A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Thursday, July 31, 2014

If Only This Telegraph Headline Were True . . .

. . . we could relax until 2086. Sadly, the ceasefire is for 72 hours, not 72 years.


The Damage to Tripoli Airport

As Greece joins other Western countries in pulling its nationals out of Tripoli in Libya, in Greece's case by sea (The US and UK evacuated overland to Tunisia), the damage to Tripoli International Airport from weeks of militias battling to control the airport is apparent. Yesterday a ceasefire was announced to allow firefighters to fight the huge oil tank fire that has been raging since earlier this week.  But that ceasefire collapsed today, and heavy fighting is reported again. This afternoon, there are reports of large protests in Tripoli's main squares, suggesting popular outrage t how the militia fighting has cut Tripoli off from the rest of the world may be reaching a boil.

Some photos from the Internet give a sense of the extensive damage to the airport. But the loss of passenger revenues, the losses in destroyed airframes and the burning fuel in the tank fire must be enormous. Some accounts say 90% or more of the aircraft on the ground when the fighting erupted have been damaged or destroyed.

About July 14:


From July 20, struck by a rocket:

 Recently, from Twitter:

From NPR:


The Silence of the Arab Regimes

The New York Times has taken note of a phenomenon I had been planning to talk about soon anyway, so I'll use their piece as a takeoff point for my own comments: "Arab Leaders Silent, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel."

As Israel's current operation in Gaza grows into something much longer and deadlier than Cast Lead six years ago, there has been much international condemnation, from Europe, the UN, and human rights groups. The US is less critical and the US Congress openly supportive (and the US is resupplying Israel with munitions in the midst of the operation), but there has been considerable criticism in the media and academia.

But two sources of pressure that helped bring previous Gaza interventions to a ceasefire are absent here. First, domestic support in Israel is higher than in some previous interventions, with polls showing overwhelming support among Israeli Jews, and Israeli peace activists increasingly facing confrontations with supporters of the war.

But even more striking is the fact that, while there has been much sympathy expressed toward Gaza in the Arab "street," the Arab regimes have been mostly silent. Egypt did make a ceasefire proposal early on, which Israel accepted (and which some suspect was negotiated beforehand) and Hamas rejected. But after the Hamas rejection, Egypt essentially washed its hands of the situation. And Egypt, of course, shares a border with Gaza, and by keeping the Rafah crossing closed, is complicit, at the very least, with maintaining the siege of Gaza. It allows humanitarian supplies in, but doesn't allow those under bombardment out.

The other country with diplomatic relations with Israel, Jordan, is also part of the broad Sunni alliance that opposes the Muslim Brotherhood, and which also includes Saudi Arabia and the UAE. At least there is evidence that the Jordanian street (with its substantial Palestinian component) is restive and supportive of Gaza civilians, if not Hamas.

The Egyptian "street" is another matter. Some of Egypt's talk-show hosts have been so virulently anti-Hamas that Israel has been quoting them in propaganda broadcasts into Gaza. Though Field Marshal Sisi rose to power under the Morsi Presidency, he and his supporters have vowed to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, and of course, Hamas was formed from the Gaza branch. And most indications are that the sentiment is widely shared among secular Egyptians.

With Egypt, Jordan, the Saudis and the UAE forming a solid front against Hamas, and Libya, Syria, and Iraq preoccupied with other matters, Hamas has few friends: Qatar, Iran and Hizbullah, and the latter two are tied down in Syria and Iraq. Whereas the Hamas leadership in exile were once welcomed in ‘Amman, and after that in Damascus, today they are stuck in distant Doha.

I have left out one Arab regime: the Palestinian Authority. Despite the recent reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO under Mahmoud ‘Abbas, and very vocal criticisms by ‘Abbas, and threats to take Israel to the International Criminal Court,the Palestinian Security Forces kept the West Bank largely quiet during the first two weeks of the campaign. Only in the last ten days or so have demonstrations in the West Bank led to open clashes, but ‘Abbas has largely kept the West Bank, if vocal, nonviolent.

We can only speculate whether the post-Arab Spring anti-Muslim Brotherhood alliance encouraged Israel to launch the present campaign; but it has surely encouraged it to seek a more thorough destruction of Hamas' military capabilities than it did in earlier incursions.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

With Tripoli Fire Still Burning, Benghazi Erupts

The deteriorating situation in Libya continues in the wake of Western evacuations of nationals from Tripoli. now Benghazi has erupted again, with Ansar al-Shari‘a seizing a Special Forces base and an important hospital,

The situation seems fluid however; Twitter posts are claiming the hospital an other sites have been taken back by popular demonstrations, bringing down the Ansar al-Shari‘a flags.

More Shrines Being Destroyed in Mosul and Nineveh Province

Following last week's destruction of the Tomb of Jonah, ISIS is continuing its destruction of ancient and medieval shrines in Mosul and the surrounding region.the tombs of Prophet Jirjis and of Seth, and the Mashhad al-Imam ‘Awn al-Din appear to be confirmed, while some reports of other sites are not. Conflict Antiquities has details and images; other reports from RFE/RL and elsewhere were collected at Juan Cole's blog.

Cordon Sanitaire: Israel Creating 3-Km Buffer Inside Gaza?

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are reporting that Israel is ordering Gazans to evacuate a three-kilometer buffer zone all along the border. The map is taken from the linked report. This appears to be intended to eliminate tunnel networks near the Israeli border and isolate Gaza further.

At the same time, however, if intended to be permanent, it will reduce the area of the Gaza Strip by nearly 40% of the total area of what is already one of the world's poorest and most densely-populated political units.

While it is true that the bulk of Gaza's population is concentrated along the seacoast, creation of such a buffer zone would concentrate the population even more, and require evacuation of the town of Beit Hanoun and other localities. See also here and here.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

LOL: Turkish Deputy PM Says Women Shouldn't Laugh Out Loud in Public

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has provoked a bit of a storm over remarks made at a Bayram event yesterday in which he said women should be chaste and modest and — the remark that set off an Internet storm —should not laugh out loud in public.

Quoting the (anti-AKP) Hurriyet Daily News:
“Chastity is so important. It is not only a name. It is an ornament for both women and men. [She] will have chasteness. Man will have it, too. He will not be a womanizer. He will be bound to his wife. He will love his children. [The woman] will know what is haram and not haram. She will not laugh in public. She will not be inviting in her attitudes and will protect her chasteness,” Arınç said, adding that people had abandoned their values today.

People needs to discover the Quran once again, Arınç said, adding that there had been a regression on moral grounds.

“Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, becoming the symbol of chastity?” he said.
He also criticized soap operas and women talking on cellphones.

Unsurprisingly, Turkish social media quickly filled with pictures of women laughing in public (most probably laughing at Arınç).

As they say, LOL. Photo below one of many on Twitter.

Some Recomended Readings

 A few select things worth reading:

Monday, July 28, 2014

July 28, 1914: As Europe Descends into War, Winston Churchill and Enver Pasha Separately Push Turkey Towards a German Alliance

One hundred years ago today, Austria declared war on Serbia, lighting the fuse that within a week would transform what Bismarck had called the Balkan powder keg into a Europe-wide explosion. It was one month exactly since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

On the same day, July 28, two men on opposite sides of Europe would take actions that would lead to the Ottoman Empire joining the German side. In London, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill initiated the idea of confiscating two Turkish battleships being built in  British shipyards, one already complete and the other nearing completion, and adding them to the Royal Navy. Meanwhile on the same day in Constantinople, the most pro-German member of the Ottoman Cabinet, War Minister Enver Pasha, was proposing an alliance to the German Ambassador. Over the coming days Churchill's move inadvertently would provoke  popular outrage in Turkey, helping push reluctant members of the Cabinet into Enver's pro-German camp.

As most other media are focusing on the centennial of the opening moves of the Great War, this blog will concentrate on the series of events that brought Turkey into the war on the side of the Central Powers, setting in motion the events from which the modern Middle East emerged.

At the moment Austria declared war on Serbia, Britain was still trying to avoid a war; in fact the British Cabinet, preoccupied with events in Ireland, had not even discussed the European crisis until July 27.

Churchill, with responsibility for the Royal Navy, was astute enough to realize that the tangle of European alliances was dragging Britain towards war,  and he was determined to make sure the Royal Navy was prepared to meet its only serious challenger, the German High Seas Fleet.

Churchill in 1914
He had taken his first precaution a week before. The fleet had had a regular mobilization maneuver in early July, ending with a Grand Review. Normally after that, the elements of the fleet would disperse to their home ports to allow heir crews shore leave. The First Fleet at Portland was scheduled to disperse on Monday, July 27, and on July 26 Churchill approved the recommendation of the First Sea Lord (senior uniformed commander in the Navy), Prince Louis of Battenberg, to keep the fleet together. Commander of the Home Fleet Admiral Sir George Callaghan was accordingly ordered not to disperse the fleet. (Within a few weeks of the war breaking out, Churchill replaced Battenberg as First Sea Lord with Admiral Sir John Fisher and the aging Callaghan as Fleet Commander with Admiral John Jellicoe). (During the war the German name Battenberg name was Anglicized as Mountbatten, and Prince Louis' son Louis would become famous in the next war as Lord Mountbatten of Burma.)

The decision not to disperse had been made in response to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Now, on Tuesday, July 28, Churchill still moving ahead of a reluctant Cabinet (whose reluctance helped convince Germany that Britain would not go to war), unilaterally another huge step: he ordered the Fleet to move from its home ports to its War Station at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys north of Scotland, where it would be in position to intercept the High Seas Fleet in the North Sea if it came out.

These moves were widely praised at the time and since by naval historians who recognize Churchill's prescience about the impending war. But July 28 seems to have also marked the genesis of another idea whose impact Churchill had not entirely foreseen: the seizure of the Turkish battleships.

Under the long reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II the Ottoman Empire more than earned its reputation as the "Sick Man of Europe." Both the Army and the Navy had been neglected, to the point that the navy had no modern warships. But with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, Turkey had embarked on a major military modernization program. For advice and training of its Army, it turned to Germany, and the famous military mission of Liman von Sanders. For the Navy, it turned to Britain, even proposing an alliance to Britain in 1911. (It was declined. Even Churchill, considered more pro-Turkish than most in the British government, was opposed. Disdain for Turkish military capabilities would persist in Britain, at least until Gallipoli and Kut.) (To balance things further, the French were training the police.)

Ex-Reshadiyeh (as HMS Erin)
As part of the buildup of its Navy, Turkey ordered the first of a new class of battleship based on the British Dreadnought, the lead ship to be named Reshadiyeh (Reşadiye in Modern Turkish). She was laid down by Vickers in 1911, launched in September 1913, and was ready for delivery by August 1914. She remained in Britain to await completion of a second battleship and preparation of proper docking facilities back home..

Meanwhile, in the interim, an even larger warship became available. Brazil, engaged in a naval arms race in 1911, had ordered a Dreadnought-class battleship named Rio de Janeiro from the Armstrong-Whitworth shipyard at Newcastle upon Tyne, designed with heavier gunnery than previous ships. When rubber prices declined and relations with Argentina improved, Brazil decided it could no longer afford payments on the ship. In December 1913,  she was sold to Turkey, and the Rio de Janeiro became the Sultan Osman I. (Perhaps setting some sort of record, within less than a year she would become HMS Agincourt.)

Ex-Sultan Osman I (as HMS Agincourt) in 1915
The cost of these two ships for an Ottoman economy struggling to pay its bills was enormous. At least in popular Turkish tradition schoolchildren had contributed their small-change paras and kuruş to fundraising efforts at schools, women reportedly selling their hair, and, of course, both higher taxes and popular subscription efforts. The ships had become symbols of national pride.

On July 7, the head of the British Naval Mission in Constantinople had embarked for Britain for the handover of the ships, as had the Sultan Osman's captain; preparations were under way to welcome the ships in the Dardanelles. On July 28, Churchill asked Prince Louis and his Third Sea Lord, who was in charge of procurement, if the ships could be seized. Churchill may have thought of the idea previously, but the paper trail starts on the 28th. Turkey was a friendly power with a valid contract, and Churchill was advised that there was no legal ground for seizing the ships since Britain was not at war; the contract allowed Britain to purchase the ships in case of necessity, but not to seize them without compensation.

On the 29th, there were reports that Sultan Osman (which had its Turkish crew for training) was fueling, despite not being completed. Churchill ordered security aboard the ship to prevent it from sailing or from raising the Turkish flag. On the 30th the Attorney General advised the move would be illegal but might be justified under the exigencies of ear, while the Foreign Office decided to let the Admiralty deal with Navy issues. I don't see much evidence in the histories of the event that anyone was discussing what the Turkish reaction might be. It just wasn't part of the equation. On July 31 the Cabinet approved the decision, and on August 1 the two shipyards, Vickers and Armstrong-Whitworth, were informed that the ships were to be detained.

It was not until August 3 (the day Britain issued its ultimatum to Germany in response to the violation of Belgian neutrality, and the day before Britain declared war) that the British Government officially notified the Ottoman Government that the ships would not be delivered, and that the British were prepared to give "all due consideration" to the financial loss to Turkey: not exactly a promise of full compensation.

August 3 is often given as the date of the decision, but clearly it had been under active discussion for a week. In fact, the fueling of the Osman on July 29 shows the Turks suspected what was happening, and certainly the Turkish crews in Britain knew they were barred from leaving; David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace notes that evidence discovered long after the war shows Enver discussed it with the other Young Turk leadership on August 1, suggesting the Government knew before the official notification on August 3. And that beings us to what was going on on the other side of Europe.

Meanwhile, in Constantinople . . .

Said Halim Pasha
The official head of the Ottoman Government in August 1914 was Said Halim Pasha, the Grand Vizier or Prime Minister. He was, ironically, a grandson of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha of Egypt, born in Cairo and collateral kinsman of the Khedive; his villa in central Cairo still stands, though decaying; but he and his wife, also a collateral of the Khedivial family, preferred their villa on the Bosporus.

Said Halim Pasha, however, was not a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, the "Young Turks"), who had led the Revolution of 1908 and taken effective control of the Cabinet in 1913. Despite being the nominal head of the government, the Cabinet was dominated by the CUP "triumvirate" consisting of the  by the War Minister, Enver Pasha, the CUP Secretary-General and Interior Minister, Talaat (Talat) Pasha (who would succeed Said Halim as Grand Vizier), and the Minister of Marine and later commander of the Fourth Army against Britain, Djemal (Jemal, Cemal) Pasha.

Enver Pasha
Of the three, Enver had long been pro-German, and wore a turned-up mustache not unlike the Kaiser's. Talaat had started by favoring an alliance with the Entente powers, but became disillusioned. Djemal Pasha also was a reluctant convert and in fact was excluded by Enver and Talat from negotiations on the German treaty. By July 1914 the triumvirate were leaning towards a German alliance. Unfortunately, Germany wasn't buying.

Germany spent parts of 1913 and 1914 trying to push Germany into an alliance with Greece (even today you may guess how that was received) or Bulgaria (its recent Balkan War adversary. These went nowhere.

Talaat Pasha
Enver had sought to sound out Germany about an alliance for some time. Turkey's main concern was Russia, whose navy dominated the Black Sea and whose armies bordered Turkey in the Caucasus, not to mention the historic Russian desire to control the Straits.

Djemal Pasha
The only powers that could help clearly did not include Greece and Bulgaria, and France and Britain, though friendly, were allies with Russia in the Triple Entente. Austria-Hungary was militarily weak, and a historic enemy of the Ottomans, though Constantinople was pursuing overtures with Vienna as well. Germany was the only obvious candidate.

But neither the German Government nor General Staff initially saw much value in a Turkish alliance. The presence of Liman von Sanders' military mission meant that they knew that the Turkish Army would take some time to prepare for war, and the assumption in Beflin that July was still that Britain would stay out, France would be quickly defeated, then the Army would turn to Russia,nd be home before winter. (The Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, apparently forgot his uncle and much more famous namesake Moltke the elder's maxim that "war plans never survive contact with the enemy." Moltke the Elder got to Paris in 1870-71; his nephew never did.)

Baron von Wangenheim
Among the nay-sayers was the German Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman Government), Hans Freiherr (Baron) von Wangenheim. Ambassador since 1912, Wangenheim considered that an alliance would be more of a burden than a boon. He called it a "liability," but all
German parties agreed that Turkey must be kept from an alliance with the Entente (unlikely since Russia was seen as the major threat). Nevertheless, Enver strongly hinted that an alliance with Russia and France was favored by some in the Cabinet, and on July 22 explicitly said the Grand Vizier, he, and Talaat were unwilling to become "vassals of Russia." (Quoted from Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Volume III, as is much else about the treaty negotiations in this section.)

But as the July crisis deepened, Berlin began to feel need for allies as war with Russia loomed, and on July 24, the day after Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, the Kaiser himself overruled Wangenheim and ordered his envoy to reopen discussions with Enver. On the 27th, Wangenheim signaled willingness to discuss the alliance.

Generalleutnant Otto Liman von Sanders
And that brings us to July 28, the day of Austria's declaration of war and of Churchill's first move against the Turkish battleships. Early in the morning the grand Vizier (presumably as a mouthpiece for Enver and Talaat) dispatched Turkey's proposal of an alliance. Turkey only sought protection against Russia. In return it would offer supreme direction of the Turkish Army and even direct command of a quarter of that Army to the German Military mission under Liman von Sanders. later the same day, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg replied in the Kaiser's name that Germany accepted the proposal with four specifications: 1) for the moment, both parties would remain neutral in the Austria-Serbia dispute; 2) if Russia intervened against Serbia, Germany would respond and that would be a casus foederis (legal cause for invoking the alliance) for Germany to bring in Turkey; 3) the German Military Mission will remain in Turkey and exercise supreme command; it will guarantee Turkey's territorial integrity against Russia; 4) the treaty to be valid for the present crisis and the conflicts emerging from it.

The Ottomans preferred that the treaty run at least to 1918, when the Liman von Sanders mission was due to conclude. By July 31, the day Russia mobilized, both Wangenheim and Sanders were expressing doubts to Berlin that Turkey was going to sign. Later that day, after Germany had declared a Kriegsgefahrstand or probability of imminent war, Chancellor Bethman-Hollweg agreed to the condition and urged Wangenheim to pursue imminent conclusion of the tresty, but with a caveat (again from Albertini):
. . . it must, however, first be ascertained whether in the present war turkey can and will undertake some action worthy of mention against Russia. In negative case alliance would obviously be useless and not to be signed.
At 4 pm on August 2, the treaty was signed. The negotiators were th Grand Vizier, Enver and Talaat on the Turkish side and Wangenheim and Liman von Sanders on the German. What exactly transpired in the negotiations on August 1 is still unclear a century later. David Fromkin, cited earlier, notes a report discovered much later that indicates that Enver already knew the British were seizing the Turkish battleships in English shipyards, and another indicating that he offered the Germans those two battleships. if both statements are true, he was offering something he already knew or suspected was not his to give. But perhaps, Fromkin suggests, that is what met Bethmann-Hollweg's condition.

That may never be known for certain. Talaat and the grand Vizier were assassinated by Armenians soon after the war and Enver died in an improbable cavalry charge in Russian Central Asia during the Russian Civil War.

Germany hoped (and Enver claimed to agree) that Turkey would declare war on Russia immediately on August 3 and announce the alliance. But in fact the treaty had been negotiated without consulting the rest of the Cabinet, and Bulgaria's continuing neutrality was an awkward geographic obstacle to the alliance.. And Turkey was nowhere near ready for war. Instead, on August 3 Turkey ordered mobilization, and declared its armed neutrality (siding with neither alliance but prepared to defend itself against either). on August 3, the day Germany declared war on France and violated Belgian neutrality, and Britain issued its ultimatum to Germany. It was also the day Britain officially informed Turkey it had seized the battleships.

Though Turkey had already committed itself to Germany, this was not known to the allies or to the Ottoman citizenry, so the parallel events leading to Churchill's seizures of the ships handed Enver a fine propaganda lever for turning the Turkish populace against the Entente. Churchill, unintentionally to be sure, had helped Enver push the Ottoman Empire to Germany's side.

Epilogue and Teaser

On that same August 1, in the midst of the treaty negotiations, Enver held a private meeting with Wangenheim and Liman von Sanders at the German Embassy.  Having on the same day offered Germany the warships being built in England (which he knew were being seized, but Germany did not), he asked for German naval support against Russia in the Black Sea. On August 3, Germany ordered the commander of its Mediterranean Division, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, who was attacking French transports carrying troops from Algeria to metropolitan France, to proceed to Constantinople. Turkey was still publicly neutral and the following day Britain, with a dominant force in the Mediterranean, entered the war. Souchon's force was to lead the British Navy on an epic chase, push Turkey more openly towards war (and ultimately ignite it), and at the same time redress the loss of the two battleships.

But Souchon had only two ships: the battle cruiser SMS Goeben and the cruiser SMS Breslau. The Goeben and Breslau were about to become two of the most famous vessels in all of naval history.

But that is a tale for the first week of August.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

‘Id al- Fitr Greetings

Though the usual astronomical issues mean the end of Ramadan will vary from country to country, most Muslims in the United States and the Middle East consider Monday to be the first day of Shawwal, which means the Ramadan fast ends at sundown today.‘Id al-Fitr greetings to my Muslim readers.

Friday, July 25, 2014

ISIS Denied Earlier Reports it Had Destroyed Jonah's Tomb; Then, Yesterday, They Blew it Up

The good news is that reports from several days ago that ISIS had destroyed the traditional tomb of the Prophet Yunus (Biblical Jonah) turned out to be untrue. The bad news is, we know this because they blew it up yesterday. Quite visibly.


Jonah, in the Bible, and Yunus, his equivalent in the Qur'an, was sent as a Prophet to Nineveh after the incident being swallowed by a "great fish." The Mosque and shrine stood on a hill known as Nabi Yunus, above the ruins of ancient Nineveh, across the Tigris from Mosul. It stood on the site of an earlier Assyrian Church dedicated to Jonah. ISIS had denied earlier reports that it had destroyed the tomb, but the video above and the before and after photos below seem to leave no doubt; as Conflict Antiquities notes, they also match older photos of the site.
Before and After

In addition to these attacks on Sunni sites, ISIS has also destroyed Shi‘ite shrines and husseiniyyas and Sufi saints' tombs.

Tunnel Networks in Guerrilla War: From Cu Chi to Gaza

A Gaza tunnel (Time)
There is nothing new under the sun, like the man said. Being in my 60s has its downside but it does mean I have a lot of memory for this blog that claims to put modern developments in "cultural and historical context," as it says up top. So when I read that Israel is finding the tunnel system in Gaza rather more daunting than they expected,  for example:

"Gaza’s underground: A vast tunnel network that empowers Hamas (Al Jazeera)"

"Israel Surprised by Number, Sophistication of Gaza Tunnels" (Fox News)

and given that Al Jazeera and Fox News don't often agree, even on the time of day, I suspect some fellow geezers of my generation will immediately think "Cu Chi."

Gaza
Yet I've seen only one reference, in this BBC report, to the parallel.

During the Vietnam War, the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) had a 75-mile long underground network of tunnels in the Cu Chi district outside Saigon; these contained command posts,and other facilities and provided an operational center for the Tet Offensive of 1968. Today the Cu Chi tunnels are a Vietnamese War Memorial, with tours available.


Cu Chi
If you look at the two photos you might see some similarities. If you're a resistance force fighting an asymmetric war against a superior military force with air supremacy and greater firepower, might some Hamas strategists have studied the writings of Vo Nguyen Giap? (Who died less than a year ago at 102.)

BBC

 

Thursday, July 24, 2014

George T. Scanlon, 1925-2014, Art Historian and Excavator of Fustat

George Scanlon (AUC)
I have belatedly learned that archaeologist and art historian George T. Scanlon died in New York City on July 13 at the age of 89.

In May we talked about potential threats to the excavations at Fustat (Part I, Part II), and anyone with a knowledge of the archaeology of that first Islamic capital of Egypt will be well-acquainted with Scanlon's name (though he also excavated in Nubia). Onetime head of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), and Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo from 1975-2011 (a post he took up soon after Sir K.A.C. Creswell left), he was an institution in Cairo and at AUC.

Though we met a few times, I didn't know him well, so I will let others pay tribute:

The official AUC announcement.

An appreciation by Maria Golia at The Arabist.

A 2010 tribute in the ARCE Bulletin on the occasion of Scanlon being honored by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (including the inevitable Zahi Hawass), written by Jere L. Bacharach, a historian who did numismatic work on the coins of Fustat.

Fouad Massoum is the New President of What is Left of Iraq, Though His Native Kurdistan is Talking About Leaving It

The Iraqi Parliament is Still Deadlocked on a new Prime Minister, but it did elect a new President today, though that post is much less powerful.  Fouad Massoum, a veteran figure in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), will replace Jalal Talabani,  head of the PUK, who recently returned to Kurdistan after a lengthy recovery in Europe from a stroke.

The fact that there is serious talk of a Kurdish referendum on independence by the end of the year underscores the fragility of Iraq at the moment.

"ISIS Orders FGM" Story Apparently Untrue, But People Will Believe Anything about ISIS

Earlier today there was great furor over a claim by a United Nations official that the Islamic State had ordered that women in Mosul aged 11 to 46 must undergo female genital mutilation (FGM, "female circumcision"). The original allegation appears to have been without foundation; even ISIS has denied it. It soon became clear that reports coming out of the Islamic State made no mention of it, and something seemed wrong with the story from the beginning. FGM is extremely widespread in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is by no means limited to Muslim groups (and is often enforced by the females of the family); outside of Egypt and Nigeria it it is not usually part of an Islamist/jihadist agenda, and it is not a traditional practice in most of the fertile crescent.

While one lesson of this story is to check your facts, especially if you are a UN official, another lesson is that almost anything said about ISIS will be believable. While ISIS denied this story, it has not denied crucifixions, mass executions, destruction of holy sites, killing and expulsion of Shi‘ites, threats of forced conversion against Christians, ethnic cleansing of Yazidis, Shabak, and Kurds, and so on. So while they may be innocent of the FGM charge, they're guilty of more than enough.

Did Israel Underestimate Hamas?

Israeli analyst Shlomi Eldar has a sobering assessment a Al-Monitor's Israel Pulse: "Hamas: the first Palestinian army." While the title may underrate the operations of Fawzi al-Qawuqji and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini's forces in 1948, it does notice the increasing professionalism and fighting skills of Hamas, even if their tactics remain objectionable. For one, Israel's casualties among the IDF is already much greater than in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, though Operation Protective Edge  has not lasted as long.

In fact the growing number of non-state actor and irregular forces showing professional skill is a subject of interest and, for state actors, perhaps a cause for concern. Hizbullah in Syria has reportedly borne the brunt of some of the heaviest fighting, surpassing their Syrian regime allies. ISIS (or the IS, or the Caliphate, or Da‘ish, or ISIL, or whatever they are today) managed to collapse several divisions of the Iraqi Army, capturing heavy weapons as it did so. The "asymmetric" part of Asymmetric Warfare may be disappearing.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Another July 23 in Egypt

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the 1952 coup in Egypt that toppled King Farouq and brought Muhammad Naguib (and Nasser).

And once again, as in all but one year of those 62, the President is a military man.

Nina Paley's "This Land is Mine"

Yes, Part II of Hester Stanhope is coming. Meanwhile, back to the present century.

This is several years old, but I'm sorry to say it's not out of date. It dates from 2012 and is by Jewish-American cartoonist Nina Paley. I'm stunned I never ran this before.

For the non-historians, she has helpfully provided a guide to the various sides, such as the fact that the guy with the gigantic hammer is a Maccabee (which means hammer). (One quibble: the IDF doesn't use AK-47s.)

The song, which you mercifully rarely hear these days, was set to the theme music of the film Exodus, the 1960 Otto Preminger film in which blue-eyed Paul Newman, blonde Eva-Marie Saint, Italian Sal Mineo and others founded the State of Israel. The words were not used in the movie theme. And, I really am not making this up: the lyrics were written by Pat Boone and are sung here by Andy Williams.

Still Undecided on Your Summer Vacation? The Caliphate is Offering Tours

Twice-weekly bus tours from Raqqa into Anbar!

Let the neighbors top that one! (Tour price does not include jizya.)

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A Little Good News . . .

Bigger posts are coming, meanwhile, amid so much bad news, some good news from The Daily Star: "AUB joins NYU to digitize 100,000 Arabic volumes."

Monday, July 21, 2014

The End of Christianity in Mosul?

Part II of the Hester Stanhope post is coming later, or tomorrow, but I wanted to comment on recent developments in Mosul.

Christianity arrived in Mosul as early as the Second Century AD, from the early Christian center at Edessa, and is said to have been the third-ranking Metropolitanate in the Assyrian Church by about 300. It has remained a major center of both the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, with other denominations such as Syriac Orthodox also present. Confronted with a declaration by ISIS that Christians must either convert to Islam, pay a jizya tax, or face death (a very strict interpretation of Islamic law), most or all of Mosul's Christian population has reportedly fled to Erbil, Dohuk, or other cities under Kurdish control. The fate of Mosul's ancient churches and monasteries appears grim.

Earlier, external crosses were reportedly removed from churches, and he tomb of Yunus, equated wih the Biblical Jonah, was reportedly destroyed. Photos circulated over the weekend of an ancient church being burned, and today it's being reported that the Monastery of Mar Behnam near Mosul has been seized and its monks expelled. By one Kurdish account, only 200 Christians remain in Mosul.

This is not characteristic of Muslim treatment of Christians, as the survival of Iraqi Christianity after 14 centuries of Muslim rule indicates, as does a joint Muslim-Christian service at a Chaldean Church in Baghdad.

Iraqi Christians have been under fire since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the US occupation,but now the Chaldean Patriarch is saying the Islamic State is worse than the Mongols.

Shi‘ite shrines have also been attacked by the "Caliphate." Yazidis are also said to be fleeing Mosul, as are, reportedly, the Shabak and Turkmen minorities. Most are seeking refuge in the Kurdistan Regional Government's territory. I hope to address these minorities as I learn more details.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Plus ça change . . . Gaza 1956

The second part of the Hester Stanhope post is taking a while and probably won't go up until Monday. I thought I'd leave you for the weekend with a historical video (though it doesn't count as nostalgic: it's a grim reminder of the present). UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold visits Gaza in 1956 after  flare-up along the border, before the outbreak of the 1956 Suez war. Gaza was then administered by Egypt.

Pentagon Assessment of State of Iraqi Army is Said to Be Grim

This McClatchy article in Stars and Stripes leaks the assessment of the Iraqi Army reportedly sent to the Pentagon by the teams of US advisers sent to assess the situation. It isn't pretty:
Four Iraqi army divisions have simply disappeared and won’t be easily resurrected.
The 2nd Division was routed from Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, on June 9 at the beginning of the Islamic State’s advance, and its four brigades have dissolved.
The 1st Division also is basically gone, losing two brigades in Anbar province earlier in the year, then two more during last month’s Islamic State onslaught, including one brigade that in the words of the senior Iraqi politician was “decimated” in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.
The same is true of Iraq’s 3rd Division. The division’s 6th and 9th Brigades fled the Islamic State’s advance in the north, and the status of its 11th Brigade is unknown. A small unit of its 10th Brigade is still in Tal Afar, but it is trapped by Islamic State forces.
The 4th Division also was routed. Half its members have disappeared — many suspect they were massacred when the Islamic State captured Tikrit — and only one small unit is known to still exist, surrounded by Islamists at a one-time U.S. military base near Tikrit known as Camp Speicher.

The Guns of July? Lessons Still Unlearned

Part II of the post on Hester Stanhope is coming later today or at the latest Monday. But first, this thought.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes," is an aphorism often attributed to Mark Twain, though like many attributed to him, no one seems to be able to locate it in his writings. Reflecting on the range of conflicts in the region today, not just the tit-for-tat cycle of retribution we are witnessing in Gaza, a war provoked by individual murders, but the disintegration of Syria and Iraq, I find the timing ironic in this July of 2014.

For it was a century ago next week that Austria delivered its ultimatum to Serbia in response to the earlier assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,setting in motion the cataclysm that would redraw the maps of Europe and the Middle East and begin the process of making the 20th Century the bloodiest in history. Austria-Hungary would be torn apart, its original quarrel with Serbia largely submerged in he four years that followed.

How little humanity seems to have learned since that earlier July.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Gaza: How Long Will it Last This Round?

The ground operations in Israel's Operation Protective Edge have begun. The casualty figures are likely to rise proportionately. But how long is the incursion likely to last? Israel isn't saying, but its previous operations in 2008-2009, with major round operations as compared to the conflict in 2012, where a ground incursion was forestalled by a ceasefire, may give some indications.

Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 lasted a total of just over three weeks. Israel began air strikes December 27, 2008 and the ground incursion on January 3, 2009. It ended in a ceasefire on January 18, for a total operation of just over three weeks and a ground component of just over two weeks.

Operation Pillar of Cloud in November 2012 (so called in Hebrew though the IDF insisted on calling it "Pillar of Defense" in English) was an eight day campaign limited to Israeli air and artillery strikes and a sustained Hamas rocket attacks. A potential ground incursion was avoided when Egypt (then led by Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization and ally of Hamas) brokered a ceasefire.

Now that a ground incursion has begun, the operation already seems to resemble Cast Lead. Whether it lasts as long remains to be seen.

The Onion: "317,000,000 State Solution"

As usual, The Onion satirically hits a home run: "Everyone In Middle East Given Own Country In 317,000,000-State Solution."
According to U.N. officials, the newly demarcated Middle East now consists of 8,000,000 independent Jewish states, 4,000,000 independent Palestinian states, 112,000,000 Shi’ite Islamic republics, 156,000,000 Sunni Islamic republics, and 19,000,000 Kurdish nations, as well as approximately 18,000,000 territories that include various Christian, Bahá'í, Druze, Zoroastrian, and secular countries.

"The Mad Nun of Lebanon": the Strange Case of Lady Hester Stanhope, Part I

Lady Hester Stanhope
 "I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."
— Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) to T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia
These words are probably a scriptwriter's creation, but delivered by Alec Guinness in what would later be recognized as the authoritative voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi, they seem full of meaning. Probably most viewers of the movie, however, if they recognized any of those names, would know Gordon of Khartoum.  They certainly reflect a reality: the English adventurer who "goes native" and adopts not just the Middle East, but the most exotic or traditional aspects of it, and plunge themselves into the most bedouin or tribal aspects thereof. Lawrence was, of course, just such a "desert-loving English," at least in one stage of his self-creation. Sir Richard Francis Burton also comes to mind, and in later generations, Wilfred Thesiger and St.John Philby.

The other names above may be less familiar. Gordon, of course, is well remembered as the Governor of Sudan, killed by the Mahdi's forces before the relief expedition reached him. Charles M. Doughty was the author of Travels in Arabia Deserta, one of the great travel books of all time, but written in an antique, pseudo-Spencerian or Elizabethan style that puts off readers (though T.E. Lawrence wrote an introduction to later editions and claimed to try to emulate the style in Seven Pillars of Wisdom). There is a wonderful field for research here: all these "desert-loving English" were a bit eccentric. Doughty's eccentricities were mainly linguistic (plus the fact that he wrote a six-volume epic poem on The Birth of Britain which he hoped would be remembered when Arabia Deserta was forgotten: he was wrong).

Of the others, all can be described, at the very least, as eccentric. Few were well-adjusted in modern eyes. Gordon of Khartoum has been the subject of psychological speculation since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians  in 1918, and T.E. Lawrence has fascinated biographers since even before his death, fueled and perhaps challenged by his own frequent self-reinventions. Burton is also a much-studied character, another man who invented an image of himself which may or may not be the real one, but which was aimed at shocking the Victorian age.

The name least likely to be recognized in the quote above is "Stanhope." Lady Hester Stanhope, the only woman in the group (though we should probably add Gertrude Bell as well) and the earliest of them in time (1776-1839) is also most likely the most eccentric of all, if not something rather more, earning her the soubriquet: "the mad nun of Lebanon." (Mad, perhaps. Of Lebanon, certainly. But "Nun" probably refers to the fact that Lady Hester never married and had extreme religious beliefs, and sequesered herself from the world in later years.  In fact, however, she was apparently an enthusiastically liberated woman both sexually and in social roles. She has become something of a proto-feminist heroine, a role marred slightly by the "Mad" part, such as her belief that she was destined to be the bride of the Islamic Mahdi. But more about that later.)

In an earlier era she was well-known. A blogger notes:
She inspired Picasso; Lytton Strachey was rude about her, W H Auden paid tribute to her courage, James Joyce saluted her in Ulysses, where she has a walk-on part as Molly Bloom's girlfriend.
A Romanticized Lady Hester
I haven't tracked those references down; I'm just reporting them, though both Picasso and Joyce apparently viewed her as  forerunner of sexual liberation. And remember, she was more a child of the Enlightenment than a Victorian; she was in her 40s when Victoria was born, and died only two years into her reign.  But she also dominates Chapter VIII of Alexander Kinglake's Eothen, once a famous travel work of a visit to the East. And Lord Byron is said to have called her, "that dangerous thing, a female wit."

Lady Hester came of a most distinguished background. Her father was Charles, 3rd Earl of Stanhope, while her mother was Hester Pitt, daughter of William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, and sister of William Pitt the Younger. So in addition to being the daughter of an Earl, Hester Stanhope was granddaughter and niece of the two greatest Prime Ministers of the age. In 1803 she became the hostess of her uncle, the Younger Pitt, then Prime Minister and unmarried and in need of an official hostess. When Pitt died in 1806 he left her a moderately comfortable (for her class) annual income of £1200.

I's pretty clear that (see Byron above) she made an impression, positive or negative, on society, and on men.  Her portraits do not show her as unattractive, by any means, but despite her rank she was widely considered not a great beauty but an intelligent, independent, and freethinking woman when none of those attributes were praised at her level of society. But her succession of lovers apparently were attracted to precisely those qualities.

But that wouldn't get her remembered, or onto this blog.  Like he others mentioned, she was attracted to the East, though the "Queen of he Desert" title is ridiculous: we're talking about Palestine and Lebanon. Like Gordon of Khartoum, she had curious religious notions, usually including messianic fantasies. And like Burton, she appears to have had a certain enthusiasm about sex. But she was also a pioneering Biblical archaeologist.

Though she never married, she was apparently no aristocratic maiden but an early liberated woman, though as usual for the era it is hard to document those who merely fell in love with her and those who may have been physical lovers. When General Sir John Moore died at Corunna in the Peninsular War against Napoleon in Spain, his last words to  her brother Charles). were reportedly, "Remember me to your sister, Stanhope." She his said to have kept his bloodstained glove for the rest of her life. And he had not been her first romance.

In 1810 she decided to visit the exotic East to explore Biblical sites and whatever else might lie before her. And there began her nearly 30 years in the Middle East. Stay tuned.

Sources used in the above post and in future parts (some only partially consulted):

Wikipedia, Lady Hester Stanhope.

 [Charles Louis Meryon], Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope as Related in Conversations with her Physician, online versions, Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III.

 [Charles Louis Meryon], Travels of the Lady Hester Stanhope, Forming the Completion of Her Memoirs, Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III.

The Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, by her Niece,the Duchess of Cleveland (online)

Frank Hamel, Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope: A New Light on Her Life and Love Affairs (PDF from microform)

Saudi Aramco World, September/October 2970, "'Queen of the Desert': Lady Hester Stanhope"


Mail Online, 22 August 2008, "Wild Life of a White Warrior Goddess." (Okay, the title alone would have told you it was The Daily Mail, but it's really a review of Kirsten Ellis' Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, which I haven't used.)

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Meanwhile in Tunis, They're Worried About Low Voter Registration

From the ongoing tragedies unfolding between Israel and Gaza, through the smoldering wreckage of the Syrian and Iraqi states, and on to Afghanistan where a possible resolution of the electoral dispute has been overshadowed by yesterday's market bombing that produced the highest death toll since 2001, the region seems to be aflame.True, the Iranian nuclear negotiations still offer some grounds for hope, but Egypt seems more authoritarian each day, and violence and kidnapping are continuing in Libya.

So it's nice to report a (somewhat) brighter scene in the only real (and still unfinished) success story of what was once called Arab Spring:  "Tunisians Divided Over Electoral Participation," and "Ask the Experts: Why Have So Few People Registered to Vote?" By comparison with its neighbors, that's almost a :First World Problem."

Other recent pieces at TunisiaLive include "Grabbing a Bite Out of Sight: Sidestepping Ramadan in Tunisia" (somewhere, Habib Bourguiba is smiling), and "Being Gay in Tunisia: Still in the Shadows." (I'm sure it's bad, but compared to, say, "Being Gay in the New Caliphate" . . .)

Now don't get me wrong: Tunisian democracy is still a work in progress. (Western democracy is still a work in progress, or maybe in  regress these days.) There are still threats to the emerging political order. But I thought noting the contrast might be worthwhile on anoher really awful day in Gaza and elsewhere.

Lessons the US Keeps Failing to Learn

Worth a read at Foreign Policy: Rosa Brooks on Six Lessons America Seems Thoroughly Incapable of Learning.

Marc Lynch Looks at Arab Twitter Trends on Gaza, Iraq, Syria

Marc Lynch, in "Arabs Do Care About Gaza," looks at Arabic Twitter trends to assess recent events in Syria, Iraq, and Gaza:
What did Palestine’s relatively declining place in Arab discourse really mean, though? For many analysts, especially in the West and Israel, it signaled a nail in the coffin of theories of linkage and the relevance of the Palestinian issue. For others, it was just a matter of the news cycle, since Palestine hadn’t had the mass demonstrations on the Tahrir Square model or the mass slaughter of Syria’s model . . .
Syria (in blue), which in 2012 and early 2013 consistently generated millions of tweets per month in Arabic, shows a relatively low level flat line. The shocking developments in Iraq (in green) galvanized attention in mid-June, and Iraq continues to attract more attention now than does Syria. But Gaza, after being virtually ignored for a long time, surges to dominate everything else once the conflict begins. Score one for the “latent relevance” hypothesis.
UPDATE: it's been pointed out that the table doesn't use the more frequent Arabic spelling of Syria as  سوريا, though a search with that spelling doesn't dramatically change the conclusion.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Cecil Rhodes, Please Call Your Office: Virginia Man Wants to be King of Bir Tawil (and I Explain Why No One Claims Bir Tawil)

You probably thought the colonial scramble for Africa was over, didn't you? Think again: "Abingdon Man Claims African Land to Make Good on Promise to Daughter." 

Abingdon is in extreme southwest Virginia. Apparently he has promised his daughter she'll be a princess some day, so he wants to be king of something, and has settled on Bir Tawil, on the Egypt-Sudan border. More on the location momentarily. Meanwhile, he has a flag and wants to name it "North Sudan." Sheila Carapico of the University of Richmond told the newspapers that it's unlikely he could get Egypt and Sudan to agree, which is an understatement. They've had some experience with foreign colonial rule. I'm sure Mr. Heaton loves his daughter, but the colonial era doesn't need reviving.

It does, however, provide me with an excuse to explain why neither Egypt nor Sudan claims Bir Tawil. And that requires me to discuss the dispute over the Hala'ib Triangle.

I was going to say it is the flip-side of the dispute over the Hala'ib Triangle, but then I realized that those too young to remember 45-RPM vinyl records won't know what a flip-side is, and then when I searched this blog in order to link to previous posts about Hala'ib, I discovered I've apparently never done a post about it. The fact that both Egypt and Sudan dispute control of the Hala'ib Triangle is the reason neither one of them claims Bir Tawil, which  I guess could be called the Bir Tawil trapezoid. So the rest of this post will deal with both enclaves.

Anyway, you will recall that after that thing with the Mahdi and Gordon of Khartoum, Sudan was made subject to an Anglo-Egyptian condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The 1899 agreement that set up the condominium drew the international boundary between Egypt and Sudan along the 22nd parallel of latitude. Since Britain was effectively running Egypt, the condominium had its limits.

In 1902, as an administrative convenience, Britain drew an "Administrative Boundary" separate from the international boundary. An area along the Red Sea coast north of 22°N was used as grazing land by the Beja of northeastern Sudan; a smaller enclave south of the line was used for grazing by the Ababda subtribe of Beja living on the Egyptian side. It made perfect sense, so long as the sun never set on the British Empire.

The area north of the line came to be known as the Hala'ib Triangle, after its most important town, or the "Sudan Government Administration Area"; the smaller enclave is Bir Tawil.

When Sudan became independent in 1956, it asserted the 1902 Administrative Boundary should be its northern boundary. Egypt claimed the international boundary, the 22nd parallel. The Wikipedia map at left illustrates the claims. The locations are clear in his Google Earth image:


The enclaves are not created equal. Hala'ib is 20,580 square kilometers; Bir Tawil only 2,060. Hala'ib has several towns and trading centers, road access to both Egypt and Sudan,, a coast on the Red Sea, and suspicions of possible offshore oil.

Bir Tawil has this:

Or, as shown in Google  Maps:




You may be thinking: but wait, countries have boundary disputes over lots of desert areas, mountaintops, glaciers and so on.

True, but the conflicting claims to Hala'ib mean that if Egypt is right and Hala'ib is Egyptian, then everything south of the international boundary is Sudanese, and Hala'ib is Egyptian. But if the Administrative boundary is used, Hala'ib is Sudnese and Bir Tawil is Egyptian. Neither side can claim Bir Tawil without losing its claim to the far more important Hala'ib Triangle.

Thus Bir Tawil is technically a terra nullius. a rare case of land territory no one claims. (But as Sheila Carapico notes in the newspaper article above, that doesn't mean it's Mr. Heaton's for the taking. The tribesmen who use it as grazing land have Egyptian or Sudanese citizenship, and have a stronger claim to it as their tribal property.)

Hala'ib remains a matter of dispute. Until the 1990s Egypt generally tolerated Sudan's continuing administration but never dropped its claim. When Sudan began negotiating offshore oil rights, Egypt sent troops to occupy the Triangle. There were tense moments in the 1990s when both countries had troops there. Sudan's withdrew in 2000; though Sudan continues to pursue its claim. Egypt administers the province as part of its Red Sea Governorate, from the Egyptian town of Shalateen on the Triangle's border. In both countries the issue continues to be an irritant in their relations.

UPDATE: And do check out Diana Buja's link about working in the Hala'ib Triangle.

Below, a more detailed map of Bir Tawil, Mr. Heaton's putative Kingdom:

Lameen Souag Analyzes a Ramadan Greeting

Algerian linguist Lameen Souag has a dialect post for Ramadan: "Grammatically analysing "Sahha Ramdankoum!," a standard Algerian Ramadan greeting.

Sahha is the Arabic word for health, and the meaning of the greeting isn't that obscure, but he's a linguist, remember, and he's speculating on whether it's functioning as a noun, a verb, or something else here. For those of you who always wanted to diagram sentences in Arabic dialects, this is he post you've been waiting for. It was also his way of passing Ramadan greetings to his readers, of course.

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Coups of Summer: Why Were So Many Arab Coups in July?

For some reason this post has temporarily disappeared. I am attempting to retrieve it.

Did Netanyahu Just Rule Out a Two-State Solution?

Binyamin Netanyahu's press conference this weekend was predictably mostly about Gaza, but in the process he also was more open in discussing his vision of future negotiations. And as this Times of Israel article notes:
He made explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. He indicated that he sees Israel standing almost alone on the frontlines against vicious Islamic radicalism, while the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism. And he more than intimated that he considers the current American, John Kerry-led diplomatic team to be, let’s be polite, naive.
That would seem to torpedo a two-state solution. But the perils of a one-state solution are well-known: if democratic, demography will in time imperil Israel's Jewish identity; if non-democratic, another element if Israel's self image would be imperiled.

July 14, 1958: The Fall of the Iraqi Monarchy

King Faisal II
Today is Bastille Day, of course, but it is also the 56th anniversary of the coup tha toppled the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, killing most of the Royal Family and Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa‘id.

At the time, in the midst of the global Cold War and the so-called "Arab Cold War,"
Nuri al-Sa‘id
the coup set off alarms in the US and Britain, as the British installed Hashemites were ousted and killed, and a key member of the Baghdad Pact changed allegiances.

The coup, led by ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim and ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif, seemed to follow the Nasser model, but it soon became clear that Qasim was more an Iraqi nationalist than a Nasserist.Qasim cultivated the Iraqi Communist Party and other groups. ‘Arif, a pan-Arabist along Nasser lines, was sidelined.

‘Arif (left)  and Qasim
An encouraging new constitution raised hopes, but Qasim proved a typical authoritarian, and after five years in power was himself overthrown and shot in 1963 in a coup led by Arif. Qasim, of mixed Sunni-Shi‘ite background, was a rare exception to the long string of Sunni rulers in Iraq.

The monarchy, Sunni, foreign, and widely seen as too pro-British, never took deep roots in Iraq, but in the international context of 1958, its overthrow led to renewed concerns in the West about Soviet and Nasserist intentions, and British moved to shore up the Jordanian Hashemites while the US landed Marines in Lebanon.

Friday, July 11, 2014

From +972 Magazine: "Why Isn't the West Bank Rioting, Too?"

Larry Derfner at the dovish Israeli +972 mag asks and generally answers a question that hasn't gotten much attention: "Why Isn't the West Bank Rioting, Too?."

Gaza's firing rockets, East Jerusalem is seeing riots, but the West Bank is calm.

The Netanyahu government isn't likely to publicly credit Mahmoud ‘Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, which may be why we aren't seeing the question asked more frequently.

(As many of you will know, +972 takes its name from Israel's telephone country code.)

Guest Post: William R. Polk Offers a Grim Assessment of Prospects for Israel and Palestine

Introductory note by Michael Dunn: On several occasions I have linked to articles by William R.Polk, particularly on Iraq. His extensive experience in the region, as Harvard professor, senior State Department official, founder of the Middle East Studies Department at Chicago, and a author of dozens of books on a wide variety of subjects is always worth listening to. Bill Polk has kindly offered this guest post on the Israel-Palestine issue. It is a grimly pessimistic one. I personally still cling to hopes for a two-state solution,  though clearly, doors are closing. Though I am more optimistic than Professor Polk, his views are clearly expressed and deserve a hearing. As with everything that appears here, the views expressed are those of the author nd do not represent the policy of The Middle East Institute or The Middle East Journal.

Palestine Peace Illusions

by William R. Polk

With the killing of three Israeli teenagers and the apparent revenge murder of a Palestinian youth – possibly burned to death – the hatred between Israelis and Palestinian has reached a new level of obscenity, and it looks like it will get worse. Much worse.

 The major Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in an editorial:
There are no words to describe the horror allegedly done by six Jews to Mohammed Abu Khdeir of Shoafat. Although a gag order bars publication of details of the terrible murder and the identities of its alleged perpetrators, the account of Abu Khdeir’s family — according to which the boy was burned alive — would horrify any mortal. Anyone who is not satisfied with this description can view the horror movie in which members of Israel’s Border Police are seen brutally beating Tariq Abu Khdeir, the murder victim’s 15-year-old cousin.
Or, as Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote about the recent atrocities:
The youths of the Jewish state are attacking Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, just like gentile youths used to attack Jews in the streets of Europe. The Israelis of the Jewish state are rampaging on social networks, displaying hatred and a lust for revenge, unprecedented in its diabolic scope. These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation – Netanyahu’s offspring.
 For five years now, they have been hearing nothing but incitement, scaremongering and supremacy over Arabs from this generation’s true instructor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not one humane word, no commiseration or equal treatment. They grew up with the provocative demand for recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state,’ and they drew the inevitable conclusions.
My own observations accord with these remarks. Over the years since my first visit to what was then the Palestine Mandate in 1946, I have watched the disappearance of the generation of civilized men of the 1930s. Such great Jewish figures as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber who flourished then are forgotten or, if remembered at all, are thought of (by Israelis) to have been naive do-gooders and (by Arabs) to have been just front men for the real Zionists, men like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinians now point out that what the most extreme of their spokesmen told the American investigators (in the King-Crane commission that Woodrow Wilson sent to the Levant in 1919), that they feared what has now happened.

In the words of the then senior British intelligence officer (Kinahan Cornwallis), the Palestinians hold "a deeply felt fear that the Jews not only intended to assume the reins of Government in Palestine but also to expropriate or buy up during the war large tracts of land owned by Moslems and others, and gradually to force them from the country."

The British cabinet already thought something like this was inevitable. It was a price the British were willing to have the Palestinians pay since in 1917-1918 they desperately wanted Jewish support in Germany (where they thought much of the Army was under Jewish officers), In Russia (where they thought Jews were the leaders of the Bolshevik movements for a separate peace that would release large German forces to fight on the Western front) and in America (where they thought Jews could provide financing for their war effort). So, they courted Jewish support in the Balfour Declaration.

In careful compromise they stuck in the Declaration two qualifications as I recount in two of my early books, Backdrop to Tragedy (with David Stamler and Edmund Asfour) and The United States and the Arab World. They specified their objective as being only "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and emphasized that this was not to denigrate the rights of the Arabs "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Qualifications aside, what has happened was precisely what everyone then knew was likely, the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state.

In a remarkably candid statement on Aug. 11, 1919, Lord Balfour, the titular author of the Declaration, admitted that "so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers [The Allies, Britain and France] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which at least in letter, they have not always intended to violate." (Quoted in my book The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century.)

The history of the past century of Palestine can be summed up in a few words: For their own interests, the British and then the Americans just closed their eyes to the developing tragedy; both were content to have a poor, defenseless Near East people pay the price for Western anti-Semitism.

Predictably, the Jewish community grew, appropriated most of the best land (largely by purchase from absentee owners), and benefited from massive infusions of foreign money (now totaling well over $100 billion, or more than all the aid programs for the rest of the world). Meanwhile, the Jewish fate in Europe moved toward the Holocaust.

What did that actually mean? If I were a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, I certainly would have gone to America and if I could not get in some could not to Palestine; if I were an Arab at almost any time from 1920 onward, I would have tried to stop the flood of immigrants. The real culprit is neither the Jew nor the Palestinian. It is us. Anti-Semitism is a Western disease.

What we see today is that the people who really agree with the Jewish terrorists are the Arab terrorists with the religious fanatics among both peoples increasingly taking the lead. Between them, there is little if any room for people of moderation, much less for decency. Tit-for-Tat is a game played with blood and steel in which no one is or will be immune. There is no end in sight.

So how have we viewed these events? I have listened for my whole professional life to a false dialogue. For years, policymakers and opinion leaders have argued over "solutions" that are unreal or at last tangential. We keep chanting the dirge one can almost put it to music one state or two states. Neither is realistic and even if feasible would not solve the fundamental problem. But we seem to believe that, if we can say one or the other often enough, one of them might become acceptable.

It is time to drop the nonsense and face the simple facts. They are these:

In the "one state," the Arabs will be the subjugated minority with few rights and little or any security they will be the "Jews" of an Israeli Germany or the "Jews" of an Israeli Imperial Russia, cooped up in ghettos, imprisoned, driven into exile or subjected to a final partition. They, their children and their grandchildren will sporadically resist. Their resistance will call forth more hatred and more reprisal. The cycle will continue.

In the "two states," those living in the truncated remnants of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) will be condemned to perpetual poverty and humiliation. They will have almost no usable agricultural land and virtually no water. They will be cut off from possible markets for what little they can produce. They can have no hope of manufacturing because their draw on electricity will be squeezed. Even the limited money they can earn will be closely controlled and often blocked by the Israeli Central Bank as it now is. They will have limited access to health facilities, educational institutions and even contact with one another, segregated as they are and will be by restricted zones, walls and standing security and military forces. They too would periodically resist or strike out in fury and so draw upon themselves reprisals. And so too the cycle of violence will continue or even escalate.

Even those who think of themselves as "Israeli Arabs" will remain, in the eyes of the real Israelis, just Arabs. They will have marginally better, but still limited, lives as they do today. As hatred grows ethnically they too will be drawn into the struggle. They are likely to lose what they have so far kept.

Is there an alternative? Yes, there are three. Which is worse depends upon who does the evaluation.

The one the Israelis want is for the Palestinians to just leave. To go where? To refugee camps or wherever, the Israelis don't care. A reading of all Israeli policies underlines the Israeli intention to make life as unattractive for the Palestinians as world opinion allows. The Israelis admit that the conditions they are creating are worse than South African apartheid was for the Bantu. And always the threat of ethnic cleansing hangs high.

The second alternative, which of course the Palestinians want, is for the Israelis "to go back where they came from." The Arabs day-dream of their relations with the Israelis in parallel to the Crusades. The Crusaders stayed a long time but finally left. The more recent parallel is to the "French" (many of whom were not French at all) pieds noirs in Algeria. It took a century but they too finally left.

The Palestinians keep track of the immigration statistics and observe that in some years more Israelis leave than immigrants come. They also note that a large part of the Israeli population keeps dual citizenship which gives them the option of leaving. New York is said to have a larger Israeli population than Jerusalem.

The third alternative is Armageddon. Israel has a huge store of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and at least once in the past came close to using nuclear weapons. The Arabs, of course, don't (now) have nuclear weapons, but at least two Arab states are thought to be capable of getting (producing or buying) them quickly. More immediate, the Palestinians, divided and relatively unarmed as they are, have the capacity to inflict pain on Israelis (and so to bring about retaliation). Sooner or later, that capacity will grow.

Here the analogy with the Crusades may make some sense. One can envisage a scenario in which acts by Arabs could either make life in Israel unattractive or, alternatively, cause the Israelis in frustration, fear or fury to destroy the Middle East and all its people. They have the means to do so.

Should we care? Forget the pious statements. If the past is any guide, we didn't much care about anti-Semitism when it affected the Jews in Europe and don't much care about it when today it makes life horrible for many Arabs in the Middle East. There is much cynical (but covert) anti-Zionist feeling even among politicians who rush to benefit from Jewish donations. Privately, many admit that much of what the Israelis are doing is illegal and even more is immoral, but it is the rare politician who says anything publicly. And those who have done so have usually paid a politically mortal price.

Meanwhile, as a nation, we Americans keep on doing what we know how to do giving money and arms. And, in a destructive and self-defeating gesture to "even-handedness" giving them to both sides. It is not so important that we don't incur favor by this policy neither side is smitten by affection for us and  the Israeli government almost daily goes out of its way to humiliate our government. But it could be, and in my judgment eventually will be, significant that we are moving toward Armageddon.

Even the most hardheaded and cynical among us should be concerned since there is a considerable danger of a spillover of any Middle Eastern war into our lives both abroad in other areas, particularly Islamic areas, and at home. At minimum it long-term and perhaps escalating hostilities in the Middle East would hurt our economy. Additionally, it they could further damage our already fragile ecology, possibly trigger a wider conflict and certainly damage the sense of law, morality and order by which we live.

Even short of actual war, the contagion of instability, hatred and violence is likely to spread and so affect us in other areas and on other issues about which we care.

Perhaps, if our leaders could even slightly raise their eyes above their immediate interests and pay a little attention to the river of events in which we float, we could grab a handhold and stop before we reach the waterfall.

Does anyone see any such leader anywhere? I confess I do not.

I am afraid, not for me, since I am now 85 years old, but for mine and yours and everyone's.