Miko Peled and Ali Abunimah on Democracy Now: ‘The incitement comes from Netanyahu.’
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Israel steps up Gaza offensive and prepares for possible ground invasion
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The Guardian reports: Israel has launched what it described as an open-ended and escalating offensive against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as air strikes and naval gunfire hit 50 sites overnight.
As part of a new offensive dubbed “Operation Protective Edge”, Israeli troops have been mobilised along the Gaza border and a limited number of reserves called up for a possible ground invasion.
The strikes came after Israeli army sources said troops were being put on notice of “preparation for escalation”. The Guardian saw columns of tank and armoured personnel carriers moving along the main highway between Jersualem and Erez, on the Gaza border.
Rocket attacks from Gaza – initially from Islamic factions other than Hamas – have been increasing in recent weeks against the backdrop of a major Israeli operation against Hamas on the West Bank following the kidnapping and murder of three teenagers whose bodies were found last week.
Air strikes by Israel, both following the discovery of the bodies and in response to rocket fire, have escalated in recent days despite assessments by analysts in Gaza and Israel that neither Hamas nor Israel wants a prolonged or bloody conflict.
Despite the continuing rocket fire, Israel’s prime minister, Binyanim Netanyahu, had shown a marked reluctance to be drawn into a military operation, offering Hamas “quiet for quiet” despite increasing political pressure from hardliners in his cabinet.
The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on Monday formally announced his party was leaving the Netanyahu coalition over the Gaza issue.
But despite this alleged government reluctance, the army has reportedly been ordered to prepare a significant expansion of its operation. [Continue reading...]
Asmaa al-Ghoul reports: During the past few days, news has circulated about indirect communication between Cairo and Hamas to set up a cease-fire agreement in Gaza with Israel. A Hamas official confirmed to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that there has been no Egyptian brokerage for the truce and that “Egypt has distanced itself this time.”
In previous statements, Hamas leaders had set the lifting of the blockade in Gaza as a condition for any truce. However, this has yet to materialize.
“We agreed with the factions during a meeting held two days ago not to launch missiles, but 20 missiles are launched every day. Therefore, it seems that some parties have breached the agreement,” the Hamas official said. [Continue reading...]
Syrian women refugees struggling alone to care for their families
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The Guardian reports: Women are the sole providers for one in four Syrian refugee families, struggling to provide food and shelter for their children and often facing harassment, humiliation and isolation, according to a report from the UN high commissioner for refugees.
More than 145,000 Syrian families now living in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan are led by women, it says. The civil war in Syria has torn apart families and communities, forcing almost three million people – mostly women and children – to flee the country.
Those interviewed for the report, Woman Alone – the Fight for Survival by Syrian Refugee Women, said they lacked resources, jobs, food, housing, protection and security. One in three reported they did not have enough to eat.
“For hundreds of thousands of women, escaping their ruined homeland was only the first step in a journey of grinding hardship,” said António Guterres, the UNHCR chief. “They have run out of money, face daily threats to their safety, and are being treated as outcasts for no other crime than losing their men to a vicious war. It’s shameful. They are being humiliated for losing everything.” [Continue reading...]
What about the Britons who fight for Israel?
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Channel 4 News: “We have British citizens going over to fight in the Israeli army. Yesterday we know they are taking part in the collective punishment of a civilian population. That’s a crime.” — Farooq Siddiqui, 3 July 2014
An ex-adviser to the government on tackling extremism in Britain’s Muslim communities raised an interesting point on Channel 4 News in relation to Brits who fight in conflicts abroad.
Farooq Siddiqui, formerly of the Prevent programme, is calling for the UK to stop criminalising young Muslims who travel to Syria to fight against Bashar al-Assad.
Security service estimates suggest around 500 Britons have travelled to Syria to take part in the civil war.
Mr Siddiqui asked why the government has threatened to arrest British Muslims who return from Syria while it allows young people to fight for Israel and other countries with impunity. [Continue reading...]
Israeli politician declares ‘war’ on ‘the Palestinian people’
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The Daily Beast reports: The political climate in Israel is so ugly that at least one member of Knesset is comparing Palestinian children to “little snakes” – and announcing that she’s ready to declare war on the entire Palestinian population.
Ayelet Shaked – a Knesset member of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party — took to Facebook with inflammatory remarks about the Palestinians on July 1, the day before the brutal murder of 17-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khudair.
“This is a war,” wrote Shaked, who has been routinely denounced in the Israeli press as an extremist. “Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started.”
The following day, Khudair was kidnapped in Jerusalem and later burned alive. Six Israeli suspects were arrested on Sunday in connection to the murder, which set off a slew of protests throughout the region. [Continue reading...]
Leading jihadist thinker condems ISIS caliphate
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Al Monitor reports: Jordanian Islamist groups have rejected the announcement of an Islamic caliphate by al-Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State (IS, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) on territory it has seized in Iraq and Syria, a move they see as a “rush job,” “forced” and “illegitimate.”
The Sunni militant organization declared itself a caliphate on June 29, renamed itself “Islamic State“ and proclaimed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, caliph of the Muslim world.
Salafist and al-Qaeda spiritual leader Assem Barqawi, better known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential voices in Salafist Islam, dismissed the declaration of a new caliphate in a lengthy statement posted July 1 on his website branding the group “deviant” and against the principles of both Islam and Sharia. [Continue reading...]
Thomas Hegghammer writes: A number of the world’s most senior jihadi ideologues have already come out against ISIS on the caliphate question, and the criticism from supporters of al-Qaida and groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida-anointed jihadi group in Syria, has been scathing. Meanwhile, ISIS has so far only received the pledge of allegiance (bay’a) from a small number of minor clerics, dissidents from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and groups in the Syrian-Iraqi theater that were at risk of being swallowed by ISIS anyway. To be sure, ISIS has also seen many declarations of support from grassroots sympathizers around the world, but it is unclear whether these are newly won adherents or people who were cheering on ISIS already. As [J.M.] Berger put it in another article, it looks like “ISIS threw a party and nobody came.”
This raises the question: why did they do it? It is hard to believe that ISIS simply miscalculated and genuinely thought the entire jihadi movement would submit to their authority. ISIS is not an isolated sect, but a tech-savvy bureaucracy that monitors enemy Twitter accounts and consumes academic literature (in fact, they will probably read this very article). They must have known the lay of the ideological land. We should therefore not dismiss the move as ideological excess, but rather assume it was based on a careful calculus.
It is possible, for example, that this was a bid for the youth vote in the jihadi movement. ISIS may have realized it was not going to win over the pro-al-Qaida old guard anyway, but that there was a potential to further increase its appeal among young recruits, especially abroad. Bear in mind that for the past three years, virtually all of the world’s new jihadi foreign fighters have gone to Syria, where a majority has joined ISIS. By comparison, only a handful have gone to Pakistan, Yemen, or Algeria to train with al-Qaida and its affiliates. Moreover, ISIS has arguably been the biggest game in town the past year in terms of visibility on the jihadi Internet. Finally, with its battlefield advances in Iraq over the past month, ISIS has demonstrated real-life impact that other jihadi groups can only dream of. New recruits—who tend to be young, male, and impatient—may be attracted to the group that gets things done. Declaring a caliphate consolidates this youth appeal by adding another element of bravado to the ISIS project. In such a context, heavy criticism from the ideological establishment may paradoxically bestow an underdog image on ISIS, which younger recruits may find attractive. [Continue reading...]
Why one Canadian woman joined ISIS’s Islamic state
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CBC News reports: Eight months ago, Umm Haritha, a 20-year-old woman from Canada, made her way to Turkey against her parents’ wishes with a half-empty suitcase and $1,500.
Within a week she was in Syria, and a few weeks later she was married to Abu Ibrahim al-Suedi, a 26-year-old Palestinian from Sweden fighting for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni jihadist group battling the Syrian regime.
It is not clear whether Umm Haritha’s marriage to Abu Ibrahim was arranged before her travel to Syria. Regardless, it only lasted five months.
On May 5, Abu Ibrahim, whose real name is Taha Shade, was in a car en route to a meeting in Deir ez-Zor with members of rival faction Jabhat al-Nusra. What was meant to be a gathering to finalize a peace treaty between ISIS and al-Nusra turned deadly when an al-Nusra fighter on a motorbike sped up to Shade’s car and detonated his explosive belt.
At the time, Shade was wearing his own explosive belt, which also went off and blew him to pieces.
Two days later, Umm Haritha tweeted about her husband’s death, calling on “Allah” to “destroy those who backstabbed the brothers and resurrect Abu Ibrahim with noor [light] from every piece of his body.”
Umm Haritha’s journey to Syria highlights an underreported part of the western Jihadist experience in Syria. [Continue reading...]
Michael Klare: Fighting for oil
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Call it a double whammy for the planet or simply irony with a capital “I.” As the invaluable Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of The Race for What’s Left, points out today, if you scan the planet for conflict, what you’ll find from Syria and Iraq to the South China Sea are a series of energy wars — fossil-fuel conflicts to be exact. At present, despite some hopeful signs, this crazed planet of ours is still a ravenous beast that only fossil fuels can sate. No question that conflicts and wars are terrible things. Just consider the million new refugees being generated by the disintegration of Iraq in a blaze of warfare and sectarian killings. But oil wars add a grim twist to the mix, because when they’re settled, however miserably or bloodily, the winners take to the oil rigs and the refineries and pump out yet more of the stuff that puts carbon dioxide and methane, both greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere and, as in the Middle East today, creates the basis for yet more conflict.
That region has been going through a period of heightened dryness and drought that researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believe to be caused, at least in part, by global warming. This winter, the driest in decades, Syria and Iraq in particular have experienced a severe lack of rainfall in what should be the wettest part of the year and record heat as well. These are factors the Pentagon lists in its recent Quadrennial Defense Review as “threat multipliers.” According to meteorologist Eric Holthaus, “As in neighboring Syria, it’s increasingly clear that Iraq is drying out, an effect that’s long been predicted as a result of the human-caused build up of heat-trapping gases like CO2. Since 1973… parts of Iraq and Syria have seen ‘some of the most dramatic precipitation declines in the world.’ Citing projected stark declines in rainfall and continued population pressure and upstream dam building, a study released earlier this year made the case that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers may no longer reach the sea by 2040.”
The weather destabilization of Syria and the rise of ISIS seem to be connected. In the Mobius Strip of life, the more desperate you are — thank you, global warming — the more you’re likely to fight over what resources, from water to oil, you can command, and then when you’re done, you’ll use those resources to heat the planet further. It’s a closed system, a simple formula for the production of violent emotions, dead bodies, and a particularly nasty world. Tom Engelhardt
Twenty-first-century energy wars
Global conflicts are increasingly fueled by the desire for oil and natural gas — and the funds they generate
By Michael T. KlareIraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share several key characteristics — notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious, and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy.
In each of these conflicts, the fighting is driven in large part by the eruption of long-standing historic antagonisms among neighboring (often intermingled) tribes, sects, and peoples. In Iraq and Syria, it is a clash among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and others; in Nigeria, among Muslims, Christians, and assorted tribal groupings; in South Sudan, between the Dinka and Nuer; in Ukraine, between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-speakers aligned with Moscow; in the East and South China Sea, among the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others. It would be easy to attribute all this to age-old hatreds, as suggested by many analysts; but while such hostilities do help drive these conflicts, they are fueled by a most modern impulse as well: the desire to control valuable oil and natural gas assets. Make no mistake about it, these are twenty-first-century energy wars.
Anbar tribal leader: Maliki is ‘more dangerous’ than ISIS
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Rudaw reports: Sheikh Hatem al-Suleiman, 43, is one of Anbar province’s most influential tribal sheikhs and is chief of the powerful Dulaim tribe in Ramadi.
Suleiman is founding member of the Anbar Salvation Council, a key group in the Sunni Awakening that collapsed after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to include the group in state and military institutions. As the leader of Anbar’s Tribes Revolutionary Council, he is a key leader in the Anbar insurgency and a sharp critic of Maliki. As early as 2006, he became a leader in mobilizing Sunni Arab rebels against Al-Qaeda.
In an exclusive interview with Rudaw, Suleiman claimed the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) and Iraq’s Sunni Arab tribes have drastically different philosophies. He says that armed tribes can easily push out ISIS but that Maliki must first leave office. [Continue reading...]
Iraq parliament chaos deepens as MPs fail to agree on new speaker
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AFP reports: A solution to the Iraq crisis appeared to slip away into the distance as a crucial parliament session aimed at kickstarting the formation of a government was delayed when MPs failed to agree on a new speaker.
They were reportedly bickering despite calls for unity to see off a jihadist offensive that has overrun swaths of the country.
The Iraqi security forces have struggled to repel the swift advance of fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. The developments have also alarmed the international community and heaped pressure on Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, as he bids for a third term in office.
But the government formation process – which international leaders and top clerics have urged should be completed as quickly as possible – suffered a setback when the session set for Tuesday was postponed to 12 August because political leaders could not reach an agreement. [Continue reading...]
‘Water war’ threatens Syria lifeline
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Al Jazeera reports: When severe water cuts began to hit Aleppo province in early May, residents started referring to a “water war” being waged at the expense of civilians. Images of beleaguered women and children drinking from open channels and carrying jerry cans of untreated groundwater only confirmed that the suffering across northern Syria had taken a turn for the worse.
However, lost in the daily reports was a far more pernicious crisis coming to a head: a record six-metre drop in Lake Assad, the reservoir of Syria’s largest hydroelectric dam and the main source of water for drinking and irrigation to about five million people.
Under the watch of the Islamic State group – formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – levels in Lake Assad have dropped so low that pumps used to funnel water east and west are either entirely out of commission or functioning at significantly reduced levels. The shortages compel residents in Aleppo and Al Raqqa to draw water from unreliable sources, which can pose serious health risks.
The primary reason behind the drop appears to be a dramatic spike in electricity generation at the Euphrates Dam in al-Tabqa, which has been forced to work at alarmingly high rates.
“[Lake Assad] is pumping out more than it is receiving. This is because the electricity generators are working 24 hours a day, more than they should be,” Waleed Zayat, a mechanical engineer working for the Syrian opposition’s interim government’s Ministry of Water Resources and Agriculture in Aleppo, told Al Jazeera. [Continue reading...]
How Kerry streamlined Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — by leaving out the Palestinians
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Barak Ravid has a detailed report on the nine months of so-called Israeli-Palestinian talks on a final-status agreement initiated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in July 2013.
Warning lights began to go on among the Israeli team at a quite early stage of the negotiations. It wasn’t clear to Netanyahu and his aides what exactly the Palestinians thought about each of the clauses in the draft framework document that were hammering out with the Americans. “At one point we discovered that throughout the entire period, the Americans didn’t actually talk to the Palestinians, only to us,” a senior Israeli official said.
A senior American official who took part in the talks admits that the bulk of the work on the document was done with the Israelis. He explained that this was due to the fact that because the Americans viewed themselves as being closer to the Palestinian approach on a large number of the issues, their major effort had to be invested in trying to get Netanyahu to soften his positions. Fearing that the Palestinians would lock themselves into a rejectionist posture, the Americans decided not to present any proposal to them until they felt their contacts with Israel had reached a sufficiently serious outcome.
However, the Americans’ comportment brought about exactly the result they had feared. On February 19, 2014, when Kerry met with Abbas in Paris and apprised him orally of the main points of the emerging framework document, the secretary of state was stunned at the reaction.
The Palestinian leader, who was unwell and in a foul mood when he arrived for the meeting, had the feeling that the Americans had pulled “a Dennis Ross” on him – referring to the veteran American diplomat who was known throughout all the years of the negotiations for his practice of first striking a deal with the Israelis and then selling it to the Palestinians as an American proposal. Abbas thought Kerry was presenting him with a done deal and trying to stuff it down his throat.
The Kerry-Abbas meeting in Paris was a total bust. Senior American and Palestinian officials maintain that Abbas has been unbudgeable since that day. He refused to hold talks on the framework document, insisting first on getting a promise that Israel would release all the prisoners it had undertaken to free at the start of the negotiations.
Throughout the whole succeeding month, the Americans tried to extract from Abbas a response or a comment on the framework document, but to no avail. Abbas viewed the document as part of a plot against him. Things came to a head on March 17, when Abbas met with President Obama at the Oval Office for more than two hours and declined to give Obama anything other than a vague promise that he would get back to him in a few days about the framework document. Which he never did.
Both Abbas and chief negotiator Erekat say rightly that the Americans never gave them a copy of the framework document, but only presented ideas orally. They could thus not peruse the paper thoroughly and formulate an opinion. At this time, drafts of the document were being exchanged between Washington and Jerusalem on a daily basis. The Palestinians’ response, when they grasped what was going on, was that they were being duped. So great was their suspiciousness and so intense their frustration with the Americans that they lost interest in the process completely.
Jewish groups’ whitewash of Israeli racism ensures it will fester
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David Sheen writes: As news spreads of the circumstances surrounding last week’s murder of 17-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdair, many international observers are responding with incredulity. Israeli police say the teenager was kidnapped from his home, beaten in the head, forced to consume a flammable liquid, and then burned alive. They also say they believe the crime was carried out by Jewish Israelis, acting out of racist hatred for non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs.
These details have come as a shock for many Jewish people living outside of Israel, who find it hard to believe that Jews could be capable of such venomous violence. Multiple viral videos of Jewish Israelis chanting “Death to Arabs!” in downtown Jerusalem earlier that same evening have added to the bewilderment of Israel’s liberal supporters in the Diaspora.
Clearly, such deep-seated hatred could not have sprung up spontaneously; surely it had been building up for weeks, months, and years. But why then, were many Jews outside of Israel only learning of it now, for the first time? Why hadn’t they been warned about it by the Jewish communal organizations that are in constant contact with their Israeli counterparts? With their claim to be a “premier civil rights” group, where has the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) been all this time, and why hasn’t it been sounding the alarm? [Continue reading...]
The virulent strain of hatred that infects Israel
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Yossi Melman writes: This may be the era in which local gangs, incited by politicians or poisoned by anti-Arab sentiments and atmosphere, turn into vigilantes and take the law into their own hands. We have sporadically witnessed such events in the past. Israeli Jews decided to avenge the deaths of their fellow Jews at the hands of Palestinian terrorists and killed innocent Palestinians.
Yet the murder last week of Abu Khdeir is beyond imagination because of its brutality and cold-bloodedness: the burning alive of the victim.
The only consolation for the Shin Bet and the police is that the suspects are not members of any political organization or any hierarchal structure. They do not have any known track record in this area. They just participated in the past in anti-Arab demonstrations in Jerusalem, inhaled in the streets hatred and racist ideology motivated by the murder of the three Israeli teens, and decided to carry out their satanic plan.
Israelis who view the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir as some kind of crime of passion — the action of a group of young Jewish men who acted in the heat of the moment — are providing themselves with a false comfort.
If there was indeed no militant group behind the killing, that just goes to show how virulent is this particular strain of hatred.
This suggests that similar acts are even more likely in the future since the perpetrators can in a more meaningful sense be called ordinary Israelis, rather than exceptional fanatics.
Anshel Pfeffer writes: We would like to believe that none of us, and no one we know, could even imagine participating in such vicious acts; but we have gotten used to living in an environment where casual racism is a norm. And when casual racism is normal, the distance between normal life and hate crimes of the worst kind rapidly shrinks.
Why Kuwait’s protests are important
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Following a renewal of demonstrations in Kuwait last week, Rami G Khouri writes: Kuwait highlights the new reality that Arab citizens are now demanding rights from their governments simply on the basis of being entitled to those rights, and not necessarily because they are poor, suffer uneven access to social services, or have been politically abused and oppressed, as was the case with uprisings in countries such as Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria.
Kuwait also speaks of deeper discontents among other citizens in oil-rich Gulf states who can only express their grievances through websites and social media. This is evident in several Arab countries, which, like Kuwait, try to suppress public political accusations and grievances, even by jailing individuals who Tweet sentiments that are critical of state policies.
The demonstrators in Kuwait are not calling for the overthrow of the regime, but rather for constitutional political reforms. The demonstrators this week chanted their demands to reform the judiciary. When such basic, reasonable and non-violent demands are almost totally ignored across most of the Arab world, citizens have only a few options, including expressing themselves through social media or via pan-Arab satellite television, or by taking to the streets. As with almost every other public protest throughout the world, the actual number of citizens on the street is not the most important factor.
It is irrelevant if 500 or 15,000 demonstrate one night. What matters is that groups of citizens speak out in public on a regular basis, and address their complaints directly to the national leaders. It is likely that those who do take to the streets – for instance, recently in Ukraine, Turkey, Thailand or Burma – represent much deeper and wider legitimate societal grievances that require a political resolution through dialogue, negotiations and credible representation and accountability.
