Category Archives: Society

Government, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Society, United Nations, United States

Israeli/Palestinian conflict: A need for restraint…

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: It must surely be in the interests of both sides in this missile strewn battle not to let their actions spiral out of control

In the first three days of its air offensive against the Palestinian militant group Hamas – to which Islamic Jihad is affiliated – the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) struck more than 780 targets in Gaza, including leaders of the organisation, rocket-launchers and missiles which have been deliberately hidden and concealed among the territory’s civilian population.

In response, Hamas has been firing hundreds of its own rockets at Israel from shifting launch-sites in the Gaza Strip.

What makes this latest outbreak so terrifying in the endless tragedy of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the extraordinary intensity of both the provocation from Hamas, and the response from Israel: Hamas for the first time in years has been directly targeting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As a result, nearly three million people in these cities have been forced into bomb-shelters over recent days.

In the past week, Hamas rockets have also been fired at targets as far away as Hadera and Haifa in northern Israel, and at the heavily-protected Dimona plant where Israel’s nuclear weapons are made and assembled.

Hamas’s military wing, the Army of Al-Qassam, has only been able to display such ambition because it has recently added a formidable new weapon to its armoury of more than 11,000 missiles – a clutch of Syrian-made M-302 rockets with a range of 100 miles. Before now, the maximum range of their rockets had been in the region of 50 miles.

With this dramatic escalation in Hamas’s ability to strike deep into Israel, the IDF is poised for a ground invasion of Gaza.

It is no understatement to say that the inevitable bloodshed and carnage that would follow such a development could inflame tensions throughout the Middle East, especially if Hamas manages to incite a general Palestinian uprising or intifada.

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Given the horrific chaos that already exists in Syria and Iraq, it is little wonder that world leaders are deeply anxious and calling for restraint on both sides.

Ever since the Israeli state was created in 1948, and carved out of land that used to be Palestine, there has always been a sense of grievance among Palestinian Arabs, many of whom were dispossessed when Jewish settlers moved in.

Although 1.7 million Palestinian Arabs still live in Israel, huge numbers left their land and moved to Gaza – a strip of territory 25 miles long by seven miles at its widest – which is now home to 1.5 million people and one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.

Whatever the rights and wrongs – and there are wrongs on both sides – it is perhaps understandable that their descendants feel resentment towards Israelis who live on land they believe is rightfully theirs.

This resentment has resulted in continual attacks on Israel by Palestinians, and the latest cycle of violence started after Hamas kidnapped three Israeli schoolboys on June 12 in a bid to boost its popularity among Palestinians in the run-up to elections in less than six months time.

The militant group coldly murdered its teenage captives – possibly in panic after discovering they were not Israeli soldiers who could be used as bargaining chips to swap for released Hamas prisoners.

Even President Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the Palestinian Authority in coalition with Hamas, reluctantly condemned the atrocity – although cynics said this was to ensure continued US and EU financial aid.

But in swift retribution, Israeli vigilantes kidnapped a Palestinian teenager and killed him. He was almost certainly burnt alive, for it has been reported that soot was found in his throat and lungs.

The Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu condemned the vigilante killing in the strongest terms, saying those responsible for the crime would be met with the full weight of the law.

Nevertheless, the Israelis felt so violated by the callous murder of their own three teenagers, that Netanyahu had to act in response to his people’s demands that something had to be done to smash the Hamas terrorist network.

Yet, this was almost certainly what the ruthless strategists of Hamas had cynically intended. For incurring the wrath and anger of Israel is a vote-winning move for them – particularly since they now possess their new long-range missiles to hit back with. Indeed, as soon as Israel launched its revenge offensive, the Syrian made M-302 missiles were wheeled into action – even though Hamas does not have proper guidance systems. As a result, some of the rockets either ended up in the sea or exploded harmlessly in open countryside.

How many of these long-range missiles Hamas have in total is not clear, but it is likely to be in the low tens. Most likely they came from Iran.

A blog on the IDF website recently suggested a ship carrying them was intercepted by Israeli commandos in March in the Red Sea, off the African coast. It stated that the ‘Iranian weapons’ on board were ‘destined for Gaza terrorists’. The ship was due to drop them off in Sudan, from where they would be delivered overland to Gaza via Egypt.

The Israelis, too, have brought into action their own state-of-the-art weaponry – not least their extraordinarily effective US -financed Iron Dome defence system. This instantly detects any missile launch from Gaza, and computers in a command truck calculate the trajectory and target destination, enabling a Tamir interceptor missile to destroy the rocket high in the air.

The ingenuity of the Iron Dome is that it can work out if the missile is likely to hit a populated area, in which case it is demolished. If it is heading for the countryside or the sea, it is left to explode.

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In Hamas’s last massed rocket assault, in 2012, Iron Dome had an 84 per cent success rate against 426 incoming missiles. This partially explains why, despite missiles being fired by both sides, there have been no Israeli deaths so far, compared to more than 85 Palestinian fatalities.

While IDF warplanes and drones pound Hamas targets, Netanyahu has called up 40,000 reservists to signal to Hamas that he is serious about a ground incursion into Gaza.

Mr Netanyahu will be reluctant to send in his ground troops, however, because the civilian casualties will be considerable. He will not want to risk such action being broadcast across the world with howls of anti-Israeli sentiments flowing back.

Netanyahu has to tread a very fine line. While many of his people are desperate for revenge against Hamas, he will not want to wipe them out altogether. If he did so, he might open the way for another and more extreme terrorist group to take over. It is known that a branch of the brutal and elusive militant group ISIS – which is causing Iraq and Syria to run with blood, having declared its own caliphate in northern areas of the two countries – already has an outpost in Gaza.

Israel does not need a bloody campaign of attrition, with all the negative publicity that would give rise to.

It is particularly concerned about neighbouring Jordan, a volatile country where local support for ISIS is growing and which is having to combat the terrorist group on its border with Iraq.

For its part, Hamas is under pressure, too. Its paymasters and chief weapons suppliers, Iran and Syria, are preoccupied with other matters – not least ISIS.

And the advent of the new Egyptian quasi-military government of President Sisi, who is hostile to all Islamist organisations, has led to a shutdown of the underground tunnels that Hamas uses to move arms and goods into Gaza from neighbouring Egyptian Sinai.

Iran has now cut off the $14million it gives Hamas each month because of the organisation’s backing for the Sunni rebels in Syria.

It must surely be in the interests of both sides in this missile strewn battle not to let their actions spiral out of control.

 

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Britain, European Union, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, Society, United Nations, United States

Former diplomats lead calls for Tony Blair to be axed as Middle East Peace Envoy…

TONY BLAIR

Intro: An open letter led by ex-diplomats, and signed by thousands more, calls for the former British Prime Minister who went to war on a lie and based on a false prospectus to be axed as Middle East peace envoy

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THREE former UK ambassadors to the Middle East have joined a new demand and are campaigning for Tony Blair to be removed from his role as Middle East ‘peace’ envoy.

Signatories to an open letter, led by Mr Blair’s former ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton, describes his achievements in the region as ‘negligible’, criticising his money-making activities and accuse him of trying to ‘absolve himself’ of responsibility for the crisis in Iraq.

Other former diplomats lending their weight to the letter are Sir Oliver Miles, Britain’s ambassador to Libya when relations were severed after the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, and Christopher Long, ambassador to Egypt between 1992 and 1995. Joining more than 4,000 signatories are human rights barrister Michael Mansfield QC, former London mayor Ken Livingstone and former Conservative prisons minister Crispin Blunt.

The letter has been organised by the makers of Respect MP George Galloway’s film The Killing of Tony Blair. It has been deliberately timed for this week’s seventh anniversary of Mr Blair’s appointment as envoy on the Middle East for the ‘quartet’ of the UN, the EU, Russia and the US, and is addressed to John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and to the EU’s ‘foreign minister’.

It argues that Mr Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is to blame for the rise of “fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously” and that he should be removed from his position.

The letter says: “We are appalled by Iraq’s descent into a sectarian conflict that threatens its existence as a nation, as well as the security of its neighbours. We are also dismayed at Tony Blair’s attempts to absolve himself of any responsibility for the current crisis by isolating it from the legacy of the Iraq war.”

It is alleged that Mr Blair ‘misled the British people’ by suggesting Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It adds: ‘It is a cruel irony for the people of Iraq that perhaps the invasion’s most enduring legacy has been the rise of fundamentalist terrorism in a land where none existed previously.

‘We believe Mr Blair, as a vociferous advocate of the invasion, must accept a degree of responsibility for its consequences.’

Criticising the former prime minister’s business interests, the letter alleges that his ‘conduct in his private pursuits also calls into question his suitability for the role’, and accuses him of ‘blurring the lines between his public position as envoy and his private roles at Tony Blair Associates and the investment bank JPMorgan Chase’.

The letter adds to growing calls for Mr Blair to stand down. In the last few days the former foreign secretary Lord Owen criticised Mr Blair for his claims that the 2003 invasion was not a factor in the current unrest in Iraq. “Tony Blair should no longer be allowed to speak for the EU on the Middle East, and someone else found for helping Palestine without his past record and crusading messianic fervour,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr Blair said: ‘These are all people viscerally opposed to Tony Blair with absolutely no credibility in relation to him whatsoever. Their attack is neither surprising nor newsworthy… They include the alliance of hard Right and hard Left views which he has thought against all his political life. Of course he completely disagrees with them over the Middle East.’

People are being urged to support the call for Mr Blair to be removed by signing the petition at www.change.org.

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Britain, Foreign Affairs, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, Society, Syria, United States

The dismal choices faced in Iraq: averting the worst scenario must be viewed as a priority…

IRAQ

Intro: Iraq is in a quagmire. The options are dismal, but the West cannot reverse the course of events in Iraq by intervening

The West will take some comfort, as well as to most Iraqis that Iraq’s ramshackle armed forces appear to have stalled the advances towards the capital by Sunni jihadists. The fall of Baghdad to the fighters of ISIS would undoubtedly lead to the termination and dissolution of Iraq as a formal state, as well as providing the jihadists and their putative caliphate with a real capital – forcing millions of Iraqi Shia to flee from their homes. It is inconceivable to believe or imagine the Middle East absorbing the shock.

Such an apocalypse has been averted, for now at least, and the Middle East and the wider world will gasp deep breaths of relief. However, even if the makeshift Iraqi forces succeed in containing the ISIS fighters (some 60 miles north of Baghdad) the long term prognosis for the country and for the region remains desperately worrying.

ISIS is in control of much of north and north-west Iraq. Whilst the insurgents may possibly cede the odd frontline town back to Iraqi forces, it will still be in possession of a de facto state composed of large, continuous chunks of Iraq and Syria. The boundaries that the British and French imposed on the Middle East following the end of the First World War seem soon to vanish, with the dismal fate that both will become failed states, much in the same way that Somalia became on the Horn of Africa. The emergence of such vacuums on the map of the world will be hugely destabilising – drawing in and expelling a range of volatile forces and consequences that will be very difficult to deal with.

The frontiers of Iraq and Syria were drawn arbitrarily to reflect the temporary interests of British and French colonists. It is quite possible, of course, with events unfolding as they are that both countries were only ever going to be viable under despotic rulers, in which case nothing can be done to prevent them from dissolving in the long term, or stop their embittered and hopelessly alienated Sunnis from creating their own entity out of the debris.

One major and worrying problem is that these countries are unravelling in a completely uncontrolled fashion. Another concern is that the heavily armed insurgents of ISIS have no intention of confining themselves to a medium-sized state based in north-west Iraq and the north-eastern parts of Syria. These extremists are religious imperialists, and their hardened and fierce ideology teaches them that they must expand or die. They will soon turn elsewhere if they are forced to consolidate control over their existing territories. The ethnically and politically fractured kingdom of Jordon surfaces as an obvious candidate for their malevolent attention.

The West, starting with the United States, cannot even hope to reverse the course of events in Iraq by intervening on the ground. President Barack Obama was right to rule out any ground incursion by US troops going back into the country.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the US takes up an observer’s seat as the region descends into ever greater chaos and disorder. Washington should encourage the tentative rapprochement between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia), both of which are starting to see just how dangerous the Sunni-Shia power struggle is becoming to each of them. The sectarian divisions and widening conflagration could easily have a tendency to draw in others by default if no attempt is made to harness relations between other countries in the region.

Western countries could also afford to be more generous in helping to address the humanitarian aspects of the latest crisis. The UK, for example, has offered an additional £3m to help tens of thousands of fleeing refugees that have been displaced as a direct result of the advances made by ISIS. Most of these refugees are now camping in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq. Such a meagre sum, given the plight of many desperate people, is hardly an adequate gesture.

A fortuitous outlook might suggest that the Sunnis in Syria and Iraq turn against their self-styled deliverers at some future point. If that is the hope, then it is vital that the Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad is persuaded to keep the door open to talks about some kind of federal option for the Sunnis, and for the Kurds. True, it may be late in the day for Iraq to even try the federalist option, but just possibly that might be the only option remaining in salvaging some kind of gossamer-thin state from the current mess. The options available are far and few between, none of which look particularly good. Despair cannot be allowed to prevail and is not the answer.

 

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