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Middle East Open Thread 2024-021
This morning Israel bombed a three story house in Damascus. The attack killed General Haj Sadegh Omidzadeh, deputy intelligence officer of IRGC's Quds Force, along with his deputy Haj Gholam (Muharram). This was most likely a revenge act for the killing of Israeli intelligence assets four days ago by an Iranian missile strike in Erbil, Iraq.
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Only for news & views directly related to the war in the Middle East.
The current open thread for other issues is here.
Please stick to the topic. Contribute facts. Do not attack other commentators.
@ karlof1 | Jan 20 2024 20:18 utc | 140
Sensible points. In general, it isn’t in the interest of the parties to widen the war, and speculations to the contrary have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Possibly, Israel isn’t terribly overburdened militarily at the moment; that is, it obviously has superior numbers of combatants, weaponry, and firepower. However, the shock of the developments, regardless of what the Israeli ruling elite may have known about them in advance, has completely upset everything in Israel, and, despite the loathsome Netanyahu, who even himself is constrained by the developments to try to please everyone while actually pleasing no one, the ruling heads in Israel do not want things to spiral out of their own control more than they already have. They are carrying on their murderous Gaza campaign with as much violence as they can muster, and the outer world is not moving to stop it. Russia and China, while possibly entertaining some fears, have to be most pleased to be spectators having fairly good relations with both sides, and it is in the interests of no one to blame them for anything. So they can watch the demise of the US and its political system in peace. Exactly like 1956, Israel has managed again to completely derail the US’s carefully-orchestrated anti-Russian, and China has been put on the back burner somewhat too. There isn’t any compelling reason for Russia and China to act belligerently toward Israel in the midst of all this. Of course, Russia and China vote to condemn Israel, but as long as they are at peace with it and do not boycott it commercially, Israel will just have to eat that, because who but a Zionist or one cowed by the Zionists could not condemn such blatant atrocities?
As for Hizbullah and Lebanon, it is interesting that polling has shown a great growth in the popularity of both Hizbullah and Hamas in Lebanon, to the extent that 99% (!) of those polled favored Arab states breaking off all relations with Israel. On the other hand, Israel and Hizbullah have no existential territorial dispute of their own. The French-British boundary of 1920 remains intact, and neither has any overt claims against the other. The question is, who would gain from initiating an attack? A lot has been said that makes no sense. Surely the US will refuse to send forces to invade Lebanon, so any Israeli efforts to sic the US on Lebanon are in vain. Nor is it likely now that such forces, however large they might be at this time, could actually defeat Hizbullah in its own country. Nor could Israel do it, after the miserable showing of its ground forces in 2006. On the other hand, Hizbullah’s arsenal and skills have only grown over the long years of confrontation and would be able to rain down considerable destruction on Israel. Israel cannot be eager for that. Of course, Hizbullah would have some motive to intervene to save Gaza, but the price it would pay would also be considerable. Hence the restraint shown so far.
As for Iran, war against it is even more remote. My understanding is that during 2007-2009, Dick Cheney and the neocons constantly pressed the sappy Bush to attack Iran, but, despite the two-year window of opportunity, he refused to do it, possibly because the US military out-and-out vetoed doing something so utterly foolish and destined for failure. Today, Iran is much better prepped to resist, and support for the US in the region is dwindling. Even if the US were able to carry on such a war successfully, which is next to impossible, it would be going it alone, and at the very least it would vastly disrupt oil production and send the price of oil through the roof. It is mainly Israel that is always trying to sic the US on Iran, but it hasn’t happened, except in very marginal ways, and the unforeseen consequences would be numerous and grim.
Of course, despite all, human stupidity and miscalculation could still upend my expectations, but in this case the further spread of war is unlikely.
I strongly agree with Karl that Hizbullah and Ansarullah in Yemen are not “proxies of Iran.” That claim, like a lot of questionable commentary, is a gross oversimplification. Both Hizbullah and Ansarullah are independent forces having their own interests. Certainly they are aligned with and sympathetic to Iran, but they do not follow its orders. Also, it is far from clear in whose interest any particular intervention would turn out to be. That is, sometimes restraint is better than rushing headlong into conflict like a chicken with its head cut off, which seems to be exactly what Israel has done here.
Posted by: Cabe | Jan 21 2024 1:23 utc | 220
@ bevin | Jan 21 2024 1:23 utc | 220
Maybe there is even a more direct connection between the dispossession of the indigenous in North America and the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinians, with the mediating element being Nazi Germany.
I believe Hitler used to justify his expansionist demands for lebensraum by citing the US destruction and dispossession of the indigenous Americans. And according to nationalist logic, he was right: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if the US using superior might and numbers to dispossess the untermenschen, then why not German against its neighbors, particularly the Slavs on the eastern side? All he was doing was reproducing what European colonialism had done all along to non-Europeans, but now he was doing it to other Europeans, and that was found truly objectionable.
When Hitler annexed Austria, the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, and Memel, all without armed resistance, he seemed to be on a roll. And all of those annexations were of Germans, except for the Czech-inhabited part of what is now the Czech Republic. Except for the Czechs, it all made perfect sense by nationalist logic, that all the speakers of the same language should be united in the same state. Had he stopped there, it would have been difficult for the Czechs to escape the German embrace, even though their own national desire for independence would eventually have been problematic for Germany. Without those Czech areas annexed in 1939 as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, however, the whole thing through Munich fit entirely under nationalist logic.
But, oh no, the Nazis couldn’t stop there. They had to have more living space, so they invaded Poland and planned to replace the Poles with German settlers in the huge area called the Werthegau. On conquering France, they briefly plotted the same fate for Northeastern France beyond Alsace-Lorraine.
All of that so strongly resembles the founding and expansion of Israel. Like Nazi Germany in 1938, had Israel been sufficed by its initial gains of 1948-1949, it could have had peace with those boundaries, long before the Palestinians finally got independently organized in 1964-1965. But, oh no, they had to have more and more!
When the colonial settlers in North America went up against the indigenous, they faced hundred of tribes, speaking hundreds of different, mutually-unintelligible languages, and usually hostile to most of their neighbors as well, and therefore mostly unable to cooperate broadly against the invaders. The Germans, on the other hand, faced large national groups already well-schooled in their own nationalisms and primed to resist, so even if they had not suffered stupid, self-inflicted catastrophes like the invasion of the Soviet Union, even so they would have faced growing partisans movements that would have worn them down. Likewise, the Israelis, despite directly and in some cases no doubt consciously imitating and emulating their Nazi persecutors, faced a dense population united under one language whom they could not outpopulate, hence their frustration, and their turn to apocalyptic violence.
Poor Israel! What are they to do? If they lighten up, they think, everyone will just jump on them and get them, so they have to keep up the iron wall. But how can they do that with so many Gazans and others whom they have abused for over a century existing right next to them just a stone’s throw away? The big effect of this war has been to reveal clearly the growth of the ability of the oppressed to resist their Zionist oppressors. In 1956 and 1967 each Gaza was conquered from the Egyptians in one day, with no participation to speak of by the Gazans themselves. In 2023-2024, it’s been over 100 days with no firm outcome. This parallels Israel’s earlier failure against Hizbullah in 2006, because Hizbullah got better, and now it is even better.
This is also a problem for the US, in that the resistance has become stronger everywhere, partly because of technologies favoring the weak and poor, but mainly because resistances always become more capable against their oppressors through time. It is like Newton’s law, “For each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” That is why some Zionists think this is their last chance; they must go all the way to ousting the Palestinians or all is lost. Actually, it is too late for that, and they will need to appeal to cooperativism instead of exclusionism, but where can they find that in their Zionist nationalist logic? They have never shown the least scintilla of concern for the Palestinians, but they are going to have be concerned with the Palestinians’ fate beyond their desire to simply get rid of them, and how can they do that?
Posted by: Cabe | Jan 21 2024 2:11 utc | 236
@ RLTW | Jan 21 2024 5:21 utc | 270
It would seem to me that one can draw a distinction between the past and and present with regard to the American Indians. In my case, half of my ancestors came to the America mainly from England and also from the Netherlands in the 17th & 18th centuries and the other half from Norway between 1866 and 1885. So, even though they themselves, as far as I know, had no direct role in displacing any Indians, they did benefit from the clearance of the land of its Indians, and that was carried out often violently and with much injustice, although, again, one has to pay attention to the details and not overgeneralize. Great, sad massacres were perpetrated by the settlers, such as the Pequod, the Sand Creek, and the Wounded Knee massacres.
Most of the natives, however, died of introduced diseases that ravaged them like the plague, and that was mostly not intentional. From many areas, such as Pennsylvania where I live, the Indians disappeared almost in toto. Today, how many descendants of the Pennsylvania Indians can even be traced? Maybe a few of the Delawares/Lenni-Lenape living in Oklahoma, a few hundred people. Today, the “blood quotient” to be a tribal member is usually one fourth, meaning a large part of the surviving American Indians have mostly European or African ancestry. That would not apply to those groups in the western states having more of their original ethnic character and cohesion, and in a few cases even their languages, and none of these form significant populations in any urban areas.
And it is true as you observe that some amends have been made, although I would not cite Andrew Jackson as a paragon of virtue in this regard. Many of the Indians provided the US Army with scouts to help conquer other tribes, just like the Crow were allied with the US against the Lakota Sioux at the Little Bighorn. Tribes like the Navahos actually have tended to support the Republican Party and underlined their USA patriotism, as with the Navaho and other Indian code talkers, who used their native languages as secret codes to help the war effort and both the First and Second World Wars. Others, like the Lakota Sioux, have a genuine greivance over the loss of their lands in Western South Dakota, and that is a political problem, but a local one, not one spread all over the US. To try to undo all of our convoluted history by an oversimplifying assignment of blame would surely be unfair to our history.
So I think it has to be recognized that it was an injustice to the Indians that they were forcibly displaced, but none of their descendants today are demanding the whole country back; they just want a better deal locally, and one has to examine each particular grievance there on its merits. Otherwise, generally, they just want to be equal citizens with everyone else and are not looking to enforce any atavistic claims, much less try to set up some opposing nationalism. Have you been to an Indian powwow where they start out with a procession headed by the American flag? I don’t think it diminishes the US any to acknowledge that injustice was done; rather, to do so would express a generous spirit.
Posted by: Cabe | Jan 21 2024 5:55 utc | 281
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