The post-Sinwar scenario

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 28 October 2024

On October 21 two Hamas sources revealed to the media that the idea of appointing a leader to succeed Yahyar Sinwar, assassinated on October 16,  had been ruled out, at least for the present.  The Hamas leadership, operating at arm’s length from Gaza in the gulf state of Qatar, had decided that the organization would be run, at least until March 2025, by the 5-man committee set up in August after the assassination of political leader Ismail Haniyeh. 

The committee, based in Doha, Qatar’s capital city, is comprised of Khalil al-Hayya, Khaled Mashaal, Zaher Jabareen, Mohammed Darwish and the political bureau’s secretary, whose identity remains anonymous for security reasons.

The internal dynamic of the Hamas organization had certainly been severely shaken, yet an informed source, well acquainted with its inner workings, struck an interesting note.  Interviewed by the Associated Press, Sadeq Abu Amer, head of the Turkey-based think tank Palestinian Dialogue Group, believed that the removal of Sinwar, whom he dubbed “one of the most prominent hawks within the movement,” was likely to lead to “the advancement of a trend or direction that can be described as dove[-like]”.  He indicated that with Sinwar out of the picture a hostage-prisoner exchange deal had become practical politics.

            Abu Amer was quick to discount any suggestion that Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, if he is still alive, could replace him as overall leader of Hamas.  “Mohammed Sinwar is the head of the field battle,” he said, “but he will not be Sinwar’s heir as head of the political bureau.”

Although somewhat off the mark, as it has turned out, he believed that Hamas’s Qatar-based political leaders might decide to elect one of their number to head the organization.  He identified the two front runners as al-Hayya and Khaled Mashaal. 

Al-Hayya, aged 63, was Sinwar’s deputy and headed the Hamas delegation in cease-fire negotiations. In a media interview in April 2024, al-Hayya said Hamas was willing to agree a truce of at least five years with Israel, and that if an independent Palestinian state were created along 1967 borders, the group would dissolve its military wing and become a purely political party.

Mashaal, aged 68, served as the group’s political leader from 1996 to 2017.  Subject of an assassination attempt back in 1997, he now supports the forces opposed to President Bashar al Assad in the 13-year-old civil war still raging in Syria.  Consequently he is not on good terms with Iran, or indeed with Hezbollah.  He has good relations with Turkey and Qatar.

Jabareen, once sentenced to a 35-year prison sentence for the deaths of two Israeli police officers at the Temple Mount, was released on a prisoner exchange.  He headed the 2023 resumption of suicide bombings within Israel.  Mohammed Darwish, also known as Abu Omar Hassan, has been chairman of the Hamas Shura Council since October 2023.

            First reactions to the news of Yahya Sinwar’s death on October 16 reflected hope in many quarters that a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of the hostages was now but a short step away. 

Such immediate expectations seemed to be quickly doused.  The first public statement after Sinwar’s death, made by his Qatar-based deputy al-Hayya, was that there will be no hostage release without “the end of the aggression… and the withdrawal from Gaza.” 

   Israel’s position immediately after Sinwar’s death was nuanced.  The first reaction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was that the war was not over.   “Evil has suffered a heavy blow,” he said, “ but the task before us is not yet complete.”

Yet in a message issued via the media, Netanyahu offered Hamas terrorists free passage out of the Gaza Strip in exchange for the release of hostages.  Anyone who laid down his arms and returned hostages, said Netanyahu, would be allowed to leave Gaza.

Could this formula provide the basis for a final hostage return deal?  Possibly – provided  Hamas’s new Qatar-based leadership committee is indeed that degree more pragmatic (more “dove-like” as Abu Amer put it) than its hawkish erstwhile leader.   A reassessment of Hamas’s situation and prospects might persuade the leadership that re-siting the organization outside the Gaza Strip might be the most effective way to recoup and recover.  Given the huge losses in manpower that Hamas has already sustained, it is certainly preferable to continue fighting inside Gaza to the last man.

This scenario, if played out, would not sit well with the aspirations of US President Joe Biden, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the many other western leaders who are so free with advice about how Israel should act.  The accepted international view has been that Israel should de-escalate on all fronts. negotiate a hostage-prisoner swap in Gaza involving an Israeli ceasefire, stop its attacks on Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, and respond only minimally to Iran’s massive missile launch on Israel of October 1.  In the event Israel's response, though far from minimal, was effectively targeted.

Netanyahu’s policy of slowly but surely eliminating the leadership of the Iran-supported terror armies in Gaza, Lebanon and the rest of the axis of evil, while depleting their manpower and wearing them down, is clearly working.  The West’s continuous advocacy of unenforceable ceasefires, peace deals and de-escalation would never have succeeded.   Against jihadist enemies dedicated to its annihilation, any such appeasement by Israel would have served only to guarantee the continuation of the multi-directional existential threat.

In the strictly limited area of the war in Gaza, however, Sinwar’s disappearance may have opened up a chink of hope.  Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar is reported to have visited Cairo on October 20 to discuss a possible revival of hostage deal negotiations. Two days later US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel, where he reiterated his view that Israel should seek to exploit the advantage gained by Sinwar’s assassination and press on with negotiating a hostage deal.  Netanyahu is reported to have concurred.  Blinken went on to Egypt, where reports suggest that discussions included the future administration and rebuilding of Gaza, involving the establishment of an international force to oversee the process.

According to an October 19 report in the Wall Street Journal, Sinwar told Hamas negotiators in Qatar that if he were killed, Israel would offer concessions.  On this, if on nothing else, he was apparently not wrong.  On October 21, media reports indicate, Israel’s TV Channel 12 claimed that Israel had recently indicated to the US that it was ready to make concessions previously not considered feasible.  What such concessions might involve was not mentioned, but they could be based on Netanyahu’s free passage offer. If the report is true, their success might turn on how flexible Hamas’s reconstituted leadership might choose to be in the post-Sinwar era.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "A post-Sinwar scenario: What's next for Hamas and Israel now?"
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-826351

Israel stands firm

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 21 October 2024 

Bombarded by missiles from its foes and advice from its friends, Israel has learned to stand firm against both.  Of the two, well-meaning advice, easy to promulgate from the safety of the US, the UK and the capitals of Europe, is the more insidious. 

After all, Israel’s anti-ballistic missile systems, though not one hundred per cent effective, do offer the nation a fair degree of protection.  But apparently humane and virtuous calls to “react proportionately”, “negotiate a ceasefire” and “stop firing in civilian areas” put Israel in the dock in the eyes of the world, charged with over-stepping the mark.

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar on October 17 has, if anything, accelerated the process.  Already US president Joe Biden, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and figures like UK prime minister Keir Starmer are calling for what amounts to a unilateral Israeli ceasefire, together with an unenforceable demand that Hamas release the remaining hostages.  Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to Sinwar’s death was “the war is not over”. 

The purveyors of well-intentioned advice to Israel seem to ignore the oft-stated intention of Iran and its satellites in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq to eliminate the Jewish state and its people.  Israel’s friends often appear to discount the fact that the nation has been fighting for its very existence from the moment it was established, and that the fight is far from won.  And they either fail to appreciate, or simply do not believe, that Iran has the West and its democratic way of life in its sights just as much as Israel, and that in battling the Iranian octopus Israel is fighting for the West as much as for its own continued existence. 

This lack of perspective has marked much of Biden’s reaction to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle East.  Biden had grown increasingly frustrated as Netanyahu appeared to brush off his advice and reject his attempts at reducing the prospect of escalation. Until October 9, when a phone call was arranged between him and Netanyahu, the two leaders had not spoken for 49 days.  

Word is that Biden was angered at Israel’s failure to provide advance warning of either the exploding pager operation (for which Israel has never claimed responsibility), or the assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah.  On October 1, 2024, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli targets, and Biden was determined not to be left in the dark about how Netanyahu planned to respond – hence their 30-minute telephone conversation.

Washington has remained tight-lipped about what they said to each other. Vice President Kamala Harris joined the call, but in a TV interview afterwards refused to provide any details, describing it as “classified”.   The most she would say was “It was an important call.”

 One visitor to the White House at the time of the conversation was Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris, in Washington to mark 100 years of US-Ireland diplomatic ties.

He told reporters that Biden “left me in no doubt” that his call with Netanyahu was “a conversation of substance and of depth, in terms of actions that Israel needs to take, in terms of aid, humanitarian aid, in terms of bringing about a ceasefire,” presumably in Gaza.

 Reported by CNN, “actions that Israel needs to take” is a direct quote by Harris, and it betrays the mindset of those who regard Israel as an ally but fail to appreciate that Israel’s best interests as perceived from Washington or London are different, sometimes radically so, from the view from Jerusalem.  A valid question is, who is better able to assess Israel’s best interests – well-meaning friends or Israel itself?

On October 8 the journal Commentary turned the issue of Biden’s frustration with Israel on its head.  His problem, the magazine pointed out, was not Israel’s defiance. It was Iran’s .

Israel resisted going into Gaza, it said, until Hamas got tired of waiting and invaded Israel instead. Nor did Israel go into Lebanon until, by way of Hezbollah’s missile campaign, Iran made clear that it would be the only way to return displaced Israelis to their homes in the north.  Iran-backed attacks, the journal said, have continued also from Iraq and Yemen, as well as from Iran itself.

“Nobody has been asking Biden or Harris why the Iranians don’t listen to them,” the journal commented, going on to observe that Qatar doesn’t follow US advice, nor does Egypt, Turkey or the Palestinian Authority. We only seem to ask about US influence, says Commentary, in connection with “the one country under assault and surrounded by genocidal enemies: Israel.”

On October 15 news broke of a letter from Washington, dated two days previously,  stating that if Israel did not significantly increase humanitarian aid to Gaza within the following thirty days, some unpleasant, though unspecified, action would follow.  The thirty days encompass the date of the forthcoming US presidential election, and whether the letter is in any way related to that momentous event is anybody’s guess.

            The prestigious British journal The Spectator carried an article on October 4 headlined: “”Why Israel was right to ignore international advice”.  It begins by setting down the picture of recent evens in the Middle East as purveyed to the UK public.

     “If you follow most of the British media,” says the author, Douglas Murray, “you may well think that the past year involves the following events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed Yemen. Oh and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.

“Of course,” he continues, “all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen — now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK — sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed the Houthis’ arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh…never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.”

     As Murray  observes: “ All this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah.  Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold, continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership and continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has built up for 18 years.”

The nub of Murray’s argument is: “The wisdom of the international community is that ceasefires are always desirable, that negotiated settlements are always to be desired, and that violence is never the answer. As so often, these wise international voices have no idea what they are talking about.  Israel’s enemies have spent the past year trying to destroy it, as they have so many times before. But it is they who have gone to the dust, with the regime in Tehran the only thing that is, for the time being, still standing…Sometimes you need war to make peace. Sometimes there is a price to pay for trying to finish the work of Adolf Hitler.”

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Why Israel ignores international advice and focuses on its survival", 21 Oct 2024

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-825363

 

 

           

UNIFIL – as ineffective as ever

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 14 October 2024

            “The force has repeatedly failed its mission and squandered its credibility” – that is the uncompromising verdict on UNIFIL in the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s paper of August 24, 2024.

The supreme irony of the situation lies in the very title of the body – the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.  Never was an organization less interim than UNIFIL.  Today, 46 years after it was established by the UN Security Council, it is still in place.  Originally a 4,500-strong peacekeeping mission, it now comprises some 10,000 troops drawn from up to 50 countries.  And, irony on irony, the one thing the interim force has failed to do throughout its 46 years is keep the peace.

          A glance at the map of Lebanon shows the Litani river running north to south down the country, and then taking a sharp right-hand turn toward the Mediterranean.  The territory lying between the river and the Lebanon-Israel border to its south, varying in width between 6 and 28 km, is where the numerous UNIFIL bases are located.

Expelled from Jordan in 1970, the PLO under Yasser Arafat settled itself in Lebanon.  It took control of the southern region, turned it into a militarized zone, and used it as a base for attacking Israel.  On March 11, 1978 a PLO group landed by sea near Tel Aviv and hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway. They then went on a shooting rampage, killing 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, and wounding over 70 others.  Three days later Israel invaded Lebanon in an effort to push the PLO back over the Litani and away from its northern border.

In response the UN Security Council (UNSC) called on Israel to withdraw, and set up UNIFIL.  Its remit was to confirm Israel’s withdrawal, restore peace and security, and assist Lebanon’s government regain effective authority in the south – a rather difficult aspiration, since Lebanon was then three years into its long-running civil war – a power struggle between Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians and Palestinians.

 Following the arrival of UNIFIL, Israeli withdrew from most of the territory it had occupied. It left its Christian militia allies, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), in control of a strip of territory well south of the Litani river, in which they established a "security zone".  This they maintained until Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

Despite the presence of UNIFIL, which seemed incapable of exercising any sort of control, the PLO quickly reestablished itself south of the Litani, and continued launching cross-border attacks and rocket fire into northern Israel. In response, Israel conducted air raids and artillery strikes on Palestinian positions.  

Then, on June 3, 1982 in the center of London, a breakaway Palestinian terrorist group attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Shlomo Argov.  He was critically injured, and was in a coma for three months.  The incident was sufficient to trigger a large-scale military operation against the PLO, undertaken in coordination with Lebanese Christian militias.

          Israeli troops crossed the Lebanese border, advanced up the country and soon reached Beirut. Once there they captured PLO headquarters and ordered the PLO out of the country. 

The departure of the PLO did not, unfortunately, mean that UNIFIL could be disbanded.  For it was in that same year, 1982, that Hezbollah was founded, with the active support of Iran and its IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).  Its prime declared purpose was to remove Israel, and all other foreign entities, from Lebanese soil. 

          UNIFIL’s mandate did not directly include confronting non-state militias – a factor that has doubtless contributed to UNFILF’s ineffectiveness over the years. Hezbollah, on the other hand, while never formally engaging with UNIFIL, has consistently obstructed or interfered with its activities. Ever since 2020, Hezbollah has been establishing and strengthening its military footprint in the heart of UNIFIL’s area of operations. Worse, in June 2007, a car bomb killed six UNIFIL members and wounded two others. In December 2022, five Hezbollah-linked militants were charged with conspiracy and murder in a shooting attack that killed an Irish UNIFIL peacekeeper and injured three others.

          On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah operatives ambushed an IDF patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border, killing eight soldiers and kidnapping two others. Israel responded with precision air strikes on Hezbollah assets, prompting the launch over the next month of some 4,000 Katyusha rockets targeting northern Israeli cities.

Passed in August 2006, UNSC Resolution 1701 ended the hostilities, expanded UNIFIL, required Lebanon to assert its sovereignty in the south, forbade the rearming of terrorist groups, and required the “unconditional release” of the kidnapped soldiers — whose bodies Hezbollah only returned as part of a 2008 prisoner exchange with Israel.

UNIFIL was either incapable or unwilling to exercise its expanded powers.  As a result its presence in ever-increasing numbers has done nothing to prevent Hezbollah taking over the whole of south Lebanon, and allowing it to become the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor, with much of its arsenal concentrated in UNIFIL’s area of operations.

UNIFIL’s mandate has to be renewed on an annual basis. During a visit to Israel in late November 2023, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto called for a “thorough re-evaluation” of UNIFIL’s mission,

citing cross-border attacks on Israel by Hezbollah as an indication that it was not working as intended. The “rules of engagement need to change,” he said.  Nevertheless in August UNFIL’s mandate was again renewed with no significant changes beyond a renewed emphasis on the need for coordination between UNIFIL and the Lebanese government.  Once again Hezbollah did not feature in the resolution.

There are some 10,000 UNIFIL troops deployed across southern Lebanon.  They have done virtually nothing to control the persistent bombardment of Israel over the past year, or to fulfil their remit to push Hezbollah north of the Litani. Since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, up to 80,000 residents of northern Israel have had to evacuate their homes.  There could therefore have been little surprise in UNIFIL headquarters when, on September 30, the IDF notified the force commander of their intention to undertake limited ground incursions into Lebanon.  

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN undersecretary-general for peace operations, told reporters that UNIFIL will remain in its positions in south Lebanon despite Israel’s request that it vacates some areas before it launched its ground operation against Hezbollah. 

          By staying put all UNIFIL is doing is to expose its troops to possible collateral death or injury, and indeed two peacekeepers were injured when IDF fire damaged a UNIFIL observation post on October 9.   

In short, having failed notably over decades to fulfil its peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL  now has units scattered across a battlefield, and has turned into a positive liability.  As Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the people of Lebanon in his TV talk on October 8, a peaceful future for Lebanon depends on freeing themselves from the burden of Hezbollah.   For Lebanon once again to enjoy peace and a positive future, Israel’s effort to overcome Hezbollah needs to succeed.  

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and Jerusalem Post online titled: "UNIFIL is ineffective and fails to fulfill its peacekeeping mission", 14 October 2024:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-824433

Published in Eurasia Review, 18 October 2024:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/18102024-unifil-as-ineffective-as-ever-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 21 October 2024

https://mpc-journal.org/unifil-as-ineffective-as-ever/

             

Al-Sisi’s winning streak

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 8 October 2024

Egypt’s 69-year-old president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, enters the post-Nasrallah era on a high.  Not only did he succeed in pulling his nation from the brink of financial collapse earlier in the year, but he has managed to achieve a new strategic partnership with the EU and also place his country in pole position in the delicate US-led Gaza ceasefire negotiations.

The one cloud on his horizon is the devastation wrought by the Houthis on Egypt’s income from the Suez Canal. The Houthis’ continuous attacks on shipping in the south of the Red Sea has led many commercial shipping lines to avoid the Suez Canal and take the long Atlantic route to and from Asia and the Far East. In July 2024 the Suez Canal Authority posted a $2 billion loss of income, year on year.  The situation is an added incentive for Egypt to facilitate a ceasefire in Gaza as speedily as possible.           

The year started well for al-Sisi. Having won the presidential election held in December 2023 on a reported 89.6% of the vote, he was inaugurated for another term on April 2, his tenure assured until 2030.  An even longer period in office is not out of the question; it only requires Egypt’s constitution to be amended in the interim.

 When al-Sisi assumed the presidency in 2014, having ousted his Muslim Brotherhood predecessor, the Egyptian constitution mirrored that of the US – namely, the presidential term of office was four years, and no president could serve more than two terms.  In 2019 al-Sisi persuaded parliament to approve amendments to the constitution that extended the presidential term from four to six years and to prolong to 2024 his second term in office, due to end in 2022.

The two years leading up to the presidential election witnessed what has been termed the worst economic crisis in Egypt’s history.  The turn of the year 2024 marked a turn in al-Sisi’s fortunes.   The first few months saw him negotiating a succession of loans, grants and deals totaling more than $50 billion, clearing the nation’s dollar shortage and eliminating any immediate risk of default.  

The first of these deals, signed in February 2024, was with a consortium based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that agreed to pay $35 billion to develop 40,000 acres of virgin land on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, known as Ras El Hekma, into a luxury tourist destination together with a financial center and a free zone. 

 An $8 billion bailout from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) had been on the stocks since December 2022, held up while the IMF’s onerous terms and conditions were hammered out and agreed.   In March Egypt finally signed up to it.  The deal was dependent on al-Sisi imposing a tranche of austerity measures on the nation, a revaluation of the currency, a new exchange rate regime, and fiscal policy restraint. 

Two weeks later the World Bank guaranteed additional financial support to Egypt amounting to $6 billion, while the EU signed an agreement to provide a further $8 billion.  This EU grant was widely believed to incorporate a payment for Egypt’s help in stemming the flow of illegal immigrants into Europe, a fair proportion of them Egyptians.

The deal with the EU was announced in June, during a visit to Cairo by an EU delegation led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

          Emphasizing the aim of boosting EU-Egyptian cooperation in renewable energy, trade, and security, and with not a word about illegal immigration, both sides agreed that the deal lifted the EU’s relationship with Egypt to a “strategic partnership”.  The four-year arrangement will see European money directed to support Egypt’s public finances and improve the country’s business environment.

These deals not only boost Egypt’s financial and economic situation, they amount to an endorsement of ea-Sisi’s presidency and a positive decision to ignore what many call his reckless financial mis-management and widespread human rights abuses. 

Al-Sisi’s personal standing has been further boosted by the prominent position Egypt is taking in the extended negotiations, led by the US and with the involvement of Qatar, around achieving a ceasefire in the Gaza conflict and the return of the hostages still held by Hamas. His value as an honest broker is enhanced by the balance he achieves between his strong support for the Palestinian cause while not wavering in his adherence to Egypt’s 45-year-old peace treaty with Israel. 

The extent of Egypt’s increased influence on the world stage became public early in September, when US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, waived the human rights conditions attached to US military financing of Egypt, and allowed the full amount of $1.3 billion to go through – a so far unprecedented step. 

          As regards the Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Egypt has a direct interest in Netanyahu’s recent insistence on retaining an Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor, the border between Egypt and Gaza.  The IDF took over the nine-mile stretch in May.  Despite numerous anti-tunnel efforts on both sides, including flooding on the Egyptian side and Israeli airstrikes, cross-border smuggling via underground routes persisted.  Al-Sisi, mindful of long-standing Egypt-Israel cooperation on security issues, would not protest too loudly at a temporary Israeli presence in the Corridor.   

Al-Sisi’s successes and enhanced status over 2024 no doubt serve to justify, in his own mind, his decision to stick with the vast prestige projects he has pursued even during the worst of times.  His government has lavished resources on grandiose infrastructure projects including the extension of the Suez Canal, a billion dollar cement factory built by the military, the Rod El Farag suspension bridge, claimed to be the largest in the world, and of course the $58 billion New Administrative Capital being constructed in the desert 30 miles east of Cairo.

Already boasting the tallest tower in Africa and the biggest cathedral in the Middle East, the city is slowly but surely coming to life.  More than 1,500 families had moved in by March; by the end of 2024 that could have risen to 10,000. Government ministries are relocating to the new city, and tens of thousands of government employees are now working there.  Parliament has started directing its meetings from the city, and banks and businesses are beginning to move their headquarters there.

Eventually, according to Khaled Abbas, chairman of the Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD), “the whole country will be managed from within the new capital.”

Despite difficult domestic issues still to be addressed, this past year has seen Egypt’s president emerge as a figure of global significance.    

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post on-line titled: "Egyptian President Sisi is on a winning streak", 8 October 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-823621

       

The UN’s in-built anti-Israel majority

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 30 September 2024

        It has been a dispiriting time, these past few days, watching a succession of world leaders parrot to the UN General Assembly misinformation, half-truths and downright lies emanating from the propaganda machines of Iran and its proxies, and see them receive rapturous applause from the delegates. 

The speeches by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, powerful though each was, fell largely on deaf ears, drowned out by consistent and continuous anti-Israel rhetoric from a succession of Muslim leaders and their allies. 

The UN General Assembly has 193 member states, and a significant number of them are part of the Global South, including Arab, Muslim-majority, and developing nations that have traditionally supported the Palestinian cause or taken positions critical of Israel.  Many of them, especially those with histories of colonization, see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of anti-colonialism.  The millennia-long association of the Jewish people with the Holy Land, proof positive that Jews are not colonialists in their own historic homeland, has been deliberately written out of the accepted anti-Israel narrative.

It is far from the only willful misrepresentation.  When South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, addressed the Assembly, he linked his country’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza to apartheid in his own country.   

“The violence the Palestinian people are being subjected to is a grim continuation of more than half a century of apartheid that has been perpetrated against Palestinians by Israel,” he said. “We South Africans know what apartheid looks like...We will not remain silent and watch as apartheid is perpetrated against others.”

He ignores the views of eminent fellow countrymen and women who utterly reject his assertion – people like Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, leader of the African Christian Democratic Party, who says that using the term in respect of Israel trivializes the suffering experienced under apartheid in South Africa. He accuses those who use apartheid in respect of Israel of distorting the truth for political purposes.  Or Mamphela Ramphele, former leader of the Agang SA political party. She argues that equating Israel’s situation with apartheid South Africa is a false equivalence. Mosioua "Terror" Lekota, the leader of the Congress of the People (COPE) party, also dismisses claims that Israel is an apartheid state (“Terror” refers to his prowess on the football field). Acknowledging the difficulties faced by some Palestinians, he asserts that these do not equate to apartheid as experienced in South Africa. 

          The address by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was an object lesson in both hype and hypocrisy. He took the already suspect Hamas-inspired figures of those killed during the Gaza war and magnified them.

At one point he said “hundreds of thousands of children are dead and are still dying”- a ridiculous exaggeration; at another he claimed that “more than 17,000 children” had been “targeted” by Israel in Gaza, implying that the IDF had gone out in search of youngsters to kill.

What is never heard from pro-Palestinian lobbyists, and too rarely from those supporting Israel, is that the Hamas health ministry’s definition of “child” is anyone under 18 years of age. Fully-fledged soldiers aged 16 and 17 are counted as children and go toward boosting the emotive total. 

Erdogan condemned Israel’s recent 45-day suspension of Al Jazeera’s activities as an unjustifiable attack on the media.  In presenting himself as the champion of journalists, Erdogan achieved the height of hypocrisy.  He conveniently forgot that in 2016 Turkey achieved the dubious record of imprisoning more journalists in one year than any other nation, ever.  Today, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), there are scores of Turkish and Kurdish journalists, indicted on charges of terrorism, awaiting trial in Turkey.

By mentioning the name "Hamas" once in his speech, Erdogan did go one better than Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.  Erdogan claimed that Hamas had accepted a ceasefire deal.  In fact, after its “acceptance” it proposed so many changes that US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, told Hamas a month later that it was “time for the haggling to stop."

 As for Abbas, the word "Hamas" never passed his lips.  He concentrated on the regrettable, but predictable, results of the barbarous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which he described as an explosion that “happened”. 

 Confident of his in-built majority in the General Assembly, he asked delegates to vote in favour of the July ruling of the ICJ that "Israel's... continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal"  and that Israel should evacuate all its settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem within twelve months. Realistically, with its in-built, anti-Israel majority, the General Assembly is likely to do just that. 

Abbas ended by outlining a 12-point plan for “the day after”, which included him and the PA in charge of Gaza, and a UN-sponsored peace conference with Israel.  A little earlier in his speech he had described Israel as  “this transient State.” Now, in support of the proposal, he declared: “We recognize the State of Israel.”

In his first address to the UN General Assembly, the new president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, condemned Israel’s campaign in Gaza, quoting the usual undifferentiated 41,000 figure of those killed, “mostly women and children”.  Israel’s renewed  initiative against Hezbollah he described as “desperate barbarism”.

Then, perhaps speaking for himself, but certainly not for his Supreme Leader or the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), he declared: “We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The words must have come as something of a shock to the hardline minders sent to accompany him into the hell of the “Great Satan”.  Their emollient president had been selected for the post only a few months before by the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who may already be regretting his choice. 

          For on his arrival in the US on September 16, Pezeshkian had held a press conference and told American reporters: "We are willing to put all our weapons aside so long as Israel is willing to do the same."  Supporters of the regime back in Tehran were aghast. A prime purpose of Iran's 1979 revolution is to overthrow Israel, the US and the West, and impose Shia law on them and the whole world. There was a media storm; the president was accused of speaking out of turn.

          Either at that point, or during his less-than-aggressive words at the General Assembly, a decision was taken.  While he was still standing on the podium, the Iranian mission to the UN announced that the president’s press conference, scheduled for the next day, had been canceled. He had apparently said more than enough.

His words to the US reporters were already in the papers, and his speech attracted only short-lived applause from the assembled delegates.  The UN General Assembly, it seems, was not prepared to countenance anyone suggesting peace with Israel, not even the representative of its supreme enemy. The UN’s in-built anti-Israel majority was as predictable as ever. 

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and in the Jerusalem Post online titled: "UN's anti-Israel majority: Misinformation and hypocrisy reign at the General Assembly", 30 Sep 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-822434

Published in Eurasia Review, 5 October 2024:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/05102024-the-uns-in-built-anti-israel-majority-oped/

Published  in the MPC Journal titled "Why the UN votes against Israel", 10 Oct 2024

https://mpc-journal.org/why-the-un-votes-against-israel/ 

Turkey seeks to join BRICS

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 23 September 2024

 On September 2, Turkey was reported to be the first and only NATO member asking to join the BRICS economic group of nations.  BRICS, headed by Russia, China, Iran and South Africa, is dominated by the Russian and Chinese presidents, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.   .

One former Turkish diplomat told the news medium Newsweek that the move by Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been driven by "accumulated frustrations" with the West and the EU.  Sinan Ulgen, head of the Istanbul-based think tank EDAM, said:  "It's a strategy to strengthen relations with non-Western powers at a time when the US hegemony is waning."

The economic grouping originally calling itself BRIC from the initials of its founding members – Brazil, Russia, India and China – was originally concerned with identifying investment opportunities for their fast-growing economies.  They held their first meeting in 2006, and soon evolved into a formal geopolitical bloc. 

In 2010 South Africa was invited to join, and this led to the change of name to BRICS.  The bloc has come to be regarded as a global alternative to the US-led G7 economic grouping – the informal body comprising seven of the world's advanced economies:  the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. The European Union is a “non-enumerated member.”

In August 2023, during its summit in Johannesburg, BRICS invited six new countries to join the group:  Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The invitation reflected BRICS’s ambition to challenge the dominance of the G7 on the world economic stage, and to strengthen ties with emerging economies.

Argentina is the only country to have formally declined the invitation.  Saudi Arabia is hesitating, might take it up at some time, but meanwhile participates in the organization's activities as an invited nation.  The other four joined on January 1, 2024.  Combined, BRICS members now encompass about 30% of the world's land surface and 45% of the global population.

Turkey's application to join puts it at odds with the rest of the NATO family, but it has been a problematic member from the very start.  Admitted in 1952, with the Cold War at its iciest, the hope was that Turkey would help protect NATO’s eastern flank from Soviet aggression.  In the event Turkey, half-in and half-out of Europe, frequently diverged from the consensus view of the alliance.  But since Erdogan came to power – first as Turkey’s prime minister, and later as President – Turkey has consistently pursued tactical and foreign policy goals at odds with the West. 

Convinced that Turkey’s place within the organization was impregnable on strategic grounds, Erdogan has persistently pursued his own agenda.  For example, even when Western countries combined to fight terror groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, Erdogan continued supporting the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot extremist militias.  In Syria Turkey is continually challenging the US for supporting Kurdish forces that Erdogan views as terrorists.

Then there was the débacle over Erdogan’s bid to purchase F-35s, the latest generation of US stealth jet fighters, at the very time he was installing Russia's advanced S-400 air-defense missile system. Defying strenuous American objections and the threat of sanctions, Turkey  received the first shipment from Russia in July 2018.  

This rendered the American F-35 deal impossible.  The S-400 is specifically designed to detect and shoot down stealth fighters like the F-35.  If Turkey acquired both, the Russian specialists required to set up the S-400 system would be able to learn about the advanced technology built into the American-made fighter jets. 

So when it became perfectly apparent that Erdogan was insistent on receiving the Russian ground-to-air missile system, Washington cancelled the F-35 deal. 

The effect of Turkey’s S-400 purchase was to enhance Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East. Every subsequent NATO operation had to take into account the presence of the Russian system in Turkey – a disruptive effect on the Western alliance very much to Putin’s liking. 

Putin must also relish Turkey’s application to join BRICS - a further chapter in the Erdogan saga, centered on his belief that he can both run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.  He may feel that a by-product of his membership of BRICS will be to gain congenial support for his latest diplomatic effort – a new Islamic alliance dedicated to delegitimizing and destabilizing Israel. He now reveals the "charm offensive" he directed toward Israel in April 2022 as the realpolitik cloak it always was.  He urgently needed to improve his standing with the US at the time. 

On September 7, speaking in Istanbul, Erdogan said: “The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries.”  He went on to emphasize that Turkey’s recent diplomatic moves to improve ties with Egypt and Syria were aimed at creating a “line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism.”  

Egypt is, of course, already a member of BRICS.  At least ten other countries are expressing interest in joining. They include a fair number of potential supporters of Turkey’s anti-Israel consortium, such as Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria  and Pakistan.

Erdogan’s fear of Israeli “expansionism” probably refers in part to the Abraham Accords – the arrangements under which four Arab nations have normalized their relations with Israel without requiring a Palestinian state as a prerequisite.  The United Arab Emirates (UAE) are already a member, and Saudi Arabia, which is in advanced negotiations with the US about an Abraham Accord of its own, was invited to join the BRICS group during its summit in August 2023, but did not do so on January 1, 2024, which was the suggested date.  It is still considering the matter.

Erdogan’s current dissatisfaction with the West stems from its support for Israel's response to Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on October 7.  Subsequent adverse criticism by many Western nations of the collateral deaths, injuries and physical damage has done nothing to placate him. His reported response to the exploding pagers and walkie-talkie episodes are to accuse Israel of seeking to expand the Gaza war to Lebanon.

Turkey has remained equivocal about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Unlike other NATO members, it has not imposed sanctions on the Kremlin.  Rather than annoying Moscow, Erdogan has established himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. He has brokered talks about grain exports from Black Sea ports and the latest prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington.

“Turkey can become a strong, prosperous, prestigious and effective country,” he said on September 1, “if it improves its relations with the East and the West simultaneously.  Any method other than this will not benefit Turkey, but will harm it.”

Warming to his theme, and sticking closely to his precarious, but well-established strategy, he continued: “We do not have to choose between the European Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as some people claim.  On the contrary, we have to develop our relations with both these and other organizations on a win-win basis.”

Turkey’s application to join BRICS will be discussed at a summit in Russia in October.


Published in the Jerusalem Post, and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Turkey seeks to join BRICS in a strategic shift away from the West" , 23 Sep 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-821275

Bias at the BBC

 Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, 20 September 2024

            The flagship BBC news and comment TV programme, “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”,  is transmitted first thing every Sunday morning, and then is available indefinitely via the BBC iPlayer, its video on demand service.  The programme always starts with a review of the UK’s Sunday newspapers, showing their front pages and headlines.

            On Sunday morning, September 8, Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, provided her viewers with a sight of every leading UK newspaper except the Sunday Telegraph.  Why was it omitted?  Perhaps because that morning the Telegraph headline read:

“BBC ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war.  Coverage was heavily biased against Israel, report into corporation’s output finds.”

   The report referred to presented an analysis of the BBC’s news coverage during a four-month period beginning October 7, 2023 – the day Hamas burst into Israel and carried out their brutal massacre of around 1,200 people, taking another 251 into Gaza as hostages.

A team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists had contributed to the research, which used artificial intelligence to analyze nine million words of BBC output.

Researchers identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which demand impartiality, accuracy and adherence to editorial values and the public interest.

“The findings,” said the report, “reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines.”

It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism, while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation, and that some journalists used by the BBC in its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict had previously shown sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its acts of terror

            The report bears the name of Trevor Asserson, a British-born lawyer. Founder and senior partner of an international law firm, he now runs the Israeli arm of the firm from Tel Aviv.

Asserson is no novice when it comes to analyzing the broadcast media.  Back in 2000 he was still based in the UK.  Listening to, and watching, the BBC reporting on the troubled Middle East following the first intifada and the failure of the Oslo Accords, he became increasingly incensed with what appeared to be the BBC’s obvious departure from its declared principles of impartiality.

 Asserting that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is “infected by an apparent widespread antipathy towards Israel,”  Asserson commissioned a series of in-depth studies to determine if the BBC’s coverage was indeed impartial or biased. 

For a seven-week period in 2001, his team recorded the bulk of the BBC’s Middle East news output on TV and radio, and for comparison they simultaneously recorded reports from a variety of other sources.  Their conclusion: the BBC was in frequent breach of its obligations under its charter and broadcasting licence to be unbiased and impartial.

Trevor Asserson’s reports, matched by vociferous Palestinian claims of pro-Israel bias in the BBC, finally led the corporation to commission an investigation and report from one of its senior journalists, Malcolm Balen.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, both TV and radio, analyzing the content in minute detail.  This exhaustive study resulted in a 20,000-word report which, at the end of 2004, was given highly restricted circulation within the top echelons of the BBC.  Thereafter it was treated as Top Secret and locked away. 

Widespread speculation that Balen had uncovered multiple examples of BBC bias and breaches of impartiality led to repeated legal applications for its release under the UK Freedom of Information Act.  These legal challenges were defended by the BBC at a cost of over £330,000. In 2009 the House of Lords, then the UK’s supreme court, ruled that as “a document held for journalistic purposes”, the report was explicitly excluded from the requirements of the Act.  So it remains locked away.

The BBC’s obvious anti-Israel stance in reporting the events of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath enraged one Asserson client. The final straw came a week into the war.  The BBC’s reporting of the explosion that occurred in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City breached BBC Guidelines just too blatantly.  Knowing of Asserson’s work a quarter of a century ago, the client suggested he undertake a similar analysis of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The now 68-year-old Trevor Asserson took up the challenge. The Report reveals that he himself designed and ran the research program.  Work undertaken by solicitors within the firm was mostly carried out on a voluntary basis. An Israeli businessman, based in London, funded such expenses as paying external lawyers to conduct human review, and for work undertaken by data scientists who contributed to the Report.

   In reporting the Al-Ahli explosion, the BBC’s correspondent, speaking live from Gaza, said "it is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes."  The  BBC’s Arabic service repeated this assessment, and anti-Israel protests immediate broke out both in the Arab world and the West. 

It did not take long for the truth to emerge, but by then the damage had been done.  The explosion was the result of a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad.  In its apology, days later, the BBC still failed to make clear that the evidence showed conclusively that the explosion had not been an Israeli attack.

"I think the BBC has a deep problem of bias against Israel," Asserson is reported to have said.  "The BBC continually and consistently failed in its duty to be journalistically accurate, and also in its duty to be impartial and objective."

The hasty and unverified assertion that Israel must be responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital was followed by a further example a few weeks later.  On that occasion the BBC reported that IDF troops had entered Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, "targeting medical teams and Arab speakers."  This was either a wilful or an unprofessional mis-reading of an IDF release, which stated that the troops had entered the hospital "accompanied by Arabic speakers and medical teams" to assist patients. On this occasion the BBC broadcast an adequate apology.

As the vast network of tunnels criss-crossing the Gaza Strip – a system larger than the London Underground – was slowly revealed, the BBC seemed to be doing its best to undermine the IDF’s discovery of a Hamas military command post directly underneath a hospital.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, seemed to suggest that the discovery of Kalashnikov assault rifles found in the hospital basements had nothing to do with Hamas. Implying that they might be part of the hospital’s own security, he said with a smile:  "Wherever you go in the Middle East you see an awful lot of Kalashnikovs."  .

Bowen, now a senior BBC official, was singled out for criticism back in April 2009 when he was the BBC’s Middle East editor. A  series of complaints of inaccuracy and anti-Israel bias were brought against him.  On investigation the charges of bias were not sustained, but three complaints of inaccuracy were fully or partially upheld by the BBC.

The new Asserson Report devotes no less than 16 pages to demonstrating inaccuracy or anti-Israel bias in Bowen’s reporting of the Gaza conflict, and also in his recently published book “The Making of the Modern Middle East”. 

The report singles out the BBC’s Arabic service as one of the most biased of all global media outlets in its treatment of the Israel-Hamas conflict.  It identifies 11 news and comment programs featuring reporters who, it shows, have previously made public statements in support of terrorism, and specifically Hamas, without viewers being informed of this.

The report also finds that the BBC associated Israel with war crimes 121 times as against 30 for Hamas; with genocide 283 times as against 19 for Hamas; and with breaching international law 167 times as against 27 for Hamas.

It is not surprising, in light of the Report’s carefully referenced evidence, that Jewish and non-Jewish voices in the UK are calling for a full independent investigation into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.  Danny Cohen, once Director of BBC Television, has said there is now an “institutional crisis” at the corporation, and called for an independent review.  The Telegraph reported that two leading Jewish groups, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the National Jewish Assembly, have added their voices to the call, while Lord Austin, a former Labour minister, accused the BBC of “high-handed arrogance” for continually dismissing questions over its impartiality.

The Asserson Report has been submitted to the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and to Samir Shah, its chairman, as well as to all board members. 

This positive and hopeful approach was immediately devalued by a BBC spokesperson, who sought to question the technical competence of the research.  The corporation had “serious questions” about the report’s methodology, the spokesperson announced, particularly its heavy reliance on Artificial Intelligence to analyze impartiality, and its interpretation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

“However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.”

Once the BBC was its own master, but in 2017 it was made subject to an external regulator, Ofcom (the Office of Communications).  The Conservative MP Greg Smith, shadow transport and business minister, has said: “There are now clear grounds for Ofcom  and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to use every tool they have in their arsenal to bring about greater compliance with the rules around neutrality and fair coverage in the BBC charter.”

Depending on the BBC’s response to the Asserson Report, Ofcom may indeed decide to take action designed to restore genuine impartiality within the corporation.

Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine and online titled: "BBC bias on Israel: How did the UK broadcaster lose impartiality?", 21 Sep 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-820841

Published in Eurasia Review, 20 Sep 2024:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/20092024-bias-at-the-bbc-oped/