. International courts aim to force Israel to halt its Gaza offensive. They want to hold the prime minister and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant accountable for the country’s war conduct. Hamas’s recent rocket attack on Tel Aviv will probably offer Netanyahu only brief relief, if any.

King Abdullah may also see mileage in popular Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr’s decision to reenter politics and run in next year’s elections. This would challenge the pro-Iranian Coordination Framework, which is the backbone of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s government.

For now, King Abdullah’s crackdown on mass pro-Palestinian protests has reduced domestic pressures, even if widespread anger continues to bubble at the surface.

Foiled plots in Jordan bode ill for Israel

In May, Jordanian sources said that security services had foiled a suspected Iranian-led plot to smuggle weapons into the kingdom. These would help King Abdullah’s opponents carry out acts of sabotage. According to the sources, an Iranian-backed Syrian militia had sent the weapons to Jordanian Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood. These members had links to Hamas, which is a Brotherhood affiliate.

In March, Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said it had stopped Iranian attempts to smuggle large quantities of advanced weapons into the West Bank. Allegedly, this was organized by two parties: Unit 4000, the intelligence unit of the Special Operations Division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Special Operations Unit 18840 of the Guards’ Quds Force in Syria.

According to Shin Bet, Munir Makdah, a senior Lebanon-based official of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Al Fatah movement, was involved in the smuggling attempt. The agency said the weapons cachet included fragmentation bombs, anti-tank landmines with fuses, grenade launchers, shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, RPG launchers and rockets, C4 and Semtex explosives.

In response to the most recent plot, Hamas insisted it had “no ties to any acts targeting Jordan.” A Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood official said its arrested members had acted independently.

Even so, Hamas leaders have repeatedly insisted Jordanians answer the call of duty since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023. “We call on our brothers in Jordan, in particular, to escalate all forms of popular, mass, and resistance action. You, our people in Jordan, are the nightmare of the occupation that fears your movement and strives tirelessly to neutralize and isolate you from your cause,” said Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida.

Senior Doha-based Hamas official Khaled Mishaal, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, held a video address. In it, he told a women’s gathering that “Jordan is a beloved country, and it is the closest to Palestine, so its men and women are expected to take more supportive roles than any other people towards the land of resistance and resilience.”

In April, Iranian-backed Iraqi militants asserted that they stood ready to arm 12,000 fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Jordan. According to these militants, the fighters would open a new front against Israel. Abu Ali al-Askari, a Kataib Hezbollah security official, suggested that this offer may have been made to test Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s assessment: If Jordanian militants gained access to weapons, they would immediately battle Israel.

Despite mounting public anger; a handful of border incidents; and the efforts by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian-backed groups, there is no evidence of an Islamic fighting force in tightly-controlled Jordan. The threat of renewed protest and increasing militancy may be more bluster than reality.

Scholar and journalist Rami Khouri suggested Jordan was managing a delicate balance. But in his words, “It’s always been there. The Jordanians have always figured it out… The situation is not going to threaten the stability of the country as long as you still have the large-scale American military [and] financial support for Jordan.”

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Jordan Keeps Its Neutral Ways in the Big Gaza War appeared first on Fair Observer.

James tells the story of how he came to pursue a career in journalism. He sheds light on the complexities of discerning information in today’s climate, emphasizing the importance of information literacy in our schools and communities.

James then takes an in-depth look at the challenges facing the journalism industry, including economic models, corporate influences and the impact of technological advancements such as AI. Rod and James discuss the future of journalism from from media democratization to voice cloning. The next generation of storytellers and journalists will certainly have their work cut out for them, but the reward is worth the challenge.

If you are passionate about the future of journalism, the impact of technology on media, and the evolving dynamics of truth and information, this episode is a must-listen. We hope you find the discussion as thought-provoking and enlightening as we did. 

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Journalism, Propaganda and the Search for Truth with James Dorsey appeared first on Fair Observer.

“We have shown the world that we survived this war as Palestinians. We stood our ground on our land. We survived 212 days of attacks and devastation by the world’s most advanced weapons. We did not leave. We survived on our own with no help from outside,” said Ahmad, a young Gazan, one of the thousands celebrating.

Yet the jubilation was short-lived. The crowds dissipated 90 minutes later as Israel made clear its rejection of the proposal.

Netanyahu is still trying to turn the war into an Israeli victory

“The Hamas proposal is far from meeting Israel’s core demands,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. Not wanting Israel to be painted as the party pooper, the statement added that Israel would “dispatch a ranking delegation to Egypt in an effort to maximize the possibility of reaching an agreement on terms acceptable to Israel.”

The celebration of a ceasefire that was not to be highlights what is at stake in the seven-month-old war with Israel’s refusal to end the carnage. Netanyahu is going through the motions as he lays the groundwork for what could be a final major offensive against Hamas in the southern Gazan enclave of Rafah.

The battle could determine Netanyahu’s chances of political survival. Rafah is his desperate attempt at achieving the war goals he has failed to realize in seven months of unrelenting military operations — at an unspeakable cost to innocent Palestinians.

These goals include the destruction of Hamas, the elimination of its military force, the killing or capture of its top leadership, the release of the remaining Hamas-held hostages which the group kidnapped during its October 7 attack on Israel and ensuring that Gaza will be longer serve as a launching-pad for Palestinian resistance.

Israel continues to play Whac-A-Mole with Hamas despite inflicting severe losses. The group’s Gaza-based leadership remains intact and in control, and it was a one-week ceasefire in November, not Israeli military action, that freed roughly half of the 250 hostages. Moreover, Israel believes that Hamas’ leadership — including its Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s most wanted man — is hiding in tunnels under Rafah shielded by the remaining hostages.

Irrespective of whether he succeeds in Gaza or not, Netanyahu is living on borrowed time. Opinion polls suggest that Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative coalition partners will lose the next election.

Hundreds of angry protesters in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem denounced the government’s rejection of the ceasefire proposal. They called on Netanyahu to prioritize the release of Hamas-held hostages by accepting the deal.

Instead, Israeli forces on May 7 took control of the Rafah side of the Gaza–Egypt border and closed the border crossing crucial to the flow of desperately needed humanitarian supplies in the Strip as Israeli tanks pushed into the city of Rafah itself.

Derived from “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel | Flash Update #114.” Via unocha.org.

Netanyahu and Sinwar gamble while Gazans suffer

Netanyahu’s rejection of the deal while going through the motions of negotiations and his impending Rafah offensive, at best, buy him time. Even so, by accepting the proposed ceasefire, Hamas threw a curveball at Netanyahu as well as the Biden administration.

The acceptance put the shoe on Netanyahu’s foot and the Biden administration on the spot. The US executive has repeatedly publicly opposed a massive military operation in Rafah, home to more than a million Palestinians displaced by the war.

The irony is that Hamas offered Israel and the US a way out by leaking details of the ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposal it had accepted that made clear that it was not a deal Israel would accept. At the same time, this allowed Hamas to project itself as engaging constructively in negotiations.

The leaks suggested, against all evidence from Jerusalem, that Israel would agree to a permanent rather than a temporary ceasefire, an end to the war and a complete withdrawal from Gaza. They also implied that US President Joe Biden had accepted Hamas’ demand that the United States guarantee implementation of the deal.

“The essential aim of the deal is a permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza, senior Hamas negotiator Khali al Hayaa told Al Jazeera. “We did what we are supposed to do. The onus is on the mediators and the international community.”

Hamas’ acceptance of a ceasefire proposal it knew Israel would reject raises the tantalizing question of whether Netanyahu may not be the only one allegedly wanting to prolong the war for personal political gain.

Nevertheless, the short-lived celebrations and the fact that a ceasefire means to Gazans more than just an end to the death, destitution and destruction in the Strip suggests that the episode could create a reckoning not only for Netanyahu but also for Sinwar. The devastation of their lives has not dampened Palestinian national aspirations, even if they are desperate for immediate relief. Gazans want to extract a price for the suffering inflicted upon them.

Sinwar and Hamas are feeling the heat of growing criticism of the group for provoking the Israeli assault that has devastated Gaza and reduced its 2.3 million inhabitants to destitution. In late March, Hamas felt compelled to issue a lengthy statement apologizing to Gazans for their suffering.

This is despite 52% of Gazans favoring a return to Hamas rule post-war, as opposed to the West Bank-based, internationally recognized Palestine Authority, an Arab peacekeeping force, the United Nations or Israel. It’s a choice between what Palestinians perceive as bad alternatives. They are opting, against all odds, for the party most vigorous in defending Palestinian rights and aspirations.

Prominent Israeli columnist Anschel Pfeffer argues that “it is looking increasingly unlikely that Hamas’ chief in Gaza and the man who calls the shots on any deal, Yahya Sinwar, is prepared to agree to any compromise that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can accept. Both men are determined to emerge with a perception of victory in their grasp – but there doesn’t appear to be any framework in which the two can have that.”

Even so, Pfeffer noted, “Israelis and Gazans aren’t stupid. Most of them have conceded that they have lost too much for there to be any notion of ‘victory’ in this war. But as long as their fates are controlled by two men who insist on being the victor at any cost, this war is going to continue.”

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Netanyahu Borrows Time by Rejecting Gaza Ceasefire appeared first on Fair Observer.

Concerned that the war could mobilize segments of civil society, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where any form of public protest is banned, have cracked down on expressions of solidarity with Gaza, including the sporting of the keffiyeh, a checkered scarf that symbolizes Palestinian nationalism.

In December, pro-Palestinian activists at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai faced unprecedented restrictions, including prohibitions on flags and explicitly naming a country in news conferences, and scrutiny of their slogans. In January, the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, the biggest film event in the Middle East and North Africa, welcomed Palestinian cinema but banned the donning of keffiyehs by attendees.

Egypt is feeling the economic pinch

Like in the second half of the 20th century, protests in the Middle East beyond the Gulf in support of Palestinians and against Israel’s assault on Gaza are as much about anger at governments’ faltering economic performance as they are about the war itself.

Nowhere is the anger more acute than in Egypt, where the country’s currency slipped this week sharply against the US dollar after the central bank raised its main interest rate by 600 basis points to 27.75% and said it would allow the currency’s exchange rate to be set by market forces. It was the Egyptian pound’s fifth devaluation in two years. Hard hit by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the government expected the measures to stymie Egypt’s 31% inflation rate, attract desperately needed foreign investment, and tackle its staggering shortage of foreign currency.

Egypt has suffered from a loss of tourism, significantly reduced Suez Canal shipping revenues because of Yemeni Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, rising wheat prices in the wake of the Ukraine war and economic mismanagement, including investment in megaprojects such as a $58 billion new desert capital, as well as granting military-owned enterprises preferential treatment and an oversized stake in the economy.

The floating of the Egyptian pound secured an expansion from $3 billion to $8 billion of Egypt’s International Monetary Fund bailout loan, making the North African country one of the IMF’s highest borrowers.

The IMF agreement cemented a recent deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop a prime stretch of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast with a $35 billion investment over the next two months. Egypt will retain a 35% stake in the development with the Talaat Moustafa Group, a construction conglomerate involved in building the new capital as one of the beneficiaries. While not officially announced, well-placed sources said It was understood that the deal was contingent on Egypt reaching an agreement with the IMF.

Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have in recent years backed away from pumping funds into black holes. Instead, they increasingly link investments in countries like Egypt and Pakistan to economic reforms and prospects for a return on investment.

The UAE pioneered the approach when it based a government minister in Cairo immediately after general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s 2013 UAE-backed coup that toppled Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. The UAE official attempted to nudge Al-Sisi towards economic reform.

In a similar vein, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan told an investment conference last year, “We work with the International Monetary Fund and according to its rules. The days of unconditional assistance are over.”

Egypt walks a political tightrope

Last week, 45-year-old policeman Abdel-Gawad Muhammad al-Sahlamy was alone when he staged a one-man protest waving a Palestinian flag atop an advertisement billboard in the port city of Alexandria, but many Egyptians were likely to have been with him in spirit. Many are angry that Egypt’s Refah border crossing into Gaza remains closed despite the images of thousands of Gazans dying and imminent famine.

In October, the government sought to pre-empt potential protests by staging pro-Palestinian demonstrations of its own.

Al-Sisi believes that pro-Palestinian activists who were allowed to stage protests under former president Hosni Mubarak shifted their focus in 2011 to his regime and ultimately toppled him during the popular Arab uprisings. The revolts also led to the demise of autocratic rulers in Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and sparked mass anti-government demonstrations elsewhere in the Middle East.

To be sure, Egypt is worried that Israel’s destruction of Gaza is an effort to rid the Strip of its population by inducing Gazans to flee to Egypt. Officials in Cairo also fear that Hamas operatives could infiltrate the Sinai Peninsula where the military has been countering a low-level insurgency. Al-Sisi’s government is wary of Hamas because of its links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even so, many Egyptians resent the government’s close security ties with Israel and its support for a 17-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza that has been tightened since the war. Egyptian resentment is compounded by reports that corrupt Egyptian government officials linked to the country’s intelligence service and a well-connected businessman who hails from the Sinai charge up to $7,500 per person for travel permits from Gaza to Egypt.

Al-Sahlamy shouted “God is Great” and denounced Al-Sisi as a “traitor and an agent” before being arrested by security forces. The Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR) said Al-Sahlamy has not been heard from since.

The network quoted a friend of Al-Sahlamy as saying he was “breaking down” because of the war, which he described as “injustice.” Al-Sahlamy demanded that “the [Egyptian] borders [with Gaza] should be opened” to allow Gazans to escape the carnage, ENHR quoted the policeman’s friend as saying.

The IMF’s austerity program could push struggling Egyptians to a level of destitution not seen since the bread riots of 1977, despite the government’s insistence that it will put in place social protection measures to shield the most vulnerable.

The rising cost of basic goods has deepened the hardships faced by lower-class Egyptians. They have suffered from price hikes since the government embarked on an ambitious reform program in 2016 to overhaul the battered economy. Nearly 30% of Egyptians live in poverty, according to official figures.

For now, Egyptians, like others elsewhere in the Arab world, fear that uprisings would only enhance the chaos already gripping their part of the world. In Egypt’s case, “the question of Sisi’s future will arise when Egyptian citizens decide that they have nothing more to lose,” said Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst Zvi Bar’el. The same is true for much of the Middle East beyond the Gulf, with widespread public frustration at Arab states’ inability or unwillingness to alleviate Palestinian suffering as the joker in the pack.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Gaza Is Now a Powder Keg in Egypt and Beyond appeared first on Fair Observer.

The poll results are significant with Hezbollah and Israel engaged in tit-for-tat cross-border attacks that both parties have sought to contain but could spin out of control at any moment. Hezbollah has wanted to contain the hostilities because a majority of Lebanese oppose their country becoming embroiled in a war, particularly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Israel could turn Beirut into another Gaza.

In the final analysis, the poll, conducted in late November and early December 2023 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, suggested that public support for Iranian-backed militants was on the rise. The poll further indicated that the majority of Lebanese opposed to increased military engagement in support of Gaza is fragile.

Various factors could upset the apple cart. These include an unintended escalation of the border hostilities sparked by a large number of civilian casualties, repeated Israeli targeted killings on Lebanese soil of prominent Hezbollah and Hamas figures, a potential International Court of Justice ruling asserting that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza risks genocide in a case submitted by South Africa and the fallout of Netanyahu rejecting the creation of an independent Palestinian state and insisting that Israel would maintain control of territory conquered in the 1967 Middle East war.

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“This is a necessary condition, and it conflicts with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty. What to do? I tell this truth to our American friends, and I also stopped the attempt to impose a reality on us that would harm Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said. “[In] every area that we evacuate we receive terrible terror against us. It happened in South Lebanon, in Gaza, and also in Judea and Samaria,” i.e., the West Bank. “And therefore I clarify that in any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea,” he argued.

Lebanese support for Hezbollah and for war is rising

The poll showed that only a slim majority of Lebanese, 53%, prioritized addressing their country’s political and economic crisis above becoming embroiled in a “foreign war.” An identical majority believed resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict required negotiations rather than a military solution. Even so, a vast majority postulated that Israeli weakness and internal divisions meant that Israel ultimately can be defeated.

At the same time, Lebanese were unanimous (99%) in wanting Arab states to break all ties to Israel because of the Gaza war.

Hezbollah is likely to take heart from significant increases in its popularity across denominations. Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Christians each account for roughly one-third of Lebanon’s population.

89% of Shiites had a “very positive” view of Hezbollah, up from 66% in 2020. The number of Sunnis who had at least a “somewhat positive” attitude towards the group jumped from 6% in 2020 to 34%. Among Christians, this number rose from 16% to 29%.

Similarly, 79% of Lebanese viewed Hamas favorably.

Netanyahu’s hardline stance

Netanyahu’s public rejection of a Palestinian state fit a long-standing pattern of Middle Eastern politics in which hardliners on both sides of various divides reinforce one another. That may be only the icing on his cake. Netanyahu did not say anything he had not suggested over the years, which puts the emphasis on the timing of the prime minister’s comments.

His reiterated rejection of a Palestinian state was designed to pacify his ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative coalition partners as well as stymie US efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel that emphasize a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

“There is a profound opportunity for regionalization in the Middle East, in the greater Middle East, that we have not had before. The challenge is realizing it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told this week’s World Economic Forum gathering of leaders in Davos.

The United States needs regionalization for Arab buy-in to postwar arrangements in Gaza and the West Bank. This is unlikely to be forthcoming without the prospect of a credible peace process.

Speaking at the Davos forum, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described relations with Saudi Arabia as a gamechanger and a key to ending the Gaza war. However, that remains a pipedream with the current Israeli government. Moreover, the problem is that a new Israeli government may not have the sharp edges of Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalists and ultra-conservatives but may be equally unwilling to make the kind of concessions required for a credible peace process.

Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the US and UK Turki al Faisal, who is believed to be close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, appeared to echo that sentiment and take it a step further. “The present leadership of Hamas, of the [Palestine Liberation Organization] and of Israel should be excluded from any participation in any future political role. They have to pay for what they have done … All of them are failures,” Al Faisal told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Responding to Netanyahu’s rejection, US President Joe Biden, wittingly or unwittingly, noted that a two-state solution means different things to different people. Biden suggested a two-state solution could involve a demilitarized Palestinian state that would be more palatable for Israeli hardliners.

That has long been Israel’s often unspoken definition of the term across the country’s political spectrum, with few exceptions. Hamas’ October 7 attack in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed reinforced this perspective. The problem is that Israeli security concerns about Palestinians are a mirror-image of Palestinian security concerns about Israel after more than half a century of occupation and the current Gaza carnage, likely making demilitarization a non-starter for Palestinians.

For his part, Netanyahu feels emboldened by Biden’s poor polling in an election year, solid Republican support for Israel and his past ability to counter a US president domestically in the United States.

Iran is emboldened

At the same time, Netanyahu bolstered with his comments the credibility of Iran’s opposition to Arab states normalizing relations with Israel. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cautioned days before Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel that normalization of relations with Israel amounted to “gambling” that was “doomed to failure.” He warned that countries establishing relations with the Jewish state would be “in harm’s way.”

Events since October 7 have reinforced Iran’s sense that the winds of Middle Eastern geopolitics are blowing in its favor. Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war has drawn criticism from much of the international community, except for the United States and several European countries. A potential international court ruling would deepen the dent in Israel’s moral standing inflicted by the war. In Switzerland, prosecutors said they were investigating unspecified criminal complaints against Herzog as he attended the World Economic Forum. It was unclear whether the complaint was related to his remarks at the Forum or to past remarks or actions. Herzog was also cited in South Africa’s international court case as suggesting that all Gazans were responsible for Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

In addition, Iran’s non-state allies complicate affairs for Israel and the United States. More than three months into the war, Israel has yet to achieve its goals of destroying Hamas and liberating the remaining 139 Hamas-held hostages abducted during the October 7 fighting, including the bodies of those since killed in Gaza.

While not directly involving Iranian non-state allies, mounting tensions in the West Bank, where Israeli raids and clashes with Palestinian fighters threaten to mushroom into an insurgency, strengthen Iran’s hardline position. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, has forced 100,000 Israelis to evacuate northern Israel and has tied down a substantial number of Israeli forces along the border.

Simultaneously, Iran-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen have trapped the United States in a catch-22 with attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea.

Finally, Iranian missile strikes earlier in January in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan reflect Iran’s sense of having the upper hand rather than an intention to escalate regional tensions. They signal Iran’s willingness to defend itself, even if it does not want to see Gaza escalate into a regional conflagration. The strikes were in response to attacks on Iranian targets, including Islamic State bombings in the city of Kerman that killed 94 people, the assassination in Syria of a senior Revolutionary Guard commander and an attack on an Iranian police station by a Pakistan-based jihadist group.

Overall, the different hot spots suggest that hardliners are calling the shots for now.

Without a halt to the fighting in Gaza, containing the various flashpoints and preventing them from spinning out of control increasingly is becoming mission impossible.

Said US foreign policy scholar Christopher S Chivvis: “In a situation where emotions are running high thanks to the appalling violence in Gaza, with hawks in Washington eager to dole out hellfire and brimstone on Tehran, and the global economy at stake, it will be even harder to exercise restraint and avoid a broader regional war – the worst-case outcome for American interests.”

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Hardline Outlooks Are Mainstream Now in Israel, Lebanon and Iran appeared first on Fair Observer.

The heightened risk suggests US efforts to allow Israel to continue attempting to destroy Hamas while minimizing civilian Palestinian casualties may backfire. This would further underline that a ceasefire is the only way of preventing an escalation, protecting innocent lives and securing the release of Hamas-held hostages.

Disputes between allies

Despite the risk, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on his fifth visit to Tel Aviv since the war began, reaffirmed “Israel’s right to prevent another October 7 from occurring” in talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, he “stressed the importance of avoiding civilian harm, protecting civilian infrastructure and ensuring the distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.” Blinken was referring to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Israeli assault on Gaza.

His reference to infrastructure constituted the United States’ first public criticism of Israeli attacks on Gazan hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. Signaling differences with Blinken, Netanyahu’s office did not issue a readout after the meeting.

Even so, US reluctance to go beyond verbal pressure, by threatening consequences if Israel fails to heed US advice, may stem from a belief that America’s leverage on Israel has diminished over time in economic and political terms. In past decades, US financial support amounted to a significant chunk of Israel’s budget. Now, the US’s annual $3.8 billion contribution is worth less than 1% of Israel’s over-half-trillion-dollar GDP. Moreover, Israel today produces many of its most essential weapons domestically, making it less dependent on US arms sales.

In addition, Israel concluded in 1991 that it could no longer blindly rely on US protection after the United States did not come to its aid when Iraq fired Scud missiles at the Jewish state during the Gulf war. Despite remaining dependent on US vetoes in the United Nations Security Council and military cooperation, Israel worked to increase its margin of autonomy, much like Gulf states did three decades later after the United States failed to respond to Iranian-inspired attacks on their critical infrastructure in 2019 and 2020.

Israel’s campaign of targeted killings

Nevertheless, acting on seemingly accurate and up-to-the-minute detailed intelligence, Israel appears to have responded to US pressure by carrying out a series of targeted killings, including operatives of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander in Syria and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

On Januar 9, Israeli forces targeted a car in southern Lebanon carrying three Hezbollah operatives north of the narrow band along the Lebanese-Israeli border, to which hostilities with the Lebanese group have so far been contained. The attack, the second in 24 hours, occurred as Blinken discussed Israeli military strategy with Netanyahu and members of his war cabinet.

Israel targeted a second car, hours after the attack, close to the home of Wassim Al-Tawil, a senior Hezbollah commander killed together with another of the group’s fighters in a drone attack on January 8, as they traveled by car north of the band. The car was targeted as Al-Tawil was laid to rest.

“We’re targeting Hezbollah operatives, infrastructure, and systems they’ve set up to deter Israel,” said newly appointed Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz.

The United States has been pushing Israel to scale back its bombing of Gaza — which has killed more than 24,000 people, a majority innocent Palestinian civilians — to withdraw troops from the Strip, and focus on militant Palestinian targets.

The killings of senior Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian commanders threaten to push Iranian-supported forces to retaliate in ways that could escalate hostilities beyond Gaza and the so far narrow Israel–Lebanese border band. In an indication of how hostilities could escalate, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli air traffic control base south of the band on January 8 in retaliation for last week’s assassination in Beirut of a senior Hamas official, Salah al Arouri.

The fact that a majority of Israel’s targeted killings have been Hezbollah operatives likely has much to do with US, French and German efforts to prevent an escalation of exchanges between Israel and the Lebanese group and negotiate a definitive demarcation of the two countries’ borders. Hezbollah has rejected Israeli demands to withdraw to a line north of the border beyond the Litani River. Hezbollah has also said it would agree to Lebanese government border demarcation talks only after Israel halts its assault on Gaza and accepts a permanent ceasefire.

Israel has threatened to militarily push Hezbollah back to the Litani if diplomatic efforts fail. On a visit this week to Israeli troops on the Lebanese border, Netanyahu warned, “If Hezbollah chooses to start an all-out war then it will … turn Beirut and southern Lebanon, not far from here, into Gaza and Khan Younis.”

The Israeli attacks on Hezbollah appear designed to force the group to choose between withdrawing and sparking an all-out war that bankrupt Lebanon cannot afford and many Lebanese do not want. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has indicated that he does not seek an escalation of hostilities but that his group was prepared if Israel opted for a full-fledged conflagration.

Israel’s apparent focus on Hezbollah operatives may also be because of its inability so far to take out Hamas’ most senior Gaza leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, more than three months into the war.

Last week, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service vowed to hunt down every Hamas member involved in the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, no matter where they are. Barnea compared the manhunt to Israel’s pursuit of Palestinian Black September after it attacked the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics and killed 11 athletes.

Last month, Ronen Bar, chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, said Israel would hunt down Hamas in Lebanon, Turkey, and Qatar even if it took years. “This is our Munich. We will do this everywhere, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar. It will take a few years, but we will be there to do it,” Bar said.

While Hamas has yet to retaliate for Al-Arouri’s killing, a senior official warned that it may expand the war beyond Israel and Palestine if the United States continued to support Israel. “The West in general, and the US government in particular, need to reconsider their position because this will have consequences … If the US insists on its position, our entire nation will view it, and treat it, as an enemy … This conflict could go beyond Palestine’s borders, and expand in scope,” said Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri.

Mr. Abu Zuhri’s warning coincided with a call by the Islamic State for lone-wolf attacks on civilian targets in Europe and the United States, including churches and synagogues.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is Israel Now Pivoting From Bombings to Assassinations? appeared first on Fair Observer.

So were the differences that raised questions about efforts in recent years to sustainably reduce regional tensions without resolving fundamental disputes and conflicts.

The joint summit of the Arab League and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which includes all Arab states, was dominated by obligatory calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, unrestricted provision of humanitarian aid, the release by Hamas of 240 mostly civilian hostages and a resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as well as condemnation of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war.

Hypocritically, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who waged a decade-long Russian- and Iranian-backed war against rebels opposed to his regime in much the same way that Israel attacked Gaza, attended the Riyadh summit.

Arab states returned al-Assad to the Arab fold as part of their effort to reduce regional tensions and ensure they don’t spin out of control. The Arab League suspended Syria in 2011 at the beginning of the civil war.

In his address to the summit, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi made clear that the Chinese-mediated restoration earlier this year of diplomatic relations between the Islamic republic and Saudi Arabia as part of the regional deescalation effort had done nothing to change policies that are at the root of many regional issues.

To be sure, most Islamic and Arab leaders will have taken heart from aisi’s support of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and his expressed desire to prevent the war from expanding regionally.

But that is where the sighs of relief may have stopped.

Much of Raisi’s speech emphasized what countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) worry most about and highlighted fundamental policy differences.

Raisi celebrated Hamas and Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, non-state actors viewed in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as Iranian proxies designed to interfere in Arab domestic affairs.

“We kiss the hands of Hamas for its resistance against Israel,” Raisi said.

In addition, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite being shocked by the indiscriminate and relentless Israeli bombing of Gaza, do not want Hamas, a group they view as affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, to survive the war.

Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack, in which at least 1,200, mostly civilian, Israelis were wantonly slaughtered, raised the specter of other militant groups — foremost Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis — learning from the Palestinians’ ability to breach Israeli defenses.

Moreover, Raisi was out of step with much of the Arab world by calling for a Palestinian state from “the river to the sea” that would replace the State of Israel rather than a two-state resolution, involving an independent Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.

Notwithstanding Raisi’s remarks, the summit’s majority view prevailed with the final communique calling for a two-state solution.

Israel calls for diplomatic breaks with Israel

Raisi put Arab and Muslim-majority states that have recognized Israel on the spot by calling on them to break off their diplomatic relations. Of the five Arab states that have formal relations with Israel, only Jordan has withdrawn its ambassador and asked Israel not to return its envoy to Amman.

Raisi also called for an economic and commercial boycott of Israel.

Iranian officials, backed by Libya, Algeria and Lebanon, demanded in preliminary talks in advance of the summit that Arab states close their airspace to Israel, halt the transfer of weapons from US bases in the region to Israel and stop oil exports to Israel, according to diplomatic sources.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who spoke immediately before Raisi, did not include Iran’s positions in his remarks. However, Turkish steps come closest to addressing the Iranian leader’s demands.

Turkey has withdrawn its ambassador to Israel and, earlier this week, suspended energy talks with the Jewish state.

Raisi had barely spoken when Beirut-based Hamas Political Bureau member Osama Hamdan echoed his words in an Al Jazeera interview.

“We are talking about actions, we don’t need speeches,” Hamdan said.

At the same time, Hamdan echoed a broader sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world, adding, “if [Arab and Muslim leaders] act, I am sure there will be a response from the United States. Any action will have impact.”

What Hamdan suggested was that by speaking out forcefully and taking some sort of action, no matter how minor, Arab and Muslim leaders could move the needle in Washington, which has so far supported Israel’s right to wage war against Hamas — even if US officials increasingly criticize the human cost of Israel’s campaign.

That didn’t prevent the differences from forcing the Arab and Muslim leaders to issue a statement that echoed the leaders’ obligatory demands but contained no suggestion of how they could be achieved.

Arab leaders weigh diverse considerations

At a news conference after the summit, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan sought to give the statement some heft by asserting that, without concerted international action to reign in Israel, the world’s international security architecture, including the United Nations Security Council, would need to be reformed.

All eyes in the coming days will be on the Council’s next meeting slated to discuss yet another draft resolution initiated by Malta and the UAE. The draft is believed to focus on the plight of children that reportedly account for half of all casualties in Gaza.

Another focal point is US President Joe Biden’s meeting on Monday with his Indonesian counterpart, Joko Widodo. Widodo traveled from the Riyadh summit to Washington in advance of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

For Arab and Muslim leaders, increasingly squeezed between mounting public anger at the Israeli assault, limited options and a struggle to prevent Gaza from shifting the paradigm on which they have built their survival strategies, pushing the US to forcefully call a halt to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, ensuring access to humanitarian personnel and goods and achieving a release of hostages are a sine qua non.

Ironically, Israel’s relentless military campaign, including the stepped-up targeting of hospitals, may achieve what Arab and Muslim leaders can’t as US and European officials, amid widespread protests, increasingly take Israel publicly to task.

In the latest shift, French President Emmanuel Macron told the BBC on Saturday: “De facto — today, civilians are bombed — de facto. These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So, there is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop.”
[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Arab and Muslim Leaders Put Limited Influence on Display appeared first on Fair Observer.

Genocide is the word most associated with Israel’s more than one-month-long assault on Gaza in response to the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, in which at least 1,200, mostly civilian, Israelis were killed.

Genocide and Holocaust scholars, including those who believe that Israel has and is committing war crimes in its assault, are divided about whether Israeli actions amount to genocide. Even so, they warn that Israeli actions could lead to genocide, if they have not already.

What is certain is that optics streaming out of Gaza of the destruction and the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians, including large numbers of children and babies, explain the popular use of the term “genocide” when discussing the Israeli assault.

To get some proper definitions and put things in perspective. I spoke to Professor Omar Bartov, a world-renowned genocide and Holocaust scholar at Brown University in Rhode Island.

James M. Dorsey: Omer Bartov, welcome to the show, and thank you for taking the time.

Omer Bartov: Thank you for having me.

Dorsey: Perhaps we can start on a personal note. I’m curious about what got you interested in genocide studies. Obviously, the ethics of the conduct of war are not purely theory to you. You were born in Israel and served in the Israeli military during the 1973 Middle East War, which, like October 7, caught Israel off guard.

Bartov: Yes, you’re right. I have a longstanding interest in this issue. It began really with my interest in war crimes as a teenager. I was very interested in military history and then, as you said, I served in the army. I ended up being an officer, a company commander, and I also kept reading about war.

What I became interested in was the tension between the kind of aura that the German military, the Wehrmacht, had in World War II as an excellent fighting force and the crimes that it claimed had been committed in the rear — behind the backs of the “heroic soldiers” of the Wehrmacht. And I became skeptical about that, particularly the war in the Soviet Union. And so, my first research was really to see whether the army, the German army of that time, and the veterans and the generals who came out of that army were telling the truth about the fact that the crimes were committed by the SS, by the Gestapo, but never by the honorable German army.

And, obviously, that was not the case. So, I spent several years digging through German archives and discovered that the German army (a) participated heavily in war crimes — which is not surprising, considering that close to 30 million Soviet soldiers and civilians were murdered during that war — and (b) that these soldiers were heavily indoctrinated. So, they were not participating in war crimes only because war is terrible, which it is, but also because they’d been indoctrinated into believing that they were fighting sub-humans.

So, that was the beginning of my interest in this question.

It actually started, as I said, with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide because the German military was involved in the genocide of the Jews, not as the main organizer, but as the facilitator of mass murder of Jews. And from there I started studying genocide more generally and ended up also studying the Holocaust more specifically.

Now, of course, I grew up in Israel. In my childhood, we were surrounded by Holocaust survivors. There were many people you could see with numbers tattooed on their forearms. There were many of my friends whose parents were traumatized and would scream at night from nightmares. I mean, this was part of the scene in which you grew up.

But as I realized later on, we also were growing up in a country that had just also ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population that had lived in the neighborhoods in which we were growing up. (I was born in the 50s.) And so that kind of realization of everything that had happened to members of my generation shortly before I was born — the Holocaust and the trauma of that and the creation of the state of Israel, much of it on the ruins of what had been Palestinian civilization — formed much of my own interest since then until to this day.

Dorsey: I want to come back to some of the things you just said, but let’s start off with trying to get some definitions. If I understand the law correctly, intent is a key factor in determining whether actions amount to genocide. I think it would be helpful if you could define what constitutes intent and what the legal differences are between genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Bartov: Right. So, it is important to make these distinctions. War crimes are defined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent protocols as serious violations of the laws and customs of war in international armed conflict, which means war between states against both combatants and civilians. So, these are crimes that are committed within the context of war against soldiers and civilians.

Crimes against humanity, for which there’s no direct convention, are defined in the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court.

The term [genocide] was already used, of course, in the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945. But the definition in the Rome Statute defines crimes against humanity as extermination of, or other mass crimes against, any civilian population. And that does not have to be at a time of war and also does not call for direct intent. It’s just mass killing of civilians.

The crime of genocide is, in particular, a somewhat bizarre convention, and it’s important to understand exactly what it says.

So, the crime of genocide is defined and was defined in 1948 by the UN as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.

So, that means that in order to identify genocide, you need two elements. One element is intent — that you can identify the organization or the state carrying out genocide intends to do that. It’s not just a byproduct of something else that it is doing such as war.

The second element is that the crime is committed against the group as such. And that’s very important. That is, that you’re not killing people only as individuals or doing anything else to them, such as depriving them of food or so forth, but that you are doing it with the intent of destroying the group that they belong to. And your intention is to make that group disappear, be destroyed, whether by killing or by other means.

And often, because genocide has been called the crime of crimes, it’s supposed to be the worst crime that any state can perpetrate. There is a tendency to use that word, which was coined in 1943/44, against anything that we find abhorrent. But in fact, in international law, it has a particular definition. And it doesn’t mean that crimes against humanity are any better or worse than genocide. It just means that they’re defined differently.

Dorsey: I just wanted to drill down on one thing. Is there a legal definition of “destroy”?

Bartov: Well, according to the UN resolution of 1948, there’s a long list of how you go about doing that. But what it means is to destroy the group as such. Hypothetically that means that you don’t necessarily have to kill anyone. If you, for instance, remove the children of that group from the group, hand them over to be adopted by another group and raise them as members of another ethnic national religious group, and they have no idea of who they would’ve been otherwise, that could constitute genocide.

And that’s actually how the term was used in the case of Australia and Canada, where children were taken away from indigenous populations. It can also be depriving a group of the sources of its existence.

So, this happens if you move it to another place — if you, say, do what happened in the genocide of the Herrero in German Southwest Africa in 1904. The German military was called in by the white settlers, who said there was an uprising of the Herrero and the Nama people. The military came in there and said to the population, “You have to go to the desert, you have to go to the Kalahari desert. We are not going to allow you to stay here anymore because you constitute a danger to our own people.” And at the same time, the army also took care to plug all the watering holes in the desert. Then, although you may not be killing them, you’re sending them to certain death and therefore you are destroying that group as such.

And it’s important to understand that, because you asked about the relationship between ethnic cleansing and genocide, and that’s where we find that somewhat of a gray zone.

Ethnic cleansing, as such, is not defined in international law. It comes under crimes against humanity, under a list of potential crimes against humanity.

But what it actually is is the removal of a group from a territory that you don’t want them in because you want your own group to be there, whereas genocide, of course, is the attempt to destroy a group, wherever it is.

But in reality, as we could see in the genocide of the Herrero in 1904, the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and in fact the genocide of the Jews as well, the original goal was to remove the population from an area where you did not want them to be. And then, under particular circumstances, you either move them to an area where they would die, or you decide, which the Nazis did well, “We have no place to move them to. So, the most humane policy,” as some Nazis said, “is to kill them.”

Dorsey: Right. What I’d like to do is see how this applies to both Israel and Hamas and start off with Hamas. And there, I really have two sets of questions.

One is that, early on, you spoke about war crimes in terms of a war between two states. The question of course, is Hamas a state or is it a non-state actor, even though it does run a government in Gaza?

And the other question is the group’s charter, which is widely cited as evidence that it is a genocidal organization. Hamas’ original charter, adopted in 1988, called for the killing of Jews based on a saying attributed to Prophet Muhammad. Hamas adopted a new charter in 2017 that dropped the call to kill Jews. Even so, the new charter calls for Israel to be replaced by a Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine, but allows for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as an interim step. Would that be enough to qualify Hamas as a genocidal organization?

Bartov: So, these are two important questions.

I’m not an international lawyer, but I think that, by and large, because Hamas was elected to power in Gaza, because it is the hegemon in Gaza, it runs most of the institutes, in fact — now, of course, there’s a big mess there right now, but [Hamas] did run most of the institutions in Gaza, law enforcement, schools, religious life and so forth, whether people liked it or not, and it also has a large armed organization — it could be seen as something resembling a government of a state. And from that point of view, I think that whatever it does, let’s say the October 7th attack, can be considered as something carried out by a government of a particular entity, a kind of state.

And under that you, I think, would not have much trouble defining that as a war crime attack on large numbers of civilians.

You could also define it, likely, as crimes against humanity, because of the large numbers and the nature of the killing, which was particularly atrocious.

And then you come to the second question. Is Hamas an organization that actually wants to destroy the state of Israel?

You are right that the original charter actually lifts whole parts out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a fabrication originally carried out by the Russian secret police before World War I or the turn of the 19th century, and is kind of antisemitic canard.

And then it also cites from the [Hadith], the most sort of anti-Jewish elements there, and is both an antisemitic document — I mean just a hair-raising document — and talks about the destruction of the state. The revised 2017 version, as far as I know, does not say that it replaces the previous charter.

It’s an adaptation of the charter to political conditions that existed at the time. And it has removed the antisemitic elements there, and it actually speaks about the fact that it is not against Jews. It is against Israel quite explicitly, and it also agrees, as you say, to an interim solution of two states. And it does it in large part to be in conformity with the Palestinian Authority. This is part of the political game there, but at the core, I think Hamas actually wants to destroy the state of Israel.

And what we have seen since October 7 is that a number of leaders of Hamas have said publicly on television that the attack will be repeated again and again, that they will do that because that’s the only way to deal with the Zionist entity, destroy the state of Israel.

So, does that make them a genocidal organization? I think one can make the case for that. It’s a little bit of a stretch, but I think what could make the case, and if that is true, then one could say, as I would understand it, the attack of October 7 was at least a genocidal attack.

So, obviously, it did not aim at killing all Jews in Israel, because it was not capable of doing that, but it was done under the general heading of the Hamas conception of what Hamas wants to do to create an Islamic Palestinian state in all of Palestine.

Perhaps. It takes you into particularly difficult waters, though, if you expand that to all kinds of ideologies that exist now on the other side — that is, in Israel — and we can talk about that and that’s why I’m a little cautious applying that category to Hamas.

Dorsey: Indeed. That’s what my next question was going to be, which is to look at the case of Israel, where to the best of my knowledge, there is no official document laying out an adopted government policy that would qualify as evidence of intent to commit genocide. There are, however, numerous statements by senior officials and military officers that could qualify as signaling intent. Would that constitute evidence? And more generally, what qualifies as evidence?

Bartov: So, as I said before, when you try to see whether genocide is taking place or may be in the offing, you need two things. By and large, you need statements of intent, and then you need to show that that intent is being implemented, that there is an implementation of policy.

Israeli political leaders, including the prime minister, the minister of defense and other cabinet ministers have made statements that show an intent to destroy, uproot, flatten, remove Hamas, but they often slide from speaking about Hamas to speaking about Gaza.

And we have to remember that the vast majority of the population of Gaza actually are refugees or descendants of refugees from what was mandatory Palestine — often from communities that are or used to be just across the fence from where the Gaza Strip is.

So, statements of intent have been made. One has to add to that that there have been other statements, coming largely from military leaders, insisting that what they’re doing is trying to dismantle Hamas as a military organization, they’re taking great care not to harm the civilian population, but because Hamas is in highly congested areas and has allegedly placed its headquarters under hospitals, its missiles (under) schools or kindergartens and so forth, it has no choice but to also harm civilians. And it says that that’s the responsibility of Hamas. So, you have two different types of statements.

If you look more closely still at the implementation of policy, I would say you have two elements here.

One, I would say, and I’m not the only one who’s saying it, is that you have a clear disproportionality between the military goals as they are articulated by the Israeli military and the number of civilians that are being killed. We have now well over 12,000. That’s the estimate of civilians killed. There may be more — I mean, some people, of course, argue that we can’t trust Hamas figures, but on the other hand, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people buried under the debris, and many of them are children. About 50% of the population is under 18.

So, first of all, you have vast disproportionality. It’s not clear that Israel has really managed to dismantle Hamas as a fighting organization. Maybe it did it in the city of Gaza, but certainly not in the entire Strip. And the numbers of losses are huge.

And when you talk about disproportionality, you’re talking about both the immediate military goal and then the larger goal. What is actually your goal in killing so many people? Why are you doing it? And here the Israeli government has not articulated that clearly, and we can get back to what that means.

The second element is that part of the Israeli military operation is based on removing the population of the northern part of Gaza to the southern part of Gaza. And so about a million people have been dislocated from northern Gaza to the southern Gaza Strip where they’re living under dire conditions and lacking all sufficient infrastructure for long-term survival. With the approach of winter now things are going to get much, much worse very quickly.

Meanwhile, Gaza has been flattened as Israeli political and military leaders said they would do. They have, and if you listen to the Israeli media, people are talking about that with glee. There have been reports from the ground in Israel where you see the city of Gaza is flattened. There are just no houses standing there.

So, even if the people who were removed from that area are allowed to go back, they have nothing to go back to. And right now, in the last two days, the Israeli army has also ordered people in the eastern part of the southern Strip to move to its western part because now they want to have military operations there.

So, they are constricting them increasingly into smaller and smaller territory. Now, I’ll add one last thing to this, and that’s really coming out just in the last few days. There is more and more talk in Israel by various people related to the government of relocating the population as a humanitarian act.

So, just as the army was saying, its humanitarian policy is to move people out of the area of operations so that they don’t get killed. Now, various spokespeople (many of them connected to the Kohelet organization [a right-wing Israeli think tank] that launched the judicial overhaul that everybody was excited about or mad about before the war) are saying we should relocate them perhaps to the Sinai Peninsula, perhaps to the Negev, and ultimately maybe they should just be distributed as refugees to other countries. They are refugees, in any case. And then we’ll have the Gaza Strip to ourselves and we’ll be able to settle it again as we had done before Israel had moved out of the Gaza Strip. These kinds of actions show a particular intent of ethnic cleansing that could also very easily become genocidal actions — that is, causing mass death to the population, removing it from the area where it lives and then, in attempting to destroy its own identity by moving it elsewhere, dispersing it around the world.

Dorsey: You’ve said that there’s no proof that Israeli operations in Gaza amount to genocide, but that they could qualify as war crimes or crimes against humanity, and that there is still time to prevent the Gaza war from evolving into genocide. Would Israeli actions like the cutting off of the supply of essentials for human life like food, the attacks on the hospitals, what you just mentioned, the unsafe moving of civilian populations, if not transferring them beyond the borders of the territory they live in, and collective punishment constitute evidence?

Bartov: So we are right now in a kind of gray zone because even what you’re citing, I said over a week ago. Things have been changing. I think that there is growing evidence of war crimes; there’s growing evidence of crimes against humanity, and, if the policies that I just outlined are allowed to be implemented, that could constitute genocide. They have not been implemented fully yet. The population of Gaza is still there. What its fate will be, we don’t know.

And I must add another element to it, which to my mind will make at least part of the difference between this sliding toward genocide and not. That is that the Israeli government has not articulated what its policy for the “day after” is, and the day after here is crucial.

At some point, the fighting will stop. We don’t know yet whether there may be a ceasefire, but a ceasefire doesn’t mean that the fighting will stop. In 1948, there were various ceasefires, and then the fighting resumed. But at some point, the fighting will come to an end. What will happen then, if you look at those kind of plans that are being floated now in the Israeli media by all kinds of spokespeople for the government — although the government has not said that itself — there are two options here. One is that the Israeli government will want to continue what existed before, just without Hamas. That is, to remove Hamas and then to put a fence around the Gaza Strip bigger and better than the one that they quite easily overcame and say, we are not responsible for those people. They can rot there. We don’t care. And then continue implementing Israel’s policy on the West Bank, which is partly ethnic cleansing, partly annexation and massive settlement. I don’t know whether that would be possible, but that’s one possibility. That will mean that Gaza will remain the same thing and things will happen over and over again.

The other option is a political option, the beginning of political negotiations and a settlement between an Israeli political leadership and a Palestinian political leadership. That means that both the Israeli political leadership has to be replaced — and I think it will be replaced; It’s totally discredited — and the Palestinian political leadership will be replaced. And Hamas, I think, is also totally discredited, and the Palestinian Authority is extremely weak and unpopular and its leadership would have to be changed. And there are potential leaders, although they’re mostly in jail. They’re in Israeli jail, so it’s not very difficult to release them.

That would create a different paradigm. And creating that different paradigm could be the difference between sliding into an increasingly genocidal policy and moving toward something that could see some silver lining at the end of all this killing. I don’t know if that is possible. It seems like there’s pressure on Israel to move in that direction. I don’t think the pressure is sufficient, but I think that that’s, in many ways, the only means by which we could prevent this from becoming even worse and potentially a genocidal situation.

Dorsey: I want to come back to the “day after” in a second, but I’d like to sort of first just clarify something. You essentially have a situation in which the siege of Gaza for all practical matters, (no food coming in, water, electricity, fuel) is essentially robbing the territory of the essentials of life. Now, clearly, there’ve been today some developments with a minimal amount of fuel being allowed into Gaza, but nonetheless, doesn’t that or does that in itself constitute intent if you’re starving people of food, of water, potable water, electricity, fuel and so on?

Bartov: It’s a complicated situation, first because this is a sort of moving target, as you said, and I think that the Israeli military and the political authorities are trying to balance things more or less in a way that they put increasing pressure on the population on the one hand, but that they’re not seeing it as entirely starving it of resources. So they’re sort of trying to find a balance, and that is clearly the reason that they’ve allowed fuel in today. They’re even saying that there is another element: that in the laws of war blockade or siege is not entirely impermissible. So even if we look at it as a war crime, there are conditions under which — if you look at, say, the British blockade of Germany in World War I — there’s a difference between a blockade or a siege that could be defined as military strategy and one that is not allowed.

And I think that at this point, Israel is trying to position itself just on this sort of margin between a war crime and a non-war crime. They have a phalanx of lawyers who constantly look at what they’re doing, which is sort of interesting on its own. So, I’m skeptical about that being defined as a war crime as opposed to indiscriminate bombing and destruction right now, which I think would be easier.

But if you move from the category of war crimes to one of genocide, then you could start. By making the lives of people in a particular territory impossible, that is creating conditions that no longer allow life over time, combined with the actual removing of the population and congesting them in one area, you are beginning to move into a situation that is clearly pre-genocidal and could easily flip to the other side.

And that’s where only political intervention can stop that. It can’t just be part of military strategy. There has to be a political horizon as to what happens next, and it can move into ways, but right now it’s stuck, and as long as it’s stuck, then the dying will only increase and the closer we come to something that we could identify as genocide.

Dorsey: I want to come back to that in one minute. One last question in this direction, though. You’re no doubt familiar with the lawsuit against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin Lloyd filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights. The complaint asserts that they are complicit in genocide committed by Israel. William Schabas, a prominent genocide and legal scholar, cites Israeli government statements, deadly military assault, and a total siege as signs of genocide. Genocide and Holocaust scholars, John Cox, Victoria Sanford and Barry Trachtenberg, cite as evidence a comparison of Israeli intentions and actions with other genocides in recent history. What is your assessment of that?

Bartov: Look, I mean, these are all people that I greatly admire, and I’ve read Schabas, and they are people who are much better versed than I am in international law. So I don’t want to debate the law with them. They know it better than I do. I can only say that my own feeling is that while there have been statements made by the prime minister or by the chief of staff, also highly dehumanizing statements, speaking about Hamas or Gaza as human animals and so forth—

Dorsey: Or the statement by the president, that there are no innocents.

Bartov: Exactly. Which is especially extraordinary coming from [Israeli President Isaac] Herzog, who we used to think of as a much more moderate politician. So despite those statements, my own sense, and I may be wrong in this, and I’ve said that those statements show intent, but my own sense is that the current policy of the government and of the military is not to destroy the civilian population of Gaza.

That is, it may happen, and then their statements will be used against them as they should, but their own policy right now is not that. But it’s evolving in that direction. And that’s why I was speaking about the relocation, these ideas for the next phase, what is the next phase of this war. But I don’t think that right now there are people in government or at the top military echelons saying, we basically have to get rid of this group altogether in one way or another.

The statements have an effect. They have a brutalizing effect on the soldiers on the ground. They’re giving license to soldiers by talking about the population in those terms. And as I say, if the policies move in the direction of an actual attempt to remove the population from Gaza, then those statements that were made will be seen as an intention to destroy Palestinians, as such, as a group. I don’t think that that up to now has been the policy. I think many of these statements were made sort of in the heat of the moment in rage, and also because the army, — and that’s a very important element — on all echelons feels humiliated. It feels that it lost its honor, and people on the ground are talking about it in those terms: We have to restore our honor as well as deterrence.

And so they use that kind of language. But the situation on the ground, what they’re doing and the way they’re talking combined, I think can devolve into genocide. We have been and are increasingly on the brink and in the long run, people like Schabas may be shown to have been correct.

I tend to believe that this can actually be stopped. Also, I’m not sure that the right policy is to sue Biden and Blinken. I hope that Biden and Blinken and the secretary of defense and other people will actually steer Israel in a different direction, not just by persuasion, but by real pressure. And the US right now has an immense ability for pressure in Israel because Israel — with all those politicians who just before the war in Israel were saying the US should “mind its own business” and” we want to change our legal system” and so forth — within days, Israel became dependent on immediate, urgent supplies of military hardware. And that is huge leverage, and they could use it publicly or they could do it privately, but they’re obviously not doing enough of that. And I would much rather they did that than try to defend themselves of whether they are complicit in genocide or not, instead of actually carrying out actions that would prevent things from getting worse.

Dorsey: In fact, if one looks at the 2021 war in Gaza, in many ways Biden pursued the same strategy, the “bear hug” if you wish, but finally on the tenth day of the war had to come out publicly and make very clear what he wanted for the Israelis and Hamas, but in this case primarily the Israelis to a day later declare a ceasefire.

Bartov: Yeah, and look, it’s different now because the scale is completely different. The scale is unprecedented on both sides, and one has to take that in. About a thousand civilians murdered in Israel and Israeli towns taken over by Hamas, that has not happened [before]. Towns taken over. It’s not happened since 1948. Our settlements and this number of Jewish victims, civilians, has not happened since 1945, and the shockwaves in Israel are huge. The sense of pain and mourning is enormous. I hear it all the time.

And on the other hand, the number of civilians that Israel has killed now in the Gaza Strip is also unprecedented compared to all its previous actions there, which were often horrific on their own. I mean, in 2014, about 500 children died from Israeli air bombardment, and that I thought was clearly a war crime. It was never adjudicated as such. And now we are talking about possibly 4 or 5 thousand children alone. So, the scale has exploded and action is needed, and it has to come from the US government. There’s no one else who can actually immediately bring about a change in policy, but they have to make that decision, and they obviously have not made it here.

Dorsey: Before we go back to the “day after,” I’d like to follow up in terms of the Israeli military. One gets the impression that attitudes towards Palestinians among the rank and file of the Israeli military have hardened even before this war erupted. It’s apparent in the frequent failure of the military to intervene when vigilante civilians attack Palestinians in the West Bank, or soldiers planting Israeli flags on mosques and homes when raiding West Bank refugee camps, towns and villages. I wonder how much of this has to do with the rise of officers like we saw in 2014, with then Colonel now Brigadier General Ofel Winter, who as commander of the Givati Brigade declared that the Gaza War is a religious war and therefore there’s been this rawification in attitudes within the Israeli military.

Bartov: Yeah, look, I mean the Israeli military is a very different animal from what it was when I served in it in the 1970s. It’s really something very different, and it’s different on a number of levels, I would say. First of all, the army is becoming more and more religious. More and more people serving in the army are people who come from a religious background, and they don’t come from the ultra-Orthodox, they come from the National Religious movement, from among the settlers. And they are not because they are more religious as Jews, but because they come from particular yeshivas, particular religious leaders, religious mentors who are very extreme politically and who have a completely different view of what Israel is about and what its mission is. They are not particularly interested in democracy and liberalism in pluralism or anything of that sort.

The most extreme representatives of that kind of movement are right now in the Israeli government, like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, these people talk about Jewish supremacy. There’s no way to speak otherwise about it. That’s how they speak themselves. They speak of a total and complete right of Israel to all of “Israel,” to all of the land of Israel, which they don’t like defining. But often what they mean certainly includes Gaza. It of course includes the West Bank. It may include also parts of Lebanon. It can include lands across the Jordan. They have no borders to a sort of vague notion of what the land of Israel is. So this is one thing that has moved into the military.

Another important element is that the Israeli military now is really divided socially. Fewer people serve in the military proportionately than served when I was in the Israeli army in the 1970s. Large parts of those who do go to serve in the military serve in intelligence and air force. The intelligence is huge. It didn’t pan out to be as effective as one would’ve hoped, but it’s huge. And the air force is basically Israel’s Wunderwaffe, as the Germans say, their wonder weapon. That’s really where Israel is completely superior to its neighbors. But the rest, those who go to be infantry, to be in the armored unit, they come from particular parts of the country. They don’t come from the better-educated groups. They don’t come from the center, from Tel Aviv and Haifa. They come from the so-called periphery. And so you also have a social divide within the army itself. Those people who support the more right-wing elements in Israeli society happen to also be serving in those units.

And the last thing, and maybe the most important, is that the Israeli army for the last 56 years has been largely the infantry units. Those people who are on the ground, the grunts have been spending much of the last 50–60 years as policemen. They police the occupation. You have generations of young men and women who spend their military service, with all their fancy uniforms and all that and highly sophisticated guns, breaking into people’s homes at four in the morning to enforce occupation. They stand in roadblocks and stop ambulances from heading to ambulances. They harass old women and children. This is what they’ve been doing.

And so that process brutalizes people, it brutalizes the occupier and it brutalizes the occupied. And in that sense, we could see that when I was in the army — I remember just before I went to the army — we already then in the early 1970s were demonstrating and saying, “Occupation corrupt.” And that occupation had begun only in 1967, when I was 13 years old. You have now young Israelis who have no memory of that at all. Their memory is of them basically bossing it over another population, that population in their own minds — without even any ideology, because of the realities on the ground — is inferior to them. They can do whatever they want to them, which is why partly that attack by Hamas has been so traumatic. Because those were people who, “Yeah, they could lob rocket at us every once in a while, but they were seen as basically no match. I mean, we can destroy them without any problems. We put a few of these”  — mostly female — “soldiers in these observation towers over the defense, and we can catch them, no problem at all.”

Suddenly they came in thousands, and the Israeli army took hours and hours and hours to get there and then to get control over the situation. That was the humiliation, the sense of shame that is in the Israeli army. Now, if you want to understand its psychology, it has to do also with the fact that it turns out we are not that superior. It turns out they can actually fight back, and therefore what we need to do is to show them who has the monopoly on power and flatten them. And on that, I’m afraid right now there’s a huge consensus in Israel, not just in this government. It can change, it can flip, but right now what I hear coming from Israel is they have to learn that they can never do that again to us.

Dorsey: I want to come back finally to the “day after” and the implications that has in terms of preventing a genocide. My reading of the situation is bleak. One, we don’t know that Hamas will be destroyed in this, but even if it’s destroyed, what Hamas stands for, for many Palestinians, is armed resistance. And that notion is becoming more popular, certainly, in the West Bank. I mean, we don’t know what effect the war will have on Hamas’s standing inside Gaza, whether it will reinforce people’s feeling or sympathy for armed struggle and maybe reverse what was a decline in popularity for Hamas prior to the war.

But also you spoke about all these various statements that Israeli leaders have made. The notion of transferring the population, turning them into migrants spread across the globe is a notion that goes far beyond the government. If you look at someone like Ram Ben-Barak, who’s contending now for leadership of the opposition party. He has advocated for distributing Gazans across the globe, and clearly, the Palestine Authority in its current constellation is not really a legitimate contender. The likelihood that Israel would release leaders like Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prisons so that a new Palestinian leadership could emerge given the breadth of sentiment across Israel, whether it be supportive of the government or not, which basically means there is no exit plan.

Arab states aren’t interested in putting boots on the ground there. The Turks are the only ones who’ve so far volunteered that for all practical matters, which really leaves you with a situation in which you either get total anarchy or the Israelis even against their own will have to take over the daily administration.

Bartov: Yes, look, none of this is simple, and as I said, we really don’t know yet where things are heading. I think that it’s quite possible that things will turn out as you just outlined. There’s a high possibility of that.

I believe that there’s another way of looking at this. Two months before the October 7 attacks, colleagues of mine and I issued a statement that was signed by about 2,500 senior scholars and religious leaders and so forth. It was called “The Elephant in the Room.” And we then warned at the time that even the protest movement against Netanyahu’s so-called judicial overhaul at the time was refusing to face the elephant in the room, which was the occupation. And that in fact, what the government was doing even then was an attempt to perpetuate the occupation, to sweep the Palestinian issue under the carpet and to eventually annex large parts of the West Bank.

The fact of the matter is that of course exploded in our faces on October 7, this attempt to say, “Well, we can deal with the Arab states, with the world and all that, and everybody will forget about the Palestinians.” But the fact of the matter is that there are 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians in areas under Israeli control.

Most of these people are not going anywhere. They’re there to stay. The Jews are and the Palestinians are. Now, you could envision, and I know that there are people in Israel who are envisioning it, somehow to remove them all, to somehow get rid of two and a half million Palestinians in Gaza and 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and maybe also the 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens — somehow, wake up tomorrow morning and they’ll be gone. And I think that there are people among Palestinians, probably not a few, who also would like to wake up one morning and see that all the Jews are gone, they’ve gone back to where they came from or somehow they’ve disappeared.

But nobody is going anywhere, and because nobody’s going anywhere, the question is, do those two groups continue to slaughter each other or do they not? Do they finally understand that they have to share that land? And if they come to that understanding that they cannot make the other group disappear, not in mind, not in spirit, they’re there, then they have to find some way to live together.

And there are actually ideas as to how to do that. It’s not a pie in the sky. The problem is that radical politicians on both sides — radical and incompetent in most cases — have always, whenever there was a possibility that something would change, immediately started using the most radical elements on the other side to make it appear impossible.

You probably remember that in the early nineties when the Oslo Accord was sort of being debated, people thought about Gaza as the Great Promise. Gaza would have an international airport and seaport and money would flow in, and it would be like Dubai, or the Hong Kong of the Middle East or something like that. And Hamas became very weak, because Hamas thrives on insecurity, on desperation, on poverty, just like extremists in Israel.

In fact, if you look at the heads of Hamas and you look at the Netanyahu coalition partners, they are mirror images of each other. They’re both thinking of the same thing. They want to be rid of the other side and have it all, and they’re sort of messianic in their worldview. But you could think about it differently. And I believe that most people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the Galilee, in Tel Aviv would rather have a better future for their children and not think that their children would have to again, engage in all these kinds of wars that we’re seeing right now. And there are plans for that, and they’re good plans, but you need a new political leadership. And here people have to stand up.

People do have a responsibility, both Palestinians (and it’s much more difficult for Palestinians) and Israeli Jews (and it’s less difficult for them), to stand up and to remove those corrupt extreme leaders and find for themselves better leaders. And they can be helped in doing that by, first of all, the American administration, but also by Americans, not least American Jews, who would actually put pressure on their own constituencies, on their own government to steer Israel in a direction that is better for it, which is a direction of compromise. And Israel, which says that Palestinians understand only the language of power, is a country that understands only the language of power, and it’s time to exert some of that on the current government.

Dorsey: Omer, on that note, this has been a very incisive conversation, and we could go on for hours, but unfortunately time is not our friend. I wish we had more time to follow through, but we’ll certainly have another opportunity. Nevertheless, thank you for taking the time, and all the best.

Bartov: Thank you very much for having me.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Biden’s Soft Approach to Israel May Not Work This Time

Want to Stop War Crimes? Cut Off Aid to Israel Now

Israel Moves to Round Two of Its Democracy Stress Test

FO° Talks: Why New Israel-Hamas War Began and How Could it End

The post A Genocide Expert Makes Sense of War Crimes in Gaza appeared first on Fair Observer.

Even then, Biden needed to be blunt and go public to get what he wanted. After 10 days of behind-the-scenes diplomacy and US blocking of condemnatory United Nations Security Council resolutions, Biden placed his fourth phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in little more than a week.

Biden advised the Israeli leader that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.” When Netanyahu sought to buy time to continue the bombing, Biden replied: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.”

Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire a day later. Biden’s bear hug approach took its toll on the Palestinians in 2021, but ultimately, it worked.

Two years later and three weeks into the most ferocious Israeli air attack on Gaza, now seeing the beginnings of a ground offensive into a besieged strip that has been devastated, the toll of Biden’s approach is a multitude.

Heart-wrenching scenes of more than 7,000 dead, including over 2,600 children, according to Palestinian sources, the closure of hospitals because of a lack of fuel, a blackout due to Gaza running out of energy, unimaginable situations in hospitals lacking electricity and medical supplies and overrun by patients and displaced persons, and impending hunger as food stocks are depleted.

Pressured by the United States and international public opinion, Israel has agreed to allow humanitarian aid to trickle into Gaza. However, it is too little, and for many too late, and impeded by unrelenting Israeli bombings.

Israeli anger has never been greater

To be sure, 2023 is not 2021. What provoked Israeli ferocity was far more extreme than the clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces and the rockets fired at Israeli towns from Gaza by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2021.

The brutal and wanton killing by Hamas of some 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and the kidnapping of some 220 Israeli, dual and foreign nationals, primarily civilians, was on an unprecedented scale and demonstrated Hamas’ refusal to distinguish between innocent civilians and security and military personnel, a mirror image of Israel’s approach to Gaza. The killings evoked Holocaust associations.

Dehumanizing statements by Israeli officials and calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza reflect the depth of Israeli anger. Coupled with a seemingly blanket US support for Israel, they also reinforced Palestinian suspicions that ridding itself of Palestinians is Israel’s long-standing goal.

Why doesn’t Biden take a harder line?

Biden’s bear hug approach and refusal to pressure Israel more forcefully involves a complicated cost-benefit analysis as well as a crucial political battle that could not only drag the United States into another Middle East war but also change the paradigm of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Republican Mike Johnson’s introduction of a bill in Congress supporting Israel that was adopted with an overwhelming majority as his first act as speaker of the US Congress demonstrates domestic restraints on Biden in the run-up to next year’s presidential election.

Even so, the depth of emotional Israeli public backing for a severe punishment of Hamas calls into question the effectiveness of a bear hug approach unless Israel decides there are reasons of its own to limit its ground offensive or stop the bloodletting.

Add to that the question of the price both Palestinians and the United States are paying for a go-slow approach. Palestinians pay the price in lives and destruction; the cost to the United States is reputation and geopolitics.

To be sure, Biden agrees with Netanyahu that Hamas leaders, commanders and fighters should be held accountable for the October 7 killings. The problem is that even if the Israeli assault destroys Hamas physically, it will not squash militancy or Palestinian national aspirations.

Moreover, Biden’s bear hug approach lends legitimacy to assertions of US hypocrisy, particularly when compared to his statements on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the exception to his tactics that he applies not only to Israel but also in domestic politics. The notion of hypocrisy undermines the US assertion that it stands for principles and values and perceptions of its reliability as a security partner elsewhere in the Middle East.

Similarly, it has opened the door to a shifting of the Israeli-Palestinian paradigm with Israel’s assertion that Hamas is the equivalent of Islamic State. The Israeli effort is designed to put the shoe on the other foot. Two decades after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington sparked a push for “moderate” Islam, the Israeli assertion turns a national conflict into a struggle against religious militancy.

On a visit to Jerusalem to express solidarity with Israel, French President Emmanuel Macron picked up on the Israeli assertion by calling for the military alliance that defeated Islamic State in Syria and Iraq to take on Hamas.

While Hamas’ October 7 rampage resembled Islamic State atrocities, Hamas differs substantially from Islamic State. It is a militant religious nationalist group, not a transnational jihadist movement seeking a caliphate. Moreover, Hamas long served Netanyahu’s effort to keep the Palestinian polity divided between the Gaza group and the Palestine Authority in the West Bank.

Equating Hamas with the Islamic State serves the same purpose as Israel’s visceral response to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez’s statement that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” Israel cannot maintain its occupation of Palestinian lands and rejection of an equitable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if the Hamas attack is explained — not justified — as linked to Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.

This week, Biden insisted that “there’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6,” the day before the Hamas attack. “That means ensuring that Hamas can no longer terrorize Israel and use Palestinians civilians as human shields. It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, Biden said.

To achieve that, Biden, the first US president in decades to refrain from Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, would have to engage. Bear hugs may not be sufficient to prevent Biden from becoming the umpteenth president to fail in resolving one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Biden’s Soft Approach to Israel May Not Work This Time appeared first on Fair Observer.

Opponents are painting him as a Western and Israeli lackey. Protesters clad in keffiyeh, the distinctive Palestinian scarf, and waving the Palestinian flag marched after last Friday’s prayers towards the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur and briefly clashed with police.

“What we are protesting here today is the colonization of Palestine, backed by America and Western powers,” said activist Hishamuddin Rais. He insisted that the Gaza war was neither a religious battle between Jews and Muslims nor a war against Hamas. Instead, he suggested, it was in opposition to a Western-backed Israeli effort to deprive Palestinians of their rights.

Rais echoed Ibrahim’s insistence that Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack on Israel in which some 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed would not alter Malaysian support for the group.

Among Middle Eastern and Asian nations with a Hamas representation, Malaysia may be the most exposed Hamas host.

The key role of Qatar, and how Turkey and Lebanon matter

Hamas leaders, including Khaled Mishaal and Ismail Haniyeh, are based in Qatar. Qatar has long served as a welcome intermediary between Israel and the group it once tacitly nurtured as an antidote to Palestinian nationalism. It was a policy tacitly endorsed by the United States, even though the US and various European countries, alongside Israel, have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. Last week, Qatar negotiated the release of two American hostages kidnapped by Hamas during its attack.

A highflier, Qatar is seeking to get more of the approximately 222 Israelis and foreigners captured by Hamas liberated. Among the hostages are at least 26 Israeli military personnel. European leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Rishi Sunak, hope Qatar can help them get their nationals freed. Nevertheless, Qatar’s relationship with Hamas is encountering headwinds, with some pundits and Western officials taking the Gulf state to task.

“There can be no more business as usual with Hamas,” said US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Blinken thanked Qatar for getting the two American hostages released. Last week, the United States sanctioned ten Hamas operatives it said were involved in financing and facilitating Hamas in Gaza, Turkey and Algeria, including Ahmad Abd Al-Dayim Nasrallah, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar.

Middle East analyst Hussien Ibish, a senior scholar at the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-funded Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington suggested a reckoning with Qatar may only come once the hostage crisis is resolved. “After the hostage situation concludes — whether it ends in tragedy or with negotiated releases involving possible prisoner swaps — Qatar is likely to face severe pressure and criticism,” Ibish said.

Turkey, another Hamas host country in which thousands have marched in support of Gaza, has sought to deflect criticism by playing a similar role, so far with less success. In a phone call with Haniyeh this weekend, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he was working to get humanitarian aid to Gaza and would welcome wounded Gazans for treatment in Turkish hospitals.

For now, Lebanon, a failed state on the verge of collapse, in which Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia, threatens to open a second front if Israel pushes ahead with a ground offensive in Gaza, is a lost case from a US and Israeli perspective.

Malaysia’s unwavering support for the Palestinian people

Ibrahim, the Malaysian prime minister, lacks a veneer for his unabashed support for Hamas to counter likely US pressure. Speaking to parliament after the October 7 attack, Ibrahim insisted, “We, as a policy, have a relationship with Hamas from before and this will continue.” The prime minister rejected unspecified foreign pressure to break with Hamas. “As such, we don’t agree with their pressuring attitude, as Hamas too won in Gaza freely through elections and Gazans chose them to lead.” Ibrahim was referring to Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006, the last time Palestinians voted.

Last week, Ibrahim pledged Malaysia’s “unwavering support for the Palestinian people” in a phone call with Haniyeh. In recent days, Ibrahim also called for an immediate ceasefire and the creation of an independent Palestinian state in territories conquered by Israel during the 1967 Middle East war. Malaysia has no diplomatic relations with Israel.

Ibrahim is likely to find maintaining his position increasingly problematic, particularly when Israel comes around to investigating its intelligence and operational failures in preventing a Hamas attack. Already, Malaysians are divided about their policy towards Hamas, even though criticism is expressed primarily behind closed doors. “With all that’s happening, support for Hamas is far from unequivocal,” said a well-placed Malaysian source.

The source noted that the Hamas-controlled, Kuala Lumpur-based Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia (PCOM) organizes well-attended public events joined by prominent intellectuals, journalists and civil society figures but rarely by senior officials.

Even so, former prime minister Mahathir Mohammed invited Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to attend a 2019 Islamic summit in Kuala Lumpur. In addition, Mahathir met Hamas leaders on several earlier occasions in the Malaysian capital. Some analysts suggested that the government, rather than changing its public stance, could quietly distance itself from Hamas by not renewing the residency visas of the group’s operatives.

PCOM was co-founded in 2011 by Ibrahim’s Rural and Regional Development Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and the prime minister’s Home Affairs Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail. The Hamas attack has revived debate in government circles and security forces about the risks involved in allowing Hamas to operate in Malaysia.

Officials and security officers first questioned the value of relations with Hamas after the 2018 killing of Kuala Lumpur-based Palestinian electrical engineering professor and Hamas operative Fadi al-Batsh in a drive-by shooting on the streets of the Malaysian capital.

Media reports asserted that Al-Batsh helped Hamas develop its rocket and drone arsenal and may have been negotiating an arms deal with North Korea. Al-Batsh, who obtained his PhD from the University of Malaya, where he lectured on electrical engineering, published extensively on power, electricity, and battery-related issues.

Moreover, in 2014, the Israeli military said that a captured Hamas commander had told Israel’s domestic intelligence service that he was one of ten fighters who trained in Malaysia for the use of motor-powered hang gliders. Fighters on hang gliders landed on the Israeli side of the Gaza border in the first minutes of the October 7 Hamas attack.

Malaysian analysts believe the company that trained the fighters was duped into believing it was developing a new tourism opportunity.

Hamas uses PCOM, the cultural center, described by Malaysians as an “unofficial embassy,” for public outreach and fundraising. PCOM denies being a political organization with Hamas links.

The analysts said Malaysian governments allowed PCOM to operate alongside the Palestinian embassy in Kuala Lumpur to balance Malaysia’s relations with Hamas and its archrival, Al Fatah, which dominates the officially recognized Palestine Authority and has an embassy in the Malaysian capital.

PCOM raises funds through a network of Malaysian civil society groups. The center advises potential donors knocking on its door to contact those groups.

Ibrahim “[was] committed to the Palestinian struggle from his younger days in Abim (Muslim Islamic Youth Movement) until he became the prime minister… His efforts in the last few hours were important in pushing back the Western narrative and Western pressure on the international community,” said Muslim Imran, a member of Hamas’ international bureau and founding director of the Kuala Lumpur-based Asia Middle East Center for Research & Dialogue.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Gaza Puts Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in a Bind appeared first on Fair Observer.

That was true for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and Israeli leaders before the PLO’s 1988 recognition of Israel and the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords. Palestinian airline hijackings and attacks on Israeli towns, Israeli retaliatory military actions and the assassinations by renegade Palestinian commander Abu Nidal in the 1980s of senior PLO officials engaged in unofficial talks with Israeli activists served hardliner purposes. So did tacit Israeli support for Hamas, born under Israeli occupation in opposition to the occupation of Palestinian lands, as an imaginary anti-dote to Palestinian nationalism.

Unprecedented disregard for human life

If anything, the reinforcement of hardline positions reinforced by the latest war, together with the unnecessary brutality and harshness of the occupation, has produced a conflict with an unprecedented disregard for the lives of the other. Mounting resistance to the Israeli occupation was inevitable without any possibility of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Hamas and Israel had choices in how to conduct hostilities.

Hamas did itself no favors with the wanton and random killing of Israeli civilians in its unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that shattered perceptions of Israeli military and intelligence superiority, demonstrated the unsustainability of the occupation and rallied degrees of support for Israel, not only from its traditional US and European allies but also influential Global South countries like Kenya and India.

Instead of embarking on an Islamic State-style killing spree, Hamas could have achieved its objectives by restricting its offensive to targeting Israeli military installations and personnel. The presence of an unknown number of Israeli soldiers among the more than 100 hostages kidnapped by Hamas proves the point.

By the same token, rather than bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, Israel could have opted for targeted killings of the Hamas senior and mid-level leadership. With a different government, it could have coupled its retaliation with a credible proposal to solve the conflict.

Granted, past targeted killings didn’t produce the desired outcome, and Israel is in no mood to talk about peace. But similarly, the current sledgehammer violence by both parties in violation of international law, too, will not achieve preferred results, at least in the short term, and likely only harden positions, much like the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, against Israeli occupation in the late 1980s and early 1990s failed to prevent escalating violence.

A lone Israeli military voice, retired Major General Itzhak Brik warned that “should a regional war break out and we are not prepared for it, the catastrophe will be hundreds of times greater … A military operation in Gaza can degenerate into an all-out war on five fronts.”

In Brik’s counting, it would be a multi-front war involving not just Hezbollah and Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria and Iran, but also Israeli cities and towns. “The next war will feature both very difficult battles on land and very difficult attacks from the air. The Israeli home front will be hit by thousands of missiles every day, and along the border, we will be facing thousands of fighters who want to come across,” the former military officer said. “But we’ll face the biggest catastrophe inside the country, as tens of thousands of armed Arab rioters will run throughout the country, and we hadn’t prepared for this.”

There are still some cooler heads around

To be sure, neither Hamas nor Israel are what they were in the 1980s. Now gone are the days when the Israeli military told then-Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin during the Intifada: “We can resolve this, but not at a price that either you or we find morally acceptable. You solve this.”

What may not be lost and will likely regain prominence are attitudes underlying ceasefire talks in 2014 to end that year’s military conflagration between Israel and Hamas.

Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk noted at the time that “the charter is not the Quran. It can be amended.” Abu Marzouk was referring to Hamas’ charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel.

His words echoed the words of the late Israeli Defence Minister Ezer Weizman who, in the 1980s, stood in front of his Likud Party emblem that showed Jordan as part of Israel and said, concerning the Palestine Liberation Organization charter that at the time called for Israel’s demise, “We can dream, so can they.”

For now, the Hamas attack and Israel’s response leave hardly any flexibility. Overall, the Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza and the cutoff of food, fuel and medical supplies to the Strip has stiffened Arab public opinion’s rejection of relations with Israel without a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The silver lining is that a minority of voices on both sides of the divide are distancing themselves from the atrocities committed in the fighting and the bombings. That was always true for Israel, even if moderate voices have been pushed to the margins over the years.

What is new is that moderate voices elsewhere in the Middle East have emerged at a time of heightened emotions and rallying around the flag. In some cases, like that of Iran, Israel, rather than being the punching bag and boogeyman, has become a sword wielded against an unpopular and repressive regime.

Over the weekend as Hamas invaded Israel, Iranian soccer fans denounced the presence of a Palestinian flag at a match in Tehran’s Azadi Stadium between Persepolis and Gol Gohar. “The Palestinian flag — shove it up your ass!” the fans chanted.

By the same token, an “IraniansStandWithIsrael” trended on Twitter, seemingly dominated by the Iranian Diaspora rather than Iranians in Iran. It was not clear whether this represented a demographic divide or increased caution among segments of society in the Islamic republic.

Similarly, breaking taboos, Arab voices on social media are taking Hamas to task for its unwarranted brutality and sparking a rare discussion in the Arab world. “I am a Kuwaiti and I stand with Israel. Any Kuwaiti who has forgotten the treachery of the Palestinian leadership is ignorant. My solidarity is with the Palestinian and Israeli people. We want to uproot Hamas and the PLO. These people have lost their competence to manage the interests of the Palestinians,” tweeted prominent Kuwaiti journalist Jasem Aljuraid, who has 86,000 followers on Twitter.

Opposed to autocratic rule, Aljuraid has left his native Kuwait but remains a voice in social media discussion. His tweet sparked thousands of contradictory and mixed responses, including more than 2,000 likes. “They killed an Israeli woman, took off her clothes, smashed her, and marched her around in victory…but victory for what?! Are these the principles of Islam?!” Aljuraid asked in a separate tweet featuring the Israeli flag.

London-based Kuwaiti Shiite Muslim religious scholar Yasser al-Habib with 22,000 followers tweeted: “Who among us does not enjoy retaliation from the Zionist enemy? We were all excited by this news when it first arrived. But as the hours passed, my feelings deteriorated after these atrocities committed by the Hamas group, including mutilation, rape of women, random killing, and similar atrocities. Where did the ethics of war go in Islam?!”

(To be fair, there is no independent confirmation, at time of writing, of reports that Hamas has raped captives.)

Adding his voice, Bahraini activist Shaheen Aljenaid charged, “This is a terrorist act and a distortion of the image of Islam and Muslims… Watch how they trade in photographing a dead woman without clothing, without morals or humanity. This is clear evidence that they have no connection to Arabism and religion.”

The importance of voices like Aljuraid, Al-Habib and Aljenaid is less their denunciation of Hamas and more the suggestion that the historic Pavlov reflex to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long challenged by Israeli doves — even if they currently threaten to be drowned out in the cacophony of anger, shock and a desire for revenge among Israelis — is for the first time being questioned in other parts of the Middle East.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post In the Middle East, History Repeats Itself … Right? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel, described by some analysts as the Jewish state’s 9/11, changes the dynamics of Middle Eastern geopolitics. The brutal attack involved prolonged fighting with the Israeli military in Israeli towns and cities, the firing of thousands of rockets at Israeli population centers, the random killing of innocent civilians in Israeli homes and the kidnapping of scores of Israeli soldiers and civilians.

BBC foreign correspondent Secunder Kermani described sirens sounding off and multiple explosions as he disembarked at Tel Aviv airport on Saturday.

Like the Turkish assault on Kurdish positions in Syria and Iraq in the wake of the October 1 suicide bombing in Ankara, the Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliatory pounding of Gaza call into question the sustainability of a regional de-escalation that freezes rather than tackles perennial conflicts.

Similarly, the attack pours cold water on the notion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative coalition partners that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands can be sustained indefinitely.

On Hamas’ tailcoat, Iran, long opposed to Arab normalization of relations with Israel, sees the Palestinian offensive as vindication of its position. Only days before the hostilities, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cautioned that normalization of relations with Israel amounted to “gambling” that was “doomed to failure.” He warned that countries establishing relations with the Jewish state would be “in harm’s way.”

Raising the specter of a wider regional conflict, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told the BBC that the group had direct backing for the attack from Iran. Hamad did not specify what support entailed.

Even if suggestions prove correct that Iran helped Hamas plan and prepare for the attack, the group would have launched its assault because it served its purposes, rather than serving Iranian interests.

Reactions across the Middle East

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia, bolstered the threat of a regional conflagration by firing rockets at the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms in southern Lebanon. Israel retaliated with armed drones. The Hezbollah attack came after Israeli soldiers opened fire on pro-Hamas demonstrators carrying the group’s flag on the Lebanese side of the border. There were no reported casualties.

Meanwhile, a Saudi statement suggested that the Hamas attack had complicated US-led efforts to engineer Saudi recognition of Israel. The Saudi foreign ministry recalled the kingdom’s “repeated warning of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.” The statement indicated that the fighting reinforced Saudi conditioning of diplomatic relations with Israel on viable steps toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Already, the fighting will stop Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman from becoming the third Cabinet-level Israeli official to visit Saudi Arabia in less than two weeks. Ms. Silman was expected to attend this week’s MENACW 2023, the Middle East and North Africa Climate Week conference in the kingdom, one of four Regional Climate Weeks held worldwide ahead of next month’s COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai.

In what diplomats described as an indication of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) predicament, Emirati officials insisted that Sunday’s United Nations Security Council discussion of the fighting would be a closed session rather than a private meeting. The UAE called for the meeting alongside Malta. Unlike a private meeting, the closed session excluded Israeli and Palestinian representatives. It ended without a Council statement.

The UAE was one of four Arab states to recognize Israel in 2020. At the same time, UAE officials describe Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Had there been a Palestinian representation, the Palestinian voice would have been President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Authority, dominated by Al Fatah, Hamas’ archrival, further marginalized by the fighting. This weekend, Abbas was reduced to issuing a statement insisting that Palestinians had the right to defend themselves against the “terror of settlers and occupation troops.” With the perennial potential collapse of the Palestine Authority, Hamas’ attack strengthens the group in a likely struggle to succeed 87-year-old Abbas, who has lost public support.

While the Israeli-Palestinian fighting was likely to boost popular Arab rejection of relations with Israel, social media responses in Turkey indicated a different sentiment among one segment of Turkish public opinion. “Israel is probably more popular than ever among Turks,” said Turkish Middle East scholar Karabekir Akkoyunlu. Akkoyunlu attributed Israel’s popularity to Israeli support for Azerbaijan against Armenia, rising anti-Arab sentiment in Turkey and Arab countries normalizing relations with the Jewish state.

That did not stop many Turks from marching in Istanbul this weekend to support the Hamas attack.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July and has allowed the group to operate. However, unlike Arab statements that blamed Israel for the violence, Erdoğan offered to mediate between Israel and Hamas.

What will the political fallout of the fighting be for Israel?

The fighting risks, at least in the short-term, stiffening Israel’s refusal to entertain steps that would enable the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel or a viable one-state solution, even if the Netanyahu government, the most ultra-conservative and ultra-nationalist in Israeli history, becomes a victim of renewed violence.

Israeli reticence will be further reinforced by likely increased violence on the West Bank, where Palestinian militants resisting Israeli occupation are certain to be emboldened. Militants called this weekend on Palestinians to fight Israelis in their West Bank towns.

Some Israeli sources suggested that Israel’s focus in the last year on Palestinian resistance in the West Bank had led Israel to pay less attention to Gaza. More than 50 years after initial Egyptian-Syrian advances in the early days of the 1973 Middle East caught Israel by surprise, the Hamas attack has put a dent in Israel’s image of military superiority and prowess.

In addition, perceptions of Israeli weakness may be reinforced once the guns fall silent, with the country likely to be wracked by assertions that the Hamas attack was an intelligence and operational failure.

Nevertheless, Israel would likely benefit from an international community breathing a sigh of relief should the Netanyahu government, too, pay a high price with its possible demise. No Israeli government has survived longer than six months in the aftermath of a major war like the 1973 war or the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Even so, the Hamas attack is likely to impact Israeli public opinion. On the one hand, it is expected to harden attitudes towards Palestinians, reinforced by Hamas’ brutal attacks on innocent civilians and abuse of soldiers. On the other hand, Israelis will probably have less confidence in Israeli security. “I’m worried. I can’t believe what happened. I’ve lost confidence,” said an Israeli woman in a text message.

Netanyahu has sought to capitalize on the hostilities and unprecedented losses suffered by Israel at the hands of Palestinians — now over a thousand, with thousands more wounded — by inviting opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz to join an emergency government. Lapid said in a statement that Netanyahu would have to ditch his far-right and ultra-conservative coalition partners in forming an emergency government. The prime minister “knows that with the current extreme and dysfunctional security cabinet, he can’t manage a war. Israel needs to be led by a professional, experienced and responsible government.”

Netanyahu’s invitation came as the fighting temporarily eased the prime minister’s immediate domestic concerns. The rocket attacks and fighting in Israeli towns and settlements close to Gaza ended, at least temporarily, nine months of mass protests against Netanyahu’s judicial changes. It also halted protests by military reservists, including fighter jet pilots currently striking Gaza, who had earlier refused to report for duty because of the judicial changes. Israeli ultra-nationalists and military commanders warned that the reservists’ protest would weaken Israeli military readiness.

On Saturday, Israel called up reservists for a possible ground invasion of Gaza after Hamas took scores of Israeli soldiers and civilians hostage and transferred them from Israel to Gaza.

Israel may take heart from the unconditional US and European support, fueled by Hamas’ Islamic State-style brutality, in public statements after the Hamas attack. However, reality is very different behind the scenes, according to US and European diplomats.

Netanyahu has not endeared himself to Western leaders by heading a government that has expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank; tacitly endorsed increased anti-Palestinian violence by Israeli settlers; violated fragile understandings on the Temple Mount or Haram-ash-Sharif, a site in Jerusalem holy to Jews and Muslims; and responded brutally to Palestinian resistance.

In addition, Netanyahu has embraced nationalist and far-right European leaders, who look more favorably at his policies than Western Europeans, the European Union and US President Joe Biden. Forming an emergency government would ease Western criticism of Israeli policies.

Distressing images from Gaza could counter that as Israel continues with its devastating bombing of Gaza, which killed at least 300 Palestinians and wounded nearly 2,000 others before the first 24 hours were over.

Nevertheless, Hamas may have miscalculated by counting on Netanyahu’s strained relations with his Western partners, leading them to take a more even-handed approach to renewed violence. Selfies of Hamas fighters lynching the corpses of killed Israeli soldiers, reports of killings of Israeli civilians in their homes in towns near Gaza, and the parade of the dead body of a German tattoo artist buried the slim chance of a more nuanced Western attitude.

Even so, a Middle Eastern diplomat argued, “The Middle Eastern paradigm has changed. Everyone is forced to recalibrate. Hamas shattered perceptions. The Middle East may never be the same.”

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Middle East May Never Be the Same appeared first on Fair Observer.

In response, Arab autocrats are scrambling to squash what they fear could evolve into a third wave of protests in little more than a decade. The autocrats have deployed tools ranging from cracking down on street protests to increased repression to engaging in perfunctory dialogue. They’ve made concessions and economic aid to defuse exploding and potential future powder kegs.

The third wave of protests since the Arab Spring

The latest protests erupted after street agitation across the Middle East bookended the last decade.

In the early 2010s, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt relied on security force violence, military interventions and support for conservatives and rebel militias to roll back the achievements of the 2011 popular revolts that toppled the long-standing autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Uprisings erupted again in 2019 and 2020 in Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan. A combination of autocratic political maneuvering and the Covid pandemic defanged them, often with devastating consequences.

Analysts, journalists and academics argued that counterrevolutionary measures had replaced the 2011 Arab Spring with a prolonged Arab Winter. The latest protests, however, suggest the winter’s snow may be melting.

This month, Iran braces for the September 16 first anniversary of Masha Amini’s death. Amini died under suspicious circumstances in the custody of Iran’s religious police, who detained her for allegedly wearing her headscarf loosely. Amini’s death sparked months of street protests in which security forces killed 530 people and arrested more than 22,000. Since then, popular defiance has turned businesses, cultural events, courthouses and religious ceremonies into protest and civil disobedience venues. “Wrong decisions may have painful consequences for the establishment. People cannot take more pressure. If it continues, we will witness street protests again,” a former government official warned.

Syria has seen almost two weeks of sustained mass anti-government protests in the Druze-populated southwest province of Suwayda, long a pro-government stronghold. The demands for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad are resonating in the neighboring Sunni region of Daraa and even Assad’s Alawite stronghold of Latakia. “Initially, Assad probably thought, ‘I have won and we can let this happen; we can let the Druze let off some steam.’ It turned out to be a mistake from the Assad point of view, and Assad’s military will have to keep him in power,” said Syria expert Joshua Landis.

Authorities in Bahrain have so far failed to end a widening, more than three-week-long hunger strike by 800 prisoners, or at least 20% of the Gulf state’s prison population, by acceding to some demands for improved incarceration conditions.

Libyan security forces were deployed this week on the streets of the capital, Tripoli, to prevent renewed protests against a meeting between since dismissed Foreign Minister Najla al-Mangoush and her Israeli counterpart, Eli Cohen. The protests heaped pressure on Libya’s internationally recognized interim national unity government to step down and make way for a new administration.

Similarly to Iran, Israel has been rocked by nine months of protests — even if Israeli pro-democracy demonstrations have focused on opposition to Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, with no reference to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

In Iraq, Arab and Turkmen protesters opposed to a Kurdish political presence in the disputed multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk clashed with Kurds this weekend, suggesting Iraq could rejoin the list of Middle Eastern countries experiencing social unrest. Authorities initially imposed a curfew in Kirkuk after four people were killed in the protests.

Could Egypt be next?

Supporters of President Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, including the UAE, worry Egypt could be the next to witness a renewed wave of protests.

“There’s a feeling people aren’t comfortable with anything right now. There’s a debt crisis, prices of everything and inflation have gone up dramatically. People’s lives and situations go from bad to worse. Their willingness to stay quiet has disappeared. You’re more likely to hear about the discontent openly in the streets,” Egyptian-Canadian journalist Karim Zidan said to me days after he arrived in Cairo for a visit last month.

In an article entitled “Egypt’s Sisi Rules by Fear—and Is Ruled by It,” Egypt expert Steven A. Cook added, “There is a large, growing, and noticeable divergence between what the government promises Egyptians and how they experience everyday life.”

Fear of renewed protests in Egypt, set to become the world’s largest importer of wheat for the fiscal year 2023–2024, was likely one reason why the Abu Dhabi Export Office and UAE-based agribusiness Al Dahra last month agreed to provide Egypt for the next five years with $100 million a year worth of imported milled wheat “at competitive prices.”

Fear of unrest drives harsh repression

The fear of protests, even in countries like Saudi Arabia with a low risk of discontent spilling into the streets, may also explain out-of-proportion repressive measures like the kingdom’s recent sentencing to death of Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a 54-year-old teacher and brother of a dissident Islamist scholar, for his activity on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Human Rights Watch said the two X accounts associated with al-Ghamdi and cited in court documents had only ten followers between them. Al-Ghamdi generally retweeted tweets by known critics of the Saudi government.

In a just-published book, author Robert D. Kaplan noted that Vladimir Lenin, a founder of the Soviet Union, understood “that it was necessary to murder and incarcerate the innocent. For how else could a dictator inculcate total fear in the population? To punish only the guilty would provide the innocent, who constitute most of the population, with peace of mind. And that, of course, would undermine the sort of control that Lenin believed was necessary.“

Kaplan’s analysis bears out in Iran’s response to protests and Israel’s West Bank and Gaza-related policies. Moreover, it doesn’t bode well for Syrian protesters. Even so, the analysis provides an explanation for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s unnecessarily harsh repression of any sign of dissent.

However, what protests in countries like Iran and Syria and powder kegs such as Egypt suggest, as did the 1989 anti-government demonstrations that sparked the demise of the Leninist empire, is that repression at best buys autocrats and authoritarians time. In the end, it doesn’t remove the risk of mounting discontent with social and economic policies spilling onto the streets.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The So-Called Arab Winter Is Now Heating Back Up appeared first on Fair Observer.

Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, a confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington this week for talks with senior officials, including US President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan. In a phone call last month, Netanyahu told Biden that, as part of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. he wanted a security treaty with the United States that would be focused on deterring Iran 

US and Israeli officials may not want to admit it, but there is little doubt that the Israeli demand complicates Biden’s already complex efforts to persuade the two nations to formalize their substantial informal ties.

Saudi Arabia has likewise asked for concessions that cater to its security and geopolitical interests. It is demanding security arrangements with the United States, US support for its peaceful nuclear program and greater access to sophisticated US weaponry. Like Israel, the kingdom wants a formalized security agreement, even if that accord may not target Iran as explicitly as Israel’s request does.

Saudi Arabia has also made Israeli moves to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians a pre-condition for a rapprochement.

The Iranian factor weighs on considerations

Saudi Arabia will likely be more circumspect following the China-mediated agreement in March reestablishing relations with Iran. Relations had ruptured in 2016 when mobs stormed Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran in protest against the execution of a prominent Saudi Shiite cleric. So far, from Saudi Arabia’s perspective, the agreement has only partially paid off.

To be sure, the agreement, alongside recent rapprochements between other Middle Eastern states, including Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, has dialed down regional tensions. The kingdom and Iran have exchanged ministerial visits, reopened diplomatic missions, spoken about security and economic cooperation and invited each other’s leaders to visit. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Saudi Arabia last week for the first time since diplomatic relations resumed.

Most importantly, from Riyadh’s point of view, Iranian recent aggressive moves in Gulf waters target US and Israel-related vessels rather than Gulf state ships and exclude attacks on Saudi and Emirati oil and other infrastructure.

An informal agreement between the United States and Iran, involving a prisoner swap and a release of frozen Iranian funds, could lead to Iran refraining from attacking US shipping. The deal does not signal a possible return to the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program, even though Iran has reportedly slowed the pace at which it accumulates near-weapons-grade enriched uranium and diluted some of its stockpiles.

However, Netanyahu has made clear that nothing short of the complete termination of Iran’s program is good enough, as far as he is concerned. “Arrangements that do not dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure do not stop its nuclear program and will only provide it with funds that will go to terrorist elements sponsored by Iran,” Netanyahu’s office said.

The statement contrasts starkly with a US position articulated in March by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley. General Milley told Congress the US would not allow Iran to “have a fielded nuclear weapon.” The key word here is “fielded.” This leaves a lot more wiggle room than Israel is comfortable with.

Saudi Arabia and Israel may be closer than meets the eye when it comes to Iran, but they strike different tones. Moreover, Israel is less inclined to deal with the current Iranian regime than Saudi Arabia is.

Addressing a closed meeting in Europe with Middle East experts, a senior Saudi official recently said it was the kingdom’s “hope” to resolve issues with Iran but cautioned that “it is too simple to think in that way—and also dangerous, because if you don’t see results you will think that de-escalation is in vain or has no results.” He likened Saudi-Iranian relations to Europe’s relations with Russia. Europe has “diplomatic relations with Russia, but you’re at war with Russia,” the official said.

The official conceded that, because of US sanctions, prospects for economic cooperation with Iran remained limited without reviving the Iranian nuclear deal. Phrased differently, Saudi-Iranian relations depend as much on policies crafted in Riyadh and Tehran as on policies pursued in Washington.

What is Netanyahu planning?

All this casts a different light on Netanyahu’s demand for an Iran-focused security agreement with the United States.

Mr. Netanyahu has made establishing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia a crown jewel of his foreign policy. To achieve that, Israel has reconciled itself to Saudi Arabia enriching uranium for research purposes as part of a US-Saudi deal.

Netanyahu has also indicated he would be willing to gesture to Palestinians if a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia depended on it. He suggested he would not let ultra-conservative religious and ultranationalist coalition members block an agreement.

It’s not clear that the prime minister could make gestures that would be minimally acceptable to the Saudis and avoid breaking up his coalition, the most hardline in Israeli history. This month’s appointment of Saudi Arabia’s first ambassador to the Palestinians illustrated the gap that Netanyahu would have to bridge. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen did not object to the move but asserted Israel would not permit the opening of diplomatic representations for the Palestinians in Jerusalem. Israel views united Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians see the east of the city, captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

As the custodian of Islam’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia would be hard-pressed to make concessions on Jerusalem, the faith’s third holiest city.

As a result, the question is what Netanyahu wants to achieve with his demand for an anti-Iran security deal with the United States. Certainly, the deal would ensure Israel’s seat at the table and bolster Israel’s position vis-à-vis Iran. Netanyahu may also want to complicate US-Saudi talks about security arrangements in the belief that, without a solid agreement with the United States, the kingdom would have a greater interest in formalizing relations with Israel sooner than later.

Either way, Israel remains a player with the potential to be disruptive rather than constructive, depending on how Mr. Netanyahu defines Israel and his political interests.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Saudi Arabia And Israel Drive A Hard Bargain For Normalization appeared first on Fair Observer.

Widely seen as giving China a grip on Qatari gas, the deal is as much a commercial agreement as it is a security arrangement. It acknowledges China as the Gulf state’s foremost export market and gives China a stake in protecting Qatar.

Qatar is not alone in giving China preferential access to its energy reserves. So do other major Gulf exporters, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for whom China has become their foremost market.

Qatar has close ties with the US

The difference is that Qatar’s energy dealings with China are embedded in a policy that broadly aligns the Gulf state with the United States, emphasizes the Gulf state’s utility as a go-between, and avoids ruffling feathers.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia and the UAE stress their independence, on occasion counter or distance themselves from the policies of the United States, the region’s security guarantor, and sometimes poke the US in the eye.

Last month, the contrast was on full display. While UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed raised eyebrows as the only head of state to attend the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani flew under the radar a week later when he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Bin Zayed “has made a sport out of rebuffing the Biden administration’s efforts to repair the relationship” between the United States and the UAE. “Of course, from his own perspective, Bin Zayed has proved himself a loyal partner to the United States time and again, but of late has had little to show for it,” said scholars Jonathan Lord and Airona Baigal.

In a further illustration of the contrast, Qatar arranged a meeting between a senior Venezuelan and US official last month to improve strained relations resulting from the United States’ recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate president and US sanctions against the South American state.

Officials said the talks could lead to a prisoner swap.

“Getting involved in Venezuela is a high-reward/low-risk strategy. By offering its services, Doha is consolidating its emerging reputation as a global diplomatic go-between, helping Washington in several particularly politically sensitive areas,” said Eldar Mamedov, a Brussels-based foreign policy expert.

A seemingly unlikely candidate to mediate in a region with which it has no ethnic or religious affinity, Qatar was well-positioned because it had neither joined a large number of governments recognizing Guaido nor adhered to the sanctions. Qatar’s refusal failed to upset Washington.

Similarly, Qatar hosts a Taliban office at the United States’ request. Hosting facilitated the 2021 negotiated US withdrawal from Afghanistan and US-Taliban contacts since then. With the withdrawal underway, Qatar, like the UAE, provided significant logistical assistance.

Furthermore, Qatar, at times, mediates between the United States and Iran and serves as a postman relaying messages between the two countries.

At the same time, Qatar, unlike the UAE, has not emerged as a haven for Russians seeking to circumvent US and European sanctions, including Russia’s Wagner Group, or suspected criminals and corrupt officials.

As a result, the US has sanctioned Emirati rather than Qatari companies for violating US sanctions on Russia and Iran. Moreover, Emirati freewheeling has landed the UAE on the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering watchdog.

Furthermore, Qatar has ensured that it is less dependent on Chinese telecommunications technology that the United States fears could give China access to US technology embedded in American weapons systems and other security projects.

Last year, the US rewarded Qatar, home to the largest US military base in the Middle East, by awarding major non-NATO ally status.

UAE and Saudi Arabia do not love the US the same way

To be sure, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been helpful, most recently negotiating prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine. In the past, the UAE contributed troops to support the United States in Afghanistan.

The different Gulf state approaches are rooted in Qatar’s response to the failed 3.5-year-long UAE-Saudi-led economic and diplomatic boycott of the Gulf state. The embargo was lifted in early 2021 without the Gulf state caving in to demands that would have put Qatar under Emirati and Saudi tutelage.

During the boycott, Qatar significantly tightened its security relationship and cooperation with the United States in fighting terrorism finance.

As a result, Qatari perceptions of relations with the United States differ from the Saudi and Emirati experience.

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator with close ties to the Saudi ruling elite, noted that the kingdom “has changed dramatically over the years, from its infancy before the Second World War to a more self-confident G-20 country secure in its place in the world today.”

Saudi attitudes have been compounded by perceptions that “the US security umbrella has been weakened as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned… (That) convinced Saudi leaders that they had to look elsewhere to guarantee their security,” Shihabi said. He was referring to a US refusal to come to the kingdom’s aid when Iran in 2019 attacked Saudi oil facilities. He was also referring to a US cutoff of arms and ammunition sales because of the Saudi intervention in Yemen.

Emirati officials voice similar complaints about US reluctance to respond to Iranian-inspired attacks.

In the same vein, Karen Elliot House, an expert on the kingdom, quoted a Saudi minister as saying in March in a closed-door conference: “You tell us not to talk to Russia, your opponent, but you are talking to Iran, our opponent. You say don’t buy Chinese weapons. ‘Do you have an alternative,’ we ask? ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘but we can’t sell it to you.'”

Another minister told the gathering, “You said you were behind us in our war in Yemen, but you proved a no-show.”

House, referring to Bin Salman by his initials, added, “The Crown Prince is making a virtue of relying less on a reluctant US to protect his nation… MBS is skillfully playing a tough hand of great power poker to benefit Saudi Arabia.”

Even so, North America remains a primary investment target of Emirati and Saudi sovereign wealth funds. Last year, the US$829 billion Abu Dhabi Investment Authority allocated between 45 and 60% of its investments to North America.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Qatar: America’s Best Friend in the Gulf? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Hypocrisy weighs on the US’s global reputation

The discrepancy between US policies and professed values has always existed. However, it’s become more evident and relevant, and more of a liability, in the past 22 years as a result of the War on Terror, rising Islamophobia, the war in Iraq, US reluctance to confront Israel head-on and, most recently, the war in Ukraine.

In addition, China did not loom so large in the past in the competition for influence in the Middle East. Arab nations were on the defensive in the years after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

The United States’ credibility problem is compounded by what Dino Patti Djalal, former Indonesian ambassador to Washington, and Michael Sheldrick, co-founder of Global Witness, see as more broad resentment in the Global South against the West. In an op-ed, Mr. Djalal and Mr. Sheldrick noted that

The West is perceived to perpetuate double standards on issues ranging from climate action and responsibility to trade and accountability for human rights violations … They called for global solidarity during the pandemic while instead often pursuing vaccine nationalism. Western nations preach free trade but increasingly engage in protectionism.

… While Westerners may see public criticism as a regular diplomatic practice, it is seen by many (in the Global South) as false righteousness, devoid of genuine partnership.

Against that backdrop, the latest Arab Youth Survey conducted by public relations agency Asda’a BCW indicates the credibility problem the Biden administration needs to address to narrow the gap.

A healthy 72% of the survey’s respondents identified the United States as an ally. Even so, the US ranked seventh as an ally behind Turkey, China, Britain, Germany, France and India.

That does not mean that the US is perceived to have lost influence in the region. 33% named the US as the most influential power in the Arab world, followed in second place by 11% pointing to the United Arab Emirates.

It does not mean that most youths want the US to retain its influence, either. 61% of respondents said they would support US disengagement, even if more than 60% believe the US will be a more important ally than Russia or China in the next five years.

Likewise, the US at 19% ranks second, behind the UAE’s 24%, as the country Arab youth prefer to live in. The same is true for which country youth would like their country to emulate.

In other words, its often unexplained contradictions in policy are catching up with the United States, but it retains sufficient ground to bridge the gap if officials recognize that credibility has become far more critical in a world of competing powers.

“Perceptions of Western hypocrisy in the Global South, compounded by bitter memories of past interventions, have made our divided world even more polarized and have pushed old friends and partners to turn to new sources of development finance that come with less baggage and fewer strings attached, at least in theory,” Djalal and Sheldrick said.

Moreover, the lack of credibility turns public criticism of human rights abuse and other illiberal and autocratic policies and actions into a liability rather than an effective policy tool.

The US must begin to practice what it preaches

Ideally, the United States and other Western nations would align their policies with their professed values. Of course, that would require an ideal world. The demands of realpolitik and increasingly polarised domestic politics ensure it is, at best, wishful thinking. But there are things the United States and others can do, at home and abroad, some of which are low-hanging fruit.

The Biden administration could take heed of this week’s United Nations recommendations to end in Guantanamo Bay prison “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” violations of detainees’ fundamental rights and freedoms, including constant surveillance, grueling isolation, and limited family access.

Guantanamo, home to the last 30 men detained as military combatants in the War on Terror since the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, long symbolized to many the perceived hypocrisy of US advocacy for adherence to human rights. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN’s special rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, made her recommendations following the first visit to the prison by UN experts in more than two decades.

In addition, the United States, together with its Western allies, could enhance its credibility by living up to promises like the pledge to provide $100 billion in climate financing to developing nations and to ensure that countries from the Global South have a seat at the table.

Western leaders have begun to acknowledge that the ball is in their court. In February, French President Emmanuel Macron told the Munich Security Conference that he was “shocked by how much credibility we are losing in the Global South.”

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, echoed Mr. Macron at the same event. “We cannot think about European security without looking at the global scene and engaging with other partners. I see how powerful the Russian narrative is, its accusations of double standards. We have to dismantle that narrative, cooperate with other countries, accept that the UN structure must be adapted,” Mr. Borrel said, referring to demands that the Global South has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The United States’ key allies, the EU and Japan, appear to have taken the lead in attempting to regain credibility and trust. So far, they have taken small steps, but, by and large, they have yet to put their money where their mouth is. For the effort to gain momentum and for the United States to benefit, it needs not only to get on board with what Djalal and Sheldrick describe as “a thousand-mile journey,” but to get in the driver’s seat.

It takes only a glance at the Arab Youth Survey to conclude that the stakes are high in the Middle East and across the globe. Credibility matters, perhaps more than ever since World War Two.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Lacks Credibility, but All Is Not Lost appeared first on Fair Observer.

A Christian in a Muslim-majority nation, Mr. Hia objected to vocational school authorities in the West Sumatran city of Padang obliging his daughter to wear a hijab. In a secretly taped video, his daughter’s teacher insisted that wearing a hijab was mandatory. The teacher demanded that Mr. Hia put his daughter’s refusal in writing, which would have been a first step to expelling her. The video went viral.

In response, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas and his home affairs and education counterparts threatened to sanction state schools seeking to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. “Religions do not promote conflict, neither do they justify acting unfairly against those who are different,” said Mr. Qoumas, who is also a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim civil society movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The school complied. Over the last two years, the number of Christian girls shedding the hijab has grown. But at the same time, Mr. Hia received threatening messages on Facebook and WhatsApp. “I lost count,” he told Human Rights Watch. “Hundreds of them.”

Mr. Hia’s air conditioning business started to lose customers. “Some customers asked me whether I was the one who was protesting the mandatory hijab rule. And they stopped requesting my services,” Mr.Hia said. Struggling to repay a bank loan, he dismissed five employees and sold his truck and his minibus. Almost two years later, Mr. Hia and his wife decided to sell their house while waiting for their daughter to finish high school. “I cannot earn enough money now. We have to move out of West Sumatra,” he said.

Support for Political Islam on the Upswing

Mr. Hia’s experience tells the story of see-saw swings in the Muslim world between trends towards increased religious individuality, a more personal understanding of religion, and skepticism towards religious and temporal authority on the one end, and support for greater public adherence to religious norms and often state-aligned clerics on the other.

These swings may influence the public standing of Islamic scholars who align themselves with autocratic rulers like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who has subjugated the kingdom’s religious establishment to his will and pushed ahead with far-reaching social reforms anchored not in civil but in religious law.

Potentially, the swings also suggest that calls by Nahdlatul Ulama for reform of Islamic law in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and a democracy, may encounter greater resistance beyond the group’s Javan stronghold in the archipelago state.

Furthermore, the swings point to a possible comeback of political Islam, a decade after groups like the Muslim Brotherhood appeared to be down and out due to a Saudi and Emirati-backed public backlash that had rolled back their initial success in the wake of the 2011 Arab popular revolts.

Fascistic Tendencies in the Muslim Brotherhood

Those revolts toppled the autocratic leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya. However, the Brotherhood suffered its most significant setback just two years later as a military coup in Egypt removed Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and the country’s first and only democratically elected president, from office. The coup and subsequent brutal repression sent the Brotherhood into exile, where it has lingered ever since.

The story appears now to be changing, however. “Results from nationally representative public opinion surveys…strongly suggest that political Islam is making a comeback. In most countries surveyed, young and old citizens demonstrate a clear preference for giving religion a greater role in politics. This is the first time that support for political Islam has increased meaningfully…since the Arab Uprisings of 2011,” said Michael Robbins, director and co-principal investigator of Arab Barometer, a group that regularly surveys public opinion in the Middle East.

Mr. Hia’s experience is one more piece of anecdotal evidence of a revival of conservatism also reflected in the polling of Mr. Robbins and others, despite contradictory attitudes also revealed in these surveys.

In a survey conducted in 2022 by UAE-based Asda’a BCW, 41% of 3,400 young Arabs in 17 Arab countries aged 18 to 24 said religion was the most important element of their identity, with nationality, family and/or tribe, Arab heritage, and gender lagging far behind.

Arab Barometer noted a stark increase in the number of Muslim youth polled in several Arab countries that wanted clerics to have greater influence on government decisions. “In 2021-2022, roughly half or more in five of ten countries surveyed agreed that religious clerics should influence decisions of government,” Mr. Robbins said.

“While youth ages 18-29 have led the return to religion across MENA [the Middle East and North Africa], the rise in support for religion in politics is more widespread across society. In most countries, both older and younger members of society are shifting their views in concert,” he added.

Similarly, more than half, 56%, in the Asda’a BCW survey said their country’s legal system should be based on Shariah or Islamic law. 70% expressed concern about the loss of traditional values and culture. 65% argued that preserving their religious and cultural identity was more important than creating a globalized society.

Despite this, 73%, up from 58% in 2018, felt that religion played too much of a role in the Middle East. In addition, 77% believed Arab religious institutions should be reformed.

Erdogan Demonstrates Islamism’s Renewed Appeal

While the support for the reform of religious institutions may work in Nahdlatul Ulama’s favor and potentially threaten the autocratic grip on religion in Middle Eastern states, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s success in his country’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections offers further food for thought about the prospects of political Islam. Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the May 14 parliamentary elections, and the president successfully defeated opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu to win a third term as head of state.

Nationalism may have been a major driver of the electoral outcome, but so was religious conservatism. “Erdogan has formed an unbreakable bond with Turkey’s largest sociopolitical bloc: religious conservatives. He also enchants them with a grand narrative: despite nefarious enemies and heinous conspiracies, he is making Turkey great and Muslim again,” said Mustafa Akyol, a Washington-based Turkish scholar of Islam.

Islamist scholars from across the Muslim world backed the alliance. Their support may not have played a direct role in the electoral contest, but it indicated political Islam’s newly found assertiveness.

In a statement, the scholars called on Turks to vote for Mr. Erdogan and non-Turkish Muslims to support his campaign. They implicitly contrasted Turkey with its religious soft power rivals, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, which have engaged with Israel to varying degrees and stress interfaith dialogue even though they differ sharply in their approaches and goals.

“Turkey has consistently defended the Prophet against Western offenses, restored the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque [in Istanbul] to its original status, and advocated for Jerusalem and its ongoing issues,” the scholars said.

Controversially, Mr. Erdogan in 2020 returned the Hagia Sofia, a sixth-century Orthodox church-turned-mosque-turned-museum, to its former status as a Muslim house of worship.

Mr. Erdogan vowed that the conversion was “the harbinger of the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Islam’s third holiest site in Jerusalem. Whether or not his words prove true, the Turkish leader may be right that his presidency is a sign of things to come.

[The Turbulent World first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is a New Islamic Conservatism on the Horizon? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In a recently published book, political scientist Anna Gryzmala-Busse traces the origins of the modern state to medieval Europe when religion and the church played a powerful role rather than the 16th-century beginnings of the modern era.

Gryzmala-Busse’s analysis is not simply academic and historical. It puts in a different light notions of Christian religiosity and heritage in Central and Eastern Europe that have strained relations in the European Union between Western European states and former Communist countries like Hungary as well as secular Europe’s struggle to come to grips with the religiosity of their Muslim minorities, nowhere more so than in France.

Although Gryzmala-Busse’s focus is on Christianity and Europe, her analysis helps explain why the Sunni Muslim world took a different path and why the concept of a caliphate remains a hot-button issue in Islam.

Religion and Politics in the Christian World

Gryzmala-Busse asserted that secular European rulers needed to create institutions to collect taxes and have an institutional base for fighting wars and negotiating peace on a fragmented continent. To do so, monarchs adopted administrative policies and approaches developed by a wealthy church that was Europe’s single largest landowner. It levied taxes on its land holdings. In addition, the church boasted a highly educated elite, commanded authority, and held out the prospect of salvation.

As a result, “the church was an essential source of legal, administrative, and conciliar innovations… The church showed rulers how to collect taxes more efficiently, request and answer a flood of petitions, keep records and accounts, interpret the law, and hold counsels that could provide valuable consent,” Gryzmala-Busse wrote.

“Concepts such as representation, binding consent, and even majority rules relied on ecclesiastical precedents,” she said. In short, “the medieval church was so influential because it was armed with superior organizational reach, human capital, and spiritual authority,” Gryzmala-Busse concluded. Implicitly, she acknowledged that the Muslim world traveled down a different path when she noted that there were no governance models in Asia and the Middle East that medieval European leaders could emulate.

Gryzmala-Busse was likely referring to Islam scholar Ahmed Kuru’s ground-breaking analysis of what he called the state-ulema alliance. That alliance precluded an arrangement similar to that between the church and rulers as portrayed by political scientist Jonathan Laurence. This arrangement involved rulers successfully deploying what they had learnt from clerics to curtail and sideline the church.

In his award-winning book, Laurence noted that ultimately the church could no longer prevail and accepted temporal jurisdiction over what became the tiny Vatican state while reaching a modus vivendi with European governments that ensured its continued existence and enabled it to thrive.

“European nations strong-armed, expropriated, violated, and humiliated the Catholic hierarchy,” forcing it to “relinquish its 1,000-year claim to political rule and focus instead on advocacy, global spiritual influence, and its evangelizing mission,” Laurence wrote. The political scientist argued further that European efforts to undermine the Ottoman caliphate that was abolished in 1924 in the wake of the emergence of a modern Turkish state fueled theological differences in the Sunni Muslim world.

Religion and Politics in the Muslim World

While that may have been a contributing factor, Kuru’s analysis suggested that the evolution of relations between the state and religious scholars in the Sunni Muslim world would have prevented it from adopting the European model irrespective of external attitudes towards the caliphate. So did the absence in Islam of a central authority like the pope.

Kuru traced the modern-day state template in many Muslim-majority countries to the 11th century. This is when Islamic scholars who until then had, by and large, refused to surrender their independence to the state were co-opted by Muslim rulers. The transition coincided with the rise of the military state legitimized by religious scholars who had little choice but to join its employ. They helped the state develop Sunni Muslim orthodoxy based on text rather than reason- or tradition-based interpretations of Islam.

It is an orthodoxy that prevails until today even though various states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have adopted far-reaching social change as part of economic reform efforts and as a regime survival strategy. The orthodoxy is reflected in reticence with few exceptions to reform outdated religious legal tenets, particularly when it comes to notions of the state.

In a bold move in February, Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest, Indonesia-based Muslim civil society movement argued that Islamic jurisprudence needs to be updated to introduce the notion of the nation-state and a United Nations that groups these states.

The movement contended that this would involve abolishing the notion of the caliphate as a legal concept. “It is neither feasible nor desirable to re-establish a universal caliphate that would unite Muslims throughout the world in opposition to non-Muslims…. Attempts to do so will inevitably be disastrous and contrary to the purposes of Sharia (Islamic law): i.e., the protection of religion, human life, sound reasoning, family, and property,” the group said in a declaration on its centennial according to the Hijra calendar.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s reforms of Islamic jurisprudence do not bind others in a Muslim world where religious authority is decentralized. However, they lay down a marker that other Muslim legal authorities will ultimately be unable to ignore in their bid to garner recognition as proponents of a genuinely moderate Islam. As a result, politics rather than morality or spirituality will determine Nahdlatul Ulama’s impact beyond Indonesia, the world’s most populous and largest Muslim-majority democracy.

The importance of politics is reinforced by the implicit agreement between scholars Gryzmala-Busse , Laurence and Kuru that the state has successfully subjugated religious power in Europe as well as much of the Sunni Muslim world.

However, the difference is that in Europe the church withdrew from politics and retreated to the spiritual realm while in the Muslim world religious figures retain some clout with rulers wanting them to legitimize their authoritarian or autocratic rule.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Make Sense of Nation-State: Born from Religion, Bred by Politics appeared first on Fair Observer.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the sharp end of the rise of a critical mass of world leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms. They imagine the ideational and/or physical boundaries of their countries as defined by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion rather than international law.

Often that assertion involves denial of the existence of the other and authoritarian or autocratic rule. As a result, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in good company when he justifies his invasion of Ukraine by asserting that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. In other words, Ukrainians as a nation do not exist.

Neither do the Taiwanese or maritime rights of other littoral states in the South China Sea in the mind of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Or Palestinians in the vision of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners. Superiority and exceptionalism are guiding principles for men like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Netanyahu. 

In 2018, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, adopted a controversial basic law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. “Contrary to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the nation-state law was seen as enshrining Jewish superiority and Arab inferiority, as bolstering Israel’s Jewish character at the expense of its democratic character, ” said journalist Carolina Landsmann.

Israeli religious Zionist writer Ehud Neor argued that “Israel is not a nation-state in Western terms. It’s a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy that Jewish people were always meant to be in the Holy Land and to follow the Holy Torah, and by doing so, they would be a light unto the world. There is a global mission to Judaism.”

Similarly, Erdogan describes Turkey as “dünyanın vicdanı,” the world’s conscience, a notion that frames his projection of international cooperation and development assistance. “Turkey is presented as a generous patriarch following in the steps of (a particularly benevolent reading of) the Ottoman empire, taking care of those in need—including, importantly, those who have allegedly been forgotten by others. In explicit contrast to Western practices described as self-serving, Turkish altruism comes with the civilizational frame of Muslim charity and solidarity reminiscent of Ottoman grandeur,” said scholars Sebastian Haug and Supriya Roychoudhury.

In an academic comparison, Haug and Roychoudhury compare Erdogan’s notion of Turkish exceptionalism with Modi’s concept of “vishwaguru.” The concept builds on the philosophy of 19th-century Hindu leader Swami Vivekananda. “His rendition of Hinduism, like Gandhian Hindu syncretic thought, ostensibly espouses tolerance and pluralism. With this and similar framings, the adoption of an allegedly Gandhi-inspired syncretic Hindu discourse enables Modi to distance himself politically from the secularist civilizational discourse of (Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal) Nehru,” the two scholars said. “At the same time, though, Modi’s civilizational discourse, with its indisputable belief in the superiority of Hinduism, has begun to underpin official rhetoric in international forums,” they added.

In a rewrite of history, Putin, in a 5,000-word article published less than a year before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, portrayed the former Soviet republic as an anti-Russian creation that grounded its legitimacy in erasing “everything that united us” and projecting “the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”

In doing so, Putin created the justification civilizationalist leaders often apply to either expand or replace the notion of a nation-state defined by hard borders anchored in international law with a more fluid concept of a state with external boundaries demarcated by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion, and internal boundaries that differentiate its superior or exceptional civilization from the other.

Civilizationalism serves multiple purposes. Asserting alleged civilizational rights and fending off existential threats help justify authoritarian and autocratic rule.

Dubbed Xivilisation by Global Times, a flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi has redefined civilisation to incorporate autocracy. In March, Xi unveiled his Global Civilization Initiative at a Beijing conference of 500 political parties from 150 countries.

Taking a stab at the Western promotion of democracy and human rights, the initiative suggests that civilisations can live in harmony if they refrain from projecting their values globally. “In other words, ” quipped The Economist, “the West should learn to live with Chinese communism. It may be based on Marxism, a Western theory, but it is also the fruit of China’s ancient culture.” Xi launched his initiative days before Biden co-hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy.

The assertion by a critical mass of world leaders of notions of a civilisational state contrasts starkly with the promotion by Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s Indonesia-based largest and most moderate Muslim civil society movement, of the nation-state as the replacement in Islamic law of the civilizationalist concept of a caliphate, a unitary state, for the global Muslim community.

Drawing conclusions from their comparison of Erdogan’s Turkey and Modi’s India, Haug and Roychoudhury concluded that civilizationalist claims serve “two distinct but interrelated political projects: attempts to overcome international marginalization and efforts to reinforce authoritarian rule domestically.”

Like Biden, Xi and other civilizationalist leaders are battling for the high ground in a struggle to shape the future world order and its underlying philosophy. Biden’s autocracy vs. democracy paradigm is part of that struggle. But so is the question of whether governance systems are purely political or civilizational. Addressing that question could prove far more decisive for democracies.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post New 21st Century World Order: Nation State vs Civilizational State appeared first on Fair Observer.

Leaving aside the multiple domestic issues India will have to address to realize its full potential, it is already, in the words of an Indian analyst, in a “geopolitical sweet spot.” Recently concluded defense and technology agreements with the US constitute a milestone. The agreements acknowledge reality, including that one underestimates the US at one’s peril and that, despite their domestic travails, the US and the UK still produce 50% of the global wealth as opposed to China and Russia’s combined 20%.

“For India, the West is the most important trading partner, the dominant source of capital and technology, and the major destination for the Indian diaspora,” said columnist and former member of India’s National Security Advisory Board C. Mohan Raja in a Foreign Policy article, titled ‘It’s Time to Tie India to the West.’ With India set to become the world’s third largest economy, Raja advocated turning the Group of 7 (G-7), which groups the world’s foremost democratic economies, into a G-8 with India as its newest member.

The agreements reinforce the notion that supply chain security and geopolitics have become as important as economics and pricing in creating and/or managing global value chains. Furthermore, they are a step towards enabling India to redress its trade imbalances skewed in China’s favor. Finally, the agreements constitute a building block for a potential future multilateral security arrangement in the Gulf in which India would be a key player.

India as a player in the Gulf

Gulf security was not foremost in the minds of Indian and US policymakers when they conceived the agreements. However, inevitably, that is where the Gulf is going for multiple reasons. These include a US desire to rejigger America’s commitment to Gulf security and share the burden with regional players. The US is not yet at a point where it is willing to share control of Gulf security commitments with other external powers. Still, it is something that policymakers in both the Trump and Biden administrations have at various times considered.

It’s an option that the US has not pursued, but neither has either administration rejected it out of hand. “I don’t think we are ever again going to see a position where the United States is prepared to be the primary security provider and bear any burden or pay any price to uphold order in the Middle East,” said former Singaporean diplomat and chairman of the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute Bilahari Kausikan.

Kausikan added that “the United States made dreadful mistakes in the Middle East 20 years ago, and an analogous shift from direct intervention to the role of an offshore balancer is happening in the region right now.” Gulf states continue to look to the US to guarantee their security interests. But over time, and as US thinking evolves, Gulf states, like in other aspects, are likely to want to hedge their bets and diversify their relationships assertively.

India is one player on which Gulf states have set their sights. Already, India’s security posture in the region is changing. India regularly deploys ships in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden as part of stepped-up military engagement with Arab states. Recently, a six-member Saudi army delegation visited India for briefings on the Indian military’s training methodology and infrastructure. In addition, India has a presence in Oman’s Duqm Port.

Regarding regional engagement, Iran remains for India the most vexing issue in its evolving security posture. To be sure, India will not allow its foreign relationships to be put at risk by cooperation with Iran. Yet, Iran is India’s gateway into Afghanistan and Central Asia. Add to this that, depending on how US-China relations evolve, it is only a matter of time before China will no longer want to rely on an adversary to guarantee its energy security.

Chinese port, pipeline, and other infrastructure investments in various parts of Asia may allow it to reduce energy security risks in the Indo-Pacific but do not address threats in various strategic Gulf waters. More fundamentally, there is no effective Indo-Pacific strategy that does not include the Arabian Sea, which requires Indian involvement, not least because of geographic proximity.

That maxim is reinforced from India’s perspective by the security presence of China, India’s main regional rival, which starts with a military base in Djibouti and is likely to expand.US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken noted that the I2U2 that groups India with the US, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates was as much about economic cooperation as it was about working together on maritime security. Last but not least, India has its own strategic, energy, security, and economic interests in the Gulf, including the millions of Indian expatriates and workers who work and live in the region. 

A new multipolar world order

India’s regional relationships, ability to get its domestic house in order, and grow its economy will likely shape its place in a new 21st century world order. This year’s Indian chairmanship of the Group of 20, which brings together the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies, is an opportunity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase where India is heading.

One focus will be the impact of the rise of Hindu nationalism, the country’s increasingly strained inter-communal relations, and what India’s motto for its chairmanship, “One Earth One Family One Future” means in practice. So far, India, like China, has benefitted from Muslim-majority states emphasizing national interests rather than communal and identity concerns. However, that may prove to be a fragile proposition.

Even so, India is likely to be a factor in determining whether a new world order will be multipolar or bipolar and dominated by the US and China. Already, it is a world in which middle powers have greater agency and are more assertive. Functional and regional blocs like I2U2; Chip4, the semiconductor alliance between Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the US, or the northern transport corridor linking India and the Indian Ocean with Europe will play a greater role in a new world order.

Furthermore, it will be a world in which Russia, as a result of the Ukraine war, is likely to be a middle rather than a superpower, a consideration that will not be lost on India, particularly at a time that the principles of the inviolability of international borders and the right to self-determination have become ever more paramount for stability. The functional and regional alliances take on added significance in an environment in which Russia, the US and China, because of its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and assertive wolf warrior diplomacy, have suffered reputational damage.

The US may have suffered the least, given its ability to marshal its allies in Europe and some in Asia to forcefully support Ukraine while remaining focused on its rivalry with China in Asia. Even so, as former Indian national security advisor Shivshankar Menon notes, “worries remain… about the United States being distracted by Ukraine from its roles elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.” Those worries are compounded by the bungled US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and concern about the impact of deep polarization in the US that is likely to be reflected in the campaign for the 2024 presidential election.

“There are new opportunities in this uncertain world. India….can work with neighbors to build the peaceful and more prosperous periphery that its own development demands. It can participate in the remaking of the rules of the international system now underway… And it can reengage economically with the dynamic economies of Asia, participating in global value chains, to further its own transformation,” Menon said. The decade of India might finally have arrived.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Yet it is Perincek, a man with a world of contacts in Russia, China, Iran, and Syria whose conspiratorial worldview identifies the United States as the core of all evil, that Erdoğan at times turns to help resolve delicate geopolitical issues.

Seven years ago, Perincek mediated a reconciliation between Russia and Turkey after relations soured following the Turkish air force’s downing of a Russian fighter.

A Peace Deal with Syria

Now, Perincek is headed for Damascus to engineer a Russian-backed rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose overthrow Erdoğan had encouraged for the past 11 years ever since the eruption of mass Arab Spring-era anti-government demonstrations that morphed into a bloody civil war.

Chances are that Perincek’s effort will be more successful than when he last tried in 2016 to patch up differences between Erdoğan and Assad but ultimately stumbled over the Turkish leader’s refusal to drop his insistence that the Syrian president must go.

Erdoğan has suggested as much in recent days, insisting that Turkey needed to maintain a dialogue with the government of Assad. He has said: “We don’t have such an issue whether to defeat Assad or not… You have to accept that you cannot cut the political dialogue and diplomacy between the states. There should always be such dialogues.” He went on to say that “we do not eye Syrian territory… The integrity of their territory is important to us. The regime must be aware of this.”

Erdoğan’s willingness to bury the war hatchet follows his failure to garner Russian and Iranian acquiescence in a renewed Turkish military operation in northern Syria. The operation was intended to ensure that US-backed Syrian Kurds, whom Turkey views as terrorists, do not create a self-ruling Kurdish region on Turkey’s border like the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Turkey hoped the operation would allow it to create a 30-kilometer buffer zone controlled by its forces and its Syrian proxies on the Syrian side of the two countries’ border. Russia and Iran’s refusal to back the scheme, which would have undermined the authority of their ally, Assad, has forced Turkey to limit its operation to shelling Kurdish and Syrian military positions.

Shifting Alliances

The United States’ seeming unwillingness to offer the Kurds anything more than verbal support, and only that sparsely, has driven the Kurds closer to Damascus and, by extension, Russia and Iran as Syria quietly expands its military presence in the region. The US has long relied on the Kurds to counter the Islamic State in northern Syria.

The rejiggering of relationships and alliances in Syria is occurring on both the diplomatic and military battlefield. The Turkish attacks and responses by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) at its core appear to be as much a military as a political drawing of battlelines in anticipation of changing Turkish and Kurdish relations with the Assad government.

By targeting Syrian military forces, Turkey is signaling that it will not stand idly by if Syria supports the Kurds or provides them cover, while unprecedented Kurdish targeting of Turkish forces suggests that the Kurds have adopted new rules of engagement. Turkey is further messaging that it retains the right to target Kurdish forces at will, much like it does in northern Iraq.

Both Erdoğan and the Kurds are placing risky bets.

The Kurds hope against all odds that Assad will repay the favor of allowing the president to advance his goal of gaining control of parts of Syria held by rebel forces and forcing a withdrawal of US forces from the area by granting the Kurds a measure of autonomy.

With elections in Turkey looming in the next year, Erdoğan hopes that Assad will help him cater to nationalist anti-Kurdish and anti-migrant sentiment by taking control of Kurdish areas.

Turkey wants to start repatriating some of the four million predominantly Syrian refugees it hosts. In early August, Turkey’s interior ministry announced that it had completed the construction of more than 60,000 homes for returning refugees to northeastern Syria.

Concern about a potential deal with Assad and a call by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusloglu for reconciliation between opposition groups and Damascus sparked anti-Turkish protests in Turkish-controlled areas of northern Syria as well as rebel-held Idlib.

Turkey also expects Assad, who is keen to regain not only territorial control but also maintain centralized power, to ultimately crack down on armed Kurdish groups and efforts to sustain autonomously governed Kurdish areas.

As a result, Perincek, alongside Turkish-Syrian intelligence contacts, has his work cut out for him. The gap between Turkish and Syrian aspirations is wide. Assad wants a complete withdrawal of Turkish forces and the return of Syrian control of Kurdish and rebel-held areas. He is unlikely willing or able to provide the kind of security guarantees that Turkey would demand. Both the Kurds and Erdoğan are caught in Catch-22s of their own that do not bode well for either.

The Kurds may be left with no options if a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement succeeds or face a Turkish onslaught if it fails. Similarly, reconciliation on terms acceptable to Erdoğan may amount to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Whether he agrees with Assad or violence in northern Syria escalates, Erdoğan risks sparking a new wave of refugees making its way to Turkey at a time that he can economically and politically least afford another refugee crisis.

In the words of analyst Kamal Alam, Erdoğan’s problem is that the Turkish president “is running out of time before the next election to solve the Gordian knot that is Syria. For his part, Assad can wait this out – because after Turkey once again fails to bomb its way out of the northeastern problem, Erdoğan will need Assad far more than the reverse.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Biden called Saudi Arabia a pariah state during his presidential election campaign. He has since effectively boycotted MBS because of the crown prince’s alleged involvement in the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MBS has denied any involvement in the killing but accepted responsibility for it as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.

A Symbolic Visit to the UAE

MBS waited for his 86-year-old father to return from the hospital before traveling to Abu Dhabi to offer his condolences for the death of United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Khaled bin Zayed and congratulations to his successor, Mohamed bin Zayed, the crown prince’s one-time mentor. MBS used the composition of his delegation to underline his grip on Saudi Arabia’s ruling family. In doing so, MBS was messaging the international community at large, and particularly Biden, that he is in full control of the kingdom no matter what happens.

The delegation was made up of representatives of different branches of the ruling Al Saud family, including Prince Abdulaziz bin Ahmed, the eldest son of Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, the detained brother of King Salman. Even though he holds no official post, Abdulaziz’s name topped the Saudi state media’s list of delegates accompanying MBS. His father Ahmed was one of three members of the Allegiance Council not to support MBS’s appointment as crown prince in 2017. The 34-member council, populated by the many parts of the Al-Saud family, was established by King Abdullah in 2009 to determine succession to the throne.

MBS has detained Ahmed as well as Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, the two men he considers his foremost rivals, partly because they are popular among US officials. Ahmed was detained in 2020 but never charged, while bin Nayef stands accused of corruption. Ahmed returned to the kingdom in 2018 from London where he told protesters against the war in Yemen to address those responsible: the king and the crown prince.

Abdulaziz’s inclusion in the Abu Dhabi delegation fits a pattern: MBS appoints to high office the younger relatives of people detained since his rise in 2015. Many older powerful royals were arrested in a mass anti-corruption campaign that often seemed to camouflage a power grab. A consultative government among members of the ruling family has now been replaced with one-man rule. MBS probably takes pleasure in driving the point home as Biden mulls a pilgrimage to Riyadh to persuade the crown prince to end his opposition to increasing the kingdom’s oil production and convince him that the United States remains committed to regional security.

The MBS and Joe Biden Dance

So far, the crown prince not only rejected US requests to help lower oil prices and assist Europe in reducing its dependency on Russian oil as part of the campaign to force Moscow to end its invasion of Ukraine but also refused to take a phone call from Biden. Asked a month later whether Biden may have misunderstood him, MBS told an interviewer. “Simply, I do not care.”

Striking a less belligerent tone, Mohammed Khalid Alyahya, a Hudson Institute visiting fellow and former editor-in-chief of Saudi-owned Al Arabiya English, noted this month that “Saudi Arabia laments what it sees as America’s wilful dismantling of an international order that it established and led for the better part of a century.” Alyahya quoted a senior Saudi official as saying: “A strong, dependable America is the greatest friend Saudi Arabia can have. It stands to reason, then, that US weakness and confusion is a grave threat not just to America, but to us as well.”

The United States has signaled that it is shifting its focus away from the Middle East to Asia even though it has not rolled back its significant military presence. Nonetheless, Middle Eastern states read a reduced US commitment to their security because Washington has failed to respond robustly to attacks by Iran and Iranian-backed Arab militias against targets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This is not to mention the Biden administration’s efforts to revive a moribund 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran.

Several senior US officials, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and CIA Director Bill Burns, met with the crown prince during trips to the kingdom last year. Separately, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called the crown prince. In one instance, MBS reportedly shouted at Sullivan after the US official raised Khashoggi’s killing. The crown prince reportedly told Sullivan that he never wanted to discuss the matter again and that the US could forget about its request to boost Saudi oil production.

Even so, leverage in the US-Saudi relationship goes both ways. Biden may need Saudi Arabia’s oil to break Russia’s economic back. By the same token, Riyadh, despite massive weapon acquisitions from the US and Europe as well as arms from China that the US is reluctant to sell, needs Washington as its security guarantor. MBS knows that he has nowhere else to go. Russia has written itself out of the equation, and China is neither capable nor willing to step into the shoes of the US any time soon.

Critics of Biden’s apparent willingness to bury the hatchet with MBS argue that in the battle with Russia and China over a new 21^st-century world order, the US not only needs to talk the principled talk but also walk the principled walk. In an editorial, The Washington Post, for whom Khashoggi was a columnist, noted that “the contrast between professed US principles and US policy would be stark and undeniable” if Biden re-engages with Saudi Arabia. Yet, with oil prices soaring and inflation rising, interests might trump values and a Biden-led US might kiss and make up with an MBS-led Saudi Arabia to attain its realpolitik ends.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Austin’s remarks were problematic on several fronts. For one, they legitimized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification of the invasion of Ukraine as a defense against US-led efforts to box Russia in and potentially undermine his regime.

“US policy toward Russia continues to be plagued by lack of rhetorical discipline. First calling for regime change, now the goal of weakening Russia. This only increases Putin’s case for escalating & shifts focus away from Russian actions in Ukraine & toward Russia-US/NATO showdown”, tweeted Richard Haas, the president of the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations and a former senior State Department official. Haas was referring to US President Joe Biden’s remark last month, which he subsequently walked back, that Putin “cannot remain in power.”

US policy toward Russia continues to be plagued by lack of rhetorical discipline. First calling for regime change, now goal of weakening Russia. This only increases Putin’s case for escalating & shifts focus away from Russian actions in Ukraine & toward Russia-US/NATO showdown.

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) April 26, 2022

Leaving aside the fact that Austin’s remark was inopportune, it also suggested a lack of vision of what it will take to ensure that Putin does not repeat his Ukraine operation elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. That is an endeavor that would involve looking beyond Ukraine to foster closer ties with former Soviet republics that do not immediately border Ukraine.

A new strategic focus: Kazakhstan

One place to look is Kazakhstan, a potential future target if Russia still has the wherewithal after what has become a draining slug in Ukraine. Mr. Putin has long set Kazakhstan up as a potential future target. He has repeatedly used language when it comes to Kazakhstan that is similar to his rhetoric on the artificial character of the Ukrainian state.

Referring to his notion of a Russian world whose boundaries are defined by the presence of Russian speakers and adherents to Russian culture rather than its internationally recognised borders, Mr. Putin asserted last December that “Kazakhstan is a Russian-speaking country in the full sense of the word.”

Mr. Putin first sent a chill down Kazakh spines eight years ago when a student asked him nine months after the annexation of Crimea whether Kazakhstan, with a 6,800 kilometer-long border with Russia, the world’s second-longest frontier, risked a fate similar to that of Ukraine.

In response, Mr. Putin noted that then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era Communist party boss, had “performed a unique feat: he has created a state on a territory where there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and he created it.”

To be sure, Russian troops invited in January by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to help put down anti-government protests were quick to withdraw from the Central Asian nation once calm had been restored.

Recognizing the opportunity

Mr. Putin’s remarks, coupled with distrust of China fuelled by the repression of Turkic Muslims, including ethnic Kazakhs, in the north-western province of Xinjiang, and the shutdown of Russia’s Black Sea Novorossiysk oil terminal, Kazakhstan’s main Caspian oil export route, have created an opportunity for the United States.

Last month, Kazakhstan abstained in a United Nations General Assembly vote that condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Since then, its sovereign wealth fund announced that it would no longer do business in rubles in compliance with US and European sanctions against Russia. This week, Kazakhstan stopped production of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against Covid-19.

In an apparent effort to stir the pot, Russian media accused Kazakhstan of preventing Russian nationals from expressing support for Mr. Putin’s invasion and firing Kazakhs who supported the Russian president’s actions from their jobs. At the same time, opponents of the war were allowed to stage demonstrations.

“As Washington policymakers look for ways to counter Russian influence and complicate Mr. Putin’s life, helping Kazakhstan reduce its dependence on Moscow-controlled pipelines, reform its economy, and coordinate with neighboring Central Asian states to limit the influence of both China and Russia might be a good place to start,” said Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead.

Last month, Mr. Tokayev, the Kazakh president, promised sweeping reforms in response to the January protests.

A high-level Kazakh delegation visited Washington this week to discuss closer cooperation and ways to mitigate the impact on Kazakhstan of potentially crippling sanctions against Russia.

Supporting Kazakhstan would involve a renewed US engagement in Central Asia, a key region that constitutes Russia’s as well as China’s backyard. The United States is perceived to have abandoned the region with its withdrawal from Afghanistan last August.

The regional implications

It would also mean enlarging the figurative battlefield to include not only military and financial support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia but also the strengthening of political and economic ties with former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are, alongside Kazakhstan, members of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which Mr. Putin, referring to Kazakhstan, described as a bulwark that “helps them stay within the so-called ‘greater Russian world,’ which is part of world civilization.”

The invasion of Ukraine has given Uzbekistan second thoughts. Uzbekistan failed to vote on the UN resolution, but Uzbek officials have since condemned the war and expressed support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

As a result, Uzbekistan appears to have reversed its ambition to join the EEU and forge closer ties to the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the region’s Russian-led military alliance.

“The way Central Asia thinks about Russia has changed. While before, Russia was seen as a source of stability, it now seems that its presence in a very sensitive security dimension has become a weakness for regional stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity,” said Carnegie Endowment Central Asia scholar Temur Umarov.

“I think that Central Asian governments will seek to minimize the influence of Russia, which will be difficult to do, but they have no choice since it has become an unpredictable power.” Mr. Umarov predicted.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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International Law

A first lesson is that failure to firmly stand up to violations of international law as they occur convinces trespassers that they can get away with them. It emboldens violators to commit ever more flagrant infringements. Kicking the can down the road by failing to immediately and firmly respond to violations amounts to allowing an open wound to fester. The longer the wound festers, the more difficult, costly and risky it is to cure.

The last 14 years of Putin’s rule are a case in point. Putin began the recreation of his Russian world in 2008 when he recognized the two Georgian breakaway republics of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. The recognition constituted the first step in Putin’s defining of Russia’s borders in civilizational rather than international legal terms.

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Putin has made no bones about the fact that he sees territories populated by Russian speakers and adherents of Russian culture as the determinants of Russia’s borders, not international law. Ever since 2008, he has demonstrated his willingness to enforce his definition of Russia’s border with military might.

Back then, the international community effectively looked the other way. The failure to stand up to Putin emboldened him six years later to annex Crimea, which is legally part of Ukraine, and foster insurgencies in the Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The United States and Europe responded by slapping Putin’s wrists. The sanctions imposed at the time did little to stop the Russian leader from increasing his war chest or making the cost of continued pursuit of his strongman tactics too costly and risky.

This month’s Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from the international community’s failure to draw a line in the sand back in 2008 or at the latest in 2014. “The Russian aggression is the result of years of appeasement of Russia by many countries,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

Human Rights Abuse

Russia is the most dramatic, most recent example of the cost of not responding firmly and unequivocally to infringements of international law as they occur. Other examples are numerous. They include the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and the subsequent military coup in Myanmar, the 2013 toppling of Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president in a takeover by the armed forces, the meek response to the brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims in China, the increasingly blatant discrimination and disenfranchisement of Muslims in India, and missed opportunities to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few.

All of these examples, like Ukraine, contain lessons the international community asserted that it had learned from World War II. They all contain a lesson that should have been learned long before Ukraine but is undeniably evident in the Eastern European crisis: Abetting violations of human rights encourages and emboldens violations of sovereign, national, ethnic, religious, cultural and gender rights.

Back in 1989, Genocide Watch Director Greg Stanton warned then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana that “if you don’t do something to prevent genocide in your country, there is going to be a genocide within five years.” Five years later, there was genocide in Rwanda. It is a word of warning that echoes in predictions by Indian journalist Rana Ayyub that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies could lead to large-scale violence against the country’s 200-million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority.

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It is a warning that reverberates in the contrast between the reception and welcome that European states are justifiably according to refugees from Ukraine compared to the rejection of earlier waves of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. A Moroccan journalist posted a video on Twitter of students from the Arab world and Africa watching buses on the Ukrainian-Polish border pick up Ukrainians every 15 minutes but transporting people from countries beyond Europe only every four hours. The journalist, Anas Daif, reported some students have been stranded for four days on the border trying to escape the war.

Freedom of Expression

In a similar vein, prominent BBC journalist Lyse Doucet, reporting from Kyiv, highlighted the fact that humans in distress are humans in distress irrespective of their ethnicity or religion. In a video message, she explained that her reporting on the current crisis in Ukraine prevented her from personally accepting in the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Irbil the 2022 Shifa Gardi Award named after a journalist killed in 2017 in Iraq by a roadside bomb.

“If anyone knows about the pain and hardship of living with war, it’s the people of Iraq, of Kurdistan. And if anyone knows what it’s like to live in a war that never seems to end, of living with powerful neighbors, and the importance of independent journalism, it is the Kurdish people,” Doucet said.

Doucet’s message brought it all together: the linkages between failing to stand up early and firmly to flagrant violations of international law, abuse of human rights and suppression of freedom of expression. Kurds formed the bulk of thousands of desperate refugees in Belarus who were trying to cross the border into Poland just four months ago. In contrast to Ukrainians being welcomed with blankets, cots, clothing and hot meals, the Kurds were brutally beaten back as they sought to storm the borders.

Iraq, Syria and Turkey may have been different places if Kurdish national and/or cultural rights, which Kurds have asserted for more than a century, had been honored. Instead, the international community abetted repressive policies of both autocratic and democratic governments. Similarly, Ukraine would have been a different place if the international community had stood up to Putin from day one.

War in Europe Is Nothing New

It would also be a different place if Europeans had less of a sense of superiority. Many have expressed shock that “this could happen in 21^st-century Europe.” Europeans would be better served to recognize that their continent is as prone to conflict as are other parts of the world.

Ukraine is not the first such incident in Europe. It was preceded by the brutal conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia and the wars of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s that, three decades later, could erupt again. That realization may be seeping in. “War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone,” wrote Telegraph journalist Peter Hannan.

It’s never too late to learn lessons. The world is finally standing up to Vladimir Putin. Yet there is little indication that the broader lessons Ukraine offers are finally being learned.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Learning Lessons in Ukraine and Beyond appeared first on Fair Observer.

The shaky pillar is the Gulf monarchies’ reliance on a powerful external ally that, in the words of Middle East scholar Roby C. Barrett, “shares the strategic, if not dynastic, interests of the Arab States.” In the first half of the 20^th century, the allies were Britain and France. Since then, the US has taken on the role. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the revered founder of the United Arab Emirates, implicitly recognized Gulf states’ need for external support. In a contribution to a book in 2001, he noted that the six monarchies that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) “only support the GCC when it suited them.”

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Going forward, question marks about the reliability of the United States may be unsettling. Yet the emerging outline of what a future US approach could look like is not all bad news for the region’s autocratic regimes. There have been efforts to dial down regional tensions and strengthen regional alliances. The factors driving this are the uncertainty over the US role in the region, the unwillingness of GCC states to integrate their defense strategies, a realization that neither China nor Russia would step into Washington’s shoes, and a need to attract foreign investment to diversify the Gulf’s energy-dependent economies.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his Emirati counterpart, Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, are headed to Washington this week for a tripartite meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The three officials intend “to discuss accomplishments” since last year’s establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE “and other important issues,” Blinken tweeted. The Israeli Foreign Ministry suggested those other issues include “further opportunities to promote peace in the Middle East” as well as regional stability and security, in a guarded reference to Iran.

Good News for the Gulf

From the Gulf’s perspective, the good news is also that the Biden administration’s focus on China may mean that it is reconfiguring its military presence in the Middle East. The US has moved some assets from the Gulf to Jordan and withdrawn systems from Saudi Arabia, but it is not about to pull out lock, stock and barrel. Beyond having an interest in ensuring the free flow of trade and energy, Washington’s strategic interest in a counterterrorism presence in the Gulf has increased following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The US now relies on an “over the horizon” approach, for which the Middle East remains crucial.

Moreover, domestic US politics mitigate toward a continued, if perhaps reduced, military presence, even if Americans are tired of foreign adventures. This is despite the emergence of a Biden doctrine that deemphasizes military engagement. The focus of US foreign policy is also now on Asia rather than the Middle East.

Various powerful lobbies and interest groups — including Israelis, Gulf states, evangelists, and the oil and defense industries — retain a stake in a continued US presence in the region. Their voices are likely to resonate louder in the run-up to crucial midterm elections in 2022. A recent Pew Research survey concluded that the number of white evangelicals had increased from 25% of the US population in 2016 to 29% in 2020.

Similarly, the fading hope for a revival of the Iran nuclear deal, from which former US President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, and the risk of a major military conflagration makes a full-fledged US military withdrawal unlikely. It also increases the incentive to continue major arms sales to Gulf Arab countries.

That’s further good news for Gulf regimes against the backdrop of an emerging US arms sales policy that the Biden administration would like to project as emphasizing respect for human rights and rule of law. However, that de facto approach is unlikely to affect big-ticket prestige items like the F-35 fighter jets promised to the UAE.

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Instead, the policy will probably apply to smaller weapons, such as assault rifles and surveillance equipment that police or paramilitary forces could use against protesters. Those are not the technological edge items where the US has a definitive competitive advantage. The big-ticket items with proper maintenance and training would allow Gulf states to support US regional operations. Examples include the UAE and Qatar‘s role in Libya in 2011 and also the UAE in Somalia and Afghanistan as part of peacekeeping missions.

Nothing to Worry About

In other words, the Gulf states can relax. The Biden administration is not embracing what some arms trade analysts define as the meaning of ending endless wars such as Afghanistan. “[E]nding endless war means more than troop withdrawal. It also means ending the militarized approach to foreign policy — including the transfer of deadly weapons around the world — that has undermined human rights and that few Americans believe makes the country any safer,” said a group of experts in April.

There is little indication that the views expressed by these analysts, which stroke with thinking in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, are taking root in the policymaking corridors of Washington. As long as that doesn’t happen, Gulf states have less to worry about.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Saudi Arabia would have wanted to be seen as hedging its bets with or without the US debacle. The kingdom realizes that Russia will exploit opportunities created by the fiasco in Afghanistan but is neither willing nor capable of replacing the US as the Gulf’s security guarantor.

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Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia likely wants to capitalize on jitters in the US as Washington tries to get a grip on what went wrong and come to terms with the fact that Afghanistan will once again be governed by the Taliban. In 2001, the US ousted the ultraconservative militants from power because they harbored al-Qaeda terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda, alongside various other militant groups, still has a presence in Afghanistan. The Taliban insist that no one will be allowed to operate cross-border or plan and/or launch attacks on other countries from Afghan soil.

Jitters in the Gulf

Yet the willingness to exploit US discomfort may also signal jitters in Saudi Arabia. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan raises questions for Riyadh. First, is the US still reliable when it comes to the defense of the kingdom and the Arabian Peninsula? Second, does the US move undermine confidence in Washington’s ability to negotiate a potential revival of the Iranian nuclear deal if and when talks start again? Third, could Afghanistan become a battlefield in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite both sides seeking to dial down tensions?

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Neil Quilliam, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, argues that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has increased its influence among the Taliban at the expense of the Saudis, who backed away from the group in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The kingdom and the Taliban’s paths further diverged with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman liberalizing the once-shared ultra-conservative social mores while Afghanistan appears set to reintroduce them.

“The Taliban leadership will likely begin a campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the Al Saud and appeal directly to the Saudi population to challenge the ruling family’s authority. At the same time, the Saudi leadership will be keen to align policy with the US and its Western partners and will follow their lead in establishing diplomatic relations with the new Afghan government and providing aid to the country’s population,” Quilliam predicted.

His analysis assumes that reduced Saudi interaction and closer Iranian ties with the Taliban mean that the group’s inclinations would lean more toward Tehran than Riyadh.

In a similar vein, some analysts have noted that Saudi Arabia was absent among the Gulf states that helped the US and European countries with evacuations from Afghanistan. Instead, it sent its deputy defense minister to Moscow.

Others suggested that Saudi Arabia chose to remain on the sidelines and hedge its bets, given its history with the Taliban. Until 2001, Saudi Arabia was a major influence among Afghan jihadists, whom it funded during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. It was also one of three countries to recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan when it first gained power in 1996. Fifteen of the 19 perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were Saudi nationals. By then, Saudi influence had already waned, as was evident in the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden before the attacks took place. 

If proven correct, Quilliam’s prediction would amount to a break with the Taliban record of not operating beyond Afghanistan’s borders except in Pakistan, even though it tolerates al-Qaeda militants and others on territory it controls. Moreover, despite being strange bedfellows, the need to accommodate one another is unlikely to persuade the Taliban to do Iran’s bidding. “Iran has tried to increase its influence within the group by getting closer to certain factions, but it is still suspicious of the Taliban as a whole,” said Fatemeh Aman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Iran and Israel

Moreover, the Taliban may want to steer clear of the Iranian-Saudi rivalry. This is particularly if those who believe that US unreliability, as demonstrated in Afghanistan, leaves Saudi Arabia no choice but to escalate the war in Yemen and confront Iran more forcefully get their way.

“We should take a lesson from the events in Afghanistan, and especially from the mistakes [that were made there], regarding Yemen. This is the time to crush the Houthis without considering the international forces,” said Saudi columnist Safouq al-Shammari, echoing other commentators in Saudi media. “Giving Israel a free hand regarding the Iranian nuclear issue has become a reasonable [option] … It seems like [Israel’s] extremist [former prime minister] Netanyahu, was right to avoid coordinating with the [Biden] administration, which he considered weak and failing.”

Shammari’s notions fit into Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to replace the religious core of Saudi identity with hyper-nationalism. They also stroke with thinking among more conservative Israeli analysts and retired military officers. In Shammari’s vein, retired Major General Gershon Hacohen of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) walked away from the US debacle in Afghanistan, warning that “for all its overwhelming material and technological superiority, the IDF stands no chance of defeating Israel’s Islamist enemies unless its soldiers are driven by a relentless belief in the national cause.”

By the same token, Major General Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser and head of military intelligence research, argued that the US withdrawal would drive home to the Gulf states the proposition that an “open relationship with Israel is vitally important for their ability to defend themselves.” He added that Israel could not replace the US as the region’s security guarantor, “but together with Israel these countries will be able to build a regional scheme that will make it easier for them to contend with various threats.”

By implication, Amidror was urging the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which last year established diplomatic relations with Israel, to forge closer security cooperation with the Jewish state. He suggested that Saudi Arabia may, in the wake of the events in Afghanistan, be more inclined to build formal ties with Israel. Yet while there is little doubt that Mohammed bin Salman would like to have an open relationship with Israel, it is equally possible that the victory of religious militants in Afghanistan will reinforce Saudi hesitancy to cross the Rubicon at the risk of sparking widespread criticism in the Muslim world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post For Saudi Arabia, Iran Looms, Israel Beckons and the Taliban Cause Goosebumps appeared first on Fair Observer.

The fall of the US-backed Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani will shelve if not kill Indian support for the Iranian port of Chabahar, which was intended to facilitate Indian trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chabahar was also viewed by India as a counterweight to the Chinese-supported Pakistani port of Gwadar, a crown jewel of Beijing’s transportation, telecommunications and energy-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

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The United States facilitated Indian investment in Chabahar by exempting the port from harsh sanctions against Iran. The exemption was intended to “support the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan.” However, due to stalled negotiations with Iran about a revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the US announced in July — together with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — plans to create a platform that would foster regional trade, business ties and connectivity.

The connectivity end of the plan resembled an effort to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It would have circumvented Iran and weakened Chabahar but potentially strengthened China’s Gwadar alongside the port of Karachi. That has become a moot point with the plans certain to be shelved as the Taliban take over Afghanistan and form a government that would be denied recognition by at least the democratic parts of the international community.

China

Like other Afghan neighbors, neither Pakistan, Uzbekistan nor China are likely to join a boycott of the Taliban. On the contrary, China last month made a point of giving a visiting Taliban delegation a warm welcome. Yet recognition by Iran, Central Asian states and China of a Taliban government is unlikely to be enough to salvage the Chabahar project. “Changed circumstances and alternative connectivity routes are being conjured up by other countries to make Chabahar irrelevant,” an Iranian source told Hard News, a Delhi-based publication.

The Taliban have sought to reassure China, Iran, Uzbekistan and other Afghan neighbors that they will not allow Afghanistan to become an operational base for jihadist groups. This includes al-Qaeda and Uighur militants of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP). The Taliban have positioned themselves as solely concerned with creating an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan and having no inclination to operate beyond the country’s borders. But they have been consistent in their refusal to expel al-Qaeda, even if the group is a shadow of what it was when it launched the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

The TIP has occasionally issued videos documenting its presence in Afghanistan. But it has, by and large, kept a low profile and refrained from attacking Chinese targets in Afghanistan or across the border in Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese province in which authorities have brutally cracked down on ethnic Turkic Uighurs. As a result, the Taliban reassurance was insufficient to stop China from repeatedly advising its citizens to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Currently, the security situation in Afghanistan has further deteriorated … If Chinese citizens insist on staying in Afghanistan, they will face extremely high-security risks, and all the consequences will be borne by themselves,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.

Pakistan

The fallout of the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan is likely to affect China beyond Afghan borders, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan, a major focus of Beijing’s single largest BRI-related investment. This has made China a target for attacks by militants, primarily Baloch nationalists. In July, nine Chinese nationals were killed in an explosion on a bus transporting Chinese workers to the construction site of a dam in the northern mountains of Pakistan, a region prone to attacks by religious militants. This incident raises the specter of jihadists also targeting China. It was the highest loss of life of Chinese citizens in recent years in Pakistan.

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The attack occurred amid fears that the Taliban will bolster ultra-conservative religious sentiment in Pakistan that celebrates the group as heroes, whose success enhances the chances for austere religious rule. “Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official. Indicating its concern, China has delayed the signing of a framework agreement on industrial cooperation, which would have accelerated the implementation of projects that are part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Kamran Bokhari, writing for The Wall Street Journal, explained: “Regime change is a terribly messy process. Weak regimes can be toppled; replacing them is the hard part. It is only a matter of time before the Afghan state collapses, unleashing chaos that will spill beyond its borders. All of Afghanistan’s neighbors will be affected to varying degrees, but Pakistan and China have the most to lose.”

The demise of Chabahar and/or the targeting by the Taliban of Hazara Shia Muslims in Afghanistan could potentially turn Iran into a significant loser too.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Starts in Afghanistan Does Not Stay in Afghanistan appeared first on Fair Observer.

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In one example, Saudi GDP per capita dropped by almost half from a peak of $17,872 in 1981 to $8,685 in 2001, the year in which 15 Saudi middle-class nationals constituted the majority of jihadists who flew airplanes into New York’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington. It was also the year in which many Saudis struggled to make ends meet amid depressed oil prices and then-King Abdullah’s efforts to introduce a measure of Saudi fiscal restraint. Many people held two to three jobs.

“Prior to the Gulf War, we didn’t pay rent in student dormitories — now we do,” a Saudi student enrolled in Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Fahd Petroleum and Minerals University told this writer at the time. “In the past, it didn’t matter if you didn’t complete your studies in five years. Now you lose your scholarship if you don’t. Soon we’ll be asked to pay for tuition. Before the Gulf War, you had 10 job offers when you graduated. Now you’re lucky if you get one,” the student said referring to the US-led reversal of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

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“There’s nothing to do here but sit around, watch television and smoke shisha,” added Abdulaziz, one of the student’s friends. “There’s nothing we can do to change things. That’s why we get married early, only to discover that it was a mistake.”

Saudi GDP per capita has dropped again, although less dramatically, from $23,337 in the year that the World Bank warned about looming poverty to $20,110 in 2020. On a positive note, the bank reports that while “poverty information and access to survey data to measure welfare conditions have been limited,” Saudi Arabia has seen “gains in administrative capacity to identify and support low-income households.” It warned, however, that the middle class could be most exposed to the pains of austerity and fiscal restraint.

A Different Saudi Arabia

To be sure, the Saudi Arabia at the turn of the century is not the same kingdom as today. Saudis made up one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters in the Islamic State group that seized territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Despite this, Saudi citizens are unlikely to respond to a unilateral rewriting of a social contract that promised cradle-to-grave-welfare and potential economic hardship by drifting toward militancy and extremism at a time that a young crown prince has promised massive change and delivered some.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has liberalized social mores, rolled back the influence of ultra-conservative clerics, created greater leisure and entertainment offerings, and enhanced women’s rights and professional opportunities. This forms part of his plan to wean Saudi Arabia off its dependency on oil exports and diversify the economy. He has simultaneously tightened the political aspect of the kingdom’s social contract involving the public’s absolute surrender of all political rights, including freedom of expression, media and assembly.

In exchange, Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 reform plan promises, according to the World Bank, to protect citizens from the pain of economic change by “modernizing the social welfare system, redirecting price subsidies toward those in need, preparing and training those unable to find employment, and providing tailored care and support to the most vulnerable citizen.” In doing so, the government has sought to soften the impact of higher energy prices and the tripling of value-added tax and expatriate levy.

More than social protections, Vision 2030 is about creating jobs for Saudis in a country where unemployment was 11.7% in the first quarter of this year. In the last three years, the Saudi private sector reportedly created a third of the 1.2 million jobs the kingdom needs to generate by 2022 to meet its unemployment target. The country’s statistics agency said the first-quarter unemployment was Saudi Arabia’s lowest in nearly five years. But the decline was partly driven by people dropping out of the labor force rather than new job creation.

Jobs for Saudis

In May, Mohammed bin Salman asserted in a wide-ranging interview that “we have 200,000 to 250,000 people getting into the job market each year and public sector jobs are limited.” Taking tourism as an example, he said the development of the industry would create 3 million jobs, 1 million of which would be for Saudis who, over time, could replace expats who would initially fill two-thirds of the openings.

“Once we create three million jobs, we can Saudize them in the future. There are also jobs in the industrial sector and so on,” Prince Mohammed said. He predicted at the same time that the percentage of foreigners in the kingdom could increase from a third of the population today to half in the next decade or two.

Writing about the changing social contract in Saudi Arabia, Mira al-Hussein and Eman Alhussein cautioned that the government needs to manage rapid economic and social change, in part by providing clearer information to the public. The scholars identified issues involving rights of foreigners versus rights accorded children of mixed Saudi and non-Saudi marriages, the rollback of religion in public life and austerity measures as potential points of friction in the kingdom. “The ramifications of existing grievances and the increasing polarization within Gulf societies … as well as the extensive social engineering programs have pitted conservatives against liberals. Arab Gulf States’ ability to redefine their social contracts without turbulence will depend on their tactful avoidance of creating new grievances and on solving existing ones,” the authors wrote.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Saudi Arabia Balance Social and Economic Change? appeared first on Fair Observer.

No doubt, MBS will not have forgotten revelations about Emirati attitudes toward Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s strategic vision of the relationship between the two countries. This was spelled out in emails by Yusuf al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador in Washington and a close associate of MBZ, which were leaked in 2017. The emails made clear that UAE leaders believed they could use Saudi Arabia — the Gulf’s behemoth — and Mohammed bin Salman as a vehicle to promote Emirati interests.

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“Our relationship with them is based on strategic depth, shared interests, and most importantly the hope that we could influence them. Not the other way around,” Otaiba wrote. In a separate email, the ambassador told a former US official that “I think in the long term we might be a good influence on KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], at least with certain people there.”

A participant in a more recent meeting with Otaiba quoted the ambassador as referring to the Middle East as “the UAE region,” suggesting an enhanced Emirati regional influence. In a similar vein, former Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan, blowing his ultra-nationalist horn, tweeted in Arabic, “It’s not humanity’s survival of the strongest, it’s the survival of the smartest.”

To be sure, Mohammed bin Zayed has been plotting the UAE’s positioning as a regional economic and geopolitical powerhouse for far longer than his Saudi counterpart. It is not for nothing that it earned the UAE the epitaph of “Little Sparta,” in the words of former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Windows of Opportunity

No doubt, smarts count for a lot. But, in the ultimate analysis, the two crown princes appear to be exploiting windows of opportunity that exist as long as their most powerful rivals, Turkey and Iran, fail to get their act together. The Saudis and Emiratis see the Turks and Iranians as threats to their regional power. Both Turkey and Iran have far larger, highly educated populations, huge domestic markets, battle-hardened militaries, significant natural resources and industrial bases.

In the meantime, separating the wheat from the chaff in the Gulf spat may be easier said than done. Bader al-Saif, a Gulf analyst, notes that differences among Arab states have emerged as a result of regime survival strategies that are driven by the need to gear up for a post-oil era. The emergence of a more competitive landscape need not be all negative. Saif warns, however, that “left unchecked … differences could snowball and negatively impact the neighborhood.

Several factors complicate the management of these differences. For one, the Vision 2030 plan for weening Saudi Arabia off its dependence on the export of fossil fuel differs little from the perspective put forward by the UAE and Qatar, two countries that have a substantial head start.

Saudi Arabia sought to declare an initial success in the expanded rivalry by revealing last week that the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the airline industry body, had opened its regional headquarters in Riyadh. IATA denied that the Saudi office would have regional responsibility. The announcement came on the heels of the disclosure of Saudi plans to create a new airline to compete with Emirates and Qatar Airways.

Further complicating the management of differences is the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are likely to compete for market share as they seek to maximize their oil export revenues in the short and medium term. This is particularly before oil demand potentially plateaus and then declines in the 2030s.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, economic diversification and social liberalization are tied up with the competing geopolitical ambitions of the two princes in positioning their countries as the regional leader. Otaiba signaled MBZ’s ambition in 2017 in an email exchange with Elliot Abram, a neoconservative former US official. “Jeez, the new hegemon! Emirati imperialism! Well, if the US won’t do it, someone has to hold things together for a while,” Abrams wrote to the ambassador, referring to the UAE’s growing regional role. “Yes, how dare we! In all honesty, there was not much of a choice. We stepped up only after your country chose to step down,” Otaiba replied.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas

Differences in the ideological and geopolitical thinking of the princes when it comes to political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood reemerged recently. Differing Saudi and Emirati approaches were initially evident in 2015 when King Salman and his son began their reign in Saudi Arabia. This was a period when Mohammed bin Zayed, who views political Islam and the Brotherhood as an existential threat, had yet to forge close ties to the new Saudi leadership. At the time, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, barely a month after King Salman’s ascendancy, told an interviewer that “there is no problem between the kingdom” and the Brotherhood.

Just a month later, the Muslim World League, a body established by Saudi Arabia in the 1960s to propagate religious ultra-conservatism and long dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, organized a conference in a building in Mecca that had not been used since the banning of the brothers. The Qataris, who have a history of close ties to the Brotherhood, were invited.

After King Salman and his son came to power, Saudi Arabia adopted a harder approach toward Brotherhood-related groups as Mohammed bin Zayed gained influence in Saudi affairs. The Muslim League has since become Mohammed bin Salman’s main vehicle for promoting his call for religious tolerance and inter-faith dialogue. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are portraying themselves as icons of a socially moderate form of Islam that, nonetheless, endorses autocratic rule.

Last week, the kingdom signaled a potential change in its attitude toward Brotherhood-related groups with the broadcast of an interview with Khaled Meshaal, the Qatar-based head of the political arm of Hamas. The interview was aired on Al Arabiya, the Saudi state-controlled news channel. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls Gaza, maintains relations with Iran and is viewed as being part of a Brotherhood network. Meshaal called for a resumption of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian movement.

In 2014, Saudi Arabia designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. This was part of a dispute between Qatar, a supporter of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, which had all withdrawn their ambassadors from Doha. The Saudis were particularly upset by the close relations that Hamas had forged with Iran and Turkey, Riyadh’s main rivals for regional hegemony.

A litmus test of the degree of change in Saudi Arabia’s attitude will be whether it releases scores of Hamas members. These members were arrested in 2019 as part of Saudi efforts to garner Palestinian support for then-US President Donald Trump’s controversial peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Quoting the Arabic service of Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, Al-Monitor reported that Al Arabiya had refrained from broadcasting a segment of the interview in which Meshaal called for the release of the detainees.

Despite Differences

The Saudi–UAE rivalry and the ambitions of their leaders make it unlikely that Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed will look at structural ways of managing differences. This includes areas like greater regional economic integration through arrangements for trade and investment and an expanded customs union. The latter would make the region more attractive to foreign investors and improve the Gulf states’ bargaining power.

In the absence of strengthening institutions, the bets are on the crown princes recognizing that, despite their differences, “it doesn’t make sense for either one of them to let go of the other.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Personality and Ambition Fuel Saudi-UAE Divide appeared first on Fair Observer.

The kingdom kicked off its effort to cement its position as the Middle East’s behemoth earlier this year. In February, Saudi Arabia announced it would cease doing business by 2024 with international companies whose regional headquarters were not based in the country. 

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The UAE ranks 16^th on the World Bank’s 2020 Ease of Doing Business Index as opposed to Saudi Arabia at number 62. As a result, freewheeling Dubai has long been the preferred regional headquarters of international firms. The Saudi move “clearly targets the” United Arab Emirates and “challenges the status of Dubai,” said a UAE-based banker.

Saudi Arabia is a latecomer to the port control game, which is dominated by Dubai’s DP World. That company operates 82 marine and inland terminals in more than 40 countries, including Djibouti, Somaliland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Cyprus. The kingdom’s expansion into port and terminal management appears to be less driven by geostrategic considerations. Instead, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT), backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, said it was targeting ports that would service vital Saudi imports, such as those related to food security.

In January, PIF and China’s Cosco Shipping Ports each bought a 20% stake in RSGT. The Chinese investment fits into Beijing’s larger Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves the acquisition of stakes in ports and terminals in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman and Djibouti, where China has a military base.

Jens Floe, the chief executive officer of RSGT, said the company planned to invest in at least three international ports in the next five years. He said each investment would be up to $500 million. “We have a focus on ports in Sudan and Egypt. They weren’t picked for that reason, but they happen to be significant countries for Saudi Arabia’s food security strategy,” Floe said.

Saudi Sports

Saudi Arabia’s increased focus on sports, including a possible bid to host the 2030 World Cup, serves multiple goals. First, it offers Saudi youth, who account for more than half of the kingdom’s population, a leisure and entertainment opportunity. Second, it boosts Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s burgeoning development of a leisure and entertainment industry. The Saudis believe this could allow the kingdom to polish its image tarnished by human rights abuse, including the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and challenge Qatar’s position as the face of Middle Eastern sports.

A recent report by Grant Liberty, a London-based human rights group that focuses on Saudi Arabia and China, estimated that Riyadh has invested $1.5 billion in the hosting of multiple sporting events. These include the final games of Italy and Spain’s top football leagues, Formula 1 races, boxing, wrestling and snooker matches, and golf tournaments. So far, Qatar is the Middle East’s leader in the hosting of sporting events, followed by the UAE.

According to Grant Liberty, further bids for events worth $800 million have failed. This did not include an unsuccessful $600-million offer to replace Qatar’s beIN Sports as the Middle Eastern broadcaster of the UEFA Champions League. Saudi Arabia reportedly continues to ban beIN from airing in the kingdom, despite the lifting of the Saudi-Emirati-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in January.

Oil Exports

Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify and streamline the Saudi economy and ween it off dependency on oil exports “has set the creation of professional sports and a sports industry as one of its goals,” said Fahad Nazer, spokesperson for the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington. “The kingdom is proud to host and support various athletic and sporting events which not only introduce Saudis to new sports and renowned international athletes but also showcase the kingdom’s landmarks and the welcoming nature of its people to the world.”

The increased focus on sports comes as Saudi Arabia appears to be backing away from its intention to reduce the centrality of energy exports for its economy. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the crown prince’s brother, recently ridiculed an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, saying “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply” as “the sequel of the La La Land movie.” He went on to ask, “Why should I take [the report] seriously?”

Putting its money where its mouth is, Saudi Arabia intends to increase its oil production capacity from 12 million to more than 13 million barrels a day. This is based on the assumption that global efforts to replace fossil fuel with cleaner energy sources will spark sharp reductions in American and Russian production. The Saudis believe that demand in Asia for fossil fuels will continue to rise even if it drops in the West. Other Gulf producers, including the UAE and Qatar, are following a similar strategy.

“Saudi Arabia is no longer an oil country, it’s an energy-producing country … a very competitive energy country. We are low cost in producing oil, low cost in producing gas, and low cost in producing renewables and will definitely be the least-cost producer of hydrogen,” Prince Abdulaziz said. He appeared to be suggesting that the kingdom’s doubling down on oil was part of a strategy that aims to ensure that Saudi Arabia is a player in all conventional and non-conventional aspects of energy. By implication, he was saying that diversification was likely to broaden Saudi Arabia’s energy offering, rather than significantly reduce its dependence on energy exports.

“Sports, entertainment, tourism and mining alongside other industries envisioned in Vision 2030 are valuable expansions of the Saudi economy that serve multiple economic and non-economic purposes,” said a Saudi analyst. “It’s becoming evident, however, that energy is likely to remain the real name of the game.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Saudi Seeks to Replace UAE and Qatar appeared first on Fair Observer.

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The principle was repeatedly challenged over the last year by athletes and businesses forcing national and international sports federations to either support anti-racist protest or, at the very least, refrain from penalizing those who use their sport to oppose racism and promote human rights and social justice — acts that are political by definition. The assault on what is a convenient fiction that sports and politics do not mix started in the US. This was not only the result of Black Lives Matter protests on US streets, but also the fact that, in contrast to the fan-club relationship in most of the world, American sports clubs and associations see fans as clients — and the client is king.

From Football to F1

The assault moved to Europe in the last month with the national football teams of Norway, Germany and the Netherlands wearing T-shirts during qualifiers for the 2022 FIFA World Cup that supported human rights and change. The European sides added their voices to perennial criticism of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar, the host of next year’s World Cup. Gareth Southgate, the manager of the English national team, said the Football Association was discussing migrant rights in the Gulf state with Amnesty International.

While Qatar is the focus in Europe, greater sensitivity to human rights appears to be moving beyond. Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton told a news conference in Bahrain ahead of this season’s opening Grand Prix that there “are issues all around the world, but I do not think we should be going to these countries and just ignoring what is happening in those places, arriving, having a great time and then leave.” Hamilton has been prominent in speaking out against racial injustice and social inequality since the National Football League in the US endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement and players taking the knee during the playing of the American national anthem in protest against racism.

In a dramatic break with its ban on “any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images” on the pitch, FIFA, the governing body of world football, said it would not open disciplinary proceedings against the European players who wore the T-shirts. “FIFA believes in the freedom of speech and in the power of football as a force for good,” a spokesperson said.

The statement constituted an implicit acknowledgment that standing up for human rights and social justice was inherently political. It raises the question of how FIFA will reconcile its stand on human rights with its statutory ban on political expression. It makes maintaining the fiction of a separation between politics and sports ever more difficult to defend. It also opens the door to a debate on how the inseparable relationship that joins sports and politics at the hip like Siamese twins should be regulated.

Georgia’s Voting Law

Signaling that a flood barrier may have collapsed, Major League Baseball this month said it would be moving its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to a new law in the US state of Georgia that threatens to potentially restrict voting access for people of color. In a shot across the bow to FIFA and other international sports associations, major companies headquartered in Georgia, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot, adopted political positions in their condemnation of the Georgia voting law.

The greater assertiveness of athletes and corporations in speaking out for fundamental rights and against racism and discrimination will make it increasingly difficult for sports associations to uphold the fiction of a separation between politics and sports. The willingness of FIFA, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), and other national and international associations to look the other way when athletes take their support for rights and social justice to the sports arena has let the genie out of the bottle. It has sawed off the legs of the FIFA principle that players’ “equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans.”

Already, the US committee has said it would not sanction American athletes who choose to raise their fists or kneel on the podium at this July’s Tokyo Olympic Games as well as future tournaments. The decision puts the USOPC at odds with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) strict rule against political protest. The IOC suspended and banned US medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos after the sprinters raised their fists on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to protest racial inequality in the United States.

Regulation

Acknowledging the incestuous relationship between sports and politics will ultimately require a charter or code of conduct that regulates it and introduces some form of independent oversight. This could be something akin to the supervision of banking systems or the regulation of the water sector in Britain, which, alongside the United States, holds privatized water as an asset.

Human rights and social justice have emerged as monkey wrenches that could shatter the myth of a separation between sports and politics. If athletes take their protests to the Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 World Cup, the myth would sustain a significant body blow. In December 2020, a statement by US athletes seeking changes to the USOPC’s rule banning protest at sporting events said: “Prohibiting athletes to freely express their views during the Games, particularly those from historically underrepresented and minoritized groups, contributes to the dehumanization of athletes that is at odds with key Olympic and Paralympic values.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The regulations, which take effect immediately, embrace aspects of a civilizational state that defines its legal reach, if not its borders, in terms of a civilization rather than a nation-state with clearly outlined, internationally recognized borders that determine the reach of its law and that is defined by its population and language.

The regulations could force social media companies to globally suppress criticism of the more onerous aspects of Pakistani law, including constitutionally enshrined discrimination of some minorities like Ahmadis, a sect widely viewed as heretic by mainstream Islam, and imposition of a mandatory death sentence for blasphemy.

Disable Access

The new rules force social media companies to “remove, suspend or disable access” to content posted in Pakistan or by Pakistani nationals abroad that the government deems as failing to “take due cognizance of the religious, cultural, ethnic and national security sensitivities of Pakistan.” The government can also demand removal of encryption. Social media companies are required to establish offices in Pakistan in the next three months and install data servers by February 2021.

The government justified the rules with the need to combat hate speech, blasphemy, alleged fake news and online harassment of women. The Asia Internet Coalition, a technology and internet industry association that includes  Facebook and Twitter, warned that the regulations “jeopardize the personal safety and privacy of citizens and undermine free expression” and would be “detrimental to Pakistan’s ambitions for a digital economy.”

The introduction of the regulations reflects frustration in government as well as Pakistan’s powerful military with social media companies’ frequent refusal to honor requests to take down content. Pakistan ranked among the top countries requesting Facebook and Twitter to remove postings.

On the assumption that Facebook, Twitter and others, which are already banned in China, will risk being debarred in Pakistan by refusing to comply with the new regulations, Pakistan could become a prime country that adopts not only aspects of China’s 21^st-century, Orwellian surveillance state but also its tightly controlled media.

System of Monitoring

The basis for potential Pakistani adoption of the Chinese system was created in 2017 in plans for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $60-billion-plus crown jewel of the Belt and Road — an infrastructure, telecommunications and energy-driven initiative to tie Eurasia to China.

The 2017 plan identifies as risks to CPEC: “Pakistani politics, such as competing parties, religion, tribes, terrorists, and Western intervention” as well as security. The plan appears to question the vibrancy of a system in which competition between parties and interest groups is the name of the game. It envisions a full system of monitoring and surveillance to ensure law and order in Pakistani cities. The system would involve deployment of explosive detectors and scanners to “cover major roads, case-prone areas and crowded places … in urban areas to conduct real-time monitoring and 24-hour video recording.”

A national fiber optic backbone would be built for internet traffic as well as the terrestrial distribution of broadcast media that would cooperate with their Chinese counterparts in the “dissemination of Chinese culture.” The plan described the backbone as a “cultural transmission carrier” that would serve to “further enhance mutual understanding between the two peoples and the traditional friendship between the two countries.”

Critics in China and elsewhere assert that repression of freedom of expression contributed to China’s delayed response to the coronavirus outbreak. China rejects the criticism, with President Xi Jinping calling for even greater control.

Pakistan’s newly promulgated regulations echo Xi’s assertion during the January 7 Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee meeting that “we must strengthen public opinion tracking and judgment, take the initiative to voice, provide positive guidance, strengthen integration, communication and interaction, so that positive energy will always fill the Internet space … We must control the overall public opinion and strive to create a good public opinion environment. It is necessary to strengthen the management and control of online media.”

*[This article was originally published by Middle East Soccer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The bitter rift between Qatar and its Saudi and Emirati-led detractors could spill onto the pitches of English football. A flurry of reports suggest that the Gulf rivals are seeking to buy big-name English clubs.

Abu Dhabi billionaire Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the ruling family, said this week he had agreed terms with Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley to buy the English Premier League club. Meanwhile, Qatar was reportedly in talks to purchase a stake in Leeds United — which plays in the second-tier Championship league — while Saudi Arabia had been rumored earlier this year to be circling Manchester United.

Stepped-up interest from the Gulf could take the region’s rivalry from the European level, where the United Arab Emirates’ acquisition of Manchester City and Qatar’s buying of Paris Saint-Germain set examples, into a national competition. While both takeovers have contributed to the UAE and Qatar’s soft power despite hiccups, Manchester City’s owner, City Football Group, has created a template for commercial exploitation. It has built what are some of the Gulf’s most valuable brands by acquiring stakes in clubs in the United States, Australia, Japan, Spain, Uruguay and China.

The Gulf Crisis

The rush to buy English clubs is, at least in part, the latest round in the Gulf crisis, which erupted in June 2017 with an alliance led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, declaring an economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

Doha has, so far, emerged on top with Qatar’s unexpected winning of the Asian Cup earlier this year — in, of all places, Abu Dhabi — and its successful thwarting this month of UAE-Saudi-backed efforts by FIFA to force it to expand the 2022 World Cup from 32 to 48 teams and share the tournament with neighboring Gulf states. Qatar’s victories came on the back of a series of failed, or at best partially successful, Saudi and UAE efforts to enhance their influence in global football governance, which would have enabled them to pressure the Gulf state.

The rush also suggests that the soft power gains of Arab states seeking to project themselves in ways that contrast starkly with their image as autocratic and often brutal violators of human rights, including widely-criticized migrant labor systems, outweigh the associated reputational risks. That assessment is borne out by Manchester City fans’ enthusiastic embrace of the club’s Emirati owners and willingness to ignore the country’s human rights record. Singing to the tune of the 1920s classic Kum Ba Yah, fans chant, “Sheikh Mansour m’lord, Sheikh Mansour, oh lord, Sheikh Mansour,” a reference to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Manchester City’s owner, who is also the UAE minister of presidential affairs and half-brother of UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Like Sheikh Mansour, Newcastle’s buyer Sheikh Khaled, whose business ties appear to be more with Dubai than Abu Dhabi, is likely to project his acquisition as personal even if the UAE’s de factor ruler, Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, keeps a tight lid on government as well as family affairs.

The Gulf states, responding differently to criticism, have nevertheless not had an easy ride in seeking to garner soft power and polish tarnished images. In contrast to the UAE and Saudi Arabia who seldom respond to their critics, Qatar has reacted to an avalanche of criticism since its winning of the 2022 World Cup hosting rights by engaging with its detractors. Although too little too late for its more strident critics, Qatar has made substantial changes to its kafala or sponsorship system that puts employees at the mercy of their employers. To be fair, so has the UAE, even if it did so less because of pressure by human rights and labor groups and more as part of an effort to project itself as a model, cutting-edge, 21st-century state.

Business Practices

Nonetheless, both the UAE and Qatar could see their reputational gains undermined if legal proceedings involving their football business practices go against them. Manchester City has reacted angrily to an investigation by UEFA into claims of financial fair play irregularities, which could lead to a Champions League ban. Yves Leterme, chairman and chief investigator of UEFA’s club financial control body investigatory chamber, has referred the allegations to the group’s adjudicatory chamber to issue a ruling. Similarly, Paris Saint-Germain’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was last week charged in France with corruption in connection with the bidding process for this year’s world athletics championships in Qatar. Khelaifi is also a UEFA executive committee member and chairman of Qatar’s television network, beIN Sports.

In an argument that could spread to Britain, Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, Spain’s top football league, denounced Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain as “state-run clubs, one off petrol money, one off gas” that should be expelled from European competitions as threats to the sport. Echoing Manchester City fans’ rejection of criticism of the UAE as “racist,” the club’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, dismissed Tebas’ assertions as ethnic slurs.

That’s a tactic that will likely work as long as fans such as Howard Hockin concede that they may be “hypocrites” who “don’t care about human rights in the Middle East.” A Manchester City podcaster, Hockin adds: “Abu Dhabi is an up-and-coming country [sic], and it wanted to boost its profile. It’s a PR thing, and we’re fine with that … I should care but I don’t. I should care about where my shoes come from — if they’ve been made by slave labour — but I don’t. I don’t look to football for my moral code. I don’t think I’ve sold my soul to support Man City.”

The question is whether Hockin would stick to his position if the business practices of his club’s owner or the politics of the UAE become a liability rather than an asset. With Khelaifi’s legal issues, the same question could confront Paris Saint-Germain fans.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Momentous developments across North and East Africa suggest the long-drawn-out process of political transition in the region — as well as the Middle East — is still in its infancy. So too does popular discontent in Syria, despite eight years of war, as well as in Egypt, notwithstanding a 2013 military coup that rolled back the advances of protests in 2011 that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

What developments across North Africa and the Middle East demonstrate is that the drivers of the 2011 Arab Spring that swept the region and forced the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen to resign not only still exist, but constitute black swans that can upset the apple cart at any moment. The situation also suggests that the regional struggle between forces of change and ancien régimes and militaries backed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia is far from decided.

Algeria and Sudan

If anything, protesters in Algeria and Sudan have learned something from the failed 2011 results: Don’t trust militaries, even if they seemingly align themselves with demonstrators, and don’t surrender the street until protester demands have been met. Distrust of the military has prompted an increasing number of Sudanese protesters to question whether chanting “the people and the army are one” is still appropriate. Slogans such as “freedom, freedom” and “revolution, revolution” alongside calls on the military to protect the protesters have become more frequent.

The protests in Algeria and Sudan have entered a critical phase in which protesters and militaries — worried that they could be held accountable for decades of economic mismanagement, corruption and repression — are tapping in the dark. With protesters emboldened by their initial successes in forcing leaders to resign, both the demonstrators and the militaries, including officers with close ties to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are internally divided about how to proceed. Moreover, neither side has any real experience in managing the crossroads at which they find themselves, while it is dawning on the militaries that their tired playbooks are not producing results.

In a telling sign, Sudan’s interim leader, Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan, praised his country’s “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as he recently met with a Saudi-Emirati delegation at the military compound in Khartoum, a focal point of the protests. Saudi Arabia has expressed support for the protests, in what many suspect is part of an effort to ensure that Sudan does not become a symbol of the power of popular sovereignty and its ability to defeat autocracy.

Syria

The ultimate outcome of the dramatic developments in Algeria and Sudan and how the parties maneuver is likely to have far-reaching consequences in a region pockmarked by powder kegs ready to explode. Mounting anger as fuel shortages caused by Western sanctions against Syria and Iran bring life to a halt have sparked rare and widespread public criticism of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government. The anger is fueled by reports that government officials cut in line at petrol stations to fill up their tanks and buy rationed cooking gas and take more than is allowed.

Syria is Here, an anonymous Facebook page that reports on economics in government-controlled areas, took officials to task after state-run television showed the oil minister, Suleiman al-Abbas, touring petrol stations that showed no signs of shortage. “Is it so difficult to be transparent and forward? Would that undermine anyone’s prestige? We are a country facing sanctions and boycotted. The public knows and is aware,” the Facebook page charged.

The manager of Hashtag Syria, another Facebook page, was arrested when the site demanded that the oil ministry respond to reports of anticipated price hikes with comments rather than threats. The site charged that the ministry was punishing the manager “instead of dealing with the real problem.” Syrian journalist Danny Makki said, “It [Syria] is a pressure cooker.”

Egypt and Libya

Similarly, authorities in Egypt, despite blocking its website, have been unable to stop an online petition against proposed constitutional amendments that could extend the rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi until 2034. The petition, entitled Batel (meaning “void” in Arabic), is, according to Netblocks — a group that maps web freedom — one of an estimated 34,000 websites blocked by Egyptian internet providers in a bid to stymie opposition to the amendments.

President Sisi is a reminder of how far Arab militaries and their Gulf backers are willing to go in defense of their vested interests in a bid to oppose popular sovereignty. Libyan renegade Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar is another. General Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) is attacking the capital Tripoli, the seat of the UN-recognized Libyan government that he and his Emirati, Saudi and Egyptian backers accuse of being dominated by Islamist terrorists.

The three Arab states’ military and financial support of Haftar is but the tip of the iceberg. The general has modeled his control of much of Libya on Sisi’s example of a military that not only dominates politics, but also the economy. As a result, the LNA is engaged in businesses ranging from waste management, metal scrap and waste export, and agricultural mega projects to the registration of migrant labor workers and control of ports, airports and other infrastructure. The LNA is also eyeing a role in the reconstruction of Benghazi and other war-devastated or underdeveloped regions.

What for now makes 2019 different from 2011 is that both sides of the divide realize that success depends on commitment to be in it for the long haul. Protesters also understand that trust in military assertions of support for the people can be self-defeating. They further grasp that they are up against a regional counterrevolution that has no scruples.

All of that gives today’s protesters a leg up on their counterparts from the Arab Spring of 2011. The jury is out on whether that will prove sufficient to succeed where the people of eight years ago failed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Donald Trump’s threat to “devastate” the Turkish economy if Ankara attacks Syrian Kurds serves his broader goal of letting regional forces fight for common goals, like countering Iranian influence in Syria.

President Trump’s comments were designed to preempt a Turkish strike against the People’s Protection Units (YPG). Turkey asserts that the YPG is part of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Turkish group that has waged a low-intensity war in southeastern Turkey, a predominantly Kurdish region, for more than three decades. Like Turkey, the United States and Europe have designated the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Turkey has been marshaling its forces for an attack on the YPG since Trump announced the withdrawal of US forces from Syria last month. This would be the third offensive against Syrian Kurds in recent years.

In a sign of strained relations with Saudi Arabia, Turkish media with close ties to the government have long reported that Riyadh is funding the YPG. There is no independent confirmation of these allegations. Relations between Ankara and Riyadh deteriorated following the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak reported in 2017 — days after the Gulf crisis erupted pitting an Arab alliance against Qatar, which is supported by Turkey — that American, Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian officials had met with the PKK and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) to discuss the future of Syrian oil once the Islamic State (IS) had been defeated. Turkey claims the PYD is the Syrian political wing of the PKK.

Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu Agency reported in May 2018 that Saudi and YPG officials had met to discuss cooperation. Saudi Arabia promised to pay Kurdish fighters $200 a month if they joined an Arab-backed force, Anadolu said. Riyadh allegedly sent aid to the YPG on trucks that traveled through Iraq to enter Syria.

In August 2018, Saudi Arabia announced that it had contributed $100 million to northeastern Syria. The funds were earmarked for agriculture, education, roadworks, rubble removal and water service. This involved territory controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which the YPG is a significant part of. Riyadh said the payment, announced on the day that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in the kingdom, was intended to fund stabilization of areas liberated from control by IS. Turkish media, however, insisted that the funds would flow to the YPG.

“The delivery of $100 million is considered as the latest move by Saudi Arabia in support of the partnership between the U.S. and YPG. Using the fight against Daesh [Islamic State] as a pretext, the U.S. has been cooperating with the YPG in Syria and providing arms support to the group. After Daesh was cleared from the region with the help of the U.S., the YPG tightened its grip on Syrian soil taking advantage of the power vacuum in the war-torn country,” the Daily Sabah said.

Saudi Arabia has refrained from including the YPG and the PKK on its extensive list of terrorist organizations, despite then-Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir describing the organization as a “terror group” in 2017.

Different Tactics, Same Goals

This week’s threat by Trump and his earlier vow to stand by the Kurds despite the US troop withdrawal gives Saudi Arabia and other Arab states political cover to support the Kurds as a force against Iran’s presence in Syria. It also allows the Saudis and Emiratis to attempt to thwart Turkish attempts to increase its regional influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have insisted that Turkey must withdraw its troops stationed in Qatar as a condition to end the diplomatic and economic boycott of the Gulf state, which was enforced in June 2017.

The UAE, determined to squash any expression of political Islam, has long led the autocratic Arab charge against Turkey because of its opposition to the 2013 military coup in Egypt, as well as Ankara’s close ties with Iran and its support for Qatar and Islamist forces in Libya.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt back General Khalifa Haftar, who commands anti-Islamist forces in eastern Libya, while Turkey — alongside Qatar and Sudan — supports the Islamists. Libyan and Saudi media reported that authorities had repeatedly intercepted Turkish arms shipments destined for Islamists, including one this month and another in December 2018. Turkey has denied the allegations.

“Simply put, as Qatar has become the go-to financier of the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical offshoot groups around the globe, Turkey has become their armorer,” said Turkey scholar Michael Rubin.

Ironically, the fact that various Arab states, including the UAE and Bahrain, recently reopened their embassies in Damascus — with tacit Saudi approval after having supported forces aligned against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for much of the civil war — makes Gulf support for the Kurds more feasible. Seemingly left in the cold by President Trump’s announced withdrawal of American forces, the YPG has sought to forge ties with the Assad regime. In response, Syria has gathered its troops near the town of Manbij, expected to be the flashpoint of a Turkish offensive.

Commenting on last year’s two-month long Turkish campaign that removed Kurdish forces from the Syrian town of Afrin, as well as Turkish efforts since to stabilize the region, Gulf analyst Giorgio Cafiero noted that “for the UAE, Afrin represents a frontline in the struggle against Turkish expansionism with respect to the Arab world.”

The same could be said from a Saudi and Emirati perspective for Manbij, not only with regard to Turkey, but also Iran’s presence in Syria. Frontlines and tactics may be shifting, but US and Gulf geopolitical goals have not.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Dug in for the long haul in its dispute with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Qatar is emerging as a key player in preventing tension between Israel and Hamas from spinning out of control. Doha’s increasing role counters Saudi and Emirati efforts to shape Palestinian politics in their mold. It further underlines the failure of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in trying to force Qatar to bow to their will by imposing a diplomatic and economic boycott, which has been in place since June 2017.

The Qatari role takes on added significance amid the Trump administration’s cancellation of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), as well as an American-Israeli effort to terminate the UN body’s mandate and rejigger the definition of a Palestinian refugee in a bid to restrict Palestinian rights.

The role of Qatar is also likely to be a litmus test of the willingness of Gulf states to support American-Israeli policy. This takes place as the Trump administration asserts that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern and European states would only be allowed to fund UNWRA for the time being. Israeli media reports said the White House was insisting that funders ultimately would have to align themselves with the US goal of closing down the agency and redefining who is a Palestinian refugee.

The redefinition would exclude the descendants of Palestinians originally displaced in 1948 and reduce the number of recognized refugees from 5 million to an estimated 500,000. It would undercut long-standing Palestinian insistence on the right of return of the 1948 refugees and their descendants — a demand viewed by Israel as an assault on its existence as a Jewish state and an undermining of its claim to the right of the land.

It remains unclear whether any of the multiple countries stepping in to compensate for the US shortfall are willing to accept US conditions.

Abbas Changes His Tune

But in a possible indication of a shifting playing field, Palestine Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas appeared to move away from his insistence on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by saying that he would entertain a US suggestion for a confederation of Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Abbas mentioned he had said as much when asked by US Middle East peace negotiators Jared Kushner, a senior advisor to President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, and Jason Greenblatt whether he would be interested in a confederation. The Palestinian leader did not say when the exchange took place. Abbas broke off all contact with the Trump administration after the US president recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017.

Israeli forces have since killed at least 166 Palestinians and wounded 18,000 others who participated in recent months in regular protests along the Gaza-Israel border in demand of their right to return. In July, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations, to prevent Hamas rocket attacks and protesters flying kites with incendiary devices into Israel — to which the Israelis responded with air strikes — from spiraling out of control.

To make the ceasefire sustainable, economic support for Gaza — where growth has been severely stunted as a result of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade since 2007 and now further aggravated by the American-Israeli assault on UNRWA — is crucial. In recent months, Israeli media reported that Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman met in Cyprus separately with Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani and Qatari Ambassador to the Palestinian Territories Mohammed al-Emadi to discuss economic support for Gaza. Qatar, beyond financial muscle, has the longest-standing relations among the mediators with Hamas. Qatar has also been negotiating the return by Hamas of two Israeli nationals held captive, as well as the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in 2014 in Gaza.

Speaking in a series of interviews, Emadi suggested Qatari funding would depend on Israel and Hamas agreeing on a sustainable ceasefire. “It is very difficult to fund the reconstruction of Gaza in an event of yet another destructive war,” he said. He said he had “discussed a maximum of five- to 10-year cease-fire with Hamas.”

Lieberman’s discussions ironically constitute recognition of Qatar’s long-standing relations with Islamists and militants, which the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain cited as the reason for their diplomatic and economic boycott.

UNRWA and Saudi Arabia

With exception of recent pledges to support UNRWA, countries like Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have focused on gaining political influence in Palestine, rather than on economic development. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have concentrated on the purchase in Jerusalem of real estate adjacent to the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s third most holy site, according to Kamal Khatib, an Israeli-Palestinian Islamist leader, as well as Arab media reports. For its part, Turkey has sent thousands of supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Democracy Party to visit the city. Turkish activists allegedly participated in last year’s protests at the Haram al-Sharif.

Saudi Arabia’s position on the American-Israeli effort to undermine UNRWA and redefine the Palestinian issue is muddied by apparent differences between King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been vocal in his support for Trump and empathy with Israeli positions.

Laying down the law, King Salman denounced the “invalidity and illegality” of the US decision to recognize Jerusalem. He told an Arab summit in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in April that he was donating $150 million to support Islam’s holy places in Jerusalem. The king’s moves ironically brought the kingdom closer to the outright condemnation by Qatar, Turkey and other Muslim nations of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem. This, however, has more to do with King Salman’s own views as well as domestic politics in kingdom. It does little, if anything, to prevent the Qatar crisis from muddying efforts to resolve the Gaza crisis.

“A bumpy road seems to be lying ahead of Qatar … as it faces strong internal and external obstacles that impede its management of the Palestinian dossier and stops it from communicating with the rest of the regional and international parties so long as its opponents keep their veto on its movements,” said Gaza-based Palestinian historian Adnan Abu Amer.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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A possible long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is proving to be much more than an effort to end escalating violence that threatens to spark yet another war in the Middle East.

Moves by Egypt and the United Nations to mediate an agreement are not only about preventing protests along the Gaza-Israel border — as well as repeated rocket fire on Israel that provoke Israeli military strikes in response — from spinning out of control. They also constitute Israeli-backed efforts to politically, economically and militarily weaken Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip. The aim is for the possible return of Mohammed Dahlan, the Abu Dhabi-based former Palestinian security chief, who is seen as a successor to the ailing Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Ironically, Israeli discussions with representatives of Qatar constitute recognition of Doha’s long-standing relations with Islamists and militants, which the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain cited as the reason for their boycott of the Gulf state in June 2017.

Israel and Egypt have agreed that Qatar would pay the salaries of tens of thousands of government employees in Gaza. Abbas has refused to pay the workers as part of an Israeli-Emirati-Saudi-backed effort to undermine Hamas’ control of Gaza and give the PA a key role in the Strip’s administration. In response to a request from Abbas, Israel has reduced electricity supplies, leaving Gazans with only three to four hours of power a day. Qatar has also been negotiating the return by Hamas of two Israeli nationals held captive, as well as the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in 2014 in Gaza.

Abbas’ economic warfare was the latest tightening of the noose in a more than a decade-long Israeli-Egyptian effort to strangle Gaza economically. Included in the moves to negotiate a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas are proposals for significant steps to ease the blockade of Gaza, which has been in place since 2007.

In a statement on Facebook, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel’s goal was to “remove the Hamas terror group from power, or force it to change its approach, i.e., recognize Israel’s right to exist and accept the principle of rebuilding in exchange for demilitarization.” Lieberman said he wanted to achieve that by “creating conditions in which the average resident of Gaza will take steps to replace the Hamas regime with a more pragmatic government,” rather than through military force.

Ironically, involving Qatar in the effort to prevent violence in Gaza from getting out of hand gives it a foot in the door. This comes as the UAE seeks to put a Palestinian leader in place who is more attuned to Emirati and Saudi willingness to accommodate the Trump administration’s controversial efforts to negotiate an overall peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Speaking in a series of interviews, Qatari Ambassador to the Palestinian Territories Mohammed al-Emadi insisted that “it is very difficult to fund the reconstruction of Gaza in an event of yet another destructive war.” He said he had “discussed a maximum of five- to 10-year cease-fire with Hamas.”

Abbas, like Hamas, has rejected US mediation following US President Donald Trump’s recognition earlier this year of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. On August 21, Trump shocked Israelis and Palestinians by saying that Israel would pay a “higher price” for his recognition of Jerusalem and that Palestinians would “get something very good” in return “because it’s their turn next.” The president gave no indication of what he meant.

Ceasefire and a New Leader

The effort to negotiate a lasting ceasefire is the latest round in a failed Emirati-Egyptian bid to return Dahlan to Palestine as part of a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Abbas’ Fatah movement. Dahlan frequently does UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed’s bidding.

During an internecine Palestinian power struggle in 2007, US President George W. Bush described Dahlan as “our guy.” Dahlan is also believed to have close ties to Lieberman.

Since late March, Hamas has backed weekly mass protests by Gazans demanding the right to return to homes in Israel proper, which they lost with the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and in the 1967 war, in an effort to force an end to the blockade. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said last week that, “thanks to these marches and resistance,” an end to Israel’s decade-long blockade of Gaza was “around the corner.” Some 170 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and 18,000 others wounded in Israel’s hard-handed response to the protests, designed to prevent demonstrators from breeching the fence that divides Gaza from Israel.

Ironically, Abbas may prove to be the loser as Israel and Hamas inch toward a long-term ceasefire that could ultimately give Dahlan a role in administering the Gaza Strip.

“Gaza has become a de facto state as it comprises a set area with a central body that governs the population, has an army and conducts foreign policy. So, in a way, countries have to be pragmatic and negotiate with Hamas. Israel’s main interest is security—a period of complete calm in Gaza—and it is willing to do what is necessary to achieve this,” said Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council.

“Until recently, Cairo insisted that Abbas re-assume control over Gaza, which Hamas would not accept, specifically the call for it to disarm. Now, Egypt understands that this is not realistic and is only demanding that Hamas prevent [the Islamic State’s affiliate] in the Sinai from smuggling in weaponry. The only party that is unhappy with this arrangement is Abbas. who has been left behind. But this is his problem,” Eiland added.

A ceasefire between Hamas and Israel and the possible return of Dahlan are likely to be the first steps in a strategy to engineer the emergence of a Palestinian leadership more amenable to negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a geopolitical environment that favors Israel.

Whether Trump’s remark that Israel would have to pay a price for his recognition of Jerusalem was a shot from the hip or part of a broader strategy is hard to discern. The White House has since sought to roll back Trump’s remarks. With the jury still out, Israelis, Palestinians and their regional allies have, nonetheless, been put on alert as they maneuver to ensure their place in whatever emerges from efforts to reengineer the political landscape.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Criticism over Pakistani efforts to combat money laundering and terrorism financing is likely to complicate incoming Prime Minister Imran Khan’s goal of tackling the country’s financial crisis. Addressing the comments by the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) is key to a possible Pakistani request for a $12 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is especially the case since the APG reports to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism watchdog, which earlier this year put Pakistan on a gray list with the prospect of blacklisting it.

Demands by the US that any IMF package exclude funding for paying off Chinese loans, coupled with the APG/FATF criticism, the Pakistani army’s quest to push militants into the mainstream of domestic politics, and Khan’s mixed statements on extremism could have a big impact. Khan may turn to China and Saudi Arabia for a rescue, a move that would likely not put Pakistan in the kind of straightjacket it needs to reform and restructure its troubled economy.

The APG criticism followed Pakistani efforts to demonstrate its sincerity by passing in February the Anti-Terrorism Ordinance of 2018, which gave groups and individuals designated by the UN as international terrorists the same status in Pakistan for the first time. But Pakistan has yet to implement the ordinance by, for example, acting against Hafez Saeed, a leader of the banned group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the alleged mastermind of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Despite having been designated a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council and having a $10 million US Treasury bounty on his head, Saeed fielded candidates in last month’s election in Pakistan.

The APG, which just ended talks with Pakistani officials, has scheduled follow-up visits to Pakistan in the fall to monitor the country’s progress in addressing its concerns. These center on legal provisions governing nonprofit and charitable organizations, transparency in the country’s beneficial ownership regime, and the handling of reports on suspicious financial transactions.

Those concerns go to the heart of the effort by the Pakistani military and intelligence to mainstream militants, who garnered just under 10% of the vote in the election but have a far greater impact on Pakistani politics. The military and intelligence have, in the past, encouraged militants to form political organizations — with which mainstream political parties have been willing to cooperate — and establish charity operations that have had a substantial social impact.

Similarly, Khan, who earned the nickname “Taliban Khan,” will likely have to counter his past record of allowing government funds to go to militant madrassas, his advocacy for the opening of a Taliban Pakistan office and his defense of the Afghan Taliban. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gave, in February, $2.5 million to Darul Aloom Haqqania, a militant religious seminary.

Dubbed a “jihad university,” Darul Aloom Haqqania, headed by Sami ul-Haq, a hardline Islamist politician known as the father of the Taliban, counts among its alumni Mullah Omar, the deceased leader of the Taliban; Jalaluddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani Network; Asim Umar, leader of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent; and Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, Mullah Omar’s successor who was killed in a 2016 US drone strike.

Those may be policies that, at least initially, could be less of an obstacle for assistance from China and Saudi Arabia to replenish Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves, which have plummeted over the past year to $10.4 billion. Pakistan’s currency, the rupee, has been devalued four times since December 2017 and lost almost a quarter of its value.

Chinese loans have so far kept Pakistan afloat with state-owned banks extending more than $5 billion in loans in the past year. PTI officials said this week that China has promised the incoming government further loans to keep Pakistan afloat and enable it to avoid reverting to the IMF. The IMF would demand transparency in the funding of projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative.

And that is where the rub is. Despite Chinese officials reportedly urging Pakistan to reduce its deficit, neither China nor Saudi Arabia — the latter has offered to lend Pakistan $4 billion — are likely to impose the kind of regime that would put the country on a sustainable financial path. Relying on China and Saudi Arabia would probably buy Pakistan time, but ultimately not enable it to avoid the consequences of blacklisting by the FATF. If Pakistan is blacklisted, it would be severely limited in accessing financial markets.

Moreover, relying on China and Saudi Arabia, two of Pakistan’s closest allies, could prove risky. Neither country shielded Islamabad from FATF gray listing in February. A Chinese official said at the time that Beijing had not stood up for Pakistan because it did not want to “lose face by supporting a move that’s doomed to fail.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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In response to international criticism, China has come closer to admitting that it has brutally cracked down on the strategic northwestern province of Xinjiang, in what Beijing claims is a bid to prevent the kind of mayhem that has wracked countries like Syria and Libya. The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times says the reports were aimed at stirring trouble and destroying hard-earned stability in Xinjiang. The province is China’s gateway to Central Asia and home to its Turkic Uighur and ethnic minority Muslim communities.

The crackdown, involving the world’s most intrusive surveillance state and the indefinite internment of large numbers of Muslims in re-education camps, is designed to quell potential Uighur nationalist and religious sentiment. It is also aimed at preventing blowback from militants moving to Central Asia’s borders with China after the Islamic State and other jihadist groups lost most of their territorial bases in Iraq and Syria.

Concern that national and religious sentiment and/or militancy could challenge China’s grip on Xinjiang — home to 15% of its proven oil reserves, 22% of its gas reserves and 115 of the 147 raw materials found in the People’s Republic, as well as part of its nuclear arsenal — has prompted Beijing to consider a more interventionist policy in the Middle East and Central and South Asia. This contradicts its principle of non-interference in the affairs of others.

The Global Times asserted that the security situation in Xinjiang had been “turned around and terror threats spreading from there to other provinces of China are also being eliminated.” The paper added: “Peaceful and stable life has been witnessed again in all of Xinjiang … [the region] has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil. It has avoided the fate of becoming ‘China’s Syria’ or ‘China’s Libya.’”

Five Chinese mining engineers were wounded on August 11 in a suicide attack in the troubled Pakistan province of Balochistan, a key node in the $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is intended to link the strategic port of Gwadar with Xinjiang and fuel economic development in the Chinese region. The attack was claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army, rather than Uighurs.

The Global Times admitted that Chinese efforts to ensure security had “come at a price that is being shouldered by people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang.”

Internment Camps in China

China has not acknowledged the existence of re-education camps, but the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said on August 10 that it had credible reports that 1 million Uighurs were being held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” The UN assertion of the existence of the camps is corroborated by academic research and media reports based on interviews with former camp inmates and relatives of prisoners, testimony to a US congressional committee, and recent revelations in a Kazakh court by a former employee in one of the camps.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, US Republican Senator Marco Rubio, the chair of the congressional committee, called for the sanctioning of Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary and Politburo member Chen Quanguo and “all government officials and business entities assisting the mass detentions and surveillance.” He also demanded that Chinese security agencies be added to a “restricted end-user list to ensure that American companies don’t aid Chinese human-rights abuses.”

Stymying the international criticism and demands for action before they gain further momentum is imperative if China wants to ensure that the Muslim world continues to remain silent about what amounts to a Chinese effort — partly through indoctrination in its re-education camps — to encourage the emergence of what it would call an Islam with Chinese characteristics. China is pushing other faiths to adopt a similar approach.

Concern that Uighur militants leaving Syria and Iraq will again target Xinjiang is likely one reason why Chinese officials suggested that, despite their adherence to the principle of non-interference in the affairs of others, China might join the Assad regime in taking on militants in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. Syrian forces have bombarded Idlib, a dumping ground for militants evacuated from other parts of Syria that have been captured by the military and the country’s last major rebel stronghold, in advance of an expected offensive.

Speaking to Syrian pro-government daily Al-Watan, China’s ambassador to Syria, Qi Qianjin, said Beijing was “following the situation in Syria, in particular after the victory in southern [Syria], and its military is willing to participate in some way alongside the Syrian army that is fighting the terrorists in Idlib and in any other part of Syria.” Chinese participation in a campaign in Idlib would be Beijing’s first major engagement in foreign battle in decades.

China has similarly sought to mediate a reduction of tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is in an effort to get both countries to cooperate in the fight against militants and ensure that Uighur jihadists are denied the ability to operate on China’s borders. It has also sought to facilitate peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Chinese officials told a recent gathering in Beijing of the Afghan-Pakistan-China Trilateral Counterterrorism dialogue that militant cross-border mobility represented a major threat that needed to be countered by an integrated regional approach.

Potentially, there’s a significant economic upside to facilitating regional cooperation in South Asia and military intervention in Syria. Post-conflict, both countries offer enormous reconstruction opportunities. Middle East scholar Randa Slim, discussing possible Chinese involvement in the clearing of Idlib, said: “You have to think about this in terms of the larger negotiations over Chinese assistance to reconstruction. Syria doesn’t have the money, Russia doesn’t have the money. China has a stake in the fighting.” It also has the money.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Imran Khan’s ability to chart his own course, as well as his relationship with Pakistan’s powerful military, is likely to be tested the moment he walks into the prime minister’s office. Pakistan’s most fundamental problems loom large and are likely to demand his immediate attention.

Khan will probably have to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $12 billion bailout to resolve Pakistan’s financial and economic crisis. The request could muddy his already ambiguous relationship with China. The IMF is likely to reinforce Khan’s call for greater transparency regarding the terms and funding of projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative and — at more than $50 billion — its single largest investment.

Crack Down

Khan’s need for a bailout is likely to give him little choice but to crack down on militant groups that have enjoyed tacit, if not overt, support of the military.

To be sure, Khan could evade resorting to the IMF if China continues to bailout Pakistan as it has done in the past year with some $5 billion in loans. Alternatively, Saudi Arabia could defer payments for oil that account for one-third of Pakistan’s petroleum imports as it did in 1998 and 2008. Continued Chinese assistance or Saudi help would provide immediate relief. But without a straightjacket forcing Pakistan to embark on painful reforms, this would do little to resolve the country’s structural problem.

An IMF straightjacket, however, may solve one Chinese dilemma: backing for the Pakistani military’s selective support for militants. China’s support was in response to a request by the military, as well as the fact that militants focusing on India and Kashmir granted Beijing useful leverage.

China, nonetheless, has hinted several times in the past two years that it is increasingly uneasy about the policy. It did so, among others, by not stopping the Financial Action Task Force — an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog — from putting Pakistan on a gray list, with the threat of being blacklisted if it failed to agree and implement measures to counter money laundering and funding of militants.

CPEC

Chinese sensitivity about greater CPEC transparency was evident in Beijing’s attempts to stymie Khan’s criticism during the recent election campaign and when he was in opposition. Chinese pressure on Khan and his populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) to tone down their criticism produced only limited results, despite China’s expansion of CPEC’s master plan to include the prime minister-in waiting’s stronghold northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The move, however, did not stop PTI activists from continuing to portray CPEC as a modern-day equivalent of the British East India Company, which dominated the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century.

PTI denounced Chinese-funded mass transit projects in three cities in Punjab — the stronghold of the party’s main rival, Pakistan Muslim League-N — as squandering of funds that could have better been invested in social spending. PTI activists suggested that the projects had involved corrupt practices. In 2017, China rejected allegations by Awami National League leader Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, a Khan ally, of corruption in a Chinese-funded bus project in the city of Multan.

Pakistani officials said PTI critics would likely get their way if the country agrees with the IMF on a bailout. “Once the IMF looks at CPEC, they are certain to ask if Pakistan can afford such a large expenditure given our present economic outlook,” the Financial Times quoted a Pakistani official as saying. CPEC was but one of several issues that have troubled China’s attitude toward Khan, despite a post-election pledge to work with the prime minister-in waiting.

China was unhappy that a five-month anti-government sit-in in Islamabad in 2014 forced President Xi Jinping to delay by a year a planned visit, during which he had hoped to unveil a CPEC master plan. Pakistani security analyst and columnist Muhammed Amir Rana, just back from a visit to China, said Beijing was also uneasy about Khan’s plan to tap the expertise of Pakistan’s highly educated US and European diaspora, who could counter the PTI’s anti-US bent.

CPEC, and particularly ownership of projects related to the corridor, is likely to be one indication of Pakistan’s relationship with China under a PTI government, as well as the nature of Khan’s rapport with the military. The issue is sensitive, given expectations that Chinese investment is pushing Pakistan into a debt trap.

Rana noted that the Sharif government had resisted a military push for the creation of a separate CPEC authority. The military and the Sharif government were also at odds over the establishment of a special security force to protect Chinese nationals and investments that have been repeatedly targeted in Pakistan.

A Friend in Khan?

The Chinese Communist Party’s English-language media organ, Global Times, was quick to declare victory in the Pakistani election. While mentioning past Chinese concerns, the paper pointed to the fact that Khan had unveiled a plan to adopt the “Chinese model” to alleviate poverty.

Noting that China was the first country Khan mentioned in his first post-election speech, the Global Times gloated: “Despite a barrage of criticism he threw at Sharif’s handling of Chinese investments, Khan is not a skeptic of the projects themselves … Imran Khan minced no words when his exclusive interview was published in Guangming Daily two days before the elections. Khan asserted that the CPEC will receive wide support from all sectors of Pakistani society.”

In the same article, Daniel Hyatt, the author, added: “Imran Khan’s politico-economic views do not seem to be influenced by his Western education. He questions the practicality of capitalist economic policies. He is also a strong critic of US President Donald Trump, the US and US-led wars … Imran Khan’s plan is a clear pivot by Pakistan, away from the US orbit and further into the Chinese bloc … China has a friend in Imran Khan.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The covert Qatari-Emirati cyberwar that helped spark the Qatar crisis may have just gotten murkier with the indictment of 12 Russian agents by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The indictment provided details on the website DCLeaks, which was allegedly registered by Russian intelligence officers. The website initially distributed illicitly-obtained documents associated with people connected to the Republican Party and later leaked hacked emails from individuals affiliated with the election campaign of Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. “Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign,” the indictment reads.

The indictment focuses exclusively on hacking related to the US election that brought Donald Trump to office. It makes no mention of hacking related to the Gulf crisis that pits an Emirati-Saudi-led alliance against Qatar. Yet the indictment’s repeated references to DCLeaks raises the question of whether there may also be a Russian link to the email hacking in 2017 of Yousef al-Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States.

Global Leaks

Otaiba’s revealing and potentially damaging emails, which seemed to help Qatar in its public diplomacy campaign, were distributed to major media outlets and analysts, including this author, by an entity known as Global Leaks. Questions about a potential link between Global Leaks, DCLeaks and Russia stem not only from Global Leaks’ use of a Russian provider that offers free email service, but also by the group’s own reference to DCLeaks. The group’s initial email had “DCLeaks” in its subject line.

It remains unclear whether the use of a Russian provider was coincidental and whether the reference to DCLeaks was meant to mislead or create a false impression.

Global Leaks initially identified itself in an email as “a new group which is bringing to limelight human right violations, terror funding, illegal lobbying in US/UK to limelight of people to help make USA and UK great again and bring justice to rich sponsors of crime and terror.” When pressed about its identity, the group said:

“[We] believe that [the] Gulf in general has been crippling the American policy by involving us in their regional objectives. Lately it’s been [the] UAE who has bought America and traditionally it was their bigger neighbor [Saudi Arabia]. If we had to hurt UAE, we have so much of documents given by source that it will not only hurt their image and economy but also legally and will for sure result in UN sanctions at the least. But that is not our goal.

Our goal is plain and simple, back off in playing with American interests and law, don’t manipulate our system, don’t use money as a tool to hurt our foreign policy…. It may be a coincidence that most things [we are leaking] do relate to UAE but in times to come if they continue and not stop these acts, we will release all the documents which may hurt all the countries including Bahrain and Qatar.”

Global Leaks’ allegation that the UAE was seeking to suck the US into Gulf affairs preceded reports that Mueller was, aside from Russia, also looking into whether George Nader had funneled funds to the Trump campaign. Nader is a highly-paid Lebanese-American advisor to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

Mueller is further investigating a meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, that was brokered by the UAE. Prince and Dmitriev have denied that the meeting had anything to do with President Trump.

The US president has not publicly addressed reports that his election campaign may have received Gulf funding. But at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16, Trump failed to endorse his government’s assessment that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why Russia would be responsible.” He has since claimed he had misspoken.

Foreign Lobbying

A British public relations watchdog, Spinwatch Public Interest Investigations, said, in a report detailing UAE lobby efforts, that the Emirates had tasked public relations companies in the US and Britain with linking members of Qatar’s ruling family to terrorism. The lobbying also aimed to get the Qatar-backed Muslim Brotherhood banned; involved UAE threats to withhold lucrative trade deals from Britain if allegedly pro-Brotherhood reporting by the BBC was not curtailed; and it targeted journalists and academics critical of the Gulf country, according to the report.

US intelligence officials said the UAE had last year orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. The hacking provided the pretext for the Emirati-Saudi led economic and diplomatic boycott of Doha. The UAE has denied the assertion.

US and Qatari officials said earlier that Russian hackers for hire had executed the attack on the Qatari websites. Cybersecurity experts said at the time that the hackers worked for various Gulf states. They said the methods used in the hacking of the Qatari website and Ambassador Otaiba’s email were similar. “They seem to be hackers-for-hire, freelancing for all sorts of different clients, and adapting their skills as needed,” said security expert Collin Anderson.

Two cybersecurity firms, ThreatConnect and Fidelis Cybersecurity, said in 2016 that they had indications that the hackers who hit the Democratic National Committee were preparing a fake version of the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that could be used in phishing attacks.

The Emirati-Qatari cyberwar was indeed likely enabled by Russian hackers working for their own account, rather than in coordination with the Russian government. It is, however, equally possible that the same hackers also put their services at the disposal of Russia.

None of what is known about the murky world of Russian hackers is conclusive, let alone produces a smoking gun. The various strands of Mueller’s investigation, however, suggest grounds to query not only Russian cyber efforts to influence the US election, but also the involvement of Russian nationals in the cyberwar in the Gulf and potential links between the two operations.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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If the notion that history repeats itself is accurate, it is nowhere truer than in the Middle East. This is a place where the international community, caught by surprise with the Arab Uprisings in 2011, has reverted to opting for political stability instead of sustainability, ignoring the undercurrents of change that are wracking the region. Major powers do so at their peril.

The United States, Europe, China and Russia have failed to recognize key drivers of fundamental societal change and revisit the underpinnings of their policies toward the Middle East and beyond. This threatens to nullify professed aims of wanting to end bloodshed, curb extremism, stabilize the region and protect their interests.

Failed Policies in the Middle East

In a recent study, Jose Antonio Sabadell, a former Spanish and European Union diplomat, argues that the narrow focus of the West — and by extension of China and Russia — on countering extremism, stemming the flood of refugees, and securing economic interests blinds major powers from recognizing tectonic social and political shifts, which are likely to reshape a region embroiled in volatile, often violent transition.

Without saying so explicitly, Sabadell harks back more than a decade to the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when leaders, including then-US President George W. Bush, recognized that Western support for Middle Eastern autocracy — support that failed to address widespread popular grievances and perceptions of Western policy — had created the feeding ground for jihadist groups focused on striking the West.

That recognition produced an expectation that the proverbial “Arab street” would assert itself, neutralize breeding grounds of extremism, and counter radicalism by pushing for political and economic change. When the Arab street did not immediately revolt, government officials, analysts and journalists wrote it off. The widespread discontent continued to simmer at the surface. It was palpable if one put their ear to the ground as this discontent finally exploded a decade later in 2011. That pattern hasn’t changed despite a brutal counterrevolution that reversed the achievements of the revolt in Egypt and produced civil wars and military interventions in Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Just how little has changed is evident in the continued validity of Egyptian-born political scientist Nazih Ayubi’s assertion 22 years ago that the Arab world is populated by hard, rather than strong, states whose power is rooted in bureaucracies, militaries and security forces. Ayubi noted that these states were “lamentably feeble when it comes to collecting taxes, winning wars or forging a really ‘hegemonic’ power bloc or an ideology that can carry the state beyond the coercive and ‘corporate’ level and into the moral and intellectual sphere.”

Recent protests, often innovative in their manifestations, in Morocco and Egypt as well as Iran — a non-Arab country — prove the following point. “The Arab world is in the middle of a process of deep social and political change … The emergence of Arab peoples as key political actors, in combination with widespread, profound and mounting popular frustration, is a game changer. What Arab populations think and crucially how they feel will determine the future evolution of their countries,” Sabadell predicted.

Boomerang

Historical record backs up his assertion that fundamental change is a process rather than an event. The era of the 2011 revolts and their counterrevolutionary aftermath may be reminiscent of the 1789 French revolutionary wave, which was countered by powerful conservative forces that ultimately failed to avert the 1848 revolution.

A renewed failure to recognize the social psychological, emotional, social, economic and political underpinnings of simmering discontent suggests that the international community’s focus on migration and extremism could boomerang. This could further antagonize significant sectors of societies in a swath of land that stretches from Africa to China.

It is likely to impact stability in a region that borders Europe, constitutes Russia’s backyard and soft underbelly, and stretches into China’s strategic northwestern province of Xinjiang. It also risks fueling rather than countering extremism that feeds on its understanding and exploitation of the emotions, social psychology and identity politics of deep-seated grievances.

“We are at a crossroads … Vital interests are at stake … These developments will define … interaction with 400 million people living in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood, and shape relations with the wider Middle East and North Africa region … This can have profound geopolitical implications, influence the global scenario for the foreseeable future and maybe change the nature of international politics,” Sabadell said.

Demonization of Islam in the West and major Asian nations and Islamophobia magnify the risk and exacerbate the problem. The centrality of Islam in Middle Eastern identity, coupled with widespread anti-Western sentiment that is reinforced by the Trump administration’s immigration policy and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, strengthens a belief that the West — and China with its repressive policy in Xinjiang — is hostile to Islam. It is a belief that hands an opportunity to extremists on a silver platter.

It is also a belief that intrinsically links social and economic grievances with perceived threats to collective national, regional and religious identities, a pillar of populism on both sides of the Atlantic as well as the Mediterranean in what Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra dubbed “the flourishing international economy of disaffection.”

The key popular demand for dignity that characterized the Arab Uprisings related as much to calls for clean, non-corrupt governance, and efficient delivery of public goods and services as it did for acknowledgement of a proper place for Arab and Muslim states in the international system.

A key issue that world powers turn a blind eye to is the fact that even if religion constitutes the bedrock of autocratic legitimacy and frames public discourse, religiosity is in flux with youth who are increasingly embracing the notion that faith is a private affair, rather than a ritualistic adherence to laws and a set of ironclad beliefs.

Policy, Not Values

Closely related is the failure to realize that the gap between the Middle East and the West — and potentially with China and Russia — is not one that is rooted in values but in policies. As a result, anti-immigrant sentiment Islamophobia, reducing the Middle East to concerns of migration and extremism, support for autocratic regimes, indifference toward the worsening plights of huge population groups, and the lack of even-handed policies toward key conflicts like Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute threaten to turn the fictional value gap into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is a prophecy that is exploited by extremists who, unlike world powers, understand the power of and beneficial focus on emotions. The self-fulfilling prophecy is underwritten by decades of failed policy in which military interventions, debilitating attempts at regime change, misconceived notions of nation building, and misconstrued calls for reform of Islam have fueled mayhem and crisis.

“What the Arab world may need is not a religious leader but rather a social leader; not someone who wants to reform religion, but who wants to reform society … one who uses the popular legitimacy and the authority of religion to promote social and political change. Islam may need a Martin Luther King Jr. more than a Martin Luther,” Sabadell said.

Stopping failed policies from cementing false perceptions in a self-fulfilling prophecy will take more than counter narratives, political messaging and promotion of “moderate” Islam. It will require fundamentally revisiting the notion that support for self-serving autocrats whose policies contribute to the threat of the prophecy is part of the solution.

The crisis in the Middle East offers the West a historic opportunity in the far larger struggle with China and Russia for a future international order. It is where the West has a strategic advantage that it can exploit, if it is capable of dropping its horse claps that allow it to only see the threats of migration and extremism.

Sabadell said: “The way the West handles its relations with the region can and should make a significant difference. What it does and says will be the key; what it does not do and does not say will be equally important. How it acts, or not, and speaks up or remains silent will define its position and determine its effectiveness.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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He’s been in and out of prison during Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule and is running against the president in the Turkish elections on June 24, with no chance of defeating him and little hope of winning a seat in parliament. Yet Dogu Perincek wields significant influence in Turkey’s security and intelligence establishment, and he sees much of his eurasianist ideology reflected in Erdogan’s foreign policy. With President Erdogan likely to emerge victorious from the election despite the opposition posing its most serious challenge to date, Perincek looks set to be a winner even if he does not make it into parliament.

At a glance, Erdogan and Perincek seem poles apart. Perincek is a maverick socialist and a militant secularist whose conspiratorial worldview identifies the United States at the core of all evil. By contrast, Erdogan carries his Islamism and nationalism on his sleeve. Nonetheless, Perincek’s philosophy and world of contacts in Russia, China, Iran and Syria have served Erdogan well in recent years. His network and ideology have enabled the president to cozy up to Russia; smoothen relations with China; build an alliance with Iran; position Turkey as a leading player in an anti-Saudi, anti-Emirati front in the Middle East; and pursue his goal of curtailing Kurdish nationalism in Syria.

Tacit cooperation between Erdogan and Perincek is a far cry from the days that he spent in prison accused of having been part of the Ergenekon conspiracy, which allegedly involved a deep state cabal plotting to overthrow the government in 2015. It was during his six years in prison in that Perincek joined forces with Lieutenant General Ismail Hakki Pekin, the former head of the Turkey’s military intelligence, who serves as vice-chairman of his Vatan Partisi or Homeland Party. His left-wing ideology, which in the past was supportive of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PPK) that is viewed as a terrorist organization by the Erdogan government, has not stopped Perincek from becoming a player in Turkey’s hedging of its regional bets.

Together with Pekin, who has extensive contacts in Moscow that include Alexander Dugin, a controversial eurasianist extreme right-winger who is believed to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Perincek mediated the reconciliation between Moscow and Ankara following the Turkish air force’s downing of a Russian fighter in 2015. The two men were supported in their endeavor by Turkish businessmen close to Erdogan and ultra-nationalist eurasianist elements in the military.

Eurasianism in Turkey was buoyed by increasingly strained relations between the Erdogan government and the West. Erdogan has taken issue with Western criticism of his introduction of a presidential system with far-reaching powers that has granted him almost unlimited power. He has also blasted the West for refusing to crack down on the Hizmet movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, whom Erdogan holds responsible for an unsuccessful coup in 2016. Erdogan has rejected Western criticism of his crackdown on the media, the dismissal of people from public sector jobs and/or arrest of tens of thousands accused of being followers of Gulen.

Differences over Syria and US support for a Syrian Kurdish group aligned with the PKK have intensified pro-eurasianist thinking that has gained currency among bureaucrats and security forces, as well as in think tanks and academia. The influence of eurasianist generals was boosted in 2016 when they replaced officers who were accused of having participated in the failed coup.

Eurasianism, as a concept, borrows elements of Kemalism — the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who carved Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire — Turkish nationalism, socialism and radical secularism. It traces its roots to Kadro, an influential leftist magazine published in Turkey between 1932 and 1934, and Yon, a left-wing magazine launched in the wake of a military coup in 1960 that became popular after yet another military takeover in 1980. Eurasianism is opposed to liberal capitalism and globalization. It also believes that Western powers want to carve up Turkey, and it sees Turkey’s future in alignment with Russia, Central Asia and China.

Foreign Policy

Perincek’s vision is shared by hardliners in Iran, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who advocate an Iranian pivot to the east. This is on the grounds that China, Russia and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are more reliable partners than Europe, let alone the US.

The IRGC believe that Iran stands to significantly benefit as a key node in China’s infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiative and will not be confronted by Beijing on its human rights record. Some Iranian hardliners have suggested that China’s principle of non-interference means that Beijing will not resist Iran’s support of regional proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen in the way the US does. Their vision was strengthened by US President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran. China, Russia and the European Union have vowed to uphold the deal.

Iranian empathy for eurasianism has been reinforced by Chinese plans to invest $30 billion in Iranian oil and gas fields and $40 billion in Iran’s mining industry, as well as the willingness of Chinese banks to extend loans at a time that Trump is re-imposing sanctions.

Turkey’s embrace of the eurasianist idea has taken on added significance since Russia and the European Union slapped sanctions on each other because of the dispute over Russian intervention in Ukraine. The EU sanctions halted $15.8 billion in European agricultural supports to Moscow. Russian countermeasures prevent shipment of those products via Russia to China.

Perincek may, however, be pushing the envelope of his influence in his determination to restore relations between Turkey and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “The first thing that we will do after victory in the election is that we will invite Bashar Assad to Ankara and we will welcome him at the airport. We see no limitations and barriers in developing relations between Turkey and Syria and we will make our utmost efforts to materialize this objective,” Perincek vowed in a campaign speech.

More in line with Erdogan’s vision is Perincek’s admiration for China. “China today represents hope for the whole humanity. We have to keep that hope alive … Every time I visited China, I encountered a new China. I always returned to Turkey with the feelings of both surprise and admiration,” Perincek told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. 

Photo Credit: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com

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Amid ever closer cooperation with Saudi Arabia, Israel’s military appears to be adopting the kind of sectarian anti-Shia rhetoric that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is abandoning. This is part of Prince Mohammad’s bid to develop a national rather than a religious ethos and promote his yet to be defined form of moderate Islam.

The Israeli rhetoric in Arabic-language video clips (translated to English) that target a broad audience across the Middle East and North Africa emerged against the backdrop of a growing influence of conservative religious conscripts and officers in all branches of the Israeli armed forces. The videos featuring army spokesman Major Avichay Adraee were also designed to undermine support for Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, ahead of a visit to the Middle East by US peace negotiators Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt.

The trip could determine when US President Donald Trump publishes his long-awaited “art of the deal” proposal for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite Israeli and tacit Saudi and United Arab Emirates backing, this is likely to be rejected by the Palestinians as well as those Arab states that have so far refused to tow the Saudi line.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, have adopted a carrot-and-stick approach in a failed bid to weaken Hamas’ control of Gaza before the announcement of Trump’s plan.

What Did He Say?

Citing a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, Major Adraee, painting Hamas as an Iranian stooge, asserted that “whoever acts like a people is one of them … You [Hamas] have officially become Shia in line with the prophet’s saying … Have you not read the works of the classical jurists, scholars … who have clearly warned you about the threat Iranian Shiism poses to you and your peoples?”

In a twist of irony, Adraee quoted the very scholars that Prince Mohammad appears to be downplaying. They include 18th-century preacher Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, whose ultra-conservative anti-Shia interpretation of Islam shaped Saudi Arabia for much of its history; Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, a 14th-century theologist and jurist whose worldview, like that of Wahhabism, inspires militant Islam; and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born, Qatar-based scholar who was designated a terrorist by Saudi Arabia and the UAE because he is believed to be the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The enlightened Salafi scholar Imam Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab warned you about the threat posed by these people to the Islamic faith with the heresies that they adhere to. He says: ‘Look at this atheist’s words. You will see that he employs rafidah [rejectionist] terms. They [the rafidah] are more harmful to the faith than Jews or Christians.’ You follow the Iranians who pose a greater danger to you than any other force,” Major Adraee said referring to Shias in derogatory language employed by ultra-conservative Sunni Muslims.

Adraee went on to quote ibn Tamiyyah as saying: “I know that the best of them are hypocrites. They fabricate lies and produce corrupt ideas to undermine the Islamic faith.” Hypocrites is a term often used by ultra-conservatives to describe Shias. The Israeli spokesman cited Sheikh Qaradawi as asserting that “the threat of the Shias is their attempt to penetrate Sunni society. They are able to do so with their excessive wealth.”

Addressing supporters of Hamas, Major Adraee asked: “Do you still want to be allies with these corrupt people while you claim to follow Islam … and respect Islamic scholars whose teachings you proudly disregard? Don’t be hypocrites.” He concluded his remarks by warning that those who, guided by Iran, caused disruption would “be punished in the hereafter.”

The IDF

Major Adraee’s remarks reflected not only Israeli public diplomacy tactics, but also the military’s changing demography. Religious recruits accounted for 40% of the graduates from last year’s officer training course, although they have yet to graduate to the military’s most prestigious command posts.

This month, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eizenkot, passed over Brigadier General Ofer Winter, the military’s most prominent religiously driven officer, in the promotions to division commander, one of the IDF’s most prestigious postings. As commander of Israel’s elite infantry Golani Brigade, which suffered high casualties in the 2014 war against Hamas, then-Colonel Winter made headlines by declaring holy war on the Palestinians. “The Lord God of Israel, make our way successful. … We’re going to war for your people, Israel, against an enemy that defames you,” the general told his troops. Military sources said Winter was not passed over because of his religious or political views, but as result of Eizenkot’s desire to promote younger officers.

In 2017, Major Adraee became the first serving Israeli military officer to be published by a Saudi publication when Elaph, a London-based, award-winning independent news portal established by Saudi-British businessman and journalist Othman al-Omeir, ran an anti-Hamas article that the Israeli had coauthored. Omeir is believed to have close ties to Prince Mohammad’s branch of the Saudi ruling family.

Prince Mohammad

While Israel and Saudi Arabia have found common ground in their opposition to Iran, Adraee’s anti-Shia rhetoric has appeared to hark back to language that Prince Mohammad has recently sought to avoid in his effort to redress the kingdom’s image as a stronghold of ultra-conservatism and sectarianism.

Although he accused Iran in an interview in April with The Atlantic of wanting to spread “their extremist Shiite [Shia] ideology,” he insisted that “we don’t believe we have Wahhabism. We believe we have, in Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shiite … You will find a Shiite in the cabinet, you will find Shiites in government, the most important university in Saudi Arabia is headed by a Shiite … We have no problem with the Shiites. We have a problem with the ideology of the Iranian regime.”

Mohammed Husain F. Jassem, a Middle East analyst with London-based research group Integrity UK, who translated Major Adraee’s clips into English, said: “The rhetoric used by the IDF is exactly the same as the one used by ISIS [Islamic State], al-Qaeda and anti-Shia bigots in propaganda videos and print.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Israel Defense Forces

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Electoral upsets have become the norm. The latest upheaval that swept aside the long-standing president of Fenerbahce SC, the political crown jewel of Turkish football, has taken on added significance with Turkey heading into crucial snap elections on June 24.

The parallels between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his defeated ally, Aziz Yildirim, who headed Fenerbahce for more than 20 years, become even more striking given that Middle Eastern football pitches often serve as barometers of political trends. “Fenerbahce achieved change … now it’s time for big change in Turkey,” tweeted Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate for the Republican People’s Party, the main opposition.

To be sure, Erdogan remains Turkey’s most popular politician and the undisputed frontrunner in the historic poll, which will see the country transition from a parliamentary to a presidential system. His chances are bolstered by his control of much of the media as a result of economic pressure, as well as turning Turkey into one of the world’s foremost jailers of journalists.

Yet the specter of Erdogan failing to win an unqualified majority or even losing looms for the first time since he became prime minister in 2002 and president in 2014. The president’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces a united opposition for the first time against the backdrop of political, economic and social turmoil, electoral fatigue and a lackluster AKP election campaign. “People are not enthusiastic this time — neither us nor our voters. We are just saying the same things as before: we built a new bridge, we are building a new airport. There are no good slogans, no good songs,” the Financial Times quoted an AKP official as saying.

Yildirim was the first public figure to become embroiled in the dispute between Erdogan and exiled Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, whom the president accused of being behind a failed military coup in 2016. President Erdogan used the botched attempt to topple him to strengthen his grip on power by cracking down on the media; purging tens of thousands from the ranks of the bureaucracy, judiciary, military and academia; and increasingly transforming Turkey into an illiberal democracy at best.

Erdogan and Yildirim have dominated their respective spheres of influence for much of the last two decades. Yildirim ensured that his club’s traditional ties to the state became ever closer. Fenerbahce is Erdogan’s favorite team.

On June 3, Yildirim was overwhelmingly defeated by Ali Koc, a business tycoon, who in 2013 provoked Erdogan’s ire by opening his hotel on Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square to anti-government Gezi Park protesters who were being attacked by law enforcement.

Like Erdogan, Yildirim aggressively attacks his detractors. In many ways, he believes that he is above the law and positions himself as the only candidate capable of resolving his club’s economic woes that, like Turkey itself, is mired in some $200 million of debt. And like Erdogan, Yildirim hoped that his emphasis on development and construction projects, including a new stadium and indoor gymnasium, would secure him another term. President Erdogan’s campaign harps on his massive infrastructure projects that have helped balloon Turkey’s debt to $453.2 billion.

Erdogan and Yildirim both see themselves as underdogs. In 1999, Erdogan was jailed for four months for reading a poem that was considered inflammatory. Like Erdogan, Yildirim used his imprisonment in 2012 after being implicated in Turkey’s largest match fixing scandal — which erupted as part of a battle between Erdogan and his former ally, Gulen, the scholar who leads what was one of the world’s richest Islamic movements — as a tool to garner sympathy and votes.

The election tactics failed to work for Yildirim. While his campaign built on the pork barrel politics of construction, Koc focused on the economy of the future with a team made up of information technology and product design experts as well as bankers, even if construction is one main stay of his conglomerate, the largest in Turkey. Koc Holding accounts for 10% of the country’s GDP. Similarly, Ince, the opposition candidate who started his career as a physicist, campaigns on promises of innovation. He emphasizes robotics and design and the need to enhance knowledge and upgrade critical and innovative thinking.

If the record of the past two years is any indication, voters, who have lost confidence in their political systems and leaders, produce upsets when they go to the polls. Yildirim’s defeat mirrors the defeat of traditional politicians by the likes of US President Donald Trump and populists in central and Eastern Europe. Most recently, the return of Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad as the world’s oldest elected head of government constituted a vote against the status quo.

Drawing conclusions from Yildirim’s defeat would be folly. But so would ignoring the message it bears. At the very least, it suggests that Erdogan’s hope that a snap parliamentary and presidential election would easily secure him another term is in question, and that he may be fighting his most difficult battle yet.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com

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Nothing in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to China is undisputed. Food is often emblematic of disputes over identity, history and political claims that underlie an arc of crisis wracked by ethnic and religious conflict; clamor for political, economic, social, national and minority rights; efforts by states and ethnic groups to garner soft power or assert hegemony and international branding; diplomatic leverage; and great power rivalry.

Israel and Lebanon fight hummus wars and join Palestine in battles over the origins of multiple dishes. Turks, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Iranians claim as their national dish baklava, a sweet whose variations over time reflect the region’s history. They fight over the sweet’s origins and even that of the word baklava (or baklawa in Arabic).

The battles over the origin of foods have forced countries to rewrite aspects of their histories and major companies to review the way they market products. Food also serves as a barometer of the influence of regional powers.

Iranian dates flooding Iraqi markets suggest that Iran is winning its proxy war with Saudi Arabia, another major grower, in Iraq, the world’s biggest producer of the fruit prior to the country’s multiple conflicts dating back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Iranian domination of the market symbolizes the Islamic Republic’s massive inroads into Iraq, ranging from the fact that it is the country’s foremost trading partner to its political influence in Baghdad and military sway exemplified by Iraq’s powerful Shia militias. Saudi Arabia, which only recently switched from effectively boycotting Iraq to forging political, economic, and cultural links, is playing catch-up. The kingdom garnered a degree of soft power on the soccer pitch and has plans to invest in Iraqi sectors like petrochemicals, energy and agriculture.

The Hummus War

The more than a decade-long Israel-Lebanon hummus wars are both a struggle to claim whose food it is, counter-perceived Israeli attempts to colonize Palestinian and Levantine culture, and an effort to make an international mark though securing a place in the Guinness Book of Records by competing for the title of having made the largest pile of the chickpea dip. Hummus symbolizes “all the tension in the Middle East,” says Israeli food journalist Ronit Vered.

The war kicked into high gear with Lebanon, home to Middle Eastern haute cuisine, producing a 4,532-pound plate in 2009 prepared by 250 Lebanese sous-chefs and their 50 instructors. The aim was to deprive Israel of its earlier record engineered by Sabra, an Israeli hummus producer. That same year, Lebanon also made its mark with a 223-kilogram kibbeh, a cylindrical, cone-shaped dish made of cracked wheat, minced onions, finely ground lean beef, lamb, goat or camel and spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and allspice.

“We were not trying to prove something, but to remind people that we should take the international market more seriously. [In the US,] if you question that hummus is Israeli, you’re an outcast, but hummus existed long before Israel,” said then-Lebanese Tourism Minister Fadi Aboud.

In a reflection of the complexity of Middle Eastern disputes and a hint toward hummus’ Arab origins, it was an Israeli-Palestinian, Jawdat Ibrahim, not an Israeli Jew who took up the Lebanese challenge. Ibrahim, the owner of a popular restaurant in Abu Ghosh, months later cooked up a 4,090-kilogram hummus that was served in a satellite dish. “It was [a] big issue ­­that hummus was Lebanese. I said, ‘No, hummus is for everybody.’ I hold a meeting in the village and I say, ‘We are going to break Guinness Book of World Record.’ Not the Israeli government, the people of Abu Gosh,” Ibrahim said. More recently, Ibrahim has come under fire for charging a Chinese party of eight $4,400 for a meal that included hummus.

Food battles do not stop at the borders of Africa and Asia. They extend into Europe and impact projections of national heritage and commerce. In March, Virgin Atlantic felt obliged to drop classification of a salad on its in-flight menu as Palestinian, even though it was based on a Palestinian recipe, after pro-Israel passengers protested and threatened to boycott the airline. The airline opted for the more generic name, Couscous Salad.

“Our salad is made using a mix of maftoul [traditional Palestinian couscous] and couscous, which is complemented by tomatoes and cucumber which really helps lift the salad from a visual perspective and is seasoned with a parsley, mint and lemon vinaigrette. However, we always want to do the right thing for our customers and as a result of feedback, we have renamed this menu item from our food offering at the end of last year and we’re extremely sorry for any offense caused,” said a spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic.

Palestinian cookbook writer Christiane Dabdoub Nasser quipped: “Maftoul is Palestinian, just like pasties are Cornish and pâté de foie gras is French. No one can deny that and yet the airline, to add insult to injury, apologizes for the offense that the mention of Palestinian maftoul might have caused.”

Two months earlier, American cookbook writer and television personality Rachel Ray sparked an uproar on social media when she showcased hummus alongside stuffed grape leaves, and various dips made from beet, eggplant, sun dried tomatoes, walnut and red pepper as well as tabbouleh, a salad, as Israeli dishes, disregarding their Levantine origins.

“This is cultural genocide. It’s not Israeli food. It’s Arab (Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian). First the Israelis take the land and ethnically cleanse it of Arabs. Now they take their food and culture and claim it’s theirs too! Shame,” tweeted prominent Arab American James Zogby.

Britain and Sweden

In 2015, British supermarket chain Waitrose took a hit when it distributed a magazine entitled “Taste of Israel” that featured tahini, zaatar and other dishes that, like Ray’s foods, originate in pre-Israel Arab lands across the Levant.

Similarly, Sweden recently conceded that meatballs, long celebrated as one the internationally best-known icons of traditional Swedish cuisine, were in fact an Ottoman import. Sweden’s official Twitter account, featuring Swedish multi-national Ikea’s rendering of the dish, admitted that Swedish King Charles XII had brought the recipe from Turkey in the early 18th century when returned from five years in exile. “Let’s stick to the facts!” Sweden said. Swedish food historians and gourmets had already accepted that Kaldolmens Day or Cabbage Roll Day, which commemorates the death of King Charles, celebrates another dish that he discovered while dwelling among the Ottomans.

Refuting Sweden’s claim was easy compared to battles over baklava, whose history dating to the eighth century BC Assyria tells the story of shifting regional power, changing tastes and the communality of food that can prove to be equally divisive. Turks, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Iranians all contributed to baklava as we know it, yet they are reticent to acknowledge the sweet as a regional rather than a national dish. Greek seamen and merchants brought it to Athens where cooks introduced a malleable, thin leaf dough to replace the Assyrian rough, bread-like mixture of mixture of flour and liquid. Armenians added cinnamon and cloves, while Arabs introduced rose and orange blossom water. Iranians invented baklava’s diamond-shape and perfected it with a nut stuffing perfumed with jasmine.

Ebtisam Masto is a refugee who fled war-torn Syria with her six children to Beirut where she joined a cooking program in an effort to rebuild her life. Summing up the region’s battle of the palates, she says, “Food is a way to preserve history and culture, to pass traditions on to the next generation so that they can understand their origins and identity. If we don’t preserve [food] and teach it to them, it will disappear. It is our duty to keep it going.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Subtle shifts in Chinese energy imports suggest that Beijing may be able to exert influence in the Middle East in alternative ways that do not involve military or overt economic pressure. The shifts involve greater dependency of Gulf states on oil and gas exports to China, the world’s largest importer, at a time that the People’s Republic has been diversifying imports at the expense of Gulf producers.

The shifts first emerged in 2015 when Chinese oil imports from Saudi Arabia rose a mere 2%, while purchase of Russian oil jumped almost 30%. Since then, Russia rather than Saudi Arabia has been China’s biggest crude oil supplier for most of the time.

The marker changes were reinforced by the US shale boom, a resulting drop in US imports from the Gulf, and President Donald Trump’s tougher trade policies. “With the Trump administration, the pressure on China to balance accounts with the U.S. is huge … Buying U.S. oil clearly helps toward that goal to reduce the disbalance,” said Marco Dunand, chief executive and co-founder of commodity trading house Mercuria.

At the same time, China became in 2016 the largest investor in the Arab world. These investments are worth $29.5 billion, much of which targets infrastructure, including the construction of industrial parks, pipelines, ports and roads.

Compounding the impact of shifts in Chinese energy imports is the fact that, despite support for Russian policy in the Middle East, Beijing increasingly fears that Moscow’s approach risks escalating conflicts and has complicated China’s ability to safeguard its mushrooming interests in the region. Viewed from Beijing, the Middle East has deteriorated into a part of the world in which regional cohesion has been shattered, countries are fragmenting, domestic institutions are losing their grip, and political violence threatens to effect security and stability in northwest China.

China’s concern is likely to increase if and when the guns fall silent in Syria and the country begins to focus on reconstruction. Already, China worries that Uyghur — Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province — militants in Syria and Iraq are heading to areas closer to Xinjiang in Pakistan and Afghanistan. An end to the war in Syria, moreover, opens up economic opportunity, but is also likely to sharpen rivalry between Russia and China as that will play to Beijing’s strength and highlight Moscow’s weakness.

Beijing’s interest in Syrian reconstruction goes beyond dollars and cents. “Syria can be a key logistics hub for China. Its history is the key to bringing stability in the Levant, meaning it has to be incorporated into China’s plan in the region. From a security perspective, if Syria is not secure, neither will [be] China’s investment in neighbouring countries,” said Kamal Alam, a Syrian military analyst.

Credible Alternative?

All of this raises the question of how Beijing can best stand up for its interests against the backdrop of a perception among Chinese scholars that China’s unsuccessful efforts to mediate in multiple conflicts in the Middle East, including Israel-Palestine, Syria and the Qatar crisis, have failed to position the People’s Republic as a credible alternative to the US and Russia.

Pouring fuel on the fire is the fact that Chinese support for Russian policies in the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere has effectively identified Beijing with Moscow, rather than allowed it to differentiate itself. The Middle East has already forced China to move away from long-standing principles that underwrote its foreign and defense policies for decades. These include non-interference in the domestic affairs of others and a refusal to establish foreign military bases.

In part, China has been able to maintain the dichotomy between theory and practice by evading public discussion on issues such as whether and under what circumstances it should use military force or apply economic pressure, as it did in 2016 when it expressed discontent with a South Korean decision to deploy a US THAAD anti-missile system.

Beyond the establishment of China’s first foreign military base in Djibouti, Chinese special forces have been advising Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in its operations against jihadists, and they have operated on the Afghan side of the Central Asian nation’s border with the People’s Republic.

China scholar Andrea Ghiselli noted that Chinese diplomats, scholars and journalists seldom focus on security in public, pointing instead to “the positive elements” of China’s relationships in the Middle East. Nevertheless, Ghiselli observed that few Middle Eastern leaders attended the 2017 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, which was intended to showcase China’s Eurasian-focused infrastructure investment initiative as “a more open and efficient international cooperation platform; a closer, stronger partnership network; and to push for a more just, reasonable and balanced international governance system.”

The Qatar crisis has rendered the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) impotent and complicated negotiations for a free trade agreement with China. Similarly, a potential withdrawal this month of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal would likely put China at odds with Middle Eastern proponents of a tougher attitude toward the Islamic Republic. These include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

Change of Plan for China

The hardening of Middle Eastern fault lines is likely to make it difficult for China to remain aloof and emphasize economic and trade relationships without getting sucked into the region’s multiple conflicts.

Saudi Arabia has so far refrained from making economics a fixture of its relationships as it attempts to counter rising Iranian influence in the Middle East. Together with the UAE, Riyadh has also not attempted to force third countries to abide by its boycott of Qatar. The question, however, is whether the GCC states will maintain their caution. Omar Ghobash, the UAE ambassador to Russia, suggested in June 2017 that the anti-Qatar alliance could “impose conditions on our own trading partners and say you want to work with us [and] then you have got to make a commercial choice.”

This alliance has so far not acted on Ghobash’s suggestion, in part because the international community — including China — has called for a negotiated end to the crisis and refused to back the Saudi-Emirati position.

The shifts in China’s energy imports, coupled with Beijing’s need to protect its interests, mean that the People’s Republic may be in a position to leverage its power in alternative ways.

“This … gives China significant leverage to impose its preference in oil contracts and improve its own energy security. It also means that China has the capability to greatly determine the economic future of countries currently engaged in all the regional hotspots, a costly endeavor that cannot be sustained without matching capital inflows,” Ghiselli said.

“Thus far,” he added, “China has bought oil and gas from both Sunni and Shia countries without showing evident preferences. However, were China to do otherwise, its actions might bring produce deep changes in the region in ways not different from those of a military intervention in favor of one of competing parties.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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On April 24, militants targeted Pakistani security forces in twin attacks in the troubled province of Baluchistan. The suicide bombings cast a light on a sustained and violent campaign against police and paramilitary units, as well as Shia and Christian minorities.

The attacks — some by groups that have had links to Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence apparatus as well as Saudi Arabia — highlight the inability of the state to implement a coherent security policy that makes a clean break with the use of militants as proxies. They also raise questions about security in a part of Pakistan that is core to the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). A Beijing-funded, $50-billion-plus infrastructure and energy program, CPEC constitutes a crown jewel in China’s Belt and Road initiative.

The attacks in which Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) — an outlawed, supremacist, anti-Shia group — figures prominently also raise the specter of Pakistani militants playing a role in potential attempts to destabilize Iran by stirring unrest among its ethnic minorities. These include the Baloch in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, which borders Pakistani Baluchistan.

The Attacks

Six policemen and paramilitary soldiers were killed and 15 others wounded in the attacks this week in the Baluchistan capital of Quetta, which saw three suicide bombers execute the assault. Earlier this month, militants in Baluchistan killed six members of Pakistan’s tiny Christian community (four of them from the same family) and two people from its Shia Muslim minority. In December 2017, two suicide bombers stormed a packed church, killing at least 10 people and wounding up to 56.

No one has claimed responsibility for this week’s attacks, which are the latest in a wave of assaults on security forces. Since 2012, such attacks have included tit-for-tat killings of scores of policemen and operatives of LeJ, which in recent years has forged ties with the Islamic State and Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan — groups that have been targeted by the Pakistani military.

Nevertheless, doubts remain about the severity of the crackdown on LeJ, which is an offshoot of Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP). SSP is an anti-Shia group with a history of Pakistani and Saudi backing that, like LeJ, has been banned but continues to operate under different names.

In interviews, SSP leaders said that Pakistani military and intelligence had advised them in 2016 to tone down their inflammatory, anti-Shia language but maintain their basic policy. The group’s leader, Ahmad Ludhyvani — a meticulously dressed Muslim scholar whose bank accounts have been blocked by Pakistani authorities — told reporters in 2016 that SSP and Saudi Arabia opposed Shia Muslim proselytization. The reporters were summoned to his headquarters in the city of Jhang, which was protected by Pakistani security forces.

“Some things are natural. It’s like when two Pakistanis meet abroad or someone from Jhang meets another person from Jhang in Karachi. It’s natural to be closest to the people with whom we have similarities … We are the biggest anti-Shia movement in Pakistan. We don’t see Saudi Arabia interfering in Pakistan,” Ludhyvani said to this author over lunch in 2016.

Tariq Khosa, the former Baluchistan police chief and ex-head of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, blames the violence in the province on Pakistan’s use of religious militants as proxies in efforts to crush nationalist insurgents. “The decision to use Shafiq as a proxy against certain Baloch separatist organisations allowed proscribed sectarian organisations to regroup in and around Quetta,” Khosa said, referring to Shafiq Mengal, an LeJ leader.

Maulana Ramzan Mengal — an Islamic scholar, a fellow tribesman of Shafiq Mengal and leader of SSP-associated groups in Baluchistan — has, according to sources close to the militants, been the funnel for large sums of Saudi money flowing into ultra-conservative madrassas in the province over the past two years.

Khosa said the government’s policy was abetted by divvying up responsibility for security in Baluchistan between the police and the Baluchistan Levies, a force recruited from local tribesmen in each district. The two forces, as well as the military’s Frontier Corps, maintain separate lines of command and have no mechanism to share intelligence. Unlike the police, who are bound by Pakistani law, the Levies operate according to tribal laws and practices that protect militants from arrest and/or prosecution.

Security of Chinese Nationals

The ambiguity of government policy and security arrangements in Baluchistan complicates the task of a 15,000-men-strong Pakistani military force that is deployed to protect thousands of Chinese nationals working on energy and infrastructure projects in the province and elsewhere in the country. In February, unidentified gunmen shot and killed a Chinese shipping company executive in the violence-plagued financial hub of Karachi. Just a month earlier, a Chinese engineer working on an energy project in Rawalpindi vanished and is believed to have been kidnapped, while in 2017 a Chinese couple, both teachers, were abducted in Quetta and killed.

The Chinese embassy in Islamabad warned its nationals in December 2017 of the threat of imminent attacks on Chinese targets. The embassy advised “Chinese-invested organizations and Chinese citizens to increase security awareness, strengthen internal precautions, reduce trips outside as much as possible, and avoid crowded public spaces.”

While Pakistan has made progress in its selective crackdown on militancy, a restoration of the kind of security that will give confidence to foreign investors and squash creeping doubts in China is likely to depend on political reforms that put an end to the country’s perceived distinction between “good and bad terrorists.”

“Nobody will come and invest in this climate of fear,” quipped Muhammad Zafar Paracha, director at the Pakistani partner of MoneyGram International during a recent visit to the heavily fortified Baloch port city of Gwadar. “Without courageous political reform, Pakistani leaders are incentivizing the internationalization of Balochistan and sowing the seeds for a dangerous harvest,” added Pakistan expert Emily Whalen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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