Archives for posts with tag: Syria

We haven’t done it…Again

January 1, 2017 //
0

It might look from the air like the Burning Man festival. It’s a gathering in the desert, but at 81,000 inhabitants in 2015, this gathering exceeds the population of Black Rock City by approximately 12,000 people. This is Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Last September, at the height of the Syrian crisis, Israel refused to take refugees from the conflict. PM Netanyahu claimed Israel was ‘too small‘. (That link points to the NY Times, but a google search on ‘Israel refuses Syrian refugees also provides links to the LA Times, Al Jazeera, and the Daily Mail in the first ten hits.) During the endgame last month the Israeli government had agreed to take a few. Netanyahu announced, ‘We see the tragedy of terrible suffering of civilians and I’ve asked the Foreign Ministry to seek ways to expand our medical assistance to the civilian causalities of the Syrian tragedy, specifically in Aleppo where we’re prepared to take in wounded women and children, and also men if they’re not combatants.’

I’ve possibly mentioned before that I’m Jewish by birth and have great love for the holy land and look forward to visiting there again, some day. However, I cry whenever enough Israelis vote for Netanyahu to put him back into office. He’s spent several decades fighting for Israel’s right to pariah-hood amongst the family of nations. At the moment they could have taken the moral high ground and admitted the refugees from one of this century’s more insane conflicts, he said no. Whenever there has been a chance to move towards peace, he increases the state of war. The main exponent of this behaviour has been the war on Israel’s Palestinians. (This subject is far more complicated than I present it and I know that in my idealism, I miss a lot of salient issues. I’ve consistently missed the point on this issue for well over 30 years, and I probably won’t stop now.) 

On the one hand there’s the treatment of the residents of the Gaza Strip, an insane piece of real estate sandwiched between the Negev desert, Egyptian Sinai, and a small piece of Mediterranean beachfront. Every couple of years, that area heats up and some idiots fire rockets from the strip into Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In reprisal, the IDF rolls in tanks and destroys another part of the Strip. Note that Israel blockades the Gaza Strip from receiving a great number of things including construction materials such as concrete. Rebuilding after these invasions, from what I gather, is well nigh impossible.

On the other hand, there are those settlements I mentioned. The ones the UN condemned last week or the week before, when, for the first time in 40 years, the US didn’t use its veto power to support Israel’s ‘right’ to construct Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The history of the settlements is well documented. For a very long time, I argued that Israel won the West Bank fair and square in 1967 and should have the right to do with it as it pleases. Of course, this ignores the fact that for 19 years the area we now call the West Bank had been in Jordanian hands, and Jordan had done feck-all to integrate the Palestinian population. When Israel occupied this area (and The Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert) at the end of the Six-Day War, there was already. The issue that refugees of the previous two wars for Israel’s right to exist (’48 and ’56) had deprived the residents of the area of houses to which the only indication the houses had ever existed were the keys the refugees and their descendants still cherished. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank precipitated its own refugee crisis for which Lebanon also provided the real estate for refugee camps.

I’m going to piss some people off here, not the least of whom are family members and friends who have made aliyah. At this point, the settlements are an abhorrent Israeli echo of Germany’s early 20th century claim to ‘lebensraum’ in northern Czechoslovakia. Netanyahu said last year that Israel is too small. The problem isn’t that Israel is too small; it’s that Israel thinks too small. Too small to do the right things for peace in a time of war, too small to say repudiate decades of No with a resounding yes, too small to give of its bounty instead of taking again.

As I said, I know this is more complicated than that. I’m well aware of how crazily hateful Israel’s enemies have been since the first shaking of the British Mandate. Remember, though, that Israel managed to make peace with Egypt and to establish diplomatic relations with Jordan. The process of peace is slow, but it was working. However, hate is easy and taking and holding the moral high ground is hard. An argument could probably be made that if the US hadn’t invaded Iraq, and perhaps had worked against the inflammation of the late 90s intifada, then we might be much closer. As I said, it’s really complicated. And dreams of what could have been are just that. Working with the now is much harder.

Beer: Brewdog Punk IPA // Music: Muslimgauze: Intifaxa

Tags , , , ,
Categories Politics, war

Iran in exile

October 30, 2015 //
0

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/30/more-than-20-dead-missile-attack-iranian-refugee-camp-baghdad
It’s a strange and dangerous time we’re living in. The article indicates that those killed  in this missile attack in Iraq were members of the MEK, an Iranian opposition group welcomed into Iraq by Saddam Hussein in the early 80s. No source in the article blames Iran, save for a member of the same group based in Paris. She’s adamant that all concerned know  it was Iran who made the strike.
Now that there’s a power vacuum in Iraq, those opposed to the government of Iran there are sitting ducks. (Much like the Kurds in Turkey and Syria now that Russia has joined the fighting there.) With the Revolutionary Iranian government a welcome party at talks about the future of Syria, and with a newly negotiated agreement between Iran and the US a done deal, it seems they have taken a free hand with regards their opponents. And as the MEK are right next door, they were an easy target. The situation reminds me of how Stalin got rid of Trotsky, but while Trotsky was easy to find and relatively easy to off, his murder was committed at close range with a small tool. The MEK was hit with missiles – they weren’t even given the benefit of looking their attackers in the eye. 

While I’ve been a reluctant supporter of the agreement to bring Iran in from the cold, I have a friend who has recently moved from Los Angeles to Jerusalem and she’s been adamant that this agreement is bad for the region and gives tacit support to the mullahs who have spent the 35 years since the revolution calling for the annihilation of Israel. This seems to be the first strike against foes outside Iran’s borders in a very long time. 

And, yeah, as noted above, the Russians are providing air support for Assad in his war against his own people. Dan Carlin recently noted that Putin is at least being forthright about wading in. (If you don’t listen yet to Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, I can’t recommend it highly enough.) He’s making a case for Russian legitimacy as a player in the region and in the current conflict. The US hasn’t been able to train a dozen fighters in the battle against Assad. We don’t even know what that means. Assad’s foes include long time opponents of the regime and new players like ISIS. The West doesn’t know how to distinguish these and hasn’t really made an effort to do so. Carlin makes the case that this is what accounts for the power vacuum in most of the places associated with the Arab Spring including Libya, Egypt, and, yeah, Syria.

And, as I’ve noted, none of this is new. Some of the issues date back to before World War I, others are closely related to other civil wars in the region – Lebanon’s for example. This is gonna sound like a hard left turn into one of my music posts, but bear with me for a minute. In 1984 (when Lebanon fell into chaos), The Human League released a single called The Lebanon. It was the first US single off Hysteria, and their first US flop in about 3 years. Part of the problem was the guitars, and part was the title. In England, that country nestled between Syria, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea has an article. In the US, it’s simply called Lebanon. The lyrics are fairly simplistic, offering a verse each to a man who joins the army and a woman who simply recalls when life was easier, and a chorus that asked ‘Who will have won when the soldiers have gone / From the Lebanon’. I was in high school at the time working at an independent record store.  My boss asked me if I thought it would be a hit. I thought perhaps it would be top 30, as it didn’t have the bounce of Mirror Man or Don’t You Want Me. It peaked at 62.  Looking as deeply as Wikipedia offers into the history of Lebanon’s civil war (which lasted 15 years), it’s a surprise Syria didn’t sink into chaos a long time ago, but the factions in Lebanon were far more diverse and featured only a supporting cast from Syria.

I think brinigng Lebanon into my discussion is simply a way of saying the madness of Iran striking opponents in Iraq, and Russia taking out Syria’s opponents in Syria (not to mention of few of Turkey’s in Turkey who just happen also to be opponents of ISIS as well) is merely an extension of hte madness that region has experienced for decades.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Politics, religion, war

All this and World War III

April 22, 2015 //
0

(Title nicked from a 70s-era compilation of Beatles covers.)

Last year the band Einsturzende Neubauten released Lament, an album commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I. In interviews, frontman Blixa Bargeld advanced the argument that the first world war never actually ended – the parties that marched across Belgium and France in 1914 continued to battle in other forms in other locations. All the results of the Sykes-Picot Agreement could be said to be further battles in that war. (My favourite track on that album is The Willy-Nicky Telegrams, in which Bargeld and Alexander Hacke recite the texts of communiques between Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas that led up to the war. The two were cousins.)

Side note: This week marks the 100th anniversary of the first recorded chemical weapon attack on soldiers in Ypres and seems a good place to share the Green Fields of France.

Disclosure: I am neither a political scientist nor an historian.

That said, I have recently stated to whomever will listen; and possibly here, that I’ll be quite surprised if we get out of this decade without a world war. I think now that it’s too late for that if. I’m pretty certain it’s already begun; we just haven’t declared it yet. Peace has been on life support since we took down the World Trade Centre and I think it’s time, as they say on the hospital dramas, to call it.

KMFDM: World War III

On Rachel Maddow’s 20 April 2015 show, she discussed a variety of the conflicts in the middle east including Yemen and Libya. Iran is currently supporting Yemen against the Saudi forces there. (Note: The BBC now reportbattleships that the Saudis have concluded their air campaign in Yemen.) On that front, the US supported Saudi. In the fight against ISIL, a Sunni force, the US supports Shiite Iran.

ETA: NYT now reports that Saudi air strikes in Yemen have resumed.

Moving east, we have the smoldering war in Ukraine. Between that (admittedly large) country and the very hot war in Syria, there’s only Turkey, another front in ISIL’s advance.

In addition, recent reports of Russian ships cruising near Britain add credence to arguments that Putin’s hostility isn’t limited to former Soviet republics.

And trade wars – the sanctions against Russia over its recent hostile actions may be yet be enough to push us all into a much hotter war.

I’m not without hope in these matters, but the decisions lie with very wealthy corporations that don’t look kindly on efforts to slow the continued accumulation of wealth. This is why we defend oil fields to the death, but care little for those who try to live their lives farther from those natural resources or who fight the conglomerates whose extraction efforts also make such places unliveable.

I don’t have numbers but the worldwide refugee crisis is only getting worse. Syria is one hotspot. (Israel could have taken the moral high ground at the start of the civil war, but unsurprisingly, Bibi didn’t.) Libya currently has the headlines because of the horrific tragedies occurring almost daily in the waters between Libya and Italy. These aren’t new, but Berlusconi had an agreement with the Gaddafi regime to keep a lid on those trying to escape. With Gaddafi dead (and Libya on the verge of being a failed state) and Berlusconi no longer Italy’s autocrat, it’s no longer in force.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Europe, Politics, war