Monthly Archives: October 2024

Britain, Gaza, Government, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

A region in flames

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: One year on from the 7 October attacks, the region is slipping deeper into war. The conflict continues to destroy countless lives. The scenes from Gaza since that fateful day have haunted millions around the world and the crisis is being felt with increasing intensity in Lebanon and the West Bank

THE last twelve months has been a period of slaughter and destruction for the Middle East. Far from any awakening from this nightmare, the region is slipping deeper into war. Israel is planning a “significant and serious” retaliation against Iran for its missile attack. The cycle of retribution is spinning faster, with the conflagration feared growing closer. Once more, civilians are paying the price.

On 7 October 2023, more than 1,200 men, women, and children were killed at a family festival in Israel by Hamas fighters who had crossed from Gaza: the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, in the country built to guarantee their safety. Another 250 – the youngest nine months old – were taken hostage. Though around half were subsequently released, many have yet to return home. Others never will.

The ensuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza has killed almost 43,000 Palestinians; most were women and children, including hundreds of infants. The chilling abbreviation WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family – has become commonplace. The survivors are displaced, hungry, and desperate, and the humanitarian catastrophe grows as Israel pursues its war in the wasteland. The last year has also been the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Already 2,000 people are dead in Lebanon.

Israel was embraced with sympathy in the wake of the Hamas attacks. Its right to defend itself does not permit it to trample the laws of war. Ministers and politicians have openly expressed – in the words of prominent Israelis – “the discourse of annihilation, expulsion, and revenge”. That speaks of the impact of permanent occupation; this story did not begin twelve months ago. Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to remain prime minister, and the zealotry of his political partners, have prevailed over the lives of Israeli hostages as well as Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s leaders too lie dead. The fear of another 7 October is understandably strengthened when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praises “a legitimate act”. But Israel’s tactical success to date against Hamas and Hezbollah is not the same as a strategic triumph. Military victory is a mirage. Israeli citizens are under immediate threat from an expanded war and the destruction of other homes and families is no foundation for their long-term, sustainable security.

Israel is now increasingly isolated, not because outsiders did not register the horror of 7 October, but because they cannot ignore the grave suffering of Palestinians. Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stand accused of crimes against humanity at the international criminal court. The international court of justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, calling for immediate withdrawal and reparations, and in January ordered it to ensure no genocidal acts are committed in Gaza. While the US continues to ship arms to an ally that ignores its warnings, others are recoiling.

The release of hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza – and now Lebanon too – become only more urgent as the months pass. Power-hungry men of hatred have pursued a war in which innocent men, women, and children across the region have died. Ending it requires diplomacy addressing not only the immediate crisis but long-term security needs, including a fair settlement for Palestinians.

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Britain, Europe, Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

The stakes are high for any target Israel chooses

MIDDLE EAST

THE idiom that “revenge is best served cold” doesn’t apply in the Middle East, because retribution is delivered swift and white-hot.

For in this febrile part of the world, failure to respond to military aggression can be fatal. Enemies smell weaknesses and will readily strike again.

And so, following Iran’s unprecedented missile strike against Israel earlier this week in this rapidly unfolding conflict, it is no surprise that Israel is already planning revenge.

The fact that a seemingly large proportion of the 200 or so Iranian rockets fired were neutered by Israel’s famed “Iron Dome” is irrelevant. Israel will strike back. The question now is just what form that military response will take.  

There are three likely options for retaliation. First, and perhaps most dangerously, Israel may well seize this as an opportunity to strike at the heart of Iran’s nuclear bomb project. Although Iran does not yet have the Bomb, its nuclear programme is alarmingly well advanced. Israel has long believed Iran’s nuclear ambitions poses an existential threat to its security and existence.

Writing on social media, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called this “the greatest opportunity in 50 years” to “destroy Iran’s nuclear programme”.

The most likely target for such an attack is the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre in the centre of Iran, 300km from the capital Tehran. Earlier this year, Israel bombed a nearby military site, a symbolic warning to its Islamist foe that it has the Isfahan centre in its sights.

It houses research reactors, a uranium conversion plant, and a fuel production base. It’s essential to Iran’s nuclear programme. A knock-out blow against this, or a similar facility, would certainly appease the hardliners in Benyamin Netanyahu’s government whose support the leader relies.

However, this strategy would mark a grave escalation in the conflict and poses the ugly risk of significant collateral damage and unintended consequences.

Such a strike could blast radioactive material into the air, unleashing a Chernobyl-style cloud of atomic pollution across the region. In the worst case, a strike on a reactor could even trigger a nuclear “chain reaction” – leading to widespread destruction reminiscent of the 1945 atomic strike on Hiroshima.

Israel must also consider that Iran’s mullahs may retaliate by spiking its future warheads with radioactive waste, creating “dirty bombs” that could have ramifications far wider than a regular missile – because even shot down by the Iron Dome the radioactivity would still disperse.

Another of Netanyahu’s options is that he could try to disrupt Iran’s military arsenals with smaller, localised strikes using its fleet of American F35 and F16 fighter jets. However, considering Iran boasts thousands of missiles and drones across the country this would not nullify the threat of a further strike by the mullahs similar to that seen this week.

Realistically, the most effective method of reprisal would be to attack command-and-control centres, the only places from which Iran can fire its long-range weaponry. Although these are buried deep underground and are incredibly well fortified, they will now be vulnerable to Isreal’s so-called “bunker-buster” bombs such as those used to assassinate the Hezbollah leader last week in Beirut.

There is, however, one further option, though fraught with danger – not just for the cauldron of the Middle East but for the world. If Israel really does intend to shake the foundations of the Iranian regime, rather than just give it a bloodied nose, it could choose to attack Kharg Island, Iran’s only oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf and the foundation of the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ riches.

If Israel does this, the price of oil will sky-rocket far beyond anything we saw during the early days of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Shia Iran will then likely retaliate – as it has vowed – by attacking oil infrastructure in Sunni Saudi Arabia, its enemy, with the goal of further disrupting the global oil supply. This would lead to a severe world shortage with inevitable energy rationing in Europe and the UK.

So far, Israel’s political allies – notably the US and the UK – have stood strong with Netanyahu. But if Israel upsets global energy supplies, international support could rapidly dissipate.

There’s a cruel irony to all this. Because if Israel does strike Iran’s oil industry, Europe could even face the ignominy of going cap in hand to purchase Russian oil – albeit through proxies and intermediaries.

Netanyahu and his war cabinet must choose their next move very carefully indeed.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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